Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (65 page)
Read Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Online
Authors: Walter Isaacson
Tags: #Azizex666, #General, #United States, #Historical, #Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), #Biography & Autobiography, #History
The most important religious role Franklin played—and it was an exceedingly important one in shaping his enlightened new republic—was as an apostle of tolerance. He had contributed to the building funds of each and every sect in Philadelphia, including £5 for the Congregation Mikveh Israel for its new synagogue in April 1788, and he had opposed religious oaths and tests in both the Pennsylvania and federal constitutions. During the July 4 celebrations in 1788, Franklin was too sick to leave his bed, but the parade marched under his window. For the first time, as per arrangements that Franklin had overseen, “the clergy of different Christian denominations, with the rabbi of the Jews, walked arm in arm.”
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His final summation of his religious thinking came the month before he died, in response to questions from the Rev. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale. Franklin began by restating his basic creed: “I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children.” These beliefs were fundamental to all religions; anything else was mere embellishment.
Then he addressed Stiles’s question about whether he believed in Jesus, which was, he said, the first time he had ever been asked directly. The system of morals that Jesus provided, Franklin replied, was “the best the world ever saw or is likely to see.” But on the issue of whether Jesus was divine, he provided a surprisingly candid and wry response. “I have,” he declared, “some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”
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The last letter Franklin ever wrote was, fittingly, to Thomas Jefferson, his spiritual heir as the nation’s foremost apostle of the Enlightenment’s faith in reason, experiment, and tolerance. Jefferson had come to call at Franklin’s bedside and provide news of their beleaguered friends in France. “He went over all in succession,” Jefferson noted, “with a rapidity and animation almost too much for his strength.” Jefferson praised him for getting so far in his memoirs, which he predicted would be very instructive. “I cannot say much of that,” replied Franklin, “but I will give you a sample.” Then he pulled out a page that described the last weeks of his negotiations in London to avert the war, which he insisted that Jefferson keep as a memento.
Jefferson followed up by asking about an arcane issue that needed resolving: Which maps had been used to draw America’s western boundaries in the Paris peace talks? After Jefferson left, Franklin studied the matter and then wrote his final letter. His mind was clear enough to describe, with precision, the decisions they had made and the maps they had used regarding various rivers running into the Bay of Passamaquoddy.
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Soon after he finished the letter, Franklin’s fever and chest pains began to worsen. For ten days he was confined to bed with a heavy cough and labored breathing. Sally and Richard Bache attended to him, as did Temple and Benny. Polly Stevenson was there as well, pressing him to make a clearer proclamation of his religious faith, pleased that he had a picture of the Day of Judgment by his bedside. Only once during that period was he able to rise briefly, and he asked that his bed be made up so that he could “die in a decent manner.” Sally expressed hope that he was recovering, that he might live many years longer. “I hope not,” he calmly replied.
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Then an abscess in his lung burst, making it impossible for him to talk. Benny approached his bed, and his grandfather reached out to hold his hand for a long time. At eleven that evening, April 17, 1790, Franklin died at the age of 84.
Back in 1728, when he was a fledgling printer imbued with the pride that he believed an honest man should have in his trade, Franklin had composed for himself, or at least for his amusement, a cheeky epitaph that reflected his wry perspective on his pilgrim’s progress through this world:
The body of
B. Franklin, Printer;
(Like the cover of an old book,
Its contents worn out,
and stripped of its lettering and gilding)
Lies here, food for worms.
But the work shall not be lost:
For it will, (as he believed) appear once more,
In a new and more elegant edition,
Revised and corrected
By the Author.
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Shortly before he died, however, he prescribed something simpler to be placed over the grave site that he would share with his wife. His tombstone should be, he wrote, a marble slab “six feet long, four feet wide, plain, with only a small molding round the upper edge, and this inscription: Benjamin and Deborah Franklin.”
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Close to twenty thousand mourners, more than had ever before gathered in Philadelphia, watched as his funeral procession made its way to the Christ Church burying ground, a few blocks from his home. In front marched the clergymen of the city, all of them, of every faith.
Epilogue
William Franklin:
In his will, Franklin bequeathed to his only surviving son nothing more than some worthless land claims in Canada and the forgiveness of any debts he still owed him. “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.” William, who thought he had already paid off his debts by deeding over his New Jersey lands, complained about the “shameful injustice” of the will, and for the remaining twenty-five years of his life never returned to America. But he still revered his father’s memory, and he did not permit himself another harsh public word about him. Indeed, when his own son, Temple, dithered in producing an edition of Franklin’s life and writings, William began work on one of his own, which he hoped would honor his father by showing the “turn of his mind and variety of his knowledge.” It was not to be. He had married his Irish landlady, Mary D’Evelyn, but after she died in 1811 he was a broken and lonely man. He died three years later, estranged from his son, suffering in what he called “that solitary state which is most repugnant to my nature.”
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Temple Franklin:
Having inherited a nice share of his grandfather’s estate and all of his important papers, Temple returned to England in 1792 and reunited temporarily with his father. Still a charming but aimless rogue, he chafed under his father’s pressure to get married and work on Franklin’s papers, and he brought the family’s dysfunctionality to new heights. He had another illegitimate child, a daughter named Ellen, whose mother was the younger sister of William’s new wife, and then he broke bitterly with them all and ran away to Paris, leaving little Ellen Franklin to be raised by William, who was both her uncle and grandfather. For fourteen years, Temple neither reestablished contact with his father nor published the papers of his grandfather, even as unauthorized portions of the
Autobiography
appeared in France. Finally, in 1812, he wrote his father to say he was about to publish the papers and wanted to come to London to consult with him. William, who remembered the cool response he had gotten when he wrote a similar letter to his own father twenty-eight years earlier, was overjoyed. “I shall be happy to see you,” he said, “not being able to bear the thought of dying in enmity with one so nearly connected.” But Temple never came to England. Instead, in 1817, he published the
Autobiography
(without the final installment) and a haphazard collection of some of his grandfather’s papers. He lived the next six years in Paris with yet another mistress, an Englishwoman named Hannah Collyer, whom he married a few months before he died in 1823. She later brought many of Franklin’s precious papers back to London, where they were rediscovered in 1840 in the shop of a tailor who was using them as patterns. The papers that Temple abandoned in Philadelphia were scattered to various souvenir hunters until the American Philosophical Society began the process of collecting them in the 1860s.
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Sally and Richard Bache:
Franklin’s loyal daughter and her husband got most of his property, including the Market Street houses, on the condition that Richard “set free his Negro man Bob.” (He did, but Bob took to drink, couldn’t support himself, and asked to be restored to slavery; the Baches declined, but they let him live in their home for the rest of his life.) Sally was also given the Louis XVI miniature encircled with diamonds, with the stipulation that she not turn “any of those diamonds into ornaments either for herself or daughters and thereby introduce or countenance the expensive, vain and useless fashion of wearing jewels in this country.” She sold the diamonds to fulfill her lifelong desire to see England. With her husband, she went to stay with William, with whom she had always remained close. On their return, the Baches settled on a farm in Delaware.
Benjamin Bache:
Inheriting Franklin’s printing equipment and many of his books, he followed in his grandfather’s steps by launching, seventy years after the
New England Courant
was first published, a crusading Jeffersonian newspaper,
The American Aurora.
The paper became fiercely partisan on behalf of those who believed, with a passion that surpassed even Franklin’s, in pro-French and democratic policies, and it attacked Washington and then Adams for creating imperial presidencies. It was, for a while, the most popular paper in America, and has been the subject of two recent books. His politics caused a rift with his parents, as did his decision to marry against their wishes a feisty woman named Margaret Markoe. In 1798, he was arrested for sedition and for libeling Adams, but before he could stand trial he died of yellow fever at age 29. By then he was so estranged from his parents that his sisters had to sneak away to see him during his final illness. Margaret promptly married her late husband’s press-man, an argumentative Irishman named William Duane, and they kept the
Aurora
going. One of Benny’s sisters, Deborah Bache, then married one of Duane’s sons from his first marriage.
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Polly Stevenson:
She inherited nothing more than a silver tankard from the man she had revered for thirty-three years, and she soon became disenchanted with all branches of his family and all things American. When her second son, Tom, went back to England (accompanied by Willie Bache, to study medicine), she wrote him longing letters about her desire to return home as well. But she died in 1795, before she had the chance. Tom ended up back in Philadelphia, where he became a successful doctor; his brother William and sister Eliza stayed in America as well, and they all raised happy families.
The aspiring tradesmen of Boston and Philadelphia:
The most unusual provision in the codicil to Franklin’s will was a trust he established. He noted that, unlike the other founders of the country, he was born poor and had been helped in his rise by those who supported him as a struggling artisan. “I wish to be useful even after my death, if possible, in forming and advancing other young men that may be serviceable to their country.” So he designated the £2,000 he had earned as President of Pennsylvania—citing his often expressed belief that officials should serve without pay—to be split between the towns of Boston and Philadelphia and provided as loans, “at 5 percent per annum, to such young married artificers” who had served apprenticeships and were now seeking to establish their own businesses. With his usual obsession with detail, he described precisely how the loans and repayments would work, and he calculated that after one hundred years, the annuities would each be worth £131,000. At that time, the cities could spend £100,000 of it on public projects, keeping the remainder in the trust, which after another hundred years of loans and compounded interest would, he calculated, be worth £4,061,000. At that point, the money would go into the public treasury.
Did it work as he envisioned? In Boston it had to be modified as the apprenticeship system went out of fashion, but the loans were made according to the spirit of his bequest and, after one hundred years, the fund was worth about $400,000, a little bit less than he had calculated. At that point a trade school, Franklin Union (now the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology), was founded with three-fourths of the money plus a matching bequest from Andrew Carnegie, who considered Franklin a hero; the rest remained in the trust. A century later, that amount had grown to nearly $5 million, not quite the equivalent of £4 million but still a sizable sum. As per Franklin’s will, the fund was then disbursed. After a legal struggle that was settled by an act of the legislature, the funds went to the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology.
In Philadelphia, the bequest did not accumulate quite as well. A century after his death, it totaled $172,000, about one-quarter of what he had projected. Of that sum, three-fourths went to establish Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, still a thriving science museum, with the remainder continued as a loan fund for young tradesmen, much of it given as home mortgages. A century later, in 1990, this fund had reached $2.3 million. Why was it less than half of what Boston had? One Philadelphia partisan charged that Boston had turned its fund into “a savings company for the rich.” By focusing on loans to poor individuals, as Franklin intended, Philadelphia had not been as successful in getting repayments.
At that point, Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode suggested, one assumes jokingly, that the Ben Franklin money be used to pay for a party featuring
Ben
Vereen and Aretha
Franklin.
Others, more serious, proposed it be used to promote tourism, which caused a popular uproar. The mayor finally appointed a panel of historians, and the state divvied up the money in accordance with their general recommendations. Among the recipients were the Franklin Institute, a variety of community libraries and fire companies, and a group called the Philadelphia Academies that funds scholarships at vocational training programs in the city schools. When the 2001 scholarships were announced, a
Philadelphia Inquirer
columnist pointed out that the diversity among the thirty-four names—including Abimael Acaedevo, Muhammed Hogue, Zrakpa Karpoleh, David Kusiak, Pedro Lopez, and Rany Ly—would have delighted their benefactor. He most certainly would have smiled at one of the small but appropriate examples of his legacy that occurred at that year’s Tour de Sol, a race of experimental cars. Some of these scholarship recipients from a poor high school in West Philadelphia used a $4,300 grant from the father of electricity to build a battery-powered car that won the race’s Power of Dreams award.
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