Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  Some historians doubt that Franklin sent these letters to Lee. But he may have read them to him, as he read to William his long letter on his negotiations in England. He obviously wanted a tough reply to Lee on the record. Franklin took Lee seriously because he realized the damage the testy Virginian could do to the American cause with his connections in Congress. Moreover, he was, technically, Franklin’s equal in the American mission in Paris. Izard, on the other hand, although he was a friend of Henry Laurens, the president of Congress, Franklin treated as comedy. For one thing, his diplomatic assignment to the Grand Duke of Tuscany was an absurdity. The Grand Duke, from whom Congress hoped to extract a loan, would not even let the ambassador into his country. But Izard, by a close reading of his commission, persuaded himself that he was empowered to remain in Paris and serve as a fourth wheel on the American mission there. Franklin did not agree, and ignored him. This produced an endless series of angry expostulations and explosions. Izard styled himself “the voice of the truth” and lectured Franklin on everything he did, even down to Franklin’s having his grandson copy the Treaty of Alliance instead of letting Lee or Izard do it. At one point, he accused Franklin of acting like the tyrant Kouli Khan who cut the tendons of a man’s legs with his sword and then afterwards compelled him to dance.

  Izard had a habit of sending his secretary, one John Julius Pringle, to Franklin with ultimata which Franklin was supposed to answer on the spot. One day in April of 1778, Pringle, who was as imperious as his employer, appeared in Franklin’s study with one of these missives. Obviously enjoying himself, Franklin singled out Izard’s favorite objection, that no one had sent him a copy of the treaty with France, which he very badly needed to study as a model for the treaty he hoped to negotiate with Tuscany. The implication was that Franklin was guilty of delaying this immensely important mission. “Has not the treaty been sent to him? Did he go into Tuscany?” Franklin asked, knowing perfectly well that Izard was still sitting in Paris, with his wife and children, living off the American mission.

  Pringle could only puff that Izard had “good reasons for staying.” Izard proceeded to stay for another eight months, and then had the gall to ask Franklin for more money to support himself and his family in their accustomed style. Wryly, Franklin pointed out to him that he had received 2000 guineas, over 10,000 dollars, less than a year before to equip him for his trip to Tuscany, and “you have not incurr’d the expence of that journey.” Then Franklin grew blunt. “You are a gentleman of fortune. You did not come to France with any dependence on being maintained here with your family at the expence of the United States in the time of their distress.” Instead of drawing more money from his country’s debt-riddled exchequer, Franklin suggested Izard reimburse the United States the money he had been paid for services never rendered.

  To complete the demolition of Izard, Franklin wrote one of his smaller satiric masterpieces, Petition of the Letter Z. It was the story, complete with dialogue, of a demand by “the letter Z, commonly called Ezzard, Zed, or Izard,” against being treated “with disrespect and indignity.” Z insists on being placed at the head of the alphabet, and substituted for S in the word wise. But the other letters vote him down. He is admonished “to be content with his station, forbear reflections upon his brother letters, and remember his own small usefulness, and the little occasion there is for him in the republic of letters.”

  To make Izard squirm a little more, Franklin, when he asked him for the government’s money, said he needed it to buy food and clothing for some 300 American prisoners who had escaped from British jails and were completely dependent on the American mission for food and clothing. These seamen were one more of Franklin’s many harassments. As a descendant on his mother’s side of Nantucket sailors, he had an instinctive sympathy for saltwater men, which seven crossings of the Atlantic had only deepened. He used has many contacts in England, particularly with the sympathetic David Hartley, to set up a fund to buy warm clothing and decent food for the sailors still in British prisons. There were almost two of these unfortunate men in jail at one point during the war.

  Technically they were not Franklin’s responsibility, but he fretted and worried over them as if they were his own children. Arthur Lee intruded his incompetent hands into the business, with the help of his tale bearing spy-secretary, Major Thornton. Certain as usual that only a Lee could do things right, Arthur personally selected a Maryland merchant, Thomas Digges, who was operating as Lee’s private secret agent in London, Like almost everyone else around Lee, Digges was on the British payroll. He was also a first-class scoundrel. He took 400 pounds which Franklin sent to David Hartley and, instead of passing it on to the prisoners in weekly stipends, kept it in his own pocket.

  Franklin’s condemnation of Digges is one of his lesser known classics. “He that robs the rich even of a single guinea is a villain; but what is he who can break his sacred trust, by robbing a poor man and a prisoner of 18 pence given in charity for his relief and repeat that crime as often as there are weeks in a winter, and multiply it by robbing as many poor men every week as make up the number of near 600? We have no name in our language for such atrocious wickedness. If such a fellow is not damned, it is not worthwhile to keep a devil.”

  Along with being hounded and harassed by his countrymen, Franklin was ceaselessly bombarded with appeals for interviews and letters of recommendation from Frenchmen. He told James Lovell of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, “You can have no conception how we are . . . besieged and worried on this head, our time cut to pieces....” His old friend Barbe Dubourg was frequently guilty of sending total strangers to Franklin. Finally Franklin could stand it no longer, and spoke his mind with undiplomatic bluntness. “These applications are my perpetual torment.... All my friends are sought out and teiz’d to teize me. Great officers in all ranks, in all departments; ladies great and small . . . worry me from morning to night. The noise of every coach now that enters my court terrifies me. I am afraid to accept an invitation to dine abroad, being almost sure of meeting with some officer or officer’s friend, who, as soon as I am put in good humour by a glass or two of champaign, begins his attack upon me. . . If therefore, you have the least remaining kindness for me, if you would not help to drive me out of France, for God’s sake, my dear friend, let this your twenty-third application be your last.”

  As usual, Franklin kept his sanity by seeing both the funny and the serious side of the situation. One day, not long after Barbe Dubourg’s twenty-third application, Franklin cooked up a “Model of a Letter of Recommendation of a Person You Are Unacquainted With.”

  The bearer of this, who is going to America, presses me to give him a letter of recommendation, tho’ I know nothing of him, not even his name. This may seem extraordinary, but I assure you it is not uncommon here. Sometimes indeed, one unknown person brings another equally unknown, to recommend him; and sometimes they recommend one another! As for this gentleman, I must refer you to himself for his character and merits, with which he is certainly better acquainted than I can possibly be. I recommend him however to those civilities which every stranger of whom one knows no harm has a right to; and I request you will do him all the good offices and show him all the favour that, on further acquaintance, you shall find him to deserve.

  Perhaps because of his aversion to the whole business of recommendation, Franklin never met the Marquis de Lafayette before that symbolic hero of Franco-American cooperation departed from France. But he did respond to pleas from friends of Lafayette’s powerful family and write a letter to George Washington, asking him to take the impulsive, twenty-year-old romantic militarist under his personal care. Only when Lafayette returned to France in 1779 to lead a projected French invasion of England did the now thoroughly certified young hero meet Franklin. Then, of course, they became instantaneous friends, and for a while Temple Franklin was so enraptured by Lafayette’s military ardor that he donned a uniform and served as his aide-de-camp.

  About this time came some comic r
elief from England. George III, acting out his paranoid conviction that Franklin was the evil genius behind the war, listened with great attention when a local electrical scientist, one Benjamin Wilson, assured him that Franklin’s pointed lightning conductors were inferior to blunt ones. The King asked Franklin’s old friend, Sir John Pringle for his opinion, and Pringle replied tartly that natural laws were not changeable by royal pleasure. George flew into a rage, fired Pringle as physician to the Queen, removed him as president of the Royal Society, and banished him from the court. He then threw himself into Wilson’s arms and replaced all the pointed conductors on St. James Palace with blunt ones.

  The wrangle inspired the following verse from a London wit:

  While you, great George, for safety hunt

  And sharp conductors change for blunt

  The nation’s out of joint:

  Franklin a wiser course pursues,

  And all your thunder fearless views,

  By keeping to the point.

  Chuckling over the story in Paris, Franklin commented that he wished the King had rejected all kinds of lightning rods. Then he might worry about whether he and his family were safe from the “thunder of Heaven” and stop using “his own thunder in destroying his innocent subjects.”

  Another creator of headaches soon arrived in Paris to challenge Franklin’s good humor. John Adams, Silas Deane’s replacement, was allied by blood and instinct to the “Ls & As” on which Arthur Lee’s schemes and hopes depended. Yet Adams’ stubborn New England honesty would not permit him to condemn Franklin out of hand. His diary supplies us with a fascinating study of a man slowly rationalizing his prejudices. It also explains why Franklin, for all his fame and geniality, had numerous enemies. Adams personified a type of man, still very much among us today, who insists that life should be far more simple and literal than it really is or ever will be. Essentially it is a moral approach to life, a demand that all activities have a direct and obvious relationship to some purpose, preferably large and important. A candor amounting to self-confession, regardless of the consequences, is another trait highly prized by such people. Franklin, who preferred to work behind the scenes, believed that indirect influence usually achieved far more than confrontation and was constantly ready to exploit the humorous or satiric potentialities in every situation, inevitably outraged the Lees and Adamses of his world, and even today arouses a kind of sniping enmity among a wide range of writers and historians.

  Almost anywhere, Adams would have found it hard to get along with Franklin, but the situation in France multiplied his bafflement and irritation. One of the more amusing things about these moralists, who are so quick to find fault with those around them, are their rather large egos. Adams was constantly fretting in his diary over his role in history. He struggled against considerable limitations to model himself into a great man, and as the leader of the fight for independence, he had won a justifiably large reputation among his own countrymen. But when he arrived in France, he got a shock from which his ego never quite recovered.

  There was only one American name on everyone’s lips: Franklin. “His name was familiar to government and people,” Adams groused, “to foreign 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 scullion in a kitchen who did not consider him a friend....” Chaumont’s publicity campaign, in which Franklin had so cheerfully joined, had obviously been a huge success. What Adams could not stand was the unabashed pleasure that Franklin took in the publicity, and the enthusiasm with which he aided and abetted it. This, declared Adams’ puritan conscience, was egotism and vanity. It made it easy for him to resent the French tendency to attribute near miraculous powers to Franklin. “When they spoke of him they seemed to think he was to restore the Golden Age,” Adams humphed. “His plans and his example would abolish monarchy, aristocracy and hierarchy through-out the world.”

  Franklin greeted Adams warmly as an old compatriot from the Continental Congress, personally introduced him to Vergennes, and for the first two weeks took him with him to dinner nightly, giving him an opportunity to become acquainted with a veritable Who’s Who of French society. Adams met everyone from the noted philosopher Condorcet to Monsieur de Sartine, the powerful Minister of Marine, and Madame de Maurepas, wife of the French Prime Minister and a lady of enormous influence. Adams missed the point completely. He simply had no idea that these sophisticated people combined diplomacy, champagne, wit and duck a la bigarade. Instead of being grateful to Franklin for giving him in two weeks an entry into the French Establishment which Arthur Lee had failed to achieve in two years, Adams wrote in his autobiography: “These incessant dinners and dissipations were not the objects of my mission to France.”

  Adams was equally obtuse when he observed Franklin’s daily routine. He called it “a scene of continual dissipation.” Franklin breakfasted too late, he complained, “and as soon as breakfast was over a crowd of carriages came to his levee.” The visitors were “philosophers, academicians and economists . . . but by far the greater part were women and children come to have the honor to see the great Franklin, and to have the pleasure of telling stories about his simplicity, his bald head and scattering straight hairs.” It never seemed to dawn on the bilious little man from Boston that Franklin was continuing that love affair between himself and the French people which had played no small part in making the alliance possible. Instead of realizing that Franklin had concentrated on this side of the mission, and let Deane handle the commercial and shipping problems, the resentful New Englander groaned: “I found that the business of the commission would never be done unless I did it.”

  With this air of self-pitying martyrdom, Adams took charge of putting the commission’s books and papers in order. There is no doubt that here he performed a much needed service. Franklin was not a very orderly man. When he attempted to convert himself into a paragon of moral perfection by practicing his list of virtues, order was the one that had baffled him most. Perhaps this was an inevitable result of his multiple talents: In France a certain amount of pride was also probably involved. At the age of seventy, when you are one of the most famous men in the world, it is difficult to turn bookkeeper. Unfortunately he got little help from those around him. William Temple Franklin was more interested in becoming a playboy than an efficient secretary, and Edward Bancroft, who was supposed to be the general secretary of the mission, spent most of his time living it up in Paris with Silas Deane, William Carmichael, and their ship captains.

  By refusing to divide the business of the mission, and by succumbing to Arthur Lee’s injunction that all official papers must be signed by all three commissioners. Adams found himself pursuing Franklin for days to get his signature on a single document. Adams raged to his diary about Franklin’s dislike for doing anything until it absolutely needed doing and he complained even more sourly over Franklin’s reluctance to speak out in public. Adams seemed to think that Franklin should have an American opinion on every aspect of the war, and that he should trumpet these day and night. He decried what he considered Franklin’s subservience to the French, never seeming to realize that America was totally dependent on France for money, guns, ships of the line, and all the other sinews of war, except men. Adams, with his puritanical insistence on bellowing the truth as he saw it, no matter what the consequences, simply could not see the wisdom of Franklin’s dictum about the need to “comply with humors” of people who were providing the wherewithal for the war effort.

  If Adams was annoyed by Franklin, he was honest enough to admit that he was appalled by Arthur Lee. By the summer of 1778, the madness which Franklin had predicted for Lee seemed close to erupting. He was completely irrational on the subject of Benjamin Franklin, spewing forth venomous slander and denunciatory diatribes to Adams and to correspondents in America. Lee made the preposterous suggestion that his house in Paris be set up as the central office o
f the commissioners, and all the papers of the mission kept there. Why the youngest member of the mission should make the oldest travel two to three hours each day to discuss their affairs and sign a few papers was hard to rationalize: “Dr. Franklin’s age,” Adams wrote Lee, “his rank in the commission . . . his character in the world,” made it a rather strange proposition. Moreover, “nine-tenths of the public letters are constantly brought to this house [Adams was living at Passy with Franklin] and will ever be carried where Dr. Franklin is.” This unarguable truth was, of course, wormwood for Arthur Lee, and when Adams suggested that Lee abandon his expensive separate quarters in Paris and move in with him and Franklin at Passy, the Virginian declared that he did not trust their host, Monsieur Chaumont. Adams suggested, by way of a final compromise, that they meet regularly at nine o’clock in the morning at Passy. This would catch Franklin before he began his daily social whirl. Lee replied that he could not possibly get there before eleven.

  In a moment of instinctive candor, Adams summed up Lee and Izard in words that explain for all time Franklin’s antipathy to them. Lee’s countenance, Adams said, “is disquieting, his air not pleasing, his manners not engaging, his temper . . . harsh, sour and fiery, and his judgment of men and things is often wrong.... Izard is still worse.” But when Adams heard the latest news from America about Silas Deane, his emotions took charge, and he went berserk.

  Deane, after waiting in vain for Congress to give him the triumphal reception he felt he deserved, gradually realized he was an accused man. When Congress was slow about giving him a hearing, he took to the newspapers and recklessly attacked Arthur Lee and his friends. Adams rushed to Franklin and told him that Deane’s public self-defense was “one of the most wicked and abominable productions that ever sprang from a human heart!” All his latent hostility for Franklin poured out. “No evil could be greater, nor any government worse than the toleration of such conduct,” he shouted.