The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

“I am old and good for nothing,” he had told Benjamin Rush, his fellow congressman. “As the storekeepers say of their remnants of cloth, I am but a fag end, and you may have me for what you are pleased to give.” So it happened that Congress in late October had been pleased to dispatch him to France in hopes of signing “a treaty with his most Christian majesty,” King Louis XVI, and to obtain “twenty or thirty thousand muskets and bayonets, and a large supply of ammunition, and brass field pieces to be sent under convoy of France.” The instructions tucked into his valise also empowered him to hire “a few good engineers” and to buy or borrow eight ships of the line, “of seventy-four and sixty-four guns, well-manned.” Franklin, this fifteenth child of a Boston candlemaker, was to descend on Versailles like a bolt of the lightning he had so famously tamed, using a diplomat’s ploys to persuade the most sophisticated court in Europe to abandon its neutrality in exchange for little more than American gratitude and a chance to further abash perfidious Britain. “It will be proper for you to press for the immediate and explicit declaration of France in our favor,” Congress had advised him, and to threaten an American reconciliation with England in the event of any French hesitation. Rarely had a supplicant—a beggar, really—set out with greater presumption, but rarely had Versailles seen anyone like Benjamin Franklin.