"Franklin's appearance in the French salons; even before he began to negotiate," says the German historian Schlosser, "was an event of great importance to the whole of Europe… His dress, the simplicity of his external appearance, the friendly meekness of the old man, and the apparent humility of the Quaker, procured for Freedom a mass of votaries among the court circles who used to be alarmed at its coarseness and unsophisticated truths." We may here add that such was the number of portraits, busts, and medallions of him in circulation before he left Paris that he would have been recognized from them by nearly every adult citizen in any part of the civilized world. Writing to his daughter in the third year of his residence in Paris, of a medallion to which she had alluded, he says – "A variety of others have been made since, of different sizes; some to be set in the lids of snuff-boxes and some so small as to be worn in rings, and the numbers sold are incredible. These, with the pictures, busts, and prints (of which copies are spread everywhere) have made your father's face as well known as the moon, so that he durst not do anything that would oblige him to run away, as his phiz would discover him wherever he should venture to show it."
The story of Franklin's mission to France, as recorded in his own correspondence, is singularly interesting and romantic. In these respects it is difficult to find its parallel in the literature of diplomacy. Its results may be summed up in a few words. He became at once, as already stated, an object of greater popular interest than any other man in France, – an interest which, during his eight years' sojourn there, seemed always on the increase. Streets in numerous cities, and several societies, were named after him; the French Academy paid him its highest honours, and he conferred more distinction upon any salon he frequented than it could reciprocate. He animated French society with a boundless enthusiasm for the cause of the rebel colonists, persuaded the Government that the interests of France required her to aid theta, obtained a treaty of alliance at a crisis in their fortunes in the winter of 1777, when such an alliance was decisive, and the great moral advantage of a royal frigate to convey the news of it to America. A few months later he signed the treaties which bound the two countries to mutual friendship and defence, and on the morning of the 30th March 1778 the three envoys were formally received by the king at Versailles, and through them the country they represented was first introduced into the family of independent nations.
In February of the following year General Lafayette, who had distinguished himself as a volunteer in the rebel army, returning to France on leave, brought a commission from the American congress to Dr Franklin as sole plenipotentiary of the United States to the court of France. From this time until the close of the war it was Franklin's paramount duty to encourage the French Government to supply the colonists with money. How successfully he discharged this duty may be inferred from the following statement of the advances made by France upon his solicitation: – In 1777, 2,000,000 francs; in 1778, 3,000,000 francs; in 1779, 1,000,000 francs; in 1780, 4,000,000 francs; in 1781, 10,000,000 francs; in 1782, 6,000,000 francs; in all, 26,000,000 francs. To obtain these aids at a time when France was not only at war, but practically bankrupt, and in defiance of the strenuous resistance of Necker, the minister of finance, was an achievement, the credit of which, there is the best reason for believing, was mainly due to the matchless diplomacy of Franklin. Writing to the French minister in Philadelphia, December 4, 1780, the Count de Vergennes said —
"As to Dr Franklin, his conduct leaves congress nothing to desire. It is as zealous and patriotic as it is wise and circumspect, and you may affirm with assurance, on all occasions where you think proper, that the method he pursues is much more efficacious than it would be if he were to assume a tone of importunity in multiplying his demands, and above all in supporting them by menaces (an allusion to the indiscreet conduct of Franklin's colleagues), to which we should give neither credence nor value, and which would only tend to render him personally disagreeable."
Again, February 15, 1781, Vergennes wrote: —
"If you are questioned respecting an opinion of Dr Franklin, you may without hesitation say that we esteem him as much on account of the patriotism as the wisdom of his conduct; and it has been owing in a great part to this cause, and the confidence we put in the veracity of Dr Franklin, that we have determined to relieve the pecuniary embarrassments in which he has been placed by congress. It may be judged from this fact, which is of a personal nature, if that minister's conduct has been injurious to the interests of his country, or if any other would have had the same advantages."
Franklin had been for some years a martyr to the gout, which, with other infirmities incident to his advanced age of seventy-five, determined him to ask congress, in 1781, to relieve him, in a letter so full of dignity and feeling, that no one can read it even now, after the lapse of nearly a century, without emotion.
"I must now," he wrote, after disposing of official topics, "beg leave to say something relating to myself – a subject with which I have not often troubled congress. I have passed my seventy-fifth year, and I find that the long and severe fit of the gout which I had the last winter had shaken me exceedingly, and I am yet far from having recovered the bodily strength I before enjoyed. I do not know that my mental faculties are impaired, – perhaps I shall be the last to discover that, – but I am sensible of great diminution of my activity, a quality I think particularly necessary in your minister at this court. I am afraid, therefore, that your affairs may some time or other suffer by my deficiency. I find also that the business is too heavy for me and too confining. The constant attendance at home, which is necessary for receiving and accepting your bills of exchange (a matter foreign to my ministerial functions), to answer letters, and perform other parts of my employment, pre vents my taking the air and exercise which my annual journeys formerly used to afford me, and which contributed much to the preservation of my health. There are many other little personal attentions which the infirmities of age render necessary to an old man's comfort, even in some degree to the continuance of his existence, and with which business often interferes.
"I have been engaged in public affairs, and enjoyed public confidence in some shape or other during the long term of fifty years, and honour sufficient to satisfy any reasonable ambition; and I have no other left but that of repose, which I hope the congress will grant me by sending some person to supply my place. At the same time I beg they may be assured that it is not any the least doubt of their success in the glorious cause, nor any disgust received in their service, that induces me to decline it, but purely and simply the reasons I have mentioned. And as I cannot at present undergo the fatigues of a sea voyage (the last having been almost too much for me), and would not again expose myself to the hazard of capture and imprisonment in this time of war, I propose to remain here at least till the peace – perhaps it may be for the remainder of my life – and if any knowledge or experience I have acquired here may be thought of use to my successor, I shall freely communicate it and assist him with any influence I may be supposed to have, or counsel that may be desired of me."
Congress not only declined to receive his resignation, but with its refusal sent him a commission, jointly with John Adams and John Jay, who had been the agent of the congress in Spain, to negotiate a peace. Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown on the 17th of October of that year, the anniversary of Burgoyne's disastrous surrender at Saratoga just four years before, and a farther prosecution of the war beyond what might be necessary to secure the most favourable terms of peace was no longer advocated by any party in England. Active negotiations with Franklin and his associates were opened, and on the 30th of November a preliminary treaty was signed by the English and American commissioners; a definitive treaty was signed on the 30th of September 1783, and ratified by congress January 14, 1784, and by the English Government on the 9th of April following. At the conclusion of the preliminary treaty Franklin renewed his application to congress to be relieved, to which he received no answer. A few weeks after signing the definitive treaty, he renewed it again, but it was not until the 7th of March 1785 that congress adopted the resolution which permitted "The Honourable Benjamin Franklin to return to America as soon as convenient," and three days later it appointed Thomas Jefferson to succeed him.
During his stay in Paris Franklin gave by no means all his time to political problems. He wrote a paper for the Royal Society on the subject of balloons, a topic which, under the auspices of the Montgolfiers, attracted a great deal of attention at that time in France. Sir Joseph Banks commended it for its completeness. To some one who asked the use of the new invention Franklin replied by asking, "What is the use of a new-born baby?" In 1784 he was appointed by the French Academy one of a commission ordered by the king to investigate the phenomena of "mesmerism"; and to a large extent he directed the investigation which resulted in the disgrace and flight of Mesmer and his final disappearance from the public eye. Franklin's Information to those who would Remove to America, his New Treatise on Privateering, his Essay on Raising the Wages in Europe by the American Revolution, his Letter to Vaughan on Luxury, his Story of the Whistle, together with his private as well as official correspondence, kept the world constantly talking about him and wondering at the inexhaustible variety and unconventional novelty of his resources. "You replace Dr Franklin," I hear, said the Count de Vergennes to Jefferson when they first met. "I succeed, no one can replace him," was Jefferson's reply.
It was on the 12th of July 1785 that, accompanied by some members of his family and most intimate friends, he set out for Havre on his return to America. In view of his infirmities, the queen had placed one of her litters at his disposal; the next day he was constrained by a most pressing invitation to accept the hospitality of Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld at Gaillon. At Rouen, he was waited upon by a deputation of the Academy of that city. At Portsmouth, where the party joined the vessel that was to take them home, the bishop of St Asaph's, "the good bishop," as Franklin used to style him, an old friend and correspondent, came down with his family to see him, and remained with him for the two or three days before they sailed.
On the 13th of September Franklin, who had become by far the most widely known and the most eminent of Americans, disembarked again at the very wharf in Philadelphia on which, sixty-two years before, he had landed a homeless, homeless, friendless, and substantially penniless runaway apprentice of seventeen. The day succeeding his arrival, the assembly of Pennsylvania voted him a congratulatory address; the public bodies very generally waited upon him, and General Washington, by letter, asked to join in the public gratulations upon his safe return to America, and upon the many eminent services he had rendered. Sensible as his countrymen were of the magnitude of their obligations to him, and of his increasing infirmities, it never seems to have occurred to them that they could dispense with his services. In the month succeeding his arrival he was chosen a member of the municipal council of Philadelphia, of which he was also unanimously elected chairman. He was soon after elected by the executive council and assembly president of Pennsylvania, by seventy-six out of the seventy-seven votes cast. "I have not firmness enough," he wrote to an old friend, "to resist the unanimous desire of my country folks, and I find myself harnessed again to their service another year. They engrossed the prime of my life. They have, eaten my flesh, and seem resolved now to pick my bones." At the expiration of his term in 1786, he was unanimously re-elected, and again unanimously in 1787. He was also chosen a member of the national convention, of which Washington was a member and president, which met on the second Monday of May 1787, to frame a constitution for the new confederacy. To the joint influence of Franklin and Washington probably should be ascribed the final adoption of the constitution which this convention framed, and which continues to be the fundamental law of the United States. The most original, if not the most ingenious, and perhaps, in view of the grave difficulties it disposed of, the most important feature of the constitution they constructed – that which gave the States equal representation in the upper house or senate and in the lower house representation according to population – was the device of Franklin. For his three years' service as president of Pennsylvania Franklin refused to accept any compensation beyond a reimbursement of the postage he had paid on official letters, amounting to some £77, 5s. 6d., it being one of his notions, which he advocated in the convention, that the chief magistrates of a nation should serve without pecuniary compensation. Franklin survived his retirement from office two years, which he consecrated almost as exclusively to the public use as any other two of his life, although most of the time the victim of excruciating pain. His pen was never more actively nor more effectively employed. He helped to organize and was president of the first society formed on the American continent or anywhere else, we believe, for the abolition of slavery, and as its president wrote and signed the first remonstrance against slavery addressed to the American congress.