Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  In the courtyard, crowds of Parisians swarmed around the envoys’ coaches. A gasp ran through the crowd when Franklin alighted. “He is dressed like a Quaker,” went the half-frightened whisper through the spectators. From Vergennes’ apartment in a wing of the palace, Franklin and his fellow envoys were led down the seemingly endless corridors to the monumental doors of the royal apartments. Noblemen and noblemwomen lined the walls, murmuring their admiration of Franklin’s daring. But the Frenchmen who almost went into shock was the royal chamberlain. There was an agonizing moment when, in the opinion of one American who was present, this functionary debated a protest. But his nerve failed him, and Franklin swept serenely into the King’s dressing room, where Louis XVI greeted him with a loack of ceremony which was in perfect harmony with the tone Franklin had set. In a loose robe, with his hair hanging down to his shoulders, the young King was warm and relaxed. “Firmly assure Congress,” he said, “of my friendship. I hope that this will be for the good of the two nations.” He added that he was “exceedingly satisfied, in particular, with you own conduct during your residence in my kingdom.” Franklin replied, “Your Majesty may count on the gratitude of Congress and it’s faithful observance of the pledge it now takes.”

  As Franklin returned to the courtyard, the sight of him inspired the spectators there to abandon the strict requirements of palace etiquette, and they burst into a tremendous cheer. There is a tradition that Franklin was so moved by it, he wept. Certainly the spontaneous affection of these warm-hearted people was enough to make him all but banish his inherited fears and prejudices, and rejoice in the certainty that he had found a good husband for the “virtuous daughter” that England had driven out of her house.

  The following day a sullen Lord Stormont slunk out of Paris without paying his respects to the King. It was practically a declaration of war. In England, the Opposition gathered around Lord Chatham for one last attempt to bring down the North ministry. Desperately ill, the great statesman was practically carried into the House of Lords and there rose to excoriate the ministry. Just as the debate began, with every evidence that North and his followers were on the brink of rout, Chatham collapsed and was carried out of the chamber, a dying man. The Opposition was left in total disarray, and North bumbled on in the service of the relentless King.

  Franklin was soon too busy coping with an outbreak of political madness in the American mission to pay much attention to what was happening in England. Instead of uniting the three commissioners in a euphoria of triumph, the French alliance became a signal for an unbelievably mean and fratricidal war of words. The evil genius was Arthur Lee.

  At first, Lee had tried to overcome his old envy of Franklin, born in the days when the man from Philadelphia had so thoroughly demolished him in the Grand Ohio fight and in the competition for the Massachusetts agency. When Lee first arrived in Paris, he wrote glowingly of Franklin to Lord Shelburne, calling him “our Pater Patriae,” the father of his country, several years before anyone had fastened the title on George Washington.” In his sour, savage way, Lee was a dedicated American. But like too many radicals, he was primarily a hater. This emotion, so foreign to Franklin’s spirit, was like a bubbling corrosive in Lee’s soul, constantly threatening to spill over onto his friends as well as his enemies.

  Lee was also an immensely vain, egotistical man, imbued with an enormous sense of personal and family esteem. The longer he stayed in France, the more mortified he became by Franklin’s popularity. How could the French shower such adulation on the son of a tallow candler and treat Arthur Lee, scion of the Lees of Virginia, as if he were practically invisible? This was the underlying, fundamental cause of Lee’s torment. But at first he controlled this basic emotion and aimed his spleen at a lesser target, Silas Deane.

  While Lee was in England he had met Beaumarchais and the ebullient dramatist had talked wildly to him, in his usual extravagant terms, about the prospects of French aid for America. At the time, Lee got the distinct impression that this aid was to be a free gift of the French King. By the time Silas Deane arrived in Europe, and Beaumarchais had got down to serious negotiations with Vergennes, the scheme of Hortalez et Cie had been born, and this free gift idea had been abandoned for both diplomatic and financial reasons.

  Louis XVI was one of the great cheapskates of history, and if he could possibly avoid giving anything away, he was eager to do it. There was also the wisdom of forcing Americans to pay for the aid in foodstuffs and raw material, thus enlarging the embryo commerce between the two nations. In fact, once Beaumarchais got his initial royal backing, he borrowed money wherever he could find it and invited numerous wealthy friends and speculators to join him in Hortalez et Cie, with the prospect of making millions. This Arthur Lee righteously refused to believe. With his basic inclination to suspect treachery and corruption everywhere, he instantly decided that Beaumarchais was a crook who was mulcting Americans for goods and services the King was giving away, and Silas Deane was even worse than a crook, he was a traitor in the game for all he could rob from his country.

  Never hesitant about putting his opinions on paper, Arthur Lee soon began writing these slanders to the Continental Congress. There he had some powerful correspondents. His two brothers, Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee, were influential members from Virginia. Richard was a fervent admirer and constant colleague of Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, who was not far behind Arthur Lee when it came to suspecting the worst of people. Thus Lee had support from the two most powerful states in the confederation. Serenely certain of his own rectitude, he was soon outlining a plan whereby the “Ls & As” could take over the whole war. The first thing he did was persuade Congress to send him reinforcements. He got his brother, William Lee, appointed commercial agent for America in France, replacing the previous commissioner, Thomas Morris, drunken half-brother of financier Robert Morris. Thomas needed replacing; he had allowed the slippery French merchant Penet, to swindle thousands from the American government. William Lee was cut from the same contumacious cloth as Arthur, in fact he was even more of an anomaly as an American diplomat because he was also still an alderman of the city of London, a post he declined to resign. Although Franklin’s son was in jail in Connecticut for trying to straddle the fence between rebel and loyalist, William Lee did not for a moment allow his strange political stance to deter him from joining Arthur in his mudslinging campaign. “You can’t at this time be unacquainted with the faithless principles, the low, dirty intrigue, the selfish views & the wicked arts of a certain race of men, & believe me, a full crop of these qualities you sent in the first instance from Philadelphia to Paris,” he told his correspondents in America. Meanwhile, Arthur was telling Samuel Adams and Richard Henry Lee how to rearrange America’s diplomats in Europe. “France remains the center of political activity, and here, therefore, I should choose to be employed.” He proposed sending Franklin to Vienna, a post that was “respectable and quiet” and thus eminently suited for an old man. Silas Deane could be shipped to Holland, and “the Alderman, brother William, was slated for Berlin. But he reiterated that France, “the great wheel that moves them all,” was to be reserved for his unique genius.

  To achieve this goal, Lee found fault with everything. He professed to be horrified when he discovered that Silas Deane alone, without consultation with the other commissioners, was sending orders to Franklin’s nephew, Jonathan Williams, in Nantes. Lee made it seem a crime that Deane was doing private business on the side, sometimes investing his own money as well as the government’s money in outfitting a privateer or in buying goods and hiring a ship to transport them to America. It did not trouble him in the least that Deane lacked the Lee family’s patriarchal estates and hundreds of slaves and had only his business connections to keep him and his family solvent. The British ministry, eager to repay Franklin for the headaches he had been giving them by feeding inside information to the Opposition, was delighted to fill Lee’s head with stories, some of them true, about Deane and Edward
Bancroft gambling in British stocks. Lee got this information from Major John Thornton, a self-styled humanitarian who had come to Paris on behalf of American prisoners of war in British jails. Lee hired Thornton as his secretary, never suspecting he was a British spy.

  While Thornton was picking him clean, Lee fulminated over Bancroft’s frequent trips to England, which aroused his suspicions to the point of frenzy. Considering the fact that he was guilty, Bancroft did a remarkable job of facing Lee down, boldly calling on him for proof and pointing to the secret information (most of it rather trifling) which he brought back from England as proof of his loyalty to the patriot cause. But lack of proof never troubled Arthur Lee. In the feverish world of his imagination, he was capable of conjuring up evidence that did not exist and then writing about it as if it were a reality he had seen and even touched. Bancroft became an excuse to widen his circle of malevolence to include Franklin. He began by accusing the Doctor of spending too much time in the salons and dining rooms of Paris. Since he himself, thanks to his sour and humorless ways, was rarely invited into French homes, he was soon conjuring up visions of unspeakable orgies in which Franklin was indulging while his country was perishing.

  Although neither Deane nor Franklin had any idea of what Lee was writing home, it was easy enough to gather from Lee’s touchy manner that all was not harmonious within the mission. Franklin struggled to maintain at least a semblance of good feeling. One day when Deane and Lee were dining with him, one of their French neighbors sent in a large cake with the inscription, Le digne Franklin (The worthy Franklin).

  “As usual, Doctor,” Deane said, “we have to thank you for our accommodation and to appropriate your present to our joint use.”

  Franklin, no doubt seeing the sour look on Arthur Lee’s face, said, “Not at all. This must be intended for all the commissioners; only these French people cannot write English. They mean, no doubt, Lee, Deane, Franklin. “

  “That might answer,” growled the humorless Lee, “but we know that whenever they remember us at all, they always put you first.”

  Unfortunately for Silas Deane, Lee’s attack on him coincided with widespread criticism of both the quality and the number of the foreign officers Deane had recruited to serve in the American Army. Too many of these men arrived in America with a contract signed by Deane, guaranteeing them commands and ranks already held by Americans. Congress was forced either to buy them out and ship them home at American expense, or order Washington to give them commands, at the risk of alienating some of the best officers in the American Army. Franklin did his best to intercede for Deane. He knew from firsthand experience the immense pressure, under which Deane had worked, as well as his inexperience in such matters. Franklin told Congressman James Lovell of the Committee for Foreign Affairs, “I, who am upon the spot and know the infinite difficulty of resisting the powerful solicitations of great men, who if disobliged might have it in their power to obstruct the supplies he was then obtaining do not wonder . . . he was at first prevailed on to make some such agreements.” All of the men were recommended as “Caesars, each of whom would have been a valuable acquisition to America,” He assured Lovell that Deane had “long since corrected that mistake, and daily approves himself to my certain knowledge an able, active and extremely useful servant of the publick.”

  Sensing he had Deane on the defensive. Lee became even more impossible to deal with during the negotiations for the Treaty of Alliance. Vergennes made it clear that Lee was persona non grata to him, and hence he was frequently left out of the highly secret diplomatic maneuverings. This threw Lee into frenzies of resentment. He called for reinforcements on his fellow Southerner, Ralph Izard, who had been appointed ambassador to the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Izard was immensely wealthy and had many of the mannerisms and attitudes of an English lord. Pontifically, he insisted on intruding himself into the delicate negotiations and was outraged when Franklin declined to consult him. At one point, Lee, with Izard’s headstrong backing, threatened to wreck the treaty by refusing to sign it, because he and Izard did not like a minor clause waiving export duties on goods shipped to the French West Indies in return for a French waiver on the exportation of molasses to the United States. Only a last minute concession by the French, which allowed Congress to be the final arbiter of this agreement, rescued Franklin from acute embarrassment.

  Izard wrote Franklin a haughty letter, declaring he felt himself hurt by Franklin’s lack of consultation with him during the negotiations, and demanding an interview with him. Franklin’s reply must have made it clear to the South Carolina aristocrat that he was not dealing with a man in his dotage. Tersely he said he had no time to give a full answer to Izard’s letter. “I must submit to remain some days under the opinion you appear to have formed, not only of my poor understanding in the general interest of America, but of my defects in sincerity, politeness and attention to your instructions.... You mentioned that you feel yourself hurt. Permit me to offer you a maxim, which has thro life been of use to me, and may be so to you in preventing such imaginary hurts. It is “always to suppose one’s friends may be right till one finds them wrong, rather than to suppose them wrong till one finds them right.”

  Hotheaded and impulsive, Deane was almost too willing to feud with Arthur Lee. Franklin attempted to cool him off by imputing Lee’s habits of mind to incipient insanity. “It is very charitable to impute to insanity what proceeds from the malignity of his heart,” Deane told Jonathan Williams. “But the Doctor insists upon it that it is really his case, & I am every day more & more inclined to give in to it.” But when Congress recalled Deane (on November 21, 1777) and replaced him with John Adams, there was no doubt that Lee had triumphed at home. The unstable Deane alternated between rage and self-pity, and at first threatened to quit politics and refuse to return to America.

  But Beaumarchais announced that he could make Deane’s return a triumph if he let the dramatist write the scenario. Beaumarchais arranged with Vergennes for Deane to return aboard a French fleet, escorting the first French ambassador to the United States. The King gave him a portrait framed in diamonds, Vergennes wrote a letter of glowing praise, and Franklin added another personal note to Henry Laurens, the president of Congress.

  More important, Franklin agreed, at Vergennes’ request, to say nothing to Arthur Lee about the identity or departure of the new French ambassador, their good friend Monsieur Gerard, the foreign office undersecretary with whom Franklin had conducted most of the negotiations. Deane, of course, found no difficulty in keeping his mouth shut, since he knew that Lee would put his busy pen to work immediately and arouse his cohorts in Congress to prime their rhetorical artillery. So, on March 31, 1778, Deane said farewell to Franklin and slipped out of Paris secretly. That night he joined Gerard somewhere along the highway south, and they headed for the naval base at Toulon, where the French fleet was ready to sail.

  This was all very comforting to Deane. But it left Franklin alone to face the spiteful wrath of the Lees. Arthur Lee went into a tantrum when he found out that he had been deceived. Lee knew, of course, that Deane had been recalled, and he had peremptorily insisted that his public accounts be settled, under his (Lee’s) authoritative eye before Deane departed. On the day Deane left Paris, Lee had written Franklin a haughty letter demanding “that the earliest day may be appointed” to tackle this formidable job. Franklin had coolly rebuffed him: “There is a stile in some of your letters, I observe it particularly in the last, whereby superior merit is assumed to yourself in point of care and attention to business, and blame is insinuated on your colleagues without making yourself accountable by a direct charge of negligence.” The tactic, Franklin said, “was as artful as it is unkind.” He then informed Lee that Deane had departed, leaving with him “the publick papers.”

  Lee exploded. “Had you studied to deceive the most distrusted and dangerous enemy of the public, you could not have done it more effectually,” he shrilled. “. . . trust, sir, you will not treat this le
tter as you have done many others with the indignity of not answering it.”

  Like William Franklin, Arthur Lee seemed to have a confirmed opinion that Franklin was in his dotage. To Lee, this meant he could be lectured and chastised almost at will. Franklin’s letter of April 3 must have changed his mind.

  SIR,

  It is true I have omitted answering some of your letters. I do not like to answer angry letters. I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation. If I have often receiv’d and borne your magisterial snubbings and rebukes without reply, ascribe it to the right causes, my concern for the honour & success of our mission, which would be hurt by our quarrelling, my love of peace, my respect for your good qualities, and my pity of your sick mind, which is forever tormenting itself, with its jealousies, suspicions & fancies that others mean you ill, wrong you, or fail in respect for you. —If you do not cure yourself of this temper it will end in insanity, of which it is the symptomatick forerunner, as I have seen in several instances. God preserve you from so terrible an evil: and for his sake pray suffer me to live in quiet.

  The following day Franklin wrote Lee a longer letter, answering his accusations in detail and adding an even more stinging rebuke. “You ask me, why I act so inconsistent with my duty to the publick? This is a heavy charge, sir, which I have not deserved. But it is to the publick, that I am accountable and not to you. I have been a servant to many publicks duo’ a long life; have serv’d them with fidelity, and have been honoured by their approbation: there is not a single instance of my ever being accus’d before of acting contrary to their interest or my duty. I shall account to the Congress when called upon for this my terrible offense of being silent to you about Mr. Deane’s and M. Gerard’s departure. And I have no doubt of their equity in acquitting me.”