The First American

by H. W. Brands

  During the next two years he discovered neither another ship nor work ashore. Yet the misfortunes of the British empire promised an end to his own, and when war broke out with Britain he sided with the Americans. He hurried to Philadelphia and received a commission as a lieutenant, upgraded to captain once the Congress acquired a few more ships. Commanding the Providence and then the Ranger, he won a reputation as the scourge of British shipping. In one especially daring raid he swooped down upon the Scottish coast with the aim of taking hostage the Earl of Selkirk, to be traded for American prisoners. But the earl was out, and Jones’s crew satisfied themselves with stealing the family silver—which Jones subsequently purchased from them and returned to its owner.

  The entry of France into the war allowed, and required, Jones to coordinate his actions with those of the French. As an American officer he reported to Franklin, the ranking representative of the United States government, but in the common interests of the alliance—and because Franklin was a self-admitted novice in naval matters—the minister plenipotentiary followed the lead of the French navy minister, Antoine Sartine. It was Sartine who prepared the invasion of England, and Franklin who urged the impetuous Jones to cooperate. “The Marquis de Lafayette will be with you soon,” Franklin wrote.

  It has been observed that joint expeditions of land and sea forces often miscarry, through jealousies and misunderstanding between the officers of the different corps. This must happen when there are little minds actuated more by personal views of profit or honour to themselves than by the warm and sincere desire of good to their country. Knowing you both as I do, and your just manner of thinking on these occasions, I am confident nothing of the kind can happen between you, and that it is unnecessary for me to recommend to either of you that condescension, mutual goodwill and harmony, which contribute so much to success in such undertakings.

  Of course, if it really had been unnecessary, Franklin would not have written. In fact Franklin knew that Jones was touchy on matters of rank and precedence. Franklin felt compelled to remind Captain Jones that General Lafayette outranked him and therefore would command the ground forces. “But the command of the ships will be entirely in you, in which I am persuaded that what ever authority his rank might in strictness give him, he will not have the least desire to interfere with you.” Because the operation joined not simply land and sea forces but American and French, “a cool prudent conduct in the chiefs is therefore the more necessary.” Jones need not fear. “There is honour enough to be got for both of you if the expedition is conducted with a prudent unanimity.”

  Franklin followed this exhortation with Jones’s formal instructions. Captain Jones was to accept the French forces Lafayette brought him and conduct them where the marquis requested. Once the troops were landed, Jones was to assist them “by all means in your power.” He must stay close: “You are during the expedition never to depart from the troops so as not to be able to protect them or to secure their retreat in case of a repulse.” Englishmen captured should be treated with care. “As many of your officers and people have lately escaped from English prisons either in Europe or America, you are to be particularly attentive to their conduct toward the prisoners which the fortune of war may throw in your hands, lest the resentment of the more than barbarous usage by the English in many places towards the Americans should occasion a retaliation, and an imitation of what ought rather to be detested and avoided for the sake of humanity and for the honour of our country.” Similar sentiments should inform the captain’s conduct in other areas. “Although the English have wantonly burnt many defenceless towns in America, you are not to follow this example, unless where a reasonable ransom is refused, in which case your own generous feelings as well as this instruction will induce you to give timely notice of your intention that sick and ancient persons, women and children may be first removed.”

  Jones replied that Franklin could count on him. “Your liberal and noble-minded instructions would make a coward brave. You have called up every sentiment of public virtue in my breast, and it shall be my pride and ambition in the strict pursuit of your instructions to deserve success.”

  Jones, who closed his letter rather fulsomely, even for that gushy era (“I am and shall be to the end of my life, with the most affectionate esteem and respect, Honoured and dear Sir, your most obliged friend and most obedient very humble servant”), seems to have been sincere. He took the ship Sartine provided him, the Duras, and rechristened it the Bonhomme Richard.

  And it was in the Bonhomme Richard that Jones made himself an immortal of the waves. Logistics and politics scuttled the invasion of England, leaving Jones to put to sea against the British navy. In September 1779 he locked up in a death struggle against the Serapis, a much larger, more heavily armed vessel. Two of Jones’s biggest guns exploded in the faces of their gunners at the start of the fight, while the eighteen-pounders of the Serapis battered the Bonhomme Richard. The captain of the British vessel, convinced he had won, shouted to Jones, offering him the chance to strike his colors. Jones replied defiantly, “No! I’ll sink, but I’m damned if I’ll strike!” (This was remembered much later by one witness as, “I have not yet begun to fight!” and so transmitted to posterity.)

  Realizing that survival required closing with the Serapis, Jones rammed his bow into her stern, fastening the two vessels together, starboard to starboard, muzzle to muzzle. While the British guns blasted holes in the Bonhomme Richard, Jones’s American and French crew climbed the rigging and rained down musket fire and grenades upon the British. One grenade landed in the magazine of the Serapis, causing a huge explosion. As the hull of the Bonhomme Richard filled with water, the decks of the Serapis filled with blood. “The scene was dreadful beyond the reach of language,” Jones reported to Franklin. “A person must have been an eyewitness to form a just idea of the tremendous scenes of carnage, wreck and ruin which every where appeared. Humanity cannot but recoil and lament that war should be capable of producing such fatal consequences.”

  Some of Jones’s men thought so too, and implored him to strike the colors before the ship sank and they all died. He ignored their pleas and urged them to redouble their efforts, leading by the example of manning a gun himself. Finally the nerve of the British commander broke. The Serapis was Jones’s—which was a good thing, since the mortally wounded Bonhomme Richard went to a watery grave.

  Franklin exulted at the news of the victory. “For some days after the arrival of your express,” he wrote Jones, “scarce any thing was talked of at Paris and Versailles but your cool conduct and persevering bravery during that terrible conflict.”

  Glorious as it was, Jones’s victory hardly won the war, nor did it much ease the financial strain America—and Franklin—faced. Jones, hoping to capitalize on the good feeling at the French court, asked Franklin to request the money he needed to refit his ship. “I must acquaint you that there is not the least probability of obtaining it,” Franklin replied, “and therefore I cannot ask it.” Jones did not want merely to fix what was broken but to improve the sea-and battle-worthiness of his vessel by sheathing the hull in copper. “It is totally out of the question,” Franklin said. “I am not authorized to do it, if I had the money; and I have not the money for it, if I had orders.” Jones was far from the only one calling on Franklin for funds, but he was the latest; as a result he received more than his share of Franklin’s frustration. “For God’s sake, be sparing, unless you mean to make me a bankrupt.”

  The alliance with France brought French resources into the conflict on America’s side but did not place them at America’s disposal. After four years of fighting, the credit of the United States was nearly nil. The Congress continued to finesse the problem at home—imperfectly, to be sure—by issuing more and more currency. Troops and other creditors of the government could accept the Continental dollars or nothing at all. Franklin, the optimist, perceived a silver lining in the disastrous depreciation of the currency. “Though an evil to particulars, there is s
ome advantage to the public in the depreciation, as large nominal values are more easily paid in taxes.”

  Foreign governments and individuals were under no compulsion to accept American paper. Indeed they marveled at the Americans’ system of financing the war. “The whole is a mystery even to the politicians,” Franklin said: “how we have been able to continue a war four years without money, and how we could pay with paper that had no previously fixed fund appropriated specifically to redeem it.” Franklin himself sometimes marveled. “This currency as we manage it is a wonderful machine. It performs its office when we issue it; it pays and clothes troops, and provides victuals and ammunition; and when we are obliged to issue a quantity excessive, it pays itself off by depreciation.”

  At times Franklin felt that Americans’ hearts were not really in the struggle—at least as it related to finances. “The extravagant luxury of our country in the midst of all its distresses is to me amazing,” he wrote John Jay, president of the Congress. “When the difficulties are so great to find remittances to pay for the arms and ammunition necessary for our defence, I am astonished and vexed to find, upon enquiry, that much the greatest part of the Congress interest-bills come to pay for tea, and a great part of the remainder is ordered to be laid out in gewgaws and superfluities.” This was a scandal for America—not to mention a pain for him. “It makes me grudge the trouble of examining, entering and accepting them, which indeed takes a great deal of time.”

  Franklin chastised his own daughter, Sally, for her part in this national extravagance.

  When I began to read your account of the high prices of goods—a pair of gloves seven dollars, a yard of common gauze twenty-four dollars, and that it now required a fortune to maintain a family in a very plain way—I expected you would conclude with telling me that every body as well as yourself was grown frugal and industrious. And I could scarce believe my eyes in reading forward that there never was so much dressing and pleasure going on, and that you yourself wanted black pins and feathers from France, to appear, I suppose, in the mode!

  He refused to indulge her. “If you wear your cambric ruffles as I do, and take care not to mend the holes, they will come in time to be lace; and feathers, my dear girl, may be had in America from every cock’s tail.”

  Sally responded with more than a touch of hurt. She explained she had simply wanted to look presentable when visiting General and Mrs. Washington and the elected officials of the government. “Though I never loved dress so much as to wish to be particularly fine, yet I will never go out when I cannot appear so as to do credit to my family and husband.” Perhaps her father did not appreciate what it meant to be driven from home by an enemy army, and how it made her long for her old, settled life. “This winter approaches with so many horrors that I shall not want any thing to go abroad in, if I can be comfortable at home. My spirits, which I have kept up during my being drove about from place to place much better than most people I met with, have been lowered by nothing but the depreciation of the money, which has been amazing lately. So home will be the place for me this winter, as I cannot get a common winter cloak and hat but just under two hundred pounds.”

  There was other worrisome news from Philadelphia. Sally’s husband, Richard, reported that Franklin’s foe Arthur Lee was up to his old machinations. Lee sent the Congress a long memorial asserting that behind Franklin’s smooth façade and tremendous popularity he was serving America poorly and was slandering Lee himself besides. Lee described Franklin as a “great politician, at least in the European estimate of that character.” With affected sorrow he added, “Would to God he were in the truest sense of the word the greatest politician in Europe! Would to God he were the firmest patriot of the age, and that his talents had been employed with half that assiduity in promoting the cause of his country that his wiles have been in weaving little plots, sowing pernicious dissensions, countenancing and covering the most corrupt and selfish use of all the opportunities which his station furnished!”

  Franklin was hardly happy to hear this, but he was beyond wasting energy on Lee. He had never done Lee the slightest injury, he told Bache, nor given any just cause for offense. But a good reputation and popular approval were more than the small minds of Lee and his allies could bear. He would not answer their charges unless the Congress specifically instructed him to do so. “I take no other revenge of such enemies than to let them remain in the miserable situation in which their malignant natures have placed them, by endeavouring to support an estimable character; and thus by continuing the reputation the world has hitherto indulged me with, I shall continue them in their present state of damnation.”

  Yet there was one part of the campaign against him he could not easily ignore. His critics complained that his employment of Temple amounted to nepotism, and demanded Temple’s removal. The allegation was accurate enough (and in keeping with Franklin’s fixed habit of employing relatives). This may have been why he rejected it so vociferously. Far from being censured, he told Bache, he should be congratulated. “Methinks it is rather some merit that I have rescued a young man from the danger of being a Tory and fixed him in honest republican Whig principles.” Besides, Temple was showing real character and ability and promised in time to be of genuine service to his country.

  There was more than this to Franklin’s defense of Temple—something much more personal. “It is enough that I have lost my son; would they add my grandson! An old man of 70, I undertook a winter voyage at the command of the Congress, and for the public service, with no other attendant to take care of me. I am continued here in a foreign country, where, if I am sick, his filial attention comforts me, and, if I die, I have a child to close my eyes and take care of my remains.”

  Franklin knew that Richard and Sally would be even more interested in hearing of his other grandson. “Ben, if I should live long enough to want it, is like to be another comfort to me,” he explained. The younger boy had started at boarding school near Passy, but his grandfather had lately sent him to Geneva. “I intend him for a Presbyterian as well as a republican.”

  One reason Franklin begrudged his daughter luxuries like pins and feathers was that he heard daily of Americans who lacked even necessaries. Franklin regularly received letters regarding the plight of American prisoners of war held in England. Typically these were sailors captured from American privateers; routinely they were tossed into prison and treated as common felons—and worse, as traitors and pirates.

  At times during the eighteenth century, war could be a gentlemanly endeavor. Captured officers were regularly paroled—that is, sent home upon their promise to engage no longer in hostilities. Such had been the fate of General Burgoyne after Saratoga. Soldiers of the rank and file were often exchanged for their counterparts from the other side.

  But the British government refused to accord such courtesies to captured Americans. London contended they were not belligerents but rebels. To an early application from Franklin regarding treatment of prisoners, the British ambassador in Paris, Lord Stormont, responded curtly, “The King’s ambassador receives no letters from rebels, unless they come to implore his Majesty’s mercy.”

  Such might have finished Franklin’s hopes for ameliorating the prisoners’ plight, if not for the assistance he gained from others in Britain. The Parliamentary opposition to the North ministry seized on the suspension of habeas corpus, as it related to the American prisoners, and attacked the government for hypocritically undermining essential English institutions in the name of defending them. English prisons were a scandal in the best of times, and though conditions there pricked few consciences regarding regular felons, the harsh treatment accorded the Americans elicited letters to editors and other forms of low-grade protest.

  To publicize the prisoners’ plight, Franklin sent a special envoy, John Thornton, to England to visit the prisons that held the Americans. Thornton had to bribe his way past the sentries; he did so with money supplied by Franklin. He reported prisoners half naked, constantly hungry
, and, in dozens of cases, confined for weeks at a time to the “black holes,” cramped, windowless dungeons where “the air doth not only become foul, but the stench sometimes insupportable.”

  Thornton’s report supplied Franklin the basis for initiating a regular program of prisoner relief. English prisoners in those days were required to contribute to the cost of their detention, and while this might be difficult for those from poor families, it was nearly impossible for Americans with families thousands of miles away—families that were often ignorant of the whereabouts of their kin (or even whether the kin were still alive). Franklin diverted monies that might have gone to purchase weapons for Washington’s army, creating a fund from which prisoners could draw some eighteen pence per week.

  This was a temporary expedient; his larger goal was the release of the prisoners. Until 1779 he had little leverage to apply against the prison doors, lacking much meaningful to trade. But the raids of John Paul Jones, who shared Franklin’s concern for the imprisoned Americans, netted hundreds of British sailors. Franklin wrote David Hartley, a member of Parliament who had served as a mediator when Franklin was working with Lord Howe in London before the outbreak of war, and suggested a swap.