Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  Chaumont also served as Franklin’s publicist. He commissioned the great Italian sculptor Giovanni Battista Nini to produce a series of Franklin medallions and the king’s portraitist Joseph-Siffrèd Duplessis to do a majestic oil painting of him. Franklin’s favorite, the Duplessis now hangs in a room atop the grand stairway of New York’s Metropolitan Museum (others by Duplessis are in Washington’s National Portrait Gallery and elsewhere).

  Benny was placed in a nearby boarding school, where he quickly mastered French; he came to dine, occasionally with some American classmates, with his grandfather every Sunday. Jonathan Williams, a grandnephew, arrived from England and for a while was entrusted to oversee commercial transactions. Temple served as Franklin’s very loyal aide, though not a great one; he became a bit of a playboy who had yet to master most of his grandfather’s thirteen virtues.

  Franklin, who was kept busy wrestling with the complexities of arms shipments and commercial transactions, would need whatever loyalty and family support he could muster, as he would find himself working alongside one co-commissioner who was corrupt, another who hated everyone, a secretary who was a spy, a cook who was an embezzler, and a landlord who hoped to be a profiteer.

  Of the motley lot, the corrupt commissioner, who was in fact quite congenial and not all that dishonest, was Franklin’s favorite. Silas Deane of Connecticut had arrived in France in July 1776, five months before Franklin, and helped arrange France’s first secret shipment of aid. In that endeavor, he worked with a most unlikely middleman: Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a diplomatic dabbler, would-be profiteer, and the world-famous dramatist who had just written The Barber of Seville and was soon to write The Marriage of Figaro. Like Beaumarchais, Deane seemed to have sticky fingers and inscrutable accounting methods. He would be recalled in a year to face, and fail, a congressional audit. But Franklin remained friendly throughout.

  The great antagonist amid this menagerie, to Deane and then to Franklin, was the third American commissioner, Arthur Lee of Virginia. He was suspicious of all around him to the point of paranoia, a trait only partly vindicated by the fact that he was right in many cases. He had been jealous of Franklin since serving with him as a colonial agent in London (and being part of a rival land scheme syndicate). Along with his brothers, William Lee and Richard Henry Lee, he was behind many of the rumors casting doubts on Franklin’s loyalty and character.

  As soon as he had succeeded in exposing, with some justification, Deane’s dubious transactions, Lee embarked on a campaign, with no justification, to cast doubt on Franklin. “I am more and more satisfied that the old doctor is concerned in the plunder,” he wrote his brother. He later noted, this time with a bit more justification, that Franklin was “more devoted to pleasure than would become even a young man in his station.”8

  Having once thought Franklin too soft on England, Lee now thought him too soft on France. He was also convinced that nearly everyone at Passy was a spy or a crook, and he fretted over every detail down to the color of the uniforms being sent to America and the fact that Deane had gotten rooms closer to Franklin’s.

  On rare occasions, Lee and Franklin put aside their animosity as they discussed their common cause. One evening at Passy, Franklin regaled him at length with the grand tale of July 1776, all of which Lee, who had been in London at the time, recorded reverentially in his diary. It was “a miracle in human affairs,” Franklin recounted, one that would result in “the greatest revolution the world ever saw.”

  By early 1778, however, Lee and Franklin would barely be speaking to each other. “I have a right to know your reasons for treating me thus,” Lee wrote, after a barrage of his resentful letters had gone unanswered. Franklin let loose with the angriest words he is known to have ever written:

  Sir: It is true I have omitted answering some of your letters. I do not like to answer angry letters. I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation. If I have often received and borne your magisterial snubbings and rebukes without reply, ascribe it to the right causes, my concern for the honor & success of our mission, which would be hurt by our quarrelling, my love of peace, my respect for your good qualities, and my pity of your sick mind, which is forever tormenting itself, with its jealousies, suspicions & fancies that others mean you ill, wrong you, or fail in respect for you. If you do not cure your self of this temper it will end in insanity, of which it is the symptomatic forerunner, as I have seen in several instances. God preserve you from so terrible an evil: and for His sake pray suffer me to live in quiet.

  As with his other famous angry letter, the one calling his friend Strahan an enemy, Franklin did not send this one. Although he meant every word of it, he was generally averse to altercations, and was now, as he noted, too old for them. Instead, on the following day, he wrote Lee a slightly milder response. In the revised version, he again admitted that he had not answered some of Lee’s letters, “particularly your angry ones in which you with very magisterial airs schooled and documented me as if I had been one of your domestics.” Instead, he had burned these letters, he said, because “I saw in the strongest light the importance of our living in a decent civility towards each other.” He complained to Deane, “I bear all his rebukes with patience for the good of the service, but it goes a little hard on me.”9

  Lee attracted like-minded visitors who proved equally annoying. His brother William had been sent as envoy to Austria but, not being received there, ended up in Paris. So, too, did Ralph Izard, a wealthy and jealous South Carolina planter, who came after finding himself unwelcome as an envoy in Tuscany. When Izard took the side of the Lees, Franklin retaliated with an anonymous satire, “The Petition of the Letter Z, Commonly called Ezzard, Zed, or Izard.” In it the letter Z complains about being “placed at the tail end of the alphabet” and “totally excluded from the word WISE.”10

  Bancroft the Spy

  Arthur Lee was particularly vituperative toward Edward Bancroft, the secretary of the American delegation. Bancroft was an intriguing character in all senses of those two words. Born in Massachusetts in 1744, he had been tutored as a young man by Silas Deane and then went to work at age 19 on a plantation in Guiana, where he wrote about tropical plants and patented a textile dye made from a native black oak bark. In 1767, at age 23, he moved to London, where he became a physician and stock speculator. There he befriended Franklin, who sponsored his election to the Royal Society and paid him to gather intelligence on British leaders. When Deane was preparing to leave for France in March 1776, he was instructed by Franklin to “procure a meeting with Mr. Bancroft by writing a letter to him, under cover to Mr. Griffiths at Turnham Green near London, and desiring him to come over to you.” Bancroft arrived in Paris in July, just as Deane did, and began working for his former tutor.11

  When Franklin arrived later that year, he made Bancroft the secretary of the delegation. What he did not know (and what historians were only to discover a century later by turning up secret documents in London archives) was that Bancroft had recently begun working as a highly active British secret agent.

  The British Secret Service, which was spending close to £200,000 per year by 1777 to gather intelligence, was run by a quick-witted man named William Eden, later Lord Auckland. Overseeing his operations in France was a New Hampshire native, Paul Wentworth, who had moved to London in the 1760s and made money by speculating in stocks and buying land in the West Indies and South America, including the plantation in Guiana where Bancroft had worked as a young medical researcher.

  Wentworth in turn recruited Bancroft to be one of his many spies in Paris, and in December 1776 they entered into a formal agreement, using the flimsy code name “Dr. Edward Edwards” for Bancroft. “Dr. Edwards engages to correspond with P. Wentworth to communicate to him whatever may come to his knowledge in the following subjects,” the memo began. It then went on for ten paragraphs to detail the information that Bancroft would provide. This included:

  The progr
ess of the treaty with France and of the assistance expected…The same with Spain and of every other court in Europe…The means of obtaining credit, effect and money and the channels and agents used…Franklin’s and Deane’s correspondence with Congress in secret…Descriptions of the ships and cargoes, the time of sailing and the ports bound to…The intelligence that may arrive from America.

  Every week, the genial and urbane Bancroft would provide his secret reports by writing between the lines of fake love letters in an invisible ink. The British spymasters had a special chemical wash that could make the writing visible. Bancroft would put the letters in a bottle with a string attached and, at 9:30 every Tuesday evening, drop it in the hollow of a tree near the south terrace of the Tuileries Gardens, where it would be picked up by a messenger from the British embassy. The instructions for the drop were explicit: “The bottle to be sealed and tied by the neck with a common twine, about half a yard in length, the other end of which to be fastened to a peg of wood…the peg into the ground on the west side.” For these services he was initially paid £500 annually, but he performed so well that his stipend rose to £1,000, which was on top of the £1,000 per year he was making as secretary to Franklin’s American delegation. He also made a lot of money on the side by using his inside information to speculate in the stock markets.12

  The hundreds of secret reports that Bancroft sent to the British were filled with sensitive information on the transactions of the Americans in Passy, the discussion they held with French ministers, the schedules of arms shipments being sent to America, and other military matters. He told, for example, of Lafayette’s departure for America in April 1777, listed the French officers accompanying him, and revealed that he was leaving from the Spanish port of San Sebastian and heading “directly to Port Royal South Carolina.” He also warned that the French were “ordering eight to ten ships of war to protect the trade of the colonies near the coast of France and to remove the British cruisers,” and in September 1777 added that “four ships of war are sailed from Toulons to join the Brest fleet.” The following year, in April 1778, he sent word that the French Admiral Count d’Estaing was sailing from Toulon to join the American war effort “and commands a fleet of 17 ships of the line and frigates to destroy or secure the English fleet.” In his letter the next week, he revealed that “the Brest fleet is nearly ready” and noted the possibility that “Count Broglio [a noted French marshal] is to conduct an invasion of England.”13

  Franklin and Deane trusted Bancroft so fully that they often had him travel secretly to London to gather intelligence there. He would use these trips to convey some of his most sensitive espionage to the British, and then return with information that seemed valuable but was in fact planted by his spymasters. The British were so intent on keeping his cover that on one trip to London, in March 1777, they pretended to arrest him and briefly imprison him for being an American agent. “Dr. Bancroft is arrested in London for corresponding with and assisting us,” a distraught Deane informed the Congress, and he added, “I feel more for Dr. Bancroft than I can express.” In what seemed a nice miracle, Bancroft was released from prison within weeks and allowed to go back to work in Passy.14

  Arthur Lee soon became suspicious of his loyalties. “The notorious character of Dr. Bancroft as a stock-jobber is perfectly known to you,” he wrote Franklin and Adams after learning that he was being sent on yet another secret mission to London in February 1779. “His living in open defiance of decency and religion you are no strangers to; nor to his enmity against me.” More seriously, Lee cited material that indicated Bancroft was a spy: “I have evidence in my possession that makes me consider Dr. Bancroft as a criminal with regard to the United States.”

  Because he was paranoid about almost everyone, Lee’s suspicions were generally ignored. He was not, however, paranoid enough to realize that his own private secretary was also a spy. Among the papers buried in the British Library are secret transcripts of more than a dozen of Lee’s most sensitive letters as well as a memo informing the head of the spy service that their agent “stole Lee’s journal and copied the information.”15

  Through it all, Franklin remained sanguine about the possibility of spies in his midst, even though, shortly after his arrival, he had been warned to be wary by a Philadelphia woman then living in Paris. “You are surrounded with spies who watch your every movement,” she wrote. With an eye more to extolling his virtues than addressing the problem, he sent what became a famous response:

  I have long observed one rule which prevents any inconveniences from such practices. It is simply this: to be concerned in no affairs I should blush to have made public, and to do nothing but what spies may see and welcome. When a man’s actions are just and honorable, the more they are known, the more his reputation is increased and established. If I was sure, therefore, that my valet de place was a spy, as he probably is, I think I should probably not discharge him for that, if in other respects I liked him.16

  On one level, Franklin’s answer was naïve, for Bancroft’s treachery led to ships being endangered. (As it turned out, there is no direct evidence that any were consequently lost: Lafayette sailed safely, the British were not able to act quickly enough to block d’Estaing’s passage through the Straits of Gibraltar, and Broglio did not invade England.) On another level, however, Franklin was shrewd, for he would end up using his assumption that there were spies in his midst to play the English off against the French when serious negotiations began.

  Realism and Idealism

  France’s foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, was a dowdy professional diplomat, portly and lacking in pretense, but in the words of Susan Mary Alsop, whose book Yankees at the Court is a delightful portrayal of the period, “he was a human and affectionate man and a shrewd judge of character.” He would, indeed, be both affectionate and shrewd in his dealings with Franklin. He was never fully accepted socially at the court of Louis XVI because his wife was bourgeois, but he admired those sensible middle-class qualities in her and presumably found them agreeable in Franklin as well.17

  Vergennes was very much a realist in his view of international relations, an outlook he summarized pithily in 1774, when he declared that “the influence of every power is measured by the opinion one has of its intrinsic force.” He was also ardently anti-British, which helped make him sympathetic to the American cause.

  In the spring of 1776, just before Franklin’s arrival, Vergennes had composed for the king a set of proposals that argued in unvarnished terms what France’s policy should be: “England is the natural enemy of France; and she is an avid enemy, ambitious, unjust, brimming with bad faith; the permanent and cherished object of her policy is the humiliation and ruin of France.” America, he said, needed French support to prevail. It was in France’s interest, economically and politically, to try to cripple England by embracing the new nation. He presented these proposals to Louis XVI and his cabinet—which included the comptroller of finances, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, who was to become Franklin’s friend and fan—in the gold-gilded Council Chamber of Versailles.

  Turgot and the other ministers were worried about France’s tight finances and lack of preparedness, so they urged caution. The king approved a compromise: France would lend some support to America, but only secretly. Vergennes’s letters on the subject, it was decided, would be dictated to his 15-year-old son, whose handwriting would not be identifiable if they fell into the wrong hands.18

  Franklin first met Vergennes later that year, on December 28, 1776, at a secret session in Paris, just days after his arrival. With Deane and Lee at his side, Franklin pushed forcefully, and perhaps a bit too quickly, for a French alliance. The foreign minister complimented Franklin on his knowledge and wit, but he made no commitments other than to say that he would consider a memo on the subject if Franklin wished to write one. In his notes that evening, he described Franklin as “intelligent but circumspect,” and in a letter to his ambassador in London he noted, “His conversation is gen
tle and honest, he appears to be a man of much talent.”19

  Franklin accepted Vergennes’s suggestion that he write a memo, and in it he emphasized the realistic balance-of-power calculus that he knew the French minister would appreciate. If France and her ally Spain joined the American cause, Britain would lose her colonies, her possessions in the West Indies, and the “commerce that has rendered her so opulent,” thus reducing her to a “state of weakness and humiliation.” America would be willing to “guarantee in the firmest manner” that France and Spain could keep any of the West Indian islands Britain lost. But if France balked, then America might be “reduced to the necessity of ending the war by an accommodation” with Britain. “Delay may be attended with fatal consequences.”20

  But Franklin realized that appealing to a cold calculus of interests was only part of the equation. Better than most other diplomats in the nation’s history, he understood that America’s strength in world affairs would come from a unique mix that included idealism as well as realism. When woven together, as they would later be in policies ranging from the Monroe Doctrine to the Marshall Plan, they were the warp and woof of a resilient foreign policy. “America’s great historical moments,” writes historian Bernard Bailyn, “have occurred when realism and idealism have been combined, and no one knew this better than Franklin.”21

  As he would prove in France, Franklin not only knew how to play a calculated balance-of-power game like the best practitioner of real-politik, but he also knew how to play with his other hand the rousing chords of America’s exceptionalism, the sense that America stood apart from the rest of the world because of its virtuous nature. Both the hard power that came from its strategic might and the soft power that flowed from the appeal of its ideals and culture would, he realized, be equally important in assuring its influence. In his diplomacy, as in his personal business, he was “a man who believed in the power of reason and the reality of virtue,” declared the writer and mathematician Condorcet, who became one of his best French friends.