Benjamin Franklin, Part 3: Chess, Spies, and the French Alliance

Charles Thomson

Last time we left you a man cast out of London, shamed over the Hutchinson letters and sailing for the one country Britain feared most. This is the last of our three conversations, Dr. Franklin. You landed in Brittany in December 1776, at seventy years old. What was the plan?

Benjamin Franklin

At seventy, Charles, a man doesn't have plans. He has a schedule of ailments. The gout, the stone, all the old companions. But I did have one asset. France had decided what I was before I ever arrived. Paris was drunk on philosophy and the American wilderness and the notion of a simple republican. So I gave them what they were hungry for. Plain brown cloth, no powdered wig, spectacles, and a fur cap, Canadian marten. Among all that silk and powder I looked like Socrates come out of the forest. Soon my face was on medallions, snuffboxes, and rings. I'd like to say the cap was all calculation. It was warm, too. But it was mostly calculation.

Charles Thomson

You settled at Passy, just outside Paris, in a house belonging to Le Ray de Chaumont. And then came the dinners. You played a great deal of chess at them. Was that recreation, or work?

Benjamin Franklin

Both, and I never saw the line between them. I even wrote a little essay on it in 1779, The Morals of Chess. The game teaches foresight, and circumspection, and caution. And above all it teaches you not to despair when the position looks bad. Now, which of those did a minister of the American cause need most in 1777? All of them. And people speak freely across a chessboard. They think they're only discussing a bishop. I sat through hours of it, with ladies and intellectuals and friends of ministers, and I came away with friends for America. Madame Brillon and my neighbor Le Veillard among them, and I enjoyed every minute of it, which I won't deny.

Charles Thomson

I've heard the doors at Passy stood rather open.

Benjamin Franklin

Open? A cat could not have found a closed one. My secretary, Dr. Bancroft, an American physician and a fellow lover of natural philosophy, lived under my roof. Arthur Lee warned me more than once that the people around me were leaking to London. I told him that constant suspicion paralyzes a mission worse than any spy could. And I said that if my valet were a spy but did his work well, I wouldn't necessarily dismiss him for it. Was Lee right? I never could prove it, and I half suspected it. I will say the British seemed uncommonly well informed. Whether I fed them only what I wanted them to know, I'll leave to historians to argue about. They enjoy arguing, and I'd hate to deprive them.

Charles Thomson

Let's get to the closed door talks. Vergennes, the foreign minister, was already sending us money and arms in secret. Why not simply sign?

Benjamin Franklin

Because Vergennes was a careful man, and a careful man doesn't marry a bankrupt. Yes, he was funneling millions of livres and weapons our way through Beaumarchais, that playwright with his dummy firm, Hortalez and Company. That kept the British guessing and kept our army fed. But recognition, and open war with Britain, was another thing entirely. He wanted proof that Americans could win a real battle in the field, and through most of 1777 I had very little to show him. Howe took Philadelphia that fall. I spent months being charming at men who were politely waiting to see if we would survive the year.

Charles Thomson

And then Saratoga.

Benjamin Franklin

On the fourth of December, 1777, a courier named Jonathan Loring Austin came to Passy. He carried word that General Burgoyne had surrendered his army in October. The whole mood at Versailles changed within days. It wasn't just that we had won. Vergennes feared that Britain, shaken by the defeat, would offer us generous terms and patch the empire back together, and then France would have spent its money for nothing. So the careful man grew quick. My fellow commissioners and I signed two treaties with France on the sixth of February, 1778, one of friendship and commerce, and one of alliance. I will tell you plainly, Charles, I didn't win France with my wit. Washington's army and Gates's victory won France. I only had the good luck to be standing nearby with a pen.

Charles Thomson

You're being modest. Why does that alliance decide the war?

Benjamin Franklin

Because it changed what kind of war it was. A colonial rebellion became a war across the world, and Britain could not fight everywhere at once. French ships, French loans, and Rochambeau's soldiers all came our way, and in 1781 they helped pin Cornwallis at Yorktown. Then in 1783, Mr. Adams, Mr. Jay, and I signed the Treaty of Paris, and Britain recognized us, and gave us a generous western boundary besides. I'm the only man who signed the Declaration, the alliance, the peace, and the Constitution. I mention it only because I'm too old to be shy.

Charles Thomson

Before we lose you, I'm told you built an instrument that people still ask about.

Benjamin Franklin

The armonica, yes. In London in 1761 I heard Edmund Delaval play musical glasses, wet fingers on the rims of wine glasses. The sound was heavenly, but the glasses were a nuisance to tune. So I had glass bowls blown in graduated sizes, thirty seven of them, and mounted them on an iron spindle turned by a foot treadle. You touch the spinning rims with a damp fingertip, and it sings. Now, in this odd studio of yours, where hindsight runs past the end of my life, I'm told Mozart wrote a quintet for it in 1791. For a blind virtuoso named Marianne Kirchgässner. I'm flattered, and a little sorry to miss the concert. Others claim the sound drove people mad, which is nonsense, though I admit it is a haunting thing.

Charles Thomson

And then there's the turkey. Everyone says you wanted it as our national bird.

Benjamin Franklin

I never proposed it, not to Congress, and not to the seal committee. On that committee I suggested Moses parting the Red Sea, and I'm told it was politely ignored. The turkey came from a private letter to my daughter Sarah, written at Passy in January of 1784. I was grumbling about the Society of the Cincinnati and its hereditary badges, knights with ribbons passed down to their sons. Critics said the eagle on their badge looked more like a turkey. So I wrote that I wished the bald eagle had not been chosen for anything. A bird of bad moral character, I said. He steals the fish the hardworking fishing hawk has caught, and a little kingbird can chase him off. The turkey, I said, is a far more respectable bird, a true native of America, and brave enough to attack a British grenadier in a red coat. It was a joke against hereditary honors. I never sent it, and I promised a friend it wouldn't be published in my lifetime. Now the whole country believes I campaigned for a barnyard fowl.

Charles Thomson

I came to design the Great Seal years later, and I can report that no turkey was submitted. Dr. Franklin, you ran away from a Boston print shop at seventeen, and you signed your name to every foundation of this country. It's been an honor to take down these three conversations.

Benjamin Franklin

The honor was mine, Charles. Though I notice you've left out the gout.

Charles Thomson

Next time, we hear from someone who arrived in Paris in 1778 and was appalled by the late dinners, the chess, and the salons. John Adams.

Benjamin Franklin

Ah. John. I once said of him that he is always an honest man, often a great one, and sometimes, in some things, quite out of his senses. I stand by it, and I say it with real affection. Ask him about the late hours. He has opinions.

Charles Thomson

I will do. Now, take care Ben and talk soon.