Ben was always busy but never busier than in 1775 and 1776. The burst of activity began the moment the Pennsylvania Packet docked at Philadelphia harbor. Cheering crowds greeted him as he disembarked. His London mission may have been a failure, but Ben, now a committed rebel at age sixty-nine, was loved by most (not all) of his fellow Americans, future citizens of the not-yet United States.
Ben was home again, but home is a moving target. Philadelphia had changed. Its population had exploded and was now the second largest in the British Empire, after London. Ben’s family life had shifted too. Deborah was dead. (Curiously, Ben hardly mentions his loss.) William was still in New Jersey, serving as royal governor and refusing to join the rebel cause. Ben moved into his new house on Market Street, Franklin Court. He had never seen it. It was Deborah who had supervised the construction and furnishing, per Ben’s detailed instructions sent from London. “Let papier mâché musical figures be tack’d to the middle of the ceiling; when this is done, I think it will look very well,” he wrote in one letter.
You can still visit Franklin’s house today, as I did one spring day. Well, sort of visit. All that remains is a “ghost house.” That’s what the National Park Service, guardians of the historic site, call it. It’s just a few steel girders arranged in the same footprint as the actual Franklin house. I ask one of the park rangers, a garrulous man with an unruly beard and Franklinesque girth, why they didn’t reconstruct the Franklin house, as they’ve done with the homes of other historical figures. They almost did, in the 1970s, the ranger explains, but balked. There were no contemporaneous drawings of the original house to work from, and they had been “burned before,” he adds enigmatically. Something about the wrong location for one of Washington’s homes.
Unlike Mount Vernon or Monticello, Franklin Court didn’t last long after its namesake’s death. It endured in several incarnations: as a boarding house, female academy, coffeehouse, and hotel before it was carved up into smaller units in 1812 and eventually razed. Franklin Court, home of America’s founding grandfather and first scientist, was, like a stolen car or failed dot.com, worth more as parts than whole.
The park service worked with what it had, aiming to re-create the feel of Franklin Court, if not the actual house. They’ve installed concrete bunkers and portals that enable you to peer at the original foundation. “Fragments of Franklin Court,” they call it but, really, it is a bunch of rocks. The entire arrangement—all that steel and concrete—lends Franklin Court an oddly Soviet feel, which might seem peculiar given it was home to the man whose face is synonymous with American capitalism but not so strange when you consider that Franklin held some decidedly socialist views.
Ben liked his new home but had little time to enjoy it. He was busy. The day after his ship docked, the Pennsylvania Assembly elected him unanimously as one of its delegates to the Second Continental Congress. Ben accepted, recalling an old adage about public appointments, “Never to ask for them, and never to refuse them,” and adding one of his own, “Never to resign them.” (This conviction would come to haunt him years later, when he craved repose.)
I’ve always imagined colonial American life (at least for White male property owners) as pleasantly languid. But there was nothing pleasant or languid about Philadelphia in 1775 or about Ben Franklin’s routine. Gone was the late-night socializing of his London days. He went to bed early and rose early, and for good reason. He served on some ten congressional committees, plus a Pennsylvania one, with meetings starting at 6 a.m. and only Sundays off. The demanding schedule exhausted men much younger than Franklin and apparently killed one. Peyton Randolph, president of the Continental Congress, collapsed while dining with fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, felled by a stroke. He was fifty-four years old.
Ben was appointed postmaster general. He helped design the new American currency and accelerated the manufacture of saltpeter, needed for gunpowder. In his new roles, Ben deployed his business acumen and charm. He also unsheathed his pen. He wrote essays and songs, mocking British soldiers and urging on the young rebellion. He also wrote a famous war cry, later adopted by Jefferson: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” Franklin wasn’t a religious man, not in the conventional sense, but he never hesitated to invoke the Lord’s name if he thought it useful.
By all accounts, Ben was in high spirits despite his busy schedule or, more likely, because of it. We think of busyness as a modern malady. But people were plenty busy in the eighteenth century, and busy people are happier than idle people, many studies have found. This holds true even if that busyness is forced on them. As horrible as Sisyphus’s fate was, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again and again, it beat being sentenced to an eternity of idleness.
Consider a more modern example. A Houston airport was in a bind. Passengers disembarking in the morning complained about long waits for their luggage. The airport hired more baggage handlers, reducing the wait time to no more than eight minutes. Yet passengers still complained. Officials investigated further and discovered the delay consisted of two parts: a one-minute walk to the carousel and a seven-minute wait for the bags.
What happened next sounds bonkers. Airport officials decided to insert intentional delays into the system. They directed arriving airplanes to more distant gates and ensured the luggage carousels were as far away as possible. This increased the walking time (busyness) to six minutes and decreased the waiting time (idleness) to two minutes. Passenger complaints dropped to nearly zero. The same dynamic explains why if I’m stuck in highway traffic I’ll take a longer route, even if it means more driving time, just so I can stay engaged and busy. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, “The great affair is to move.”
I don’t want just any kind of busyness. What I seek is good busyness. Meaningful busyness. When we say we want a happy life, we often mean a meaningful life. Happiness is a purely subjective state. Meaningfulness is not. Others have a say. Usefulness directed inward is solipsistic nonsense. We are useful to other sentient beings, and this demands a certain amount of energy, of busyness. Yes, we need time to rest and recharge, but how do we deploy our fully charged batteries? As Ben said, “A life of leisure, and a life of laziness, are two things.” Leisure is useful. Laziness is not.
In January 1776, Benjamin Franklin turned seventy years old. That is a not insignificant milestone today. In Franklin’s day, when the average life expectancy was thirty-five, it amounted to a miracle. Ben did not, as far as we know, celebrate the occasion. He was too busy.
Not everyone cheered Ben’s return to Philadelphia. Some questioned his loyalties. He had spent the bulk of the past seventeen years abroad, on English soil, and had many English friends. Samuel Adams considered Franklin “a suspicious person, designing to betray the cause.” Rumors spread that Franklin had returned to America not as a friend but as a spy.
Ben was no spy. The man who spent the past two decades trying to reconcile with Britain, to keep the china vase intact, had flipped, and now displayed the conviction of the converted. Franklin knew the British better than anyone else, and he didn’t like what he saw. Writing to a friend, he said, “It is a true old saying, that make yourselves sheep and the wolves will eat you: to which I may add another, God helps them that help themselves.” Ben had gone full rebel.
He won over his doubters. After meeting Ben in Massachusetts, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, saying she found in Franklin “a disposition entirely American,” adding that “he does not hesitate at our boldest measures, but rather seems to think us, too irresolute, and backward.”
We think of rebels as young and reckless. Ben was neither. He was a methodical septuagenarian, a revolutionary grandfather. It’s not as unexpected as it seems. His radicalism had been gestating for a long time. Recall what sixteen-year-old Ben, wearing his Silence Dogood mask, said: “I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges, is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly.” Ben’s rebellious spirit was lying in wait, like a dormant gene ready to be activated.
Besides, the alternative to joining the rebel cause was to withdraw from public life entirely and retreat to a “cool sullen silence.” That wasn’t Ben’s style. He needed to be doing, to be useful. Did he have a lot to lose? In one sense, yes. He had spent years building his reputation and amassing a small fortune. Both could vanish in an instant. Yet, now in his seventies, Ben knew he didn’t have that long to live and would “soon quit the scene,” as he told George Washington. He found that prospect terrifying—and liberating. As an old man, he was free to listen to his heart, knowing that once the war was over, a new generation would see America flourish “like a field of young Indian corn” battered by wind and rain, but once the storm passed, “shoots up with double vigour, and delights the eye not of its owner only, but of every observing traveler.”
I love this about Ben. I love how he could stare into the void that is the future, a Ben-less future, and see not emptiness but meaning. His flame may vanish, but the light still blazes, burning bright in the hearts and minds of a new generation.
I am a decade younger than Rebel Ben yet not nearly as bold. I am not staring down a tyrannical king or outfitting a ragtag army or writing words that animate a revolution, but we don’t get to choose our era. This is who I am and when I am. The only question is: What am I going to do with the temporal hand I’ve been dealt? How am I going to be useful?
I now realize my ego has stunted my usefulness. I help my wife but on my terms, the way I want, not the way she needs. This is not useful, as she helpfully points out. I had forgotten that usefulness is a response to the actual needs of another, not a selfish assertion of one’s talents.
Ben rarely fell into this trap. He listened to others, then looked for the intersection of their needs and his abilities. If Philadelphia needed a hospital, he worked toward that, not founding another newspaper, even though journalism lay closer to his wheelhouse than medicine. He holstered his ego and did the needful.
Life was good for Ben Franklin, with one notable exception: his relationship with his son William. The two had been drifting apart for years. Now the drift accelerated, swept along by fast-moving events.
After he was humiliated in the Cockpit, Franklin urged William to resign his royal governorship and take up farming instead. It is, Ben said, a more independent profession and therefore a more honorable one. Franklin warned his son, as fathers are wont to do, that events were unfolding rapidly and not in the younger Franklin’s favor. Should William remain a Loyalist, “you will find yourself in no comfortable situation, and perhaps wish you had soon disengaged yourself,” Ben wrote. William ignored his father’s advice, as sons are wont to do. He stayed on as New Jersey governor, faithful to the British Parliament and to King George.
It is the summer of 1775. Shots have been fired at Lexington and Concord. The British and American forces were careening toward all-out war. We find the elder Franklin firmly on the side of the rebels and the son just as firmly on the side of King George. Something had to give, and it did. Father and son met twice that summer, at a mutual friend’s country house in Pennsylvania. No one knows what transpired, but the conversations “ended in shouting matches loud enough to disturb the neighbors.” It would be years before father and son spoke again.
History is a series of flukes masquerading as inevitabilities. What today looks like a foregone conclusion was only one of many possible outcomes. For every path taken, there are dozens, hundreds, of alternative routes, enticing what-ifs.
I think about one of these what-ifs every summer. For the past eight years, my wife and I have rented the same cottage in northern Vermont along with two Canadian friends, Martin and Karen. The house is so close to the Quebec border that my friends use a Canadian cell phone service while my wife and I use an American one. For years, we treated the border as a nonentity. We’d cycle across, stopping at a tiny shack of an immigration post. I’d walk my dog, Parker, along the border, with me on the US side and him in Canada. It was a borderless border, a joke, or so we thought.
Then the pandemic hit, and the joke was on us. The border was shut as tight as the Korean DMZ and remained so for nearly two years. We vacationed without our Canadian friends, which saddened us. I had a lot of time on my hands that summer, so I indulged in a thought experiment. What if there was no border? What if there was no Canada or perhaps no United States, just one giant political entity stretching from Key West to Nunavut? This was Ben Franklin’s vision, and he nearly pulled it off. Well, not nearly, not even close, actually, but he tried. That he made the arduous journey from Philadelphia to Montreal through snow and ice, and at age seventy—seventy!—makes him only more insane, and thus more laudable, and likable, in my eyes.
Most Franklin biographers mention the Great Canadian Fiasco only briefly, if at all. That’s understandable. The expedition—spoiler alert!—was a failure. It did not alter the course of history, not even a little. Yet I find the Great Canadian Fiasco fascinating. The journey says a lot about Franklin and his bottomless reserves of energy and moxie. It offers a little-known window into what made him tick.
There is, I confess, another reason for my outsized interest in the Great Canadian Fiasco. I have something of a Canada obsession. I can name all the provinces (and territories!), as well as their capitals. I can list most of the Canadian prime ministers. I have mastered Canadianisms like “eh” and “oot and aboot.” I know that a loonie is more than a bird. I actively seek, and actually enjoy, Tim Hortons coffee. I am nice but in an annoyingly passive-aggressive way.
Over the years, my Canada obsession has evolved from quirk to deep appreciation. I genuinely like Canadians. To me, they embody all the best of America and none of the worst. I began to fantasize about moving to Canada long before it was fashionable to do so.
Franklin was obsessed with Canada too, but with one important difference. I wanted to settle in Canada. He wanted to acquire it.
Franklin thought about Canada more than most Americans, then or now. “Canada” appears hundreds of times in his correspondence. He saw it as strategically crucial, first to the British Empire and then to the fledgling United States. So when Congress asked him to join an expedition to Montreal, he jumped at the chance. His fellow delegates included Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll, as well as a French printer named Fleury Mesplet. Their mission: to charm the Canadians and persuade them to join the American Revolution. To that end, Franklin and his colleagues were authorized to offer inducements, such as freedom of religion and the press, representation in Congress, and a mutual defense agreement. What they could not offer, unfortunately, was cash.
The mission was a long shot. Most Canadians were Roman Catholic, most Americans Protestant, and the two didn’t exactly see eye to eye. The Continental Army, meanwhile, was floundering up north, though to what extent would become clear to Franklin only once he reached Montreal.
It was a long and difficult journey for even a young man, and Franklin was not a young man. At seventy, he suffered from gout, among other ailments, and was seriously overweight. Friends urged Franklin, “in the evening of life,” not to embark on such a dangerous expedition. So did William, who, despite their differences, prayed for his father’s safe return.
Franklin and his colleagues left Philadelphia in late March, thinking winter was over. They thought wrong. En route, they encountered snow and ice while sailing on small, uncovered boats, riding in horse and carriage over rugged roads, and sleeping in the woods. All the while Ben was suffering from swollen legs and painful boils. Ben feared he wouldn’t survive the journey. “I begin to apprehend that I have undertaken a fatigue that at my time of life may prove too much for me,” he wrote to Josiah Quincy in Massachusetts. “So I sit down to write to a few friends by way of farewell.”
News of his demise was exaggerated. Six weeks after they departed Philadelphia, the delegation crossed a frozen Lake George in New York and at last reached Montreal. They were “very politely received” by General Benedict Arnold. The traitor-to-be was the most senior American officer on Canadian soil.
Ben never got the chance to deploy his considerable powers of persuasion. The Canadians were not in the mood. The Continental Army looked like a losing bet. American troops were outgunned and outmanned. They had not been paid in weeks. American credit was worthless. Food and provisions were running low. Then there was a smallpox outbreak that sidelined hundreds of soldiers. No wonder the British had pushed American forces into full retreat. The withdrawal represented not only a military setback but a public relations disaster. As Franklin and his colleagues wrote, “Our enemies take the advantage of this distress, to make us look contemptible in the eyes of the Canadians.”
Perhaps, but the truth is that the Americans had only themselves to blame. Historian Jonathan Dull pinpoints the larger reasons behind the Great Canadian Fiasco: “Believing in the righteousness of their cause the Americans failed to consider that the Canadians had reason to distrust them,” a statement as true now as it was then.
Toward the end of his life, Business Ben looked back at the Great Canadian Fiasco and concluded it would have made more sense to buy Canada than conquer it. War-weary, Franklin extended this notion to all conflicts. “It seems to me, that if statesmen had a little more arithmetic, or were more accustomed to calculation, wars would be much less frequent.”
There are few traces of Franklin’s brief stay in Montreal. There is no monument to the Great Canadian Fiasco. No tome chronicling the expedition. That’s a shame. We should commemorate our failures as well as our triumphs, for they are not as far apart as we think. Triumph is failure that made one or two better choices, took a slightly different path.
I dig deeper and unearth a few Franklin fragments in Canada. I tell my Canadian friends Martin and Karen, and they offer to investigate. Being Canadian, they are not only nice but competent too. I knew my research was in good hands.
The border reopened and we rendezvoused at the Vermont cottage once again. There, Martin and Karen shared their notes and impressions of Ben Franklin’s foray to their homeland. The site they visited is Château Ramezay. Built in 1705 as the private residence for Claude de Ramezay, governor of Montreal, it also served as the focal point for the region’s commercial and political life. Franklin spent ten or so working days there during the Great Canadian Fiasco. Inside the tan-stoned chateau, docents dressed in colonial-era outfits speak of the “American Invasion” of 1775, which is accurate, I suppose, but I like to think of it as a friendly invasion. The Canadians, I’m sure, didn’t see it that way.
The Franklin exhibit is relegated to one corner of the museum, almost as an afterthought. There is a portrait of Ben, wigless with thin strands of gray hair flowing to his shoulders. He is wearing an expression of restrained dismay, as if he were wondering what the hell he was doing in Canada. My Canadian friends wondered too. This “unexpected historical twist,” as Karen put it, or “American incursion,” as Martin did, is only dimly recalled in Canada. “We’ve almost written him out of our history,” Karen said. I note her use of almost. They didn’t write Ben entirely out of their history. That would not be very nice, or very Canadian.
The small museum, being Canadian, manages to find two bright spots to the Great Canadian Fiasco. On display are papers guaranteeing safe passage to Albany for one Mrs. Walker. She had graciously housed the American delegation in Montreal, making her a target for British reprisals. I’m happy to report she made it across the border to safety.
The other bright spot to an otherwise dark chapter is that French printer Fleury Mesplet stayed behind in Montreal and fired up his printing press. Two years later, after enduring brushes with the British authorities, he founded Canada’s first French-language newspaper, later known as the Montreal Gazette.
As I put to bed this odd little chapter in Ben’s life, an odd little thought occurs to me: I’m glad Franklin failed this time. Had he succeeded, Canada would have become the fourteenth colony, then one of the original states. Most likely, it would have been subsumed by the dominant American culture. Canada would not be Canada. And that, I’m sure, would have been an even greater fiasco.
Franklin returned from Canada exhausted and ill. The gout that plagued him had resurfaced. His legs and feet were swollen and sore. His big toe was red and tender and felt like it was on fire. Walking was difficult and painful. He had to miss several sessions of the Continental Congress.
Gout was especially prevalent during Franklin’s time. One medical historian noted wryly that the Age of Reason was also “the Golden Age of Gout.” Ben had many risk factors. His diet was meat heavy, and he loved wine, particularly Madeira. He’d regularly down a bottle a day. His skin ailment, most likely psoriasis, also rendered him more vulnerable to gout.
Today we know that gout is caused by a buildup of uric acid in the blood, forming sharp, needlelike urate crystals that accumulate in the joints, causing pain and inflammation. Purines, the source of uric acid, are found in certain foods, especially red meat and alcoholic drinks sweetened with fructose.
Ben tried various treatments, such as they were: a bit of bloodletting and purging. He suggested to a woman he fancied that sexual activity might cure his gout. His rationale: “When I was a young man and enjoyed more of the favors of the sex than I do at present, I had no gout.” So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature.
When gout struck, Ben did moderate his vices. He drank less wine, ate less meat, and exercised more. He heeded the advice of Poor Richard (i.e., himself): “Be temperate in wine, eating, girls and sloth; or the gout will seize you and plague you both.” Perhaps the most potent medicine in his cabinet was humor. After one flare-up of gout, he wrote that hilarious bagatelle, “Dialogue Between the Gout and Mr. Franklin.”
The Gout proceeds to scold Franklin for his gluttony and sedentary lifestyle until, finally, he agrees to eat less and exercise more. The Gout isn’t buying it: “I know you too well. You promise fair; but, after a few months of good health, you will return to your old habits.” The dialogue’s takeaway: to defang your maladies, poke fun at them. Humor saps them of their power over our minds, if not our bodies.
At age seventy-one, Ben inventoried his health, writing in the third person as if he were a real doctor assessing a patient. He notes the gout, of course, as well as the scurf, the boils, and “some small spots on his hands and face.” He ends his clinical report on an upbeat note. “[The patient’s] health is otherwise good. He feels on comparison no diminution of his strength, but is as capable of bearing labour as he was at 50. His legs particularly seem stronger since the swelling left them, and he can walk much without weariness. His digestion is good.”
Old Ben’s healthiest habit was his attitude. He never whined or complained; he had no interest in comparing notes with other older people, engaging in what a friend of mine calls “organ recitals.” Ben’s uric acid may have hardened but not his heart. He treated his body with kindness and gratitude. As he wrote in 1790, some three weeks before his death, “I do not repine at my malady, though a severe one, when I consider… how many more horrible evils the human body is subject to; and what a long life of health I have been blessed with, free from them all.”
Ben was accepting but not resigned. He consulted with physician friends and invented medical devices such as bifocals. He was stoic in his outlook, changing what he could, accepting what he could not. “There are in life real evils enough, and it is a folly to afflict ourselves with imaginary ones,” he told his sister Jane.
I have far fewer real ailments than Ben but far more imaginary ones. The IBS, a touch of sleep apnea, the occasional AFIB, and something to do with my bladder that I’d rather not discuss. Overall, my health is good. Yet I complain prodigiously and with alarming gusto. I worry too. Every chest pain is a heart attack, every headache an aneurysm. This chronic hypochondria is not sustainable. When I do pass that milestone, the one that prominently features the number six, I know that my body, no longer under warranty, will begin to act up. Parts will need to be repaired, possibly replaced. My body will emit strange, indeterminate sounds, even more than it does now, and I will worry even more.
There is hope for me, though. Poor health need not demoralize. Some people maintain high levels of happiness even when facing chronic health challenges, a recent study found. The keys are friends and perspective, recognizing that all things considered, you are doing well. This was Franklin’s way. He had many close friends and was genuinely grateful for his reasonably good health. Gratitude, like sincerity, cannot be faked.
Many people grow happier as they age, even in the face of adversity, another study found, provided they possess one trait: a flexible sense of self. The happy elderly consider flexibility central to who they are. When I stumbled on that study, I thought of Ben and his bagful of masks. The man, even at age seventy, was remarkably flexible. He was that rare and wonderful human who grew more, not less, nimble with each passing year.
History is to Americans as water is to fish—an all-pervasive, life-sustaining substance that somehow evades notice. The fish doesn’t appreciate water until it’s deprived of it. The American doesn’t appreciate history until it bites him in the ass.
I am just as fishy as my fellow Americans; at least I was for a long time. Should history be thrust upon me, I would not reject it, but I rarely sought it out. A case in point. I’ve been living in the Washington, DC, area for the past fifteen years yet not once have I visited the National Archives Museum. How can this be? Laziness only partly explains my oversight. The disturbing truth is I haven’t gone because I haven’t cared. There, I said it. But now I do care, thanks to Ben, the futurist with a rearview mirror.
I take the Metro, Washington’s sad subway, to the Gallery Place station, then walk a few blocks through Chinatown before arriving at the museum. I climb the prodigious stairs and step inside slowly, reverentially, as if entering a cathedral or mosque. That’s understandable. The documents housed inside are precious. America’s secular scripture. I am interested in only one.
The Declaration of Independence is located in the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom, a serious room with serious pillars, a high-domed ceiling and marble everywhere. America’s founding document is encased in glass and mounted in a gold frame. It is larger than I expected, about the size of a small coffee table. The parchment is intact but so faded that only a few phrases are legible: “When in the course of human events… we, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America…” It is credited to a lone man, but the declaration was a group effort.
No writer likes to be edited, and Thomas Jefferson was no exception. To make matters worse, he was edited by a committee: the fifty-six delegates to the Second Continental Congress. Each man had an opinion about what the document proclaiming American independence should and should not say and how it should or should not say it. Some delegates objected to “two or three unlucky expressions,” Jefferson whined. (Incredibly, one of those “unlucky expressions” was a call to abolish the slave trade.) After Jefferson excised these objectionable passages, the nitpickers found other alleged faults. Jefferson bristled at these “mutilations” of his pristine words, sounding less like a founding father and more like a touchy writer.
Fortunately, he had made a new friend: Ben Franklin. The two sat next to each other during the congressional sessions. They were an odd pairing. Ben was world famous; Jefferson was a nobody, at least outside the American colonies. Ben, the son of a soap and candle maker, had two years of formal education. Jefferson, the son of a landowner and “gentleman,” studied law at William and Mary College. Ben was seventy years old, Jefferson thirty-three. But they both shared a love of the written word and a distrust of the spoken one. And both men saw themselves as outsiders. They got along swimmingly.
Franklin sensed Jefferson’s irritation (it was impossible to miss) at seeing his words maimed and tried to comfort the young lawyer from Virginia by deploying his favorite tactic: humor. Committees make terrible editors, Ben said. Then he relayed a story from his Boston days.
There was a local hatter named John Thompson who was about to open his own shop. He needed a signboard, so he composed these words: “John Thompson, Hatter makes and sells hats for [cash].” There. Thompson liked it, but thought he’d consult with a few friends.
“ ‘Hatter’ and ‘makes hats’ are redundant,” said one friend. Thompson deleted the latter.
“You really don’t need the part about ‘for cash,’ ” said another friend, since that form of payment was customary. Thompson cut those words too.
“You don’t really need ‘sells hats,’ ” chimed a third friend. “Nobody will expect you to give them away.”
And so it went until the sign was reduced to simply, “John Thompson” accompanied by a drawing of a hat.
I can picture Jefferson chuckling, the tension draining from his neck and shoulders. He was not the first or the last writer to bristle at editorial suggestions. Fortunately for him, Franklin, recovered from gout, was assigned to the five-person team tasked with drafting the declaration. Jefferson wrote the document. Franklin and the others edited it. Ben was a rigorous but kind editor, a rare combination.
Click. Click. I zoom closer and closer, straining to read the digitized 248-year-old document more clearly. On my laptop, I am looking at an early draft of the Declaration of Independence. It contains dozens of edits: deletions and insertions, scratches and scrawls. It looks less like American scripture and more like American graffiti. Scholars have tried to distinguish the marks and identify who made which. Was it John Adams or perhaps one of the other delegates? Or was it the work of Ben’s meaty printer’s hands?
Franklin’s handwriting, thankfully, is distinctive, so we have a good idea which revisions are his. They are not mutilations but, I think, improvements. The original Jefferson draft read that Americans “should declare the causes which impel them to threaten separation.” Franklin scratched out “threaten,” thus simplifying the text and at the same time making the split irrevocable.
The most important Franklin edit appears early. Jefferson’s original draft reads, “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal.” An assertive pen stroke—most likely Franklin’s—struck through “sacred & undeniable,” replacing it with “self-evident.” We hold these truths to be self-evident. The best-known seven words of the Declaration of Independence. It might seem like a minor revision, a more concise wording of the same idea, but it is more than that—much more. It is, I believe, the greatest edit of all time. Jefferson’s original wording appeals to religious authority. These truths are sacred. They are undeniable, presumably because they are sacred. This was a fine seventeenth-century argument but not an enlightened eighteenth-century one, a time when appeals to sacred sources were on the decline.
By revising the passage to read “self-evident,” Franklin invoked a different and, he believed, higher authority: human reason. The idea was in the air, thanks to the English philosopher John Locke. His fingerprints are all over America’s founding documents, especially the Declaration of Independence. Locke rejected the long-standing belief that ideas are innate. We are not born with any knowledge, he believed, but are like a blank sheet of paper waiting to be written on. Experience, acquired through our senses, is the source of all knowledge. A self-evident truth is one deduced from direct experience. You don’t need to be a philosopher or even educated at all to grasp a self-evident truth. Anyone, even a child, can see it.
Locke lists several examples of self-evident truths. That “it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be,” that “white is not black,” that “a square is not a circle,” that “bitterness is not sweetness,” and so on. Locke calls this “intuitive knowledge,” though it is more a kind of seeing than knowing. Just as the eye detects light, the mind detects a self-evident truth. No proof is needed. What is self-evident “strikes the mind as immediately and perpetually true” and “leaves no room for hesitation, doubt or examination,” Locke said. Self-evident truths are beyond—or, rather, above—debate.
This is where it gets tricky. It is crucial we get these truths right, for once declared self-evident, they are no longer in play. On the one hand, this can be wonderfully liberating. For instance, it is self-evident that I love my daughter. I know it so thoroughly and so deeply I need not waste time questioning or “proving” it. It just is. Another of my self-evident truths is that I am overweight. I don’t need a scale to tell me. I know it every time I try to squeeze into a pair of jeans.
The drafting committee for the Declaration of Independence faced a similar bugaboo. Jefferson named a number of supposedly self-evident truths: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that people have the right to abolish an unjust government. To eighteenth-century readers, though, these were not self-evident at all, certainly not in the reductionist hot-is-not-cold way John Locke had in mind.
Jefferson and his editors attempted something audacious. They hoped that by proclaiming these truths as self-evident, they would become so. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” was less an observation than an assertion, a wish. They wanted to extend self-evident truths from the world of perception—up is not down, hot is not cold—to the world of morality: might is not right, equality is better than inequality. This evolution remains a work in progress, as the state of race relations in America shows, but with Jefferson’s draft and Ben’s sagacious pen strokes, the two steered us in the right direction.
The same month Franklin began editing the Declaration of Independence, news of a much more personal nature reached him. New Jersey rebels had arrested Franklin’s son William, the last of the royal governors, on charges he had “discovered himself to be an enemy of the liberties of this country.” On the day his father signed the Declaration of Independence, July 4, William was moved to Connecticut where he would spend the next two years in jail, including eight months in solitary confinement. Conditions were harsh. He was imprisoned in a dark and bare cell with only straw to sleep on. In September, William wrote to Connecticut’s revolutionary governor, Jonathan Trumbull: “I suffer so much in being thus buried alive, having no one to speak to day or night, and for the want of air and exercise, that I should deem it a favor to be immediately taken out and shot.”
William’s wife, Elizabeth, was distraught. She worried about her husband and was in poor health herself. She wrote to Ben, pleading with him to use his clout and intercede. “Consider my dear and honored sir, that I am now pleading the cause of your son, and my beloved husband,” she wrote, adding a plaintive note: “If I have said, or done anything wrong I beg to be forgiven.” Ben did not reply.
Their dispute came down to a knotty question. What is the higher duty—a father’s unconditional love for his son or a son’s undying loyalty to his father? On this question, Benjamin and William Franklin could not agree.
I’m not sure if it’s my nascent Franklinian hopefulness or perhaps my covert Canadianness, but I desperately want to salvage a lesson from this sad affair. I dig into the historical record, scouring Ben’s correspondence and William’s too. Nothing. If there is a truth to be gleaned, it is far from self-evident.
I’ve seen this before. Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., and others: great men who shaped history but were terrible parents and spouses. Why these lapses in humanity, and with those closest to them? It is not, I’m sure, a matter of excessive busyness, but something else, some character flaw that manifests not on the world stage but at the family dinner table, those quiet moments when the klieg lights fade and, for a moment, it is simply a husband and wife, a father and son, alone with each other. For Ben, I suspect, the intimacy proved uncomfortable, and he yearned to escape. Once again, he heeded the call of the open seas.
I am standing in front of an unremarkable colonial-era building, red-bricked with white, arched windowpanes, and a small cupola sitting atop its A-frame roof. There is nothing the least bit grand or monumental about Carpenters’ Hall, so-named because it was (and still is) home to Philadelphia’s carpentry trade guild, yet a lot of history happened here. This was where the First Continental Congress convened in 1774. For a while, it was also home to two Franklin creations: the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Philosophical Society. It is also where, in late December 1775, a series of clandestine meetings took place that altered the course of Benjamin Franklin’s life and that of the not-yet United States.
One of those in attendance was Julien Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir, a shabbily dressed, disabled twenty-six-year-old who had recently arrived in Philadelphia. He claimed to be a French military officer on sick leave and enthralled by the American cause. He was actually a French secret agent, dispatched by Louis XVI to assess the viability of the American rebels.
His timing was good. Congress had recently formed the Committee of Secret Correspondence. I love the name. It sounds like something a gaggle of twelve-year-old boys dreamed up while huddled in a tree house. The committee was, in fact, quite serious, the forerunner of the US State Department. Its mission was to identify foreign governments willing to back the American rebellion with either money or arms or, ideally, both.
France was an obvious prospect. The country was still smarting from the thumping it received by the British in the Seven Years’ War, a brutal, sprawling conflict that also ensnared the other great powers of Europe and felt longer than its name implies. France was eager to avenge its loss but wasn’t yet ready to commit. The war had dented its economy and decimated its military. There was also the sticky issue of a monarchy like France backing a rebellion whose stated aim was the ouster of another monarch. Who knows? The French people might get ideas.
Bonvouloir was instructed to seek out one man in Philadelphia: Ben Franklin. Ben had visited France and, like many other first-time visitors, was instantly smitten. France made him feel twenty years younger, he said.
Once in Philadelphia, Bonvouloir made some discreet inquiries and before long was sitting down with Franklin and three other members of the Committee of Secret Correspondence. They met at night and, recalled Bonvouloir, “each one of us took a separate path” to Carpenters’ Hall.
The two sides, French and American, sniffed each other like two dogs meeting for the first time. Bonvouloir wanted to know if the Americans were being truthful about the upstart Continental Army’s ability to wage war. Franklin and his fellow Americans wanted to know if Bonvouloir might be a double agent, possibly working for the British secret service. Over the course of the three meetings, they grew to trust one another and the sniffing subsided. At least one “deliverable,” as diplomats say, emerged from these meetings: Bonvouloir promised to provide George Washington with two French army engineers, which he desperately needed, and the Americans agreed to continue the conversation. It was the beginning of a mercurial but beautiful friendship.
After the meetings, Bonvouloir fired off a report to his handlers in Versailles. He described the American forces in rosy, breathless terms. “Everyone here is a soldier, the troops are well clothed, well paid and well armed.… They are more powerful than we could have thought, beyond imagination powerful; you will be astonished by it. Nothing shocks or frightens them, you can count on that.”
Bonvouloir’s assessment was exaggerated, but it served a useful purpose. Versailles and Philadelphia inched closer. By spring 1776, the French began to secretly supply the Americans with much-needed gunpowder. Congress dispatched a representative to France. Silas Deane, a Connecticut merchant and congressional delegate, sailed with diplomatic instructions from Franklin, a handful of letters for Ben’s French friends—and vials of invisible ink, presumably so the Committee of Secret Correspondence could live up to its name. (John Jay, Deane’s handler, was given solvent that could render the ink visible.)
Congress soon realized they needed a more prominent representative in France. They asked Franklin. This made sense. He was America’s most experienced diplomat and its only international celebrity. His electrical experiments were received enthusiastically everywhere but nowhere more so than in France. The French adored Franklin.
It was a dangerous mission, though, beginning with the ocean crossing. Should the British capture Franklin, he surely would be arrested and possibly hanged. Assuming he made it to France, a viper’s pit of politics and British spies awaited him.
Ben accepted the assignment without hesitation. His philosophy of public appointments—Never to ask for them and never to refuse them—helps explain his decision, but I suspect there was something else going on. Two decades earlier, in a letter to his friend the preacher George Whitefield, Ben explained his approach to ageing in theatrical terms: “Life, like a dramatic piece, should not only be conducted with regularity, but methinks it should finish handsomely,” he said. “Being now in the last act, I begin to cast about for something fit to end with.” Of course, that was not Ben’s last act, not even close. The man had more last acts than the musical Cats. He was not about to play the role of the distinguished but irrelevant elder statesman. He wanted to go out with a bang, and the mission to France was just the sort of fireworks he craved.
I’d also like to go out with a bang, or at least a gong. Too many otherwise rich and meaningful lives end with a bland mélange of golf, early bird specials, and nagging ennui. Ageism is nothing new. It’s been around for as long as there have been old people and young people to mock them. Yet the idea that old age is necessarily a time to disengage from active life is relatively new. It began in the 1940s, with a theory called structural functionalism. If the elderly were unhappy, this theory posited, it was because they suffered from “adjustment problems.” They couldn’t cope with the “natural” process of ageing and the accompanying loss of relevance. Books with titles like Growing Old: The Process of Disengagement suggested the elderly simply do less and aim for what the Roman philosopher Cicero called otium cum dignitate, “leisure with dignity.” Only relatively recently have attitudes shifted and the elderly encouraged to stay active.
Not all busyness is equal. There is a difference between bingo busy and revolutionary busy. One is meaningful, the other is not. Franklin enjoyed games, especially chess, but I can’t see him withdrawing to a chess-themed retirement home. Nor do I see myself doing so, and not only because I can’t play chess. Pleasure alone is rarely a good enough reason to do anything. Purpose is a far more powerful engine.
In late October 1776, Ben visited friends to say farewell. He did so discreetly. His mission to France was a secret, though not a very good one. Philadelphia was gossipy and lousy with British spies. On October 27, Franklin boarded an American naval vessel, aptly named Reprisal. Ben was accompanied not by two enslaved people, as he was en route to London two decades earlier, but by his two grandchildren, seven-year-old Benny, his daughter’s son, and sixteen-year-old Temple, the son of still-imprisoned William. Ben had more or less raised Temple. The two lived together in London and, now, in Philadelphia. For Ben, Temple was a reliable presence in an unreliable world.
At the helm of the Reprisal was a young but capable captain named Lambert Wickes. The Committee of Secret Correspondence handed him sealed orders to be read only once at sea. They urged him not to tarry, to obey Dr. Franklin, and to “keep totally secret where you are bound… or what is your business.” To avoid detection, Franklin and his grandchildren boarded not in Philadelphia but at Marcus Hook, several miles downstream.
Normally Franklin loved long sea voyages, but not this time. The Reprisal was “a miserable vessel,” the autumn seas were rough, the quarters cramped, and most of the food too hard for his aged teeth. Ben was also plagued by boils and the scurf, “extending over all the small of my back, on my sides, my legs, and my arms, besides what continued under my hair.” Then there was the constant fear of capture. Two weeks into the voyage, the crew spotted a pair of British men-of-war. Captain Wickes took evasive action, barely eluding the enemy ships. Ben no doubt recalled his sister Jane’s plaintive plea that he never cross the Atlantic again. “Don’t go, pray don’t go.”
By the time the Reprisal’s crew spotted the French coast on November 28, Ben was weak and malnourished. The journey, he said, “almost demolish’d me.” Unfavorable winds prevented the ship from reaching its intended destination, the port town of Nantes. For four days, they loitered off the coast until Franklin, exhausted and frustrated, convinced Captain Wickes to hire a small fishing boat to bring him ashore.
On December 4, 1776, Benjamin Franklin, seventy years old, landed at the fishing village of Auray. This time, there were no cheering crowds. Nobody was expecting him.