Book of Ages (30 page)

S
ailing across the ocean with his grandson Temple,
Benjamin Franklin wrote, in the form of a letter to William, a twenty-thousand-word history of “the Misunderstandings between Great Britain and America.”
¹
He reached Philadelphia on May 5, 1775. The next day, he was elected by a unanimous vote of the
Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly to the
Second
Continental Congress.

“God be Praised for bring you saif back to America,” Jane wrote to her brother on May 14. Then she added a postscript: “Dear Brother I am tould you will be joynd to the Congress & that they will Remove to conetecut will you Premit me to come & see you there Mrs Green says she will go with me.” Jane had found refuge in Warwick, in the home of her friend Catharine Ray Greene. They were as close as family. (“My Dear Mama,” Caty called Jane. “The Epethet of Daughter which you Seem to like to use cannot be Disagreable to me,” Jane answered.)
²
Caty was forty-four years old and running a house filled with five children, the oldest fifteen, the youngest not yet one. She opened her doors to sixteen refugees.
³
At the bottom of Jane’s letter to Franklin, Caty added a note of her own. “When Shall We See you here?” she asked. “Do let it be as Soon as the Congress is adjournd or dont know but your good Sister and Self Shall mount our old Naggs and Come and See you.”
⁴

The rumor that Congress would remove to
Connecticut turned out to be false. And Franklin didn’t receive Jane’s letter for weeks. Instead, he learned that she had escaped the siege of Boston from John Adams, who’d arrived in Philadelphia from Massachusetts. “I have just now heard by Mr. Adams that you are come out of Boston, and are at Warwick in Rhodeilland,” he wrote her on May 26, in a letter that went first to Cambridge,
where, Harvard students having been sent home, some seven hundred soldiers were quartered in the college. From Cambridge, the letter was sent to Newport, where it sat for three weeks before it was forwarded to Warwick. Jane didn’t receive it until July 14.
⁵

“I found my Family well,” he told her, “but have not found the Repose I wish’d for.”
⁶
Neither had she.

“Send me what News you can that is true,” he urged her.
⁷

“I am so much at a lose to know whether the News I hear be trew or no that prehaps I had beter leve it to other hands,” she wrote back.
⁸

He was worried. “I wish to hear from you,” he pressed, “and to know how you have left your Affairs [in] Boston; and whether it will be inconvenient for you to come hither, or you wish rather that I should come to see you, if the Business I am engag’d in will permit.”
⁹

He was engaged in a great deal of business. Congress having no power to tax, Franklin argued that waging the war demanded that Congress print
paper money—“
Continental dollars”—to be issued by the “United Colonies.” He was charged with their design. These bills would have no kings or queens. Instead, Franklin chose proverbs, illustrated by pictures. For the two-dollar bill, he used a picture of a hand threshing grain, with the motto
Tribulatio Ditat:
“tribulation enriches.”
¹⁰

That money was meant to help Congress raise an army. On June 10, John Adams proposed that the soldiers arrayed outside Boston be considered the
Continental Army. Among them was Jane’s thirty-two-year-old son Josiah, who enlisted in Captain
Charles Furbush’s company of Colonel
Ebenezer Bridge’s regiment. On June 15, Adams nominated a Virginian named George Washington to serve as general of the new army. Washington accepted the next day and began preparing to ride to Cambridge.

On June 17, Franklin wrote his sister another letter. He had, at last, received her letter of May 14, in which she had described her flight from the city. “I sympathise most sincerely with you and the People of my native Town and Country,” he wrote. “Your Account of the Distresses attending their Removal affects me greatly.” He had left his parents behind. He had run away from an apprenticeship with his brother. He had left his sister behind. He had left his wife behind, even on her deathbed. He had grown estranged from his son. He was determined not to abandon his sister.

“I wish you to be other wise provided for as soon as possible,” he told her, “and I wish for the Pleasure of your Company, but I know not how long
we may be allowed to continue in Quiet here if I stay here, nor how soon I may be ordered from hence; nor how convenient or inconvenient it may be for you to come hither.” And, after all, the field of battle might soon come to Philadelphia. He wondered whether, rather than come to him, she ought to accept William’s offer to stay with him at the governor’s mansion in New Jersey. “Perhaps that may be a Retreat less liable to Disturbance than this: God only knows, but you must judge.”
¹¹
It was very hard to say where anyone would be safe. And there was Jane’s age to consider. To Catharine Ray Greene, Franklin wrote a letter warning her not to try riding with Jane to Philadelphia. “It is much too long a journey for her who is no good Horsewoman.”
¹²

The day Franklin wrote those letters, shots were fired in what came to be called the
Battle of Bunker Hill. Charlestown was burned to the ground. Two hundred and twenty-six
British soldiers died, including
Thomas Turner, the husband of Catherine Oakey Mecom, the widow of Jane’s son John. One hundred and forty colonists were killed, including Josiah Mecom’s captain,
Charles Furbush, and at least one other soldier from Mecom’s company. Four more men from Mecom’s company were wounded, possibly including Mecom himself.
¹³
He died not long afterward.
¹⁴
He may have died of wounds; he may have succumbed to
disease.
¹⁵
Some sixty thousand Americans died during the war. Most of them were soldiers. Only about forty-five hundred died in battle. The rest died of cold or accident or, above all, disease, most falling prey to
smallpox, dysentery, or typhus.
¹⁶
Jane likely never found out how Josiah met his end.
¹⁷
She reckoned her losses. “As to Sons I have nothing but misery in those that are left,” she wrote, thinking about Peter and Benjamin. “Boath of them Distracted.”
¹⁸

On July 3, George Washington reached Cambridge and took command of the
Continental Army on the Cambridge Common. All summer, anyone who saw Franklin’s sister sent him word of her. In June, Jonathan Williams Sr. visited her in Rhode Island and wrote to Franklin that she was well, “and happy for every one is so that thinks themselves so.”
¹⁹
Jane worried about the Greenes; she was, she felt, “an Incumbrance to this good Famely.”
²⁰
Franklin shared her worry. Caty reassured him, “You are fear full She will be trouble Some but be assurd that her Company Richly Pays as She goes along and we are Very happy together and Shall not Consent to Spare her to any body.”
²¹

In Philadelphia, the matter of the post needed attention. The Pennsylvania printer
William Goddard (who had once employed Jane’s son Benjamin) had proposed a “Constitutional post,” arguing that the royal post amounted to taxation without representation. The question had been raised but then tabled.
Committees of Correspondence had already established an alternative postal network. Franklin headed the effort to launch a new, American post. Its inauguration, on July 26, amounted to a declaration of American sovereignty.
²²

Congress adjourned on the morning of August 2. That afternoon, Franklin wrote to Jane: “I think you had best come hither as soon as the Heats are over, i.e. sometime in September, but more of this in my next.”
²³
Congress resumed on September 13. Franklin, appointed to a committee charged with conferring with Washington in Cambridge, left Philadelphia on October 4. On October 16, he wrote to Jane from Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge.

The next week, he rode to Warwick.

Jane and her brother hadn’t seen one another for eleven years. Reunited, they set out for Philadelphia.

“My seat was Exeding Easey & Jurney very Pleasant,” Jane wrote Caty. “My Dear Brothers conversation was more than an Equivelent to all the fine wether Emaginable.”

They stopped to see William Franklin in New Jersey. The governor’s mansion, Jane wrote Caty, “was very magnificient.”
²⁵
She said no more.

After his father and aunt departed, William Franklin convened the assembly and instructed the legislature to form a committee to draft a petition to the king “to express the great Desire this House hath to a Restoration of Peace and Harmony with the parent State.” And then he told the assemblymen that he feared for his life.
²⁶

By the end of October, Jane and her brother reached Philadelphia, where, in his house, they lived under the same roof for the first time since they were children.

CHAPTER XXVIII

T
he cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind” declared a pamphlet printed in Philadelphia in January 1776.
¹
It was called
Common Sense,
and almost no one knew who wrote it. “Some make Dr. Franklin the Author,” a friend wrote to
John Adams. “I think I see strong marks of your pen in it,” wrote another. “I could not have written any Thing in so manly and striking a style,” Adams admitted. But he soon found out the author: “His Name is Paine.”
²

Thomas Paine, born in England, was the son of a tradesman who sewed the bones of whales into stays for ladies’ corsets. At twelve, he left school to serve as his father’s apprentice. He ran away to sea. He came back, opened a shop, taught school, collected taxes, married and lost a wife and, in 1771, married again. Three years later, when he was thirty-seven, he was fired from a post with the excise office and everything he owned was sold at auction to pay off his debts (exactly what had happened to Benjamin Mecom in 1770, at about the same age). Ruined, Paine fled to America. He landed in Philadelphia in 1774 so sick he had to be carried off the ship. What saved his life was a letter found in his pocket: “The bearer Mr Thomas Pain is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man.” It was signed “B. Franklin.”
³

Paine had met Franklin in London. In Philadelphia, Franklin’s name gained Paine a position as editor of the
Pennsylvania Magazine
. In the summer of 1775, Paine’s essay “An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex” had appeared in the magazine. “If we take a survey of ages and of countries, we shall find that
women, almost—without exception—at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed,” Paine wrote. “Man with regard to them,
in all climates, and in all ages, has been either an insensible husband or an oppressor.”
⁴
More than one revolution had begun.

That fall, while Paine was writing
Common Sense,
Jane was living in Philadelphia, in Franklin’s house. “I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine wrote.
⁵
There’s a reason people thought Franklin might have written
Common Sense
. Like Franklin, Paine wrote for everyone—even for the tradesmen’s daughters. “As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand,” Paine explained, “I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet.”
⁶
He wrote for readers as plain as Jane.