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June 1775,
July 5,
the Olive Branch Petition.
Franklin agreed for the sake of consensus to sign the Olive Branch Petition.
the Olive Branch Petition
“We have carried another humble petition to the crown, to give Britain one more chance, one opportunity more of recovering the friendship of the colonies; which however I think she has not sense enough to embrace, and so I conclude she has lost them for ever.”
Liberated by his private break with his son and his public break with Strahan, Franklin became one of the most ardent opponents of Britain in the Continental Congress.
In March 1776, Franklin, now 70, embarked on a brutal trip to Quebec.
he picked up a soft marten fur cap that he would later make famous when, as an envoy in Paris, he wore it as part of his pose as a simple frontier sage.
in January of that year, of an anonymous forty-seven-page pamphlet entitled Common Sense.
Thomas Paine,
“Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
he felt that the power of the national congress should come from the people and not from the states.
It was an odd appointment. Elderly and ailing, Franklin was now happily ensconced, finally, in a family nest that actually included members of his own brood.
he was the most famous and revered American in France.
Into his hands, almost as much as those of Washington and others, had been placed the fate of the Revolution. Unless he could secure the support of France—its aid, its recognition, its navy—America would find it difficult to prevail.
“He knew how to be impolite without being rude.”
Passy compound became America’s first foreign embassy.
Better than most other diplomats in the nation’s history, he understood that America’s strength in world affairs would come from a unique mix that included idealism as well as realism.
“America’s great historical moments,” writes historian Bernard Bailyn, “have occurred when realism and idealism have been combined, and no one knew this better than Franklin.”
“Tyranny is so generally established in the rest of the world that the prospect of an asylum in America for those who love liberty gives general joy, and our cause is esteemed the cause of all mankind.”
The treaties had an important aspect: they did not violate the idealistic view, held by Franklin and others, that America, in its virgin purity, should avoid becoming entangled in foreign alliances or European spheres of influence.
The American commissioners met in Paris on February 5, 1778, for the signing of the treaty. Vergennes’s secretary had a cold, however, so the ceremony was put off for a day. At both gatherings, Franklin appeared without his usual brown coat. Instead, he wore a suit of blue Manchester velvet that was faded and a bit worn. Silas Deane, finding this puzzling, asked why. “To give it a little revenge,” Franklin answered. “I wore this coat the day Wedderburn abused me at Whitehall.” It had been four years since his humiliation in the Cockpit, and he had saved the suit for such an occasion.
Franklin’s diplomatic triumph would help seal the course of the Revolution. It would also alter the world’s balances of power, not just between France and England, but also—though France certainly did not intend it to—between republicanism and monarchy.
Franklin’s triumph permitted America the possibility of an outright victory in its war for independence while conceding no lasting entanglements that would encumber it as a new nation.
After a few years, Franklin would tire of Adams and declare that he was “sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”
Among his many reputations was that of a legendary and lecherous old lover who had many mistresses among the ladies of Paris.
I very well know that the quantity of meat and drink proper for a man who takes a reasonable degree of exercise, would be too much for another who never takes any . . .
