Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (44 page)

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.”
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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:

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.”
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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.
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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 Franklinand 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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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:

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.”
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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.
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