Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (54 page)

With the British not yet ready to deal with him and the French no longer willing to deal with him, Adams once again left Paris feeling resentful. And Franklin once again tried to keep their disagreements from becoming personal. He wrote to Adams in Holland, where he had gone to try to elicit a loan for America, and commiserated about the difficulties of that task. “I have long been humiliated,” he said, “with the idea of our running from court to court begging for money and friendship.” And in a subsequent letter complaining about how long France was taking to answer his own requests, Franklin wryly wrote Adams: “I have, however, two of the Christian graces, faith and hope. But my faith is only that of which the apostle speaks, the evidence of things not seen.” If their mutual endeavors failed, he added, “I shall be ready to break, run away, or go to prison with you, as it shall please God.”
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America’s need for more money had indeed become quite desperate by the end of 1780. Earlier in the year, the British commander Sir Henry Clinton had sailed south from New York, with General Cornwallis as his deputy, to launch an attack on Charleston, South Carolina. It succeeded in May, and Cornwallis set up a British command there after Clinton returned to New York. Also that summer, the troubled American general Benedict Arnold had turned coat in a way that made his name synonymous with treachery. “Our present situation,” Washington wrote Franklin in October of that year, “makes one of two things essential to us: a peace, or the most vigorous aid of our allies, particularly in the article of money.”

Franklin thus resorted to all of his wiles—personal pleadings mixed with appeals to idealism and national interests—in his application to Vergennes in February 1781. “I am grown old,” he said, adding that his illness made it probable that he would soon retire. “The present conjuncture is critical.” If more money did not come soon, the Congress could lose its influence, the new government would be stillborn, and England would recover control over America. That, he warned, would tilt the balance of power in a way that “will enable them to become the Terror of Europe and to exercise with impunity that insolence which is so natural to their nation.”
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His request was audacious: 25 million livres.
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In the end, France agreed to provide 6 million, which was a great victory for Franklin and enough money to keep American hopes alive.

Franklin, however, was disheartened. Back home, his enemies were being as vindictive as ever. “The political salvation of America depends upon the recalling of Dr. Franklin,” Ralph Izard wrote Richard Lee. Even Vergennes expressed some doubts that made their way back to the Congress. “Although I have a high esteem for M. Franklin,” he wrote to his minister in Philadelphia, “I am nevertheless obliged to concede that his age and his love of tranquility produce an apathy incompatible with the affairs in his charge.” Izard pushed a recall vote that was supported by the Lee–Adams faction. Although Franklin easily survived, the Congress did decide to send a special envoy to take over the work of handling future financial transactions.

So, in March, after receiving word of France’s new loan, Franklin informed the Congress that he was ready to resign. “I have passed my 75th year,” he wrote, adding that he was plagued by gout and weakness. “I do not know that my mental faculties are impaired; perhaps I shall be the last to discover that.” Having served in public life for fifty years, he had received “honor sufficient to satisfy any reasonable ambition, and I have no other left but that of repose, which I hope Congress will grant me.”

He included one personal request: that the members find a job for his grandson Temple, who had passed up the chance to study law so that he could serve his country in Paris. “If they shall think fit to employ him as a secretary to their minister at any European court, I am persuaded they will have reason to be satisfied with his conduct, and I shall be thankful for his appointment as a favor to me.”
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The Congress refused Franklin’s offer to resign. Instead, in what came as a pleasant surprise, he was not only kept on as minister to France, he was also given an additional role: one of the five commissioners to handle the peace negotiations with Britain if and when the time came for an end to the war. The others were John Adams (who originally had been designated the sole negotiator and was at the time still in Holland), Thomas Jefferson (who again declined the overseas assignment for personal reasons), South Carolina planter-merchant Henry Laurens (who was captured at sea by the British and imprisoned in the Tower of London), and New York lawyer John Jay.

Franklin’s selection was controversial, and it came partly because of pressure from Vergennes. Despite his doubts about Franklin’s energy, the French minister instructed his envoy in Philadelphia to lobby on his behalf and inform the Congress that his conduct “is as zealous and patriotic as it is wise and circumspect.” Vergennes also asked the Congress to require that the new delegation take no steps without France’s approval. The Congress complied by giving its commissioners strict instructions “to make the most candid and confidential communications upon all subjects to the ministers of our generous ally, the King of France; to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without their knowledge and concurrence.”
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Adams was appalled at being so shackled to France’s will, and he called the instructions “shameful.” Jay agreed, declaring that by “casting herself into the arms of the King of France” America would not “advance either her interest or her reputation.” Franklin, on the other hand, was pleased with the instructions to follow France’s guidance. “I have had so much experience of his majesty’s goodness to us,” he wrote the Congress, “and of the sincerity of this upright and able minister [Vergennes], that I cannot but think the confidence well and judiciously placed and that it will have happy effects.”
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He was heartened as well by a personal triumph. Over the objections of even such friends as Silas Deane, he was able to get Temple appointed as the secretary to the new delegation. The honor of his new appointment, and the rejection of his resignation, rejuvenated him. “I call this continuance an honor,” he wrote a friend, “and I really esteem it to be greater than my first appointment, when I consider that all the interest of my enemies…were not sufficient to prevent it.”

He even wrote another friendly letter to Adams, whose own commission to negotiate with Britain had been diluted by the addition of the new delegation. Their mutual appointments, Franklin told Adams, were a great honor, but he wryly lamented that they were likely to be criticized for whatever they accomplished. “I have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous, that was not censured as inadequate,” he said. “‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world, for in this they are frequently cursed.”
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As a master of the relationship between power and diplomacy, Franklin knew that it would be impossible to win at the negotiating table what was unwinnable on the battlefield. He had been able to negotiate an alliance with France only after America had won the Battle of Saratoga in 1777; he would be able to negotiate a suitable peace with Britain only after America and its French allies won an even more decisive victory.

That problem was solved in October 1781. The British general Lord Cornwallis had marched north from Charleston, seeking to engage General Washington’s forces, and had taken his stand at Yorktown, Virginia. France’s support proved critical: Lafayette moved to Cornwallis’s southern flank to prevent a retreat, a French fleet arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake to preclude an escape by sea, French artillery arrived from Rhode Island, and nine thousand French soldiers joined eleven thousand Americans under General Washington’s command. Two four-hundred-man columns, one French and the other American, began the allied assault and bombardment, which continued day and night with such intensity that when Cornwallis sent out a drummer on October 17 to signal his willingness to surrender, it took a while for him to get noticed. It had been four years since the battle of Saratoga, six and a half since Lexington and Concord. On November 19, word of the allied triumph at Yorktown reached Vergennes, who sent a note to Franklin that he reprinted on his press at Passy and distributed the following dawn.

Although the war seemed effectively over, Franklin was cautious. Until the present ministry resigned, there was always the chance that Britain would renew the struggle. “I remember that, when I was a boxing boy, it was allowed, even after an adversary said he had enough, to give him a rising blow,” he wrote Robert Morris, the American finance minister. “Let ours be a douser.”
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Lord North’s government finally collapsed in March 1782, replaced by one headed by Lord Rockingham. Peace talks between America and Britain could now begin. Franklin, it so happened, was the only one of the five American commissioners who was then in Paris. So, for the next few months, until Jay and then Adams finally arrived, he would handle the negotiations on his own. In doing so, he would face two complicating factors:

• America had pledged to coordinate its diplomacy with France and her allies, rather than negotiate with London separately. But the British wanted direct talks leading to a separate peace with America. Franklin, on the surface, would initially insist on acting in concert with the French. But behind the scenes, he would arrange for private and direct peace negotiations with the British.
  
• The Rockingham government had two rival ministers, Foreign Secretary Charles Fox and Colonial Secretary Lord Shelburne, each of whom sent their own negotiators to Paris. Franklin would maneuver to ensure that Shelburne’s envoy, whom he liked better and found more malleable, was given a commission to negotiate with the Americans.
  

“Great affairs sometimes take their rise from small circumstances,” Franklin recorded in the journal he began of the 1782 peace negotiations. In this case, it was a chance meeting between his old flame Madame Brillon and an Englishman named Lord Cholmondeley, who was a friend of Shelburne. Madame Brillon sent Cholmondeley to call on Franklin in Passy, and through him Franklin sent his regards to the new colonial secretary. Franklin had known and liked Shelburne since at least 1766, when he lobbied him about getting a western land grant and made occasional visits to his grand country manor in Wiltshire. Madame Helvétius also played a small role; Shelburne had just sent her some gooseberry bushes, and Franklin wrote politely that they had arrived “in excellent order.”
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Shelburne responded by dispatching Richard Oswald, a retired one-eyed London merchant and former slave trader who had once lived in America, to begin negotiating with Franklin. Oswald arrived on April 15 and immediately tried to convince Franklin that America could get a quicker and better deal if it negotiated independently of the French. Franklin was not yet willing. “I let him know,” he wrote, “that America would not treat but in concert with France.” Instead, he took Oswald to Versailles the next day to meet with Vergennes, who proposed to host a general peace conference of all the warring parties in Paris.
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On the way back from Versailles, Oswald argued again for a separate peace. Once the issue of American independence was settled by negotiations, he said, it should not be held up while matters relating only to France and Spain (including the ownership of Gibraltar) were still being disputed. He added an implicit threat: if France became involved and made too many demands, England would continue the war and finance it by stopping payment on its public debt.

The issue of independence, Franklin pointedly replied, had already been settled back in 1776. Britain should simply acknowledge it, rather than offer to negotiate it. As for reneging on their debt in order to renew the war, Franklin made no reply. “I did not desire to discourage their stopping payment, which I considered as cutting the throat of their public credit,” he wrote in his journal. “Such menaces were besides an encouragement with me, remembering the old adage that
they who threaten are afraid.”

Instead, Franklin suggested that Britain consider offering reparations to America, especially to “those who had suffered by the scalping and burning parties” that England had enlisted the Indians to wage. “Nothing could have a greater tendency to conciliate,” he said, and that would lead to the renewal of commerce that Britain both needed and desired.

He even suggested a specific reparations proposal: Britain should offer to cede control of Canada. The money Britain could make from the Canadian fur trade, after all, was tiny compared to what it would save by not having to defend Canada. It was also far less than Britain could make through the renewed commerce with America that would flow from a friendly settlement. In addition, the money that America made from selling open land in Canada could be used to compensate the patriots whose homes had been destroyed by British troops and also the British loyalists whose estates had been confiscated by the Americans.

Behind France’s back, Franklin was playing a wily balance-of-power game. He knew that France, despite her enmity toward Britain, did not want it to cede control of Canada to America. That would make America’s borders more secure, reduce its tensions with Britain, and lessen its need for a friendship with France. If England continued to hold Canada, Franklin explained to Oswald, it “would necessarily oblige us to cultivate and strengthen our union with France.” In his report to Vergennes about his conversation with Oswald, Franklin did not mention that he had suggested the ceding of Canada. It was the first small indication that Franklin, despite his insistence that he would work hand in glove with the French, would be willing to act unilaterally when warranted.