The First American

by H. W. Brands

  War and its avoidance were serious matters. The approaching end of Franklin’s public life encouraged such serious reflection. Yet the creator of Silence Dogood was older than the philosopher-diplomat, and must have his jokes.

  In a short piece written for one of the Paris journals, Franklin reflected on the nocturnal habits of French high society, and recounted an astonishing discovery he had made. He had spent a March evening in company discussing the recent invention of a lamp by M. Quinquet; all present admired the lamp but wondered whether it did not burn oil excessively. The cost of lighting, everyone agreed, was outrageous, and must not be increased.

  I went home, and to bed, three or four hours after midnight, with my head full of the subject. An accidental sudden noise waked me about six in the morning, when I was surprised to find my room filled with light; and I imagined at first that a number of those lamps had been brought into it; but, rubbing my eyes, I perceived the light came in at the windows. I got up and looked out to see what might be the occasion of it, when I saw the sun just rising above the horizon, from whence he poured his rays plentifully into my chamber, my domestic having negligently omitted, the preceding evening, to close the shutters.

  Subsequent investigation revealed that this remarkable phenomenon occurred every morning, and in summer (here an almanac was consulted) still earlier. “Your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early, and especially when I assure them that he gives light as soon as he rises.”

  Savants with whom this finding had been shared refused to accept it. “One, indeed, who is a learned natural philosopher, has assured me that I must be mistaken as to the circumstance of the light coming into my room; for it being well known, as he says, that there could be no light abroad at that hour, it follows that none could enter from without; and that, of consequence, my windows, being accidentally left open, instead of letting in the light, had only served to let out the darkness.”

  Yet additional experiments confirmed the truth that Paris lay in broad daylight for several hours before noon. This prompted certain deep, and most useful, reflections. “I considered that if I had not been awakened so early in the morning, I should have slept six hours longer by the light of the sun, and in exchange have lived six hours the following night by candle-light.” The latter being much dearer than the former, an elementary (if somewhat tedious) calculation revealed that the hundred thousand families of Paris might save more than 96 million livres every year by the simple device of rising with the sun.

  For the great benefit of this discovery, thus freely communicated and bestowed by me upon the public, I demand neither place, pension, exclusive privilege, nor any other reward whatever. I expect only to have the honour of it.

  And yet I know there are little, envious minds who will, as usual deny me this, and say that my invention was known to the ancients, and perhaps they may bring passages out of the old books in proof of it. I will not dispute with these people that the ancients knew not the sun would rise at certain hours; they possibly had, as we have, almanacs that predicted it; but it does not follow thence that they knew he gave light as soon as he rose.

  This is what I claim as my discovery. If the ancients knew it, it might have been long since forgotten; for it certainly was unknown to the moderns, at least to the Parisians; which to prove, I need use but one plain simple argument. They are as well instructed, judicious, and prudent a people as exist anywhere in the world, all professing, like myself, to be lovers of economy; and, from the many heavy taxes required from them by the necessities of the state, have surely an abundant reason to be economical. I say it is impossible that so sensible a people, under such circumstances, should have lived so long by the smoky, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles, if they had really known that they might have had as much pure light of the sun for nothing.

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  1785–86

  Another bagatelle had a decidedly darker theme. It involved a lion, king of the beasts, who numbered among his subjects a body of faithful dogs, devoted to his person and government, and through whose assistance he had greatly extended his dominions. The lion, however, influenced by evil counselors, took an aversion to the dogs, condemned them unheard, and ordered his tigers, leopards, and panthers to attack and destroy them.

  The brave dogs, dismayed at their master’s change of heart, reluctantly defended themselves—but not without internal dissent. “A few among them, of a mongrel race, derived from a mixture with wolves and foxes, corrupted by royal promises of great rewards, deserted the honest dogs and joined their enemies.”

  After a sore struggle the dogs fought off the tigers, leopards, and panthers. In their victory they refused to suffer the return of the mongrels—who thereupon applied to the lion to fulfill the promises he had made. The wolves and the foxes supported their appeal and urged that every loyal subject of the lion should be taxed to that end.

  Only the horse, with a boldness and freedom that became the nobility of his nature, spoke against the mongrels and the wolves and foxes. The lion, he said, had been misled by bad ministers to war unjustly on his faithful subjects. Royal promises, when made to encourage subjects to act for the public good, should indeed be honored; but if made to encourage betrayal and mutual destruction, they were wicked and void from the beginning. “If you enable the King to reward those fratricides, you will establish a precedent that may justify a future tyrant to make like promises; and every example of such an unnatural brute rewarded will give them additional weight.” Horses and bulls, as well as dogs, might thus be divided against their own kind, and civil wars produced at pleasure. All would be so weakened that neither liberty nor safety would survive, and nothing would remain but abject submission to a despot, “who may devour us as he pleases.”

  At the time Franklin wrote this fable, the British Parliament was complaining at the Americans’ failure to compensate the Loyalists for their losses. The piece was written for a British audience; Franklin’s point was that the Loyalists did not deserve compensation—certainly not from the Americans, nor even from the British king or Parliament.

  In some respects Franklin was a magnanimous victor. He repaired relations with old friends in England, resuming correspondence where the war had broken it off. But on the subject of the Loyalists he never relented. Indeed, he went so far as to deny they deserved the label they adopted. “The name loyalist was improperly assumed by these people,” he wrote a British friend. “Royalists they may perhaps be called. But the true loyalists were the people of America, against whom they acted.” Eventually Franklin acknowledged that if Parliament wished to compensate the Loyalists, it might do so. But his reasoning revealed his continuing bitterness. “Even a hired assassin has a right to his pay from his employer.”

  Perhaps as consequence, perhaps as cause—probably as both— Franklin’s feelings toward the Loyalists as a group were closely connected to his feelings toward William. In August 1784, after a hiatus of several years, he received a letter from his son. William had been released from custody in a prisoner exchange in 1778, and after four years among his fellow refugees in the vicinity of New York he sailed for London. There he took up the cause of the American Loyalists, becoming one of the wolves and foxes of his father’s fable—not to mention already being one of the foremost mongrels. For several months after the conclusion of the war neither father nor son made any move to contact the other, the former out of hurt and anger, the latter out of pride.

  Finally the son took the step. Assuming that his father would be leaving France for America soon, and probably taking Temple with him, William averred his desire to “revive that affectionate intercourse and connexion which till the commencement of the late troubles had been the pride and happiness of my life.” He conceded that his actions during the war had disappointed his father. Yet an honorable man
did what he must. “I uniformly acted from a strong sense of what I conceived my duty to my King and regard to my country.” At this late hour he would not apologize. “If I have been mistaken, I cannot help it. It is an error of judgment that the maturest reflection I am capable of cannot rectify, and I verily believe that were the same circumstances to occur tomorrow, my conduct would be exactly similar to what it was heretofore.” All this was history, however. He hoped to resume the relationship as it had been before the war.

  “Dear Son,” Franklin replied. “I received your letter of the 22d past, and am glad to find that you desire to revive the affectionate intercourse that formerly existed between us. It will be very agreeable to me.”

  Yet not really. “Let us now forgive and forget,” Franklin had said to Jonathan Shipley. But with William he could neither forgive nor forget.

  Nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen sensations as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against me, in a cause wherein my good fame, fortune and life were all at stake.

  You conceived, you say, that your duty to your King and regard for your country required this. I ought not to blame you for differing in sentiment with me in public affairs. We are men, all subject to errors. Our opinions are not in our own power; they are formed and governed much by circumstances that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible. Your situation was such that few would have censured your remaining neuter, though there are natural duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguished by them.

  Franklin underlined these last words, which went to the heart of the issue—and to the heart of Franklin himself. Friends—even close friends like William Strahan—Franklin could forgive for their political differences with him on the issue of allegiance to the Crown; family he could not. He insisted that William’s loyalty to his father come before his loyalty to his king.

  Logic did not compel Franklin to frame the question this way. He did not accuse Loyalists as a group of waging war on him personally—of “taking up arms against me.” But he so accused William. He seems not to have considered that William might have leveled an analogous accusation against him. After all, Franklin was the rebel of the two. Perhaps Franklin felt a son owed more to his father in this regard than the father owed the son. Yet if such was his conception of filial relations, he certainly had showed no evidence of it in his dealings with his own father, whom he disregarded whenever interest bade him.

  All his life Franklin had sought respect. His search had been stunningly successful by the standards of most mortals. No man on earth was more broadly respected than Benjamin Franklin. Even the British government, whose conspicuous disrespect had made him one of the most formidable enemies the Crown ever faced, had come round, as Shelburne made abundantly clear during the peace talks.

  But William refused to accord him the respect he demanded. William was not allowed to discover his own mind and honor his own convictions. To disagree with his father was, on this critical issue, to disrespect him.

  It was not Franklin’s finest hour. And he knew it. “This is a disagreeable subject,” he wrote William. “I drop it.” He promised to try to bury the past “as well as we can,” but his tone left William little room for hope.

  Neither did the sole meeting between the two. In May 1785 Franklin received the message he had long been awaiting. “You are permitted to return to America as soon as convenient,” wrote John Jay on behalf of the Congress. Franklin’s French friends urged him to stay. “They press me much to remain in France,” he told Sally and Richard Bache, “and three of them have offered me an asylum in their habitations. They tell me I am here among a people who universally esteem and love me; that my friends at home are diminished by death in my absence; that I may there meet with envy and its consequent enmity which here I am perfectly free from; this supposing I live to complete the voyage, but of that they doubt.”

  Franklin himself had some questions on that score. He was not sure he could find a ship that would not kill him crossing the ocean. Remembering his latest journey from America, before his stone started plaguing him, he declared, “I must be better stowed now, or I shall not be able to hold out the voyage.” The pain that accompanied the least journey on land made him dubious. But ultimately the desire “of spending the little remainder of life with my family” determined him to see if he could bear the motion of a ship. “If not, I must get them to set me on shore somewhere in the Channel, and content myself to die in Europe.”

  He bade au revoir to Vergennes, who regretted his departure. “This minister has won the King’s esteem,” Vergennes remarked to one of his subordinates. “And I personally have the greatest confidence in his principles and in his integrity. The United States will never have a more zealous and more useful servant than Mr. Franklin.”

  Franklin reciprocated the respect. “I think your minister, who is so expert in composing quarrels and preventing wars, the great blessing of this age,” he told a French friend. “The Devil must send us three or four heroes before he can get as much slaughter of mankind done as that one man has prevented.”

  Finding a suitable ship required some weeks, and it was July before Franklin set out. “When he left Passy,” Jefferson recorded, “it seemed as if the village had lost its patriarch.” He had intended to float down the Seine on a barge, but a dry summer made navigation difficult. Instead the queen offered her royal litter, which was carried by two large mules—“who walk very easy,” Franklin was relieved to note. (King Louis’s gesture was a portrait of himself, framed in four hundred diamonds.) Several of Franklin’s friends accompanied him; count, colonel, and cardinal hosted him on his journey to the sea. Delegations from towns and villages en route greeted him; the Academy of Rouen presented him with a magic square said to represent his name in numbers. (“I have perused it since,” he wrote, “but do not comprehend it.”)

  A letter awaited him at Havre. The leave-taking had been hardest for the women Franklin loved, and who loved him. Madame Brillon could not bear to see him go. “My heart was so heavy yesterday when I left you,” she wrote, “that I feared, for you and for myself, another such moment which would have only added to my misery without further proving the tender, unchanging love I have devoted to you forever…. If it ever pleases you to remember the woman who loved you the most, think of me. Farewell, my heart was not meant to be separated from yours, but it shall not be. You shall find it near yours; speak to it and it shall answer you.”

  Madame Brillon’s letter he read in his litter (with the aid of his double spectacles); the one that caught him at the coast was from Madame Helvétius.

  I cannot get accustomed to the idea that you have left us, my dear friend; that you are no longer in Passy, that I shall never see you again. I can picture you in your litter, further from us at every step, already lost to me and to your friends who loved you so much and regret you so. I fear you are in pain, that the road will tire you and make you more uncomfortable.

  If such is the case, come back, my dear friend; come back to us. My little retreat will be the better for your presence; you will like it because of the friendship you will find here and the care we will take of you. You will make our life happier; we shall contribute to your happiness.

  To his surprise, the journey was quite tolerable. The mules earned their oats keeping him comfortable; he wrote Madame Helvétius that his strength was improving. He must go on, though his heart resisted. “We shall stay here a few days, waiting for our luggage, and then we shall leave France, the country that I love the most in the world. And there I shall leave my dear Helvetia. She may be happy yet. I am not sure that I shall be happy in America, but I must go back. I feel sometimes that things are badly arranged in this world when I consider that people so well matched to be happy together are forced to separate.” He closed as gallantly as ever: “I will not tell you of my love. For one would say that there is nothing remarkable or prais
eworthy about it, since every body loves you. I only hope that you will always love me some.”

  From Havre the Franklin party—consisting of himself, Temple, Benny, and Franklin’s nephew Jonathan Williams—traversed the Channel to Southampton, to catch a British ship. (Belatedly the French navy minister declared, “Had I been informed of it sooner, I should have proposed to the king to order a frigate to convey you to your own country in a manner suitable to the known importance of the services you have been engaged in.” Franklin accepted the minister’s apologies.)

  The Channel boat encountered stiff headwinds and contrary seas. For nearly two full days the craft pitched and the passengers moaned—all but Franklin, the one aboard who did not get sick. “I feel very well,” he wrote Madame Helvétius from Southampton—adding a last “I shall always love you.”

  Several of his surviving English friends came to see him. Jonathan Shipley and family put up at the Star tavern with the Franklin party; it was probably Shipley who introduced Franklin to one of the local attractions. “I went at noon to bathe in Martin’s salt-water bath,” Franklin wrote, “and, floating on my back, fell asleep, and slept near an hour by my watch, without sinking or turning! a thing I never did before, and should hardly have thought possible. Water is the easiest bed that can be.”

  Less pleasant was his meeting with William. The younger man still hoped for a reconciliation. He knew he would never see his father again, for age would claim the old man long before America would forgive the son. If they were ever to recapture some of the intimacy they had shared for many years, they would have to do so now.

  The presence of Temple raised the emotional stakes for both men. Temple was the surrogate son Franklin had claimed after his own son abandoned him, and he did not want to give him up. Politics aside, he probably felt he had a better claim to Temple than William did, having raised Temple, educated him, and brought him to the beginning of a career. William doubtless regretted not having acknowledged Temple earlier, but he nonetheless must have felt that Franklin had stolen what was the natural right of all parents: the affection of a child. Franklin had grudgingly allowed Temple to visit William in London the previous summer. “I trust that you will prudently avoid introducing him to company that it may be improper for him to be seen with,” Franklin wrote William, in what could only have been interpreted as a condescending tone. And he chafed as long as Temple was away, urging him to write by every post and making plain that, at least in his view, Temple answered to him rather than to William.