The First Scientific American

by Joyce Chaplin

  Not surprisingly, the English were equally attentive to the politics of Franklin’s science. When lightning struck the Board of Ordnance at Purfleet on May 15, 1777, Franklin’s not-so-protective system prompted questions. A Royal Society committee recommended modifications, but Benjamin Wilson cried foul: Franklin said lightning did not strike pointed rods, but it had. The king commanded Wilson to do further experiments; he complied by conducting elaborate ones in a London dance hall and again urged rods with rounded ends. The king found Wilson convincing.59

  Yet again, Franklin declined to comment. Instead, in a private letter, he grandly pronounced his status as a gentleman, someone who did not have to work for a living. “I have no private Interest in the Reception of my Inventions by the World” he proclaimed, because he had never arranged “to make the least Profit by any of them.” Moreover, he said, “I have never entered into any Controversy in defence of my philosophical Opinions; I leave them to take their Chance in the World.”60

  George III next ordered—at least, the French whispered he did—blunt rods installed atop the queen’s palace and supposedly asked the president of the Royal Society, Franklin’s old friend Sir John Pringle, to order that kind of rod for Purfleet. Pringle responded (again, as it was rumored) that the king might change human law but not the laws of nature. Of the king’s preference, Franklin could not resist observing, “It is only since he thought himself and Family safe from the Thunder of Heaven, that he dared to use his own Thunder in destroying his innocent [American] Subjects.” In Britain, some faintly disloyal verses made the rounds:While you great George for knowledge hunt

  And sharp conductors change for blunt,

  The Empire’s out of Joint:

  Franklin another course pursues,

  And all your thunder heedless views,

  By keeping to the point.

  Franklin liked the poem so much that he kept a copy.61

  However these images of Franklin and science may amuse us, they revealed a deep ambivalence among his contemporaries. In the context of an unprecedented war against empire, the major combatants were using ideas about the sciences to portray power but also to argue about power. What was the point of the war? Each nation’s use of Franklin indicated its answer. When conflict had begun between the United Colonies and Britain, Franklin’s Promethean reputation had reemerged in order, it seems, to assure the Americans that they had a secret weapon. Indeed, Franklin’s paradoxical authority resembled that of his new nation—it seemed contrary to nature, though it in fact used the laws of nature.

  The French were not so sure. After the Franco-American alliance, they busily crafted images of Franklin as semidivine philosopher but also as evil sorcerer. Those images showed France’s own uneasy ambition. The French hoped a war against Britain would help them recoup their losses in the Seven Years’ War, yet they feared the new conflict might bring them even more devastating losses. Not surprisingly, they obsessed over the spell Franklin seemed to have cast on them.

  Interestingly, the British were most conflicted. Some of his former fellow British subjects thought Franklin was now an enemy of the nation, someone who mischievously recommended invalid technology; others believed in Franklin’s genius and considered him an astute critic of the monarch, perhaps even wiser than George III.

  Franklin did not contest that notion. Once, as he played a game of chess with a French noblewoman, he seized her king. “We do not take kings so,” the lady protested. “We do in America,” Franklin replied.62

  LIFE IN PARIS was not all poetry and board games—it was work. If Edinburgh had constituted Franklin’s densest happiness, Paris was his densest busyness. Winning French recognition and alliance was only one of his tasks. He also had to make the United States a power in the world, which meant on the sea. His long, complicated relations with maritime people entered their final stage. So too did his long devotion to circulation, in both its physical and social forms.63

  Congress had created the delightfully oxymoronic Continental Navy in late 1775, but it still (and always) lacked ships and supplies. When asked in early 1777 what America needed most, Franklin promptly replied, “bronze cannon and warships.” He installed his grandnephew, Jonathan Williams Jr. (the Yankee merchant who had considered working for the East India Company) at Nantes, an important port where Williams procured everything from boots and blankets to entire ships. His uncle’s famous name helped initially—“I am treated here with as much Respect as if I were the Nephew of a prince.” Williams ran a lucrative private trade on the side and was a hands-on maritime expert. In one typical letter to his granduncle, Williams related his modifications to a French vessel to “make her a compleat Ship of War.”64

  America’s hastily assembled navy began to harry British shipping. Franklin cheered that “our Privateers and Cruisers in the Channel have rais’d the Insurance in London.” The American commissioners estimated in February 1777 that the British West Indies trade had lost almost 2 million pounds sterling, which pushed shipping insurance to 28 percent, higher than during the Seven Years’ War. Meanwhile, British stocks fell, including those for the Bank of England and East India Company. Franklin must have enjoyed the news that a privateer named the Franklin took three British prizes in the spring of 1777. 65

  And he vengefully promoted attacks on the packets of the Post Office that had recently sacked him. British postal losses during the Revolution exceeded those of the Seven Years’ War. In 1777, the Americans nabbed a British packet to the Netherlands and the 2,000 pieces of mail it carried. The American commissioners made a point of forwarding the letters that belonged to noncombatants, despite French protests that all the mail should be turned over to them. The action gave evidence both of America’s military power and of its independence as a political actor.66

  U.S. privateering offered an exciting start to the naval struggle with Great Britain. But it ignited a suspicion, which smoldered even through the Napoleonic Wars, that Americans were nothing but pirates. Vergennes counseled Franklin to recall privateers’ commissions in midsummer 1780, and Franklin took the advice. But it was too late. Franklin would ever after have to defend everyone, sailors and officers alike, from the charge of piracy, and he never erased the stigma. Given that naval maneuvers never really advanced the American military cause, it was a high price to pay.67

  In the long run, the Continental Navy was chiefly important for ferrying things and people. That assignment was dangerous enough, as Beaumarchais could have warned the American commissioners. Until the 1778 alliance, France did not officially allow its ships to convoy military supplies directly to the United States. Williams regretted that the choices were to use American ships or send French ones via the West Indies; “the first is too hazardous,” he said, “the other too far round.” Transporting peaceful items, such as mail, was no easier. Entrepreneur and American supporter Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, Franklin’s landlord, contracted to supply a packet service, which failed after only one ship sailed. Williams then hired another French firm to send materiel. The company was diligent, sending sixty ships to America within the first eighteen months of service. But its losses mounted until the spring of 1778, when Louis XVI allowed it to take prizes, meaning capture enemy vessels and their contents for profit.68

  Mere navigation was a problem. At the start of the war, the Revolutionaries were desperate for maps of land and charts of the sea. As Williams reported from Nantes, “nothing is more difficult than to procure Charts of our Coast”; William Bingham, holding down a U.S. outpost on Martinique, warned that “very few French Masters of Vessels are acquainted with the Coast of America.” Williams could only refer the alliance’s mariners to “the general Charts (Mercators &c.).” One American captain, Lambert Wickes (who had carried Franklin to France), protested that an order to cruise the Baltic would be a challenge without “proper Charts for those Sea’s.” On another occasion, Wickes offered to loan his precious “quarter Waggoner” to Williams, who pleaded with Franklin f
or proper “Charts from Paris.”69

  Franklin ordered what maps he could. He even received some English maps of the Great Lakes region from Benjamin Vaughan, an obligingly disloyal friend in London. (Vaughan sent the maps in January 1777, just as the Americans were digging in around Fort Ticonderoga and Lake Champlain—it was no idle gift.) And Franklin and the other commissioners advised captains unfamiliar with the western Atlantic. Perhaps drawing on Franklin’s own knowledge of Atlantic winds, they cautioned one man “to keep well on the West on account of the North and westerly winds on the Coast of America.”70

  British cartographers were busy creating maps to help their own troops and commanders. In 1776, London mapmakers Sayer and Bennett published the capaciously named American Military Pocket Atlas . . . of the British Colonies; Especially Those Which Now Are, or Probably May Be the Theatre of War. The work drew on existing maps and charts done by William Gerard De Brahm, Surveyor General Samuel Holland, and Franklin’s old associate Thomas Pownall, a colonial adminstrator. The biggest cartographic project had started before the war. In the 1770s, Joseph F. W. DesBarres had begun to survey the North American coastline, islands, and soundings for his Atlantic Neptune. He had produced the first part of this atlas in 1774. In 1776, it became clear that war would interrupt DesBarres’s surveying but also make his work critical to military operations. In the end, he produced five volumes, the last appearing in 1781. The charts in the Atlantic Neptune were mainly valuable for their detailed depictions of the coastline, essential information for the British invasion and control of territory. DesBarres’s charts did not, however, add much to knowledge of the open ocean.71

  French cartographers also sensed a good moment to expand their market, and French officials, mindful of a possible war with Britain and a hoped-for trade with the Americans, encouraged the entrepreneurship. Georges-Louis Le Rouge, géographe royale and Franklin’s eventual collaborator, played a major role in this burgeoning industry. Le Rouge had long produced French editions of British maps and atlases, and Franklin knew of his work as early as March 1778. That year, the Paris firm began to produce a large maritime atlas, Pilot amériquain septentrional, a French version of the London-produced North American Pilot, completed in 1779. But the French atlas turned British maps against Britain. The very first plate showed the channel and England’s south coast, which hinted at a possible invasion of the latter via the former. The French launched just such an attack in 1779.72

  The atlas moved from the channel across the North Atlantic, surveyed the coast of North America, passed through the West Indies, and then entered the Gulf of Mexico. The charts of the Gulf of Florida and of the Caribbean emphasized, with arrows, the gulf currents that flowed north—long a feature of sea charts. Likewise, northeasterly currents on either side of the Bermudas were described as the strongest because they were “coming from the Gulf of Florida” (venant du Golfe de Floride) . All charts that included the North Atlantic were marked with lines to indicate the 1769 voyage of Charles-Pierre Claret de Fleurieu along the Gulf Stream. The largest chart, a two-sheet representation of the Atlantic, was also marked with the “voyage de Gerard de Brahm’s en 1771.” Thanks to De Brahm, among others, the northern part of the Gulf Stream was, at last, featured prominently on sea charts, just in time for the Revolutionary War.

  But charts and ships were useless without sailors. The Continental Navy overflowed with officers but lacked able seamen. Franklin was so desperate to increase their ranks that he welcomed French convicts ; some enterprising British smugglers offered to freelance. What a lively place an American warship must have been.73

  The shortage of sailors challenged Franklin’s conviction that the United States was bursting with people. He estimated the population of the country at 3 million and breezily promised that, were this an overestimate (it was), “rapid Increase” would soon make it true: “Men will not be wanting [lacking] to continue this War.” To a member of the British Parliament, he claimed that “America adds to her Numbers annually 150,000 Souls. She therefore grows faster than you can diminish her.”74

  He gave the same message to his many petitioners, the thousands who requested military commissions, commercial favors, or assistance in removing to America. Scores of European families had strong, intelligent sons or nephews who were anxious to render service to the United States; countless people loved liberty and had peerless skills they offered to the new republic. Requests came from on high and from friends, as when Turgot asked for help with a relative. (Some petitioners offered proposals with their pleas—Franklin suffered through descriptions of numerous inventions, including an “Electrical Pistol.”) After a few months of this, he never wanted to see a “begging” letter again. His sleep, Franklin complained to one supplicant, held the “only Hours of Comfort” away from the din of requests; “for God’s sake, my dear Friend, let this your 23d Application be the last.”75

  Franklin made an important exception for sailors, whom his nation always needed. He quickly responded to pleas for help when the British tried to impress Americans onto Royal Navy vessels and imprisoned those who refused. Franklin fumed—such actions affronted human liberty and denied Americans’ political independence. (He had less to say about the fact that the Continental Navy and various state navies also stooped to impressment.) The British government even refused to release American officers on parole, lest that imply any recognition that they fought for a real nation. But this was so much against the usual practice that, once publicized in British papers, even Britons were outraged. Within fifteen days, around Christmastime in 1777, British subscribers had raised £3,700 to comfort their nation’s captive enemies. Freeing imprisoned sailors became Franklin’s pet cause, so much so that he cited the financial needs for this effort as a reason not to fund other official projects.76

  By equating impressment with slavery, Franklin joined the protests, mounting since the Seven Years’ War, against all forms of captivity. Imprisonment, critics argued, was appropriate only for those within a legal system and convicted of crimes against it. It was an unjust penalty for people outside the legal system, meaning foreigners, European or otherwise. This argument was useful in a number of ways: to criticize the Indians who took war captives, the North Africans who enslaved Europeans, and the Europeans who enslaved black Africans. Now, during the American Revolution, simmering unease over the slave trade, impressment, and abuse of prisoners of war exploded into a propaganda war between Britain and the United States. If Americans were friends of liberty, why did they hold slaves? If the English championed legal rights, why did they trample on those of Americans?77

  In 1779, Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette assembled a list of British atrocities, which they planned to illustrate as a children’s book (a primer for little patriots). They compared the British treatment of prisoners of war to the handiwork of Indians and Africans who abused their captives. Two of the twenty-five “British Cruelties” involved British-sponsored attacks by “negroes,” and five others outlined the barbarities of British-allied Indians (one showed George III contentedly receiving an “Acct. of Scalps”). Nine of the projected illustrations would represent British mistreatment of American prisoners, whether soldiers or sailors, officers or ordinary men.78

  Franklin demanded an exchange of American and British prisoners. The measure would promote “that mutual Confidence, which it would be for the Good of Mankind that Nations should maintain honourably with each other, tho’ engag’d in War.” He expressed empathy for the “poor Prisoners on both Sides” and, to honor the Franco-American alliance, insisted that French sailors taken from American ships were equivalent to American-born seamen. Franklin protested British impressment of Americans into the Britons’ merchant trades, as if they were slave labor. (Britain impressed its own men into naval service, not commercial service.) “If we had sold your People to the Moors . . . as you have many of ours to the African and East India Companies, could you have complained?” The American commissioners petitioned Lord
North on behalf of the American prisoners, some of whom had been lashed with “Stripes,” others “now groaning in bondage in Africa and India.” In 1779, Franklin learned that sixteen Americans who had been taken in the assault on Quebec two years earlier were among English-speaking prisoners released from Senegal.79

  Once the British agreed, in 1778, to prisoner exchanges, Franklin asked the alliance’s naval leaders to capture as many Britons as possible. They would then have men to swap for Americans. To Lafayette, Franklin proposed invading coastal towns in England and Scotland, seizing “ready Money and Hostages.” He also commissioned French privateers to take British prisoners. And Franklin instructed the Revolution’s famous naval captain, John Paul Jones, “to bring to France all the English Seamen you may happen to take Prisoners, in order to compleat the good Work . . . of delivering by an Exchange the rest of our Countrymen now languishing in the Gaols of Great Britain.”80

  Jones was diligent, if not obsessed. He took his ship, the Ranger, to Scotland in 1778 in an attempt to kidnap the Earl of Selkirk, a hostage expected to yield many Americans in exchange. (As it turned out, Selkirk was away at a spa; Jones looted the family silver, felt guilty, and returned it with an apology to Lady Selkirk.) Next, Jones tried to capture for ransom the Scottish town of Leith. When that effort failed, he resolved on a naval prize. To honor Franklin and Franklin’s mission to save imprisoned seamen, he renamed the ship under his command in 1779 the Bonhomme Richard and used it to lead his brilliant moonlit attack on the Serapis and Countess of Scarborough , ships returning to Yorkshire from the Baltic. In the battle, Jones lost almost half his men, and after a French ally mistakenly (he said) fired into it, he lost the Bonhomme Richard, too. But Jones gained 504 prisoners and bore them back to France.81