The Parallel Lives

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts, 320 years ago.

     In recent days, I discovered Ken Burns’s two episodes on Benjamin Franklin that aired in April 2022 on PBS. The second part is more interesting, his efforts during the Revolution.

     Franklin was in London, when the Boston Tea Party occurred on December 16, 1773. It was he, a well-known American, who received a public berating from England’s Solicitor General January of 1774, in the Privy Council.

     His feelings hurt, Franklin sailed back to Pennsylvania, convinced that independence was a better choice. He arrived home in May 1775, a month after the battles at Lexington and Concord, a month before the horrific battle at Bunker Hill. 

     Pennsylvania appointed Franklin to the 2nd Continental Congress. He was the old man there, 69-years old. He stayed quiet, appeared to sleep often, but was keen for independence.

     In late April of 1776, Franklin, with two other delegates, traveled to Montreal, in Canada, to convince the Canadians to join the 13 colonies. The Canadians refused. Loyalists they were.

     Franklin returned with a hat composed of fur, skinned from a marten. 

      That summer, Franklin served on a committee to write a declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, then 33-years-old, wrote it, but Franklin edited it.

     Instead of, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” Franklin urged for a more philosophical meaning, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Jefferson agreed.

     On September 11, 1776, Franklin and John Adams met with British Admiral Richard Howe on Staten Island to discuss peace, but Howe refused to admit that the colonists had a new nation.

     In October 1776, Franklin sailed from Philadelphia, with two grandsons, 16-year-old Temple Franklin, and 7-year-old Benny Bache. The USS “Reprisal” arrived in France in December 1776. A month later Franklin turned 71.

     Franklin wore his marten fur hat to hide unsightly scabs atop his bald head due to weeks of a poor diet aboard the “Reprisal.” The French people considered Franklin’s hat rustic and quaint. 

     Franklin’s duty: to convince French officials to sign an alliance with the colonies and to support the Americans with arms.

     He was the one American whom the French people knew, because of his experiment with a kite in a lighting storm. Many wanted to see this famous American. He was harassed day and night at his room in the Hotel de Valentinois in Passy, a suburb within Paris.

     He played chess. He flirted with beautiful French ladies. He met King Louis XVI.

     After Franklin received the good news that American forces had defeated General Burgoyne at the battle at Saratoga, in New York, in 1777, he and French officials signed two alliances.

     The French government spent some 1.3 billion livres on the colonists’ war with England.

     With French naval support in the Chesapeake Bay, and with French soldiers and cannons, the combined American and French armies forced British general Lord Cornwallis to surrender his army at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781. The brutal and bloody war was over.

     If not for Franklin’s diplomatic skill in France, Washington may not have won the war.

     Two years later, on September 3, 1783, Benjamin Franklin signed the Paris Peace Treaty with English officials. By it, England’s government recognized America’s independence.

     Franklin sailed back to Philadelphia in the summer of 1785. Two years later, Pennsylvania appointed Franklin to the Constitutional Convention. When asked if America now had a republic or a monarchy, Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” 

     A Poor Richard quote: “either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing about.” Franklin did both. He passed away on April 17, 1790, at the age of eighty-four.