Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (52 page)

In early 1779, Sally wrote of the high price of goods in America and how she was busy spinning her own tablecloths. Unfortunately, however, she made the mistake of adding that she had been invited to a ball in honor of General Washington and had sent to France for pins, lace, and feathers so she could look fashionable. “There never was so much dressing and pleasure going on,” she exulted to her father, and she added that she hoped he would send her some accessories so that she could take pride in showing off his taste.

At the time, Franklin was writing his sweet bagatelles to his French friends and promising Polly Stevenson a pair of diamond earrings if one of his lottery tickets won. But he responded with dismay at Sally’s plea for a few luxuries. “Your sending for long black pins, and lace, and feathers! disgusted me as much as if you had put salt in my strawberries,” he chided. “The spinning, I see, is laid aside, and you are to be dressed for the ball! You seem not to know, my dear daughter, that, of all the dear things in this world, idleness is the dearest.” He sent her some of the items she had requested “that are useful and necessary,” but added a dose of homespun advice, with just a touch of his humor, about the frivolous fineries. “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.”
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Clearly hurt, she replied with a detailed description of how industrious and frugal she was being, and she tried to work back into his graces by sending over some homespun American silk for him to present from her to Queen Marie-Antoinette. Knowing her father’s desire to promote the local silk industry, she noted, “It will show what can be sent from America.”

It was a sweet gesture, with all the elements—industriousness, self-lessness, promotion of American products, gratitude toward France—that should have appealed to Franklin. Alas, the silk was stained by salt water on the way over and, worse yet, her father scoffed at the entire scheme. “I wonder how, having yourself scarce shoes to your feet, it would come into your head to give clothes to a Queen,” he wrote back. “I shall see if the stains can be covered by dyeing it and make summer suits of it for myself, Temple and Benny.” He did, however, end on a kinder and gentler note. “All the things you order will be sent, for you continue to be a good girl, and spin and knit your family stockings.”
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Franklin’s heart proved far softer when it came to news about his grandchildren. In late 1779, Sally had a fourth child and, in hopes of pleasing Franklin, baptized the boy Louis, after the French king. The name was so unusual in America that people had to inquire whether the child was a boy or girl. When her son Willy recited the Lord’s Prayer after a nightmare and addressed it to Hercules, she asked her father for his advice: “Whether it is best to instruct him in a little religion or let him pray a little longer to Hercules?” Franklin replied, with a hint of humor, that she should teach him “to direct his worship more properly, for the deity of Hercules is now quite out of fashion.” Sally complied. A little later she wrote that Willy was learning his Bible well and that he had “an extraordinary memory” for all literature. “He has learned the speech of Anthony over Caesar’s body, which he can scarcely speak without tears.” Her daughter, Elizabeth, she added, was fond of looking at the picture of her grandfather “and has frequently tried to tempt you to walk out of the frame to play with her with a piece of apple pie, the thing of all others she likes best.”
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Sally also found a project that enabled her to earn Franklin’s unvarnished approval. With Washington’s army suffering in tattered uniforms in December 1779, she rallied the women of Philadelphia to raise donations, buy cloth, and sew more than two thousand shirts for the beleaguered troops. “I am very busily employed in cutting out and making shirts…for our brave soldiers,” she reported. When Washington tried to pay cash for even more shirts, the ladies refused it and kept working for free. “I hope you will approve of what we have done,” she wrote, clearly fishing for an expression of praise. Franklin, of course, did approve. He wrote back commending her for her “amor patrie,” and he had an account of her activities published in France.
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Her son Benny also felt the vagaries of Franklin’s affection, even though the boy had been snatched from the bosom of the Bache family to accompany him to Europe. After two years at a boarding school near Passy, where he saw his grandfather but once a week, the quiet 9-year-old was packed off to an academy in Geneva, where he would not see him for more than four years. Despite his love of the French, Franklin felt that a Catholic monarchy was not the best place to educate his grandson, he wrote Sally, “as I intend him for a Presbyterian as well as a Republican.”
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Benny was taken to Geneva by a French diplomat, Philibert Cramer, who was a publisher of Voltaire. Hungry as ever for affection and a father figure, Benny latched on to Cramer, who died suddenly a few months later. So he lived for a while with Cramer’s widow, Catherine, and then was left in the charge of Gabriel Louis de Marignac, a former poet and military officer who ran the academy.

Horribly lonely, Benny begged that his brother William, or his former Passy classmate John Quincy Adams, be sent to join him. At the very least, could he please have a picture of Franklin and some news? Franklin, ever willing to send out his portrait, obliged with one, along with the news of Sally’s success in supplying shirts to Washington’s troops. “Be diligent in your studies that you also may be qualified to do service to your country and be worthy of so good a mother,” he wrote. He also sent word that four of Benny’s former Passy schoolmates had died of smallpox, and he should be thankful he had been inoculated as a child. Yet even his expressions of affection contained a note of contingency. “I shall always love you very much if you continue to be a good boy,” he closed one letter.
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Benny did well his first year and even won the school prize for translating Latin into French. Franklin sent him some money so that he could host the celebration the prizewinner traditionally gave for his classmates. He also asked Polly Stevenson, still in London, to pick out some books for Benny in English, as he was showing signs of losing that language. Polly, knowing how to flatter her friend, picked out a book that included mentions of Franklin.
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But Benny eventually fell into the funk of a depressed adolescent, perhaps because Franklin never visited, nor did Temple, nor was he brought back to Passy for vacations. He turned shy and indolent, reported Madame Cramer, who continued to keep an eye on him. “He has an excellent heart; he is sensible, reasonable, he is serious, but he has neither gaiety nor vivacity; he is cold, he has few needs, no fantasies.” He didn’t play cards, never got in fights, and showed no signs that he would ever display “great talents” or “passions.” (In this prediction she was wrong, for in later life Benny would become a crusading newspaper editor.) When she reminded Benny that he had won the Latin prize and was clearly capable of being a good student, “he answered coldly that it had been sheer luck,” she wrote Franklin. And when she offered to request for him a larger allowance from his grandfather, he showed no interest.

Benny’s parents became worried, and Richard Bache timidly suggested that perhaps Franklin could find time to go see him. “It would give us pleasure to hear that you had found leisure enough to visit him at Geneva,” Bache wrote, noting that “the journey might conduce to your health.” But it was a tentative suggestion made almost apologetically. “I suspect your time has been more importantly employed,” he quickly added. Madame Cramer, for her part, suggested that at the very least he could write Benny more frequently.
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Franklin did not find time to travel to Geneva, but he did compose for him one of his didactic little essays that proclaimed the virtues of education and diligence. Those who study hard, he wrote, “live comfortably in good houses,” whereas those who are idle and neglect their schoolwork “are poor and dirty and ragged and ignorant and vicious and live in miserable cabins and garrets.” Franklin liked the lesson so much that he made a copy and sent it to Sally, who gushed that “Willy shall get it by heart.” Benny, on the other hand, did not even acknowledge receiving it. So Franklin sent him another copy and ordered him to translate it into French and send it back to assure he understood it.
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Finally, Benny found a friend who brought him out of his torpor: Samuel Johonnot, the grandson of Franklin’s Boston friend the Rev. Samuel Cooper. A “turbulent and factious” lad, he was expelled from the school in Passy, and Franklin arranged to send him to the Geneva academy. He was a smart student, placing first in the class and spurring Benny to come in a respectable third.

Socially, Johonnot’s effect on Benny was even more pronounced. He began to develop more of his family’s rebellious streak. At one point, a cat killed one of their pet guinea pigs, and they resolved to kill a cat, any cat, in revenge, which they did. Benny went to his first dance, which unnerved him so much that he was relieved when a fire across the street brought it to an abrupt end, but then he went to another dance and a third, where he enjoyed himself thoroughly. He wrote to his grandfather that he was now having fun, told of his butterfly-hunting and grape-harvesting expeditions, and was even so bold to hint that he would, after all, like a larger allowance. That, and a watch, “a good golden one.” It would be practical, he assured his grandfather, and he promised to take good care of it.

Franklin responded the way he had to Sally’s request for lace and feathers: “I cannot afford to give gold watches to children,” he wrote. “You should not tease me for expensive things that can be of little or no service to you.” He was also appalled when young Johonnot asked that he and Benny be allowed to come back to Paris. That elicited another stern admonition sent to Johonnot but directed at both boys: “It is time for you to think of establishing a character for manly steadiness.”
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It was an injunction that should have been addressed to his other grandson, Temple, who had gone to France to continue his own education but had neither enrolled in a college nor taken a course. Temple’s work for the American delegation was competent enough, but he spent most of his time hunting, riding, partying, and chasing women. Hoping to help him settle down with both a dowry and a job, Franklin proposed a marriage between his roguish grandson and the Brillons’ elder daughter, Cunégonde.

This was nothing new. An incorrigible but never successful matchmaker, Franklin was incessantly trying, usually with ironic half-seriousness, to marry off his children and grandchildren to those of his friends. This time, however, he was wholly serious, indeed earnestly plaintive. His letter making the formal proposal, awkwardly written in a French that was uncorrected by his friends, declared that Madame Brillon was a daughter to him and expressed hope that her daughter would become one as well. He said that Temple, whom the Brillons called Franklinet, had agreed to the proposal, especially after Franklin promised to “remain in France until the end of my days” if the marriage took place. After repeating his desire to have children nearby “to close my eyes when I die,” he went on to extol the virtues of Temple, “who has no vices” and “has what it takes to become, in time, a distinguished man.”

Knowing Temple well, the Brillons may not have fully agreed with that assessment. They certainly did not agree to the marriage proposal. The main excuse they gave was that Temple was not a Catholic. That gave Franklin an opening to write, as he had often done before, about the need for religious tolerance and how all religions had at their core the same basic principles. (Among the five he listed in his letter was his own oft-stated religious credo, “The best service to God is doing good to men.”)

Madame Brillon agreed, in her reply, that “there is only one religion and one morality.” Nevertheless, she and her husband refused to assent to the marriage. “We are obliged to submit to the customs of our country,” she said. M. Brillon was looking to retire from his position as a tax receiver-general and wanted a son-in-law who could succeed him. “This position is the most important of our assets,” she wrote, ignoring that she had frequently complained to Franklin that she was trapped in an arranged marriage made for financial reasons. “It calls for a man who knows the laws and customs of our country, a man of our religion.”

Franklin realized that M. Brillon’s objections might be caused by something more than merely Temple’s religion. “There may be other objections he has not communicated to me,” he wrote Madame Brillon, “and I ought not give him trouble.” For his part, Temple embarked on a year-long series of affairs with women high and low, including a French countess and an Italian, until suddenly falling in love, albeit briefly, with the Brillons’ younger daughter, who was only 15. This time M. Brillon seemed ready to approve of the alliance, and even offered a job and dowry, but the fickle Temple had already moved on to other women, including a married mistress who would, eventually, end up making him the third generation of Franklins to bear an illegitimate son.
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Paris, 1778–1785

By the summer of 1778, it had become clear to all three American commissioners that there should be only one person in charge. Not only was it difficult for the three of them to agree on policies, Franklin told the Congress, but it was now even difficult for them to work in the same house together. Even their servants were quarreling. In addition, the French had appointed a minister plenipotentiary to America, and protocol demanded that the new nation reciprocate with an appointee of similar rank. Arthur Lee nominated himself and conspired with his brothers to win the prize. John Adams more graciously suggested to friends that Franklin, despite his work habits and softness toward France, would be best. Franklin did not overtly push for the job, but he did strongly ask the Congress, in July 1778, to “separate us.”

The French did Franklin’s lobbying for him. They let it be known that he was their choice, and the Congress complied in September by electing him the sole minister plenipotentiary. The vote was 12–1, the dissenting state being Pennsylvania, where his enemies questioned his loyalty and that of his grandson Temple, the son of an imprisoned loyalist governor.
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Word of his appointment did not reach Paris until February 1779, for the war and the winter hindered the passage of American ships. When it did, Arthur Lee sulked and refused to hand over his papers to Franklin. As for Adams, his biographer David McCullough writes, “The new arrangement was exactly what Adams had recommended and the news was to leave him feeling more miserable than ever.” He soon left Paris, at least for the time being, to make his way back to Massachusetts.

Franklin was suffering from the gout and could not immediately present his new credentials, but in late March he paid a call on the king and his ministers. Mindful of Adams’s hurt feelings, Franklin worked to keep their relationship cordial. He wrote Adams a polite and amusing letter in which he described his rounds at Versailles and complained that “the fatigue however was a little too much for my feet and disabled me for near another week.” In his own letters, Adams kept up a collegial façade, and he even expressed some support for Franklin’s deep fealty to the French, despite his own doubts about the wisdom of becoming too aligned with them. “I am much pleased with your reception at court in the new character,” he replied, “and I do not doubt that your opinion of the good will of this court to the United States is just.”

Adams’s fragile equanimity was shaken, however, when Franklin and the French decided to commandeer the ship that was supposed to take him home and assign it to be part of the fleet that John Paul Jones planned to use against the British (of which more below). Well aware that Adams was impatiently waiting at the port of Nantes to set sail, Franklin was apologetic, and he even got the powerful French naval minister Antoine de Sartine to write a letter explaining the decision. Another ship would be assigned to take him home as soon as feasible, Franklin promised, and it would allow Adams the benefit of traveling with the new French minister to the United States.

Adams pretended to be understanding: “The public service must not be obstructed for the private convenience of an individual, and the honor of a passage with the new Ambassador should be a compensation to me for the loss of the prospect of so speedy a return home.” Showing just a touch of the polite hypocrisy that he was generally famed for lacking, Adams even went so far as to ask Franklin to “oblige me much by making my compliments [to] Madame Brillon and Madame Helvétius, ladies for whose characters I have a great respect.”

But as he brooded in port, Adams became increasingly bitter. After dining with Jones, he declared that the captain was a man of “eccentricities and irregularities,” and he grew furious at the thought that Jones and Franklin were conspiring to delay his trip home. “It is decreed that I shall endure all sorts of mortifications,” he wrote in his diary. “Do I see that these people despise me, or do I see that they dread me?” Inevitably, he began to ascribe dark motives to Franklin. Simmering in self-importance, Adams began to suspect that Franklin was hindering his return because he feared the “dangerous truths” he might reveal. “Does the Old Conjurer dread my voice in Congress?” Adams wrote in his diary. “He had some reason, for he has often heard it there, a terror to evil doers.”

Franklin was blithely oblivious of Adams’s dark suspicions, and he carried on trying to be cordial in his letters. “I shall take care to present your respects to the good ladies you mention,” he cheerfully promised. He even agreed, after three strident requests from Adams, that the new ship might go directly to Boston, rather than accommodating the French minister by going to Philadelphia first. But it was to no avail. New specters of distrust had infected Adams’s mind, and they were destined to haunt his relationship with Franklin when he returned the following year.
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While Adams simmered, Arthur Lee and his brothers declared open war on Franklin back in America. Lee circulated a letter accusing Franklin of “weaving little plots” and “sowing pernicious dissension,” and he also made sure that the Congress saw the flurry of accusatory letters to Franklin, questioning his honor, that he and Ralph Izard had written earlier that year.

Warned by his son-in-law, Richard Bache, of all these intrigues, Franklin was able to dismiss the resentments of the Lees. “My too great reputation,” he wrote, “grieve those unhappy gentlemen, unhappy in their tempers and in the dark, uncomfortable passions of jealousy, anger, suspicion, envy and malice.”

He was, however, far more wounded by Bache’s reports that Lee and his allies were attacking Temple, for he loved his grandson with a blindness that was unusual for him. “Izard, Lees & company,” Bache wrote, “lay some stress upon your employing as a private secretary your grandson whom they hold unfit to be trusted because of his father’s principles.” Then he added ominously, “They have had some thoughts of bringing a motion to have him removed.” In a separate note, Sally Bache confided that her husband had been afraid to inform Franklin of this campaign against Temple because he knew it would upset him.

It certainly did. “Methinks it is rather some merit that I have rescued a valuable young man from the danger of being a Tory,” he wrote Richard. Then he let loose a cry of anger at the thought that Temple might be recalled:

In a letter to Sally at the same time, he repeated these sentiments and added that trying to deprive him of Temple would be cruel but futile. “I should not part with the child, but with the employment,” he threatened. “But I am confident that, whatever may be proposed by weak or malicious people, the Congress is too wise and too good to think of treating me in that manner.” The Congress was indeed supportive. There was no serious effort to have Temple dismissed, and he remained the secretary to the American delegation.
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Temple was about 19 at the time, still a roguish lad who worked hard but had earned the deep respect of few besides his grandfather. As the controversy swirled around him in the summer of 1779, he decided to prove his mettle by taking part in an audacious mission with Lafayette to launch a surprise attack on Britain itself.

The French general, less than three years older than Temple, had recently returned from serving under George Washington. By this time, the Revolution had reached an unsteady stalemate, with British troops under Sir Henry Clinton still ensconced in New York but doing little for the time being other than conducting hit-and-run raids. So Lafayette, on arriving back in Paris, hatched his audacious plan to attack the British mainland, and he shared it with Franklin and the French military. “I admire much the activity of your genius,” Franklin wrote. “It is certain that the coasts of England and Scotland are extremely open and defenseless.” He conceded that he did not know enough about military strategy to “presume upon advising it.” But he could give encouragement. “Many instances of history prove that in war, attempts thought to be impossible do often, for that very reason, become possible and practicable because nobody expects them.”

Lafayette was eager to have Temple at his side. “We will be always together during the campaign, which I do assure you gives me great pleasure,” he wrote the young man. For his part, Temple, ever the dandy, fretted about his rank, his title, his commission, and his uniform. He wanted to be commissioned as an officer rather than merely as a volunteer, and he insisted on the right to wear the epaulettes of an officer, even though Lafayette advised against it. Just as all these issues were being settled, the land invasion was called off by the French military.

Franklin professed to be disappointed. “I flattered myself,” he wrote Lafayette, “that he might possibly catch from you some tincture of those engaging manners that make you so much the delight of all that know you.” Once again, Temple’s chance to make a name for himself on his own was scuttled.
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One component of the proposed invasion of Britain did proceed, and it inserted a colorful character into Franklin’s life. When Lafayette was first planning his mission, Franklin told him that “much will depend on a prudent and brave sea commander who knows the coasts.” They settled instead for a commander who was, as Franklin was already well aware, more brave than prudent: John Paul Jones.

Born John Paul, the son of a Scottish landscape designer, he had shipped off to sea at age 13, served as the first mate of a slave vessel, and soon commanded his own merchant ship. But the hotheaded captain, who throughout his career was prone to provoking mutinies, got into trouble by flogging a crew member who later died and then, after being exonerated, running his sword through yet another crew member who was threatening an insurrection. So he fled to Virginia, changed his last name to Jones, and at the beginning of the Revolution won a commission in America’s motley navy of ex-privateers and adventurers. By 1778, he was making his reputation by conducting daring attacks along the English and Scottish coasts.

On one of these raids, Jones decided to kidnap a Scottish earl, but the man was away taking the waters down in Bath, so the crew instead forced his wife to hand over the family silver. In a fit of noble guilt, Jones decided to buy the booty from his crew so that he could return it to the family, and he wrote a flowery letter to the earl declaring his intention, copies of which he circulated to various friends, including Franklin, who had by then assumed the difficult task of acting as his American overseer as well as his occasional host in Passy. Franklin tried to help Jones resolve the problem, but it led to such a convoluted exchange of letters with the outraged earl and his baffled wife that the silver was not returned until after the end of the war.

Franklin decided that the impetuous captain would do more good, or less harm, if he focused his raids on the Channel Islands instead. “The Jersey privateers do us a great deal of mischief,” he wrote to Jones in May 1778. “It has been mentioned to me that your small vessel, commanded by so brave an officer, might render great service by following them where greater ships dare not venture.” He added that the suggestion came “from high authority,” meaning the great French naval minister Antoine Sartine.
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Jones, not so easily managed, replied that his ship,
Ranger,
was too “crank and slow,” and it would require promises of great reward for him to convince his men to undertake more missions. But he knew how to flatter Franklin: he sent him a copy of his battle journals, which Franklin read avidly. So, without permission from his fellow commissioners or from France, Franklin decided that Jones should be given command of a ship that had just been built for the Americans in Amsterdam. Alas, the nervous Dutch, who were trying to remain neutral, scuttled the plan, especially after the British, who had learned of it through their spy Bancroft, applied pressure.

Franklin was finally able to help secure for Jones, in February 1779, an old forty-gun man-of-war named the
Duras,
which Jones promptly rechristened the
Bonhomme Richard
in his patron’s honor. Jones was so thrilled that he paid a visit to Passy that month to thank Franklin and his landlord Chaumont, who had helped supply Jones with uniforms and funds. There was perhaps another reason for the visit: Jones may have been having an illicit affair with Madame de Chaumont.
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During this stay, an incident occurred that, as played out in subsequent letters, resembled a French farce. A wizened old woman, who was the wife of the Chaumonts’ gardener, alleged that Jones tried to rape her. Franklin made a passing allusion to the alleged incident in a postscript to a subsequent letter, and Jones mistakenly assumed that “the mystery you so delicately mention” referred to the controversy that surrounded his killing of the rebellious crew member years earlier. So he provided a long and anguished account of that old travail.

Confused and somewhat amused by Jones’s detailed explanation of impaling the mutineer, Franklin replied that he had never heard that story and informed Jones that the “mystery” he alluded to referred, instead, to an allegation made by the gardener’s wife that Jones had “attempted to ravish her” in the bushes of the estate at “about 7 o’clock the evening before your departure.” The woman had recounted the horror in great detail, “some of which are not fit for me to write,” and three of her sons had declared that they “were determined to kill you.” But Jones should not worry: everyone at Passy found the tale to be the subject of great merriment. It “occasioned some laughing,” wrote Franklin, “the old woman being one of the grossest, coarsest, dirtiest and ugliest that one may find in a thousand.” Madame Chaumont, whose own familiarity with Jones’s sexual appetites did not prevent her from a great display of French insouciance, declared that “it gave a high idea of the strength of appetite and courage of the Americans.”