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.
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 ashore 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 CONSTITUTION-MAKER
Almost immediately on Franklin's return to Philadelphia he was made
President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, under the
extraordinary constitution 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 grass-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 passed 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 niggard
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."
[Illustration: 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 passionately interested in such subjects should enter the great
domain of constitution-making and, in spite of many blunders, excel
those who had made it their special study.
He had no knowledge of technical law, either in practice or as a
science. He was once elected a justice of the peace in Philadelphia, but
soon resigned, because, as he said, he knew nothing of the rules of
English common law. It was perhaps the only important domain of human
knowledge in which he was not interested.
As a public man of long experience he had considerable knowledge of
general laws and their practical effect. He was a law-maker rather than
a law-interpreter. He understood colonial rights, and knew every phase
of the controversy with Great Britain, and he had fixed opinions as to
constitutional forms and principles. Some of his ideas on
constitution-making were unsound; but it is astonishing what an
important part he played during his long life in American constitutional
development.
I have shown in another volume, called "The Evolution of the
Constitution of the United States," how the principles and forms of that
instrument were developed out of two hundred years' experience with more
than forty colonial charters and Revolutionary constitutions and more
than twenty plans of union. The plans of union were devised from time to
time with the purpose of uniting the colonies under one general
government. None of them was put into actual practice until the
"Articles of Confederation" were adopted during the Revolution. But
although unsuccessful in the sense that no union was formed under any of
them, they contributed ideas and principles which finally produced the
federalism of the national Constitution under which we now live.
Two of these plans of union were prepared by Franklin. No other American
prepared more than one, and Franklin's two were the most important of
all. Not only was he the originator of the two most important plans, but
he lived long enough to take part in framing the final result of all the
plans, the national Constitution, and he was the author of one of the
most valuable provisions in it.
The first plan of union which he drafted was the one adopted by the
Albany Conference of 1754, that had been called to make a general treaty
with the Indians which would obviate the confusion of separate treaties
made by the different colonies. Such a general treaty, by controlling
the Indians, would, it was hoped, assist in resisting the designs of the
French in Canada. It was obvious, also, that if the colonies were united
under a general government they would be better able to withstand the
French. Franklin had advocated this idea of union in his _Gazette_, and
had published a wood-cut representing a wriggling snake separated into
pieces, each of which had on it the initial letter of one of the
colonies, and underneath was written, "Join or die."
He was sent to the conference as one of the delegates from Pennsylvania,
and his plan of union, which was adopted, was a distinct improvement on
all others that had preceded it, and contained the germs of principles
which are now a fundamental part of our political system. In 1775, while
a member of the Continental Congress, he drafted another plan, which,
though not adopted, added new suggestions and developments. But as both
of these plans are fully discussed in "The Evolution of the
Constitution,"[29] it is unnecessary to say more about them here.