Chapter IV: Franklin's Family Relations (5)

I was directed [he says] to their house, and we found
them both alive, but weak with age, very glad however
to see us. She seems to have been a very smart,
sensible woman. They are wealthy, have left off
business, and live comfortably. They have had only one
child, a daughter, who died, when about thirty years of
age, unmarried. She gave me several of my uncle
Benjamin's letters to her, and acquainted me where the
other remains of the family lived, of which I have,
since my return to London, found out a daughter of my
father's only sister, very old, and never married. She
is a good, clever woman, but poor, though vastly
contented with her situation, and very cheerful. The
others are in different parts of the country. I intend
to visit them, but they were too much out of our tour
in that journey.

This was in 1758. Mary Fisher had good reason to be weak with age; for this letter states that she was five years older than Franklin's sister Dowse, and remembered her going away with Franklin's father and his first wife and two other children to New England about the year 1685, or some seventy-three years before Franklin's visit to Wellingborough.

"Where are the old men?
I who have seen much,
Such have I never seen."

Only the truly gray earth, humming, as it revolves on its axis, the derisive song, heard by the fine ear of Emerson, could ask this question, unrebuked by such a stretch of human memory as that. The letter then goes on to say that from Wellingborough the writer passed to Ecton, about three or four miles away, where Franklin's father was born, and where his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had lived, and how many of the family before them they knew not.

We went first [Franklin tells us] to see the old house
and grounds; they came to Mr. Fisher with his wife,
and, after letting them for some years, finding his
rent something ill paid, he sold them. The land is now
added to another farm, and a school kept in the house.
It is a decayed old stone building, but still known by
the name of the Franklin House. Thence we went to visit
the rector of the parish, who lives close by the
church, a very ancient building. He entertained us very
kindly, and showed us the old church register, in which
were the births, marriages, and burials of our
ancestors for two hundred years, as early as his book
began. His wife, a good-natured, chatty old lady
(granddaughter of the famous Archdeacon Palmer, who
formerly had that parish, and lived there) remembered a
great deal about the family; carried us out into the
churchyard, and showed us several of their gravestones,
which were so covered with moss, that we could not read
the letters, till she ordered a hard brush and basin of
water, with which Peter (Franklin's negro servant)
scoured them clean, and then Billy (William Franklin)
copied them. She entertained and diverted us highly
with stories of Thomas Franklin, Mrs. Fisher's father,
who was a conveyancer, something of a lawyer, clerk of
the county courts and clerk to the Archdeacon in his
visitations; a very leading man in all county affairs,
and much employed in public business. He set on foot a
subscription for erecting chimes in their steeple, and
completed it, and we heard them play. He found out an
easy method of saving their village meadows from being
drowned, as they used to be sometimes by the river,
which method is still in being; but, when first
proposed, nobody could conceive how it could be; "but
however," they said, "if Franklin says he knows how to
do it, it will be done." His advice and opinion were
sought for on all occasions, by all sorts of people,
and he was looked upon, she said, by some, as something
of a conjuror. He died just four years before I was
born, on the same day of the same month.

The likeness between Thomas and his nephew may have been insufficient under any circumstances to justly suggest the thought of a metempsychosis to William Franklin, but Thomas does seem to have been a kind of tentative effort upon the part of Nature to create a Benjamin Franklin.

The letter then states that, after leaving Ecton, the party finally arrived at Birmingham where they were soon successful in looking up Deborah's and cousin Wilkinson's and cousin Cash's relations. First, they found one of the Cashes, and he went with them to Rebecca Flint's where they saw her and her husband. She was a turner, and he a button-maker; they were childless and glad to see any person that knew their sister Wilkinson. They told their visitors what letters they had received from America, and even assured them--such are the short and simple annals of the poor--that they had out of respect preserved a keg in which a gift of sturgeon from America had reached them. Then follow certain details about other members of this family connection, commonplace enough, however, to reconcile us to the fact that they have been cut short by the mordant tooth of time which has not spared the remainder of the letter.

On his second mission to England, Franklin paid another visit to these Birmingham relations of his wife, and was in that city for several days. The severest test of a good husband is to ask whether he loves his wife's relations as much as his own. To even this test Franklin appears to have been equal.

Sally Franklin, the daughter of Thomas Franklin, of Lutterworth, a second cousin of Franklin, also flits through the correspondence between Deborah and her husband. When she was about thirteen years of age, her father brought her to London to see Franklin, and Mrs. Stevenson persuaded him to leave the child under her care for a little schooling and improvement, while Franklin was off on one of his periodical tours.

When I return'd [the latter wrote to Deborah] I found
her indeed much improv'd, and grown a fine Girl. She is
sensible, and of a sweet, obliging Temper, but is now
ill of a violent Fever, and I doubt we shall lose her,
which particularly afflicts Mrs. Stevenson, not only as
she has contracted a great Affection for the Child, but
as it was she that persuaded her Father to leave her
there.

Sally, however, settled all doubts by getting well and furnishing future material for Franklin's letters to Deborah. One letter tells Deborah that Sally's father was very desirous that Franklin should take her to America with him; another pays the compliment to Sally, who was at the time in the country with her father, of saying that she is a very good girl; another thanks Deborah for her kind attitude toward her husband's partially-formed resolution of bringing Sally over to America with him; another announces that Sally is again with Mrs. Stevenson; and still another doubtless relieved Deborah of no little uncertainty of mind by informing her that Sally was about to be married to a farmer's son. "I shall miss her," comments Franklin, "as she is nimble-footed and willing to run of Errands and wait upon me, and has been very serviceable to me for some Years, so that I have not kept a Man."

Among Franklin's papers, too, was found at his death a letter from his father to him, beginning "Loving Son," which also makes some valuable contributions to our knowledge of Franklin's forefathers.

As to the original of our name, there is various
opinions [says Josiah]; some say that it came from a
sort of title, of which a book that you bought when
here gives a lively account, some think we are of a
French extract, which was formerly called Franks; some
of a free line, a line free from that vassalage which
was common to subjects in days of old; some from a bird
of long red legs. Your uncle Benjamin made inquiry of
one skilled in heraldry, who told him there is two
coats of armor, one belonging to the Franklins of the
North, and one to the Franklins of the west. However,
our circumstances have been such as that it hath hardly
been worth while to concern ourselves much about these
things any farther than to tickle the fancy a little.

Josiah then has a word to say about his great-grandfather, the Franklin who kept his Bible under a joint stool during the reign of Bloody Mary, and his grandfather. The former, he says, in his travels

went upon liking to a taylor; but he kept such a stingy
house, that he left him and travelled farther, and came
to a smith's house, and coming on a fasting day, being
in popish times, he did not like there the first day;
the next morning the servant was called up at five in
the morning, but after a little time came a good toast
and good beer, and he found good housekeeping there; he
served and learned the trade of a smith.

Josiah's grandfather, the letter tells us, was a smith also, and settled in Ecton, and "was imprisoned a year and a day on suspicion of his being the author of some poetry that touched the character of some great man." An ancestry that could boast one sturdy Tubal Cain, ready, though the fires of Smithfield were brightly burning, to hazard his life for his religious convictions, and another, with letters and courage enough to lampoon a great man in England in the sixteenth or the seventeenth century, is an ancestry that was quite worthy of investigation. It at least tickles the fancy a little, to use Josiah's phrase, to imagine that the flame of the Ecton forge lit up, generation after generation, the face of some brawny, honest toiler, not unlike the village blacksmith, whose rugged figure and manly, simple-hearted, God-fearing nature are portrayed with so much dignity and beauty in the well-known verses of Longfellow. Be this as it may, the humble lot of neither ancestral nor contemporary Franklins was a source of mortification to Poor Richard even after the popularity of his _Almanac_ had brought in a pair of shoes, two new shifts, and a new warm petticoat to his wife, and to him a second-hand coat, so good that he was no longer ashamed to go to town or be seen there.

"He that has neither fools nor beggars among his kindred, is the son of a thunder gust," said Poor Richard.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] This lady, whose father was Lewis Evans, of Philadelphia, a surveyor and map-maker, was a god-daughter of Deborah, and, according to a letter from Franklin to Deborah, dated July 22, 1774, fell little short of being ubiquitous. He wrote: "She is now again at Tunis, where you will see she has lately lain in of her third Child. Her Father, you know, was a geographer, and his daughter has some connection, I think, with the whole Globe; being born herself in America, and having her first Child in Asia, her second in Europe, and now her third in Africa."

[17] A readable essay might be written upon the sea-voyages of Franklin. The sloop, in which he absconded from Boston, in 1723, was favored with a fair wind, and reached New York in three days. His voyage from Philadelphia to Boston in 1724 lasted for about a fortnight. The "little vessel," in which he sailed, he tells us in the _Autobiography_, "struck on a shoal in going down the bay, and sprung a leak." "We had," Franklin says, "a blustering time at sea, and were oblig'd to pump almost continually, at which I took my turn." The cabin accommodations and abundant sea stores that fell to the lot of Ralph and himself, under circumstances already mentioned by us, on their voyage from Philadelphia to England in 1724, in the _London-Hope_, Captain Annis, were rare windfalls; but the voyage was marked by a great deal of bad weather. The return voyage of Franklin from London to Philadelphia in 1726, in the _Berkshire_, Captain Clark, including _obiter_ delays on the south coast of England, consumed the whole interval between July 21 and Oct. 12. All the incidents of this long voyage were entered in the Journal kept by him while it was under way, and there are few writings in which the ordinary features of an ocean passage at that time are so clearly brought before the reader: the baffling winds, the paralyzing calms; the meagre fare; the deadly _ennui_; and the moody sullenness bred by confinement and monotony. The word "helm-a-lee," Franklin states, became as disagreeable to their ears as the sentence of a judge to a convicted malefactor. Once he leapt overboard and swam around the ship to "wash" himself, and another time he was deterred from "washing" himself by the appearance of a shark, "that mortal enemy to swimmers." For a space his ship was in close enough companionship for several days with another ship for the masters of the two vessels, accompanied by a passenger in each instance, to exchange visits. On his second voyage, of about thirty days, to England, in 1757, the packet, in which he was a passenger, easily outstripped the hostile cruisers by which she was several times chased, but wore about with straining masts just in time to escape shipwreck on the Scilly rocks. Of his return to America in 1762, he wrote to Strahan from Philadelphia: "We had a long Passage near ten Weeks from Portsmouth to this Place, but it was a pleasant one; for we had ten sail in Company and a Man of War to protect us; we had pleasant Weather and fair Winds, and frequently visited and dined from ship to ship." At the end of his third voyage to England in 1764, Franklin wrote to Deborah from the Isle of Wight that no father could have been tenderer to a child than Captain Robinson had been to him. "But we have had terrible Weather, and I have often been thankful that our dear Sally was not with me. Tell our Friends that din'd with us on the Turtle that the kind Prayer they then put up for thirty Days fair Wind for me was favourably heard and answered, we being just 30 Days from Land to Land." Of his return voyage to America in 1775, he wrote to Priestley: "I had a passage of six weeks, the weather constantly so moderate that a London wherry might have accompanied us all the way." His thirty-day voyage to France in 1776 proved a rough and debilitating one to him at his advanced age, but Captain Wickes was not only able to keep his illustrious passenger out of the Tower, but to snatch up two English prizes on his way over. We need say no more than we have already incidentally said in our text of the seven weeks that Franklin gave up to his pen and thermometer on his return voyage to America in 1785. After the passage, he wrote to Mrs. Hewson that it had been a pleasant and not a long one in which there was but one day, a day of violent storm, on which he was glad that she was not with them.

[18] A copious note on the leading portraits of Franklin will be found in the _Narrative and Critical History of America_, edited by Justin Winsor, vol. vii., p. 37. The best of them resemble each other closely enough to make us feel satisfied that we should recognize him at once, were it possible for us to meet him in life on the street.

[19] Franklin was frequently the recipient of one of the most delightful of all forms of social attention, an invitation to a country house in the British Islands. On Oct. 5, 1768, he writes to Deborah that he has lately been in the country to spend a few days at friends' houses, and to breathe a little fresh air. On Jan. 28, 1772, after spending some seven weeks in Ireland and some four weeks in Scotland, he tells the same correspondent that he has received abundance of civilities from the gentry of both these kingdoms.

[20] Speaking of a portrait of Sally in a letter to Deborah from London in 1758, Franklin says: "I fancy I see more Likeness in her Picture than I did at first, and I look at it often with Pleasure, as at least it reminds me of her."

[21] The only blot upon the useful labors of Jared Sparks, as the editor of Franklin's productions, is the liberties that he took with their wording. Sometimes his alterations were the offspring of good feeling, sometimes of ordinary puristic scruples, and occasionally of the sickly prudery which led our American grandfathers and grandmothers to speak of the leg of a turkey as its "drum-stick." The word "belly" appears to have been especially trying to his nice sense of propriety. One result was these scornful strictures by Albert Henry Smyth in the Introduction to his edition of Franklin's writings: "He is nice in his use of moral epithets; he will not offend one stomach with his choice of words. Franklin speaks of the Scots 'who entered England and _trampled on its belly_ as far as Derby,'--'marched on,' says Sparks. Franklin is sending some household articles from London to Philadelphia. In the large packing case is 'a jug for beer.' It has, he says, 'the coffee cups in its belly.' Sparks performs the same abdominal operation here."

[22] The maladies to which Franklin was subject, and the spells of illness that he experienced, like everything else relating to him, have been described in detail by at least one of his enthusiastic latter-day biographers. We are content, however, to be classed among those biographers in whose eyes no amount of genius can hallow an ague or glorify a cutaneous affection.

[23] "I must mention to you," Sally said in a letter to her father, dated Oct. 30, 1773, "that I am no longer housekeeper; it gave my dear mama so much uneasiness, and the money was given to me in a manner which made it impossible to save anything by laying in things beforehand, so that my housekeeping answered no good purpose, and I have the more readily given it up, though I think it my duty, and would willingly take the care and trouble off of her, could I possibly please and make her happy."

[24] The entire conduct of Franklin towards his son after the dismissal of the father from office by the British Government seems to have been thoroughly considerate and decorous. His wish that William Franklin would resign his office as Governor of New Jersey, which he could not hold without pecuniary loss to his father, and without apparent insensibility to the indignity to which his father had been subjected, was delicately intimated only. Even after William Franklin became a prisoner in Connecticut in consequence of his disloyalty to the American cause, Franklin, while giving Temple some very good practical reasons why he could not consent that he should be the bearer of a letter from Mrs. William Franklin to her husband, takes care to tell Temple that he does not blame his desire of seeing a father that he had so much reason to love. At this time he also relieved with a gift of money the immediate necessities of Mrs. William Franklin. The temper of his letters to Temple, when Temple went over to England from France, at his instance, to pay his duty to William Franklin, was that of settled reconciliation with his son. "Give my Love to your Father," is a message in one of these letters. When he touched at Southampton on his return from his French mission, William Franklin, among others, was there to greet him. In the succeeding year we find Franklin asking Andrew Strahan to send him a volume and to present his account for it to his son. But on one occasion during the last twelve months of his life, he speaks of William no longer as "my son" but as "William Franklin." On the whole, it would appear that it was not so much the original defection of the son from the American cause as the fact that he kept aloof from the father, after the return of the father from France, which was responsible for the asperity with which the latter refers in his will to the political course of William Franklin during the Revolution.

[25] Altogether Peter Folger must have been a man of sterling sense and character. He was one of the five Commissioners appointed to survey and measure the land on the Island of Nantucket, and in the order of appointment the following provision was inserted: "Whatsoever shall be done by them, or any three of them, _Peter Folger being one_, shall be accounted legal and valid."

[26] That Peter Franklin had some of the ability of his famous brother we may infer from a long letter written to him by Franklin in which the latter, after acknowledging the receipt of a ballad by Peter, descants upon the superiority of the old, simple ditties over modern songs in lively and searching terms which he would hardly have wasted on a man of ordinary intelligence.

[27] The first letter from the Commissioners to Jonathan Williams, dated Apr. 13, 1778, simply asked him to abstain from any further purchases as naval agent, and to close his accounts for the present. It was not until May 25, 1778, that a letter was addressed to him by the Commissioners expressly revoking his authority as naval agent on the ground that Congress had authorized William Lee to superintend the commercial affairs of America in general, and he had appointed M. Schweighauser, a German merchant, as the person to look after all the maritime and commercial interests of America in the Nantes district. In signing the letter, Franklin took care to see that this clause was inserted: "It is not from any prejudice to you, Mr. Williams, for whom we have a great respect and esteem, but merely from a desire to save the public money, to prevent the clashing of claims and interests, and to avoid confusion and delays, that we have taken this step." The result was that, instead of the uniform commission of two per cent., charged by Williams for transacting the business of the naval agency, Schweighauser, whose clerk was Ludlow Lee, a nephew of Arthur Lee, charged as much as five per cent. on the simple delivery of tobacco to the farmers-general. Later Williams, who was an expert accountant, was restored to the position which he had really filled with blameless integrity and efficiency. After his return to America, his career was an eminent one. He is termed by General George W. Cullum in his work on the campaigns and engineers of the War of 1812-15 the father of the Engineer Service of the United States. In the same work, General Cullum also speaks of his "noble character."

[28] In sending a MS. to Edward Everett, which he placed in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Thomas Carlyle said: "The poor manuscript is an old Tithes-Book of the parish of Ecton, in Northamptonshire, from about 1640 to 1700, and contains, I perceive, various scattered faint indications of the civil war time, which are not without interest; but the thing which should raise it above all tithe-books yet heard of is, that it contains actual notices, in that fashion, of the ancestors of Benjamin Franklin--blacksmiths in that parish! Here they are--their forge-hammers yet going--renting so many 'yard lands' of Northamptonshire Church-soil--keeping so many sheep, etc., etc.,--little conscious that one of the demi-gods was about to proceed out of them."