Before he declared he was going to be for independence, Franklin wanted to have a meeting with his son, William, who's the royal governor of New Jersey by this point. And Franklin goes and they meet in a manor house halfway in between Philadelphia and where William was in New Jersey, and they have a very long and tough night. And Benjamin Franklin tells William he's going to be on the side of the revolution and that William should resign his governorship.
And William doesn't, And I think he was dismayed that his son had not only become a royal governor and a loyalist, but was loving the persh of power. And it's a riff that never gets repaired.
In many ways, Benjamin Franklin was an unlikely revolutionary. Franklin was someone who always tried to mend fences rather than tear them down. Through his work as an experimental scientist, a writer, and a businessman. He was always problem solving, looking for the most practical solution. But his pension for compromise was challenged during the Revolution when his adopted hometown of Philadelphia became a hotbed of anti colonial fervor still, Franklin was a man of his times, ready to meet
the moment. But what's surprising is how much of the work he did on behalf of America was actually done abroad. In this episode of On Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson paints the picture of Franklin the diplomat and how his genius as a statesman may be one of his most underappreciated. Let's talk about a bit of Franklin and his early work as a founding father. When does Franklin move from being this civic minded businessman hanging out with the Leather Apron Club to really diving into politics.
When he retires in his early forties and gets interested in science, he also gets interested in politics in a larger scale. He believes that we have to all work together in the various colonies to stave off threats, and so he takes that notion of civic associations applies it on a more colonial level, helping fund George Washington and
others fighting the French and Indian War. And so Franklin is trying to work out a system where instead of just voluntary associations, we now have to tax ourselves we now have to govern ourselves. He was a leader in the Colonial Assembly in Pennsylvania and of the faction that was trying to oppose the Penn family because the different
colonies had different ways of governance. Some were crown colonies directly ruled by the king, but some were proprietors like the Penn family, who had the right to govern Pennsylvania to some extent. They had a charter, and it was unclear whether they could tax the people in Pennsylvania and refuse to pay taxes themselves, which is indeed what was happening, And so that gets him involved in the things that lead us to a revolution, whether it's the import duties,
the stamp, taxation without representation. But Franklin's first mission is simply to loosen the power of the Penn family.
Franklin gets selected by the Assembly to represent Pennsylvania in London as their agent to the Crown, and he's animated by the challenge, but he's also excited by the energy of this bustling city.
Although Philadelphia in the seventeen fifties was the largest city in America, it had only twenty three thousand inhabitants. It was just a few dusty streets in a market street, whereas London was thirty times the size, with a quarter of a million inhabitants and growing really fast. London was the largest city in Europe and second only to Beijing in the world. But it was cramped, It was dirty,
It was filled with disease and prostitutes in clime. More importantly, it was stratified into an upper class of titled aristocrats and a lower class of impoverished workers. What Franklin does, as he did in America, was gravitate to what was becoming a burgeoning middle class, a middle class of tradesmen
and artisans. When he gets back to London for the first time, he goes back to the print shop where he worked as a young printer, and he buys beer for everybody there, the fashionable aristocrats in London, there were growing up a lot of clubs such as Whites and Brooks and Boodles. Franklin didn't feel comfortable there, but there was for the burgeoning new class of writers and journalists
and professionals and intellectuals. There were coffee shops which provided newspapers and tables where you could sit all afternoon with friends and discuss current events, and that's where Franklin gravitated, certainly, both with his middle class and intellectual friends, but also people cared about politics. Lark barklay Hume had created an enlightenment mindset that you saw in London and also in Paris, and not surprisingly those become the two cities Franklin loves
the most besides Philadelphia. Now there were those who were more disposed to American rights, and Franklin becomes close to a lot of them, especially the Whigs. But there are those in a governing party who consider him dangerous, as indeed he was to their control.
And so there's this class of people who are clearly suspicious of Ben Franklin. Does he have to be careful about what he says or.
Does Franklin understood the new media age of his time and how there could be scandals and people could write scoreless things. And in the seventeen sixties he writes a letter to his daughter and says, your slightest indiscretions will be magnified into crimes in order to sensibly wound and afflict me. In other words, he had become such a celebrity. He knew that his enemies would be publishing stories about his family as a way to take him down.
And that's even something that you might not realize today if you think of Franklin as how famous he was for his scientific experiments and famous as a founder, but that if you're going to be that famous, you will also generate enemies.
Franklin tried very hard not to generate enemies. This was a very passionate period that I'm leading up to a revolution, of course, and whether it was the Penn family or there was a family of Lee's up in Massachusetts, he developed enemies of people who either were loyal to the crown or were loyal to the proprietors. And he tended his reputation very well. But when he did make enemies, they were pretty strong enemies.
Now did he have revolutionary notions at that time.
Franklin was very much a believer in the beauty of the British Empire. He was very loyal to the concept of Americans and people in England all being part of this great empire. He called it a noble vase, and once it got broken, it wouldn't be put back together. So as the colonial agent in London, his first mission is trying to prevent a revolution. Near the end, he comes up with the plan that the colonial assemblies are
just like Parliament. They're all subject to the king, but they make their own taxes and do their own governance. And it's sort of what we now have in the Commonwealth. Had his plan succeeded, the US would be like Canada. He got very close and had the Whig state and power in England. He may have been able to work out this Commonwealth relationship, but he gets humiliated by the ministers.
There describe a little bit how that humiliation came about.
At one point when he keeps presenting petitions to the ministers, he gets embroiled in controversy over leaking some letters, which he did. But the most important thing is he gets called before a hearing of Parliament in what's called the cockpit. He's wearing this velvet coat and he gets prosecuted and he doesn't say a word as they keep attacking him and attacking him. And this is the beginning of his
realization that no, this is not going to work. And the interesting thing is that years later, when he ends up at the end of the revolution negotiating both the alliance with France and then the peace treaty with England. When he signs it, he puts that same coat back on and he gusks why, and he says to give it a little revenge because he remembers that day in the cockpit.
So it feels like he's still learning as a diplomat right now, still figuring out how to maneuver in this new position.
Right One of Franklin's problems as an agent in England is he was too accommodat and he tried too hard to get a solution. He hasn't fervently fought the Stamp Act, and when it gets back to America, there's a backlash, so he has to scramble, and in a way that pushes him towards the side of becoming more revolutionary because he realizes that he's lost touch with the anti taxation, anti British sentiments that had welled up in America.
But in a way he quickly finds his footing because he actually prints one of the more incendiary pamphlets.
Yeah. One of the great spurs to revolution in early seventeen seventy six was an anonymous pamphlet called Common Sense. It turned out it was written by Thomas Paine, but people didn't know that it was anonymous, and some people thought that Franklin had written it. It's a huge success. I think it'd sold more than one hundred thousand copies.
Even though Franklin wasn't the author, he had an indirect hand in it because he was the one who had helped bring Thomas Payne over from England as a cheeky young hope to be printer and helped get Common Sense published. So Franklin is bequeathing to a new generation that notion of being a pamphleteer being published, and that helps bring us closer to revolution.
More on that right, after a quick break, let's talk about the revolution. When the first shots were fired in April seventeen seventy five, Benjamin Franklin wasn't back from London yet. He arrives just a few weeks later. What's this scene like.
In seventeen seventy five, about half the people in the colonies built loyal to the crown, in about half were starting to well up with a sense that we were going to have a revolution. When he finally returns to Philadelphia, he's greeted by cheering throngs, but there's a question will he really cast his lot on the side of revolution.
Did the fact that Franklin's son was a real governor and that he broke with him over independence, did that lend Franklin more credibility among the revolutionaries or did it end up casting suspicion on him that he might still have royal inclinations.
Yeah, well, Franklin's rivals and enemies treated him with some suspicion. But one thing that happens is George Washington ends up finally winning in New Jersey and William is arrested, and it becomes a question whether Benjamin Franklin will earne urge that his son be parolled or whatever. And no, he doesn't. He lets his son be arrested and imprisoned in Connecticut. And I think it's because Benjamin Franklin wanted to make
it clear he didn't have divided loyalties. His new loyalties were with the new country and not with his son, the royal governor.
And so in seventeen seventy six, as a full fledged revolutionary, Benjamin Franklin joins the Continental Congress.
One of the things that happens is the Continental Congress decides if we're going to have a revolution for independence, we have to write a declaration explaining why we're doing this. And so the Continental Congress appoints a committee may have been the last time Congress appointed a great committee. But on it are Benjamin Franklin, of course, Thomas Jefferson, and
John Adams. And Jefferson gets to write the first draft, even though he's like really young, I think thirty one or so, because he's the best writer, he's more passionate, and he sends it to Franklin for editing, and it's a wonderful letter, he writes. They're all living in Philadelphia with the Congress's meeting. He said, with the good doctor Franklin and all of his wisdom, look over this document and see what improvements it can make. And it's like
people are really nice to editors back then. And you see one of the most amazing documents in American history. It's not just the declaration, but the first draft of the declaration that's in the Library of Congress. And you look at the most famous, most brilliant sentence ever written by human hand, the one that begins, we hold these truths, And there's Jefferson's first draft, we hold these truths to
be sacred. And Franklin, with the dark black backslashes a printer he uses to cross something out, takes it out and writes self evident, and he explains we're trying to create a new type of nation in which our rights come not from the dictates of religion, but from rationality and reason. And the sentence goes on, and there's John Adams's handwriting when they say endowed by their creator with
certain inalienable rights. So just in the writing of one half of one sentence, you can see our founders doing this balance between the role of divine providence and the role of rationality and reason in securing our rights as individuals and our governance as a nation.
I feel you can also see there all of what you've already discussed about Franklin's inclination towards collaboration and compromise happening around that document.
Right. What Franklin realizes is that they're balances you have to put in, And even in that part of a sentence, you have a balance. It's not all divine right gives us this, and it's not all just pure rationality. There's a certain balance that we strike. When we're figuring out our role as a nation.
Let's talk about self evident because I want to make sure we don't gloss over that. The importance of self evident, right, What was the significance of the phrase.
When Jefferson writes we hold these truths to be sacred, and then Franklin edits it to be self evident. He's partly talking about the role of rationality, but he also got that phrase from his close friend David Hume, the world's greatest philosopher at the time. Franklin actually stayed at the home of David Hume. You know, he met Adam Smith. He read The Wealth of Nations before it was published.
So Franklin has soaked all this up. And David Hume had come up with this idea that there were certain truths that were just self evident.
And the issue with sacred was I mean, I don't know how much she explicated this then or leader, but would the issue with sacred be that anyone could make a claim on sacred if it had a religious tinge to it.
Most governments up until that point derive their authority from an appeal to divinity, the divine right of kings, being the most famous example, and the grace of God explained where the power came from. There was something totally new that was beginning with the Declaration and culminates with the Constitution, which is, no, the power is not divinely given. It's
something that comes from we the people. And I think Franklin was saying, we don't want to premise our basic beliefs that all men have created equal, they're endowed with certain inalienable rights. We don't want to premise this on coming from theology. No, it comes from certain evident truth.
And then we get this moment, this most famous moment of John Hancock saying there must be no pulling in different ways.
When they're signing the declaration. John Hancock of course does it with the famous flourish and he says, we must not all go our separate ways. We have to hang together. And Franklin, that's the theme of his life, that we have to all intertwine, we have to all hold hands, and he says a famous funny line, which is, yes, we all must hang together, or surely we'll all hang separately.
And so this notion of working collegially and in tandem to assert our rights that begins with the Declaration then culminates with the Constitution.
There was one smaller moment that just really struck me in the way that Franklin shows up and influences so many different aspects of American life. And it's that don't tread on Me flag that he also happens to be the person who saw that flag and brought it in to be more official flag of the revolution.
Yeah, it was part of Franklin's genius of sort of knowing how to visually convey information, How a Join or Die cartoon of a snake being cut up, how these visual things can have an impact.
He loved a snake. He's got the snake in Join or Die. There's the don't tread on Me snake, and he has all philosophy about why the snake is the right symbol. It doesn't strike first.
But when it strikes, it strikes, yes, right exactly. Another snake that's interesting that we have to deal with today is one of Franklin's sort of friends but occasional opponents, the guy named Albert Gary, who didn't really believe in a pure democracy. He felt that the rabble shouldn't be allowed to rule too much. And among other things, that he creates as his congressional district that looks like a snake,
and it gets called a gary Man. Nowadays we pronounced it Jerry Mander based on Albert Gary doing that snake like district, and Franklin thought that was a bit appalling.
One snake that he didn't care for. Ye, So after the Declaration of Independence, I feel like he could have hung up his spurs. He's in his seventies by this point. He keeps taking on assignments to go places and do things, no matter the danger.
I mean, he's hitting seventy, which is back then considered retirement age. Yeah. But they give him another mission, which is we just declared a revolution and we needed the munitions, we needed the navy, and so they send Franklin off to France to try to form an alliance in which the French would come in on outside on the revolution. Yeah.
You describe it as the most dangerous, complex and fascinating of all of his public missions.
It's a very treacherous voyage, especially during wartime. But Franklin both out of a sense of duty, but also I think as a personal sense of venture, wanting to be relevant. He's there sailing across the ocean, pushing himself in a somewhat courageous way, when he could have been sitting back at home in his new house that he had built in Philadelphia.
After the break, we dive into Franklin's adventures in France and how the savvy diplomat charmed the nation in between playing chess with his mistresses. On December third, seventeen seventy six, Ben Franklin arrives in France with an enormous diplomatic challenge ahead of him. He's come to woo the French to get them to support the American side, because, like the other founding fathers, he knows that without France's help, the revolutionaries have no chance of winning the war.
It is very difficult to get France in on our side in the revolution. I mean to put it mildly. The King of France wasn't so much in favor of revolutions against royal rule. But France has its own interests, and Franklin is brilliant at both playing to the national interests of France and the national ideals. So he gets to France and he plays this balance of power game,
saying France and Spain. The Bourbon pac Nations, along with the Netherlands, have for more than four hundred years been fighting off and on with England, and if they come in with us on our side in the revolution is going to help the balance of power. It will help them keep the colonies like in the Caribbean, etc. But he also plays an idealistic game when he gets there. He has a printing press and he prints the documents coming out of America, like the Declaration of Independence or
the rights of Virginia. And he realizes that in France is welling up this notion of liberty, equality for and he wants to play to that as well.
But as we mentioned in an earlier episode, when Benjamin Franklin gets to France, he's a bit of a rock star. He's older and widowed by now, but he's a celebrity. Crowds are waiting at the docks to catch a glimpse of the guy who invented the lightning rod. He's carried to the steps of the Academy of Sciences in Paris to hug Voltaire, and he's dressed in a ridiculous fashion with a specific purpose in mind.
When Franklin gets to France. He continues to portray himself in ways that'll be useful, and he knows that the French of red Rousseau perhaps wants to do often, and they worship the backwoods philosopher as a natural man. And so Franklin gets to France and he wears instead of a wig, he wears this backwoods fur cap. And so soon in Paris the women are wearing cafus a la Franklin. I mean, their hair do is done as if it's
a wool cap. And he just totally wins over the French people, which he realizes, besides playing to his vanity, helps him win over the French government, the French foreign minister and others. They know how popular America and Franklin is.
Well, that's I mean, it's such a masterful pr move for him to portray himself as this sort of davy Crockett who's actually never been out on the frontier fighting the fight.
Yeah, Franklin was not a backwoods natural wilderness philosopher. He had lived in the heart of Boston. He had lived on Market Street, and he had lived on Craven Street in London. He had barely been to the backwoods on one trip to Canada, where he's representing the Pennsylvania Assembly trying to figure out its defenses, he buys a fur cap and it certainly wins the French over.
I want to talk about his life outside out of Paris, or in the suburbs of Paris. It's very striking.
Yeah, it's Posse, which is a suburb of Paris. It's a nice manor house. It's used as the American colonial or then the United States out posts there. So John Adams is there for a while when he's an agent. Jefferson of course comes over at some point, but it's weirdly a nest of spies. There's a guy Edward Bancroft who's working there who's a total spy on Franklin and
reading his letters. But Franklin says, I've learned that even if my valet is a spy, to act the same way, because I'll just do things that I don't care if they get exposed, which wasn't totally good because Bancroft was effective at knowing what ships were going over. But Franklin just leads this fun life in Posse.
He's a man who rejects pretension in all ways. When he's younger and throughout his life he represents the rejection of pretension, but also it seems like he likes a little bit of the high life.
Well, I mean, it is true that all people who reject pretension so don't really mind having a good bottle of wine now and then, and certainly he was in that category. He loved Madeira, and yes he never puts on royal airs, but he does live pretty well, and
of course he loves the adulation. He has two what he calls mistresses there and at this point, as I say, he's in his seventies, so they're not purely romantic, but Madame Brionn, Madame Haviltius, he's flirting with, he's having salons, he has them over so he loves leading the good life in Paris and even playing chess while he's in the bathtub with one of his mistresses. But he also makes fun about how his relationship won't get too far even though he dreams of it. That type of thing, and.
Describe this environment as a state that he's living on.
John Adams is also there, and they're a bit like oil and water. Franklin said he learned French by writing Bagatelles to his French girlfriends. Was John Adams learned French by memorizing funeral orations? And Adams think that Franklin's having too much fun with Madam Hillvisius and Madame Briawe and others.
Yeah, there's a little bit of pearl clutching by John Adams when he arrives onto the scene.
Oh. John Adams's rivalry was Franklin is the stuff of law. He's always very jealous. John Adams thought that he had written the Founding Document of America, which was a resolution earlier in seventeen seventy six to break away the assemblies from parliamentary power, and he's upset that Jefferson and then Franklin are given KREDI says, everybody's going to think it's just Franklin who's always doing the things. But he also comes to be a grudging admirer of Franklin.
And how does Franklin mix this sort of social and political Like it seems like he's having fun, but there's a method to it.
Yeah. I think that, especially his appearance with Voltaire when they hug on the steps of the Academy, or his way of being part of the salons, both of Paris and in Posse. He realizes, as others after him did, that having this Rakish cachet and a bit of celebrity gives him a certain power. He can't be ignored or declared persona non grado the way they did with John Adams.
And is the rivalry between Adams and Franklin in this time? I mean, is there a way in which they're driving each other like they have different outlooks to a certain extent on how this diplomacy should be taking place. Adams doesn't always like how Franklin's doing it. But is it the combination of them that makes it happen or is Adam's kind of impediment to Franklin's plans?
Early on, before the revolution was in full force, Adams and Franklin traveled together to go meet the commander of the British forces on Staten Island. And it's that scene where they have to share a bedroom and they argue about the common cold and the freshness of air. But they send Adams along because they think Franklin, just by his nature, is to accommodating. You send him there, you'll
find some deal to be made. Whereas Adams is not a deal maker, and that continues all the way through the Great because Adams feels Franklin's too accommodating to the French. He gives away too much, he wants to be liked too much, and this is why the French like Franklin. They don't like Adams, but it's useful for them to be there. And then the next round is when they have to negotiate the treaty that ends the war, the treaty with England, and once again Adams it's a hard
liner and Franklin's more willing to make a deal. So I guess that combination works well. And how is the communication happening?
I mean, these days, no diplomat is operating anywhere in the world without constant communication with the people who have dispatched that diplomat there. But it takes a month to even get there. The letters are going to be slow. How much is Franklin freelancing and he can do whatever he wants versus he's tethered to the desires of the Continental Congress.
That's why diplomacy was so much more important back then, because you couldn't have detailed instructions being cabled to you every hour, Yeah, to wait a month or so. And so when it comes to doing both the treaty of Alliance with France and then the treaty that ends in war with Britain, Franklin has quite a bit of leeway. And there are some disputes later where he may have
conceded too much on fishing rights or something. But it was a time when diplomats had to figure out for themselves, being genius about how to get things done.
So how does Franklin ultimately sway the French to join the war and pull off this.
Feet At first Verjeon, who is a French foreign minister, and certainly the king resists it. They want to help America but not have to take blame for it. But then Franklin was more successful than he could have imagined, getting a full fledged treaty of alliance, and then even people like Lafayette being sent over, who becomes an indispensable commander.
In addition to getting Lafayette to come over, of course, there's the famous John Paul Jones who becomes supplied by France and his ship is called the bon Homme Richard, and that's because it's named after poor Richard of Poor
Richard's Almanac. I think that you rarely have seen in history a blending of idealism and realism that are twined together the way Franklin did, in other words, with his public diplomacy and public persona winning over the hearts and minds of a French people who believed in liberty and equality and fraternity. There have been other great diplomatic triumphs, but not ones that depended equally on both realism and idealism.
So why was obtaining this French alliance so crucial? Without France we could not have won the revolution. They supply most of the munitions, the arms, the gunpowder, and then more importantly it's their navy which has blockaded the coast, so that you know, when Washington finally wins a few victories, they can't be reinforced. So by getting France in on our side, it basically made it possible for the United States. Says it was then calling itself to triumph militarily rather
than come to a stalemate. But it does feel like there are many accounts of the Revolution and many accounts of the founding fathers, and Franklin can end up being a little bit pushed aside as this sort of compromiser maybe, or as the person on the sidelines who wasn't quite the action man that some of these other founders were.
Franklin played the role of bringing people together, not being the point person, not being Samuel Adams or being the most aggressive person, but that role of pulling people together was essential. Is it going to create a democracy. It's not going to be driven by passionate leaders. It's going to be with the people trying to pull things together.
When it comes to trying to create the treaty that they'll end the war, there's this question about whether it's going to be between the three nations or one emerging nation United States, France, and England, or it's going to be direct between the US and England. And that feels like another place where Franklin and Adams come into conflicts. And there's a question about Franklin being too accommodating.
One of the agreements the United States had made with France and part of the Treaty of Alliance, was that it would not negotiate a totally separate peace with England without keeping France both informed and consulted. And Franklin is very good at keeping the French foreign minister in the loop on all the negotiations. Initially this is Verjon, the French foreign Minister, but at a certain point Franklin floats
some ideas with his English friends. They come to an agreement of what the framework of a deal for peace would look like, and he hasn't fully consulted Verjon. So when the deal happens, the French are upset, the foreign minister's upset, and Franklin writes the most soothing diplomatic letter blaming it on himself, saying, yes, I'm so sorry, but
our love for France and our gratitude whatever. And by the end of that discussion he has a temerity to ask for another loan from France, but he's been able to smooth it over with the French Foreign minister and the King.
It almost feels like by that point he's again just deploying this public persona, both his ability to write, obviously, but also it's just you can't be mad at Franklin very long. He always seems to have a plan that he thinks can solve the dispute.
Benjamin Franklin was the only one of the founders who is involved in all four of the great founding documents of America, the Declaration, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty that ends the War with Great Britain, and then the Constitution. Even though he's not seen as a George Washington, as indispensable or passionate the way Jefferson was, he was both the glue that held people together and the thread that tied our progress.
In the final episode, we discussed ben Franklin's legacy, the scientific trick he used to keep the Constitutional Convention on track, and we hear about his personal ledger and the ways he tried to write his wrongs.
Franklin always was in favor of compromise, but the big moral challenge in life is knowing when to compromise and when to stand true to principle. And he realizes that they shouldn't have compromised on the issue of slave.
That's next week on Benjamin Franklin. This show is based on the writing and research of Walter Isaacson. So stood by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed and sound designed by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our consulting producer. Lizzie Jacobs is our editor Social media by Dara Potts. The show was engineered at CDM Sound Studios from iHeart Podcast. The executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kalledyscope, it was executive produced by Mangeshtigaure with an assist from
Oz Walishan Kostaslinos and Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Amanda Urban, Bob Pittman, Connell Burn, Will Pearson, Nikki Etor, Kerry Lieberman, Nathan Otowski.
And Ali Gavitt.
And if you like podcasts about inventions what they mean for humanity, check out my other show, shell Game, about how it created an AI clone and said it loose on the world. It's a shell Game dot co. And for more shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC. Thanks so much for listening.