The month after the Declaration was approved, Jefferson had been worried about his wife’s health. Martha Jefferson was apparently pregnant, and, given her history of childbearing, her husband knew she was going through a painful and dangerous time. But since he hadn’t told his fellow representatives about his wife’s distress, they were impatient when he resigned his seat in the Congress to be with her. That time the immediate crisis had subsided; Martha Jefferson seems to have suffered a miscarriage. By the time Jefferson was asked to travel to Paris in the fall of 1776, she was pregnant again. Jefferson thought that taking her with him on a rough ocean crossing was as unthinkable as spending months abroad without her. He tried then to make his reasons for refusing the assignment clearer. He wrote to Hancock, as president of the Congress, that “circumstances very peculiar in the situation of my family” dictated his refusal. But other delegates faced domestic crises and resented the implication that Jefferson’s problems were more pressing. Richard Henry Lee, who was also concerned about an ailing wife, wrote to remind Jefferson that if everyone put his personal concerns above his country, the result would be slavery.
Not long after Jefferson had left the Congress, John Adams accepted another term. Following a brief respite in Braintree, he returned to his duty, leaving Abigail Adams pregnant for the sixth time. Adams, in lamenting Jefferson’s absence, had expressed his own priorities when he wrote that their country was not yet secure enough “to excuse your retreat to the delights of domestic life.”
The delegates were even more frustrated by Jefferson’s refusal to go to France because his knowledge of French and his tact would have made him an admirable companion for Dr. Franklin. As for Franklin, he seemed to be taking the arduous new challenge in stride. He told Benjamin Rush, “I am old and good for nothing, but as storekeepers say of their remnants of cloth, I am but a fag end, and you may have me for what you are pleased to give.”
When Jefferson remained adamant, the Congress asked Richard Henry Lee’s brother Arthur, who was in London, to join Franklin in France. The third member of the delegation was Silas Deane, a former delegate to the Congress from Connecticut who had gone to Paris the previous March posing as a private merchant. Deane, thirty-eight, the son of a blacksmith, was a graduate of Yale, a successful merchant and an odd choice for any enterprise that required subtle judgment. He also had reasons to beg off from the assignment: his wife had been too frail to join him even in Philadelphia. In his role as a trader, Deane was authorized to buy goods from Frenchmen who sided with America. For that he would receive a five percent commission. No one in the Congress seemed troubled that Deane’s profit-making activities might conflict with his duties as a secret agent.
Deane was still a novice at diplomacy, having been America’s sole representative in France for only the last six months of 1776. He took his orders from the Committee of Secret Correspondence, which tried to lessen his distractions by forbidding him to sightsee around Paris “as so many foreigners are tempted to do.” He also changed his lodgings often, partly because England had spies everywhere but also because the Congress was slow in forwarding his funds. Deane was not likely to be seduced by the Parisian salons; his wife had reproached him for being so indifferent to Philadelphia society that he had been unable to describe the latest fashions to her. And Deane was faring badly in other ways. Behind his back, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais called him the most silent man in Paris—he wouldn’t open his mouth in front of Englishmen for fear of revealing his mission and he couldn’t speak six consecutive words in French.
Even before Achard de Bonvouloir’s mission to Philadelphia on behalf of the French court, Beaumarchais had taken up America’s cause ebulliently. By the age of forty-three he had held many posts at King Louis’s court, from royal watchmaker to music teacher for the king’s daughters. He had married a rich, older widow and with her money bought himself the title of secretary to the king. It carried no duties but included a title of nobility. Beaumarchais could also pay his own way by writing successful plays, among them Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro. When Vergennes wanted to support the American rebellion against Britain, he had turned to Beaumarchais. The playwright was authorized to set up a private company that could supply America with arms and material. Vergennes launched the firm—Roderigue, Hortalez et Compagnie—with a secret grant of a million French livres and persuaded the Spanish court to contribute the same.
Beaumarchais had met with Arthur Lee in London long before Silas Deane arrived in Paris. Lee assumed that the arms were a gift to America, and that was how he passed along the news to the Congress. But Vergennes had viewed the matter differently and told Beaumarchais that while there was no point in badgering the Americans for money, since they had none, he could ask the colonies for payment in products they manufactured. Beaumarchais asked the Committee of Secret Correspondence to send his company ten or twelve thousand hogsheads of the best American tobacco in return for his shipments of arms. Even after America began receiving the French weapons, the committee neither replied nor sent the tobacco, and Arthur Lee continued to assure the Congress that no payment was expected. For months, Beaumarchais went on trusting to American integrity for his tobacco. The silence, he said, “is depressing, but depression is a long way from discouragement.”
Silas Deane had been told very little about those tangled negotiations, but he soon found himself enmired in the affairs of Roderique, Hortalez and was authorizing the purchase of brass cannon and clothing for thousands of men. Still the French would not provoke London. When George Washington had been driven off Long Island, the British ambassador to France had sent a jubilant message to Vergennes, who had replied that he was deeply touched to be permitted to share the British joy over the American defeat. But Washington’s early losses only made Vergennes more determined to speed supplies to America through the secret pipeline. For Beaumarchais, the adventure had become theater. “Unless a pistol stops me,” he vowed, “those who stand in my way will find their match.”
—
To mislead British spies, Benjamin Franklin hired a coach and rode off from Philadelphia as though he were going on a picnic. On the Delaware he boarded an American ship, the Reprisal He took with him two grandchildren, William Temple Franklin, sixteen years old, and Benjamin Franklin Bache, seven. William’s father, the governor of New Jersey, was now under house arrest there for his loyalty to the king. Benjamin Franklin hoped to brighten the boy’s future by taking him to France as his clerk.
British agents in Paris tried to play down the sensation that Franklin’s trip was provoking. When he arrived, they spread rumors that he knew the Revolution was lost, had turned his Continental paper bills into thirty thousand pounds of gold and was appealing to France for asylum. The French police were also watching Franklin. One police agent wrote a sketch of him for the files: “This Quaker wears the full costume of his sect. He has an agreeable physiognomy, spectacles always on his eyes; but little hair—a fur cap is always on his head. He wears no powder, but has a neat air, linen very white and a brown coat.”
Lord Stormont, the British ambassador, tried to make a joke of Franklin’s rustic fur hat. Franklin retaliated by coining a new French verb, stormonter, to lie, and the Parisians took it up overnight. But there was nothing lighthearted in Stormont’s warning that Britain would consider Vergennes’s receiving Franklin at Versailles an unfriendly act, one that could lead their countries into open war.
The French knew that Stormont had a legion of paid informers and wouldn’t be easily deceived about any dealings with the Americans. Beaumarchais could leave Paris without telling even his mistress where he was going, yet the British ambassador always knew. Just before Christmas, 1776, Stormont had recruited his most illustrious double agent. Dr. Edward Bancroft, who was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, had known Silas Deane before going to London to become a medical doctor. Bancroft had written several books, including a novel. An outspoken patriot, he was also friendly with Benjam
in Franklin, who regarded him as sensible and highly intelligent. From the time Franklin arrived in France, he had found Silas Deane entirely congenial, and when Dr. Bancroft appeared from London he became one more link between them. Franklin and Deane hired Bancroft as a private secretary.
One of Franklin’s admirers was allowing him to stay free of charge in the Hôtel Valentinois, a large house with stately gardens at Passy—one mile from Paris, seven from Versailles. The house became the informal headquarters of the American delegation, and Bancroft also moved in. It was a period of watchful waiting, and Franklin was circumspect as he met with French officials to ask for more assistance than they were ready to give. Vergennes was equally discreet; he had an aide refuse Franklin in person so that the Americans wouldn’t have any written documents proving they had been negotiating with France.
But Dr. Bancroft was rendering all of those precautions futile. While professing loyalty to America, he had struck a deal with the British to pass along everything he could learn about any future treaty between France and America. His price was a down payment of five hundred pounds and another four hundred pounds each year.
When Arthur Lee crossed the Channel to Paris and met Bancroft, he immediately distrusted him, but Lee’s suspicions were hard to take seriously. His years of living amid the intrigues of London and a correspondence with Samuel Adams that fed their mutual fears had made Arthur Lee moody and contentious. A man had once observed to him that it was a very cloudy day. “It is a cloudy day, sir,” Lee had replied, “but not very cloudy.” While in England, Lee had been sure that Benjamin Franklin was undermining the patriots. Now he was convinced that Deane and Beaumarchais were bilking Congress over the secret arms shipments. Lee’s distaste for his new colleagues was not one-sided. Beaumarchais called him “the bilious Arthur Lee, with his yellow skin, green eyes, yellow teeth and hair always in disorder.”
As it turned out, Lee wasn’t suspicious enough. Because the British agents who controlled Bancroft distrusted his blatant greed, they wanted to have a second channel in case the Americans outbid them for his loyalties. As a safeguard, they enlisted John Thornton, Arthur Lee’s secretary. British intelligence referred to Benjamin Franklin in its reports as “72” or as “Moses.” Franklin claimed to be untroubled by spies and counterspies, and when a woman wrote to warn him not to trust supposed friends, Franklin answered that he was sure he was surrounded by such men, but one rule spared him any concern—he did nothing in private that a spy wasn’t welcome to observe. If his valet was a spy, and he probably was, Franklin wouldn’t discharge him as long as he gave good service.
The answer showed Franklin at his most disingenuous. He knew that his simplicity was part of his appeal and that his homely fur hat had enhanced his popularity. If the French regarded him as a Quaker, which he was not, let them. They took him for Rousseau’s natural man, a brilliant philosopher who had arisen from the savage forests of the New World, a view that meant overlooking the twenty years Franklin had spent in European society. Whenever he ventured out from Passy, he was trailed by a curious but genteel crowd. People paid for places to stand to watch his coach pass, and Parisians hung engravings of him over their mantelpieces.
Franklin received the acclaim with open pleasure. He was sought after for his fame and wit, and although he suffered from gout he accepted invitations to dine every night of the week but Sunday. Franklin’s French hostesses often had a sketchy knowledge of his past contributions, but they knew they had been substantial.
—
Franklin was no classic philosopher—metaphysical reasoning bored him—and the total of his writings on politics and government ran to a few pages. He went to church on occasion because he thought Christianity, while it might be untrue, was indispensable to the kind of society he preferred. His great renown had come as a self-taught scientist. Benjamin Franklin hadn’t been the first man to suggest that lightning and electricity were the same force of nature, but he had been the first to offer proof.
Franklin had invited no onlookers for his first experiment in June 1752, because he didn’t want witnesses if he failed. His son William, then twenty-two, had helped him raise a silken kite in the rain. Franklin had retreated to watch from a nearby shed while William ran with the kite across a cow pasture. A promising cloud passed with no effect, and father and son were disappointed. Then, at last, loose threads on the wet kite string stiffened and a spark flew off a metal key at the end of the string to William’s knuckle.
For five months Franklin pondered the incident. Then he made a diffident announcement in the next edition of his Poor Richard’s Almanack and also described his invention of the lightning rod. The experiments enhanced his reputation at home and overseas. Harvard College gave him the first honorary degree that had not gone to a member of its own faculty. The Royal Society of London sent its Copley Medal and the king of France his congratulations. Franklin said the honors made him feel like a little girl who holds her head higher because, unknown to anyone else, she is wearing a new pair of silk garters.
Readers on both sides of the ocean cherished Franklin’s humor and the wisdom he wrapped in wit. In Braintree, Abigail Adams delivered a stillborn daughter and fought her way out of depression by recalling one of Franklin’s most popular maxims: “That saying of Poor Richard often occurs to my mind: God helps them who help themselves.”
But Franklin’s experiments with the kite had come more than twenty years before this trip to France. He had broken with his son William when William suggested that the Bostonians had been wrong in their tea protest. Franklin had responded to his son’s disloyalty by denouncing him: “But you, as a thorough courtier, see everything with government eyes.” In France, Franklin was now the courtier, hoping to break through the timidity at Versailles and win the open support that America needed to win the war.
One night Franklin discovered that he was dining at the same inn as Edward Gibbon, whose first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been published the year before. Franklin delivered a note asking for the pleasure of his company. Gibbon replied that, much as he admired Mr. Franklin as a man and as a philosopher, as a loyal subject of his king he could not enter into conversation with a rebel. Franklin wrote again: He retained his high respect for the historian and would supply him with the many documents in his possession when Mr. Gibbon came to write his account of the decline and fall of the British Empire.
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John Adams was visiting his cousin in his chambers one day during a recess when Samuel Adams took out a pair of scissors and began to cut up whole bundles of his letters into tiny scraps. Since the weather was mild and there was no fire, Samuel raised the window and threw out the bits for the wind to scatter. By this time, the two men were enough attuned in their politics that John felt he could twit his cousin for being so cautious. Samuel responded with a mild rebuke: “Whatever becomes of me, my friends shall never suffer by my negligence.”
John Adams fretted later that his cousin’s scruples would prevent history from ever understanding him. But his contemporaries sometimes seemed to know Samuel Adams too well. The depths of his Puritan fervor had been shown in his attempt to ban galas and dances in Philadelphia. When Martha Washington visited Philadelphia, a ball had been arranged in her honor at the City Tavern. After Adams called on her and explained that the Congress officially opposed “vain amusements,” Mrs. Washington decided not to attend.
On matters of state, he could be equally inflexible. Men who sought to advance their relatives were reminded that Adams strongly disapproved of favoritism. He had been proud that Samuel Adams, Jr., was making his way as a surgeon in the army without assistance from his father. Adams’ own willingness to sacrifice everything for his country had led to a detachment about other men’s suffering that could seem unfeeling. Unless a memorial ceremony underscored a political point, Adams rarely paused to mourn. The death of his young friend Joseph Warren was “greatly afflicting,” he had written to his
wife, but it was man’s duty to submit to the will of Heaven.
Although Samuel Adams freely confessed to his ignorance about military matters, it didn’t stop him from promoting the careers of certain generals, usually those whose outspoken patriotism had convinced him of their strategic genius. George Washington was far too composed, too little given to ardent rhetoric, to convince Adams he was trustworthy. With his own influence waning in the Congress and the nation, Adams watched disapprovingly as men began to worship General Washington. Adams considered Washington an imperfect idol. He had married wealth and he craved property. He owned slaves. He was not secure enough in his own righteousness to ignore his public reputation. He enjoyed the theater. He danced. But had the two men ever become intimates, Samuel Adams would have taken away a warmer impression of the commander in chief. Adams was a democrat before he was a Puritan, and he could have found no fault with Washington’s belief that though a democratic nation might sometimes move slowly, the people would always be right.
Samuel Adams’ ebbing authority in the Congress did not mean he was withdrawing from public life. Looking around the Congress early in 1777, John Adams saw that he and his cousin were among the few left from the first assembly. The rest had died, resigned or, like Patrick Henry and Christopher Gadsden, gone home to become governors or legislators in their state. Samuel Adams made occasional trips to Boston, where he reassured those friends who thought the war was causing a breakdown in society. As always, Adams believed the solution was to instill principles of morality in the young. Uncorrupted men whose love of country was their ruling passion would lead the state to purity and virtue.
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