The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (75 page)

“Zoons, what does the fellow mean! Begone with your iron, or I’ll break your head!”

“Nay, Monsieur,” replies he, “if you do not choose it, I do not insist upon it. But at least you will in justice have the goodness to pay me something for the heating of my iron.”

17
Duties and pleasures
1766–67

“My Dear Child,” Franklin wrote Debbie a little later, packing a box for shipment home:

As the Stamp Act is at length repealed, I am willing you should have a new gown, which you may suppose I did not send sooner as I knew you would not like to be finer than your neighbours, unless in a gown of your own spinning. Had the trade between the two countries totally ceased, it was a comfort that I had once been clothed from head to foot in woolen and linen of my wife’s manufacture, that I never was prouder of any dress in my life, and that she and her daughter might do it again if it was necessary.

Franklin described how he had told Parliament that the Americans could learn to make their own clothes before the ones they were wearing wore out. “And indeed if they all had as many old clothes as your old man has, that would not be very unlikely; for I think you and George reckoned when I was last at home, at least 20 pair of old breeches.”

So Debbie got a bolt of satin and Sally a new negligee and petticoat, while ships traveling in the opposite direction carried cargo of another sort, namely congratulations for Franklin on a job well done. “The Assembly entertain the most grateful sense of the firmness and integrity with which you have served your country on this very important occasion—and will not be wanting in their demonstrations of it on your return,” reported Joseph Galloway. The truly inveterate of Franklin’s enemies, Galloway said, still slandered him, but counterproductively. “They are daily put to shame on that account.”

Franklin could not but be pleased at the praise, yet he refused to overvalue it. If he was lionized now, he would be lambasted again. Two weeks after his session in Commons, but before reports of it reached America, he wrote to Jane Mecom, who herself had written to him complaining of his ill treatment at the hands of his enemies. “As to the reports you mention that are spread to my disadvantage, I give myself as little concern about them as possible,” he said.

I have often met with such treatment from people that I was all the while endeavouring to serve. At other times I have been extolled extravagantly when I have had little or no merit. These are the operations of nature. It sometimes is cloudy, it rains, it hails, again ’tis clear and pleasant, and the sun shines on us.

Take one thing with another, and the world is a pretty good sort of world; and ’tis our duty to make the best of it and be thankful. One’s true happiness depends more upon one’s own judgement of one’s self, on a consciousness of rectitude in action and intention, and in the approbation of those few who judge impartially, than upon the applause of the unthinking undiscerning multitude, who are apt to cry Hosanna today, and tomorrow, Crucify him.

Franklin had turned sixty during the fight for repeal; this personal milestone understandably occasioned reflection of the sort he shared with his sister, who had just lost her husband of many years. Some months earlier one of his oldest friends, Junto charter member Hugh
Roberts, had written with news of the club and how the political quarreling in Philadelphia had continued to divide the membership. Franklin expressed hope that the squabbles would not keep Roberts from the meetings. “’tis now perhaps one of the
oldest
clubs, as I think it was formerly one of the
best,
in the King’s dominions; it wants but about two years of forty since it was established.” Few men were so lucky as to belong to such a group. “We loved and still love one another; we are grown grey together and yet it is too early to part. Let us sit till the evening of life is spent; the last hours were always the most joyous. When we can stay no longer ’tis time enough then to bid each other good night, separate, and go quietly to bed.”

And in what consisted that final sleep? Franklin’s theology had changed over the years, from borderline atheism to rationalistic deism. At times in his later years he would approach Christianity. Throughout, however, Franklin’s God remained as reasonable as Franklin himself. In Philadelphia before leaving for London this latest time, Franklin heard from his old friend, the evangelist George Whitefield. Franklin replied:

Your frequently repeated wishes and prayers for my eternal as well as temporal happiness are very obliging. I can only thank you for them, and offer you mine in return. I have my self no doubts that I shall enjoy as much of both as is proper for me. That Being who gave me existence, and through almost threescore years has been continually showering his favours upon me, whose very chastisements have been blessings to me, can I doubt that he loves me? And if he loves me, can I doubt that he will go on to take care of me not only here but hereafter? This to some may seem presumption; to me it appears the best grounded hope: hope of the future, built on experience of the past.

And that Being looked after not only individual souls but their actions together. Franklin was the least sectarian person he knew, and he shuddered at the illegitimate intrusion of religion into politics. But he believed that right would eventually win out. “The malice of our adversaries I am well acquainted with,” he reassured a friend and ally who had gone down to defeat in the 1764 Assembly election. “But hitherto it has been harmless, all their arrows shot against us have been like those that Rabelais speaks of which were headed with butter hardened in the sun. As long as I have known the world I have observed that wrong is always
growing more wrong, till there is no bearing, and that right, however opposed, comes right at last.”

Franklin
passed another milestone during that same busy period. After eighteen years his printing partnership with David Hall came to its scheduled end. Franklin at sixty had no desire to extend it; Hall was happy to proceed in the printing business on his own. Before leaving for London, Franklin had given James Parker his power of attorney to settle the account with Hall; the report Parker filed revealed, among innumerable details, that Franklin had taken nearly £14,000 out of the business over the eighteen years, in the form chiefly of cash but including certain in-kind supplies and services. At the termination of the partnership, Franklin owed Hall slightly less than £1,000, by Hall’s (and Parker’s) reckoning.

This amount injected a slight element of friction at the close of what had been a productive and profitable relationship for both men. Franklin questioned some of the entries and totals in Parker’s accounting, but his distance from Philadelphia postponed any final settlement.

Hall was willing to trust Franklin for the balance; somewhat more unsettling was what Hall interpreted to be Franklin’s participation in a new printing venture just months after Franklin & Hall dissolved. Two of the prime movers behind the new partnership were Joseph Galloway and Thomas Wharton; the expressed purpose was the dissemination of the views of the antiproprietary party through a new paper called the
Pennsylvania Chronicle.
The partnership and purpose certainly suggested Franklin’s participation, as did rumors that Franklin was putting money into the new venture. When it opened for business in a house owned by Franklin, the connection appeared confirmed.

Not surprisingly, Hall was miffed. He wrote Franklin relating what he knew of this upstart press, and what he was hearing about Franklin’s taking a part. “This I will never allow myself to believe, having still, as I always had, the highest opinion of your honour,” he declared, as if requesting reassurance. Hall reminded Franklin of the clause in their contract that forbade either to compete with the other. “Though you are not absolutely prohibited from being any farther concerned in the printing business in this place, yet so much is plainly implied.” But Hall preferred not to rely on a contract; rather he appealed their long-standing friendship, a friendship “I shall always value and endeavour to deserve.”

Franklin supplied the requested reassurance. He had no hand in the new printing business and told Hall so. “It was set on foot without my knowledge or participation, and the first notice I had of it was by reading the advertisement in your paper.”

Yet he could not let Hall’s interpretation of their own partnership agreement go uncontested. That agreement forbade competition
during the life
of the partnership but not beyond. There was reason for this. “I could not possibly foresee 18 years beforehand, that I should at the end of that term be so rich as to live without business. And if this did not happen, it would be obliging myself to the hard alternative of
starving
or
banishment,
since threescore is rather too late an age to think of going ’prentice to learn a new trade, and I have no other.”

As matters currently stood, Franklin did not expect to reenter the printing trade. His office as deputy postmaster provided an income, as to a lesser extent did rents from his various properties. Certain debts were owed him, which he hoped to collect. Nor were his needs great: “I am not inclined to much expense.” But things might change, and he could not bar himself his trade. “I am sure you would take no pleasure in seeing me ruined, or obliged at my time of life to quit my country, friends and connections to get my bread in a strange place.”

Franklin
had other hopes for his retirement from the printing business. His speculative schemes in land moved forward—slowly, to be sure, and in a different direction than originally planned, but forward still. Although the Proclamation of 1763 ruled out the Ohio project for the time being, opportunities elsewhere beckoned. The British government appeared eager to make British the territories seized from France; to this end London granted real estate in Nova Scotia to speculators willing to develop the property and plant settlements. Richard Jackson alerted Franklin to this opportunity, and in the autumn of 1765 Franklin became one of twenty-three individuals, mostly Philadelphians, jointly awarded 200,000 acres on the St. John and Peticodiac rivers.

The land was not free. Legal and surveying costs had to be covered. Attempt was made to minimize the former by chartering the venture on October 31, 1765, the day before the Stamp Act, which decreed a tax on such transactions, was to take effect. (In light of the colonies’ refusal of the stamps, and the later repeal of the act, what Franklin and his associates saved by their timeliness was not money but several months.) Regarding
the surveying costs, Deborah six weeks later reported paying £53 to a young surveyor named Anthony Wayne (who would win renown as “Mad Anthony” Wayne of the Revolutionary War). “So you see that I am a real land jobber,” Deborah remarked, in words that applied as well to her husband.

The grantees committed themselves to improving their lands—enclosing them, cultivating them, or finding others to do so—at the rate of one-third of the grant for each ten years elapsed. An annual quitrent eventually amounting to one farthing per acre would be owed the Crown, starting in five years. Should the grantees fail to meet these conditions, the land would revert to the Crown.