The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Franklin was initially more guarded in his judgment. He granted that Oswald appeared “wise and honest,” but he questioned the purpose of his mission. The fact that Oswald proposed to talk to him alone—apart from Vergennes—indicated a desire to separate America from France. Such a separation Franklin refused to allow. “I let him know that America would not treat but in concert with France,” Franklin recorded in his journal of the negotiations.

  Oswald did not dispute this. But he would never have received his present appointment had he been so easily dissuaded. “I told the Doctor I made no doubt that was the case,” Oswald wrote. “Yet I could not see but it was in the power of the commissioners of the colonies, by meeting and consulting together, to smooth the way to an equitable settlement of general negotiation, by framing some particular points separately regarding Great Britain.” This would be no more than an efficient use of time.

  There was more, however. Oswald suggested that once the issue of American independence was settled, reconciliation between the two branches of the English-speaking people could take place quickly; it ought not be delayed by issues concerning only the French. Britain had its pride, and if the French confused British weariness for war in America with unwillingness to defend British interests against French encroachment, they would rue their error—and so would the Americans, if they tied themselves to France. “In case France should make demands too humiliating for England to submit to, the spirit of the nation would be roused, unanimity would prevail, and resources would not be wanting.”

  Franklin begged to differ. The issue of independence was already settled, he said. It had never been in question in American minds since 1776; and if Britain was slow to acknowledge the obvious, that was the problem of the king and Parliament. Britain said it desired reconciliation. “It is a sweet word.” But it meant more than mere peace and required more than a termination of hostilities. For six years Britain had waged a cruel and unjust war upon America; not surprisingly, Americans harbored a great deal of resentment against Britain. Would his countrymen demand reparation for property destroyed by British troops? For homes and villages burned by Britain’s Indian allies? Franklin did not presume to say. “But would it not be better for England to offer it? Nothing would have a greater tendency to conciliate, and much of the future commerce and returning intercourse between the two countries may depend on the reconciliation. Would not the advantage of reconciliation by such means be greater than the expence?”

  What might be fair reparation? Franklin answered his own query: Canada. Britain could hardly get more from Canada in furs and other items of export than it cost her to defend and govern the province. Americans could make far better use of it. Franklin appreciated that Britain might not wish to give up Canada at the insistence of the United States; he acknowledged the role pride played in human affairs. But why not offer Canada without being asked, as a token of Britain’s sincerity regarding reconciliation? Such an offer would have “an excellent effect” in America. It would settle the issue of reparations—and at the same time provide, through Canadian land sales, the means by which the Loyalists might be indemnified for loss of their estates.

  If Oswald was surprised at the audacity of Franklin’s opening offer, he diplomatically cloaked his feelings. He congratulated Franklin on the forthrightness of his statement, and the two agreed that Oswald ought to relay the message personally to Shelburne in London. Franklin had written out his position in advance; Oswald, explaining that his own paraphrase could not do justice to Franklin’s own wording, asked to take Franklin’s paper with him. He assured the author it would be returned safely. Franklin, though reminding Oswald that the American commission comprised others besides himself, and that these would have to be consulted before any decisions could be made, at length agreed.

  Franklin’s initial skepticism of Oswald had vanished. “We parted exceeding good friends,” he recorded. To Shelburne he declared, “I desire no other channel of communication between us than that of Mr. Oswald, which I think your Lordship has chosen with much judgment.” Franklin hoped that the secretary of state, replying through Oswald, would be as frank and serious as he himself had tried to be. “If he is enabled, when he returns hither, to communicate more fully your Lordship’s mind on the principal points to be settled, I think it may contribute much to the blessed work our hearts are engaged in.”

  Blessed the work may have been, but complicated. Oswald returned in the first week of May with the news that Shelburne had read Franklin’s proposal with real interest. Oswald relayed that Shelburne had evinced surprise that a reparation was even under consideration, and he wondered if the Americans were going to demand it. Franklin, of course, had not said they would; and now Oswald tried to ensure that they would not. Speaking confidentially, he said—and subsequently repeated—that he thought the question of Canada would be settled to the Americans’ satisfaction at the end of the negotiations. But if they brought it up at the beginning it might snarl the talks irreparably.

  Franklin was not sure what to make of this. Was Oswald speaking for Shelburne or simply for himself? “On the whole,” he wrote in his journal, “I was able to draw so little from Mr. Oswald on the sentiments of Lord Shelburne, who had mentioned him as entrusted with the communication of them, that I could not but wonder at his being sent again to me.”

  Franklin’s wonder increased upon the arrival of a second envoy. The new man was young—only twenty-seven—and just recently elected to Parliament. But he was obviously well connected, for he was the son of Franklin’s nemesis, George Grenville. And he was well tutored, in that his instructions from Charles Fox indicated precisely how he was to conduct himself. Thomas Grenville was to determine whether the diplomatic distance between Franklin and Vergennes remained as small as it appeared to Oswald, and to do everything in his power to increase it. In secret instructions to young Grenville, Fox explained:

  After having seen Mons. de Vergennes you will go to Dr. Franklin, to whom you will hold the same language as to the former, and as far as his country is concerned there can be no difficulty in shewing him that there is no longer any subject of dispute and that if unhappily this treaty should break off his countrymen will be engaged in a war in which they can have no interest whatever either immediate or remote. It will be very material that, during your stay at Paris, and in the various opportunities you may have of conversing with this gentleman, you should endeavour to discover whether, if the treaty should break off or be found impracticable on account of points in which America has no concern, there may not in that case be a prospect of a separate peace between G. Britain and America, which after such an event must be so evidently for the mutual interests of both countries.

  Grenville’s first efforts in this direction failed. Franklin ushered him to a meeting with Vergennes; when Grenville proposed that Britain formally acknowledge American independence in exchange for a return to the territorial status quo ante bellum, Vergennes smiled. The offer of independence amounted to nothing, he said. “America does not ask it of you. There is Mr. Franklin; he will answer you as to that point.”

  Franklin obliged. “We do not consider ourselves as under any necessity of bargaining for a thing that is our own,” he said, “which we have bought at the expense of much blood and treasure, and which we are in the possession of.”

  Britain would have to do better, Vergennes continued. And as for a return to the status quo, had Britain been thus contented after the last war? That war had started over minor disputes regarding the Ohio and Nova Scotia; it ended with Britain taking Canada, Louisiana, and Florida, not to mention her gains in the East Indies. A country that gambled on war, Vergennes suggested, must accept its losses.

  Grenville answered that France had provoked the present war by encouraging the Americans to revolt. “On which the Count de Vergennes grew a little warm,” Franklin recorded, “and declared, firmly, that the breach was made, and our independence declared, long before we received the least encouragement
from France; and he defied the world to give the smallest proof of the contrary. ‘There sits,’ said he, ‘Mr. Franklin, who knows the fact, and can contradict me if I do not speak the truth.’”

  This was cleverly worded. Vergennes did not ask Franklin to vouch for his statement with a positive assertion, which would have required Franklin to lie. In fact France had encouraged the American revolt, secretly supplying money long before the Declaration of Independence. Franklin, as a member of the Committee of Secret Correspondence, knew this perfectly well. Vergennes, as the moving spirit behind the money, knew he knew. Grenville may have known too, from British spies in America or France. On the other hand, as young and new to the game as Grenville was, he may not have known it. In any event, he did not call Vergennes’s bluff.

  Vergennes suspected there must be more to Grenville’s mission than this initial unacceptable offer. France had entered the war not simply for America’s sake; it expected to regain some of what it had lost the last time out. And, having done so, it was not about to give those gains back. Surely Grenville—and his superiors—realized this. Noting Grenville’s antecedents, Vergennes wrote to the French ambassador in Spain, “He belongs to an important family which is connected by interest with the present ministry, and it is not very likely that the latter would intend him for a role so dull and so little analogous to his birth and his condition as that of coming to amuse and delude us.”

  Amusing, deluding, or otherwise, Grenville pursued Franklin back to Passy. Following Fox’s instructions, he pointed out that America had accomplished its goal of independence, and he contended that America therefore had no reason to continue fighting. For the Americans to cling too closely to France would be to risk reopening the war for reasons that had nothing to do with American interests.

  Franklin replied with a small lecture on debt and gratitude.

  A, a stranger to B, sees him about to be imprisoned for a debt by a merciless creditor. He lends him the sum necessary to preserve his liberty. B then becomes the debtor of A and, after some time, repays the money. Has he then discharged the obligation? No. He has discharged the money debt, but the obligation remains, and he is a debtor for the kindness of A, in lending him the sum so seasonably. If B should afterwards find A in the same circumstances that he, B, had been in when A lent him the money, he may then discharge this obligation or debt of kindness, in part, by lending him an equal sum. In part, and not wholly, because when A lent B the money there had been no prior benefit received to induce him to it. And therefore if A should a second time need the same assistance, B, if in his power, is in duty bound to afford it to him.

  Grenville rejoined that Americans would carry gratitude very far to apply this personal calculus to politics among nations. France, he pointed out, was the party that benefited by America’s separation from Britain, as that separation materially weakened Britain and comparatively strengthened France.

  Franklin responded that he was so strongly impressed by the kind assistance France afforded America in her time of trial, and by the generous and noble manner in which it was given, without the French exacting a single privilege in return, that he never entertained reasons to lessen the American obligation to France. He added that he did not doubt that his countrymen were all of the same sentiment.

  “Thus he gained nothing of the point he came to push,” Franklin recorded of Grenville. “We parted, however, in good humour.”

  In many respects the peace negotations resembled a game of chess, a pastime of which Franklin was famously fond. The tale of his chess match with a friend in Madame Brillon’s bathroom, which went on for hours while she watched from her tub, was a favorite around Paris. (Later tellings often elided that French tubs in those days had wooden covers, which shielded the bather’s body from view.) His penchant for bending the rules when occasion indicated—as with the Duchess of Bourbon—was esteemed a charming foible. When one opponent, a Frenchman, checked his king, Franklin illegally ignored the check and moved another piece. Called on the violation, Franklin declared, “I see he is in check, but I shall not defend him. If he was a good king, like yours, he would deserve the protection of his subjects; but he is a tyrant and has cost them already more than he is worth. Take him, if you please. I can do without him, and will fight out the rest of the battle en républicain.”

  On another occasion he and one of the abbés who lived with Madame Helvétius were playing a game far into the night when the last candle sputtered down. The abbé assumed that the game would end. “My dear abbé,” said Franklin, “it is impossible for two men such as us to stop merely because of lack of light.” The abbé recalled where some candles were stored, and proposed to fetch them, even in the dark. “Go, then,” Franklin encouraged, “and may the goddess of the night protect you in your adventurous course.” In the abbé’s absence, even as the candle flickered its last, Franklin rearranged the pieces to guarantee himself the victory. The abbé returned with the candles, lit one, and registered dismay at his hopeless position. Franklin chuckled and said, “The goddess of night has just answered my prayers and has sent one of Mercury’s agents here to aid me while you were gone.”

  Franklin added to his chess lore with a written reflection on the subject. The Morals of Chess, printed on his Passy press, was more serious than some of the other bagatelles, but hardly ponderous. “Life is a kind of chess,” he explained, “in which we have often points to gain, and competitors and adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and evil events that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it.” In playing chess a person could learn foresight. “If I move this piece, what will be the advantages of my new situation? What use can my adversary make of it to annoy me?” Likewise circumspection, “which surveys the whole chessboard, or scene of action, the relations of the several pieces and situations, the dangers they are respectively exposed to.” Also caution, in that once a piece was touched, that piece must be moved, and once a piece was set down, there it must stand. “If you have incautiously put yourself into a bad and dangerous position, you cannot obtain your enemy’s leave to withdraw your troops and place them more securely; but you must abide all the consequences of your rashness.”

  Players must exercise good sportsmanship. “You must not, when you have gained a victory, use any triumphing or insulting expression, nor show too much pleasure; but endeavour to console your adversary, and make him less dissatisfied with himself by every kind and civil expression.” Finally, players must remember that the best victory was not over the opponent but over oneself. A player might point out where the other slipped and graciously suggest a more effective move. “You may indeed happen to lose the game to your opponent, but you will win what is better: his esteem, his respect, and his affection, together with the silent approbation and good will of impartial spectators.”

  British negotiators in France certainly saw this essay. How Richard Oswald and Thomas Grenville interpreted it is hard to know. Was the army of Cornwallis a chess piece placed rashly and the British government the player that had to abide the consequences of the rashness? Who was the victor to whom magnanimity in triumph was recommended? Whose esteem was being sought? Franklin left them to guess.

  British officials saw much more from Franklin’s pen than his bagetelles. As a civil conflict the Revolutionary War was fertile soil for secret agents. The differences of language and culture that typically separate countries at war did not exist; patriots and loyalists looked alike, sounded alike, dressed alike. And—despite the nomenclature applied to the opposing parties—questions of patriotism and loyalty were often clouded. A Frenchman selling secrets to England during the Seven years’ War, for example, could be expected to have to wrestle harder with his conscience than an American cleaving to King George during the Revolutionary War. There is no evidence, and little reason to believe, that William Franklin’s conscience was any less clear than his father’s.

  The elder Franklin was a prime target for Briti
sh espionage. As minister to France he was the hinge of the alliance upon which the conflict turned; as peace commissioner (especially until the arrival of John Adams and John Jay) he was the person who knew, or would determine, how far America could be pushed at the peace table. It would pay the British government greatly to learn this vital information.

  And the British government in turn would pay to acquire this information. London found its man in Edward Bancroft. Nearly forty years Franklin’s junior, Bancroft had been born in humble circumstances in Westfield, Massachusetts. When the boy was two his father died, in a pigsty of an epileptic seizure. His stepfather owned a tavern in which young Edward grew up; such schooling as he received was largely makeshift and self-administered. (Significantly, part of the formal portion came at the tutelage of Silas Deane.) Bancroft taught himself chemistry; his aptitude for the science was revealed in a path-breaking book on the chemistry of color and in a patent that promised to ruin the market for Carolina indigo. He also apprenticed to a doctor, eventually becoming a charter member of the Medical Society of London. Meanwhile he found time to sojourn in South America, a journey that provided the material for a natural history of Guiana and its peoples.

  Bancroft’s travels terminated, for the time being, in London, where, as a bright and inquisitive American transplant, he fell in with Franklin, who took to him at once. Franklin recommended Bancroft to the editor of the Monthly Review, in which Bancroft reported on American politics. Franklin introduced Bancroft to friends Pringle, Priestley, and others. Franklin successfully sponsored Bancroft for election to the Royal Society. Franklin even brought Bancroft in on the scheme to win a charter for the colony on the Ohio. Bancroft was present at Franklin’s inquisition in the Cockpit and was one of the few persons who defended Franklin in the London papers in the matter of the Hutchinson letters.