Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  Even more exasperated, if possible, was Lord Stormont in Paris. He accused Vergennes of allowing Conyngham to sail on another pirate cruise, of outfitting and arming his ship, and, in short, of making war on British commerce. Furious, Stormont threatened to resign and thus break off diplomatic relations, which was exactly what Franklin was hoping he would do. An agitated Vergennes wrote a stiff letter to Franklin and Deane warning them that the conduct of their privateering captains “affects the dignity of the King, my master, at the same time it offends the neutrality which His Majesty professes.” As for Conyngham, Vergennes showed the aggrieved Stormont the port records, which stated that the Revenge had been sold by its American owner, one William Hodge, to a British subject named Richard Allen, who had declared the ship was leaving on a commercial cruise.

  When this palpable dodge did not stand up Allen was a common seaman who had shipped out with Conyngham as part of his crew; Vergennes had Hodge arrested at his hotel and escorted to the Bastille. Hodge was an agent for the commercial committee of Congress and hence a part of the American mission in Paris. Franklin promptly had influential French friends intercede for him but Vergennes, desperate to keep up appearances, replied stiffly that it was “a very serious fault to tell the King a falsehood,” and kept him in jail.

  Franklin and Deane did their best to play along with Vergennes. Deane solemnly avowed that Conyngham had sailed with written instructions not to attack the enemy, but that his men had mutinied and forced him to turn privateer. Nevertheless, Hodge stayed in the Bastille until the French fishing fleet was safely home from Newfoundland’s Grand Banks. If Stormont had resigned and called for war, this irreplaceable source of French sailors, not to mention a fortune in ships and fish, would have been instantly devoured by the British fleet.

  The naval war was by no means the only way in which Franklin made George III and his ministers squirm. When he heard the good news that Washington had reversed the tide of defeat by storming into Trenton on Christmas night to capture almost a thousand Hessians, Franklin was inspired to write one of his satiric masterpieces. It was entitled “From the Count de Shaumbergh to the Baron Hohendorf Commanding the Hessian Troops in America.”

  Dated from Rome, it was supposedly a letter from the Count to the Baron, in which he rapturously discusses the Hessian casualties at Trenton. “You cannot imagine my joy in being told that of the 1,950 Hessians engaged in the fight, but 345 escaped. There were just 1,605 men killed, and I cannot sufficiently commend your prudence in sending an exact list of the dead to my minister in London.” Like all the petty German princes who had sold troops to the British the Count was getting paid per casualty and the English had listed only 1,455 dead, maintaining that there were a hundred wounded who ought not to be included on the dead list. But the Count had no worries on this score. “I trust you will not overlook my instructions to you on quitting Cassel and that you will not have tried by human succor to recall to life the unfortunates whose days could not be lengthened but by the loss of a leg or an arm.” He was thus looking forward to collecting 643,500 florins from the British Exchequer.

  “I am about to send you some new recruits,” crowed the Count. “Don’t economize them.” The Count’s trip to Italy had cost him “enormously” and he had contracted for a “grand Italian opera” which was going to cost even more. It was absolutely necessary to encourage as much mortality as possible. “You will, therefore, promise promotion to all who expose themselves; you will exhort them to seek glory in the midst of dangers. . . . Meantime, I pray God, my dear Baron de Hohendorf, to have you in his holy and gracious keeping.”

  Franklin also turned out numerous other propaganda pieces on American credit and the English national debt (if laid out in shilling pieces, he computed it would be 9572 miles more than twice around the whole circumference of the earth) with the implication that America was a sterling financial risk for European bankers and England was on the verge of financial collapse. Perhaps even more alarming to the English was the information, supplied by Paul Wentworth, ex-agent for New Hampshire and now England’s Secret Service chief in France that Franklin was corresponding with the leading members of the British opposition, Lord Shelburne and Lord Rockingham, as well as with his old friend, banker Thomas Walpole, who was close to Lord Chatham. Edward Bancroft was probably the channel through which these letters passed. Even though he made copies of the letters to pass on to Wentworth the spy had to deliver them. Thus Franklin, without realizing it in this case, got another dividend out of George III’s espionage budget.

  Then, from George III’s point of view, came an even more alarming development. Benjamin Vaughan, now Lord Shelburne’s secretary, appeared in Paris in September 1777, with messages for Franklin that his master did not choose to commit to paper. Almost certainly Vaughan was attempting to find out what terms, if any, Franklin was prepared to offer in truce negotiations. This made Franklin uneasy, or so he pretended. He did not want the French public to see him meeting openly with a British emissary. He could not have had any illusions about Vergennes and the rest of the French government finding out about it. Their spy system was almost as efficient and at least as numerous as the British. To avoid “speculation” Franklin told Vaughan to meet him in “a large white wooden building upon a boat in the river opposite to the Tuileries.” Here Franklin and Parisians who were swimming enthusiasts took to the water two or three times a week. The bathing attendants did not know Franklin’s name. Vaughan was told to ask for “an old Englishman with grey hair.”

  There is no record of what Franklin told Vaughan, but he probably got the same reply Franklin made by mail to another member of the English Opposition, David Hartley, who had written to him, hoping to get some glimmer of hope that peace could be speedily restored. Both Vaughan and Hartley were thinking of a peace based on the old colonial arrangement. Franklin swiftly demonstrated that when the interests of his country were at stake, peace at any price was not one of his solutions. “As to our submitting to the government of Great Britain,” he told Hartley, “it is vain to think of it. She has given us by her numberless barbarities . . . in the prosecution of the war and in the treatment of prisoners [in England] . . . so deep an impression of her depravity, that we never again can trust her in the management of our affairs and interests.” He even went so far as to tell Hartley that not merely the ministers and the members of Parliament were now detested by Americans, but the whole British people were considered equally guilty because of their “public rejoicings on occasion of any news of the slaughter of an innocent and virtuous people, fighting only in defense of their just rights.”

  Grimly Franklin added that if he could draw his friends and the friends of liberty and virtue out of England, he would prefer to continue the war “to the ruin of the rest.” But since such a withdrawal was impossible, he was prepared to admit a “wish” for peace. But this wish would be ineffective unless the British showed some sign of mending their vicious ways. The best and first thing they could do, Franklin told Hartley, was permit the Americans to send a commissary, or hire one, to supply the numerous American prisoners in British jails with decent food and warm clothing. Most of them were captured seamen and some of them, he pointed out wrathfully, had been sold to the African and East India Companies. This might inspire Americans to sell some captured British “to the Moors.”

  While he undoubtedly meant every word of it on one level, Franklin, who was always capable of thinking on three or four levels simultaneously, also had shrewd diplomatic reasons for this bellow of defiance.

  He was mentally preparing for the possibility that he might yet have to negotiate some kind of truce with the English.

  On the French side of his diplomatic tightrope act things were looking grim. Although Washington had checked the British at Trenton and Princeton, there were ominous signs that in the next campaign George III and his generals were making the immense effort to crush the rebellion predicted by Robert Morris. One British army, commanded by Major Gene
ral John Burgoyne, was slated to descend from Canada along the lakes and the Hudson River and cut off New England from the middle states. Major General Howe, meanwhile, was to attack Washington’s main army and capture Philadelphia.

  Practically none of the supplies Deane and Beaumarchais had purchased with the King’s money had reached Washington’s troops. The seas off the French coast swarmed with British cruisers and the American coast was equally well patrolled. Even Dutch ships were searched and seized in European waters as well as in the Caribbean. Neither the French nor the Dutch had the stomach to challenge Great Britain by sending American cargoes under armed convoy to the West Indies. In Versailles, the French government revealed its profound caution in other ways. Vergennes assured Ambassador Stormont that the King had ordered him and the Minister of Marine to maintain “strictest obedience” to French neutrality agreements. Franklin was told to make himself as invisible as possible by ceasing to appear in public. When a publisher dedicated a book about a French scientist to Franklin, he routinely asked royal permission. At first the King gave his blessing. But when the Americans started losing, the royal imprimatur was cryptically revoked.

  As usual, Franklin declined to lose his head. He understood precisely why the French were nervous, and he did his best to humor them. He stated his philosophy in a letter to Arthur Lee. “While we are asking aids, it is necessary to gratify the desires, and in some sort comply with the humours of those we apply to.” But Franklin did not comply to the point of cringing submission. He continued to let Vergennes know in numerous shrewd and subtle ways that his policy of watchful waiting was unwise. One day in July Franklin casually mentioned how much he would like to see two plays by Moliere. The Comedic Francaise heard about it, not by accident, we can be sure, and instantly announced a command performance for “Bon Homme Richard.” By four in the afternoon the performance was sold out.

  Elsewhere, Franklin used his wit, knowing that every word he said would be carried swiftly back to Vergennes. When a dinner companion remarked to him, “One must admit, monsieur, that it is a great and superb spectacle which America offers us today,” Franklin replied, “Yes. But the spectators do not pay.” As the year 1777 drew to a close and nothing but bad news arrived from America, Franklin grew more blunt. One night in September, at another dinner party with an influential French nobleman, he deliberately drank more wine than usual. Then he turned to his host and said, “There is nothing better to do here than to drink; how can we flatter ourselves . . . that a monarchy, will help republicans revolted against their monarch.”

  Franklin was playing a truly desperate game, and in that gloomy fall of 1777, even he must have wondered if he was holding a losing hand. Along with the French stand-pat policy, and mounting English pressure, there was the dismal prospect of American bankruptcy. The cargoes of tobacco and wheat that were to have financed their mission could not penetrate the British blockade. The French loan to the commissioners was exhausted and Hortalez et Cie, to the vast agitation of Beaumarchais, was also awash in red ink. Franklin and Deane discussed the possibility of selling some of the unshipped guns and uniforms they had already bought to keep the mission going.

  The news from America continued to be bad. Arthur Lee read the commissioners a paragraph from his Congressman brother, Richard Henry Lee, morosely predicting that without an alliance with France and Spain and an immense loan, it would be “difficult to maintain . . . independence.” The swarm of spies inside and outside the Paris mission also took their toll. When they presented a memoire to Versailles, asking for an additional loan of 14 million livres and the recognition of American independence, Vergennes told them that his immediate superior, the aged and timid Count de Maurepas, had been warned by Ambassador Stormont that the memoire was coming before it even arrived.

  From America in that same gloom-ridden fall of 1777 came bad news of a more personal kind. William Franklin had been caught signing and smuggling out of Connecticut official pardons, which the British were using to regain wavering New Jerseyites who had taken an oath of allegiance to Congress. Negotiations for his exchange with the British for an American prisoner of equal rank were abruptly suspended and William was confined to the town jail in Litchfield, Connecticut. It was on the second floor above the local tavern, making sleep almost impossible. William’s cell was minute, with only one tiny window. Meanwhile, the British Army abandoned New Jersey and took William’s wife Elizabeth with them. Adrift in a New York already jammed with loyalist refugees, without funds or friends, Elizabeth collapsed both mentally and physically. Friends got word to William that she was dying and he begged Washington’s permission to go to her side. The tenderhearted Virginian was inclined to grant his request, but when he referred it to Congress, it was icily refused. So, poor Elizabeth Franklin died, bewildered and alone. Her sweet, compliant nature had won Jane Mecom’s affection and she wrote to Franklin, lamenting how much Elizabeth must have “suffered . . . how attentive so ever those about her might have been to do all that was necessary for her. . . She is seldom out of my mind. I loved her greatly.” Then she added words that were even more poignant to Franklin. “Temple will mourn for her much.” For Temple, life had indeed become a series of losses and the death of the only mother he had ever known was undoubtedly a major factor in the emotional instability he was soon to reveal.

  Not quite as distressing, personally, but unsettling in other ways, was the news of Joseph Galloway’s about-face. Forgetting his tall talk about raising an American regiment Galloway had given up straddling the fence and fled to the protection of the British Army late in 1776, when they looked like sure winners. With a pang, Franklin must have instantly wondered what happened to the trunk full of his personal papers which he had left with his indecisive friend before sailing to France. Not only all the correspondence of his twenty years in England was in it, but also the only existing copy of the Autobiography he had written for William during those tranquil weeks at Twyford House with the Shipleys.

  Nevertheless, Franklin struggled to keep up his own spirits and those of the other Americans. In a long talk with Arthur Lee, he reiterated his faith that America would survive. What had been accomplished already, the achievement of national unity and the Declaration of Independence, was “such a miracle in human affairs” that if he had not been in the midst of it, and seen all the developments, he would never have believed it possible. Then late in November came news that seemed to demolish even this theoretical optimism. Sir William Howe had captured Philadelphia. Congress had fled first to Baltimore, and then to York, Pennsylvania. For all of the Americans in Paris it was a devastating blow. But for Franklin, the disaster was not only political but personal. All his property, most of his personal wealth and, as far as he knew, his daughter, her husband, and his beloved grandchildren were in British hands.

  But Franklin was not the sort of man who let his personal anguish disturb his public face. A few days later at a dinner party, someone said to him with obvious malice in his voice, “Well, Doctor Howe has taken Philadelphia.”

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

  There was truth as well as wit in this answer. Philadelphia was, from a strategic point of view, useless to the British, and Franklin with his chess player’s eye saw this clearly. The Delaware River was a thin, tenuous lifeline on which the British had to depend for supplies. They were surrounded by a sea of hostile Americans. Philadelphia was a symbolic conquest, not a real one.

  But diplomats deal in symbols and to the American mission in Paris the news was disheartening. On November 27, they gathered for a grim conference. Silas Deane wanted to categorically inform the French government that the Americans demanded an immediate alliance, or they would begin negotiations for a settlement with Great Britain. Franklin refused to throw in his hand so recklessly. He insisted America could “maintain the contest and successfully too without any European assistance.” The danger was that France might construe such an ultimatum
as a threat and “abandon us in despair or in anger.” Lee sided with Franklin. The disconsolate envoys ended the conference by agreeing that the most they could hope for at the moment was that France would continue to pay the interest on their debts, which would at least keep them out of jail.

  Less than a week after this dismal decision, a rumor came drifting into Paris from Nantes. An American ship had arrived with a messenger carrying important dispatches for the commissioners in Paris. Like starving men, Franklin and his confreres gnawed on this crumb of hope. Perhaps the story of Howe’s capture of Philadelphia was another British fiction. The three commissioners and their French friends, Beaumarchais and Chaumont, gathered at Franklin’s house in Passy to await the arrival of the courier.

  The moment a chaise was heard rattling over the cobblestones of the courtyard of the Hotel Valentinois, Franklin and the others rushed out of the house. Thirty-year-old Jonathan Loring Austin of Boston, secretary of the Massachusetts Board of War, barely had time to introduce himself before Franklin asked, “Sir, is Philadelphia taken?”