Part 24
At the second glass the countess sang a similar refrain, at the third glass the viscount sang, and so on for seven glasses, each verse more extraordinary than the others. Virtue herself had assumed the form of Benjamin; he was greater than William Tell; Philadelphia must be such a delightful place; the French would gladly dwell there, although there was neither ball nor play. But Sanoy was Philadelphia as long as dear Benjamin remained there. He was led to the garden to plant a tree, with more singing about the lightning that he had drawn from the sky, and the lightning, of course, would never strike that tree. Finally he was allowed to depart with another song of adulation addressed to him after he was seated in the carriage.
Now that more than a hundred years have passed it is gratifying to our national pride to reflect that a man who was so thoroughly American in his origin and education should have been worshipped in this way by an alien race as no other man, certainly no other American, was ever worshipped by foreigners. But the enjoyment of this stupendous reputation, overshadowing and dwarfing the Adamses, Jays, and all other public men who went to Europe, was marred by some unpleasant consequences. Jealousies were aroused not only among individuals, but to a certain extent among all the American people. It was too much. He had ceased to be one of them. It was rumored that he would never return to America, but would resign and settle down among those strangers who treated him as though he were a god.
It was also inevitable that a worse suspicion should arise. He was too subservient, it was said, to France. He yielded everything to her. He was turning her from an ally into a ruler. He could no longer see her designs; or, if he saw them, he approved of them. This suspicion gained such force that it was the controlling principle with Adams and Jay when they went to Paris to arrange the treaty of peace with England after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in October, 1781. We have seen instances in our own time of our ministers to Great Britain becoming very unpopular at home because they were liked in England, and in Franklin's case this feeling was vastly greater than anything we have known in recent years, because his popularity in France was prodigious, and he avowedly acted upon the principle that it was best to be complaisant to the French court.
During the winter which followed the surrender of Lord Cornwallis overtures of peace were made by England to Franklin, as representing America, and to Vergennes, as representing France, and they became more earnest in March after the Tory ministry, which had been conducting the war, was driven from power. In April the negotiations with Franklin were well under way, and he continued to conduct them until June, when he was taken sick and incapacitated for three months. After his recovery he took only a minor part in the proceedings, for Jay and Adams had meanwhile arrived.
Congress had appointed Adams, Jay, Franklin, Jefferson, and Laurens commissioners to arrange the treaty, and made Adams head of the commission. When the negotiations began, however, Franklin was the only commissioner at Paris, and necessarily took charge of all the business. Just before he was taken sick Jay arrived, and he and Jay conducted affairs until Adams joined them at the end of October. Laurens, who had been a prisoner in England, did not reach Paris until just before the preliminary treaty was signed, and Jefferson, being detained in America, took no part in the proceedings.
While Franklin was carrying on the negotiations alone, he insisted on most of the terms which were afterwards agreed upon: first of all, independence, and, in addition to that, the right to fish on the Newfoundland Banks and a settlement of boundaries; but he added a point not afterwards pressed by the others,--namely, that Canada should be ceded to the United States. In exchange for Canada he was prepared to allow some compensation to the Tories for their loss of property during the war. Adams and Jay, on taking up the negotiations, dropped Canada entirely and insisted stoutly to the end that there should be no compensation whatever to the Tories.
Franklin's admirers have always contended that it would have been better if Jay and Adams had kept away altogether, for in that case Franklin would have secured all that they got for us and Canada besides. This, however, is mere supposition, one of those vague ideas of what might have been without any proof to support it. Franklin pressed the cession of Canada, it is true; but there is no evidence that it would have been granted. At that time the people of the United States appear not to have wanted the land of snow, and ever since then the general opinion has been that we have enough to manage already, and are better off without a country vexed with serious political controversies with its French population and the Roman Catholic school question.
On the whole, it would not have been well for Franklin to have continued to conduct the negotiations alone. The situation was difficult, and the united efforts and varied ability of at least three commissioners were required. Neither Franklin nor Jay knew much about the fisheries question, and they might have been forced to yield on this point. But Adams, from his long experience in conducting litigation for the Massachusetts fishing interests, was better prepared on this subject than any other American, and it was generally believed by the public men of that time that the important rights we secured on the Newfoundland Banks were due almost entirely to his skill. He was also more familiar with the boundary question between Maine and New Brunswick, and had brought with him documents from Massachusetts which were invaluable.
While Jay and Franklin were acting together before the arrival of Adams, a serious question arose about the commission of Oswald, the British negotiator who had come over to Paris. He was empowered to treat with the "Colonies or Plantations," and nowhere in the document was the term United States of America used. Jay refused to treat with a man who held such a commission. Franklin and Vergennes vainly urged that it was a mere form, and that Great Britain had already in several ways acknowledged the independence of the United States. Oswald showed an article of his instructions which authorized him to grant complete independence to the thirteen colonies, and he offered to write a letter declaring that he treated with them as an independent power; but Jay was inflexible, and in this he seems to have been right.
Franklin made a great mistake in not agreeing with him, for in the suspicious state of people's minds at that time his conduct in this respect was taken as proof positive of his subserviency to the French court. Jay suspected that Vergennes advised accepting Oswald's commission so as to prevent a clear admission of independence, and thus keep the United States embroiled with England as long as possible. In order to support his opposition to Jay, Franklin was obliged to talk about his confidence in the French court, its past generosity and friendliness, and also to call attention to the instruction of Congress that the commissioners should do nothing without the knowledge of the French government, and in all final decisions be guided by that government's advice.
This instruction had been passed by Congress after much debate and hesitation, and was finally carried, it is said, through the influence of the French minister. Its adoption was a mistake; without it the commissioners would probably of their own accord have sought the advice of Vergennes; but a positive order to do so put them in an undignified and humiliating position. Franklin had been so long intimate with Vergennes and was so accustomed to consulting him that the instruction was superfluous as to him. His reputation was so great in France and his tact so perfect that he was in no danger of feeling overshadowed or subdued by such consultations; but Jay and Adams so thoroughly detested the instruction that they had made up their minds to disregard it altogether.
"Would you break your instruction?" said Franklin.
"Yes," said Jay, "as I break this pipe," and he threw the pieces into the fire.
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 assist 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 assistance 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 assistance 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 passion for women to get the better of him. He and Jay conducted the rest of the negotiations and completed the treaty, Franklin merely assisting; 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 prostituted 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 assented 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 manoeuvre." 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 passion.
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 assistance we received, only to keep it alive, that we might be so much the more weakened by it; that to think of gratitude 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 pass 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."
[Illustration: 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 noblemen, 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.