Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  Thus, with clear vision and a bit of conniving, Franklin had set the stage for the final negotiations that would end the Revolutionary War. Shelburne promptly informed Oswald that the suggestions were “un-equivocal proofs of Dr. Franklin’s sincerity.” Britain was willing, he said, to affirm America’s independence as a preliminary to negotiations, and it should “be done decidedly so as to avoid future risks of enmity.” If America would drop the “advisable” provisions, Shelburne said, and “those called necessary alone retained as the ground of discussion,” then he was confident that a treaty could be “speedily concluded.” Although it would take a few more months, that is in essence what happened.34

  The final resolution was delayed, however, when Franklin was struck by “cruel gout” and kidney stones, which incapacitated him for much of August and September. John Jay, who had finally arrived in Paris, took over as the lead negotiator. The flinty New Yorker objected that the wording of Oswald’s commission, which authorized him to negotiate “with the said colonies and plantations,” was not much better than Grenville’s had been, and he demanded that Oswald get a clear statement that he was dealing with an independent nation before talks proceeded further.

  When Jay and Franklin went to call on Vergennes, the French minister advised that it did not seem necessary to insist that Oswald’s commission contain a clear declaration of America’s sovereignty. Franklin, who likewise gave his opinion that Oswald’s commission “would do,” was thrilled by Vergennes’s tacit approval for the British-American negotiations to proceed, which he interpreted as a magnanimous and supportive gesture showing France’s “gracious goodwill.”

  Jay’s interpretation, more sinister but more correct, was that Vergennes did not want Britain to recognize American independence except as part of a comprehensive peace settlement involving France and Spain. “This Court chooses to postpone an acknowledgment of our independence by Britain,” Jay reported to the Congress, “in order to keep us under their direction” until all the demands of France and Spain were met. “I ought to add that Dr. Franklin does not see the conduct of this Court in the light I do.”35

  Jay’s skepticism about France’s motives led to a heated argument with Franklin when they returned to Passy from Versailles that evening. Jay was especially angry, he told Franklin, that Vergennes had brought up Spain’s desire to claim some of the land between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River. Franklin fully agreed that Spain should not be permitted to “coop us up,” but he gave Jay one of his gentle lectures about the wisdom of assuming that a friend like France was acting in good faith until there was hard evidence to the contrary. France was not trying to hold up negotiations, as Jay kept angrily insisting; instead, Franklin argued, Vergennes had shown a willingness to speed them along by not objecting to the wording of Oswald’s commission.

  But Jay’s suspicions were reinforced when he learned that Vergennes had sent a deputy on a secret mission to London. Trusting neither the French nor Franklin, Jay joined in the back-channel fandango by dispatching a secret envoy of his own to London. What made this especially intriguing was that the man he sent was Benjamin Vaughan, Franklin’s longtime friend and publisher, who had come to Paris to visit Franklin and do what he could to promote peace.

  Jay asked Vaughan to tell Lord Shelburne that Oswald’s commission needed to state unambiguously that he was to negotiate with “the United States.” Such an explicit acknowledgment of American independence at the outset, Jay promised, would help “cut the cords” that bound America to France. Shelburne, eager to conclude a peace before his government toppled, was willing to go far enough to satisfy Jay. In mid-September his cabinet granted Oswald a new commission “to treat with the commissioners appointed by the colonies under the title of 13 united states,” and it reaffirmed that American independence could be acknowledged as a preliminary to further discussions.

  So, on October 5, with Jay and Franklin both satisfied and back in harmony, official negotiations began. Oswald presented his formal new commission, and Jay presented a proposed treaty that was very similar to the one Franklin had informally offered in July. The only addition to Franklin’s four “necessary” points was a provision that was sure to please Britain, though not France or Spain: that both Britain and America would have free navigation rights on the Mississippi.

  Their momentum, however, was slowed for a few weeks after Britain succeeded in beating back a French-Spanish attack on Gibraltar, thus emboldening their ministers. To stiffen Oswald’s backbone, Shelburne sent over Henry Strachey, a cabinet officer who had served as Admiral Howe’s secretary. Just as he arrived, so did John Adams, yet again, to assume his role as a member of the American delegation.

  Adams was as blunt as ever, filled with suspicions and doubting everyone’s character but his own. Even Lafayette, who had become Franklin’s close confidant, was immediately slammed by Adams as a “mongrel character” of “unlimited ambition” who was “panting for glory.” Adams also displayed, in a public and undiplomatic way, his personal distrust of Vergennes by not calling on him for almost three weeks, until the minister “caused him to be reminded of” his duty to do so. (Vergennes, who was as smooth as Adams was rough, baffled the wary Adams by laying on a lavish dinner and plying him with fine wines and Madeira.)36

  Adams likewise initially balked at paying a courtesy call on Franklin, who was pretty much confined to Passy with the gout and kidney stones, even though they had managed to exchange civil letters during Adams’s mission in Holland. “He could not bear to go near him,” Matthew Ridley, an American merchant in Paris, recorded in his diary. Ridley, who was a friend of both men, finally convinced Adams that it was necessary.

  Adams felt particularly spiteful because he had recently learned about the letter Franklin had written to the Congress, at the behest of Vergennes, which had led to his earlier recall. Franklin had been motivated by “base jealousy” and “sordid envy,” Adams told a friend. That was a complete misreading of Franklin, who had acted more out of annoyance than jealousy and whose occasional vices did not include an excess of envy.

  Whatever the cause, Adams was filled with anger by the time he arrived back in Paris. “That I have no friendship for Franklin I avow,” he wrote. “That I am incapable of having any with a man of his moral sentiments I avow.” In his diary, Adams had even more to say: “Franklin’s cunning will be to divide us. To this end he will provoke, he will insinuate, he will intrigue, he will maneuver.”37

  So it was a great testament to Franklin’s charm that, as it turned out, he got along rather well with Adams once they settled down to work. When Adams bluntly told him, during the visit he finally made to Passy, that he agreed with Jay’s tougher attitude toward France, “the Doctor heard me patiently, but said nothing.” And at a meeting of the three commissioners the next day, Franklin serenely agreed with Adams and Jay that it made sense to meet with the British negotiators without coordinating with the French. Turning to Jay he said, “I am of your opinion and will go on with these gentlemen in the business without consulting this [France’s] Court.”

  Franklin’s willingness to negotiate without consulting France was not new; he had begun pursuing that approach before Jay and Adams arrived in Paris. But he made it seem that he was doing it partly in deference to the views of his two fellow commissioners, which served to soften Adams’s attitude. Franklin “has gone on with us in entire harmony and unanimity,” Adams happily recorded in his diary, “and has been able and useful, both by his sagacity and his reputation, in the whole negotiation.”

  For his part, Franklin continued to feel the same mixture of admiration and annoyance toward Adams that he had long held. As he would put it to Livingston a few months later, once the negotiations were over, “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”38

  On October 30, Adams’s forty-seventh birthday, the American negotiators and their British count
erparts launched an intense week of negotiations, which started at eleven each morning and continued through late suppers most evenings. The British readily accepted the four “necessary points” that Franklin had proposed back in July, but not the “advisable points,” such as the ceding of Canada. The main disputes they faced that week were:

  Fishing rights off Newfoundland: This was a major issue for Adams, who, as David McCullough points out, was eloquent in his sermons on “New England’s ancient stake in the sacred codfish.” Franklin was likewise firm on the point, and he provided an economic argument: the money that Americans made from fishing would be spent on British manufactures once friendship was restored. “Are you afraid there is not fish enough,” he asked, “or that we should catch too many?” The British conceded the point, to the dismay of France, which was hoping to win special fishing rights of its own. (When Franklin was accused by his enemies in America of favoring the French position and opposing a demand for American fishing rights, he wrote Jay and Adams asking them to attest to his firmness; Jay graciously complied, and Adams did so more grudgingly.)39

  Prewar debts still owed by Americans to British merchants: Franklin and Jay felt they should be renounced, because Britain had taken or destroyed so much American property. Adams, however, insisted that such debts be honored, and his view prevailed.

  The western boundary: With his lifelong vision of American expansion, Franklin insisted that no other nation should have rights to the land between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi. As Jay recorded, “He has invariably declared it to be his opinion that we should insist on the Mississippi as our Western boundary.” Again, this is not something that France or Spain would have supported at a general peace conference. But Britain was happy to accept the river as the western boundary along with free navigation rights for both nations.

  Compensation for the British loyalists in America whose estates had been confiscated: This was the most contentious issue, and Franklin made it even more so. He justified his implacable stance on moral grounds. The loyalists had helped cause the war, and their losses were far less than those suffered by American patriots whose property had been destroyed by the British. But his stubbornness also had a personal component. Among the most visible loyalists were his former friend Joseph Galloway and, more notably, his estranged son, William. Franklin’s anger toward his son, and his desire to prove it publicly, had a major impact on his attitude toward the loyalist claims, and it added a painful personal poignancy to the final weeks of negotiations.

  William, who had been released from his Connecticut captivity through a prisoner exchange in September 1778, had been living in British-occupied New York, where he served as the president of the Board of Associated Loyalists. In that capacity, he had encouraged a series of small but brutal raids on American forces. One of these resulted in the lynching murder of an American captain, and General Washington had responded by threatening to hang one of his British prisoners, a young and very well-connected officer named Charles Asgill, if the perpetrators were not brought to justice.

  Asgill’s friends and family used their great influence to try to save his life, and Shelburne sent a personal appeal to Franklin to intercede. Franklin sharply refused. Washington’s aim was “to obtain the punishment of a deliberate murderer,” he replied. “If the English refuse to deliver up or punish this murderer, it is saying that they choose to preserve him rather than Captain Asgill. It seems to me therefore that the application should be made to the English ministers.”40

  The issue became more personal for Franklin when a British court-martial acquitted the accused British soldier on the grounds that he was merely following orders. That prompted outraged Americans to demand the arrest of the person who had issued those orders: William Franklin. So, in August 1782, twenty years after his arrival in America as New Jersey governor, William prudently fled back to London, where he arrived in late September, just as his father’s final round of peace negotiations with Oswald were beginning.

  The meddlesome Vaughan further complicated matters by urging Shelburne to be solicitous toward William. He informed the prime minister that Temple Franklin had, when Vaughan discussed it with him in Passy, “intimated hopes to see something done for his father,” and Vaughan later added his own belief, very mistaken, that doing so would have a “seasonable effect” on Benjamin Franklin’s disposition toward Britain. So Shelburne met with William and promised to do all he could to help both him and the loyalists. Franklin was chagrined when he learned of all this, and was especially angry when he discovered that Vaughan’s misguided interference had come at the behest of young Temple, who had interceded on his father’s behalf without telling his grandfather.41

  Franklin expressed his sentiments, as he often did, in a short fable. There was once, he wrote, a great lion, king of the forest, who “had among his subjects a body of faithful dogs.” But the lion king, “influenced by evil counselors,” went to war with them. “A few of them, of a mongrel race, derived from a mixture of wolves and foxes, corrupted by royal promises of great rewards, deserted the honest dogs and joined their enemies.” When the dogs won their freedom, the wolves and foxes of the king’s council gathered to argue for compensation to the mongrels who had remained loyal. But a horse arose, “with a boldness and freedom that became the nobleness of his nature,” and argued that any reward for fratricide was unjust and would lead only to further wars. “The council had sense enough,” Franklin concluded, “to resolve that the demand be rejected.”42

  In the final days of the negotiations, Franklin became even more obdurate against any compensation for the loyalists, even as Adams and Jay showed some willingness to compromise on the issue. In the past, Adams had accused Franklin of being untrustworthy because of his supposed sympathy toward his loyalist son. Now he was baffled that Franklin was being so belligerent in the other direction. “Dr. Franklin is very staunch against the Tories,” he noted in his diary, “more decided on this point than Mr. Jay or myself.”

  Given the influence of the loyalist emigrants now living in Britain, Shelburne knew that his ministry might fall if he did nothing to satisfy their claims. His negotiators pushed until the very last day, but Franklin threatened to scuttle the entire treaty over this point. He pulled from his pocket a paper that resurrected his own demand that Britain, if it wanted any recompense for the loyalists’ estates, must pay for all of the American towns destroyed, goods taken, cargo captured, villages burned, and even his own looted library in Philadelphia.

  The British were forced to relent. After hearing Franklin’s diatribe, they retired to an adjacent room, huddled, and returned to say they would accept instead a somewhat meaningless promise that the Congress would “earnestly recommend” to the individual states that they make whatever restitution each of them saw fit for the loyalists’ estates confiscated there. The Americans knew that the states would end up doing little, so they agreed, but Franklin still insisted on one caveat, aimed at William: the recommendation would not apply to loyalists who had “borne arms against the said United States.”

  The next morning, November 30, 1782, the American negotiators, along with their secretary, Temple Franklin, met with the British in Oswald’s suite at the Grand Hotel Muscovite to sign the provisional treaty that, in effect, ended the Revolutionary War. In a nod to the obligations owed France, the pact would not become formally binding “until terms of a peace shall be agreed upon between Great Britain and France.” That would take another nine months. But the treaty had an immediate and irrevocable import that was contained in its opening line, which declared the United States “to be free, sovereign and independent.”

  That afternoon, the American negotiators all went to Passy, where Franklin hosted a celebratory dinner. Even John Adams was feeling mellower, at least for the time being. He conceded to his friend Matthew Ridley that Franklin had “behaved well and nobly.”43

  Placating the French

  To Franklin fell the difficult duty of explaining
to Vergennes why the Americans had breached their obligations to France, and their instructions from the Congress, by agreeing to a treaty without consulting him. After sending Vergennes a copy of the signed accord, which he stressed was provisional, Franklin called on him at Versailles the following week. The French minister remarked, coolly but politely, that “proceeding in this abrupt signature of the articles” was not “agreeable to the [French] King” and that the Americans “had not been particularly civil.” Nevertheless, Vergennes did allow that the Americans had done well by themselves, and he noted that “our conversation was amicable.”

  Only when Franklin followed up with a brash request for yet another French loan, along with the information that he was transmitting the peace accord to the Congress, did Vergennes take the opportunity to protest officially. It was lacking in propriety, he wrote Franklin, for him “to hold out a certain hope of peace to America without even informing yourself on the state of negotiation on our part.” America was under an obligation not to consider ratifying any peace until France had also come to terms with Britain. “You have all your life performed your duties,” Vergennes continued. “I pray you to consider how you propose to fulfill those which are due to the King.”44

  Franklin’s response, which has been called “a diplomatic masterpiece” and “one of the most famous of all diplomatic letters,” combined a few dignified expressions of contrition with appeals to France’s national interest. “Nothing has been agreed in the preliminaries contrary to the interests of France,” he noted, not entirely correctly, “and no peace is to take place between us and England until you have concluded yours.” Using a French word that roughly translates as “propriety,” Franklin sought to minimize the American transgression:

  In not consulting you before they were signed, we have been guilty of neglecting a point of bienséance. But, as this was not from want of respect for the King, whom we all love and honor, we hope it will be excused, and that the great work, which has hitherto been so happily conducted, is so nearly brought to perfection, and is so glorious to his reign, will not be ruined by a single indiscretion of ours.