George Washington wasn’t winning the American Revolution. He was losing it. So, under cover of darkness on the evening of October 26, 1776, seventy-year-old Benjamin Franklin boarded his seven-year-old646 namesake grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, into a carriage and headed south from Philadelphia beside the Delaware River to Chester, Pennsylvania, where a 130–man, sixteen-gun American warship the Reprisal waited, under orders of the Continental Congress, to carry them on a secret mission to Europe.
On that fateful night, little Benny Bache could not have known that he would not see his parents, Richard and Sarah Bache, again for nine long years, not until he was old enough to enter college. Little Benny Bache could not have known that from childhood till manhood, he would be in the care of the world-famous grandfather he had met only a year and a half before.
Instructions to Lambert Wickes, the Reprisal’s thirty-four-year-old captain, from the Committee of Secret Correspondence of the American Continental Congress were to be opened only after the committee’s chairman, Benjamin Franklin, was safely on board. They ordered Captain Wickes to transport Franklin and his party with all possible speed to France and not to stop, not even for British prizes, along the way. Thus began the historic mission which prompts these writings and which decided the independence of the United States of America.
(To illuminate certain details of this history, I have chosen to quote the weekly newspaper The Pennsylvania Gazette, which Benjamin Franklin co-owned and edited from 1729 until 1748. I do so as a tribute to Franklin’s newspaper career and as a further reminder that the roots of American democracy lie deep in the freedom of the press.)