The True Benjamin Franklin Part 24

Jay's firmness compelled Oswald to obtain a new commission in the proper form, and while he deserves credit for this and also for his principle, "We must be honest and grateful to our allies, but think for ourselves,"

he seems in the light of later evidence to have been mistaken in his deep mistrust of the French court. His opinions have been briefly stated by Adams:

"Mr. Jay likes Frenchmen as little as Mr. Lee and Mr. Izard did.

He says they are not a moral people; they know not what it is; he don't like any Frenchman; the Marquis de Lafayette is clever, but he is a Frenchman. Our allies don't play fair, he told me; they were endeavoring to deprive us of the fishery, the western lands, and the navigation of the Mississippi; they would even bargain with the English to deprive us of them; they want to play the western lands, Mississippi, and whole Gulf of Mexico into the hands of Spain." (Adams's Works, vol. iii. p. 303.)

Jay had had a very bitter experience in Spain, where the cold haughtiness and chicanery of the court had made him feel that he was among enemies. The instructions sent to him by Congress had been intercepted, and instead of receiving them as secret orders from his government, they had been handed to him by the Spanish prime-minister after that official had read them. He was accordingly prepared to think that the French government was no better.

In a certain sense there were grounds for his suspicion of France. She was interested in the fisheries on the Banks of Newfoundland, and would naturally like to have a share in them. It was also obviously her policy to prevent the United States and England from becoming too friendly and from making too firm a peace, for fear that they might unite at some future time against her. If she could get them to make a sort of half peace with a number of subjects left unsettled, about which there would be difficulties for many years, it would be a great advantage to her.

Spain wanted to secure the control of the Gulf of Mexico, the exclusive navigation of the Mississippi, and the possession of the lands west of that river, and France, as her ally, might be expected to a.s.sist her to obtain these concessions. Arguments and suggestions favoring all these projects were unquestionably used by Frenchmen at that time, and no doubt Vergennes and other public men often had them in mind. It was their duty at least to consider them. But there is no evidence that they actively promoted these schemes or acted in any other than an honorable manner towards us.

As a matter of fact, our commercial relations with England were left unsettled. England claimed, among other things, the right to search our ships, and there was great discontent over this for a long time, amply sufficient to keep us from friendship with England until the question was finally settled by the war of 1812. Adams seems to imply that he could have settled this and other difficulties in 1780 by the commercial treaty which he was empowered to make with England, and that Vergennes, in advising him not to communicate with England, had intended to keep England and the United States embroiled. Possibly that may have been Vergennes's intention. But as it was afterwards found impossible to adjust these commercial difficulties until the war of 1812, and as Adams himself did not attempt it, though he might have done so in spite of Vergennes's advice, and as they were finally settled only by a war, it is not probable that Adams could have adjusted them in the easy, offhand way he imagines. In any event, it was not worth while for the sake of these future contingencies to offend Vergennes and jeopardize our alliance and the loans of money we were obtaining from France.

Franklin's policy of making absolutely sure of the friendship and a.s.sistance of France seems to have been the sound one, and with his wonderful accomplishments and adaptability he could be friendly and agreeable without sacrificing anything. But Adams went at everything with a club, and could understand no other method.

I cannot find that Franklin was at any time willing to sacrifice the fisheries, or the Mississippi River or the western lands. In fact, he was more firm on the question of the Mississippi than Congress. In its extremity, Congress finally instructed Jay to yield the navigation of the Mississippi if he could get a.s.sistance from Spain in no other way; and the Spanish premier, having intercepted this instruction and read it, had poor Jay at his mercy. But Franklin was very strenuous on this point, and wrote to Jay,--

"Poor as we are, yet, as I know we shall be rich, I would rather agree with them to buy at a great price the whole of their right on the Mississippi, than sell a drop of its waters. A neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street door."

Jay grew more and more suspicious of France, and Adams reports him as saying, "Every day produces some fresh proof and example of their vile schemes." One of the British negotiators obtained for him a letter which Marbois, the secretary of the French legation in America, had written home, urging Vergennes not to support the commissioners in their claim to the right of fishing on the Newfoundland Banks. This he considered absolute proof; but the examination which has since been made of all the confidential correspondence of that period does not show that Marbois's suggestion was ever acted upon. Individuals doubtless cherished purposes of their own, but the French government in all its actions seems to have fully justified Franklin's confidence in it. Jefferson, who afterwards went to France, declared that there was no proof whatever of Franklin's subserviency.

When Adams arrived he was delighted to find himself in full accord with Jay. He had been in Holland, where he had succeeded in negotiating a loan and a commercial treaty, and consequently felt that he was somewhat of a success as a diplomatist, and need not any longer be so much overawed by Franklin. He relates in his diary how the French courtiers heaped compliments on him. "Sir," they would say, "you have been the Washington of the negotiation." To which he would answer in his best French, "Sir, you have given me the grandest honor and a compliment the most sublime." They would reply, "Ah, sir, in truth you have well deserved it." And he concludes by saying, "A few of these compliments would kill Franklin, if they should come to his ears."

He uses strong language about the "base system" pursued by Franklin, and talks in a lofty way of the impossibility of a man becoming distinguished as a diplomatist who allows his pa.s.sion for women to get the better of him. He and Jay conducted the rest of the negotiations and completed the treaty, Franklin merely a.s.sisting; and Adams gloried in breaking the instruction of Congress to take the advice of France. He was still smarting under the rebuke administered for his interference and for the offence he gave Vergennes a year or two before, and after declaring that Congress in this rebuke had prost.i.tuted its own honor as well as his, he breaks forth on the subject of the instruction to take the advice of France:

"Congress surrendered their own sovereignty into the hands of a French minister. Blush! blush! ye guilty records! blush and perish! It is glory to have broken such infamous orders.

Infamous, I say, for so they will be to all posterity. How can such a stain be washed out? Can we cast a veil over it and forget it?" (Adams's Works, vol. iii. p. 359.)

Franklin finally agreed that they should go on with the negotiations and make the treaty without consulting the French government. Vergennes was offended, but Franklin managed to smooth the matter over and pacify him.

Congress censured the commissioners for violating the instruction, and they all made the best excuses they could. Franklin's was a very clever one.

"We did what appeared to all of us best at the time, and if we have done wrong, the Congress will do right, after hearing us, to censure us. Their nomination of five persons to the service seems to mark, that they had some dependence on our joint judgment, since one alone could have made a treaty by direction of the French ministry as well as twenty."

It is probable that Franklin agreed to ignore the instruction, and a.s.sented to all the other acts of the commissioners, because he thought it best to have harmony. Such an opportunity for a terrible quarrel could not have been resisted by some men, for Adams bluntly told him that he disapproved of all his previous conduct in the matter of the treaty. As Adams was the head of the commission, it would seem that Franklin, finding himself outvoted, took the proper course of not blocking a momentous negotiation by his personal feelings or opinions, so long as substantial results were being secured. In this respect he did exactly the reverse of what Adams had prophesied. In the beginning of the negotiations Adams entered in his diary, "Franklin's cunning will be to divide us; to this end he will provoke, he will insinuate, he will intrigue, he will manuvre." Instead of that he encouraged their union.

Adams's writings are full of extraordinary suspicions of this sort which turned out to be totally unfounded; but so fond was he of them that, after having been obliged to confess that Franklin had acted in entire harmony with the commissioners, and after all had ended well and Franklin had obtained another loan of six millions from Vergennes, he cannot resist saying, "I suspect, however, and have reason, but will say nothing." Those familiar with him know that this means that he had no reason or evidence whatever, but was simply determined to gratify his peculiar pa.s.sion.

Franklin wrote a long letter to Congress about the treaty, and after saying that he entirely discredited the suspicions of the treachery of the French court, he squares accounts with Adams:

"I ought not, however, to conceal from you, that one of my colleagues is of a very different opinion from me in these matters. He thinks the French minister one of the greatest enemies of our country, that he would have straitened our boundaries, to prevent the growth of our people; contracted our fishery, to obstruct the increase of our seamen; and retained the royalists among us, to keep us divided; that he privately opposes all our negotiations with foreign courts, and afforded us, during the war, the a.s.sistance we received, only to keep it alive, that we might be so much the more weakened by it; that to think of grat.i.tude to France is the greatest of follies, and that to be influenced by it would ruin us. He makes no secret of his having these opinions, expresses them publicly, sometimes in presence of the English ministers, and speaks of hundreds of instances which he could produce in proof of them. None, however, have yet appeared to me, unless the conversations and letter above-mentioned are reckoned such.

"If I were not convinced of the real inability of this court to furnish the further supplies we asked, I should suspect these discourses of a person in his station might have influenced the refusal; but I think they have gone no further than to occasion a suspicion, that we have a considerable party of Antigallicians in America, who are not Tories, and consequently to produce some doubts of the continuance of our friendship. As such doubts may hereafter have a bad effect, I think we cannot take too much care to remove them; and it is therefore I write this, to put you on your guard, (believing it my duty, though I know that I hazard by it a mortal enmity), and to caution you respecting the insinuations of this gentleman against this court, and the instances he supposes of their ill will to us, which I take to be as imaginary as I know his fancies to be, that Count de Vergennes and myself are continually plotting against him, and employing the news-writers of Europe to depreciate his character, &c. But as Shakespeare says, 'Trifles light as air,'

&c. I am persuaded, however, that he means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses."

Adams never forgave this slap, and he and his descendants have kept up the "mortal enmity" which Franklin knew he was hazarding.

Before he left France Franklin took part in making a treaty with Prussia, and secured the insertion of an article which embodied his favorite idea that in case of war there should be no privateering, the merchant vessels of either party should pa.s.s unmolested, and unarmed farmers, fishermen, and artisans should remain undisturbed in their employments. But as a war usually breaks all treaties between the contending nations, this one might have been difficult to enforce.

At last, in July, 1785, came the end of his long and delightful residence in a country which he seems to have loved as much as if it had been his own. No American, and certainly no Englishman, has ever spoken so well of the French. He never could forget, he said, the nine years'

happiness that he had enjoyed there "in the sweet society of a people whose conversation is instructive, whose manners are highly pleasing, and who, above all the nations of the world, have, in the greatest perfection, the art of making themselves beloved by strangers."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTRAIT OF LOUIS XVI. GIVEN BY HIM TO FRANKLIN]

The king gave him his picture set in two circles of four hundred and eight diamonds,[28] and furnished the litter, swung between two mules, to carry him to the coast. If the king himself had been in the litter he could not have received more attention and worship from n.o.blemen, ecclesiastics, governors, soldiers, and important public bodies on the journey to the sea. It was a triumphal march for the American philosopher, now so old and so afflicted with the gout and the stone that he could barely endure the easy motion of the royal mules.

His two grandsons accompanied him. De Chaumont and his daughter insisted on going as far as Nanterre, and his old friend Le Veillard went with him all the way to England. He kept a diary of the journey, full of most interesting details of the people who met him on the road, how the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld sent messengers to stop him and order him with mock violence to spend the night at his castle. It is merely the jotting down of odd sentences in a diary, but the magic of Franklin's genius has given to the smallest incidents an immortal fascination.

He would have liked to spend some time in England among his old friends, but the war feeling was still too violent. He, however, crossed to England and stayed four days at Southampton waiting for Captain Truxton's ship, which was to call for him. English friends flocked down to see him and to give him little mementos, and the British government gave orders that his baggage should not be examined. The Bishop of St.

Asaph, who lived near by, hastened to Southampton with his wife and one of his daughters and spent several days in saying farewell. On the evening of the last day they accompanied him on board the ship, dined there, and intended to stay all night; but, to save him the pain of parting, they went ash.o.r.e after he had gone to bed. "When I waked in the morning," he says, "found the company gone and the ship under sail."

The bishop's daughter, Catherine, wrote him one of her charming letters which, as it relates to him, is as immortal as any of his own writings.

Every day at dinner, she tells him, they drank to his prosperous voyage.

She is troubled because she forgot to give him a pin-cushion. He seemed to have everything else he needed, and that might have been useful. "We are forever talking of our good friend; something is perpetually occurring to remind us of the time spent with you." They had besought him to finish during the voyage his Autobiography, which had been begun at their house. "We never walk in the garden without seeing _Dr.

Franklin's room_, and thinking of the work that was begun in it."

FOOTNOTES:

[28] By his will Franklin left this picture to his daughter, Sarah Bache, and it is still in the possession of her descendants. He requested her not to use the outer circle of diamonds as ornaments and introduce the useless fashion of wearing jewels in America, but he implied that she could sell them. She sold them, and with the proceeds she and her husband made the tour of Europe. The inner circle he directed should be preserved with the picture, but they were removed.

XI

THE CONSt.i.tUTION-MAKER

Almost immediately on Franklin's return to Philadelphia he was made President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, under the extraordinary const.i.tution he had helped to make before he went to France in 1776. This office was somewhat like that of the modern governor. He held it for three years, by annual re-elections, but without being involved in any notable questions or controversies.

He was at this period of his life still genial and mellow, in spite of disease, and full of anecdotes, learning, and curious experiences. His voice is described as low and his countenance open, frank, and pleasing.

He enjoyed what to him was one of the greatest pleasures of life, children and grandchildren. He had six grandchildren, and no doubt often wished that he had a hundred. He had no patience with celibacy, and was constantly urging marriage on his friends. To John Sargent he wrote,--

"The account you give me of your family is pleasing, except that your eldest son continues so long unmarried. I hope he does not intend to live and die in celibacy. The wheel of life that has rolled down to him from Adam without interruption should not stop with him. I would not have one dead unbearing branch in the genealogical tree of the Sargents. The married state is, after all our jokes, the happiest."

Sir Samuel Romilly, who visited him in Paris shortly before his return to America, says in his journal,--

"Of all the celebrated persons whom in my life I have chanced to see, Dr. Franklin, both from his appearance and his conversation, seemed to me the most remarkable. His venerable patriarchal appearance, the simplicity of his manner and language, and the novelty of his observations, at least the novelty of them at that time to me, impressed me with an opinion of him as one of the most extraordinary men that ever existed."

(Life of Romilly. By his Sons. Vol. i. p. 50.)

He lived in a large house in Philadelphia, situated on a court long afterwards called by his name, a little back from the south side of Market Street, between Third and Fourth Streets. There was a small garden attached to it, and also a gra.s.s-plot on which was a large mulberry-tree, under which he often sat and received visitors on summer afternoons. He built a large addition to the house, comprising a library, a room for the meetings of the American Philosophical Society, with some bedrooms in the third story. Here he pa.s.sed the closing years of his life with his daughter and six grandchildren, reading, writing, receiving visits from distinguished men, and playing cards in the winter evenings.

"I have indeed now and then," he writes to Mrs. Hewson, "a little compunction in reflecting that I spend time so idly; but another reflection comes to relieve me, whispering, '_You know that the soul is immortal; why then should you be such a n.i.g.g.ard of a little time, when you have a whole eternity before you?_'

So, being easily convinced, and, like other reasonable creatures, satisfied with a small reason, when it is in favor of doing what I have a mind to, I shuffle the cards again, and begin another game."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRANKLIN PORTRAIT IN WEST COLLECTION]

He was soon, however, given very important employment in spite of his age. He had made himself famous in many varied spheres, from almanacs and stove-making to treaties of alliance. Nothing seemed to be too small or too great for him. He invented an apparatus for taking books from high shelves. He suggested that sailors could mitigate thirst by sitting in the salt water or soaking their clothes in it. The pores of the skin, he said, while large enough to admit the water, are too small to allow the salt to penetrate; and the experiment was successfully tried by shipwrecked crews. He suggested that bread and flour could be preserved for years in air-tight bottles, and Captain Cook tried it with good results in his famous voyage. It is certainly strange that the man who was so pa.s.sionately interested in such subjects should enter the great domain of const.i.tution-making and, in spite of many blunders, excel those who had made it their special study.