For a man of seventy, suffering from gout and assorted lesser afflictions, to leave his home in the middle of a war, to cross a wintry sea patrolled by enemy warships whose commanders could be counted on to know him even if they knew nary another American face, was no small undertaking. John Adams declined nomination to Franklin’s commission; Thomas Jefferson rebuffed election. Yet Franklin had made his decision that America must be free, and he was determined to pay whatever cost his country required. “I have only a few years to live,” he told Benjamin Rush, “and I am resolved to devote them
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