The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Even as it drove Jane Mecom from her home, the fighting at Boston drew members of the Continental Congress back to Philadelphia. When last they met, the danger had been prospective; now it was actual. Then they had protested and petitioned; now they had to prosecute a war.

  For this reason the man awaited most expectantly was not Franklin—whose appearance, in any event, took nearly all the delegates by surprise—but George Washington. The veteran soldier had attended the first Congress the previous year but been overshadowed by his Virginia colleagues Peyton Randolph, who was elected president, and Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, who stirred the delegates with their speeches. Washington seemed no more than “a tolerable speaker” to Silas Deane of Connecticut. He himself accounted his role in the Congress as that of “attentive observer and witness.”

  The outbreak of fighting changed everything. Of speakers the new Congress had many; of military leaders it had but one. He packed his uniform when he left Mount Vernon for Philadelphia on May 4. Riding in his own chariot, he drew the cheers of Virginians and then Marylanders as he made his way north; six miles outside Philadelphia he was met by a boisterous brigade of five hundred horsemen. At the edge of the city several hundred more militia—mounted and foot—joined the cavalcade; a military band fell in step and played martial airs the rest of the way to the State House.

  “We have a very full Congress,” Washington reported home, “and I flatter myself that great unanimity will prevail.” It did on one subject: the selection of a commanding general. “Colonel Washington appears at Congress in uniform,” John Adams wrote his wife Abigail, “and by his great experience and abilities in military matters is of much service to us.” (Adams added, with the envy and ambition that characterized his whole career, “Oh, that I were a soldier. I will be! I am reading military books.”) Briefly the delegates considered other individuals for the command. But Artemas Ward of Massachusetts, the most likely alternate, lacked Washington’s moral and military stature; Charles Lee (a professional soldier and resident Virginian who himself might have been a candidate but for his English birth) dismissed Ward as “a fat old gentleman who had been a popular churchwarden.” Consequently in mid-June the Congress voted without dissent to confer the command upon Washington. He becomingly professed himself unequal to the task. “However,” he continued, “as the Congress desire it, I will enter upon the momentous duty, exert every power I possess in their service, and for support of the glorious cause.”

  Franklin was one of those voting for Washington. Under other circumstances his fellow Pennsylvanians might have allowed him a well-deserved retirement upon his return. Franklin himself was looking forward to such when he left London. But the onset of war altered this as so much else. When the Pennsylvania Packet landed at the foot of Market Street on May 5, the delegates to the Continental Congress were already converging on Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Assembly did not grant Franklin even twenty-four hours before electing him a delegate to the Congress. Who knew better than Franklin the mind of the ministry in London? Who better to advise the Congress on what to expect from Parliament?

  Matters did not work out quite as expected. Franklin was weary from the voyage and needed time to readjust to a city he hardly knew. America had grown as rapidly as he had predicted it would; Philadelphia led the growth. The city was filled with new buildings and new faces. As he rode from the river the two blocks up Market Street—to the house Debbie had lived in these last ten years but that was new to him—he must have marveled at what a different place it was from the city that had first greeted him half a century before. At times he had felt old in London; here in Philadelphia he felt absolutely ancient.

  And all the more ancient when the Congress convened at the State House. The building was the same one where he had so often sat while in the Assembly, but the generation of men filling the chairs was decidedly different. Franklin was easily the oldest man present, a full twenty or thirty years older than the moving spirits of the body. George Washington was forty-three; his fellow Virginians Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were thirty-eight and thirty-two respectively. John Adams was thirty-nine; John Hancock, also of Massachusetts, thirty-eight.

  The young men of the Congress exhibited the impatience of youth. “A frenzy of revenge seems to have seized all ranks of people,” Jefferson observed as the delegates gathered in Philadelphia; and if the frenzy diminished slightly as the magnitude of the task before the Congress became apparent, audacity remained the predominant attitude.

  Franklin disappointed some of those who knew him only by reputation—a group that encompassed nearly the entire membership. He struck no lightning bolts of rhetoric, preferring to sit silent while others orated. Washington cut a far more impressive figure in his soldier’s uniform than Franklin in his philosopher’s coat. The visitors from out of town—again, nearly the entire body—took dinner together in taverns and spent nights about town; Franklin retired to his own house when the Congress recessed, passing evenings with Sally and Richard Bache and his grandchildren. (“The youngest boy is the strongest and stoutest child of his age that I have ever seen,” he boasted to Jane Mecom, regarding two-year-old William Bache. “He seems an infant Hercules.”)

  Franklin’s diffidence struck some as suspicious. William Bradford, the son of Franklin’s old printing rival, currently publisher of the Pennsylvania Journal, and like many another journalist an avid consumer of gossip, complained to James Madison (not a delegate to the Congress but at twenty-four already active in Virginia politics), “I have but little to tell you of the Congress; they keep their proceedings so secret that scarce any thing transpires but what they think proper to publish in the papers.” Yet all was not lost to one who kept his ear to the keyhole. “I can however (inter nos) inform you that they begin to entertain a great suspicion that Dr. Franklin came rather as a spy than as a friend, & that he means to discover our weak side and make his peace with the minister by discovering it to him.” Bradford could not vouch for the veracity of the report, which might sound implausible on its face. “But the times are so remarkable for strange events,” he reasoned, “that improbability is almost become an argument for their truth.”

  The source of the rumors was Richard Henry Lee, the Virginia delegate who was also the elder brother of Arthur Lee. Obviously Arthur had been sharing his own suspicions (and jealousies) of Franklin; probably he had told Richard Henry to keep watch on the crafty old man. Perhaps the elder Lee had been poisoning other Virginia minds against Franklin; James Madison for one was entirely willing to credit Bradford’s gossip. “If he were the man he formerly was, and has even of late pretended to be,” Madison said of Franklin, “his conduct in Philadelphia on this critical occasion could have left no room for surmise or distrust. He certainly would have been both a faithful informer and an active member of the Congress. His behaviour would have been explicit and his zeal warm and conspicuous.” (Madison possessed a brilliant legal mind but also a penchant for assuming the worst of others. Before maligning Franklin he had castigated Washington as one of a class of tidewater gentry that demonstrated “a pusillanimity little comporting with their professions or the name of Virginian.”)

  Franklin doubtless heard the rumors. As on other occasions he let silence supply his answer, and as on most other occasions it sufficed. “Hath any thing further been whispered relative to the conduct of Dr. Franklin?” queried the conspiratorially minded Madison after a dearth of additional dirt. Bradford could only disappoint. “The suspicions against Dr. Franklin have died away,” Bradford reported. “Whatever was his design at coming over here, I believe he has now chosen his side, and favours our cause.”

  John Adams put the matter more positively. Franklin’s initial diffidence had reflected respect for the Congress and a desire to avoid claiming special wisdom for himself, Adams said. Of late Franklin had displayed “a disposition entirely American.” Indeed, far from favoring Britain, he was Britain’s bitterest foe. “He does not hesitate at our b
oldest measures, but rather seems to think us too irresolute and backward.”

  What silenced the skeptics was their gradual realization that on the subject of resistance to British tyranny, none was more determined than Franklin. He took no pleasure in the present war—“which the youngest of us may not see the end of,” he said. “But, as Britain has begun to use force, it seems absolutely necessary that we should be prepared to repel force by force, which I think, united, we are well able to do.”

  Franklin was still angry over his own and America’s treatment by the British government, and his anger grew with accumulating evidence of British perfidy. Late June brought news of the Battle of Bunker Hill, in which British troops torched parts of Charlestown, outside of Boston. “She has begun to burn our seaport towns,” he wrote Joseph Priestley, “secure, I suppose, that we shall never be able to return the outrage in kind.” To Jonathan Shipley he complained of London’s diplomacy. “All Europe is conjured not to sell us arms or ammunition, that we may be found defenceless, and more easily murdered.” Eminent British figures, Franklin said, were advocating attempts “to excite the domestic slaves you have sold us to cut their masters’ throats.” Others urged “hiring the Indian savages to assassinate our planters in the back-settlements.” “This is making war like nations who never had been friends, and never wish to be such while the world stands.”

  No one in Britain was closer to Franklin than Bishop Shipley; it pained Franklin to write as he did, but he felt he had reason—reason shared by his countrymen. “You see I am warm; and if a temper naturally cool and phlegmatic can, in old age, which often cools the warmest, be thus heated, you will judge by that of the general temper here, which is now little short of madness.”

  The clearest evidence of Franklin’s anger—rage is hardly too strong a word—was a letter he wrote to William Strahan. The letter, to Franklin’s oldest friend in England, was jarringly direct.

  Mr. Strahan,

  You are a member of Parliament, and one of that majority which has doomed my country to destruction. You have begun to burn our towns, and murder our people. Look upon your hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations! You and I were long friends; you are now my enemy, and I am yours.

  Franklin never sent this letter; his anger, though powerful, did not carry him away. Yet the fact of its writing indicated the emotional separation he felt from England—and it suggested, with everything else, that political separation could not be far behind. “Words and arguments are now of no use,” he said in a letter he did send to Strahan. “All tends to a separation.” To Joseph Priestley he explained the circumstances surrounding what came to be called the “Olive Branch petition.” “It has been with difficulty that we have carried another humble petition to the Crown, to give Britain one more chance, one opportunity more of recovering the friendship of the colonies, which however I think she has not sense enough to embrace.” Anticipating the rejection that indeed occurred, he closed, “And so I conclude she has lost them forever.”

  A full year before the Congress declared officially in favor of independence, Franklin had come to believe that independence was inevitable. Now he began working to make it a reality. None but the most obtuse could conceive American independence absent some form of intercolonial union; in July 1775 Franklin proposed a plan for just such a union. In spirit these “Articles of Confederation” drew on the plan of union he had presented at Albany in 1754, but what then would have been a federation within the British empire now foreshadowed an independent state. The purpose of the confederation was the colonies’ “common defence against their enemies” and “the security of their liberties and properties, the safety of their persons and families, and their mutual and general welfare.” The congress of the confederation would be empowered to declare war and negotiate peace, enter into alliances, settle disputes among the separate colonies, create new colonies, arrange treaties with the Indian tribes, establish a post office, and administer or otherwise regulate a general currency. Representation in the congress would be proportional to population; executive power would be vested in an “executive council” whose members would serve staggered three-year terms. The congress would have the power to propose amendments to the articles of confederation; these would take effect on adoption by a majority of the colonies.

  Franklin appreciated that all this was considerably more than many of the delegates to the Continental Congress were willing to accept. To allay their fears he appended a clause contemplating the dissolution of the confederation upon Britain’s restoration of the rights and privileges of the American colonies, the withdrawal of all British troops from America, and the receipt of compensation for damages to Boston’s commerce and Charlestown’s structures and for the expense to the colonies of “this unjust war.” How much this actually allayed the fears of the timid must be doubted; by all proclamation and policy Britain evinced that it would never accept such conditions. Failing acceptance, “this Confederation is to be perpetual.”

  Even with the escape clause Franklin’s confederation was too forward, as he certainly realized. He contented himself with reading his articles to a committee of the whole Congress. He made no motion that required a vote or even a formal record of his proposal; his purpose was to set the delegates thinking about the kind of union that would be necessary to fight and win a war and to carry America into the peace beyond. In this he certainly succeeded, and when the time proved riper, his proposal became the starting point for the Articles of Confederation the Congress and the states finally adopted.

  Other actions by Franklin bore fruit immediately. It was lost on none of the delegates, on none of the committees of correspondence of the several colonies, or for that matter on the British government, that the resistance to British usurpation could not have congealed as it had without an efficient postal service. Needless to say, British postal officials would be loath to deliver letters for practicing rebels; already the mails were being regularly opened. And already the colonial governments were making separate provisions for delivery. As one, the delegates to the Congress concluded that the obvious person to organize this alternative service was the man who had made the system run so well under the British. On July 26 the Congress unanimously elected Franklin postmaster general for the American colonies.

  Even as he engaged the subordinates necessary to make the American post office a reality (true to nepotic form, he appointed Richard Bache his secretary and comptroller), Franklin received another appointment freighted with no less importance, albeit considerably less publicity. In September he was named to the “secret committee” of the Congress; this group bore primary responsibility for obtaining the weapons necessary to wage the war. Franklin’s experience provisioning General Braddock’s army at the outset of the French and Indian War stood him well in this endeavor, as did his repeated raising of militia to defend Philadelphia, and his construction of forts on the Pennsylvania frontier. But the job was immense, being hardly less than creating an army from scratch—or, what was worse, from a motley collection of militias jealous of their rights and confirmed in their ignorance.

  Franklin felt the immensity of the task on a visit to General Washington’s headquarters. Following his appointment to the command of what was optimistically styled the “Continental Army,” Washington traveled to Boston to take charge of the mostly Massachusetts force besieging the British there. He required a few weeks to assess his soldiers and reconnoiter the position; molding the militia into a real army took considerably longer. This necessitated the creation of an officer corps that knew its business and could teach the troops. But the troops did not want to learn, considering themselves above discipline and, in many cases, intending to leave the ranks when their brief terms of enlistment expired. To make bad worse, winter was fast descending on an army ill equipped even for a New England autumn. Washington appealed to the Congress for help; without it, he warned, the army would disintegrate.

  The Congress did what congresses do:
it appointed a committee to investigate. Franklin headed the committee; joining him were Thomas Lynch of South Carolina and Benjamin Harrison of Virginia. In October the three traveled to Washington’s headquarters at Cambridge. For seven days they met with Washington and his staff in an effort to forge a policy that would meet the needs of the military moment without abridging the political liberties for which the war was being fought. Discipline was a central issue. The group authorized the death penalty for mutiny and incitement thereto. Drunken officers should be drummed out of the army with infamy. Sentries caught asleep should receive not less than twenty lashes nor more than thirty-nine. An officer absent without leave should be fined one month’s pay for the first offense and cashiered for the second; an enlisted man should be confined and placed on bread and water for seven days for the first such offense and suffer similar confinement, with loss of a week’s pay, for the second.

  The group considered rations—to wit, what the Congress could afford and the men tolerate. They decided on a pound of beef or salt fish or three-quarters of a pound of pork per man per day; a pound of bread or flour; a pint of milk; a quart of spruce beer or cider (or 9 gallons of molasses per company—of somewhat fewer than a hundred men—per week, for making rum); a half-pint of rice or one pint of cornmeal per man per week; 24 pounds of soft soap or 8 pounds of hard soap per company per week; and 3 pounds of candles per company per week. Additional provisions—vegetables, beans and peas, extra milk—might be purchased by the troops at regulated prices.

  Standards were established for the men’s arms. The several colonies should set their gunsmiths to work fabricating firelocks with barrels three-quarters of an inch in bore and 44 inches in length, with bayonets 18 inches in the blade. For additional arms the colonies should “import all that can be procured.”