Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin

Of all the tasks that a universal genius faces, the most devastating of all tasks is to find someone to carry it on, some successor. It’s difficult for us with the misinformation that we have that we’ve grown up with, and that is current about Franklin, to understand the stature of the man. And thus the extent of the problem of passing on what he represented, or to be more correct, what he presented in his life-form, in his energizing of meaning, in his ability to bring together disparate persons and disparate disciplines and unite them, integrate them, into a sense, a fabric which we today, too glibly, call mankind. Franklin was in fact the first world citizen and Benjamin Franklin is forever revered for having disclosed to us the characteristics which have not changed of the first world citizen. This is not simply a wonderful appellation which I might extend to the good Doctor. But I want to give you a short paragraph from Dumas Malone’s wonderful second volume of his six-volume series on Jefferson. This is, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, volume two, and this is what Malone records on page 33:

“Late in his life Jefferson said that as Franklin’s successor he found the Court of Louis XVI a school of humility. This remark, now well-known, was not an example of false modesty. The fame of his predecessor, as John Adams had said, was more universal than that of Leibniz or Newton, Frederick the Great or Voltaire. He himself observed that the respect for Franklin was greater than that shown to any other person in France, foreign or native. Many admiring Frenchmen regarded the soberly dressed Philadelphian, with his invariable spectacles and unpowdered hair, as the first citizen in the world.”

We have to picture to ourselves and the only phenomenon that’s available to us in our own time to understand the appeal of Franklin was his figure approached, what today we would call, a super rock star. There were little dolls of Franklin. There were all kinds of mementos that had his face on it. Household items throughout Europe bore the face, the physiognomy, of Franklin. He was the most instantly recognized human being in all of Europe and for that matter in all of America. But because Europe at this time – the late 18th century – was conquering the world, was colonizing India, making inroads into China, taking over Indonesia, beginning to populate the Pacific, beginning to dominate Latin America to that extent Franklin was the great world citizen. He was the most conspicuous human being on the planet. Part of the mystique, part of the charm, of Franklin was his ability to grow his uncanny sense of accumulating humanity. He was, in human terms, what the little glass vials and bottles, the Leyden jars and electricity were. As they accumulated charge, Franklin accumulated humanity. And this overwhelming responsibility to him to be able to pass this on.

This sense of the indelible grandeur of the human being verged on a new age where man as a species would form one family, one unit. The age old dream of a world empire but strike from the phrase ‘world empire’ and insert ‘world republic’. Because Franklin had no less a design than a world wide republic of man guided by his reason, by his enlightenment to overcome all of the intolerant categories and divisions that history had raised since time immemorial. And in Franklin’s estimation it was nothing short of a return of man to his primal nature to his cosmic nature. And for Franklin the ever present symbol of the fact that this universe runs on an energy which is universal. The little bells with the little rods hanging over his desk so that when lightning in the French summer or winter storms would hit his lightning rod it would convey down an arc of electricity over his desk and ring the bell, reminding Franklin constantly that this world is real. And that man’s destiny apparently was to recover his primordial universality, and to overcome, in that way, the divisive vicissitudes of history.

And this was extraordinarily poignant and powerful for Franklin’s mind had understood that history is made by the ideal of kingship, that without the ideal of kingship, history does not come into record. Nations are not made. Civilizations are not made. That the principle of divine kingship has mysteriously within its structure. Our very largest sense of time is registering as an order. The very fact that kings were numbered, Louis the XV, was like an emblem of the reasonable progression of the idea of kingship throughout history reuniting it. But for Franklin he lived at the time when the kingship was transforming and there would no longer be a king but there would be a president who was not so much the leader as the king had been, but would become the focus for the many.

The closest thing I can think of in our time to this transformation, this disparate symbol – and I’ll digress for just a minute with your permission – The great Russian poet Yevtushenko, who had angered the authorities several times by his freedom of speech and they had told him that you have two choices: to go back home to Siberia and shut up, or be killed. This is the way the Soviets work. And Yevtushenko had gone home and in his home in Siberia, near Irkutsk, they had built through common and forced labor a hydroelectric dam which was interestingly enough called Bratsk Station (Brotherly Station). It was a hydroelectric station and Yevtushenko saw in that hydroelectric station a symbol for a new kind of order; that the order in Moscow was the old pyramid order. There’s room at the top for only one and he controls everything. It is a dead pyramid. But the hydroelectric station took all of the energies that were put into it and transformed nature and gave it back to the people in the form of energy: light and heat. And that’s why it was ‘Brotherly Station.’ And his wonderful Bratsk Station, published in an Anchor Doubleday paperback is the most mystical poem of our time.

Franklin saw the idea of kingship had become like a dead pyramid weighing down man’s organizational capacity. It was short circuiting his energized universality that had come into its own, and there needed to be placed – in its stead – a new vision of the leader. He was not the dead point of a pyramid, but he was the revivifying focus of the ambitions, the energies, the dreams, the hopes and aspirations of a people. And he would but focus that and give it back to the people, radiating out through his structural capacity an order, a new order, of a new age. And this was Franklin’s great vision of a United States, of a United States. Franklin’s sense of accrual of this humanity; his building up of this profound penetration of understanding of human nature on a cosmic scale had built him up so that by the age of seventy, Franklin was simply massive, like a cloud bank in the sky.

And it was when he came back to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress – he thought his life work in Europe was over in 1775 – that he finally met his successor, the man who would be lightning to Jefferson. Franklin seemed like this enormous capacitor and Jefferson saw himself as the one to discharge and bring this energy, this light, to the people that what was needed more than anything was for a structure of government to be brought into manifestation whereby the scale of man’s vision the industriousness of man’s vision, accumulated in Franklin, could be given to the common man. The age old American dream: let’s make it available for everyone; every man’s house will be a castle; every man will be a king unto himself. And coming together these sovereign, liberated human beings, will create by the intensity of their focus a new structure of government, a new vision of what leadership might be. We have, I think, more poignantly than any other place in Jefferson’s work the character, the lightning-like quality of Jefferson’s mind and his language.

I have for you just two brief quotations from a letter to George Washington from Thomas Jefferson written in Annapolis, April 16th, 1784. Two and a half months later, despite what Jefferson says here, that he was retiring, he would be on his way to Europe on his way to France to become the successor of Benjamin Franklin in every sense of the word. But here’s what Jefferson writes to Washington. Notice the tone of mind. Notice the tacitean condensation of language, the penetration of insight wrapped up into prize phrase after prize phrase.

Dear Sir,
I received your favor of the eighth instant by Colonel Harrison. The subject of it is interesting, and, so far as you have stood connected with it, has been [a] matter of anxiety to me: because whatever may be the ultimate fate of the institution of the Cincinnati, as in its course it draws [it to] some degree of disapprobation, I have wished to see you stand on grounds separated from it; and that the character which will be handed to future ages at the head of our revolution may in no instance be compromitted in subordinate altercations. The subject has been at the point of my pen in every letter I have written to you; but has been still restrained by a reflection that you had among your friends more able counselors, and in yourself one abler than them all. Your letter has now rendered a duty what was before a desire, and I cannot better merit your confidence than by a full and free communication of facts and sentiments as far as they have come within my observation.”

He’s saying to him, I thought you had better advisers than this, and I thought you yourself had better sense. And now I tell you exactly what I’m talking about. He closes the letter:

“You will be sensible, Sir, that these communications are without all reserve. I supposed such to be your wish, and mean them but as materials, with such others as you may collect, for your better judgment to work on. I consider the whole matter as between ourselves alone, having determined to take no active part in this or any thing else which [might] lead to altercation, or disturb [the] quiet and tranquility of mind to which I consign the remaining portion of my life. I have been thrown back by events on a stage where I had never more thought to appear. It is but for a time however, and as a day laborer, free to withdraw or be withdrawn at will. While I remain I shall pursue in silence the path of right; but in every situation public or private shall be gratified by all occasions of rendering you service and of convincing you there is no one to whom your reputation and happiness are dearer than to, Sir, Your most obedient and most humble servant, Thomas Jefferson.”

And Washington caught him and held him to his promise that he would be responsive publicly if the situation demanded. And Congress empowered Jefferson as the only candidate to replace Franklin.

What becomes important here for future considerations of both the way in which American history unfolded, specifically the way in which the revolution of 1800 was a necessary counter move, the figure of John Adams comes to mind. He had been in Europe for some time. He had been in Holland. Why was John Adams not capable of replacing Benjamin Franklin? Franklin put it succinctly in one of his letters to Robert Livingston when he was the president of Congress. He said: “I am very often dismayed that my humility seems to get in the way of John Adams’s positiveness.”

Adams, of course, in Holland, constantly getting the United States, the nascent United States, into jams. The worst of them was a financial crisis brought on by his insulting the French court. By his telling them in his frank New England manner, we’d be better off by ourselves anyway, keep your fingers off. And of course Franklin had worked long and hard to bring the French court into a position of supporting the American cause and it was due to Franklin alone that this had obtained. And in fact, Franklin had struck, in Paris, a medal which had on one side a baby in a cradle strangling two serpents. Franklin said this is the infant Hercules – this is the United States as an infant Hercules – grasping at Saratoga (Gentleman John Burgoyne’s army and at Yorktown general Cornwallis’s army). And the dates of those two events were there. On the other side of the medal was the goddess Athena but the peplos no longer had all of the mystic mythological symbols of the Greek world but the Fleur de lis, the symbolic busy-bee of royalty which is omnipresent and always working behind the scenes. An ancient Egyptian symbol of royalty and Athena was cloaked with the Fleur de lis peplos. This was the medal that Franklin had struck. And of course Louis XVI and de Virgennes, his foreign minister, were always sensible to the fact that the first citizen in the world loved France, loved the French people and understood that the $20 million lent almost annually was not important. What it was was the appreciation of the glory of the French people in a time of crisis for an oppressed people had turned to them in all honesty and the French grandly had responded that that was the basis on which the liaison was established and on none other. And Adams was simply a clumsy, awkward, other alien who had barged in upon this gentleman’s agreement to historical and universal glory.

Jefferson was the only figure that Franklin had confidence in; could wear this mantle upon his shoulders of becoming a world citizen and understanding the delicate rapport required to stretch a mind a sensitivity a sense of culture a penetration of purpose out until it encompassed the entire world. The entire world an extent of space, the entire world an extent of time which included the capacity to have future vision. And on this regard we find, in the writings of Franklin and Jefferson, a shared vision of the cosmic destiny of the United States. If you recall as early as the 1750s Franklin was already extending himself in his thought, in his regard, over the Appalachian Mountains as far as the Mississippi River. And in the peace negotiation documents, again and again, we run across Franklin’s concern that the British not be given an ambiguous possibility of slipping into the Ohio Valley area, into the Northwest Territories, that the United States must have the exclusive right to extend itself to the Mississippi. That in fact the Mississippi should be specifically navigable to American ships. And we saw that during the Revolutionary War period that Jefferson himself made sure that George Rogers Clark was outfitted, and even with just a small force of two hundred men, was able to carry himself through what is now Kentucky down the Ohio and capture without, firing a shot, Vincennes and Cahokia, Kaskaskia and all the other communities. The French formed communities along the Wabash, the Ohio, and the Mississippi and how the great French British fortress of Detroit had sent this army down to capture Vincennes again and how Vincennes fell and then George Rogers Clark and his men marched across the southern tip of Illinois in a flood season never out of water for a hundred and eighty miles and descended upon Vincennes in the middle of the night and recaptured the city. And how that masterful stroke broke the British power in the whole Trans-appalachian region.

It was a shared vision that Franklin and Jefferson almost alone of their time had that the United States was going to grow. It was as Franklin envisioned it, an infant Hercules who could only be defeated in the cradle and even in the cradle. He was strong enough to stop two whole British armies, something that had never happened in history, that two entire armies of ten thousand men in arms had been taken intact. Not a single person escaped. Twice it had happened in the same war. And to Franklin this was an omen, this was augury on the large scale, this was augury on the scale of historical unfoldment that the time had come for some new birth some new kind of structure that was so much stronger than any structure that had come into manifestation in world history, previously, could even in its cradle already throttle the powers sent against it.

The United States was a super creation in the mind of Franklin and Jefferson. But the problem was how to display this to the American people. The European mind, the French mind in particular, grasped this above all else. In 1778 when Franklin and Voltaire embraced each other at court publicly giving the kisses on the cheeks it was a sign that the best of the old age and the best of the new age had come together in equanimity, in amiable exchange. And Voltaire represented the cream of the old order come to maturity to philosophical scale vision, but that Franklin had ushered in a new age, the age of the wise common man. And it’s important here to emphasize the fact that Franklin was by trade, by preparation, a printer.

When printing first came in in the Renaissance there were so few literate people in Europe that editions of great classic authors were sometimes as small as two or three hundred copies. There weren’t any more readers than that. No one knew how to read, except a few individuals. Books were illuminated manuscripts that cost fortunes. The printing press had introduced an element of democracy into the mode known as literacy and it made information available, and by Franklin’s time it was just becoming self conscious, self-creatively conscious, that there was also no limit to what an individual could now find out and know. And this confidence, this as Sir Kenneth Clark once said of civilization, this warming of the environment of man’s capacity everything seems possible now a spring time in the world. This increased capacity of the individual to know was reflected by all the scientific experiments that were happening at the time. Franklin was there not only with his discovery of electricity, and with Apeneus’s (sp?) discovery that magnetism and electricity were a co-phenomenon, and that Franklin’s great experimental structure could be converted into a mathematical form. By 1759 it was all mathematized, it was opened up in Leibniz’s universal language of calculus; that the seals of nature had been broken, not by history still caged by the precious elite, but at a time when history itself was cracked open like an Orphic egg for everyone. And science was an expression of the democratic movement of the Republic of Letters for all men. And Franklin saw it exactly in this way, and so did Jefferson. That the curiosity of examining your world that nature was again available directly to the individual man; that he had stepped outside of these frozen frames of reference that had perhaps in their time when they were needed and first made serviceable for man. But through historical processes had become cages, had become chains.

You know we have up here at Forest Lawn here in Los Angeles part of the huge chain that in the Revolutionary War was stretched across the Hudson River and stopped the British ships from going out. And you go and look at that huge chain with those links and it’s almost like a– a symbol of the determination to stop a certain retrograde movement because it was destroying man’s soul his spiritual nature. It was moving towards an enslavement of man on a worldwide scale. This is how Franklin wrote it. He said, what is wrong with this mentality? It isn’t just that the British king is a bad man or that his advisers are greedy. There’s an idea about man here that most of us are to be slaves. That’s the idea. To be controlled by the few who control the economic strings of power. That’s what needs to be stopped by these chains, and those are in fact paradoxically the very chains which we must cast off.

When Jefferson arrived in Paris in 1784 he came with notebooks full of notations and he shared them with Franklin who had done this for some fifty years. And with the confirmation of some of Jefferson’s findings Franklin published a little pamphlet disclosing for the first time the shape of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean. And they sent copies to Congress so it could be printed up and be given out to American mariners saying there are streams in the ocean. They have shapes, they have forms. We can know where they are. We can take advantage of these natural currents and increase our commerce, increase our shipping. We’re going to know where the fish are. This is why the vast schools of fish off New Foundland, the New Foundland banks and so forth.

Franklin had put together the scale of his mind was he could understand the Atlantic as if it were a pond. Just as we will see towards the end of this lecture that when the American visionary spirit matured in someone like Henry David Thoreau he could see the ocean of the world in Walden Pond. Just the obverse of that process, mastered so well that the incidental, the daily, became indications of cosmic movements. And we’ll see in Thoreau’s journals the exquisiteness of a sage an ancient time honored sage such as one might have walked in the Himalayas standing in those beautiful Massachusetts woods surveying a snowstorm because no one had done that, and someone needed to be there with the trees in the snow and sense that and understand and let it penetrate, let that nature resonate, that this is in fact the real basis upon which we exist. And if the individual can be brought face to face with the natural cosmos in its universal energized workings, then man’s true nature and destiny will be revealed. And we would like to see that birth, not only for some precious few, but for as many men and women who can claim that heritage for themselves if they claim it for themselves it belongs to them. Let no government take it away from them, and that the only reason there are governments in the new age is to provide a focus for those people to come and report to each other the efficacy of their experiments with life and the fact that it not only works, but amplifies itself again and again with new issues, new domains.

This was the kind of thinking that was natural to Franklin and natural to Jefferson. They had formed a committee to write the Declaration of Independence and the third major person in that committee was John Adams, and that was 1776. And in 1785, nine years later, the same trio found themselves in Paris. Enforcing and living out the Declaration of Independence and realizing that it might extend to more than just the colonies. Franklin was able, finally, in 1785 to take himself back to the United States. By this time a gallstone and several infections had gotten to him so he had to be carried in a litter. His mind was still clear. In fact we’ll see that just nine days before he died he rallied himself and his brilliant memory in a service to Thomas Jefferson who was struggling at that time in 1790 in April, struggling still in Paris to– to try to come to grips with the tremendous new pressures that were coming out. Their vision had caught on in France. When Franklin had introduced Jefferson to Madame d’Houdetot who was the heroine of Rousseau’s Confessions. It was like bringing everything to a close. The Americans had come to encapsulate in their own lives as their being, the ideas that the French philosophes had been developing since Montesquieu. That indeed the spirit of laws is the free man who intelligently is able to command and control their effective focus and application. And that when you have such men, then is when you have a reality. The enlightenment depends upon the connection being made that the ideas must come to life in a person.

Towards the end of his life Jefferson had written to Franklin asking about a certain boundary in the Northwest Territories, and Franklin pulled out of his memory, almost exactly right, telling Jefferson in such and such a drawer you will find such and such a packet of information that I had sent decades ago to Congress and they will forward the issues to you and you will be able to affect change in decision, there in Paris vis a vis, the English. Nine days later Franklin was dead at the age of 84 years and 3 months.

Well, I see by the movement we’ve got to take a break. So I’ll quiet down and hush up.

Okay. The issue of TIME magazine, July 14th, has a one page review of a new book on Franklin. Just look up the. I think it’s the July 14th issue of TIME – January– January 14th – and read that one page book review and– and put it next to either this lecture or the six or seven cassettes that I have on Franklin already and you’ll see that it amounts to a misrepresentation.

[Comment from audience:] This is a review of the book?

A new book on Franklin.

[Comment from audience:] Have you read the book?

No.

Read the review though it’s apparent I brought it here last week and read some portions. You see if we don’t recognize that the– that the routes are open, open-ended, then it’s easy for people to say, well, America doesn’t really have a philosophy, it’s whoever is in power or whoever gets there, and we do have a philosophy – it’s just very sophisticated. It’s not like Marxist-Leninism where it’s a codified grasping kind of a mentality. The American philosophy was made to be open to experience what we are to experience nature as it is. It’s not just philosophy and it’s not just a psychism. Consider this fact, how many Americans went to the moon? Have any Russians ever gone to the moon? Ever? There’s something psychological in being able to step off the planet and be yourself. No other people have done it yet. It’s been thirteen years. The skies are open. It’s not a mystery. It’s a question of character. Americans have a very specific special kind of character: A willingness to commit themselves to openness. All right if that’s what it takes, well let’s do it; we’ll see what’s there. That’s an odd mentality. Odysseus might have had it. Not many people since that.

I of course had everything outlined here. I have about another three hundred notes I can’t get to. I want to get this in. This is from George Washington to Benjamin Franklin the 23rd of September 1789. And of course by this time Washington was beginning the tradition of the presidency.

“Dear Sir,
The affectionate congratulations on the recovery of my health – and the warm expressions of personal friendship which were contained in your [letter] of the 16th instant, claim my gratitude. And the consideration that it was written when you were afflicted with a painful malady, greatly increases my obligation for it. Would to God, my dear Sir, that I could congratulate you upon the removal of that excruciating pain under which you labor! and that your existence might close with as much ease to yourself, as its continuance has been beneficial to our Country and useful to Mankind – or, if the united wishes of a free people, joined with the earnest prayers of every friend to science and humanity could relieve the body from pains or infirmities, [that] you could claim an exemption on this score. But this cannot be, and you have within yourself the only resource to which we can confidently apply for relief – a philosophic mind. If to be venerated for benevolence – if to be admired for talent – if to be esteemed for patriotism – if to be beloved for philanthropy can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know that you have not lived in vain; and I flatter myself that it will not be ranked among the least grateful occurrences of your life to be assured that so long as I retain my memory – you will be [recollected] with respect, veneration and affection… Your sincere friend… George Washington.”

One of the last concerns for Franklin was slavery and Washington had written to him as president because Franklin had addressed him, had pointed the attention – now that we’ve had a society, a government of free men that was operable and evidently going to go on and occur, one of the major problems for this mind, for this quality of mind, for this character of new age structure, was to address itself to the issue of human slavery. And Franklin, unerringly writing to General President George Washington – 1789: “The business relative to Free Blacks, shall be transacted by a committee of twenty-four persons, annually elected by ballot, at the meeting of this society” – which was the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Blacks. This was to become one of the crucial issues in American history. This was 1789 – sixty years later when Theodore Parker would talk in this same mode to his supposedly freed and liberated Massachusetts, Boston, in the church where he was the pastor, he was drummed out of the church because this issue would fracture the power structure that was nascently trying to reassert itself, nascently trying to bring itself back. And the central question was slavery. And we will see when the series goes on that when it did break that structure, Lincoln with his Franklin-esque natural sympathy, with his Jeffersonian lightning-like directness, saw exactly the truth of the issues. If man is free he is able to unite himself. And conversely if he is not united, there are some, eventually many – almost inevitably all – will not be free in some way or another. The question is Slavery with a capital S and it extends down to the notion of what a human being is. Who has rights? Man has rights. Who has powers? Structures of government have powers. It’s a question of might versus right. And we have to structure the power so that it reveals the right for every man, otherwise all is lost. We are either all going to be free together, or none of us are going to be free. This was the eye-opening realization that Franklin was laying before Washington now that there was a presidency, there was a United States. Honorable President, this is an important issue. It’s not going to go away. And part of the key to it of course was the treatment of the American Indian. We’ve gone to that quite frequently.

The addressing on the issue of slavery was so intense that in Philadelphia, November 9th, 1789 – Franklin almost 84 years of age. This is the beginning paragraphs of An Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes, Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and it was written by Franklin.

“It is with peculiar satisfaction we assure the friends of humanity, that in prosecuting the design of our association, our endeavors have proved successful, far beyond our most sanguine expectations. Encouraged by this success, and by the daily progress of that luminous and benign spirit of liberty, which is diffusing itself throughout the world;”

She holds the torch aloft so all may see; she dispenses not power but light so that right might be disclosed. Her name is Columbia, she is the persona of Liberty.

“...that luminous and benign spirit of liberty, which is diffusing itself throughout the world; and humbly hoping for the continuance of the divine blessing on our labors, we have ventured to make an important addition to our original plan, and do therefore, earnestly solicit the support and assistance, of all who can feel the tender emotions of sympathy and compassion, or relish the exalted pleasure of beneficence. Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. The unhappy man who has long been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart. Accustomed to move like a mere machine, by the will of a master, reflection is suspended; he has not the power of choice; and reason and conscience, have but little influence over his conduct: because he is chiefly governed by the passion of fear. He is poor and friendless – perhaps worn out by extreme labor, age, disease. Under such circumstances, freedom may often prove a misfortune to himself, and prejudicial to society.”

And it goes on in this mode. And what Franklin was pointing out was that there is a thin, tenuous capacity which ensures the New Age Liberty and that is the freedom of man to recognize that he needs all other men to ensure his freedom. They must be free in order for him to be free. It was the revelation of the reoccurring shot heard round the world, the revelation that unless we are all working together to ensure each other’s freedom, sooner or later these age-old structures of habituation to might will reassert themselves and come back from nowhere. We would say the subconscious, or the collective unconscious, or other, and reassert themselves. And man who was free will be but a memory because the capacity to recognize his ability to respond to liberty was hard won through interminable ages in history. And was just now precariously won by us and instituted into a structure of protection.

Governments are instituted to assure the right for self-discovery – of living a life to ourselves. This is why they are instituted among men. And without the consent of enlightened human beings thus so protected the government has no power at all. This was to be one of the great realizations that Jefferson would have to bring into order. Franklin, in his tremendous work, had realized that he had indeed become a citizen of the world. But how to pass this on to Jefferson? Why again– Why was it Jefferson, why not Adams? We find that towards the end of his life John Adams, when he writes to Jefferson, addresses him as your Excellency which galled Franklin. And when his sister Jane Meacham began addressing him as His Excellency, Your Excellency, he wrote her a letter terse and he said don’t use that word with me; Dr. Franklin will do if you have to give me a title. Because Adams still had within himself this kowtowing tendency. He was one of those who still habitually, subconsciously thought well General Washington is our king. But Franklin was not a king, he was not a king figure, he never fit the model. And those who disparage Franklin disclose a psychological tendency almost subconsciously manifested to worship power to worship the structures that control and to disparage and look askance at a free man who wears no crown except the penetrating intelligence which his free mind has been able to develop on its own.

Jefferson on the other hand, when he was brought into France in 1784, that poignant time. You know his wife had died a few years before and he’s grieved over that – Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. He was ill when he got to France – Jefferson loved the classical lines of Greek architecture under full sunshine. And he got to cloudy Gothic France, riding in from the port to Paris, everywhere they stopped there were beggars along the way with their hands out. Jefferson seeing this terrible contrast between the fruitfulness of the terrain – he had an eye for good land just like Franklin had. It was fruitful land; it was elegantly manicured and organized and walking on it were the ragged population. What in the world was wrong? And it began to fester in Jefferson’s sensibility, in his mind and became ill. He was ill for about four months, and almost to exasperate his sense of humanity, word came that his youngest daughter died of whooping cough – two and a half years old. Jefferson had come over with his oldest daughter Patsy. He called her. Her name was Martha. And it took him a while to get into the swing of things. But Franklin worked with him day after day, introducing him, giving him letters of introduction. But most poignantly the liaison between Jefferson and Lafayette was reestablished.

If you recall perhaps you don’t. It was Franklin who brought Lafayette into the American Revolution. We often don’t realize the tremendous contributions that he made to the German. Baron who was a master at drill instruction that Franklin covered up for him, and said that he had been a general in the Prussian Army, and actually had only been a drill sergeant. But he introduced him to Washington and he was the one who organized the American troops – that was at Valley Forge. That’s why Valley Forge is remembered; that horrible horrible winter of 1777 when the American Revolutionary Army went into Valley Forge they went just like those French populations besieging Jefferson. They went in rags, in discontinuities, to die lonely in the snow. And Franklin had sent just the right man at the right time, several right men at the right time. And in Valley Forge it was the training of the troops, the drilling of the troops, into unified movements that brought them together out of their self-pity and made soldiers out of them, made a revolutionary army. So that when Washington marched out in the spring he marched out with an army. And one of the reasons that Saratoga happened was that the American armies had become disciplined. They were no longer just artisans, merchants, farmers, mountain men – they were capable of mounting together voluntarily a military operation that had sophisticated movements in it. The British were completely taken by surprise. The American rebel turned out to be organized fighters.

It was Franklin’s ingenuity that made this possible. He kept sending the right people over. And one of the major ones of course was Lafayette. And Lafayette, if you recall or even if you don’t recall, was given his first command at the young age – I think he was 22 or 23 – by Washington. When Cornwallis was moving to sweep through Virginia to meet the British forces that were coming up from Charleston, South Carolina – they already held New York, they held all the major seaports except Boston and they were moving in a pincer movement to cut off the United States in two since they couldn’t do it as they had tried in the early Revolutionary War by coming up the Hudson and down Lake Champlain thus cutting off New York and New England from the rest of the colonies. They had shifted the scene of the war to the southern colonies and they were seeking to move through Virginia and come up through the Carolinas and cut the southern colonies off. All right, the Yankees are tough. They can starve up there. We’ll take the fertile southern colonies and we’ll go inland and eventually they’ll have to come back into the fold. They’ll get tired. But it was Lafayette, brilliant Lafayette – the age of 22 or 23 – went in with a couple of thousand troops and began harassing and harrying Cornwallis and stopping his movements and then fleeing before he could be destroyed and then coming in again almost like a sophisticated guerrilla action, only in classical tactical battlefield techniques.

I think I mentioned in the European series one time, we often forget that before Napoleon there was a Lafayette – brilliant strategist. And it was Lafayette’s parry that forced Cornwallis into a retreating mode. And as Lafayette began to accrue more troops – several thousand from here, several thousand from there – finally he had enough force so that when the Washington mind was put onto the situation they coordinated fantastically a naval and a land combat force. One of the first times in history that it was done with that kind of precision. You have to go almost to D-Day in World War two to find that massive scale of coordination of so many different kinds of troops, speaking so many different kinds of languages, trained in so many different ways, all brought to focus at exactly the right time, the right hour of the right day. And Cornwallis had nothing to do except to surrender everything: 170 cannons, 6000 trained crack British troops, 1800 crack regulars that had come from another sector. All of this delivered completely intact. It was an embarrassment. Lord North, when he went into paroxysms of fear of having to tell the King. How am I going to tell George this? He already knew that the king was on pins and needles – You know George went insane don’t you? Because of the American Revolution because of the pressure because of having been beaten by people who should have been dead years ago. And they keep not only fighting but winning. And Lord North when he was told of Yorktown lost his wig and paced back and forth: Oh my God, oh my God! How will we tell him?

But behind all of that the mind of Franklin constantly envisioning the total moving structure of world events. The brilliancy of Washington to conceive of the military Revolutionary War was exceeded by Franklin’s incredible visionary capacity to conceive of the whole world in motion, of the whole cosmic nature of man coming to the fore. And it was not just a question of winning a fight for freedom but of engendering the very structures that would permit man, by the millions, to grow up free and to think of himself as an individual capable of forming alliances with other individuals, not on the basis of some philosophy or doctrine or religion or policy or outlook or prejudice, but on a basis of seeing a situation that needs to be done. It’s as simple as this car is stuck, here we are, if we work together we can get it out. That kind of instant collectivity of individuals who come together for a purpose and consciously of their own free will give themselves up momentarily, temporarily to form a working unit to get something done. Get the job done. It’s an American outlook. No task is too large. Are there millions starving? Very well. Let’s organize and find a way to feed millions. Man is not defeated by circumstance. It is simply the problem to be solved. This was the mentality that Franklin was working towards. But the apprehension was he was getting to be 80, mid-80s – he’s going to die. Who’s going to carry it on? This is why he addressed Jefferson as Your Excellency in his letters to Jefferson. Because of this incredible capacity to understand.

When Jefferson was on the boat going over to meet Franklin to take the laurels, to take that burden, you know what book he read? He read Don Quixote by Cervantes, getting ready to meet the master, getting ready to think in terms of– of cosmic paradoxes, getting ready to be attentive to someone for whom the adventure of life is profound. Not only that but Jefferson taught himself Spanish in nineteen days by reading Cervantes. The quality of mind, the intelligence, the capacity to open oneself up and commit oneself exclusively to solving a situation so that one gains – the techne as the Greeks would say – the know how, the know how. And that would become the– the seed of the development of American pragmatism with William James and John Dewey. And we’ll see that too, how all that develops out of there. The capacity to go to things.

Jefferson in his abilities impressed Franklin and Franklin wanted more than anything else to bring Lafayette and Jefferson together. Yes, there are these salons. Yes, there are these philosophes. They are the cream of Europe. The French mind, scientifically and philosophically, had raised itself to heights undreamt of by past ages. But this is a new age and your closest friends are going to have to be people who understand these new times and Lafayette was one of those. And so Lafayette and Jefferson were brought together and kept together by Franklin. You know it was Madame Lafayette who embroidered George Washington’s Masonic apron. We have it here in Los Angeles. It’s over across from USC on Exposition Boulevard in the Museum of Natural History of all things, in a glass case. Because the connections were deep, they were profound. And when you have a masterful cloud-like accumulation of humanity like Franklin was, Jefferson and Lafayette were like two bolts of lightning brought together. And the incredible blossoming of the mutual admiration and friendship between the two would, for the rest of their lives, sustain them.

The image comes to mind and we have to close with this tonight. The old Jefferson in 1825, 83 years old himself by that time, hobbling out of Monticello, and coming out of the carriage up to meet him, the old crippled Lafayette who had been brought over to the United States to be feted with statues and commemorations. 1825 you see, it was 50 years since the Declaration of Independence and it was going to be a great event. And they were touting Lafayette. And the two old men hobbling towards each other and embraced madly like Franklin and Voltaire had done 50 years before. Ah, Jefferson. Ah, Lafayette.

Next week – more.