The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (31 page)

All this pestering would have taxed the energies of a young man, but Franklin by eighteenth-century standards was an old man, suffering from a variety of maladies—gout, painful bladder or kidney stones, a chronic skin disease, and swollen joints. He had gained weight and walked with more and more difficulty. The sea voyage had been especially difficult and, as he later recalled, had “almost demolish’d” him.
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Indeed, the French thought him much older than he was.

If these difficulties were not enough, the Paris in which Franklin was expected to operate was a hotbed of espionage and counterespionage. The most ingenious spy novelist could scarcely have invented the Parisian world of these years. Every nation had agents in Paris, even the Americans. In fact, at the outset the American commissioners themselves may well have been involved in secretly releasing information to the British. Before the French formally allied with the Americans, the situation was very complicated. The British were warning the French that they could not tolerate much longer France’s supplying arms to the American rebels. The commissioners thus had a vested interest in manipulating the information to be revealed to the British in order to precipitate a British declaration of war against France or, after war broke out, to influence British opinion against continuing the war against the
Americans. It was all these attempts to manipulate information that led some people at the time and some subsequent historians to believe that Franklin was spying on behalf of the British.
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The British, however, had such an extensive network of spies in Paris keeping watch on Franklin, whom George III called “that insidious man,” that they may not have needed Franklin’s help as a spy.
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Franklin never suspected that Paul Wentworth, a wealthy émigré from New Hampshire, ran the British network and had several other Americans working for him. Nor did Franklin realize that the secretary of the American legation, Massachusetts-born Edward Bancroft, was also a spy in the pay of the English government.

In fact, not only did Franklin not suspect Bancroft, but he had great affection for him. Franklin had successfully sponsored Bancroft for membership in the Royal Society and had introduced him to many of his friends in London. Bancroft had been present in the Cockpit during Wedderburn’s diatribe against Franklin, and he had been one of the few defenders of Franklin in the London press during the affair of the Hutchinson letters—something that was bound to win Franklin’s heart. Even though some Americans suspected that Bancroft might be a spy, Franklin trusted him completely.

Bancroft was actually a double agent who sometimes spied on behalf of the American cause, but most of his spying was done for the English. He supplied Wentworth with regular reports on the American negotiations with France and Spain, the commissioners’ correspondence with Congress, the names of ships and captains employed by the commissioners, and news of sailings and prizes seized by privateers. Bancroft wrote his reports in invisible ink and dropped them off in a sealed bottle in the hollow of a tree on the south side of the Tuileries, where they were picked up every Tuesday evening at nine thirty.
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Despite being surrounded by spies, Franklin was not at all worried and, in fact, blithely dismissed the possibility of spies having any harmful effects on his mission. As long as he was involved “in no Affairs that I should blush to have made publick; and to do nothing but what Spies may see and welcome,” he could not care less about spies. “If I was sure ... that my Valet de Place was a Spy, as probably he is, I think I should not discharge him for that, if in other Respects I lik’d him.”
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These facetious remarks that confused his own moral behavior with state affairs involving American lives and property reveal once again how much Franklin tended to see the Revolution in personal terms.
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He did have one fright, however, when he thought a spy had tried to poison him; he knew the Paris chief of police well enough to have the suspected culprit locked up in the Bastille.
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Not only did Franklin have to convince the French to support America, but he also had to persuade his countrymen to trust France, and that turned out to be much the harder task. As former Englishmen, Americans had always known France as England’s traditional enemy. Indeed, by the eighteenth century the English had come to define much of their national identity by their differences from the French, from the extent of their liberties and their consumption of beef to their religious views— especially their religious views. France was Roman Catholic, and to be English was to be Protestant. Although Americans were now fighting England, it would not be easy for them to shed their inherited English dislike of France and fear of Catholicism. Besides, they had just fought a long and costly war against the French and their Indian allies, and the memory of that war lingered. For Franklin to get his fellow Americans to trust the French as much as he came to trust them remained his greatest challenge throughout his nearly eight-year-long mission—one he was never entirely successful in meeting.

THE BURDEN OF HIS FELLOW COMMISSIONERS

The character of his two fellow commissioners, Deane and Lee, did not help matters any. Deane had been in Paris since the spring of 1776 seeking aid secretly from the French government. He had joined up with Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a man of many talents who had strong connections to the French court. Between writing
Le Barbier de Séville
and
Le Mariage de Figaro,
Beaumarchais organized a fictitious trading company to act as a front for the French government’s supplying of arms to the Americans. Beaumarchais seems to have hoped to make money out of this gunrunning enterprise, but whether Deane hoped to is not clear;

Deane’s accounts turned out to be such a mess that no one at the time or ever since has been able to untangle them. At any rate Beaumarchais lost a fortune in the business, and Deane was eventually accused of embezzlement and profiteering by his fellow commissioner Arthur Lee.

Lee was a very difficult man, a superpatriot mistrustful of everyone who did not think as he did, including his two fellow commissioners.
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He was unable to relate to the Comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister, with whom the commission had to deal. Lee distrusted France and missed no opportunity to let Vergennes know how fortunate the French were in being able to help the Americans. France, of course, wanted revenge against Britain for its defeat in the Seven Years War, but there were other things France might have done besides going to war with Britain in support of America, including trying to recover its lost territory in North America.
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Lee never appreciated that, but Franklin did.

Because Franklin did get along with Vergennes and refrained from vigorously pressing him for an alliance, Lee assumed that Franklin had been taken in by the French or, worse, had shifted his allegiance to France. Lee, of course, had been suspicious of Franklin back in London in the early 1770s, and thus he had his eye on the old man from the moment they got together in Paris.

To complicate the situation further, Congress in July 1777 appointed Lee’s brother William as minister to Berlin and Vienna and Ralph Izard, a wealthy South Carolina planter, as minister to Tuscany. Because none of these European states wished to recognize the new republic—in a monarchical world, governments that did away with kings were not very welcome, especially if their rebellion did not succeed—William Lee and Izard had their credentials as ministers refused. Instead, the two disgruntled ministers settled in Paris and convinced themselves that they too should be members of the commission to France. They sniped and quarreled and made life miserable for Franklin. They complained that they could not get Franklin to attend meetings or sign papers, saying that the only thing he was punctual for was his dinner. They charged him with withholding information and ignoring them and with collaborating with Deane in a system of “disorder, and dissipation in the conduct of public affairs.” Finally, because Franklin was haughty and self-sufficient and “not guided by principles of virtue and honor,” they charged him with being “an improper person to be trusted with the management of the affairs of America.”
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Although Izard thought Franklin was more dangerous than Deane, because “he had more experience, Art, cunning and Hypocricy,” Arthur Lee tended to mistrust Deane more.
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He thought that Deane had creamed off profits for himself during the time he was supplying arms for the American cause. With the aid of Richard Henry Lee, his brother in the Continental Congress, he launched a campaign against Deane that eventually resulted in Congress’s recalling the Connecticut merchant in November 1777 to answer the charges of embezzlement and other matters. The accusations against Deane divided the Congress between those zealous patriots like Richard Henry Lee and Samuel Adams, who saw wickedness and corruption everywhere, and those more worldly moderates like Robert Morris and John Jay, who realized that financing a revolution required that some people make money. Many of these kinds of important urbane people supported Deane, and Franklin was one of them.

Franklin liked Deane, and he endorsed him in a letter to the Congress. He told Henry Laurens, the president of the Congress, in March 1778 that there must be some mistake in the Congress’s recalling of Deane, perhaps “the Effect of some Misrepresentation from an Enemy or two” in France. He had lived intimately with Deane for fifteen months, and he found him to be “a faithful, active and able Minister, who to my Knowledge has done in various ways great and important Services to his Country.”
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Since Franklin got along so well with Deane, Lee assumed that Franklin had to be in cahoots with him. “I am more and more satisfied that the old doctor is concerned in the plunder,” he wrote to his brother Richard Henry Lee in Congress that September, “and that in time we shall collect the proofs.”
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Deane’s subsequent actions only deepened Lee’s suspicion of Franklin. Deane eventually became so angry at the shabby way he was being treated that he publicly denounced the Congress, repudiated the Revolution, and settled in England. Since Franklin had defended Deane, the Lees and other zealous patriots such as Samuel Adams had grounds for questioning Franklin’s patriotism.
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Despite the Lee faction’s criticism, Franklin carried out his duties brilliantly. He bore his colleagues’ malice and abuse with silence and restraint. He sloughed off the charges that he was lazy and spent too much time dining and seeing people. He knew that diplomacy was not simply a matter of writing letters and shuffling papers. He knew too that the French feared that the Anglo-Saxons might get back together, and he skillfully played on these fears. He encouraged concessions from the British government and simply allowed these to spur Vergennes, who was always worried about a British-American rapprochement, into increased activity on behalf of the Americans. All the while Franklin charmed the French and put the best face he could on the course of events as he waited for an American victory. When told in the summer of 1777 that General William Howe had taken Philadelphia, he replied: “You mean, Sir, Philadelphia has taken Sir Wm. Howe.”
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With the news of the defeat and surrender of British troops at Saratoga that October, he at last had a substantial American victory to convince the French that the American cause was worth supporting with an open military alliance. With the prospect of France’s entering the war openly on behalf of the Americans, the alarmed British were now prepared to offer the colonists everything they had wanted short of independence.

THE FRENCH ALLIANCE

Although some Americans were suspicious of Franklin’s devotion to the cause, in fact no one was more committed to American independence than Franklin. Whatever loyalty Franklin had earlier felt for the British Empire was gone. He was now completely dedicated to the success of what he called “a miracle in human affairs” and “the greatest revolution the world ever saw.”
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Consequently, he initially ignored all British efforts to talk about ending the war short of American independence. At several points he even destroyed or refused to pass on to America offers from the British government for reconciliation, out of fear that some wobbly Americans back home might have second thoughts about continuing the struggle for complete independence. Only when the French kept hesitating about openly allying with America did he, in January 1778, finally agree to meet with Paul Wentworth, ostensibly an emissary from the British government but actually the chief British spy in France. He knew that the French would learn of this meeting and would perhaps be goaded into an alliance.

Wentworth, according to his own account, opened the two-hour conversation with some compliments, to which, he said, Franklin was “very open.” Wentworth reminded Franklin that the doctor had formerly favored imperial union rather than American independence. But Franklin said that was then; circumstances were different now. When Wentworth read him a letter from someone in England promising unqualified independence, Franklin replied: “Pity it did not come a little sooner.” In the process of recalling the various negotiations he had been involved in during the early 1770s, Franklin, according to Wentworth, “worked Himself into passion and resentment.” Wentworth tried to tell him “that His resentments should be lost in the Cause of his Country; that His [cause] was too great to mix private quarrells with.” Although Franklin replied that “His warmth did not proceed from a feeling of personal Injuries” alone, Wentworth was not mistaken in observing the way the highly agitated Franklin lost his breath in describing “the burning of Towns, the neglect or Ill treatment of Prisoners,” and the other “Barbarities inflicted on His Country.” Wentworth had never known Franklin to be so discombobulated; normally Franklin was succinct and pointed, “but He was diffuse and unmethodical to day.” As much as Wentworth tried, he could not get Franklin to calm down and stop talking about English savagery.
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