The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Franklin’s interest flattered his hosts at Cambridge, who invited him back for commencement in the summer of 1758. He was flattered in turn. “My vanity was not a little gratified by the particular regard shown me by the chancellor [the Duke of Newcastle] and vice chancellor of the university, and the heads of colleges,” he reported to Deborah.

  His vanity was gratified the more several months later when the University of St. Andrews awarded him an honorary doctorate of laws. “The ingenuous and worthy Benj. Franklin has not only been recommended to us for his knowledge of the law, the rectitude of his morals and sweetness of his life and conversation,” the citation read, “but hath also by his ingenious inventions and successful experiments, with which he hath enriched the science of natural philosophy and more especially of electricity which heretofore was little known, acquired so much praise throughout the world as to deserve the greatest honours in the Republic of Letters.” The governing body of the ancient university went on to declare that henceforth said Franklin should be addressed and treated by all as “the most Worthy Doctor.” Neither in that era nor later were the recommendations of educators always followed, but this recommendation took, and Franklin thereafter was generally referred to as “Dr. Franklin.”

  With each honor that came his way, Franklin felt farther from home. The feeling evoked ambivalence, for while he missed his wife and daughter and the familiar sights of Philadelphia, the larger circles in which he now moved possessed an undeniable appeal.

  Franklin acknowledged his ambivalence to Debbie. “You may think perhaps that I can find many amusements here to pass the time agreeable,” he wrote in January 1758. “’tis true, the regard and friendship I meet with from persons of worth, and the conversation of ingenious men, give me no small pleasure. But at this time of life, domestic comforts afford the most solid satisfaction, and my uneasiness at being absent from my family, and longing desire to be with them, make me often sigh in the midst of cheerful company.”

  Certainly the first part of Franklin’s statement—about the pleasure of the company he now kept—was true; undoubtedly the second part was true as well. Yet he could say no less, especially in a letter in which he informed his wife that “I shall hardly be able to return before this time twelve months.” The work was slow, and he was determined to do it properly, which required “both time and patience.”

  Franklin appreciated Debbie’s efforts to keep him abreast of events at home. “I thank you for sending me brother Johnny’s journal,” he wrote. “I hope he is well, and sister Read and the children. I am sorry to hear of Mr. Burt’s death…. I am not much surprized at Green’s behaviour. He has not an honest principle, I fear…. I regret the loss of my friend Parsons. Death begins to make breaches in the little Junto of old friends that he had long forborne, and it must be expected he will now soon pick us all off one after another.”

  Similarly he sought to include Debbie in his life in London, at least vicariously. She had asked about his accommodations; he responded, “We have four rooms furnished, and every thing about us pretty genteel, but living here is in every respect very expensive. Billy is with me, and very serviceable. Peter has behaved very well. Goodies I now and then get a few; but roasting apples seldom. I wish you had sent me some.” She had urged him to hire a coach to have on hand; he answered that he had done just that, to avoid foul weather and preserve appearances. “The hackney coaches at this end of town, where most people keep their own, are the worst in the whole city, miserable dirty broken shabby things, unfit to go into when dressed clean, and such as one would be ashamed to get out of at any gentleman’s door.” He had lamented the smoke from coal fires; she suggested burning wood. “It would answer no end,” he explained, “unless one could furnish all one’s neighbours and the whole city with the same.” Smoke was London’s bane, and would become Franklin’s while there. “The whole town is one great smoky house, and every street a chimney, the air full of floating sea-coal soot, and you never get a breath of what is pure, without riding some miles for it into the country.”

  He sent her presents, that she might enjoy the bounty of the metropolis even if she could not be there. “Bowl remarkable for the neatness of the figures,” he wrote, in a partial inventory. “Four silver salt ladles, newest, but ugliest, fashion … six coarse diaper breakfast cloths: they are to spread on the tea table, for no body here breakfasts on the naked table … a little basket, a present from Mrs. Stevenson to Sally, and a pair of garters for you which were knit by the young lady her daughter, who favoured me with a pair of the same kind, the only ones I have been able to wear, as they need not be bound tight, the ridges in them preventing their slipping.” He sent carpeting for the floor at home, blankets and bed linen, napkins, and “7 yards of printed cotton, blue ground, to make you a gown. I bought it by candlelight, and liked it then, but not so well afterwards; if you do not fancy it, send it as a present from me to Sister Jenny.” Two sets of books and some sheet music were for Sally. A candle-extinguisher was “for spermaceti candles only.” A large jug was for beer. “I fell in love with it at first sight, for I thought it looked like a fat jolly dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white calico gown on, good natured and lovely, and put me in mind of—Somebody.”

  Franklin must have thought he knew his Debbie to be able to liken her to a beer jug, even if he declined the explicit reference at the last word. He also knew her well enough to recognize her reluctance to come over to England. William Strahan, with whom Franklin obviously discussed the matter, continued to urge her to join her husband. Writing to David Hall, Strahan said, “Tell her I am sorry she dreads the sea so much…. There are many ladies here that would make no objection to sailing twice as far after him.”

  Perhaps it was her dread of the deep that kept Deborah away. But something else was almost certainly involved as well. She had watched her husband grow over the years, from the promising but penniless journeyman she married in 1730 to a public figure honored by many of the greatest men and institutions of the British empire. Debbie was the same simple soul she had been at the start: a thrifty housewife, a good mother (if a sometimes testy stepmother), a competent business partner (who was now handling her husband’s affairs in his absence). Philadelphia was not merely her home; it was her world. Franklin could move in another, larger world, and do so comfortably. Debbie could not, and she knew enough not to try.

  13

  Imperialist

  1759–60

  On the Plains of Abraham, high above the St. Lawrence River, where the St. Charles River entered the larger stream and formed a point on which the French had built the fortress of Quebec, in the summer of 1759 the struggle for North America drew to a climax. That it did so was the work of one man more than any other.

  William Pitt first won fame with a wicked tongue in the House of Commons. When George II put 16,000 troops from his native Hanover on the British payroll, Pitt denounced the move as reducing England to the status of “a province to a despicable electorate.” Pitt characterized John Carteret, the courtier generally held responsible for the king’s pro-German policy (and a man with a weakness for burgundy), as one who “seemed to have drunk of the potion described in poetic fictions, which makes men forget their country.”

  George did not appreciate having his favorites so described; still less did he like hearing his homeland called a “despicable electorate.” But such was Pitt’s strength in Commons that after the disappointments of first phase of the Seven years’ War (as Europe dubbed the struggle that began with Braddock’s defeat in western Pennsylvania), the monarch decided he had no choice but to turn to the “Great Commoner.” Pitt agreed; with typical egotism he asserted, “I am sure I can save the country and nobody else can.”

  What Pitt knew—besides the fact that he must be England’s savior—was that salvation would be found not in Europe but overseas. The American colonies might occupy the frontier of the British empire, but they became the center of Pitt’s strategy. He ordered an a
ttack on Louisbourg, which succeeded in July 1758. He sent a new force against Fort Duquesne; this effort also succeeded. When the retreating French blew up the fort, the victorious British troops built a fort of their own and named it for Pitt.

  But the hinge of Pitt’s American strategy, and the fulcrum of empire for both Britain and France, was the assault on Quebec. Pitt’s ministry gave the command to James Wolfe, a major general just thirty-three years old, who would lead a force of some 8,000 against the Canadian town. He would, that is, if he could get the men up the St. Lawrence from the sea. Admiral Charles Saunders had overall authority for transport, but the hazardous negotiation of the shallows and eddies of the vexing river fell to Captain James Cook. Although Cook’s destiny awaited him in the Pacific, the French were plenty impressed at his work in the St. Lawrence. “The enemy have passed sixty ships of war where we dare not risk a vessel of a hundred tons by night and day,” declared the suddenly worried Canadian governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil.

  Though reaching Quebec was half the battle, the other half was harder. The site of the city afforded its greatest protection, with the St. Lawrence on the east and south, the St. Charles on the north, and the third side of the triangle commanded by the Plains of Abraham, which in turn were protected from the St. Lawrence by an intimidating escarpment. The French commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, was so confident that the bluff could not be scaled that he did not bother to defend it.

  Wolfe initially agreed with Montcalm’s assessment. He landed his troops below the city and tried every trick he could conceive to lure Montcalm away from the city into an open fight. Montcalm refused to be drawn. Wolfe sent a detachment to capture Point Lévis across the St. Lawrence from the city, at a place where the stream abruptly narrowed from a mile and a half to three-quarters of a mile (this narrowing was what gave Quebec its name—an Algonquin word meaning “strait” or “narrow”). From Point Lévis, British cannon bombarded the city. Montcalm remained unmoved.

  Yet if position favored Montcalm, time did not. Provisioning the city posed a growing problem. Obviously no supplies would be coming up the river, which was now covered with British warships. Should Saunders and Cook proceed upstream, they might well cut the French supply lines from the interior. For this reason Montcalm could not simply wait for winter’s ice to freeze out his attackers.

  So he tried fire instead. Torching seven of his own vessels, he cast them upon the current in the direction of the British squadron. All eyes on both sides of the river followed the floating infernos as they bore down on the attackers, but between the waywardness of the flow and the watchfulness of British boatmen who hooked the most threatening craft and pulled them aside, the incendiary ships drifted harmlessly away.

  Weeks passed, then months. The British could not lure Montcalm from his redoubt. In frustration Wolfe sent rangers up and down the river to destroy whatever might give aid or comfort to the enemy. More than a thousand homes and farms were ravaged in the process, but Quebec remained untouched. One impetuous action by some British grenadiers against the French emplacements below the city produced—amid rain, thunder, mud and misfiring muskets—a sharp rebuke by the French. “Everything proves that the grand design of the English has failed,” wrote Governor Vaudreuil.

  Wolfe fell sick under the strain. Feverish, his high hopes from the spring fading as the frosts of autumn approached, the British general turned to his lieutenants for ideas. They urged a landing miles upriver from Quebec, beyond the cliffs; from there the city could be approached overland. Wolfe assented, and preparations for moving some 3,500 men fifteen miles upstream commenced.

  But rain delayed the operation, in the process intensifying Wolfe’s anxiety. He had a boat crew row him up and down the river, seeking something he had overlooked, some weakness in the enemy’s defenses. Several days into September he found it: a narrow strip of land on a tiny cove directly below the heights of Abraham’s plain. Reconnaissance suggested that an ascent might conceivably be accomplished via a steep, treacherous path. Artillery in any numbers was out of the question, but lightly burdened infantry might manage the climb.

  Wolfe determined to try. With 1,800 men, in the dead of night on September 12, he floated silently down the river to the cove. Through deserters the British commander had learned that a French supply convoy was scheduled to arrive that night; in fact it had been canceled, but, as British luck would have it, the officer in charge failed to notify Quebec of the cancellation. When a French sentry, hearing the British boats in the darkness, called out, a French-speaking British captain convincingly responded, “Vive le roi!”

  At four in the morning the lead boats landed. Wolfe and Lieutenant Colonel William Howe led an ascent by a select squadron up the steep side of the cliff; hand over hand, clinging to roots and rocks, they scaled the bluff to surprise the guards at the top of the winding path. Before being overpowered, the guards managed to send a message into the city, but by the time Montcalm could react, the rest of Wolfe’s landing party of 4,500 had climbed the path.

  This ascent was either a brilliant stroke or a stupid one, depending on what happened next. The French outnumbered the British and had the better position. If the redcoats got into trouble, the same steep slope that had been so difficult to surmount on the attack would be even more difficult in retreat—in confusion and under fire. For Wolfe and the British, on the Plains of Abraham it was triumph or die.

  Wolfe did both. Montcalm, alarmed at the sudden appearance of his enemy where they were least expected, ordered an immediate attack. The French forces advanced bravely but in poor order; irregulars among the ranks fired from too far away to inflict much damage on the British. Wolfe meanwhile commanded his men to hold their fire. The French came closer, closer, closer—until at forty paces Wolfe gave the order. The British volley decimated the French line, which staggered and broke. Montcalm’s troops fell back, fighting as they went. Wolfe, leading the pursuit from the front, took a ball in the wrist, then one in the groin, then one in the lung. Dying, he gave a final order to cut off the French retreat, before declaring, “Now, God be praised, I will die in peace.”

  Montcalm died no less heroically but considerably less happy. Wounded in the retreat, the French general survived long enough to appreciate the extent of his failure. Those French troops that could leave the city fled to the west; those that could not were captured and transported to France. The French fleur-de-lis was struck from the ramparts of the citadel above the St. Lawrence; the British Union Jack went up in its place. Canada was not yet British, but Quebec, the key to Canada, was.

  It was a glorious victory, and recognized as such, but, to the astonishment of Franklin and his fellow Americans, the victory looked likely to be undone even before the glow of its doing diminished. The capture of Louisbourg, Duquesne, and Quebec, combined with other victories in America, as well as thrashings of the French in India and Europe and on the high seas, augured an auspicious peace for Britain. But any peace with France would be negotiated rather than dictated, partly because Britain’s triumphs at arms, stunning though they were, did not warrant dictation, and partly because Britain’s foreign policy was premised on a maintenance, rather than destruction, of the European balance of power. Britain would have to live with France; it therefore behooved the British to leave a France they could live with. The question for Britain’s negotiators was how much of what the nation’s armies had won in the field its diplomats ought to retain at the bargaining table.

  As after the previous round of fighting, the Americans discovered that their interests counted for little in the thinking of Britain’s leaders. The news of the capture of Quebec had hardly reached London before interested parties began talking of handing Canada back to the French. British forces had captured Guadeloupe, the French sugar island in the West Indies, during that same glorious season; on the assumption that one or the other would have to be restored to France, influential voices in England advocated keeping Guadeloupe and returning Canada.

/>   Franklin accounted such a course the height of folly. Had the British government learned nothing from this latest round of conflict with France? Had a peace treaty that left France in control of Canada ever led to anything but another war?

  Franklin initially employed satire against the arguments for the return of Canada, thinking folly should be met with derision. He wrote a letter to the London Chronicle adducing a list of absurdities arguing for return, among them that British commerce was already too great and could not stand the increase certain to follow access to all of Canada; that a surfeit of beaver pelts would drive down prices for the broad-brimmed hats favored by “that unmannerly sect, the Quakers”; that England ought soon to have another costly war in order to avoid the dangers of becoming too rich; that the French Indians might continue their scalping campaigns against the colonists and thus prevent the colonies from growing too strong; that the English tradition of fighting bravely but negotiating meekly should continue unbroken (“Otherwise we shall be inconsistent with ourselves”).

  Franklin’s barbs glanced off, and the campaign for restoration of Canada gained strength. In light of the seriousness of the threat, Franklin himself grew more serious. In April 1760 he published a pamphlet with the sober title The Interest of Great Britain Considered, with Regard to Her Colonies and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadeloupe. He left off his name, after the custom (his and the era’s) of anonymity and in recognition that as the agent of Pennsylvania he might be accused of special pleading. Yet though he spoke as a loyal subject of King George, close reading suggested that anyone this conversant with circumstances on the North American frontier must be a colonial. And even a cursory reading indicated that the author possessed a powerful mind, one that might benefit Britain—or endanger Britain, if it came to that.