The First Scientific American
Page 31
That much was evident to Franklin. His worry over the impending, all-out war affected even the national icons he proposed. He sketched a design for the national currency that featured, in Latin, his oft-repeated warning that “the waves never rise but when the winds blow.” For the front of the seal of the United States, he suggested more Latin, the cheerful motto “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of Many, One). For the reverse of the seal, he suggested an image of Moses “extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharoah.” This image was to bear the motto “Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God.” Congress adopted the Latin motto but not the comparison of George III to Pharoah.19
But unless they created a navy, the Americans would be the ones overwhelmed by the sea. Others labored to create the Continental Army; Franklin, the former aspiring sailor, worried over the colonies’ “Want of a naval Force.” He had spent years decrying Americans who smuggled—now he wanted Congress to sponsor American privateering against the British. He wrote a fiery preamble to a resolution, never passed (and possibly never presented), in which he observed that Britons had already “proceeded to open Robbery” on the sea. They were “manifesting themselves to be hostes humani generis,” or enemies of humanity, and should expect “Reprisals.” “Nothing will give us a greater Weight and Importance,” Franklin insisted, “than a Conviction that we can annoy, on Occasion, their Trade, and carry our Prizes into safe Harbors.”20
The Committee of Secret Correspondence scrambled in July 1776 to obtain or commission ships. To one captain, members of the committee emphasized, “You must Ship as many Seamen as you can possibly get, especially American Seamen.” But anyone would do—“We are in Want of Seamen and you may bring People of all Countrys or Nations” willing to serve the United States. In another of the committee’s letters later that year, Franklin and Robert Morris hoped that measures “to encourage the breeding [training] of seamen amongst ourselves, will in a few Years make us respectable on the Ocean.”21
Breeding in the usual sense was what Americans did best as far as Franklin was concerned, and he introduced it as a political factor during debates over the Articles of Confederation, predecessor of the U.S. Constitution. Franklin wanted a system of political representation based on the population of each state. He rarely opened his mouth, even in committees, so he surprised fellow delegates when he rose to speak in the full Congress three times, always on questions of representation and taxation. Leaders of small states, who feared their citizens would be outvoted by those in more populous states, wanted the same number of representatives for each state. Franklin protested. “To sett out with an unequal Representation is unreasonable,” he said, given the long-standing colonial complaint against Britain’s system of virtual representation. Franklin had made too much of America’s burgeoning population for him to concede that it did not matter, politically.22
Franklin’s tag—E Pluribus Unum—heralded the federal system (many states joined into one nation) but also celebrated that nation’s multiplying citizens. It was an oddly erudite motto for a man who boasted his lack of Greek and Latin. But it made perfect sense for a political arithmetician such as Franklin, who believed that a state’s power ultimately derived from its productive members. For this reason, too, Franklin ventured into the combustible debate over whether slaves should be counted as part of the population that would determine each state’s contribution to the common treasury. Southern delegates protested, one of them saying that slaves were not citizens to be taxed any more than sheep were. Franklin replied sharply. “Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the state,” he declared, “there is therefore some difference between them and Sheep. Sheep will never make any Insurrections.” He moved an amendment, “that Votes should be in Proportion to Numbers” of people, but was outvoted. (A similar proposal for assessment, which included slaves and free people, also failed.) Franklin would have to wait until the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to raise the question again.23
But he would keep reminding anyone who would listen that America’s large population mattered. And he could not resist telling the British so. He served on a committee that, after the Battle of Long Island in 1776, met with Lord Howe on Staten Island, in yet another last-ditch effort at reconciliation. During the talks, Howe swore that the British did not seek merely to draw revenue from America—they esteemed “her Commerce, her Strength, her Men.” Franklin evidently gave Howe “rather a sneering Laugh” and then said that America indeed had “a pretty considerable Manufactory of Men.” Americans’ constant growth in numbers was a formidable weapon against the British. The meeting ended without any reconciliation. 24
The breach was now permanent. Franklin must have felt himself torn away from Britain’s centers of learning. His fellow Revolutionaries did not offer much consolation. On their way to meet Howe on Staten Island, Franklin and John Adams had shared a room—and bed—at an inn in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Nursing a cold, Adams ventured to shut the bedroom window. “Oh!” cried Franklin. “Dont shut the Window. We shall be suffocated.” When Adams objected that the night air would make him worse, Franklin insisted that the air inside was “worse than that without Doors,” meaning full of Adams’s effluvia. “Come!” he invited Adams, “open the Window and come to bed, and I will convince you.” In they tucked themselves. “The Doctor then began an harrangue,” Adams made sure to record in his diary, “upon Air and cold and Respiration and Perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his Philosophy together.”25
That must have been rather how Franklin felt—surrounded by fellow patriots yet alone with his philosophy. Pressed into service by the new nation and the new state of Philadelphia, he was both celebrated as a philosopher and neglected as one, too. He would have better luck abroad. The United States was lucky as well. Desperate for help from France, continental Europe’s most powerful nation, it had Benjamin Franklin, the internationally renowned natural philosopher, to make its appeal. At the trickiest court in Europe, where the politics were as dazzling and disorienting as the mirrored hall at Versailles, Franklin was the key to a lasting, important alliance between France and the United States.26
AT THE END OF 1776, the delegates to Congress decided to send embassies to the different European courts. Congress needed material support for the war and wanted international recognition of U.S. independence. The diplomatic mission would require someone well known abroad, and Franklin was really the only candidate. Earlier efforts to create a much-needed Franco-American alliance had been rather desperate. Congress had been depending on their man in France, Silas Deane, who barely knew French and who was realizing he was in over his head. Congress gained more from Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. By force of character, the French playwright managed to charm some of his compatriots, including the king, into a guarded sympathy for the American rebels. Zealous in the cause of American independence, Beaumarchais almost single-handedly organized a small and unofficial flow of materiel to America. But without any official connection to the United States or any great influence at the French court, he was unable to secure formal alliance.
Deane was greatly relieved to discover that two men, Franklin and Virginian William Lee, were about to join him. The three American commissioners would represent the United States in France during the first full year of the nation’s independence. (In 1778, Congress would recall Deane and replace him with John Adams.)
On October 27, Franklin sailed on the aptly named Reprisal, having first scooped up his two grandsons, William Temple Franklin (sixteen years old) and Benjamin Franklin Bache (seven). Temple had been in New Jersey with his father, Benny with his parents in Philadelphia. The youngsters were delighted to be headed to France, but Temple’s embarkation represented a family rupture: Franklin had just renounced his loyalist son, William Franklin. By appropriating his son’s son, he made clear that he did not wish him raised in a household loyal to George III. Even a Catholic nation with a foreign king wa
s better. Franklin also insisted on a European education for young Benny—American learning was, he implied, too limited for his grandson. The three Franklins had no idea how long they would be away or whether France would welcome them (or throw them out), but off they went.27
The journey began well but ended in misery, at least for Franklin. His grandsons were hardy, handy attendants at sea, and he evidently got along with the Reprisal’s captain and crew, to whom he made a shrewd gift of wine. But the thirty-day passage was agonizing. The Reprisal was faulty (it later sank), and conditions were rough. Even in good weather, Franklin suffered. The seventy-year-old developed boils and another skin condition, possibly psoriasis, both of which had begun to plague him during his mission to Canada. The old man still had a few teeth in his head, but he could not manage the ship’s hard biscuits and tough fowls. He made do with salt beef. Even hashed into something like lobscouse, a savory sea dish, the beef might have been hard to chew—or keep down. Salt beef little resembled its fresh counterpart—suspicious sailors greeted it with the cry “salt horse.”28
Yet within the ravaged body, the fierce intellect still burned. As the sea buffeted Franklin, he studied it. He made (or, from his berth, weakly directed his grandsons to make) a second set of temperature readings in the Atlantic in order to determine the position of the Gulf Stream. This set was more extensive than the data he had collected the previous year, twenty-nine days as against the thirteen from 1775. Clearly, Franklin realized he was on to something. This time, he did not mention his results to anyone, not even Priestley, perhaps because when he arrived in France on December 3, he was even busier than when he had disembarked in Philadelphia. And he was in extremely poor health.
Starved and pustular when he arrived, Franklin “had scarce strength to stand.” (Much later, he admitted to his family that the trip “almost demolish’d” him.) Of course, nearly dying after crossing the Atlantic was a little tradition for Franklin. So too was his fond reliance on a comforting piece of travel clothing, a warm woolen gown on the 1764 passage and a soft fur cap in 1776. The latter was necessary because Franklin’s skin conditions made a scratchy wig unbearable. The cap was a Canadian souvenir, useful in the chilly north when his skin had first erupted and useful again when winter wind clawed the Atlantic. The headgear drew cries of admiration—and inspired a brief fashion among the coastal Frenchwomen who first learned of it.29
It took some two weeks more, traveling overland and on coastal ships, for Franklin’s party to reach Paris. They then settled into a wing of a grand private house, the Hôtel de Valentinois, at Passy, on the main road between the city and the court at Versailles. Now it was on to business.30
But when Franklin was ready for business in early 1777—housed and somewhat healthier—France did not officially recognize the United States. He could not be presented at court nor have official contact with French foreign minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, or anyone else in the government. Franklin was frantically busy reminding the French that he was there and assuring Congress that he did so, but his official invisibility gave him incentive and opportunity to restate his authority in philosophical and political realms.
He already had an inkling that his fame in France would serve him and his nation quite well. In December 1776, he gloated to his sister, “You can have no Conception of the Respect with which I am receiv’d and treated here by the first People, in my private Character ; for as yet I have assum’d no public One.” He had also learned that his Canadian cap was a selling point. “Figure to yourself,” he asked Polly Hewson, “an old Man with grey Hair appearing under a Martin Fur Cap, among the Powder’d Heads of Paris.”31
Just as in 1757, when he had his miniature painted from a London sickbed, Franklin used his recovery period in 1777 to have a portrait done, yet another iconic Benjamin Franklin. This, the first important French image, a drawing of 1777, featured the fur cap. The drawing became a widely reproduced and circulated engraving, among those of Franklin that one French newspaper proclaimed “the fashionable New Year’s gift.” Franklin wears a good suit to offset the rustic headgear, but the escaping strand of hair emphasizes his informality. Cap and lack of wig became trademarks, which was just as well, as Franklin’s skin disorders continued until his death and caused him to abandon wigs.32
The portrait shows Franklin at his wariest. He seems thinner and drawn (perhaps from the recent illness)—and watchful. His older trademark, his spectacles, draw attention to his sidelong gaze. See and be seen: he was examining the French examining him. (He was also listening to them, as bifocals helped him learn French by focusing precisely on “the Movements in the Features.”) The portrait was a two-way image, but what did the French see in it? And what did Franklin see in them?33
The first fur-cap portrait. Augustin de Saint-Aubin, Benjamin Franklin ( 1777). FOGG ART MUSEUM, HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUMS.
The French saw a philosopher—his cap proclaimed him one. Generations of American schoolchildren (and historians) have celebrated the “American” quality of Franklin’s hat. The cap did signal a plain style, as noted in a January 1777 account of Franklin’s arrival, strengthening the Barbeu-Dubourg myth of a Quakerish Franklin. But Franklin also resembled fur-capped French philosophes. These included the moral philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Newtonian theorist Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Maupertuis had gone to Lapland to help settle the dispute about the earth’s axis; an engraving showed him in Laplander gear, including elegant fur cap, and with a pointing right index figure. In France, Franklin’s fur cap was the badge not so much of a frontiersman as of a new kind of philosopher, the explorer-naturalist. Cap and bifocals together signaled his learned and adventurous quality.34
The French also saw in Franklin a dreaded possibility: the Seven Years’ War all over again. Few thought that the Americans had a chance of winning their war against Britain. French leaders feared that, if they allied with the colonists, their presence in the conflict would reignite global combat. (Britons feared this, too.) Franklin offered an opportunity to the French to settle old scores—but at what appalling cost? In his charming cap and spectacles, he cut a dangerous figure.35
What, in turn, did the bifocal-wearing Franklin see in France? The Old Regime, as it would be known after the French Revolution of 1789, was an intensely hierarchical society with glittering and squalid extremes. The king was at the center and apex—the nobles and church clerics around him enjoyed considerable privilege. The Catholic Church was protected by the state; so, too, were the comprehensive taxes that raked wealth from land and commerce. No aspect of learning was unregulated because nothing could be legally published without first clearing a board of censors.36
All in all, France was somewhat like Franklin’s beloved Britain but greatly unlike his native Pennsylvania. Britain had aristocrats and taxes, as well as an established church; Pennsylvania had none of these things. Both places lacked the busy censors and nosy police who made sure that argument over the constituted order of things never got out of hand.
But in France, people spoke two languages: French and code. Despite the censors, people could say and write nearly anything, if they were clever enough. Banned books were often best-sellers; coded commentary enabled a broader range of conversation than the law officially sanctioned. Playwrights, publishers, newspaper printers, and even ragged ballad-singers made fun of the church and court and often got away with it. And nearly everyone had something to say about France. The nation hovered in a palpable state of historic transition—or perhaps indecision. It had survived one war but might face another; its society had to change, but no one yet knew it would take a revolution to do so. The French endlessly discussed the possibilities and were particularly fascinated with the American struggle, which dominated political reporting. But they had to be more careful than ever—the censors cracked down on the press precisely because of speculation about the American war.37
So on top of everything else, Franklin would have to learn
both the French language and the native mode of expression, clever yet elliptical. That wary glance in the fur-cap portrait of early 1777 already evoked a strategic silence. During his stay in France, Franklin generated fewer personal papers than in any other part of his life.
His actions, at least, made clear that he carefully picked his way through this foreign landscape with guides from the republic of letters. He especially relied on his old friends Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg and Jean Baptiste Le Roy. His first letter in France went to Barbeu-Dubourg; his residence in Passy was near the royal laboratory, which Le Roy directed. The two Frenchmen were eager to help—minor figures, they gained by association with the master electrician. Franklin convinced several other men of science to support the American cause. Rotterdam printer Reinier Arrenberg, who published the proceedings of the Batavian Society of Experimental Science (Franklin had been a member since 177 1), helped Franklin distribute propaganda in the Netherlands. Even Thomas-François Dalibard, who had first done the “Philadelphia experiment,” contracted to supply the United States with muskets, from the royal manufactory, no less.38
Next, Franklin inserted himself into the culture of learning in Paris, quickly replacing his British activities in the sciences with their French counterparts. He began attending meetings of the Académie Royale des Sciences, to which he had been elected associé étranger in 1772. His memoir on pointed electrical conductors had been read at the Académie in 1773, but to welcome him, the Académie published it in 1777. Chemical experimenter Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier invited him to the Académie, also in 1777, to observe experiments repeating Joseph Priestley’s on air. No idle onlooker, Franklin served on an Académie committee, with Le Roy and the Marquis de Condorcet, to initiate a general correspondence among men of learning, Nouvelles de la république des lettres et des ar ts. Lavoisier admired Franklin’s ability to contemplate any philosophy amid the ongoing political whirlwind (tourbillon de la politique).39