Part 10

For fear of British retaliation, Vergennes dared not openly sponsor him. Privately he was doing all in his power to convince Louis XVI that the American rebellion, even though against another king, should be supported to the hilt. This was not easy, for the French ruler was not yet ready to show more than a token interest in the Americans. Franklin understood Vergennes’ position and did not press him for what he had really come to get, an open alliance. His most important task, from Vergennes’ viewpoint, was to win French public opinion to his side. This he did without half trying.

His popularity mounted daily. For the French he was a man of reason, like their Voltaire, and an advocate of the equality of man and the virtues of rustic living, like their philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. They saw him as the man who had singlehandedly fomented the American Revolution, a rumor carefully nourished by the British Ambassador in Paris, Lord Stormont.

He was given credit for the Declaration of Independence and the Pennsylvania Constitution. Not knowing yet of Thomas Paine, people took it for granted that he was the author of that marvelous pamphlet “Common Sense,” which was reprinted in French with the omission of its attacks on royalty. They admired him alike for his scientific achievements and for “The Way of Wealth,” the proverbs of Poor Richard as cited by Father Abraham, which they praised to the skies as “sublime morality.”

It became the fashion of every home to have an engraving of him above the mantel. Medallions with his image in enamel adorned the lids of snuffboxes, and tiny ones were even set in rings, selling in incredible numbers. In time his portrait was reproduced on watches, clocks, vases, dishes, handkerchiefs, pocket knives. There were paintings of him without end, and busts in marble, bronze and plaster. “These,” Franklin wrote to his daughter Sally, “with the pictures, busts, and prints (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere), have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon.”

The first of March he moved from the Paris hotel where he and his grandsons had been staying to Passy, a beautiful spot half a mile from Paris, less a village than a group of villas set amidst forests and vineyards. Their house was on the great estate of Le Ray de Chaumont, an ardent partisan of the United States, who refused to accept rent from his distinguished guest.

The grounds of the Chaumont estate were laid out in formal gardens around an octagonal pond, with alleys of linden trees. Often Franklin and his grandsons ate at the lavish Chaumont table, or had their meals sent from the Chaumont kitchen for a minimum charge. When he gave a large dinner party in his own quarters, everything would be sent over by the Chaumont staff. He had his own servants, including a coachman, and kept a carriage and a pair of horses. Benjamin Bache went to boarding school in the village, coming home for Sunday. Temple acted as his secretary.

The British, who had spies everywhere, were well aware of the reason for his presence in France. Vainly did British Ambassador Lord Stormont try to belittle him or his country. He could not match Franklin’s wit. Once Franklin learned that Stormont was spreading a rumor that 4,000 Americans had been lost in a battle and their general killed. “Truth is one thing. Stormont is another,” he commented dryly. In Parisian slang, the verb “to Stormont” became a synonym for “to lie.”

In truth, with the exception of Washington’s victory over the Hessians at Trenton, the Christmas of 1776, news from America was discouraging. Franklin refused to show any sign of worry. “_Ça ira_,”—“it will go on”—he would say to anyone who asked how the American Revolution was faring. In the years of France’s own revolution, Franklin’s famous _Ça ira_ became the catchword of a popular war song.

Some time that summer, or so it is said, Franklin passed a night at the same inn as Edward Gibbon, author of _Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire_. Franklin sent up a note requesting the pleasure of his company. Gibbon answered that though he admired Franklin as a philosopher he could not, as a loyal English subject, converse with a Rebel. Franklin promptly sent him a second note. He had the greatest respect for the historian, he wrote, and when Gibbon decided to write the _Rise and Fall of the British Empire_, he would be happy to supply all the needed data.

The revolt in America had enormous glamour for innumerable European officers who were eager to offer their services, for money, for the thrill of adventure, and perhaps less often because they believed in the American cause. Franklin was besieged with their requests for him to recommend them to the American army. “My perpetual torment,” he called them:

People will believe, notwithstanding my continually repeated declaration to the contrary, that I am sent hither to engage officers. You have no conception how I am harassed.... Great officers of all ranks, in all departments; ladies, great and small, besides professed solicitors, worry me from morning to night.... I am afraid to accept an invitation to dine abroad, being almost sure of meeting some officer or some officer’s friend who, as soon as I am put in good humour with a glass of champagne, begins his attack upon me.

Only partly in jest, he composed a form letter:

The bearer of this, who is going to America, presses me to give him a letter of recommendation, though I know nothing of him, not even his name. This may seem extraordinary, but I assure you is not uncommon here. Sometimes, indeed, one unknown person brings another, equally unknown, to recommend him; and sometimes they recommend one another. As to this gentleman, I must refer you to himself for his character and merits, with which he is certainly better acquainted than I can possibly be. I recommend him, however, to those civilities which every stranger of whom one knows no harm has a right to; and I request you will do him all the good offices, and show him all the favour, that on further acquaintance you shall find him to deserve.

Temple later claimed that he actually used this letter on occasion, though it has never been proved.

There was, however, one officer whom Franklin recommended to George Washington without ever having met. This was the nineteen-year-old Marquis de Lafayette, an ardent youth set on revenging a father killed by the English. “He is exceedingly beloved,” he wrote Washington early in August after Lafayette had already left France, “and everybody’s good wishes attend him; we cannot but hope he may meet with such a reception as will make the country and his expedition agreeable to him.”

Another valuable recruit Franklin sent to America was the former Prussian officer Baron von Steuben, whose rigid training of American troops at Valley Forge raised morale at a moment when it had sunk to a new low.

In England, he still had friends in high places. Lord Rockingham was praising his courage in crossing the Atlantic, risking capture and being brought to an “implacable tribunal.” Charles James Fox, a member of Lord North’s cabinet, was quoting to his fellow cabinet members Franklin’s remark that England’s war on America would be as costly and useless as the Crusades. While to George III he had become “that insidious man from Philadelphia,” Sir John Pringle, now president of the Royal Society, supported him in one of the few comic episodes of wartime.

During Franklin’s stay in England, he had given advice on installing lightning rods on St. Paul’s Cathedral and other important buildings. One member of the Royal Society, Benjamin Wilson, an artist who had painted Franklin’s portrait, argued that blunt lightning rods would be more effective than pointed ones, but he had been over-ruled. The battle between “the sharps and the flats” raged briefly and then subsided.

It was revived when the war was under way by George III, who felt that since pointed lightning rods had been invented by a Rebel, they must certainly be subversive. He ordered that the rods on his palace and throughout the United Kingdom be replaced by the blunt type and commanded Sir John Pringle to back him. Sir John boldly retorted that the laws of nature were not changeable at royal pleasure. He was thereupon informed that the royal authority did not believe that a man of his views should occupy the presidency of the Royal Society. Sir John, loyal to Franklin to the end, promptly resigned.

As for Franklin, he remained an objective observer: “I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions,” he wrote in October 1777. “I leave them to take their chances in the world. If they are _right_, truth and experience will support them; if _wrong_, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper, and disturb one’s quiet.”

In November a visitor to Passy informed him that General Howe had taken Philadelphia. (Congress had fled to York, Pennsylvania, which became temporarily the capital of the United States.) Calm and smiling, Franklin countered, “I beg your pardon, sir. Philadelphia has taken Howe.”

Inwardly, he was gravely concerned. His daughter and her family, his home, those he loved, and everything he owned was in Philadelphia. But he could not afford to let his anxiety show.

He considered at this time telling Vergennes that unless America could count on a French alliance, they would have to make terms with England, but decided the threat might boomerang and force the French to abandon them. Best wait until the news was better. It so happened he had not long to wait.

On December 4, a messenger from Boston arrived at Passy, to announce that General John Burgoyne, whom the British had sent to Canada to lead an army to invade the colonies from the north, had been defeated at Saratoga. Beaumarchais, who was present when this news came, drove off to Paris so recklessly that his carriage upset and his arm was broken.

Franklin and his two commissioners promptly drew up a dispatch for Vergennes. Two days later Conrad-Alexandre Gérard of the foreign office arrived at Passy with Vergennes’ congratulations—and a request that the Americans renew their proposal for an alliance.

Franklin drafted the proposal on December 7 and Temple delivered it the next day. On the 12th, the commissioners met secretly with Vergennes. Franklin hoped the matter could be settled there and then but the French minister said France could not agree to an alliance without Spain. It took three weeks for a courier to make the trip and bring back an answer from Spain. It was negative. Temporarily negotiations were at a standstill.

In the meantime England had sent an envoy named Paul Wentworth to parley with the Americans. He passed himself off as a stock speculator though he was actually chief of the British espionage. Silas Deane saw him several times. Wentworth told him that the British ministry was ready to return to the imperial status of before 1763, suggested a general armistice with all British troops withdrawn except those on the New York islands, and added, insinuatingly, that any Americans who helped to bring about an understanding would be rewarded with wealth and titles and high administrative posts.

Franklin knew about Wentworth but refused to see him until January 6, a week after the news of Spain’s rejection of the alliance. That day he conferred two hours with Wentworth, devoting the whole time to a recital of England’s crimes against America. After that he and Wentworth had dinner with Silas Deane and his assistant Edward Bancroft (who was also an English spy).

The results of this dinner were exactly what Franklin anticipated. It was duly reported to Vergennes, who could only judge that negotiations for a reconciliation between England and America were under way, which was the last thing in the world he wanted. The very next day the French King’s council voted formally on a treaty and an alliance with the United States of America.

The signing of the treaty took place on Friday, February 7, 1778, at the office of the ministry for foreign affairs in the Hotel de Lautrec, Paris. For this all important occasion Franklin donned an old costume, somewhat old-fashioned and rather too tight for him, of figured Manchester velvet. Someone asked him why. “To get it a little revenge,” Franklin said. “I wore this coat on the day Wedderburn abused me.”

The ceremony was simple. Gérard signed first, then Franklin, after which Arthur Lee and Silas Deane added their names. A magnificent diplomatic campaign had been won.

On March 20, Louis XVI avowed the treaty by receiving the three commissioners in his private quarters at Versailles. Franklin wore a brown velvet suit, white hose, and carried a white hat under his arm. He had neither wig nor sword, and his spectacles were on his nose. The courtiers claimed they had never seen anything so striking as this “republican simplicity.”

To the commissioners, the King said, “Firmly assure Congress of my friendship. I hope that this will be for the good of the two nations.”

Franklin responded for his fellow envoys. “Your Majesty may count on the gratitude of Congress and its faithful observance of the pledges it now takes.”

That evening Vergennes gave a great dinner in their honor at Versailles. Later they made a call on the royal family. The charming and beautiful Marie Antoinette, who was at her gambling table, insisted that Franklin stand by her, and talked to him in between making her bids at exceedingly high stakes. It was certainly the first time in history that the son of an American candlemaker kept company with a queen.

15 AMERICA’S FIRST AMBASSADOR

In the spring after the signing of the treaty with France, Silas Deane was recalled to America. John Adams was sent to take his place. Franklin invited him and his wife Abigail to stay with him at Passy, and arranged for their ten-year-old son John Quincy to go to school with Benjamin Bache.

The comfortable life at Passy made Puritan-minded Adams uncomfortable. Though Franklin’s taste in dress and food was exceedingly simple compared to the French aristocrats with whom he had to keep company, Adams found him extravagant. He felt it a waste of money that Arthur Lee should have separate quarters in Paris. At the same time he objected that no rent was paid at Passy and vainly tried to get Chaumont to accept payment.

He could not help himself. Basically it was simply impossible for him to approve of someone like Benjamin Franklin: “He loves his ease, hates to offend, and seldom gives any opinion till obliged to do it.... Although he has as determined a soul as any man, yet it is his constant policy never to say yes or no decidedly but when he cannot avoid it.”

John Adams was a man who always said yes or no decidedly, never having, like Franklin, learned from Socrates that if you wish to convince people, making them think for themselves is more effective than bludgeoning them.

But as he was essentially honest, Adams did not deny that Franklin was beloved by the French as he would never be: “His name was familiar to government and people,” he wrote later, “to king, courtiers, nobility, clergy, and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a _valet de chambre_, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen who was not familiar with it and who did not consider him a friend to human kind.... When they spoke of him they seemed to think he was to restore the golden age....”

In one of the many elaborate ceremonies organized in Franklin’s honor, a crown of laurel was placed on his white hair by the most beautiful of three hundred women admirers. At another, a walking stick with a gold head wrought in the form of a cap of liberty was presented to him. A poem, composed for the occasion, was read.

The wood of the cane, it said, had been seized on the plains of Marathon by the Goddess of Liberty before she abandoned Greece. It had been transported to Switzerland, where the valiant mountaineers fought against invading Austrians. More recently it had been seen at Trenton, where Washington defeated the British. By possession of this symbol of victory, Benjamin Franklin was assured of a place in the “Temple of Memory.”

Franklin’s French friends had long been hoping for a meeting between him and Voltaire, considered the two most enlightened men of the eighteenth century. In February 1778, after an exile of more than twenty-eight years, Voltaire returned to spend the last four months of his life in Paris. With his grandson Temple, Franklin called to pay his respects to the great philosopher. Voltaire was then eighty-four, lean and emaciated, but he still had the fiery spirit that had kept all Europe in an uproar over the major part of his life. He insisted on greeting the “illustrious and wise Franklin” in English, and held his hand over Temple’s head in blessing, pronouncing the words “God and Liberty.”

There was a more publicized meeting in April at the Academy of Sciences. The audience, seeing both present, clamored to have them introduced to each other. Obligingly, they stepped forward and bowed to each other. The spectators were not yet satisfied. They wanted them to embrace each other in the French manner. Only when Franklin and Voltaire put their arms around each other and kissed each other’s cheeks did the tumult subside.

That year the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, who had immortalized Voltaire in marble, did his bust of Franklin, catching his likeness better than any other had done. And that Baron Turgot, the French Minister of Finance, made his most famous epigram about Franklin: “He snatched the lightning from the sky and the sceptre from the tyrants.” Vainly Franklin protested that other Americans, “able and brave men,” deserved credit for the Revolution.

On September 14, 1778, Congress revoked the commission of three and elected Franklin sole plenipotentiary to France—America’s first official ambassador to a foreign land. With only Temple and a clerk to help him with detail work, he was in actual fact consul-general, consultant on American affairs, propagandist for America, and, the part which pleased Franklin least but which he performed expertly, official beggar to the Court of Versailles for the ever increasing sums of money which Congress instructed him to procure for their costly war.

With his other duties, he was director of naval affairs, Judge of the Admiralty, and in effect if not in name, overseas Secretary of the Navy. In this capacity in March of 1779 he wrote a “passport” for the Pacific explorer Captain James Cook, instructing commanders of American ships that Cook and his crew should be treated as “common friends to mankind” and allowed to go on their way. The sad news had not reached Europe; a month before Franklin’s instructions, Cook had been killed by natives on the Hawaiian Islands.

Ever since his arrival in France, he had been concerned with the plight of captured American seamen, whom the English kept in foul prisons and treated not as prisoners-of-war but as traitors, charged with high treason and subject to execution. To Lord Stormont, the British ambassador, he had sent a formal plea requesting the exchange of American prisoners for English ones, man for man. It was ignored. A second came back unopened with a note: “The King’s Ambassador receives no Letters from Rebels but when they come to implore his Majesty’s Mercy.”

Through an English friend, David Hartley, Franklin sent money for the relief of the American prisoners, and generous Englishmen added to the fund. That was all that could be done until some nine months after the signing of the treaty with France, when he received reluctant consent from the London ministry for prisoner exchange.

There was still the problem of getting sufficient English prisoners for the exchange. Before the treaty, British seamen on the “prizes” which American ships brought into French ports had to be set free by maritime law. With France now officially at war with England, the ban no longer applied, but there were still far fewer English prisoners in France than American ones in England.

In May 1779, as Minister of the United States at the Court of France, Franklin signed a commission for Captain Stephen Marchant of Boston, on the privateer, the _Black Prince_, to operate off the north coast of France. The _Black Prince_ was so named for her sleek lines, her black sides, and her reputation as one of the swiftest vessels ever to run a cargo.

Franklin’s instructions to the captain were brief and explicit. He was to bring in all the prisoners possible “to relieve so many of our countrymen from their captivity in England.” He only found out later that Captain Marchant was a figurehead. The real commander of the _Black Prince_ was a twenty-five-year-old Irishman named Luke Ryan, with a dazzling record as a smuggler—an honorable profession in an Ireland reduced to starvation by repressive English trade regulations.

The success of the _Black Prince_ was phenomenal—twenty-nine prizes, including a recapture, in the space of two months and eleven days. Franklin gave commissions to two sister privateers, the _Black Princess_ and the _Fearnot_. Their combined efforts produced a total of 114 British vessels of all descriptions, brought into free ports, burned, scuttled or ransomed. They created havoc with coastal trade in the English, Irish and Scotch seas, embarrassed the British Admiralty, caused marine insurance rates to soar.

Franklin was proud of his three privateers and must have had a vicarious thrill in their exploits. His own role in the affair became increasingly worrisome. Each prize was judged in the local marine court of the port where it was brought. Sometimes there were delays, resulting in the loss of perishable cargo and voluble cries of protest from the crews who saw their prize money diminishing daily. In due time Franklin, as Judge of the Admiralty, received the bulky and voluminous report, handwritten and of course in French. It was up to him and Temple to appraise the contents if the venture was to be kept going.

Unfortunately, much as the privateers disrupted English shipping, the number of prisoners was far fewer than Franklin had hoped. Sometimes there was no room for prisoners on shipboard, or, when there were captive ships to man, not enough men to guard prisoners. Franklin proposed that the privateer captains get sea paroles from those they set free, but the British stubbornly refused to honor the paroles in prisoner exchange. There were also numerous British seamen who gladly joined the privateer crews, finding their free life far preferable to the cruel discipline of the British Navy.

Aside from his privateers, Franklin pinned his hope on a Scottish-born American seaman with a colorful past, named John Paul Jones. In 1778, Jones had captured the _Drake_, the first British warship to surrender to a Continental vessel. He had come to Brest from America in the _Ranger_, which had raided English and Scottish coasts, taking seven prizes. Red tape kept Jones idle for some months after that but at length he was given an aged and decrepit French forty-gun ship, which he renamed the _Bonhomme Richard_—the French translation of “Poor Richard.”

In September 1779, the _Bonhomme Richard_ closed in on the superior British frigate, the _Serapis_, in a battle which lasted three and a half hours. When the hull of the _Bonhomme Richard_ was pierced, her decks ripped, her hold filling with water, and fires destroying her, the British captain asked if they were ready to surrender.

“Sir, I have not yet begun to fight,” Jones reportedly replied.

While his ship was sinking, he and his men boarded the _Serapis_ and took her captive.