The First American

by H. W. Brands

  For himself, Franklin said, he preferred the sentiment of a traditional drinking song entitled “The Old Man’s Wish,” which in successive verses asked for a warm house in a country town, an easy horse, good books, ingenious and cheerful companions, pudding on Sundays, stout ale, and a bottle of burgundy. Each verse ended:

  May I govern my passions with an absolute sway,

  Grow wiser and better as my strength wears away,

  Without gout or stone, by a gentle decay.

  “But what signifies our wishing?” Franklin asked. “Things happen, after all, as they will happen. I have sung that Wishing Song a thousand times when I was young, and now find, at fourscore, that the three contraries have befallen me, being subject to the gout and the stone, and being not yet master of all my passions—like the proud girl in my country who wished and resolved not to marry a parson, nor a Presbyterian, nor an Irishman, and at length found herself married to an Irish Presbyterian parson.”

  At times Franklin approached a belief in reincarnation. Observing the “great frugality” of nature, which the Deity had designed so as to ensure that nothing once created was lost, Franklin supposed that something similar applied to souls. “When I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of water wasted, I cannot suspect the annihilation of souls, or believe that he will suffer the daily waste of millions of minds ready made that now exist, and put himself to the continual trouble of making new ones.” Franklin included his own soul in this conservation scheme. “Thus finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist; and with all the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition of mine; hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.”

  Franklin did not share this unorthodox view with everyone—and he counseled others to exercise similar caution. An author unidentified in the surviving correspondence, but quite possibly Thomas Paine, sent Franklin a manuscript challenging the basis of organized religion; Franklin told him not to publish. “Though your reasonings are subtle, and may prevail with some readers, you will not succeed so as to change the general sentiments of mankind on that subject, and the consequence of printing this piece will be a great deal of odium drawn upon yourself, mischief to you, and no benefit to others. He that spits against the wind, spits in his own face.” Even if the manuscript succeeded in its purpose, what good would come? The author might be able to live a virtuous life without the aid of religion, but not everyone was so blessed. “Think how great a proportion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced and inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to support their virtue, and retain them in the practice of it till it becomes habitual.” Usually a model of tact, Franklin now chose bluntness. “Burn this piece before it is seen by any other person, whereby you will save yourself a great deal of mortification from the enemies it may raise against you, and perhaps a good deal of regret and repentance. If men are so wicked as we now see them with religion, what would they be if without it?” (If the author of the manuscript was Paine, Franklin’s warning had some effect: Paine did not publish The Age of Reason for several years—to a reception very much like that Franklin forecast.)

  Other advice was more positive. The young Noah Webster was busy formulating the declaration of lexicographical independence that would make his name synonymous with American dictionaries; on a visit to Philadelphia he shared his thoughts with Franklin, who resurrected his own ideas on a phonetic alphabet. The exchange fired Webster’s enthusiasm. “I am encouraged by the prospect of rendering my country some service, to proceed in my design of refining the language and improving our general system of education,” he wrote George Washington. “Dr. Franklin has extended my views to a very simple plan of reducing the language to perfect regularity.” Though the “perfect regularity” of Franklin’s phonetic scheme ultimately proved too radical for Webster, enough of the spirit of Franklin remained for Webster to dedicate his pioneering Dissertations on the English Language to Franklin.

  During his first several months back from France, Franklin spent more time than he wished tending to details that remained from his diplomatic mission. One detail seemed more than a detail to his critics, for it involved a missing million livres. Because of the irregular nature of French aid to the United States prior to the treaties of 1778—through the likes of Beaumarchais and the Farmers General—records of the transactions were incomplete and contradictory. Certain receipts from King Louis, signed by Franklin, registered grants to America of 3 million livres, but only 2 million appeared on the deposit accounts of the American government in its French bank. “I wonder how I came to sign the contract acknowledging three millions of gift, when in reality there was only two,” Franklin wrote Ferdinand Grand, America’s banker in Paris. “I most earnestly request of you to get this matter explained, that I may stand clear before I die, lest some enemy should afterwards accuse me of having received a million not accounted for.”

  Unfortunately for Franklin’s peace of mind, Grand could not find the money either. Franklin guessed that the records had been buried for a reason. “I conjecture it must be money advanced for our use to M. de Beaumarchais,” he informed Congress, “and that it is a mystère du cabinet, which perhaps should not be further enquired into.” The whole business had been delicate for the French government, and evidently remained delicate. “It may well be supposed that if the Court furnished him with the means of supplying us, they may not be willing to furnish authentic proofs of such a transaction so early in our dispute with Britain.”

  Franklin’s conjecture eventually proved correct. But the evidence—in the form of a receipt from Beaumarchais for the million—did not surface until after Franklin’s death, and in the meantime it complicated his efforts to settle his own account with Congress. An auditor engaged by Congress determined that Franklin was owed some 7,500 livres for his services in France. But between the continuing hostility of the Lee faction, which seized upon the missing money as evidence that Franklin had filled his own pocket, and the general tardiness of Congress in paying all its creditors, his balance remained unpaid.

  He had better luck with Georgia. When that colony had engaged him to serve as its agent in London before the war, it promised him £100 per year. But the money was never paid, and with everything else that occurred in the interim, he had never pursued the debt. Now he reminded the appropriate officials of the state of Georgia, who responded by offering him land, of which they had much, in lieu of cash, of which they had little. Georgia had awarded a handsome tract to Admiral d’Estaing, who had been severely wounded fighting for Savannah; Franklin wrote to d’Estaing describing his own settlement with Georgia: “The Assembly of that state has granted me 3,000 acres of their land to be located wherever I can find any vacant. I wish much that it might be near yours, for you contrived to make your neighbourhood so agreeable to me at Passy that I could wish to be your neighbour everywhere.”

  Franklin did not worry excessively about his finances, partly because he did not expect to live long and partly because his fortunes had survived the war better than he had expected. “My own estate I find more than tripled in value since the Revolution,” he wrote Ferdinand Grand. This figure was misleading, in that the war had inflated prices across the economy. In this same letter Franklin explained that the high price of labor was causing him to defer some building plans he had devised. All the same, he had resources sufficient to maintain him even in the more comfortable style to which he had grown accustomed in France.

  In time he grew used to the higher cost of labor, and he determined to build. He tore down three old houses on lots he owned on Market Street and prepared to replace them with new ones. But before the construction commenced, a neighbor disputed a lot line, and litigation delayed the work. Because Franklin had already engaged the workmen and was obligated for their wages, he set them to building an addition to his own ho
use, now too small for himself, Sally, Richard, and the grandchildren. “I propose to have in it a long room for my library and instruments, with two good bedchambers and two garrets,” he explained to Jane Mecom. “The library is to be even with the floor of my best old chamber, and the story under it will for the present be employed only to hold wood, but may be made into rooms hereafter.” He granted that this might not be the wisest use of resources. “I hardly know how to justify building a library at an age that will so soon oblige me to quit it.” But he aimed to indulge himself. “We are apt to forget that we are grown old, and building is an amusement.”

  It was also a business. By the beginning of 1787, Philadelphia had pulled itself out of the postwar slump, and rising rents promised profits to landlords. Repeating himself to Ferdinand Grand that building was “an old man’s amusement,” Franklin added, “The advantage is for his posterity. Since my coming home, the market is extended before my ground next the street, and the high rents such a situation must afford have been one of my inducements.”

  Not for years had the entrepreneur in Franklin been heard from; now he returned. Franklin replaced the three decrepit houses on Market Street at the front of his lot with two large, fine ones, each twenty-four feet wide by forty-five feet deep, and three stories tall, besides the garrets. An arched passage between the two allowed access to Franklin’s own house in back. Elsewhere in the neighborhood he built three other houses. “The affairs in dealing with so many workmen and furnishers of materials,” he wrote a French friend in April 1787, “such as bricklayers, carpenters, stone-cutters, painters, glaziers, lime-burners, timber-merchants, copper-smiths, carters, labourers, etc., etc., have added not a little to the fatiguing business I have gone through in the last year.” But on the whole he enjoyed the work, which, as he said to Jane Mecom, made him forget he was grown old.

  The fatiguing business he referred to was that of Pennsylvania politics. In May 1786 Benjamin Rush dined with Franklin. “He appeared as cheerful and gay as a young man of five-and-twenty,” Rush wrote, “but his conversation was full of the wisdom and experience of mellow old age. He has destroyed party rage in our state, or to borrow an allusion from one of his discoveries, his presence and advice, like oil upon troubled waters, have composed the contending waves of faction which for so many years agitated the State of Pennsylvania.”

  Rush was always generous to Franklin, who just weeks before had felt obliged to request that Rush omit an effusive encomium to Franklin he intended to employ as a dedication to a new book. And his description of Franklin’s calming effect on Pennsylvania politics may have been more apt than he intended. The surface was indeed smoothed—sufficiently that Franklin was reelected president in the autumn of 1786, this time unanimously (except, again, for his own vote).

  Yet beneath the surface, deep currents still drove Pennsylvania politics. Some reflected the old divisions within the province; others were peculiar to independent statehood. The latter category included the Bank of North America, a brainchild of Robert Morris, and in the eyes of the better-off classes, including most Pennsylvania Republicans, a necessary force for stability and progress in society. To the Constitutionalists, on the other hand, the Bank of North America—and in particular its existence as a corporation of unlimited duration—represented a threat to liberty and the very meaning of the Revolution. “The accumulation of enormous wealth in the hands of a society who claim perpetual duration,” wrote one Constitutionalist, referring to the bank, “will necessarily produce a degree of influence and power which can not be entrusted in the hands of any set of men whatsoever without endangering the public safety.”

  Throughout the 1780s the Constitutionalists employed every opportunity to curtail the activities of the bank. In 1786 they succeeded in repealing its state charter. That the bank continued to operate under charters it had obtained from other states simply confirmed the Constitutionalist judgment that it was a hydra-headed monster ready to devour the people. Meanwhile the Republicans mounted a counterattack. When Robert Morris became head of the party, Benjamin Rush—a central figure in the adoption of the 1776 constitution but lately put off by the radicalism of the Constitutionalists—recorded hopefully, “It is expected that the charter of the Bank of North America will be restored.”

  A second bone of contention was closer to Franklin’s heart, if perhaps further from his wallet. The College of Philadelphia, which had evolved out of Franklin’s Academy, gradually grew away from its egalitarian roots, so that by the start of the Revolutionary era it was often seen as a nest of aristocracy and Anglicanism. When the provost and several of the trustees exhibited Tory tendencies—remaining in the city during the British occupation, for example—the state Assembly seized the institution. It threw out the administration and trustees, renamed the college the University of the State of Pennsylvania, and put it on the public dole.

  But the provost and trustees waged a rearguard action. They alleged abrogation of legitimate property rights and, when the state failed to provide adequate funding, fiscal mismanagement. Restoration of the college became a central issue for Republicans; defense of egalitarianism in education remained a rallying cry for Constitutionalists.

  Franklin did his best to remain above the fray. Partly from pride of authorship, he held to the basic principles of the 1776 constitution: the legislature of one house, the annual elections, the executive responsibility in the hands of a council (headed by a primus inter pares president—currently himself) rather than a single strong governor. In this regard he was a Constitutionalist. At the same time, he shared the philosophical and economic conservatism of many Republicans. He quietly backed recharter of the Bank of North America as good for business (this goal was accomplished in 1787). Ambivalent as he was, and appreciating the motives of those who voted for him as a symbol of unity, he avoided controversy. Indeed, he avoided most meetings of the Executive Council, attending the daily sessions about once a week.

  Instead he made the rounds of his construction sites, querying here, nudging there. Workers on his own house, removing materials from the roof, discovered something that gave him satisfaction. Years earlier, while he was gone, the house had received a terrible blow from lightning. The neighbors, who saw the strike, ran to the house to inquire of the condition of the inhabitants and to put out the fire they believed must have been kindled. But there was no fire, and all inside were well, if rather dazed by the loud sound. Franklin now discovered why, as he explained to an Italian scientist who had sent him his latest work on lightning rods, electrical conductors, and the like. “The conductor was taken down to be removed, when I found that the copper point which had been nine inches long, and in its thickest part about one third of an inch in diameter, had been almost all melted down and blown away, very little of it remaining attached to the iron rod. So that at length the invention has been of some use to the inventor.”

  Yet the inventor did not intend to rely on copper and iron exclusively. The construction gave him scope to indulge his long interest in fire prevention. “I lament the loss your town has suffered this year by fire,” he wrote Jane Mecom after hearing of Boston’s latest blaze. “I sometimes think men do not act like reasonable creatures when they build for themselves combustible dwellings in which they are every day obliged to use fire. In my new dwellings I have taken a few precautions, not generally used: to wit, none of the wooden work of one room communicates with the wooden work of any other room; and all the floors, and even the steps of the stairs, are plastered close to the boards, besides the plastering on the laths under the joists. There are also trap-doors to go out upon the roofs, that one may go out and wet the shingles in case of a neighbouring fire.”

  One of the buildings on Market Street was intended for a print shop for Benny Bache, after he finished at the college. Almost certainly the young man joined his grandfather in supervising the work there; doubtless they discussed the prospects for a new printer in the city, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the comp
etition. Perhaps they spoke of the paper young Ben would publish.

  From a distance Franklin observed his eldest grandson. Temple spent most weeks in New Jersey on his father’s old farm; Franklin wrote with encouragement and advice. Ever the practical educator, Franklin apparently suggested that Temple apply gypsum to a meadow, in a pattern shaping the words, “This field has been plastered.” When the grass of the letters grew lusher and taller than the rest of the meadow, passersby received a lesson in agronomy.

  But it soon became apparent that Temple’s heart was not in the soil. Franklin wrote Lafayette that his grandson “amuses himself with cultivating his lands.” Franklin felt a bit guilty at having raised Temple to public office, the more since Congress had shown no inclination to honor the grandfather’s request to find a post for the young man. Besides, the older Franklin got, the more he—the lifelong city dweller—came to view agriculture as the wellspring of virtue. “I wish he would make a serious business of it, and renounce all thoughts of public employment,” Franklin wrote Lafayette, “for I think agriculture the most honourable, because the most independent, of all professions.” But youth would have its way. “I believe he hankers a little after Paris, or some of the other polished cities of Europe.”

  When the work on his own house was complete, Franklin outfitted the new rooms to his pleasure. The library had shelves that ranged from floor to ceiling. Less agile than in years past, he invented a mechanical arm for pulling books from high shelves without resort to stools or ladders. In another room he installed an unusual shoe-shaped copper tub, in which he took long hot baths to ease his stone. “He sits in the heel,” reported a guest, “and his legs go under the vamp; on the instep he has a place to fix his book; and here he sits and enjoys himself.” (This guest had both a low opinion of Pennsylvania politics and a droll sense of humor. Referring to Franklin’s selection as head of the Executive Council, he said, “His accepting the office is a sure sign of senility. But would it not be a capital subject for an historical painting—the Doctor placed at the head of the Council Board in his bathing slipper?”)