A Benjamin Franklin Reader
Page 61
The Assembly looked into my entering into the first part of the engagement, as an essential service to the Province, since it secured the credit of the paper money then spread over all the country. They gave me their thanks in form when I returned. But the proprietaries were enraged at Governor Denny for having passed the act, and turned him out with threats of suing him for breach of instructions which he had given bond to observe. He, however, having done it at the insistence of the General, and for His Majesty’s service, and having some powerful interest at court, despised the threats and they were never put in execution.
Here ends Franklin’s text. By May 1789, a year before his death, he was facing ever greater pain from his kidney stones, and he had resorted to using Laudanium, a tincture of opium and alcohol. “I am so interrupted by extreme pain, which obliges me to have recourse to opium, that between the effects of both, I have but little time in which I can write anything,” he complained to his friend Benjamin Vaughan, who had urged him to complete his narrative. He also worried that what he had written was not worth publishing. “Give me your candid opinion whether I had best publish it or suppress it,” he asked, “for I am grown so old and feeble in mind, as well as body, that I cannot place any confidence in my own judgment.”
Back in 1728, when he was a fledgling printer imbued with the pride that he believed an honest man should have in his trade, Franklin had composed for himself, or at least for his amusement, a cheeky epitaph that reflected his wry perspective on his pilgrim’s progress through this world:
The body of
B. Franklin, Printer;
(Like the cover of an old book,
Its contents worn out,
and stripped of its lettering and gilding)
Lies here, food for worms.
But the work shall not be lost:
For it will, (as he believed) appear once more,
In a new and more elegant edition,
Revised and corrected
By the Author.
Shortly before he died, however, he prescribed something simpler to be placed over the gravesite that he would share with his wife. His tombstone should be, he wrote, a marble stone “six feet long, four feet wide, plain, with only a small molding round the upper edge, and this inscription: Benjamin and Deborah Franklin.”
Close to 20,000 mourners, more than had ever before gathered in Philadelphia, watched as his funeral procession made its way to the Christ Church burying ground, a few blocks from his home. In front marched the clergymen of the city, all of them, of every faith.
*I fancy his harsh & tyrannical treatment of me, might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my entire life.
About the Author
Walter Isaacson is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and the president of the Aspen Institute. He has been the chairman and CEO of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Kissinger: A Biography and the coauthor, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives with his wife and daughter in Washington, D.C.