The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

by H.W. Brands

On the fundamental issue of constitutional relations, the Americans and the British were further apart than ever. Parliament claimed the right to legislate in all matters for the Americans; the American assemblies denied that right, with increasing fervor. At the moment Parliamentary rule rode lightly on American shoulders; but for the tax on tea they were choosing not to drink, the colonists hardly noticed. Yet the Declaratory Act remained on the statute books, and while it did it threatened to be the rock on which the empire would break.

The gist of the letters was that the troubles in America reflected no broad disaffection but simply the political perversions of a minority. The most damning passage—damning in the eyes of American patriots—was one written by Hutchinson in January 1769 outlining the measures he judged necessary to restore order and respect for government in Massachusetts. There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties. I relieve myself by considering that in a remove from the state of nature to the most perfect state of government there must be a great restraint of natural liberty. I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in which a colony 3000 miles distant from the parent state shall enjoy all the liberty of the parent state. I am certain I have never yet seen the projection. I wish the good of the colony when I wish to see some further restraint of liberty rather than the connexion with the parent state should be broken; for I am sure such a breach must prove the ruin of the colony.

Franklin did not deal in stolen goods without compunction. But Hutchinson and Oliver had crossed the line. For years they had been “bartering away the liberties of their native country for posts”—it was not lost on Franklin, nor did he want it lost on Cushing and the others in Massachusetts, that Hutchinson and Oliver had gained their present positions after these letters reached Britain. As part of the bargain the two received increases in their salaries and pensions, “for which the money is to be squeezed from the people.” The people naturally resisted; to suppress the resistance, and preserve their ill-gotten gains, Hutchinson and Oliver summoned British troops, conjuring “imaginary rebellions” and “exciting jealousies in the Crown, and provoking it to wrath against a great part of its faithful subjects.” In sum, the malign pair had shown themselves “mere time-servers, seeking their own private emolument through any quantity of public mischief; betrayers of the interest, not of their native country only, but of the Government they pretend to serve, and of whole English Empire.”

Others, however, felt less constrained. It may have been John Hancock who laid the letters before the House; it certainly was Sam Adams who read them to the members. Shortly thereafter the House ordered the letters printed for members’ use. Soon they were available in pamphlet form and in installments in the Massachusetts Spy. Copies quickly found their way all over the colony.

Thoughts of home warred in Franklin’s heart against the continuing attractions of England. For all his distaste of recent English politics, London still offered much to a man of the world. The famous scientists and philosophers who called on him in London would never find their way to Philadelphia. His closest current friends all lived in England; with each passing year more old friends from Philadelphia passed on. A decade and a half after he had really made Philadelphia home, Franklin found London more familiar and comfortable, in many respects, than the city of the Quakers.

To get over this, my way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then during three or four days’ consideration I put down under the different heads short hints of the different motives that at different times occur to me for or against the measure. When I have thus got them all together in one view, I endeavour to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out. If I find a reason pro equal to some two reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons con equal to some three reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies.

The key, Franklin believed, was time. He explained to Thomas Cushing, “Our great security lies, I think, in our growing strength both in wealth and numbers, that creates an increasing ability of assisting this nation in its wars, which will make us more respectable, our friendship more valued, and our enmity feared. Thence it will soon be thought proper to treat us, not with justice only, but with kindness; and thence we may expect in a few years a total change of measures with regard to us.” Needless to say, the Americans must maintain their sturdy spirit in order to effect this appreciation in English minds. But sturdiness need not imply belligerence, which in fact would disrupt the process. “In confidence of this coming change in our favour, I think our prudence is meanwhile to be quiet, only holding up our rights and claims on all occasions, in resolutions, memorials, and remonstrances, but bearing patiently the little present notice that is taken of them. They will all have their weight in time, and that time is at no great distance.”

Franklin was a conciliator, but he was also a propagandist. During the summer and autumn of 1773 he wrote regularly for the London papers; two pieces from the period became two of his most famous short works. One was cast in the form of a dispatch from Danzig containing an edict of the king of Prussia, Frederick II. This edict informed the inhabitants of Britain that henceforth they would be subject to a variety of taxes and other impositions, payable to and enforced by Prussia. The asserted justification for these measures was the historic fact that Germans in distant times past had settled in the island of Britain, thereby planting what Frederick was pleased to denominate his German colonies. Moreover, Prussia had fought to defend Britain against France in the late war, a boon for which Prussia had not received adequate compensation. The taxes to be levied, on imports to Britain and exports therefrom, would afford Prussia just such compensation. Various restraints on British trade would benefit Prussian merchants and manufacturers. The edict additionally decreed the transport of German felons to Britain “for the Better Peopling of that country.” Lest the inhabitants of Britain conceive this order as unreasonable, Frederick pointed out that he had modeled his edict on several statutes—he obligingly listed them—that the monarchs and Parliament of Britain had enacted toward their own colonies in America and Ireland.

Some take this edict to be merely one of the King’s jeux d’esprit. Others suppose it is serious, and that he means a quarrel with England. But all here think the assertion it concludes with, “that these regulations are copied from Acts of the English Parliament respecting their colonies,” a very injurious one; it being impossible to believe that a people distinguished for their love of liberty, a nation so wise, so liberal in its sentiments, so just and equitable towards its neighbours, should, from mean and injudicious views of petty immediate profit, treat its own children in a manner so arbitrary and tyrannical!

He had them in another room, and we were chatting in the breakfast parlour, when he came running in to us, out of breath, with the paper in his hand. Here! says he, here’s the news for ye! Here’s the king of Prussia, claiming a right to this kingdom! All stared, and I as much as any body; and he went on to read it. When he had read two or three paragraphs, a gentleman present said, Damn his impudence. I dare say we shall hear by next post he is upon his march with one hundred thousand men to back this. Whitehead, who is very shrewd, soon after began to smoke it, and looking in my face said, I’ll be hanged if this is not some of your American jokes upon us.

“In the first place, Gentlemen, you are to consider that a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges. Turn your attention therefore first to your remotest provinces, that as you get rid of them, the next may follow in order.” Second, in order that such separation remain possible, special care should be taken that the provinces not be incorporated into the Mother Country, that they not enjoy the same rights and privileges, but that they be subject to laws more severe, and not of their own enacting. Third, should said provinces acquire strength of trade or fleet, strength that enabled them to assist the Mother Country in wartime, this must be forgotten by the Mother Country, or treated as an affront. Should the colonists acquire the spirit of liberty, nurtured in the principles of the Mother Country’s own revolution, this must be stamped out. “For such principles, after a revolution is thoroughly established, are of no more use; they are even odious and abominable.”

There were several more principles along similar lines. Some mirrored policies already in place; others projected from present policies. The colonists, after loyally supporting the Mother Country in war, should be burdened with taxes and treated with contempt. “Nothing can have a better effect in producing the alienation proposed, for though many can forgive injuries, none ever forgave contempt.” If news arrived of general dissatisfaction in the colonies, such news must be disbelieved. “Suppose all their complaints to be invented and promoted by a few factious demagogues, whom if you could catch and hang, all would be quiet. Catch and hang a few of them accordingly; and the blood of the martyrs shall work miracles in favour of your purpose.” By the time all these rules were put into effect in the colonies, the outcome would be guaranteed. “You will that day, if you have not done it sooner, get rid of the trouble of governing them, and all the plagues attending their commerce and connection from thenceforth and for ever.”

In my own private concerns with mankind, I have observed that to kick a little when under imposition has a good effect. A little sturdiness when superiors are much in the wrong sometimes occasions consideration. And there is truth in the old saying, that if you make yourself a sheep, the wolves will eat you.

Wedderburn reiterated the argument made by the government (and by Hutchinson and Oliver) that the unrest in America was not the work of ordinary people—“these innocent, well-meaning farmers, which compose the bulk of the Assembly,” Wedderburn said—but of self-serving conspirators, of whom Franklin was the “first mover and prime conductor” (Wedderburn liked this phrase enough to repeat it), the “actor and secret spring,” and the “inventor and first planner.”

Wedderburn linked Franklin to Sam Adams, and Adams to the effort to forge a united front against Parliament by the circulation of “an inflammatory letter sounding an alarm of a plan of despotism, with which the Administration and the Parliament intended to enslave them, and threatened them with certain and inevitable destruction.” This letter was accompanied by a pamphlet designed to incite the ordinary people still further. “It told them a hundred rights of which they never had heard before, and a hundred grievances which they never before had felt.” Franklin and Adams did their work well; the townships of Massachusetts responded as if on cue, with resolves like none ever seen. “They are full of the most extravagant absurdities, such as the most enthusiastic rants of the wildest of my countrymen in Charles the Second’s days cannot equal.” Not least of the absurdities was the treasonous assertion of desire to call in foreign powers to rectify imagined injuries perpetrated by Parliament against the people of New England. “These are the lessons taught in Dr. Franklin’s school of politics.”

Through all of this Franklin remained silent. The audience, including many of the lords, laughed and cheered at the solicitor’s slashing assault on Franklin’s behavior and character, but the object of the day’s entertainment stood before his accuser betraying not the slightest emotion. “The Doctor was dressed in a full dress suit of spotted Manchester velvet,” Edward Bancroft recalled, “and stood conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of any part of his body. The muscles of his face had been previously composed, so as to afford a placid tranquil expression of countenance, and he did not suffer the slightest alteration of it to appear during the continuance of the speech in which he was so harshly and improperly treated.” He appeared, Bancroft said, “as if his features had been made of wood.”

Within forty-eight hours of his session in the Cockpit, Franklin received notice of his dismissal as deputy postmaster. Although anticipated, this move struck Franklin as both unfair to one who had built the American post from nothing to an efficient and profitable operation, and symptomatic of the wicked folly of a government that would cut off its nose to spite its face.

“I am very angry.” His anger was both personal and political. Of the former he declined to speak, even to Cushing, lest his remarks “should be thought the effects of resentment and a desire of exasperating.” But he went on, “What I feel on my own account is half lost”—but only half lost—“in what I feel for the public. When I see that all petitions and complaints of grievances are so odious to government that even the mere pipe which conveys them becomes obnoxious, I am at a loss to know how peace and union is to be maintained or restored between the different parts of the empire. Grievances cannot be redressed unless they are known; and they cannot be known but through complaints and petitions. If these are deemed affronts, and the messengers punished as offenders, who will henceforth send petitions? And who will deliver them?” Wise governments encouraged the airing of grievances, even those that were lightly founded. Foolish governments did the opposite—to their peril. “Where complaining is a crime, hope becomes despair.”

“They may expect that your resentment of their treatment of me may induce you to resign, and save them the shame of depriving you whom they ought to promote.” Franklin went on, “But this I would not advise you to do. Let them take your place if they want it, though in truth I think it scarce worth your keeping…. One may make something of an injury, nothing of a resignation.”

For himself, he thought he had already made something of his injury. He wrote to Jane Mecom, whose own money problems disposed her to worry about her brother in his loss of income, telling her not to be troubled. “You and I have almost finished the journey of life. We are now but a little way from home, and have enough in our pockets to pay the post chaises.” As for the principle involved, it was plainer than ever, to honest men if not to his enemies. “Intending to disgrace me, they have rather done me honour. No failure of duty in my office is alleged against me; such a fault I should have been ashamed of. But I am too much attached to the interests of America, and an opposer of the measures of Administration. The displacing me is therefore a testimony of my being uncorrupted.”

“I am too much of an American.”

To steal from Heaven its sacred fire he taught, The Arts to thrive in savage climes he brought In the New World the first of men esteemed; Among the Greeks a god he had been deemed.

Even supposing he had infamously obtained the letters, would that have altered the nature of them, their tendency and design? Would that have made them innocent? How weak and ridiculous is this? The truth is, the Doctor came by the letters honourably; his intention in sending them was virtuous: to lessen the breach between Britain and the colonies, by showing that the injuries complained of by one of them did not proceed from the other, but from traitors among themselves. The treason thus discovered, the conspirators were complained of. The agent is suffered to be abused by a solicitor; the complaint called—I had like to have said judged—false, vexatious, scandalous; and the complainers factious and seditious. The pain we feel on Dr. Franklin’s account is lost in what we feel for America and for Britain.

The government had followed this shameful affair by dismissing Dr. Franklin from his position with the post office. Such action was discreditable in itself; it was even more pernicious in its prospect. Appointments to the post office—a service essential to all who lived in the colonies—were being held hostage to adherence to the policies of whatever ministry happened to hold power. Moreover, at a time when committees of correspondence in the several colonies were attempting to coordinate opposition to oppression, the very mails communicating those attempts were subject to surveillance by government placemen. “Behold Americans where matters are driving!”

Whether the acts that followed were more or less moderate depended on one’s point of view. The Massachusetts Government Act suspended the charter of the colony and granted the Crown much greater control over its affairs. The Administration of Justice Act allowed royal officials charged with certain crimes to be tried in England. The Quartering Act required private householders to take in troops upon the order of the British commanding officer. The Quebec Act—not a direct response to the Boston Tea Party but passed in the same atmosphere of disregard for American sensibilities—established a London-dominated civil government for Canada and extended the boundaries of Canada to the Ohio River, effectively vetoing claims of several of the existing colonies to the region. The five measures together were called the “Intolerable Acts” in America, for after everything else of the previous decade, they seemed more than the Americans could bear.

What had appealed about England was its intellectual openness, the opportunities it afforded to share ideas with men (and the occasional woman, such as Polly Stevenson) of curiosity, ingenuity, and a willingness to challenge received wisdom. But there was nothing open about a system determined to stifle the most fundamental liberties of a large portion of its people simply because they lived across the ocean.

I observed to them that nations, as well as individuals, had their different ages, which challenged a different treatment. For instance, My Lord, I said to the old Peer, you have sometimes, no doubt, given your son a whipping; and I doubt not but it was well merited and did him much good. Yet you will not think it proper at present to employ the birch. The colonies are no longer in their infancy. But yet I say to you, they are still in their nonage, and Dr. Franklin wishes to emancipate them too soon from their mother country.

“Your popularity in this country, whatever it may be on the other side, is greatly beyond whatever it was,” William wrote his father from America. Popular evidence certainly indicated as much. Indignant crowds carried effigies of Wedderburn and Hutchinson through the streets of Philadelphia; the tag on the Wedderburn figure read, “Such horrid monsters are a disgrace to human nature, and justly merit our utmost detestation and the gallows, to which they are assigned, and then burnt by ELECTRIC FIRE.”

“If you should ever tamely submit to the yoke prepared for you, you cannot conceive how much you will be despised here, even by those who are endeavouring to impose it on you. Your very children and grandchildren will curse your memories for entailing disgrace upon them and theirs, and making them ashamed to own their country.”

The Americans were as steadfast and united as Franklin had hoped. The Congress condemned the Intolerable Acts and the assorted other encroachments by Parliament on the rights of Americans, reasserted the exclusive authority of the colonial legislatures to make laws for the colonies, and revived nonimportation. At the same time, however, the Congress reiterated American allegiance to the Crown.

I was much disgusted from the ministerial side by many base reflections on American courage, religion, understanding, &c., in which we were treated with the utmost contempt, as the lowest of mankind, and almost of a different species from the English of Britain; but particularly the American honesty was abused by some of the Lords, who asserted that we were all knaves and wanted only by this dispute to avoid paying our debts; that if we had any sense of equity or justice we should offer payment of the tea &c.

When Franklin left London at the vernal equinox of 1775 he believed he would never return. For most of eighteen years London had been his home; he knew London now better than he knew Philadelphia. But the London he left by coach to catch the Pennsylvania packet at Portsmouth was not the London he had known just a few years earlier. Corruption had always troubled its politics, yet corruption now overwhelmed all else. The placemen, the toadies, the cynics had triumphed; honest seekers after the welfare of the empire as a whole had no place. For eighteen years he had resisted returning to America, for the last eleven successfully; he resisted no more.

It did so for the reasons that were fully apparent in Franklin’s final weeks in England. The British government was determined to have matters out with the Americans. “The die is now cast,” George III declared. “The colonies must either submit or triumph.” Shortly thereafter the monarch made his point more forcefully: “The New England governments are in a state of rebellion. Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”

Franklin was still angry over his own and America’s treatment by the British government, and his anger grew with accumulating evidence of British perfidy. Late June brought news of the Battle of Bunker Hill, in which British troops torched parts of Charlestown, outside of Boston. “She has begun to burn our seaport towns,” he wrote Joseph Priestley, “secure, I suppose, that we shall never be able to return the outrage in kind.” To Jonathan Shipley he complained of London’s diplomacy. “All Europe is conjured not to sell us arms or ammunition, that we may be found defenceless, and more easily murdered.” Eminent British figures, Franklin said, were advocating attempts “to excite the domestic slaves you have sold us to cut their masters’ throats.” Others urged “hiring the Indian savages to assassinate our planters in the back-settlements.” “This is making war like nations who never had been friends, and never wish to be such while the world stands.”

Franklin never sent this letter; his anger, though powerful, did not carry him away. Yet the fact of its writing indicated the emotional separation he felt from England—and it suggested, with everything else, that political separation could not be far behind. “Words and arguments are now of no use,” he said in a letter he did send to Strahan. “All tends to a separation.” To Joseph Priestley he explained the circumstances surrounding what came to be called the “Olive Branch petition.” “It has been with difficulty that 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.” Anticipating the rejection that indeed occurred, he closed, “And so I conclude she has lost them forever.”

“I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine declared in asserting that continued connection with Britain made no more sense than perpetual childhood for a grown adult, that no continent should be forever governed by an island, that attachment to Britain would inevitably draw America into Europe’s wars, and, finally, that “a government of our own is our natural right.”

“Yes, we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

“Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the state,” he said, “and there is therefore some difference between them and sheep. Sheep will never make insurrections.”

“Directing pardons to be offered the colonies, who are the very parties injured,” Franklin wrote, “expresses indeed that opinion of our ignorance, baseness and insensibility which your uninformed and proud nation has long been pleased to entertain of us; but it can have no other effect than that of increasing our resentment.” The Declaration’s litany of British crimes had not yet reached the king; Franklin supplied a short summary. “It is impossible we should think of submission to a government that has with the most wanton barbarity and cruelty burnt our defenceless towns in the midst of winter, excited the savages to massacre our farmers, and our slaves to murder their masters, and is even now bringing foreign mercenaries to deluge our settlements with blood.” If Americans could never forgive such injuries, neither could they realistically expect the British to forgive the assertion of American rights. “And this must impel you, were we again under your government, to endeavour breaking our spirit by the severest tyranny, and obstructing by every means in your power our growing strength and prosperity.” Franklin could describe what Britain needed to do to restore peace, but he would be wasting his time. “I know too well her abounding pride and deficient wisdom to believe she will ever take such salutary measures. Her fondness for conquest as a warlike nation, her lust of dominion as an ambitious one, and her thirst for a gainful monopoly as a commercial one (none of them ...

The premise in this question was the sticker. France was willing to grant the Americans a modest amount of money simply for the nuisance they caused Britain; in May 1776 Louis approved an appropriation of 1 million livres. But this amount, while numerically impressive, would not keep the Continental Army in boots and bullets long. France refused to plunge deeper until the Americans proved their willingness and ability to see their task to its end. The willingness came with the Declaration of Independence, which was a document written for foreign readers as much as for Americans. The ability was more problematic. The collapse of the Americans’ Canadian offensive, followed by Washington’s defeat on Long Island, left the French and other Europeans with grave doubts the Americans would last another season of fighting. The Americans were caught in a cruel trap. They could not win without French backing, but they could not gain French backing without showing they could win. The Congress, desperate, directed Franklin to Paris.

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 to the work that my fellow citizens deem proper for me; or speaking as old-clothes dealers do of a remnant of goods, ‘You shall have me for what you please.’”

Franklin offered something to almost everyone in France. He was a philosopher to the liberal philosophes, an ardent foe of Britain (by now it was clear he was not selling America out) to the conservatives who hungered for revenge against perfidious Albion, a wit to the habitués of the salons, a prophet of profits to the makers of weapons and outfitters of privateers.

As other princes of Europe are lending or hiring their troops to Britain against America, it is apprehended that France may, if she thinks fit, afford our Independent States the same kind of aid, without giving England just cause of complaint. But if England should on that account declare war, we conceive that by the united force of France, Spain and America, she will lose all her possessions in the West Indies, much the greatest part of that commerce that has rendered her so opulent, and be reduced to that state of weakness and humiliation she has by her perfidy, her insolence, and her cruelty both in the East and West so justly merited.

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. Slaves naturally become base as well as wretched. We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature. Glorious it is for the Americans to be called by Providence to this post of honour. Cursed and detested will everyone be that deserts or betrays it.

When an acquaintance commiserated upon hearing of the loss of America’s capital, Franklin replied, “You mistake the matter. Instead of Howe taking Philadelphia, Philadelphia has taken Howe.”

I do not like to answer angry letters. I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation. If I have often received and borne your magisterial snubbings and rebukes without reply, ascribe it to the right causes, my concern for the honour and success of our mission, which would be hurt by our quarrelling; my love of peace; my respect for your good qualities; and my pity for your sick mind, which is forever tormenting itself with its jealousies, suspicions and fancies that others mean you ill, wrong you or fail in respect for you. If you do not cure your self of this temper, it will end in insanity, of which it is the symptomatic forerunner, as I have seen in several instances. God preserve you from so terrible an evil; and for his sake pray suffer me to live in quiet.

In the summer of 1779 the obscure Adams fell into conversation with a French gentleman, a “Mr. M.,” who remarked that in France foreign ambassadors were free to hold religious services in their own way. “But Mr. Franklin never had any,” the Frenchman said, with evident surprise. “No, said I, laughing,” Adams recorded in his diary, “because Mr. F. had no—I was going to say, what I did not say, and will not say here. I stopped short and laughed.” “No, said Mr. M., Mr. F. adores only great nature, which has interested a great many people of both sexes in his favour.” “Yes, said I, laughing, all the atheists, deists and libertines, as well as the philosophers and ladies are in his train—another Voltaire and Hume.” “Yes, said Mr. M., he is celebrated as the great philosopher and the great legislator of America.” “He is, said I, a great philosopher, but as a legislator of America he has done very little. It is universally believed in France, England and all Europe that his electric wand has accomplished all this revolution, but nothing is more groundless. He has done very little. It is believed that he made all the American constitutions, and their confederation. But he made neither. He did not even make the constitution of Pennsylvania, bad as it is.”

Adams could never forgive Franklin for receiving too much credit for events. He held a similar grudge against Washington, and in the last year of Franklin’s life complained to Benjamin Rush, “The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the Earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod, and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures and war.”

The life of Dr. Franklin was a scene of continual dissipation. I could never obtain the favour of his company in a morning before breakfast, which would have been the most convenient time to read over the letters and papers, deliberate on their contents, and decide upon the substance of the answers. It was late when he breakfasted, and as soon as breakfast was over, a crowd of carriages came to his levee, or if you like the term better, his lodgings, with all sorts of people; some philosophers, academicians and economists; some of his small tribe of humble friends in the literary way whom he employed to translate some of his ancient compositions, such as his Bonhomme Richard [Poor Richard] and for what I know his Polly Baker &c.; but by far the greater part were women and children, come to have the honour to see the great Franklin, and to have the pleasure of telling stories about his simplicity, his bald head and scattering straight hairs, among their acquaintances. These visitors occupied all the time, commonly, till it was time to dress to go to dinner. He was invited to dine abroad every day and never declined unless we had invited company to dine with us. I was always invited with him, till I found it necessary to send apologies, that I might have some time to study the French language and do the business of the mission. Mr. Franklin kept a horn book always in his pocket in which he minuted all his invitations to dinner, and Mr. Lee said it was the only thing in which...

Franklin, observing the same mores, determined to make himself at home. His pursuit of Madame Brillon commenced with a conversation on theology and the afterlife. She, a devout Catholic, was mildly shocked at his deism. He suggested, perhaps suggestively, that she take charge of his soul. She responded in like vein. “You were kind enough yesterday, my dear brother, to entrust me with your conversion,” she wrote. “I will not be stern, I know my penitent’s weak spot, I shall tolerate it! As long as he loves God, America, and me above all things, I absolve him of all his sins, present, past, and future; and I promise him Paradise where I shall lead him along a path strewn with roses.” She listed the cardinal sins, and absolved him of the first six. The seventh—lust—was not so easy to dispose of. “All great men are tainted with it; it is called their weakness,” she said. “You have loved, my dear brother; you have been kind and lovable; you have been loved in return! What is so damnable about that? Go on doing great things and loving pretty women—provided that, pretty and lovable though they may be, you never lose sight of my principle: always love God, America, and me above all.”