Book of Ages (66 page)

39.
  
Sparks’s notes from his undated interview with
Jane Mecom Kinsman are bound in “Franklin, Benjamin. Notes and memoranda, 1836–1840,” Sparks Papers, MS Sparks 18, p. 78. Curiously, on pp. 75–76 of this volume, Sparks has transcribed JFM to BF, Boston, December 5, 1774. Sparks did not extract this letter in his
Works,
which suggests that he did not see it until near the end of his research. In May 1839, the letter was printed in a magazine, the editors stating, “The various editions of Franklin’s works contain numerous letters from him to his youngest and favorite sister, Jane, married to Mr. Mecom of Boston. The following from her to him, although a fragment, will, it is believed, be interesting. It is copied from the original and has been hitherto unpublished.” “Letter from Mrs. Jane Mecom,”
Southern Literary Messenger
5 (May 1839): 304. Duane did not include it in his
Letters
. The original seems to have disappeared soon after Sparks made this copy. Its proximity, in his notebook, to his interview with Jane Mecom Kinsman suggests that she likely showed it to him.

40.
  Jared Sparks to Hilliard Gray, April 25, 1837, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana Papers, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House, Cambridge, MA, Box 140, Folder 60.

41.
  He began lecturing in March 1839, having decided to confine his lectures to the subject of “the history of the American Revolution from 1763 to 1783.” Sparks recounts the invitation, from President Quincy, in his diary entry for July 10, 1838: “He represented the matter in a very favorable light, saying that I should have the organization of the department, and that there was a disposition to make it in all respects agreeable to me.” He also includes his inclination to accept: “As the subjects to be taught in this department accord entirely with my tastes and pursuits, and as I have certain projects of a historical nature, which I hope to execute, particularly relating to American history, and which the duties of the office, would rather facilitate than obstruct, I have been led to think favorably of the proposal.”
Sparks, Diary 1831–39, July 10, 1838, Sparks Papers, MS Sparks 141h, pp. 211–12. That October, he was urged to run for Congress, as he had been in 1834. He declined and instead accepted the professorship at Harvard (October 1, 1838, pp. 218–19). On the lectures beginning in March, see his diary entry for March 12, 1839 (March 12, 1839, p. 227).

42.
  Jared Sparks, ed.,
The Library of American Biography
(Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1834), 1:iv.

43.
  In 1849, a woman named Sarah Pellet wrote to Sparks, asking to be admitted to the college. “I am not aware that any law exists touching this point,” he answered. Still, he was against it. “I should doubt whether a solitary female, mingling as she must do promiscuously with so large a number of the other sex, would find her situation either agreeable or advantageous. Indeed, I should be unwilling to advise any one to make such an experiment, and upon reflection I believe you will be convinced of its inexpediency.” Jared Sparks to Sarah Pellet, Cambridge, April 25, 1849, in
The Harvard Book: Selections from Three Centuries,
ed. William Bentinck-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 62. He concluded his letter by expressing regret that “an enlightened public opinion has not led to the establishment of Colleges of the higher order for the education
of females.” (“Harvard Annex” was created for
women students in 1879; Radcliffe College was annexed 1894.) Sparks’s presidency did not last long, as might have been predicted by the terms he set in 1838 when he accepted a professorship of history: “I shall not be required to take any part whatever in the government and discipline of the College, nor to reside in Cambridge” (Sparks, Diary 1831–39, December 17, 1838, Sparks Papers, MS Sparks 141h, p. 223).

44.
  Jared Sparks,
The Life of John Ledyard
(Cambridge, MA: Hilliard and Brown, 1828), vi. This is not to say that Sparks had an interest in hiding what he would have considered defects of character. “The character and turn of events more frequently take their coloring from the foibles and waywardness of the actors than from their merits or elevated qualities … The causes of evils must rest on somebody, and justice requires that they should fall on the right head. History which keeps men’s defects out of sight tells but half the tale, and that half imperfectly” (Adams,
Life of Sparks,
1:571).

45.
  Jared Sparks, review of William Wirt,
Sketches in the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, North American Review
6 (March 1818): 294.

46.
  In 1839, for instance, Charles Sumner sent him a letter of Franklin’s he found at an auction in Vienna. Charles Sumner to Jared Sparks, November 26, 1839, in Adams,
Life of Sparks,
2:348.

47.
  Adams,
Life of Sparks,
2:357.

48.
  JFM to BF, August 29, 1789.

49.
  Sparks,
Works,
10:395n.

50.
  For more on Sparks’s editorial methods, see
appendix E
.

51.
  Brooks,
Flowering of New England,
527; “Lord Mahon and Mr. Sparks,”
Living Age
35 (October 23, 1852): 189; Ellis,
Memoir,
57. See also J. Franklin Jameson,
The History of Historical Writing in America
(1891; repr., New York: Greenwood, 1969), 110–11, and Scott E. Casper,
Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture
in Nineteenth-Century America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), chapter 3.

52.
  “Lord Mahon and Mr. Sparks,”
Living Age
35 (October 23, 1852): 189.

53.
  “Hawthorne’s Life of Pierce.—Perspective,”
Democratic Review
31 (September 1852), 276.

54.
  “Mr. Jared Sparks’s Liberties with George Washington,”
Literary World
8 (March 1, 1851): 165, 170.

55.
  
The Papers of George Washington,
ed. W. W. Abbott et al. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 1:1.

56.
  George Washington, [Proposed Address to Congress? April? 1789], in
The Writings of George Washington,
ed. John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931–44), 30:296–97n81. And see John C. Fitzpatrick,
George Washington Himself: A Common-Sense Biography Written from His Manuscripts
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1933), 529–30n2.

57.
  JFM to BF, Boston, October 30, 1767 (
PBF
dates this letter October 23), partially transcribed and corrected by Jared Sparks in
Works,
7:515n.

58.
  
Elizabeth Duane Gillespie was the daughter of
Deborah Bache Duane and William John Duane, a son of William Duane, who married Benjamin
Franklin Bache’s widow.

59.
  Elizabeth Duane Gillespie,
A Book of Remembrance
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1901), 59–60. Gillespie knew Abiah Mecom as well. So did Franklin Bache, who signed Abiah Mecom’s death certificate. (Death notice of Abiah Mecom, Philadelphia, August 6, 1841, “Pennsylvania, Philadelphia City Death Certificates, 1803–1915,” FamilySearch [
https://www.familysearch.org
], accessed January 2, 2012, citing Death Records, FHL microfilm 4,001,153; Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). There is something especially poignant about Franklin’s great-grandson Franklin Bache, taking care of Jane’s granddaughter Abiah Mecom, whom Jane’s son Benjamin had named after his grandmother,
Abiah Folger Franklin. Elizabeth Duane Gillespie used to visit Abiah Mecom when she was a little girl. Gillespie’s mother was Deborah Bache, a daughter of Sally Franklin Bache; her father was William John Duane, whose father, William Duane, married the widow of Deborah’s brother Benjamin Franklin Bache. When she was a little girl, Elizabeth Duane Gillespie used to visit two dotty old ladies, relatives of her mother’s: Jane Franklin Mecom’s granddaughters Abiah Mecom and Jane Mecom Kinsman. “Why they drifted to Philadelphia I never understood,” Gillespie wrote. Of her “Cousin Abiah”: “I remember her when she was at the head of a boardinghouse in Sixth Street near Prune.” When one of her
boarders died, leaving behind a closetful of medicine, Abiah drank it all. “It tastes just like ‘vanilla,’ ” she liked to say. Abiah Mecom died of dropsy in Philadelphia in 1841. Her obituary reads, “Abiah Mecom died on August 6, 1841, in Philadelphia, in the 81st year of her age.” It appeared in the
National Gazette,
August 7, 1841.

60.
  
Charlestown Mercury,
September 27, 1856. On discovering such relics, see Alfred Young,
The Shoemaker and the Tea Party
.

61.
  Adams,
Life of Sparks,
2:357n1.

62.
  Robert C. Winthrop,
Oration at the Inauguration of the Statue of Benjamin Franklin,
in His Native City, September 17, 1856
(Boston: Press of T. R. Marvin, 1856), 5, 6, 24. Winthrop actually quotes one of Franklin’s letters to JFM, from November 4, 1787 (p. 22). Sparks had printed this letter in the
Works
(10:325–27), after which it went to private hands.

63.
  Winthrop,
Oration at the Inauguration,
28. Revere’s obituary appeared in the
Boston Gazette,
May 15, 1818. The
Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association wanted to celebrate Revere as the “patriot Mechanic of the Revolution.” Sparks had often lectured to the association. George B. Emerson, Committee of Instruction of the Boston Mechanicks’ Institution, to
Jared Sparks, Boston, July 16, 1827, MS Sparks 153, Sparks Papers. Revere had no place in Sparks’s
Library of American Biography
.

64.
  Ellis,
Memoir of Jared Sparks,
43.

65.
  Robert C. Winthrop, in Adams,
Life of Sparks,
2:586.

66.
  “
Paul Revere’s Ride,”
Atlantic Monthly
7 (January 1861): 27–30. On how Longfellow came to write the poem, see Lepore,
The Story of America,
220–39. In a census taken earlier that year, Jane Mecom Kinsman’s occupation was listed as, simply, “niece of Dr. Franklin.” Eighth Census of the United States, 1860 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M653), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, DC, Roll 1158, p. 408, Schedule 1—Free Inhabitants, Eighth Ward, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, dated June 1860, Dwelling no. 220, Family no. 257. Her estate was announced in the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
December 29, 1860. John Clayton was listed as her executor. “Her last years were made most comfortable by relatives of hers, the Misses Baldwin” (Gillespie,
Book of Remembrance,
60). By the 1850 federal census, she was listed as living with Walter Colton, Catherine Baldwin, and Sarah Baldwin, relatives of her mother’s sister, Mary Ross Baldwin. She had been living with them at the time of her death. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M432), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, DC, Roll 812, p. 117, Schedule for the South Ward of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, dated August 14, 1850, Dwelling no. 71, Family no. 71.

  
1.
  
Catalogue of Important Autograph Letters, Literary, Historical & Medieval Manuscripts … Which will be Sold by Auction, by Messrs. Sotheby and Col … On Monday, 17th of December, 1928, and Four following Days
(London: J. Davy and Sons, 1928), 75–84, Lots 414–70.

  
2.
  For more on the history of this set of papers, see
appendix A
.

  
3.
  Woolf wrote
Orlando
between October 1927 and March 1928.
Virginia Woolf,
The Diary of Virginia Woolf,
ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 3:viii.

  
4.
  Virginia Woolf, “The Lives of the Obscure,” in
The Common Reader
(Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1925), 146.

  
5.
  On Woolf’s ideas about biography, see, e.g., Juliette Atkinson,
Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Hidden Lives
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 252–64.

  
6.
  Van Doren,
Benjamin Franklin
, ix.

  
7.
  
Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography [1939],” in
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
(London: Hogarth Press, 1942), 125.

  
8.
  “Jane Mecom,”
Boston Globe,
March 12, 1917. This article refers to an 1882 series called “Street Saunterings” that appeared in “a Boston paper” and was written by William T. W. Ball; he says that on September 17, 1856, the day of the dedication of the statue to Franklin, the house on Unity Street “was decorated to mark it as the house in which Franklin’s sister, Jane Mecom, lived.” But the writer of this article disputed that Jane Mecom ever lived there because he found “Jane Mecom” in the 1798 directory as at Bridges Lane. That “Jane Mecom,” of course, was Jane’s granddaughter. The demolition of the house is discussed in Van Doren,
Letters,
359.

  
9.
  Roelker,
BF and CRG,
7, 29n2.

10.
  The site is now a brick-paved park, a walkway leading tourists from the Paul Revere Mall to Old North Church. Eight locust trees line the path. In 2012, a small memorial garden honored “the men and women in the Armed Forces and the civilians who have lost their lives in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.”

11.
  Charles Van Doren to the author, n.d. but postmarked June 13, 2011.

12.
  Some letters written by Jane, rather than by Franklin, were already known. In 1859, Franklin’s great-grandson (
Deborah Bache Duane’s son) William Duane privately published
Letters to Benjamin Franklin, from his Family and Friends, 1751–1790
. It included thirty-seven letters from Jane. Duane called her “the youngest and favorite sister of Dr. Franklin.” William Duane, ed.,
Letters to Benjamin Franklin, from his Family and Friends, 1751–1790
(New York, 1859), 3–4.

13.
  
PBF,
1:xxii. The Bache descendants’ bequest includes Benjamin Mecom’s letters to his aunt—the only letters written by Benjamin Mecom that weren’t destroyed.

14.
  The Rosenbach Company,
Catalogue Thirty-four: For Librarians, Collectors and Scholars
(Philadelphia: Rosenbach Company, 1943), item 181: “FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN. A Series of Fifty-nine Autograph Letters Signed to his Sister, Jane Mecom of Boston.”

15.
  Van Doren,
Letters,
v.

16.
  Van Doren had intended to include, as an illustration, a photograph of the Book of Ages, but it does not appear.
Carl Van Doren Papers, Special Collections, Princeton University, Box 11, Folder 10.

17.
  Van Doren,
Jane Mecom,
v.

18.
  Esther Forbes, “Carl Van Doren’s Final Study of Our Revolutionary Past,”
New York Herald Tribune Book Review,
October 15, 1950.