Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  It would turn out to be the last time Franklin would see his son other than a final tense meeting in England ten years later. But neither man knew that at the time, and they kept the meeting short. “We would willingly have detained them longer,” William’s wife wrote Temple, “but Papa was anxious to get home.”22

  Back in Philadelphia, a group of Marine units were being organized to try to capture British arms shipments. Franklin noticed that one of their drummers had painted a rattlesnake on his drum embla-zoned with the words “Don’t tread on me.” In an anonymous article, filled with bold humor and a touch of venom, Franklin suggested that this should be the symbol and motto of America’s fight. The rattlesnake, Franklin noted, had no eyelids, and “may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance.” It also never initiated an attack nor surrendered once engaged, and “is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage.” As for the rattles, the snake on the drum had thirteen of them, “exactly the number of the colonies united in America; and I recollected too that this was the only part of the snake which increased in number.” Christopher Gadsen, a delegate to the Congress from South Carolina, picked up the suggestion in Franklin’s article and subsequently designed a yellow flag with a rattlesnake embla-zoned “Don’t Tread on Me.” It was flown in early 1776 by America’s first Marine units and later by many other militias.23

  Canada

  Undertaking a mission to the Boston area in autumn was understandable: it was an easy enough trip to the town of his birth. The Congress’s decision to send him on his second mission, and his willingness to agree, was less explicable. In March 1776, Franklin, now 70, embarked on a brutal trip to Quebec.

  A combined American force, led in part by the still-patriotic Benedict Arnold, had invaded Canada with the goal of preventing Britain from launching an expedition down the Hudson and splitting the colonies. Trapped and under siege, the American forces had spent the winter freezing and begging the Congress for reinforcements. Once more, the Congress responded by appointing a committee, again with Franklin at the head.

  On their first day of travel, Franklin and his fellow commissioners passed just north of Perth Amboy, where William kept up the pretense of governing even though local rebels restricted his movements. Franklin did not visit. His son was now an enemy. Indeed, William showed where his loyalties now were: he sent back to London all the information he had been able to gather on his father’s mission. “Dr. Franklin,” he noted, planned to “prevail on the Canadians to enter into the Confederacy with the other colonies.” Yet, in his letters to Temple, William poured out his sorrow and fears. Was the old man healthy enough to survive the journey? Was there a way to dissuade him from going? “Nothing ever gave me more pain than his undertaking that journey.”

  By the time he reached Saratoga, where they paused to wait for the ice on the lakes to clear, Franklin realized that he in fact might not survive. “I have undertaken a fatigue that at my time of life may prove too much for me,” he wrote Josiah Quincy. “So I sit down to write to a few friends by way of farewell.” But he soldiered on and, after an arduous month of travel that included time spent sleeping on the floors of abandoned houses, finally reached Montreal. Along the way, he picked up a soft marten fur cap that he would later make famous when, as an envoy in Paris, he wore it as part of his pose as a simple frontier sage.24

  Despite the disarray of his forces, Benedict Arnold hosted Franklin and his fellow commissioners at a grand supper graced by a profusion of young French ladies. Alas, Franklin was in no shape to enjoy it. “I suffered much from a number of large boils,” he later wrote. “In Canada, my legs swelled and I apprehended a dropsy.”

  The military situation was equally bad. America’s besieged army had expected the committee to bring needed funds, and there was great discouragement when they discovered this was not the case. Franklin’s delegation hoped, on the other hand, that it would be able to raise funds from the local Canadians, but that proved impossible. Franklin personally provided £353 in gold from his own pocket to Arnold, a nice gesture that bought him some affection while doing little to solve the situation.

  Franklin had been instructed to try to entice Quebec into joining the American rebellion, but he decided not to even try. “Until the arrival of money, it seems improper to propose the federal union of this province with the others,” he reported, “as the few friends we have here will scarce venture to exert themselves in promoting it until they see our credit recovered and a sufficient army arrived.”

  When reports came that more British ships were on their way, the Canadians became even less hospitable. The committee reached what was an inevitable conclusion: “If money cannot be had to support your army here with honor, so as to be respected instead of being hated by the people, we repeat it as our firm and unanimous opinion that it is better immediately to withdraw.”

  Exhausted and feeling defeated, Franklin spent the month of May struggling to make it back to Philadelphia. “I find I grow daily more feeble,” he wrote. When he arrived home, his gout was so bad that he could not leave his house for days. It seemed he had performed his last mission for his country.

  But his strength gradually returned, spurred by a visit from General Washington and by some tidings of a big event that was about to occur. His poor health, he wrote Washington on June 21, “has kept me from Congress and company almost ever since you left us, so that I know little of what has passed there except that a Declaration of Independence is preparing.”25

  The Path to the Declaration

  Until 1776, most colonial leaders believed—or politely pretended to believe—that America’s dispute was with the king’s misguided ministers, not with the king himself nor the Crown in concept. To declare independence, they had to convince their countrymen, and themselves, to take the daunting leap of abandoning this distinction. One thing that helped them do so was the publication, in January of that year, of an anonymous forty-seven-page pamphlet entitled Common Sense.

  In prose that drew its power, as Franklin’s often did, from being unadorned, the author argued that there was no “natural or religious reason [for] the distinction of men into kings and subjects.” Hereditary rule was a historic abomination. “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” Thus, there was only one path for Americans: “Every thing that is right or natural pleads for separation.”

  Within weeks of its appearance in Philadelphia, the pamphlet sold an astonishing 120,000 copies. Many thought Franklin the author, for it reflected his blunt sentiments about the corruption of hereditary power. In fact, Franklin’s hand was more indirect: the real author was a cheeky young Quaker from London named Thomas Paine, who had failed as a corset maker, been fired as a tax clerk, and then gained an introduction to Franklin, who, not surprisingly, took a liking to him. When Paine decided he wanted to immigrate to America and become a writer, Franklin procured him passage and wrote to Richard Bache in 1774 asking him to help get Paine a job. Soon he was working for a Philadelphia printer and honing his skills as an essayist. When Paine showed him the manuscript for Common Sense, Franklin offered his wholehearted support along with a few suggested revisions.26

  Paine’s pamphlet galvanized the forces favoring outright revolution. Cautious colonial legislatures became less so, revising their instructions to their delegates so that they now were permitted to consider the question of independence. On June 7, as Franklin recuperated, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee, brother of his once and future rival Arthur Lee, put the motion on the table, to wit: “These United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.”

  Although the Congress put off a vote on the motion for a few weeks, it took one immediate step toward independence that affected the Franklins personally: ordering the removal of all royal governments in the colonies. Patriotic new provincial congresses asserted themselves, and the one in New Jersey, on June 15, 1776, declared that Gov. William Franklin was
“an enemy of the liberties of this country.” In deference to the fact that he was a Franklin, the order for William’s arrest did suggest that he be handled “with all the delicacy and tenderness which the nature of the business can possibly admit.”

  William was in no mood for delicacy or tenderness. The speech he made at his trial on June 21 was so defiant that one of the judges described it as “every way worthy of his exalted birth,” referring to his illegitimacy rather than to his famous paternity. For his part, the elder Franklin was not acting particularly paternal. His letter to Washington that noted the preparation of a declaration of independence was written on the same day that his son was being tried, but Franklin didn’t mention it. Nor did he say or do anything to help his son when the Continental Congress, three days later, voted to have him imprisoned in Connecticut.

  Thus, the words that William wrote on the eve of his confinement to his own son, who was now firmly ensconced in his grandfather’s custody, read so painfully generous: “God bless you, my dear boy; be dutiful and attentive to your grandfather, to whom you owe great obligation.” Then he concluded with a bit of forced optimism: “If we survive the present storm, we may all meet and enjoy the sweets of peace with the greater relish.”27

  They would, in fact, survive the storm, and indeed all meet again, but never to relish the sweets of peace together. The wounds of 1776 would prove too deep.

  Editing Jefferson

  As the Congress prepared to vote on the question of independence, it appointed a committee for what, in hindsight, would turn out to be a momentous task, but one that at the time did not seem so important: drafting a declaration that explained the decision. It included Franklin, of course, and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, as well as Connecticut merchant Roger Sherman and New York lawyer Robert Livingston.28

  How was it that Jefferson, at 33, got the honor of drafting the document? His name was listed first on the committee, signifying that he was the chairman, because he had gotten the most votes and because he was from Virginia, the colony that had proposed the resolution. His four colleagues had other committee assignments that they considered to be more important, and none of them realized that the document would eventually become viewed as a text akin to scripture.

  For his part, Adams mistakenly thought he had already secured his place in history by writing the preamble to a May 10 resolution that called for the dismantling of royal authority in the colonies, which he proclaimed incorrectly would be regarded by historians as “the most important resolution that ever was taken in America.” Years later, in his pompous way, he would claim that Jefferson wanted him to be the declaration’s writer, but that he had convinced the younger man to do the honors, arguing: “Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.” Jefferson’s recollection was quite different. The committee “unanimously pressed on myself alone to make the draught,” he later wrote.29

  As for Franklin, he was still laid up in bed with boils and gout when the committee first met. Besides, he later told Jefferson, “I have made it a rule, whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body.”

  And thus it was that Jefferson had the glorious honor of composing, on a little lap desk he had designed, some of the most famous phrases in history while sitting alone in a second-floor room of a home on Market Street just a block from Franklin’s home. “When in the course of human events…” he famously began. Significantly, what followed was an attack not on the British government (i.e., the ministers) but on the British state incarnate (i.e., the king). “To attack the king was,” historian Pauline Maier notes, “a constitutional form. It was the way Englishmen announced revolution.”30

  The document Jefferson drafted was in some ways similar to what Franklin would have written. It contained a highly specific bill of particulars against the British, and it recounted, as Franklin had often done, the details of America’s attempts to be conciliatory despite England’s repeated intransigence. Indeed, Jefferson’s words echoed some of the language that Franklin had used earlier that year in a draft resolution that he never published:

  Whereas, whenever kings, instead of protecting the lives and properties of their subjects, as is their bounden duty, do endeavor to perpetrate the destruction of either, they thereby cease to be kings, become tyrants, and dissolve all ties of allegiance between themselves and their people; we hereby further solemnly declare, that whenever it shall appear clearly to us, that the King’s troops and ships now in America, or hereafter to be brought there, do, by his Majesty’s orders, destroy any town or the inhabitants of any town or place in America, or that the savages have been by the same orders hired to assassinate our poor out-settlers and their families, we will from that time renounce all allegiance to Great Britain, so long as that kingdom shall submit to him, or any of his descendants, as its sovereign.31

  Jefferson’s writing style, however, was different from Franklin’s. It was graced with rolling cadences and mellifluous phrases, soaring in their poetry and powerful despite their polish. In addition, Jefferson drew on a depth of philosophy not found in Franklin. He echoed both the language and grand theories of English and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, most notably the concept of natural rights propounded by John Locke, whose Second Treatise on Government he had read at least three times. And he built his case, in a manner more sophisticated than Franklin would have, on a contract between government and the governed that was founded on the consent of the people.

  Jefferson also, it should be noted, borrowed freely from the phrasings of others, including the resounding Declaration of Rights in the new Virginia constitution that had just been drafted by his fellow planter George Mason, in a manner that today might subject him to questions of plagiarism but back then was considered not only proper but learned. Indeed, when the cranky John Adams, jealous of the acclaim that Jefferson had gotten, did point out years later that there were no new ideas in the Declaration and that many of the phrases had been lifted from others, Jefferson retorted: “I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”32

  When he had finished a draft and incorporated some changes from Adams, Jefferson sent it to Franklin on the morning of Friday, June 21. “Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it,” he wrote in his cover note, “and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?”33 People were much more polite to editors back then.

  Franklin made only a few changes, some of which can be viewed written in his own hand on what Jefferson referred to as the “rough draft” of the Declaration. (This remarkable document is at the Library of Congress and on its Web site.) The most important of his edits was small but resounding. He crossed out, using the heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”34

  The idea of “self-evident” truths was one that drew less on John Locke, who was Jefferson’s favored philosopher, than on the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and on the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. In what became known as “Hume’s fork,” the great Scottish philosopher, along with Leibniz and others, had developed a theory that distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact (such as “London is bigger than Philadelphia”) and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition (“The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees”; “All bachelors are unmarried”). By using the word “sacred,” Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religi
on. Franklin’s edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality.

  Franklin’s other edits were less felicitous. He changed Jefferson’s “reduce them to arbitrary power” to “reduce them under absolute despotism,” and he took out the literary flourish in Jefferson’s “invade and deluge us in blood” to make it more sparse: “invade and destroy us.” And a few of his changes seem somewhat pedantic. “Amount of their salaries” became “amount and payment of their salaries.”35

  On July 2, the Continental Congress finally took the momentous step of voting for independence. Pennsylvania was one of the last states to hold out; until June, its legislature had instructed its delegates to “utterly reject” any actions “that may cause or lead to a separation from our Mother Country.” But under pressure from a more radical rump legislature, the instructions were changed. Led by Franklin, Pennsylvania’s delegation, with conservative John Dickinson abstaining, joined the rest of the colonies in voting for independence.

  As soon as the vote was completed, the Congress formed itself into a committee of the whole to consider Jefferson’s draft Declaration. They were not so light in their editing as Franklin had been. Large sections were eviscerated, most notably the one that criticized the king for perpetuating the slave trade. The Congress also, to its credit, cut by more than half the draft’s final five paragraphs, in which Jefferson had begun to ramble in a way that detracted from the document’s power.36

  Jefferson was distraught. “I was sitting by Dr. Franklin,” he recalled, “who perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations.” But the process (in addition to in fact improving the great document) had the delightful consequence of eliciting from Franklin, who sought to console Jefferson, one of his most famous little tales. When he was a young printer, a friend starting out in the hat-making business wanted a sign for his shop. As Franklin recounted: