Franklin

by Thomas Fleming

  As France began to move toward its revolution, he followed the ominous signs of trouble to come there with growing concern. But he was largely worried about the fate of personal friends, such as the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, who would die at the hands of the mob; and others, such as Abbe Morellet, who would be driven into exile in the years to come. It was the steady progress of the American government that absorbed Franklin’s mind and heart.

  In his last letter to George Washington, Franklin unmistakably revealed the source of his will to live. He congratulated the first President “on the growing strength of our new government under your administration.” Then he added, “For my own personal ease, I should have died two years ago; but tho these years have been spent in excruciating pain, I am pleased that I have lived them, since they have brought me to see our present situation. I am now finishing my 84th, and probably with it my career in this life; but in whatever state of existence I am plac’d hereafter, if I retain any memory of what has pass’d here, I shall with it retain the esteem, respect and affection with which I have long been, my dear friend, yours most sincerely.”

  Washington’s reply was perhaps the finest tribute ever paid to Franklin, and incidentally refutes the notion that the father of his country was an emotionless statue.

  Would to God, my dear sir, that I could congratulate you upon the removal of that excruciating pain, under which you labor, and that your existence might close with as much ease to yourself, as its continuance has been beneficial to our country and useful to mankind; or, if the united wishes of a free people, joined with the earnest prayers of every friend to science and humanity, could relieve the body from pains or infirmities, that you could claim an exemption on this score. But this cannot be, and you have within yourself the only resource to which we can confidently apply for relief, a philosophic mind.

  If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be beloved for philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know, that you have not lived in vain. And I flatter myself that it will not be ranked among the least grateful occurrences of your life to be assured that, so long as I retain my memory, you will be thought of with respect, veneration and affection by your sincere friend,

  George Washington

  At home, Franklin was surrounded by a warm and loving circle. Sarah Bache and her seven children lived in the same house with him. Widowed Polly Stevenson Hewson took his advice and came to America with her three children, to be near the man who was her spiritual and intellectual father. She visited him constantly, read to him and nursed him with tireless affection. Only Temple Franklin worried his grandfather. He was utterly bored with a farmer’s life and neglected his 500 New Jersey acres to spend most of his time in Philadelphia. Franklin made one last try to obtain some favor for him from the new Congress, through his old friend Charles Carroll, now Senator from Maryland, but it came to nothing. Embittered by this rejection, in 1791 Temple was to fulfill Franklin’s forebodings by contemptuously abandoning America and going to live with his father in England. William had by this time remarried. His wife was Mary D’Evelin, the daughter of a well-to-do Irish family. Her sister, Ellen, lived with them in London, and Temple, although he violently resisted the idea of marriage, had apparently no compunctions about making her his mistress. A daughter, Ellen Franklin, was baptized in St. James Church, London, on May 16, 1798. After a violent quarrel with his father, Temple abandoned both mother and child and departed for France, where he lived the life of a dilettante with an English mistress, Hannah Collier. William raised Ellen as his own daughter, and she lived with him until his death in 1813. Hannah finally browbeat Temple into marrying her in the Paris house of the British ambassador in 1823. He died a few months later, childless, extinguishing forever Franklin’s hope of founding a family line. Temple also failed Franklin in a more direct and disastrous way. Instead of publishing a thorough and complete edition of his papers, which would have replaced the autobiography Franklin never wrote, and enabled nineteenth-century historians to better appraise Franklin’s role in the founding of the nation, it took Temple twenty years to get around to throwing together a very inadequate slapdash edition, which did Franklin’s reputation more harm than good. Most of the precious documents Temple carelessly abandoned.

  Franklin himself, in making his will, could not stifle one more expression of the pain William had caused him. He left to “my son William Franklin, late governor of the Jerseys, all the lands I hold or have a right to in the province of Nova Scotia,” a claim which was vague at best. Franklin also gave him “all my books and papers which he has in his possession, and all debts standing against him on my account books,” an item which he had already settled with William in their meeting in Southampton. Then came the last exhalation of bitterness. “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate [than] he endeavored to deprive me of.”

  To others, who had given him love and received it in abundance from him, he began writing gentle farewells. To Catherine Ray Greene in Rhode Island, he said, “Among the felicities of my life I reckon your friendship.” To fellow peacemaker David Hartley, he wrote one of his noblest sentiments. “God grant that not only the love of liberty, but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man, may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my country.”

  For Madame Helvetius, who had aroused such deep feelings in him, he transported himself back in time for one last visit to sunny Auteuil. “I cannot let this chance go by, my dear friend, without telling you that I love you always, and that I am feeling well. I think endlessly of the pleasures I enjoyed in the sweet society of Auteuil. And often, in my dreams, I dine with you, I sit beside you, on one of your thousand sofas, or I walk with you in your beautiful garden.” By now, Madame Helvetius spoke of her love for him with the same frankness he used with her. “. . . I am getting old, my dear, but I don’t mind it, I am coming closer to you, we will meet again all the sooner.”

  Finally, there was time for one last cause. Franklin accepted the presidency of “the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.” The Society presented a memorial to the first Congress, urging an immediate repudiation of slavery. James Jackson of Georgia led an attack on the proposal, presenting arguments that would eventually grow grossly familiar, that slavery was sanctioned by the Bible, and the Negroes were better off and happier as slaves. This inspired Franklin to play one last hoax with his facile pen. He sent to the Federal Gazette an essay which he said was an authentic statement by one Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a leading member of the Algerian government a hundred years ago. It was Sidi’s reply to a sect called the Erika, or purists, who urged on the Algerians the need to abolish piracy and their nasty habit of enslaving white Christians.

  With logic that marvelously paralleled Jackson’s speech in Congress, Sidi argued that the Algerians could not afford to free their white slaves to gratify a whimsical sect. He pointed out that Christians were far better off as slaves. They lived lives of perfect safety; they were well-fed, lodged, and clothed. “They are not liable to be impressed for soldiers, and forced to cut one another’s Christian throats, as in the wars of their own countries.” He quoted the Koran to prove that slavery had the blessing of Allah and convinced the government of Algiers that “the doctrine, that plundering and enslaving the Christians is unjust, is at best problematical; but that it is the interest of this state to continue the practice, is clear.”

  Numerous Philadelphians were so thoroughly hoaxed that they ransacked the bookstores and libraries of the city, searching for the volume Franklin had cited as his source, “Martin’s Account of His Counselship, Anno 1687.”

  About the same time, Ezra Stiles, one of Franklin’s old New England friends, now president of Yale, wrote
to him asking him confidentially about his religious beliefs. After making Stiles promise to keep absolute silence, Franklin told him that he still could not subscribe to the teaching of any current sect. But he believed “in one God, the creator of the universe. That He governs it by His providence. That He ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we render to Him is doing good to His other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.”

  Early in April 1790, Franklin complained of a pain in his chest. He became feverish and it was soon evident that he was suffering an attack of pleurisy. After almost ten days of agonizing pain, he seemed, momentarily, to recover. His cough vanished and he even arose from his bed. But it was to let his daughter Sally make the bed so that he might “die in a decent manner “ When Sally said that she was praying that he would get well and live many more years, Franklin quietly replied: “I hope not.” A few hours later an abscess in his lungs burst and it became more and more difficult for him to breathe. At 11 p.m. on April 17, 1790, he passed quietly into history.

  His sorrowing family stood at his bedside, dutiful daughter Sally, and stolid, dependable Richard Bache, grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache, already on his way to becoming a brilliant newspaper editor, and William Temple Franklin. That last face, not unhandsome, but somehow diminished, could only remind the dying man of another dearer face, lost through words spoken and unspoken, through emotions that have tormented fathers and sons since history began; ultimately lost here by a son’s inability to grasp the deep and daring dimensions of a new ingredient in the ancient instinctive quarrel, American freedom.

  Father and son, the two Franklins had dared the lightning together and won. But American freedom, with its inevitable turmoil and upheaval, had been a more formidable force. Perhaps the best evidence of the value Franklin placed on this freedom was the personal price he paid for it. In those last sinking hours, we can be sure that his regrets were balanced by the knowledge that a whole people had become his spiritual heirs, committed to this questing experimental freedom as the central value of their nationhood. Today’s Americans, struggling to cope with this still vital, often unruly heritage in a threatening world, may find some answers in the mature Franklin’s life, with its unique blend of faith and realism, laughter and courage. It is for us to reclaim this Franklin and bring him into the mainstream of American life and thought.

  Published by New Word City Inc., 2014

  www.NewWordCity.com

  © Thomas Fleming

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-61230-704-6