In the early going of the account, I stumbled across the tale of Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic mission from New York City to Montreal in the early spring of 1776.
Franklin, who at age 70 was already an elderly gentleman and no longer in the best of health, traveled up the Hudson River, venturing by degrees into what we now know as the North Country.
“We had a heavy snow here yesterday and the waters are so out, as to make traveling difficult by land,” Franklin wrote from Saratoga on April 13th.
“There is a strong fresh in the river against the boats, but we shall endeavor to get on as well as we can.”
It must have struck his eye as a howling wilderness indeed, mountainous, war-wracked, and choked with mud and ice.
Just two months before he was tasked with helping to write the Declaration of Independence, Franklin traveled by bateau across the waters of Lake George.
With a small delegation from the Continental Congress, Franklin then camped rough along the primitive shore of Lake Champlain.
He dispatched a second letter, suggesting that the journey might be arduous enough to end his life:
“I am here on my way to Canada, detained by the present state of the lakes, in which the unthawed ice obstructs navigation,” he recounted mournfully.
“I begin to apprehend that I have undertaken a fatigue that at my time of life may prove too much for me, so I sit down to write to a few friends by way of farewell.”
We think these days of our Founding Fathers as statesmen and visionaries; and in their words, they tried to convey not only the rightness but the inevitability of their cause.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they declared, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
But the account of Franklin’s desperate journey through the shadows of the Adirondack and Green Mountains is a reminder of just how hardscrabble their effort was. Victory was anything but self-evident.
In his tone, you can hear some of the bleakness of the hour. In 1776, the early war was going terribly. The decision to invade Canada and besiege Quebec City was unraveling, with horrendous losses.
Franklin was hoping to mitigate the damage by winning support from French-speaking subjects of the British Crown. The diplomatic mission failed abjectly, a rare case of his legendary charm falling on deaf ears.
His delegation eventually dispatched a letter to Congress, warning that the Canadians had begun to view the American revolution “as bankrupt and their cause as desperate.”
With the northern front in peril, efforts to secure New York City were also collapsing, with George Washington’s dwindling army faced by growing British and Hessian forces.
It seemed that soon the Colonies would be neatly divided, with King George’s armies and navy controlling the crucial water highway and portages between Montreal and New York.
In those dangerous months, Ticonderoga and Crown Point weren’t proudly defended American outposts. They were refugee encampments, occupied by wrecked and disease-ravaged soldiers.
So on this 4th of July, it’s worth remembering that by the time Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, he knew in his bones what the fight for freedom would mean. It would be long and harrowing.
He had learned on that cold pilgrimage through the North Country that the patriots would have to be willing to put everything on the line. Their comfort, their security, their lives.
That’s a tough choice for any man to make, but for a gentleman of seventy years to join such a cause was remarkable.
This was the vision and courage of 1776.
To see past the mud and ice and the early defeats, to grasp that a Republic of free people, ruled with the consent of the governed, would be worth every sacrifice.