28
Another bagatelle had a decidedly darker theme. It involved a lion, king of the beasts, who numbered among his subjects a body of faithful dogs, devoted to his person and government, and through whose assistance he had greatly extended his dominions. The lion, however, influenced by evil counselors, took an aversion to the dogs, condemned them unheard, and ordered his tigers, leopards, and panthers to attack and destroy them.
The brave dogs, dismayed at their master’s change of heart, reluctantly defended themselves—but not without internal dissent. “A few among them, of a mongrel race, derived from a mixture with wolves and foxes, corrupted by royal promises of great rewards, deserted the honest dogs and joined their enemies.”
After a sore struggle the dogs fought off the tigers, leopards, and panthers. In their victory they refused to suffer the return of the mongrels—who thereupon applied to the lion to fulfill the promises he had made. The wolves and the foxes supported their appeal and urged that every loyal subject of the lion should be taxed to that end.
Only the horse, with a boldness and freedom that became the nobility of his nature, spoke against the mongrels and the wolves and foxes. The lion, he said, had been misled by bad ministers to war unjustly on his faithful subjects. Royal promises, when made to encourage subjects to act for the public good, should indeed be honored; but if made to encourage betrayal and mutual destruction, they were wicked and void from the beginning. “If you enable the King to reward those fratricides, you will establish a precedent that may justify a future tyrant to make like promises; and every example of such an unnatural brute rewarded will give them additional weight.” Horses and bulls, as well as dogs, might thus be divided against their own kind, and civil wars produced at pleasure. All would be so weakened that neither liberty nor safety would survive, and nothing would remain but abject submission to a despot, “who may devour us as he pleases.”
At the time Franklin wrote this fable, the British Parliament was complaining at the Americans’ failure to compensate the Loyalists for their losses. The piece was written for a British audience; Franklin’s point was that the Loyalists did not deserve compensation—certainly not from the Americans, nor even from the British king or Parliament.
In some respects Franklin was a magnanimous victor. He repaired relations with old friends in England, resuming correspondence where the war had broken it off. But on the subject of the Loyalists he never relented. Indeed, he went so far as to deny they deserved the label they adopted. “The name loyalist was improperly assumed by these people,” he wrote a British friend. “Royalists they may perhaps be called. But the true loyalists were the people of America, against whom they acted.” Eventually Franklin acknowledged that if Parliament wished to compensate the Loyalists, it might do so. But his reasoning revealed his continuing bitterness. “Even a hired assassin has a right to his pay from his employer.”
Perhaps as consequence, perhaps as cause—probably as both— Franklin’s feelings toward the Loyalists as a group were closely connected to his feelings toward William. In August 1784, after a hiatus of several years, he received a letter from his son. William had been released from custody in a prisoner exchange in 1778, and after four years among his fellow refugees in the vicinity of New York he sailed for London. There he took up the cause of the American Loyalists, becoming one of the wolves and foxes of his father’s fable—not to mention already being one of the foremost mongrels. For several months after the conclusion of the war neither father nor son made any move to contact the other, the former out of hurt and anger, the latter out of pride.
Finally the son took the step. Assuming that his father would be leaving France for America soon, and probably taking Temple with him, William averred his desire to “revive that affectionate intercourse and connexion which till the commencement of the late troubles had been the pride and happiness of my life.” He conceded that his actions during the war had disappointed his father. Yet an honorable man did what he must. “I uniformly acted from a strong sense of what I conceived my duty to my King and regard to my country.” At this late hour he would not apologize. “If I have been mistaken, I cannot help it. It is an error of judgment that the maturest reflection I am capable of cannot rectify, and I verily believe that were the same circumstances to occur tomorrow, my conduct would be exactly similar to what it was heretofore.” All this was history, however. He hoped to resume the relationship as it had been before the war.
“Dear Son,” Franklin replied. “I received your letter of the 22d past, and am glad to find that you desire to revive the affectionate intercourse that formerly existed between us. It will be very agreeable to me.”
Yet not really. “Let us now forgive and forget,” Franklin had said to Jonathan Shipley. But with William he could neither forgive nor forget.
Nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen sensations as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against me, in a cause wherein my good fame, fortune and life were all at stake.
You conceived, you say, that your duty to your King and regard for your country required this. I ought not to blame you for differing in sentiment with me in public affairs. We are men, all subject to errors. Our opinions are not in our own power; they are formed and governed much by circumstances that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible. Your situation was such that few would have censured your remaining neuter, though there are natural duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguished by them.
Franklin underlined these last words, which went to the heart of the issue—and to the heart of Franklin himself. Friends—even close friends like William Strahan—Franklin could forgive for their political differences with him on the issue of allegiance to the Crown; family he could not. He insisted that William’s loyalty to his father come before his loyalty to his king.
Logic did not compel Franklin to frame the question this way. He did not accuse Loyalists as a group of waging war on him personally—of “taking up arms against me.” But he so accused William. He seems not to have considered that William might have leveled an analogous accusation against him. After all, Franklin was the rebel of the two. Perhaps Franklin felt a son owed more to his father in this regard than the father owed the son. Yet if such was his conception of filial relations, he certainly had showed no evidence of it in his dealings with his own father, whom he disregarded whenever interest bade him.
All his life Franklin had sought respect. His search had been stunningly successful by the standards of most mortals. No man on earth was more broadly respected than Benjamin Franklin. Even the British government, whose conspicuous disrespect had made him one of the most formidable enemies the Crown ever faced, had come round, as Shelburne made abundantly clear during the peace talks.
But William refused to accord him the respect he demanded. William was not allowed to discover his own mind and honor his own convictions. To disagree with his father was, on this critical issue, to disrespect him.
It was not Franklin’s finest hour. And he knew it. “This is a disagreeable subject,” he wrote William. “I drop it.” He promised to try to bury the past “as well as we can,” but his tone left William little room for hope.
Neither did the sole meeting between the two. In May 1785 Franklin received the message he had long been awaiting. “You are permitted to return to America as soon as convenient,” wrote John Jay on behalf of the Congress. Franklin’s French friends urged him to stay. “They press me much to remain in France,” he told Sally and Richard Bache, “and three of them have offered me an asylum in their habitations. They tell me I am here among a people who universally esteem and love me; that my friends at home are diminished by death in my absence; that I may there meet with envy and its consequent enmity which here I am perfectly free from; this supposing I live to complete the voyage, but of that they doubt.”
Franklin himself had some questions on that score. He was not sure he could find a ship that would not kill him crossing the ocean. Remembering his latest journey from America, before his stone started plaguing him, he declared, “I must be better stowed now, or I shall not be able to hold out the voyage.” The pain that accompanied the least journey on land made him dubious. But ultimately the desire “of spending the little remainder of life with my family” determined him to see if he could bear the motion of a ship. “If not, I must get them to set me on shore somewhere in the Channel, and content myself to die in Europe.”
He bade au revoir to Vergennes, who regretted his departure. “This minister has won the King’s esteem,” Vergennes remarked to one of his subordinates. “And I personally have the greatest confidence in his principles and in his integrity. The United States will never have a more zealous and more useful servant than Mr. Franklin.”
Franklin reciprocated the respect. “I think your minister, who is so expert in composing quarrels and preventing wars, the great blessing of this age,” he told a French friend. “The Devil must send us three or four heroes before he can get as much slaughter of mankind done as that one man has prevented.”
Finding a suitable ship required some weeks, and it was July before Franklin set out. “When he left Passy,” Jefferson recorded, “it seemed as if the village had lost its patriarch.” He had intended to float down the Seine on a barge, but a dry summer made navigation difficult. Instead the queen offered her royal litter, which was carried by two large mules—“who walk very easy,” Franklin was relieved to note. (King Louis’s gesture was a portrait of himself, framed in four hundred diamonds.) Several of Franklin’s friends accompanied him; count, colonel, and cardinal hosted him on his journey to the sea. Delegations from towns and villages en route greeted him; the Academy of Rouen presented him with a magic square said to represent his name in numbers. (“I have perused it since,” he wrote, “but do not comprehend it.”)
A letter awaited him at Havre. The leave-taking had been hardest for the women Franklin loved, and who loved him. Madame Brillon could not bear to see him go. “My heart was so heavy yesterday when I left you,” she wrote, “that I feared, for you and for myself, another such moment which would have only added to my misery without further proving the tender, unchanging love I have devoted to you forever…. If it ever pleases you to remember the woman who loved you the most, think of me. Farewell, my heart was not meant to be separated from yours, but it shall not be. You shall find it near yours; speak to it and it shall answer you.”
Madame Brillon’s letter he read in his litter (with the aid of his double spectacles); the one that caught him at the coast was from Madame Helvétius.
I cannot get accustomed to the idea that you have left us, my dear friend; that you are no longer in Passy, that I shall never see you again. I can picture you in your litter, further from us at every step, already lost to me and to your friends who loved you so much and regret you so. I fear you are in pain, that the road will tire you and make you more uncomfortable.
If such is the case, come back, my dear friend; come back to us. My little retreat will be the better for your presence; you will like it because of the friendship you will find here and the care we will take of you. You will make our life happier; we shall contribute to your happiness.
To his surprise, the journey was quite tolerable. The mules earned their oats keeping him comfortable; he wrote Madame Helvétius that his strength was improving. He must go on, though his heart resisted. “We shall stay here a few days, waiting for our luggage, and then we shall leave France, the country that I love the most in the world. And there I shall leave my dear Helvetia. She may be happy yet. I am not sure that I shall be happy in America, but I must go back. I feel sometimes that things are badly arranged in this world when I consider that people so well matched to be happy together are forced to separate.” He closed as gallantly as ever: “I will not tell you of my love. For one would say that there is nothing remarkable or praiseworthy about it, since every body loves you. I only hope that you will always love me some.”
From Havre the Franklin party—consisting of himself, Temple, Benny, and Franklin’s nephew Jonathan Williams—traversed the Channel to Southampton, to catch a British ship. (Belatedly the French navy minister declared, “Had I been informed of it sooner, I should have proposed to the king to order a frigate to convey you to your own country in a manner suitable to the known importance of the services you have been engaged in.” Franklin accepted the minister’s apologies.)
The Channel boat encountered stiff headwinds and contrary seas. For nearly two full days the craft pitched and the passengers moaned—all but Franklin, the one aboard who did not get sick. “I feel very well,” he wrote Madame Helvétius from Southampton—adding a last “I shall always love you.”
Several of his surviving English friends came to see him. Jonathan Shipley and family put up at the Star tavern with the Franklin party; it was probably Shipley who introduced Franklin to one of the local attractions. “I went at noon to bathe in Martin’s salt-water bath,” Franklin wrote, “and, floating on my back, fell asleep, and slept near an hour by my watch, without sinking or turning! a thing I never did before, and should hardly have thought possible. Water is the easiest bed that can be.”
Less pleasant was his meeting with William. The younger man still hoped for a reconciliation. He knew he would never see his father again, for age would claim the old man long before America would forgive the son. If they were ever to recapture some of the intimacy they had shared for many years, they would have to do so now.
The presence of Temple raised the emotional stakes for both men. Temple was the surrogate son Franklin had claimed after his own son abandoned him, and he did not want to give him up. Politics aside, he probably felt he had a better claim to Temple than William did, having raised Temple, educated him, and brought him to the beginning of a career. William doubtless regretted not having acknowledged Temple earlier, but he nonetheless must have felt that Franklin had stolen what was the natural right of all parents: the affection of a child. Franklin had grudgingly allowed Temple to visit William in London the previous summer. “I trust that you will prudently avoid introducing him to company that it may be improper for him to be seen with,” Franklin wrote William, in what could only have been interpreted as a condescending tone. And he chafed as long as Temple was away, urging him to write by every post and making plain that, at least in his view, Temple answered to him rather than to William.
The meeting of the three generations occurred under inauspicious circumstances. Franklin’s guests were coming and going; at the Star the three had scarce time and less privacy for the sort of soul-searching a genuine reunion required. Doubtless Franklin preferred it this way. Scars had formed over the wounds he felt at what he considered his son’s betrayal; better not to reopen them.
Besides, there was business to transact. William had property in New Jersey and New York that was doing him no good; he decided to sell it to Temple. Franklin underwrote the transaction, applying toward the price various debts William owed him and authorizing William to seek payment from the British government of debts owed Franklin (William could keep half of any amount recovered; the other half would go to Sally). For the balance of 48,000 livres on the sale price, Franklin wrote to a banker friend in Paris for a loan.
William found the encounter acutely distressing. His hopes for reconciliation were dashed, his ties to his homeland severed. Shortly after Franklin and Temple sailed away, William wrote disconsolately that “my fate has thrown me on a different side of the globe.”
Franklin kept his feelings to himself, as he generally did on this most painful part of his life. He turned from William to Shipley and other friends. On July 27 the group went aboard the ship that would take the travelers to America. “The captain entertains us at supper,” Franklin recorded in his journal. “The company stay all night.”
Yet the company did not stay all night. After Franklin retired, Shipley and the others slipped to shore. “We all left your ship with a heavy heart,” Shipley’s daughter wrote Franklin later. “But the taking leave was a scene we wished to save you as well as ourselves.”
In the night the wind freshened, and the captain weighed anchor on the ebb tide. When Franklin awoke, the ship was miles at sea.
He had worried that the voyage would kill him; instead it restored him. A single stormy day interrupted an otherwise smooth passage. Since a visit by Polly Hewson to Passy the previous winter, he had been gently trying to persuade her to move to America with her children (her husband having died); he booked a cabin large enough to accommodate the whole group. When she chose to remain in England, he was left with more room than he could fill.
For years his friends had implored him to complete his memoirs. First the war got in the way, then the peace negotiations, then the fact that he had lost the part already written. It was among papers he left in the care of Joseph Galloway upon departing America in 1776. Although Galloway espoused the British cause, he certainly would have respected Franklin’s papers, but amid the confusion of the British occupation of Philadelphia his house was raided and its contents, including Franklin’s papers, scattered. Consequently, when Franklin had sat down at Passy to continue his tale, he had no record of what he had already written and few materials with which to go forward. He found the work difficult and unsatisfactory. When friends persisted in urging him to tell his story, he put them off by intimating he would take up pen once more during the leisure of his voyage home.
He did take up pen, but not in the service of history. His memoirs had begun as a letter to William; perhaps the pain of this final parting from his son put him off the task. For whatever reason, he devoted his time at sea to his philosophical pursuits. He renewed his investigations of the Gulf Stream, with Jonathan Williams serving as assistant this time. He devised an ingenious method of measuring the temperature of the water at different depths. He corked an empty bottle and tied it to a leaded rope, letting out twenty fathoms, then drawing it back up. The cork remained in place and the bottle empty. Then he threw it back over the side and let it out thirty-five fathoms before drawing it up. This time, the pressure of the water at depth having pushed the cork into the bottle, the bottle was full of water from that depth. By Franklin’s thermometer the difference between the temperature at the surface and the temperature below was as much as twelve degrees. In other words, the Gulf Stream was a river of warm water flowing over the colder body of the ocean. Franklin drew the characteristically practical conclusion that “the thermometer may be a useful instrument to a navigator.” A captain sailing north should seek warm water, which would indicate a current moving from south to north; a captain sailing south should hunt for cold.
Other observations involved the safety of ocean travel. He reiterated his recommendation to build watertight bulkheads belowdecks, after the Chinese fashion. Recalling having read of the proas of the Polynesian islanders, which employed outriggers to resist oversetting, he wondered whether the same effect might be achieved by making double-hulled ships with spars between the hulls (a later generation would call such vessels catamarans). He remembered seeing “islands of ice” (icebergs) off Newfoundland on earlier voyages and advocated lookouts to avoid them. He noted that though these and other safety measures might make sense to landlubbers, they would probably be resisted by sailors. “Our seafaring people are brave, despise danger, and reject such precautions of safety, being cowards only in one sense, that of fearing to be thought afraid.”Appealing over their heads, as it were, he pointed out that safety measures would reduce insurance rates and command a premium from passengers less careless with their lives than the sailors.
During the voyage Franklin also returned to his much earlier theme of efficient combustion. Recalling the trouble the smoke of London had occasioned him, he described an improved stove, one designed to burn the soft coal so coughingly common in England and to consume all its own smoke. In a separate essay he addressed the causes and cures of smoky chimneys. For all the honors he had received for his electrical work and other scientific speculations, he never forgot that upon such humble issues as access to heat was a happy society constructed. “In traveling I have observed that in those parts where the inhabitants can have neither wood nor coal nor turf but at excessive prices, the working people live in miserable hovels, are ragged, and have nothing comfortable about them. But when fuel is cheap (or where they have the art of managing it to advantage) they are well furnished with necessaries and have decent habitations.”
On the forty-eighth day out, Franklin awoke to learn that the vessel had passed Cape May and entered the estuary of the Delaware. They ascended to Newcastle before the wind died and the tide turned, and they anchored for the night. “With the flood in the morning,” Franklin recorded, “came a light breeze, which brought us above Gloucester Point, in full view of dear Philadelphia! when we again cast anchor to wait for the health officer, who, having made his visit, and finding no sickness, gave us leave to land. My son-in-law came with a boat for us; we landed at Market Street wharf, where we were received by a crowd of people with huzzas, and accompanied with acclamations quite to my door. Found my family well. God be praised and thanked for all his mercies!”
The war had been hard on Philadelphia, but the peace was almost harder. The march of armies through the streets, the arrival of refugees, the flight of refugees, the occupation by the British, the evacuation by the British, the sundry other insults of war had left William Penn’s “green country town” battered and worn. Visitors remarked the peeling paint and broken windows. Houses and public buildings that had sheltered soldiers and horses stank of the waste of both species. Light rains made rock-strewn quagmires of streets where tight cobbles had formerly defied the heaviest downpours.
But at least the war had been good for business. Bakers, butchers, tailors, printers, and purveyors of all manner of necessities and luxuries had supplied the contending armies in turn (and in some cases simultaneously). The same crew had fed, housed, entertained, and otherwise supplied the members of the Congress and their assorted supplicants and dependents.
The Congress was the first to go when the war ended, departing even before all the soldiers left. In June 1783 some three hundred troops of the Pennsylvania Line surrounded the State House and demanded assurances of Congress they would receive their back pay before being mustered out. The leadership of the Congress, incensed at this mutinous behavior, insisted that the Pennsylvania government discipline the rebellious troops. The Pennsylvania Executive Council respectfully demurred. The troops announced a twenty-minute deadline for the hostage Congress to redress their grievances. Some congressmen, noting the jugs being passed around among the rebels, feared for their lives; several others guessed that the liquor would distract the mutineers. Summoning all their dignity, these latter lawmakers marched straight out through the siege line to safety, whereupon the soldiers returned to their barracks.
Shortly thereafter the president of the Congress, Elias Boudinot, summoned the members to abandon this seat of sedition for the safer neighborhood of Princeton, New Jersey. The stated reason for the move was the refusal of the Pennsylvania government to take appropriate measures against the revolt. Additional reasons, which may have counted for more among many members, were the high cost of living and related distractions of Philadelphia. Even before the mutiny one member reported that it was “generally agreed that Congress should remove to a place of less expense, less avocation and less influence than are to be expected in a commercial and opulent city.”
The pullout of Congress combined with the end of the war to derange business. The shortages of wartime had driven prices up; the surpluses of peacetime drove them back down. Determining whether they fell further than they had risen was complicated by the currency gyrations the Congress had fostered by its penchant for papering over its fiscal problems with flimsy money.
Philadelphia’s—and Pennsylvania’s—problems were aggravated by politics that made the old tiffs between the proprietary and antiproprietary parties appear almost genteel. The Revolution had solved the problem with the Penns, the one that had consumed so much of Franklin’s political career, by placing them definitively on the wrong side of history.
Richard Penn, the last proprietary governor, had been commissioned by the Continental Congress to carry the Olive Branch petition of 1775 to King George; upon its rejection Penn calculated that safety lay on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and stayed in England. The new state constitution adopted the following year—over the drafting of which Franklin had presided—wrote the proprietors out of Pennsylvania politics; it meanwhile wrote in an entire class of voters heretofore excluded. Essentially all tax-paying adult males could now vote to elect members to the unicameral legislature Franklin favored. Annual elections guaranteed that the legislature would remain close to the people, as did term limits preventing members from serving more than four years out of any seven. An oath to uphold the people’s interest was required of officeholders. A bill of rights protected the people from overreaching government.
In the flush of independence a populist government seemed just the thing for Pennsylvania, but before long, doubts began to surface. The constitution drew support among the artisans of Philadelphia (the people occupying Franklin’s old niche), but its real backers were the farmers in the western part of the state (the heirs of the Paxton mob he had confronted on behalf of the Assembly). Evincing skepticism were members of the old proprietary party (whom Franklin had opposed), but also men who through their own efforts had attained a measure of wealth (men like Franklin). In time the two groups formed factions, with the former calling themselves Constitutionalists, the latter Republicans.
Franklin’s arrival coincided with a raucous election campaign between the two groups. Consequently the effusive welcome he received reflected not simply gratitude for past accomplishments but hope for future support. Pennsylvanians—like Americans generally—were not yet reconciled to the existence of political parties: more or less permanent groupings with predictably clashing interests. They cherished a belief that parties were an artifact of English corruption; having done with England, America would be free of parties. In Pennsylvania, Constitutionalists and Republicans alike looked to Franklin to soothe factional passions and heal the growing rift in society.
He had hardly landed before the leaders of both parties came calling. A delegation of Constitutionalists remembered fondly his role in writing the constitution, and nominated him for a place on the Executive Council. The Republicans, applauding his unexampled efforts on behalf of independence, and more recently of peace, nominated him too.
The dual nominations assured his election to the Executive Council, which proceeded to choose him as its head. When the Assembly met a week later, it joined forces with the Council to elect Franklin president of Pennsylvania. The vote was nearly unanimous, only one ballot besides Franklin’s own not naming him.
This turn of events surprised Franklin as much as it gratified him. Thomas Paine had written welcoming Franklin home; Franklin replied, “The ease and rest you wish me to enjoy for the remainder of my days is certainly what is most proper for me, what I long wished for, and what I proposed to myself in resigning my late employment. But it is what I am not likely to obtain.” He recounted how the leaders of the two parties had approached him to reunify the people of Pennsylvania. “I had not sufficient firmness to refuse their request.”
After all the slanders his reputation had suffered in his absence, it was nice to know that his work was appreciated. “The people, when one serves them faithfully and steadily, are not ungrateful,” he wrote an English acquaintance. To Jonathan Williams he confessed, “Old as I am, I am not yet grown insensible with respect to reputation.” At the same time, he guessed that by his accepting the new office, his reputation must suffer. “I apprehend they expect too much of me.”
As the excitement of his homecoming wore off, so did the effect of that excitement on his health. Fresh from the boat he had written to John and Mrs. Jay of his delight at the revivifying effects of his journey. “I am now so well as to think it possible that I may once more have the pleasure of seeing you both perhaps at New York. I imagine that on the sandy road between Burlington and Amboy I could bear an easy coach, and the rest is water.” During the next few months, however, his ailments returned, and the stone, especially, kept him close to home. Early in 1786 an acquaintance offered to sell him a farm just eight miles outside of Philadelphia; Franklin declined, saying he could not visit the estate if he owned it. “The stone does not permit me to ride either on horseback or in a wheel carriage.”
Yet if he could not travel, he could enjoy the quiet satisfaction of life among family and his few surviving old friends. He met with the Union Fire Club, now approaching the half-century mark of its existence. Only four of the founding members were still alive, and they had not answered alarms for years. Yet Franklin gamely promised to have his bucket and kit ready for the next meeting. The American Philosophical Society welcomed him back; it would be honored, its editorial board averred, to print in its Transactions the pieces he had written at sea.
But home was what supplied the deepest personal satisfaction. “I am now in the bosom of my family,” he wrote the Jays, “and find four new little prattlers who cling about the knees of their Grandpapa and afford me great pleasure.” Jonathan Shipley, who had opened his home and family to Franklin, inquired of his friend’s domestic circumstances. “They are at present as happy as I could wish them,” Franklin replied. “I am surrounded by my offspring, a dutiful and affectionate daughter in my house, with six grandchildren, the eldest of which [Benny] you have seen, who is now at a College in the next street, finishing the learned part of his education; the others promising, both for parts and good dispositions. What their conduct may be when they grow up and enter the important scenes of life, I shall not live to see, and I cannot foresee. I therefore enjoy among them the present hour, and leave the future to Providence.”
The proximity of his daughter and her children doubtless reminded Franklin of his two sons who were missing. He did not speak directly of William and Franky, but they almost certainly influenced his remarks to Jonathan Shipley about family life.
He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand, as Watts says, a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too. When we launch our little fleet of barques into the ocean, bound to different ports, we hope for each a prosperous voyage; but contrary winds, hidden shoals, storms, and enemies come in for a share in the disposition of events; and though these occasion a mixture of disappointment, yet, considering the risque where we can make no insurance, we should think our selves happy if some return with success.
Family was a form of immortality, but perhaps not the only form. Franklin explained to Shipley that though he fared as well as he had any right to expect at his age, he could not live much longer. “The course of nature must soon put a period to my present mode of existence.” What would come after? Franklin was intrigued to find out. “Having seen during a long life a good deal of this world, I feel a growing curiosity to be acquainted with some other.” He hoped not to be disappointed; rather, with “filial confidence,” he resigned his spirit to “that great and good Parent of mankind who created it, and who has so graciously protected and prospered me from my birth to the present hour.”
George Whately had remarked on what remained at the end of a long life, and had sent an epitaph written by Pope, which included a line scoffing at worldly praise: “He ne’er cared a pin/What they said or may say of the mortal within.” Franklin was skeptical. “It is so natural to wish to be spoken well of, whether alive or dead, that I imagine he could not be quite exempt from that desire; and that he at least wished to be thought a wit, or he would not have given himself the trouble of writing so good an epitaph to leave behind him.”
For himself, Franklin said, he preferred the sentiment of a traditional drinking song entitled “The Old Man’s Wish,” which in successive verses asked for a warm house in a country town, an easy horse, good books, ingenious and cheerful companions, pudding on Sundays, stout ale, and a bottle of burgundy. Each verse ended:
May I govern my passions with an absolute sway,
Grow wiser and better as my strength wears away,
Without gout or stone, by a gentle decay.
“But what signifies our wishing?” Franklin asked. “Things happen, after all, as they will happen. I have sung that Wishing Song a thousand times when I was young, and now find, at fourscore, that the three contraries have befallen me, being subject to the gout and the stone, and being not yet master of all my passions—like the proud girl in my country who wished and resolved not to marry a parson, nor a Presbyterian, nor an Irishman, and at length found herself married to an Irish Presbyterian parson.”
At times Franklin approached a belief in reincarnation. Observing the “great frugality” of nature, which the Deity had designed so as to ensure that nothing once created was lost, Franklin supposed that something similar applied to souls. “When I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of water wasted, I cannot suspect the annihilation of souls, or believe that he will suffer the daily waste of millions of minds ready made that now exist, and put himself to the continual trouble of making new ones.” Franklin included his own soul in this conservation scheme. “Thus finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist; and with all the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition of mine; hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.”
Franklin did not share this unorthodox view with everyone—and he counseled others to exercise similar caution. An author unidentified in the surviving correspondence, but quite possibly Thomas Paine, sent Franklin a manuscript challenging the basis of organized religion; Franklin told him not to publish. “Though your reasonings are subtle, and may prevail with some readers, you will not succeed so as to change the general sentiments of mankind on that subject, and the consequence of printing this piece will be a great deal of odium drawn upon yourself, mischief to you, and no benefit to others. He that spits against the wind, spits in his own face.” Even if the manuscript succeeded in its purpose, what good would come? The author might be able to live a virtuous life without the aid of religion, but not everyone was so blessed. “Think how great a proportion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced and inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to support their virtue, and retain them in the practice of it till it becomes habitual.” Usually a model of tact, Franklin now chose bluntness. “Burn this piece before it is seen by any other person, whereby you will save yourself a great deal of mortification from the enemies it may raise against you, and perhaps a good deal of regret and repentance. If men are so wicked as we now see them with religion, what would they be if without it?” (If the author of the manuscript was Paine, Franklin’s warning had some effect: Paine did not publish The Age of Reason for several years—to a reception very much like that Franklin forecast.)
Other advice was more positive. The young Noah Webster was busy formulating the declaration of lexicographical independence that would make his name synonymous with American dictionaries; on a visit to Philadelphia he shared his thoughts with Franklin, who resurrected his own ideas on a phonetic alphabet. The exchange fired Webster’s enthusiasm. “I am encouraged by the prospect of rendering my country some service, to proceed in my design of refining the language and improving our general system of education,” he wrote George Washington. “Dr. Franklin has extended my views to a very simple plan of reducing the language to perfect regularity.” Though the “perfect regularity” of Franklin’s phonetic scheme ultimately proved too radical for Webster, enough of the spirit of Franklin remained for Webster to dedicate his pioneering Dissertations on the English Language to Franklin.
During his first several months back from France, Franklin spent more time than he wished tending to details that remained from his diplomatic mission. One detail seemed more than a detail to his critics, for it involved a missing million livres. Because of the irregular nature of French aid to the United States prior to the treaties of 1778—through the likes of Beaumarchais and the Farmers General—records of the transactions were incomplete and contradictory. Certain receipts from King Louis, signed by Franklin, registered grants to America of 3 million livres, but only 2 million appeared on the deposit accounts of the American government in its French bank. “I wonder how I came to sign the contract acknowledging three millions of gift, when in reality there was only two,” Franklin wrote Ferdinand Grand, America’s banker in Paris. “I most earnestly request of you to get this matter explained, that I may stand clear before I die, lest some enemy should afterwards accuse me of having received a million not accounted for.”
Unfortunately for Franklin’s peace of mind, Grand could not find the money either. Franklin guessed that the records had been buried for a reason. “I conjecture it must be money advanced for our use to M. de Beaumarchais,” he informed Congress, “and that it is a mystère du cabinet,which perhaps should not be further enquired into.” The whole business had been delicate for the French government, and evidently remained delicate. “It may well be supposed that if the Court furnished him with the means of supplying us, they may not be willing to furnish authentic proofs of such a transaction so early in our dispute with Britain.”
Franklin’s conjecture eventually proved correct. But the evidence—in the form of a receipt from Beaumarchais for the million—did not surface until after Franklin’s death, and in the meantime it complicated his efforts to settle his own account with Congress. An auditor engaged by Congress determined that Franklin was owed some 7,500 livres for his services in France. But between the continuing hostility of the Lee faction, which seized upon the missing money as evidence that Franklin had filled his own pocket, and the general tardiness of Congress in paying all its creditors, his balance remained unpaid.
He had better luck with Georgia. When that colony had engaged him to serve as its agent in London before the war, it promised him £100 per year. But the money was never paid, and with everything else that occurred in the interim, he had never pursued the debt. Now he reminded the appropriate officials of the state of Georgia, who responded by offering him land, of which they had much, in lieu of cash, of which they had little. Georgia had awarded a handsome tract to Admiral d’Estaing, who had been severely wounded fighting for Savannah; Franklin wrote to d’Estaing describing his own settlement with Georgia: “The Assembly of that state has granted me 3,000 acres of their land to be located wherever I can find any vacant. I wish much that it might be near yours, for you contrived to make your neighbourhood so agreeable to me at Passy that I could wish to be your neighbour everywhere.”
Franklin did not worry excessively about his finances, partly because he did not expect to live long and partly because his fortunes had survived the war better than he had expected. “My own estate I find more than tripled in value since the Revolution,” he wrote Ferdinand Grand. This figure was misleading, in that the war had inflated prices across the economy. In this same letter Franklin explained that the high price of labor was causing him to defer some building plans he had devised. All the same, he had resources sufficient to maintain him even in the more comfortable style to which he had grown accustomed in France.
In time he grew used to the higher cost of labor, and he determined to build. He tore down three old houses on lots he owned on Market Street and prepared to replace them with new ones. But before the construction commenced, a neighbor disputed a lot line, and litigation delayed the work. Because Franklin had already engaged the workmen and was obligated for their wages, he set them to building an addition to his own house, now too small for himself, Sally, Richard, and the grandchildren. “I propose to have in it a long room for my library and instruments, with two good bedchambers and two garrets,” he explained to Jane Mecom. “The library is to be even with the floor of my best old chamber, and the story under it will for the present be employed only to hold wood, but may be made into rooms hereafter.” He granted that this might not be the wisest use of resources. “I hardly know how to justify building a library at an age that will so soon oblige me to quit it.” But he aimed to indulge himself. “We are apt to forget that we are grown old, and building is an amusement.”
It was also a business. By the beginning of 1787, Philadelphia had pulled itself out of the postwar slump, and rising rents promised profits to landlords. Repeating himself to Ferdinand Grand that building was “an old man’s amusement,” Franklin added, “The advantage is for his posterity. Since my coming home, the market is extended before my ground next the street, and the high rents such a situation must afford have been one of my inducements.”
Not for years had the entrepreneur in Franklin been heard from; now he returned. Franklin replaced the three decrepit houses on Market Street at the front of his lot with two large, fine ones, each twenty-four feet wide by forty-five feet deep, and three stories tall, besides the garrets. An arched passage between the two allowed access to Franklin’s own house in back. Elsewhere in the neighborhood he built three other houses. “The affairs in dealing with so many workmen and furnishers of materials,” he wrote a French friend in April 1787, “such as bricklayers, carpenters, stone-cutters, painters, glaziers, lime-burners, timber-merchants, copper-smiths, carters, labourers, etc., etc., have added not a little to the fatiguing business I have gone through in the last year.” But on the whole he enjoyed the work, which, as he said to Jane Mecom, made him forget he was grown old.
The fatiguing business he referred to was that of Pennsylvania politics. In May 1786 Benjamin Rush dined with Franklin. “He appeared as cheerful and gay as a young man of five-and-twenty,” Rush wrote, “but his conversation was full of the wisdom and experience of mellow old age. He has destroyed party rage in our state, or to borrow an allusion from one of his discoveries, his presence and advice, like oil upon troubled waters, have composed the contending waves of faction which for so many years agitated the State of Pennsylvania.”
Rush was always generous to Franklin, who just weeks before had felt obliged to request that Rush omit an effusive encomium to Franklin he intended to employ as a dedication to a new book. And his description of Franklin’s calming effect on Pennsylvania politics may have been more apt than he intended. The surface was indeed smoothed—sufficiently that Franklin was reelected president in the autumn of 1786, this time unanimously (except, again, for his own vote).
Yet beneath the surface, deep currents still drove Pennsylvania politics. Some reflected the old divisions within the province; others were peculiar to independent statehood. The latter category included the Bank of North America, a brainchild of Robert Morris, and in the eyes of the better-off classes, including most Pennsylvania Republicans, a necessary force for stability and progress in society. To the Constitutionalists, on the other hand, the Bank of North America—and in particular its existence as a corporation of unlimited duration—represented a threat to liberty and the very meaning of the Revolution. “The accumulation of enormous wealth in the hands of a society who claim perpetual duration,” wrote one Constitutionalist, referring to the bank, “will necessarily produce a degree of influence and power which can not be entrusted in the hands of any set of men whatsoever without endangering the public safety.”
Throughout the 1780s the Constitutionalists employed every opportunity to curtail the activities of the bank. In 1786 they succeeded in repealing its state charter. That the bank continued to operate under charters it had obtained from other states simply confirmed the Constitutionalist judgment that it was a hydra-headed monster ready to devour the people. Meanwhile the Republicans mounted a counterattack. When Robert Morris became head of the party, Benjamin Rush—a central figure in the adoption of the 1776 constitution but lately put off by the radicalism of the Constitutionalists—recorded hopefully, “It is expected that the charter of the Bank of North America will be restored.”
A second bone of contention was closer to Franklin’s heart, if perhaps further from his wallet. The College of Philadelphia, which had evolved out of Franklin’s Academy, gradually grew away from its egalitarian roots, so that by the start of the Revolutionary era it was often seen as a nest of aristocracy and Anglicanism. When the provost and several of the trustees exhibited Tory tendencies—remaining in the city during the British occupation, for example—the state Assembly seized the institution. It threw out the administration and trustees, renamed the college the University of the State of Pennsylvania, and put it on the public dole.
But the provost and trustees waged a rearguard action. They alleged abrogation of legitimate property rights and, when the state failed to provide adequate funding, fiscal mismanagement. Restoration of the college became a central issue for Republicans; defense of egalitarianism in education remained a rallying cry for Constitutionalists.
Franklin did his best to remain above the fray. Partly from pride of authorship, he held to the basic principles of the 1776 constitution: the legislature of one house, the annual elections, the executive responsibility in the hands of a council (headed by a primus inter pares president—currently himself) rather than a single strong governor. In this regard he was a Constitutionalist. At the same time, he shared the philosophical and economic conservatism of many Republicans. He quietly backed recharter of the Bank of North America as good for business (this goal was accomplished in 1787). Ambivalent as he was, and appreciating the motives of those who voted for him as a symbol of unity, he avoided controversy. Indeed, he avoided most meetings of the Executive Council, attending the daily sessions about once a week.
Instead he made the rounds of his construction sites, querying here, nudging there. Workers on his own house, removing materials from the roof, discovered something that gave him satisfaction. Years earlier, while he was gone, the house had received a terrible blow from lightning. The neighbors, who saw the strike, ran to the house to inquire of the condition of the inhabitants and to put out the fire they believed must have been kindled. But there was no fire, and all inside were well, if rather dazed by the loud sound. Franklin now discovered why, as he explained to an Italian scientist who had sent him his latest work on lightning rods, electrical conductors, and the like. “The conductor was taken down to be removed, when I found that the copper point which had been nine inches long, and in its thickest part about one third of an inch in diameter, had been almost all melted down and blown away, very little of it remaining attached to the iron rod. So that at length the invention has been of some use to the inventor.”
Yet the inventor did not intend to rely on copper and iron exclusively. The construction gave him scope to indulge his long interest in fire prevention. “I lament the loss your town has suffered this year by fire,” he wrote Jane Mecom after hearing of Boston’s latest blaze. “I sometimes think men do not act like reasonable creatures when they build for themselves combustible dwellings in which they are every day obliged to use fire. In my new dwellings I have taken a few precautions, not generally used: to wit, none of the wooden work of one room communicates with the wooden work of any other room; and all the floors, and even the steps of the stairs, are plastered close to the boards, besides the plastering on the laths under the joists. There are also trap-doors to go out upon the roofs, that one may go out and wet the shingles in case of a neighbouring fire.”
One of the buildings on Market Street was intended for a print shop for Benny Bache, after he finished at the college. Almost certainly the young man joined his grandfather in supervising the work there; doubtless they discussed the prospects for a new printer in the city, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. Perhaps they spoke of the paper young Ben would publish.
From a distance Franklin observed his eldest grandson. Temple spent most weeks in New Jersey on his father’s old farm; Franklin wrote with encouragement and advice. Ever the practical educator, Franklin apparently suggested that Temple apply gypsum to a meadow, in a pattern shaping the words, “This field has been plastered.” When the grass of the letters grew lusher and taller than the rest of the meadow, passersby received a lesson in agronomy.
But it soon became apparent that Temple’s heart was not in the soil. Franklin wrote Lafayette that his grandson “amuses himself with cultivating his lands.” Franklin felt a bit guilty at having raised Temple to public office, the more since Congress had shown no inclination to honor the grandfather’s request to find a post for the young man. Besides, the older Franklin got, the more he—the lifelong city dweller—came to view agriculture as the wellspring of virtue. “I wish he would make a serious business of it, and renounce all thoughts of public employment,” Franklin wrote Lafayette, “for I think agriculture the most honourable, because the most independent, of all professions.” But youth would have its way. “I believe he hankers a little after Paris, or some of the other polished cities of Europe.”
When the work on his own house was complete, Franklin outfitted the new rooms to his pleasure. The library had shelves that ranged from floor to ceiling. Less agile than in years past, he invented a mechanical arm for pulling books from high shelves without resort to stools or ladders. In another room he installed an unusual shoe-shaped copper tub, in which he took long hot baths to ease his stone. “He sits in the heel,” reported a guest, “and his legs go under the vamp; on the instep he has a place to fix his book; and here he sits and enjoys himself.” (This guest had both a low opinion of Pennsylvania politics and a droll sense of humor. Referring to Franklin’s selection as head of the Executive Council, he said, “His accepting the office is a sure sign of senility. But would it not be a capital subject for an historical painting—the Doctor placed at the head of the Council Board in his bathing slipper?”)
Franklin reckoned himself blessed. “I have found my family here in health, good circumstances, and well respected by their fellow citizens,” he reported to Polly Hewson. The companions of his youth were almost all departed, but he enjoyed the company of their children and grandchildren. “I have public business enough to preserve me from ennui, and private amusement besides in conversation, books, my garden, and cribbage.” He played cards with friends for amusement. Occasionally he felt a twinge of compunction when he reflected on his idleness. “But another reflection comes to relieve me, whispering: ‘You know that the soul is immortal; why then should you be such a niggard of a little time, when you have a whole eternity before you?’ So, being easily convinced, and, like other reasonable creatures, satisfied with a small reason when it is in favour of doing what I have a mind to, I shuffle the cards again, and begin another game.”