Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  Franklin made his edits from his sickbed in the country but returned to Congress in time for debate on the document, which began on June 28. Congress reworked segments and struck whole paragraphs on political grounds, including most passages critical of slavery. The process visibly irritated Jefferson. Franklin attempted to comfort (or at least distract) him with an anecdote. As Jefferson later related Franklin’s story, after composing a sign for his shop that read “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,” joined with the picture of a hat, the hatmaker showed it to his friends. Each offered a different redaction until the sign included only the shopkeeper’s name “with the figure of a hat subjoined.”62 At least Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence fared better than Thompson’s sign.

  Congress approved the revised Declaration on July 4, 1776, two days after Lee’s resolution, and it immediately became a rallying cry for revolution. Washington had it read to the troops on July 9, prefaced with his commentary that it should “serve as a fresh incentive to every officer, and soldier, to act with Fidelity and Courage, as knowing that now the peace and safety of his Country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms.”63 When Congress’s president John Hancock signed the parchment copy with a stern warning to fellow delegates, “We must all hang together,” Franklin reportedly added the pithy retort, “or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”64

  BY THEN, the American cause needed whatever boost it could get from the declaration. On July 2, General Howe began landing troops on undefended Staten Island—across New York harbor from Manhattan—amassing an invasion force that exceeded twenty-five thousand men by early August. Washington’s chief lieutenant, Henry Knox, depicted local patriots as “frigh’d to death,” while Washington worried about the encouragement given to loyalists.65 “We expect a very bloody Summer of it at New York,” he wrote, “as it is there I expect the grand efforts of the Enemy will be aim’d.”66 Despite an order from Congress directing him to defend the city, its extended coastline and open terrain made it all but indefensible against a seaborne invasion by an overwhelming force.

  Despite their military advantage, Howe and his brother, the operation’s naval commander Admiral Lord Howe, still hoped for peace and carried commissions empowering them to offer generous terms to secure it: pardons for all and restored rights for colonies. This was the same Lord Howe who, as an independent member of the House of Lords, had tried to negotiate privately with Franklin in London along similar lines, only to have Parliament reject any limit on its right to tax the colonies. Now, after lobbying the king, he had enhanced authority to bargain for peace.

  As his brother assembled the army on Staten Island, Admiral Howe sent circuitously worded letters to Washington and Franklin inviting them “to converse” on “the reestablishment of lasting Peace and Union with the Colonies.”67 Not authorized to acknowledge their official status under a rebel government, Admiral Howe addressed both men as private citizens. Washington refused to receive Howe’s letter to him because it did not address him as general. Franklin, who was a private citizen as well as a delegate, turned his over to Congress and dispatched a cold reply to Howe. If “Peace is here meant,” Franklin wrote, it must be “a Peace between Britain and America as distinct States now at War.”68 This Admiral Howe had no authority or inclination to discuss. There things stood until a series of deft British maneuvers against American positions on Long Island and Brooklyn Heights forced Washington’s reeling army back onto Manhattan island, where it risked entrapment. So far in the New York campaign, the Americans had been outmanned, outgunned, and outgeneraled at every turn, with worse to come.

  With his brother pausing the assault at a point when it might have crushed patriot resistance, Admiral Howe again reached out to Franklin in a letter sent by way of Washington. While noting that he was not empowered “to negociate a reunion with America under any other description than as subject to the crown of Great Britain,” Howe now made clear that he was authorized to discuss terms like those laid out by Congress a year earlier in its Olive Branch Petition, which suggested that America and Britain have separate assemblies under a single king.69

  “The time is past,” Franklin wrote in a hastily drafted but never posted reply. “One might as well propose it to France.”70 On reflection, he waited to hear what Congress wished in light of the situation in New York.

  Admiral Howe also sent a captured American officer named John Sullivan to press Congress for the conference. As directed by his captors, Sullivan claimed that the Howes had “full power to Compromise the Dispute between Great Britain and America, upon Terms advantageous to both.”71 John Adams dismissed Sullivan as a decoy, but Congress decided to authorize a meeting anyway, with Adams and Edward Rutledge accompanying Franklin. By dispatching letters back and forth between the sides, Washington served as intermediary for the two parties, which met on September 11 at Staten Island’s southern tip, across from American-held New Jersey.

  Scarcely recovered from his mission to Canada, Franklin pushed his way through New Jersey on roads clogged with refugees and soldiers. The lack of available accommodations on the outbound journey forced him to share a bed with Adams in a small room with a single window that Franklin (who insisted on fresh air when sleeping) wanted open and Adams (who feared a cold) wanted shut. No one catches colds from cold air, Franklin insisted; they spread from person to person in stagnant air. He likely eyed the already ailing Adams as a possible source of contagion. “The Doctor then began an harrangue, upon Air and cold and Respiration and Perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his Philosophy together,” Adams later recalled.72

  The conference itself was a bust. Admiral Howe opened with a long discourse on his personal affection for America and the king’s desire to grant generous reforms. But, according to the report submitted by Franklin’s committee to Congress, Howe offered “no explicit proposition of peace” without the Americans’ submission to British authority. To this, the report noted, “We gave it as our opinion to his lordship that a return to the domination of great Britain was not now to be expected” in light of Britain’s past failures to address colonial grievances and popular support for independence.73 This effectively ended the meeting, although Adams later reported Howe’s adding that he would feel and lament America’s fall “like the Loss of a Brother.” In response, Franklin, with “a Bow, a Smile and all that Naivetee which sometimes appeared in his Conversation and is often observed in his Writings, replied ‘My Lord, We will do our Utmost Endeavours, to save your Lordship that mortification.’”74 Howe’s personal secretary captured the meeting’s tenor in a journal entry. “They met, they talked, they parted,” he noted of the four principals, “and now, nothing remains but to fight it out.”75

  Franklin’s return to Philadelphia marked the end of his visits to the front and a transition in his relationship with Washington. Since its formation in 1775, Franklin had served on Congress’s secret committee dealing with foreign affairs and, since June, on one openly planning treaties and alliances with foreign powers. This work, plus his experience as a colonial agent in London and international renown, made him the logical pick to lead the new nation’s diplomatic offensive in Europe.

  ON SEPTEMBER 26, 1776, Congress elected Franklin as a commissioner to France, to serve with two American agents already in Europe, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee, to secure foreign support for the Revolution. With the Howes resuming the attack in mid-September and quickly driving Washington’s army out of New York, Franklin’s efforts in France became as vital for the American cause as anything happening on the battlefield. France was Europe’s other great power and England’s historic rival. If France did not help America, no other country would. Franklin and Washington began working together at a distance, with the success of each dependent on that of the other. America needed French money, arms, troops, and naval support, which France would supply only if the American army showed some chance of winning
the war.

  As important as it was, Franklin’s foreign assignment took him away from his work for Pennsylvania and in Congress, responsibilities which had grown since the Declaration of Independence. Beginning in mid-July, Franklin presided over the convention drafting a new constitution for a now independent commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Most other states engaged in similar efforts. Inspired by new notions of liberty (and no longer bound to the crown), they sensed a pressing need to replace their old royal or proprietorship charters with republican constitutions. Under Franklin’s leadership, Pennsylvania crafted the most democratic of all the new state charters. It featured broad voting rights for free males, a unicameral legislature, recallable judges, an executive council presided over by a weak president, and an expansive declaration of rights. After decades of proprietorship control, the people would rule in Pennsylvania.

  Simultaneously and in the same historic building, Franklin participated in congressional debates over articles of confederation for the newly independent United States. Without unity under the crown, the newly sovereign states needed to forge their own working alliance. In these debates, Franklin argued for allocating representation in Congress on the basis of population rather than giving each state one vote and, as a means to discourage slavery, counting slaves as people for purposes of computing the per capita financial contribution of each state. Delegates from southern states naturally wanted to count only free people to determine their state’s share. Called from these debates for service in France, Franklin had staked out positions he would support twelve years later at the Constitutional Convention. Although war service prevented him from participating in such efforts for his state or in Congress, Washington recognized their vital importance. “To form a new Government,” he wrote at this time, “requires infinite care, & unbounded attention; for if the foundation is badly laid the superstructure must be bad.”76

  Franklin left for France in October aboard the Reprisal, a fast but unsteady brig acquired by Congress to wreak havoc on British merchant ships and, if possible, capture them for prize money. For company, he took along his grandsons Temple, who served as his secretary, and Benny, who would receive a proper European education. Slipping through the British naval blockade of American ports, the Reprisal crossed the Atlantic in one seasickness-inducing month, snagging two British vessels on the way. Later admitting the voyage “almost demolish’d me,” Franklin disembarked at first sight of land and traveled by carriage to Paris.77

  The French greeted Franklin with acclaim. To them, he was both an Enlightenment philosopher like Voltaire and the personification of Rousseau’s freedom-loving natural man, plus a renowned scientist and England’s enemy to boot. Franklin became the man of the hour and person of the age in Paris, with medallions struck bearing his image. “These,” he wrote to his daughter, “with the pictures, busts, and prints, (of which copies upon copies are spread every where) have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon.”78 Knowing the value of image in fashion-conscious France, he played the rustic sage, with uncoiffed hair, frontier fur cap, and bifocals. “Think how I must appear among the Powder’d Heads of Paris,” he wrote.79

  Franklin became a fixture in the finest salons of the French capital and resumed his scientific studies even as he served as America’s senior diplomat in Europe. Ladies of the French court particularly favored him, and he them, which gave Franklin access to the inner workings of pre-revolutionary French society. French philosophes welcomed him too, and made him one of their own. These activities complemented one another to reinforce Franklin’s already legendary stature. Born into a working-class family on the edge of civilization, Franklin’s entrée into aristocratic high society symbolized the promise of America.

  Winning over French society strengthened Franklin’s hand but, so long as the American cause looked as desperate as it did after the battles in New York, gaining French support would take more than style. Franklin gave substance to American foreign policy by coupling cold realism with glittering idealism. Using the simple calculus that helping America weakened Britain, Comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister, signaled a desire to aid the rebellion even before Franklin arrived. With France still rebuilding its navy after the Seven Years’ War, however, it dare not risk war with Britain. Instead, it supplied secret support to America in the form of loans, trade, and (in some cases) covertly opening French ports to American privateers.

  From the outset, Franklin pressed for more, with his commission’s initial memo to Vergennes requesting ships, arms, artillery, ammunition, and a military alliance with France and its ally, Spain. “The Interest of the three Nations is the same,” the memo explained: weakening Britain and expanding commerce. Supporting America’s War for Independence would advance both objectives and perhaps result in France and Spain securing British colonies in the West Indies. Without aid, however, “our People” would be forced to reach some “accommodation” with Britain, the memo added.80 This became Franklin’s refrain: help us or else.

  But he honed other arguments as well. Franklin never tired of telling Europeans that America was fighting for freedom, not self-aggrandizement. While the idealistic aspects of Franklin’s diplomacy may not have appealed to the interests of the French court (which naturally feared republicanism), it carried weight among those who could influence French policy. Franklin knew this and used it. After his arrival in France, for example, he arranged for translating and publishing America’s republican state constitutions and Articles of Confederation in Paris. “All Europe is for us,” Franklin’s commission reported in a March 1777 memo informing Congress of its activities. “The Prospect of an Asylum in America for those who love Liberty gives general Joy, and our Cause is esteem’d the Cause of all Mankind.”81 Recognizing the practical value of popular goodwill, Franklin instinctively linked realism and idealism in the pursuit of national interests. “He knew that America had a unique and powerful meaning for enlightened reformers in France, and that he himself, his very existence, was the embodiment, the palpable expression, of that meaning,” historian Bernard Bailyn observed.82 That meaning was Franklin’s greatest asset.

  ALTHOUGH FRANKLIN LAID THE FOUNDATION for an alliance with France, only the prospect of success on the battlefield could secure it. That prospect remained dim and distant during Franklin’s initial year in Paris. First came the disastrous New York campaign that drove Washington’s army, or what was left of it, out of Manhattan, across New Jersey, and into Pennsylvania by early December 1776. With units of General Howe’s army having reached the Delaware River by then, Washington warned Congress on the ninth about Philadelphia, “The Enemy might . . . march directly in and take Possession.”83 He thought that Howe would take the city as soon as the river froze enough for his troops to cross over it. “In truth, I do not see what is to prevent him,” Washington wrote.84 Congress decamped for Baltimore. Meanwhile, a British force under Henry Clinton took and held the strategic harbor at Newport, Rhode Island. Between captures, casualties, disease, and desertion, Washington’s army had dwindled to scarcely a few thousand soldiers fit for duty, with the terms of enlistment for most of these remaining men due to expire on December 31. “In a word,” Washington declared, “if every nerve is not straind to recruit the New Army with all possible Expedition I think the game is pretty near up.”85

  The impending deadline forced Washington to gamble. On Christmas night 1776, scarcely a week before most of his men were free to leave, in a desperate effort to restore morale and regain the initiative, Washington took this army back across the ice-choked Delaware River and captured the Hessian garrison at Trenton, New Jersey. Buying more time by paying each man who would take it a ten-dollar bounty for an extra six weeks’ service, Washington held off a British counterattack at nearby Assunpink Creek and routed a British force in Princeton before retiring with his remaining troops to Morristown, New Jersey, for the winter.

  Dismissing the episode as a minor setback, General Howe pulled back most
of his troops to New York for the winter. At the time, European armies typically spent the winter in quarters, a custom both sides followed throughout the American Revolution. Philadelphia was safe for another year. Congress returned to the city.

  While these pivotal victories boosted American spirits, they could not dissipate the gathering gloom as soldiers left the Continental Army in droves once their commissions expired. After pulling in men from other units, Washington encamped for the winter in Morristown with about three thousand soldiers while Howe wintered with up to ten times that number in and around Manhattan. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote during that winter in his pamphlet The American Crisis.

  WASHINGTON USED THE BLEAK WINTER at Morristown to reassess and revise his army’s structure and strategy. Both were faulty. “The misfortune of short Inlistments, and an unhappy dependance upon Militia, have shewn their baneful Influence at every period,” he wrote in January 1777, but “at no time, nor upon no occasion were they ever more exemplified than since Christmas. . . . All our movements have been made with inferior numbers, & with a mix’d, motley crew; who were here today, gone tomorrow.”86 The militia, Washington complained, “come in, you can not tell how—go, you cannot tell when—and act, you cannot tell where—consume your provisions—exhaust your Stores, and leave you at last at the critical moment.”87 He wanted what amounted to a standing army with more soldiers, multiyear terms of enlistment, and severe penalties for disobedience and desertion. For the Continental Army, those extended terms typically became “three years or during the war,” which would create confusion when the war unexpectedly lasted more than three additional years.