The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Yet at Franklin’s end the throngs only grew. “These applications are my perpetual torment,” Franklin wrote Dubourg in the autumn of 1777. “You can have no conception how I am harassed. All my friends are sought out and teased to tease me; great officers of all ranks in all departments, ladies great and small, besides professed solicitors, worry me from morning to night. The noise of every coach now that enters my court terrifies me. I am afraid to accept an invitation to dine abroad, being almost sure of meeting with some officer, or officer’s friend, who as soon as I am put into good humour by a glass or two of champagne begins his attack upon me. Luckily I do not often in my sleep dream myself in these vexatious situations, or I should be afraid of what are now my only hours of comfort.” Dubourg had asked just such a favor for a friend; Franklin concluded his tale of woe with a supplication: “If therefore you have the least remaining kindness for me, if you would not help to drive me out of France, for God’s sake, my dear friend, let this your 23rd application be the last.”

  Franklin would have admitted in this case that he was exaggerating for effect; despite the crush of requests he never lost his sense of humor. In a moment of respite he composed a reference for all occasions.

  Sir:

  The bearer of this who is going to America presses me to give him a letter of recommendation, though I know nothing of him, not even his name. This may seem extraordinary, but I assure you it is not uncommon here. Sometimes indeed one unknown person brings me another equally unknown, to recommend him; and sometimes they recommend one another! As to this gentleman, I must refer you to himself for his character and merits, with which he is certainly better acquainted than I can possibly be.

  What America needed was not men but money. By the autumn of 1777 the situation was dire. The Congress had authorized the purchase of war supplies for the American army and the construction of warships for the American navy; now that the bills were coming due the commissioners discovered they lacked the funds to pay the suppliers and the builders. In September, Franklin, Deane, and Lee made a new appeal to the goodwill and self-interest of the French and Spanish courts.

  “The Commissioners find themselves extremely embarrassed by their engagements,” they explained in a memorandum drafted by Franklin for Vergennes and the Spanish ambassador. But worse than the embarrassment to themselves was the injury to their country’s credit and cause. They briefly reviewed the events that had brought things to such a pass. Efforts to borrow money from European bankers foundered on the reluctance of the bankers to lend to America while its future hung in the balance. Ships carrying cargoes from America were lost to the British blockade. France’s refusal to countenance the sale of American prizes curtailed the revenues America had derived therefrom. The Spanish court had lately stopped furnishing funds, for reasons unexplained.

  Under the circumstances, Franklin and his fellow commissioners thought they should remind the French and Spanish governments what their countries would gain by an American victory. France and Spain would secure access to the American market, which would strengthen them; at the same time Britain’s loss of its monopoly of the American trade would weaken the British, to the additional advantage of France and Spain. Lest the French and Spanish governments get the wrong impression—which was to say, the right impression—the commissioners quickly added, “They offer these advantages, not as putting them to sale for a price, but as ties of the friendship they wish to cultivate with these kingdoms.”

  In fact the commissioners did put a price on American actions—an entire list of prices. Eighty thousand blankets cost 56,000 livres. Eighty thousand shirts cost 32,000 livres. One hundred tons of powder cost 200,000 livres. One hundred tons of saltpeter cost 110,000 livres. Eight ships of the line came to 7,730,000 livres. The French and Spanish governments could see for themselves what it cost to continue the war.

  As previously, Franklin and the others strove to seem confident even as they warned that without assistance the American cause might collapse. Rumors were circulating of an accommodation that would allow Britain once more to claim the American commerce for itself. The commissioners denied such rumors vigorously. “They can assure your Excellencies that they have no account of any treaty on foot in America for any accommodation; nor do they believe there is any. Nor have any propositions been made by them to the Court of England.” If this sounded like protesting too much, it was intended to. “The Commissioners are firmly of opinion that nothing will induce the Congress to accommodate on the terms of an exclusive commerce with Britain but the despair of obtaining effectual aid and support from Europe.”

  Vergennes had been willing to see the Americans sweat, especially after all the trouble they had caused with their privateers, but he was not willing to see them expire. He promised enough cash to keep them going a while longer, and he hinted that France would take care of construction costs for their frigates. He also said to forget about paying Beaumarchais’s company (which corroborated the American belief that the playwright was a profiteer). Yet all this was done under cover; as before, France remained officially aloof.

  “We are scarce allowed to know that they give us any aids at all,” Franklin reported to the Congress at the end of November 1777. “But we are left to imagine, if we please, that the cannon, arms &c. which we have received and sent are the effects of private benevolence and generosity.” An open alliance was still the goal, yet the phlegmatic Franklin noted an advantage in its absence: “It leaves America the glory of working out her deliverance by her own virtue and bravery.”

  At that particular moment such a prediction required a leap of faith. After the British victory on Long Island, General Howe chased Washington off Manhattan Island, across the Hudson River and New Jersey, and across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. Washington assumed that the British objective was Philadelphia; he began destroying boats to keep the Delaware between Howe and the American capital. “We have prevented them from crossing,” Washington wrote on December 17, “but how long we shall be able to do it, God only knows.”

  What God knew—and Washington learned, to his relief—was that Howe in fact was not driving for Philadelphia. The British commander had decided to spend the winter in New York, with isolated garrisons—manned in several instances by Hessian troops—posted at various towns between there and the Delaware.

  Washington, desperate for a victory that would restore at least a little morale and thereby diminish the desertions that made the collapse of his army a frightening possibility, took advantage of the isolation of a Hessian unit at Trenton. Recrossing the ice-clogged Delaware during a storm of rain and snow on Christmas night, Washington struck the hungover Trenton garrison at dawn the next day. The Hessian commander was hardly awake before an American bullet felled him; his confused subordinates surrendered by the hundreds. It was a brilliant victory, accomplished with negligible American losses.

  Washington’s hopes of following up with an assault on the British magazine at New Brunswick melted before the rapid arrival of reinforcements from New York under General Cornwallis, but the triumph at Trenton guaranteed that the Continental Army would survive the winter. The Congress returned to Philadelphia, whence it had fled on the rumors of Howe’s advance; there it received Franklin’s optimistic report, which afforded additional reason for hope.

  Unfortunately, by the time that report arrived, General Howe was in the process of preparing to evict the Congress once more. Coordinating with his brother’s ships, the British commander loaded 18,000 troops into transports and vanished into the Atlantic. The land-bound Washington, and the equally terrestrial Congress, could only guess where he had gone. “Not a word yet from Howe’s fleet,” John Adams wrote his wife on August 20. “The most general suspicion now is that it is gone to Charlestown S.C. But it is a wild supposition. It may be right, however, for Howe is a wild general.”

  It was wrong. Howe turned up not in South Carolina but in Maryland, at the head of the Chesapeake Bay. Quite evidently he intended
to take Philadelphia from the rear. Washington hurried southwest to cut him off, and although he slowed the British advance at Brandywine Creek, Howe ground steadily forward. In mid-September the Congress once more fled, this time into the Pennsylvania hinterland; shortly thereafter Howe occupied the capital.

  The loss of Philadelphia was a serious blow, but for most of the summer the really threatening news came from the north. General John Burgoyne had spent the winter in England, galloping with the king in Hyde Park, gallivanting with the ladies about London, and gabbing about how he would win the war with a thrust from Canada down to New York City. The government decided to give him his head and several thousand troops, with which, upon his return to Quebec, he set out for Lake Champlain.

  All went well for Burgoyne at first. He reached Fort Ticonderoga at the head of the long lake by the beginning of July; within the week that strong spot was his. He pursued the American forces south, toward the Hudson, certain that victory was in his grasp. Once on the Hudson he would float magnificently down to Manhattan, thereby slicing the American colonies in two. Surrender would follow shortly, and probably an earldom for the man who forced it.

  Amid his daydreams Burgoyne found time to draft a proclamation to the peoples still resisting the inevitable. “In consciousness of Christianity, my Royal Master’s clemency and the honour of soldiership,” he called on Americans to return to the British fold. If they did, all would be well. If not, “I have but to give stretch to the Indian forces under my direction, and they amount to thousands, to overtake the hardened enemies of Great Britain and America…. The messengers of justice and of wrath await them in the field, and devastation, famine and every concomitant horror that a reluctant but indispensable prosecution of military duty must occasion, will bar the way to their return.”

  The Presbyterians and other dissenters of New England did not take kindly to the preachments of an Anglican general, but what really infuriated them was Burgoyne’s threat to unleash the Indians. In that wilderness district the memories of the French and Indian War still burned, and Burgoyne’s boast made them burn the more.

  To capitalize on the combustion, Washington replaced General Philip Schuyler, a stodgy Dutch patroon distrustful of the democratic tendencies of the New England militia, with Horatio Gates, an old shoe who openly admired the rank and file. Between Burgoyne and Gates, American recruitment swelled, and the farther the former got from his Canadian base, the larger the latter’s army grew.

  Franklin, the veteran of wilderness warfare, had predicted years past that the forests would swallow any force Britain was foolish enough to send against America; Burgoyne made the philosopher a seer. South of Ticonderoga, Burgoyne and his men found themselves slowed by narrow roads unsuited to the passage of armies and artillery, soaked by rushing streams rendered more difficult by the Americans’ destruction of bridges, blocked by massive trees felled by American axes, weakened by short rations getting shorter by the week, and chilled by the deepening autumn. Unable to advance, unwilling to retreat, Burgoyne floundered. When the Americans repulsed a relief column coming up the Hudson and scattered another approaching from the west, the British were trapped. The final battle near Saratoga featured the mercurial American Benedict Arnold, who had recently been relieved of his command but now led by sheer ambition and bravery, hurling his men again and again upon the British lines, which staggered and broke.

  The battle finished Burgoyne. Negotiating terms of surrender took several days; upon completion they erased the danger from the north, the threat to the integrity of the colonies, and most of the smugness with which Britain had entered the war.

  “When all are ready for it, a small matter may suddenly bring it on,” Franklin had said regarding French entry into the war. The American victory at Saratoga was more than a small thing, and by the time news of the triumph reached Europe, all were ready.

  The first report took Franklin by surprise, a mere five days after he had concluded that America might have to win her deliverance by her own virtue and bravery. An American messenger was said to have landed at Nantes with a dispatch from the front; in the late morning of December 4 this young man, Jonathan Loring Austin, galloped into the courtyard of Franklin’s residence. “Sir, is Philadelphia taken?” demanded Franklin, his mind on the danger to the American capital—and his home.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Austin, whereupon Franklin wrung his hands and turned to go back inside.

  “But, sir, I have greater news than that,” the breathless courier continued. “General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners of war!”

  This changed everything, of course. At once Franklin circulated the welcome news among the influentials of Paris and Versailles, with a gloss highlighting Gates’s accomplishment and minimizing Howe’s. The version that went to Vergennes described “the total reduction of the force under General Burgoyne” and the difficulties confronting Howe. At the time of the courier’s departure from America, “General Gates was about to send reinforcements to General Washington, who was near Philadelphia with his army. General Howe was in possession of that city, but having no communication with his fleet, it was hoped he would soon be reduced to submit to the same terms with Burgoyne, whose capitulation we enclose.”

  Perhaps Franklin believed that Howe’s end was near; certainly he judged it politic to appear so. When an acquaintance commiserated upon hearing of the loss of America’s capital, Franklin replied, “You mistake the matter. Instead of Howe taking Philadelphia, Philadelphia has taken Howe.”

  Before the future could prove him wrong—as it did, soon enough—Franklin moved to exploit the recent past. In this he received encouragement from Vergennes. The foreign minister sent his secretary, Conrad Alexandre Gérard, to Franklin’s apartment. As Arthur Lee recorded the conversation, “He said as there now appeared no doubt of the ability and resolution of the states to maintain their independency, he could assure them it was wished they would reassume their former proposition of an alliance, or any new one they might have, and that it could be done none too soon.”

  The French had reason for haste. The British, alarmed at the prospect of an alliance between America and France, were scurrying to prevent it. To Paris came envoys informal and official to meet with Franklin and determine whether the Americans might settle their dispute with Britain without involving the French. Sir Philip Gibbes resumed an earlier conversation (of February 1777) in which Franklin had hinted—according to Gibbes’s recounting—that an Anglo-American confederation for war and peace (“to make peace and war as one state”) and for trade might follow Britain’s recognition of American independence. If accurately reported, it was merely a suggestion, of which nothing came, as Britain was in no mood to grant independence. Eleven months later, independence was a de facto reality, and Britain’s mood had changed. But so had America’s. Franklin told Gibbes it would cost Britain more now to end the conflict. But he refused to say how much more. “America is ready to make peace. If Great Britain desires to make peace, let her propose the terms to the Commissioners here.” At the same time he warned Gibbes that whatever Britain offered would be communicated to the French government. America, he said, was new at treaty-making and wished to employ the experience of its French friends.

  Needless to say, this was not what London intended. “I am sorry, I much lament, sir,” Gibbes replied, “that your engagements with France oblige you to submit to her the terms of a peace between Great Britain and America.”

  “Do not mistake me,” Franklin rejoined. “I did not say we should submit them to France. I said, distrusting ourselves, we should consult France.” Yet any British offer had better be good. “Terms that come voluntarily, and shew generosity, will do honour to Great Britain and may engage the confidence of America.”

  Gibbes had nothing to offer, but Franklin’s next visitor did. Paul Wentworth was a British spy who came straight from the office of William Eden, the head of British intelligence. “I called on 72 yesterday,” Wentworth reporte
d to Eden, employing the code for Franklin (which Eden interlined for posterity upon receiving the letter). “We remained together two hours before 51 [Silas Deane] joined us, when the conversation ceased.” In the course of the conversation Wentworth introduced a letter from Eden. “I said if he would pledge his honour to me that he would not, on any account whatever, now or hereafter mention the substance or any part of a letter I wished to show him, I would read him one, which induced me to come to 144 [Paris]. He agreed, and I read the first and second pages, ending in unqualified 107 [independence].” Franklin listened carefully. “He said it was a very interesting, sensible letter,” Wentworth reported. “Pity it did not come a little sooner.”

  Wentworth had not said whom the letter was from. Franklin wanted to know. Wentworth declined to identify Eden, beyond indicating that the author was someone with the ear of the king.