Two hundred and fifty years ago today, Benjamin Franklin slipped out of Philadelphia on a secret errand. He was 70 years old, the war for independence was going badly, and Congress was sending him across the Atlantic to ask France for help.
The Declaration of Independence was not yet four months old. That summer the British had driven George Washington's army off Long Island, and in September they took New York City. The Continental Army needed muskets, powder, cannon and money, and France was the likeliest place to get them. On September 26, 1776, Congress chose Franklin as one of three commissioners to the French court. Silas Deane of Connecticut, already in Paris, was another.
Franklin left without fanfare. On Saturday, October 26, he set out down the Delaware River with two grandsons, Temple Franklin, 16, and Benjamin Franklin Bache, 7. At Marcus Hook the Continental warship Reprisal was waiting. Her captain, Lambert Wickes, had orders to carry Franklin to Nantes and then go after British shipping. The Reprisal cleared the Delaware capes on October 29 and turned east.
The crossing took 30 days. Wickes drilled his men for battle along the way, and Franklin, watching, judged them as ready as any crew in the King's own navy. Two days before they sighted France, the Reprisal captured two British brigantines, one carrying claret and the other brandy.
The ship anchored in Quiberon Bay, on the coast of Brittany, at the end of November. The wind would not let her into the Loire River, so on December 3 Franklin went ashore at Auray and made the 70 miles to Nantes by road. He was worn out. "Our Voyage tho' not long was rough," he wrote to John Hancock, the President of Congress, "and I feel myself weakned by it." He reached Paris on December 21.
The French were delighted with him. Franklin was already famous in Europe for his experiments with electricity, and in Paris he played the plain American. In February he described himself to an old friend in England, Emma Thompson: "very plainly dress'd, wearing my thin grey strait Hair, that peeps out under my only Coiffure, a fine Fur Cap, which comes down my Forehead almost to my Spectacles." Think how that must look, he told her, "among the Powder'd Heads of Paris." Artists drew him in that cap, and the print at the top of this page is one of them.
The errand worked. On February 6, 1778, Franklin, Deane and the third commissioner, Arthur Lee of Virginia, signed treaties of alliance and commerce with France. French soldiers and French ships stood with Washington at Yorktown in 1781.
Franklin died in 1790, two years before work began on the White House, but he has a place of honor there. Above the Green Room fireplace hangs his portrait by the Scottish painter David Martin, made in London in 1767. Franklin sits with a paper in hand and his thumb pressed to his chin, deep in thought, while a bust of Isaac Newton looks on. It is sometimes called the thumb portrait. Mr. and Mrs. Walter H. Annenberg gave it to the White House in 1962.
You can find that portrait on our 2019 Green Room ornament from the White House Heritage Collection. Look just above the white mantel and there is Franklin in his gold frame, under a 3-D chandelier that casts real shadows. It is finished in 24k gold, made in America, and comes with a history card in a green and gold box. Take a closer look.