Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (32 page)

The battle served to remind Franklin about the virtues of the wife he had left back home, or at least to feel guiltier about his neglect of her. Deborah’s frugality and self-reliance were symbols of America’s ability to sacrifice rather than submit to an unfair tax. Now that it was repealed, Franklin rewarded her with a shipment of gifts: fourteen yards of Pompadour satin (he noted that it “cost eleven shillings a yard”), two dozen gloves, a silk negligee and petticoat for Sally, a Turkish rug, cheeses, a corkscrew, and some tablecloths and curtains, which he politely informed her had been selected by Mrs. Stevenson. In the letter accompanying the gifts, he wrote:

Perhaps, he jovially noted, some of the cheese would be left for him to enjoy by the time he got home. But even though he had turned 60 during the repeal battle and his work in England seemed done, Franklin was not ready to return. Instead, he made plans to spend the summer of 1766 visiting Germany with his friend the physician Sir John Pringle.
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Deborah’s letters to her husband, awkward though they were, convey both her strength and her loneliness: “I partake of none of the diversions. I stay at home and flatter myself that the next packet will bring me a letter from you.” She coped with his absence and the political tensions by cleaning the house, she said, and she tried hard (perhaps on his instructions) not to bother him with her worries about political matters. “I have wrote several letters to you one almost every day but then I could not forbear saying something to you about public affairs then I would destroy it and then begin again and burn it again and so on.” Describing their newly completed house, she reported that she had not yet hung his pictures because she feared driving nails into the wall without his approval. “There is great odds between a man’s being at home and abroad as everybody is afraid that they shall do wrong so every thing is left undone.”

His letters, in return, were generally businesslike, focusing mainly on the details of the house. “I could have wished to have been present at the finishing of the kitchen,” he wrote. “I think you will scarce know how to work it, the several contrivances to carry off steam and smell and smoke not being fully explained to you.” He issued detailed instructions for how to paint each room and occasionally made tantalizing references to his eventual homecoming: “If that iron [furnace] is not set, let it alone till my return, when I shall bring a more convenient copper one.”
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At the end of 1766, his printing partnership with David Hall expired after eighteen years. The end came with a bit of acrimony. Hall had become less ardent about using the pages of the
Pennsylvania Gazette
to attack the Proprietors, and two of Franklin’s friends helped fund a new printer and paper to take up the cause. Hall considered this a breach of the spirit of their partnership agreement, even though it had expired. “Though you are not absolutely prohibited from being any farther concerned in the printing business in this place, yet so much is plainly implied,” he wrote plaintively.

Franklin replied from London that the new rival print shop had been “set on foot without my knowledge or participation, and the first notice I had of it was by reading the advertisement in your paper.” He professed his deep affection for Hall and said he had no disagreements with his politics or editorial policies, even if some of his political allies felt otherwise. “I never thought you of any party, and as you never blamed me for the side I took in public affairs, so I never censured you for not taking the same, believing as I do that every man has and ought to enjoy a perfect liberty of judging for himself in such matters.”

Still, he felt compelled to add that their original agreement did not in fact prevent him from competing now that it had expired: “I could not possibly foresee 18 years beforehand that I should at the end of that term be so rich as to live without business.” Then he added a veiled threat, wrapped in a promise, by saying that he had been offered a chance to become a partner in the rival business but would refrain from doing so as long as Hall provided some more of what Franklin thought he was owed. “I hope I shall have no occasion to do it,” he said of the possibility that he would join with Hall’s rival. “I know there must be a very great sum due to me from our customers, and I hope much more of it will be recovered by you for me than you apprehend.” If so, Franklin promised, that money along with his other income would allow him to stay retired. “My circumstances will be sufficiently affluent, especially as I am not inclined to much expense. In this case I have no purpose of being again concerned in printing.”
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The expiration of the partnership meant that Franklin would lose about £650 in income a year, which stoked his sense of economy. His life in London was a middle-class mix of frugality and indulgence. Although he did not entertain or live in the grand style that might be expected of someone of his stature, he liked to travel, and his accounts show that he ordered top-quality beer for his home at 30 shillings a barrel (a sharp contrast to his first stay in London, when he preached the virtues of bread and water over beer). His efforts at economy were mainly directed at his wife. In June of 1767 he wrote her:

What made the letter particularly cold was that it was written in response to the news that their daughter had fallen in love and hoped for his approval to marry. Sally had grown into a distinguished fixture in Philadelphia society, attending all the balls and even riding in the carriage of Franklin’s adversary Governor Penn. But she fell in love with a man who seemed to be of questionable character and financial security.

Richard Bache, the suitor in question, had emigrated from England to work as an importer and marine insurance broker with his brother in New York, and then he headed to Philadelphia to open a dry goods store on Chestnut Street. Charming to women but hapless in business, Bache had been engaged to Sally’s best friend, Margaret Ross. When Margaret became fatally ill, she made a deathbed request for Sally to take care of Bache for her, and Sally was quite willing to oblige.
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For Deborah, deciding what to do in her husband’s absence was an overwhelming responsibility. “I am obliged to be father and mother,” she wrote Franklin, with a tinge of accusation. “I hope I act to your satisfaction, I do so according to my best judgment.”

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

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

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

So the marriage was put on hold, and Bache tried to explain himself to Franklin in a letter. It was true, he admitted, that he had suffered a severe financial reversal, but he claimed it was not his fault. He had unfairly been left holding the bills for a merchant ship that suffered in the Stamp Act boycott.
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“I love my daughter perhaps as well as ever a parent did a child,” Franklin replied with perhaps some exaggeration. “But I have told you before that my estate is small, scarce a sufficiency for the support of me and my wife…Unless you can convince her friends of the probability of your being able to maintain her properly, I hope you will not persist in a proceeding that may be attended with ruinous consequences to you both.” Franklin wrote Deborah the same day to say that he assumed Bache would now back off. “The misfortune that has lately happened to his affairs,” said Franklin, “will probably induce him to forbear entering hastily” into a marriage. He suggested that Sally might, instead, want to visit England, where she could meet other men, such as William Strahan’s son.
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Though Franklin’s sentiments were clear, his letters did not outright forbid his daughter from getting married. Perhaps he felt that, because he was unwilling to come home to deal with the matter, he had neither the moral right nor practical ability to issue any decrees. Detached from his family by distance, he also remained rather emotionally detached.

Further complicating the odd family dynamics, Mrs. Stevenson decided to weigh in. Having lived with Franklin, she felt herself to be Deborah’s soul mate, and she wrote to share her sympathy. Franklin, she reported, was in a foul humor. Stung by his temper, she consoled herself by buying some silk and making a petticoat for his daughter, even though she had never met her. Indeed, she confided, she was so excited by the possible wedding that she had wanted to buy even more gifts, but Franklin had forbidden it. She longed for the opportunity to sit down and chat, she told Deborah. “I truly think your expectations of seeing Mr. Franklin from time to time has been too much for a tender affectionate wife to bear.”
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Ignoring the family drama back in Philadelphia, Franklin escaped in August 1767 for a summer vacation to France. “I have stayed too long in London this summer, and now sensibly feel the want of my usual journey to preserve my health,” he wrote Deborah. His mood was so sour that, on the way, he “engaged in perpetual disputes with the innkeepers,” he told Polly. He and his traveling companion, John Pringle, were upset that their carriage was rigged in such a way that they had little view of the countryside. The coachman’s explanation of the rationale, Franklin groused, “made me, as upon a hundred other occasions, almost wish that mankind had never been endowed with a reasoning faculty, since they know so little how to make use of it.”

When they got to Paris, however, things improved. He was intrigued by how the ladies there applied their rouge, which he chose to share in great detail in a letter to Polly rather than to his own daughter. “Cut a hole of three inches in diameter in a piece of paper, place it on the side of your face in such a manner as that the top of the hole may be just under your eye; then with a brush dipped in the color paint face and paper together, so when the paper is taken off there will remain a round patch of red.”
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Franklin was feted as a celebrity in France, where electrical experimenters were known as
franklinistes,
and he and Pringle were invited to Versailles to attend a grand
couvert
(public supper) with King Louis XV and Queen Marie. “He spoke to both of us very graciously and cheerfully,” Franklin reported to Polly. Despite his travails with England’s ministers, however, he stressed he was still loyal “in thinking my own King and Queen the very best in the world and the most amiable.”

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