Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (25 page)

When he left a few weeks later on a postal inspection trip, “the officers of my regiment took it into their heads that it would be proper for them to escort me out of town.” They drew their swords and accompanied him to the ferry, which infuriated Thomas Penn when he read of it in London. “This silly affair,” Franklin noted, “greatly increased his rancor against me…and he instanced this parade with my officers as a proof of my having an intention to take the government of the province out of his hands by force.” Franklin was likewise “chagrined” by the display, or at least so he said in retrospect. “I had not been previously acquainted with the project or I should have prevented it, being naturally averse to the assuming of state on any occasion.”

In fairness to Franklin, he was never the type of person who liked to revel in public ceremony or the pomposity and perks of power. When Penn and his allies sought to neutralize him by forming rival militias in Philadelphia and then convincing the king’s ministers to nullify his militia act, Franklin responded by readily surrendering his commission. In a reflective letter to his friend Peter Collinson, he admitted that he enjoyed the public affection but realized that he should not allow it to go to his head. “The people happen to love me,” he wrote, but then added, “Forgive your friend a little vanity, as it’s only between ourselves…You are now ready to tell me that popular favor is a most uncertain thing. You are right. I blush at having valued myself so much upon it.”
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Franklin’s days as a dexterous politician, one who was willing and able to seek pragmatic compromises in times of crisis, were temporarily over. At the height of earlier tensions, he had enjoyed occasional amiable consultations and social interactions with Governor Morris, but that was no longer the case. Morris and others in the Proprietary faction were doing whatever they could to humiliate him, and for a while he talked of moving to Connecticut or even out west to help start a colony in the Ohio region.

So his postal inspection trip to Virginia was a welcome respite, one he extended for as long as possible. From Williamsburg he wrote to his wife that he was “as gay as a bird, not beginning yet to long for home, the worry of perpetual business being fresh in my memory.” He met with Colonel Washington and other acquaintances, marveled at the size of the peaches, accepted an honorary degree from William & Mary, and rode through the countryside inspecting postal accounts at a leisurely pace.

When he finally returned home after more than a month, the atmosphere of Philadelphia was even more polarized. The Proprietors’ secretary, Richard Peters, conspired with William Smith, whom Franklin had recruited to run the Pennsylvania Academy, to oust him from the presidency of that board. Smith had been writing harsh attacks on Franklin, and the two men stopped speaking to each other, another in the line of rifts he had with male friends.

Late that summer of 1756, there was a brief period of hope for restored civility when a professional military man, William Denny, replaced Morris as governor. All sides hastened to greet and embrace him. At his festive inaugural dinner, he took Franklin aside to a private room and tried to cultivate him. Drinking liberally from a decanter of Madeira, Denny profusely flattered Franklin, which was a smart approach, and then tried to bribe him with financial promises, which wasn’t. If Franklin’s opposition abated, Denny promised, he could “depend on adequate acknowledgments and recompenses.” Franklin replied that “my circumstances, thanks to God, were such as to make proprietary favors unnecessary to me.”

Denny was less fastidious about financial inducements. Like his predecessor, he confronted the Assembly by rejecting bills that taxed the Proprietary estates, but he later reversed himself, without permission from the Penns, on being offered a generous salary by the Assembly.

The Assembly, in the meantime, decided that the obstinacy of the Proprietors could no longer be tolerated. In January 1757, the members voted to send Franklin to London as their agent. His goal, at least initially, would be to lobby the Proprietors to be more accommodating to the Assembly over taxation and other matters, and then, if that failed, to take up the Assembly’s cause with the British government.

Peters, the Proprietors’ secretary, was worried. “B.F.’s view is to effect a change of government,” he wrote Penn in London, “and considering the popularity of his character and the reputation gained by his electricity discoveries, which will introduce him into all sorts of company, he may prove a dangerous enemy.” Penn was more sanguine. “Mr. Franklin’s popularity is nothing here,” he replied. “He will be looked upon coldly by great people.”

In fact, Peters and Penn would both turn out to be right. Franklin set sail in June 1757 with the firm belief that the colonists should forge a closer union among themselves and be accorded their full rights and liberties as subjects of the British Crown. But he held these views as a proud and loyal Englishman, one who sought to strengthen his majesty’s empire rather than seek independence for the American colonies. Only much later, after he was indeed looked on coldly by great people in London, would Franklin prove a dangerous enemy to the imperial cause.
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*Roughly equivalent to $128,000 in 2002 dollars. See page 507 for currency equivalents.

London, 1757–1762

As he crossed the Atlantic in the summer of 1757, Franklin noticed something about the other ships in the convoy. Most roiled the water with large wakes. One day, however, the ocean behind two of them was oddly tranquil. Ever inquisitive, he asked about the phenomenon. “The cooks,” he was told, “have been emptying their greasy water through the scuppers, which has greased the sides of those ships.”

The explanation did not satisfy Franklin. Instead, he recalled reading about how Pliny the Elder, the first-century Roman senator and scientist, had calmed agitated water by pouring oil on it. In the ensuing years, Franklin would engage in a variety of oil-and-water experiments, and he even devised a parlor trick where he stilled waves by touching them with a cane that contained a hidden cruet of oil. The metaphor, though obvious, is too good to resist: Franklin, by nature, liked to find ingenious ways to calm turbulent waters. But during his time as a diplomat in England, this instinct would fail him.
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Also during the crossing, his ship narrowly avoided being wrecked on the Scilly Isles when it sought to evade French privateers in the fog. Franklin described his grateful reaction in a letter home to his wife. “Were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint,” he wrote. “But as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a
lighthouse.”
Franklin always took pride in his instinct for practical solutions, but that too would fail him in England.
²

Franklin’s return to London at age 51 came almost thirty-three years after his first visit there as a teenage printer. His mission as Pennsylvania’s agent was to mix lobbying with deft diplomacy. Unfortunately, his usual observational skills, his sense of practicality and prudence, and his soothing temperament and cool head would be overwhelmed by frustration and then bitterness. Yet, even as his diplomatic mission foundered, there would be aspects of his life in London—the company of cosmopolitan intellectuals who doted on him, the creation of a contented home life similar to his in Philadelphia—that would make it hard for him to tear himself away. He initially thought his work would be done in five months, but he ended up staying more than five years, and then, after a brief interlude back home, another ten.

Franklin arrived in London in July accompanied by his son, William, then about 26, and two slaves who had been their household servants. They were met by his longtime pen pal Peter Collinson, the London Quaker merchant and botanist, who had helped procure books for the Junto’s first library and later published Franklin’s letters on electricity. Collinson put Franklin up at his stately home just north of London and immediately invited over others, such as the printer William Strahan, who were likewise delighted finally to meet in person the now-legendary man they had known only through years of correspondence.
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After a few days, Franklin found lodgings (including a room for his electricity experiments) in a cozy but convenient four-story row house on Craven Street, nestled between the Strand and the Thames River just off what is now Trafalgar Square, a short walk from the ministries of Whitehall. His landlady was a sensible and unpretentious middle-aged widow named Margaret Stevenson. With her he would form a familial relationship, at once both curious and mundane, that replicated the marriage of comforting convenience that he enjoyed with Deborah in Philadelphia. His London friends often treated Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson as a couple, inviting them together to dinners and inquiring after them both in letters. Though it is possible that their relationship had some sexual aspect, there was no particular passion, and it provoked very little gossip or scandal in London.
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More complex was his relation with her daughter Mary, known as Polly. She was a lively and endearing 18-year-old with the sort of inquisitive intellect that Franklin loved in women. In some respects, Polly served as the London counterpart to his daughter, Sally. He treated her in an avuncular, and sometimes even paternal, manner, instructing her on life and morals as well as science and education. But she was also an English version of Caty Ray, a pretty young woman of playful demeanor and lively mind. His letters to her were flirtatious at times, and he flattered her with the focused attention that he lavished on women he liked.

Franklin spent hours talking to Polly, whose eager curiosity enchanted him, and then, when she went to live with an aunt in the country, carried on an astonishing correspondence. During his years in London, he wrote to her far more often than he wrote to his family. Some of the letters were flirtatious. “Not a day passes in which I do not think of you,” he wrote less than a year after their first meeting. She sent him little gifts. “I have received the garters you have so kindly knit for me,” he said in one letter. “They are of the only sort that I can wear, having worn none of any kind for 20 years, until you began to supply me…Be assured that I shall think as often of you in the wearing as you did of me in the making.”

As with Caty Ray, his relationship with Polly was an engagement of the mind as much as the heart. He wrote to her at great length and in sophisticated detail about how barometers work, colors absorb heat, electricity is conducted, waterspouts are formed, and the moon affects tidal flows. Eight of these letters were later included in a revised edition of his electricity papers.

He also worked with Polly to come up with what was essentially a correspondence course to teach her a variety of subjects. “Our easiest method of proceeding, I think, will be for you to read some books I may recommend to you,” he suggested. “Those will furnish matter for your letters to me and, in consequence, of mine also to you.” Such intellectual tutoring was, for him, the ultimate way to flatter a young woman. As he ended one letter to her, “After writing six folio pages of philosophy to a young girl, is it necessary to finish such a letter with a compliment? Is not such a letter of itself a compliment? Does it not say, She has a mind thirsty after knowledge and capable of receiving it?”
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His one concern was that Polly would take her studies
too
seriously. Even though he appreciated her mind, Franklin flinched when she hinted at her desire to devote herself to learning at the expense of getting married and raising a family. So he provided her with some paternal prodding. In response to her suggestion that she might “live single” the rest of her life, he lectured her about the “duty” of a woman to raise a family:

Polly took the injunction to heart. “Thank you my dear preceptor for your indulgence in satisfying my curiosity,” she replied. “As my greatest ambition is to render myself amiable in your eyes, I will be careful never to transgress the bounds of moderation you prescribe.” And then, over the next few weeks, they proceeded to engage in an extensive colloquy, filled with both factual research and various theories, of how the tides affect the flow of water at the mouth of a river.
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Polly would eventually marry, have three children, and then become widowed, but through it all she remained extraordinarily close to Franklin. As he would write to her in 1783, near the end of his life, “Our friendship has been all clear sunshine, without the least cloud in its hemisphere.” And she would be at his bedside when he died, thirty-three years after their first meeting.
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Margaret and Polly Stevenson provided a replica of the family he left in Philadelphia, just as comfortable and more intellectually stimulating. So what did this mean for his real family? Franklin’s English friend William Strahan expressed concern. He wrote Deborah to try to persuade her to join her husband in London. The opposite of the peripatetic Franklin, she had no desire to travel and was deeply afraid of the sea. Strahan assured her that no one had ever been killed crossing from Philadelphia to London, not mentioning that this statistic ignored that many had been killed on similar routes. The trip would also be a great experience for Sally, Strahan went on to urge.

That was the sweet part of the letter, the carrots designed to entice. But it was followed, almost rudely, by some jarringly presumptuous advice, which was courteously cloaked but contained barely concealed warnings that reflected Strahan’s knowledge of Franklin’s nature: “Now madam, as I know the ladies here consider him in exactly the same light I do, upon my word I think that you should come over with all convenient speed to look after your interest; not but that I think him as faithful to his Joan [Franklin’s poetic nickname for Deborah] as any man breathing, but who knows what repeated and strong temptation may in time, and while he at so great a distance from you, accomplish.” In case Deborah missed the point, Strahan dropped a poison-tinged reassurance at the very end of his letter: “I cannot take my leave of you without informing you that Mr. F. has the good fortune to lodge with a very discreet gentlewoman who is particularly careful of him, who attended him during a very severe cold with an assiduity, concern and tenderness which, perhaps, only yourself could equal; so that I don’t think you could have a better substitute until you come over to take him under your own protection.”
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Franklin was fond of Deborah, relied on her, and respected her solid and simple manner, but he knew that she would be out of place in this more sophisticated London world. So he seemed somewhat ambivalent about the prospect of enticing her to England—and typically realistic about the likelihood. “[Strahan] has offered to lay me a considerable wager that a letter he wrote to you will bring you immediately over here,” he wrote. “I tell him I will not pick his pocket, for I am sure there is no inducement strong enough to prevail with you to cross the seas.” When she replied that she would indeed be staying in Philadelphia, Franklin showed little grief. “Your answer to Mr. Strahan was just what it should be; I was very much pleased with it. He fancied his rhetoric and art would certainly bring you over.”

In his letters home, Franklin walked a fine line of assuring Deborah that he was well looked after, but also reassuring her that he missed her love. After falling ill a few months after his arrival, he wrote, “I have made your compliments to Mrs. Stevenson. She is indeed very obliging, takes great care of my health, and is very diligent when I am in any way indisposed; but yet I have a thousand times wished you with me, and my little Sally…There is a great difference in sickness between being nursed with that tender attention which proceeds from sincere love.”

Accompanying the letter was an assortment of gifts, some of which, he told her, were chosen by Mrs. Stevenson. The shipment included china, four of London’s “newest but ugliest” silver salt ladles, “a little instrument to core apples, another to make little turnips out of great ones,” a basket for Sally from Mrs. Stevenson, garters for Deborah that had been knit by Polly (“who favored me with a pair of the same kind”), carpets, blankets, tablecloths, gown fabric chosen for Deborah by Mrs. Stevenson, candle snuffers, and enough other items to assuage any guilt.
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Deborah was generally sanguine about the women in Franklin’s life. She supplied him with all the news and gossip from home, including the latest she had heard from Caty Ray asking for advice about (of all things) her love life. “I am glad to hear that Miss Ray is well, and that you correspond,” Franklin replied, though he urged her not to “be forward in giving advice in such cases.”

Their correspondence, for the most part, contained little of the emotional or intellectual content to be found in the letters Franklin exchanged with Polly or Caty Ray or later with his female friends in Paris. Nor did he discourse much with her on political matters, the way he did with his sister Jane Mecom. Although his letters conveyed what seems to be a sincere fondness for Deborah and for the practical nature of their partnership, there were no signs of the more profound partnership that is so evident, for example, in John Adams’s correspondence with his wife, Abigail.

Eventually, as Franklin’s mission stretched on, Deborah’s letters to him would become more bereft and self-pitying, especially after her mother died in a horrible kitchen fire in 1760. Shortly after, she wrote in her awkward way about her loneliness and her worries about rumors she had heard about him and other women. Franklin’s reply, though reassuring, was phrased in a coolly abstract manner. “I am concerned that so much trouble should be given you by idle reports,” he wrote. “Be satisfied, my dear, that while I have my senses, and God vouchsafes me his protection, I shall do nothing unworthy the character of an honest man, and one that loves his family.”
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With 750,000 inhabitants and growing rapidly, London in the 1750s was the largest city in Europe and second only to Beijing (pop: 900,000) in the world. It was cramped and dirty, filled with disease and prostitutes and crime, and had long been stratified into an upper class of titled aristocrats and a lower class of impoverished workers who struggled with starvation. Yet it was also vibrant and cosmopolitan, and by the 1750s it had an emerging middle class of merchants and industrialists as well as a growing coffeehouse society of intellectuals, writers, scientists, and artists. Although Philadelphia was the largest city in America, it was a tiny village by comparison, with only 23,000 inhabitants (about the size of Franklin, Wisconsin, or Franklin, Massachusetts, today).