Friend of the Court
The absence of John Adams from Paris, so pleasing both to Franklin and the French court, was too good to last. He had left, in a mood even more sour than usual, after Franklin was made the sole minister to France, but he had been home only a few months when the Congress decided to send him back to Paris. His new official mission was to negotiate a peace accord with the British, if and when the time ever became ripe. As the time was not, in fact, ripe for such talks, Adams contented himself by meddling in Franklin’s duties.
This thoroughly annoyed the French foreign minister Vergennes. When Adams proposed, on his arrival in February 1780, to make public his authority to negotiate with the British, Vergennes invoked the American promise not to act independently of France. He should say and do nothing. “Above all,” Vergennes sternly instructed him, “take the necessary precautions that the object of your commission remain unknown to the Court of London.”10
Franklin was also annoyed. Adams’s return threatened to disrupt his careful cultivation of the French court, and it reminded him of the attacks on his reputation that had long been waged by the Adams and Lee family factions in the Congress. In a ruminative mood, he wrote Washington a letter that ostensibly offered reassurance about the general’s reputation but clearly reflected his worries about his own. “I must soon quit the scene,” Franklin wrote, in an unusually introspective way, referring not to his post in France but his life in this world. Washington’s own great reputation in France, he said, was “free from those little shades that the jealousy and envy of a man’s countrymen and contemporaries are ever endeavoring to cast over living merit.” It was clear that he was trying to reassure not only Washington but also himself that history would ignore “the feeble voice of those groveling passions.”11
More specifically, Franklin sought to explain, to himself and his friends (and also to history), why Adams rather than he had been chosen to negotiate any potential peace with Britain. Just as Adams was arriving, Franklin wrote a letter to his old friend David Hartley, a member of Parliament with whom he had previously discussed prisoner exchanges and peace feelers. Hartley had proposed a ten-year truce between Britain and America. Franklin replied that it was his “private opinion” that a truce might make sense, but he noted that “neither you nor I are at present authorized” to negotiate such matters. That authority now resided with Adams, and Franklin put his own spin on the Congress’s choice: “If the Congress have therefore entrusted to others rather than to me the negotiations for peace, when such shall be set on foot, as has been reported, it is perhaps because they may have heard of a very singular opinion of mine, that there hardly ever existed such a thing as a bad peace, or a good war, and that I might therefore easily be induced to make improper concessions.”12
Franklin had indeed often used the phrase about there being no such thing as a bad peace or a good war, and he would repeat it to dozens of other friends after the Revolution ended. It is sometimes used as an antiwar slogan and cited to cast Franklin as one of history’s noble pacifists. But that is misleading. Throughout his life, Franklin supported wars when he felt they were warranted; he had helped form militias in Philadelphia and raised supplies for the battles with the French and Indians. Though he had initially worked to avert the Revolution, he supported it strongly when he decided that independence was inevitable. The sentiments in his letter were aimed both at Hartley and at history. He wanted to explain why he had not been chosen as a peace negotiator. Perhaps more intriguing, he also wanted to let his friends in Britain know that he could eventually provide a good channel, better than Adams, if the talks ever began.13
In the meantime, Franklin was ardently committed to the French alliance, more so than most of his American colleagues. This led to a great public rift with Adams after his return in early 1780. Previously, the tension between the two men had been based more on their differences in personality and style, but this one was caused by a fundamental disagreement over policy: whether or not America should show gratitude, allegiance, and fealty to France.
In the early days of the Revolution, both men shared a somewhat isolationist or exceptionalist view, one that has since been a thread throughout American history: the United States should never be a supplicant in seeking support from other nations, and it should be coy and cautious about entering into entangling foreign alliances. Even after he began his love affair with France in 1777, Franklin restated this principle. “I have never yet changed the opinion I gave in Congress that a virgin state should preserve the virgin character, and not go about suitoring for alliances,” he assured Arthur Lee. In negotiating the alliance with France, he had successfully resisted making any concessions that would give a monopoly over American trade or favors.
Once the treaties were signed in early 1778, however, Franklin became a strong believer in showing gratitude and loyalty. In the words of diplomatic historian Gerald Stourzh, he “extolled the magnanimity and generosity of France in terms which at times touch on the slightly ridiculous.” America’s fealty to France, in Franklin’s view, was based on idealism as well as realism, and he described it in moral terms rather than merely in the cold calculus of commercial advantages and European power balances. “This is really a generous nation, fond of glory, and particularly that of protecting the oppressed,” he declared of France in a letter to the Congress. “Telling them their commerce will be advantaged by our success, and that it is their interest to help us, seems as much to say, ‘help us and we shall not be obliged to you.’ Such indiscreet and improper language has been sometimes held here by some of our people, and produced no good effects.”14
Adams, on the other hand, was much more of a cold realist. He felt that France had supported America because of its own national interests—weakening Britain, gaining a lucrative new trading relationship—and neither side owed the other any moral gratitude. France, he correctly predicted, would help America only up to a point; it wanted the new nation to break with Britain but not to become so strong that it no longer needed France’s support. Franklin showed too much subservience to the court, Adams felt, and on his return in 1780 he forcefully propounded this view. “We ought to be cautious,” Adams wrote the Congress in April, “how we magnify our ideas and exaggerate our expressions of the generosity and magnanimity of any of those powers.”
Vergennes, not surprisingly, was eager to deal only with Franklin, and by the end of July 1780 he had exchanged enough strained correspondence with Adams—on everything from American currency revaluation to the deployment of the French navy—that he felt justified in sending him a stinging letter that managed to be both formally diplomatic and undiplomatic at the same time. On behalf of the court of Louis XVI, he declared, “The King did not stand in need of your solicitations to direct his attentions to the interests of the United States.” In other words, France would not deal with Adams any longer.15
Vergennes informed Franklin of this decision and sent him copies of all his testy correspondence with Adams, with the request that Franklin “lay the whole before Congress.” In his reply, Franklin was exceedingly candid with Vergennes, indeed dangerously so, in revealing his own frustration with Adams. “It was from his particular indiscretion alone, and not from any instructions received by him, that he has given such just cause of displeasure.” Franklin went on to explicitly distance himself from Adams’s activities. “He has never yet communicated to me more of his business in Europe than I have seen in the newspapers,” Franklin told Vergennes. “I live upon terms of civility with him, not of intimacy.” He concluded by promising to send the Congress the offending Adams correspondence that Vergennes had supplied.
Although Franklin could have, and perhaps should have, dispatched the letters without comment, he took the opportunity to write (“with reluctance”) a letter of his own to the Congress that detailed his disagreement with Adams. Their dispute was partly due to a difference in style. Adams believed in blunt assertions of American interests, whereas Franklin favo
red suasion and diplomatic charm. But the dispute was also caused by a fundamental difference in philosophy. Adams believed that America’s foreign policy should be based on realism; Franklin believed that it should also include an element of idealism, both as a moral duty and as a component of America’s national interests. As Franklin put it in his letter:
Mr. Adams…thinks, as he tells me himself, that America has been too free in expressions of gratitude to France; for that she is more obliged to us than we to her; and that we should show spirit in our applications. I apprehend that he mistakes his ground, and that this Court is to be treated with decency and delicacy. The King, a young and virtuous prince, has, I am persuaded, a pleasure in reflecting on the generous benevolence of the action in assisting an oppressed people, and proposes it as a part of the glory of his reign. I think it right to increase this pleasure by our thankful acknowledgments, and that such an expression of gratitude is not only our duty, but our interest.16
With the British not yet ready to deal with him and the French no longer willing to deal with him, Adams once again left Paris feeling resentful. And Franklin once again tried to keep their disagreements from becoming personal. He wrote to Adams in Holland, where he had gone to try to elicit a loan for America, and commiserated about the difficulties of that task. “I have long been humiliated,” he said, “with the idea of our running from court to court begging for money and friendship.” And in a subsequent letter complaining about how long France was taking to answer his own requests, Franklin wryly wrote Adams: “I have, however, two of the Christian graces, faith and hope. But my faith is only that of which the apostle speaks, the evidence of things not seen.” If their mutual endeavors failed, he added, “I shall be ready to break, run away, or go to prison with you, as it shall please God.”17
America’s need for more money had indeed become quite desperate by the end of 1780. Earlier in the year, the British commander Sir Henry Clinton had sailed south from New York, with General Cornwallis as his deputy, to launch an attack on Charleston, South Carolina. It succeeded in May, and Cornwallis set up a British command there after Clinton returned to New York. Also that summer, the troubled American general Benedict Arnold had turned coat in a way that made his name synonymous with treachery. “Our present situation,” Washington wrote Franklin in October of that year, “makes one of two things essential to us: a peace, or the most vigorous aid of our allies, particularly in the article of money.”
Franklin thus resorted to all of his wiles—personal pleadings mixed with appeals to idealism and national interests—in his application to Vergennes in February 1781. “I am grown old,” he said, adding that his illness made it probable that he would soon retire. “The present conjuncture is critical.” If more money did not come soon, the Congress could lose its influence, the new government would be stillborn, and England would recover control over America. That, he warned, would tilt the balance of power in a way that “will enable them to become the Terror of Europe and to exercise with impunity that insolence which is so natural to their nation.”18
His request was audacious: 25 million livres.* In the end, France agreed to provide 6 million, which was a great victory for Franklin and enough money to keep American hopes alive.
Franklin, however, was disheartened. Back home, his enemies were being as vindictive as ever. “The political salvation of America depends upon the recalling of Dr. Franklin,” Ralph Izard wrote Richard Lee. Even Vergennes expressed some doubts that made their way back to the Congress. “Although I have a high esteem for M. Franklin,” he wrote to his minister in Philadelphia, “I am nevertheless obliged to concede that his age and his love of tranquility produce an apathy incompatible with the affairs in his charge.” Izard pushed a recall vote that was supported by the Lee–Adams faction. Although Franklin easily survived, the Congress did decide to send a special envoy to take over the work of handling future financial transactions.
So, in March, after receiving word of France’s new loan, Franklin informed the Congress that he was ready to resign. “I have passed my 75th year,” he wrote, adding that he was plagued by gout and weakness. “I do not know that my mental faculties are impaired; perhaps I shall be the last to discover that.” Having served in public life for fifty years, he had received “honor sufficient to satisfy any reasonable ambition, and I have no other left but that of repose, which I hope Congress will grant me.”
He included one personal request: that the members find a job for his grandson Temple, who had passed up the chance to study law so that he could serve his country in Paris. “If they shall think fit to employ him as a secretary to their minister at any European court, I am persuaded they will have reason to be satisfied with his conduct, and I shall be thankful for his appointment as a favor to me.”20
Peace Commissioner
The Congress refused Franklin’s offer to resign. Instead, in what came as a pleasant surprise, he was not only kept on as minister to France, he was also given an additional role: one of the five commissioners to handle the peace negotiations with Britain if and when the time came for an end to the war. The others were John Adams (who originally had been designated the sole negotiator and was at the time still in Holland), Thomas Jefferson (who again declined the overseas assignment for personal reasons), South Carolina planter-merchant Henry Laurens (who was captured at sea by the British and imprisoned in the Tower of London), and New York lawyer John Jay.
Franklin’s selection was controversial, and it came partly because of pressure from Vergennes. Despite his doubts about Franklin’s energy, the French minister instructed his envoy in Philadelphia to lobby on his behalf and inform the Congress that his conduct “is as zealous and patriotic as it is wise and circumspect.” Vergennes also asked the Congress to require that the new delegation take no steps without France’s approval. The Congress complied by giving its commissioners strict instructions “to make the most candid and confidential communications upon all subjects to the ministers of our generous ally, the King of France; to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without their knowledge and concurrence.”21
Adams was appalled at being so shackled to France’s will, and he called the instructions “shameful.” Jay agreed, declaring that by “casting herself into the arms of the King of France” America would not “advance either her interest or her reputation.” Franklin, on the other hand, was pleased with the instructions to follow France’s guidance. “I have had so much experience of his majesty’s goodness to us,” he wrote the Congress, “and of the sincerity of this upright and able minister [Vergennes], that I cannot but think the confidence well and judiciously placed and that it will have happy effects.”22
He was heartened as well by a personal triumph. Over the objections of even such friends as Silas Deane, he was able to get Temple appointed as the secretary to the new delegation. The honor of his new appointment, and the rejection of his resignation, rejuvenated him. “I call this continuance an honor,” he wrote a friend, “and I really esteem it to be greater than my first appointment, when I consider that all the interest of my enemies…were not sufficient to prevent it.”
He even wrote another friendly letter to Adams, whose own commission to negotiate with Britain had been diluted by the addition of the new delegation. Their mutual appointments, Franklin told Adams, were a great honor, but he wryly lamented that they were likely to be criticized for whatever they accomplished. “I have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous, that was not censured as inadequate,” he said. “‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world, for in this they are frequently cursed.”23
As a master of the relationship between power and diplomacy, Franklin knew that it would be impossible to win at the negotiating table what was unwinnable on the battlefield. He had been able to negotiate an alliance with France only after America had won the Battle of Saratoga in 1777; he would be able to negotiate a suitable peace with Britain only aft
er America and its French allies won an even more decisive victory.
That problem was solved in October 1781. The British general Lord Cornwallis had marched north from Charleston, seeking to engage General Washington’s forces, and had taken his stand at Yorktown, Virginia. France’s support proved critical: Lafayette moved to Cornwallis’s southern flank to prevent a retreat, a French fleet arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake to preclude an escape by sea, French artillery arrived from Rhode Island, and nine thousand French soldiers joined eleven thousand Americans under General Washington’s command. Two four-hundred-man columns, one French and the other American, began the allied assault and bombardment, which continued day and night with such intensity that when Cornwallis sent out a drummer on October 17 to signal his willingness to surrender, it took a while for him to get noticed. It had been four years since the battle of Saratoga, six and a half since Lexington and Concord. On November 19, word of the allied triumph at Yorktown reached Vergennes, who sent a note to Franklin that he reprinted on his press at Passy and distributed the following dawn.
Although the war seemed effectively over, Franklin was cautious. Until the present ministry resigned, there was always the chance that Britain would renew the struggle. “I remember that, when I was a boxing boy, it was allowed, even after an adversary said he had enough, to give him a rising blow,” he wrote Robert Morris, the American finance minister. “Let ours be a douser.”24
Lord North’s government finally collapsed in March 1782, replaced by one headed by Lord Rockingham. Peace talks between America and Britain could now begin. Franklin, it so happened, was the only one of the five American commissioners who was then in Paris. So, for the next few months, until Jay and then Adams finally arrived, he would handle the negotiations on his own. In doing so, he would face two complicating factors:
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