Book of Ages (47 page)

Sparks saw at least some of the papers in Mrs. Loring’s hands, in 1833. He did not acquire them, and I believe he made, chiefly, redacted copies or extracts. The originals of all of Jane’s papers once in the possession of Mrs. Loring have either been lost or remain in private hands.

Another of John Lathrop’s daughters, Ann, married a Boston merchant named Thomas Motley. This may explain why Sparks at first thought
Jane Lathrop Loring had fifty or sixty letters and later told
Bache she had twenty-five. Suppose that, in 1794, Lathrop had taken from Jane Franklin Mecom’s papers dozens of letters written to her by her brother and that, at Lathrop’s death in 1816, these letters went not to his sons but to his two daughters: twenty-five letters to Jane Lathrop Loring and fifty-nine to
Ann Lathrop Motley. In the 1830s, Sparks saw twenty-five letters—the letters in the possession of Jane Lathrop Loring. Then they were lost.

The letters belonging to Ann Lathrop Motley were saved. Her first son, born in 1814, was
John Lothrop Motley. (Somewhere along the way, the spelling of the family name changed from Lathrop to Lothrop.)
¹⁴
In 1832, when John Lothrop Motley was eighteen, he went to Göttingen to study
history. While he was there, he wrote a letter home, thanking his parents for having sent him a letter of his grandfather’s: a letter from
George Washington to John Lathrop. “I am very much obliged to you for Washington’s letter,” young Motley wrote home, “and you may be quite sure I shall keep it very religiously, and should like very much to have Franklin’s letters, which mother speaks of, and can certainly very easily send.”
¹⁵

Sparks was on good terms with the Motleys. In January 1833, he had written to Thomas Motley, asking him to intervene with Mrs. Loring. (“I hope in a day or two to have the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Loring and will not fail in making known your wishes,” Motley wrote back, but he seems to have been unable to convince his wife’s sister to allow Sparks to have her set of the letters.)
¹⁶
In 1837, by which time John Lothrop Motley had returned from Europe, Sparks, who had finished the
Familiar Letters
but was still collecting material for his
Works of Benjamin Franklin,
and who was also bankrupt (having lost a fortune in the Panic of 1837), wrote to him. He wanted Motley’s help in finding some letters from Franklin to John Lathrop. Motley consulted with his mother and father. Then he wrote to Sparks, “My father begs me to inform you that the only letter which my mother or any of her family have preserved, from Dr Franklin to Dr Lathrop, is the one of September 1788 already published in your collection.” Motley went on: “They looked carefully through the collection of letters to Mrs. Mecom & others but have not been able to find the one to which you allude.”
¹⁷

Motley, meanwhile, tried writing
historical fiction. But after receiving poor reviews for novels published in 1838 and 1839 and set in colonial Massachusetts, he began writing history. In this field, he achieved considerable renown. His most important work,
The Rise of the Dutch Republic,
was enthusiastically reviewed by Sparks’s
North American Review
in 1856, as the product of “the matured powers of a vigorous and brilliant mind, and the abundant fruits of a patient and judicious study and deep reflection”; it was judged “one of the most important contributions to historical literature that have been made in this country.”
¹⁸

John Lothrop Motley spent much of his life abroad, serving as a U.S. diplomat in Russia and, later, Austria. From 1869 to 1870, he was the American minister to Great Britain; in 1871 he moved to The Hague. He visited America in 1875, but after returning to Europe, he lived in
England from 1875 until his death.

His children were raised in England. The year before Motley died, his daughter
Elizabeth Cabot Motley was married in Westminster Abbey to Sir
William George Granville Harcourt, a liberal member of Parliament and later the home secretary. They had one son,
Robert Vernon Harcourt, born in 1878.
¹⁹

Lady Harcourt died in 1928; everything in her estate went to her son. That year, Sotheby’s of London printed a catalog listing, as the property of Robert Harcourt, fifty-nine letters from Benjamin Franklin to his sister. Jane’s papers had been in the hands of her minister and his descendants since 1794.
²⁰

Van Doren made sure this collection was purchased by the
American Philosophical Society.
²¹
That made a significant enough set of letters that Van Doren proposed publishing a properly edited collection of the complete correspondence. The American Philosophical Society gave him a grant, a secretary, and a research assistant.
²²

In the 1940s, Van Doren gathered together a collection of all the letters then available: ninety-eight letters from Franklin to Jane and sixty-eight from Jane to Franklin or other relatives, from originals held in more than a dozen archives. Edited by Van Doren and under the auspices of the American Philosophical Society,
The Letters of Benjamin Franklin and Jane Mecom
was published in 1950, three months after Van Doren’s death.

Three letters from Jane to Franklin were purchased by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. (The society already owned four other letters written by Jane: one to Franklin, one to Sarah Bache, and two to the executors of Franklin’s estate.) Remarked a collector, “What would Jane, who always needed money so badly, have thought if she had known that one of her poor letters would bring even ten dollars at auction!”
²³
Letters written by Jane to recipients other than Franklin are few, but letters written by Jane to her friend Catharine Ray Greene were carefully kept by Greene and remained in the Greene homestead, in Warwick, Rhode Island, until 1946, along with letters Jane received from Franklin while staying with Greene; these letters were acquired by the American Philosophical Society in 1946.
²⁴

The people most likely to have gone through Jane’s papers, with Jane Mecom Kinsman’s permission, are the other members of the family named in Jane’s will: Jane Mecom Collas, Franklin Greene,
Sally Greene, and Josiah Flagg. Nearly all of these people corresponded with Jane, but only one original letter from Jane to Jane Mecom Collas survives (in private hands), while another, a copy, descended through the family of Josiah Flagg, and no letters written by Jane to either Franklin or Sally Greene survive. Of all of what Jane’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren took out of her house in the days after her death in 1794, only what Josiah Flagg selected has been found. He took from that house letters he himself had written, as well as a letter Franklin wrote to Jane in May 1786—presumably, because that letter is about him—along with the letter
Richard Bache wrote to Jane in 1790, informing her of Franklin’s death.

Some things Jane left to her Greene grandchildren can be traced. In 1758, Franklin had his
portrait painted, in London, in miniature. He sent the miniature
to his wife, asking her to send it to his sister. Jane either gave it to
Franklin Greene or else he took it from her estate. The miniature was handed down, in Franklin Greene’s family, for generations, along with the name: by Franklin Greene to his son Franklin Greene Jr., who gave it to his daughter Agnes, who married a man named
Balch, with whom she had a son named Franklin Greene Balch, born in Roxbury in 1864, and he, in 1899, loaned the miniature to the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston. Franklin Greene Balch had a son, also named Franklin Greene Balch, born in Jamaica Plain in 1896, and who, in 1943, gave the miniature to the museum as a permanent gift, writing to the museum’s director, “I think it will be in a much more appropriate spot than it would be in my safe deposit box.”
²⁵

Balch told a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts that he had something else he might be interested in giving to the museum: “a
mourning ring of Benjamin Franklin’s.” Balch had no idea the ring had belonged to Jane Franklin Mecom. In her 1794 will, Jane had left to Sally Greene “a mourning Ring, which was given me at the funeral of my kinsman Josiah Williams.” (Jane’s blind nephew, Josiah Williams, a son of Grace and Jonathan Williams Sr., died in 1772, at the age of twenty-four; Jane had been given the ring at his funeral.)
²⁶
Sally Greene died of a fall from her horse in 1795, at the age of seventeen. Her brother ended up with the ring. Like the miniature of Benjamin Franklin, Jane Franklin Mecom’s ring remained in the Greene family, descending through the Franklin Greene Balches. Over time, they forgot that it had ever belonged to Jane Franklin Mecom; they decided it must have belonged to Benjamin Franklin.

Balch expected that the museum wouldn’t be interested in it; the connection to Franklin, after all, was not very well established. “Do you suppose the
Massachusetts Historical Society would care to have the ring?” he asked. And then he added, as an afterthought, in the very last line of his letter: “I have two letters of Jane Mecum’s.”
²⁷
He didn’t think anyone would want those, either. He was right. The museum declined the ring, informing Balch, “The same applies to the letters of Jane Mecum.”
²⁸
The Massachusetts Historical Society, too, declined.
²⁹

In 1946,
Katherine T. Balch, Franklin G. Balch’s sister-in-law, left half of her estate—hundreds of thousands of dollars—to the museum. This led the curators to reverse their decision to decline the ring.
³⁰
In 1949 the ring entered the museum’s collections. In the museum’s catalog, it is described as “traditionally owned by Benjamin Franklin.”
³¹

After Van Doren’s biography of Jane,
Jane Mecom,
appeared, Benjamin Franklin’s sister was suddenly—briefly—somebody. In 1955, the art historian
Charles Coleman Sellers, who had been hired to prepare an exhibit of portraits of Franklin for the
American Philosophical Society’s marking of the 250th anniversary of Franklin’s birth the next year, discovered the miniature in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Digging through the accession files, he discovered, too, that the portrait had once belonged to Franklin’s sister. In 1955, he published a two-page account of the miniature in the society’s proceedings. It was probably Sellers who pointed out to museum staff that Balch had once mentioned that he had some of Jane Franklin Mecom’s letters.
³²
A member of the staff wrote to Balch, asking about the letters. Ailing and in his nineties, Balch replied with bad news. He had
once had “two letters signed Jane Mecum and they were in my safe deposit box for years,” he began. But “then I took them out to show them to someone and now they are not in my box.”
³³

These two letters, alone among the dozens and dozens of letters Jane Franklin Mecom must have written to Jane Flagg Greene, Franklin Greene, and Sally Greene, had survived for two centuries, only to be misplaced. Balch’s sister went back to the bank and double-checked the safe deposit box: no letters. Balch’s son rifled through the drawers of his father’s desk: no letters. Balch was stumped.
³⁴
The originals of the letters disappeared, but in 1956, a daughter of Balch’s sent photostats of them to the editor of the Benjamin Franklin Papers, at Yale.
³⁵

No one at the museum ever tied the
mourning ring to Jane Franklin Mecom. The ring is a band of gold inlaid with black enamel. An inscription reads, “
josiah williams 1772.” Atop the band is set a beveled piece of glass in the shape of a coffin, under which rests a tiny slip of paper, onto which is sketched a skeleton, smaller than a fly.
³⁶

Jane’s grandson Josiah Flagg inherited her collection of books, including her Book of Ages, as well as a number of papers, her portraits
of Josiah Flagg and Jane Flagg Greene as children, and, apparently, a miniature of Benjamin Franklin. Some of these materials were inherited by Josiah Flagg’s son Samuel, some by his daughter Sally, and others (all now lost) by his other surviving children. Some of what Samuel and Sally Flagg inherited they gave to the
New England Historic Genealogical Society in
Boston, and some to the Thayer Memorial Library in
Lancaster.

A few more letters have turned up since Carl Van Doren published his collection of the correspondence in 1950. A letter from Franklin to Jane dated March 2, 1767, was purchased by the
University of Virginia, at auction, in 1951.
³⁷
In 1976, a letter from Jane to Jonathan Williams Jr., dated August 12, 1792, entered the collections of Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum with the Jonathan Williams Papers. Resources not available to Van Doren in the 1940s yielded information about letters unknown to him. The
Cripe and Campbell index to American manuscripts in auction records and dealers’ catalogs, published in 1977, lists two letters sent by Jane and five letters received by her. Two letters written by Jane, one auctioned in 1892, the other in 1895, either have been lost or remain in private hands.
³⁸
Three letters from Franklin to Jane were auctioned by Sotheby’s in 1985. They remain in private hands.
³⁹
Copies of two letters from Franklin to Jane, previously unknown to scholars, turned up as recently as 2006. (These two were among twelve letters—some are only fragments of letters—between Franklins and Mecoms that were sent in 1825 by William Duane Jr., in Philadelphia, to the
London Magazine
for publication but were not published.)
⁴⁰

Meanwhile, Franklin’s papers were being collected and edited, for a modern
edition. In 1954,
Yale University and the
American Philosophical Society launched
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
. So far, thirty-nine volumes of a projected forty-seven volumes have been published.