The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (136 page)

Yet to his relief, the Pennsylvania constitution forbade a fourth term, and as the weeks ran down to the end of October 1788, he looked forward to the retirement he had so long postponed. But because he postponed it so long, he discovered he had less to look forward to than he hoped. The excitement surrounding the Constitutional Convention had temporarily rejuvenated him. “Some tell me I look better, and they suppose the daily exercise of going and returning from the State House has done me good,” he told Jane just afterward. He even thought he might make a last trip to Boston. But a bad fall on the steps of his garden that winter sprained his wrist, bruised his hip, and aggravated his stone. His afflictions kept him away from the meetings of the Executive Council and canceled all plans to travel.

The finality of this left him wistful. A Boston admirer urged him to come; Franklin replied that it would be “a very great pleasure if I could once again visit my native town, and walk over the grounds I used to frequent when a boy, and where I enjoyed many of the innocent pleasures of youth, which would be so brought to my remembrance, and where I might find some of my old acquaintance to converse with.” But travel by land was too fatiguing, and travel by sea equally unappealing “to one who, although he has crossed the Atlantic eight times, and made many smaller trips, does not recollect his ever having been at sea without taking a firm resolution never to go to sea again.” Anyway, the reality would fall short of the memory. “If I were arrived in Boston I should see but little
of it, as I could neither bear walking nor riding in a carriage over its pebbled streets.” As for acquaintances, “I should find very few indeed of my old friends living, it being now sixty-five years since I left it to settle here.”

All the same, the thought of his first home would not leave him, and he would not let it go. “I enjoy the company and conversation of its inhabitants when any of them are so good as to visit me; for besides their general good sense, which I value, the Boston manner, turn of phrase, and even tone of voice and accent in pronunciation, all please and seem to refresh and revive me.”

Sometimes New England simply made him laugh. In a letter to Jane Mecom he asked whether she ever saw any of their Folger relations from Nantucket. He said he himself had not of late. “They are wonderfully shy. But I admire their honest plainness of speech. About a year ago I invited two of them to dine with me. Their answer was that they would, if they could not do better. I suppose they did better, for I never saw them afterwards.”

Franklin’s
unfailing sense of humor helped him accept his afflictions. His stone was a large one, “as I find by the weight when I turn in bed.” Close friends, passing acquaintances, and people he hardly knew sent him recipes for medications and instructions for treatments, but all to no avail. “I thank you much for your intimations of the virtues of hemlock,” he wrote Benjamin Vaughan (who had suggested a sub-Socratic dose). “But I have tried so many things with so little effect that I am quite discouraged, and have no longer any faith in remedies for the stone.”

Yet if he could not diminish the stone, at least he could try to prevent its increase. He ate less than before, largely abstained from wine and cider, and exercised with his dumbbell, which improved his circulation without requiring the kind of motion that gave him pain.

For a time innocuous palliatives alleviated the worst symptoms. “As the roughness of the stone lacerates a little the neck of the bladder,” he told the Comte de Buffon, a fellow sufferer, “I find that when the urine happens to be sharp, I have much pain in making water and frequent urgencies. For relief under this circumstance I take, going to bed, the bigness of a pigeon’s egg of jelly of blackberries. The receipt for making it
is enclosed. While I continue to do this every night, I am generally easy the day following, making water pretty freely and with long intervals.”

But Franklin’s most potent medicine was his continuing curiosity and his irrepressible interest in life. “Our ancient correspondence used to have something philosophical in it,” he wrote James Bowdoin, a recently retired old friend, in May 1788. “As you are now more free from public cares, and I expect to be so in a few months, why may we not resume that kind of correspondence?” Bowdoin’s interest was the earth; Franklin proceeded to offer several questions for reflection. “How came the earth by its magnetism? … Is it likely that iron ore immediately existed when the globe was first formed; or may it not rather be supposed to be a gradual production of time?” Was the earth’s magnetism related to the iron it contained? If so, had that iron ever been nonmagnetic? And if
that
was so, how had it become magnetized? “May not a magnetic power exist throughout our system, perhaps through all systems, so that if men could make a voyage in the starry regions, a compass might be of use? … As the poles of magnets may be changed by the presence of stronger magnets, might not, in ancient times, the near passing of some large comet, of greater magnetic power than this globe of ours, have been a means of changing its poles?” Did not the presence in cold regions of the shells and bones of animals natural to warm regions indicate that the earth’s geographic poles had shifted? “Does not the apparent wrack of the surface of this globe thrown up into long ridges of mountains, with strata in various positions, make it probable that its internal mass is a fluid, but a fluid so dense as to float the heaviest of our substances?”

Some of these conjectures—about the shifting of the earth’s magnetic and geographic poles, about the fluid nature of the earth’s interior and its relation to surface structures—were remarkably prescient, identifying a research agenda that would keep geophysicists busy into the twenty-first century. During Franklin’s day the conjectures stimulated discussion among the members of the American Philosophical Society, where this letter was read and which met in Franklin’s library when he could not get out. And they showed his mind to be as active at eighty-two as it had been at forty-two.

And
as it had been at forty-two, it was no less concerned with human welfare than with matters merely philosophical. For decades
Franklin had been troubled by shabby treatment of Indians by whites. The unfair dealings had practical implications, as when they provoked the Indians to attack frontier settlements or assist the enemies (first France, then Britain) of the people of Pennsylvania and the United States. But there was also in Franklin’s thought a fundamental feeling that Indians, as members of the human race, ought to be treated better than they often were.

On his press at Passy, Franklin had printed an essay entitled “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” in which his first sentence made plain the intended irony of his title. “Savages we call them,” he wrote, “because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.” The balance of the essay suggested that the Indians had the better of this argument. Franklin pointed out how admirably Indian ways suited the Indians. “Having few artificial wants, they have abundance of leisure for improvement by conversation. Our laborious manner of life compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the learning on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous and useless.” Plato himself could not have objected to the Indian mode of political organization. “All their government is by the counsel or advice of the sages; there is no force, there are no prisons, no officers to compel obedience or inflict punishment.” At council meetings the old men sat in the foremost ranks; when one of the old men rose to speak, everyone else observed a respectful silence. “How different this is from the conduct of a polite British House of Commons,” Franklin noted sardonically, “where scarce a day passes without some confusion that makes the Speaker hoarse in calling
to order.”

The Indians were exceedingly gracious to strangers, setting aside a special house in each village to accommodate visitors, and were exemplars of toleration. Franklin wrote of a missionary who told the Susquehanna the story of Adam’s fall, and how it had led to great travail and necessitated Jesus’ sufferings and death. “When he had finished, an Indian orator stood up to thank him,” Franklin related, with a twinkle in either his own eye or the Indian’s. “What you have told us, says he, is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider.” The Indian thereupon shared his people’s creation story with the missionary. The missionary grew impatient, then disgusted. “What I delivered to you were sacred truths,” he said. “But what you tell me is mere fable, fiction and falsehood.” The Indian replied, “My brother, it seems your friends have not done you justice in your education; they have not
well instructed you in the rules of common civility. You saw that we who understand and practise those rules believed all your stories. Why do you refuse to believe ours?”

As president of Pennsylvania, Franklin had occasion to apply his views to public policy. During the summer of 1786 the young Wyandot chief Scotosh visited Philadelphia. Franklin, recalling the elaborate treaty ceremonies in which he had taken part on the frontier thirty years earlier, paid Scotosh the courtesy of recapitulating some of those ceremonies at his house on Market Street. Scotosh expressed concern that white surveyors (“measurers”) were encroaching on Indian country. His own people were peacefully inclined, but he could not say as much of others. “The bad people will, I fear, take occasion from the measuring to do more mischief. Perhaps the measurers will be killed. And it would give pain to me and my nation to hear such bad news.”

Franklin assured the chief that Pennsylvania had no designs on his people’s lands. “This state of Pennsylvania measures no land but what has been fairly purchased of the Six Nations.” He explained that the land in question was under the control of Congress, then meeting in New York. He encouraged Scotosh to go to New York, and gave him money for the trip. He also sent a letter of recommendation to Foreign Secretary John Jay, explaining that Scotosh had been “always very friendly to our people” and hoping his fears could be assuaged. The young chief had expressed curiosity about France; Franklin suggested to Jay that Congress offer to send Scotosh overseas. This would benefit both Scotosh and American interests in the frontier regions. “It might be of use to our affairs in that part of the country if, after viewing the court and troops and population of France, he should return impressed with a high idea of the greatness and power of our ally.”

Franklin’s
judgment that savagery and civilization were no respecters of skin color led him, in the last years of his life, to embrace a movement that was by certain measures the most radical in America. Franklin came to abolitionism via anger at Britain. The American charges that Parliament intended to enslave the colonies led some among those making the charges to examine America’s own conduct in enslaving black Africans. Yet in a country where indentured servants and transported felons also provided a substantial part of the workforce, the mere existence of an institution of unfree labor was not as striking as it would
seem later. Prior to his conversion, Franklin kept his slaves, George and King, as personal servants, and apparently thought little about it.