Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein

by Isaacson, Walter

  The October trip came in response to an appeal from General Washington, who had taken command of the motley Massachusetts militias and was struggling to make them, along with various undisciplined backwoodsmen who had arrived from other colonies, into the nucleus of a true continental army. With little equipment and declining morale, it was questionable whether he could hold his troops together through the winter. So the Congress appointed a committee to look into the situation, which was about all it could do, and Franklin agreed to serve as its head.

  On the eve of his departure, Franklin wrote two of his British friends to emphasize that America was determined to prevail. “If you flatter yourselves with beating us into submission, you know neither the people nor the country,” he told David Hartley. To Joseph Priestley, he provided a bit of math for one of their friends to ponder: “Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20,000 a head…During the same time, 60,000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all.”17

  Franklin and his two fellow committee members met with General Washington in Cambridge for a week. Discipline was a big problem, and Franklin approached it in his usual meticulous manner by drawing up (as he had done two decades earlier for Pennsylvania’s militia) incredibly detailed methods and procedures. His list of prescribed punishments, for example, included between twenty and thirty-nine lashes for sentries caught sleeping, a fine of a month’s pay for an officer absent without leave, seven days’ confinement with only bread and water for an enlisted man absent without leave, and the death penalty for mutiny. The rations for each man were spelled out in similar detail: a pound of beef or salt fish per day, a pound of bread, a pint of milk, a quart of beer or cider, and so on, down to the amount of soap and candles.18

  As they were preparing to leave, Washington asked the committee to stress to the Congress “the necessity of having money constantly and regularly sent.” That was the colonies’ greatest challenge, and Franklin provided a typical take on how raising £1.2 million a year could be accomplished merely through more frugality. “If 500,000 families will each spend a shilling a week less,” he explained to Bache, “they may pay the whole sum without otherwise feeling it. Forbearing to drink tea saves three-fourths of the money, and 500,000 women doing each threepence worth of spinning or knitting in a week will pay the rest.” For his own part, Franklin forked over his postmaster’s salary plus £100 that Mrs. Stevenson had helped raise in London for the American wounded. He also collected from the Massachusetts Assembly the money it owed him for his services as their London agent, and that he kept.19

  At a dinner during the trip, he met John Adams’s wife, Abigail, who was later to be disparaging about Franklin but on that night was charmed. Her description in a letter to her husband shows that she had a good insight into his demeanor, though not his religious convictions:

  I found him social but not talkative, and when he spoke something useful dropped from his tongue. He was grave, yet pleasant and affable. You know I make some pretensions to physiognomy, and I thought I could read into his countenance the virtues of his heart; among which patriotism shone in its full luster, and with that is blended every virtue of a Christian: for a true patriot must be a religious man.20

  On his way back to Philadelphia, Franklin stopped in Rhode Island to meet his sister Jane Mecom. She had fled British-occupied Boston and taken refuge with Franklin’s old friend Catherine Ray Greene and her husband. Caty’s house now included dozens of refugee relatives and friends, and Franklin worried that Jane “must be a great burden to that hospitable house.” In fact, as Claude-Anne Lopez notes, “Jane and Caty, a generation apart in age, a world in circumstances and temperament, had a marvelous rapport.” Just as Franklin was wont to find surrogate daughters for himself, Jane took to treating Caty as one. (“Would to God I had such a one!” she wrote Caty, even though Jane in fact had a daughter of her own from whom she was estranged.)21

  Franklin reciprocated. When he picked up Jane, he convinced Caty’s 10-year-old son, Ray, to come with them back to Philadelphia and enroll with Temple at the college there. The carriage ride through Connecticut and New Jersey was a delight for Jane. “My dear brother’s conversation was more than the equivalent of all the fine weather imaginable,” she reported to Caty. The good feelings were so strong that they were able to overcome any political tensions when they made a brief stop at the governor’s mansion in Perth Amboy to call on William.

  It would turn out to be the last time Franklin would see his son other than a final tense meeting in England ten years later. But neither man knew that at the time, and they kept the meeting short. “We would willingly have detained them longer,” William’s wife wrote Temple, “but Papa was anxious to get home.”22

  Back in Philadelphia, a group of Marine units were being organized to try to capture British arms shipments. Franklin noticed that one of their drummers had painted a rattlesnake on his drum embla-zoned with the words “Don’t tread on me.” In an anonymous article, filled with bold humor and a touch of venom, Franklin suggested that this should be the symbol and motto of America’s fight. The rattlesnake, Franklin noted, had no eyelids, and “may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance.” It also never initiated an attack nor surrendered once engaged, and “is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage.” As for the rattles, the snake on the drum had thirteen of them, “exactly the number of the colonies united in America; and I recollected too that this was the only part of the snake which increased in number.” Christopher Gadsen, a delegate to the Congress from South Carolina, picked up the suggestion in Franklin’s article and subsequently designed a yellow flag with a rattlesnake embla-zoned “Don’t Tread on Me.” It was flown in early 1776 by America’s first Marine units and later by many other militias.23

  Canada

  Undertaking a mission to the Boston area in autumn was understandable: it was an easy enough trip to the town of his birth. The Congress’s decision to send him on his second mission, and his willingness to agree, was less explicable. In March 1776, Franklin, now 70, embarked on a brutal trip to Quebec.

  A combined American force, led in part by the still-patriotic Benedict Arnold, had invaded Canada with the goal of preventing Britain from launching an expedition down the Hudson and splitting the colonies. Trapped and under siege, the American forces had spent the winter freezing and begging the Congress for reinforcements. Once more, the Congress responded by appointing a committee, again with Franklin at the head.

  On their first day of travel, Franklin and his fellow commissioners passed just north of Perth Amboy, where William kept up the pretense of governing even though local rebels restricted his movements. Franklin did not visit. His son was now an enemy. Indeed, William showed where his loyalties now were: he sent back to London all the information he had been able to gather on his father’s mission. “Dr. Franklin,” he noted, planned to “prevail on the Canadians to enter into the Confederacy with the other colonies.” Yet, in his letters to Temple, William poured out his sorrow and fears. Was the old man healthy enough to survive the journey? Was there a way to dissuade him from going? “Nothing ever gave me more pain than his undertaking that journey.”

  By the time he reached Saratoga, where they paused to wait for the ice on the lakes to clear, Franklin realized that he in fact might not survive. “I have undertaken a fatigue that at my time of life may prove too much for me,” he wrote Josiah Quincy. “So I sit down to write to a few friends by way of farewell.” But he soldiered on and, after an arduous month of travel that included time spent sleeping on the floors of abandoned houses, finally reached Montreal. Along the way, he picked up a soft marten fur cap that he would later make famous when, as an envoy in Paris, he wore it as part of his pose as a simple frontier sage.24

  Despite the disarray of his forces, Benedict Arnold hosted Franklin and his fellow commissioners at a gran
d supper graced by a profusion of young French ladies. Alas, Franklin was in no shape to enjoy it. “I suffered much from a number of large boils,” he later wrote. “In Canada, my legs swelled and I apprehended a dropsy.”

  The military situation was equally bad. America’s besieged army had expected the committee to bring needed funds, and there was great discouragement when they discovered this was not the case. Franklin’s delegation hoped, on the other hand, that it would be able to raise funds from the local Canadians, but that proved impossible. Franklin personally provided £353 in gold from his own pocket to Arnold, a nice gesture that bought him some affection while doing little to solve the situation.

  Franklin had been instructed to try to entice Quebec into joining the American rebellion, but he decided not to even try. “Until the arrival of money, it seems improper to propose the federal union of this province with the others,” he reported, “as the few friends we have here will scarce venture to exert themselves in promoting it until they see our credit recovered and a sufficient army arrived.”

  When reports came that more British ships were on their way, the Canadians became even less hospitable. The committee reached what was an inevitable conclusion: “If money cannot be had to support your army here with honor, so as to be respected instead of being hated by the people, we repeat it as our firm and unanimous opinion that it is better immediately to withdraw.”

  Exhausted and feeling defeated, Franklin spent the month of May struggling to make it back to Philadelphia. “I find I grow daily more feeble,” he wrote. When he arrived home, his gout was so bad that he could not leave his house for days. It seemed he had performed his last mission for his country.

  But his strength gradually returned, spurred by a visit from General Washington and by some tidings of a big event that was about to occur. His poor health, he wrote Washington on June 21, “has kept me from Congress and company almost ever since you left us, so that I know little of what has passed there except that a Declaration of Independence is preparing.”25

  The Path to the Declaration

  Until 1776, most colonial leaders believed—or politely pretended to believe—that America’s dispute was with the king’s misguided ministers, not with the king himself nor the Crown in concept. To declare independence, they had to convince their countrymen, and themselves, to take the daunting leap of abandoning this distinction. One thing that helped them do so was the publication, in January of that year, of an anonymous forty-seven-page pamphlet entitled Common Sense.

  In prose that drew its power, as Franklin’s often did, from being unadorned, the author argued that there was no “natural or religious reason [for] the distinction of men into kings and subjects.” Hereditary rule was a historic abomination. “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” Thus, there was only one path for Americans: “Every thing that is right or natural pleads for separation.”

  Within weeks of its appearance in Philadelphia, the pamphlet sold an astonishing 120,000 copies. Many thought Franklin the author, for it reflected his blunt sentiments about the corruption of hereditary power. In fact, Franklin’s hand was more indirect: the real author was a cheeky young Quaker from London named Thomas Paine, who had failed as a corset maker, been fired as a tax clerk, and then gained an introduction to Franklin, who, not surprisingly, took a liking to him. When Paine decided he wanted to immigrate to America and become a writer, Franklin procured him passage and wrote to Richard Bache in 1774 asking him to help get Paine a job. Soon he was working for a Philadelphia printer and honing his skills as an essayist. When Paine showed him the manuscript for Common Sense, Franklin offered his wholehearted support along with a few suggested revisions.26

  Paine’s pamphlet galvanized the forces favoring outright revolution. Cautious colonial legislatures became less so, revising their instructions to their delegates so that they now were permitted to consider the question of independence. On June 7, as Franklin recuperated, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee, brother of his once and future rival Arthur Lee, put the motion on the table, to wit: “These United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.”

  Although the Congress put off a vote on the motion for a few weeks, it took one immediate step toward independence that affected the Franklins personally: ordering the removal of all royal governments in the colonies. Patriotic new provincial congresses asserted themselves, and the one in New Jersey, on June 15, 1776, declared that Gov. William Franklin was “an enemy of the liberties of this country.” In deference to the fact that he was a Franklin, the order for William’s arrest did suggest that he be handled “with all the delicacy and tenderness which the nature of the business can possibly admit.”

  William was in no mood for delicacy or tenderness. The speech he made at his trial on June 21 was so defiant that one of the judges described it as “every way worthy of his exalted birth,” referring to his illegitimacy rather than to his famous paternity. For his part, the elder Franklin was not acting particularly paternal. His letter to Washington that noted the preparation of a declaration of independence was written on the same day that his son was being tried, but Franklin didn’t mention it. Nor did he say or do anything to help his son when the Continental Congress, three days later, voted to have him imprisoned in Connecticut.

  Thus, the words that William wrote on the eve of his confinement to his own son, who was now firmly ensconced in his grandfather’s custody, read so painfully generous: “God bless you, my dear boy; be dutiful and attentive to your grandfather, to whom you owe great obligation.” Then he concluded with a bit of forced optimism: “If we survive the present storm, we may all meet and enjoy the sweets of peace with the greater relish.”27

  They would, in fact, survive the storm, and indeed all meet again, but never to relish the sweets of peace together. The wounds of 1776 would prove too deep.

  Editing Jefferson

  As the Congress prepared to vote on the question of independence, it appointed a committee for what, in hindsight, would turn out to be a momentous task, but one that at the time did not seem so important: drafting a declaration that explained the decision. It included Franklin, of course, and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, as well as Connecticut merchant Roger Sherman and New York lawyer Robert Livingston.28

  How was it that Jefferson, at 33, got the honor of drafting the document? His name was listed first on the committee, signifying that he was the chairman, because he had gotten the most votes and because he was from Virginia, the colony that had proposed the resolution. His four colleagues had other committee assignments that they considered to be more important, and none of them realized that the document would eventually become viewed as a text akin to scripture.

  For his part, Adams mistakenly thought he had already secured his place in history by writing the preamble to a May 10 resolution that called for the dismantling of royal authority in the colonies, which he proclaimed incorrectly would be regarded by historians as “the most important resolution that ever was taken in America.” Years later, in his pompous way, he would claim that Jefferson wanted him to be the declaration’s writer, but that he had convinced the younger man to do the honors, arguing: “Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.” Jefferson’s recollection was quite different. The committee “unanimously pressed on myself alone to make the draught,” he later wrote.29

  As for Franklin, he was still laid up in bed with boils and gout when the committee first met. Besides, he later told Jefferson, “I have made it a rule, whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body.”

  And thus it was that Jefferson had the glorious honor of composing, on a little lap desk he had designed, some of the most famous phrases in history while
sitting alone in a second-floor room of a home on Market Street just a block from Franklin’s home. “When in the course of human events…” he famously began. Significantly, what followed was an attack not on the British government (i.e., the ministers) but on the British state incarnate (i.e., the king). “To attack the king was,” historian Pauline Maier notes, “a constitutional form. It was the way Englishmen announced revolution.”30

  The document Jefferson drafted was in some ways similar to what Franklin would have written. It contained a highly specific bill of particulars against the British, and it recounted, as Franklin had often done, the details of America’s attempts to be conciliatory despite England’s repeated intransigence. Indeed, Jefferson’s words echoed some of the language that Franklin had used earlier that year in a draft resolution that he never published:

  Whereas, whenever kings, instead of protecting the lives and properties of their subjects, as is their bounden duty, do endeavor to perpetrate the destruction of either, they thereby cease to be kings, become tyrants, and dissolve all ties of allegiance between themselves and their people; we hereby further solemnly declare, that whenever it shall appear clearly to us, that the King’s troops and ships now in America, or hereafter to be brought there, do, by his Majesty’s orders, destroy any town or the inhabitants of any town or place in America, or that the savages have been by the same orders hired to assassinate our poor out-settlers and their families, we will from that time renounce all allegiance to Great Britain, so long as that kingdom shall submit to him, or any of his descendants, as its sovereign.31