Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  The French did Franklin’s lobbying for him. They let it be known that he was their choice, and the Congress complied in September by electing him the sole minister plenipotentiary. The vote was 12–1, the dissenting state being Pennsylvania, where his enemies questioned his loyalty and that of his grandson Temple, the son of an imprisoned loyalist governor.1

  Word of his appointment did not reach Paris until February 1779, for the war and the winter hindered the passage of American ships. When it did, Arthur Lee sulked and refused to hand over his papers to Franklin. As for Adams, his biographer David McCullough writes, “The new arrangement was exactly what Adams had recommended and the news was to leave him feeling more miserable than ever.” He soon left Paris, at least for the time being, to make his way back to Massachusetts.

  Franklin was suffering from the gout and could not immediately present his new credentials, but in late March he paid a call on the king and his ministers. Mindful of Adams’s hurt feelings, Franklin worked to keep their relationship cordial. He wrote Adams a polite and amusing letter in which he described his rounds at Versailles and complained that “the fatigue however was a little too much for my feet and disabled me for near another week.” In his own letters, Adams kept up a collegial façade, and he even expressed some support for Franklin’s deep fealty to the French, despite his own doubts about the wisdom of becoming too aligned with them. “I am much pleased with your reception at court in the new character,” he replied, “and I do not doubt that your opinion of the good will of this court to the United States is just.”

  Adams’s fragile equanimity was shaken, however, when Franklin and the French decided to commandeer the ship that was supposed to take him home and assign it to be part of the fleet that John Paul Jones planned to use against the British (of which more below). Well aware that Adams was impatiently waiting at the port of Nantes to set sail, Franklin was apologetic, and he even got the powerful French naval minister Antoine de Sartine to write a letter explaining the decision. Another ship would be assigned to take him home as soon as feasible, Franklin promised, and it would allow Adams the benefit of traveling with the new French minister to the United States.

  Adams pretended to be understanding: “The public service must not be obstructed for the private convenience of an individual, and the honor of a passage with the new Ambassador should be a compensation to me for the loss of the prospect of so speedy a return home.” Showing just a touch of the polite hypocrisy that he was generally famed for lacking, Adams even went so far as to ask Franklin to “oblige me much by making my compliments [to] Madame Brillon and Madame Helvétius, ladies for whose characters I have a great respect.”

  But as he brooded in port, Adams became increasingly bitter. After dining with Jones, he declared that the captain was a man of “eccentricities and irregularities,” and he grew furious at the thought that Jones and Franklin were conspiring to delay his trip home. “It is decreed that I shall endure all sorts of mortifications,” he wrote in his diary. “Do I see that these people despise me, or do I see that they dread me?” Inevitably, he began to ascribe dark motives to Franklin. Simmering in self-importance, Adams began to suspect that Franklin was hindering his return because he feared the “dangerous truths” he might reveal. “Does the Old Conjurer dread my voice in Congress?” Adams wrote in his diary. “He had some reason, for he has often heard it there, a terror to evil doers.”

  Franklin was blithely oblivious of Adams’s dark suspicions, and he carried on trying to be cordial in his letters. “I shall take care to present your respects to the good ladies you mention,” he cheerfully promised. He even agreed, after three strident requests from Adams, that the new ship might go directly to Boston, rather than accommodating the French minister by going to Philadelphia first. But it was to no avail. New specters of distrust had infected Adams’s mind, and they were destined to haunt his relationship with Franklin when he returned the following year.2

  While Adams simmered, Arthur Lee and his brothers declared open war on Franklin back in America. Lee circulated a letter accusing Franklin of “weaving little plots” and “sowing pernicious dissension,” and he also made sure that the Congress saw the flurry of accusatory letters to Franklin, questioning his honor, that he and Ralph Izard had written earlier that year.

  Warned by his son-in-law, Richard Bache, of all these intrigues, Franklin was able to dismiss the resentments of the Lees. “My too great reputation,” he wrote, “grieve those unhappy gentlemen, unhappy in their tempers and in the dark, uncomfortable passions of jealousy, anger, suspicion, envy and malice.”

  He was, however, far more wounded by Bache’s reports that Lee and his allies were attacking Temple, for he loved his grandson with a blindness that was unusual for him. “Izard, Lees & company,” Bache wrote, “lay some stress upon your employing as a private secretary your grandson whom they hold unfit to be trusted because of his father’s principles.” Then he added ominously, “They have had some thoughts of bringing a motion to have him removed.” In a separate note, Sally Bache confided that her husband had been afraid to inform Franklin of this campaign against Temple because he knew it would upset him.

  It certainly did. “Methinks it is rather some merit that I have rescued a valuable young man from the danger of being a Tory,” he wrote Richard. Then he let loose a cry of anger at the thought that Temple might be recalled:

  It is enough that I have lost my son; would they add my grandson! An old man of seventy, I undertook a winter voyage at the command of the Congress, and for the public service, with no other attendant to take care of me. I am continued here in a foreign country, where, if I am sick, his filial attention comforts me, and if I die, I have a child to close my eyes and take care of my remains.

  In a letter to Sally at the same time, he repeated these sentiments and added that trying to deprive him of Temple would be cruel but futile. “I should not part with the child, but with the employment,” he threatened. “But I am confident that, whatever may be proposed by weak or malicious people, the Congress is too wise and too good to think of treating me in that manner.” The Congress was indeed supportive. There was no serious effort to have Temple dismissed, and he remained the secretary to the American delegation.3

  Temple was about 19 at the time, still a roguish lad who worked hard but had earned the deep respect of few besides his grandfather. As the controversy swirled around him in the summer of 1779, he decided to prove his mettle by taking part in an audacious mission with Lafayette to launch a surprise attack on Britain itself.

  The French general, less than three years older than Temple, had recently returned from serving under George Washington. By this time, the Revolution had reached an unsteady stalemate, with British troops under Sir Henry Clinton still ensconced in New York but doing little for the time being other than conducting hit-and-run raids. So Lafayette, on arriving back in Paris, hatched his audacious plan to attack the British mainland, and he shared it with Franklin and the French military. “I admire much the activity of your genius,” Franklin wrote. “It is certain that the coasts of England and Scotland are extremely open and defenseless.” He conceded that he did not know enough about military strategy to “presume upon advising it.” But he could give encouragement. “Many instances of history prove that in war, attempts thought to be impossible do often, for that very reason, become possible and practicable because nobody expects them.”

  Lafayette was eager to have Temple at his side. “We will be always together during the campaign, which I do assure you gives me great pleasure,” he wrote the young man. For his part, Temple, ever the dandy, fretted about his rank, his title, his commission, and his uniform. He wanted to be commissioned as an officer rather than merely as a volunteer, and he insisted on the right to wear the epaulettes of an officer, even though Lafayette advised against it. Just as all these issues were being settled, the land invasion was called off by the French military.

  Franklin professed to be disappointed
. “I flattered myself,” he wrote Lafayette, “that he might possibly catch from you some tincture of those engaging manners that make you so much the delight of all that know you.” Once again, Temple’s chance to make a name for himself on his own was scuttled.4

  John Paul Jones

  One component of the proposed invasion of Britain did proceed, and it inserted a colorful character into Franklin’s life. When Lafayette was first planning his mission, Franklin told him that “much will depend on a prudent and brave sea commander who knows the coasts.” They settled instead for a commander who was, as Franklin was already well aware, more brave than prudent: John Paul Jones.

  Born John Paul, the son of a Scottish landscape designer, he had shipped off to sea at age 13, served as the first mate of a slave vessel, and soon commanded his own merchant ship. But the hotheaded captain, who throughout his career was prone to provoking mutinies, got into trouble by flogging a crew member who later died and then, after being exonerated, running his sword through yet another crew member who was threatening an insurrection. So he fled to Virginia, changed his last name to Jones, and at the beginning of the Revolution won a commission in America’s motley navy of ex-privateers and adventurers. By 1778, he was making his reputation by conducting daring attacks along the English and Scottish coasts.

  On one of these raids, Jones decided to kidnap a Scottish earl, but the man was away taking the waters down in Bath, so the crew instead forced his wife to hand over the family silver. In a fit of noble guilt, Jones decided to buy the booty from his crew so that he could return it to the family, and he wrote a flowery letter to the earl declaring his intention, copies of which he circulated to various friends, including Franklin, who had by then assumed the difficult task of acting as his American overseer as well as his occasional host in Passy. Franklin tried to help Jones resolve the problem, but it led to such a convoluted exchange of letters with the outraged earl and his baffled wife that the silver was not returned until after the end of the war.

  Franklin decided that the impetuous captain would do more good, or less harm, if he focused his raids on the Channel Islands instead. “The Jersey privateers do us a great deal of mischief,” he wrote to Jones in May 1778. “It has been mentioned to me that your small vessel, commanded by so brave an officer, might render great service by following them where greater ships dare not venture.” He added that the suggestion came “from high authority,” meaning the great French naval minister Antoine Sartine.5

  Jones, not so easily managed, replied that his ship, Ranger, was too “crank and slow,” and it would require promises of great reward for him to convince his men to undertake more missions. But he knew how to flatter Franklin: he sent him a copy of his battle journals, which Franklin read avidly. So, without permission from his fellow commissioners or from France, Franklin decided that Jones should be given command of a ship that had just been built for the Americans in Amsterdam. Alas, the nervous Dutch, who were trying to remain neutral, scuttled the plan, especially after the British, who had learned of it through their spy Bancroft, applied pressure.

  Franklin was finally able to help secure for Jones, in February 1779, an old forty-gun man-of-war named the Duras, which Jones promptly rechristened the Bonhomme Richard in his patron’s honor. Jones was so thrilled that he paid a visit to Passy that month to thank Franklin and his landlord Chaumont, who had helped supply Jones with uniforms and funds. There was perhaps another reason for the visit: Jones may have been having an illicit affair with Madame de Chaumont.6

  During this stay, an incident occurred that, as played out in subsequent letters, resembled a French farce. A wizened old woman, who was the wife of the Chaumonts’ gardener, alleged that Jones tried to rape her. Franklin made a passing allusion to the alleged incident in a postscript to a subsequent letter, and Jones mistakenly assumed that “the mystery you so delicately mention” referred to the controversy that surrounded his killing of the rebellious crew member years earlier. So he provided a long and anguished account of that old travail.

  Confused and somewhat amused by Jones’s detailed explanation of impaling the mutineer, Franklin replied that he had never heard that story and informed Jones that the “mystery” he alluded to referred, instead, to an allegation made by the gardener’s wife that Jones had “attempted to ravish her” in the bushes of the estate at “about 7 o’clock the evening before your departure.” The woman had recounted the horror in great detail, “some of which are not fit for me to write,” and three of her sons had declared that they “were determined to kill you.” But Jones should not worry: everyone at Passy found the tale to be the subject of great merriment. It “occasioned some laughing,” wrote Franklin, “the old woman being one of the grossest, coarsest, dirtiest and ugliest that one may find in a thousand.” Madame Chaumont, whose own familiarity with Jones’s sexual appetites did not prevent her from a great display of French insouciance, declared that “it gave a high idea of the strength of appetite and courage of the Americans.”

  They all ended up concluding, Franklin assured Jones, that it must have been a case of mistaken identity. As part of the Mardi Gras festivities, a chamber girl had apparently dressed up in one of his uniforms and, so they surmised, attacked the gardener’s wife as a prank. It seems quite implausible that the gardener’s wife, even in the dimness of early evening, could have been so easily fooled—not even their friend Beaumarchais would have attempted such a cross-dressing rape scene in The Marriage of Figaro—but the explanation was satisfactory enough that the event was not mentioned in subsequent letters.7

  All of this occurred just as Franklin was helping to plan the proposed sneak attack on Britain by Jones and Lafayette, who had both arrived at Passy and were spending hours warily assessing one another under Franklin’s worried eye. Both officers were proud, and they were soon struggling over matters large and small, ranging from who would be in charge of various aspects of the invasion to whether their men would eat at the same tables. Franklin resorted to his most indirect manner in trying to soothe Jones. “It has been observed that joint expeditions of land and sea forces often miscarry through jealousies and misunderstandings between the officers of different corps,” he pointed out. Then, saying almost the opposite of what he truly felt, he added, “Knowing you both as I do and your just manner of thinking on these occasions, I am confident nothing of the kind can happen between you.” But Franklin made it clear that he was concerned, quite understandably, about Jones’s temperament. “A cool, prudent conduct” was necessary, he cautioned. Jones must remember that Lafayette was the ranking officer, and it would be “a kind of trial of your abilities and of your fitness in temper and disposition for acting in concert with others.”

  In his formal set of instructions to Jones, Franklin was even more explicit in ordering him to show restraint, especially in light of his crew’s previous plundering of the Scottish earl’s silver. “Although the English have wantonly burnt many defenseless towns in America, you are not to follow this example, unless where a reasonable ransom is refused; in which case your own generous feelings, as well as this instruction, will induce you to give timely notice of your intention, so that sick and ancient persons, women and children, may be first removed.” Replied Jones, “Your liberal and noble minded instructions would make a coward brave.”8

  When Lafayette’s part of the mission was scrapped, Franklin and the French decided that Jones should proceed with a purely naval attack, which he did in September 1779. The result was the fabled sea battle between the Bonhomme Richard and the much better-equipped Serapis. When the British captain, after applying a fierce pounding, asked him to surrender, Jones replied, at least according to legend, “I have not yet begun to fight!” As Jones put it in his vivid and detailed account of the battle to Franklin, “I answered him in the most determined negative.”

  Jones was able to lash the Bonhomme Richard into a death grip with the Serapis, and his men scrambled up the masts to lob grenades into the ammunition
holds of the enemy ship. After a three-hour battle, in which half of his three hundred crew members were killed or wounded, Jones captured control of the Serapis just before the Bonhomme Richard sank. “The scene was dreadful beyond the reach of language,” he wrote Franklin. “Humanity cannot but recoil and lament that war should be capable of producing such fatal consequences.”

  Franklin took great pride in Jones’s success, and they became even closer friends. “Scarce anything was talked of at Paris and Versailles but your cool conduct and persevering bravery during that terrible conflict,” he replied. He helped to get Jones, who was desperately eager to gain social respect, initiated into the Nine Sisters Masonic Lodge, and he accompanied him on a triumphal visit to the king at Versailles. Franklin even got embroiled in Jones’s lengthy and bitter disputes with the insubordinate Pierre Landais, captain of the Alliance, which was supposed to be part of Jones’s fleet. Landais had failed to come to the rescue during the battle with the Serapis, and in fact had actually fired on the Bonhomme Richard. For the next two years, Franklin and Jones fought with Landais, who was supported by Arthur Lee, over who should be the captain of the Alliance. When Landais finally commandeered the vessel and sailed away, a beleaguered Franklin decided it was best to let others sort it all out. He had other things in France to deal with.9