With these bold proposals, which he did not discuss with Vergennes, Franklin gave the ball Oswald had placed against his foot a mighty boot toward the public goal of peace, and his private goal, American control of the North American continent. Like the good gamesman he was, Franklin knew that by eliminating Grenville, he had seized the initiative in the negotiations, and he was determined to maintain his momentum. There was another reason for his urgency, which sprang from his insider’s knowledge of English politics. He knew that Lord Shelburne had only a tenuous grip on Parliament. It was imperative to strike a bargain with him as soon as possible because the chances were all too good that any minister who replaced him would be a more compliant tool of George III, hence far more hostile to American claims.
Simultaneously Franklin made it clear that he was not going to be an apostle of reconciliation, trusting in the triumph of sweetness and light, without some clear-cut gestures of reciprocity from Shelburne. When the Prime Minister dragged his feet on sending Oswald an official commission to act as peace commissioner, Franklin forbade the old Scot to mention his eight-point offer and demanded a specific assurance that Shelburne was prepared to concede American independence. To reassure the Doctor, Shelburne sent across the Channel one of Franklin’s most ardent English admirers, young Benjamin Vaughan. He had published an edition of Franklin’s scientific writings in London in 1779, a neat bit of propaganda on America’s behalf. Arriving in Paris, Vaughan went straight to Passy and handed over to Franklin copies of several secret dispatches which Shelburne had sent at the same time by courier to Oswald. These included a concession of Franklin’s four necessary articles. Now he was ready to begin escalating the advisable articles into necessary ones, especially the article on Canada.
In a carefully understated, routine way, Franklin sent Shelburne’s communications to Vergennes. The reaction of the French foreign minister reflected his fear, and no doubt his amazement, that Franklin was moving so fast. The French had barely opened their negotiations. If Franklin maintained his momentum, he had already obtained more than Vergennes ever dreamt the English were ready to concede it seemed more than ever likely that the Americans might sign a separate peace which would make them independent of both Britain and France. So the Count sent Franklin a terse warning that Shelburne’s prime goal was still “producing a division between the King and the United States.” Franklin was prepared to ignore this warning with equanimity. He had already demonstrated his intention, and his ability, to negotiate independently. But momentum, Canada, even peace itself, were suddenly imperiled by the return of John Jay to the negotiating table.
The hawk-nosed, thin-lipped puritan from New York recovered from his influenza just in time to greet Richard Oswald, returning from London with his commission to negotiate a treaty. The wording of the commission was not much better than the equivocal phraseology young Grenville had obtained, and to which Franklin had objected so strenuously. Oswald was empowered to treat for peace “with the said colonies or any of them or any parts thereof.” Shelburne, with one eye on the hawks in Parliament, was making a desperate effort not to concede American independence in advance. Jay angrily declined to tolerate this omission. He absolutely refused to negotiate another step unless Oswald obtained a commission specifically recognizing the United States of America.
It was legalism at its worst. Franklin had objected to Grenville’s commission to get rid of Grenville as a negotiator. Now he had the man he wanted, Oswald, who agreed with almost every word he said. But he did not dare to contradict the vehement Jay without opening the American delegation to the kind of acrimony that Franklin had come to dread, thanks to Arthur Lee. After wrangling with Oswald over the wording for the better part of a week, Franklin persuaded Jay to discuss the problem with Vergennes. The French foreign minister smoothly assured Jay that he was quibbling over a technicality. Why not exchange full powers with Oswald? Once he accepted the Americans’ commissions as plenipotentiaries of the United States of America, Britain would have de facto admitted American independence. Jay frowned and shook his head, his dissatisfaction still all too evident. Vergennes turned to Franklin, and with studied reluctance Franklin said that this formula “would do.” He was not inwardly disagreeing and outwardly capitulating to Vergennes. Instead, he was forced to simulate enough reluctance to avoid including himself in Jay’s super-suspicious view of the situation. Franklin knew Jay was in communication with John Adams, and he knew, too, that Adams was already convinced that Franklin was a Vergennes tool.”
From the argument over recognition, Jay and Vergennes passed to discussing an even more disagreeable issue. During Jay’s negotiations in Madrid he had learned that the Spaniards were claiming all the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, from the Gulf of Mexico north to the Ohio River. Jay had insistently rebutted this claim and had written to Franklin for help. He had backed Jay wholeheartedly. He would not sell a drop of the Mississippi’s waters. “A neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street door,” he told Jay. Now, through the Spanish ambassador in Paris, the Spaniards were renewing this claim, which ran directly counter to Franklin’s goal of gaining the maximum territory possible for the United States. In fact, on August 12, 1782, he wrote Robert R. Livingston, explicitly declaring: “I hope Congress will insist on the Mississippi as the boundary, and the free navigation of the river.”
In the interview with Jay, Vergennes did not commit himself either way, but his confidential secretary, Gerard de Rayneval who was present as a translator, made it clear that in his opinion the Americans were asking too much. Back at Passy, a few hours later, this French reluctance to support American claims inspired Jay to a wild outburst of invective against Vergennes and France. Franklin listened in silence while Jay ranted that the French were playing the Spanish game and were out to keep America as small and impotent as possible. They were not even wholehearted supporters of American independence, Jay insisted, although Vergennes had told him that he would stipulate in all his negotiations with the British that American independence would be the first article in any treaty. After Jay had exhausted his invective against France, Franklin calmly conceded that Spain wanted to “coop us up within the Allegheny Mountains,” something both he and Jay had known for two years. But until he saw some proof that France was playing this game, he preferred to apply the principle he usually followed in such eases, to assume a friend was honest until hard evidence was presented to the contrary. As for Jay’s accusation that France was deliberately slowing down the negotiations, everything Vergennes had suggested in their conference seemed aimed at speeding them up.
What Franklin might have added, but did not dare tell his contentious young colleague, was the simple fact that he understood Vergennes’ position. Caught between the counterclaims of two allies, the Count instinctively groped for some kind of compromise. It was hardly even surprising that the French foreign minister should lean toward Spain since Spain was a far more important and influential ally to France than America. This was part of the diplomatic game, which was played on a field of shifting grays, not the absolute blacks and whites which the moralistic, literalistic Jay seemed to insist upon. What counted with Franklin was the fact that Vergennes had given the Americans a free hand in negotiating independently with the English, and Franklin had more than demonstrated that he construed this to mean he was free to drive the best bargain he could get from England. What counted even more, Franklin knew from his insider’s knowledge of English politics, was maintaining the initiative and Momentum that he had already built up with Oswald and Shelburne.
When Oswald visited him the next day (August 11) at Passy, Franklin talked about almost nothing but Canada. He discoursed on the “stretch of frontier” it occupied along America’s borders and vowed that there could be no hope of a lasting peace until England handed it over. How thoroughly he was succeeding, Oswald revealed in his letters to his superiors in England. After that conversation, he confessed he was ready to yield “the whole ter
ritory.”
But the next time Oswald saw Jay, he found the younger American wearing a startlingly different face. The truculent and negative manner of their first meeting had vanished. Now Jay suddenly seemed, not merely reasonable, but almost friendly on all points, except one, his insistence on a prior recognition of independence. Jay even drafted a patent or deed for George III, which he argued the King could sign without an act of Parliament, and urged Oswald to forward it to London. Franklin joined Oswald in talking him out of this absurdity, but other members of the British diplomatic mission were soon reporting to London that Jay was “much more open and unreserved” than Franklin.
This shift was deliberate on Jay’s part. Over Franklin’s objections, he had decided to disregard Vergennes’ advice, and the clear instructions of Congress to rely on it, and push for unilateral absolute recognition of American independence, prior to any negotiation. To prove his point, that he was willing to ignore his instructions from Congress, Jay, according to family legend, flung his pipe into Franklin’s fireplace at Passy, defiantly declaring that he would break any instructions, in the same way, that forced him to compromise the dignity and honor of America. From The Hague, John Adams, another lawyer in love with legalistic affirmations, and even more in love with anything that Franklin disliked, backed Jay.
Some historians have attempted to convert Jay into a hero by this bullheaded all-or-nothing demand for independence. There is no doubt that it has a noble, patriotic aura, but as the French general remarked, watching the charge of the Light Brigade, “Magnificent, but it is not war.” One can only say of the New Yorker’s patriotic intransigence. “It is not diplomacy.” Jay was letting his ancestral Huguenot prejudices against Catholic France run amok. Instead of playing the game like a chess champion, Franklin style, masking long-range goals, forcing the other side to make the first move, Jay practically gave away all his bargaining power by telling Oswald, “You have only to cut the knot of independence” and Americans would “take care” to be independent of all other nations. This was veering perilously close to violating the treaty with France, which Jay had vowed to Franklin he would never do. But puritans such as Jay and Adams never doubt their own integrity, only the integrity of others.
Canada, and every other point on Franklin’s advisable list, vanished from the horizon, and peace itself seemed to recede as this wrangle over “the point of independence” consumed the month of August. Then came a blow which knocked Franklin completely out of the negotiations for the better part of a month, his first severe attack of bladder stone. Jay was left alone on the field.
The British, encouraged by Jay’s loose remarks about a separate peace, decided to give him what he wanted and sent Oswald fresh instructions, agreeing that the King would recommend to Parliament an act acknowledging American independence. But by the time this concession arrived in Paris, Jay had allowed his paranoia about France to get completely out of control. He told Oswald that all he wanted, really, was a change in his phraseology, “constructively” recognizing American independence by empowering him to treat with the “commissioners of the United States of America.” Next, Jay, immensely disturbed by learning that Gerard de Rayneval had gone to London for personal conferences with Shelburne, persuaded Benjamin Vaughan to become a private courier to the Prime Minister, without Franklin’s knowledge. Jay’s purpose, in his own mind, was twofold. He was anxious to rebut what he suspected Rayneval was asking Shelburne to do, join France and Spain in limiting American claims to western lands and the Newfoundland fisheries.
To some extent Jay was correct in this suspicion. Although American claims were not the main purpose of Rayneval’s mission, he was sent to discuss peace terms between France and England; the subject did come up in the course of his conversations with Shelburne. Playing the game of placating Spain, the French envoy let Shelburne know that France thought American claims to the western lands were excessive. Shelburne casually agreed. But no deal was made, nothing was signed or even verbally arranged. Rayneval was simply fishing for British support if it came to the crunch on this question with the Americans. There was no secret agreement, or even a secret understanding arrived at. The whole situation remained immensely more fluid than Jay, with his rigidly suspicious mind, saw it.
No matter what France or Spain wanted to do about American claims, they were relatively powerless. Shelburne, dealing alone with four belligerents, was the only man who had the power to make decisive choices, as Franklin had seen from the start—and acted upon by negotiating boldly with him for the highest stakes. So Jay’s first message to Shelburne, urging him to back American claims to the fisheries and western lands, was largely superfluous.
Shelburne was far more interested in the second message which Vaughan carried from the American negotiator. On Jay’s behalf, Vaughan urged Shelburne to “cut the cords” which tied America to France. As Jay explained it to Robert R. Livingston, he made it clear that America intended “faithfully to fulfill our treaty and engagements with this Court,” but he pointed out that “it was a different thing to be guided by their or our construction of it.” Why this is heralded by some historians as a kind of breakthrough or departure from the policy laid down by Franklin is something of a mystery. It is precisely what he had been doing, and assuming that Vergennes had been doing, from the beginning of the negotiations.
But Jay’s words made the possibility of concluding a separate peace with the Americans begin to dance even more brightly before British eyes. Shelburne immediately rephrased Oswald’s commission, giving him power to “treat with the commissioners appointed by the colony’s, under the title of 13 United States.” This was still equivocal phraseology, but Jay accepted this watery reassurance and finally, on September 27, six weeks after they should have begun bargaining, he began drafting peace propositions. But before he could give them to Oswald, news from a battlefront arrived, underscoring the urgency Franklin had felt about time and momentum.
A joint French-Spanish attack on Gibraltar had been beaten off with heavy losses, and a relieving British fleet, under the leadership of Admiral Lord Howe, had slipped through the French and Spanish blockade to bring the fortress enough food and ammunition to guarantee its survival for another year at least. The threat to Gibraltar had been perhaps the key reason why the British had been panting to sign a separate peace with the Americans, to get them out of the war. Capture of the Rock, which the British had held since 1704, had been the prime goal of the Spanish war effort.
By way of peace propositions, Jay had nothing to propose but Franklin’s four necessary articles with refinements specifying boundaries. There is no evidence that Oswald used Gibraltar as an argument to exclude Canada, but this hardly proves that it had no influence on the negotiations. Defeat at Gibraltar made it all the more likely that Spain might press her territorial claims in the Mississippi Valley to get something out of the war, and Jay grew so jittery about this that he offered the English free navigation of the Mississippi River in return for backing American claims beyond the Alleghenies. Canada vanished from the peace negotiations, never to be mentioned again. The initiative had been lost and the momentum was now definitely in the hands of the British.
At this point, into Paris rode John Adams, with one of his few real diplomatic triumphs in his pocket. He had negotiated both a commercial treaty and a loan with Holland. His ego immensely inflated by this success, Adams saw himself arriving in France just in time to rescue his country from Franklin’s craven duplicity. He disapproved of everything Franklin had done, such as negotiating with Oswald before he had an official commission. Corresponding with gossips in Paris who fed his delusions, Adams added to his already incredible list of diary indiscretions by declaring that he could feel for Franklin “no other sentiment than contempt or abhorrence.” When Adams heard about the American acceptance of Oswald’s watery, altered commission, he had instantly leaped to the conclusion that Franklin’s finesse was at work, and wrote a violent letter to the American foreign se
cretary, threatening to resign from the peace commission. He deleted his threat from the final draft of his letter when he found out that the acceptance was John Jay’s decision. But Adams did not remove the conviction from his mind that Franklin was in the business of betraying his country for France.
The first thing Adams did in Paris was to listen to another talebearer, a Marylander named Matthew Ridley, who assured him that Franklin was selling America down the Seine. Adams was also fuming over what he considered a personal affront — the appointment of William Temple Franklin as the secretary of the commission, without consulting John Adams. This same Ridley assured Adams that Franklin had duped Jay into this appointment while Jay was still in Madrid, a total lie which Jay swiftly corrected. To his diary, Adams confided the following absurdity: “Between two as subtle spirits as any in this world, the one malicious, the other I think honest, shall have a delicate, a nice, a critical part to act. Franklin’s cunning will be to divide us . . .”
Perhaps the most ridiculous thing Adams confided to this perennially revealing confessional is the following: “The present conduct of England and America resembles that of the eagle and the cat. An eagle scaling over a farmer’s yard espied a creature that he thought a hare; he pounced upon him and took him up in the air. . ..” Adams proceeded to tell the fable of the eagle that is forced to stoop and set the cat down, never realizing that he was simply paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin.
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