by Conrad Black
In August 1774, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, who had not been accessible to Franklin during the Seven Years’ War, though his chief secretaries were and they knew each other indirectly, called upon Franklin. They met again on December 26, right after Franklin had received and sent on to Chatham the Continental Congress resolutions. Chatham declared that the Congress had acted with such “Temper, Moderation, and Wisdom,” that it was “the most honourable Assembly of Statesmen since those of the ancient Greeks and Romans in the most virtuous times.” Chatham spoke in the House of Lords on January 20, 1775, ostentatiously greeting and speaking with Franklin in the lobby of the House and advocated withdrawal of British troops from Massachusetts, appointment of a commission to negotiate a settlement, and a general de-escalation. He feared for destruction of the Empire he had largely built and saw as clearly as Franklin did where the present course would shortly lead.
Chatham presented his bill to the House of Lords on January 29, 1775. It restricted Parliament’s right to legislate in America to matters of trade, made any taxation in America conditional on consent of the taxed, and recognized the Continental Congress. All British statutes that the Congress had objected to from 1764 to 1774 were to be suspended or repealed. The ministry attacked it as the insidious work of Franklin, as if Britain’s greatest living statesman were a mere mouthpiece. Chatham replied that the bill was his own, but that were he charged to resolve the mess the government and its predecessors had created, he would not hesitate to consult the man “whom all Europe held in high Estimation for his Knowledge and Wisdom, and ranked with our Boyles and Newtons, who was an Honour not to the English Nation only, but to Human Nature.”29
Such high praise from so great a man in so eminent a place indicated Franklin’s unique standing as the premier American in the world, but Chatham’s bill was vituperatively rejected. Franklin assimilated the praise as expressionlessly as he had endured being reviled the year before by the same objectors. This was the end, and he left a few weeks later and arrived in Philadelphia on May 5, 1775. The die was cast.
2. THE OUTBREAK OF WAR
On April 19, 1775, American militiamen and British Redcoats exchanged fire at Lexington and Concord, outside Boston, and the British conducted a ragged retreat back into Boston, harried by American irregulars sniping and skirmishing. The war had begun, though sequels were a time in coming. The Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia just after Franklin’s return to that city; formed, at least theoretically, a Continental Army (of the Massachusetts militia and six additional companies the Congress thought it could dispatch); and drafted Colonel George Washington, as the ranking British officer among Americans (who attended the Congress in the old blue uniform he had worn for his official portrait), and by now a committed imperial secessionist, as its commander.
John Adams (of Massachusetts) had proposed him, which gave something of a national character to his commission. Washington, in his previous career, had not been a particularly successful commanding officer, though he understood logistics and the basic requirements of leadership and had been conspicuously courageous. He had earned the respect of all by his sober demeanor and imposing appearance. He said he was unworthy of the honor, and declined to be paid, apart from his expenses. He was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies because of his astute management of his plantation, adding little factories to provide what the escalation of the boycott against Britain had required to be manufactured domestically. And British victories over the French now assured a steady inflow of settlers and appreciating land values in the Ohio country where he had been a very astute acquirer of land.
George Washington the semi-autodidact, the unsuccessful striver for a British army commission and combat glory, had made himself, by default as well as by his own distinguished bearing, the custodian of the hopes of a new country. To his wife and others, Washington wrote that he could not decline the draft of the Continental Congress to command the Continental Army; that to have done so would have caused censure to rain down upon him, for cowardice, fecklessness, and betrayal. Thus was born the mighty myth of the disinterested Cincinnatus, the unseeking officer and country squire summoned from his bucolic and familial pleasures to take in hand the cause of human liberty. Fortunately for the whole project, the propagation of its motives was to be chiefly in the hands of one of the most adept spin-doctors of world history in Thomas Jefferson.
Washington proceeded to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take command of the minimalist, but grandiosely titled, Continental Army, ostensibly a force of 17,000. If he succeeded, he would be the father of a new and predestined nation. If he failed, he was running some risk of being hanged as a traitor. He had seen the ineptitude of British forces in America, except when they had overwhelming numbers, and he had certainly seen the insufferable incompetence and arrogance of British colonial administration, and shared Franklin’s view of the golden future of America. Britain’s greatest statesmen, Chatham (Pitt), Burke, and Fox, were in sympathy with the American project. In one of his greatest Demosthenean oratorical triumphs, Burke urged an almost spellbound but dissentient Parliament to “keep the poor, giddy, thoughtless people of our country from plunging headlong into this impious war.”30
John Adams forged what would prove the axis of the first administration of the new state and the basis of what became the Federalist Party by being the chief propagator of the Washington legend. None of the general’s (as he shortly became) successors in the great office he would hold and establish were better served by their touts and publicists than Washington was by Adams, who must have known there was some hyperbole in his comments, asserting in the summer of 1775 that the general was “a gentleman of one of the first fortunes upon the continent,” who was “leaving his delicious retirement [aged 43], his family and friends, sacrificing his ease and hazarding all in the cause of his country.” Washington’s gamble should not be understated. But Britain was at least as divided as America, as Franklin told him. It had been one thing to land forces on the Atlantic littoral of America and proceed westward and north to deal with outnumbered and under-supplied French, while receiving the cooperation, however grudging, of 2.5 million colonists (not counting several hundred thousand slaves). It would be something else, altogether more complicated, to land and sustain forces, or supply them by the tenuous routes from Canada, in sufficient numbers to subdue a rebellious population over an area four to five times as extensive as the British Isles.
The foolishness of the king and his advisers, who would be heckled mercilessly by Britain’s greatest parliamentarians (illustrating that whatever the grievances of the Americans, Britain was not quite the tyranny they claimed), could probably be relied upon to produce a great many mistakes. And the principal European powers, especially France, after the drubbing it had so recently received at the hands of the British, would be only too happy to assist in any obstruction of British enjoyment of the spoils of their recent victory. The British were hugely overconfident, because they assumed that almost all the colonists were a good deal more attached to the mother country and the Crown than they were (and they took no account of the substantial segments of the American population that were of Dutch, French, and German origin). No conventional colony had successfully revolted in post-Hellenic times, but there had never been a colony like this millions of headstrong people in as sophisticated a society as the mother country, thousands of miles distant.
For Washington, principle and opportunity conjoined, and it seemed a risk worth taking. For Franklin, it was unfolding as he expected, once he had had a good look at delusional British intransigence, toward an outcome of which he was confident. For Jefferson, much younger and less prominent than the other two, it seemed the tide of events and an idea that could be glamorized and sold. As often happens when people initiate wars, it would be much longer and more difficult than either side imagined, but, the principal American founders must have reasoned, especially Franklin with his intimate knowledge of both sides, it should be
easier to exhaust the patience of the British by attrition than to crush the spirit of the distant Americans. Though no one could have known this at the time, suppressing such a revolt, as would be shown in the colonial struggles of the twentith century, from South Africa to Algeria, would generally require at least as many soldiers as there were able-bodied rebels, something vastly beyond the capacities of the British in this case.
Yet the purpose of the conflict was still not unanimously clear in America. In a pattern that would be replicated, there was an incomplete consensus in America about a war already underway. The leading Virginians, especially Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, and the leading Massachusetts public men, such as John Adams and his cousin, Samuel Adams, claimed the British recourse to force had begun a war for independence. There was a good deal of opinion in New York, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and other colonies (or states) that was less militant, still royalist in principle, and was wary of being dragged into a futile war by Virginia plantation owners and Boston merchants.
On July 5, 1775, the Second Continental Congress sent King George III a final and unanimous petition (including Washington and Jefferson and Franklin), asking that he exercise the impartial, overarching legal and moral authority he enjoyed as sovereign of all the British, at home and across the seas, to resolve the dispute between America and the British Parliament. In one of the most catastrophic blunders of British history, he issued a proclamation on August 23, condemning “the traitorous correspondence, counsels, and comfort, of diverse wicked and desperate persons within this realm” and ordered all loyal subjects, whether civilian or military, to use their “utmost endeavors to withstand and suppress such rebellion and to disclose and make known all treasons and traitorous conspiracies.” This drew the line, and many of the approximately one-third of Americans who were primarily loyal to the Crown prepared to depart for Britain or Canada; ultimately about 60,000 did depart (though estimates range up to 100,000),31 three-quarters of them to Canada, where they raised the English-speaking share of the population from less than 20 to over 40 percent, a total of 165,000 people (100,000 French), compared with about 2.5 million free Americans and 300,000 slaves. (As Canada was too northerly for the cultivation of cotton, there was never any economic rationale for slavery in that country.)
The rest of colonial opinion firmed up admirably in support of rebellion, and Franklin, still in intense correspondence with his British friends, ignored the king, whom he took to be a suggestible hothead (with some reason), and lamented “the mangling hands of a few blundering ministers.... God will protect and prosper [America]; you will only exclude yourselves from any share in it,” he wrote to an English friend.32 It would be a civil war, and therefore the bitterest of conflicts. Franklin was durably estranged from his son Billy, the royal governor of New Jersey, and after a long and unsuccessful conversation lasting through much of the night in May, they parted, on unfriendly terms. Young Franklin was interned in Connecticut in the ensuing conflict and spent the balance of his life in Britain. They were reconciled after the war. Franklin, now well clear of the harassments of the Penns, was president of the Committee of Safety of Pennsylvania (a precursor to the title of the dreaded authors of the Terror of Prairial in France, in the world’s next great revolution, less than 15 years off).
He called for the construction of ships to harass British men o’ war should they approach Philadelphia, and gave an outline of his proposed constitution for the new country in the Congress in the autumn of 1775. He claimed, then and later, to have been opposed to seeking alliances, but on December 9, 1775, he wrote to Charles Dumas, a learned and well-connected salonnier in The Hague, and asked for his informed opinion on the possibility of seeking aid in Europe against the British in a coming insurrection. While he was awaiting a response, the French government sent the Chevalier de Bonvouloir to America to investigate the military and diplomatic prospects. Franklin and his committee eagerly concerted hypotheses with the visitor. The Committee of Correspondence that Jefferson had helped establish, at Franklin’s urging, sent Silas Deane to Paris with a mandate to determine whether alliance, or at least recognition, would be attainable from the French.
Thomas Paine’s inflammatory pamphlet Common Sense called for independence and denounced monarchy generally, and had a huge sale and influence. Washington had sent a force to gain control of the British province of Quebec and persuade the French-speaking Canadians to join the incipient revolt. They captured Montreal but were sent packing before the walls of Quebec. Washington asked Franklin, as the Americans’ preeminent diplomat, to try his hand at persuading the Canadians. Unfortunately for the cause, the government of Canada was in the hands of a governor so skillful that had he been given charge of America instead, he might have settled down the whole problem. Sir Guy Carleton, subsequently Lord Dorchester, had caused the British adoption of the Quebec Act in 1774, by which the French Canadians pledged allegiance to the British Crown and the British government pledged preservation of the French language, the Roman Catholic religion, and the civil law. Both sides adhered rigorously to their pledges.
For the French Canadians, there was a credibility problem in the American profession of friendship, as hostility to the French and to Roman Catholicism had been prominent in the attitudes of their late opponents in the French and Indian (Seven Years’) Wars. Franklin was empowered to make no such pledge of continuity and cultural security, though he could probably have managed the religious and legal guarantees. But as citizens of a united amalgamation of emancipated colonies, the French population of 100,000 was sure to be subsumed in the English-speaking majority of three million. The Americans had been foraging off the land and were hugely unpopular with the locals, and they were effectively chased out of Canada. (Benedict Arnold, an able general, commanded, and underestimated at the outset, by almost 50 percent, the length of the long trek ahead of him. He led his force well, as he would continue to do as the most controversial figure in the war, but it was an impossible mission.)
From Lexington and Concord, possibly the most mythologized aspects of this entire conflict (no one knows which side fired the first shot “heard round the world”; Paul Revere did not ride alone, never got to Concord, and was arrested by the British in mid-ride; and Longfellow was perhaps the greatest myth-maker of all the fabulists who have had a hand in this, starting with Jefferson), the British repaired to Boston and the armies met at Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. It was a bloody engagement, and the British retained control of Boston, but it was something of a moral victory for the Americans to have held their own so tenaciously against a larger and better-trained force. The British lost about half of the 2,200 men engaged, and three times as many casualties as the Americans. Washington skillfully besieged Boston, and the British commander, General William Howe, withdrew by sea to Halifax on March 17, 1776.
The war largely adjourned, apart from the redoubled preparations of both sides, until the British reappeared at New York on June 25. Hundreds of transports commanded by the naval commander, Admiral Richard Lord Howe, brother of lands forces commander, General William Lord Howe, transported 30,000 men, a remarkable feat of amphibious warfare for the time. General Howe’s second-in-command, Henry Clinton, had proposed going up the Hudson to what is now Morningside Heights, disembarking and cutting off Washington’s retreat from his positions on Manhattan and Long Island, which might have been a decisive stroke, but General Howe disembarked on Staten Island on July 2, 1776.
3. THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
John and Samuel Adams had pushed through the Congress by a narrow margin a bill ordering each colony to suppress what remained of British government within its borders. A committee was set up to declare the independence of the colonies, consisting of Jefferson (whose “felicity of expression,” in Adams’s words, was widely recognized), Franklin, Adams, Robert Livingston of New York, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut, representing five different colonies, though only Jefferson represented the South. Jefferson wa
s tasked with writing the draft, which he did over nearly three weeks in the Philadelphia boarding house where he was living. He adapted his draft constitution of Virginia. Adams and Franklin had some substantive suggestions, which Jefferson incorporated, and the draft of the declaration was given to the Congress on June 28, 1776.
Jefferson addressed two objectives: the demonization of George III as a tyrant of Caligulan proportions, whose iniquities justified in themselves the revolt that was starting, and a universal declaration of human rights designed to put the new insurgent regime at the forefront of the Enlightenment’s exaltation of human rights, from John Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The second purpose thunders out of the preamble (and also winds up the document): “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter and abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
