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BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
SELF-REVEALED
A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY BASED MAINLY ON HIS OWN WRITINGS
BY
WILLIAM CABELL BRUCE
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME I
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
_The Knickerbocker Press_
1917
COPYRIGHT, 1917
BY
W. CABELL BRUCE
_The Knickerbocker Press, New York_
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER
I.--FRANKLIN'S MORAL STANDING AND SYSTEM 12
II.--FRANKLIN'S RELIGIOUS BELIEFS 51
III.--FRANKLIN, THE PHILANTHROPIST AND CITIZEN 102
IV.--FRANKLIN'S FAMILY RELATIONS 198
V.--FRANKLIN'S AMERICAN FRIENDS 310
VI.--FRANKLIN'S BRITISH FRIENDS 372
VII.--FRANKLIN'S FRENCH FRIENDS 473
Benjamin Franklin
Self-Revealed
Introduction
In reading the life of Benjamin Franklin, the most lasting impressions left
upon the mind are those of versatility and abundance. His varied genius
lent itself without effort to the minutest details of such commonplace
things as the heating and ventilation of rooms, the correction of smoky
chimneys and naval architecture and economy. His severely practical turn of
mind was disclosed even in the devices with which he is pictured in his old
age as relieving the irksomeness of physical effort--the rolling press with
which he copied his letters, the fan which he worked with his foot in warm
weather as he sat reading, the artificial hand with which he reached the
books on the upper shelves of his library. But, sober as Franklin's genius
on this side was, it proved itself equal to some of the most exacting
demands of physical science; and above all to the sublime task, which
created such a world-wide stir, of reducing the wild and mysterious
lightning of the heavens to captivity, and bringing it down in fluttering
helplessness to the earth. It was a rare mind indeed which could give happy
expression to homely maxims of plodding thrift, and yet entertain noble
visions of universal philanthropy. The stretch between Franklin's weighty
observations on Population, for instance, and the bright, graceful
bagatelles, with which his pen occasionally trifled, was not a short one;
but it was compassed by his intellect without the slightest evidence of
halting facility. It is no exaggeration to say that this intellect was an
organ lacking in no element of power except that which can be supplied by a
profound spiritual insight and a kindling imagination alone. _The
Many-Sided Franklin_, the title of the essay by Paul Leicester Ford, is a
felicitous touch of description. The life, the mind, the character of the
man were all manifold, composite, marked by spacious breadth and freedom.
It is astonishing into how many different provinces his career can be
divided. Franklin, the Man of Business, Franklin, the Philosopher,
Franklin, the Writer, Franklin, the Statesman, Franklin, the Diplomatist,
have all been the subjects of separate literary treatment. As a man of
business, he achieved enough, when the limitations of his time and
environment are considered, to make him a notable precursor of the strong
race of self-created men, bred by the later material expansion of America.
As a scientist, his brilliant electrical discoveries gave him for a while,
as contemporary literature so strikingly evinces, a position of
extraordinary pre-eminence. As a writer, he can claim the distinction of
having composed two productions, _The Autobiography_ and _The Way to
Wealth_, which are read the world over. Of his reputation as a statesman it
is enough to remark that his signature is attached to the Declaration of
Independence, the Treaty of Alliance between the United States and France,
the Treaty of Peace between Great Britain and the United States, and the
Federal Constitution. Of his labors as a diplomatist it may be said that,
if it is true that, without the continuous assistance of France, our
independence would not have been secured, it is perhaps equally true that,
without his wisdom, tact and European prestige, we should never have
retained this assistance, so often imperilled by the jealousy and vanity of
his colleagues as well as by the usual accidents of international
intercourse. His life was like a full five-act play--prophetic prologue and
stately epilogue, and swelling scene imposed upon swelling scene, until the
tallow chandler's son, rising from the humblest levels of human fortune to
the highest by uninterrupted gradations of invincible success, finally
becomes the recipient of such a degree of impressive homage as has rarely
been paid to anyone by the admiration and curiosity of mankind.
To such a diversified career as this the element of mere longevity was, of
course, indispensable. Renown so solid and enduring as that of Franklin and
acquired in so many different fields was not a thing to be achieved by a
few fortunate strokes. He did not awake one morning, as did Byron, to find
himself famous; though his fame in the province of electrical science
travelled fast when it once got under way. Such a full-orbed renown could
be produced only by the long gestation of many years of physical vigor and
untiring activity. With the meagre opportunities afforded by colonial
conditions for the accumulation of wealth, there had to be an extended
period of unflagging attention to Poor Richard's saying: "Many a little
makes a mickle." To this period belong some things that the self-revelation
of the _Autobiography_, unselfish as it is, cannot dignify, or even redeem
from moral squalor, and other things which even the frankness itself of the
_Autobiography_ is not frank enough to disclose. Then there is the unique
story, imprinted upon the face of Philadelphia to this day, of his fruitful
exertions as Town Oracle and City Builder. Then there is the episode of
scientific inquiry, all too brief, when the prosperous printer and
tradesman, appraising wealth at its true value, turns away from his
printing press and stock of merchandise to give himself up with
enthusiastic ardor to the study of electrical phenomena. Then there is the
long term of public employment, beginning with the Clerkship of the
Pennsylvania Assembly and not ending until, after many years of illustrious
public service as legislator, administrator, diplomatic agent and foreign
minister, Franklin complains in a letter to Dr. and Mrs. John Bard that the
public, not content with eating his flesh, seems resolved to pick his
bones.
The amount of work that he did, the mass of results that he accomplished,
during the long tract of time covered by his life, is simply prodigious.
Primarily, Franklin was a man of action. The reputation that he coveted
most was, as he declared, in a letter to Samuel Mather, that of a doer of
good. Utility was the standard set by him for all his activities, and even
his system of ethics did not escape the hard, griping pressure of this
standard. What he aimed at from first to last, whether in the domain of
science, literature or government, was practical results, and men, as they
are known to experienced and shrewd, though kindly, observers of men, were
the agencies with which he sought to accomplish such results. He never lost
sight of the sound working principle, which the mere academician or closet
philosopher is so prone to forget, that the game cannot be played except
with the chess-men upon the board. But happily for the world few men of
action have ever bequeathed to posterity such abundant written records of
their lives. When Franklin desired to promote any project or to carry any
point, he invariably, or all but invariably, invoked the aid of his pen to
attain his end. To write for money, or for the mere pleasure of writing, or
even for literary fame was totally alien to the purposes for which he
wrote. A pen was to him merely another practical instrument for forwarding
some private aim of his or some definite public or political object, to
which his sympathies and powers were committed, or else but an aid to
social amusement. As the result of this secondary kind of literary
activity, he left behind him a body of writings of one kind or another
which enables us to measure far more accurately than we should otherwise
have been able to do the amount of thought and performance crowded into
those eventful years of lusty and prolific existence. In the Library of
Congress, in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, in the
Library of the University of Pennsylvania, in numerous other collections in
both hemispheres are found the outflowings of a brain to which exuberance
of production was as natural as rank vegetation to a fat soil. Nor should
it be forgotten that many of his papers have perished, which, if still
extant, would furnish additional proofs of the fertility of his genius and
swell the sum of pleasure and instruction which we derive from his works.
With the sigh that we breathe over the lost productions of antiquity might
well be mingled another over the papers and letters which were confided by
Franklin, on the eve of his mission to France, to the care of Joseph
Galloway, only to fall a prey to ruthless spoliation and dispersion. To
look forward to a long winter evening enlivened by the missing letters that
he wrote to his close friends, Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph's,
"the good Bishop," as he called him, Sir Edward Newenham, of the Irish
Parliament, and Jan Ingenhousz, physician to Maria Theresa, would alone, to
one familiar with his correspondence, be as inviting a prospect as could be
held out to any reader with a relish for the intimate letters of a wise,
witty and humorous letter-writer.
The length of time during which the subtle and powerful mind of Franklin
was at work is, we repeat, a fact that must be duly taken into account in
exploring the foundations of his celebrity. "By living twelve years beyond
David's period," he said in one of his letters to George Whatley, "I seem
to have intruded myself into the company of posterity, when I ought to have
been abed and asleep." He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 6
(old style), 1706, and died in the City of Philadelphia on April 17, 1790.
At the time of his birth, Anne was in the fourth year of her reign as Queen
of England, and Louis XIV. was King of France. Only eighty-five years had
elapsed since the landing at Plymouth. More than three years were to elapse
before the battle of Malplaquet, more than five years before the
publication of the first _Spectator_, twenty years before the publication
of _Gulliver's Travels_. Franklin's name was an honored one not only in his
native land but beyond seas before any of the other great men who signed
the Declaration of Independence had emerged from provincial obscurity. His
birth preceded that of Washington by twenty-six years, that of John Adams
by thirty years, that of Jefferson by thirty-seven years. Coming into the
world only fifteen years after the outbreak of the witchcraft delusion at
Salem, he lived to be a member of the Federal Convention and to pass down
to us as modern in spirit and purpose as the American House of
Representatives or the American Patent Office. He, at least, is a standing
refutation of the claim that all the energetic tasks of human life are
performed by young men. He was seventy years of age when he arrived in
France to enter upon the laborious diplomatic career which so signally
increased the lustre of his fame and so gloriously prospered our national
fortunes; and he was seventy-nine years of age when his mission ended. But
even then, weighed down though he was by the strong hand of time and vexed
by diseases which left him little peace, there was no danger that he would
be classed by anyone with the old townsmen of whom Lord Bacon speaks "that
will be still sitting at their Street doore though thereby they offer Age
to Scorne." After his return from France, he lived long enough to be thrice
elected President of the State of Pennsylvania and to be a useful member of
the Convention that framed the Federal Constitution; and only twenty-four
days before his death he wrote the speech of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the
petition of the Erika, or Purists for the abolition of piracy and slavery
which is one of the happiest effusions of his satirical genius.
_Multos da annos_ is a prayer, we may readily believe, that is often
granted by the Gods with a scornful smile. In the case of Franklin, even
without such a protracted term of life as was his portion, he would still
have enjoyed a distinguished place in the memory of men, but not that
broad, branching, full-crowned fame which makes him one of the most
conspicuous landmarks of the eighteenth century.
And fully in keeping with the extent of this fame was the extent of his
relationship to the social and intellectual world of his time. The main
background of his life, of course, was American--Lake Champlain, the St.
Lawrence, the Charles, the Connecticut, the Hudson, the Delaware and the
Ohio rivers; the long western reaches of the Atlantic; the dark curtain of
firs and hemlocks and primeval masses of rock which separated the two
powers that ceaselessly struggled for the mastery of the continent, and
rarely lifted except to reveal some appalling tragedy, chargeable to the
French and their dread ally, the Red Indian; Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Fort Duquesne--all the internal features and surroundings in
a word of the long, narrow strip of English territory between Boston and
Philadelphia with which he was so familiar, and over which his influence
was asserted in so many ways. With the exception of his brief sojourn in
London in his youth, his whole life was passed in the Colonies until he was
fifty-one years of age. Before he sailed for England in 1757, upon his
first foreign mission, the circumstances of his career had been such as to
make him generally known to the people of the Colonies. His _Almanac_, his
_Gazette_, his pithy sayings, his humorous stories, his visits to Boston,
attended by the formation of so many wayside friendships, his postal
expeditions, the printing presses set up by him at many different points,
his private fortune, his public services, his electrical experiments were
all breath for the trump of his fame. He knew Colonial America as few
Colonial Americans knew it. He was born and reared in Boston, and, after
his removal to Philadelphia, he revisited his native city at regular
intervals. "The Boston manner, turn of phrase, and even tone of voice, and
accent in pronunciation, all please, and seem to refresh and revive me," he
said in his old age in a letter to the Rev. John Lathrop. Philadelphia, the
most populous and opulent of the colonial towns, was his lifelong place of
residence. In the _Autobiography_ he refers to it as "A city I love, having
lived many years in it very happily." He appears to have been quite
frequently in New York. His postal duties took him as far south as
Williamsburg, and the Albany Congress drew him as far north of New York as
Albany. He was in the camp of Braddock at Frederick, Maryland, just before
that rash and ill-starred general set out upon his long, dolorous march
through the wilderness where disaster and death awaited him. Facts like
these signify but little now when transit from one distant point to another
in the United States is effected with such amazing rapidity, but they
signified much under the crude conditions of colonial life. Once at least
did Franklin have his shoulder dislocated by an accident on the atrocious
roads of Colonial New England. Once he was thrown into the water from an
upset canoe near Staten Island. His masterly answers, when examined before
the House of Commons, showed how searchingly conversant he was with
everything that related to America. For some of our most penetrating
glances into colonial life we are indebted to his writings; particularly
instructive being his observations upon population in the Colonies, the
economic condition and political temper of their people and the
characteristics and habits of the Indians. It was a broad experience which
touched at one extreme the giddy and artificial life of Paris, on the eve
of the French Revolution, and at the other the drunken Indian orgies at the
conclusion of the treaty at Carlisle which Franklin has depicted in the
_Autobiography_ with a brush worthy of Rembrandt in these words: "Their
dark-colour'd bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the
bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied
by their horrid yellings, form'd a scene the most resembling our ideas of
hell that could well be imagin'd."
But the peculiar distinction of Franklin is that his life stands out
vividly upon an European as well as an American background. It is
interesting to contrast the scene at Carlisle with the opera in honor of
the Comte du Nord, at which he was present, during the French mission. "The
House," he says in his _Journal of the Negotiation for Peace with Great
Britain_, "being richly finish'd with abundance of Carving and Gilding,
well Illuminated with Wax Tapers, and the Company all superbly drest, many
of the Men in Cloth of Tissue, and the Ladies sparkling with Diamonds,
form'd altogether the most splendid Spectacle my Eyes ever beheld." Until
the august figure of Washington filled the eye of mankind, Franklin was the
only American who had ever won a solid and splendid European reputation.
The opportunity had not yet arisen for the lively French imagination to
declare that he had snatched the sceptre from tyrants, but the first half
of Turgot's tremendous epigram had been realized; for the lightning he had
snatched, or rather filched, from the sky. It may well be doubted whether
any one private individual with such limited pecuniary resources ever did
as much for the moral and intellectual welfare of any one community as
Franklin did for pre-revolutionary Philadelphia; but it was impossible that
such aspirations and powers as his should be confined within the pale of
colonial provincialism. His widespread fame, his tolerant disposition, his
early residence in England, his later residence there for long periods, his
excursions into Scotland and Ireland and Continental countries, the society
of men of the world in London and other great cities combined to endow him
with a character truly cosmopolitan which was to be still further
liberalized by French influence. During his life, he crossed the Atlantic
no less than eight times. After 1757 the greater part of his life was spent
abroad. Of the eighty-four years, of which his existence was made up, some
twenty-six were passed in England and France. He was as much at home on The
Strand as on Market Street in Philadelphia. The friendships that he formed
in England and France were almost as close as those that he had formed in
Pennsylvania with his cronies, Hugh Roberts and John Bartram. He became so
thoroughly domesticated in England during his periods of sojourn in that
country that he thought of remaining there for the rest of his life, and
yet, if the Brillons had only been willing to confer the hand of their
daughter upon his grandson, William Temple Franklin, he would contentedly
have died in France. If there ever was an American, if there ever was a
citizen of the world, if there ever was a true child of the eighteenth
century, it was he. His humanitarian sympathies, his catholic temper, his
generous, unobstructed outlook enabled him without difficulty to adjust
himself with ease to the genius of every people with whom he was brought
into familiar contact. In America he was such a thorough American in every
respect that Carlyle is said to have termed him on one occasion, "The
Father of all the Yankees." In England he was English enough to feel the
full glow of her greatness and to see her true interests far more clearly
than she saw them herself. He had too many Anglo-Saxon traits to become
wholly a Frenchman when he lived in France, but he became French enough to
truly love France and her people and to be truly beloved by them. In the
opinion of Sainte-Beuve he is the most French of all Americans.
CHAPTER I
Franklin's Moral Standing and System
Until a comparatively recent period totally false conceptions in some
respects of Franklin's character were not uncommon. To many he was merely
the father of a penurious, cheese-paring philosophy, and to no little
extent the idea prevailed that his own nature and conduct corresponded with
its precepts. There could be no greater error. Of the whole science of
prudential economy a master indeed he was. His observations upon human
life, in its pecuniary relations, and upon the methods, by which affluence
and ease are to be wrested from the reluctant grasp of poverty, are always
sagacious in the highest degree. Poor Richard is quite as consummate a
master of the science of rising in the world as Aristotle is of the Science
of Politics or Mill of the Science of Political Economy. Given health and
strength, a man, who faithfully complied with his shrewd injunctions and
yet did not prosper, would be as much a freak of nature as a man who thrust
his hand into the fire and yet received no physical hurt. The ready and
universal assent given to their full truth and force by human experience is
attested by the fact that _The Way to Wealth_, or _The Speech of Father
Abraham_, "the plain, clean old Man with white Locks" in which Franklin,
when writing one of the prefaces of _Poor Richard's Almanac_, condensed the
wit and wisdom, original and second hand, of that incomparable manual of
_The Art of Material Success_, has, through innumerable editions and
reprints, and translations into every written tongue from the French to the
Russian and Chinese, become almost as well known to the entire civilized
globe as the unbroken strain of the martial airs of England. So well
calculated, it was thought, was it to promote sound principles of diligence
and frugality that it was, we are told by Franklin, reprinted in England,
to be set up in the form of a broadside in houses, and, when translated
into French, was bought by the clergy and gentry of France for distribution
among their poor parishioners and tenants. But so far from being the slave
of a parsimonious spirit was Franklin that it would be difficult to single
out any self-made man who ever formed a saner estimate of the value of
money than he did or lived up to it more fearlessly. In seeking money, he
was actuated, as his early retirement from business proved, only by the
high-minded motive to self-enrichment which is so pointedly expressed in
the lines of Burns:
"Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant,
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent."
No sooner did he accumulate a sufficient fortune to provide for the
reasonable wants of his family and himself than he proceeded to make this
fortune the handmaid of some of the higher things of life--wholesome
reading, scientific research, public usefulness, schemes of beneficence. In
1748, when he was in the full flush of business success and but forty-two
years of age, he deliberately, for the sake of such things, retired from
all active connection with business pursuits. In a letter to Abiah
Franklin, his mother, shortly after he found himself free forever from the
cares of his shop, he speaks of himself in these words: "I enjoy, thro'
Mercy, a tolerable Share of Health. I read a great deal, ride a little, do
a little Business for myself, more for others, retire when I can, and go
into Company when I please; so the Years roll round, and the last will
come; when I would rather have it said, _He lived Usefully_, than _He died
Rich_." About the same time, he wrote to William Strahan, a business
correspondent, that the very notion of _dying worth_ a great sum was to him
absurd, and just the same as if a man should run in debt for one thousand
superfluities, to the end that, when he should be stripped of all, and
imprisoned by his creditors, it might be said, he _broke worth_ a great
sum. On more than one occasion, when there was a call upon his public zeal,
his response was generous to the point of imprudence. The bond that he gave
to indemnify against loss the owners of the wagons and horses procured by
his energy and address for Braddock's expedition led to claims against him
to the amount of nearly twenty thousand pounds, which would have ruined
him, if the British Government had not rescued him after long delay from
his dreadful situation. Without hesitation he entered during his first
mission to England into a personal engagement that an act taxing the estate
of the Proprietaries of Pennsylvania in common with the estates of the
People of Pennsylvania would not result in any injustice to the
Proprietaries. On a later occasion, in order to prevent war between Great
Britain and her Colonies, he was willing to bind himself, to the whole
extent of his private fortune, to make pecuniary reparation for the
destruction of the tea cast into Boston harbor, if the Province of
Massachusetts did not do so. One of his last acts before leaving America
for his mission to France was to place the sum of three or four thousand
pounds, which was a large part of this fortune, and all the ready money at
his command, at the disposal of Congress. His salary as President of
Pennsylvania was all given or bequeathed by him to public objects. The
small sums, to which he became entitled as one of the next of kin of his
father and his cousin, Mrs. Fisher, of Wellingborough, England, he
relinquished to members of the family connection who needed them more than
he did. Once, though a commercial panic was prevailing, he pledged his
credit to the extent of five thousand pounds for the purpose of supporting
that of a London friend. His correspondence nowhere indicates any degree of
pecuniary caution in excess of the proper demands of good sense. On the
contrary, it furnishes repeated testimony to his promptitude in honoring
the solicitations of private distress or subscribing to public purposes.
Conspicuously unselfish was he when the appeal was to his public spirit or
to his interest in the general welfare of mankind. Among his innumerable
benefactions was a gift of one thousand pounds to Franklin College,
Pennsylvania. When he invented his open stove for the better warming of
rooms, he gave the model to his friend, Robert Grace, who found, Franklin
tells us in the _Autobiography_, the casting of the plates for the stove at
his furnace near Philadelphia a profitable thing. So far from begrudging
this profit to his friend, he wrote his interesting _Account of the
New-invented Pennsylvanian Fireplaces_ to promote the public demand for the
invention. A London ironmonger made some small changes in the stove, which
were worse than of no value to it, and reaped, Franklin was told, a little
fortune by it. "And this," he says in the _Autobiography_, "is not the only
instance of patents taken out for my inventions by others, tho' not always
with the same success, which I never contested, as having no desire of
profiting by patents myself, and hating disputes." When he was actually
engaged in the business of printing, a similar motive, so far as public
spirit went, led him to offer to print a treatise by Cadwallader Colden on
the _Cause of Gravitation_ at his own expense and risk. If he could be the
means of communicating anything valuable to the world, he wrote to Colden,
he did not always think of gaining nor even of saving by his business.
That the character of Franklin should ever have been deemed so meanly
covetous is due to _Poor Richard's Almanac_ and the _Autobiography_. The
former, with its hard, bare homilies upon the Gospel of Getting on in Life
and its unceasing accent upon the duty of scrimping and saving, circulated
so long and so widely throughout the Colonies that the real Franklin came
to be confused in many minds with the fictitious Poor Richard. Being
intended mainly for the instruction and amusement of the common people,
whose chief hope of bettering their condition lay in rigid self-denial, it
is naturally keyed to unison with the ruder and austerer principles of
human thrift. As to the _Autobiography_, with its host of readers, the only
Franklin known to the great majority of persons, who have any familiarity
with Franklin at all, is its Franklin, and this Franklin is the one who had
to "make the night joint-laborer with the day," breakfast on bread and milk
eaten out of a two-penny earthen porringer with a pewter spoon, and closely
heed all the sage counsels of _Poor Richard's Almanac_ before he could even
become the possessor of a china bowl and a silver spoon. It is in the
_Autobiography_ that the story of Franklin's struggle, first for the naked
means of subsistence, and then for pecuniary competency, is told; and the
harsh self-restraint, the keen eye to every opportunity for self-promotion,
and the grossly mechanical theory of morals disclosed by it readily give
color to the notion that Franklin was nothing more than a sordid
materialist. It should be remembered that it is from the _Autobiography_
that we obtain the greatest part of our knowledge of the exertions through
which he acquired his fortune, and that the successive ascending stages, by
which he climbed the steep slopes that lead up from poverty and obscurity,
are indelibly set forth in this lifelike book with a pen as coarse but at
the same time as vivid and powerful as the pencil with which Hogarth
depicts the descending stages of the Rake's Progress. And along with these
facts it should also be remembered that the didactic purpose by which the
_Autobiography_ was largely inspired should be duly allowed for before we
draw too disparaging inferences about Franklin from anything that he says
in that book with respect to his career.
It is a curious fact that almost every reproach attaching to the reputation
of Franklin is attributable to the candor of the _Autobiography_. It is
true that in the political contests between the Proprietary and Popular
Parties in Colonial Pennsylvania he was often visited with virulent abuse
by the retainers of the Proprietaries. This was merely the dirty froth
brought to the surface by every boiling pot. It is also true that, after
the transmission of the Hutchinson letters to New England, he was the
object of much savage censure at the hands of British Tories. But this
censure, for the most part, was as empty as the ravings of the particular
bigot who indorsed on the first page of a volume of letters in the Public
Record Office, in London, a statement that the thirteen letters of Doctor
Franklin in the volume were perhaps then "only precious or Important so far
as they prove and discover the Duplicity, Ingratitude, and Guilt of this
Arch Traitor whom they unveil and really unmask Displaying him as an
accomplish'd Proficient in the blacker Arts of Dissimulation and Guile."
Not less hollow was the invective with which the distempered mind of Arthur
Lee assailed the character of Franklin when they were together in France.
Nor can it be denied that in such Rabelaisian _jeux d'esprit_ as Polly
Baker's Speech, the Letter on the Choice of a Mistress, and the Essay on
Perfumes, dedicated to the Royal Academy of Brussels, in the _naivete_
which marked Franklin's relations to his natural son, William Franklin,
and to his natural son's natural son, William Temple Franklin, and in the
ease with which he adopted in his old age the tone, if not the practices,
of French gallantry, we cannot but recognize a nature too deficient in the
refinements of early social training, too physically ripe for sensual
enjoyment and too unfettered in its intellectual movements to be keenly
mindful of some of the nicer obligations of scrupulous conduct. In moral
dignity, Franklin was not George Washington, though there was no one held
in higher honor by him. "If it were a Sceptre, he has merited it, and would
become it," he said in bequeathing a fine crab-tree walking stick to
Washington, whom he termed "My friend, and the friend of mankind." If for
no other reason, Franklin was not Washington because he lacked the family
traditions and early social advantages of Washington, and perhaps
Washington might have been more like Franklin, if he had had some of
Franklin's humor. While the resemblance is limited, Franklin does resemble
in some respects Jefferson who was too scientific in spirit and too liberal
in his opinions not to be a little of a skeptic and a heretic himself. But
nothing can be more certain than the fact that Franklin was esteemed by his
contemporaries not only a great but a good man. We pass by the French
extravagance which made him out a paragon of all the virtues as well as the
_plus grand philosophe du siecle_; for the French were but mad idolaters
where he was concerned. It is sufficient for our purposes to limit
ourselves to his English and American panegyrists. Referring to Franklin's
humble birth, Benjamin Vaughan, a dull but good man, wrote to him that he
proved "how little necessary all origin is to happiness, virtue, or
greatness." In another place, Vaughan speaks of the "affection, gratitude
and veneration" he bears to Franklin. To the sober Quaker, Abel James, the
author of the _Autobiography_ was the "kind, humane, and benevolent Ben.
Franklin" whose work almost insensibly led the youth "into the resolution
of endeavoring to become as good and eminent" as himself. In urging
Franklin to complete the story of his life, he added: "I know of no
character living, nor many of them put together, who has so much in his
power as thyself to promote a greater spirit of industry and early
attention to business, frugality, and temperance with the American youth."
As Franklin's letters bring to our knowledge friend after friend of his,
among the wisest and best men of his day, on both sides of the Atlantic, we
begin to ask ourselves whether anyone ever did have such a genius for
exciting the sentiment of true, honest friendship in virtuous and useful
men. His correspondence with Catherine Ray, Polly Stevenson, and Georgiana
Shipley, though several of his letters to the first of the three are
blemished by the freedom of the times and vulgar pleasantry, demonstrates
that his capacity for awakening this sentiment was not confined to his own
sex. Inclined as he was in his earlier and later years, to use Madame
Brillon's phrase, to permit his wisdom to be broken upon the rocks of
femininity, unbecoming his advanced age and high position as was the
salacious strain which ran through his letters to this beautiful and
brilliant woman, as we shall see hereafter, nothing could illustrate better
than his relations to Polly Stevenson how essentially incorrupt his heart
was when his association was with any member of the other sex who really
had modesty to lose. Such was the pure affection entertained for him by
this fine woman that, after the death of her celebrated husband, Dr.
William Hewson, she removed from London to Philadelphia with her children
to be near the friend, little less than a father, who had lavished upon her
all that was best in both his mind and heart. There is much in the life of
Franklin to make us believe that his standards of sexual morality were
entirely too lax, but there is everything in it, too, to make us believe
that he would not only have been incapable of seducing female innocence but
would have been slow to withhold in any regard the full meed of deferential
respect due to a chaste girl or a virtuous matron. It is hard to repress a
smile when we read under the head of "Humility" in his _Table of Virtues_,
just below the words, in which, under the head of "Chastity," he deprecates
the use of "venery" to the injury of one's own or another's peace or
reputation, the injunction for his own guidance, "imitate Jesus and
Socrates." All the same, it is a fact that one person, at any rate, Jane
Mecom, his sister, even thought him not unworthy to be compared with our
Saviour. "I think," she said, "it is not profanity to compare you to our
Blessed Saviour who employed much of his time while here on earth in doing
good to the body as well as souls of men." Elizabeth Hubbard, the
stepdaughter of his brother John, even warned him that, if he was not less
zealous in doing good, he would find himself alone in heaven. Through all
the observations of his contemporaries vibrates the note that he was too
wise and benevolent to belong to anything less than the entire human race.
Jonathan Shipley, "The Good Bishop," suggested as a motto suitable to his
character, "his country's friend, but more of human kind." Burke called him
"the lover of his species." By Sir Samuel Romilly he was pronounced "one of
the best and most eminent men of the present age." Chatham eulogized him in
the House of Lords as one "whom all Europe held in high Estimation for his
Knowledge and Wisdom, and rank'd with our Boyles and Newtons; who was an
Honour, not to the English Nation only, but to Human Nature." In one of his
works, Lord Kames spoke of him as "a man who makes a great figure in the
learned world; and who would make a still greater figure for benevolence
and candor, were virtue as much regarded in this declining age as
knowledge." Less formal was the heartfelt tribute of Dr. Samuel Cooper, of
Massachusetts, after many years of intercourse: "Your friendship has united
two things in my bosom that seldom meet, pride and consolation: it has been
the honor and the balm of my life." And when towards the close of
Franklin's life he wrote to George Washington, "In whatever State of
Existence I am plac'd hereafter, if I retain any Memory of what has pass'd
here, I shall with it retain the Esteem, Respect, and Affection, with which
I have long been, my dear Friend, yours most sincerely," he received a
reply, which was not only a reply, but the stately, measured judgment of a
man who never spoke any language except that of perfect sincerity. "If,"
said Washington, "to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for
talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for
philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing
consolation to know, that you have not lived in vain." "And I flatter
myself," he continued, "that it will not be ranked among the least grateful
occurrences of your life to be assured that, so long as I retain my memory,
you will be recollected with respect, veneration, and affection by your
sincere friend." These were credentials indeed for the old printer to take
with him on his journey to the bright orbs which it was a part of his early
religious fantasies to believe were swayed by Gods intermediate in the
scale of intelligent existence between ourselves and the "one Supreme, most
Perfect Being, Author and Father of the Gods themselves."[1]
It is, we repeat, the _Autobiography_ which is mainly responsible for the
unfavorable impressions that have been formed about the character of
Franklin. It is there that we learn what heady liquor his sprightly mind
and free spirit quaffed from the cup of boyhood and what errata blurred the
fair, fresh page of his early manhood. It is there that he has told us how,
as the result of his written attacks upon the Established Order, Puritan
Boston began to consider him in an unfavorable light "as a young genius
that had a turn for libelling and satyr"; how his indiscreet disputations
about religion caused him to be pointed at with horror by good people in
the same starch town as an infidel or atheist; how he availed himself of a
fraud in the second indentures of apprenticeship between his brother and
himself to claim his freedom before his time was up; how, in distant
London, he forgot the troth that he had plighted to Deborah Read; how he
attempted familiarities with the mistress of his friend Ralph which she
repulsed with a proper resentment; how he broke into the money which Mr.
Vernon had authorized him to collect; how he brought over Collins and Ralph
to his own free-thinking ways; how he became involved in some foolish
intrigues with low women which from the expense were rather more
prejudicial to him than to them. It is in the _Autobiography_ also that we
learn from him how he thought that the daughter of Mrs. Godfrey's relation
should bring him as his wife enough money to discharge the remainder of the
debt on his printing house even if her parents had to mortgage their house
in the loan office; how partly by sheer force and pinching economy and
partly by dexterity and finesse, sometimes verging upon cunning, he pushed
himself further and further along the road to fortune, and finally how he
was so successful with the help of his _Art of Virtue_, despite occasional
stumblings and slips, in realizing his dream of moral perfection as to be
able to write complacently upon the margin of the _Autobiography_, "nothing
so likely to make a man's fortune as virtue." It is things like these in
the _Autobiography_ that have tended to create in minds, which know
Franklin only in this narrative, the idea that he was a niggard, a squalid
utilitarian, and even a little of a rogue; though the same _Autobiography_
witnesses also that he was not so engrossed with his own selfish interests
as not to find time for the enlarged projects of public utility which to
this day render it almost impossible for us to think of Philadelphia
without recalling the figure of Franklin. _Si monumentum requiris
circumspice_, was the proud inscription placed over the grave of Sir
Christopher Wren in the city where his genius had designed so many
edifices. The same inscription might be aptly placed over the grave of
Franklin in Christ Church yard in the city where his public spirit and
wisdom laid the foundations of so much that has proved enduring.
There is unquestionably a shabby side to the _Autobiography_, despite the
inspiring sacrifice of his physical wants which Franklin made in his
boyhood to gratify his intellectual cravings, the high promptings which the
appetites and unregulated impulses of his unguarded youth were powerless to
stifle, the dauntless resolution and singleness of purpose with which he
defied and conquered his adverse star, the wise moderation of his hour of
victory, the disinterested and splendid forms of social service to which he
devoted his sagacious and fruitful mind, his manly hatred of injustice and
cruelty, his fidelity to the popular cause which neither flattery could
cajole nor power overawe. In its mixture of what is noble with what is
ignoble the _Autobiography_ reminds us of the merchandise sold at the new
printing-office near the Market in Philadelphia, where Franklin conducted
his business as a printer and a merchant, where his wife, Deborah, assisted
him by folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop and purchasing old
linen rags, and where his mother-in-law, Mrs. Read, compounded her
sovereign remedy against the itch and lice. Now it was a translation of
Cato's _Moral Distichs_ or a pamphlet against slavery fresh from his own
press, now it was a copy of some devotional or useful work which the last
packet had brought over from London, now it was a lot of goose feathers, or
old rags, or a likely young negro wench. But on the whole we cannot help
thinking that the calm view, which Franklin himself, in the cool of the
evening of his life, takes of the early part of his existence, was, with
some qualifications, not far wrong. Notwithstanding the dangerous season of
youth and the hazardous situations, in which he was sometimes placed among
strangers, when he was remote from the eye and advice of his sterling
father, Josiah Franklin, he believed, as we know from the _Autobiography_,
that he had not fallen into any "willful gross immorality or injustice";
and, start as the student of Franklin may at times at things which might
chill for the moment the enthusiasm of even such a Boswellian as the late
John Bigelow, to whose editorial services the reputation of Franklin is so
deeply indebted, he is likely in his final estimate to find himself in very
much the same mood as that which impelled Franklin in the _Autobiography_
to make the famous declaration, so true to his normal and intensely vital
nature, that, were it offered to his choice, he "should have no objection
to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the
advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the
first." Be this as it may, it is at least safe to say that it is very
unfair to judge the character of Franklin by the _Autobiography_ without
bearing in mind one of the leading motives by which he was induced to write
his own life. To his great honor it can be said that to do good in the
higher social sense, to promote the lasting interests of humanity, to free
the march of the race from every handicap, every impediment, whether
arising in or outside of ourselves, to instruct, to enlighten, were the
dominant incentives, the mellow, yet commanding passions of his existence.
Like many another philosopher before and since, in his zeal to subserve the
general interest he forgot himself. If other young men treading in his
footsteps could be deterred by the warnings of his errors from becoming
involved in the mistakes and moral lapses in which his youth and
inexperience were involved, he was willing, though not without some
misgivings, to lay before them and the whole world all the details of these
errors. In composing the _Autobiography_, he was influenced to no little
degree by the spirit of a man who bequeaths his own body to the surgeons
for the advancement of science. If his reputation suffered by his tender of
himself as a _corpus vile_ for the benefit of future generations, he was
prepared to take this risk, as he was prepared to take the risks of the two
electric shocks, which nearly cost him his life, in the promotion of human
knowledge. It is impossible for anyone, who is not familiar with the
perfect lack of selfish reserve brought by Franklin to the pursuit of truth
or the universal interests of mankind, to understand the extent to which,
in composing the _Autobiography_, he was moved by generous considerations
of this sort. In no other production of his did he show the same
disposition to turn the seamier side of his existence to the light for the
simple reason that no other production of his was written with the same
homiletic purpose as the _Autobiography_. And, if this purpose had not been
so strong upon him, how easy it would have been for him by a little
judicious suppression here and a few softening touches there to have
altered the whole face of the _Autobiography_, and to have rendered it as
faithless a transcript of the slips and blots of his life as are most
autobiographies of human beings--even those of men who have enjoyed a high
repute for moral excellence--in their relations to the indiscretions, the
follies and the transgressions of their immaturer years! At any rate, of
the offences of Franklin, mentioned in the _Autobiography_, may be said
what cannot be said of the similar offences of many men. He handsomely
atoned for them all so far as the opportunity to atone for them arose. It
was undoubtedly a serious breach of the moral law for him to have begotten
William Franklin out of lawful wedlock, and in the impartial affection,
which he publicly bestowed upon his illegitimate son and his legitimate
daughter, we see another illustration of his insensibility to the finer
inflections of human scruples. But when we see him accept this illegitimate
son as if he had come to him over his right shoulder instead of his left,
take him under his family roof, give him every advantage that education and
travel could confer, seek an honorable alliance for him, put him in the way
to become the Governor of Colonial New Jersey, even affectionately
recognize his illegitimate son as a grandson, we almost feel as if such
ingenuous naturalism had a kind of bastard moral value of its own.
The _Autobiography_ is interesting in every respect but in none more so
than in relation to the System of Morals adopted by Franklin for his
self-government in early life, when, to use his own words in that work, he
"conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection."
This project once formed, he went about its execution in a manner as
strictly mechanical as if he had been rectifying a smoky chimney or
devising a helpful pair of glasses for his defective eyesight. The virtues
were classified by him under thirteen heads: Temperance, Silence, Order,
Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation,
Cleanliness, Tranquillity, Chastity and Humility. These terms were all
tabulated by him in a little pocketbook kept for that especial purpose, and
to each virtue the close attention of a week was successively given by him.
If an offence was committed by him on a certain day, it was entered by a
little black mark under that date opposite the affronted virtue. The object
was to so concentrate his vigilance upon each virtue in turn and to so
strengthen his capacity to resist every temptation to violate it as to
finally render its practice habitual and instinctive. The plan in spirit
was not unlike the system of prudential algebra to which he told Joseph
Priestley, many years afterwards, that he resorted when his judgment was in
a state of uncertainty about some problem. In one column he would jot down
on a piece of paper all the _pros_ of the case, and in another all the
_cons_, and then, by appraising the relative value of each _pro_ and _con_
set down before his eye, and cancelling equivalent considerations, decide
upon which side the preponderance of the argument lay. Even Franklin
himself admits that his plan for making an automatic machine of virtue did
not work in every respect. Order he experienced extreme difficulty in
acquiring. Indeed, this virtue was so much against his grain that he felt
inclined to content himself with only a partial measure of fidelity to it,
like the man, he said in the _Autobiography_, who, though at first desirous
of having his whole ax bright, grew so tired of turning the grindstone on
which it was being polished that when the smith, who was holding it,
remarked that it was only speckled, and asked him to turn on, he replied,
"But I think I like a speckled ax best." The Humility, too, which Franklin
acquired, he was disposed to think was more specious than real. Pride, he
moralizes in the _Autobiography_, is perhaps the hardest of our natural
passions to subdue, and even, if he could conceive that he had completely
overcome it, he would probably, he thought, be proud of his humility. This
reminds us of his other observation in the _Autobiography_ that he gave
vanity fair quarter wherever he met with it, and that, in many cases, it
would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity
among the other comforts of life. In the effort, however, to acquire
Humility, Franklin did, he informs us in the same work, acquire, as time
wore on, the habit of expressing his opinions in such conciliatory forms
that no one perhaps for fifty years past had ever heard a dogmatic
expression escape him. "And to this habit (after my character of
integrity)," he declares, "I think it principally owing that I had early so
much weight with my fellow citizens when I proposed new institutions, or
alterations in the old, and so much influence in public councils when I
became a member; for I was but a bad speaker, never eloquent, subject to
much hesitation in my choice of words, hardly correct in language, and yet
I generally carried my points." On the whole, even though Franklin did find
Order and Humility not easy of attainment, he was very well satisfied with
the results of his plan for imparting the force of habit to virtue. In his
seventy-ninth year the former tradesman sat down to count deliberately his
moral gains. To his "little artifice" with the blessing of God he owed, he
felt, the constant felicity of his life until that time. To Temperance he
ascribed his long-continued health and what was still left to him of a good
constitution; to Industry and Frugality the early easiness of his
circumstances and the acquisition of his fortune with all that knowledge
that enabled him to be a useful citizen and obtained for him some degree
of reputation among the learned; to Sincerity and Justice the confidence of
his country and the honorable employs it conferred upon him; and to the
joint influence of the whole mass of the virtues, even in the imperfect
state that he was able to acquire them, all that evenness of temper and
that cheerfulness in conversation which made his company still sought for
and agreeable even to his younger acquaintance. From other expressions of
his in the _Autobiography_ we are left to infer that he believed that
Frugality and Industry, by freeing him from the residue of the debt on his
printing house and producing affluence and independence, had made more easy
the practice of sincerity and justice and the like by him.
So highly did Franklin esteem his method that he intended to follow it up
with a treatise, to be known as the _Art of Virtue_, containing a practical
commentary upon each of the virtues inserted in his little book, and
showing just how anyone could make himself virtuous, if he only had a mind
to. In this treatise, it was his desire, he says in the _Autobiography_, to
expound the doctrine that vicious actions are not hurtful because they are
forbidden but forbidden because they are hurtful, the nature of man alone
considered, and that it is therefore to the interest of everyone to be
virtuous who wishes to be happy even in this world. "I should from this
circumstance," he said, "(there being always in the world a number of rich
merchants, nobility, states, and princes, who have need of honest
instruments for the management of their affairs, and such being so rare),
have endeavoured to convince young persons that no qualities were so likely
to make a poor man's fortune as those of probity and integrity." The
thought was more fully developed in a letter to Lord Kames, dated May 3,
1760.
I purpose likewise [he said], a little work for the
benefit of youth, to be called the _Art of Virtue_.
From the title I think you will hardly conjecture what
the nature of such a book may be. I must therefore
explain it a little. Many people lead bad lives that
would gladly lead good ones, but know not _how_ to make
the change. They have frequently _resolved_ and
_endeavoured_ it; but in vain, because their endeavours
have not been properly conducted. To expect people to
be good, to be just, to be temperate, &c., without
_shewing_ them _how_ they should _become_ so, seems
like the ineffectual charity mentioned by the Apostle,
which consisted in saying to the hungry, the cold, and
the naked, "Be ye fed, be ye warmed, be ye clothed,"
without shewing them how they should get food, fire, or
clothing.
Most people have naturally _some_ virtues, but none
have naturally _all_ the virtues. To _acquire_ those
that are wanting, and secure what we acquire, as well
as those we have naturally, is the subject of _an art_.
It is as properly an art as painting, navigation, or
architecture. If a man would become a painter,
navigator, or architect, it is not enough that he is
_advised_ to be one, that he is _convinced_ by the
arguments of his adviser, that it would be for his
advantage to be one, and that he resolves to be one,
but he must also be taught the principles of the art,
be shewn all the methods of working, and how to acquire
the habits of using properly all the instruments; and
thus regularly and gradually he arrives, by practice,
at some perfection in the art.
The virtue, which this new art was to fabricate, was obviously too much in
keeping with the national tendency to turn over tasks of every sort to
self-directed machinery. The _Art of Virtue_, however, was never actually
penned, owing to the demands of private and public business upon Franklin's
time, and the world was consequently left to get along as it best could
with virtue of the old impulsive and untutored type. We are also apprised
in the _Autobiography_ that the _Art of Virtue_ itself was to be but an
incident of a great and extensive project which likewise never reached
maturity for the same reasons that arrested the completion of that work.
This project was the formation of a United Party for Virtue, to be
composed of virtuous men of all nations under the government of suitable
good and wise rules. The conditions of initiation into this body, which was
to move on sin and debt throughout the world with embattled ranks and
flying banners, were to be the acceptance of Franklin's final religious
creed, of which we shall have something to say presently, and the
continuous practice for thirteen weeks of Franklin's moral regimen; and the
members were to engage to afford their advice, assistance and support to
each other in promoting one another's interests, business and advancement
in life. For distinction, the association was to be called The Society of
the Free and Easy, "free, as being, by the general practice and habit of
the virtues, free from the dominion of vice; and particularly by the
practice of industry and frugality, free from debt, which exposes a man to
confinement, and a species of slavery to his creditors." It is in the
_Autobiography_ also that Franklin states that he filled the spaces between
the remarkable days in the calendar in his _Poor Richard's Almanac_ with
proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality,
"as the means," he declared, "of procuring wealth, and thereby securing
virtue; it being more difficult for a man in want, to act always honestly,
as, to use here one of those proverbs, _it is hard for an empty sack to
stand upright_."[2]
This prudential view of morality also found utterance in other forms in the
writings of Franklin. In the first of the two graceful dialogues between
Philocles, the Man of Reason and Virtue, and Horatio, the Man of Pleasure,
which appeared in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_, the former warns the latter
in honeyed words that he would lose even as a man of pleasure, if, in the
pursuit of pleasure, he did not practice self-denial, by taking as much
care of his future as his present happiness, and not building one upon the
ruins of the other; all of which, of course, was more epigrammatically
embodied in that other injunction of Poor Richard, "Deny self for self's
sake." No wonder that Horatio was so delighted with a theory of
self-denial, which left him still such a comfortable margin for sensual
enjoyment, that, when Philocles bids him good night, he replies: "Adieu!
thou enchanting Reasoner!"
"Money makes men virtuous, Virtue makes them happy"; this is perhaps an
unfair way of summarizing Franklin's moral precepts, but it is not remote
from fairness. "Truth and Sincerity," he had written in his _Journal of a
Voyage from London to Philadelphia_, when he was but twenty years of age,
"have a certain distinguishing native lustre about them, which cannot be
perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame, that cannot be
painted." It would have been well for the moralist of later years to have
remembered this statement when he made up his mind to contract the habit of
moral perfection. His Milton, from which he borrowed the _Hymn to the
Creator_ that is a part of his _Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion_,
might have told him,
"Virtue could see to do what Virtue would
By her own radiant light, though sun and moon
Were in the flat sea sunk,"
or in those other words from the same strains of supernal melody,
"If Virtue feeble were
Heaven itself would stoop to her."
In teaching and pursuing a system of morals, which was nothing but a scheme
of enlightened selfishness, dependent for its aliment upon pecuniary ease
and habit, he was simply faithful to a general conception of life and
character entirely too earthbound and grovelling to satisfy those higher
intuitions and ideals which, be the hard laws of our material being what
they may, not only never permit our grosser natures to be at peace, but
reject with utter disdain the suggestion that they and our vices and
infirmities are but offshoots of the same parent stock of selfishness. It
cannot be denied that, as a general rule, a man with some money is less
urgently solicited to commit certain breaches of the moral law than a man
with none, or that we should be in a bad way, indeed, if we did not have
the ply of habit as well as the whisper of conscience to assist us in the
struggle between good and evil that is ever going on in our own breasts.
But the limited freedom from temptation, secured by the possession of
money, and the additional capacity for resisting temptation, bred by good
habits, are, it is hardly necessary to say, foundations too frail to
support alone the moral order of the universe. Beyond money, however
conducive it may be in some respects to diminished temptation, there must
be something to sweeten the corrupting influence of money. Beyond good
habits, however desirable as aids to virtue, there must be something to
create and sustain good habits. This thing no merely politic sense of
moral necessity can ever be. Franklin's idea of supplying our languid moral
energies with a system of moral practice as material as a go-cart or a
swimming bladder is one, it is safe to say, upon which neither he nor
anyone else could build a character that would, as Charles Townsend might
have said, be anything but "a habit of lute string--a mere thing for summer
wear." His _Art of Virtue_ was a spurious, pinchbeck, shoddy substitute for
the real virtue which has its home in our uninstructed as well as our
instructed moral impulses; and for one man, who would be made virtuous by
it, ten, we dare say, would be likely to be made shallow formalists or
canting scamps. It is a pity that Poor Richard did not make more of that
other time-honored maxim, "Virtue is its own reward."
Indeed, we shrewdly suspect that even Franklin's idea that he was such a
debtor to his factitious system of moral practice was not much better than
a conceit. The improvement in his moral character, after he first began to
carry the virtues around in his pocket, is, we think, far more likely to
have been due to the natural decline of youthful waywardness and dissent,
the discipline of steady labor, the settling and sober effects of domestic
life and the wider vision in every respect in our relations to the world
which comes to us with our older years. It is but just to Franklin to say
that, even before he adopted his "little artifice," his character as
respects the virtues, which he specifically names as having had a hand in
producing the constant felicity of his life, namely, Temperance, Industry,
Frugality, Sincerity and Justice was, so far as Temperance, Industry and
Frugality were concerned, exceptionally good, and, so far as Sincerity and
Justice were concerned, not subject to any ineffaceable reproach. In truth,
even he, we imagine, would have admitted with a laugh, accompanied perhaps
by a humorous story, that the period of his life, before his dream of
moral perfection was formed, when he was so temperate as to be known to his
fellow printers in London as the "Water American," and to be able to turn
from the common diet to the vegetarian, and back again, without the
slightest inconvenience, would compare quite favorably with the period of
his life, after his dream of moral perfection had been formed, when he had
to confess on one occasion to Polly Stevenson that he had drunk more at a
venison feast than became a philosopher, and on another to his friend, John
Bartram that, if he could find in any Italian travels a recipe for making
Parmesan cheese, it would give him more satisfaction than a transcript of
any inscription from any old stone whatever. How far the effect of his
moral regimen was to strengthen the virtues of Silence, Resolution,
Moderation, Cleanliness and Tranquillity we lack sufficient materials for a
judgment. These, assuming that Cleanliness must have gone along with such
an eager propensity for swimming as his, were all native virtues of his
anyhow we should say. But as to Chastity the invigorating quality of the
regimen is certainly open to the most serious doubt. There is only too much
in the correspondence which has survived him to give color to the statement
of John Adams that even at the age of seventy-odd he had neither lost his
love of beauty nor his taste for it. When we bear this in mind and recall
what he had to say in the _Autobiography_ about the "hard-to-be-governed
passion of youth," which frequently hurried him into intrigues with low
women that fell in his way before he resolved to acquire the habit of
chastity with the aid of his book, we realize that the artificial
scaffolding, which he proposed to build up around his character, reasonably
enough broke down at just the point where the natural vigor of his
character was the weakest.
In point of sexual morality, Franklin was no better than the Europe of the
eighteenth century; distinctly worse than the America of that century. His
domestic affections were uncommonly strong, but the notable peculiarity
about his domestic life is that he was not a whit less soberly dutiful in
his irregular than in his regular family connections, and always acted as
if the nuptial ceremony was a wholly superfluous form, so far as a proper
sense of marital or paternal obligation, or the existence of deep,
unreserved affection, upon the part of a husband or father, went. His lack
of scruples in this respect almost reminds us of the question put by his
own Polly Baker, when she was prosecuted the fifth time for giving birth to
a bastard: "Can it be a crime (in the nature of things, I mean) to add to
the king's subjects, in a new country, that really wants people?"
Apparently no ceremony of any kind ever preceded his union with Deborah,
though accompanied by circumstances of cohabitation and acknowledgment
which unquestionably rendered it a valid, binding marriage, in every
respect, under the liberal laws of Pennsylvania. He simply remarks in the
_Autobiography_, "I took her to wife, September 1, 1730." The artlessness
with which he extended the full measure of a father's recognition to
William Franklin excited comment abroad as well as at home, and, together
with the political wounds inflicted by him upon the official arrogance and
social pride of the Proprietary Party in Pennsylvania, was mainly
responsible for the opprobrium in which his memory was held in the higher
social circles of Philadelphia long after his death. So far as we know,
there is nothing in his utterances or writings to indicate that the birth
of William Franklin ever caused him the slightest shame or embarrassment.
His dignity of character, in its way, it has been truly said by Sydney
George Fisher, was as natural and instinctive as that of Washington, and,
in its relations to illegitimacy, for which he was answerable, seems to
have felt the lack of conventional support as little as our first parents,
in their pristine state, did the lack of fig leaves. He accepted his
natural son and William Temple Franklin, William's natural son, exactly as
if both had come recommended to his outspoken affection by betrothal,
honest wedding ring and all. The idea that any stigma attached to either,
or that they stood upon any different footing from his legitimate daughter,
Sarah Bache and her children, was something that his mind does not appear
to have harbored at all. His attitude towards them was as unblushingly
natural and demonstrative, to get back to the Garden of Eden, as the mutual
caresses of Adam and Eve before the Fall of Man. William was born a few
months after the marriage of Franklin and Deborah, and his father, so far
as we can see, took him under his roof with as little constraint as if his
introduction had been duly provided for in the marriage contract. Indeed,
John Bigelow, who is always disposed, in the spirit of Franklin's own
limping lines on Deborah, to deem all his Joan's faults "exceedingly
small," rather ludicrously observes: "William may therefore be said to have
been born in wedlock, though he was not reputed to be the son of Mrs.
Franklin." So identified did he become with all the other members of
Franklin's household that Franklin in his letters not only frequently
conveyed "Billy's" duty to his "mother" and "Billy's" love to his "sister"
but on one occasion at least even "Billy's" duty to his "grandmother," Mrs.
Read, the mother of Mrs. Franklin. As the boy outgrew his pony, of which we
obtain a pleasant glimpse in a "lost" notice in the _Pennsylvania Gazette_,
we find Franklin in a letter to his own mother, Abiah Franklin, in which he
couples the name of "Billy" in the most natural way with that of his
daughter Sally, saying: "Will is now nineteen years of age, a tall proper
Youth, and much of a Beau." It was with William Franklin, when Governor of
New Jersey, that Sally took refuge at the time that her father's house in
Philadelphia was threatened with destruction by a Stamp Act mob; and it was
to him shortly afterwards, when the tide of popular approval was again
running in favor of Franklin, then the agent of Pennsylvania at London,
that she dispatched these joyful words: "Dear Brother:--_The Old Ticket
forever! We have it by 34 votes! God bless our worthy and noble agent, and
all his family!_" Through the influence of his father the son obtained a
provincial commission which brought him some military experience, and also
filled the office of Postmaster at Philadelphia, and afterwards the office
of Clerk of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania. He was with Franklin when
the latter sent his kite on its memorable flight into the skies; when he
visited Braddock's camp; and when he conducted his military expedition
against the murderous Indians. When Franklin sailed for England in 1757,
William accompanied him with the view of obtaining a license from the Inns
of Court, in which he had already been entered by the former, to practice
as a barrister. Abroad, he still remained his father's inseparable
companion, living with him, accompanying him in his travelling excursions,
attending him, when he was so signally honored at Cambridge and Oxford,
even poring with him over the parish records and gravestones at Ecton from
which Franklin sought to rescue such information as he could about his
humble ancestors, who could not have excited his curiosity more keenly, if
they had all been Princes of the Blood. What the two learned at Ecton of
the abilities and public spirit of Thomas, an uncle of Franklin, and a man
of no little local prominence, suggested such a close resemblance between
the uncle and nephew that William Franklin remarked: "Had he died on the
same day, one might have supposed a transmigration." Alexander Carlyle in
his _Autobiography_ has something to say about an occasion at Doctor
Robertson's house in Edinburgh when the pair as well as Hume, Dr. Cullen,
Adam Smith and others were present. The son, Carlyle tells us, "was open
and communicative, and pleased the company better than his father; and some
of us observed indications of that decided difference of opinion between
father and son which in the American War alienated them altogether." The
favorable impression made by William Franklin on this company at this
period of his life, he also made on William Strahan, of whom we shall have
much more to say. "Your son," Strahan wrote to Franklin's wife, "I really
think one of the prettiest young gentlemen I ever knew from America."
Indeed, even in extreme old age the handsome presence, courtly manners and
quick intelligence of William Franklin won their way at any social
gathering. Speaking of an occasion on which he had met him, Crabbe Robinson
says in his _Diary_, "Old General Franklin, son of the celebrated Benjamin
was of the party. He is eighty-four years of age, has a courtier-like mien,
and must have been a very fine man. He is now very animated and
interesting, but does not at all answer to the idea one would naturally
form of the son of the great Franklin."[3] A few days after the departure
of Franklin from England in August, 1762, the son was married to Miss
Elizabeth Downes, of St. James Street, "a very agreeable West India lady,"
if her father-in-law may be believed. Before the marriage took place, he
had been appointed, in the thirty-second year of his age, Governor of New
Jersey. If the appointment was made, as has been supposed, to detach
Franklin from the Colonial cause, it failed, of course, to produce any such
result, but it did have the effect of completely bringing over William
Franklin to the Loyalist side, when the storm finally broke, and Franklin
pledged his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to the patriot cause. As
the Revolution drew on, William Franklin became a partisan of the British
Government, and, when he still held fast to his own office, in spite of the
dismissal of his father from his office as Deputy Postmaster-General for
the Colonies, Franklin wrote to him bluntly: "But you, who are a thorough
Courtier, see everything with Government Eyes." The son even disregarded
what was practically a request from the father that he should give up an
office, which was becoming more and more complicated with the arbitrary
measures of the English Ministry, and had been year after year a drain upon
the purse of the father. Then followed his ignominious arrest as a Tory by
the New Jersey Assembly, his defiant vaunt "_Pro Rege_ and Patria was the
motto I assumed, when I first commenced my political life, and I am
resolved to retain it till death shall put an end to my mortal existence,"
his breach with his father, his rancorous activity as the President of the
Board of Associated Loyalists, which drew down on him the suspicion of
having abetted at least one murderous outrage, and his subsequent
abandonment of America for England, where he died long after the war, a
pensioner of the British Crown. With the breach between father and son,
ended forever the visits that the members of the Franklin family in
Philadelphia had been in the habit of paying from time to time to the
Colonial Governor, the personal intercourse between the two, which, upon
the part of the father, we are told by William Strahan, was at once that of
a friend, a brother and an intimate and easy companion, and such filial
letters as the one, for example, in which William Franklin wrote to
Franklin that he was extremely obliged to him for his care in supplying him
with money, and should ever have a grateful sense of that with the other
numberless indulgences that he had received from his parental affection.
After the restoration of peace between the two waning countries, overtures
of reconciliation were made by William Franklin. "I ... am glad," his
father wrote, "to find that you desire to revive the affectionate
Intercourse, that formerly existed between us. It will be very agreeable to
me; indeed 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." Then with an
uncertain touch of the native sense of justice, which was so deeply seated
in his breast, he continued: "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 form'd and govern'd much by
Circumstances, that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible.
Your Situation was such that few would have censured your remaining Neuter,
_tho' there are Natural Duties which precede political ones, and cannot be
extinguish'd by them_." Responding to a statement in this same letter that
the writer would be glad to see him when convenient, but would not have
him come to Paris at that time, William Franklin had a brief interview with
his father at Southampton, when the latter was returning, after the
restoration of peace between Great Britain and the United States, full of
gratified patriotism, as well as of years and infirmities, to the land from
which the son was an outcast. That immedicable wound, however, was not to
be healed by one or even by many interviews, and, while Franklin did
subsequently devise his lands in Nova Scotia to William Franklin and
release him from certain debts, he could not refrain from a bitter fling in
doing so. "The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public
notoriety," the will ran, "will account for my leaving him no more of an
estate he endeavoured to deprive me of."
Again that remorseless moral system, in comparison with which the flimsy
moral system of the _Autobiography_ is, to use Bismarck's figure, but a
lath painted to look like iron, had reminded one, who had had the temerity
to violate its ordinances, that what is now as luscious as locusts may
shortly be as bitter as coloquintida.
Surely there are few things in history more pathetic than that the
relationship, for which the father had set aside the world and the world's
law, and to which the incalculable workings of human love had almost
communicated the genuineness and dignity of moral legitimacy, should have
been the one thing to turn to ashes upon the lips of a life blessed with
prosperity and happiness almost beyond the measure of any that the past has
brought home to us![4]
It has been suggested that Franklin had another natural child in the wife
of John Foxcroft. In a letter to the former, Foxcroft acquaints him that
"his daughter" had been safely brought to bed, and had presented the writer
with a sweet little girl, and in several letters to Foxcroft Franklin
speaks of Mrs. Foxcroft as "my daughter." "God send my Daughter a good
time, and you a Good Boy," are the words of one of them. The suggestion has
been rejected by Albert Henry Smyth, the accomplished editor of Franklin's
writings, on chronological grounds which, it seems to us, are by no means
conclusive. The term, "daughter," however, standing alone, would certainly,
under any circumstances, be largely deprived of its significance by the
fact that Franklin, in his intercourse with other women than Mrs. Foxcroft,
seems in the course of his life to have been addressed, in both English and
French, by every paternal appellation from Pappy to _Tres cher Papa_ known
to the language of endearment.[5] Moreover, so singularly free from
self-consciousness was he in relation to his own sexual vagaries, so urgent
were his affectionate impulses, that it is hard to believe that he could
have been the father of such an illegitimate daughter when there is no
evidence to show that, aside from a little concession to the jealousy of
Mrs. Franklin, he treated her exactly as he did his acknowledged daughter,
Sally.
The unsophisticated relations of Franklin to William Franklin were also his
relations to William Temple Franklin, who was born in England, when his
father was in that country with Franklin during the latter's first mission
abroad. The mother of his father is unknown, and so is his own. Silence was
one of the virtues enjoined on Franklin by his little book, and was an
innate attribute of his strong character besides. The case was certainly
one, in which, if he had been reproached by his father, William Franklin
could have found an extenuating example very near at hand, even if not very
readily available for the purposes of recrimination. But there is nothing
to lead us to believe that Franklin was more concerned about the second bar
sinister in his coat of arms than the first. On the contrary, his affection
appropriated his little grandson with a promptitude which reminds us of the
story told in one of his letters to his wife about the boy who asked
another boy, when the latter was crying over a pennyworth of spilt vinegar,
for fear that his mother would whip him, "Have you then got ne'er a
Grandmother?" Almost, if not, from the very beginning, Franklin, and not
William, was Temple's real father, and, after William became estranged from
Franklin, the grandson thenceforth occupied the place in the heart of the
latter which the son had previously occupied, or one, if anything, even
warmer. When William was appointed Governor of New Jersey, and sailed away
with his bride to his province, Temple, then about two years old, was left
in London. As he grew older, he was placed by his grandfather, after the
return of the grandfather to England in 1764, in a school near London from
which he often came to visit the latter at Mrs. Stevenson's house at No. 7
Craven Street. After one of these visits, Franklin writes to William,
"Temple has been at home with us during the Christmas Vacation from School.
He improves continually, and more and more engages the Regard of all that
are acquainted with him, by his pleasing, sensible, manly Behaviour." On
another occasion, in settling an account with William Franklin he says
proudly, after referring to outlays required by the maintenance and
education of Temple, "But that his Friends will not grudge when they see
him." For a time, Temple was an inmate of the Craven Street House. When
Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1775, he took him with him, and turned
him over to William Franklin, whose family name the youth, until then known
as William Temple, assumed for the future. Temple, however, after spending
some happy months in New Jersey, was soon again with his grandfather at
Philadelphia for the purpose of attending the College of Philadelphia, and
here he was when Franklin was on the point of setting out on his mission to
France. When he did sail, Temple, then sixteen or seventeen years of age,
and Benjamin Franklin Bache, the oldest son of Franklin's daughter, Sally,
a boy of seven, accompanied him; it being the purpose of Franklin to place
Temple at some foreign university, with the design of ultimately making a
lawyer of him, and Benjamin at some school in Paris.[6] Governor Franklin,
who was a prisoner in Connecticut, did not hear of the departure of his
father until several weeks after the three had sailed. "If," he wrote to
his wife, "the old gentleman has taken the boy with him, I hope it is only
to put him into some foreign university."
Abroad, the idea of giving Temple a legal education was first deferred, and
then finally dismissed. His grandfather, with an infinite amount to do, and
with no clerical help provided by Congress to assist him in doing it, was
constrained to employ him as his private secretary, without any aid except
that of a French clerk, who was paid a salary of fifty louis per annum.
Engaging in person, endowed to some degree with the vivacity of his
grandfather and father, speaking French much better than his grandfather,
possessed of fair abilities and attentive to his duties, he appears to have
filled the post of secretary creditably, though Congress, for one reason or
another, could never be induced to recognize his appointment officially.
Later on, when John Adams, John Jay, Henry Laurens and Franklin were
appointed with Jefferson, who declined to serve, Commissioners to negotiate
peace with Great Britain, he became their Secretary at an annual salary of
one thousand pounds, but the vain, pathetic efforts of the grandfather,
both before and after his return to America from France, when too much time
had been lost for Temple to resume the thought of taking up the study of
law, to obtain some secondary diplomatic, or other, position in the public
service for the grandson, make up one of the despicable chapters in the
history of Congress. Remarkable as it now seems, at one time there was even
an effort on foot in America to oust Temple from his position as the
private secretary of Franklin. It called forth a remonstrance in a letter
from the latter to Richard Bache, his son-in-law, which is not only deeply
interesting because of its stirring, measured force of expression, but also
because of the tenderness for Temple which it manifests.
I am surprised to hear [he said] that my grandson,
Temple Franklin, being with me, should be an objection
against me, and that there is a cabal for removing him.
Methinks it is rather some merit, that I have rescued a
valuable young man from the danger of being a Tory, and
fixed him in honest republican Whig principles; as I
think, from the integrity of his disposition, his
industry, his early sagacity, and uncommon abilities
for business, he may in time become of great service to
his country. It is enough that I have lost my _son_;
would they add my _grandson_? An old man of seventy, I
undertook a winter voyage at the command of the
Congress, and for the public service, with no other
attendant to take care of me. I am continued here in a
foreign country, where, if I am sick, his filial
attention comforts me, and, if I die, I have a child to
close my eyes and take care of my remains. His dutiful
behaviour towards me, and his diligence and fidelity in
business, are both pleasing and useful to me.
The same indulgent estimate of Temple's capacity is also indicated in a
letter to Samuel Huntington in which Franklin requested Congress to take
his grandson under his protection. After stating that Temple seemed to be
qualified for public foreign affairs "by a sagacity and judgment above his
years, and great diligence and activity, exact probity, a genteel address,
a facility in speaking well the French tongue, and all the knowledge of
business to be obtained by a four years' constant employment in the
secretary's office," he added: "After all the allowance I am capable of
making for the partiality of a parent to his offspring, I cannot but think
he may in time make a very able foreign minister for Congress, in whose
service his fidelity may be relied on."
A thing most earnestly desired by Franklin was the marriage of Temple to a
daughter of Madame Brillon, who sometimes referred to Temple as "M.
Franklinet." So ardent was the chase upon his part that he even assured the
mother that he was ready to spend the rest of his life in France if the
only obstacle to the union was the fear that Temple would return to America
with him. Mademoiselle Brillon does not seem to have been inclined to let
Temple despair but her parents were unwilling to give their consent. Madame
Brillon declared that it would have been sweet to her heart and most
agreeable to M. Brillon to have been able to form a union which would have
made but one family of the Brillons and the Franklins, and that they liked
Temple, and believed that he had everything requisite to make a man
distinguished, and to render a woman happy, but they must have, she said, a
son-in-law who would be in a situation to succeed her husband in his
office, and who was also a man of their religion. This was in reply to a
letter from Franklin in which he proposed the match, and had said of
Temple, "He is still young, and perhaps the partiality of a father has made
me think too highly of him, but it seems to me that he has the stuff in him
to make in time a distinguished man." After reading the letters from
Franklin about his grandson, we can readily believe that Lafayette did not
exaggerate when he wrote to Washington that Franklin loved his grandchild
better than anything else in the world. Even when Temple was some
twenty-four years of age, Franklin in one of his letters addresses him as
"My Dear Child" and signs himself, "Your loving Grandfather." While the two
remained in France, the old man improved every opportunity to advance the
fortunes of the younger one, matrimonial or otherwise. When his legs grew
too gouty to enable him to keep pace in mounting the stairways at
Versailles with the other foreign ministers, it was by Temple that he was
represented at Court _levees_. By him Temple was also introduced to
Voltaire, and enjoyed the unusual honor of having that great man with an
expressive gesture say to him: "My child, God and Liberty! Recollect those
two words." To Temple, too, was delegated by our envoys the office of
handing to Vergennes the memorial proposing an alliance between France,
Spain and the United States, and it was he who actually delivered to
Lafayette, on behalf of his grandfather, the handsome sword with which
Congress had honored the former. When the olive branch extended by William
Franklin to Franklin was accepted by him, Temple was sent over by him to
William in England for a season as the best peace-offering in the gift of
the sender. "I send your Son over to pay his Duty to you," he wrote to
William. "You will find him much improv'd. He is greatly esteem'd and
belov'd in this Country, and will make his Way anywhere." A letter written
to Temple, during his absence on this occasion, by his grandfather, in
which his grandfather pathetically complains of his silence, is another
minor proof of the devotion felt by Franklin for Temple. And there is every
reason to believe that the feeling was fully returned; for even the
prospect of being united to the daughter of Madame Brillon, with the full
sanction of his grandfather, was not sufficient to reconcile Temple to the
thought of being left behind in France by him. So far from being heeded by
Congress was the request of Franklin that some public office be conferred
upon Temple that the latter was even displaced in his secretaryship by
another person without a line of notice from Congress to his grandfather.
And when the two arrived in America, after they had lingered long enough at
Southampton for William Franklin to transfer to his son a farm of some six
hundred acres at Rancocas, in the State of New Jersey, purchased for Temple
by Franklin, Temple fared no better at the hands of the American Government
than in France. His efforts, first, to secure the Secretaryship of the
Federal Convention of 1787, and, afterwards, to obtain some appointment
under the administration of Washington, met with no success, despite all
that his grandfather could do for him. For a while he lived on his _Terre_,
as Franklin called it, at Rancocas, but, after the death of Franklin, who
did not forget him in his will, he became restless, and wandered back to
the Old World, where he delayed so long the publication of his
grandfather's writings, bequeathed to him by the latter, that he was
strongly but unjustly suspected for a time of having been bribed by the
British Government to suppress them. His slender literary qualifications
for giving the proper perspective to such a mass of material had simply
stood appalled at the magnitude of their task.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The superlative eulogy of Franklin is that of Josiah Quincy, Junior,
who expressed his conviction in his journal that Franklin was one of the
wisest and best of men upon earth; one, of whom it might be said that this
world was not worthy. Of course, no man capable of creating such a
conviction as this was safe from "the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass'
hoof." Capefigue in his _Memoirs of Louis XVI._ called Franklin "one of the
great charlatans" of his age. This is the language of a man who finds a
phrase and thinks he has found a fact. Arthur Lee said on one occasion that
Franklin was "the meanest of all mean men, the most corrupt of all corrupt
men"; but this was merely the froth of a rabid mental condition. Stephen
Sayre wrote to Capellen that Franklin was a "great villain," but Sayre had
unsuccessfully solicited office from Franklin. Besides, this extraordinary
character seems to have nearly, if not quite, answered Franklin's
description of a man who has neither good sense enough to be an honest man
nor wit enough for a rogue. The only one of Franklin's slanderers whose
arrow hit anywhere near the mark was an anonymous French poet who termed
him "Cameleon Octogenaire."
[2] Franklin was as fearless in applying his ethical principles to himself
as to others. After telling his sister Jane in a letter, dated Dec. 30,
1770, that he trusted that no apprehension of removal from his office as
Postmaster would make the least alteration in his political conduct, he
uses these striking words: "My rule, in which I have always found
satisfaction, is, never to turn aside in public affairs through views of
private interest; but to go straight forward in doing what appears to me
right at the time, leaving the consequences with Providence. What in my
younger days enabled me more easily to walk upright, was, that I had a
trade, and that I knew I could live upon little; and thence (never having
had views of making a fortune) I was free from avarice, and contented with
the plentiful supplies my business afforded me. And now it is still more
easy for me to preserve my freedom and integrity, when I consider that I am
almost at the end of my journey, and therefore need less to complete the
expense of it; and that what I now possess, through the blessing of God,
may, with tolerable economy, be sufficient for me (great misfortunes
excepted), though I should add nothing more to it by any office or
employment whatsoever."
[3] In a paper on William Franklin, read before the New Jersey Historical
Society on Sept. 27, 1848, William A. Whitehead sketches him in this
manner: "He was of a cheerful, facetious disposition; could narrate well
entertaining stories to please his friends; was engaging in his manners,
and possessed good conversational powers. He lived in the recollection of
those who saw him in New Jersey as a man of strong passions, fond of
convivial pleasures, well versed in the ways of the world, and, at one
period of his life not a stranger to the gallantries which so frequently
marred the character of the man of that age. He was above the common size,
remarkably handsome, strong and athletic, though subject to gout towards
the close of his life." His writings, Whitehead thought, though perhaps
less remarkable than might be expected from his advantages of education and
association, gave evidence of literary attainments which compared favorably
with those of most of the prominent men of that day in the Colonies. If
_The Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania
from its Origin_ is one of them, as has been supposed, we can only say that
it at least hardly deserves such praise. The unassimilated material
scattered through its pages reminds us of nothing so much as feather
pellets and fragments of bone that have passed unchanged through the
gastric tract of a hawk.
[4] The judgment of Franklin himself as to how far his life had been a
fortunate one was freely expressed in a letter to his friend John Sargent,
dated Jan. 27, 1783. "Mrs. Sargent and the good Lady, her Mother," he said,
"are very kind in wishing me more happy Years. I ought to be satisfy'd with
those Providence has already been pleas'd to afford me, being now in my
seventy-eighth; a long Life to pass without any uncommon Misfortune, the
greater part of it in Health and Vigor of Mind and Body, near Fifty Years
of it in continu'd Possession of the Confidence of my Country, in public
Employments, and enjoying the Esteem and affectionate, friendly Regard of
many wise and good Men and Women, in every Country where I have resided.
For these Mercies and Blessings I desire to be thankful to God, whose
Protection I have hitherto had, and I hope for its Continuance to the End,
which now cannot be far distant."
[5] For instance, in a letter to Elizabeth Partridge Franklin signs himself
"Your affectionate Papah," and in a letter to Madam Conway, "Your
affectionate Father (as you do me the Honor to call me)," and in a letter
to Miss Flainville, "Your loving Papa."
[6] In a letter from Paris to Jan Ingenhousz, dated Apr. 26, 1777, Franklin
told Ingenhousz that he had brought Temple with him from America "partly to
finish his Education, having a great Affection for him, and partly to have
his Assistance as a Secretary."