The First American

by H. W. Brands

  The size of the army should be increased to 20,000 (the overly precise figure was 20,372). It should consist of regiments of 728 men (including officers), with each regiment divided into eight companies consisting of one captain, two lieutenants, one ensign, four sergeants, four corporals, two drums or fifes, and 76 privates. Some in the Congress, complaining of cost, advocated reducing the pay of the troops. Washington and his staff, and Franklin and his committee, agreed unanimously that lowering pay “would be attended with dangerous consequences.” It should remain at 40 shillings per month.

  Provisions for privateers were made, along with procedures for disposing of their prizes. General Washington should arrange for the sale of vessels and cargoes captured by warships outfitted at the expense of the Congress; the proceeds would support the war effort.

  Many other matters were decided, but on a critical question of strategy the soldiers and civilians agreed to consult the Congress. Washington and his war council had determined that a frontal attack on the British forces in Boston was impractical before winter; he now requested guidance as to whether an artillery bombardment of British positions and troops in the city was appropriate. He could probably compel a withdrawal, but not without destroying the town. What should he do?

  Franklin and the other committee members agreed, as they stated in their report, that this was “a matter of too much consequence to be determined by them”; therefore they referred it back to the Congress. In sending them off, Washington made another appeal for money: “The General then requested that the Committee would represent to the Congress the necessity of having money constantly and regularly sent.”

  Franklin had heard the dire reports from Washington and others of the army’s troubles; having seen the soldiers and spoken to the officers, he thought the reports overblown. “Here is a fine healthy army,” he wrote Richard Bache, “wanting nothing but some improvement in its officers, which is daily making.”

  As for the expense of the war, he was similarly optimistic. What was necessary could well be borne.

  Though I am for the most prudent parsimony of the public treasury, I am not terrified by the expence of this war, should it continue ever so long. A little more frugality, or a little more industry in individuals will with ease defray it. Suppose it [costs] £100,000 a month, or £1,200,000 a year. If 500,000 families will each spend a shilling a week less, or earn a shilling a week more; or if they will spend 6 pence a week less and earn 6 pence a week more, they may pay the whole sum without otherwise feeling it. Forbearing to drink tea saves three fourths of the money; and 500,000 women doing each threepence worth of spinning or knitting in a week will pay the rest. (How much more then may be done by the superior frugality and industry of the men?)

  I wish nevertheless most earnestly for peace, this war being a truly unnatural and mischievous one; but we have nothing to expect from submission but slavery and contempt.

  In another letter Franklin examined the cost question from the British side and came to the same conclusion. He and Joseph Priestley had a mutual friend, Richard Price, a man of mathematical (among other) interests; Franklin sent Priestley a message to forward. “Tell our good friend Dr. Price, who sometimes has doubts and despondencies about our firmness, that America is determined and unanimous, a very few tories and placemen excepted, who will probably soon export themselves.” Franklin then suggested a simple calculation. “Britain, at the expence of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20,000 a head; and at Bunker’s Hill she gained a mile of ground, half of which she lost again by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During the same time 60,000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expence necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole territory.”

  While Washington maintained the siege of Boston (permission to bombard the city was withheld), another American force drove north to Canada. As it had for the French before them, Canada currently enabled the British to conceive a strike at the American interior, raising the possibility that New England might be cut off, via New York and the Hudson River, from the lower colonies. The American invasion of Canada was designed to deny that province to the British; if the Canadians could be persuaded to join the other colonies in opposition to Britain, all the better.

  The invasion was a two-pronged affair. Philip Schuyler pushed up from Fort Ticonderoga along Lake Champlain to Fort St. John; after sickness disabled him he turned the command over to Richard Montgomery, who captured Montreal before driving down the St. Lawrence toward Quebec. Meanwhile Benedict Arnold led an appallingly arduous march across Maine, losing nearly half his men to cold, hunger, sickness, exhaustion, and discouragement before meeting up with Montgomery below the walls of Quebec. At dawn on the last day of 1775 the combined American force attempted to repeat Wolfe’s feat of seizing the fortress. The assault was a fiasco, with Montgomery (like Wolfe in this respect at least) dying in the battle. A seriously wounded Arnold watched the American force break itself on the British defenses; in a howling blizzard the Americans—those who avoided death or capture—had all they could do to retreat beyond range of the defenders’ guns. Snug behind their walls, the British let them freeze while both sides awaited the spring thaw, which would certainly bring British reinforcements up the river, and possibly American reinforcements overland.

  Naturally the Continental Congress desired to know whether to send such reinforcements, especially in light of the other demands on American resources. In March 1776 the Congress appointed a commission to travel to Canada to investigate. The commissioners were Franklin, Samuel Chase of Maryland, and Charles Carroll, another Marylander, who was not a delegate to the Congress but who had been educated in France and was a prominent Catholic. Carroll was also the cousin of John Carroll, an even more prominent Catholic and a priest, who was persuaded to accompany the commission; the two Carrolls, the Congress thought, might have some influence with the largely Catholic, formerly French, Canadians.

  The British government learned of the mission almost as soon as it began. None other than William Franklin informed Lord Germain, the new secretary for America and the man overseeing the American war, of his father’s movements, company, and purpose. “I have just heard,” the governor wrote on March 28, “that two of the delegates (Dr. Franklin and Mr. Chase) have passed through Woodbridge this morning in their way to Canada, accompanied by a Mr. Carroll, a Roman Catholic gentleman of great estate in Maryland, and a Romish priest or two. It is suggested that their principal business is to prevail on the Canadians to enter into the confederacy with the other colonies and to send delegates to the Continental Congress.” William added a pleasant note: “It is likewise reported that a great number of the continental troops have returned to Albany, not being able to cross the lakes, several soldiers, carriages, etc. having fallen in and some lives lost by the breaking of the ice.”

  Franklin encountered the problems of the ice, as well as others felt acutely by a man of seventy. His trip up the Hudson—Lake George—Lake Champlain corridor was all he could manage. “I begin to apprehend that I have undertaken a fatigue that at my time of life may prove too much for me,” he wrote Josiah Quincy while waiting at Saratoga for the ice to clear. “So I sit down to write to a few friends by way of farewell.”

  Yet Franklin’s time had not come, and in fact he held up better in certain instances than his traveling companions. At St. Johns they spent two nights sleeping on the floor of a house that had been wrecked by fighting; while Charles Carroll complained of his aching back, Franklin amused the party with stories from his long personal history.

  At Montreal they met with General Arnold, still hobbling and now directing the siege of Quebec from a distance. Arnold’s was a personality that blew hot and cold; after a long winter the cold won out regarding Canada. From Arnold and others the commission learned of the discouraging prospects for American forces along the St. Lawrence. Part of the problem was military, reflecting the
difficulties of supporting an invasion so far from home. But the larger part was political. American forces were living off the land—which was to say off the labor of the locals. Sometimes the American officers simply took what they needed; sometimes they promised to pay. The latter instances blurred into the former when the officers, lacking money from the south, failed to fulfill their promises. On May 1 Franklin and the others urged the Congress to apply the “utmost dispatch” in supplying Arnold with money—£20,000 would make a fair start. “Otherwise it will be impossible to continue the war in this country, or to expect the continuance of our interest with the people here, who begin to consider the Congress as bankrupt and their cause as desperate.” In its charge to the commission the Congress had instructed the commissioners to propose a union of Canada with the other colonies; Franklin thought such an offer unwise under present circumstances. “Till the arrival of money, it seems improper to propose the federal union of this province with the others, as the few friends we have here will scarce venture to exert themselves in promoting it till they see our credit recovered and a sufficient army arrived to secure the possession of the country.”

  A week of additional discussions underscored this argument. Apparently the creditors of the American forces had been led to believe that the commissioners were bringing money; they were sorely disappointed to learn otherwise. The American Congress had become contemptible in Canadian eyes; with British ships even now on the way to lift the siege of Quebec, attachment to the Americans would have been nothing less than folly. “We have daily intimations of plots hatching and insurrections intended for expelling us on the first news of the arrival of a British army,” Franklin wrote for himself and the others. “Your commissioners themselves are in a critical and most irksome situation, pestered hourly with demands great and small that they cannot answer, in a place where our cause has a majority of enemies, the garrison weak, and a greater would, without money, increase our difficulties.” A single conclusion was possible: “If money cannot be had to support your army here with honour, so as to be respected instead of hated by the people, we repeat it as our firm and unanimous opinion that it is better immediately to withdraw it.”

  Unbeknownst to Franklin, American forces were already putting his advice into effect. At the beginning of May the freshly arrived American commander at Quebec, John Thomas, decided to drop the ragged siege there. Slowness in carrying out the decision, however, enabled the long-awaited British reinforcements to turn an orderly retreat into an ignominious rout. Thomas succumbed to smallpox, his successor mounted an unsuccessful counterattack, and by mid-July the Americans had been driven all the way back to Ticonderoga.

  Amid the bad news from the north came good news—or at least big news—from Philadelphia. For some months opinion in the colonies, and in the Congress, had been inching toward the conclusion Franklin had reached the previous summer: that independence was inevitable. To some extent this reasoning reflected the iron logic of battle; the longer Americans fought against the British, the less likely they were to desire reconciliation with the British. But even the inevitable requires explanation, often justification, of which none was more compelling than that provided by Thomas Paine.

  Franklin knew Paine. Indeed Franklin was largely responsible for Paine’s presence in Philadelphia. One of Franklin’s fellows in the Royal Society had introduced young Paine to Franklin in London, and although Paine’s career to date consisted chiefly of failure—at corsetmaking, schoolteaching, shopkeeping, tax-collecting—he was a self-taught seeker of practical knowledge in a variety of fields, with an obvious irreverence toward British authority. In other words, he was a young man of the sort Franklin might wish to encourage. This Franklin did. When Paine in 1774 indicated a desire to emigrate to America, Franklin supplied a letter of introduction to Richard Bache. Franklin described Paine to his son-in-law as “an ingenious, worthy young man,” and requested a favor: “If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor (all of which I think him very capable), so that he may procure a subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country, you will do well and much oblige your affectionate father.”

  Franklin’s letter was almost literally a lifesaver. On the voyage over, Paine took fearfully sick; he remained at death’s portal when the ship docked in Philadelphia. “Dr. Kearsley of this place attended the ship upon her arrival,” Paine wrote Franklin from America, “and when he understood that I was on your recommendation he provided a lodging for me and sent two of his men with a chaise to bring me on shore, for I could not at that time turn in my bed without help.” Slowly Paine recovered, and as he did so he benefited still more from Franklin’s good offices. “Your countenancing me has obtained me many friends and much reputation.” Several gentlemen requested that he tutor their sons; a printer, Robert Aitken, enlisted his help producing a new magazine.

  This latter connection had momentous implications for Paine and for America. Aitken’s journal afforded the budding journalist scope to sharpen his now-discovered gift for political argumentation; in the course of the next year the Pennsylvania Magazine ran articles by Paine against slavery and in favor of various vital causes.

  None was so vital as that of American independence, which in late 1775 inspired Paine to write perhaps the most inspired political pamphlet in American history. Common Sense appeared in January 1776; at two shillings for forty-seven pages it soon sold more than a hundred thousand copies. “I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine declared in asserting that continued connection with Britain made no more sense than perpetual childhood for a grown adult, that no continent should be forever governed by an island, that attachment to Britain would inevitably draw America into Europe’s wars, and, finally, that “a government of our own is our natural right.”

  Common Sense produced a “great impression” among the delegates to the Continental Congress, Franklin said. In doing so it tilted the field of debate decidedly toward independence. One by one those advocating additional efforts toward reconciliation changed their minds; one by one the provincial assemblies instructed their delegates to consider formal separation. On June 7 Richard Henry Lee offered a motion declaring “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” The motion encountered some residual resistance, which prompted a decision to delay a final vote until the first of July. Meanwhile the Congress created a committee to draft a declaration justifying the decision for independence, should the Congress so decide. Appointed to the committee were John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert Livingston of New York, and Franklin.

  Franklin had little to do with the first drafting of the document, which the committee left to Jefferson, partly because of his known felicity of phrasing (“You can write ten times better than I,” John Adams recalled telling Jefferson), partly because Jefferson was a Virginian (and hence would add geographic balance to a conflict provoked by New England), partly because none on the committee appreciated what a momentous document this would be, and partly because Franklin was happy to leave the task to another. He would explain this last point to Jefferson presently; for now his physical condition afforded sufficient excuse. “I am just recovering from a severe fit of the gout, which has kept me from Congress and company almost ever since you left us,” Franklin wrote on June 21 to Washington, who had departed Philadelphia on June 4 after a series of meetings with delegates. Besides gout and fatigue, Franklin suffered from an assortment of rashes, boils, and related lesions that reflected both the strain of the Canada trip and the inability of travelers to keep as clean as at home. Franklin had tried to avoid two other chronic problems of travelers—bedbugs and lice—by carrying his own bedding; whe
ther he succeeded is unclear. But June was, altogether, a miserable month for him.

  So Jefferson retired to the second-story parlor of the house of a young German mason named Graff, and on his lap-desk drafted the declaration. When he had something he liked he sent it the short distance to Franklin’s house. “Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?” he requested in a covering note.

  After decades as a writer and editor, Franklin knew good prose when he read it. He treated Jefferson’s draft gently. Jefferson’s phrase “reduce them to arbitrary power,” referring to what the British were trying to do to the Americans, was strengthened to “reduce them under absolute despotism.” “Amount of their salaries”—referring to what King George was trying to seize as a lever against colonial judges—was made more specific: “the amount and payment of their salaries.” “Taking away our charters, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments” was elaborated: “taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.” “Answered by repeated injury” was sharpened: “answered only by repeated injury.” “To invade and deluge us in blood” was toned down: “to invade and destroy us.”

  The Congress handled Jefferson’s draft more harshly. Clause after sentence was struck, leaving Jefferson aghast. Franklin consoled him with what became one of his most famous stories. “I was sitting by Dr. Franklin, who perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations,” Jefferson recalled.

  “I have made it a rule,” said he, “whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body. I took my lesson from an incident which I will relate to you. When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself. His first concern was to have a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription. He composed it in these words, ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,’ with a figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word ‘Hatter’ tautologous, because followed by the words ‘makes hats,’ which showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word ‘makes’ might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats. If good and to their mind, they would buy them, by whomsoever made. He struck it out. A third said he thought the words ‘for ready money’ were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Every one who purchased expected to pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood, ‘John Thompson sells hats.’ ‘Sells hats!’ says his next friend. ‘Why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What then is the use of that word?’ It was stricken out, and ‘hats’ followed it, the rather as there was one painted on the board. So the inscription was reduced ultimately to ‘John Thompson,’ with the figure of a hat subjoined.”