The First American

by H. W. Brands

  The meeting of the three generations occurred under inauspicious circumstances. Franklin’s guests were coming and going; at the Star the three had scarce time and less privacy for the sort of soul-searching a genuine reunion required. Doubtless Franklin preferred it this way. Scars had formed over the wounds he felt at what he considered his son’s betrayal; better not to reopen them.

  Besides, there was business to transact. William had property in New Jersey and New York that was doing him no good; he decided to sell it to Temple. Franklin underwrote the transaction, applying toward the price various debts William owed him and authorizing William to seek payment from the British government of debts owed Franklin (William could keep half of any amount recovered; the other half would go to Sally). For the balance of 48,000 livres on the sale price, Franklin wrote to a banker friend in Paris for a loan.

  William found the encounter acutely distressing. His hopes for reconciliation were dashed, his ties to his homeland severed. Shortly after Franklin and Temple sailed away, William wrote disconsolately that “my fate has thrown me on a different side of the globe.”

  Franklin kept his feelings to himself, as he generally did on this most painful part of his life. He turned from William to Shipley and other friends. On July 27 the group went aboard the ship that would take the travelers to America. “The captain entertains us at supper,” Franklin recorded in his journal. “The company stay all night.”

  Yet the company did not stay all night. After Franklin retired, Shipley and the others slipped to shore. “We all left your ship with a heavy heart,” Shipley’s daughter wrote Franklin later. “But the taking leave was a scene we wished to save you as well as ourselves.”

  In the night the wind freshened, and the captain weighed anchor on the ebb tide. When Franklin awoke, the ship was miles at sea.

  He had worried that the voyage would kill him; instead it restored him. A single stormy day interrupted an otherwise smooth passage. Since a visit by Polly Hewson to Passy the previous winter, he had been gently trying to persuade her to move to America with her children (her husband having died); he booked a cabin large enough to accommodate the whole group. When she chose to remain in England, he was left with more room than he could fill.

  For years his friends had implored him to complete his memoirs. First the war got in the way, then the peace negotiations, then the fact that he had lost the part already written. It was among papers he left in the care of Joseph Galloway upon departing America in 1776. Although Galloway espoused the British cause, he certainly would have respected Franklin’s papers, but amid the confusion of the British occupation of Philadelphia his house was raided and its contents, including Franklin’s papers, scattered. Consequently, when Franklin had sat down at Passy to continue his tale, he had no record of what he had already written and few materials with which to go forward. He found the work difficult and unsatisfactory. When friends persisted in urging him to tell his story, he put them off by intimating he would take up pen once more during the leisure of his voyage home.

  He did take up pen, but not in the service of history. His memoirs had begun as a letter to William; perhaps the pain of this final parting from his son put him off the task. For whatever reason, he devoted his time at sea to his philosophical pursuits. He renewed his investigations of the Gulf Stream, with Jonathan Williams serving as assistant this time. He devised an ingenious method of measuring the temperature of the water at different depths. He corked an empty bottle and tied it to a leaded rope, letting out twenty fathoms, then drawing it back up. The cork remained in place and the bottle empty. Then he threw it back over the side and let it out thirty-five fathoms before drawing it up. This time, the pressure of the water at depth having pushed the cork into the bottle, the bottle was full of water from that depth. By Franklin’s thermometer the difference between the temperature at the surface and the temperature below was as much as twelve degrees. In other words, the Gulf Stream was a river of warm water flowing over the colder body of the ocean. Franklin drew the characteristically practical conclusion that “the thermometer may be a useful instrument to a navigator.” A captain sailing north should seek warm water, which would indicate a current moving from south to north; a captain sailing south should hunt for cold.

  Other observations involved the safety of ocean travel. He reiterated his recommendation to build watertight bulkheads belowdecks, after the Chinese fashion. Recalling having read of the proas of the Polynesian islanders, which employed outriggers to resist oversetting, he wondered whether the same effect might be achieved by making double-hulled ships with spars between the hulls (a later generation would call such vessels catamarans). He remembered seeing “islands of ice” (icebergs) off Newfoundland on earlier voyages and advocated lookouts to avoid them. He noted that though these and other safety measures might make sense to landlubbers, they would probably be resisted by sailors. “Our seafaring people are brave, despise danger, and reject such precautions of safety, being cowards only in one sense, that of fearing to be thought afraid.” Appealing over their heads, as it were, he pointed out that safety measures would reduce insurance rates and command a premium from passengers less careless with their lives than the sailors.

  During the voyage Franklin also returned to his much earlier theme of efficient combustion. Recalling the trouble the smoke of London had occasioned him, he described an improved stove, one designed to burn the soft coal so coughingly common in England and to consume all its own smoke. In a separate essay he addressed the causes and cures of smoky chimneys. For all the honors he had received for his electrical work and other scientific speculations, he never forgot that upon such humble issues as access to heat was a happy society constructed. “In traveling I have observed that in those parts where the inhabitants can have neither wood nor coal nor turf but at excessive prices, the working people live in miserable hovels, are ragged, and have nothing comfortable about them. But when fuel is cheap (or where they have the art of managing it to advantage) they are well furnished with necessaries and have decent habitations.”

  On the forty-eighth day out, Franklin awoke to learn that the vessel had passed Cape May and entered the estuary of the Delaware. They ascended to Newcastle before the wind died and the tide turned, and they anchored for the night. “With the flood in the morning,” Franklin recorded, “came a light breeze, which brought us above Gloucester Point, in full view of dear Philadelphia! when we again cast anchor to wait for the health officer, who, having made his visit, and finding no sickness, gave us leave to land. My son-in-law came with a boat for us; we landed at Market Street wharf, where we were received by a crowd of people with huzzas, and accompanied with acclamations quite to my door. Found my family well. God be praised and thanked for all his mercies!”

  The war had been hard on Philadelphia, but the peace was almost harder. The march of armies through the streets, the arrival of refugees, the flight of refugees, the occupation by the British, the evacuation by the British, the sundry other insults of war had left William Penn’s “green country town” battered and worn. Visitors remarked the peeling paint and broken windows. Houses and public buildings that had sheltered soldiers and horses stank of the waste of both species. Light rains made rock-strewn quagmires of streets where tight cobbles had formerly defied the heaviest downpours.

  But at least the war had been good for business. Bakers, butchers, tailors, printers, and purveyors of all manner of necessities and luxuries had supplied the contending armies in turn (and in some cases simultaneously). The same crew had fed, housed, entertained, and otherwise supplied the members of the Congress and their assorted supplicants and dependents.

  The Congress was the first to go when the war ended, departing even before all the soldiers left. In June 1783 some three hundred troops of the Pennsylvania Line surrounded the State House and demanded assurances of Congress they would receive their back pay before being mustered out. The leadership of the Congress, incensed at this mutinous behavior
, insisted that the Pennsylvania government discipline the rebellious troops. The Pennsylvania Executive Council respectfully demurred. The troops announced a twenty-minute deadline for the hostage Congress to redress their grievances. Some congressmen, noting the jugs being passed around among the rebels, feared for their lives; several others guessed that the liquor would distract the mutineers. Summoning all their dignity, these latter lawmakers marched straight out through the siege line to safety, whereupon the soldiers returned to their barracks.

  Shortly thereafter the president of the Congress, Elias Boudinot, summoned the members to abandon this seat of sedition for the safer neighborhood of Princeton, New Jersey. The stated reason for the move was the refusal of the Pennsylvania government to take appropriate measures against the revolt. Additional reasons, which may have counted for more among many members, were the high cost of living and related distractions of Philadelphia. Even before the mutiny one member reported that it was “generally agreed that Congress should remove to a place of less expense, less avocation and less influence than are to be expected in a commercial and opulent city.”

  The pullout of Congress combined with the end of the war to derange business. The shortages of wartime had driven prices up; the surpluses of peacetime drove them back down. Determining whether they fell further than they had risen was complicated by the currency gyrations the Congress had fostered by its penchant for papering over its fiscal problems with flimsy money.

  Philadelphia’s—and Pennsylvania’s—problems were aggravated by politics that made the old tiffs between the proprietary and antiproprietary parties appear almost genteel. The Revolution had solved the problem with the Penns, the one that had consumed so much of Franklin’s political career, by placing them definitively on the wrong side of history.

  Richard Penn, the last proprietary governor, had been commissioned by the Continental Congress to carry the Olive Branch petition of 1775 to King George; upon its rejection Penn calculated that safety lay on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and stayed in England. The new state constitution adopted the following year—over the drafting of which Franklin had presided—wrote the proprietors out of Pennsylvania politics; it meanwhile wrote in an entire class of voters heretofore excluded. Essentially all tax-paying adult males could now vote to elect members to the unicameral legislature Franklin favored. Annual elections guaranteed that the legislature would remain close to the people, as did term limits preventing members from serving more than four years out of any seven. An oath to uphold the people’s interest was required of officeholders. A bill of rights protected the people from overreaching government.

  In the flush of independence a populist government seemed just the thing for Pennsylvania, but before long, doubts began to surface. The constitution drew support among the artisans of Philadelphia (the people occupying Franklin’s old niche), but its real backers were the farmers in the western part of the state (the heirs of the Paxton mob he had confronted on behalf of the Assembly). Evincing skepticism were members of the old proprietary party (whom Franklin had opposed), but also men who through their own efforts had attained a measure of wealth (men like Franklin). In time the two groups formed factions, with the former calling themselves Constitutionalists, the latter Republicans.

  Franklin’s arrival coincided with a raucous election campaign between the two groups. Consequently the effusive welcome he received reflected not simply gratitude for past accomplishments but hope for future support. Pennsylvanians—like Americans generally—were not yet reconciled to the existence of political parties: more or less permanent groupings with predictably clashing interests. They cherished a belief that parties were an artifact of English corruption; having done with England, America would be free of parties. In Pennsylvania, Constitutionalists and Republicans alike looked to Franklin to soothe factional passions and heal the growing rift in society.

  He had hardly landed before the leaders of both parties came calling. A delegation of Constitutionalists remembered fondly his role in writing the constitution, and nominated him for a place on the Executive Council. The Republicans, applauding his unexampled efforts on behalf of independence, and more recently of peace, nominated him too.

  The dual nominations assured his election to the Executive Council, which proceeded to choose him as its head. When the Assembly met a week later, it joined forces with the Council to elect Franklin president of Pennsylvania. The vote was nearly unanimous, only one ballot besides Franklin’s own not naming him.

  This turn of events surprised Franklin as much as it gratified him. Thomas Paine had written welcoming Franklin home; Franklin replied, “The ease and rest you wish me to enjoy for the remainder of my days is certainly what is most proper for me, what I long wished for, and what I proposed to myself in resigning my late employment. But it is what I am not likely to obtain.” He recounted how the leaders of the two parties had approached him to reunify the people of Pennsylvania. “I had not sufficient firmness to refuse their request.”

  After all the slanders his reputation had suffered in his absence, it was nice to know that his work was appreciated. “The people, when one serves them faithfully and steadily, are not ungrateful,” he wrote an English acquaintance. To Jonathan Williams he confessed, “Old as I am, I am not yet grown insensible with respect to reputation.” At the same time, he guessed that by his accepting the new office, his reputation must suffer. “I apprehend they expect too much of me.”

  As the excitement of his homecoming wore off, so did the effect of that excitement on his health. Fresh from the boat he had written to John and Mrs. Jay of his delight at the revivifying effects of his journey. “I am now so well as to think it possible that I may once more have the pleasure of seeing you both perhaps at New York. I imagine that on the sandy road between Burlington and Amboy I could bear an easy coach, and the rest is water.” During the next few months, however, his ailments returned, and the stone, especially, kept him close to home. Early in 1786 an acquaintance offered to sell him a farm just eight miles outside of Philadelphia; Franklin declined, saying he could not visit the estate if he owned it. “The stone does not permit me to ride either on horseback or in a wheel carriage.”

  Yet if he could not travel, he could enjoy the quiet satisfaction of life among family and his few surviving old friends. He met with the Union Fire Club, now approaching the half-century mark of its existence. Only four of the founding members were still alive, and they had not answered alarms for years. Yet Franklin gamely promised to have his bucket and kit ready for the next meeting. The American Philosophical Society welcomed him back; it would be honored, its editorial board averred, to print in its Transactions the pieces he had written at sea.

  But home was what supplied the deepest personal satisfaction. “I am now in the bosom of my family,” he wrote the Jays, “and find four new little prattlers who cling about the knees of their Grandpapa and afford me great pleasure.” Jonathan Shipley, who had opened his home and family to Franklin, inquired of his friend’s domestic circumstances. “They are at present as happy as I could wish them,” Franklin replied. “I am surrounded by my offspring, a dutiful and affectionate daughter in my house, with six grandchildren, the eldest of which [Benny] you have seen, who is now at a College in the next street, finishing the learned part of his education; the others promising, both for parts and good dispositions. What their conduct may be when they grow up and enter the important scenes of life, I shall not live to see, and I cannot foresee. I therefore enjoy among them the present hour, and leave the future to Providence.”

  The proximity of his daughter and her children doubtless reminded Franklin of his two sons who were missing. He did not speak directly of William and Franky, but they almost certainly influenced his remarks to Jonathan Shipley about family life.

  He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand, as Watts says, a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too. When we laun
ch our little fleet of barques into the ocean, bound to different ports, we hope for each a prosperous voyage; but contrary winds, hidden shoals, storms, and enemies come in for a share in the disposition of events; and though these occasion a mixture of disappointment, yet, considering the risque where we can make no insurance, we should think our selves happy if some return with success.

  Family was a form of immortality, but perhaps not the only form. Franklin explained to Shipley that though he fared as well as he had any right to expect at his age, he could not live much longer. “The course of nature must soon put a period to my present mode of existence.” What would come after? Franklin was intrigued to find out. “Having seen during a long life a good deal of this world, I feel a growing curiosity to be acquainted with some other.” He hoped not to be disappointed; rather, with “filial confidence,” he resigned his spirit to “that great and good Parent of mankind who created it, and who has so graciously protected and prospered me from my birth to the present hour.”

  George Whately had remarked on what remained at the end of a long life, and had sent an epitaph written by Pope, which included a line scoffing at worldly praise: “He ne’er cared a pin/What they said or may say of the mortal within.” Franklin was skeptical. “It is so natural to wish to be spoken well of, whether alive or dead, that I imagine he could not be quite exempt from that desire; and that he at least wished to be thought a wit, or he would not have given himself the trouble of writing so good an epitaph to leave behind him.”