Franklin’s selection was controversial, and it came partly because of pressure from Vergennes. Despite his doubts about Franklin’s energy, the French minister instructed his envoy in Philadelphia to lobby on his behalf and inform the Congress that his conduct “is as zealous and patriotic as it is wise and circumspect.” Vergennes also asked the Congress to require that the new delegation take no steps without France’s approval. The Congress complied by giving its commissioners strict instructions “to make the most candid and confidential communications upon all subjects to the ministers of our generous ally, the King of France; to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without their knowledge and concurrence.”21
Adams was appalled at being so shackled to France’s will, and he called the instructions “shameful.” Jay agreed, declaring that by “casting herself into the arms of the King of France” America would not “advance either her interest or her reputation.” Franklin, on the other hand, was pleased with the instructions to follow France’s guidance. “I have had so much experience of his majesty’s goodness to us,” he wrote the Congress, “and of the sincerity of this upright and able minister [Vergennes], that I cannot but think the confidence well and judiciously placed and that it will have happy effects.”22
He was heartened as well by a personal triumph. Over the objections of even such friends as Silas Deane, he was able to get Temple appointed as the secretary to the new delegation. The honor of his new appointment, and the rejection of his resignation, rejuvenated him. “I call this continuance an honor,” he wrote a friend, “and I really esteem it to be greater than my first appointment, when I consider that all the interest of my enemies…were not sufficient to prevent it.”
He even wrote another friendly letter to Adams, whose own commission to negotiate with Britain had been diluted by the addition of the new delegation. Their mutual appointments, Franklin told Adams, were a great honor, but he wryly lamented that they were likely to be criticized for whatever they accomplished. “I have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous, that was not censured as inadequate,” he said. “‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world, for in this they are frequently cursed.”23
As a master of the relationship between power and diplomacy, Franklin knew that it would be impossible to win at the negotiating table what was unwinnable on the battlefield. He had been able to negotiate an alliance with France only after America had won the Battle of Saratoga in 1777; he would be able to negotiate a suitable peace with Britain only after America and its French allies won an even more decisive victory.
That problem was solved in October 1781. The British general Lord Cornwallis had marched north from Charleston, seeking to engage General Washington’s forces, and had taken his stand at Yorktown, Virginia. France’s support proved critical: Lafayette moved to Cornwallis’s southern flank to prevent a retreat, a French fleet arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake to preclude an escape by sea, French artillery arrived from Rhode Island, and nine thousand French soldiers joined eleven thousand Americans under General Washington’s command. Two four-hundred-man columns, one French and the other American, began the allied assault and bombardment, which continued day and night with such intensity that when Cornwallis sent out a drummer on October 17 to signal his willingness to surrender, it took a while for him to get noticed. It had been four years since the battle of Saratoga, six and a half since Lexington and Concord. On November 19, word of the allied triumph at Yorktown reached Vergennes, who sent a note to Franklin that he reprinted on his press at Passy and distributed the following dawn.
Although the war seemed effectively over, Franklin was cautious. Until the present ministry resigned, there was always the chance that Britain would renew the struggle. “I remember that, when I was a boxing boy, it was allowed, even after an adversary said he had enough, to give him a rising blow,” he wrote Robert Morris, the American finance minister. “Let ours be a douser.”24
Lord North’s government finally collapsed in March 1782, replaced by one headed by Lord Rockingham. Peace talks between America and Britain could now begin. Franklin, it so happened, was the only one of the five American commissioners who was then in Paris. So, for the next few months, until Jay and then Adams finally arrived, he would handle the negotiations on his own. In doing so, he would face two complicating factors:
America had pledged to coordinate its diplomacy with France and her allies, rather than negotiate with London separately. But the British wanted direct talks leading to a separate peace with America. Franklin, on the surface, would initially insist on acting in concert with the French. But behind the scenes, he would arrange for private and direct peace negotiations with the British.
The Rockingham government had two rival ministers, Foreign Secretary Charles Fox and Colonial Secretary Lord Shelburne, each of whom sent their own negotiators to Paris. Franklin would maneuver to ensure that Shelburne’s envoy, whom he liked better and found more malleable, was given a commission to negotiate with the Americans.
The Negotiations Begin
“Great affairs sometimes take their rise from small circumstances,” Franklin recorded in the journal he began of the 1782 peace negotiations. In this case, it was a chance meeting between his old flame Madame Brillon and an Englishman named Lord Cholmondeley, who was a friend of Shelburne. Madame Brillon sent Cholmondeley to call on Franklin in Passy, and through him Franklin sent his regards to the new colonial secretary. Franklin had known and liked Shelburne since at least 1766, when he lobbied him about getting a western land grant and made occasional visits to his grand country manor in Wiltshire. Madame Helvétius also played a small role; Shelburne had just sent her some gooseberry bushes, and Franklin wrote politely that they had arrived “in excellent order.”25
Shelburne responded by dispatching Richard Oswald, a retired one-eyed London merchant and former slave trader who had once lived in America, to begin negotiating with Franklin. Oswald arrived on April 15 and immediately tried to convince Franklin that America could get a quicker and better deal if it negotiated independently of the French. Franklin was not yet willing. “I let him know,” he wrote, “that America would not treat but in concert with France.” Instead, he took Oswald to Versailles the next day to meet with Vergennes, who proposed to host a general peace conference of all the warring parties in Paris.26
On the way back from Versailles, Oswald argued again for a separate peace. Once the issue of American independence was settled by negotiations, he said, it should not be held up while matters relating only to France and Spain (including the ownership of Gibraltar) were still being disputed. He added an implicit threat: if France became involved and made too many demands, England would continue the war and finance it by stopping payment on its public debt.
The issue of independence, Franklin pointedly replied, had already been settled back in 1776. Britain should simply acknowledge it, rather than offer to negotiate it. As for reneging on their debt in order to renew the war, Franklin made no reply. “I did not desire to discourage their stopping payment, which I considered as cutting the throat of their public credit,” he wrote in his journal. “Such menaces were besides an encouragement with me, remembering the old adage that they who threaten are afraid.”
Instead, Franklin suggested that Britain consider offering reparations to America, especially to “those who had suffered by the scalping and burning parties” that England had enlisted the Indians to wage. “Nothing could have a greater tendency to conciliate,” he said, and that would lead to the renewal of commerce that Britain both needed and desired.
He even suggested a specific reparations proposal: Britain should offer to cede control of Canada. The money Britain could make from the Canadian fur trade, after all, was tiny compared to what it would save by not having to defend Canada. It was also far less than Britain could make through the renewed commerce with America that would flow from a friendly settlement. In addition, th
e money that America made from selling open land in Canada could be used to compensate the patriots whose homes had been destroyed by British troops and also the British loyalists whose estates had been confiscated by the Americans.
Behind France’s back, Franklin was playing a wily balance-of-power game. He knew that France, despite her enmity toward Britain, did not want it to cede control of Canada to America. That would make America’s borders more secure, reduce its tensions with Britain, and lessen its need for a friendship with France. If England continued to hold Canada, Franklin explained to Oswald, it “would necessarily oblige us to cultivate and strengthen our union with France.” In his report to Vergennes about his conversation with Oswald, Franklin did not mention that he had suggested the ceding of Canada. It was the first small indication that Franklin, despite his insistence that he would work hand in glove with the French, would be willing to act unilaterally when warranted.
As usual, Franklin was speaking from notes he had prepared, and Oswald “begged” to be trusted with them so he could show them to Shelburne. After some hesitation, Franklin agreed. Oswald was charmed by Franklin’s trust, and Franklin found Oswald to be sensible and devoid of guile. “We parted exceeding good friends,” he noted.
Franklin had one regret about the paper he entrusted to Oswald: its hint that compensation might be due to the British loyalists in America whose property had been confiscated. So he published on his Passy press, and sent to Adams and others, a fake issue of a Boston newspaper that purported to describe, in gruesome detail, the horrors that the British had perpetrated on innocent Americans. His goal was to emphasize that no sympathy was due the British loyalists, and that it was the Americans who deserved compensation. The fake edition was cleverly convincing. It featured a description of a shipment of American scalps purportedly sent by the Seneca Indians to England and a letter that he pretended was from John Paul Jones. To make it more realistic, he even included fake little ads about a new brick house for sale in south Boston and a missing bay mare in Salem.27
Britain agreed to Vergennes’s proposal for an all-parties peace conference, but that meant sending a new envoy, one who represented the foreign secretary Charles Fox rather than the colonial secretary Shelburne. The new envoy’s name was not auspicious: Thomas Grenville, the son of the despised George Grenville who had imposed the Stamp Act back in 1765. But Fox, who had long been sympathetic to the American side, assured Franklin that the young Grenville, a mere 27, was to be trusted. “I know your liberality of mind too well to be afraid that any prejudices against Mr. Grenville’s name may prevent you from esteeming those excellent qualities of heart and head which belong to him, or from giving the fullest credit to the sincerity of his wishes for peace.”28
When Grenville arrived in early May, Franklin immediately took him to Versailles, where the young Englishman made the mistake of suggesting to Vergennes that if “England gave America independence,” France should give back some of the Caribbean islands it had conquered and a peace could be quickly settled.
With the hint of a smile, Vergennes turned on the novice English diplomat and belittled his offer of independence. “America,” he said, “did not ask it of you. There is Mr. Franklin. He will answer you as to that point.”
“To be sure,” said Franklin, “we do not consider ourselves as under any necessity of bargaining for such a thing that is our own and which we have bought at the expense of much blood and treasure.”
Like Oswald, Grenville hoped to be able to convince Franklin to negotiate a separate peace with Britain rather than remain linked to France’s demands as well. To that end, he visited Passy a few days later and warned that France “might insist on” provisions that were not related to the treaty she had made with America. If that happened, America should not feel obligated by that treaty to “continue the war to obtain such points for her.”
As he had done with Oswald, Franklin refused to make such a concession. “I gave a little more of my sentiments on the general subject of benefits, obligations and gratitude,” Franklin noted. People who wanted to get out of obligations often “became ingenious in finding out reasons and arguments” to do so, but America would not follow that route. Even if a person borrows money from another and then repays it, he still owes gratitude:“He has discharged the money debt, but the obligation remains.”
This was stretching the idea of gratitude rather far, replied Grenville, for France was the party that actually benefited from America’s separation from Britain. Franklin insisted that he felt so strongly about the “generous and noble manner” in which France had supported America that “I could never suffer myself to think of such reasonings for lessening the obligations.”29
Grenville further annoyed Franklin by trying to hide the fact that his commission gave him the authority to negotiate only with France and not directly with the United States, which Britain did not yet recognize as an independent country. Franklin confronted him on this point at the beginning of June. Why did his commission not explicitly authorize him, Franklin asked, to deal directly with the United States? As Franklin reported to Adams the next day, “He could not explain this to my satisfaction, but said he believed the omission was occasioned by their copying an old commission.” That, of course, did not convince Franklin. He insisted that Grenville get a new commission before any negotiation could begin. This was not merely a nicety of protocol, as Franklin well knew. He was insisting that the British tacitly accept America’s independence as a precondition for talks. “I imagine there is a reluctance in their King to take this first step,” he wrote Adams, “as the giving such a commission would itself be a kind of acknowledgment of our independence.”30
Franklin was willing to work in concert with France, but he had nointention of allowing Britain to insist that France negotiate on America’s behalf. Vergennes agreed. “They want to treat with us for you. But this the King [of France] will not agree to. He thinks it not consistent with the dignity of your state. You will treat for yourselves.” All that was necessary, Vergennes added, was “that the treaties go hand in hand and are signed the same day.”
Wittingly or not, Vergennes had given Franklin tacit permission to begin separate discussions with the British. Because the British were very eager to have such talks, and because there were two British negotiators vying to conduct them, Franklin had a lot of leverage. When Grenville returned to Passy at the beginning of June to argue once again for direct talks, this time Franklin decided “to evade the discussion” rather than reject the idea.
“If Spain and Holland and even if France should insist on unreasonable terms,” Grenville asked, “can it be right that America should be dragged on in a war for their interests only?”
It was “unnecessary to enter at present into considerations of that kind,” Franklin replied. “If any of the other powers should make extravagant demands,” he continued enticingly, “it would then be time enough to consider what our obligations were.”
Because Grenville was so eager to get direct talks underway, he was willing to tell Franklin, confidentially, that he was “instructed to acknowledge the independence of America previous to the commencement of the treaty.” Oswald was also eager for direct talks to begin, and he came to Passy two days later to hint that he would be willing to serve as Britain’s negotiator if Franklin preferred. He was coy. He was not trying to supplant Grenville, he insisted, for he was old and had no need for further glory. But it was clear to Franklin that he was now in the happy position of having a choice between two hungry suitors.
Oswald was more sophisticated than Grenville, and he was able to appear both more eager and more threatening. Peace was “absolutely necessary” for Britain, he confided. “Our enemies may now do what they please with us; they have the ball at their foot.” On the other hand, there were those back in London who were “a little too much elated” by Britain’s recent victory over the French navy in a major battle in the West Indies. If he and Franklin did not act soon, they might
prevail in prolonging the war. There had even been serious discussions, Oswald warned, of ways to finance further fighting by canceling debt payment only on bonds of more than £1,000, which would not upset most of the population.
Franklin noted that he viewed this “as a kind of intimidation.” Yet Oswald was able to soften Franklin through flattery. “He repeatedly mentioned the great esteem the ministers had for me,” Franklin recorded. “They depended on me for the means of extricating the nation from its present desperate situation; that perhaps no single man had ever in his hands an opportunity of doing so much good as I had at present.”
Oswald further endeared himself to Franklin by seeming to agree with him privately on what should be in a treaty. When Franklin railed against the idea of paying compensation to loyalists whose estates had been confiscated, saying that such a demand would elicit a contrary one from America demanding reparations for all the towns the British had burned, Oswald confidentially said that he personally felt the same. He also said that he agreed with Franklin that Britain should cede Canada to America. It was as if he were competing with young Grenville in an audition for the job of being Britain’s negotiator and trying to win Franklin’s recommendation.
Indeed, oddly enough, he was. He showed Franklin a memo that Shelburne had written that offered to give Oswald, if Franklin wished it, a commission to be the special negotiator with America. Shelburne wrote that he was willing to give Oswald any authority “which Dr. Franklin and he may judge conducive to a final settlement of things between Great Britain and America.” That way, Shelburne’s memo added, Britain could forge a peace with America “in a very different manner from the peace between Great Britain and France, who have always been at enmity with each other.”
Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein Page 118
