Until February 1775, Franklin continued to work and hope for some kind of resolution to the colonial crisis. He achieved nothing, and as February ended, he decided to go home. Both the decision and its timing were sad. By prolonging a pointless fight in London, Franklin guaranteed that he would never again see his wife. Deborah Franklin, smitten by a series of strokes, had died in December 1774.
Shipwrecked: in the eighteenth century, the word described a man who had lost everything—livelihood, reputation, prospects, hope. There were moments in 1774 and 1775 when Franklin must have felt himself to be wrecked, though he still had some hope—and rage—to sustain him. As he wrote his son from the ship that carried him back to America in March 1775, the “wrong politicks” had prevented Americans and Britons from “extending our Western Empire [by] adding Province to Province as far as the South Sea.” So much for the pacific—and Pacific—promises of the British Empire. “The Waves never rise but when the Winds blow.” Did Franklin feel any satisfaction, however grim, that his political and philosophical sentiments had converged?102
Chapter 8
THE SCIENCE OF WAR
FRANKLIN had waited until the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour to leave London. On March 22, 1775, he embarked from Portsmouth on one of the packets that still, barely, connected the colonies to Britain. The six-week passage gave him ample time to write a bitter journal of the failed peace negotiations in London. And he worried, yet again, about “Voyages from & to America why not of equal Length,” as he titled a note he wrote “at Sea” on April 5.1
In the political essay, Franklin addressed a problem with a solution he could now define: separation from Britain by any means necessary. There would be no more compromises. In his essay on science, in contrast, he addressed a problem that continued to puzzle him. The Gulf Stream caused different lengths of passage across the Atlantic, but what on earth caused the stream? Such was his indefatigable curiosity about nature that even at that moment, still reeling from a grave political defeat, Franklin attacked a major philosophic topic, one emblematic of the dangerous distance between Britain and America.
He still suspected that the earth’s rotation was involved; a ship sailing east must gain speed as the world turned, perhaps “two miles in a minute faster.” When a ship went the other way, “just the contrary must happen.” But perhaps the current had other causes, and Franklin now examined a new factor, thermal variation in seawater, that revived his old interests in temperature and circulation. He joined a clutch of naturalists, including those on Cook’s second Pacific voyage, who were starting to collect sea-surface temperature readings.2
How do you take the ocean’s temperature? In the eighteenth century, if you were nearly seventy years old, you could do it handily with the help of a Fahrenheit thermometer and a spry young person. Franklin’s assistant was his teenaged grandchild, William Temple Franklin. Temple was William Franklin’s son, born in London (out of wedlock) but now going to America to join his father, who was serving as governor of New Jersey. While he and his grandfather were at sea, it was probably Temple who hauled up buckets of sea-water or lowered the thermometer in a protective device. We have the final assessment of their data, published as part of Franklin’s 1786 “Maritime Observations,” which may be only a subset of the readings he and Temple had collected a decade earlier. These data recorded the sea’s surface temperature on thirteen days in April and May. Franklin also took the air’s temperature, and for the final six days of readings (April 28 through May 3), he made measurements of air and water several times a day. The data allowed Franklin to see how the temperature of the ocean varied according to the time of day and atmospheric temperature. The records included, for each reading, prevailing wind direction, the ship’s course, position at latitude and longitude, and narrative remarks.3
The latter were mostly notes on the color of the ocean’s water and whether it contained any “gulph weed,” the two visible clues Franklin had noticed in 1726. He remarked on two places where the temperature of the water rose, gulfweed appeared, and phosphorescence vanished. One note referred to an older thermal interest, a “Thunder-gust”; another followed Timothy Folger’s advice for locating the great current: “saw a whale.” Franklin seemed to be compiling all he had learned and was continuing to learn about the Gulf Stream.4
Then Franklin dropped the matter—again. As never before, public affairs—meaning the birth of the United States—robbed him of time to address the sciences. It was the Franklin paradox in its starkest form.
We could look at this situation in two different ways. In one way, the American Revolution destroyed Franklin’s scientific career; the event made it impossible for him to maintain even the low level of activity he had managed in London while the crisis was brewing. But in another way, the Revolution guaranteed his immortal fame. The event made clear that Franklin had surpassed all other modern philosophers. He had gained glory in natural science, as figures such as Newton had also done. But then he guided a new nation through war and into international recognition, tasks even Newton had never had to face.
Franklin was surely not oblivious to the trade-off. In essence, he made a silent pact with his new nation: he laid his reputation as a philosopher on the altar of the Revolution. He guaranteed his apotheosis as a genius but sacrificed any time to do further work in the sciences.
Moreover, Franklin brokered his fame to win European allies. This was yet another of his astonishing balancing acts. The republic of letters was supposed to stand above nation, but Franklin used his status as man of letters to help found a nation. During the war that created the United States, he embodied the complex relations between science and politics—sometimes studiously separated, sometimes opportunistically conflated.
DISEMBARKING in Philadelphia on May 5, Franklin learned of the battles of Lexington and Concord. The next day, he was selected as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Second Continental Congress, whose members debated whether to break with Britain. Knowing his time for science would soon vanish, Franklin quickly wrote Joseph Priestley on May 1 6 that “in coming over I made a valuable philosophical discovery, which I shall communicate to you, when I can get a little time.” Priestley waited. Later in May, Franklin began another letter, possibly to him, on the question the Boston Board of Customs had sent “to the Lords of the Treasury,” five or six years earlier, about different lengths of voyages across the Atlantic. He ran through the available explanations, adding that he “could not but think the Fact misunderstood or misrepresented,” a sign that his work on thermal variation might have followed. But the letter stopped there and was never posted. He had other things to think about.5
Franklin had always wanted Philadelphia to be at the center of things—now, he got his wish. The city was the heart of the “United Colonies,” the seat of the Continental Congress, which met in Pennsylvania’s State House. (There, Massachusetts delegate John Adams saw Henry Popple’s map of British America, which Franklin had ordered in 1746—Adams reported that it was the largest map he had ever seen.) Franklin joined congressional committees meant to establish independent power for the United Colonies. The Committee of Secret Correspondence sought diplomatic and military aid; the parallel Secret Committee sought materiel to use against Britain.6
Then, in late July of 1775, Congress founded a post office, and fittingly, Franklin was appointed its first postmaster general. His old friend and now political critic William Strahan was alarmed. Strahan recognized that, by creating an American postal authority, Congress was declaring colonial independence and that Franklin, by becoming postmaster, was declaring his as well. “I see with Concern that you have accepted of the Place of Postmaster from the Congress,” Strahan wrote, “a Step of itself which sufficiently indicates your Opinion, that a Separation will take Place.” Strahan noted that he communicated his suspicion via “the last regular Packett that is to sail from hence for some time at least.” He thus retracted an earlier promise to write Franklin by every packet and wi
thdrew his friendship. Franklin had already written him a note signed, with clever fury, “You are now my Enemy, and I am, Yours, B FRANKLIN.” But he could not bring himself to send it.7
As the first British empire fell apart, so did its postal system, ominously severing thousands of human connections between Britain and America. On August 23, 1775, the king declared the colonies to be in open rebellion. One month later, on September 28, the British General Post Office announced in the London newspapers that mail to the thirteen rebellious colonies would leave one last time on October 4. Many scribbling Britons, including Strahan, posted their letters on that day. Thereafter, North American packet boats ran only to and from Halifax. A final round of mail for Britain left the United Colonies the following spring, which was how Franklin sent a package of letters to Anthony Todd. Assuring Todd of his friendship despite the “Breach” between their homelands, he did not expect him to frank the enclosed letters but to forward them and charge the cost to Franklin.8
When the imperial postal system collapsed, paper could no longer easily span distance. Thus began a long period during which Franklin had to use circuitous means to communicate with friends in England. One transatlantic packet of letters, from Mary Stevenson Hewson, took over a decade to reach Franklin. When Franklin’s letters stopped, Hewson plaintively wrote him that “the Atlantic is now the great gulph, indeed; for there seems no possibility of passing over it to each other.”9
Franklin still hoped that good sense might avert a costly war—a little political economy revealed the folly of British invasion. In a letter “to a Friend in London” dated October 1775, he offered their mutual friend, Richard Price, “some data to work upon.” These morbid numbers consisted of the revenue the British ministry had already spent on the war, the “mile” of ground they had gained at Lexington and Concord minus the half mile they subsequently lost at Bunker Hill, the British casualties, the American casualties, and then the 60,000 to 70,000 children who had been born in the United Colonies since fighting had broken out in New England. Given these data, Franklin concluded, it would take roughly forever “for England to conquer America.” Americans could breed faster than they could be killed—a doggedly cheerful scenario.10
But the American invasion of Canada between 1775 and 1776 severely tested this political arithmetic. The rebels had decided, somewhat ambitiously, not only to defend themselves but also to strike back at the British. So American forces assaulted Quebec. They did so in December, hardly the ideal month in which to invade the frigid territory to the north. The Americans lost their commander, and as myth has it, a small band of survivors left bloody footprints in the snow as they retreated.
Congress then appealed to Franco-Canadians, who had endured British rule since the Treaty of Paris and were presumably eager to overthrow their conquerors. But there was no reason for Franco-Canadians to trust the predominantly Protestant colonies in British America, with their rich anti-Catholic history. So Congress carefully selected four emissaries to Montreal. Members of that body ransacked Maryland, Britain’s only originally Catholic colony, and came up with Jesuit-educated Charles Carroll of Carrollton and Catholic Father John Carroll. The other two men were Anglican Marylander Samuel Chase and deist Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin was the first delegate listed on Congress’s official letter and the only man introduced at length: “Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris FRS &c. &c.” The other delegates had no “et ceteras” after their names. Franklin, the man of science, was above faith and nation—that was why his membership in the Académie des Sciences mattered. (The “FRS” hastily disclosed Franklin’s affiliation with British learning.)11
Northward the four men went in March 1776, but the francophone Canadians swiftly rebuffed them. The delegation trailed back to Philadelphia in May, and leaders of the Canadian campaign conceded defeat the next month. But the venture foreshadowed Franklin’s role in wooing the French. Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg’s creation of a peacefully Quakerish Franklin in the French Oeuvres already had interesting possibilities. Even at that early stage, members of the nascent Congress recognized that Franklin’s international reputation could serve the national interest.
For the same reasons, the somewhat crazed idea of Franklin’s Promethean power reappeared. William Goforth conjured up the image in a 1776 letter to Franklin. Goforth was a New York artisan and radical leader, already a veteran in the war. He begged Franklin for an unearthly assistance against British Canada: “I understood you are a great man that you Can Turn the Common Course of nature that you have power with the Gods and Can Rob the Clouds of their Tremendious Thunder.” Franklin needed merely to “Collect the Heavey Thunders of the United Colonies” to “Shake the Quebec walls or on the other hand inform us how to Extract the Electric fire” to do so. Obviously, Goforth knew the power of flattery.12
But it almost did not matter that the idea of Franklin as a Merlin or Prospero was overstated—as patriotic guff went, it was pretty powerful. The New-Jersey Gazette, for instance, would crow that Franklin would, at any moment, put together “an electrical machine” that could “disunite kingdoms, join islands to continents.” He could also concoct “a certain chymical preparation” to “smooth the waves of the sea in one part of the globe, and raise tempests and whirlwinds in another.”13
Clearly, the American Revolutionaries thought they might need supernatural aid. And indeed, they were facing Europe’s most powerful empire, flushed with victory from the Seven Years’ War and equipped with the world’s best navy, meaning the best means to invade and retake the rebellious colonies. It made perfect sense that the Americans were scared—scared enough to want to believe they had a sorcerer on their side.
Franklin, man of letters, rallied a weapon more effective than thunder: Tom Paine. Paine was an English workingman—a corset maker—possessed of a ready wit, an interest in natural philosophy, and radical political sentiments. When Franklin had first met him in London sometime in the 1760s, he recognized a kindred spirit, even if the two men’s politics did not match, exactly. When Paine emigrated to America in 1774, he arrived with Franklin’s letter of introduction to Richard Bache, Franklin’s son-in-law, who got him printer’s work in Philadelphia. Like Franklin before him, Paine honed his writing skills while setting type for other authors’ works. Political essays became his forte, and in 1776, Paine crafted a short, sharp treatise, Common Sense, probably the most important piece of propaganda ever published in what was about to become the United States.14
Common Sense’s tone, indeed its very title, asserted that truth was perfectly apparent, perhaps as obvious as material reality itself. On these grounds, Paine mocked the still prevalent arguments for reconciliation with Great Britain, urged a final break, and championed a republican form of government, meaning one without a king.
Franklin critiqued a draft of Common Sense, which, published anonymously in January 1776, was so persuasive that people suspected Franklin wrote it. (Mistakes are rarely compliments, but this misattribution complimented both Paine and Franklin.) Many parts of Common Sense articulated Franklin’s own emerging sentiments, including a plea for a navy, “that nice point in national policy, in which commerce and protection are united.” Nature had been “liberal” to America: the world’s great powers had either coastline or inland materials for shipbuilding, but America had both. It already produced “tar, timber, iron, and cordage” and had enough “able and social sailors” to instruct “active landmen in the common work of a ship.”15
Common Sense and the popular response to it emboldened the Continental Congress. In June, members of that body established a committee, which included Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and charged it to write a declaration of independence. Early the next month, that manifesto announced to the world that the people of America would assume “the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s god entitle them.” That phrase remarkably echoed Polly Baker’s claim that her steady production of bastards obeyed
“The Command of Nature, and of Nature’s God, Encrease and Multiply.” (If Franklin fed Thomas Jefferson the line, he never confessed it.)
The authors of the Declaration of Independence, like Polly Baker and Tom Paine, leaned hard on the argument that nature itself proclaimed truths that humans needed only to follow. Indeed, either Franklin or Jefferson (the draft’s handwriting is not clear) defined these “Truths to be self-evident.” By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, this Newtonian language was thoroughly familiar and, more to the point, a thrilling bit of rhetoric. The laws of nature, nature’s God, self-evident truths—the Declaration of Independence shows perfectly how the sciences had permeated public culture, even in provincial places on the far side of the Atlantic.16
Science even helped promulgate the Declaration of Independence. When Philadelphians assembled to hear it read for the first time, they gathered around the platform that the American Philosophical Society had built to observe the 1769 transit of Venus. Here again was the eighteenth century’s distinctive blend of science and politics: a document read from an astronomical observatory insisted that nature was above politics—it simply proclaimed truth. Yet the sciences were always political, embedded in contemporary debate. Like their president, Franklin, the members of the APS had literally lent their platform—and their authority—to a political cause. 17
To found a nation on unwritten laws of nature was bold, albeit debatable. If Americans were “entitled” to anything “by any law of God,” snorted English moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham, “they had only to produce that law,” meaning something in writing. Bentham’s dismissive remarks were typical of the international reaction to the Declaration of Independence. Natural science did not, most people believed, generate a human science of comparable authority. Not a single monarch or head of state was willing to recognize the United States. Military force would have to prove what the laws of nature did not—the Americans would have to fight for their freedom. 18
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