The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  In June 1776, New Jersey’s rebel government arrested Governor Franklin. After a hasty trial before two leaders of the rebel assembly, during which one of them, John Witherspoon, the president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), called him “a base born brat,” the Continental Congress ordered him deported to Connecticut. William wrote Temple a farewell note, urging him to be “dutiful and attentive to your grandfather to whom you owe great obligations.” But the governor also begged his son to “love Mrs. Franklin for she loves you and will do all she can for you if I should never return more. If we survive the present storms we may all meet and enjoy the sweets of peace with greater relish.” He signed this incompatible advice, “Your truly affectionate father.”

  VII

  Elizabeth wrote pathetic letters to Temple and to Sally Franklin Bache, describing her isolation in the governor’s mansion surrounded by unruly American soldiers who insulted her to her face if she ventured outside. All the wealthy loyalist friends in the vicinity had been arrested and shipped to the interior of New Jersey. “I can do nothing but sigh and cry,” she told Sally Bache in July 1776. “My hand shakes to such a degree I can scarcely hold a pen.” Sally tried to assure her sister-in-law of her continued friendship. When she gave birth to a baby in December 1775, she asked Elizabeth to be the godmother.

  A distraught Temple persuaded his grandfather to let him go to Perth Amboy to protect his stepmother. Soon he was writing strident letters, protesting the treatment she and his father were receiving from the rebel government.11 Elizabeth had not heard a word from William, nor did she have any address to which she might send a letter. She wrote a plaintive letter to her father-in-law, begging him to intercede with the Continental Congress on William’s behalf. He did not answer her.

  Next, Temple asked permission to take a letter from Elizabeth to his father. Ben refused to let him risk his life. The British and Americans were fighting furious battles in and around New York, and the rebels were losing most of them. The whole region was a war zone. Temple replied with an angry letter that made his grandfather realize he was becoming a loyalist like his father.

  Political decisions in Philadelphia flowed inevitably from those unnerving military defeats. Congress decided that the Americans could not win the war without foreign aid. They voted to send Benjamin Franklin, the one American with international fame, to France to plead for it. Ben made a fateful decision. He summoned Temple to Philadelphia to discuss “something offering here that will be much to your advantage.” That something was an appointment as Benjamin Franklin’s private secretary in France. Ben told Temple it was a chance to launch a diplomatic career that would make him famous in America. He would also have unique educational opportunities in Europe, if he wished to pursue them. Ben was taking his daughter Sally’s oldest child, seven-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache, with him to send him to school in Geneva, Switzerland.

  We do not know what Temple thought and felt during this discussion. But it is not difficult to imagine his inner torment. To accept his grandfather’s invitation meant he was leaving in Perth Amboy the fragile, loving woman he had learned to call mother. Yet his father had told him to obey his grandfather. On October 26, 1776, Franklin, Temple, and Benny Bache boarded the American warship USS Reprisal and sailed for France. A year later, Elizabeth Downes Franklin died a lonely, penniless refugee in British-occupied New York without seeing her “dear persecuted prisoner” (William) or Temple again.12

  Abandoning Elizabeth Downes Franklin was the cruelest act of Benjamin Franklin’s life. He never offered her the shelter of his house in Philadelphia or urged his daughter, Sally, and her husband, Richard Bache, to look after her. He never interceded on her behalf with the leaders of the Revolution in New Jersey. It was grim evidence of how deeply William Franklin’s defection from the Revolutionary cause had wounded his father—and how bitterly Ben Franklin felt that Elizabeth shared the responsibility for this demoralizing pain.

  MON CHER PAPA

  In France, seventy-year-old Benjamin Franklin began the third phase of his extraordinary life. His fame as a scientist and philosopher blended with the huge excitement he generated as the spokesman for the embattled new republic, the United States of America. With consummate shrewdness, Franklin wore the simple clothes of an American Quaker, an imaginary character created by savants such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The French wanted to believe that in the new world a new kind of man was emerging, free of the corruptions and infirmities of their decadent old world. Franklin was more than ready to encourage this illusion. One excited Parisian wrote: “Everything about him announces the simplicity of primitive morals…The people clustered about him as he passed and asked: ‘Who is this old peasant who has such a noble air?’”

  The old peasant, whose primitive morals had enabled him to maintain wives on both sides of the Atlantic without a hint of scandal, was soon displaying his gift for backstairs diplomacy. He began by charming France’s foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes. With the help of several American victories on the battlefield, Franklin persuaded this cautious veteran of twenty-four years’ service in Europe’s capitals to back the United States, first with secret aid and then with a formal alliance in 1778. This was only the beginning of Franklin’s French accomplishments. He secured over $40 million in loans and gifts from the French treasury—the equivalent of perhaps $600 million today—money that kept the bankrupt American government functioning. He supervised the shipment of tons of supplies and weapons to America. He armed and equipped American sea captains, such as John Paul Jones, who preyed on British shipping in their home waters with spectacular success. He raised money and aroused sympathy for American captives in British jails. He wrote letters and gave interviews that encouraged opposition in Parliament to George III’s determination to smash the rebellion.

  One might think these achievements would have made Franklin’s fellow American diplomats among his most ardent admirers. But the Americans of the eighteenth century were almost as complicated and unpredictable as their descendants of the new millennium. In the contorted souls of several colleagues, Franklin’s performance stirred envy and suspicion rather than admiration. They accused him of gross sexual misconduct and a dangerous subservience to France. Back in America, members of Congress echoed these charges—or read them aloud from the diplomats’ letters. The torrent of abuse became so vitriolic that in May 1781, Franklin resigned as ambassador to France. A panicky Congress persuaded him to withdraw the letter of resignation—but it remains a testimony to the industry if not the accuracy of Franklin’s enemies.

  Franklin’s seeming lack of system and orderliness as a diplomat irritated his critics. But it was his tendency to spend so much time with women that drove those with puritanical tendencies into paroxysms. They were appalled by the way the ladies of France swarmed to exchange kisses with the ambassador. This was visible proof that the septuagenarian Franklin was a libertine with sexual appetites of gargantuan proportions. Franklin’s fellow diplomat, Arthur Lee of Virginia, told his brother, Congressman Richard Henry Lee, that Franklin was “a wicked old man” who had made his headquarters in France “a corrupt hotbed of vice.” John Adams chimed in with equally savage letters. By 1780, Richard Henry Lee was asking Samuel Adams, “How long should the interests of the United States be sacrificed to the bad passions of that old man under the idea of his being a philosopher?”1

  In a cheerful letter to a grandniece in America, Franklin had a different explanation for his dalliances: “Somebody gave it out that I loved ladies; and then every body presented me their ladies (or the ladies presented themselves) to be embraced, that is to have their necks kissed. For as to kissing on the lips or cheeks it is not the mode here, the first is reckoned rude, and the other may rub off the paint. The French ladies have however 1000 other ways of rendering themselves agreeable; by their various attentions and civilities, & their sensible conversation. ’Tis a delightful people to live with.”2

  There were
times when female enthusiasm almost overwhelmed Franklin. At one point three hundred ladies surrounded him and placed a laurel wreath on his bald pate. Then they chose the prettiest among them to kiss him—and of course, to be kissed in return. A French neighbor who enjoyed watching Franklin in action told of women talking to him “for hours on end, without realizing that he did not understand much of what they said because of his scant knowledge of our language. But he greeted each one of them with a kind of amiable coquettishness that they loved. Occasionally, one madam or mademoiselle asked him if he cared for her more than the other pursuers. With a smile Franklin would reply in his limping French, ‘Yes, when you are closest to me, because of the power of the attraction.’”

  The remark combined flirtation and a reminder of his fame as a scientist. He was comparing the lady’s impact on him to the way an electrified piece of metal drew iron filings to it. Behind these amorous games lay the goal Franklin never forgot—persuading the French to back the faltering American Revolution. He knew—and cheerfully approved—the passion for politics among upper-class French women. He hoped their enthusiasm for his amiable American ways would be transmitted to their influential husbands or lovers.3

  II

  During his first years in France, Franklin’s favorite Frenchwoman was his neighbor in the suburb of Passy, Madame Brillon de Jouy. At thirty-five, she was exquisitely beautiful—and was also one of the best amateur pianists in Europe. Leading musicians dedicated compositions to her, and she wrote a number of sonatas for the harpsichord and the piano. She first attracted Franklin with her music. He began visiting her house to hear her play and her two pretty daughters sing. Franklin was soon calling these visits “my opera.”

  The ambassador also met Monsieur Brillon, who was twenty-four years older than his wife and rather brusque and self-satisfied, as became a powerful treasury official. Madame Brillon’s beloved father had recently died, which left her depressed and vaguely discontented with her husband. She began discussing religion with Franklin—one of his favorite topics. One night, sitting on the terrace of the Brillon mansion, Ben remarked that if the Catholic religion was the true one, he feared he was damned. He was constantly committing one or another of the seven deadly sins—pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, or sloth. Madame Brillon said he needed a spiritual director. Franklin asked her if she would take the job.

  Madame Brillon accepted the appointment and solemnly insisted she now had to hear his confession. The ambassador annotated his sins, placing special emphasis on his fondness for beautiful women. She announced she would have to think about this overnight and decide on his penance. The next day a note arrived on Franklin’s desk, informing him that Madame Brillon would grant him absolution. She forgave him for all his past sins and even his future ones, and would tolerate his weakness “as long as he loves God, America and me above all things, and I promise him a paradise where I shall lead him along a path strewn with roses.”4

  Amorous banter became the order of the day whenever Ben visited Madame Brillon. At one point he confessed there was a sin he could not stop committing—coveting his neighbor’s wife. On another visit he wondered whether a certain long-dead church father might have been right when he advised people that the best way to get rid of temptations was to yield to them.

  Madame Brillon coolly replied that she would have to discuss that question with “the neighbor whose wife you covet.” She stormily rejected his argument that the friendship a man has for women could be divided among many recipients like the music from her pianoforte. “This is something I shall never put up with,” she imperiously announced. Her heart, which was “capable of great love,” had chosen “only a few objects,” and Franklin was at the head of the list.

  Franklin protested that his “poor little love” was “thin and ready to die of hunger” for want of the “nourishment that his mother inhumanly refuses!” Now she wanted “to cut his little wings so that he cannot go seek it elsewhere.” But Madame Brillon was unrelenting. She insisted on a special place in Franklin’s heart—and she knew exactly what it should be. She began calling him “Mon Cher Papa” and Franklin, ruefully at first, began calling her his daughter.

  Franklin knew too much about women to abandon these amorous games. He continued to welcome Madame Brillon’s kisses, often delivered with fervor while she sat on his lap. Occasionally they played chess together while Madame Brillon was in her bath. This was not nearly as erotic as it sounds to modern ears; eighteenth-century bathtubs were covered with boards that prevented indecent exposure.5

  In mid-1779 came a crisis. Madame Brillon discovered what almost everyone else in Passy already knew: Monsieur Brillon was having an affair with their children’s governess. She fled to Franklin for solace and advice. “My soul is very sick,” she cried. “You are my father.” Here was the moment when Franklin, if he had only seduction on his mind, could have satisfied his desire. Instead, he did his utmost to restore Madame Brillon’s spiritual strength.

  He urged her to forgive her husband—to continue to be a “good mother, good wife, good friend, good neighbor, good Christian (without forgetting to be a good neighbor to your Papa) and to neglect and forget, if you can, the wrongs you may be suffering at present.” He advised her to practice one of his favorite maxims: “Doing an injury puts you below your enemy, revenging one makes you but even with him, forgiving him sets you above him.” If the advice made Franklin feel his age, so be it. Like a caring father, he watched and encouraged and approved as Madam Brillon slowly regained her equilibrium.6

  III

  Ambassador Franklin grew more and more harassed by America’s bankruptcy and his enemies’ assaults on his reputation. This may explain an explosion of bad temper that could easily have alienated another woman in his life, his daughter, Sally Franklin Bache. She had not enjoyed the two years that followed Ben’s departure to France with Temple and her oldest son, Benjamin. Twice she and her husband and younger children had to flee into the countryside when the British army threatened Philadelphia. In the fall of 1777 the enemy army captured the city, and Sally had spent some very unpleasant months living in a town near Lancaster. Her husband, Richard Bache, was postmaster general of the new United States, a job his father-in-law had obtained for him. But the Continental Congress seldom paid him, and the paper money was depreciating so fast that it did not come close to feeding the family. They had to live on credit. When the British fled Philadelphia at the news of the French alliance, the Baches returned to find their house had been wrecked and looted by the British officers who lived in it. Nonetheless, they were in a mood to celebrate, like the rest of the city. Everyone assumed the alliance would swiftly end the war.

  Sally wrote to her father early in 1779, asking him for some French “finery” that she might wear to the dinner parties and balls that were proliferating in Philadelphia. “There was never was so much dressing and pleasure going on,” she remarked. She particularly wanted something to wear for a ball in honor of General Washington. She saw herself telling people that her father had sent her the dresses. They would be an illustration of his good taste. It took months for the letter to reach Franklin. By that time, the French alliance was turning into a very complicated and disappointing affair. The fleet that the new ally sent to America was too small to have any impact on the war. The French were more interested in joining their Spanish ally in an invasion of England, which turned into a humiliating fiasco.

  A depressed Franklin reacted with uncharacteristic nastiness to Sally’s request. Lecturing her as if she were ten years old, he declaimed that her letter “disgusted me as much as if you had put salt in my strawberries.” Instead of making her own cloth at the spinning wheel, she had to be “dressed for the ball!” He wondered why she did not know that “of all the dear things in this world, idleness is the dearest, except mischief.” She had told him that wartime inflation and the depreciating dollar were driving up the price of everything. But instead of adding that she and everyone e
lse were becoming “frugal and industrious,” she wanted him to spend money on feathers and lace! Ben told her to get her feathers from the end of a cock’s tail.

  Reading this rant, Sally must have wondered whether the ghost of parsimonious Poor Richard had acquired power over her famous father. But she refused to lose her temper. She told her father that she was sure he never would have written such a nasty letter if he had stopped to realize it would hurt her. She asked him if he wanted her to stay away from the French ambassador’s or General Washington’s entertainments. In fact, the general and “his Lady” had asked her to spend the day with them. The Benjamin Franklin she knew was the “last person” who would want her to accept such an invitation wearing “singular” clothes. She had never insisted on looking “particularly fine,” but she would never go out “when I cannot appear so as to do credit to my family and husband.”7

  Still grumpy—the war news continued to be terrible—Franklin replied that he would send Sally everything she wanted. But he could not restrain a needless comment that he was rewarding her for “being a good girl” because she had told him she was spinning cloth and knitting stockings for her family. Another reason for Franklin’s hostility may have been Sally’s insistence on remaining in contact with her half brother, William. She told Temple in a separate letter that she still loved William and was not going to let their “political difference” change her mind. She urged Temple never to let that happen to him. Temple may have mentioned Sally’s stance to Ben, and the wound inflicted by William’s defection bled again.

  Undeterred by her father’s black mood, Sally launched a project that required Franklinesque political skills and energy. As 1780 began, the war was looking interminable and American morale was drooping. Washington’s troops were in rags. Sally organized a group of Philadelphia women who raised thousands of dollars for the army. They wanted to give the cash directly to the soldiers. General Washington demurred and suggested they give it to him, as the army’s commander in chief. Sally politely but firmly refused. She wanted the soldiers to know how much the women cared about them. She bought cloth, which the women sewed into more than two thousand shirts. Her chastened father sent her a warm letter of praise and published the story in French newspapers.