The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Yet Franklin was not so sure what he and the commission had accomplished. “The report is published and makes a great deal of talk,” he wrote Temple. “Every body agrees it is well written, but many wonder at the force of imagination described in it, as occasioning convulsions &c., and some fear that consequences may be drawn from it by infidels to weaken our faith in some of the miracles of the New Testament…. Some think it will put an end to Mesmerism. But there is a wonderful deal of credulity in the world, and deceptions as absurd have supported themselves for ages.”

  Franklin preferred philosophy, but diplomacy insisted. As ranking American minister in Europe, he carried the burden of counseling emigrants to the new nation on what to expect. And a burden it was. “I am pestered continually,” he wrote Charles Thomson, “with numbers of letters from people in different parts of Europe who would go to settle in America but who manifest very extravagant expectations, such as I can by no means encourage, and who appear otherwise to be very improper persons.” To save himself trouble Franklin composed and printed a pamphlet entitled Information to Those Who Would Remove to America. The pamphlet’s nominal purpose was to correct common misconceptions about America; it also served as a confession by Franklin as to what America stood for.

  First among the misconceptions was that Americans were rich but ignorant, able, and willing to shower wealth upon Europeans with the slightest ingenuity. Second was the belief that with so many new governments and so few families of standing, the thirteen states must have hundreds of offices available to well-born Europeans willing to cross the water. Third was the notion that the new governments bestowed land gratis on strangers, complete with livestock, tools, and slaves. “These are all wild imaginings,” Franklin declared, “and those who go to America with expectations founded upon them will surely find themselves disappointed.”

  What was the reality? “Though there are in that country few people so miserable as the poor of Europe, there are also very few that in Europe would be called rich. It is rather a happy mediocrity that prevails.” Americans were far from ignorant; their country supported nine colleges or universities and numerous academies. The several states did employ many people, but those employed often served at personal sacrifice. “It is a rule established in some of the states that no office should be so profitable as to make it desirable.”

  Birth counted for next to nothing in America. “People do not enquire, concerning a stranger, What is he? But What can he do? If he has any useful art, he is welcome; and if he exercises it and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him; but a mere man of quality, who on that account wants to live upon the public by some office or salary, will be despised and disregarded.” This practical outlook colored every aspect of American life. “The people have a saying, that God Almighty is himself a mechanic, the greatest in the universe; and he is respected more for the variety, ingenuity and utility of his handiworks than for the antiquity of his family.”

  The only encouragement offered to strangers was what derived from liberty and good laws. Who came without a fortune must work to eat. “America is the land of labour, and by no means what the English call Lubberland, and the French Pays de Cocagne, where the streets are said to be paved with half-peck loaves, the houses tiled with pancakes, and where the fowls fly about already roasted, crying, Come eat me!”

  Who, then, should travel to America? “Hearty young labouring men, who understand the husbandry of corn and cattle…. Artisans of all the necessary and useful kinds…. Persons of moderate fortunes and capitals, who having a number of children to provide for, are desirous of bringing them up to industry.” Such people would find opportunities for material improvement unequaled in Europe.

  They would find something else as well. America was a land where virtue grew among the corn. “Industry and constant employment are great preservatives of the morals and virtue of a nation. Hence bad examples to youth are more rare in America, which must be a comfortable consideration to parents.” Comforting too was the encouragement American liberty and tolerance afforded to real religion. “Atheism is unknown there, infidelity rare and secret, so that persons may live to a great age in that country without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an atheist or an infidel. And the Divine Being seems to have manifested his approbation of the mutual forbearance and kindness with which the different sects treat each other, by the remarkable prosperity with which he has been pleased to favour the whole country.”

  Loose ends remained from the war. They entangled Franklin, who was still trying to resign, and they threatened to entangle the United States. The peace treaty had not even been initialed when Vergennes complained that the Americans had deceived and disappointed him. Yes, he had accepted that they might negotiate with the English separately from France, but he had no idea they would actually conclude a separate settlement. “I am rather at a loss, sir, to explain your conduct,” the self-possessed foreign minister declared to Franklin, in what for him amounted to outrage. “You have concluded your preliminary articles without informing us, although the instructions of Congress stipulate that you do nothing without the participation of the King.” Appealing to Franklin’s personal honor, Vergennes complimented even as he complained. “You are wise and discreet, sir; you understand the proprieties; you have fulfilled your duties all your life. Do you think you are satisfying those that connect you to the King? I do not wish to carry these reflections further; I commit them to your integrity.”

  Franklin essayed to mollify his host. He explained that by sending the preliminary agreement to America, he and his fellow commissioners were merely informing their masters of a work in progress. The British, no doubt, would send the news across the Atlantic to their officers. “It was certainly very incumbent on us to give Congress as early an account as possible of our proceedings, who must think it extremely strange to hear of them by other means without a line from us.”

  Besides, the French government in fact had little cause for complaint. “Nothing has been agreed to in the preliminaries contrary to the interests of France, and no peace is to take place between us and England till you have concluded yours.” Franklin granted that the American commissioners had erred in a minor matter of form in not consulting the French court before signing the preliminary articles. “But as this was not from want of respect for the King, whom we all love and honour, we hope it may be excused, and the great work which has hitherto been so happily conducted, is so nearly brought to perfection, and is so glorious to his reign, will not be ruined by a single indiscretion of ours.” Already the British fancied they were causing a rift in the alliance. “I hope this little misunderstanding will therefore be kept a perfect secret, and that they will find themselves totally mistaken.”

  It was too late for that. Franklin wrote to Vergennes on December 17; by December 19 London had the news from Edward Bancroft. British officials delighted at what one called Vergennes’s “storm of indignation” against Franklin, and they gleefully anticipated a falling-out between America and France, which could only benefit Britain.

  Yet Vergennes had no intention of letting such a thing happen. Fully aware of British ambitions regarding the Americans, he was content to let Franklin know that King Louis was not pleased; then he allowed the American back into His Majesty’s good graces.

  Which was precisely what Franklin had expected—as Vergennes doubtless realized. The two wily diplomats understood each other, and appreciated each other. Vergennes told the French ambassador in Philadelphia, Anne-César Luzerne, how all ended well at a recent interview with Franklin. “It passed very amiably for both of us. He assured me that the intention of his principals was not to take the least action at any time that might detract from the fidelity which they owed to their engagements and which, in spite of the necessity and the expediency of peace, they would renounce rather than neglect the obligations they have to the King and the gratitude they owe him.”

  Franklin’s handling of Vergennes paid ad
ditional dividends when the foreign minister agreed to lend the United States more money. Better than Adams or Jay, Franklin understood that though the fighting was over, the American government needed money almost as much as ever. Its debts were daunting, and with the war’s focusing effect on the national psyche largely dissipated, the states would be even less likely than before to pay their shares. If Congress expected France to keep furnishing funds, it behooved American representatives to be considerate of French interests.

  Franklin’s current application was for 20 million livres. Vergennes had professed to be aghast at its size. “That sum far exceeds all the proportions under consideration,” he said. Yet at this late hour France was not inclined to see the United States fail. Louis approved a new loan of 6 million livres, of which 600,000 would be delivered to Franklin at once for dispatch to America.

  The approval of the aid did not mean that Franklin had heard the last of Louis’s annoyance. If nothing else, the French court intended to use the Americans’ indiscretion as a bargaining chip against them. Vergennes initially directed Ambassador Luzerne to remonstrate to Congress about the deception perpetrated by the American commissioners; after Franklin’s soothing letter and visit the foreign minister sent a new letter exonerating the commissioners. But Luzerne showed the first letter to the American foreign secretary, Robert Livingston, while verbally communicating the second—thereby reminding the Americans of their sins even while pardoning them. In a conversation with several members of Congress, Luzerne made clear (in the words of one member, James Madison) “that the King had been surprised and displeased and that he said he did not think he had such allies to deal with.” When one of the members asked whether Louis was going to file a formal complaint against Franklin and the other commissioners, Luzerne’s associate, François Barbé de Marbois, answered “that great powers never complained but that they felt and remembered.”

  Had he been twenty years younger, Franklin might have summoned enthusiasm for this subtle game of nations. But probably not, even then; his was not a personality that reveled in intrigue and artful maneuvering. (It was perhaps significant in this regard that for all his affinity for chess, he never became very good at the game.)

  Besides, he was tired. His gout and his stone—“the gout and gravel,” he called them—made it impossible for him to travel with comfort, sometimes to travel at all. “I cannot bear a carriage on pavement,” he wrote. The annual vacations that for years had guarded his health were out of the question. Entertainments that had enlivened his existence—a grand dinner he hosted on the second anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (the first anniversary since the alliance with France); a “salon” the following year, where his visage was celebrated in painting, in engraving, and in sculpture (“My face is almost as well known as that of the Moon,” he commented to Jane Mecom); the afternoons at Auteuil; the summer days at Moulin-Joli; the meetings of Masons at the Lodge of the Nine Sisters; the pursuit of his women friends—all were things of the past. The memory was pleasant, but repetition almost unthinkable. “Repose is now my only ambition,” he wrote in the spring of 1784.

  Repose and retirement. This last comment was to John Jay and his wife, recently returned to America, where Jay would become foreign secretary. “Mr. Jay was so kind as to offer his friendly services to me in America,” Franklin reminded. “He will oblige me by endeavouring to forward my discharge from this employment.”

  What would Franklin do on retirement? He thought seriously of staying in France. By the time his discharge arrived, he might be in no condition to return to America. “I may then be too old and feeble to bear the voyage.” Besides, France held much for him, and America less and less. “I am here among a people that love and respect me, a most amiable nation to live with; and perhaps I may conclude to die among them; for my friends in America are dying off, one after another, and I have been so long abroad that I should now be almost a stranger in my own country.”

  Death held no terror for Franklin. To his friend George Whately he explained the principle of his bifocals and said they made his failing eyes almost as useful as ever. He went on, “If all the other defects and infirmities were as easily and cheaply remedied, it would be worth while for my friends to live a good deal longer; but I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.”

  Some mornings he still rose refreshed. When he did, a measure of the old energy returned. And it was augmented by a new partner in diplomacy. The prospect of continued service with John Adams had been one reason Franklin was so eager to retire. In a transparent reference to Adams, Franklin wrote Robert Morris, “I hope the ravings of a certain mischievous madman here against France and its ministers, which I hear every day, will not be regarded in America.” To Henry Laurens, the long-absent American commissioner, Franklin wrote saying he wished Laurens could come to Paris. “Mr. Jay will probably be gone, and I shall be left alone, or with Mr. A., and I can have no favourable opinion of what may be the offspring of a coalition between my ignorance and his positiveness.”

  Franklin received better than Laurens; in August 1784 the other missing commissioner, Thomas Jefferson, arrived. The contrast between Adams and Jefferson could hardly have been greater. Adams was jealous of Franklin (and of every other successful person he met); Jefferson easily accepted Franklin’s status as the greatest American of all. Adams embodied the prudishness of New England; Jefferson lived the tolerance of Virginia. Adams cared little for philosophy or speculation; Jefferson was a philosopher and scientist second among Americans only to Franklin. Adams distrusted France and inclined toward England; Jefferson felt just the opposite.

  The arrival of this kindred spirit lifted Franklin’s own. Had he been more mobile he would have escorted Jefferson about Paris and to the court at Versailles; as it was, Jefferson met those of Franklin’s friends who called at Passy. Jefferson’s admiration for Franklin grew; the younger man later called the elder “the ornament of our country, and I may say, of the world.” When the Congress, after finally allowing Franklin to retire, named Jefferson the American minister to France, and he was introduced around Paris as the one who replaced Franklin, he liked to interject that though he might succeed Dr. Franklin, no one could replace him.

  In his final months in Paris, Franklin oversaw negotiation of treaties with various countries; one, with Prussia, contained an article he thought should be generalized. In the event of war between them, the United States and Prussia would forgo the use of privateers. Although privateers had played a critical role for America in the late war, with Franklin urging the privateers on, he disliked this form of licensed lawlessness. Privateers were nothing better than pirates, and to allow—indeed encourage—their depredations was to foster disrespect for law and order. “Justice is as strictly due between neighbour nations as between neighbour citizens,” he wrote to Benjamin Vaughan, with the intention that his letter be published (it was). “A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang.” Needless to say, Franklin believed that America’s defensive war against Britain had been just; it was this that excused America’s resort to privateers. But every war entailed injustice on one side or the other, and Franklin judged that the greater justice dictated abolition of this evil practice.

  He appreciated that America would be giving up more than other countries by such a ban. The rich trade routes of the European powers to the West Indies ran right by American shores, making the merchant vessels of those powers tempting targets for American craft. But privateering under any flag was a heinous business, starting with theft and ending with murder. “It is high time, for the sake of humanity, that a stop be put to this enormity.” He and his fellow commissioners were trying to include antiprivateering clauses in all their treaties. “This will be a happy improvement in the law of nations. The humane and the just cannot but wish general success to the proposition.”


  Franklin’s opposition to privateering suggested that he thought America would be involved in war rarely if ever; otherwise he would not so lightly have bargained away a potentially important American advantage. Indeed, a true son of the Enlightenment, he believed that wars would become less frequent—if national leaders employed their reason rather than their passions. To a correspondent who registered disapproval of war on grounds of its inhumanity, he agreed, then added that war was not simply inhumane but foolish. “I think it wrong in point of human prudence, for whatever advantage one nation would obtain from another, whether it be part of their territory, the liberty of commerce with them, free passage on their river, &c., it would be much cheaper to purchase such advantage with ready money, than to pay the expense of acquiring it by war.” An army was a “devouring monster” that had to be fed, clothed, housed, and otherwise tended to; beyond the cost of the army itself were “all the knavish charges of the numerous tribe of contractors.” If statesmen were better at arithmetic, wars would be far fewer. England might have purchased Canada from France for much less than England paid to fight the war that won that province. Similarly London was penny wise and pound foolish in its treatment of the American colonies. If Parliament had humored the Americans in their resistance to taxes, the British government might have got more through voluntary grants and contributions than her stamps and duties would ever have yielded. “Sensible people will give a bucket or two of water to a dry pump, that they may afterwards get from it all they have occasion for. Her ministry were deficient in that little point of common sense, and so they spent one hundred millions of her money, and, after all, lost what they had contended for.”