Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (64 page)

He also finally resumed work on his autobiography. He had written 87 manuscript pages in Twyford in 1771, and then added 12 more in Passy in 1784. Writing steadily from August 1788 until May of the following year, he completed another 119 pages, which brought him up to his arrival in England as a colonial agent. “I omit all facts and transactions that may not have a tendency to benefit the young reader,” he wrote to Vaughan. His purpose was still to provide a self-help manual for America’s ambitious middle class by describing “my success in emerging from poverty” and “the advantages of certain modes of conduct which I observed.”
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By now he was facing ever greater pain from his kidney stones, and he resorted to using laudanum, a tincture of opium and alcohol. “I am so interrupted by extreme pain, which obliges me to have recourse to opium, that between the effects of both, I have but little time in which I can write anything,” he complained to Vaughan. He also worried that what he had written was not worth publishing. “Give me your candid opinion whether I had best publish it or suppress it,” he asked, “for I am grown so old and feeble in mind, as well as body, that I cannot place any confidence in my own judgment.” He had now begun to dictate the work to Benny rather than write it by hand, but he was able to complete only a few more pages.

Friends sent him various home remedies for kidney stones, including a suggestion from Vaughan, which amused Franklin, that a small dose of hemlock might work. At times, he could be cheerful enough about his maladies and repeat his maxim that those who “drink to the bottom of the cup must expect to meet some of the dregs,” as he did to his old friend Elizabeth Partridge. He was still, he said, “joking, laughing and telling merry stories, as when you first knew me, a young man about fifty.”
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Yet Franklin was becoming resigned to the fact that he did not have much longer to live, and his letters took on a tone of sanguine farewell. “Hitherto this long life has been tolerably happy,” he wrote to Caty Ray Greene, the girl who had captured his mind and heart thirty-five years earlier. “If I were allowed to live it over again, I should make no objection, only wishing for leave to do what authors do in a second edition of their works, correct some of my errata.” When Washington became president that year, Franklin wrote to him that it made him glad he was still alive: “For my own personal ease, I should have died two years ago; but, though those years have been spent in excruciating pain, I am pleased that I have lived them, since they have brought me to see our present situation.”
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He was also sanguine about the revolution now welling up in his beloved France. The explosion of democratic sentiments was producing “mischief and trouble,” he noted, but he assumed that it would lead to greater democracy and eventually a good constitution. So most of his letters to his French friends were inappropriately lighthearted. “Are you still living?” he wrote the French scientist Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, his friend and Passy neighbor, in late 1789. “Or have the mob of Paris mistaken the head of a monopolizer of knowledge for a monopolizer of corn, and paraded it about the streets upon a pole?” (It was also in this letter that he famously noted that “nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.”) He assured Louis-Guillaume le Veillard, his neighbor and closest friend in Passy, that it was all for the good. “When the fermentation is over and the troubling parts subsided, the wine will be fine and good, and cheer the hearts of those that drink it.”
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Franklin was wrong, sadly wrong, about the French Revolution, though he would not live long enough to learn it. Le Veillard would soon lose his life to the guillotine. So would Lavoisier the chemist, who had worked with him on the Mesmer investigation. Condorcet, the economist who had accompanied Franklin to his famed meetings with Voltaire, would be imprisoned and poison himself in his cell. And la Rochefoucauld, who had translated the state constitutions for Franklin and engaged him in a lively correspondence since his departure, would be stoned to death by a mob.

In the very last year of his life, Franklin was to embark on one final public mission, a moral crusade that would help ameliorate one of the few blemishes on a life spent fighting for freedom. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, slavery had been an institution that few whites questioned. Even in brotherly Philadelphia, ownership continued to climb until about 1760, when almost 10 percent of the city’s population were slaves. But views had begun to evolve, especially after the ringing words of the Declaration and the awkward compromises of the Constitution. George Mason of Virginia, despite the fact that he owned two hundred slaves, called the institution “pernicious” at the Constitutional Convention and declared that “every master of slaves is a petty tyrant; they bring the judgment of heaven on a country.”

Franklin’s views had been evolving as well. He had, as we have seen, owned one or two household slaves off and on for much of his life, and as a young publisher he had carried ads for slave sales. But he had also published, in 1729, one of the nation’s first antislavery pieces and had joined the Associates of Dr. Bray to establish schools for blacks in America. Deborah had enrolled her house servants in the Philadelphia school, and after visiting it Franklin had spoken of his “higher opinions of the natural capacities of the black race.” In his 1751 “Observations on the Increase of Mankind,” he attacked slavery strongly, but mainly from an economic perspective rather than a moral one. In expressing sympathy for the Philadelphia abolitionist Anthony Benezet in the 1770s, he had agreed that the importation of new slaves should end immediately, but he qualified his support for outright abolition by saying it should come “in time.” As an agent for Georgia in London, he had defended the right of that colony to keep slaves. But he preached, in articles such as his 1772 “The Somerset Case and the Slave Trade,” that one of Britain’s great sins against America was foisting slavery on it.

Franklin’s conversion culminated in 1787, when he accepted the presidency of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. The group tried to persuade him to present a petition against slavery at the Constitutional Convention, but knowing the delicate compromises being made between north and south, he kept silent on the issue. After that, however, he became outspoken.

One of the arguments against immediate abolition, which Franklin had heretofore accepted, was that it was not practical or safe to free hundreds of thousands of adult slaves into a society for which they were not prepared. (There were about seven hundred thousand slaves in the United States out of a total population of four million in 1790.) So his abolition society dedicated itself not only to freeing slaves but also to helping them become good citizens. “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils,” Franklin wrote in a November 1789 address to the public from the society. “The unhappy man, who has long been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains that bind his body do also fetter his intellectual faculties and impair the social affections of his heart.”

As was typical of Franklin, he drew up for the society a meticulously detailed charter and procedures “for improving the condition of free blacks.” There would be a twenty-four-person committee divided into four subcommittees:

• A Committee of Inspection, who shall superintend the morals, general conduct, and ordinary situation of the free Negroes, and afford them advice and instruction…
  
• A Committee of Guardians, who shall place out children and young people with suitable persons, that they may (during a moderate time of apprenticeship or servitude) learn some trade or other business…
  
• A Committee of Education, who shall superintend the school instruction of the children and youth of the free blacks. They may either influence them to attend regularly the schools already established in this city, or form others with this view…
  
• A Committee of Employ, who shall endeavor to procure constant employment for those free Negroes who are able to work; as the want of this would occasion poverty, idleness, and many vicious habits.
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On behalf of the society, Franklin presented a formal abolition petition to Congress in February 1790. “Mankind are all formed by the same Almighty Being, alike objects of his care, and equally designed for the enjoyment of happiness,” it declared. The duty of Congress was to secure “the blessings of liberty to the People of the United States,” and this should be done “without distinction of color.” Therefore, Congress should grant “liberty to those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage.”
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Franklin and his petition were roundly denounced by the defenders of slavery, most notably Congressman James Jackson of Georgia, who declared on the House floor that the Bible had sanctioned slavery and, without it, there would be no one to do the hard and hot work on plantations. It was the perfect setup for Franklin’s last great parody, written less than a month before he died.

He had begun his literary career sixty-eight years earlier when, as a 16-year-old apprentice, he pretended to be a prudish widow named Silence Dogood, and he made a subsequent career of enlightening readers with similar hoaxes such as “The Trial of Polly Baker” and “An Edict from the King of Prussia.” In the spirit of the latter of these essays, he anonymously published in a local newspaper, with appropriate scholarly source citations, a purported speech given by a member of the divan of Algiers one hundred years earlier.

It bore a scathing mirror resemblance to Congressman Jackson’s speech. “God is great, and Mahomet is his prophet,” it began realistically. Then it went on to attack a petition by a purist sect asking for an end to the practice of capturing and enslaving European Christians to work in Algeria: “If we forbear to make slaves of their people, who in this hot climate are to cultivate our lands? Who are to perform the common labors of our city, and in our families?” An end to the slavery of “infidels” would cause land values to fall and rents to sink by half.

In his parody, Franklin recorded that the Algerian divan ended up rejecting the petition. Congress, likewise, decided that it did not have the authority to act on Franklin’s abolition petition.

It is not surprising that, at the end of their lives, many people take stock of their religious beliefs. Franklin had never fully joined a church nor subscribed to a sectarian dogma, and he found it more useful to focus on earthly issues rather than spiritual ones. When he narrowly escaped a shipwreck as he neared the English coast in 1757, he had joked to Deborah that, “Were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint; but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a
lighthouse.”
Likewise, when a town in Massachusetts named itself Franklin in 1785 and asked him to donate a church bell, he told them to forsake the steeple and build a library, for which he sent “books instead of a bell, sense being preferable to sound.”
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As he grew older, Franklin’s amorphous faith in a benevolent God seemed to become more firm. “If it had not been for the justice of our cause and the consequent interposition of Providence, in which we had faith, we must have been ruined,” he wrote Strahan after the war. “If I had ever before been an atheist, I should now have been convinced of the Being and government of a Deity!”
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His support for religion tended to be based on his belief that it was useful and practical in making people behave better, rather than because it was divinely inspired. He wrote a letter, possibly sent in 1786 to Thomas Paine, in response to a manuscript that ridiculed religious devotion. Franklin begged the recipient not to publish his heretical treatise, but he did so on the grounds that the arguments could have harmful practical effects, not on the grounds that they were false. “You yourself may find it easy to live a virtuous life without the assistance afforded by religion,” he said, “but think how great a proportion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced and inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice.” In addition, he noted, the personal consequences for the author would likely be odious. “He that spits against the wind, spits in his own face.” If the letter was indeed addressed to Paine, it had an effect. He had long been formulating the virulent attack on organized religious faith that he would later title
The Age of Reason,
but he held off publishing it for another seven years, until near the end of his life.
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