In addition to re-forming his army, Washington now favored adopting a so-called Fabian military strategy, named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius who wore down a superior Carthaginian army through a war of attrition. “Desperate diseases, require desperate remedies,” Washington wrote to Hancock.88 Congress had opposed a standing army on republican grounds and repeatedly directed Washington to defend major cities rather than fall back to preserve his army. Now, faced with the army’s imminent collapse, it agreed to Washington’s terms and empowered him to impose them without oversight.89 “Our Fabius will be slow, but sure,” John Adams assured his wife.90
By the spring of 1777, Britain had a large army in Canada and a larger one in New York. The United States could only respond with the remnant of the force that once invaded Canada holed up in a defensive posture at Fort Ticonderoga and the remaining troops of the now Fabian-minded Washington encamped in New Jersey. Fully expecting to suppress the rebels by fall, the British began their offensive in June with John Burgoyne’s northern army moving south from Canada and retaking Ticonderoga. With the veteran officer Horatio Gates taking command and augmented by state and local militia streaming in from New England and New York plus crack units sent north by Washington, the Americans regrouped in the forested regions around Saratoga. They hoped to stop the British advance before it reached the lower Hudson Valley and split the states in two from Montreal to Manhattan.
Washington and other patriot leaders expected General Howe to send forces north from New York City to relieve Burgoyne. Burgoyne thought so too and did not keep his supply lines open to Canada. Instead, Howe dithered until mid-July trying to lure Washington into an open fight and, when this failed, then loaded two-thirds of his men onto ships headed south. “Howes Fleet has been at Sea, these 8 days. We know not where he is gone,” Adams wrote on July 30. “Some guess he is gone to Cheasapeak, to land near Susquehanna and cross over Land to Albany to meet Burgoine. But they might as well imagine them gone round Cape horn into the South Seas to land at California.”91 In fact, failing to recognize that armies (not cities) were critical in this war, Howe had bypassed Washington’s forces to assault Philadelphia from the south.
Washington shifted his army to counter Howe’s force at Brandywine Creek south of Philadelphia. When this failed, however, he did not follow up with a determined defense of the city. The British occupied it without resistance on September 26. By then, Congress had moved again, this time to central Pennsylvania, where it remained for months. After a sharp clash at Germantown in October, Washington withdrew to winter quarters at Valley Forge while Howe wintered in Philadelphia. Franklin immediately recognized the shortsightedness of Howe’s occupying a city with little strategic importance, no established defensive perimeter, and many indifferent Quaker residents. “You mistake the matter,” he told friends who lamented the city’s capture, “instead of Howe taking Philada.—Philada has taken Howe.”92 Once the operation ended, London recognized the blunder of the British army’s not remaining based on Manhattan island and replaced Howe with Henry Clinton, who withdrew his army to New York and later dispatched much of it to the southern states while keeping his headquarters in Manhattan.
Franklin received confirmation that Philadelphia had fallen from the same messenger who brought news that Burgoyne had surrendered with his entire army to Gates at Saratoga. Without relief from the south, Burgoyne’s position had become untenable. Suddenly Philadelphia did not matter. With the victory at Saratoga, Franklin had everything he needed to seal an alliance with France. It still required a bit of acting by Franklin, who forced Vergennes’s hand by pretending to discuss terms with an anxious British agent, but that ruse only accelerated the inevitable. In Paris on February 6, 1778, representatives of France and the United States signed treaties recognizing American independence, opening formal trade between the two countries, and establishing terms for their military alliance. These treaties did not win the war—that process would take five more years—but they made victory possible. In marked contrast with others at the ceremonial signing, Franklin reportedly sported an old coat for the occasion—the same one that he had worn in 1775 during his denouncement before Britain’s Privy Council. He never forgot or forgave that act. The French alliance was his revenge, and he savored it.93
WASHINGTON AND FRANKLIN COMMUNICATED by mail more often and more regularly during the year leading up to the French alliance than during any other period, and more letters between the two men survive from the term of Franklin’s service in France than from all other times. More than twenty such letters exist from 1777 alone. Of course, Franklin and Washington did not need to communicate by mail when they served together in Congress or, later, at the Constitutional Convention. They could talk. But they did not need to exchange letters during the war years either.
With both men holding positions under Congress during Franklin’s tenure in Paris, each typically conveyed critical information to congressional committees or to the president of Congress, who in turn passed it on to the other as needed. Reports, dispatches, and commentary therefore normally passed between the two men through Philadelphia rather than by direct correspondence. As Washington noted in one 1780 letter to Franklin in words similar to what appeared in others, “I doubt not you are so fully informed by Congress of our political and Military State that it would be superflueus to trouble you with any thing relating to either.” Nevertheless, he closed this letter with the warm valediction, “With my best wishes for the preservation of your useful life and for every happiness that can attend you which a sincere attachment can dictate.”94
Franklin replied in kind, with closings such as “My best Wishes always have and always will attend you, being with the greatest and most sincere Esteem & Respect.”95 Rather than terms of endearment, these were words of mutual admiration and reliance.
Although warm words were not uncommon in letters passing between Franklin and Washington during this period, much of their correspondence was purely perfunctory, especially if it related to Europeans seeking commissions in the Continental Army. From his arrival in Paris, Franklin was besieged with supplicants of this sort. Most wanted to be officers and asked him for letters of recommendation to Washington. “These Applications are my perpetual Torment,” Franklin complained in 1777. “Not a Day passes in which I have not a Number of soliciting Visits besides Letters.”96 He sought to filter the applicants and to recommend only the best, but some had contacts in France making them hard to refuse.97 These often received the most cursory letters, including a phrase such as “He goes over at his own Expence, and without any Promise from me.”98 Indeed, Franklin parodied the process in a printed form recommendation. “The Bearer of this who is going to America, presses me to give him a Letter of Recommendation, tho’ I know nothing of him,” it stated. “I must refer you to himself for his Character and Merits, with which he is certainly better acquainted than I can possibly be.”99
Swamped with applicants for commissions from multiple sources, in August 1777, Washington begged Franklin not to send more. This slowed the flow, but some of the most promising candidates still got through. A few whom Franklin recommended with added emphasis proved invaluable: Count Pulaski, Baron von Steuben, and the Marquis de Lafayette. “I give no Expectations to those who apply,” Franklin assured Washington. “I promise nothing.”100 This was a working partnership.
Franklin and Washington knew that by being the first, they were establishing norms for future American diplomats and generals, and that these norms called for working through Congress. Certain subjects called for direct communication, however. In one letter from 1780, for example, Franklin invited Washington to tour Europe with him following the war. “You would on this Side the Sea, enjoy the great Reputation you have acquir’d,” he wrote in words that surely cheered Washington during a dark period of the war. “At present I enjoy that Pleasure for you: as I frequently hear the old Generals of this martial Country, (who study the Maps of America, and mark upon them all you
r Operations) speak with sincere Approbation & great Applause of your Conduct, and join in giving you the Character of one of the greatest Captains of the Age.”101 With experience and through mistakes, Washington was learning how to lead soldiers in battle and armies in war—and Franklin wanted him to know it was recognized and appreciated.
Another direct exchange between the two patriot leaders occurred after a massive joint Franco-American operation led to the surrender of Lord Cornwallis and his southern army at Yorktown in October 1781. By fast frigate, Washington immediately sent Franklin a copy of the articles of capitulation and a summary account of the eight thousand prisoners and more than two hundred cannons taken. Transmission “thru the usual channel of the department of foreign affairs” would take too long, Washington explained.102 With the siege of Yorktown that netted Cornwallis’s surrender, the Virginian finally achieved that one bold stroke to sweep Britain from the field that he had yearned for since assuming command of American forces after the Battle of Bunker Hill. But while Washington brilliantly orchestrated the siege, only French troops and ships made it feasible.
Indeed, it is fair to call it a Franco-American operation (with France named first) because more French troops were involved in it than Continental ones. The reference to Washington’s yearning for bold strokes after the Battle of Bunker Hill is also apt because, as in the siege of Boston, the forces on the American side at Yorktown outnumbered those on the British side by two to one, with the British trapped on a peninsula. The key difference between the two sieges was that this time, instead of a British navy in Boston harbor able to resupply and ready to evacuate its forces, the British faced a French navy at Yorktown blocking their resupply and escape.
At Yorktown, unlike Boston, Washington could follow his instincts by bombarding and attacking at will to compel a surrender that he reasonably believed would end the war. Fittingly, he shared the news with Franklin. After all, both of them played vital parts in achieving the victory. For his part, Franklin much later wrote to Washington congratulating him “on the final Success of your long & painful Labours in the Service of our Country, which have laid us all under eternal Obligations.”103
Five
“The Most Awful Crisis”
THE LAST FEW PAGES READ as if Franklin’s French alliance led directly to Washington’s victory at Yorktown and the war’s end with virtually nothing of significance in between. Some modern accounts make the story almost this straightforward. Walter Isaacson’s masterly biography of Franklin speaks of the alliance helping to “seal the course of the Revolution” and never mentions another battle until Yorktown.1 (It had named many prior ones.) The American Revolution: A History, a primer by the war’s preeminent historian, Gordon Wood, races from the alliance to Yorktown in under four pages. The book’s telling of the story from Lexington to the alliance spans nearly thirty.
Even at the time, it seemed as if it should be so. The Pennsylvania Packet, for example, depicted the alliance as the instrument “of giving liberty, independence, and the prospects of peace to this country.”2 Similarly, the Massachusetts Board of War responded to news from Franklin of the alliance by exalting, “France has seizd the happy moment and perhaps by her new ally may lay a foundation, at least, to prevent Brittain longer ruling the World.”3
Franklin had all but invited such hopes by his letter to the board, which declared that, under the alliance, the French king “guarantees the Liberty, Sovereignty, and Independence absolute and unlimited of the United States.”4 Such a guarantee, if given by the treaties, would justify great expectations. Washington encouraged them in his general orders to the troops announcing the alliance, which thanked divine providence for “raising us up a powerful Friend among the Princes of the Earth to establish our liberty and Independence upon lasting foundations.”5 Indeed, tying the war’s end to the French alliance and victory at Yorktown was implicit in Adams’s famous rant, set forth in chapter 1, that Americans would remember their revolution as simply “Dr Franklins electrical Rod, Smote the Earth and out Spring General Washington.”6
Reality was not so simple. More than three and a half years of warfare separated the French alliance in February 1778 from Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, and nearly another two years passed before the Treaty of Paris formally ended the American Revolution in September 1783. More American soldiers were killed, wounded, and captured after the alliance than before it. Although the winter quarters at Morristown in 1776–1777 and Valley Forge a year later were aptly depicted as times that tried men’s souls, the winter that followed in 1779–1780, again at Morristown, was far worse in terms of human privation, despite French aid resulting from the alliance. Bitter cold and heavy snow, including seven blizzards in December and a record thirty-eight snowfalls overall, kept supplies from reaching the encampment and kept soldiers largely confined to some one thousand crudely constructed log huts, each housing twelve men in one small room. “The oldest people now living in this Country do not remember so hard a Winter,” Washington wrote near its end. “The severity of the frost exceeded anything of the kind that has ever been experienced in this climate before.”7
The suffering caused by a lack of food, clothing, and shelter was compounded by the collapse in value of the Continental currency and inability to pay the troops. The ongoing war and Congress’s failure to capitalize on the alliance with France to establish a governing structure capable of addressing domestic needs carried essential lessons. Washington, Congress’s superintendent of finance Robert Morris, Washington’s aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton, and other budding federalists learned these lessons more during the dark days after the alliance than those before it. And if “federalist” here means those who wanted a stronger federal union, even Franklin fell in this camp. These days shaped their approach to the ensuing peace.
THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS that appointed Washington as commander in chief and sent Franklin to France had dubious authority to do either (or any) act. Neither the king nor Parliament recognized the Congress, even though it met for more than a year prior to declaring independence. Colonial assemblies chose some of its members (like Franklin), but never with the approval of their appointed governors. Many of its members (like Washington) were chosen by extralegal conventions composed of most (but not all) delegates to a colony’s assembly meeting in defiance of their royal governors. Acting under its own authority and by its own rules, the Second Continental Congress managed the war, issued currency, commissioned officers, entered into contracts, borrowed money, negotiated with foreign nations, invaded Canada, and declared independence. So much for divine right of kings; here was republicanism with a vengeance.
Anticipating challenges to Congress’s legal authority, in 1775, Franklin introduced in Congress an enhanced version of his 1754 Albany Plan of Union. This would have provided a governing authority for Congress, but it never received a hearing. Only after Congress began debating independence in June 1776 did it appoint a committee to draft articles of confederation. Committed to a stronger central government than the committee proposed, Franklin was deeply involved in congressional debates over those articles until Congress dispatched him to France in September 1776.
After deliberating off and on for more than a year, Congress approved the Articles of Confederation in November 1777 and sent them to the states for ratification. Designating the union as “a league of friendship” among sovereign states, the Articles formed a weaker central government than either Franklin or Washington wanted.8 It lacked power to levy taxes, draft troops, or pass laws for the general welfare. The states (rather than the people) were represented in Congress, with each state having one vote, a supermajority of nine votes required to pass legislation, and unanimity needed to amend the Articles. Franklin had favored proportional representation so that people (rather than states) would be represented. The Articles limited Congress’s authority to matters of war and peace, foreign affairs, relations with Native peoples, postal services, standardizing weight
s and measures, and resolving disputes between states. Even then, given the reluctance of states to relinquish power, final adoption took time. Ten states ratified within five months but concerns about the status of western lands kept the final state, New Jersey, from agreeing until 1781. In the meantime, Congress followed the Articles as the de facto frame of government. Congress’s weakness frustrated both Franklin and Washington. It made their jobs more difficult.
WASHINGTON FELT IT MOST. The French alliance opened all sorts of opportunities for his army, but a chronic lack of resources hobbled its ability to exploit them. Charged following the alliance with also defending Britain’s prized sugar-producing colonies in the West Indies against French assaults and Florida from recapture by France’s ally Spain, British commander Henry Clinton withdrew his troops from Philadelphia in 1778 to consolidate them with those remaining in New York before dispatching many of them to the south. Buoyed by the alliance and fresh from a winter of drilling the troops at Valley Forge in the ways of European warfare under the tutelage of Baron von Steuben, Washington opted to harass the British on their way to New York. One of the European officers recommended by Franklin to Washington, von Steuben had been hounded out of the Prussian army by charges of homosexuality and arrived with a young male companion at Valley Forge, where no questions were asked.9 The winter training proved its worth in New Jersey in June 1778, when pursuing troops under Washington held their ground against a British counterattack at the Battle of Monmouth, before the enemy disengaged after nightfall and hurried on to New York.
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