Franklin clasped his hands and turned to stumble back into the house.
“But, sir, I have greater news than that,” continued the messenger. “General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners of war.”
The French government hesitated no longer; in a few weeks it openly recognized the United States, and made a treaty with them.
In 1785 Franklin returned home. He was now nearly eighty, but his public life was not at an end. He was elected President of Pennsylvania and the next year he was sent as a delegate to the Convention which met to form a Constitution for the United States. In April, 1790, he died and was buried in his adopted home in Philadelphia. He had years before written an epitaph for himself.
“The Body
of
Benjamin Franklin, Printer,
(Like the cover of an old book,
Its contents torn out,
And stripped of its lettering and gilding,)
Lies here food for worms.
Yet the work itself shall not be lost,
For it will, (as he believed) appear once more
In a new
And more beautiful Edition
Corrected and Amended
By
The Author.”
Montcalm and Wolfe
You have heard of the beginnings of the French power in America—how Cartier and La Salle, Marquette and Champlain, explored the country and claimed it in the name of their king. They went up and down the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, and established along the streams their trading-posts and military forts.
The English meanwhile, settled along the Atlantic coast and established farms and villages.
The English patents granted to their colonists the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The French claimed and were occupying the Mississippi valley. The English pressed westward and crossed the Alleghany Mountains through gaps made by the rivers which the French claimed; the French pressed eastward along these same rivers. Contact and conflict were inevitable. The French foresaw it and made their preparations accordingly. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, they established posts and organized their forces. French traders, French missionaries, French settlers, upheld the power of their king. They made friends with the Indians of many tribes, but from the day that Champlain joined battle against the Iroquois, the Five Nations were the deadly enemies of the French and therefore the friends of the English.
The English were, as you may think, most unwilling to give up the western lands which they claimed. Governor Spottswood of Virginia, who in 1716 rode westward to the summit of the Blue Ridge at the head of a company of gentlemen, realized how important it was to hold this fair region against the French. He urged the English government to establish a chain of posts from the lakes to the Mississippi in order to keep back the French. His advice was unheeded. A few years later the French began to occupy the valley of the Ohio, and it became evident that there the two nations would clash.