The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (121 page)

If Adams expected a fight, Franklin disappointed him. Having received the approval of Vergennes himself to talk separately with the British, he declined to dispute with Jay and Adams when they proposed to do just that, despite instructions from the Congress to the contrary. More to the point, he understood how close the principal parties were to a settlement. After a long war, if there would be quibbling, he would leave it to his fellow commissioners.

The quibbling lasted a month. At the end of November the Americans and British reached a settlement both sides could accept. It included all of Franklin’s necessary conditions, as well as a guarantee of American navigational rights on the Mississippi. (Whether Spain would honor the guarantee where the river cut through Spanish territory remained unanswered.) In exchange the Americans agreed to recognize debts owed British merchants from before the war and to recommend to the states fair treatment of the Loyalists.

The settlement was only preliminary, not to take effect without a general settlement among all the warring parties. But that was merely a matter of time. For the United States the Paris pact marked an eminently satisfactory outcome to a conflict that had often threatened to end in disaster. The independence of the United States was now recognized by the world; American territory reached from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. In other words, America’s present was safe and its future assured.

Best of all, the bloodshed and destruction were over. This prospect, more than anything else, was what inclined Franklin not to argue for the last advantage from either Britain or France. He could congratulate himself and his fellow commissioners for what they had accomplished at Paris, and he could applaud his fellow Americans for what they had won on the battlefield. But he remained utterly unconvinced of the efficacy of war as a general endeavor. If anything, the conflict just concluding reinforced his opposite feeling. Some months earlier he had received a letter from his old friend Jonathan Shipley hoping that the peace talks might
soon bear fruit. Franklin seconded the hope, coining a motto that would forever be associated with his name. “After much occasion to consider the folly and mischiefs of a state of warfare,” Franklin wrote, “and the little or no advantage obtained even by those nations who have conducted it with the most success, I have been apt to think that there has never been, nor ever will be, any such thing as a
good
war, or a
bad
peace.”

27
Savant
1783–85

In March 1783 Franklin wrote Shipley again. By this time the other belligerents had called an armistice, and Franklin looked forward to a definitive conclusion to the conflict between Shipley’s country and his.

Let us now forgive and forget. Let each country seek its advancement in its own internal advantages of arts and agriculture, not in retarding or preventing the prosperity of the other. America will, with God’s blessing, become a great and happy country; and England, if she has at length gained wisdom, will have gained something more valuable, and more essential to her prosperity, than all she has lost.

Yet Franklin doubted England really
had
learned anything from the war. Her “great disease,” he said, was the large number and emoluments of her political offices; her downfall the “avarice and passion” these aroused in her public officials. “They hurry men headlong into factions and contentions, destructive of all good government.” As long as riches attached to office, Britain would suffer. “Your Parliament will be a stormy sea, and your public councils confounded by private interests.”

For Franklin the essence of the American Revolution was not simply self-rule for the former colonies, necessary though that was. The essence of the Revolution was the triumph of virtue over vice. In the years before the Revolution he had watched corruption permeate British politics; on that fateful morning in the Cockpit he had felt corruption’s foul breath. He knew himself to be the most reluctant of revolutionaries, an ardent Briton driven from the arms of the mother country only by a deep, personal disillusionment. Others of the Revolutionary generation subscribed to the notion of America’s peculiar virtue, but for few did it have the personal meaning it had for Franklin, because few had been so disillusioned.

The emotional counterpart to Franklin’s disillusionment with Britain was his investment of hope in America. For Franklin the Revolution
had
to be about more than self-rule, for self-rule was, at bottom, simply another form of office-seeking. On the other hand, if the Revolution was about virtue, and the application of virtue to politics, then the struggle became transcendent. “Our Revolution is an important event for the advantage of mankind in general,” he wrote his English friend Richard Price. Mankind already showed evidence of following the American lead. The summer of 1783 brought murmurings of anti-British rebellion in Ireland; Franklin credited “the contemplation of our successful struggle” as a central element in the resistance. He went on to reflect with satisfaction “that liberty, which some years since appeared in danger of extinction, is now regaining the ground she had lost; that arbitrary governments are likely to become more mild and reasonable, and to expire by degrees.”

The patriot in Franklin might have been willing to accept American virtue on its face, but the philosopher demanded explanation. Franklin knew Americans—and Britons—well enough to recognize that on human merits there was little to distinguish the one people from the other. After chiding William Strahan for Britain’s faults, he declared, “My dear friend, do not imagine that I am vain enough to ascribe our success to any superiority in any of these points.” So what
did
account for the
American victory, if not the virtue of Americans? The virtue of that for which Americans fought. “If it had not been for the justice of our cause, and the consequent interposition of Providence, in which we had faith, we must have been ruined.” With half a smile, one imagines, Franklin suggested that it was enough to drive a man to religion. “If I had ever before been an atheist, I should now have been convinced of the being and government of a Deity!”

Franklin’s
interpretation of the Revolution as the victory of virtue made him worry at news that American virtue might be slipping. Robert Morris wrote of difficulty getting the states to pay their shares of national obligations. “The remissness of our people in paying taxes is highly blamable,” Franklin replied; “the unwillingness to pay them is still more so.” Franklin knew what the victory had cost in terms of American commitments, not least because he had been the one making most of those commitments. He hated to see Americans trying to disavow them. When tax resisters justified their opposition on grounds that the government was taking money out of their pockets, he countered that they were fundamentally mistaken. “Money, justly due from the people, is their creditors’ money, and no longer the money of the people, who, if they withhold it, should be compelled to pay.”

For one subsequently cited as an apostle of capitalist virtues, Franklin took a strikingly socialistic view of property. “All property, indeed, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his match-coat, and other little acquisitions absolutely necessary for his subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public convention,” he wrote. Laws and customs made accumulation of property possible; the public therefore had the right to regulate the quantity and use of property. “All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition.” Needless to say, this was hardly a universal opinion among a people who had fought a war over taxes. But Franklin was unmoved. “He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages.”

When Samuel Cooper wrote from Boston that the Massachusetts
legislature had consented to pay up, Franklin replied with congratulations—and scorn for those states that remained in arrears. The latter put Franklin in mind of the improvident Quaker who pleaded poverty in not repaying the principal on a debt and conscience in not paying interest. His creditor damned him for a rogue, saying, “You tell me it is against your principle to pay interest, and it being against your interest to pay the principal, I perceive you do not intend to pay me either one or t’other.”

Virtue in paying America’s debts would have tangible benefits; a failure of virtue would exact material costs. In May 1784, following the final ratification of the peace treaty, Franklin wrote Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, that “the great and hazardous enterprise we have been engaged in is, God be praised, happily completed, an event I hardly expected I should live to see.” Though the war had been hard, peace would quickly restore the country—assuming Americans kept their faith. If they failed in this regard, the vultures of the world, starting with the British, would be waiting. “If we do not convince the world that we are a nation to be depended on for fidelity in treaties, if we appear negligent in paying our debts, and ungrateful to those who have served and befriended us, our reputation, and all the strength it is capable of procuring, will be lost, and fresh attacks upon us will be encouraged.”

An obvious
and easy form of virtue was frugality. Beneficial in itself, it would help Americans pay their debts and redeem their foreign promises. In his letter to Thomson, Franklin warned against America’s being “enervated and impoverished by luxury,” and he lauded frugality as practical patriotism.

This was an old argument from Franklin. At seventy-eight years of age, he might have been thought to have little new to say on the subject. Yet such was his subtlety and flexibility of mind, and such his skepticism even of his own long-held opinions, that in the middle of speaking for frugality he was willing to find virtue in its opposite. Benjamin Vaughan, his English editor, had inquired if Franklin knew a remedy for the American penchant for luxury, on which Vaughan had heard travelers remark disapprovingly. Franklin replied that he knew of no such remedy, then added that the problem was much exaggerated, and in any event might not be a problem at all. “Is not the hope of being one day able to purchase and enjoy luxuries a great spur to labour and industry? May not luxury, therefore, produce more than it consumes?” Even the clearest
cases of squandering resources might not be so clear after all. “A vain, silly fellow builds a fine house, furnishes it richly, lives in it expensively, and in a few years ruins himself. But the masons, carpenters, smiths and other honest tradesmen have been by his employ assisted in maintaining and raising their families; the farmer has been paid for his labour and encouraged; and the estate is now in better hands.”

Franklin told a story from his own experience to illustrate the point. Decades ago the skipper of a Cape May shallop had done Franklin and Deborah a favor for which he refused payment. Deborah knew he had a daughter, and bought a cap for the girl. Three years later the captain, accompanied by a farmer friend, visited the Franklins. The captain said his daughter liked her cap very much. “But it proved a dear cap to our congregation,” he added.