Tag Archives: American Revolution

Diplomacy, Ben Franklin Style

13 Friday Oct 2017

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“In France, seventy-year-old Franklin began the third phase of his extraordinary life. His fame as a scientist and philosopher blended with the huge excitement he generated as the spokesman for the embattled new republic, the United States of America. With consummate shrewdness, Franklin wore the simple clothes of an American Quaker, an imaginary character created by savants such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The French wanted to believe that in the new world a new kind of man was emerging, free of the corruptions and infirmities of their decadent old world. Franklin was more than ready to encourage this illusion. One excited Parisian wrote: ‘€œEverything about him announces the simplicity of primitive morals€… The people clustered about him as he passed and asked: “Who is this old peasant who has such a noble air?”‘

The old peasant, whose primitive morals had enabled him to maintain wives on both sides of the Atlantic without a hint of scandal, was soon displaying his gift for backstairs diplomacy. He began by charming France’€™s foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes. With the help of several American victories on the battlefield, Franklin persuaded this cautious veteran of twenty-four years™ service in Europe’€™s capitals to back the United States, first with secret aid and then with a formal alliance in 1778. This was only the beginning of Franklin’€™s French accomplishments. He secured over $40 million in loans and gifts from the French treasury — €”the equivalent of perhaps $600 million today — €”money that kept the bankrupt American government functioning. He supervised the shipment of tons of supplies and weapons to America. He armed and equipped American sea captains, such as John Paul Jones, who preyed on British shipping in their home waters with spectacular success…

In a cheerful letter to a grandniece in America, Franklin had [an] explanation for his dalliances: ‘Somebody gave it out that I loved ladies; and then every body presented me their ladies (or the ladies presented themselves) to be embraced, that is to have their necks kissed. For as to kissing on the lips or cheeks it is not the mode here, the first is reckoned rude, and the other may rub off the paint. The French ladies have however 1000 other ways of rendering themselves agreeable; by their various attentions and civilities, & their sensible conversation. ‘Tis a delightful people to live with.’…

Occasionally, one madam or mademoiselle asked him if he cared for her more than the other pursuers. With a smile Franklin would reply in his limping French, ‘€˜Yes, when you are closest to me, because of the power of the attraction.’

The remark combined flirtation and a reminder of his fame as a scientist. He was comparing the lady’€™s impact on him to the way an electrified piece of metal drew iron filings to it. Behind these amorous games lay the goal Franklin never forgot — €”persuading the French to back the faltering American Revolution. He knew — €”and cheerfully approved — the passion for politics among upper-class French women. He hoped their enthusiasm for his amiable American ways would be transmitted to their influential husbands or lovers.”

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Pulled from Thomas Fleming’s The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers.

Move onward:

Jefferson and the Bible

29 Friday May 2015

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Thomas Jefferson

“Mr. Jefferson was a public professor of his belief in the Christian religion. In all his most important early State papers… there are more or less pointed recognitions of God and Providence. In his two inaugural addresses as president of the United States, and in many of his annual messages, he makes the same recognitions… declares his belief in the efficacy of prayer, and the duty of ascriptions of praise of the Author of all mercies; and speaks of the Christian religion as professed in his country as a benign religion, evincing the favor of Heaven. Had his wishes been consulted, the symbol borne on our national seal would have contained our public profession of Christianity as a nation. There is nothing in his writings or in the history of his life to show that his public declarations were insincere, or thrown out for mere effect. On the contrary, his most confidential writings sustain his public professions, and advance beyond them into the avowal of a belief in a future state of rewards and punishments…

From his second Inaugural Message, December 15th, 1802: ‘When we assemble together, fellow citizens, to consider the state of our beloved country, our just attentions are first drawn to those pleasing circumstances which mark the goodness of that Being from whose favor they flow, and the large measure of thankfulness we owe for His bounty. Another year has come around and finds us still blessed with peace and friendship abroad; law, order, and religion, at home.’

From his third annual message, October 17th, 1803: ‘While we regret the miseries in which we see others involved, let us bow with gratitude to that kind Providence, which, inspiring with wisdom and moderation our late legislative counsels while placed under the urgency of the greatest wrongs, guarded us from hastily entering into the sanguinary contest, and left us only to look on and to pity its ravages.’

He contributed freely to the erection of Christian churches, gave money to Bible Societies and other religious objects, and was a liberal and regular contributor to the support of the clergy. Letters of his are extant which show him urging, with respectful delicacy, the acceptance of extra and unsolicited contributions on the pastor of his parish, on occasions of extra expense to the latter, such as the building of a house, the meeting of an ecclesiastical convention at Charlottesville, etc. He attended church with as much regularity as most of the members of the congregation — sometimes going alone on horseback, when his family remained at home. He generally attended the Episcopal Church, and when he did so, always carried his prayer book and joined in the responses and prayers of the congregation. He was baptized into the Episcopal Church in his infancy; he was married by one of its clergymen; his wife lived and died a member of it; his children were baptized into it, and when married were
married according to its rites; its burial services were read over those of them who preceded him to the grave, over his wife, and finally over himself. No person ever heard him utter a word of profanity, and those who met him most familiarly through periods of acquaintance that they never heard a word of impiety, or any scoff at extending from two or three to twenty or thirty years, declare religion from his lips. Among his numerous familiar acquaintances, we have not found one whose testimony is different, or who entertained any doubts of the strict justice, sincerity, truthfulness and exemplariness of his personal character.”

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Pulled from the Jefferson chapter of William Slaughter’s 1878 book Reminiscences of Distinguished Men.

I’m sorry for the recent hiatus. I’ve been really busy with real business.

In a letter to his eldest daughter, Jefferson cited his personal declaration of faith, which he made in the following letter to his friend, Benjamin Rush, on April 21st, 1803:

Dear Sir:

In some of the delightful conversations with you, in the evenings of 1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the afflictions of the crisis through which our country was then laboring, the Christian religion was sometimes our topic; and I then promised you, that one day or other, I would give you my views of it. They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus Himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others.

To this rather elastic, New Testament self-definition of Christian, it’s worth adding that Jefferson — who spent a good chunk of his retirement splicing his own, naturalistic version of the Gospels — was found to have hand-written the entirety of Psalm 15 on the inside cover of the prayer book mentioned by Slaughter.

As a small additional note: in 1776, at the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson was appointed along with Franklin and Adams to the committee to design a national seal. Adams suggested Hercules as the seal’s central figure. Franklin recommended Moses standing atop the Red Sea. Jefferson sided with Franklin, but also wanted it to include Pharaoh and Hengist and Horsa, the Germanic brothers who led the Anglo-Saxons in their fifth-century conquest of Britain.

Read on:

How George Washington Led

01 Monday Dec 2014

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George Washington

“Financial support from France and the Netherlands, and military support from the French army and navy, would play a large part in the outcome. But in the last analysis it was Washington and the army that won the war for American independence. The fate of the war and the revolution rested on the army. The Continental Army — not the Hudson River or the possession of New York or Philadelphia — was the key to victory. And it was Washington who held the army together and gave it ‘spirit’ through the most desperate of times.

He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.

Again and again, in letters to Congress and to his officers, and in his general orders, he had called for perseverance — for ‘perseverance and spirit,’ for ‘patience and perseverance,’ for ‘unremitting courage and perseverance.’ Soon after the victories of Trenton and Princeton, he had written: ‘A people unused to restraint must be led, they will not be drove.’ Without Washington’s leadership and unrelenting perseverance, the revolution almost certainly would have failed. As Nathanael Greene foresaw as the war went on, ‘He will be the deliverer of his own country.’

American Revolution.png

The war was a longer, far more arduous, and more painful struggle than later generations would understand or sufficiently appreciate. By the time it ended, it had taken the lives of an estimated 25,000 Americans, or roughly 1 percent of the population. In percentage of lives lost, it was the most costly war in American history, except for the Civil War.

The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they would never forget.

Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning — how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference — the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.”

George Washington at Yorktown

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The final page of 1776by David McCullough.

Press onward:

What to be Wary of in Your Government

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

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John Adams

“The management of so complicated and mighty a machine, as the United Colonies, requires the meekness of Moses, the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon, added to the valour of Daniel…

We may feel sanguine confidence of our strength: yet in a few years it may be put to the tryal.

We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger, that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear, that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence, by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance not learning. By contracted hearts not large souls. I fear too, that it will be impossible to convince and perswade People to establish wise regulations.

There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we are all undone. There must be a decency, and respect… introduced for persons in authority, of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular Government, this is the only way of supporting order—and in our circumstances, as our People have been so long without any Government at all, it is more necessary than, in any other.”

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John Adams, writing to his friend and Paymaster General of the Continental Army, James Warren, on April 22nd, 1776.

It’s critical to keep in mind exactly what Adams and the founders meant by “happy” in the context of writing about government and law. As Robert P. George recently clarified:

The term “happiness” in the 18th century—and, in fact, until quite recently—did not refer simply to a pleasing or desirable psychological state—one that might be induced by virtue, vice, or, for that matter, some pharmacological product. It included the idea of flourishing or all round well-being, which necessarily was understood to involve virtue. (As in “happy the man who walks the path of justice.”) In other words, it was a morally inflected locution.

Exactly two decades following the delivery of this letter, Adams himself would be elected to the Presidency. Commenting on that event, Christopher Hitchens noted, “It is perhaps both heartening and sobering to reflect that, in the contest between Jefferson and Adams in 1796, the electors were offered a choice between the President of the American Philosophical Society and the founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and chose both of them.” Jefferson was President of the APS in 1780 (Benjamin Franklin had founded the society in 1743), and John Adams founded the AAAS with John Hancock and James Bowdoin during the American Revolution. In the election of 1796, Adams carried 71 electoral votes to become President, barely edging Jefferson’s 68.

More Adams:

The Incredible Rise of Alexander Hamilton

29 Tuesday Apr 2014

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Alexander Hamilton4

“Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being — that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen — seems little short of miraculous. Because he maintained perfect silence about his unspeakable past, never exploiting it to puff his later success, it was impossible for his contemporaries to comprehend the exceptional nature of his personal triumph. What we know of Hamilton’s childhood has been learned almost entirely during the past century.”

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From Ron Chernow’s biography Alexander Hamilton.

To make matters worse, and add yet another card to a deck already stacked against him, young Alexander was simultaneously struck with the same fever which eventually took his mother, and was therefore too delirious to even say farewell. Because the family had only a single bed, Chernow notes, Alexander was “probably writhing inches from his mother when she expired.”

The fact that Hamilton overcame these enormous setbacks to quickly rise to political prominence — not to mention emotional normalcy — is a testament to the singularity of both his intelligence and his resilience. What’s more, as one often senses in accounts of the Founders, not only was he a luminous statesman, but he also emerges from the page as, well, a pretty cool guy, with a personality somehow more endearingly human and three-dimensional than many in Washington today. I’ve already posted some about Hamilton the bachelor, to which Chernow adds a priceless anecdote:

Hamilton, twenty-five, was instantly smitten with Schuyler, twenty-two. Fellow aide Tench Tilghman reported: ‘Hamilton is a gone man.’ Pretty soon, Hamilton was a constant visitor at the two-story Campfield residence, spending every evening there. Everyone noticed that the young colonel was starry-eyed and distracted. Although a touch absentminded, Hamilton ordinarily had a faultless memory, but, returning from Schuyler one night, he forgot the password and was barred by the sentinel…

For those interested in reading more about Hamilton, I recommend Chernow’s book (which is lengthy yet well paced), but not before you watch the fantastic exchange between Jon Meacham and David Brooks about the competing political visions and personalities of Hamilton and his rival Thomas Jefferson. In this discussion, Meacham takes the side of the subject of his biography, as Brooks, a traditional conservative, defends Hamilton. The following remarks from Brooks are highlights of the discussion and supplement the words above:

I’m going to get the dates wrong, but you’ll get the idea.

So when Hamilton was thirteen, his mom died in the bed next to him. He was adopted by his uncle who died — who committed suicide — then he was adopted by his grandparents who died within a year. So by fourteen he’d lost everybody he ever loved except for his brother. A court came in and took away his property. So at fourteen he essentially had nothing. By twenty-five he is George Washington’s Chief of Staff and a war hero. By thirty-five he’s been the author of The Federalist Papers and is one of the top lawyers in New York. By forty or forty-five he has retired as the most successful treasury secretary in U.S. history.

And so he is a story of intense upward mobility. And his philosophy was to create a system of government which would allow poor boys and girls like him to succeed.

Read on:

  • Alexander Hamilton the bachelor identifies what he likes in a girl
  • David Brooks and Jon Meacham discuss Jefferson, Hamilton, and the ‘art of power’
  • Jefferson and Hamilton duke it out over the national debt

Alexander Hamilton

George Washington Rips Party Politics

25 Friday Apr 2014

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George Washington

“[P]arty disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day whilst the momentous concerns of an empire, a great and accumulated debt; ruined finances, depreciated money, and want of credit (which in their consequences is the want of every thing) are but secondary considerations and postponed from day to day, from week to week as if our affairs wore the most promising aspect; after drawing this picture, which from my Soul I believe to be a true one I need not repeat to you that I am alarmed and wish to see my Countrymen roused.”

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General George Washington, writing from Philadelphia on December 30th, 1778, in a letter to his friend and signatory to the Declaration Independence, Benjamin Harrison V.

This correspondence, which was penned at the dicey midpoint of the Revolutionary War, of course illuminates the abiding nature of American partisanship and our intermittent anxiety about inflation, debt and national finances. Yet it also gives depth to the psyche of its normally even-tempered author, most especially Washington’s faithfulness, which was as unshakeable as folkloric claims about his honesty. As historian Ron Chernow notes in his biography, “Washington was always reluctant to sign on to any cause, because when he did so, his commitment was total.”

In his text, Chernow bookends this letter which a description of its tense political context, which has some pointed applicability to our own time and picks up exactly a week before Washington penned this note:

On December 23 Washington took a brief respite from his incessant labors and traveled to Philadelphia to confer with Congress about the prospective Canadian invasion… Washington had already asked Martha to meet him in Philadelphia and she had eagerly awaited him there since late November. They would celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary in the city that January… yet the trip would prove anything but a vacation. Staying at the Chestnut Street home of Henry Laurens, Washington got a view of civilian life that would revolt him with an indelible vision of private greed and profligacy. Like soldiers throughout history, he was jarred by the contrast between the austerity of the army and the riches being earned on the home front through lucrative war contracts…

Ever since Valley Forge, Washington had lamented the profiteering that deprived his men of critically needed supplies, and he remained contemptuous of those who rigged and monopolized markets, branding them “the pests of society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America,” as he erupted in one fire-breathing letter. “I would to God that one of the most atrocious of each state was hung in gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman.” Because of hoarding and price manipulation, among other reasons, the mismanaged currency had lost 90 percent of its value in recent months. As he contemplated these problems, Washington was also distraught over popular disunity and wished that the nation could move beyond factional disputes…

More letters from the founders:

  • Mr. Jefferson lends some advice to his teenage grandson
  • Alexander Hamilton sends a request to a friend, asking about girls
  • John Adams writes to his wife about his faltering sense of self-confidence