Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  43. Howe’s remarks in Papers 22:518; Richard Howe to BF, Aug. 16, 1776.

  44. Adams Diary 3:418.

  45. Many accounts were written of the Staten Island summit: the notes of Henry Strachey (Howe’s secretary) in the New York Public Library and reprinted elsewhere; report to Congress of the committee to confer with Lord Howe, in Smyth Writings, 6:465 and elsewhere; Adams Diary 3:79, 3:418–22; Papers 22:518–20; Howe’s report to Lord Germain, Sept. 20, 1776, in the London Public Records Office and reprinted in Documents of the American Revolution (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981); John Adams to Abigail Adams, Sept. 14, 1776, in Adams Letters 2:124. See also Parton 2:148; Van Doren 558–62; Clark 287–91; Brands 518–19; McCullough 156–58.

  46. Alsop 30–31.

  47. BF to Benjamin Rush, Sept. 27, 1776.

  48. “Sketch of Propositions for Peace,” written sometime between Sept. 26 and Oct. 25, 1776, Papers 22:630; Smyth Writings, 454; Cecil Currey, Code Number 72(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 73; Van Doren 553.

  49. Currey Code Number 72, 77–78; Edward Hale Sr. and Edward Hale Jr., Franklin in France (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888), 1:67.

  50. Elizabeth Franklin to SF, July 12, 1776; Elizabeth Franklin to TF, July 16, 1776.

  51. BF to TF, Sept. 19, 1776; Elizabeth Franklin to BF, Aug. 6, 1776; Skemp William, 217.

  52. BF to TF, Sept. 19, 22, 1776; TF to BF, Sept. 21, 1776.

  53. BF to TF, Sept. 28, 1776; WF to Elizabeth Franklin, Nov. 25, 1776.

  54. BF to RB, June 2, 1779.

  Chapter 13

  1. Franklin’s Passy journal, Oct. 4, 1778; BF to SF, May 10, 1785; BF to John Hancock, Dec. 8, 1776. He was writing to Hancock in his capacity as president of Congress.

  Franklin’s social life in Paris has, not suprisingly, inspired many books. The most delightful include Lopez Cher; Aldridge French; Alsop; Schoenbrun. An older work of some value is Edward Hale Sr. and Edward Hale Jr., Franklin in France (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888). It was also the subject of a musical, Ben Franklin in Paris, by Mark Sandrich Jr. and Sidney Michaels, which premiered Oct. 27, 1964, and ran for 215 performances.

  2. BF to SF, June 3, 1779; Aldridge French, 43; Van Doren 632. The tale of the chamber pot given by the king to Comtesse Diane de Polignac comes from the memoirs of Madame Henriette de Campan, the lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette. It is well enough known that it was told by the French ambassador at a ceremony in the Benjamin Franklin room of the U.S. State Department; see: www.info-france-usa.org/news/statmnts/1998/amba0910.asp. However, Claude-Anne Lopez tells me, “It comes from a very unreliable source, a snobbish sourpuss, and my guess is that it’s not true.” That said, Lopez included it without qualification in her own book, Lopez Cher, 184.

  3. The Boston Patriot, May 15, 1811, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856) 1:660; Lopez Cher, 13; Wright 270.

  4. Aldridge French, 23, 66, 115, 43, 61; Voltaire, “Letters on England” (1733), www.literatureproject.com/letters-Voltaire ; Van Doren 570; Abbé Flamarens to Mèmoires Secret, Jan. 17, 1777.

  5. BF to Emma Thompson, Feb. 8, 1777; BF to PS, Aug. 28, 1767.

  6. BF to Josiah Quincy, Apr. 22, 1779; BF to Elizabeth Partridge, Oct. 11, 1776.

  7. BF to MS, Jan. 25, 1779; Alsop 76–94; Lopez Cher, 123–36; Aldridge French, 196–99. Temple’s letter is from Randall 455, citing TF to SF, Nov. 25, 1777. The quote from Madame Chaumont is from Adams Diary 4:64. I am grateful to Professor Thomas Schaeper of St. Bonaventure University for his help and his delightful, though hard to find, biography of Franklin’s landlord, France and America in the Revolutionary Era: The Life and Times of Jacques-Donatien Leray de Chaumont(Providence, R.I.: Berghahn, 1995).

  8. Arthur Lee to Richard Lee, Sept. 12, 1778; BF to Congress, Dec. 7, 1780; Charles Isham, The Silas Deane Papers (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1890). For more on the Silas Deane papers in the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford and a biographical sketch, see www.chs.org/library/ead/htm_faids/ deans1789.htm#OB1.3.

  9. BF to Arthur Lee, Apr. 3 (unsent), 4, 1778; Van Doren 598.

  10. “Petition of the Letter Z,” 1778, Papers 28:517.

  11. “Instructions to Silas Deane,” Mar. 2, 1776, from Congress’s Committee of Secret Correspondence, signed by BF and others and apparently written by BF, Papers 22:369; Sidney Edelstein, “Notes on the Wet-Processing Industry: The Dual Life of Edward Bancroft,” American Dyestuff Reporter (Oct. 25, 1954).

  12. “Engagement of Dr. Edwards to correspond with P. Wentworth and Lord Stormont, and the means of conducting that correspondence,” Dec. 13, 1776, British Library, London, Auckland Papers, additional manuscripts 34,413 (hereafter cited as Auckland Papers, Add Mss); Edward Bancroft memo to the Marquis of Camarthen, Sept. 17, 1784, Foreign Office papers, 4:3, Public Records Office, London.

  Some of the material is available in Material Relating to the American Revolution from the Auckland Papers (Yorkshire, England: EP Microform, 1974) and in Benjamin Stevens, ed., Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives Relating to America, 1773–1783 (25 volumes published in 1898, copies in the Franklin collection in Yale’s Sterling Library). Please note the acknowledgment to Susan Ann Bennett, who provided research help in London finding and transcribing some of the documents cited in this section.

  I am also grateful to the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence for providing the declassified paper by John Vaillancourt, “Edward Bancroft (@Edwd. Edwards) Estimable Spy,” Studies in Intelligence (winter 1961): A53–A67. See also Lewis Einstein, Divided Loyalties (Boston: Ayer, 1933), 3–48; Cecil Currey, Code Number 72 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972); Samuel Bemis, “The British Secret Service and the French-American Alliance,” American Historical Review 29.3 (Apr. 1924). There is also a historical novel, fun but heavily fictionalized, on Bancroft: Arthur Mullin, Spy: America’s First Double Agent, Dr. Edward Bancroft (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1987).

  Currey argues that Franklin’s loyalties (and Deane’s) were also suspect. It’s an interesting and fact-filled book, but I think its analysis is unconvincing. Jonathan Dull, in Franklin the Diplomat (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1982), 1:72, 36, and passim, convincingly argues that Franklin was oblivious to Bancroft’s dealings and that Deane was involved in stock speculating but not in spying with Bancroft.

  13. Auckland papers, Add Mss 34413, f330 and 402; 46490, f64; 34413, f405–7; Paul Wentworth to the Earl of Suffolk (the minister in charge of the northern department), quoting a secret letter from “Dr. Edwards,” Sept. 19, 1777, in the Stevens Facsimiles at Yale noted above.

  14. Silas Deane to Robert Morris for Congress, Mar. 16, 1777; Isham, The Silas Deane Papers, 2:24.

  15. Arthur Lee to BF and John Adams, Feb. 7, 1779; Auckland Papers, Add Mss, 46490, f52 and f57.

  16. Juliana Ritchie to BF, Jan. 12, 1777; BF to Juliana Ritchie, Jan. 19, 1777.

  17. Alsop 20.

  18. Dull, Franklin the Diplomat, 1:72, 9; Alsop 35–40, from Henri Doniol, History of the Participation of France in the Establishment of the United States (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1866), 1:244.

  The best overviews of Franklin’s diplomacy in France, in addition to Dull’s book cited above, include Jonathan Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Jonathan Dull, The French Navy and American Independence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Richard Morris, The Peacemakers (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (New York: Appleton, 1935); Stourzh; Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert, eds., Diplomacy and Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981). For original documents, see Francis Wharton, ed., Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1889). See also Orville Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982).

  19. Ve
rgennes, Dec. 28, 1776, in Papers 23:113n; Vergennes to the Marquis de Noailles, Jan. 10, 1777, in Clark 306.

  20. BF to Vergennes, Jan. 5, 1777; Doniol, History of the Participation of France,1:20; Stourzh 137.

  21. Bernard Bailyn, Realism and Idealism in American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Institute of Advanced Studies, 1994), 13, reprinted in Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew (New York: Knopf, 2003).

  22. BF to Committee of Secret Correspondence, Apr. 9, 1777; BF to Samuel Cooper, May 1, 1777; Brands 532; Stourzh 3. For a contemporary discussion of “hard power” versus “soft power,” see Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). The “city upon a hill” image comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:14: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.” It was used by John Winthrop in the sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” that he preached on Mar. 22, 1630, on the Arabella while heading to America. Ronald Reagan used the image throughout his political career, most notably as the title of a Jan. 25, 1974, speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee, in his first 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, in a 1980 debate with John Anderson, in his 1984 speech to the Republican Convention, and in his 1989 farewell speech.

  23. “The Sale of the Hessians,” Feb. 18, 1777, Lib. of Am. 917; Papers 23:480; Van Doren 577. I am grateful to Claude-Anne Lopez for pointing out to me the weak French pun.

  24. Alsop 77; New Jersey Gazette, Oct. 2, 1777, quoted in Clark 325.

  25. William Parsons to BF, Aug. 4, 1778; Mrs. Parsons to BF, Aug. 12, 17, Oct. 2, Nov. 2, 1778; BF to Mrs. Parsons, Aug. 12, 1778; BF to George Washington, Mar. 29, Sept. 4, 1777; Washington to BF, Aug. 17, 1777; “Model of a Letter of Recommendation,” by BF, Apr. 2, 1777; Van Doren 578; Clark 335. In the Sept. 4, 1777, letter to Washington, Franklin refers to Baron von Steuben as Baron de Steuben and inflates his rank from captain to lieutenant general. The spy Bancroft reported back to London that they had “received a resolve of Congress directing all their ministers” to discourage French mercenaries unless they spoke English, which “may enable us to cut short the solicitation with which we have for a long time almost been persecuted to death by thousands of officers wanting employment in America”; Edward Bancroft to Paul Wentworth, June 1777, Auckland papers, Add MSS 46490, f64.

  26. Arthur Lee’s journal, Nov. 27, 1777, in Richard Lee, Life of Arthur Lee(Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1829), 1:354; Hale and Hale, Benjamin Franklin in France, 1:159; Papers 25:234n.

  27. Franklin statement, Dec. 4, 1777; BF to Vergennes, Dec. 4, 1777; Lee, Life of Arthur Lee, 1:357; Alsop 93–94; Doniol, History of the Participation of France,2:625. See also Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution, 89. Dull argues that for months the French had been planning to enter the war against Britain in early 1778 once their naval rearmament program permitted; the American victory at Saratoga, he contends, was not a major factor. Others dispute this view. See Claude Van Tyne, “Influences Which Determined the French Government to Make Their Treaty with America,” American Historical Review 21 (1915–16): 528, cited by Dull.

  28. Alsop 103; Cecil Currey, Code Number 72 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 175–92. Currey devotes an entire chapter to the Wentworth meeting. It seems somewhat overdrawn in its assessment of Franklin’s duplicity, but it is carefully annotated and researched. See also James Perkins, France and the American Revolution (New York: Franklin, 1970), 203–4.

  29. Paul Wentworth to William Eden, Dec. 25, 1777, Jan. 7, 1778; Van Doren 592; Currey, Code Number 72, 186; Dull, Franklin the Diplomat, 29.

  30. BF to Thomas Cushing, for Congress, Feb. 27, 1778.

  31. R. M. Bache, “Franklin’s Ceremonial Coat,” PMHB 23 (1899); 444–52, quote is on 450.

  32. Edward Bancroft to Paul Wentworth, as deciphered, Jan. 22, 28, 1778, Auckland Papers, Add Mss 46491, f1 and f1b; Edward Bancroft memo to the Marquis of Camarthen, Sept. 17, 1784, Foreign Office papers 4:3, Public Records Office, London; Edward Bancroft to Thomas Walpole, under cover to Mr. White, with two pages of invisible ink, Nov. 3, 1777, Auckland Papers, Add Mss 34414, f.304; Edward Bancroft note, unsigned and undated, sent to Samuel Wharton, with two pages of white ink, November 1777, Auckland Papers, Add Mss 34414, f.306; Samuel Wharton letters to Edward Bancroft, 1778, Auckland Papers, Add Mss 321, ff6–35; Silas Deane’s accounts with Edward Bancroft, Feb, 1778, Aug. 1779, the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, series 4, folder 9.12.

  Jonathan Dull discusses Bancroft’s stock manipulations in Franklin the Diplomat, 33–36, and notes that Silas Deane, although in his opinion not a spy, was also able to make money by speculating with Wharton on Bancroft’s inside information. Also in on the scheme was Thomas Walpole, the wealthy and well-connected London banker who had tried with Franklin to win a land grant in Ohio. Deane died of poisoning in 1789 as he was preparing to sail from London to Canada, and some have speculated that he was murdered by Bancroft, an expert in poisons.

  33. Lopez Cher, 179–83; Alsop 108–10; Van Doren 595; Clark 341.

  34. Van Doren 593; Edmund Morgan, The Birth of the Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 83; Gordon Wood, “Not So Poor Richard,” The New York Review of Books, June 6, 1996; Samuel Cooper to BF, May 14, 1778. See also Samuel Cooper to BF, July 1, 1778, in which the Boston clergyman describes how the treaty thwarted England’s attempts to lure Congress into a reconciliation and how information sent by Franklin and Adams about a British convoy of eleven warships would be passed along, presumably to warn French admiral d’Estaing.

  Chapter 14

  1. Edward Bancroft, “most secret extracts,” Apr. 2, 16, 1778, British Library, Auckland papers, Add MSS 34413, f405–7; Middlekauff 171; McCullough 197, 204, 208, 239. Middlekauff’s chapter on Adams in his book, pp. 171–202, is a vivid look at the vagaries of their relationship. McCullough, 210–15, provides an authoritative assessment of their feelings about each other, with some deference to Adams.

  2. Adams to James Lovell, Feb. 20, 1779, Adams Letters 4:118–19; Middlekauff 189.

  3. Lopez Private, 237; Lopez Cher, 9. The quote is from Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Complete Works (Paris: Bossange frères, 1825), 2:267.

  4. Brands 547–48; Adams Diary 2:391, 4:69.

  5. BF to Robert Livingston, July 22, 1783.

  6. Diderot, editor, Enyclopédie, www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/ encyc/; Alsop 13; Harold Nicolson, The Age of Reason (London: Constable, 1960), 268.

  7. Most accounts say, I think mistakenly, that it was Temple who received the benediction. Smith 60, 187 traces the mystery and convincingly concludes that the “boy” was actually his younger grandson Benny, who was 7 at the time, rather than Temple, who was about 18. Aldridge French, 10, says it was Temple, but in his later writings, including Voltaire and the Century of Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 399, he revises his opinion. Claude-Anne Lopez tells me that Temple used a wax seal with the phrase “God and Liberty,” which leads her to believe it may have been Temple. See also Voltaire to the Abbé Gaultier, Feb. 21, 1778, in The Works of Voltaire (Paris: Didot, 1829), 1:290; Hutchinson Diary and Letters 2:276. The newspaper quoted is Les Memoirs Secret, Feb. 22, 1778, in Aldridge French, 10.

  8. Aldridge French, 12; Adams Diary 3:147; Van Doren 606.

  9. Lopez Life, 148–57; Van Doren 655–56; Lemay Reappraising, 145.

  10. Lopez Cher, 34, 29. As one of the Yale editors, Lopez’s specialty was analyzing Franklin’s papers from his period in France. Her translations, astute assessments, and personal discussions with me informed this chapter.

  11. Madame Brillon to BF, July 30, 1777.

  12. Madame Brillon to BF, Mar. 7, 1778; BF to Madame Brillon, Mar. 10, 1778.

  13. Madame Brillon to BF, May 3, 8, 1779; Lopez Cher, 40, 61–62; Adams Letters 4:46; Brands 552.

  14. BF to Madame Brillon, July 27, 1778. Lib. of Am. uses a version dated 1782, and some sources have the final article worded differently. The version
I have used is from the Yale Papers and the American Philosophical Society; Papers 27:164.

  15. Madame Brillon to BF, Mar. 16, 17, 18, Apr. 26, June 9, July 27, Sept. 13, 17, 1778; BF to Madame Brillon, July 27, Sept. 1, 15, 1778.

  16. Madame Brillon to BF, Sept. 13, 1778; BF to Madame Brillon, Sept. 15, 1778; Lopez Cher, 29–121.

  17. “The Ephemera,” Sept. 20, 1778, Lib. of Am. 922; A. Owen Aldridge, “Sources for Franklin’s Ephemera,” New England Quarterly 27 (1954): 388.

  18. BF to Madame Brillon, Nov. 29, 1777; Madame Brillon to BF, Nov. 30, 1777 (the chess game partner was their neighbor Louis-Guillaume le Veillard); Papers 25:204, 25:218); Madame Brillon to BF, Dec. 10, 15, 20, 1778; BF to Madame Brillon, Dec. 11?, 1778.

  19. Lopez Cher, 243–48. Lopez draws on Antoine Guillois, Le Salon de Madame Helvétius (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1894). Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’Esprit(Paris, 1758; English translation, Essays on the Mind, London, 1759); it was publicly burned in Paris but also one of the most widely read books of its time. See gallica.bnf.fr/Fonds_textes/T0088614.htm ; www.aei.ca/˜anbou/mhelv.html.

  20. Aldridge French, 162; Gilbert Chinard, “Abbé Lefebvre de la Roche’s Recollections of Benjamin Franklin,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society(1950).

  21. BF to Madame Helvétius, Oct. 31, 1778.

  22. Aldridge French, 165; Adams Papers 2:55.

  23. BF to Madame Helvétius, through Cabanis, Sept. 19, 1779. It is possible that Poupon was a cat, but we know she had a dog and this is more likely.

  24. “The Flies,” Papers 34:220; Lib. of Am., 991 (the date of this piece is unkown and in dispute); Lopez Cher, 260. See also Lopez Cher, 371n.32 arguing that some biographers “overdramatize” Franklin’s proposal to Madame Helvétius whereas others discount it too much.

  25. “The Elysian Fields,” Dec. 7, 1778, Lib. of Am. 924.

  26. Turgot to Pierre du Pont de Nemours, June 24, 1780, in Lopez Cher, 170.

  27. BF to Thomas Bond, Mar. 16, 1780.