Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (33 page)

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

By that time, though he did not know it, Sally and Richard had already gone ahead and gotten married. In October 1767, as recorded in the
Pennsylvania Chronicle
(the new rival to Franklin’s old
Gazette
), “Mr. Richard Bache, of this city, merchant, was married to Miss Sally Franklin, the only daughter of the celebrated Doctor Franklin, a young lady of distinguished merit. The next day all the shipping in the harbor displayed their colors on this happy occasion.”
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There is no sign that Franklin ever expressed regret for missing the wedding of his only daughter. In December, his sister Jane Mecom wrote to offer congratulations on the “marriage of your beloved daughter to a worthy gentleman whom she loves and is the only one that can make her happy.” Franklin replied the following February in a cool manner: “She has pleased herself and her mother, and I hope she will do well; but I think they should have seen some better prospect than they have, before they married, how the family was to be maintained.”
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In his occasional letters over the next few months, Franklin would send his love to Deborah and Sally, but he never made any overtures to Bache. Finally, in August 1768, Franklin wrote Bache admitting him into the family. “Loving son,” he began promisingly, before turning a bit cool. “I thought the step you had taken, to engage yourself in the charge of a family while your affairs bore so unpromising an aspect with regard to the probable means of maintaining it, a very rash and precipitate one.” This was why, Franklin explained, he had not answered Bache’s earlier letters. “I could say nothing agreeable: I did not choose to write what I thought, being unwilling to give pain where I could not give pleasure.” But at the end of the one-paragraph letter, Franklin softened somewhat. “Time has made me easier,” he said. “My best wishes attend you, and that if you prove a good husband and son, you will find me an affectionate father.” In a one-sentence postscript, he gave his love to Sally and noted that he was sending her a new watch.

Deborah was thrilled. In a note she sent when forwarding Franklin’s letter to Bache, who was visiting Boston, she wrote, “Mr. Bache (or my son Bache), I give you joy: although there are no fine speeches as some would make, your father (or so I will call him) and you, I hope, will have many happy days together.”
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Deborah got even better news from Franklin at the beginning of1769. His health was very good, he wrote, but “I know that according to the course of nature I cannot at most continue much longer.” He had just turned 63. Therefore, he was “indulging myself in no future prospect except one, that of returning to Philadelphia, there to spend the evening of my life with my friends and family.” Sally and her husband came back from Boston hoping to find Franklin there. But he was still not ready, despite what he had written, to return.

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

Even good news could not yet entice him back to Philadelphia. When he heard that Sally was pregnant that summer, he conveyed his affection by sending a little luxury: six caudle cups, which were used by pregnant women to share a brew of wine, bread, and spice. Sally missed no opportunity for seeking his affection. The child, born in August 1769, was named Benjamin Franklin Bache. Franklin would turn out to be closer to his grandchildren than his children; Benny Bache, like his cousin Temple, would eventually become part of his retinue. In the meantime, he sent his best wishes and instructions to make sure that Benny was inoculated for smallpox.
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In his family life, as in the rest of his personal life, Franklin clearly did not look for deep commitments. He did, however, have a need for domestic comfort and intellectual stimulation. That is what he found with his surrogate family in London. On Craven Street there was a cleverness and spirit that was absent on Market Street. His landlady, Mrs. Stevenson, was livelier than Deborah, her daughter, Polly, a bit smarter than Sally. And in September 1769, just after Franklin returned from France, Polly found a suitor who was more distinguished than Bache.

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

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

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

For almost a year, Polly held off getting married because Franklin refused to advise her to accept Hewson’s proposal. Finally, in May 1770, Franklin wrote that he had no objections. It was hardly an overwhelming endorsement. “I am sure you are a much better judge in this affair of your own than I can possibly be,” he said, adding that the match appeared “a rational one.” As for her worry that she would not bring much of a financial dowry, Franklin could not resist noting that “I should think you a fortune sufficient for me without a shilling.”
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Although he had missed the weddings of both his own children, this was one Franklin made sure not to miss. Even though it was held in midsummer, when he usually traveled abroad, he was there to walk Polly down the aisle and play the role of her father. A few weeks later, he professed to be pleased that she was happy, but he confessed that he was “now and then in low spirits” at the prospect of having lost her friendship. Fortunately for all, it was not to be. He became close to the new couple, and he and Polly would exchange more than 130 more letters during their lifelong friendship.

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

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

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

That final edition contained one of Franklin’s inimitable letters to the editor, signed with the pseudonym “Indignation,” decrying the food and conditions. Referring to Polly and her husband, it railed: “If these nefarious wretches continue in power another week, the nation will be ruined—undone!—totally undone if the Queen does not return; or (which is better) turn them all out and appoint me and my friends to succeed them.” It was answered by “A Hater of Scandal,” who wrote that the surly Franklin had been offered a wonderful dinner of beef ribs and had rejected it, saying “that beef does not with him perspire well, but makes his back itch, to his no small vexation now that he hath lost the little Chinese ivory hand at the end of the stick, commonly called a scratchback, presented to him by Her Majesty.”
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Franklin was able to indulge on Craven Street the many eccentricities he had developed. One of these was taking hour-long “air baths” early each morning, during which he would open his windows and “sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever.” Another was engaging in little flirtations. The famous painter Charles Willson Peale recounted how he once visited Craven Street unannounced and found “the Doctor was seated with a young lady on his knee.” The lady in question was probably Polly, though the sketch Peale later made of the scene is ambiguous.
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Eventually, Polly and William Hewson moved into Craven Street and brought with them Hewson’s skeletons, “prepared fetuses,” and other tools for his medical research. Later, Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson moved a few doors away. Their odd relationship was reflected in a crotchety letter Franklin wrote her during one of her regular escapes to visit friends in the country. Reminding her of Poor Richard’s adage that guests become tiresome after three days, he urged her to return on the next stagecoach. But lest she think he was too dependent on her, he spelled out his contentment at being alone. “I find such a satisfaction in being a little more my own master, going anywhere and doing anything just when and how I please,” he claimed. “This happiness however is perhaps too great to be conferred on any but Saints and holy hermits. Sinners like me, I might have said us, are condemned to live together and tease one another.”
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In his dramatic testimony arguing for repeal of the Stamp Act, Franklin made a serious misjudgment: he said that Americans recognized Parliament’s right to impose external taxes, such as tariffs and export duties, just not internal taxes that were collected on transactions inside the country. He repeated the argument in April 1767, writing as “A Friend to Both Countries” and then as “Benevolus” in a London paper. In an effort to soothe troubled relations, he recounted all the times that Americans had been very accommodating in helping to raise money for the defense of the empire. “The colonies submit to pay all external taxes laid upon them by way of duty on merchandise imported into their country and never disputed the authority of Parliament to lay such duties,” he wrote.
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Charles Townshend, the new chancellor of the exchequer, had been among those who grilled Franklin in Parliament about his acceptance of external but not internal taxes. The distinction was complete “nonsense,” Townshend felt, but he decided to pretend to please the colonies—or call their bluff—by adopting it. In a brilliant speech that earned him the nickname “Champagne Charlie” because it was delivered while he was half-drunk, he laid out a plan for import duties on glass, paper, china, paint colors, and tea. Making matters worse, part of the money raised would be used to pay royal governors, thus freeing them from dependence on colonial legislatures.

Once again, as with the passage of the Stamp Act, Franklin expressed little concern when the Townshend duties passed in June 1767, and he did not realize how far he lagged behind the growing radicalism in parts of the colonies. Outrage at the new duties grew particularly strong in the port city of Boston, where the Sons of Liberty, led by Samuel Adams, effectively roused sentiments with dances around a “Liberty Tree” near the common. Adams got the Massachusetts Assembly to draft a circular letter to the rest of the colonies that petitioned for repeal of the act. The British ministry demanded that the letter be rescinded and sent troops to Boston after the Assembly refused.