In the spring of 1781, Franklin received two American visitors at Passy, young Colonel John Laurens, son of the former Congress president Henry Laurens, and Thomas Paine. There was another financial crisis in Congress and they had come to request a loan of a million pounds sterling each year for the duration. Franklin had foreseen the need and could tell them he already had a promise of an outright gift of 6 million livres. Since July 1780, General Rochambeau and 6,000 fully equipped French regulars were in America, waiting for the auspicious time to join the conflict. France had its own to protect now.
The tide turned that year. The valiant General Nathanael Greene (nephew by marriage of Franklin’s friend, Catherine Ray Greene) together with Daniel Morgan, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, and Francis Marion (known as “The Swamp Fox”) harassed Cornwallis into Virginia, where General Lafayette, in charge of his first command, forced him onto the peninsula of Yorktown. To Lafayette’s aid came two armies, the American one led by Washington, and the French one led by Rochambeau. The siege lasted just nine days. Cornwallis surrendered on October 18, 1781. The news reached Franklin at eleven o’clock on the night of November 19, just one month later.
The defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown marked the unofficial end of the war, though George III refused to believe it. In his disordered mental state, he could not face the reality of the enormous budget asked from an empty treasury. Nearly everyone else knew that the former American colonies were lost to the British Empire forever.
Franklin wrote Congress offering his resignation, planning that if it were accepted he would take his grandsons on a tour in Italy and Germany. Congress had other plans for him. Along with John Adams and John Jay of New York, he was chosen a commissioner to negotiate the formal peace with Great Britain.
“I have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous,” Franklin wrote John Adams, “that was not censured as inadequate.... I esteem it, however, an honour.”
John Jay and his family came to stay at Passy, as the Adams family had done. Maria Jay, age one and a half years, formed a “singular attachment” to the ancient philosopher, which he claimed he would never forget.
The peace negotiations dragged on month after month, seemingly interminable. In April 1782, in the midst of them, Franklin was stricken with a kidney stone, which disabled him the rest of his life. From then on even the jolting of his carriage over the cobblestone streets was unbearably painful. He refused either to have an operation or take drugs. “You may judge that my disease is not very grievous,” he wrote John Jay, “since I am more afraid of the medicine than the malady.”
The preliminary Anglo-American peace terms were finally signed on November 30, 1782, and on September 3, 1783, came the signing of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain at last acknowledged the independence of the United States. The achievement of this treaty, by Franklin with John Adams and John Jay, would be labeled “the greatest triumph in the history of American diplomacy.”
“May we never see another war!” wrote Franklin to Josiah Quincy. “For in my opinion there never was a good war or a bad peace.”
“The times that tried men’s souls are over,” wrote Thomas Paine in America.