America's first frenemies

Boston Globe

21-04-2025

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The two collaborated easily, together reviewing Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. By the time they found it necessary to share a bed in a New Jersey tavern, en route to a 1776 conference with the British admiral Lord Howe, they were on fond terms, having come less to resemble a starstruck young lawyer and storied elder statesman than an old married couple. Cheerfully, they bickered over what to do with their window. Fearing a draft, Adams had shut it. 'Come! Open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you,' Franklin urged, serenading Adams to sleep with his theory of colds. They did not derive, he insisted, from cold air.
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Adams was equally charmed by Franklin's manner with Howe. When the admiral regretted that England would grieve an independent America's certain demise, Franklin — 'with an easy air and a collected countenance, a bow, a smile, and all that naivete which sometimes appeared in his conversation' — assured Howe that the Colonies would do all in their power to spare Great Britain any such misery. The comment survives only thanks to Adams.
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In 1778 Adams joined Franklin in Paris, arriving just after his masterful negotiation of a French treaty of alliance. The king of France could now openly bankroll a rebellion he had for some time covertly supported. At the outset, Adams luxuriated in his warm rapport with his colleague, nourished over two years of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, by public deliberations and secret consultations. They unfailingly saw eye to eye. He and 11-year-old John Quincy Adams happily took up residence in Franklin's rented villa.
They were to fare less well as housemates than as bedmates. Adams soon discovered that the diplomatic mission's record books were in disarray. Franklin was an abysmal administrator, at war with his colleagues. His French was more primitive than Adams had assumed. Adams disapproved of the hours Franklin kept; of the friends he kept; of the dates he failed to keep. Adams balked especially at his embrace of France, which struck him as unseemly. Franklin was soon enough neither a great statesman nor a great philosopher. Within a year, his life amounted to 'a scene of continual dissipation.'
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Nor was it simply on Franklin's 'outrages to morality and decorum' that the relationship foundered. His embrace of France was one thing, France's embrace of him quite another. Franklin's image blossomed everywhere in Paris, celebrity he parlayed into support for a long, ruinously expensive war. So great was his fame that, as Adams put it, 'there was scarcely a peasant, a citizen, a valet de chambre, a coachman or footman, a lady's chamber maid or a scullion in the kitchen, who was not familiar with his name, and who did not consider him as a friend to human kind.' The European papers bulged with his praises. Were a collection made of late-18th century gazettes, cursed Adams, 'a greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon 'le grand Franklin' would appear' than on any other man who had ever lived. Adams was apoplectic.
Franklin enjoyed the adulation without ever losing sight of its utility. Adams never lost sight of the adulation —– it rankled still three decades later — which refused to square with New England sensibilities. By the time Adams returned to Paris for a second stay in 1782, he could only sputter. And when John Adams sputtered, he rose to heights of incomparable eloquence. He reduced Franklin to the love child of Machiavelli and the Jesuits, the greatest imposter on earth 'since the days of Mahomet.' His arts consisted of 'practiced cunning' and 'theoretic ignorance.' He was everywhere applauded like a common opera girl. With all his heart Adams wished Franklin out of office, repenting for his sins and preparing for the next world.
The envy was lost on neither Franklin nor French society. Franklin acknowledged 'the ravings of a certain mischievous madman of which he heard daily.' Where possible, he ignored both the accounts and Adams, a strategy that drove the younger man to distraction. The two were perfectly civil when they met; hints of asperity but not animosity turn up in their correspondence. All the same, Franklin found working with his intemperate colleague a trial. With his dogmatism, Adams left America's best friends at Versailles gasping. 'I can have no favorable opinion,' Franklin warned Congress, 'on what may be the offspring of a coalition between my ignorance and his positiveness.'
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Franklin worried less about the damage Adams was doing to his reputation at home than the damage Adams inflicted on the alliance abroad. For the sake of the war effort as much as his own, he distanced himself from his rabid colleague. He diplomatically explained away Adams's undiplomatic behavior at Versailles, where the foreign minister asked to be spared future contact with him, a request Franklin had the thankless task of submitting to America. In 1783 he appealed to Congress to neutralize Adams, who was by then convinced that Franklin was plotting against him.
Even in their mutual disaffection, the two ventured in opposite directions. 'It would be worse than folly to conceal my opinion of his great faults,' explained Adams, lunging at any opportunity to elaborate on Franklin's 'insidious wiles.' Only with difficulty could Franklin bring himself to devote more than a few lines to a man with a 'disorder on his brain.'
Adams reached for Newton and Voltaire, Hercules and Minerva, to convey the extent of Franklin's European fame. Franklin recruited 'Othello' to explain Adams. His Massachusetts colleague was indeed a staunch patriot. At the same time, wrote Franklin, he was 'always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.' (Franklin underlined the 'absolutely.') It was an appraisal on which no one has improved and to which any number of contemporaries subscribed. It also made its way immediately back to Adams, who was still gnawing on it decades later.
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Neither man was without vanity, though Franklin hid his better. Only one had his eye on the history books. In 1779, Adams bristled at Franklin's supposed powers. All Europe seemed to believe he and his 'electric wand' had ignited the Revolution. Nothing, Adams informed a French diplomat, could be further from the truth. He perfected the image in 1790: 'The essence of the whole,' Adams wrote, 'will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth, and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod — and thence forward these two conducted all the policy negotiations, legislation, and war.' By 1810 he still fulminated that Franklin's 'mysterious wand' was understood to have liberated the Colonies. (In fairness, Adams thought both Franklin and Washington 'not only superficial but ignorant.' As for Jefferson, he had, in a theatrical coup, run off with all the glory for the Declaration.)
Others advised Adams to desist. The historical record would speak for itself. He could not, unable to shake the sense that Washington and Franklin had got free passes. No one questioned their patriotism, only his. Franklin was in the grave for four days when Adams blustered on — the 'honest man' barb embedded in his side — about his former colleague's duplicity. He would rage into his 80s. Adams railed especially against Franklin's silence; to the end it annoyed him that he could not get a rise out of him. (Very little did. Franklin scurried from the emotionally fraught, with predictable results, one of which was that Adams's version of Franklin the Parisian libertine survived.) It had been, Adams insisted, an unfair fight. He had been up against a colossus, while he was but 'a poor man, almost without a name, unknown in the European world, born and educated in the American wilderness, out of which he had never set his foot til 1778.' At the time he wrote those lines, Franklin had been dead for 20 years. And the babe in the woods had served as president of the United States.
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Adams continued to rewrite history, forgetting the 'prodigious genius' with whom he had argued for independence, polished the Declaration, and signed the treaty that gave birth to America. From the first, Franklin's 'excellence as a legislator, a politician, or a negotiator' had been nowhere in sight, insisted Adams, revising liberally, hurrying past even the deft handling of Lord Howe. Nor was it sufficient merely to have the last word. By the time Adams wrote up the New Jersey bedtime serenade, Franklin was dead. Adams could not resist adding that he had it on good authority that Franklin had ultimately succumbed not to the kidney stone from which he long suffered but — having sat too long at an open midwinter window — from a cold.