Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

  He went on, undaunted, to press his case for another loan. “Certainly the whole edifice sinks to the ground immediately if you refuse on that account to give us any further assistance.” With that came both a plea and an implied threat: making a public issue of the transgression, he warned, could hurt the mutual interests of both countries. “The English, I just now learn, flatter themselves they have already divided us. I hope this little misunderstanding will therefore be kept a secret, and that they will find themselves totally mistaken.”45

  Vergennes was stunned by Franklin’s letter, a copy of which he sent to his ambassador in Philadelphia. “You may imagine my astonishment,” he wrote. “I think it proper that the most influential members of Congress should be informed of the very irregular conduct of their commissioners in regard to us.” He did not blame Franklin personally, except to say that “he has yielded too easily to the bias of his colleagues.” Vergennes went on to lament, correctly, that the new nation was not one that would enter into entangling alliances. “We shall be but poorly paid for all that we have done for the United States,” he complained, “and for securing to them a national existence.”

  There was little Vergennes could do. Forcing a showdown, as Franklin had subtly warned, would drive the Americans into an even faster and closer alliance with Britain. So, reluctantly, he let the matter drop, instructed his envoy not to file an official protest with the Congress, and even agreed to supply yet another French loan.46

  “Two great diplomatic duelists had formally crossed swords,” Carl Van Doren noted, “and the philosopher had exquisitely disarmed the minister.” Yes, but perhaps a better analogy would be to Franklin’s own favorite game of chess. From his opening gambit that led to America’s treaty of alliance with France to the endgame that produced a peace with England while preserving French friendship, Franklin mastered a three-dimensional game against two aggressive players by exhibiting great patience when the pieces were not properly aligned and carefully exploiting strategic advantages when they were.47

  Franklin had been instrumental in shaping the three great documents of the war: the Declaration of Independence, the alliance with France, and the treaty with England. Now he turned his thoughts to peace. “All wars are follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones,” he wrote Polly Stevenson. “When will mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their differences by arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the cast of a die, it would be better than by fighting and destroying each other.” To Joseph Banks, one of the many old friends from England he wrote in celebration, he asserted yet again his famous, albeit somewhat misleading, credo: “There never was a good war or a bad peace.”48

  Benny and Temple

  Rather than return home immediately, Franklin decided to relish his newly earned peace and leisure by enjoying the friends, family, and intellectual pursuits available to him in the idyllic setting of Passy. His grandson Benny had been languishing at his school in Geneva, which had recently been thrown into political turmoil over plans to give full voting rights to all citizens. Now that his diplomatic duties had subsided, Franklin decided to permit Benny to come back to Passy for a vacation during the summer of 1783, his first since leaving four years earlier.49

  Reunited at last with the grandfather he was so eager to impress, Benny was completely charmed. Franklin was “very different from other old persons,” he told a visitor, “for they are fretful and complaining and dissatisfied, and my grandpapa is laughing and cheerful like a young person.” Their new proximity also warmed Franklin. Benny was “so well grown,” he wrote the boy’s parents, “and so much improved in his learning and behavior.” To Polly Stevenson he wrote, “He gains every day upon my affections.”

  That summer, during which Benny turned 14, his grandfather took him to the Seine for swimming lessons, and his cousin Temple taught him fencing and dancing. Temple also impressed him by pretending to kill a mouse with helium, then reviving him, then killing him for good with an electric spark from one of Franklin’s batteries. “I am sure my cousin would pass for a conjurer in America,” Benny wrote his parents.50

  Benny had been sickly and depressed at school, Franklin learned, and the political situation in Geneva remained volatile. So he decided that the boy need not return, even though he had left his clothes and books there. He had earlier considered sending Benny to school in England under the care of Polly Stevenson, who had been excited by the prospect. Now, worried that Benny was losing his command of English, he raised the possibility with Polly more seriously. “Would that still be convenient to you?” he asked. “He is docile and of gentle manners, ready to receive and follow good advice, and will set no bad example to your other children.” Polly was wary but willing. “I fear he will think us so unpolished he will scarcely be able to endure us,” she replied, “but if English cordiality will make amends for French refinement, we may have some chance of making him happy.”51

  Franklin, who had grown ever more fond of Benny, instead decided that he should stay in Passy. “He showed such an unwillingness to leave me, and Temple such a fondness for retaining him, that I concluded to keep him,” Franklin explained to Polly in a letter at the end of 1783. “He behaves very well, and we love him very much.”

  Perhaps, with his felicity in language, Benny could become a diplomat, Franklin thought. That would require, however, getting him a public appointment, something that was proving difficult for Temple. He had once told Richard Bache, just as he had told his son, William, and many others, that it was demeaning to be dependent on a government appointment. Now he expressed the same sentiment to Richard again, this time in a letter about his son Benny: “I have determined to give him a trade that he may have something to depend on, and not be obliged to ask favors or offices of anybody.”52

  The trade Franklin chose was the obvious one. His private little printing press at Passy was busy that autumn turning out editions of his bagatelles, so he was delighted when the boy eagerly started to work there. A master founder was hired to teach him how to cast type, and by spring Franklin had persuaded François Didot, the greatest and most artistic printer in France, to take him on as a student. Benny was destined to follow in Franklin’s footsteps, not only as a printer but also eventually as a newspaper editor.

  As for Temple, Franklin was reduced to asking for favors and offices. As he was enjoying the sweet summer of 1783, he wrote to Foreign Secretary Livingston yet another plaintive plea on poor Temple’s behalf:

  He has now gone through an apprenticeship of near seven years in the ministerial business, and is very capable of serving the States in that line, as possessing all the requisites of knowledge, zeal, activity, language, and address…But it is not my custom to solicit employments for myself, or any of my family, and I shall not do it in this case. I only hope, that if he is not to be employed in your new arrangement, I may be informed of it as soon as possible, that, while I have strength left for it, I may accompany him in a tour to Italy, returning through Germany, which I think he may make to more advantage with me than alone, and which I have long promised to afford him, as a reward for his faithful service, and his tender filial attachment to me.

  Temple did not get a ministerial posting, nor did his grandfather take him on a grand tour. Instead, he emulated his grandfather (and father) in a less laudable way than Benny. After failing to marry either of the Brillons’ daughters, Temple became involved with a married woman who lived near Passy, Blanchette Caillot, whose husband was a successful actor. With her he fathered an illegitimate son, Theodore. In a cruel irony, the child died from smallpox, the disease that had taken the only legitimate son among three generations of Franklins.

  Theodore Franklin, the illegitimate son of the illegitimate son of Franklin’s own illegitimate son, was, albeit briefly, the last male-line descendant of Benjamin Franklin, who would in the end leave no family line bearing his name.53

  Balloon Mania

  Among the diversions Benny enjoyed with his grandfat
her in the summer and fall of 1783 were the grand spectacles of the first balloon flights. The age of air travel began in June when two brothers, Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, launched an unmanned hot-air balloon near Lyons that rose to a height of six thousand feet. The Franklins were not there, but they did witness in late August the first unmanned flight using hydrogen. A scientist named Jacques Charles launched a twelve-foot-diameter silk balloon filled with hydrogen produced by pouring oil of vitriol over fiery iron filings. With great fanfare, it took off from Paris in front of fifty thousand spectators and floated for more than forty-five minutes before landing in a village more than fifteen miles away. “The country people who saw it fall were frightened,” Franklin wrote Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, “and attacked it with stones and knives so that it was much mangled.”

  The race was then on to produce the first manned flight, and it was won on November 21 by the Montgolfiers with their hot-air model. As a huge crowd cheered and countless women fainted, the balloon took off with two champagne-toting noblemen, who initially found themselves snared by some tree branches. “I was then in great pain for the men, thinking them in danger of being thrown out or burnt,” Franklin reported. But soon they were free and gliding their way over the Seine, and after twenty minutes they landed on the other side and popped their corks in triumph. Franklin was among the distinguished scientists who signed the official certification of the historic flight the following evening, when the Montgolfiers called on him at Passy.

  The Montgolfiers believed that the lift was caused not just by hot air but also by smoke, so they instructed their “aeronauts” to ply the fire with wet straw and wool. Franklin, however, was more partial to Charles’s “inflammable air” model using hydrogen, and he helped to finance the first manned flight in such a balloon. It took place ten days later. As Franklin watched from his carriage parked near the Tuileries Gardens (his gout preventing him from joining the throng on the wet grass), Charles and a partner flew for more than two hours and landed safely twenty-seven miles away. Once again, Franklin provided a report to the Royal Society through Banks: “I had a pocket glass, with which I followed it until I lost sight, first of the men, then of the car, and when I last saw the balloon it appeared no bigger than a walnut.”

  Ever since the days of his electricity experiments, Franklin believed that science should be pursued initially for pure fascination and curiosity, and then practical uses would eventually flow from what was discovered. At first, he was reluctant to guess what practical use might come of balloons, but he was convinced that experimenting with them would someday, as he told Banks, “pave the way to some discoveries in natural philosophy of which at present we have no conception.” There could be, he noted in another letter, “important consequences that no one can foresee.” More famous was his pithier expression of the same sentiment, made in response to a spectator who asked what use this new balloon thing could be. “What is the use,” he replied, “of a newborn baby?”54

  Because the English saw no utility in ballooning and because they were a bit too proud to follow the French, they did not join in the excitement. “I see an inclination in the more respectable part of the Royal Society to guard against the Ballomania [until] some experiment likely to prove beneficial either to society or science is proposed,” Banks wrote. Franklin scoffed at this attitude. “It does not seem to me a good reason to decline prosecuting a new experiment which apparently increases the power of man over matter until we can see to what use that power may be applied,” he replied. “When we have learned to manage it, we may hope some time or other to find uses for it, as men have done for magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement.” By early the following year, he had come up with one possibility for a practical use: balloons might serve as a way to wage war, or even better, as a way to preserve peace. “Convincing sovereigns of the folly of wars may perhaps be one effect, since it will be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his dominions,” he wrote to his friend Jan Ingenhousz, the Dutch scientist and physician.

  Mainly, however, Franklin contented himself with enjoying the craze and all the entertainments surrounding it. Exhibition flights of fanciful balloons, decorated and gilded in glorious patterns, became the rage in Paris that season, and they even influenced hats and hair-styles, fashions and dances. Temple Franklin and Benny Bache produced their own miniature models. And Franklin wrote one of his typical parodies, which, like many of his early ones, used the anonymous voice of a fictional woman. “If you want to fill your balloons with an element ten times lighter than inflammable air,” she wrote to one of the newspapers, “you can find a great quantity of it, and ready made, in the promises of lovers and of courtiers.”55

  Eminence Grise

  Even as he indulged in the frivolities of prerevolutionary Paris, Franklin focused much of his writing on his egalitarian, antielitist ideas for building a new American society based on middle-class virtues. His daughter, Sally, sent him newspaper clippings about the formation of a hereditary order of merit called the Society of the Cincinnati, which was headed by General Washington and open to distinguished officers of the American army who would pass the title down to their eldest sons. Franklin, replying at the beginning of 1784, ridiculed the concept. The Chinese were right, he said, to honor the parents of people who earned distinction, for they had some role in it. But honoring a worthy person’s descendants, who had nothing to do with achieving the merit, “is not only groundless and absurd but often hurtful to that posterity.” Any form of hereditary aristocracy or nobility was, he declared, “in direct opposition to the solemnly declared sense of their country.”

  He also, in the letter, ridiculed the symbol of the new Cincinnati order, a bald eagle, which had also been selected as a national symbol. That provoked one of Franklin’s most famous riffs about America’s values and the question of a national bird:

  I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character, he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, near the river where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labors of the fishing-hawk…The turkey is, in comparison, a much more respectable bird, and a true original native of America…He is (though a little vain and silly, it is true, but not the worse emblem for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards.56

  Franklin heard so frequently from people who wanted to emigrate to America that in early 1784 he printed a pamphlet, in French and English, designed to encourage the more industrious of them while discouraging those who sought a life of upper-class leisure. His essay, “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” is one of the clearest expressions of his belief that American society should be based on the virtues of the middle (or “mediocre,” as he sometimes called them, meaning it as a word of praise) classes, of which he still considered himself a part.

  There were few people in America either as poor or as rich as those in Europe, he said. “It is rather a general happy mediocrity that prevails.” Instead of rich proprietors and struggling tenants, “most people cultivate their own lands” or follow some craft or trade. Franklin was particularly harsh on those who sought hereditary privilege or who had “no other quality to recommend him but his birth.” In America, he said, “people do not enquire of a stranger, What is he? but, What can he do?” Reflecting his own pride in discovering that he had hardworking forebears rather than aristocratic ones, he said that a true American “would think himself more obliged to a genealogist who could prove for him that his ancestors and relations for ten generations had been ploughmen, smiths, carpenters, turners, weavers, tanners or even shoemakers, and consequently that they were useful members of society, than if he could only prove that they were Gentlemen, doing nothing of value but living idly on the labor of others.”

  America was creating a society, Franklin proclaimed, where
a “mere man of Quality” who does not want to work would be “despised and disregarded,” while anyone who has a useful skill would be honored. All of this made for a better moral clime. “The almost general mediocrity of fortune that prevails in America, obliging its people to follow some business for subsistence, those vices that arise usually from idleness are in a great measure prevented,” he concluded. “Industry and constant employment are great preservatives of morals and virtue.” He purported to be describing the way America was, but he was also subtly prescribing what he wanted it to become. All in all, it was his best paean to the middle-class values he represented and helped to make integral to the new nation’s character.57

  Franklin’s affection for the middle class and its virtues of hard work and frugality meant that his social theories tended to be a blend of conservatism (as we have seen, he was dubious of generous welfare laws that led to dependency among the poor) and populism (he was opposed to the privileges of inheritance and to wealth idly gained through ownership of large estates). In 1784, he expanded on these ideas by questioning the morality of excess personal luxuries.

  “I have not,” he lamented to Benjamin Vaughan, “thought of a remedy for luxury.” On the one hand, the desire for luxury spurred people to work hard. He recalled how his wife had once given a fancy hat to a country girl, and soon all the other girls in the village were working hard spinning mittens in order to earn money to buy fancy hats. This appealed to his utilitarian sentiments: “Not only the girls were made happier by having fine caps, but the Philadelphians by the supply of warm mittens.” However, too much time spent seeking luxuries was wasteful and “a public evil.” So he suggested that America should impose heavy duties on the importation of frivolous fineries.58