Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (53 page)

They all ended up concluding, Franklin assured Jones, that it must have been a case of mistaken identity. As part of the Mardi Gras festivities, a chamber girl had apparently dressed up in one of his uniforms and, so they surmised, attacked the gardener’s wife as a prank. It seems quite implausible that the gardener’s wife, even in the dimness of early evening, could have been so easily fooled—not even their friend Beaumarchais would have attempted such a cross-dressing rape scene in
The Marriage of Figaro
—but the explanation was satisfactory enough that the event was not mentioned in subsequent letters.
⁷

All of this occurred just as Franklin was helping to plan the proposed sneak attack on Britain by Jones and Lafayette, who had both arrived at Passy and were spending hours warily assessing one another under Franklin’s worried eye. Both officers were proud, and they were soon struggling over matters large and small, ranging from who would be in charge of various aspects of the invasion to whether their men would eat at the same tables. Franklin resorted to his most indirect manner in trying to soothe Jones. “It has been observed that joint expeditions of land and sea forces often miscarry through jealousies and misunderstandings between the officers of different corps,” he pointed out. Then, saying almost the opposite of what he truly felt, he added, “Knowing you both as I do and your just manner of thinking on these occasions, I am confident nothing of the kind can happen between you.” But Franklin made it clear that he was concerned, quite understandably, about Jones’s temperament. “A cool, prudent conduct” was necessary, he cautioned. Jones must remember that Lafayette was the ranking officer, and it would be “a kind of trial of your abilities and of your fitness in temper and disposition for acting in concert with others.”

In his formal set of instructions to Jones, Franklin was even more explicit in ordering him to show restraint, especially in light of his crew’s previous plundering of the Scottish earl’s silver. “Although the English have wantonly burnt many defenseless towns in America, you are not to follow this example, unless where a reasonable ransom is refused; in which case your own generous feelings, as well as this instruction, will induce you to give timely notice of your intention, so that sick and ancient persons, women and children, may be first removed.” Replied Jones, “Your liberal and noble minded instructions would make a coward brave.”
⁸

When Lafayette’s part of the mission was scrapped, Franklin and the French decided that Jones should proceed with a purely naval attack, which he did in September 1779. The result was the fabled sea battle between the
Bonhomme Richard
and the much better-equipped
Serapis.
When the British captain, after applying a fierce pounding, asked him to surrender, Jones replied, at least according to legend, “I have not yet begun to fight!” As Jones put it in his vivid and detailed account of the battle to Franklin, “I answered him in the most determined negative.”

Jones was able to lash the
Bonhomme Richard
into a death grip with the
Serapis,
and his men scrambled up the masts to lob grenades into the ammunition holds of the enemy ship. After a three-hour battle, in which half of his three hundred crew members were killed or wounded, Jones captured control of the
Serapis
just before the
Bonhomme Richard
sank. “The scene was dreadful beyond the reach of language,” he wrote Franklin. “Humanity cannot but recoil and lament that war should be capable of producing such fatal consequences.”

Franklin took great pride in Jones’s success, and they became even closer friends. “Scarce anything was talked of at Paris and Versailles but your cool conduct and persevering bravery during that terrible conflict,” he replied. He helped to get Jones, who was desperately eager to gain social respect, initiated into the Nine Sisters Masonic Lodge, and he accompanied him on a triumphal visit to the king at Versailles. Franklin even got embroiled in Jones’s lengthy and bitter disputes with the insubordinate Pierre Landais, captain of the
Alliance,
which was supposed to be part of Jones’s fleet. Landais had failed to come to the rescue during the battle with the
Serapis,
and in fact had actually fired on the
Bonhomme Richard.
For the next two years, Franklin and Jones fought with Landais, who was supported by Arthur Lee, over who should be the captain of the
Alliance.
When Landais finally commandeered the vessel and sailed away, a beleaguered Franklin decided it was best to let others sort it all out. He had other things in France to deal with.
⁹

The absence of John Adams from Paris, so pleasing both to Franklin and the French court, was too good to last. He had left, in a mood even more sour than usual, after Franklin was made the sole minister to France, but he had been home only a few months when the Congress decided to send him back to Paris. His new official mission was to negotiate a peace accord with the British, if and when the time ever became ripe. As the time was not, in fact, ripe for such talks, Adams contented himself by meddling in Franklin’s duties.

This thoroughly annoyed the French foreign minister Vergennes. When Adams proposed, on his arrival in February 1780, to make public his authority to negotiate with the British, Vergennes invoked the American promise not to act independently of France. He should say and do nothing. “Above all,” Vergennes sternly instructed him, “take the necessary precautions that the object of your commission remain unknown to the Court of London.”
¹⁰

Franklin was also annoyed. Adams’s return threatened to disrupt his careful cultivation of the French court, and it reminded him of the attacks on his reputation that had long been waged by the Adams and Lee family factions in the Congress. In a ruminative mood, he wrote Washington a letter that ostensibly offered reassurance about the general’s reputation but clearly reflected his worries about his own. “I must soon quit the scene,” Franklin wrote, in an unusually introspective way, referring not to his post in France but his life in this world. Washington’s own great reputation in France, he said, was “free from those little shades that the jealousy and envy of a man’s countrymen and contemporaries are ever endeavoring to cast over living merit.” It was clear that he was trying to reassure not only Washington but also himself that history would ignore “the feeble voice of those groveling passions.”
¹¹

More specifically, Franklin sought to explain, to himself and his friends (and also to history), why Adams rather than he had been chosen to negotiate any potential peace with Britain. Just as Adams was arriving, Franklin wrote a letter to his old friend David Hartley, a member of Parliament with whom he had previously discussed prisoner exchanges and peace feelers. Hartley had proposed a ten-year truce between Britain and America. Franklin replied that it was his “private opinion” that a truce might make sense, but he noted that “neither you nor I are at present authorized” to negotiate such matters. That authority now resided with Adams, and Franklin put his own spin on the Congress’s choice: “If the Congress have therefore entrusted to others rather than to me the negotiations for peace, when such shall be set on foot, as has been reported, it is perhaps because they may have heard of a very singular opinion of mine, that there hardly ever existed such a thing as a bad peace, or a good war, and that I might therefore easily be induced to make improper concessions.”
¹²

Franklin had indeed often used the phrase about there being no such thing as a bad peace or a good war, and he would repeat it to dozens of other friends after the Revolution ended. It is sometimes used as an antiwar slogan and cited to cast Franklin as one of history’s noble pacifists. But that is misleading. Throughout his life, Franklin supported wars when he felt they were warranted; he had helped form militias in Philadelphia and raised supplies for the battles with the French and Indians. Though he had initially worked to avert the Revolution, he supported it strongly when he decided that independence was inevitable. The sentiments in his letter were aimed both at Hartley and at history. He wanted to explain why he had not been chosen as a peace negotiator. Perhaps more intriguing, he also wanted to let his friends in Britain know that he could eventually provide a good channel, better than Adams, if the talks ever began.
¹³

In the meantime, Franklin was ardently committed to the French alliance, more so than most of his American colleagues. This led to a great public rift with Adams after his return in early 1780. Previously, the tension between the two men had been based more on their differences in personality and style, but this one was caused by a fundamental disagreement over policy: whether or not America should show gratitude, allegiance, and fealty to France.

In the early days of the Revolution, both men shared a somewhat isolationist or exceptionalist view, one that has since been a thread throughout American history: the United States should never be a supplicant in seeking support from other nations, and it should be coy and cautious about entering into entangling foreign alliances. Even after he began his love affair with France in 1777, Franklin restated this principle. “I have never yet changed the opinion I gave in Congress that a virgin state should preserve the virgin character, and not go about suitoring for alliances,” he assured Arthur Lee. In negotiating the alliance with France, he had successfully resisted making any concessions that would give a monopoly over American trade or favors.

Once the treaties were signed in early 1778, however, Franklin became a strong believer in showing gratitude and loyalty. In the words of diplomatic historian Gerald Stourzh, he “extolled the magnanimity and generosity of France in terms which at times touch on the slightly ridiculous.” America’s fealty to France, in Franklin’s view, was based on idealism as well as realism, and he described it in moral terms rather than merely in the cold calculus of commercial advantages and European power balances. “This is really a generous nation, fond of glory, and particularly that of protecting the oppressed,” he declared of France in a letter to the Congress. “Telling them their
commerce
will be advantaged by our success, and that it is their
interest
to help us, seems as much to say, ‘help us and we shall not be obliged to you.’ Such indiscreet and improper language has been sometimes held here by some of our people, and produced no good effects.”
¹⁴

Adams, on the other hand, was much more of a cold realist. He felt that France had supported America because of its own national interests—weakening Britain, gaining a lucrative new trading relationship—and neither side owed the other any moral gratitude. France, he correctly predicted, would help America only up to a point; it wanted the new nation to break with Britain but not to become so strong that it no longer needed France’s support. Franklin showed too much subservience to the court, Adams felt, and on his return in 1780 he forcefully propounded this view. “We ought to be cautious,” Adams wrote the Congress in April, “how we magnify our ideas and exaggerate our expressions of the generosity and magnanimity of any of those powers.”

Vergennes, not surprisingly, was eager to deal only with Franklin, and by the end of July 1780 he had exchanged enough strained correspondence with Adams—on everything from American currency revaluation to the deployment of the French navy—that he felt justified in sending him a stinging letter that managed to be both formally diplomatic and undiplomatic at the same time. On behalf of the court of Louis XVI, he declared, “The King did not stand in need of your solicitations to direct his attentions to the interests of the United States.” In other words, France would not deal with Adams any longer.
¹⁵

Vergennes informed Franklin of this decision and sent him copies of all his testy correspondence with Adams, with the request that Franklin “lay the whole before Congress.” In his reply, Franklin was exceedingly candid with Vergennes, indeed dangerously so, in revealing his own frustration with Adams. “It was from his particular indiscretion alone, and not from any instructions received by him, that he has given such just cause of displeasure.” Franklin went on to explicitly distance himself from Adams’s activities. “He has never yet communicated to me more of his business in Europe than I have seen in the newspapers,” Franklin told Vergennes. “I live upon terms of civility with him, not of intimacy.” He concluded by promising to send the Congress the offending Adams correspondence that Vergennes had supplied.

Although Franklin could have, and perhaps should have, dispatched the letters without comment, he took the opportunity to write (“with reluctance”) a letter of his own to the Congress that detailed his disagreement with Adams. Their dispute was partly due to a difference in style. Adams believed in blunt assertions of American interests, whereas Franklin favored suasion and diplomatic charm. But the dispute was also caused by a fundamental difference in philosophy. Adams believed that America’s foreign policy should be based on realism; Franklin believed that it should also include an element of idealism, both as a moral duty and as a component of America’s national interests. As Franklin put it in his letter: