Philadelphia, 1775–1776
Just as his son, William, had helped him with his famed kite-flying experiment, now William’s son, Temple, lent a hand as he lowered the homemade thermometer into the ocean. Three or four times a day, they would take the temperature and record it on a chart. Franklin had learned from his Nantucket cousin, the whaling captain Timothy Folger, about the course of the Gulf Stream. During the latter half of his six-week voyage home, after writing a detailed account of his futile negotiations, Franklin turned his attention to studying it. The maps he published and the temperature measurements he made are included on the NASA Web site, which notes how remarkably similar they are to the infrared data gathered by modern satellites.1
The voyage was notably calm, but in America the long-brewing storm had begun. On the night of April 18, 1775, while Franklin was in midocean, a contingent of British redcoats headed north from Boston to arrest the tea party planners Samuel Adams and John Hancock and capture the munitions stockpiled by their supporters. Paul Revere spread the alarm, as did others less famously. When the redcoats reached Lexington, seventy American “minutemen” were there to meet them.
“Disperse, ye rebels,” the British major ordered. At first they did. Then a shot was fired. In the ensuing skirmish, eight Americans were killed. The victorious redcoats marched on to Concord, where, as Emerson put it, “the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world.” (Somehow, the poor Lexington fighters lost out in Emerson’s poetic version of history, just as William Dawes and other messengers got slighted in Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.”) On their day-long retreat back to Boston, more than 250 redcoats were killed or wounded by American militiamen.
When Franklin landed in Philadelphia with his 15-year-old grandson on May 5, delegates were beginning to gather there for the Second Continental Congress. Bells were rung to celebrate his arrival. “Dr. Franklin is highly pleased to find us arming and preparing for the worst events,” wrote one reporter. “He thinks nothing else can save us from the most abject slavery.”
America was indeed arming and preparing. Among those arriving in Philadelphia that week, with his uniform packed and ready, was Franklin’s old military comrade, George Washington, who had become a plantation squire in Virginia after the French and Indian War. Close to a thousand militiamen on horse and foot met him at the outskirts of Philadelphia, and a military band played patriotic songs as his carriage rode into town. Yet there was still no consensus, except among the radical patriots in the Massachusetts delegation, about whether the war that had just erupted should be waged for independence or merely for the assertion of American rights within a British Empire that could still be preserved. For that question to be resolved would take another year, though not for Franklin.
Franklin was selected a member of the Congress the day after his arrival. Nearing 70, he was by far the oldest. Most of the sixty-two others who convened in the Pennsylvania statehouse—such as Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry from Virginia and John Adams and John Hancock from Massachusetts—had not even been born when Franklin first went to work there more than forty years earlier.
Franklin moved to the house on Market Street that he had designed but never known, the one where Deborah had been living without him for the past ten years. His daughter, Sally, took care of his housekeeping needs, her husband, Richard Bache, remained dutiful, and their two children, Ben and Will, provided amusement. “Will has got a little gun, marches with it, and whistles at the same time by way of fife,” Franklin wrote.2
For the time being, Franklin kept quiet about whether or not he favored independence, and he avoided the taverns where the other delegates spent the evenings debating the topic. He diligently attended sessions and committee meetings, said little, and then went home to dine with his family. Beginning what would become a long and conflicted association with Franklin, the loquacious and ambitious John Adams complained that the older man was treated with reverence even as he was “sitting in silence, a great part of the time fast asleep in his chair.”
Many of the younger, hotter-tempered delegates had never witnessed Franklin’s artifice of silence, his trick of seeming sage by saying nothing. They knew him by reputation as the man who had successfully argued in Parliament against the Stamp Act, not realizing that oratory did not come naturally to him. So rumors began to circulate. What was his game? Was he a secret loyalist?
Among the suspicious was William Bradford, who had taken over the printing business and newspaper of his father, Franklin’s first patron and later competitor. Some of the delegates, he confided to the young James Madison, “begin to entertain a great suspicion that Dr. Franklin came rather as a spy than as a friend, and that he means to discover our weak side and make his peace with the ministers.”3
In fact, Franklin was biding his time through much of May because there were two people, both very close to him, whom he first wanted to convert to the American rebel cause. One was Joseph Galloway, his old ally in the struggle against the Penns, who had acted as his lieutenant and surrogate for ten years in the Pennsylvania Assembly. During the First Continental Congress, Galloway had proposed the creation of an American congress that would have power parallel to that of Parliament, with both loyal to the king. It was a plan for an imperial union along the lines that Franklin had supported at the Albany Conference and later, but the Congress peremptorily rejected it. Sulking, Galloway had declined an appointment to the Second Continental Congress.
By early 1775, Franklin had come to believe it was too late for a plan like Galloway’s to work. Nevertheless, he tried to persuade Galloway to join him as a member of the new Congress. It was wrong to quit public life, he wrote, “at a time when your abilities are so much wanted.” Initially, he also gave Galloway no more clue than he had given others about where he stood on the question of independence. “People seemed at a loss what party he would take,” Galloway later recalled.4
The other person Franklin hoped to convert to the revolutionary cause was someone even closer to him.
New Jersey governor William Franklin, still loyal to the British ministry and embroiled in disputes with his own legislature, read of his father’s return to Philadelphia in the papers. It was, he wrote Strahan, “quite unexpected news to me.” He was eager to meet with his father and to reclaim his son, Temple. First, however, he had to endure a special session of the New Jersey legislature he had called for May 15. Shortly after it ended in rancor, the three generations of Franklins—father and son and a poor grandson caught in the middle—were finally reunited.5
Franklin and his son chose a neutral venue for their summit: Trevose, the grand fieldstone manor house of Joseph Galloway in Bucks County, just north of Philadelphia. Surprisingly, given the intensely emotional nature of the meeting, neither they nor Galloway apparently ever wrote about it. The only source for what transpired is, ironically, the diary of Thomas Hutchinson, the Massachusetts governor whose letters Franklin had purloined; in his diary, Hutchinson recorded an account of the meeting Galloway gave three years later, when both men were exiled loyalists in England.
The evening started awkwardly, with embraces and then small talk. At one point, William pulled Galloway aside to say that he had avoided, until now, seriously talking politics with his father. But after a while, “the glass having gone around freely” and much Madeira consumed, they confronted their political disagreements. “Well, Mr. Galloway,” Franklin asked his longtime ally, “you are really of the mind that I ought to promote a reconciliation?”
Galloway was indeed of such a mind, but Franklin would hear none of it. He had brought with him the long letter he had written to William during his Atlantic crossing, which detailed his futile attempts at negotiating a reconciliation. Although Galloway had already heard portions of it, Franklin again read most of it aloud and told of the abuse he had suffered. Galloway volleyed with his own horror stories about how anonymous radicals had sent him a noose for proposing a plan to save the British union. A revolution, he stressed, would be suicidal.
William argued that it was best for them all to remain neutral, but his father was not moved. As Hutchinson later recorded, he “opened himself and declared in favor of measures for attaining to independence” and “exclaimed against the corruption and dissipation of the kingdom.” William responded with anger, but also with a touch of concern for his father’s safety. If he intended “to set the colonies in flame,” William hoped, he should “take care to run away by the light of it.”6
So William rode back to New Jersey, defeated and dejected, to resume his duties as royal governor. With him was his son, Temple. The one issue that Benjamin and William had settled at Trevose was that the boy would spend the summer in New Jersey, then return to Philadelphia to be enrolled in the college his grandfather had founded there. William had hoped to send him to King’s College (now Columbia) in New York, but Benjamin scuttled that plan because it had become a hotbed of English loyalism. Temple was soon to be caught in a tug-of-war between two men who vied for his loyalty. He eagerly sought to please them both, but he was fated to find that impossible.
It is hard to pinpoint precisely when America crossed the threshold of deciding that complete independence from Britain was necessary and desirable. It is even difficult to determine when that tipping point came for specific individuals. Franklin, who for ten years had juggled hope and despair that a breach could be avoided, made his own private declaration to his family during their summit at Trevose. By early July 1775, precisely a year before his fellow American patriots made their own stance official, he was ready to come out publicly.
There were many specific events that pushed Franklin across the line to rebellion: personal slights, dashed hopes, betrayals, and the accretion of hostile British acts. But it is also important to take note of the core causes of Franklin’s evolution and, by extension, that of a people he had come to exemplify.
When Englishmen such as his father had immigrated to a new land, they had bred a new type of people. As Franklin repeatedly stressed in his letters to his son, America should not replicate the rigid ruling hierarchies of the Old World, the aristocratic structures and feudal social orders based on birth rather than merit. Instead, its strength would be its creation of a proud middling people, a class of frugal and industrious shopkeepers and tradesmen who were assertive of their rights and proud of their status.
Like many of these new Americans, Franklin chafed at authority, which is why he had run away from his brother’s print shop in Boston. He was not awed by established elites, whether they be the Mathers or the Penns or the peers in the House of Lords. He was cheeky in his writings and rebellious in his manner. And he had imbibed the philosophy of the new Enlightenment thinkers, who believed that liberty and tolerance were the foundation for a civil society.
For a long time he had cherished a vision of imperial harmony in which Britain and America could both flourish in one great expanding empire. But he felt that it would work only if Britain stopped subjugating Americans through mercantile trading rules and taxes imposed from afar. Once it was clear that Britain remained intent on subordinating its colonies, the only course left was independence.
The bloody Battle of Bunker Hill and the burning of Charleston, both in June 1775, further inflamed the hostility that Franklin and his fellow patriots felt toward the British. Nevertheless, most members of the Continental Congress were not quite as far down the road to revolution. Many colonial legislatures, including Pennsylvania’s, had instructed their delegates to resist any calls for independence. The captain of the cautious camp was Franklin’s long-time adversary John Dickinson, who still refrained from erecting a lightning rod on his house.
On July 5, Dickinson pushed through the Congress one last appeal to the king, which became known as the Olive Branch Petition. Blaming the troubles on the perfidies of “irksome” and “delusive” ministers, it “beseeched” the king to come to America’s rescue. The Congress also passed a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, in which it proclaimed “that we mean not to dissolve that union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored.”
Like the other delegates, Franklin agreed for the sake of consensus to sign the Olive Branch Petition. But he made his own rebellious sentiments public the same day. The outlet he chose was quite odd: a letter to his long-time London friend and fellow printer, William Strahan. No longer addressing him as “dear Straney,” he wrote in cold and calculated fury:
Mr. Strahan,
You are a Member of Parliament, and one of that Majority which has doomed my country to destruction. You have begun to burn our towns, and murder our people. Look upon your hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations! You and I were long friends: You are now my enemy, and I am, Yours,
B. Franklin.
What made the famous letter especially odd was that Franklin allowed it to be circulated and publicized—but he never sent it. Instead, it was merely an artifice for making his sentiments clear to his fellow Americans.
In fact, Franklin wrote Strahan a much mellower letter two days later, which he actually sent. “Words and arguments are now of no use,” he said in tones more sorrowful than angry. “All tends to a separation.” Just as he had not mailed the angrier version, Franklin did not keep a copy of the milder letter in his papers.7
(Franklin ended up remaining close friends with Strahan, who four years earlier had declared that “though we differ we do not disagree.” The very day Franklin wrote his unsent note, Strahan wrote one from London lamenting the possibility that the looming war would lead to “the ultimate ruin of the whole of the most glorious fabric of civil and religious government that ever existed.” They continued to correspond throughout 1775, with Strahan begging Franklin to return to England “with proposals of accommodation.” Franklin responded in October by suggesting that Strahan “send us over fair proposals of peace, if you choose it, and nobody will be more ready than myself to promote their acceptation: for I make it a rule not to mix personal resentments with public business.” He signed the letter, as Strahan had signed his, “your affectionate and humble servant.” A year later, when he arrived in Paris as an American envoy, Franklin would receive a gift of Stilton cheese that Strahan sent over from London.)8
Franklin wrote his two other close British friends on July 7 as well. To Bishop Shipley, he railed against England’s tactics of stirring up slaves and Indians against the colonists, and then he apologized for the angry tone of his letter. “If a temper naturally cool and phlegmatic can, in old age, which often cools the warmest, be thus heated, you will judge by that of the general temper here, which is now little short of madness.”9
To Joseph Priestley, he lamented that the Olive Branch Petition was destined to be rejected. “We have carried another humble petition to the crown, to give Britain one more chance, one opportunity more of recovering the friendship of the colonies; which however I think she has not sense enough to embrace, and so I conclude she has lost them for ever.” The letter to Priestley also offered a glimpse into Franklin’s workday and the mood of relative frugality in the colonies:
My time was never more fully employed. In the morning at 6, I am at the committee of safety, appointed by the assembly to put the province in a state of defense; which committee holds till near 9, when I am at the congress, and that sits till after 4 in the afternoon . . . Great frugality and great industry are now become fashionable here: Gentlemen who used to entertain with two or three courses, pride themselves now in treating with simple beef and pudding. By these means, and the stoppage of our consumptive trade with Britain, we shall be better able to pay our voluntary taxes for the support of our troops.10
Liberated by his private break with his son and his public break with Strahan, Franklin became one of the most ardent opponents of Britain in the Continental Congress. He served on a committee to draft a declaration to be issued by General Washington, and the result was so strong that the Congress was afraid to pass or publish it. The document clearly came from Franklin’s pen. It contained phrases he had used before to refute Britain’s claims of having funded the defense of the colonies (“groundless assertions and malicious calumnies”), and it even concluded by seriously comparing the American-British relationship to the one between Britain and Saxony (“her mother country”), a comparison he had earlier made facetiously in his parody “An Edict by the King of Prussia.” In an even more strongly worded preamble to a congressional resolution on privateering that he drafted but never submitted, Franklin accused Britain of “the practice of every injustice which avarice could dictate or rapacity execute” and of “open robbery, declaring by a solemn act of Parliament that all our estates are theirs.”11
No longer was there any doubt, even among his detractors, where Franklin stood. Ever eager, like many Virginians, to hear about Franklin, Madison wrote to Bradford to see if the rumors of his ambivalence persisted. “Has anything further been whispered relative to the conduct of Dr. Franklin?” Bradford confessed that opinions had changed. “The suspicions against Dr. Franklin have died away. Whatever was his design at coming over here, I believe he has now chosen his side and favors our cause.”
Likewise, John Adams reported to his wife, Abigail, that Franklin was now squarely in their revolutionary camp. “He does not hesitate at our boldest measures, but rather seems to think us too irresolute.” The jealous orator could not suppress a slight resentment that the British believed that American opposition was “wholly owing” to Franklin, “and I suppose their scribblers will attribute the temper and proceedings of this Congress to him.”12
For the colonies to cross the threshold of rebellion, they needed to begin conceiving of themselves as a new nation. To become independent of Britain, they had to become less independent of each other. As one of the most traveled and least parochial of colonial leaders, Franklin had long espoused some form of confederation, beginning with his Albany Plan of 1754.
That plan, which was never adopted, envisioned an intercolonial Congress that would be loyal to the king. Now, in 1775, Franklin put forth the idea again, but with one big difference: although his plan allowed for the possibility that the new confederation would remain part of the king’s empire, it was designed to work even if the empire broke apart.
The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union that he presented to the Congress on July 21, like his Albany Plan, contained the seeds of the great conceptual breakthrough that would eventually define America’s federal system: a division of powers between a central government and those of the states. Franklin, however, was ahead of his time. His proposed central government was very powerful, indeed more powerful than the one eventually created by the actual Articles of Confederation that the Congress began to draft the following year.
Much of the wording in Franklin’s proposal was drawn from New England confederation plans that stretched back to one forged by settlements in Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1643. But the scope and powers went far beyond anything previously proposed. “The Name of the Confederacy shall henceforth be The United Colonies of North America,” Franklin’s detailed thirteen articles began. “The said United Colonies hereby severally enter into a firm League of Friendship with each other, binding on themselves and their posterity, for their common defense against their enemies, for the security of their liberties and properties, the safety of their persons and families, and their mutual and general welfare.”13
Under Franklin’s proposal, the Congress would have only a single chamber, in which there would be proportional representation from each state based on population. It would have the power to levy taxes, make war, manage the military, enter into foreign alliances, settle disputes between colonies, form new colonies, issue a unified currency, establish a postal system, regulate commerce, and enact laws “necessary to the general welfare.” Franklin also proposed that, instead of a single president, the Congress appoint a twelve-person “executive council” whose members would serve for staggered three-year terms.
Franklin included an escape provision: in the event that Britain accepted all of America’s demands and made financial reparation for all of the damage it had done, the union could be dissolved. Otherwise, “this confederation is to be perpetual.”
As Franklin fully realized, this pretty much amounted to a declaration of independence from Britain and a declaration of dependence by the colonies on each other, neither of which had widespread support yet. So he read his proposal into the record but did not force a vote on it. He was content to wait for history, and the rest of the Continental Congress, to catch up with him.
By late August, when it was time for Temple to return from New Jersey to Philadelphia, William tentatively suggested that he could accompany the boy there. Franklin, uncomfortable at the prospect of his loyalist son arriving in town while the rebellious Congress was in session, decided instead to fetch Temple himself.14
Temple was lanky, fun-loving, and as disorganized as most 15-year-olds. Much correspondence was spent reuniting him with personal items he had left in the wrong place. As his stepmother noted, “You are extremely unlucky in your clothes.” William tried hard to keep up the pretense of family harmony and included kind words about Franklin in all his letters to Temple. He also tried to keep up with Temple’s frequent requests for more money; in the tug-of-war for his affections, the lad got fewer lectures about frugality than other members of his family had.
Once again, Franklin surrounded himself with the sort of domestic menagerie he found so comfortable: his daughter and her husband, their two children (Benny, 6, and William, 2), Temple, and eventually Jane Mecom, his sole surviving sibling. In none of the letters we have from that time is Deborah mentioned; life on Market Street seemed to go along without her.
For the time being, Franklin was able to close out his accounts, literally and symbolically, with his counterpart family back in London. He sent Mrs. Stevenson a £1,000 payment for his back rent, and stiffly warned her to invest it in a piece of land instead of stocks. “Britain having begun a war with us, which I apprehend is not likely soon to be ended,” he wrote, “there is great probability of these stocks falling headlong.”
For her part, Mrs. Stevenson sunk into “weak spirits” pining for his return. “Without the animating hope of spending the remainder of life with you,” a friend of hers wrote Franklin, “she would be very wretched indeed.” In his jovial way, Franklin once again proposed an arranged marriage, this time between his grandson Benny and Polly Stevenson’s daughter, Elizabeth Hewson.15
Franklin had been serving his country, as it headed toward revolution, in roles befitting a man of his age: diplomat, elder statesman, sage, and dozing delegate. But he still had the inclination and talent for hands-on management, organizing things and making them happen in a practical way.
He was the obvious choice to chair a committee to figure out how to replace the British-run postal system and then become, as he did in July, America’s new postmaster general. The job paid a handsome £1,000 per year, but Franklin’s patriotism overwhelmed his frugality: he donated the salary to care for wounded soldiers. “Men can be as diligent with us from zeal for the public good as with you for thousands per annum,” he wrote Priestley. “Such is the difference between uncorrupted new states and corrupted old ones.” His penchant for nepotism, however, remained intact. Richard Bache became the financial comptroller of the new system.
Franklin was also put in charge of establishing a system of paper currency, one of his long-standing passions. As usual, he immersed himself in many of the details. Using his botanical knowledge of the vein structures of different types of leaves, he personally drew the leaf designs for the various notes to make them harder to counterfeit. Once again, Bache benefited: he was one of those Franklin selected to oversee the printing.
Franklin’s other assignments included heading up the effort to collect lead for munitions, devising ways to manufacture gunpowder, and serving on committees to deal with the Indians and to promote trade with Britain’s enemies. In addition, he was made president of Pennsylvania’s own defense committee. In that capacity, he oversaw construction of a secret system of underwater obstructions to prevent enemy warships from navigating the Delaware River and wrote detailed proposals, filled with historical precedents, for using pikes and even bows and arrows (reminiscent of the suggestions he had made in 1755 for using dogs) to compensate for the colonial shortage of gunpowder. The idea of using arrows might seem quirky, but he justified it in a letter to Gen. Charles Lee in New York. Among the reasons he offered: “A man may shoot as truly with a bow as with a common musket . . . He can discharge four arrows in the same time of charging and discharging one bullet . . . A flight of arrows, seen coming upon them, terrifies and disturbs the enemies’ attention to their business . . . An arrow striking in any part of a man puts him hors du combat till it is extracted.”16
Given his age and physical infirmities, Franklin might have been expected to contribute his expertise from the comfort of Philadelphia. But among his attributes was a willingness, indeed an eagerness, to be involved in practical details rather than detached theorizing. He was also, both as a teen and as a septuagenarian, revitalized by travel. Thus, he would find himself embarked on missions for the Congress in October 1775 and the following March.
The October trip came in response to an appeal from General Washington, who had taken command of the motley Massachusetts militias and was struggling to make them, along with various undisciplined backwoodsmen who had arrived from other colonies, into the nucleus of a true continental army. With little equipment and declining morale, it was questionable whether he could hold his troops together through the winter. So the Congress appointed a committee to look into the situation, which was about all it could do, and Franklin agreed to serve as its head.
On the eve of his departure, Franklin wrote two of his British friends to emphasize that America was determined to prevail. “If you flatter yourselves with beating us into submission, you know neither the people nor the country,” he told David Hartley. To Joseph Priestley, he provided a bit of math for one of their friends to ponder: “Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20,000 a head . . . During the same time, 60,000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all.”17
Franklin and his two fellow committee members met with General Washington in Cambridge for a week. Discipline was a big problem, and Franklin approached it in his usual meticulous manner by drawing up (as he had done two decades earlier for Pennsylvania’s militia) incredibly detailed methods and procedures. His list of prescribed punishments, for example, included between twenty and thirty-nine lashes for sentries caught sleeping, a fine of a month’s pay for an officer absent without leave, seven days’ confinement with only bread and water for an enlisted man absent without leave, and the death penalty for mutiny. The rations for each man were spelled out in similar detail: a pound of beef or salt fish per day, a pound of bread, a pint of milk, a quart of beer or cider, and so on, down to the amount of soap and candles.18
As they were preparing to leave, Washington asked the committee to stress to the Congress “the necessity of having money constantly and regularly sent.” That was the colonies’ greatest challenge, and Franklin provided a typical take on how raising £1.2 million a year could be accomplished merely through more frugality. “If 500,000 families will each spend a shilling a week less,” he explained to Bache, “they may pay the whole sum without otherwise feeling it. Forbearing to drink tea saves three-fourths of the money, and 500,000 women doing each threepence worth of spinning or knitting in a week will pay the rest.” For his own part, Franklin forked over his postmaster’s salary plus £100 that Mrs. Stevenson had helped raise in London for the American wounded. He also collected from the Massachusetts Assembly the money it owed him for his services as their London agent, and that he kept.19
At a dinner during the trip, he met John Adams’s wife, Abigail, who was later to be disparaging about Franklin but on that night was charmed. Her description in a letter to her husband shows that she had a good insight into his demeanor, though not his religious convictions:
I found him social but not talkative, and when he spoke something useful dropped from his tongue. He was grave, yet pleasant and affable. You know I make some pretensions to physiognomy, and I thought I could read into his countenance the virtues of his heart; among which patriotism shone in its full luster, and with that is blended every virtue of a Christian: for a true patriot must be a religious man.20
On his way back to Philadelphia, Franklin stopped in Rhode Island to meet his sister Jane Mecom. She had fled British-occupied Boston and taken refuge with Franklin’s old friend Catherine Ray Greene and her husband. Caty’s house now included dozens of refugee relatives and friends, and Franklin worried that Jane “must be a great burden to that hospitable house.” In fact, as Claude-Anne Lopez notes, “Jane and Caty, a generation apart in age, a world in circumstances and temperament, had a marvelous rapport.” Just as Franklin was wont to find surrogate daughters for himself, Jane took to treating Caty as one. (“Would to God I had such a one!” she wrote Caty, even though Jane in fact had a daughter of her own from whom she was estranged.)21
Franklin reciprocated. When he picked up Jane, he convinced Caty’s 10-year-old son, Ray, to come with them back to Philadelphia and enroll with Temple at the college there. The carriage ride through Connecticut and New Jersey was a delight for Jane. “My dear brother’s conversation was more than the equivalent of all the fine weather imaginable,” she reported to Caty. The good feelings were so strong that they were able to overcome any political tensions when they made a brief stop at the governor’s mansion in Perth Amboy to call on William.
It would turn out to be the last time Franklin would see his son other than a final tense meeting in England ten years later. But neither man knew that at the time, and they kept the meeting short. “We would willingly have detained them longer,” William’s wife wrote Temple, “but Papa was anxious to get home.”22
Back in Philadelphia, a group of Marine units were being organized to try to capture British arms shipments. Franklin noticed that one of their drummers had painted a rattlesnake on his drum emblazoned with the words “Don’t tread on me.” In an anonymous article, filled with bold humor and a touch of venom, Franklin suggested that this should be the symbol and motto of America’s fight. The rattlesnake, Franklin noted, had no eyelids, and “may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance.” It also never initiated an attack nor surrendered once engaged, and “is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage.” As for the rattles, the snake on the drum had thirteen of them, “exactly the number of the colonies united in America; and I recollected too that this was the only part of the snake which increased in number.” Christopher Gadsen, a delegate to the Congress from South Carolina, picked up the suggestion in Franklin’s article and subsequently designed a yellow flag with a rattlesnake emblazoned “Don’t Tread on Me.” It was flown in early 1776 by America’s first Marine units and later by many other militias.23
Undertaking a mission to the Boston area in autumn was understandable: it was an easy enough trip to the town of his birth. The Congress’s decision to send him on his second mission, and his willingness to agree, was less explicable. In March 1776, Franklin, now 70, embarked on a brutal trip to Quebec.
A combined American force, led in part by the still-patriotic Benedict Arnold, had invaded Canada with the goal of preventing Britain from launching an expedition down the Hudson and splitting the colonies. Trapped and under siege, the American forces had spent the winter freezing and begging the Congress for reinforcements. Once more, the Congress responded by appointing a committee, again with Franklin at the head.
On their first day of travel, Franklin and his fellow commissioners passed just north of Perth Amboy, where William kept up the pretense of governing even though local rebels restricted his movements. Franklin did not visit. His son was now an enemy. Indeed, William showed where his loyalties now were: he sent back to London all the information he had been able to gather on his father’s mission. “Dr. Franklin,” he noted, planned to “prevail on the Canadians to enter into the Confederacy with the other colonies.” Yet, in his letters to Temple, William poured out his sorrow and fears. Was the old man healthy enough to survive the journey? Was there a way to dissuade him from going? “Nothing ever gave me more pain than his undertaking that journey.”
By the time he reached Saratoga, where they paused to wait for the ice on the lakes to clear, Franklin realized that he in fact might not survive. “I have undertaken a fatigue that at my time of life may prove too much for me,” he wrote Josiah Quincy. “So I sit down to write to a few friends by way of farewell.” But he soldiered on and, after an arduous month of travel that included time spent sleeping on the floors of abandoned houses, finally reached Montreal. Along the way, he picked up a soft marten fur cap that he would later make famous when, as an envoy in Paris, he wore it as part of his pose as a simple frontier sage.24
Despite the disarray of his forces, Benedict Arnold hosted Franklin and his fellow commissioners at a grand supper graced by a profusion of young French ladies. Alas, Franklin was in no shape to enjoy it. “I suffered much from a number of large boils,” he later wrote. “In Canada, my legs swelled and I apprehended a dropsy.”
The military situation was equally bad. America’s besieged army had expected the committee to bring needed funds, and there was great discouragement when they discovered this was not the case. Franklin’s delegation hoped, on the other hand, that it would be able to raise funds from the local Canadians, but that proved impossible. Franklin personally provided £353 in gold from his own pocket to Arnold, a nice gesture that bought him some affection while doing little to solve the situation.
Franklin had been instructed to try to entice Quebec into joining the American rebellion, but he decided not to even try. “Until the arrival of money, it seems improper to propose the federal union of this province with the others,” he reported, “as the few friends we have here will scarce venture to exert themselves in promoting it until they see our credit recovered and a sufficient army arrived.”
When reports came that more British ships were on their way, the Canadians became even less hospitable. The committee reached what was an inevitable conclusion: “If money cannot be had to support your army here with honor, so as to be respected instead of being hated by the people, we repeat it as our firm and unanimous opinion that it is better immediately to withdraw.”
Exhausted and feeling defeated, Franklin spent the month of May struggling to make it back to Philadelphia. “I find I grow daily more feeble,” he wrote. When he arrived home, his gout was so bad that he could not leave his house for days. It seemed he had performed his last mission for his country.
But his strength gradually returned, spurred by a visit from General Washington and by some tidings of a big event that was about to occur. His poor health, he wrote Washington on June 21, “has kept me from Congress and company almost ever since you left us, so that I know little of what has passed there except that a Declaration of Independence is preparing.”25
Until 1776, most colonial leaders believed—or politely pretended to believe—that America’s dispute was with the king’s misguided ministers, not with the king himself nor the Crown in concept. To declare independence, they had to convince their countrymen, and themselves, to take the daunting leap of abandoning this distinction. One thing that helped them do so was the publication, in January of that year, of an anonymous forty-seven-page pamphlet entitled Common Sense.
In prose that drew its power, as Franklin’s often did, from being unadorned, the author argued that there was no “natural or religious reason [for] the distinction of men into kings and subjects.” Hereditary rule was a historic abomination. “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” Thus, there was only one path for Americans: “Every thing that is right or natural pleads for separation.”
Within weeks of its appearance in Philadelphia, the pamphlet sold an astonishing 120,000 copies. Many thought Franklin the author, for it reflected his blunt sentiments about the corruption of hereditary power. In fact, Franklin’s hand was more indirect: the real author was a cheeky young Quaker from London named Thomas Paine, who had failed as a corset maker, been fired as a tax clerk, and then gained an introduction to Franklin, who, not surprisingly, took a liking to him. When Paine decided he wanted to immigrate to America and become a writer, Franklin procured him passage and wrote to Richard Bache in 1774 asking him to help get Paine a job. Soon he was working for a Philadelphia printer and honing his skills as an essayist. When Paine showed him the manuscript for Common Sense, Franklin offered his wholehearted support along with a few suggested revisions.26
Paine’s pamphlet galvanized the forces favoring outright revolution. Cautious colonial legislatures became less so, revising their instructions to their delegates so that they now were permitted to consider the question of independence. On June 7, as Franklin recuperated, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee, brother of his once and future rival Arthur Lee, put the motion on the table, to wit: “These United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.”
Although the Congress put off a vote on the motion for a few weeks, it took one immediate step toward independence that affected the Franklins personally: ordering the removal of all royal governments in the colonies. Patriotic new provincial congresses asserted themselves, and the one in New Jersey, on June 15, 1776, declared that Gov. William Franklin was “an enemy of the liberties of this country.” In deference to the fact that he was a Franklin, the order for William’s arrest did suggest that he be handled “with all the delicacy and tenderness which the nature of the business can possibly admit.”
William was in no mood for delicacy or tenderness. The speech he made at his trial on June 21 was so defiant that one of the judges described it as “every way worthy of his exalted birth,” referring to his illegitimacy rather than to his famous paternity. For his part, the elder Franklin was not acting particularly paternal. His letter to Washington that noted the preparation of a declaration of independence was written on the same day that his son was being tried, but Franklin didn’t mention it. Nor did he say or do anything to help his son when the Continental Congress, three days later, voted to have him imprisoned in Connecticut.
Thus, the words that William wrote on the eve of his confinement to his own son, who was now firmly ensconced in his grandfather’s custody, read so painfully generous: “God bless you, my dear boy; be dutiful and attentive to your grandfather, to whom you owe great obligation.” Then he concluded with a bit of forced optimism: “If we survive the present storm, we may all meet and enjoy the sweets of peace with the greater relish.”27
They would, in fact, survive the storm, and indeed all meet again, but never to relish the sweets of peace together. The wounds of 1776 would prove too deep.
As the Congress prepared to vote on the question of independence, it appointed a committee for what, in hindsight, would turn out to be a momentous task, but one that at the time did not seem so important: drafting a declaration that explained the decision. It included Franklin, of course, and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, as well as Connecticut merchant Roger Sherman and New York lawyer Robert Livingston.28
How was it that Jefferson, at 33, got the honor of drafting the document? His name was listed first on the committee, signifying that he was the chairman, because he had gotten the most votes and because he was from Virginia, the colony that had proposed the resolution. His four colleagues had other committee assignments that they considered to be more important, and none of them realized that the document would eventually become viewed as a text akin to scripture.
For his part, Adams mistakenly thought he had already secured his place in history by writing the preamble to a May 10 resolution that called for the dismantling of royal authority in the colonies, which he proclaimed incorrectly would be regarded by historians as “the most important resolution that ever was taken in America.” Years later, in his pompous way, he would claim that Jefferson wanted him to be the declaration’s writer, but that he had convinced the younger man to do the honors, arguing: “Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.” Jefferson’s recollection was quite different. The committee “unanimously pressed on myself alone to make the draught,” he later wrote.29
As for Franklin, he was still laid up in bed with boils and gout when the committee first met. Besides, he later told Jefferson, “I have made it a rule, whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body.”
And thus it was that Jefferson had the glorious honor of composing, on a little lap desk he had designed, some of the most famous phrases in history while sitting alone in a second-floor room of a home on Market Street just a block from Franklin’s home. “When in the course of human events . . . ” he famously began. Significantly, what followed was an attack not on the British government (i.e., the ministers) but on the British state incarnate (i.e., the king). “To attack the king was,” historian Pauline Maier notes, “a constitutional form. It was the way Englishmen announced revolution.”30
The document Jefferson drafted was in some ways similar to what Franklin would have written. It contained a highly specific bill of particulars against the British, and it recounted, as Franklin had often done, the details of America’s attempts to be conciliatory despite England’s repeated intransigence. Indeed, Jefferson’s words echoed some of the language that Franklin had used earlier that year in a draft resolution that he never published:
Whereas, whenever kings, instead of protecting the lives and properties of their subjects, as is their bounden duty, do endeavor to perpetrate the destruction of either, they thereby cease to be kings, become tyrants, and dissolve all ties of allegiance between themselves and their people; we hereby further solemnly declare, that whenever it shall appear clearly to us, that the King’s troops and ships now in America, or hereafter to be brought there, do, by his Majesty’s orders, destroy any town or the inhabitants of any town or place in America, or that the savages have been by the same orders hired to assassinate our poor out-settlers and their families, we will from that time renounce all allegiance to Great Britain, so long as that kingdom shall submit to him, or any of his descendants, as its sovereign.31
Jefferson’s writing style, however, was different from Franklin’s. It was graced with rolling cadences and mellifluous phrases, soaring in their poetry and powerful despite their polish. In addition, Jefferson drew on a depth of philosophy not found in Franklin. He echoed both the language and grand theories of English and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, most notably the concept of natural rights propounded by John Locke, whose Second Treatise on Government he had read at least three times. And he built his case, in a manner more sophisticated than Franklin would have, on a contract between government and the governed that was founded on the consent of the people.
Jefferson also, it should be noted, borrowed freely from the phrasings of others, including the resounding Declaration of Rights in the new Virginia constitution that had just been drafted by his fellow planter George Mason, in a manner that today might subject him to questions of plagiarism but back then was considered not only proper but learned. Indeed, when the cranky John Adams, jealous of the acclaim that Jefferson had gotten, did point out years later that there were no new ideas in the Declaration and that many of the phrases had been lifted from others, Jefferson retorted: “I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”32
When he had finished a draft and incorporated some changes from Adams, Jefferson sent it to Franklin on the morning of Friday, June 21. “Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it,” he wrote in his cover note, “and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?”33 People were much more polite to editors back then.
Franklin made only a few changes, some of which can be viewed written in his own hand on what Jefferson referred to as the “rough draft” of the Declaration. (This remarkable document is at the Library of Congress and on its Web site.) The most important of his edits was small but resounding. He crossed out, using the heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”34
The idea of “self-evident” truths was one that drew less on John Locke, who was Jefferson’s favored philosopher, than on the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and on the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. In what became known as “Hume’s fork,” the great Scottish philosopher, along with Leibniz and others, had developed a theory that distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact (such as “London is bigger than Philadelphia”) and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition (“The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees”; “All bachelors are unmarried”). By using the word “sacred,” Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. Franklin’s edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality.
Franklin’s other edits were less felicitous. He changed Jefferson’s “reduce them to arbitrary power” to “reduce them under absolute despotism,” and he took out the literary flourish in Jefferson’s “invade and deluge us in blood” to make it more sparse: “invade and destroy us.” And a few of his changes seem somewhat pedantic. “Amount of their salaries” became “amount and payment of their salaries.”35
On July 2, the Continental Congress finally took the momentous step of voting for independence. Pennsylvania was one of the last states to hold out; until June, its legislature had instructed its delegates to “utterly reject” any actions “that may cause or lead to a separation from our Mother Country.” But under pressure from a more radical rump legislature, the instructions were changed. Led by Franklin, Pennsylvania’s delegation, with conservative John Dickinson abstaining, joined the rest of the colonies in voting for independence.
As soon as the vote was completed, the Congress formed itself into a committee of the whole to consider Jefferson’s draft Declaration. They were not so light in their editing as Franklin had been. Large sections were eviscerated, most notably the one that criticized the king for perpetuating the slave trade. The Congress also, to its credit, cut by more than half the draft’s final five paragraphs, in which Jefferson had begun to ramble in a way that detracted from the document’s power.36
Jefferson was distraught. “I was sitting by Dr. Franklin,” he recalled, “who perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations.” But the process (in addition to in fact improving the great document) had the delightful consequence of eliciting from Franklin, who sought to console Jefferson, one of his most famous little tales. When he was a young printer, a friend starting out in the hat-making business wanted a sign for his shop. As Franklin recounted:
He composed it in these words, “John Thompson, hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,” with a figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word “Hatter” tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats,” which showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats . . . He struck it out. A third said he thought the words “for ready money” were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Everyone who purchased expected to pay. They were parted with; and the inscription now stood, “John Thompson sells hats.” “Sells hats!” says his next friend; “why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What then is the use of that word?” It was stricken out, and “hats” followed, the rather as there was one painted on the board. So his inscription was reduced ultimately to “John Thompson,” with the figure of a hat subjoined.”37
At the official signing of the parchment copy on August 2, John Hancock, the president of the Congress, penned his name with his famous flourish. “There must be no pulling different ways,” he declared. “We must all hang together.” According to the early American historian Jared Sparks, Franklin replied: “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Their lives, as well as their sacred honor, had been put on the line.38
Having declared the collective colonies a new nation, the Second Continental Congress now needed to create, from scratch, a new system of government. So it began work on what would become the Articles of Confederation. The document was not completed until late 1777, and it would take another four years before all the colonies ratified it, but the basic principles were decided during the weeks following the declaration of independence.
In the Articles of Confederation plan he had submitted a year earlier, Franklin proposed a strong central government run by a popularly elected congress based on proportional representation. By temperament and upbringing, he was among the most democratic of the colonial leaders. Most of his ideas did not prevail in the new Articles, but the arguments he made in the debate—and in the concurrent meetings at which the Pennsylvania Assembly wrote a new constitution for that state—were eventually to prove influential.
One of the core issues, then and throughout American history, was whether they were creating a confederacy of sovereign states or a single unified nation. More specifically: Should each state have one vote in Congress, or should representation be in proportion to population? Franklin, not surprisingly, favored the latter, not merely because he was from a big state, but also because he felt that the power of the national congress should come from the people and not from the states. In addition, giving small states the same representation as large ones would be unfair. “A confederation upon such iniquitous principles will never last long,” he correctly predicted.
As the argument got heated, Franklin attempted to add some levity. The smaller states had argued that they would be overwhelmed by the larger ones if there was proportional representation. Franklin replied that some Scots had said, at the time of the union with England, that they would meet Jonah’s fate of being swallowed by a whale, but so many Scots ended up being part of the government “that it was found, in the event, that Jonah had swallowed the whale.” Jefferson noted that the Congress laughed heartily enough to regain its humor. Nevertheless, it voted to keep the system of one vote per state. Franklin initially threatened to persuade Pennsylvania not to join the confederation, but he eventually backed down.
Another issue was whether slaves should be counted as part of a state’s population for the purpose of assessing its tax liability. No, argued one South Carolina delegate, slaves were not population but property, more akin to sheep than to people. This drew a rebuke from Franklin: “There is some difference between them and sheep: Sheep will never make any insurrections.”39
At the same time the Congress was debating the new Articles, Pennsylvania was holding its own state constitutional convention, conveniently in the same building. Franklin was unanimously chosen as its president, and his main contribution was to push for a legislature composed of only one house. The idea of balancing the power of a directly elected legislature with an indirectly chosen “upper” house, he contended, was a vestige of the aristocratic and elitist system against which America was rebelling. Franklin likened a legislature with two branches to “the fabled” snake with two heads: “She was going to a brook to drink, and in her way was to pass through a hedge, a twig of which opposed her direct course; one head chose to go on the right side of the twig, the other on the left; so that time was spent in the contest, and, before the decision was completed, the poor snake died with thirst.” His fingerprints were also visible in the list of qualifications that Pennsylvania’s officeholders must meet: unlike in other states, they did not have to own property, but they should have a “firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality.”
Franklin’s preference for a unicameral legislature would eventually be discarded both by Pennsylvania and the United States, but it was greeted with great acclaim in France, which implemented it (with dubious results) after its own revolution. Another ultrademocratic proposal Franklin made to the Pennsylvania convention was that the state’s Declaration of Rights discourage large holdings of property or concentrations of wealth as “a danger to the happiness of mankind.” That also ended up being too radical for the convention.
In his spare time, Franklin served on a variety of congressional committees. He helped design, for example, the Great Seal of the new nation, working once again with Jefferson and Adams. Jefferson proposed a scene of the children of Israel being led through the wilderness, and Adams suggested a depiction of Hercules. Franklin’s proposal was to have the motto E Pluribus Unum on the front and an ornate scene on the reverse of Pharaoh being engulfed by the Red Sea with the phrase “Rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God.” Jefferson then embraced Franklin’s plan, and much of it was adopted by the Congress.40
Franklin’s negotiations in London with Adm. Richard Howe—the ones that began under the cover of chess matches at Howe’s sister’s house at the end of 1774—had ended in failure, but they did not destroy the respect the two men felt for each other. What particularly frustrated Lord Howe was that the impasse had dashed his dream of being designated a peace envoy to the colonies. By July 1776, the admiral was commander of all British forces in America, with his brother, Gen. William Howe, in charge of the ground troops. In addition, he had gotten his wish of being commissioned to try to negotiate a reconciliation. He carried with him a detailed proposal that offered a truce, pardons for the rebel leaders (with John Adams secretly exempted), and promises of rewards for any American who helped restore peace.
Because the British did not recognize the Continental Congress as a legitimate body, Lord Howe was unsure where to direct his proposals. So when he reached Sandy Hook, New Jersey, he sent a letter to Franklin, whom he addressed as “my worthy friend.” He had “hopes of being serviceable,” Howe declared, “in promoting the establishment of lasting peace and union with the colonies.”41
Franklin had the letter read to the Congress and was granted permission to reply, which he did on July 30. It was an adroit and eloquent response, one that made clear America’s determination to remain independent yet set in motion a fascinating final attempt to avert an all-out revolution.
“I received safe the letters your Lordship so kindly forwarded to me, and beg you to accept my thanks,” Franklin began with requisite civility. But his letter quickly turned heated, even resurrecting the phrase “deluge us in blood” that he had edited out of Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration:
Directing pardons to be offered to the colonies, who are the very parties injured, expresses indeed that opinion of our ignorance, baseness and insensibility which your uninformed and proud nation has long been pleased to entertain of us; but it can have no other effect than that of increasing our resentments. It is impossible we should think of submission to a government that has with the most wanton barbarity and cruelty burnt our defenseless towns in the midst of winter, excited the savages to massacre our peaceful farmers, and our slaves to murder their masters, and is even now bringing foreign mercenaries to deluge our settlements with blood.
Skillfully, however, Franklin included in his letter more than mere fury. With great sorrow and poignancy, he went on to recall how they had worked together to prevent an irreparable breach. “Long did I endeavor, with unfeigned and unwearied zeal, to preserve from breaking that fine and noble china vase, the British empire; for I knew that, being once broken, the separate parts could not retain even their share of the strength or value that existed in the whole,” he wrote. “Your Lordship may possibly remember the tears of joy that wet my cheek when, at your good sister’s in London, you once gave me expectations that a reconciliation might soon take place.”
Perhaps, Franklin intimated, peace talks could be useful. It was not likely. It would require that Howe be willing to treat Britain and America “as distinct states.” Franklin said he doubted that Howe had such authority. But if Britain wanted to make peace with an independent America, Franklin offered, “I think a treaty for that purpose is not yet quite impracticable.” He ended on a graceful personal note, declaring “the well-founded esteem and, permit me to say, affection which I shall always have for your Lordship.”42
Howe was understandably taken aback by the terms of Franklin’s response. The messenger who delivered it reported the “surprise” on his face and his comment that “his old friend had expressed himself very warmly.” When the messenger asked if he wanted to send a reply, “he declined, saying the doctor had grown too warm, and if he expressed his sentiments fully to him, he should only give him pain, which he wished to avoid.”
Howe waited two weeks, as the British outmaneuvered General Washington’s forces on Long Island, before sending a carefully worded and exceedingly polite response to his “worthy friend.” In it, the admiral admitted that he did not have the authority “to negotiate a reunion with America under any other description than as subject to the crown of Great Britain.” Nevertheless, he said, a peace was possible under terms that the Congress had laid out in its Olive Branch Petition to the king a year earlier, which included all of the colonial demands for autonomy yet still preserved some form of union under the Crown. Although he had refrained from being explicit “in my public declaration,” he now made clear that the peace he envisioned would be “of mutual interest to both countries.” In other words, America would be treated as a separate country within the framework of the empire.43
This was what Franklin had envisioned for years. Yet it was, after July 4, likely too late. Franklin now felt so. Even more fervently, John Adams and others in his radical faction felt that way. So there was much discussion and dissent within the Congress about whether Franklin should even keep the correspondence alive. Howe forced the issue by paroling a captured American general and sending him to Philadelphia with an invitation for the Congress to send an unofficial delegation for talks before “a decisive blow was struck.”
Three members—Franklin, Adams, and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina—were appointed to meet with Howe to hear what he had to say. The inclusion of Adams (who had warned the Congress that, in his biographer David McCullough’s words, Howe’s messenger was “a decoy duck sent to seduce Congress into renunciation of independence”) was a safeguard that Franklin would not revert to his old peace-seeking habits.
With perhaps a hint of irony, Franklin proposed that the meeting could take place in the governor’s mansion at Perth Amboy, which had lately been vacated by his captive son, or alternatively on Staten Island. Howe chose the latter. On the way there, the committee spent the night in New Brunswick, where the inn was so full that Franklin and Adams were forced to share a bed. The result was a somewhat farcical night, recorded by Adams in his diary, which gave a delightful glimpse at Franklin’s personality and the odd-couple relationship he had over the years with Adams.
Adams was suffering from a cold, and as they went to bed he shut the small window in their room. “Oh!” said Franklin. “Don’t shut the window. We shall be suffocated.”
Adams replied that he was afraid of the evening air.
“The air within this chamber will soon be, and is indeed now, worse than that outdoors,” Franklin replied. “Come! Open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.”
Adams reopened the window and “leaped into bed,” a sight that must have been worth beholding. Yes, he said, he had read Franklin’s letters (see p. 264) arguing that nobody got colds from cold air, but the theory was inconsistent with his own experience. Would Franklin please explain?
Adams, with a touch of wryness unusual for him, recorded: “The Doctor then began a harangue, upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together.” In addition to winning the argument over leaving open the window, it should be noted that Franklin, perhaps as a result, did not catch Adams’s cold.44
When Howe sent a barge to ferry the American delegation to Staten Island, he instructed his officer to stay behind as a hostage. Franklin and his committee brought the officer with them as a gesture of confidence in Howe’s honor. Although Howe marched his guests past a double line of menacing Hessian mercenaries, the three-hour meeting on September 11 was cordial, and the Americans were treated to a feast of good claret, ham, tongue, and mutton.
Howe pledged that the colonies could have what they had requested in the Olive Branch Petition: control over their own legislation and taxes, and “a revisal of any of the plantation laws by which the colonists may be aggrieved.” The British, he said, were still kindly disposed toward the Americans: “When an American falls, England feels it.” He felt the same, even more strongly. If America fell, he said, “I should feel and lament it like the loss of a brother.”
Adams recorded Franklin’s retort: “Dr. Franklin, with an easy air and collected countenance, a bow, a smile and all that naiveté which sometimes appeared in his conversation and is often observed in his writings, replied, ‘My Lord, we will do our utmost endeavors to save your Lordship that mortification.’ ”
The dispute that was causing this horrible war, Howe insisted, was merely about the method Britain should use in raising taxes from America. Franklin replied, “That we never refused, upon requisition.”
America offered other sources of strength to the empire, Howe continued, including “her men.” Franklin, whose writings on population growth Howe knew well, agreed. “We have a pretty considerable manufactury of men.”
Why then, Howe asked, was it not possible “to put a stop to these ruinous extremities?”
Because, Franklin replied, it was too late for any peace that required a return to allegiance to the king. “Forces have been sent out and towns have been burnt,” he said. “We cannot now expect happiness under the domination of Great Britain. All former attachments have been obliterated.” Adams, likewise, “mentioned warmly his own determination not to depart from the idea of independency.”
The Americans suggested that Howe send home for authority to negotiate with them as an independent nation. That was a “vain” hope, replied Howe.
“Well, my Lord,” said Franklin, “as America is to expect nothing but upon unconditional submission . . . ”
Howe interrupted. He was not demanding submission. But it was clear, he acknowledged, that no accommodation was possible, at least for now, and he apologized that “the gentlemen had the trouble of coming so far to so little purpose.”45
Within two weeks of his return from meeting Lord Howe, Franklin was chosen, by a congressional committee acting in great secrecy, to embark on the most dangerous, complex, and fascinating of all his public missions. He was to cross the Atlantic yet again to become an envoy in Paris, with the goal of cajoling from France, now enjoying a rare peace with Britain, the aid and alliance without which it was unlikely that America could prevail.
It was an odd appointment. Elderly and ailing, Franklin was now happily ensconced, finally, in a family nest that actually included members of his own brood. But there was a certain logic, from the Congress’s perspective, to the choice. Though he had visited there only twice, he was the most famous and revered American in France. In addition, as a member of the Congress’s Committee of Secret Correspondence, Franklin had held confidential talks over the past year with a variety of French intermediaries. Among them was Julien de Bonvouloir, an agent personally approved by the new king, Louis XVI. Franklin met with him three times in December 1775, and came away with the impression, though Bonvouloir was scrupulously circumspect, that France would be willing to support, at least secretly, the American rebellion.46
Two other commissioners were also chosen for the mission to France: Silas Deane, a merchant and congressional delegate from Connecticut who had already been sent to Paris in March 1776, and Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson begged off for family reasons, his place was given to the cantankerous Virginian Arthur Lee, who had taken over Franklin’s duties as a colonial agent in London.
Franklin professed to accept the assignment reluctantly. “I am old and good for nothing,” he said to his friend Benjamin Rush, who was sitting next to him in the Congress. “But as the storekeepers say of their remnants of cloth, I am but a fag end, and you may have me for what you are pleased to give.”47
Yet, knowing Franklin—with his love for travel, attraction to new experiences, taste for Europe, and (perhaps) his proclivity to run away from awkward situations—it is likely that he welcomed the assignment, and there is some evidence that he sought it. During the Secret Committee’s deliberations the previous month, he had written a “Sketch of Propositions for Peace” with England, which the committee ended up not using. In his draft, Franklin noted his own inclination for going back to England:
Having such propositions to make, or any powers to treat of peace, will furnish a pretence for B.F.’s going to England, where he has many friends and acquaintances, particularly among the best writers and ablest speakers in both Houses of Parliament; he thinks he shall be able when there, if the terms are not accepted, to work up such a division of sentiments in the nation as to greatly weaken its exertions against the United States.48
His meeting with Lord Howe, which occurred after he had drafted this memo, made a mission to England less enticing, especially compared to the possibilities of Paris. From his previous visits he knew that he would love Paris, and it would certainly be safer than remaining in America with the outcome of war so unclear (Howe was edging closer to Philadelphia at the time). A few of Franklin’s enemies, including the British ambassador to Paris and some American loyalists, thought he was finding a pretense to flee the danger. Even his friend Edmund Burke, the pro-American philosopher and member of Parliament, thought so. “I will never believe,” he said, “that he is going to conclude a long life, which has brightened every hour it continued, with so foul and dishonorable flight.”49
Such suspicions were probably too harsh. If personal safety were his prime concern, a wartime crossing of an ocean controlled by the enemy’s navy at age 70 while plagued with gout and kidney stones was not the most logical course. As with all of Franklin’s decisions about crossing the Atlantic, this one involved many conflicting emotions and desires. But surely the opportunity to serve his country in a task for which there was no American better equipped, and the chance to live and be feted in Paris, were simple enough reasons to explain his decision. As he prepared for his departure, he withdrew more than £3,000 from his bank account and lent it to the Congress for prosecuting the war.
His grandson Temple had been spending the summer taking care of his forlorn stepmother in New Jersey. The arrest of her husband had left Elizabeth Franklin, who was fragile in the best of times, completely distraught. “I can do nothing but sigh and cry,” she wrote her sister-in-law Sally Bache in July. “My hand shakes to such a degree that I can scarcely hold a pen.” In pleading with Temple to come stay with her, she complained of the “unruly soldiers” who surrounded her mansion. “They have been extremely rude, insolent and abusive to me and have terrified me almost out of my senses.” They even, she added, tried to steal Temple’s pet dog.50
Temple arrived at his stepmother’s house at the end of July, typically forgetting some of his clothes on the way. (“There seems to be,” his grandfather wrote, “a kind of fatality attending the conveyance of your things between Amboy and Philadelphia.”) The elder Franklin sent along some money for Elizabeth, but she begged for something more. Couldn’t he “sign a parole” so that William would be permitted to return to his family? “Consider, my Dear and Honored Sir, that I am now pleading the cause of your son and my beloved husband.” Franklin refused, and he dismissed her pitiful complaints about her plight by noting that others were suffering far worse at the hands of the British. Nor did he make any effort to see her when he passed through Amboy on his way to meet Lord Howe. Ever since her marriage to his son, he had shown little desire to befriend her, visit her, or correspond with her, much less engage in any of the flatteries he usually lavished on younger women.51
Temple was more sympathetic. In early September, he made plans to travel to Connecticut so he could visit his captive father and bring him a letter from Elizabeth. But Franklin forbade him to go, saying that it was important for him to resume his studies in Philadelphia soon. Temple kept pushing. He had no secret information, just a letter he wanted to deliver. His grandfather remained unmoved. “You are mistaken in imagining that I am apprehensive of your carrying dangerous intelligence to your father,” he chided. “You would have been more in the right if you could have suspected me of a little tender concern for your welfare.” If Elizabeth wanted to write her husband, he added, she could do so in care of the Connecticut governor, and he even included some franked stationery for that purpose.
Franklin, in fact, realized that his grandson had other motives—one bad, the other honorable—for wanting to go see his father: “I rather think the project takes its rise from your own inclination to ramble and disinclination for returning to college, joined with a desire I do not blame of seeing a father you have so much reason to love.” Not blaming him for wanting to see his father? Saying he had so much reason to love him? For Franklin, such sentiments with regard to William were somewhat surprising, even poignant. They did, however, come in a letter that had denied William’s son the right to visit him.52
The dispute became moot less than a week later. Careful about keeping the news of his appointment as envoy to France secret, Franklin was cryptic. “I hope you will return hither immediately and your mother will make no objections to it,” he wrote. “Something offering here that will be much to your advantage.”
In deciding to take Temple to France, Franklin never consulted with Elizabeth, who would die a year later without seeing her husband or stepson again. Nor did he inform William, who did not learn until later of the departure of his sole son, a lad he had gotten to know for only a year. It is a testament to the powerful personal force exerted by Benjamin Franklin, a man so often callous about the feelings of his family, that William was so pitifully accepting of the situation. “If the old gentleman has taken the boy with him,” he wrote to his forlorn wife, “I hope it is only to put him in some foreign university.”53
Franklin also decided to take along his other grandson, Benny Bache. So it was an odd trio that set sail on October 27, 1776, aboard a cramped but speedy American warship aptly named Reprisal: a restless old man about to turn 71, plagued by poor health but still ambitious and adventurous, heading for a friendless land from whence he was convinced he would never return, accompanied by a high-spirited, frivolous lad of about 17 and a brooding, eager-to-please child who had just turned 7. The experience in Europe would be good for his grandchildren, he hoped, and their presence would be comforting to him. Two years later, writing of Temple but using words that applied to both boys, Franklin explained one reason he wanted them along: “If I die, I have a child to close my eyes.”54