17
“My Dear Child,” Franklin wrote Debbie a little later, packing a box for shipment home:
As the Stamp Act is at length repealed, I am willing you should have a new gown, which you may suppose I did not send sooner as I knew you would not like to be finer than your neighbours, unless in a gown of your own spinning. Had the trade between the two countries totally ceased, it was a comfort that I had once been clothed from head to foot in woolen and linen of my wife’s manufacture, that I never was prouder of any dress in my life, and that she and her daughter might do it again if it was necessary.
Franklin described how he had told Parliament that the Americans could learn to make their own clothes before the ones they were wearing wore out. “And indeed if they all had as many old clothes as your old man has, that would not be very unlikely; for I think you and George reckoned when I was last at home, at least 20 pair of old breeches.”
So Debbie got a bolt of satin and Sally a new negligee and petticoat, while ships traveling in the opposite direction carried cargo of another sort, namely congratulations for Franklin on a job well done. “The Assembly entertain the most grateful sense of the firmness and integrity with which you have served your country on this very important occasion—and will not be wanting in their demonstrations of it on your return,” reported Joseph Galloway. The truly inveterate of Franklin’s enemies, Galloway said, still slandered him, but counterproductively. “They are daily put to shame on that account.”
Franklin could not but be pleased at the praise, yet he refused to overvalue it. If he was lionized now, he would be lambasted again. Two weeks after his session in Commons, but before reports of it reached America, he wrote to Jane Mecom, who herself had written to him complaining of his ill treatment at the hands of his enemies. “As to the reports you mention that are spread to my disadvantage, I give myself as little concern about them as possible,” he said.
I have often met with such treatment from people that I was all the while endeavouring to serve. At other times I have been extolled extravagantly when I have had little or no merit. These are the operations of nature. It sometimes is cloudy, it rains, it hails, again ’tis clear and pleasant, and the sun shines on us.
Take one thing with another, and the world is a pretty good sort of world; and ’tis our duty to make the best of it and be thankful. One’s true happiness depends more upon one’s own judgement of one’s self, on a consciousness of rectitude in action and intention, and in the approbation of those few who judge impartially, than upon the applause of the unthinking undiscerning multitude, who are apt to cry Hosanna today, and tomorrow, Crucify him.
Franklin had turned sixty during the fight for repeal; this personal milestone understandably occasioned reflection of the sort he shared with his sister, who had just lost her husband of many years. Some months earlier one of his oldest friends, Junto charter member Hugh Roberts, had written with news of the club and how the political quarreling in Philadelphia had continued to divide the membership. Franklin expressed hope that the squabbles would not keep Roberts from the meetings. “’tis now perhaps one of the oldest clubs, as I think it was formerly one of the best, in the King’s dominions; it wants but about two years of forty since it was established.” Few men were so lucky as to belong to such a group. “We loved and still love one another; we are grown grey together and yet it is too early to part. Let us sit till the evening of life is spent; the last hours were always the most joyous. When we can stay no longer ’tis time enough then to bid each other good night, separate, and go quietly to bed.”
And in what consisted that final sleep? Franklin’s theology had changed over the years, from borderline atheism to rationalistic deism. At times in his later years he would approach Christianity. Throughout, however, Franklin’s God remained as reasonable as Franklin himself. In Philadelphia before leaving for London this latest time, Franklin heard from his old friend, the evangelist George Whitefield. Franklin replied:
Your frequently repeated wishes and prayers for my eternal as well as temporal happiness are very obliging. I can only thank you for them, and offer you mine in return. I have my self no doubts that I shall enjoy as much of both as is proper for me. That Being who gave me existence, and through almost threescore years has been continually showering his favours upon me, whose very chastisements have been blessings to me, can I doubt that he loves me? And if he loves me, can I doubt that he will go on to take care of me not only here but hereafter? This to some may seem presumption; to me it appears the best grounded hope: hope of the future, built on experience of the past.
And that Being looked after not only individual souls but their actions together. Franklin was the least sectarian person he knew, and he shuddered at the illegitimate intrusion of religion into politics. But he believed that right would eventually win out. “The malice of our adversaries I am well acquainted with,” he reassured a friend and ally who had gone down to defeat in the 1764 Assembly election. “But hitherto it has been harmless, all their arrows shot against us have been like those that Rabelais speaks of which were headed with butter hardened in the sun. As long as I have known the world I have observed that wrong is always growing more wrong, till there is no bearing, and that right, however opposed, comes right at last.”
Franklin passed another milestone during that same busy period. After eighteen years his printing partnership with David Hall came to its scheduled end. Franklin at sixty had no desire to extend it; Hall was happy to proceed in the printing business on his own. Before leaving for London, Franklin had given James Parker his power of attorney to settle the account with Hall; the report Parker filed revealed, among innumerable details, that Franklin had taken nearly £14,000 out of the business over the eighteen years, in the form chiefly of cash but including certain in-kind supplies and services. At the termination of the partnership, Franklin owed Hall slightly less than £1,000, by Hall’s (and Parker’s) reckoning.
This amount injected a slight element of friction at the close of what had been a productive and profitable relationship for both men. Franklin questioned some of the entries and totals in Parker’s accounting, but his distance from Philadelphia postponed any final settlement.
Hall was willing to trust Franklin for the balance; somewhat more unsettling was what Hall interpreted to be Franklin’s participation in a new printing venture just months after Franklin & Hall dissolved. Two of the prime movers behind the new partnership were Joseph Galloway and Thomas Wharton; the expressed purpose was the dissemination of the views of the antiproprietary party through a new paper called the Pennsylvania Chronicle. The partnership and purpose certainly suggested Franklin’s participation, as did rumors that Franklin was putting money into the new venture. When it opened for business in a house owned by Franklin, the connection appeared confirmed.
Not surprisingly, Hall was miffed. He wrote Franklin relating what he knew of this upstart press, and what he was hearing about Franklin’s taking a part. “This I will never allow myself to believe, having still, as I always had, the highest opinion of your honour,” he declared, as if requesting reassurance. Hall reminded Franklin of the clause in their contract that forbade either to compete with the other. “Though you are not absolutely prohibited from being any farther concerned in the printing business in this place, yet so much is plainly implied.” But Hall preferred not to rely on a contract; rather he appealed their long-standing friendship, a friendship “I shall always value and endeavour to deserve.”
Franklin supplied the requested reassurance. He had no hand in the new printing business and told Hall so. “It was set on foot without my knowledge or participation, and the first notice I had of it was by reading the advertisement in your paper.”
Yet he could not let Hall’s interpretation of their own partnership agreement go uncontested. That agreement forbade competition during the life of the partnership but not beyond. There was reason for this. “I could not possibly foresee 18 years beforehand, that I should at the end of that term be so rich as to live without business. And if this did not happen, it would be obliging myself to the hard alternative of starving or banishment, since threescore is rather too late an age to think of going ’prentice to learn a new trade, and I have no other.”
As matters currently stood, Franklin did not expect to reenter the printing trade. His office as deputy postmaster provided an income, as to a lesser extent did rents from his various properties. Certain debts were owed him, which he hoped to collect. Nor were his needs great: “I am not inclined to much expense.” But things might change, and he could not bar himself his trade. “I am sure you would take no pleasure in seeing me ruined, or obliged at my time of life to quit my country, friends and connections to get my bread in a strange place.”
Franklin had other hopes for his retirement from the printing business. His speculative schemes in land moved forward—slowly, to be sure, and in a different direction than originally planned, but forward still. Although the Proclamation of 1763 ruled out the Ohio project for the time being, opportunities elsewhere beckoned. The British government appeared eager to make British the territories seized from France; to this end London granted real estate in Nova Scotia to speculators willing to develop the property and plant settlements. Richard Jackson alerted Franklin to this opportunity, and in the autumn of 1765 Franklin became one of twenty-three individuals, mostly Philadelphians, jointly awarded 200,000 acres on the St. John and Peticodiac rivers.
The land was not free. Legal and surveying costs had to be covered. Attempt was made to minimize the former by chartering the venture on October 31, 1765, the day before the Stamp Act, which decreed a tax on such transactions, was to take effect. (In light of the colonies’ refusal of the stamps, and the later repeal of the act, what Franklin and his associates saved by their timeliness was not money but several months.) Regarding the surveying costs, Deborah six weeks later reported paying £53 to a young surveyor named Anthony Wayne (who would win renown as “Mad Anthony” Wayne of the Revolutionary War). “So you see that I am a real land jobber,” Deborah remarked, in words that applied as well to her husband.
The grantees committed themselves to improving their lands—enclosing them, cultivating them, or finding others to do so—at the rate of one-third of the grant for each ten years elapsed. An annual quitrent eventually amounting to one farthing per acre would be owed the Crown, starting in five years. Should the grantees fail to meet these conditions, the land would revert to the Crown.
But should the grantees find settlers to whom to sell the land, they might expect to turn a profit. The most ambitious speculators in that era could hope to become very wealthy, from holdings in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of acres. Franklin, whose Nova Scotia tracts totaled some 11,500 acres, initially set his sights lower. Yet even he could hope to leave a legacy. “I tell Sally this is for grandchildren,” Debbie said in the letter to Franklin about paying Anthony Wayne. “She seemed very well pleased.”
Encouraged, Franklin applied for a grant on his own. Early in 1766 he requested 20,000 acres in Nova Scotia, to be selected where he or his agent thought best. His request bubbled slowly up through the British bureaucracy; in June 1767 the Privy Council awarded Franklin his prize, subject to conditions similar to those on the earlier grant.
Even as the second Nova Scotia request was moving forward, Franklin was working on a scheme far grander—one, moreover, in which he cooperated more closely than ever with his son. Perhaps because William sensed, after the tumultuous events surrounding the Stamp Act, that the tenure of a royal governor might be brief, he worked assiduously, almost obsessively, to gain a stake in unsettled lands. With some Philadelphia friends of his father’s, the Indian agent George Croghan, and Sir William Johnson, the superintendent for Indian affairs in the northern part of the colonies, William organized a group called the Illinois Company to seek vast grants in the Illinois country beyond the Ohio River. Eventually the project grew to encompass the creation of a new colony in the west. William knew that such a venture required an agent in England; for this purpose he invited his father to join. Franklin did so with pleasure.
During the latter half of 1766 and most of 1767 father and son corresponded regularly; the most frequent object of discussion was the status of the Illinois project. “I have mentioned the Illinois affair to Lord Shelburne,” Franklin wrote William in September 1766. Shelburne was secretary of state of the Southern Department of the American colonies and was considered supportive of western settlement. “His Lordship had read your plan for establishing a colony there, recommended by Sir William Johnson, and said it appeared to him to be a reasonable scheme.” Two weeks later Franklin reported further progress: “I was again with Lord Shelburne a few days since, and said a good deal to him on the affair of the Illinois settlement. He was pleased to say he really approved of it.” Yet Shelburne cautioned that during the current period of financial retrenchment, patience must be the watchword.
Franklin was patient—but not inactive. He enlisted the help of Richard Jackson, who, upon request from the ministry, delivered his opinion that the Illinois plan was “certainly well framed.” Jackson added, “I have no doubt of its practicability or utility.” Franklin kept at his task, until in August 1767 he was able to announce a major hurdle surmounted. He had again dined with Shelburne, who was accompanied in this case by the secretary of state for the Northern Department, Henry Conway. “The Secretaries appeared finally to be fully convinced,” Franklin wrote William. The only remaining obstacle was the Board of Trade, which, the two secretaries suggested, ought to be brought round privately before the matter reached that body in official form.
The lobbying took a few months; in late October the Board of Trade summoned Franklin and Richard Jackson to answer certain questions. Apparently satisfied with what they heard, the members approved the plan.
And then, at the edge of success, the project encountered a new obstacle. The better to coordinate colonial policy, the imperial government melded the Northern and Southern departments into a single American Department; over this new office was placed Lord Hillsborough. Shelburne had been a friend of the Americans; Hillsborough proved just the opposite. He was skeptical of new projects and new expenses; he was also suspicious of most things American. The Illinois project came to a shuddering halt; the two Franklins’ dream of western wealth danced beyond their reach.
The elevation of Hillsborough at just this moment was no accident, although the reason had nothing to do with the Franklins’ land scheme. The British government had never been stable since the accession of George III, and it remained unstable—not least since George himself was less than a rock. The young king’s infatuation with Bute had worn off the way infatuations do, but, as infatuations often do, it left traces of jealousy and suspicion, and not in the king alone. George Grenville might have become a powerful and long-tenured prime minister, but he could never put out of his mind that Bute had been George’s first love. In 1765 the king fell seriously ill; though none knew it, these were the first symptoms of the hereditary disease—apparently porphyria—that would drive him mad. The malady prompted calls for the creation of a regency in the event the monarch was carried off or permanently incapacitated. Although George recovered, the regency bill passed, and in doing so provoked a row over the identity of the regent. George wanted to appoint his own; Grenville and the ministry wanted their man. When George won out, Grenville refused to accept defeat gracefully. He insisted on spiting the king, and demonstrating his power, by forcing the resignation of Bute’s brother, whom George still favored, from an inconsequential office.
The king wept and gnashed his teeth. He struggled to free himself of Grenville but found no rescuer. “George the Third,” jibed Horace Walpole, “is the true successor of George the Second, and inherits all his grandfather’s humiliations.” But the grandson had learned from those humiliations, and before long he found the alternative to Grenville he had been seeking. That this alternative and his friends were discovered at the racetrack at Ascot prompted another wag to declare that the new government was formed of “persons called from the stud to the state, and transformed miraculously out of jockeys into ministers.” On the lead horse was the Marquis of Rockingham.
Yet Grenville had his revenge. Rockingham’s first order of business was liquidating the Stamp Act fiasco Grenville had created, and he rallied what he trumpeted to George as “public opinion” behind repeal. The public in question did not include Grenville and his friends, as they demonstrated in cross-examining Franklin during his testimony before Commons; and although they failed to prevent repeal they weakened Rockingham. Subsequent Rockingham reforms—of the Sugar Act, for instance, which was revised to lower the molasses duty from three pence to one, while extending it to British molasses—pleased certain constituencies (Americans especially) but further alienated the Grenville crowd.
This alienation might not have unseated Rockingham had Rockingham not simultaneously alienated the king. George was unhappy with the repeal of the Stamp Act, preferring a stiffer line against the unruly Americans. Nor did he like Rockingham’s appeal to the public, a strategy that promised to place the Crown in the shade of such rabble as were ruining the empire in America. Moreover, following his recovery from his illness, George was in a mood to place his own stamp, even if not Grenville’s stamps, on imperial politics.
Between Grenville’s enmity and George’s envy, Rockingham was pushed aside. His successor seemed, at first glance, an odd choice. William Pitt had most recently distinguished himself by speaking out against the Stamp Act. “I rejoice that America has resisted,” he proclaimed in Commons (in the very face of Grenville, a single seat away). “Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.” Americans rejoiced, in their turn, at Pitt’s rejoicing; a statue to Pitt went up in New York. But this was hardly language to reassure a worried monarch confronting incipient rebellion.
All the same, Pitt proved the indispensable man now, as he had previously. He was as popular as Grenville was not, and George could hope that some of the Great Commoner’s popularity would rub off on the Crown. Unfortunately for both, George offered Pitt an earldom, and Pitt accepted. Almost at once his popularity with the masses began to dissipate; how could an earl (of Chatham) be the Great Commoner? Popularity aside, Pitt’s move from Commons to Lords was a tactical blunder, for it precluded control of the lower house, by now far and away the most important body in British politics. As if this were not enough, he fell badly ill, leaving day-to-day direction of government affairs in the hands of his associates, who showed even worse judgment and considerably less talent.
Franklin observed the ministerial minuets with a mixture of fascination and dismay. “The confusion among our Great Men still continues as great as ever,” he told Joseph Galloway. “And a melancholy thing it is to consider, that instead of employing the present leisure of peace in such measures as might extend our commerce, pay off our debts, secure allies, and increase the strength and ability of the nation to support a future war, the whole time seems wasted in party contentions about power and profit, in court intrigues and cabals, and in abusing one another.”
Also abused were the Americans. Franklin visited the House of Lords and heard the peers rant about the insubordinate wretches across the sea. “It gave me great uneasiness to find much resentment against the colonies in the disputants,” he recorded. “The word rebellion was frequently used.”
Franklin did what he could to avert the abuse. He frequented the pages of the London journals, writing under various noms de plume. As “A Friend to Both Countries” he characterized the current atmosphere and sought to deflate it.
Every step is now taken to enrage us against America. Pamphlets and news papers fly about, and coffee-houses ring with lying reports of its being in rebellion. Force is called for. Fleets and troops should be sent. Those already there should be called in from the distant posts and quartered on the capital towns. The principal people should be brought here and hanged, &c. And why?
Why! Do you ask why?
Yes. I beg leave to ask why?
Why they are going to throw off the government of this country, and set up for themselves.
Pray how does that appear?
Why, are they not all in arms?
No. They are all in peace.
Have they not refused to make the compensation to the sufferers by the late riots, that was required of them by government here?
No. They have made ample satisfaction. Which, by the way, has not been done here to the sufferers by your own riots.
Have they not burnt the custom-house?
No. That story is an absolute invented lie, without the least foundation.
As “Benevolus,” Franklin answered several allegations commonly laid against the Americans. The colonies were not settled at the expense of Parliament, he explained. “If we examine our records, the journals of Parliament, we shall not find that a farthing was ever granted for the settling any colonies before the last reign, and then only for Georgia and Nova Scotia, which are still of little value.” The colonies had not received their constitutions from Parliament, but from the king. Consequently Parliament could not claim that the colonial assemblies were creatures of Parliament.
The colonies had not been constantly protected from the Indians at Parliament’s expense. “They protected themselves at their own expence for near 150 years after the first settlement and never thought of applying to Parliament for any aid against the Indians.” The last two wars were fought not for the colonies’ protection, but for the protection of British trade. In the most recent case: “The colonies were in peace, and the settlers had not been attacked or molested in the least, till after the miscarriage of Braddock’s expedition to the Ohio.”
The colonies had not refused to contribute their share toward the war effort. The colonial contribution in men was “far beyond their proportion,” in treasure an expense “ten times greater than the money returned to them.” The colonies were not the great gainers from the latest war. In fact just the opposite. The new acquisitions of land went to the king, not the Americans; moreover, the new land available for settlement diminished (through oversupply) the value of existing holdings; finally, the colonies in prosecuting the war assumed a heavy burden of debt they would be years retiring. The colonies did not escape taxes. “There cannot be a greater mistake than this.” The colonies paid taxes to support civil and military establishments, to fund the debt from the war, and to create various public works—roads, bridges, and the like—that were already built and paid for in Britain. As a proportion of property, taxes in America were greater than those in Britain.
Lastly, the colonies did not claim that Parliament had no authority over them. All acts of Parliament had been accepted as such by the colonies—“acts to raise money upon the colonies by internal taxes only and alone excepted.” Put otherwise: “The colonies submit to pay all external taxes laid on them by way of duty on merchandises imported into their country, and never disputed the authority of Parliament to lay such duties.”
Charles Townshend probably read this piece. If so, the new chancellor of the exchequer, and de facto prime minister in Chatham’s illness, might have taken issue with parts of Franklin’s argument. The king had indeed granted the colonial charters, but since then England had fought a civil war to vindicate the primacy of Parliament over the Crown. The colonies might have defended themselves for the first 150 years, but for the several years after that they were happy for Parliament’s help. To imply that the Americans paid taxes comparable to Britons was simply ludicrous; Franklin’s standard of comparison—property values—grossly distorted the true tax burden.
But what must have interested Townshend most was Franklin’s reiteration that the Americans did not object to external taxes. Townshend had heard Franklin make this argument in Commons; likely he guessed that “Benevolus” was actually Franklin. Townshend may have accepted Franklin’s characterization of the American mind, or he may simply have wished to see Franklin hoist by his own petard. In either case, Townshend drew up a schedule of external taxes—to which, by Franklin’s reasoning, the Americans ought not to object. The Townshend taxes were import duties: on glass, lead, paint pigments, paper, and tea.
Even had the Townshend program consisted of nothing more than this, many Americans would have complained. By no means was Franklin’s distinction between internal and external taxes universally shared. Yet Townshend went beyond imposing new duties. The revenues from the new duties were earmarked not simply for the defense of the colonies but for the administration of colonial government. The effect of this, as Townshend intended and the Americans immediately recognized, would be to free royal governors and other royal officials from the control of the local assemblies, which heretofore had paid their salaries—and might withhold their salaries at displeasure.
Another alarming measure involved the Quartering Act of 1765, which required the colonies to barrack British troops on the request of the British commander in America. General Gage had so requested of New York, which resisted the request, leading to minor violence between American civilians and British troops. Townshend proposed to punish the New Yorkers by suspending their assembly.
That such measures should emanate from a ministry nominally headed by a friend of America surprised some members of Parliament. But a widespread feeling that the rebellious colonials must be brought into line overrode such surprise, and during the summer of 1767 the Townshend program became law.
During this period, Franklin found himself distracted by an important personal matter. His only daughter determined to wed a man of dubious character and prospects.
Richard Bache was the brother of a New York merchant named Theophylact Bache, a native of Yorkshire who migrated to Manhattan in 1751 and took up business with his aunt’s husband, a former mayor of New York. The uncle died, leaving Theophylact the business. This proved successful enough to attract Theophylact’s brother over from Yorkshire but not successful enough to support both Baches in New York itself, at least not at the level to which they aspired. Richard Bache accordingly was dispatched to Philadelphia, by now the leading city in the colonies, to open a branch of the business.
Somewhere between Yorkshire and New York the family name, which had been pronounced “beach,” became “baytch,” and it was under this pronunciation that Richard Bache met Sally Franklin shortly after his arrival in Philadelphia. (The pronunciation apparently wobbled, however. Franklin said “beach” at least occasionally, to judge by the misspellings in his dictated letters.) Almost certainly Bache arrived in finer style than Sally’s father had displayed to her mother some forty years earlier, if only because Richard Bache was twenty-eight to Franklin’s seventeen and already established in his trade. But the result was the same, and before long, Sally and Richard Bache were speaking of marriage.
Until now Deborah had managed the affairs of the family with adeptness and aplomb in Franklin’s absence. Rearing Sally had fallen largely upon her shoulders, certainly during the last ten years. But arranging—or approving, rather—her daughter’s marriage was not a responsibility she wished to take on unassisted. As the daughter of Pennsylvania’s most famous citizen, and the (half) sister of New Jersey’s governor, Sally did not want for company. “Sally has friends all about,” her mother explained. Yet this new “addition of her friends,” as Deborah described Richard Bache to Franklin, was special—to Sally, at any rate. Debbie was not quite sure how to deal with him, and so opted for a friendly yet watchful approach. Better this than to try to keep them apart. “I think it would only drive her to see him somewhere else, which would give me much uneasiness.” It was very difficult to know how to proceed. “I am obliged to be father and mother,” she said, somewhat plaintively. She added, “I hope I act to your satisfaction. I do according to my best judgment.”
Franklin was concerned to know the character and prospects of Sally’s suitor. Yet he appreciated the handicap his absence from home placed him under in this regard, and he did not want his handicap to become his daughter’s. In May 1767 he could not know when he would be returning to Philadelphia, so he referred the matter to the combined judgment of Deborah, who knew Sally best, and William, who was in a position to find out something about Richard Bache. “I would not occasion a delay of her happiness if you thought the match a proper one.”
But he could not leave the matter at this—after all, Sally was his only daughter. “I know very little of the gentleman or his character, nor can I at this distance,” he wrote Debbie just a month later. He worried that Bache might have developed a wrong impression.
I hope his expectations are not great of any fortune to be had with our daughter before our death. I can only say, that if he proves a good husband to her, and a good son to me, he shall find me as good a father as I can be. But at present I suppose you would agree with me that we cannot do more than fit her out handsomely in clothes and furniture, not exceeding in the whole five hundred pounds of value. For the rest they must depend, as you and I did, on their own industry and care, as what remains in our hands will be barely sufficient for our support, and not enough for them when it comes to be divided at our decease.
Per Franklin’s request—and doubtless from a fraternal feeling as well—William inquired of Bache’s business. Bache himself confessed to some recent financial reverses that left him temporarily illiquid; this prompted William to investigate further. What he found occasioned grave worry. It seemed Sally was not the first woman Bache had wooed, nor even the first in Philadelphia. He had initially fallen for Margaret Ross, one of Sally’s closest friends. But two untoward occurrences had prevented the consummation of the romance. The first was Bache’s inability to prove his worthiness to John Ross, Margaret’s father. Ross investigated Bache’s finances and discovered they were substantially less sound than Bache made them out to be. As William Franklin learned secondhand, and described to Franklin, Ross declared not only “that Mr. B. had often attempted to deceive him about his circumstances, but that he was well convinced he was not, before this unlucky affair [the recent reverse to which Bache owned up] happened, worth any thing if all his debts were paid. In short, that he is a mere fortune hunter who wants to better his circumstances by marrying into a family that will support him.”
William conceded that the nature of the evidence against Bache was such that one could not know exactly where the truth lay, but on their face things looked bad. “I think it evident that these bills have involved him in a load of debt greatly more than he is worth, and that if Sally marries him they must both be entirely dependent on you for subsistence.” William closed with an admonition revealing his sense that he had touched delicate issues. “Do burn this,” he told his father.
The second, and definitive, development that had prevented the marriage of Bache and Margaret Ross was the young lady’s sudden death in August 1766. This not only released Bache from a relationship that seemed stalled, but threw him into Sally’s arms, for according to subsequent family tradition, Sally received a deathbed request from Margaret Ross to take Margaret’s lover as her own and marry him. Perhaps the romantic-tragic aspect of this request was too much for Sally; perhaps she simply found Bache as charming as Margaret had. In any case, she then fell for Bache (if she had not already), and determined to marry him.
Franklin was torn by the situation. He did not wish to prevent Sally’s happiness, but neither did he want her to marry a ne’er-do-well. In May 1767 Bache wrote Franklin a detailed accounting and explanation of his financial affairs. Evidently he was persuasive, for Franklin wrote back: “I received yours of the 21st of May and am truly sorry to hear of your misfortune. It must however be a consolation to you that it cannot be imputed to any imprudence of your own.”
Franklin went on to make Bache’s misfortune a test of his devotion to Sally. Bache was young; through industry and good management he might in a few years recoup his loss.
But in the mean time your own discretion will suggest to you how far it will be right to charge yourself with the expense of a family which if undertaken before you recover yourself, may forever prevent your emerging. I love my daughter perhaps as well as ever parent did a child, but I have told you before that my estate is small, scarce a sufficiency for the support of me and my wife, who are growing old and cannot now bustle for a living as we have done….
I am obliged to you for the regard and preference you express for my child and wish you all prosperity; but unless you can convince her friends of the probability of your being able to maintain her properly, I hope you will not persist in a proceeding that may be attended with ruinous consequences to you both.
This was hardly a blessing on the match, but neither was it a veto. Had Franklin been on hand, he might have taken a stronger stand. Yet from across the Atlantic he could not reasonably do so. Sally knew her mind, while her father did not quite know his—on this subject. Setting aside his misgivings, she went ahead with the marriage.
During this third stay in England, Franklin continued his practice of summer vacations away from London. However great the city might be in many respects, it took a toll on one’s health. Whether the thick smoke and damp chill of winter were worse than the infectious diseases of summer was partly a matter of taste. The taste of government officials tended toward summer departures, which afforded another reason for Franklin’s holidays: when the city cleared out, there was nothing for a colonial agent to do. Additionally, of course, a man of Franklin’s wide interests thrived on new sights and experiences.
In the summer of 1766 he traveled to Germany with John Pringle. “Though I was not quite to say sick, I was often ailing last winter and through this spring,” Franklin explained to Debbie. Pringle wanted to drink the waters at Bad Pyrmont, a spa in the neighborhood of George III’s ancestral home. “I hope more from the air and exercise,” Franklin said. They left London in mid-June; because Pringle was physician to Queen Charlotte and she was expecting a child in the early autumn, they had to be back before the end of August.
After a week’s journey by road, channel packet, and again road, they arrived at Bad Pyrmont. For two weeks they took the waters there. Pringle had intended to stay longer, but either because the treatment effected its benefits sooner than expected or because it appeared unlikely to do so at all, Pringle decided to join Franklin on a tour of the north German countryside. “I found a very fine country,” Franklin explained, “and seemingly not so much hurt by the late war as one might have expected, since it appears every where fully cultivated, notwithstanding the great loss it sustained in people.” For the first time Franklin saw the source of all those Germans who had emigrated to Pennsylvania over the years. At the same time he discovered that America was not the only place they were going. “It should seem their numbers are inexhaustible, since the Empress of Russia is now inviting into her country such Germans as are willing to leave their own, and obtained no less than forty thousand of them last year.”
In mid-July they visited the city of Hanover, where they examined the Royal Library and watched the noted German scientist Johann Friedrich Hartman conduct a series of electrical experiments. From Hanover they went south to Göttingen; both were inducted into the Royal Academy. A professor at the University of Göttingen, Gottfried Achenwall, took the opportunity to query Franklin at length on past and current conditions in the British North American colonies. Franklin expatiated on American geography, on the founding of the colonies, on the growth of their populations, on Indian affairs, on the diverse modes of free and bound labor, on American relations with Britain. Not surprisingly the professor received an account of recent events that favored the colonies. In an afterword to his transcript of their conversation, Achenwall summarized the lesson: “Every colony respects its founders, if it is well treated. But if it feels injured and despised, it is alienated. Colonies are not sent out to be slaves, but as lawful equals to those who remain at home.”
Franklin and Pringle traveled south to Frankfurt and Mainz, then north down the Rhine to Cologne and the Netherlands, whence they crossed the Channel back to England. They arrived in good time for Pringle to oversee the birth of a healthy Princess Charlotte. As for Franklin, in reporting to the Pennsylvania Assembly that he was back on the job, he pronounced himself “well and hearty, my journey having perfectly answered its intention.”
The following year Franklin repeated his Continental cure. Again he traveled with Pringle, who again had a couple of months free before he had to be back with the queen, who again was pregnant.
The trip started in late August. “I have stayed too long in London this summer, and now sensibly feel the want of my usual journey to preserve my health,” Franklin wrote Debbie. The principal symptoms of his delay were two: a backful of rashes and boils that “made him very uneasy,” according to Mrs. Stevenson, and a sour temper, doubtless an expression of that uneasiness. From London to Dover he found nothing good to say about the journey. “I was engaged in perpetual disputes with the innkeepers, hostlers and postillions,” he told Polly Stevenson. He could not understand why every post chaise he and Pringle rode in had a hood or canopy so pitched as to make it nearly impossible for the passengers to see out—which, in Franklin’s opinion, was the whole reason for traveling. When he tried to persuade his drivers to change the rigging, they explained that this would be impossible. The chaises were rigged for the safety and benefit of the horses; to change would kill the animals. Franklin thought this absurd and said so, to no avail. “They added other reasons that were no reasons at all, and made me, as upon a hundred other occasions, almost wish that mankind had never been endowed with a reasoning faculty, since they know so little how to make use of it and so often mislead themselves by it; and that they had been furnished with a good sensible instinct instead of it.”
The crossing to the Continent offered further evidence of human folly. “We embarked for Calais with a number of passengers who had never been before at sea. They would previously make a hearty breakfast, because if the wind should fail, we might not get over till supper-time. Doubtless they thought that when they had paid for their breakfast they had a right to it, and that when they had swallowed it they were sure of it. But they had scarce been out half an hour before the sea laid claim to it, and they were obliged to deliver it up. So it seems there are uncertainties even beyond those between the cup and the lip.”
Things improved in France, slightly. Describing the boatmen and porters on the two sides of the Channel, Franklin declared, “I know not which are most rapacious, the English or French; but the latter have, with their knavery, the most politeness.”
The roads from Calais to Paris were as good as those in England, paved in many places with smooth stones and lined with rows of trees. “But then the poor peasants complained to us grievously, that they were obliged to work upon the roads full two months in the year without being paid for their labour. Whether this is truth, or whether, like Englishmen, they grumble cause or no cause, I have not yet been able fully to inform myself.”
Franklin was struck by the different complexions he encountered: dark at Calais and Boulogne but much lighter at Abbeville. He suspected that the change might be due to the immigration of Dutch spinners and weavers some generations earlier; these people were naturally lighter, and their work kept them indoors, away from the sun. Whatever the cause of their fairness, they were hard workers. “Never was I in a place of greater industry, wheels and looms going in every house.”
At Paris the complexion changed again, but for a reason more readily discerned. Franklin thought Polly Stevenson would be interested in the beauty secrets of French ladies, so he shared them in some detail. The use of rouge was most striking.
I have not had the honour of being at any lady’s toilette to see how it is laid on, but I fancy I can tell you how it is or may be done: Cut a hole of 3 inches diameter in a piece of paper, place it on the side of your face in such a manner as that the top of the hole may be just under your eye; then with a brush dipped in the colour paint face and paper together, so when the paper is taken off there will remain a round patch of red exactly the form of the hole.
This is the mode, from the actresses on stage upwards through all ranks of ladies to the princesses of the blood.
The practice stopped just short of the queen, as Franklin could attest from personal observation. He and Pringle were invited to a grand convert, where King Louis XV and Queen Marie supped in public. Franklin was favorably impressed. “Serenity, complacence and beauty” characterized the queen; as for the king: “He spoke to both of us very graciously and cheerfully, is a handsome man, has a very lively look, and appears younger than he is.” (Louis, called the Well-Beloved, was fifty-seven.) Yet Franklin did not wish Polly to get the wrong impression. “I would not have you think me so much pleased with this King and Queen as to have a whit less regard than I used to have for ours. No Frenchman shall go beyond me in thinking my own King and Queen the very best in the world and the most amiable.”
Versailles alone was worth the trouble and expense of the trip. “The range of building is immense; the garden front most magnificent, all of hewn stone; the number of statues, figures, urns, &c. in marble and bronze of exquisite workmanship is beyond conception.” The cost of construction was estimated to Franklin at £80 million. Yet someone was stinting on maintenance. “The waterworks are out of repair, and so is a great part of the front next the town, looking with its shabby half brick walls and broken windows not much better than the houses in Durham Yard.” The effect was odd, but French. “There is, in short, both at Versailles and Paris, a prodigious mixture of magnificence and negligence, with every kind of elegance except that of cleanliness and what we call tidyness.”
Yet Franklin conceded the palm to Paris on two points of civic hygiene. The first had to do with the water supply, which was rendered “as pure as that of the best spring by filtering it through cisterns filled with sand.” The second involved the streets, which “by constant sweeping are fit to walk in though there is no paved foot path.” For that reason many well-dressed people did indeed walk in the streets, eschewing the coaches and chairs essential for unspattered travel in London.
Franklin found the French people to be the politest he had met. “It seems to be a point settled here universally that strangers are to be treated with respect; one has just the same deference shewn one here by being a stranger as in England by being a lady.” At a customs house near Paris the officers were about to seize two dozen bottles of Bordeaux wine given to Franklin and Pringle at Boulogne. “But as soon as they found we were strangers, it was immediately remitted on that account.” At the cathedral of Notre-Dame, where an immense crowd had gathered to see an exhibit dedicated to the recently deceased dauphiness, Franklin and Pringle initially despaired of getting in. “But the officer being told that we were strangers from England, he immediately admitted us, accompanied and showed us everything.” Franklin asked himself and Polly, “Why don’t we practice this urbanity to Frenchmen? Why should they be allowed to outdo us?”
The experience occasioned reflections on travel and life. “Travelling is one way of lengthening life, at least in appearance. It is but a fortnight since we left London, but the variety of scenes we have gone through makes it seem equal to six months living in one place.” The present journey had wrought effects upon the traveler obvious at first glance.
Perhaps I have suffered a greater change to my own person than I could have done in six years at home. I had not been here six days before my tailor and peruquier had transformed me into a Frenchman. Only think what a figure I make in a little bag wig [which gathered the hair in a bag at the nape of the neck] and naked ears! They told me I was become 20 years younger, and looked very galante. So being in Paris where the mode is to be sacredly followed, I was once very near making love to my friend’s wife.
Vacation once more produced its intended effect. The travelers wended back to London early in October, with Franklin revived in body and spirit. Three weeks later he wrote to Debbie, “I have been extremely hearty and well ever since my return from France, the complaints I had before I went on that tour being entirely dissipated, and fresh strength and activity, the effects of exercise and change of air, have taken their place.”