Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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and publicists than Washington was by Adams, who must have known there was some hyperbole in his comments, asserting in the summer of 1775 that the general was “a gentleman of one of the first fortunes upon the continent,” who was “leaving his delicious retirement [aged 43], his family and friends, sacrificing his ease and hazarding all in the cause of his country.” Washington’s gamble should not be understated. But Britain was at least as divided as America, as Franklin told him. It had been one thing to land forces on the Atlantic littoral of America and proceed westward and north to deal with outnumbered and under-supplied French, while receiving the cooperation, however grudging, of 2.5 million colonists (not counting several hundred thousand slaves). It would be something else, altogether more complicated, to land and sustain forces, or supply them by the tenuous routes from Canada, in sufficient numbers to subdue a rebellious population over an area four to five times as extensive as the British Isles.
The foolishness of the king and his advisers, who would be heckled mercilessly by Britain’s greatest parliamentarians (illustrating that whatever the grievances of the Americans, Britain was not quite the tyranny they claimed), could probably be relied upon to produce a great many mistakes. And the principal European powers, especially France, after the drubbing it had so recently received at the hands of the British, would be only too happy to assist in any obstruction of British enjoyment of the spoils of their recent victory. The British were hugely overconfident, because they assumed that almost all the colonists were a good deal more attached to the mother country and the Crown than they were (and they took no account of the substantial segments of the American population that were of Dutch, French, and German origin). No conventional colony had successfully revolted in post-Hellenic times, but there had never been a colony like this millions of headstrong people in as sophisticated a society as the mother country, thousands of miles distant.
For Washington, principle and opportunity conjoined, and it seemed a risk worth taking. For Franklin, it was unfolding as he expected, once he had had a good look at delusional British intransigence, toward an outcome of which he was confident. For Jefferson, much younger and less prominent than the other two, it seemed the tide of events and an idea that could be glamorized and sold. As often happens when people initiate wars, it would be much longer and more difficult than either side imagined, but, the principal American founders must have reasoned, especially Franklin with his intimate knowledge of both sides, it should be easier to exhaust the patience of the British by attrition than to crush the spirit of the distant Americans. Though no one could have known this at the time, suppressing such a revolt, as would be shown in the colonial struggles of the twentith century, from South Africa to Algeria, would generally require at least as many soldiers as there were able-bodied rebels, something vastly beyond the capacities of the British in this case.
Yet the purpose of the conflict was still not unanimously clear in America. In a pattern that would be replicated, there was an incomplete consensus in America about a war already underway. The leading Virginians, especially Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, and the leading Massachusetts public men, such as John Adams and his cousin, Samuel Adams, claimed the British recourse to force had begun a war for independence. There was a good deal of opinion in New York, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and other colonies (or states) that was less militant, still royalist in principle, and was wary of being dragged into a futile war by Virginia plantation owners and Boston merchants.
On July 5, 1775, the Second Continental Congress sent King George III a final and unanimous petition (including Washington and Jefferson and Franklin), asking that he exercise the impartial, overarching legal and moral authority he enjoyed as sovereign of all the British, at home and across the seas, to resolve the dispute between America and the British Parliament. In one of the most catastrophic blunders of British history, he issued a proclamation on August 23, condemning “the traitorous correspondence, counsels, and comfort, of diverse wicked and desperate persons within this realm” and ordered all loyal subjects, whether civilian or military, to use their “utmost endeavors to withstand and suppress such rebellion and to disclose and make known all treasons and traitorous conspiracies.” This drew the line, and many of the approximately one-third of Americans who were primarily loyal to the Crown prepared to depart for Britain or Canada; ultimately about 60,000 did depart (though estimates range up to 100,000),6 three-quarters of them to Canada, where they raised the English-speaking share of the population from less than 20 to over 40 percent, a total of 165,000 people (100,000 French), compared with about 2.5 million free Americans and 300,000 slaves. (As Canada was too northerly for the cultivation of cotton, there was never any economic rationale for slavery in that country.)
The rest of colonial opinion firmed up admirably in support of rebellion, and Franklin, still in intense correspondence with his British friends, ignored the king, whom he took to be a suggestible hothead (with some reason), and lamented “the mangling hands of a few blundering ministers. . . . God will protect and prosper [America]; you will only exclude yourselves from any share in it,” he wrote to an English friend.7 It would be a civil war, and therefore the bitterest of conflicts. Franklin was durably estranged from his son Billy, the royal governor of New Jersey, and after a long and unsuccessful conversation lasting through much of the night in May, they parted, on unfriendly terms. Young Franklin was interned in Connecticut in the ensuing conflict and spent the balance of his life in Britain. They were reconciled after the war. Franklin, now well clear of the harassments of the Penns, was president of the Committee of Safety of Pennsylvania (a precursor to the title of the dreaded authors of the Terror of Prairial in France, in the world’s next great revolution, less than 15 years off).
He called for the construction of ships to harass British men o’ war should they approach Philadelphia, and gave an outline of his proposed constitution for the new country in the Congress in the autumn of 1775. He claimed, then and later, to have been opposed to seeking alliances, but on December 9, 1775, he wrote to Charles Dumas, a learned and well-connected salonnier in The Hague, and asked for his informed opinion on the possibility of seeking aid in Europe against the British in a coming insurrection. While he was awaiting a response, the French government sent the Chevalier de Bonvouloir to America to investigate the military and diplomatic prospects. Franklin and his committee eagerly concerted hypotheses with the visitor. The Committee of Correspondence that Jefferson had helped establish, at Franklin’s urging, sent Silas Deane to Paris with a mandate to determine whether alliance, or at least recognition, would be attainable from the French.
Thomas Paine’s inflammatory pamphlet Common Sense called for independence and denounced monarchy generally, and had a huge sale and influence. Washington had sent a force to gain control of the British province of Quebec and persuade the French-speaking Canadians to join the incipient revolt. They captured Montreal but were sent packing before the walls of Quebec. Washington asked Franklin, as the Americans’ preeminent diplomat, to try his hand at persuading the Canadians. Unfortunately for the cause, the government of Canada was in the hands of a governor so skillful that had he been given charge of America instead, he might have settled down the whole problem. Sir Guy Carleton, subsequently Lord Dorchester, had caused the British adoption of the Quebec Act in 1774, by which the French Canadians pledged allegiance to the British Crown and the British government pledged preservation of the French language, the Roman Catholic religion, and the civil law. Both sides adhered rigorously to their pledges.
For the French Canadians, there was a credibility problem in the American profession of friendship, as hostility to the French and to Roman Catholicism had been prominent in the attitudes of their late opponents in the French and Indian (Seven Years’) Wars. Franklin was empowered to make no such pledge of continuity and cultural security, though he could probably have managed the religious and legal guarantees. But as citizens of a united amalgamation of emancipated colonies, the French population of 100,000 was sure to be subsumed in the English-speaking majority of three million. The Americans had been foraging off the land and were hugely unpopular with the locals, and they were effectively chased out of Canada. (Benedict Arnold, an able general, commanded, and underestimated at the outset, by almost 50 percent, the length of the long trek ahead of him. He led his force well, as he would continue to do as the most controversial figure in the war, but it was an impossible mission.)
From Lexington and Concord, possibly the most mythologized aspects of this entire conflict (no one knows which side fired the