Book of Ages (29 page)

In London,
Patience
Wright, acting as an American spy, began writing reports to the Continental Congress. She heard a great deal of loose talk at her
waxworks, while taking the likenesses of the king’s ministers. She often went to Parliament and sat in the gallery, watching the debates. She had much to report. She smuggled her letters out of England, tucked inside heads made of wax.
⁴⁰
Everything augured
war.

CHAPTER XXVI

R
umors chased rumors. In November 1774, Jane heard that her nephew William Franklin, the royally appointed governor of New Jersey, continued to support Parliament, even after its ministers had accused his father of
treason. She probably heard this news from her son Benjamin, who, in August 1774, had abandoned printing and was making and selling the family soap in Burlington.
¹

She could not, would not, believe it. She wrote to her brother. “I think it is Presumeing on yr Patience but I must Just mention the Hored lie tould & Publishd hear about yr son.” At first she thought “it might be trew,” until “a litle consideration convinced me it was Imposable.”
²

But it was true. “You who are a thorough Courtier, see every thing with Government Eyes,” Benjamin Franklin raged at his son.
³
There were more sources of estrangement between them than
politics. Deborah Franklin suffered a stroke, her second, on December 14, 1774. Five days later, she was dead.
Richard Bache sent an express to New Jersey, so that William might ride to Philadelphia in time to attend the funeral. Writing to his father to tell him the news, William made no attempt to hide his bitterness about his father’s conduct. Deborah’s death had long been expected, as her husband had known very well, and she had hoped to see him once more before she died. “I think her Disappointment in that respect preyed a good deal on her Spirits,” he told his father.
⁴
Not to mention, if Franklin hadn’t stayed so long in England, William argued, he might have attended the Continental Congress, where he might have done some good in healing the breach between England and America: “Had you been there you would have framed some Plan for an Accommodation of our Differences.”
⁵

William took a side, against his father, and stuck with it. In January
1775, he convened the
New Jersey General Assembly and delivered a speech in which he urged legislators to break with the Continental Congress and instead seek reconciliation by submitting a petition to the king. “You have now pointed out to you, Gentlemen, two Roads,” he said. “One evidently leading to Peace, Happiness, and a Restoration of the publick Tranquility—the other inevitably conducting you to Anarchy, Misery, and all the Horrors of Civil
War.”
⁶

Benjamin Franklin left England on March 21, 1775, bringing with him his young grandson, Temple Franklin.
⁷
On April 6,
Patience Wright smuggled a letter out of London. “Meny thousand fire arms sent out of the tower and shipt on bord the transports,” she warned. “Meny hundrd Cags of flints marked
BOSTON on Each Cagg with all Implements of WARR.”
⁸
On April 14, General Gage, in Boston, received orders from London to arrest the leaders of the rebellion, the men who met at the Green Dragon Tavern.
⁹
On April 18,
Joseph Warren, hearing that Gage planned to march to Lexington and Concord to seize the colonists’ stores of arms, gave
Paul Revere and William Dawes orders to set off to sound the alarm.
¹⁰
At daybreak, some seven hundred redcoats reached Lexington, where they found about seventy armed
minutemen waiting for them. The
British fired.
¹¹

Word of the battle reached Boston within hours. Gage had “sent out a party to creep out in the night & Slauter our Dear Brethern for Endevering to defend our own Property,” Jane reported to her brother. “The distress it has ocationed is Past my discription,” she wrote. “The Horror the Town was in when the Batle Aprochd within Hearing Expecting they would Proceed quite in to town, the comotion the Town was in after the batle ceasd by the Parties coming in bringing in there wounded men causd such an Agetation of minde I beleve none had much sleep, since which we could have no quiet.” She expected that the colonial militia would march into town and continue the battle in Boston: “We under stood our Bretheren without were determined to Disposes the Town of the Regelors.” Instead, the militia surrounded the city. Occupied by the
British Army, Boston became a city under siege. Jane wrote, “The Generol shuting up the town not Leting any Pass out but throw such Grate Dificulties as were allmost insoportable.”
¹²

Nevertheless, thousands fled. “The unhappy situation of this town, which, by the late cruel and oppressive measures gone into by the British Parliament, is now almost depopulated,” the Reverend
Andrew Eliot
wrote. His wife and eight of his children fled; he stayed to preach to those left behind.
¹³
Of a population of fifteen thousand there were, in a matter of days, only three thousand people left in the city. Most of those who remained behind were
loyalists, seeking the protection of the
British Army. Others were simply unable to escape. They had to watch while
the soldiers ransacked the city. Jonathan Williams Sr. wrote to Franklin that Boston “is now become a den of theaves and robers.”
¹⁴
When wood grew scarce, British regulars gutted the Old South Meeting House, burned the pews and pulpit, and used the floor to exercise their horses. A party of soldiers broke into Edes’s print shop, on Queen Street; failing to find him, they seized his son instead. Eighteen-year-old
Peter Edes spent months as a
prisoner of war. He watched from the window of his cell while a fellow captive, a Boston painter, was dragged to the yard and beaten until, broken, he finally called out, “God bless the King.”
¹⁵

Jane was among those who managed to escape. “I had got Pact up what I Expected to have liberty to carey out intending to seek my fourtune with hundred others not knowing whither,” she wrote to her brother. She had all of her shop goods, her
millinery supplies. She couldn’t afford to lose them. Then there were her
books and papers. She couldn’t leave them behind. She knew, too, that the soldiers were imposing limits on what could be brought out of the city. With the harbor blockaded, the British soldiers occupying the besieged city would have to live off what they could raid from abandoned homes; they didn’t want people leaving with much of use. Jane turned smuggler. “I Brought out what I could Pack up in trunks & chists & I so contrived to Pack em in our wereing Aparil Lining & Beding that they Pasd Examination, without discovery.” (Franklin had once sent her a pamphlet he had written, condemning
smuggling. So she joked, telling him about her escape, “This was not an unlawfull smuggling which you would have reproved for they were not owed for, nor any won cheated of Duties.”) “The whol of my Houshold furniture,” she told him, “Except a few small maters I put into my trunk I left behind.” She secured the house “with locks & bars but those who value not to Deprive us of our lives will find a way to brake throw.”
¹⁶

She fled, first, to Cambridge. “My Poor litle litle Delicat nabour Mrs Royall & Famely came out with me not knowing where she should find a Place,” she related.
Abigail Royall, an elderly widow, wasn’t sturdy enough to travel far. “I left them at Cambridg in a most shocking Disagreable
Place,” Jane reported, “but since hear she is gone to wooster.” Jane’s daughter, Jane Mecom Collas, living in Roxbury, was “obliged to fly in to the woods.”
¹⁷
Jonathan Williams Sr. had been out of town, to Grace’s distress. “His Poor wife slaved her self almost to Death to Pack up & Secure what She could & sent away her two Daughters Intending to go to Him & behold in comes he in to town the day before I came out Imagining (as I was told for I did not see him) that was the saifest Place.” She feared he was dead. “I can hear nothing of Him since.” (He was not. He was in Worcester.) Jane’s “Daughter foot”—Neddy’s widow, Ruth, who had married a cabinetmaker named Thomas Foot—had managed to escape but was “in a bad stat of helth,” and had left all her belongings in Boston. Her son John’s widow, Catherine Oakey Mecom, had married a British officer named
Thomas Turner. Jane “left them in Boston” and “how it has faired with them can not hear tho I wish them saif for He realy appeared a Good sort of man.” The civil war had divided even her own family: “O how horrable is our situation that Relations seek the Destruction of Each other.”
¹⁸

Worst of all, she thought, was the fate of her grandson
Josiah Flagg, fourteen. Jane had never wanted Josiah and his sister Jenny to leave her house in the first place. It was their father,
William Flagg, who had taken them from her when he remarried and who would not allow them to return to live with her. William Flagg’s “storey is two long & two full of shocking sircumstances to troble you with,” Jane wrote her brother, and I “shall only tell you that in the winter He was taken in a fitt which terminated in Distraction & confined Him some time.” He then “sent out His wife & children Intending to follow them but was soon After taken in the same maner as in winter & Died in a few days.” He had sent out of the city his second wife and her children, keeping Jane’s grandchildren Josiah and Jenny behind. Jane was frantic. “Por Flagg tho He has used me very Ill I Deplore His Fate the more as there is two of my Daughters Children left I know not how they will be Provided for.” Eventually Jenny Flagg—“an Grand Daughter who I could not leve if I had it would have been her Death”—made her way to her grandmother, somehow, but Jane could not find Josiah, hard as she tried.
¹⁹
She was forced to leave without him.

From Cambridge, Jane and her granddaughter made their way, on roads filled with fugitives, to Providence.
William Franklin had sent his aunt an invitation to come stay with him in
New Jersey, but she never received his letter. “Cousen Coffen has Invited me to
nantuckett,” she wrote her
brother. “I don’t know if it would be [prudent] for me to go now.”
²⁰
She went, instead, to Warwick, Rhode Island.

She fled from her home at the age of sixty-three, riding a cart through a city in turmoil, stowing her goods between sheets. Her house she left locked. She was the last of the Franklins of Boston. In a trunk, she carried her brother’s letters, and her Book of Ages.

CHAPTER XXVII