The True Benjamin Franklin

Franklin said and wrote very little on the subject. He sent no letters to members of Congress undermining the characters of his fellow-commissioners; the few statements that he made were exceedingly mild and temperate, and were usually to the effect that there were differences and disputes which he regretted. He usually invited his fellow-commissioners to dine with him every Sunday, and on these occasions they appeared very friendly, though at heart cherishing vindictive feelings towards one another.

In truth, Lee and Izard wrote so much and so violently that they dug the graves of their own reputations. It was Dr. Johnson who said that no man was ever written down except by himself, and Franklin once shrewdly remarked, “spots of dirt thrown upon my character I suffered while fresh to remain; I did not choose to spread by endeavoring to remove them, but relied on the vulgar adage that they would all rub off when they were dry.”

General public opinion was then and has remained in favor of Franklin, and the prominent men of France were, without exception, on his side. They all in the end detested Lee, whose conduct showed a vindictive disposition, and who evidently had purposes of his own to serve. One of his pet suspicions was that Paul Jones was a rascal in league with the other rascal, Franklin, and he protests in a letter to a member of Congress against Jones being “kept upon a cruising job of Chaumont and Dr. Franklin.” Jones, he predicted, would not return from this cruise, but would go over to the enemy.

Franklin’s service in France may be divided into four periods. First, from his arrival in December, 1776, until February, 1778, during which two years he and Deane conducted the business as best they could and quarrelled with Lee and Izard. Second, the year from February, 1778, until February, 1779, during which John Adams was in Paris in the place of Silas Deane. Third, some of the remaining months of 1779, during which, although Franklin was sole plenipotentiary to France, Lee, Izard, and others still retained their appointments to other countries, and remained in Paris, continuing the quarrels more viciously than ever. They were recalled towards the close of 1779, and from that time dates the fourth period, during which Franklin enjoyed the sole control, unassailed by the swarm of hornets which had made his life a burden.

I have already described most of the first period as briefly as possible; its full treatment would require a volume. All that remains is to describe the act with which it closed, – the signing of the treaty of alliance. This treaty, which secured the success of our Revolution by giving us the assistance of a French army and fleet, was the result of unforeseen events, and was not obtained by the labors of Franklin or those of any of the commissioners.

France had been anxious to ally herself with us during the first two years of the Revolution, but dared not, because there was apparently no prospect that we would be successful. In fact, all the indications pointed to failure. Washington was everywhere defeated; had been driven from New York, lost the battle of the Brandywine, lost Philadelphia, and then the news arrived in Europe that Burgoyne was moving from Canada down the Hudson, and would be joined by Howe from New York. This would cut the colonies in half; separate New England, the home of the Revolution, from the Middle and Southern Colonies and result in our total subjugation.

The situation of the commissioners in Paris was dismal enough at this time. They had been successful at first, with the aid of Beaumarchais; but now Beaumarchais was in despair at the ingratitude of Congress and its failure to pay him; no more prizes were coming in, for the British fleets had combined against the American war vessels and driven them from the ocean; the commissioners had spent all their money, and Franklin proposed that they should sell what clothing and arms they had been unable to ship and pay their debts as far as possible with the proceeds. At any moment they might hear that they had neither country nor flag, that the Revolution had collapsed, and that they must spend the rest of their lives in France as pensioners on the royal bounty, daring to go neither to America nor to England, where they would be hung as ringleaders of the rebels.

In their dire extremity they forgot their animosities, and one is reminded of those pictures of the most irreconcilable wild animals – foxes and hares, or wolves and wild-cats – seeking refuge together from a flood on a floating log. In public they kept a bold front, in spite of the sneers of the English residents in Paris and the shrugging shoulders of the Frenchmen.

“Well, doctor,” said an Englishman to Franklin, “Howe has taken Philadelphia.”

“I beg your pardon, sir; Philadelphia has taken Howe.”

But in his heart Franklin was bowed down with anxiety and apprehension. We all know what happened. Burgoyne and Howe failed to connect, and Burgoyne surrendered his army to the American general, Gates. That was the turning-point of the Revolution, and there was now no doubt in France of the final issue. A young man, Jonathan Austin, of Massachusetts, was sent on a swift ship to carry the news to Paris. The day his carriage rolled into the court-yard of Chaumont’s house at Passy, Franklin, Deane, both the Lees, Izard, Beaumarchais, – in fact, all the snarling and quarrelling agents, – were there, debating, no doubt, where they would drag out the remains of their miserable lives.

They all rushed out to see Austin, and Franklin addressed to him one sad question which they all wanted answered, whether Philadelphia really was taken.

“Yes, sir,” said Austin.

The old philosopher clasped his hands and was stumbling back into the house.

“But, sir, I have greater news than that. General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners of war.”

Beaumarchais drove his carriage back to Paris so fast that it was overturned and his arm dislocated. Austin relates that for a long time afterwards Franklin would often sit musing and dreaming and then break out, “Oh, Mr. Austin, you brought us glorious news.”

Austin had arrived on December 3, 1777. On the 6th of the same month the French government requested the commissioners to renew their proposals for an alliance. Eleven days after that they were told that the treaty would be made, and within two months, – namely, on February 6, 1778, – after full discussion of all the details, it was signed. This was certainly very prompt action on the part of France and shows her eagerness.

On the day that he signed the treaty, Franklin, it is said, wore the same suit of Manchester velvet in which he had been dressed when Wedderburn made his attack upon him before the Privy Council in London, and after the signing it was never worn again. When asked if there had not been some special meaning attached to the wearing of these clothes at the signing, he would make no other reply than a smile. It was really beautiful philosophic vengeance, and adds point to Walpole’s epigram on the scene before the Council:

“Sarcastic Sawney, swol’n with spite and prate,On silent Franklin poured his venal hate.The calm philosopher, without reply,Withdrew, and gave his country liberty.”

There was much discussion among the three envoys over the terms of the treaty, and their love for one another was not increased. The principal part of Izard’s bitterness against Franklin is supposed to have begun at this time. Lee made a point on the question of molasses. In the first draft of the treaty it was agreed that France should never lay an export duty on any molasses taken from her West India islands by Americans. Vergennes objected that this was not fair, as the Americans bound themselves to no equivalent restriction on their own exports. Franklin suggested a clause that, in consideration of France agreeing to lay no export duty on molasses, the United States should agree to lay no export duty on any article taken by Frenchmen from America, and this was accepted by Vergennes.

Lee, however, objected that we were binding ourselves on every article of export, while France bound herself on only one. In this he was entirely right, and it was not an officious interference, as Franklin’s biographers have maintained. He pressed his point so hard that it was finally agreed with the French government that Congress might accept or reject the whole arrangement on this question, if it saw fit. Congress supported Lee and rejected it.

The signing of the treaty of course rendered Beaumarchais’s secret work through Hortalez & Co. of less importance. France was now the open ally of the United States; the French government need no longer smuggle arms and clothing into America, but was preparing to send a fleet and an army to assist the insurgents, as they were still called in Paris. All this rendered the labors of the embassy lighter and less complicated.

In April, 1778, a few months after the signing of the treaty, John Adams, after a most dangerous and adventurous voyage across the Atlantic, arrived to take the place of Silas Deane. He has left us a very full account of the condition of affairs and his efforts at reform. Franklin’s biographers have been sorely puzzled to know what to do with these criticisms; but any one who will take the trouble to read impartially all that Adams has said, and not merely extracts from it, will easily be convinced of his fairness. He makes no mistake about Lee; speaks of him as a man very difficult to get on with, and describes Izard in the same way. There is not the slightest evidence that these two men poisoned his mind against Franklin. He does not side with them entirely; but, on the contrary, in the changes he undertook to make was sometimes on their side and sometimes against them. He held the scales very evenly.

Lee wanted all the papers of the embassy brought to his own house, and Adams wrote him a letter which certainly shows that Adams had not gone over to the Lee party, and is also an example of the efforts he was making to improve the situation.

“I have not asked Dr. Franklin’s opinion concerning your proposal of a room in your house for the papers, and an hour to meet there, because I know it would be in vain; for I think it must appear to him more unequal still. It cannot be expected, that two should go to one, when it is as easy again for one to go to two; not to mention Dr. Franklin’s age, his rank in the country, or his character in the world; nor that nine-tenths of the public letters are constantly brought to this house, and will ever be carried where Dr. Franklin is. I will venture to make a proposition in my turn, in which I am very sincere; it is that you would join families with us. There is room enough in this house to accommodate us all. You shall take the apartments which belong to me at present, and I will content myself with the library room and the next to it. Appoint a room for business, any that you please, mine or another, a person to keep the papers, and certain hours to do business. This arrangement will save a large sum of money to the public, and, as it would give us a thousand opportunities of conversing together, which now we have not, and, by having but one place for our countrymen and others to go to, who have occasion to visit us, would greatly facilitate the public business. It would remove the reproach we lie under, of which I confess myself very much ashamed, of not being able to agree together, and would make the commission more respectable, if not in itself, yet in the estimation of the English, the French, and the American nations; and, I am sure, if we judge by the letters we receive, it wants to be made more respectable, at least in the eyes of many persons of this country.” (Bigelow’s Franklin from His Own Writings, vol. ii. p. 424.)

Adams had none of the rancor of Lee and Izard, but he tells us candidly that he found the public business in great confusion. It had never been methodically conducted. “There never was before I came a minute book, a letter book, or an account book; and it is not possible to obtain a clear idea of our affairs.” Of Deane he says that he “lived expensively, and seems not to have had much order in his business, public or private; but he was active, diligent, subtle, and successful, having accomplished the great purpose of his mission to advantage.”

Adams procured blank books and devoted himself to assorting the papers of the office at Passy, where Franklin had allowed everything to lie about in the greatest confusion. He found that too many people had been making money out of the embassy, and of these Jonathan Williams appears to have been one. He united with Lee in demanding Williams’s accounts, and compelled Franklin to join in dismissing him. A man named Ross was another delinquent who was preying on the embassy, and the arrangement by which he was allowed to do it is described by Adams as “more irregular, more inconsistent with the arrangement of Congress and every way more unjustifiable than even the case of Mr. Williams.”

He gives us many glimpses of Franklin’s life, – his gayety, the bright stories he told, and his wonderful reputation among the French. An interesting young lady, Mademoiselle de Passy, was a great favorite with Franklin, who used to call her his flame and his love. She married a man whose name translated into English would be “Marquis of Thunder.” The next time Madame de Chaumont met Franklin, she cried out, “Alas! all the conductors of Mr. Franklin could not prevent the thunder from falling on Mademoiselle de Passy.”

Adams was at the Academy of Sciences when Franklin and Voltaire were present, and a general cry arose among the sensation-loving people that these two wonderful men should be introduced to each other. They accordingly bowed and spoke. But this was not enough, and the two philosophers could not understand what more was wanted. They took each other by the hand; but still the clamor continued. Finally it was explained to them that “they must embrace in French fashion.” The two old men immediately began hugging and kissing each other, which satisfied the company, and the cry spread through the whole country, “How beautiful it was to see Solon and Sophocles embrace!”

Some of Adams’s criticisms and estimates of Franklin, though not satisfactory to his eulogists, are, on the whole, exceedingly just.

“That he was a great genius, a great wit, a great humorist, a great satirist, and a great politician is certain. That he was a great philosopher, a great moralist, and a great statesman is more questionable.” (Adams’s Works, vol. iii. p. 139.)

This brief statement will bear the test of very close investigation. Full credit, it will be observed, is given to his qualities as a humorous and satirical writer, and even as a politician. The word politician is used very advisedly, for up to that time Franklin had done nothing that would raise him beyond that class into statesmanship.

He had had a long career in Pennsylvania politics, where his abilities were confined to one province, and in the attempt to change the colony into a royal government he had been decidedly in the wrong. While representing Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Georgia in England from the time of the Stamp Act until the outbreak of the Revolution, he had accomplished nothing, except that his examination before Parliament had encouraged the colonists to persist in their opposition; he had got himself into a very bad scrape about the Hutchinson letters; and his plan of reconciliation with the mother country had broken down. In France, the government being already very favorable to the colonies, there was but little for the embassy to do except to conduct the business of sending supplies and selling prizes, and in this Deane and Beaumarchais did most of the work, while Franklin had kept no accounts, had allowed his papers to get into confusion, was utterly unable to keep the envoys in harmony, and had not made any effective appeal to Congress to change the absurd system which permitted the sending to a foreign country of three commissioners with equal powers. In the last years of his mission in France he did work which was more valuable; but it was not until some years afterwards, when he was past eighty and on the verge of the grave, that he accomplished in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 the one act of his life which may be called a brilliant stroke of statesmanship.

His qualities as a moralist have been discussed in a previous chapter which fully justifies Adams’s assertion. As a philosopher, by which Adams meant what we now call a man of science, Franklin was distinguished, but not great. It could not be said that he deserved to be ranked with Kepler or Newton. His discovery of the nature of lightning was picturesque and striking, and had given him popular renown, but it could not put him in the front rank of discoverers.

In a later passage in his Diary Adams attempts to combat the French idea that Franklin was the American legislator.

“‘Yes,’ said M. Marbois, ‘he is celebrated as the great philosopher and the great legislator of America.’ ‘He is,’ said I, ‘a great philosopher, but as a legislator of America he has done very little. It is universally believed in France, England, and all Europe, that his electric wand has accomplished all this revolution. But nothing is more groundless. He has done very little. It is believed that he made all the American constitutions and their confederation; but he made neither. He did not even make the constitution of Pennsylvania, bad as it is.’…

”I said that Mr. Franklin had great merit as a philosopher. His discoveries in electricity were very grand, and he certainly was a great genius, and had great merit in our American affairs. But he had no title to the ‘legislator of America.’ M. Marbois said he had wit and irony; but these were not the faculties of statesmen. His Essay upon the true means of bringing a great Empire to be a small one was very pretty. I said he had wrote many things which had great merit, and infinite wit and ingenuity. His Bonhomme Richard was a very ingenious thing, which had been so much celebrated in France, gone through so many editions, and been recommended by curates and bishops to so many parishes and dioceses.

“M. Marbois asked, ‘Are natural children admitted in America to all privileges like children born in wedlock?’… M. Marbois said this, no doubt, in allusion to Mr. F.’s natural son, and natural son of a natural son. I let myself thus freely into this conversation, being led on naturally by the Chevalier and M. Marbois on purpose, because I am sure it cannot be my duty, nor the interest of my country, that I should conceal any of my sentiments of this man, at the same time that I do justice to his merits. It would be worse than folly to conceal my opinion of his great faults.” (Adams’s Works, vol. iii. p. 220.)

The French always believed that Franklin was the originator of the Revolution, and that he was a sort of Solon who had prepared laws for all the revolted colonies, directed their movements, and revised all their state papers and public documents. It was under the influence of this notion that they worshipped him as the personification of liberty. It must have been extremely irritating to Adams and others to find the French people assuming that the old patriarch in his fur cap had emancipated in the American woods a rude and strange people who without him could not have taken care of themselves. But, protest as they might, they never could persuade the French to give up their ideal, and this was undoubtedly the foundation of a great deal of the hostility to Franklin which showed itself in Congress.

In 1811, long after Franklin’s death, Adams wrote a newspaper article defending himself against some complaints that Franklin had made, of which I shall have more to say hereafter. It is a most vigorous piece of writing, and, in spite of some unfounded suspicions which it contains and the bluster and egotism so characteristic of its author, is by far the most searching and fairest criticism of Franklin that was ever written:

“His reputation was more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and esteemed than any or all of them… His name was familiar to government and people, to kings and 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 as a friend to human kind.” (Adams’s Works, vol. i. p. 660.)

A large part of this reputation rested, Adams thought, on great talents and qualities, but the rest was artificial, the result of peculiar circumstances which had exaggerated the importance of Franklin’s opinions and actions. The whole tribe of printers and newspaper editors in Europe and America had become enamoured and proud of him as a member of their body. Every day in the year they filled the magazines, journals, pamphlets, and all the gazettes of Europe “with incessant praise of Monsieur Franklin.” From these gazettes could be collected “a greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon ‘le grand Franklin’ than upon any other man that ever lived.” He had become a member of two of the most powerful democratic and liberal bodies in Europe, the Encyclopedists and the Society of Economists, and thus effectually secured their devotion and praise. All the people of that time who were rousing discontent in Europe and preparing the way for the French Revolution counted Franklin as one of themselves. When he took part in the American Revolution their admiration knew no bounds. He was “the magician who had excited the ignorant Americans to resistance,” and he would soon “abolish monarchy, aristocracy, and hierarchy throughout the world.” But most important of all in building up his reputation was the lightning-rod.

“Nothing,” says Adams, “perhaps, that ever occurred upon the earth was so well calculated to give any man an extensive and universal a celebrity as the discovery of the efficacy of iron points and the invention of lightning-rods. The idea was one of the most sublime that ever entered a human imagination, that a mortal should disarm the clouds of heaven, and almost ‘snatch from his hand the sceptre and the rod.’ The ancients would have enrolled him with Bacchus and Ceres, Hercules and Minerva. His paratonnerres erected their heads in all parts of the world, on temples and palaces no less than on cottages of peasants and the habitations of ordinary citizens. These visible objects reminded all men of the name and character of their inventor; and in the course of time have not only tranquillized the minds and dissipated the fears of the tender sex and their timorous children, but have almost annihilated that panic, terror, and superstitious horror which was once almost universal in violent storms of thunder and lightning.” (Adams’s Works, vol. 1. p. 661.)

The Latin motto universally applied to Franklin at this time, Eripuit cœlo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis, has usually been attributed to Turgot, the French Minister of Finance; but Adams believed that Sir William Jones was the author of it. Turgot made an alteration in it. As usually understood, the last half referred to the American colonies delivered from the oppression of Great Britain; but as Franklin grew to be more and more the favorite of that large class of people in Europe who were opposed to monarchy, and who believed that he would soon be instrumental in destroying or dethroning all kings and abolishing all monarchical government, Turgot suggested that the motto should read, Eripuit cœlo fulmen; mox septra tyrannis, which may be freely translated, “He has torn the lightning from the sky; soon he will tear their sceptres from the kings.”

At first Adams took the quarrelling lightly, trying to ignore and keep clear of it; but in a little while he confesses that “the uncandor, the prejudices, the rage among several persons here make me sick as death.” After about a month he was so disgusted with the service, so fully convinced that the public business was being delayed and neglected on account of the disputes, that he determined to try to effect a change. He therefore wrote to Samuel Adams, then in Congress, declaring that the affairs of the embassy were in confusion, prodigious sums of money expended, large sums yet due, but no account-books or documents; the commissioners lived expensively, each one at the rate of from three to six thousand pounds a year; this would necessarily continue as long as their salaries were not definitely fixed, and it would be impossible to get an account of the expenditure of the public money. Equally ridiculous was the arrangement which made the envoys half ambassadors and half commercial agents. Instead of all this he suggested that Congress separate the offices of public ministers from those of commercial agents, recall all the envoys except one, define with precision the salary he should receive, and see that he got no more.