Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (12 page)

In his autobiography (which extols the virtues of “industry” and “frugality” a total of thirty-six times), Franklin wrote of his wife, “It was lucky for me that I had one as much disposed to industry and frugality as myself.” He gives her even more credit in a letter written later, near the end of his life: “Frugality is an enriching virtue, a virtue I could never acquire in myself, but I was lucky enough to find it in a wife, who thereby became a fortune to me.” For Franklin, this passed for true love. Deborah helped at the print shop, stitched pamphlets, and purchased rags for papermaking. At least initially, they had no servants, and Franklin ate his bread-and-milk porridge each morning from a twopenny bowl.

In later years, after a conflicted Franklin had developed some taste for finery while still clinging to his admiration for frugality, he wryly recounted a little lapse on Deborah’s part that showed “how luxury will enter families and make a progress, in spite of principle.” One day he arrived at breakfast to find it served in a china bowl with a silver spoon. Deborah had bought them at the “enormous sum” of 23 shillings, with “no other excuse or apology to make but that she thought her husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his neighbors.” With a droll mix of pride and disdain, Franklin recalled how, over many years, as their wealth grew, they ended up with china and furnishings worth several hundred pounds.

When the young Franklin heard that his little sister Jane was planning to marry, he wrote her a letter that reflected his view that a good wife should be frugal and industrious. He had thought about sending her a tea table, he said, but his practical nature got the better of him. “When I considered that the character of a good housewife was far preferable to that of being only a pretty gentlewoman, I concluded to send you a spinning-wheel.” As Poor Richard would soon phrase it in his first almanac: “Many estates are spent in the getting/ Since women for tea forsook spinning and knitting.”
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The virtue of frugality was also one of young Franklin’s favorite themes in his newspaper writings. In Anthony Afterwit’s letter, after complaining about having to elope with no dowry, he goes on to ridicule his wife for adopting the airs and spending habits of a gentlewoman. First she pays for a fancy mirror, which then requires a nice table under it, then a tea service, and then a clock. Facing mounting debts, Anthony decides to sell these things when his wife leaves town to visit relatives. To replace the fancy furniture, he buys a spinning wheel and some knitting needles. He asks the
Gazette
to publish the letter so that she will read it before she returns and thus be prepared. “If she can conform to this new scheme of living, we shall be the happiest couple perhaps in the province.” And then, as a reward, he might let her have the nice mirror back.

Less sexist than most men of his day, Franklin also aimed his barbs at men. Afterwit’s letter was answered two weeks later by one from another Franklin creation, Celia Single. With the delightful gossipy voice of his other female characters, such as Silence Dogood and Alice Addertongue, Single recounts a visit to a friend whose husband is trying to replicate Afterwit’s approach. A raucous argument ensues. “There is neither sin nor shame in knitting a pair of stockings,” the husband says. She replies, “There are poor women enough in town that can knit.” Single finally leaves, “knowing that a man and his wife are apt to quarrel more violently when before strangers than when by themselves.” She later hears that the knitting thread ended up in the fireplace.

Single (or rather Franklin) goes on to admonish Franklin for publishing more tales of self-indulgent women than men. “If I were disposed to be censorious, I could furnish you with instances enough,” she says, then proceeds to rattle off a long list of men who waste their time playing pool, dice, or checkers and buying fancy clothes. Finally, Franklin has her cleverly poke at his veil of pseudonymity. “There are holes enough to be picked in your coat as well as others; and those who are affronted by the satires you may publish will not consider so much who wrote as who printed.”
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On a more serious and less modern note, Franklin published, four weeks after he married, “Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness.” He began with a paean to marriage, “the surest and most lasting foundation of comfort and love.” However, the folly of some who enter into it often makes it “a state of the most exquisite wretchedness and misery.” He apologized for aiming his advice at women, as men were in fact more faulty, “but the reason is because I esteem them better disposed to receive and practice it.”

Among his rules: avoid all thoughts of managing your husband, never deceive him or make him uneasy, accept that he “is a man not an angel,” “resolve every morning to be good-natured and cheerful,” remember the word “obey” in your marriage vows, do not dispute with him, and “deny yourself the trivial satisfaction of having your own will.” A woman’s power and happiness, Franklin wrote, “has no other foundation than her husband’s esteem and love.” Therefore, a wife should “share and soothe his cares, and with the utmost diligence conceal his infirmities.” And when it comes to sex: “Let the tenderness of your conjugal love be expressed with such decency, delicacy and prudence as that it may appear plainly and thoroughly distinct from the designing fondness of a harlot.”
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Franklin’s essays and fictional letters make it clear that he entered into his union with Deborah holding some traditional views on matrimony: wives should be supportive, households should be run frugally and industriously. Fortunately for him, Deborah tended to share those views. In general, she had plain tastes, a willingness to work, and a desire to please her spouse. Of course, as he might have pointed out, the same could be said of him at the time.

And so they settled into a partnership that was both more and less than a conventional marriage. A tireless collaborator both in the house and at work, Deborah handled most of the accounts and expanded their shop’s inventory to include ointments made by her mother, crown soap made by Franklin’s Boston relatives, coffee, tea, chocolate, saffron, cheese, fish, and various other sundries. She strained her eyes binding books and sewing clothes by candlelight. And though her spelling and choice of words reflected her lack of education—the sexton of the church was noted as the “seck stone” and one customer was called “Mary the Papist”—her copious entries in their shop book are a delightful record of the times.

Franklin’s affection for her grew from his pride at her industry; many years later, when he was in London arguing before the House of Commons that unfair taxes would lead to boycotts of British manufacturers, he asserted that he had never been prouder than when he was a young tradesman and wore only clothes that had been made by his wife.

But Deborah was not merely a submissive or meek partner to the man she often addressed (as he did her) as “my dear child” and whom she sometimes publicly called “Pappy.” She had a fierce temper, which Franklin invariably defended. “Don’t you know that all wives are in the right?” he asked a nephew who was having a dispute with Deborah. Soon after their marriage, he wrote a piece called “A Scolding Wife,” in which he defended assertive women by saying they tended to be “active in the business of the family, special good housewives, and very careful of their husband’s interests.”
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The only extant painting of Deborah makes her appear to be a sensible and determined women, plump and plain but not unattractive. In a letter he wrote her years later from London, he described a mug he was sending and compared it to her: “I fell in love with it at first sight, for I thought it looked like a fat, jolly dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white calico gown on, good natured and lovely, and just put me in mind of—somebody.”

It was a relationship that did not inspire great romantic verse, but it did produce an endearing ballad that he put into the mouth of Poor Richard. In it, Franklin paid tribute to “My Plain Country Joan” and blessed the day he made her his own. Among the lyrics:

Over the years, Franklin would outgrow Deborah in many ways. Though they shared values, he was far more worldly and intellectual than she was, or ever wanted to be. There is some evidence that she may have been born in Birmingham and brought to America as a young child, but during her adult life she seems never to have spent a night away from Philadelphia, and she lived most of her life on Market Street within two blocks of the house where she was raised.

Franklin, on the other hand, loved to travel, and although he would, in later years, occasionally express some hope that she would accompany him, he knew that she was not so inclined. He seemed to sense that she would not be socially comfortable in his new realms. So, in this regard, they respected each other’s independence, perhaps to a fault. For fifteen of the last seventeen years of Deborah’s life, Franklin would be away, including when she died. Nevertheless, their mutual affection, respect, and loyalty—and their sense of partnership—would endure.
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Two years into their marriage, in October 1732, Deborah gave birth to a son. Francis Folger Franklin, known as Franky, was doted on by both parents: he had his portrait painted when still a baby, and his father advertised for a tutor to teach both his children when Francis was 2 and William about 4. For the rest of his life, Franklin would marvel at the memory of how precocious, curious, and special Franky was.

These were, alas, destined to be only sorrowful memories. In one of the few searing tragedies of Franklin’s life, Franky died of smallpox just after his fourth birthday. On his grave, Franklin chose a simple epitaph: “The delight of all who knew him.”

The bitter irony was that Franklin had become a fervent advocate of smallpox vaccinations after they had been ridiculed in the
New England Courant
when Franklin worked there for his brother. In the years preceding Franky’s birth, he had editorialized in the
Pennsylvania Gazette
in support of inoculations and published statistics showing how effective they were. In 1730, for example, he wrote an account of a Boston epidemic in which most people who had been vaccinated were spared.

He had planned to inoculate Franky, but he had delayed doing so because the boy had been ill with the flux. In a sad announcement that appeared in his paper a week after the boy’s death, Franklin denied rumors that he died from being vaccinated. “I do hereby sincerely declare that he was not inoculated, but received the distemper in the common way of infection.” He went on to declare his belief that inoculation was “a safe and beneficial practice.”

The memory of Franky was one of the few things ever to cause Franklin painful reflections. When his sister Jane wrote to him in London years later with happy news about his grandsons, Franklin responded that it “brings often afresh to my mind the idea of my son Franky, though now dead thirty-six years, whom I have seldom since seen equaled in everything, and whom to this day I cannot think of without a sigh.”
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Adding to the poignancy, Franklin had written for his paper, while Franky was still alive, an unusually deep rumination on “The Death of Infants,” which was occasioned by the death of a neighbor’s child. Drawing on his observations of the tiny Franky, he described the magical beauty of babies: “What curious joints and hinges on which limbs are moved to and fro! What an inconceivable variety of nerves, veins, arteries, fibers, and little invisible parts are found in every member!…What endless contrivances to secure life, to nourish nature, and to propagate the same to future animals!” How could it be, Franklin then asked, that “a good and merciful Creator should produce myriads of such exquisite machines to no other end or purpose but to be deposited in the dark chambers of the grave” before they were old enough to know good from evil or to serve their fellow man and their God? The answer, he admitted, was “beyond our mortal ken” to understand. “When nature gave us tears, she gave us leave to weep.”
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When we last took Franklin’s spiritual pulse in London, he had written his ill-conceived “Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity,” which attacked the idea of free will and much of Calvinist theology, and then he had repudiated the pamphlet as an embarrassing “erratum.” That left him in a religious quandary. He no longer believed in the received dogmas of his Puritan upbringing, which taught that man could achieve salvation only through God’s grace rather than through good works. But he was uncomfortable embracing a simple and unenhanced version of deism, the Enlightenment-era creed that reason and the study of nature (instead of divine revelation) tell us all we can know about our Creator. The deists he knew, including his younger self, had turned out to be squirrelly in their morals.