Book of Ages (16 page)

This book of remembrance was a monument not to his mother and father but to Franklin himself: prodigal son, gentleman. But it was more, too. Josiah and Abiah Franklin had dozens of grandchildren, not seven. The “seven grandchildren” Franklin counted as having been “brought up” by them were Jane’s children, the seven of hers raised in the
Blue Ball, before Josiah Franklin’s death: Neddy, Benny, Eben, Sally, Peter, Johnny, and Josiah.
³²

Reader, Be encouraged to Diligence in thy Calling.
Dear Reader, dear Sister, dear Jenny.
Distrust not Providence.

CHAPTER XV

I
n 1745, after Josiah Franklin died, Franklin arranged for Jane’s thirteen-year-old son, Benny, the most promising of her sons, to become an apprentice to
James Parker, a printer
in New York. Parker was another of Franklin’s projects. In 1733, when Parker, then nineteen, had run away from his own apprenticeship, Franklin had taken him in. In 1742, Franklin bought Parker a press and four hundred pounds of type, allowing him to set up his own shop in New York, in exchange for one-third of his profits.
¹
Three years later, Franklin sent Parker his nephew.

“I am confident he will be kindly used there,” Franklin assured his sister, “and I shall hear from him every week. You will advise him to be very cheerful, and ready to do everything he is bid, and endeavour to oblige every body, for that is the true way to get friends.”
²

“The Way to Wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the Way to Market,” Franklin wrote in an essay called “
Advice to a Young Tradesman”: “It depends chiefly on two Words,
INDUSTRY and
FRUGALITY.”
³
But Benny Mecom proved neither cheerful nor obliging, neither industrious nor frugal. In 1748, both he and Jane wrote to Franklin, complaining that Parker had shown himself at best an indifferent master and at worst a cruel one. Jane wanted Franklin to get her son out of his indenture. The boy had gotten
smallpox, she said, and Parker had taken poor care of him. He clothed him in rags. He beat him. He sent him on petty errands. He had treated him so badly that Benny, wretched and unloved, had run away to a
privateer, only to be snatched up by Parker just before the ship set sail.

To Jane, Franklin sent reassurance bundled with remonstrance. As for the smallpox, and Benny’s complaint that Parker’s “negro woman,” a slave, didn’t bring him what he needed when he asked for it, maybe, Franklin
delicately suggested, the boy might have been, “like other sick people, a little impatient, and perhaps might think a short time long.” If Benny was staying out all night, Parker ought to be beating him more often, not less. “If he was my own son, I should think his master did not do his duty by him, if he omitted it, for to be sure it is the high road to destruction. And I think the correction very light, and not likely to be very effectual, if the strokes left no marks.” All boys dream of running away to sea, Franklin reminded her, and many try. Even William had once tried run off to a
privateer, Franklin reported, but this wasn’t because Franklin had treated him cruelly: “Every one, that knows me, thinks I am too indulgent a parent, as well as master.” And “as to clothes, I am frequently at New York, and I never saw him unprovided with what was good, decent, and sufficient” and, after all, “I never knew an apprentice contented with the clothes allowed him by his master, let them be what they would.” Benny Mecom had told his mother he hadn’t been able to go to Sunday meeting because his clothes were too ragged. It was a good story, Franklin allowed, but it was codswallop. Franklin, who had spent a Sunday at Parker’s house, had seen the Parkers call Benny to church, again and again, only to discover him “delaying and shuffling till it was too late.” This only amused Franklin, who had no small fondness for rebellious, impious, runaway boys:

Jane had sent her brother two letters to deliver: one for Benny and one for Parker. This Franklin refused to do: “I think your appearing to give ear to such groundless stories may give offence, and create a greater misunderstanding, and because I think what you write to Benny, about getting him discharged, may tend to unsettle his mind.”

If Franklin already suspected the unsettled nature of Benny’s mind, he waved those suspicions away. “I have a very good opinion of Benny in the
main,” he wrote Jane, “and have great hopes of his becoming a worthy man, his faults being only such as are commonly incident to boys of his years, and he has many good qualities, for which I love him.”
⁴

Benny Mecom had a knack for printing. Parker, Franklin said, “look’d on Benny as one of his best Hands.”
⁵
But if the boy learned his trade, he never learned his place. In 1750, he tried, once again, to run away.
⁶
Two years later, when he was in the seventh year of his apprenticeship, Franklin called him to Philadelphia.

Earlier, Franklin had sent a young tradesman named
Thomas Smith to
Antigua to set up that island’s first printing press. Smith was another of Franklin’s former apprentices.
⁷
He had worked in Franklin’s printing shop, and then he had worked in Parker’s. In sending Smith to Antigua, Franklin made the same arrangement he had made with Parker: Franklin bought Smith type and a press, in exchange for a third of his profits.
⁸
Smith, however, drank himself to death, and Franklin needed to send another young tradesman in his place, lest he lose both his investment and his source of news: Smith had started a newspaper, the
Antigua Gazette
. Franklin wanted it to be continued. He also wanted a correspondent
in Antigua, close to the equator, to make
astronomical observations.

He proposed to send young Benny Mecom to Antigua, at once releasing him from an apprenticeship in which he was bridling and promoting him, in a stroke, from apprentice to master. He would be
postmaster, too. The boy was only nineteen, but he was clever and an able tradesman: a franklin.

Franklin made haste. There was no time for the boy to go to
Boston to say good-bye to his parents. On September 14, 1752, Franklin reported to his sister that Benny had sailed from Philadelphia and would soon land at Antigua. “The Island is reckoned one of the healthiest in the West Indies,” he assured her (this was a lie). “My late Partner there enjoy’d perfect Health for four Years, till he grew careless and got to sitting up late in Taverns, which I have caution’d Benny to avoid, and have given him all other necessary Advice I could think of relating both to his Health and Conduct, and hope for the best.” Benny, who was indentured for two more years, till the age of twenty-one, agreed to pay Parker for that part of his apprenticeship he had not completed. Franklin urged Jane to make amends with Parker, too: “You will not think it amiss to write Mr. and Mrs. Parker a Line or two of Thanks; for notwithstanding some little Misunderstandings, they have on the whole been very kind to Benny.”
⁹

Smith’s print shop and post office was on Kerby’s Wharf, in St. John’s. Between St. John’s and Boston lay a thousand miles of cobalt sea. Antigua was a
sugar factory: three hundred sugar plantations owned by absentee landlords and worked by thirty thousand African slaves, mostly men, overseen by three thousand whites. It was brutal. In 1736, black men convicted of conspiring to murder their masters were burned at the stake, broken on the wheel, starved to death, and hanged from chains in public squares. It was a graveyard. Blacks died by the thousands. Whites either died or fled. An English agent for the Board of Trade filed a report on conditions in 1734 in which he concluded, “The Decrease of White Men I apprehend to be Owing to Several Causes. Epidemical Distempers have destroyed Numbers, Dry Weather, Want of Provisions, And inability to pay their Taxes have obliged Others to go off.”
¹⁰

Before he drank himself to death, Thomas Smith had run into debt, unable to keep a printing business afloat on an island where subscribers to his newspaper had a habit of not paying for it. Sending nineteen-year-old Benjamin Mecom there was not the path of wisdom.

Benny wrote to his mother, astonished at the place where he’d landed. He was unsettled. Maybe worse. Jane wrote to her brother, alarmed by what she’d read.

“In my opinion, if Benny can but be prevailed on to behave steadily, he may make his fortune there,” Franklin wrote back. “And without some share of steadiness and perseverance, he can succeed no where.” But he shared her concern. “That you may know the whole state of his mind and his affairs, and by that means be better able to advise him, I send you all the letters I have received from or concerning him. I fear I have been too forward in cracking the shell, and producing the chick to the air before its time.” And then, in a postscript: “Please return to me the letters.”
¹¹

Mad Benny Mecom was a stain on the Franklin family. The letters Franklin sent Jane must have chronicled the strange, erratic quality
of Benny Mecom’s mind. Franklin wanted those letters back. They do not survive.

Franklin had another reason for sending his nephew to Antigua. Under the terms of Josiah Franklin’s will, the Blue Ball had to be sold following Abiah Franklin’s death. Jane had lived in that house for almost the whole
of her life. It was the only home that most of her children had ever known, a tumble of children, almost too many to count. (William signed off a letter to his aunt “with love to Mr. Mecom, Coz. Neddy,
Sally, Jenny, Johnny, Polly, Josiah, Eben and Peter” adding, “I believe that’s all of them.”)
¹²

Abiah Franklin died in May 1752. Benjamin Franklin sent Benny Mecom to Antigua that September. In October, two advertisements appeared in the
Boston Evening-Post
. One announced an auction of Josiah Franklin’s movables:

The other, immediately below, advertised the real estate.

(William Homes, the goldsmith who handled the sale, was Jane’s and Benjamin’s nephew; he was the son of their sister Mary, who had died of
breast cancer.)
¹⁴