The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (114 page)

Yet there was one part of the campaign against him he could not easily ignore. His critics complained that his employment of Temple amounted to nepotism, and demanded Temple’s removal. The allegation was accurate enough (and in keeping with Franklin’s fixed habit of employing relatives). This may have been why he rejected it so vociferously. Far from being censured, he told Bache, he should be congratulated. “Methinks it is rather some merit that I have rescued a young man from the danger of being a Tory and fixed him in honest republican Whig principles.” Besides, Temple was showing real character and ability and promised in time to be of genuine service to his country.

There was more than this to Franklin’s defense of Temple—something much more personal. “It is enough that I have lost my
son;
would they add my
grandson!
An old man of 70, I undertook a winter voyage at the command of the Congress, and for the public service, with no other attendant to take care of me. I am continued here in a foreign country, where, if I am sick, his filial attention comforts me, and, if I die, I have a child to close my eyes and take care of my remains.”

Franklin knew that Richard and Sally would be even more interested in hearing of his other grandson. “Ben, if I should live long enough to want it, is like to be another comfort to me,” he explained. The younger boy had started at boarding school near Passy, but his grandfather had lately sent him to Geneva. “I intend him for a Presbyterian as well as a republican.”

One reason
Franklin begrudged his daughter luxuries like pins and feathers was that he heard daily of Americans who lacked even necessaries. Franklin regularly received letters regarding the plight of American prisoners of war held in England. Typically these were sailors captured from American privateers; routinely they were tossed into prison and treated as common felons—and worse, as traitors and pirates.

At times during the eighteenth century, war could be a gentlemanly endeavor. Captured officers were regularly paroled—that is, sent home
upon their promise to engage no longer in hostilities. Such had been the fate of General Burgoyne after Saratoga. Soldiers of the rank and file were often exchanged for their counterparts from the other side.

But the British government refused to accord such courtesies to captured Americans. London contended they were not belligerents but rebels. To an early application from Franklin regarding treatment of prisoners, the British ambassador in Paris, Lord Stormont, responded curtly, “The King’s ambassador receives no letters from rebels, unless they come to implore his Majesty’s mercy.”

Such might have finished Franklin’s hopes for ameliorating the prisoners’ plight, if not for the assistance he gained from others in Britain. The Parliamentary opposition to the North ministry seized on the suspension of habeas corpus, as it related to the American prisoners, and attacked the government for hypocritically undermining essential English institutions in the name of defending them. English prisons were a scandal in the best of times, and though conditions there pricked few consciences regarding regular felons, the harsh treatment accorded the Americans elicited letters to editors and other forms of low-grade protest.

To publicize the prisoners’ plight, Franklin sent a special envoy, John Thornton, to England to visit the prisons that held the Americans. Thornton had to bribe his way past the sentries; he did so with money supplied by Franklin. He reported prisoners half naked, constantly hungry, and, in dozens of cases, confined for weeks at a time to the “black holes,” cramped, windowless dungeons where “the air doth not only become foul, but the stench sometimes insupportable.”

Thornton’s report supplied Franklin the basis for initiating a regular program of prisoner relief. English prisoners in those days were required to contribute to the cost of their detention, and while this might be difficult for those from poor families, it was nearly impossible for Americans with families thousands of miles away—families that were often ignorant of the whereabouts of their kin (or even whether the kin were still alive). Franklin diverted monies that might have gone to purchase weapons for Washington’s army, creating a fund from which prisoners could draw some eighteen pence per week.

This was a temporary expedient; his larger goal was the release of the prisoners. Until 1779 he had little leverage to apply against the prison doors, lacking much meaningful to trade. But the raids of John Paul Jones, who shared Franklin’s concern for the imprisoned Americans, netted hundreds of British sailors. Franklin wrote David Hartley, a member
of Parliament who had served as a mediator when Franklin was working with Lord Howe in London before the outbreak of war, and suggested a swap.

The British government, although inclined to respond, did so diffidently. Each man to be released had to receive a pardon for his treason from the king, which took time. During this time recruiters for the Royal Navy attempted to persuade the Americans to defect, painting a grim picture of America’s prospects generally and a dire one of theirs personally in the event they were captured again. But finally the exchanges began. One hundred Americans were sent to France, and one hundred Britons returned to Britain. Franklin was encouraged. “This is to continue till all are exchanged,” he assured the Congress.

It did not continue nearly that long. The British government, apparently believing that the Americans lost more from having seamen detained than Britain did, threw additional hurdles in the way of the exchanges. It refused to trade Americans for British captured by French vessels or captured in America. After Franklin ran out of qualifying British prisoners, the exchanges clanked to a halt.

So Franklin adopted other—unsanctioned—methods. Escape from English prisons was hardly impossible, especially for Americans who spoke the language and looked like the locals. Sometimes all it took was money to bribe the guards. One successful escapee described how, after “oiling the sentry’s conscience,” he simply strolled out of prison in a cleric’s garb. Franklin funded such ruses, often after the fact.

He also reimbursed sympathizers who helped the escapees get to France. Thomas Digges, a Maryland merchant living in London, frequently took in the fugitives—and frequently wrote Franklin for money. “I cannot describe to you the trouble I have with these people,” Digges declared. “And the expence is so heavy on me at times that even with my curtailed and economic mode of living I am put to extreme difficulties. It is not trifles that will do for men who come naked by dozens and half dozens, and it is harder still to turn one’s back upon them.”

Such was just how Franklin felt, and why he spent the time he did on relatively small numbers of people. Those who solicited his aid discovered he had a soft place in his heart for those in distress. When that distress involved matters of the heart, his own heart was softer still. A young captain named John Lock, who claimed to be an American, was taken from a British vessel by a French ship and imprisoned at Nantes. His fiancée, a fair young Frenchwoman, visited Passy and poured out her feelings. Franklin comforted her and promised to write to French naval
minister Sartine. “By the letters that have passed between this Captain and the lady,” Franklin explained, “and by her earnestness in her solicitations, I perceive they are passionate lovers, and cannot but wish the obstacles to her union removed, and that there were a great many more matches made between the two nations, as I fancy they will agree better together in bed than they do in ships.”

In this case Franklin’s sympathies outran his judgment. The damsel’s lament was genuine—but woefully ill informed. Her lover was not an American after all, but British. This discrepancy grieved her less than it embarrassed Franklin; what upset
her
was the fact that her handsome captain was already married.

Franklin’s face reddened in another instance as well—but from anger more than embarrassment. Although Thomas Digges for a time did honest service on behalf of American escapees, that time terminated well before Franklin’s funding did. In 1781 Digges disappeared with £400 Franklin had forwarded for prisoner relief. Franklin could hardly contain himself.

He that robs the rich even of a single guinea is a villain; but what is he who can break his sacred trust by robbing a poor man and a prisoner of eighteen pence given charitably for his relief, and repeat that crime as often as there are weeks in a winter, and multiply it by robbing as many poor men every week as make up the number of 600? We have no name in our language for such atrocious wickedness. If such a fellow is not damned, it is not worth while to keep a Devil.

Franklin’s
correspondence with David Hartley involved more than prisoner exchanges. A skeptic regarding the war, Hartley continued the pacifying efforts he had begun with Franklin in London in 1775. Hartley communicated confidentially with Lord North, who authorized Hartley to sound Franklin out. The terms offered were not insignificant, starting with what Hartley characterized—certainly with North’s approval—as “a tacit cession of independence to America.” For now the acknowledgment of independence must remain tacit; Parliament
did
have its pride. But the bridge from tacit to formal was plausible: a suspension of hostilities for a period of from five to seven years, during which time, presumably, minds as subtle as Franklin’s ought to be able to find the language
to satisfy all parties. The one real hitch for the Americans was Britain’s insistence that they abandon their alliance with France.

Hartley made a compelling case for the plan. He quoted Franklin (circa 1775) back to Franklin: “A little time given for cooling might have excellent effects.” He pointed out that the proposal committed no one to anything permanent. Should the transition from tacit to formal independence fail, “We can but fight it out at last. War never comes too late.” Yet even then something would have been gained—namely, five years of peace. “Peace is a
bonum in se,
whereas the most favourable events of war are but relatively lesser evils.” Besides, he could not believe that war would resume once halted. “If the flames of war could be but once extinguished, does not the Atlantic Ocean contain cold water enough to prevent their bursting out again?”

Hartley acknowledged that America’s French connection complicated things. Yet Franklin ought to consider carefully the French interest in the affair. Doubtless the
French
did. “There is a certain point, to France, beyond which their work would fail and recoil upon themselves: If they were to drive the British ministry totally to abandon the American war, it would become totally a French war.” For now the French alliance might serve America, but not forever—and perhaps not to the point of American independence.

Hartley did not ask Franklin for any commitment, which he supposed Franklin was not, by himself, in any position to give. He asked only for some encouraging sign. And let it come soon. “Peace
now
is better than peace a twelve-month hence, at least by all the lives that may be lost in the mean while and by all the accumulated miseries that may intervene by that delay.”

Franklin refused to oblige. This was a better offer, because more authoritative, than the vague hints brought by Paul Wentworth a year earlier. The alliance with France was serving its purpose. Yet the offer was not good enough. Franklin assured Hartley that he remained as devoted to peace as ever. “But this is merely on motives of general humanity, to obviate the evils men devilishly inflict on men in time of war, and to lessen as much as possible the similarity of Earth and Hell.” Britain had brought the war upon itself by bringing it on America, and America was not going to abandon the fight on some indefinite promises. The war would continue “till England shall be reduced to that perfect impotence of mischief which alone can prevail with her to let other nations enjoy peace, liberty and safety.”
With equal adamance Franklin rejected abandonment of the treaties

with France. America owed France a debt of gratitude and justice for taking America’s part in time of need. The American alliance with France reflected a general appreciation of this fact; for this reason the alliance would last. “Though it did not exist, an honest American would cut off his right hand rather than sign an agreement with England contrary to the spirit of it.”