Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  It was like Franklin to tell a joke at the moment when he was voting for a declaration that would make him a traitor, liable to be hanged, drawn and quartered under English law. Contrary to the myth, however, no one actually signed the Declaration on July 4. Instead, it was publicly proclaimed in the State House Yard on July 8. Not until August 2, was a final copy, engrossed on parchment, signed by the members of Congress. Then, Franklin is supposed to have made another witticism that is more imperishably connected with his name. John Hancock, after placing his large scrawl at the head of the document, reportedly said, “We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling different ways; we must all hang together.”

  “Yes,” Franklin replied, “we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

  It is something Franklin may well have said, but long years of searching by dozens of historians have exhumed no credible evidence for it. It was undoubtedly current in Philadelphia at the time. On April 14, 1776, Carter Braxton of Virginia wrote to a friend: “It is a true saying of a wit. We must hang together or hang separately.”

  Such humor came naturally to Franklin. But there is another more profound explanation for the way it appeared in a new and, more effervescent way now and in the years to come. The farther he went down the road toward independence, the more totally he turned his back on the two great but essentially egotistic dreams of his life, founding a Western colony, and creating a family dynasty. Independence meant the death blow to both these dreams, and by letting them go, opening himself at seventy to an unknown future, Franklin drew on resources of the spirit which only those who have experienced freedom in all its mysterious depths can understand. He had been born a free man, but now he was freeing himself from those self-imposed ambitions that had narrowed the political and emotional side of his life. True, he had served the public for many years out of a sense of gratitude for early good fortune. But there was little or no risk or loss involved in these previous years of public service. Now he was risking everything, the modest estate he had accumulated, the reputation he had so painfully constructed. If England won the war, his property would be confiscated, his reputation as a philosopher and public servant besmirched forever by the King’s condemnation as a traitor and rebel. This risk, this ultimate commitment to freedom without hope of personal gain, simply because he knew it was right, because he felt embodied in his soul the cause of America, now and in future centuries, was a unique, soaring emotion that made the risks of punishment, the burdens of Congress and Pennsylvania politics seem mere bubbles to be laughed away.

  The proponents of independence had predicted that it would inspire Americans everywhere with new resolution and fresh energy. It certainly seemed to have that effect on Franklin. For a man who less than a month before had been describing himself as old and feeble, he now plunged into a whirl of state and national politics that would have exhausted two men half his age. He accepted the presidency of the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, as well as the leadership of the new state delegation to the Continental Congress. John Adams exulted to his wife, “Dr. Franklin will be governor of Pennsylvania! The new members from this city are all in this taste, chosen because of their inflexible zeal for independence.” The triumph of the Independence Party, which coincided with the publication of the Declaration, was celebrated in Philadelphia by “bonfires, bells and other great demonstrations of joy,” according to one local diarist.

  Franklin did not participate to any great extent in the debates of the Pennsylvania Constitutional Congress. But his influence was amply evident in its results. Instead of a governor, the state chose to be guided by an executive council, and instead of a two-house legislature, they chose a single chamber. Both these ideas were the results of Franklin’s meditation on his long years of political experience. He thought a plural executive reduced the danger of dictatorial one-man rule, while a single legislative chamber made the law-making body more responsive to the will of the people. When one man asked Franklin why he was against a two-house legislature, he responded with a story about a snake with two heads and one body. “The snake was going to a brook to drink,” Franklin said, “and on her way was to pass through a hedge, a twig of which opposed her direct course. One head chose to go on the right side of the twig, the other on the left. . . Before the decision was completed the poor snake died with thirst.”

  Independence may have galvanized Franklin. It is also obvious that regaining political power in Pennsylvania added not a little to his energy. His long months of silence were over. Throughout the hot, humid weeks of July and August he was on his feet in Congress day after day, participating vigorously in the debates, trying to make muddleheaded delegates think clearly about creating a union that would endure. But the victory of independence was followed by almost complete frustration on union.

  Congress, in one of its typical fits of waywardness, had formed a committee to draw up plans for a confederation about the same time that it commissioned a declaration of independence. They had made John Dickinson the chairman and had handed to him Franklin’s long-ignored Articles of Confederation. A more idiotic combination of man and document could not have been devised. The name Franklin instantly raised prickles on Dickinson’s skin, and he felt compelled to overhaul the Articles of Confederation along different, if not superior, lines. The most important, and disastrous, change Dickinson made was throwing out Franklin’s idea of proportional representation, based on the number of male voters in each colony between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Each delegate in Franklin’s Congress was to have one vote. Each colony in Dickinson’s version had one vote.

  This was nothing less than an invitation to chaos. Again and again Franklin warned that the larger states such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and Virginia would soon grow disgusted with being reduced to equality with mini-states such as Rhode Island and would pull out of the confederacy. “Let the smaller colonies,” Franklin said, “give equal money and men, and then have an equal vote. But if they have an equal vote without bearing equal burdens, a confederation upon such iniquitous principles will never last long.”

  The smaller colonies protested that if the big states had their full weight in Congress, the smaller states would become “vassals.” Such strong imagery produced violent emotions in many of the members, and revived some of the fears that had originally made Congress abhor the idea of independence. Most of the proponents of independence had been from the two largest states, Massachusetts and Virginia, and Franklin, once more in the saddle in Pennsylvania, had also been an independence man. Now all three were fighting for proportional representation. John Adams, with his usual intransigence, insisted, “Reason, justice and equity never had weight enough on the face of the earth to govern the councils of men. It is interest alone which does it, and it is interest alone which can be trusted. . . Therefore the interests within doors should be the mathematical representatives of the interests without doors.” The individuality of a colony, which the small states revered, “was a mere sound. Does the individuality of a colony increase its wealth and numbers? If it does, pay equally.”

  For a while it looked as if the British were right, and the unity of the Americans was a rope of sand. Many smaller-state men were so angry that it seemed they might walk out. Franklin arose to spread some oil on the waters. He told them a story he had heard in England about the opposition of Scottish peers to the union between England and Scotland. One nobleman predicted “that as the whale had swallowed Jonah, so Scotland would be swallowed by England.” But there were soon so many Scotsmen in high places in the English government “that it was in event that Jonah had swallowed the whale.” An admiring Jefferson later recalled: “This little story produced a general laugh and restored good humor.”

  But neither humor nor reason could persuade the Congressmen to agree. The small states clung fiercely to Dickinson’s unworkable plan. They could not even agree on how to count heads, if they accepted proportional representation. Di
ckinson was for counting every man, woman, and child in a colony, which missed Franklin’s point, that by counting only men from sixteen to sixty, they would get a good index of a state’s productive capacity, which in turn suggested what proportion of the federal taxes they could pay. Then Southerners began arguing against counting their slaves as people. Thomas Lynch of South Carolina blandly declaimed: “Our slaves being our property, why should they be taxed more than the land, sheep, cattle, horses, etc.?”

  Franklin cut him down by pointing out that there was “some difference” between slaves and sheep. Sheep will never make any insurrections.”

  For the first three weeks of August, the Congress wrangled day and night without coming even close to agreement. They seemed mesmerized by another Dickinson change in Franklin’s original Articles. Franklin had, with his usual reasonableness, pointed out that nothing in this world is perfect, things changed, and therefore amendments could be proposed to the Articles by Congress, and approved by a majority of the colonial Assemblies. Dickinson insisted that alterations could only be made “in an assembly of the united states” (a Constitutional Convention) and “be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every colony.”

  The Congressmen were also paralyzed by a conviction, which Franklin himself shared, that the war would not last more than another year. On August 28, Franklin wrote to Horatio Gates, now in command of the Northern Department along the Canadian border: “My last advices from England say, that the ministry . . . cannot find means next year to go on with the war.” This idea made the fear of their brother states loom larger in the minds of many Congressmen than the specter of British conquest. Samuel Chase of Maryland went home in disgust, denouncing all the taxation plans he had heard thus far. Other Congressmen followed him, lured, as he was, by the politics of their native states, and the dismal sensation that Congress was getting nowhere.

  At the end of five weeks, the Congressmen had agreed on nothing, neither taxation, representation nor executive powers. On top of this appalling failure came news from the fighting front that was even more dismaying. On August 27, George Washington and his largely amateur army had given battle on Long Island to the superbly trained and equipped British host commanded by Major General William Howe, and had been murderously thrashed. Only a near miraculous combination of British overconfidence and foggy weather had enabled Washington to escape with the bulk of his army to Manhattan Island, by night.

  At this worst of all possible moments, there arrived on Congress’s doorstep a new offer for reconciliation from England.

  Franklin’s old friend, Lord Howe, had arrived in New York, armed with his long-sought commission to make peace. He was also armed with a less peaceful title, Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. His brother, Major General William Howe, was also a member of this strangely ambiguous peace commission. Late in July, Howe had written Franklin a letter informing him of his commission and urging a parley. Franklin had written a scorching, highly personal reply, informing Howe that the “atrocious injuries” already inflicted by the British “had extinguished every remaining spark of affection for that parent country we once held so dear.” If Lord Howe was prepared to negotiate a peace “between Britain and America as distinct states now at war,” Franklin thought that was “not yet quite impracticable, before we enter into foreign alliances.” His esteem for Howe made it “painful to me to see you engage in conducting a war . . . both unjust and unwise.” He warned Howe that “even success will not save from some degree of dishonor those, who voluntarily engaged to conduct it.”

  Lord Howe refused to be discouraged by this blast and after the battle of Long Island had demonstrated, so he thought, the clear superiority of the British over the American Army, he sent a captured American general, John Sullivan, to Philadelphia to suggest a parley with some members of Congress, on a purely private, unofficial basis. Howe was forced to make this foredoomed approach because he had been strictly forbidden by the British ministry to recognize Congress.

  Shaken by the defeat on Long Island and their own failure to confederate, Congress decided that they could not afford to ignore Lord Howe’s offer. While John Adams fumed that General Sullivan was “a decoy duck,” and wished that the first bullet fired on Long Island had gone through his head, Congress appointed a committee of three to meet Howe. Franklin was the logical first choice. So was Adams, to calm the fears of the independence men. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, a vigorous opponent of independence until the very last moment, represented the Congressional doves.

  The three men journeyed to South Amboy, where they had trouble getting beds at a very crowded inn. The roads were swarming with soldiers en route to reinforce Washington in New York. Franklin and John Adams had to share one small, lumpy bed. Although they were in wholehearted agreement on the subject of independence, the two men were temperamentally and physically opposites in almost every other way. Adams was a hypochondriac, who always saw himself in danger of a deadly disease. He had a special dread of the night air, shared by many people, including numerous distinguished physicians of the era. Franklin, proponent of air baths and ventilation, was horrified when Adams slammed tight the only window in their tiny room.

  “Don’t shut the window, we shall be suffocated,” Franklin said. Adams explained that he was “an invalid” and the night air would be his death.

  “The air within the chamber will soon be, and indeed is now, worse than that without doors,” Franklin said. “Come open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.”

  A reluctant Adams opened the window and crept into bed with Franklin.

  Cool air, night air, moist air, none of these things caused colds, as most people then believed, Franklin declared. “People often catch cold from one another when shut up together in closed rooms, coaches, &c., and when sitting near and conversing so as to breathe in each other’s transpiration.” He also suspected “too full living, with too little exercise.” But he was absolutely convinced that no one ever caught cold from being cold. “Traveling in our severe winters, I have suffered cold sometimes to an extremity only short of freezing, but this did not make me catch cold. Boys never get cold by swimming. Dampness may indeed assist in producing the disorder we call a cold; but of itself can never by a little addition of moisture . . . hurt a body . . . filled with watery fluids . . . from head to foot . . .”

  Adams fell asleep, he said, in the middle of the Doctor’s explanation, and the last words he heard from Franklin had a very sleepy sound to them.

  The next day the negotiators were in Perth Amboy. The sight of his son’s handsome new house must have been painful to Franklin, especially since Elizabeth Franklin was still living in it, growing steadily more depressed and distraught. Her husband had been confined to the town of Wallingford, Connecticut. All summer she had written tearful letters to Temple, telling how soldiers delighted in being “rude, insolent and abusive” to the royal governor’s wife. She was desperate for money since William’s salary had been cut off, and none of his debtors would pay her a cent. Early in August, Temple had come down to spend the rest of the summer with her, and had brought her $60, which he had extracted from his grandfather. Franklin had also sent Elizabeth a brief but not unkind note; he sympathized with her unhappiness, but he reminded her that thousands of people who had been forced to flee from occupied Boston and threatened New York were equally unhappy and suffering more than she was. Elizabeth’s reply was full of self-pity and bad humor. Her troubles “were really more than so weak a frame” could support. Moreover, it was “generally in your power to relieve them.” She could not see why Franklin did not use his influence to persuade Congress to let William live in his own home. She seemed to have forgotten that William had rejected the offer of a parole on his Burlington County farm and had practically forced the state to arrest him.

  Franklin had suggested William’s house as a possible meeting place for the conference wit
h Howe. Perhaps he was hoping he would thus have an excuse to see Elizabeth Franklin and Temple, without drawing public attention to his visit. But the admiral preferred a safer (for him) house on British-occupied Staten Island, just opposite Amboy. A barge sent by Lord Howe met the committee on the Jersey shore. In it was an officer who informed the Americans he had been sent as a hostage to guarantee their safe return. John Adams for once overcame his suspicious nature and suggested the arrangement was childish and undignified. In his diary, Adams gives himself full credit for the suggestion, but it is hard to believe that Franklin did not feel the same way the moment he saw the hostage. He knew Lord Howe too well to suspect him of such crude treachery.

  On Staten Island, Lord Howe had a regiment of Hessians drawn up in a double line from the shore to the door of the big stone mansion known as the Billopp House. When he saw his officer in the boat, Howe exclaimed, “Gentlemen, you make me a very high compliment and you may depend upon it I will consider it the most sacred of things.” He shook Franklin’s hand with special cordiality and displayed all the vaunted Howe charm he could muster in greeting Adams and Rutledge. But the Hessian guard, looking, in Adams’ words, “fierce as ten furies,” was a silent commentary on the other role which the admiral was playing. Strictly speaking, they were a guard of honor, but there was more than a suggestion of a threat in their presence, as well. The admiral, conforming to the letter of his instructions from the King, was proffering both the olive branch and the sword.