Book of Ages (42 page)
Authors: Jill Lepore
O
n February 17, 1794,
Benjamin Franklin’s sister, eighty-one years old, “weak in Body yet of sound mind and memory,” signed her will. The will itself is written in another hand. She could no longer write.
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She had lived through a century of revolution. In 1771, Massachusetts’s
poor laws had, for the first time, required that girls be taught to write. This hadn’t changed matters as much as it might have. “We don’t pretend to teach the female part of the town anything more than dancing,” one
Boston teacher reported in 1782.
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Jane reckoned her estate. She had some small items of value: things made of silver and gold. To her grandson Josiah Flagg, she gave a silver porringer that had belonged to her brother
Peter Franklin.
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To her great-grandson Franklin Greene: “my Gold sleeve Buttons.” To her great-granddaughter Sally Greene: “a mourning Ring, which was given to me at the funeral of my kinsman Josiah Williams.”
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To her friend
Elizabeth Lathrop, the wife of her minister: “a White Medallion of Dr. Franklin.”
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To her granddaughter Jenny Mecom, nearly thirty and unmarried, she gave things made of wool and flax, things made of wood, things made of copper and iron and brass:
In consideration of the extraordinary attention paid me by my Grand Daughter Jane Mecom exclusive of her common and necessary concerns in domestic affairs & the ordinary business of the Family, I think proper to give and bequeath unto her several articles of household furniture, particularly as follows The Bed, Bedstead, and Curtains which I commonly use, the three pair of homespun sheets lately
made and the Bedding of every kind used with this Bed both in Summer and Winter, consisting of two Blankets, a White Counterpane and two Calico Bedquilts, one of which is new; The Chest of Drawers and Table which usually stand in my Chamber, and six Black Walnut Chairs with green bottoms also two black Chairs, my looking Glass which I bought of Samuel Taylor and which commonly hangs in my Chamber, a large Brass Kettle, a small Bell mettle skillet, a small Iron Pot, a large Trammel, a pair of large Iron hand irons, a shovel and pair of Tongs, a Black Walnut stand and tea board, two brass Candle sticks, a small Copper Tea Kettle and one half of my Wearing Apparel of every kind.
Believing her son Benjamin to be dead, Jane left the remainder of her estate, including the house itself, in the hands of her executors, her minister, John Lathrop, and
Benjamin Summers, a merchant, stipulating that the only one of her twelve children still alive, her daughter Jane Mecom Collas, would be allowed to occupy the house for as long as she lived.
She considered what to do with her papers. A letter she loved best she decided to show to Benjamin Edes. Edes printed it on the front page of the March 3 issue of the
Boston Gazette,
under this head:
WAR.
Extract from a letter written by that great Philosopher, and wise politician, the late DR. FRANKLIN, to a friend in Boston, not long before his death.
There followed a paragraph from a letter Franklin had sent Jane on September 20, 1787, three days after he signed the Constitution. It begins, “I agree with you perfectly in your disapprobation of war.”
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Franklin’s letter was an answer to a letter of his sister. “I had Rather hear of the Swords being beat into Plow-shares, & the Halters used for Cart Roops, if by that means we may be brought to live Peaceably with won a nother,” she had written him.
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Edes didn’t print Jane’s letter or mention it.
To a friend in Boston
is all he said.
· · ·
Six weeks later, on April 17, America’s first best-selling novel,
Charlotte: A Tale of Truth,
was published in Philadelphia.
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Its author,
Susanna Rowson, grew up in Boston; later, she founded Boston’s Young Ladies’ Academy, where she taught not only
writing but also
history.
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Charlotte
is the tale of a fifteen-year-old girl who is seduced, gives birth, and dies.
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In eighteenth-century
novels, women do not generally survive
seduction at the age of fifteen. At fifteen, Jane Franklin hadn’t married a gentleman, like Pamela. She hadn’t died miserably, like Charlotte. Instead, she’d married a poor man, raised her children. She’d raised her grandchildren. She’d raised her great-grandchildren. And only then did she meet her end.
She died at home on Wednesday, May 7, 1794.
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Of “old age, & a Cold,” John Lathrop wrote in his church record book.
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Edes reported the event in the “Deaths” column of the
Boston Gazette
. The notice was picked up in New York, Philadelphia, and Newport.
Her funeral was held in her house at five o’clock on May 10. “Her friends, and the friends of the late Dr. Franklin are requested to attend,” read one notice.
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Mourners must have been few. She had outlived almost everyone she’d ever loved.
No account of the funeral survives. Jane Mecom Collas and Jenny Mecom would have been there. Josiah Flagg would likely have come from Lancaster. Franklin and Sally Greene, thirteen and sixteen, might have ridden from
Rhode Island, but maybe not.
John Lathrop would have delivered the sermon. It does not survive. At the funeral of his first wife, Lathrop had preached on resurrection: “The unwieldy carcass which is now with difficulty moved from place to place, shall be changed for a body such as God shall please to give.”
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Maybe he said much the same for Jane.
No one knows where she is buried. The records of the administration
of her estate include “funeral Charges” of more than seven pounds but no mention of any payment to the engraver of a stone.
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She had kept with her, all her life, a scrap of paper on which her brother had written an
epitaph for himself:
The Body of
B. Franklin Printer;
Like the Cover of an old Book
Its Contents torn out
And stript of its Lettering and
Gilding,
Lies here, Food for Worms.
But the Work shall not be wholly lost:
For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more
In a new & more perfect Edition,
Corrected and amended,
By the Author.
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She thought she was a book, too. In the twilight of her life, she wrote to her brother that she looked forward to both of them attaining “the Injoyment of that New & more Beautifull Edition.”
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She believed that every life mattered, even her own. “I am willing to Depart out of it when ever my Grat Benifactor has no farther Use for me,” she wrote her brother, for “I know the most Insignificant creature on Earth may be made some Use of in the Scale of Beings, may Touch some Spring.”
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She loved, too, a poem about death written by her uncle Benjamin: “Thy Journeys End.” She had once copied it out:
Let Joy sit on thy Brow
Down Hill art going now
Next stage may give the flight
From all those Earthly things
Up to the King of Kings
In uncreated Light
(“Tho the Poitry is not so good,” she wrote, discerningly, “I have taken Grat satisfaction in Reading it.”)
My soul still thither bend
Thy steps all this way tend
Thy all to this Aply
When thow art wonce got there
Past want & woe & care
Thou’rt Blest Eternaly.
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She might have liked that, for an
epitaph:
Past want & woe & care. Blest Eternaly.
She may have been buried near her parents, in the old Granary Burying Ground.
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By the time she died, the inscription on the stone her brother had placed there had begun to wear and fade. A few decades more and it was “nearly obliterated.”
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In 1825, Boston marked the
fiftieth anniversary of the revolution. “Those who established our
liberty and our government are daily dropping from among us,”
Daniel Webster said at the dedication of the
Bunker Hill Monument on the battle’s fiftieth anniversary, June 17, 1825.
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The city from which a very young Benjamin Franklin had fled, and to which he had rarely returned, wanted to count him among its founders. People began raising money to replace the stone Franklin had placed in the Granary Burying Ground with something grander. (A campaign was launched, too, to rename the burial ground “Franklin Cemetery”; this proved unsuccessful.)
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In 1827, Franklin’s marker was removed and replaced with a massive, five-tiered, twenty-foot-high obelisk made of granite taken from the same quarry as the Bunker Hill Monument. It dwarfs every other stone in the burying ground. On its face, brass letters read, simply, FRANKLIN.
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Jane’s bones might lie there somewhere, underfoot, beneath her brother’s name. If she ever had a
gravestone, it’s long since sunk underground.
Silver and gold. Copper, iron, brass. Wool and flax. Wood and stone. Flesh and bone. What had become of her books and papers?
CHAPTER XL
The LibrarianS
he gave her papers to an archivist and her books to a librarian.
She had kept hold of her papers, scraps saved against time, in trouble and strife, in war and peace. A letter her brother had written to their mother, in 1749, she had tucked away. “From my Brother to His Father & Mother,” she wrote on the back of it.
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“To go into the Litle Trunk,” she wrote on the back of another.
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In 1794, knowing she was dying, she gave the bulk of her papers to her granddaughter and namesake, Jenny Mecom, with the provision that her minister, John Lathrop, could go through them and take what he wanted.
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Lathrop was a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1791, he was elected Librarian and Keeper of the Cabinet.
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He was an archivist. He died in 1816. At his death, his five surviving children, including a daughter named Jane, inherited his estate. In 1821, Jane Lathrop married a Boston merchant named
Caleb Loring; Jane Franklin Mecom’s papers remained in Lathrop and Loring family hands for more than a century.
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Sometime before Jane died, she gave her Book of Ages to her grandson
Josiah Flagg. Not long after traveling from Philadelphia to Boston in 1786, Flagg had settled
in
Lancaster, Massachusetts. He married in 1789. In 1790, he was among the original proprietors of the town’s first library, founded to promote “a general diffusion of knowledge.”
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