Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

  Surely, this should have precipitated Franklin’s return. He remained, however, distant from his family. The only time he had hastened home to Philadelphia was when his son was planning to marry—in London. “As I am in doubt whether I shall be able to return this summer,” he wrote Deborah, “I would not occasion a delay in her happiness if you thought the match a proper one.” Permitting himself to be indulgent from afar, he sent Sally two summer hats with the letter.

  A few weeks later, he sent his long sermon about saving money. “Do not make an expensive feasting wedding,” he wrote Deborah, “but conduct everything with frugality and economy, which our circumstances really now require.” She should make clear to Bache, he added, that they would provide a nice but not excessive dowry:

  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.25

  Then came more disturbing news. At Franklin’s request, William checked into Bache’s financial situation and discovered it was in shambles. Worse yet, he learned that Margaret Ross’s father had previously found the same thing and denied them permission to marry. “Mr. Bache had often attempted to deceive him [Ross] about his circumstances,” William reported. “In short, he is a mere fortune hunter who wants to better his circumstances by marrying into a family that will support him.” He ended the letter with a request: “Do burn this.” Franklin didn’t.

  So the marriage was put on hold, and Bache tried to explain himself to Franklin in a letter. It was true, he admitted, that he had suffered a severe financial reversal, but he claimed it was not his fault. He had unfairly been left holding the bills for a merchant ship that suffered in the Stamp Act boycott.26

  “I love my daughter perhaps as well as ever a parent did a child,” Franklin replied with perhaps some exaggeration. “But I have told you before that my estate is small, scarce a sufficiency for the support of me and my wife…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.” Franklin wrote Deborah the same day to say that he assumed Bache would now back off. “The misfortune that has lately happened to his affairs,” said Franklin, “will probably induce him to forbear entering hastily” into a marriage. He suggested that Sally might, instead, want to visit England, where she could meet other men, such as William Strahan’s son.27

  Though Franklin’s sentiments were clear, his letters did not outright forbid his daughter from getting married. Perhaps he felt that, because he was unwilling to come home to deal with the matter, he had neither the moral right nor practical ability to issue any decrees. Detached from his family by distance, he also remained rather emotionally detached.

  Further complicating the odd family dynamics, Mrs. Stevenson decided to weigh in. Having lived with Franklin, she felt herself to be Deborah’s soul mate, and she wrote to share her sympathy. Franklin, she reported, was in a foul humor. Stung by his temper, she consoled herself by buying some silk and making a petticoat for his daughter, even though she had never met her. Indeed, she confided, she was so excited by the possible wedding that she had wanted to buy even more gifts, but Franklin had forbidden it. She longed for the opportunity to sit down and chat, she told Deborah. “I truly think your expectations of seeing Mr. Franklin from time to time has been too much for a tender affectionate wife to bear.”28

  Ignoring the family drama back in Philadelphia, Franklin escaped in August 1767 for a summer vacation to France. “I have stayed too long in London this summer, and now sensibly feel the want of my usual journey to preserve my health,” he wrote Deborah. His mood was so sour that, on the way, he “engaged in perpetual disputes with the innkeepers,” he told Polly. He and his traveling companion, John Pringle, were upset that their carriage was rigged in such a way that they had little view of the countryside. The coachman’s explanation of the rationale, Franklin groused, “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.”

  When they got to Paris, however, things improved. He was intrigued by how the ladies there applied their rouge, which he chose to share in great detail in a letter to Polly rather than to his own daughter. “Cut a hole of three inches in 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 color paint face and paper together, so when the paper is taken off there will remain a round patch of red.”29

  Franklin was feted as a celebrity in France, where electrical experimenters were known as franklinistes, and he and Pringle were invited to Versailles to attend a grand couvert (public supper) with King Louis XV and Queen Marie. “He spoke to both of us very graciously and cheerfully,” Franklin reported to Polly. Despite his travails with England’s ministers, however, he stressed he was still loyal “in thinking my own King and Queen the very best in the world and the most amiable.”

  Versailles was magnificent but negligently maintained, he noted, “with its shabby half brick walls and broken windows.” Paris, on the other hand, had some pristine qualities that appealed to his affection for civic improvement schemes. The streets were swept daily so they were “fit to walk in,” unlike those of London, and the water was made “as pure as that of the best spring by filtering it through cisterns filled with sand.” While his daughter was preparing for a wedding without him, Franklin was getting new tailored clothes and “a little bag wig” that made him look “twenty years younger,” he told Polly. The trip had done so much to invigorate his health, he joked, that “I was once very near to making love to my friend’s wife.”30

  On his return from France, Franklin promptly wrote charming letters to Polly and others, but only a short note home. He seemed miffed that the letters from Philadelphia carried little news of his daughter, other than that she was “disappointed” that her marriage plans were put in limbo. He assured Deborah that he had been “extremely hearty and well ever since my return,” and then deigned to inquire about his daughter’s welfare.

  By that time, though he did not know it, Sally and Richard had already gone ahead and gotten married. In October 1767, as recorded in the Pennsylvania Chronicle (the new rival to Franklin’s old Gazette), “Mr. Richard Bache, of this city, merchant, was married to Miss Sally Franklin, the only daughter of the celebrated Doctor Franklin, a young lady of distinguished merit. The next day all the shipping in the harbor displayed their colors on this happy occasion.”31

  There is no sign that Franklin ever expressed regret for missing the wedding of his only daughter. In December, his sister Jane Mecom wrote to offer congratulations on the “marriage of your beloved daughter to a worthy gentleman whom she loves and is the only one that can make her happy.” Franklin replied the following February in a cool manner: “She has pleased herself and her mother, and I hope she will do well; but I think they should have seen some better prospect than they have, before they married, how the family was to be maintained.”32

  In his occasional letters over the next few months, Franklin would send his love to Deborah and Sally, but he never made any overtures to Bache. Finally, in August 1768, Franklin wrote Bache admitting him into the family. “Loving son,” he began promisingly, before turning a bit cool. “I thought the step you had taken, to engage yourself in the charge of a family while your affairs bore so unpromising an aspect with regard to the probable means of maintaining it, a very rash and precipitate one.” This was why, Franklin explained, he had not answered Bache’s earlier letters. “I could say nothing agreeable: I did not choose to write what I thought, being unwilling t
o give pain where I could not give pleasure.” But at the end of the one-paragraph letter, Franklin softened somewhat. “Time has made me easier,” he said. “My best wishes attend you, and that if you prove a good husband and son, you will find me an affectionate father.” In a one-sentence postscript, he gave his love to Sally and noted that he was sending her a new watch.

  Deborah was thrilled. In a note she sent when forwarding Franklin’s letter to Bache, who was visiting Boston, she wrote, “Mr. Bache (or my son Bache), I give you joy: although there are no fine speeches as some would make, your father (or so I will call him) and you, I hope, will have many happy days together.”33

  Deborah got even better news from Franklin at the beginning of1769. His health was very good, he wrote, but “I know that according to the course of nature I cannot at most continue much longer.” He had just turned 63. Therefore, he was “indulging myself in no future prospect except one, that of returning to Philadelphia, there to spend the evening of my life with my friends and family.” Sally and her husband came back from Boston hoping to find Franklin there. But he was still not ready, despite what he had written, to return.

  Nor did he return that spring when he learned that Deborah had suffered a small stroke. “These are bad symptoms in advanced life and augur danger,” her doctor wrote to Franklin. He consulted his traveling companion, John Pringle, who was physician to the queen, and forwarded his advice to Deborah. For once expressing slight impatience with her wayward husband, she disparaged the advice and said that her condition was largely caused by “dissatisfied distress” brought on by his prolonged absence: “I was only unable to bear any more and so I fell and could not get up again.”

  Even good news could not yet entice him back to Philadelphia. When he heard that Sally was pregnant that summer, he conveyed his affection by sending a little luxury: six caudle cups, which were used by pregnant women to share a brew of wine, bread, and spice. Sally missed no opportunity for seeking his affection. The child, born in August 1769, was named Benjamin Franklin Bache. Franklin would turn out to be closer to his grandchildren than his children; Benny Bache, like his cousin Temple, would eventually become part of his retinue. In the meantime, he sent his best wishes and instructions to make sure that Benny was inoculated for smallpox.34

  The Surrogate Family

  In his family life, as in the rest of his personal life, Franklin clearly did not look for deep commitments. He did, however, have a need for domestic comfort and intellectual stimulation. That is what he found with his surrogate family in London. On Craven Street there was a cleverness and spirit that was absent on Market Street. His landlady, Mrs. Stevenson, was livelier than Deborah, her daughter, Polly, a bit smarter than Sally. And in September 1769, just after Franklin returned from France, Polly found a suitor who was more distinguished than Bache.

  William Hewson was a good catch for Polly, who by then was 30 and still unmarried. He was on the verge of what would be a prominent career as a medical researcher and lecturer. “He must be clever because he thinks as we do,” Polly gushed in a letter from the country home where she was staying. “I should not have you or my mother surprised if I should run off with this young man; to be sure it would be an imprudent step at the discreet age of 30.”

  Amid these half-jokes, Polly played coy with Franklin by confessing (or feigning) her lack of enthusiasm for marrying Hewson. “He may be too young,” she told her older admirer. She was filled with happiness, she added, but she couldn’t be sure whether “this flight might be owing to this new acquaintance or to the joy of hearing my old one [meaning Franklin, who had been in Paris] is returned to this country.”

  Franklin’s reply, written the very next day, contained more flirtations than felicitations. “If the truth were known, I have reason to be jealous of this insinuating handsome young physician.” He would flatter his vanity, he said, and “turn a deaf ear to reason” by deciding “to suppose you were in spirits because of my safe return.”

  For almost a year, Polly held off getting married because Franklin refused to advise her to accept Hewson’s proposal. Finally, in May 1770, Franklin wrote that he had no objections. It was hardly an overwhelming endorsement. “I am sure you are a much better judge in this affair of your own than I can possibly be,” he said, adding that the match appeared “a rational one.” As for her worry that she would not bring much of a financial dowry, Franklin could not resist noting that “I should think you a fortune sufficient for me without a shilling.”35

  Although he had missed the weddings of both his own children, this was one Franklin made sure not to miss. Even though it was held in midsummer, when he usually traveled abroad, he was there to walk Polly down the aisle and play the role of her father. A few weeks later, he professed to be pleased that she was happy, but he confessed that he was “now and then in low spirits” at the prospect of having lost her friendship. Fortunately for all, it was not to be. He became close to the new couple, and he and Polly would exchange more than 130 more letters during their lifelong friendship.

  Indeed, a few months after their wedding, Polly and William Hewson came to stay with Franklin while Mrs. Stevenson spent one of her long weekends visiting friends in the country. Together they published a fake newspaper to mark the occasion. The Craven Street Gazette for Saturday, September 22, 1770, reported on the departure of “Queen Margaret” and Franklin’s ensuing grumpiness. “The GREAT person (so called from his enormous size)…could hardly be comforted this morning, though the new ministry promised him roasted shoulder of mutton and potatoes for his dinner.” Franklin, it was reported, was also miffed that Queen Margaret had taken the keys to a closet so that he could not find his ruffled shirts, which prevented him from going to St. James’s Palace for Coronation Day. “Great clamors were made on this occasion against her Majesty…The shirts were afterwards found, tho’ too late, in another place.”

  For four days, the newspaper poked fun at various Franklin foibles: how he violated his sermons about saving fuel by making a fire in his bedroom when everyone else was out, how he vowed to fix the front door but gave up because he was unable to decide whether it required buying a new lock or a new key, and how he pledged to go to church on Sunday. “It is now found by sad experience that good resolutions are easier made than executed,” Sunday’s edition reported. “Notwithstanding yesterday’s solemn Order of Council, nobody went to church today. It seems the GREAT person’s broad-built bulk lay so long abed that breakfast was not over until it was too late.” The moral of the tale could have been written by Poor Richard: “It seems a vain thing to hope reformation from the example of our great folks.”

  One particularly intriguing entry seems to refer to a woman living nearby with whom Franklin had an unrequited flirtation. That Sunday, Franklin pretended to visit her: “Dr. Fatsides made 469 turns in his dining room, as the exact distance of a visit to the lovely Lady Bar-well, whom he did not find at home, so there was no struggle for and against a kiss, and he sat down to dream in his easy chair that he had it without any trouble.” By the third day of Mrs. Stevenson’s absence, the Gazette was reporting that Dr. Fatsides “begins to wish for her Majesty’s return.”

  That final edition contained one of Franklin’s inimitable letters to the editor, signed with the pseudonym “Indignation,” decrying the food and conditions. Referring to Polly and her husband, it railed: “If these nefarious wretches continue in power another week, the nation will be ruined—undone!—totally undone if the Queen does not return; or (which is better) turn them all out and appoint me and my friends to succeed them.” It was answered by “A Hater of Scandal,” who wrote that the surly Franklin had been offered a wonderful dinner of beef ribs and had rejected it, saying “that beef does not with him perspire well, but makes his back itch, to his no small vexation now that he hath lost the little Chinese ivory hand at the end of the stick, commonly called a scratchback, presented to him by Her Majesty.”36

  Franklin was able to indulge on Craven Str
eet the many eccentricities he had developed. One of these was taking hour-long “air baths” early each morning, during which he would open his windows and “sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever.” Another was engaging in little flirtations. The famous painter Charles Willson Peale recounted how he once visited Craven Street unannounced and found “the Doctor was seated with a young lady on his knee.” The lady in question was probably Polly, though the sketch Peale later made of the scene is ambiguous.37

  Eventually, Polly and William Hewson moved into Craven Street and brought with them Hewson’s skeletons, “prepared fetuses,” and other tools for his medical research. Later, Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson moved a few doors away. Their odd relationship was reflected in a crotchety letter Franklin wrote her during one of her regular escapes to visit friends in the country. Reminding her of Poor Richard’s adage that guests become tiresome after three days, he urged her to return on the next stagecoach. But lest she think he was too dependent on her, he spelled out his contentment at being alone. “I find such a satisfaction in being a little more my own master, going anywhere and doing anything just when and how I please,” he claimed. “This happiness however is perhaps too great to be conferred on any but Saints and holy hermits. Sinners like me, I might have said us, are condemned to live together and tease one another.”38

  Hillsborough and

  the Townshend Duties

  In his dramatic testimony arguing for repeal of the Stamp Act, Franklin made a serious misjudgment: he said that Americans recognized Parliament’s right to impose external taxes, such as tariffs and export duties, just not internal taxes that were collected on transactions inside the country. He repeated the argument in April 1767, writing as “A Friend to Both Countries” and then as “Benevolus” in a London paper. In an effort to soothe troubled relations, he recounted all the times that Americans had been very accommodating in helping to raise money for the defense of the empire. “The colonies submit to pay all external taxes laid upon them by way of duty on merchandise imported into their country and never disputed the authority of Parliament to lay such duties,” he wrote.39