“I am here immers’d in so much Business that I have scarce time to eat or sleep,” Franklin wrote. “My time has never been more fully employed.”33 Because Franklin had recently returned from London where he socialized with British officials and his son still served as New Jersey’s royal governor, some delegates initially doubted Franklin’s commitment to the patriot cause, but they were soon won over by his zeal. “He does not hesitate at our boldest Measures,” John Adams wrote in July, “but rather seems to think us, too irresolute, and backward.”34 And no delegate had a wider range of expertise and experience to bring to the effort.
Franklin’s experience led him to foresee sooner than most the need for undertaking two fundamental reforms that seemingly ran counter to the libertarian impulse driving the Revolution. First, he consistently spoke and thought in terms of “America” rather than of colonies, believing that the British could be defeated and liberty secured only by a “united” effort.35 Having pushed the Albany Plan of Union during the French and Indian War, Franklin introduced a similar though somewhat stronger draft constitution for the colonies in July. Knowing that Congress was not yet ready for such a step, Franklin simply offered his proposal and asked that it be tabled for later consideration. Clearly federal in nature, with each colony retaining control over matters peculiar to it, Franklin’s draft contained concepts that he would support at the Constitutional Convention, including proportional representation in Congress and centralized power over commerce, war and peace, foreign affairs, western lands, and such domestic matters as thought “necessary to the General Welfare.”36 These would become the same issues that Washington also embraced at the Convention.
Second, while many patriots, blinded by faith in their cause, believed that citizen-soldiers could quickly vanquish a hireling army, Franklin, sobered by experience dealing with obstinate British leaders, foresaw a long war. At its outset in May 1775, he predicted to David Hartley, a forty-five-year-old member of Parliament, that neither of them “may live to see” its end.37
Summer soldiers and part-time militias could not win such a war; only a disciplined, unified force could. Yet as commander of troops besieging Boston, not only did Washington face the daunting task of transforming volunteer militiamen from various colonies into a single, Continental Army, but he had to do so knowing that most of his men had signed up only to the end of 1775. Confronting an army of professional soldiers led by generals content to wait for the patriot cause to flag, Franklin and Washington knew that their army must be reconstituted on a more permanent basis. As Congress came around to this view once militia commissions began expiring with the British still embedded in Boston, it assigned Franklin to multiple committees charged with reforming the army. This work brought him back in direct contact with Washington on a common cause.
FRANKLIN HAD WRITTEN TO WASHINGTON only once since the general left Philadelphia in June. That came in August, when state militia under Franklin’s command in Pennsylvania captured a British vessel with military supplies and army officers. Franklin sent them to Washington. By September, however, Washington faced a crisis demanding immediate attention. “My Situation is inexpressibly distressing, to see the Winter, fast approaching upon a naked Army: The Time of their Service within a few Weeks of expiring, & no Provision, yet made for such important Events,” he wrote to Congress on September 21. “A Dissolution of the present Army therefore will take Place, unless some early Provision is made agst such an Event.”38
Congress responded by sending a three-member delegation chaired by Franklin to meet with Washington and leaders from the New England colonies at army headquarters in Cambridge. There, Franklin stayed with Washington in a stately, three-story Georgian mansion commandeered from the loyalist brother-in-law of the colony’s royal lieutenant governor. The house stood only a short walk from Harvard College, which had awarded Franklin its first-ever honorary degree two decades earlier, and Cambridge Commons, where Washington drilled the troops. The meeting of Washington, Franklin, and the others produced the framework for a new Continental Army.
The conference lasted for a week and addressed a range of issues relating to transforming a mishmash of militias jealous of their privileges into a Continental Army free of provincial distinctions. By all accounts, Washington and Franklin saw eye to eye and got their way—though executing their ambitious plan proved difficult on Congress’s limited budget. Upon taking command, Washington had ordered “that exact discipline be observed, and due Subordination prevail thro’ the whole Army,”39 but he never fully achieved either with existing recruits. These principles ran through conference recommendations for the new army. Pay, rations, rank, and arms would be standardized on stated terms. Clothing and blankets would be supplied to soldiers who lacked them. The death penalty was authorized for treason and mutiny; lashings for soldiers convicted of insubordination and a host of other offenses. Officers would be cashiered for cowardice, fraud, or drunkenness.
Upon taking command, Washington said of the old army, “The Men would fight very well (if properly Officered)” but “their Officers generally speaking are the most indifferent kind of People I ever saw.”40 He sought to set this right in composing the new army by retaining the better officers for reorganized units and letting the others go. Overall, the conferees agreed to expand the army’s size to roughly twenty thousand officers and men—an ambitious target it never reached. State regiments and militia units, which sometimes worked in coordination with the Continental Army but also performed local defense duties under the command of their governor, always competed with the regular army for soldiers and officers.
Washington saved one issue to discuss with the delegates from Congress after the conference ended and the governors left. For the new army, he did not want to recruit slaves or freed Blacks, or even to reenlist Blacks already serving in existing units, as many did in the Massachusetts and Rhode Island militias. Washington took slaves from Virginia to the front, but only as personal servants wearing the livery of Mount Vernon, not in military uniform. It is unclear how Franklin responded to Washington’s request. By this point, the Pennsylvanian had long held that Blacks were innately as capable as whites. Indeed, twelve years earlier, after visiting a school in Philadelphia for Black children, Franklin reported finding the students’ abilities equal to that of whites.41 The other two delegates from Congress were southern slaveholders, however, and the delegates informally agreed to Washington’s request without including it among their official recommendations.42 Recruiters initially followed the new policy, but manpower needs soon overwhelmed it. Within about a year, free Blacks serving alongside whites constituted a tenth of the Continental Army.
FRANKLIN USED THE OPPORTUNITY of this trip to reunite with his sister Jane, who had been driven from her home in Boston by the British occupation, and take her to Philadelphia with him. This reunion roughly coincided with his complete estrangement from his loyalist son William, who was soon forced out as governor of New Jersey, arrested, exchanged for a captured patriot governor, and eventually resettled in England. Once so close as to present a model father-son relationship, the two never reconciled. Franklin could not forgive his son’s allegiance to the crown.
As Franklin headed south from Massachusetts with his sister, Martha Washington prepared to head north to join her husband for the winter encampment. Such visits became a regular feature of their wartime marriage. The Revolution utterly disordered domestic life for both families, as it did so many others. After leaving the estate in 1775, Washington did not see Mount Vernon again until 1781, and then only briefly. Although initially able to remain mainly in Philadelphia, Franklin ultimately spent more years away from his home for wartime service than Washington.
Indeed, after returning from Massachusetts in November 1775, Franklin was off again on an arduous trip to Montreal the following March. Hoping disaffected Canadians would rally to the revolutionary cause, Congress had ordered, and Washington had supported, an ill-conceived, ill-planned, and ill-
executed invasion of Canada in 1775. It captured Montreal and much of the upper St. Lawrence Valley in November but stalled before the fortress at Quebec City in December. With the British unable to mount a counterattack with fresh troops until spring, the Americans settled into an uncomfortable occupation of the regions they had captured. While those occupying Montreal initially enjoyed some local support, it waned as they began suppressing loyalists and became unable to pay for requisitioned supplies. Pro-British landowners and clerics also warned that the invaders would impose their Protestant religion on the colony’s largely Catholic population.
Suddenly the liberation promised in a published address by Washington to the Canadian people did not sound so liberating. “Come,” he had written at the invasion’s rosy outset, “unite with us in an indissoluble Union, let us run together to the same Goal. We have taken up Arms in Defence of our Liberty, our Property, our Wives, and our Children. We are determined to preserve them, or die.”43 For French Canadians only recently subjected to British rule, American promises of freedom were unpersuasive.
In the spring of 1776, then, in a remedial measure almost as ill conceived as the initial invasion, Congress dispatched a commission led by Franklin to revive local support—even as Britain massed troops in the lower St. Lawrence Valley to relieve Quebec and retake Montreal.44 Although Congress had the good sense to name a Catholic to the commission and, in Franklin, someone committed to religious freedom and with some fluency in French, it did not provide commissioners with the hard currency, supplies, or troops needed to win back local trust. Instead, it carried copies of Common Sense, patriot propagandist Thomas Paine’s new pamphlet, which was working wonders in turning Americans against King George but had less effect in Canada.45
“I am here on my way to Canada, detain’d by the present state of the Lakes, in which the unthaw’d Ice obstructs Navigation,” Franklin wrote from upstate New York in April. “I begin to apprehend that I have undertaken a Fatigue that at my Time of Life may prove too much for me.”46 Heavy snow blocked overland routes. Franklin had the foresight to bring his own bedding to guard against fleas and lice, but still returned with boils, rashes, and infections. On the way north, commissioners slept on the bare floors of war-ravaged houses. In Montreal, creditors hounded them to pay for what the troops had taken. Dire reports flooding in from the front near Quebec City spoke of a dwindling American army—ravaged by smallpox, reduced by expiring commissions, and relying on scant supplies—facing the imminent threat of fresh British forces arriving by sea.
“It is impossible to give you a just idea of the lowness of the Continental credit here,” Franklin wrote to Congress from Montreal on May 1. “The general apprehension, that we shall be driven out of the Province as soon as the King’s troops can arrive, concurs with the frequent breaches of promise the Inhabitants have experienced, in determining them to trust our people no farther.”47 A week later, the commission advised Congress, “If Money cannot be had to support your Army here with Honor, so as to be respected instead of being hated by the people, . . . it is better immediately to withdraw it.”48 Although the news had not yet reached Montreal, by this time American forces were already pulling back from the region around Quebec City in the face of British advances. The withdrawal soon turned into a panicked retreat as the British pushed up the St. Lawrence Valley. Learning of the rout, Franklin abandoned Montreal for the safety of upstate New York on May 12, with the remaining American troops following in mid-June.
For all its failings, the invasion of Canada shed light on the revolutionary vision of Franklin, Washington, and other patriot leaders. Believing that people want freedom, they thought Canadians would rally to the cause if given a chance: only force and misinformation kept them in chains. Washington foresaw Canadians greeting his troops as liberators. “Range yourselves under the Standard of general Liberty,” he urged.49 Evidence forwarded by Franklin’s foreign affairs committee to Congress leading to the commission’s appointment spoke of lies by local Catholic clerics and nobles turning Canadians against “the American side.”50 Congress instructed the commission to counter those lies. America invaded “for the Purpose of frustrating the Designs of the British Court against our Common Liberties,” the commissioners were told to proclaim. “Declare that it is our Inclination that the People of Canada may set up such a Form of Government, as will be most likely, in their Judgment, to produce their Happiness,” Congress asserted. “Declare that we hold sacred the Rights of Conscience, and may promise to the whole People solemnly, in our Name, the free and undisturbed Exercise of their Religion.” To get out this word, Congress directed the commission, “You are to establish a free Press.”51
Issued four months before the Declaration of Independence, these instructions trumpeted America’s founding principles: liberty for all, republican self-government, freedom of conscience, and a free press. At a time when most colonists spoke English and viewed Catholicism as an alien religion, Congress directed the commissioners to assure the people of Quebec, “It is our earnest Desire to adopt them into our Union as a Sister Colony, and to secure the same general System of mild and equal Laws for them and for ourselves, with only such local Differences, as may be agreeable to each Colony respectively.”52
The United Colonies, as Congress still called the American union, was to be federal in nature, with common core principles married alongside provincial variations, and open to ethnic and religious diversity.53 Washington stressed this in his address to the Canadian people: “The Cause of America, and of Liberty, is the Cause of every virtuous American Citizen; whatever may be his Religion or his Descent,” he wrote.54 At a time when many colonies still supported an established Protestant church and imposed limits on Catholics, after assuring Canadians of the right to practice their Catholic religion, Congress’s instructions went on to provide that members of “other Denominations of Christians” in Quebec be equally entitled to practice theirs and “be totally exempt from the Payment of any Tythes or Taxes for the Support of any religion.”55 Here was a strong free-exercise right along with antiestablishment principles. With Franklin and Washington yoked equally to the effort, Congress was defining what it meant to be American.
AS AMERICAN TROOPS RETREATED from Canada during June 1776 in the face of a British army, a second and much larger British army sailed toward New York harbor—a show of strength designed to end the rebellion once and for all. Anticipating the move, Washington had shifted his main force from New England to New York in April and begun readying harbor defenses. In light of the expected attack and before the final retreat from Canada, Congress called Washington to Philadelphia for talks that extended from May 23 to June 3. Before leaving for them, he wrote to Franklin about the debacle in Canada. “Tho your presence may conduce to the public good in an essential manner,” Washington said of Franklin’s labors in Montreal, “yet I am certain you must experience difficulties and embarrasments of a peculiar nature. Perhaps in a little time, Things may assume a more promising appearance than the present is.”56
After a hard trip home that left him sick for weeks, Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on May 30 with the latest news of defeat in Canada. “The ignorance of the Canadans, there Incapasity and Aversnes to have any thing to do with war and his Indisposition I believe Affected His Spirets,” Franklin’s sister observed.57 That indisposition, which Franklin attributed to a recurrence of gout, lasted nearly a month. “I find I grow daily more feeble,” Franklin complained in late May.58 His first days back were active, however, as he caught up on his work at Congress and discussed the situation in Canada and New York with Washington, before taking to his bed after the general left. By various accounts, their discussions were somber but not desperate. Indeed, after them, Franklin wrote with his characteristic optimism to Washington about British advances in Canada and on New York, “I see more certainly the Ruin of Britain if she persists in such expensive distant Expeditions.”59 Franklin would soon be at the front again, but not before taking center
stage in the Revolution’s signature event. On this too, Washington stood in full accord.
ON MAY 15, 1776, in light of the British offensive, the Virginia Convention had voted to direct its delegation in Congress to offer a motion for independence. These instructions arrived before Washington left Philadelphia. “I am very glad to find that the Virginia Convention have passed so noble a vote,” Washington wrote at the time. “Things have come to that pass now, as to convince us, that we have nothing more to expect from the justice of G: Britain.”60 Franklin was out of town recovering from his fit of gout on June 7, when Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee formally offered the motion in Congress, but was nevertheless appointed to a “Committee of Five” to draft a declaration to accompany it. Jefferson, Adams, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman—some of Congress’s best thinkers and writers—joined Franklin. Congress delayed the vote on independence until early July so that delegates could receive instructions from their colonies on how to vote, giving time for the committee to do its work. Jefferson assumed lead writing duties but submitted his draft to Franklin, Adams, and the full committee for review.
A seasoned editor, Franklin knew good copy when he saw it and made few changes to Jefferson’s draft. Britain’s “arbitrary power” became its “absolute Despotism.” The charge of Britain “taking away our Charters, & altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments” expanded to also include “abolishing our most valuable Laws.” The colonists’ petitions being “answered by repeated injury” hardened to being “answered only by repeated Injury.” And most profoundly, for the foundation of human rights and equality, “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable,” rose to the phrase that rings down through history, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Reason trumped revelation. Other edits sharpened the long list of specific charges levied against the king.61
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