Book of Ages (26 page)

In her grief, she grew bold. It was at this moment, in the depth of her despair, that she asked her brother to send her “all the Pamphlets & Papers that have been Printed of yr writing.” She wanted to read “all the political Pieces” he had ever written: “Do Gratifie me.”
⁶

“I could as easily make a Collection for you of all the past Parings of my Nails,” he wrote back.
⁷

Still, he sent what he could.

She loved best
books about ideas. “I keep your books of
Philosophy, and Politics, by me (tho I have Read them throw several times) and when I am dull I take won up & Read, and it seems as tho I were conversing with you, or hearing you,” she once wrote. “I find a Pleasure in that.”
⁸
She asked him, too, for books written by other authors—books she’d heard about and was keen to read.

“I will endeavour to get the Books you desire,” he promised, warning
her that “it will be difficult.” Still, he usually managed it: “I send you by this Opportunity the two you wrote for.” He sent her, too, London newspapers, with this caution: “If you think you see any thing of mine there, don’t let it be publish’d as such.”
⁹

She read and read. She read till her eyes grew tired.

“I thought you had mentioned in one of your Letters a Desire to have Spectacles of some sort sent you,” he wrote her from London, “but I cannot now find such a Letter.”
¹⁰

She had asked, in a letter he lost, for eyeglasses. Spectacles were, to Franklin, a kind of signature.
¹¹
A student of Isaac Newton’s
Opticks,
he had long been fascinatined with lenses.
¹²
He had sat for many
portraits, but one of the best known, and his favorite, was painted by the artist
David Martin in 1767. The portrait had been exhibited in London, and Franklin had commissioned a miniature, which he sent home to Philadelphia. He may have given Jane, too, a miniature of the Martin portrait. He sent her many likenesses of himself, the next best thing, he said, “to waiting on you in Person.”
¹³
Martin painted Franklin in lavish attire, seated in his study, with a bust of Isaac Newton on his desk. Franklin strokes his chin while reading a letter. He wears wire-rimmed temple spectacles. Man of learning, man of science, man of letters: reading.

He sent her the spectacles. “I send you a Pair of every Size of Glasses from 1 to 13,” he wrote her. There followed careful instructions on how she ought to conduct her own eye exam. “To suit yourself, take out a pair at a time, and hold one of the Glasses first against one Eye, and then against the other, looking on some small Print.—If the first Pair suits neither Eye, put them up again before you open a second. Thus you will keep them from mixing. By trying and comparing at your Leisure, you may find those that are best for you.” Two eyes, two lenses. “Few Peoples Eyes are Fellows,” Benjamin Franklin told his sister, “and almost every body in reading or working uses one Eye principally, the other being dimmer or perhaps fitter for distant Objects.”
¹⁴

Look, Dear Reader, Dear Jenny, Dear Sister, and
see
.

In London, Franklin was beginning to believe that the imperial crisis might end in American independence. In January 1768, he published an essay in
the
London Chronicle
—which he might well have sent to Jane—describing the colonists’ vantage on the Townshend Acts from what he insisted was the disinterested position of a mere chronicler, “an impartial historian of American facts and opinions.” Americans, Franklin explained, consider their royally appointed governors corrupt and their properly elected assemblies powerless. They are willing to contribute funds to the empire, but they dispute, entirely, the right of Parliament, a body “in which there is not a single member of our chusing,” to levy direct taxes. However much affection and loyalty Americans felt toward the mother country, Franklin concluded, “this unhappy new system of politics tends to dissolve those bands of union, and to sever us forever.”
¹⁵

Franklin’s plea for calm went unheard. In September 1768,
British soldiers landed in Boston to suppress the growing rebellion. Two regiments of infantrymen disembarked from ships in the harbor, marched through the streets of the city, flying flags, drumming drums, and wheeling artillery. They set up camp in the Common. From New Jersey, William Franklin expressed at once relief and concern, believing that the
army “will have to good Effect to prevent such scandalous Riots, and Attacks on the Officers of Government, as had before prevail’d,” but warning that “no Force on Earth is sufficient to make the Assemblies acknowledge, by any Act of theirs, that the Parliament has a Right to impose Taxes on America.”
¹⁶

From Boston, Jane reported, “The whol conversation of this Place turns upon Politices.”
¹⁷
The rest of the colonies might still be at peace, but Bostonians were living under an occupying army.
¹⁸
Benjamin Edes began producing a daily
Journal of the Times,
a chronicle of atrocities committed by redcoats on the people of Boston. “Working the political Engine” is what
John Adams called writings for Edes, after a night spent “Cooking up Paragraphs” for “the Next Days newspaper.”
¹⁹

Jane didn’t trust a word of it. She reported to her brother that, in Boston, politics was “managed with two much Biterness as you will see by the News Papers If you give yr self the Troble to Read them.” The newspapers, she warned him, “will not Infalably Informe you of the Truth.” By what Edes printed, she was disconcerted. “Every thing that any Designing Person has a mind to Propagate Is stufed into them, & it is Dificult to know whither Either Party are in the Right.”
²⁰
She was a remarkably discerning reader.

“Your Political Disputes I have no Objection to if they are carried on
with tolerable Decency, & do not become outrageously abusive,” Franklin wrote back. “They make People acquainted with their Rights & the Value of them.”
²¹

She had her doubts. The governor ordered the rebellious
Massachusetts General Assembly to dissolve. Jane was miffed. She had lost her best
boarders.

“I suppose the Dissolution of your Assembly will affect you a little in the Article of Boarders,” Franklin wrote her, “but do not be discouraged.”
²²

She reported to him about the spinning of Boston’s women, which left her no choice but to close her
millinery shop.

“The Acct. you write of the growing
Industry,
Frugality and good Sense of my Country-women gives me more Pleasure than you can imagine,” he wrote back delicately. “I should be sorry that you are engag’d in a Business which happens not to coincide with the general Interest, if you did not acquaint me that you are now near the End of it.”
²³

“For my Part I wish we had Let alone strife before it was medled with,” she wrote him, “& followed things that make for Peace.”
²⁴

CHAPTER XXIV

I
n the fall of 1769, Jane left New England for the first time in her life. She was fifty-seven years old. Not since she was a girl had she had no children to care for. Her youngest child, Jane Mecom, was twenty-four. Her grandchildren, little Jenny and
Josiah Flagg, twelve and eight, had gone to live with their father, who had married again.
¹
She decided to venture into the world.

She proposed to go to Philadelphia, and when she didn’t hear back from anyone she meant to visit, she determined to go anyway. “I have no leter from you nor my son since I wrot you I was Going to Philadelphia,” Jane wrote Deborah from Boston on September 14, “but Still Persist in my Intent & Porpose to sit out in about a fortnight.”
²

She set out at the end of the month, by carriage. She went first to New Brunswick, New Jersey, to visit her son John. Earlier that year, as William Franklin had reported to his father,
John Mecom had “gone and quarter’d himself and Wife on his Mother at Boston” (he “has turn’d out as bad as Ben,” William warned).
³
But by the end of the summer, John and his wife had gone and quartered themselves on someone else: John’s wife’s family in New Brunswick. Jane stopped to see them. She rode next to Perth Amboy, to visit William. (New Jersey had at the time two capitals, Burlington in the west, and Perth Amboy in the east. The assembly met in Burlington; the governor lived in Perth Amboy.) From there she rode to Philadelphia, to see her son Benjamin and his family; they had settled
in Philadelphia the year before.
⁴

“Benney Macume and his Lovely Wife and five Dafters is Come hear to live and woork Jurney worke,” Deborah had written to her husband.
⁵

“I cannot comprehend how so very sluggish a Creature as Ben Mecom
is grown, can maintain
in Philadelphia so large a Family,” Franklin had written back. “I hope they do not hang upon you.”
⁶

From William, Franklin had received a more candid account: “Coz. Ben. Mecom is starving at Philadelphia, and would have been, I suppose in Gaol by this Time, if it had not been for the Assistance my Mother and I have afforded him and his Family.”
⁷

Benjamin Mecom had hired himself out as a journeyman to just about every printer in the city of Philadelphia, William reported to his father, but “cannot agree with any Body, and is I believe now without any Employ.”
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To keep out of debtors’ prison, he had borrowed money from everyone in the family, clutching at the hope that his uncle would set him up in business yet again. (This hope was groundless; Franklin had lost all patience with Mecom.)
⁹
That August, Mecom went back to
Connecticut to make a desperate effort to collect what debts were owed him there.
¹⁰
Not long after, James Parker sold what was left of Mecom’s inventory, in an attempt to regain his own losses.
¹¹

Visiting her unstable son would have been painful. But Jane was especially keen to visit her brother’s wife.
Deborah had earlier visited Jane in Boston, and the two women longed to see each other again.
¹²
Jane wrote Deborah that she was eager to “Have the Pleasure to convers with you by yr own Fier side.”
¹³

She reached Philadelphia by the middle of December. She had a great many people to visit, including her niece
Sally, Franklin’s daughter, whose husband,
Richard Bache, a
merchant, Jane had met the year before.
¹⁴
(“I am glad you approve the Choice they have made,” Franklin wrote Jane.)
¹⁵
She grew especially fond of her grandnephew, Sally’s son,
Benjamin Franklin Bache, then four months old. “King Bird,” Deborah called him. Jane thought he looked just like her brother.
¹⁶

“Sister is verey a greabel to me and makes everey thing verey plesant to me,” Deborah wrote to her husband, “and we air as hapey as we Cold expeckte.”
¹⁷
Jane was so happy in Philadelphia that Franklin wondered whether she might consider settling there. “Since your family is so much reduced, I do not see why you might not as well continue there, if you like the place equally with Boston,” he wrote to her. “It would be a pleasure to me to have you near me.”
¹⁸
But in January 1770, she decided to go home.

“You had not, I hope, any Offence in Philadelphia, that induc’d you to leave it so soon,” he inquired.
¹⁹

There had been none.
²⁰
Instead, she had other reasons to leave. She may have wanted to see her son John once more. “Johney has been sick Ever since His wife wrot me to Philadelphia,” Jane explained to Deborah.
²¹
(John Mecom died in New Brunswick on September 30, 1770.)
²²
And her son Josiah, who had become a sailor on a whaling vessel, was about to get married, to a girl who worked as a servant. It was a bad match, but “I have no Objection,” Jane wrote Deborah, “for I am convinced
Poverty is Intailed on my Famely.”
²³