The First American

by H. W. Brands

  “I know you too well. You promise fair, but after a few months of good health, you will return to your old habits. Your fine promises will be forgotten like the forms of the last year’s clouds. Let us then finish the account, and I will go. But I leave you with an assurance of visiting you again at a proper time and place, for my object is your good, and you are sensible now that I am your real friend.”

  Franklin’s literary reputation had long preceded him to Paris—although in some cases the reality outreached the reputation. One such instance led to the discovery of the true identity of Polly Baker. Franklin and Silas Deane one day were remarking the numerous mistakes in Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, when the author himself happened in the door. Franklin was diplomatic enough to drop the subject, but Deane was not. “The Doctor and myself, Abbé, were just speaking of the errors of fact into which you have been led in your history.”

  “Oh, no, sir,” the abbé replied. “That is impossible. I took the greatest care not to insert a single fact for which I had not the most unquestionable authority.”

  “Why, there is the story of Polly Baker,” Deane said, “and the eloquent apology you have put into her mouth when brought before a court of Massachusetts to suffer punishment under a law which you cite, for having had a bastard. I know there never was such a law in Massachusetts.”

  “Be assured you are mistaken, and that that is a true story. I do not immediately recollect indeed the particular information on which I quote it, but I am certain that I had for it unquestionable authority.”

  Franklin’s diplomatic discretion failed him at this point. Laughing aloud, he said, “I will tell you, Abbé, the origin of that story. When I was a printer and editor of a newspaper, we were sometimes slack of news, and to amuse our customers I used to fill up our vacant columns with anecdotes and fables, and fancies of my own. This of Polly Baker is a story of my making on one of these occasions.”

  The abbé listened with horror quickly hidden by aplomb. “Oh, very well, Doctor,” he declared. “I had rather relate your stories than other men’s truths.”

  Raynal himself refuted his own certitude in another instance. Conventional philosophical wisdom in Europe held that the races of men and animals degenerated in the New World, becoming smaller and less fit. The abbé was convinced of this, and at a dinner party hosted by Franklin at Passy held forth at length on the subject. Franklin had designed his guest list to include as many Americans as French; while Raynal ran on, Franklin noticed something interesting about the seating arrangement and comparative statures of the two nationalities represented.

  “Come, Monsieur l’Abbé,” he said, “let us try this question by the fact before us. We are here one half Americans and one half French, and it happens that the Americans have placed themselves on one side of the table, and our French friends are on the other. Let both parties rise, and we will see which side nature has degenerated.”

  Thomas Jefferson, who heard this story from Franklin, and who knew several of the guests (and who, moreover, was as determined to refute this alleged New World degeneracy as Raynal was to confirm it), explained the rest. “It happened that his American guests were Carmichael, Harmer, Humphreys, and others of the finest stature and form; while those on the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbé himself particularly was a mere shrimp.”

  To the initial surprise of his French guests, Franklin typically deferred to others in conversation. This reticence reflected both his temperament and his incomplete mastery of the French language, acquired initially from books and self-study. “If you Frenchmen would only talk no more than four at a time, I might understand you, and would not come out of an interesting party without knowing what they were talking about,” he explained to a friend. Not surprisingly, the relative rarity of his spoken mots made them the more precious.

  One that was long remembered came from a chess match between Franklin and the elderly Duchess of Bourbon. Inexpert, she illegally placed her king in check. Franklin, in the spirit of rule-breaking, captured it. She, knowing enough to realize that this was not permitted, declared that in France “we do not take kings.”

  With a sly smile he responded, “We do in America.”

  25

  Minister plenipotentiary

  1779–81

  The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II was traveling incognito in France during this period, and frequented the same salons as Franklin. Watching Franklin’s chess game with the Duchess of Bourbon, he was asked why he did not share the general enthusiasm for America. “I am a king by trade,” he replied.

  George III felt the same way, although most nights he had little more reason to lose sleep over the Americans’ activities than the Holy Roman emperor did. Even after the American victory at Saratoga the war went poorly for the rebels. An American defeat at Germantown left British forces in control of Philadelphia, and efforts to keep the British fleet from reaching and reinforcing the city failed after an imaginative scheme for sinking the British vessels misfired. David Bushnell had tinkered with an underwater boat—“Bushnell’s turtle,” it was called—that would torpedo the enemy below the waterline; when this encountered technical difficulties, Bushnell switched to floating bombs. He stuffed kegs with explosives and surreptitiously drifted them down the river toward the British fleet. Most missed, and the scheme was discovered when a bargeman lifted one of the kegs from the water, setting it off and killing himself and several companions. Although no British ships were destroyed, the very thought of bobbing ruin put the British on edge. Soldiers were arrayed along the riverbank to fire at suspicious objects in the water; by one account, just as the scare was abating, a farmer’s wife accidentally dropped a keg of cheese in the river, sparking a renewed alert and another outpouring of lead into the water.

  As General Howe wintered in Philadelphia, warmed by his mistress and assisted in the governance of the city by Franklin’s old friend and ally Joseph Galloway, Washington and the American army froze on the windy hillsides of Valley Forge. They arrived worn from their failed campaign against Howe, and they grew wearier from the effort to construct winter quarters from the ground up. In dark huts fourteen feet by sixteen they shivered and went hungry. The entire commissary when the winter began consisted of twenty-five barrels of flour—this for 11,000 officers and men. “Firecake”—a leavenless pancake cooked over campfire—and water was the sole fare. “What have you for your dinner, boys?,” an army surgeon recalled the officers asking. “Nothing but firecake and water, sir.” “What is your supper, lads?” “Firecake and water, sir.” “What have you got for breakfast?” “Firecake and water, sir.” The surgeon, in charge of maintaining the army’s health on this meager regime, cursed those responsible. “The Lord send that our Commissary of Purchases may live on firecake and water till their glutted guts are turned to pasteboard.”

  Feeding the army was far from the only challenge Washington faced. Clothing the men was just as hard. “We have, by a field return this day made,” he reported to Congress on December 23, “no less than 2898 men now in camp unfit for duty because they are bare foot and otherwise naked.” Lack of blankets forced the men to spend nights crowded around fires “instead of taking comfortable rest in a natural way.” Washington normally bore hardship stoically, but the trials of his men forced him to speak his mind about those state legislatures that postured bravely but failed to provide what the troops needed. “It is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fire side than to occupy a cold bleak hill and sleep under frost and snow without clothes or blankets.” Unless some decided change took place, “this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things: Starve, dissolve, or disperse in order to obtain subsistence.”

  Washington opted for the last. Foraging parties were drawn from those with shoes and trousers and the strength to stand. The pickings were slim in that part of Pennsylvania, which was crowded with refugees—including both the Congress an
d the Bache family. So the parties were sent to other parts of the state, and into New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Despite the urgings of the Congress, Washington hesitated to seize what he required, lest the people turn against the revolutionary cause. Some of his subordinates were less fastidious, arguing that in the case of New Jersey and Delaware, at any rate, those states were infested with Loyalists who would not have supported the revolutionary cause even if it came with kid gloves and cash.

  In camp, Washington attempted to maintain morale by keeping the men busy. Baron von Steuben arrived with his letter from Franklin and commenced drilling the troops. He lacked English beyond the basics, but his prestige as an officer in the army of Frederick the Great counted for much where military professionals were few. Discipline improved, and with it the mood in camp. (Certain cultural problems would persist, however. “Believe me, dear Baron, that the task I had to perform was not an easy one,” Steuben later explained to the Prussian ambassador in Paris. “My good republicans [that is, the Americans] wanted everything in the English style; our great and good allies [the French] everything according to the French mode; and when I presented a plate of sauerkraut dressed in the Prussian style, they all wanted to throw it out of the window. Nevertheless, by the force of proving by Goddams that my cookery was the best, I overcame the prejudices of the former; but the second liked me as little in the forests of America as they did on the plains of Rossbach.”)

  For all the hardship, Washington and the army survived the winter at Valley Forge—partly because by the standards of old-timers in that country, the winter of 1777–78 was relatively mild. The arrival of spring brought additional good news: that France had embraced the American cause. The effect of the alliance was felt most immediately when the British, under Howe’s replacement Henry Clinton, evacuated Philadelphia for New York, the better to fend off the expected French attack.

  The first American cavalry unit entered Philadelphia fifteen minutes after the last British troops departed, and on a rising tide of American morale Washington’s forces harried Clinton’s across New Jersey. Washington was tempted to strike directly at the long, straggling British line, but after an engagement at Monmouth was mishandled (leading to the court-martial and conviction of Charles Lee), Washington was reduced to watching the British make their escape across the Hudson estuary to New York.

  Had he delayed them just another week the war might have been materially shortened. On July 11 a French fleet of sixteen warships—which could have contested Clinton’s crossing of the Hudson—arrived off Sandy Hook. As it was, the fleet admiral, the Comte d’Estaing, was content to hover outside New York harbor, prevented from attacking the city by shallow water and the British guns that guarded the entrance. Meanwhile Washington crossed the Hudson upstream from the city and settled in at White Plains to keep Clinton from escaping by land.

  With the capital clear, the Congress returned to Philadelphia and voted to terminate the American commission in Paris. Three heads had been better than one in negotiating treaties, the legislators thought, but now that Louis’s government had recognized the United States, diplomatic precedent indicated representation by a single minister plenipotentiary. And where a certain skepticism, even suspicion, was called for in negotiators driving hard for a bargain, an expansive friendliness ought to guide the actions of an ambassador to a wartime ally. Franklin was the obvious choice, and the Congress made it.

  Franklin delivered his letter of appointment to “Our Great Faithful & Beloved Friend and Ally,” as the Congress styled Louis, in February 1779. The letter requested his majesty to accept Franklin’s credentials and “to give entire credit to every thing which he shall deliver on our part.”

  In fact Louis would have been wise to discount one of Franklin’s first messages. The Congress had instructed Franklin to ask the king for a French expeditionary force against Halifax and Quebec; Franklin unilaterally added British-occupied Rhode Island to the target list. In time Washington would accept the necessity of inviting French troops onto the soil of the United States, but for the moment the memories of frontier service against the French were too strong. Though the American commander wanted French forces to harass Britain, he preferred they do it elsewhere than from American soil. Fortunately for Franklin, Louis was not ready to send soldiers across the Atlantic, and the request languished, sparing Franklin substantial embarrassment.

  At seventy-three Franklin was an unlikely one to be swept away by zest for battle; the inspiration of his indiscretion may have been a young man nearly fifty-two years his junior. Lafayette was back in France after a brilliant beginning in America. Armed with Franklin’s letter of recommendation; with a desire to avenge his father, a colonel of grenadiers killed in the Seven years’ War; with a passion for la gloire; and, not least important, with a large independent income, he had convinced the Congress to make him a major general—at the tender age of nineteen. He immediately fell in love with Washington (“the God-like American hero” was how he described him to Franklin). Washington reciprocated by taking the boy general under his wing, almost as the son he never had. Lafayette was bloodied in his first battle, which endeared him to his men, and he shared their hardships at Valley Forge, which endeared him still more. A daring midwinter “irruption into Canada” by Lafayette and a handful of men foundered before launch, leaving Lafayette impatient for action. “Dear general,” he wrote Washington, “I know very well that you will do everything to procure me the only thing I am ambitious of—glory.” His ambition was satisfied slightly at the battle of Monmouth in June 1778, in which he performed with conspicuous bravery but incomplete success.

  France’s entry into the war brought tears of joy and a request to return to his homeland to prepare the troops he was certain must be marching toward the docks already. The Congress consented; yet lest the courageous general forget his adopted country it voted to award him a special sword, which Franklin would present in France after it was fashioned. A minor problem arose on the return voyage when the crew—consisting largely of British prisoners and deserters—mutinied. But Lafayette unsheathed his regular sword and cowed the mutineers.

  A problem of a different sort arose on arrival in Paris, when he was reminded that his service in America had violated a direct order of the king (given before the alliance with the United States). To his chagrin, the young marquis was placed under house arrest. His detention postponed a meeting he had requested with Franklin, to whom he carried a letter from Washington extolling his “zeal, military ardour and talents.”

  Louis let Lafayette stew for a week before issuing a royal pardon. But he insisted that Lafayette come to court to apologize in person. This provoked additional bit-champing. “In our kingly countries we have a foolish law called Etiquette that any one, though a sensible man, must absolutely follow,” Lafayette complained to Franklin. His enthusiastic reception at court momentarily alleviated his impatience. Even Marie Antoinette, who had laughed at his awkwardness on the dance floor and his inability to hold his liquor, joined the acclaim. The ladies of the court vied for his favors.

  Yet he must return to soldiering. After Monmouth but before leaving for France, Lafayette had participated in a botched attempt to break the British hold on Newport, Rhode Island. Mortified by this failure, he ached to make it right. Lafayette was the courier who brought Franklin’s commission as minister plenipotentiary and his instructions from the Congress about asking France for help attacking Halifax and Quebec; he may have intimated that an attack on Rhode Island was an oral addendum to the written instructions—perhaps too sensitive to commit to paper. Franklin should have been shrewd enough to know the difference, but he may simply have been moved by the young hero’s obvious devotion to the American cause.

  When the expedition to America was delayed, Lafayette proposed something more audacious: a strike at England itself. Louis’s tentative approval set him aquiver. “My blood is boiling in my veins,” he declared. In another letter, to Admiral d’Estaing, Lafayette
warned, “If you undertake an attack on England and land troops and I am not there with you, I shall hang myself!”

  Franklin would not have put his own feelings the same way, but he shared the broad sentiment, and he endorsed the expedition with enthusiasm. “I admire much the activity of your genius, and the strong desire you have of being continually employed against the common enemy,” Franklin wrote Lafayette. “It is certain that the coasts of England and Scotland are extremely open and defenceless. There are also many rich towns near the sea, which 4 or 5000 men, landing unexpectedly, might easily surprise and destroy, or exact from them a heavy contribution, taking a part in ready money and hostages for the rest.” Bristol, for example, ought to be worth 48 million livres, Liverpool the same, Bath 12 million, Lancaster 6 million. If the raiding parties included cavalry, all the better. “It would spread terror to much greater distances, and the whole would occasion movements and marches of troops that must put the enemy to prodigious expence and harass them exceedingly.”

  Franklin did not presume to judge the military merits of one strategy over another. But if history was any guide, the very audacity of the endeavor augured well for it. “In war, attempts thought to be impossible do often for that very reason become possible and practicable, because nobody expects them and no precautions are taken to guard against them.” Franklin concluded with an appeal he knew Lafayette could not resist: “Those are the kind of undertakings of which the success affords the most glory.”

  In this same letter Franklin noted that “much will depend on a prudent and brave sea commander who knows the coasts.” He had just the man in mind, although some wondered if “prudent” was the appropriate word. John Paul Jones had been born simply John Paul, the son of the gardener of a Scottish squire. Young John left home and went to sea at the age of twelve—about the same age Franklin thought of doing so from Boston. By nineteen he had visited Virginia, studied navigation, and advanced to first mate aboard a slaver making the notorious Middle Passage from Africa to America. Before long he had a command of his own, a Dumfries merchantman to the West Indies. Paul proved a taskmaster who brooked no dereliction; he flogged crewmen with gusto and some regularity. One day at Tobago he flogged the ship’s carpenter more severely than usual, and the man died. The carpenter’s father brought charges of murder against Paul, who was jailed. Eventually he persuaded others aboard the ship to affirm his innocence, and the charges were dropped, although a cloud of suspicion continued to hover about his head. In 1773, while commanding another ship, his crew challenged his authority, and in a scuffle the leader of the challenge was killed by Paul’s sword. Paul testified he was merely defending himself, but this time the witnesses were hostile, and he judged flight the better part of valor. A few weeks later he was in Virginia with a new surname: Jones.