The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (129 page)

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 competition. 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?”)

Franklin reckoned himself blessed. “I have found my family here in health, good circumstances, and well respected by their fellow citizens,” he reported to Polly Hewson. The companions of his youth were almost
all departed, but he enjoyed the company of their children and grandchildren. “I have public business enough to preserve me from
ennui,
and private amusement besides in conversation, books, my garden, and cribbage.” He played cards with friends for amusement. Occasionally he felt a twinge of compunction when he reflected on his idleness. “But another reflection comes to relieve me, whispering: ‘You know that the soul is immortal; why then should you be such a niggard of a little time, when you have a whole eternity before you?’ So, being easily convinced, and, like other reasonable creatures, satisfied with a small reason when it is in favour of doing what I have a mind to, I shuffle the cards again, and begin another game.”

29
Sunrise at Dusk
1786–87

In correspondence with British friends, Franklin took pains to defend America against reports of post-Revolutionary troubles. Many Britons, for reasons not difficult to fathom, liked to read that their wayward cousins had cause to rue their waywardness, and consequently their papers often carried such stories. Franklin regularly rebutted these tales. “Your newspapers, to please honest
John Bull,
paint our situation here in frightful colours, as if we were very miserable since we broke our connexion with him,” he wrote in the autumn of 1786, in one letter of many like it. “But I will give you some remarks by which you may form your own judgment. Our husbandmen, who are the bulk of the nation, have had plentiful crops; their produce sells at high prices and for ready, hard money—wheat, for instance,