Benjamin Franklin on War

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, Anne-Rosalie Bocquet Filleul (attr.), 1778 or 1779

ASELECTION from the letters of Benjamin Franklin expressing his views on the folly and evils of war.

First, Franklin’s letter to Dr. Richard Price, in 1780. This was in the very midst of the war, and Dr. Price was a London clergyman, a subject of King George; but Franklin and he remained warm friends throughout, and this letter is one of many which Franklin sends from Paris:

We make daily great improvements in natural, there is one I wish to see in moral philosophy: the discovery of a plan that would induce and oblige nations to settle their disputes without first cutting one another’s throats. When will human reason be sufficiently improved to see the advantage of this? When will men be convinced that even successful wars at length become misfortunes to those who unjustly commenced them, and who triumphed blindly in their success, not seeing all its consequences?

In 1782, in a letter from Franklin to Dr. Joseph Priestley upon man’s common inhumanity to man, occurs the following famous passage:

In what light we are viewed by superior beings may be gathered from a piece of late West India news, which possibly has not reached you. A young angel of distinction, being sent down to this world on some important business, for the first time, had an old courier spirit assigned him for his guide ; they arrived over the seas of Martinico, in the middle of the long day of obstinate fight between the fleets of Rodney and De Grasse. When through the clouds of smoke he saw the fire of the guns, the decks covered with mangled limbs, and bodies dead or dying; the ships sinking, burning, or blown into the air; and the quantity of pain, misery and destruction the crews yet alive were thus with so much eagerness dealing round to one another; he turned angrily to his guide and said: “You blundering blockhead! you undertook to conduct me to the earth, and you have brought me into hell!” “No, sir,” says the guide,” I have made no mistake; this is really the earth, and these are men. Devils never treat one another in this cruel manner; they have more sense, and more of what men vainly call humanity.”

The next year, 1783, the treaty of peace was signed which recognized the independence of the United States; and Franklin writes as follows to Sir Joseph Banks:

I join with you most cordially in rejoicing at the return of peace. I hope it will be lasting, and that mankind will at length, as they call themselves reasonable creatures, have reason enough to settle their differences without cutting throats; for, in my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace. What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of life might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility! What an extension of agriculture, even to the tops of the mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices and improvements, rendering England a complete paradise, might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief in bringing misery into thousands of families, and destroying the lives of so many working people, who might have performed the useful labors.

In the same year he wrote from Paris to David Hartley in London:

I think with you that your Quaker article is a good one, and that men will in time have sense enough to adopt it. … What would you think of a proposition, if I should make it, of a compact between England, France and America? America would be as happy as the Sabine girls if she could be the means of uniting in perpetual peace her father and her husband. What repeated follies are these repeated wars! You do not want to conquer and govern one another. Why then should you be continually employed in injuring and destroying one another? How many excellent things might have been done to promote the internal welfare of each country; what bridges, roads, canals and other public works and institutions, tending to the common felicity, might have been made and established with the money and men foolishly spent during the last seven centuries by our mad wars in doing one another mischief! You are near neighbors, and each have very respectable qualities. Learn to be quiet and to respect each other’s rights. You are all Christians. One is The Most Christian King, and the other Defender of the Faith. Manifest the propriety of these titles by your future conduct. “By this,” says Christ, “shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye love one another.” “Seek peace and ensue it.”

In 1783, when peace was uppermost in his thoughts, he wrote also to Mrs. Mary Hewson:

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. When will mankind be convinced, and agree to settle their differences by arbitration? Were they to do it even by the cast of a die, it would be better than by fighting and destroying each other.

Four years later, in 1787, just after the close of the Constitutional Convention, he wrote the following impressive letter to his sister, Mrs. Jane Mecom:

I agree with you perfectly in your disapprobation of war. Abstracted from the inhumanity of it, I think it wrong in point of human providence. For whatever advantages one nation would obtain from another, whether it be part of their territory, the liberty of commerce with them, free passage on their rivers, etc., etc., it would be much cheaper to purchase such advantages with ready money than to pay the expense of acquiring it by war. An army is a devouring monster, and when you have raised it you have, in order to subsist it, not only the fair charges of pay, clothing, provision, arms and ammunition, with numberless other contingent and just charges, to answer and satisfy, but you have all the additional knavish charges of the numerous tribe of contractors to defray, with those of every other dealer who furnishes the articles wanting for your army, and takes advantage of that want to demand exorbitant prices. It seems to me that if statesmen had a little more arithmetic, or were more accustomed to calculation, wars would be much less frequent. I am confident that Canada might have been purchased from France for a tenth part of the money England spent in the conquest of it; And if, instead of fighting with us for the power of taxing us, she had kept us in a good humor by allowing us to dispose of our own money, and now and then giving us a little of hers by way of donation to colleges or hospitals, or for cutting canals or fortifying ports, she might easily have drawn from us much more by our occasional voluntary grants and contributions than ever she could by taxes. Sensible people will give a bucket or two of water to a dry pump that they may afterwards get from it all they have occasion for. Her Ministry were deficient in that little point of common sense; and so they spent one hundred millions of her money, and after all lost what they contended for.

To Alexander Small, in England, he wrote in 1787:

You have one of the finest countries in the world, and if you can be cured of the folly of making war for trade (in which wars more has been always expended than the profits of any trade can compensate) you may make it one of the happiest. Make the most of your own natural advantages, instead of endeavoring to diminish those of other nations, and there is no doubt but that you may yet prosper and flourish. Your beginning to consider France no longer as a natural enemy is a mark of progress in the good sense of the nation.

Finally, in 1788, he wrote as follows to M. Le Veillard in France:

When will princes learn arithmetic enough to calculate, if they want pieces of one another’s territory, how much cheaper it would be to buy them than to make war for them, even though they were to give a hundred years’ purchase? But if glory cannot be valued, and therefore the wars for it cannot be subject to arithmetical calculation, so as to show their advantage or disadvantage, at least wars for trade, which have gain for their object, may be proper subjects for such computation; and a trading nation, as well as a single trader, ought to calculate the probabilities of profit and loss before engaging in any considerable adventure. This, however, nations seldom do, and we have had frequent instances of their spending more money in wars for acquiring or securing branches of commerce than a hundred years’ profit or the full enjoyment of them can compensate.

Source: Mead, Edwin D. Washington, Jefferson and Franklin on war. World Peace Foundation Pamphlet Series. Boston, May 1913; pp. 7−10.

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