Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2)

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."

29

The death of John Laurens in an obscure skirmish, almost at the very end of the Revolutionary War, after a brief career, distinguished by rare intellectual promise and daring valor is one of the most painful tragedies of that war. "He had not a fault that I could discover," Washington said of him, "unless it were intrepidity bordering on rashness."

30

It may be said of the fame of Washington in his own land, with something like approximate accuracy, that a file of wild geese winging its flight along the Atlantic Seaboard from Maine to the alluvial meadows of the Roanoke in Southern Virginia, is, for but brief periods only out of sight of some statue or monument erected in his honor by his grateful countrymen. The fame of Franklin in America is but little less strikingly attested. As long ago as 1864, Parton could say this of it: "As there are few counties in the Union which have not a town named Franklin, so there are few towns of any magnitude, which do not possess a Franklin Street, or a Franklin Square, a Franklin hotel, a Franklin bank, a Franklin fire-engine, a Franklin Lyceum, a Franklin lodge, or a Franklin charitable association. His bust and his portrait are only less universal than those of Washington, and most large cities contain something of the nature of a monument to Franklin." How little this fame has died down since these words were written was seen in the pomp and splendor with which the second centenary of the birth of Franklin was celebrated in the United States and France in 1906.

31

Another story of Franklin's told by Jefferson is good enough at any rate for a footnote. At parties at the French Court he sometimes had a game of chess with the old Duchess of Bourbon. Happening once to put her king into prize, he took it. "Ah," said she, "we do not take kings so." "We do in America," said he.

32

It may be said of Ralph that few names are surer of immortality than his, though not for the reasons upon which he founded his deceitful hopes. Between the Autobiography and the Dunciad he is, not unlike a mummy, preserved long beyond the date at which, in the ordinary course of things, he would have been overtaken by oblivion. This is one of the couplets that Pope bestowed upon him in the Dunciad:

"Silence, ye Wolves! While Ralph to Cynthia howls,
And makes night hideous – answer him, ye owls."

The couplet was accompanied by a still more venomous sting in prose: "James Ralph, a name inserted after the first editions, not known till he writ a swearing-piece called Sawney, very abusive of Dr. Swift, Mr. Gay, and myself. These lines allude to a thing of his entitled Night, a poem. This low writer attended his own works with panegyrics in the Journals, and once in particular praised himself highly above Mr. Addison, in wretched remarks upon that author's account of English poets, printed in a London Journal, September, 1728. He was wholly illiterate and knew no language, not even French. Being advised to read the rules of dramatic poetry before he began a play, he smiled and replied 'Shakspeare writ without rules.' He ended at last in the common sink of all such writers, a political newspaper, to which he was recommended by his friend Arnal, and received a small pittance for pay; and being detected in writing on both sides on one and the same day, he publicly justified the morality of his conduct." Another couplet of the Dunciad is this:

"And see! the very Gazetteers give o'er,
Ev'n Ralph repents, and Henley writes no more."

33

"The ship Ohio still aground," is the manner in which Franklin communicated on one occasion to Galloway the slow progress that the application for the Ohio grant was making.

34

"Mrs. Shipley and her daughter Kitty, in their passion for you rival Georgiana." Letter from Jonathan Shipley to Franklin, Nov. 27, 1785.

35

To a series of experiments, conducted by Sir John Pringle, we owe our knowledge of the fact that mosquito hawks are so whimsically constituted that they live longer with their heads off than on. One of these decapitated moths was so tenacious of his existence as to survive for 174 days.

36

A letter from Franklin to Francis Maseres, dated Passy, June 26, 1785, suggests an additional reason why the antipathy of the American Whigs to the American loyalists was so unrelenting. "The war against us was begun by a general act of Parliament, declaring all our estates confiscated; and probably one great motive to the loyalty of the royalists was the hope of sharing in these confiscations. They have played a deep game, staking their estates against ours; and they have been unsuccessful. But it is a surer game, since they had promises to rely on from your government, of indemnification in case of loss; and I see your Parliament is about to fulfil those Promises. To this I have no objection, because, though still our enemies, they are men; they are in necessity; and I think even a hired assassin has a right to his pay from his employer."

37

The business of Whitefoord as a wine-merchant was carried on at No. 8 Craven Street, and he enjoyed a considerable reputation for wit in his time. He served as Secretary to the Commission that settled the terms of peace with the United States. He was, Burke thought, a mere diseur de bons mots. Goldsmith deemed him of sufficient importance to make him the subject of an epitaph intended to be worked into the Retaliation, and reading as follows:

"Here Whitefoord reclines, deny it who can;
Tho' he merrily lived, he is now a grave man.
What pity, alas! that so lib'ral a mind
Should so long be to Newspaper Essays confined!
Who perhaps to the summit of science might soar,
Yet content if the table he set in a roar;
Whose talents to fit any station were fit,
Yet happy if Woodfall confessed him a wit."

His intimacy with Franklin, Whitefoord said on one occasion, had been the "pride and happiness" of his life.

38

In a letter to Count de Moustiers, dated Philadelphia, Feb. 10, 1788, Franklin termed Louis XVI. and France "the best of Kings & the most beloved of Nations."

39

Franklin was too old when he entered upon the French mission to acquire a real mastery of the French language. On one occasion, when at the theatre with Madame de Boufflers, from whom he took his cue in helping to swell the plaudits of the evening, he was chagrined to find that his most vigorous applause had been bestowed on flattering allusions to himself.

40

No humanitarian levels were too high for the aspirations of Franklin, but he always took care, to use one of the sayings that he conceived or borrowed, not to ride before the horse's head. There is just a suspicion of unconscious sarcasm in a letter from him to Dupont in which he expresses the wish that the Physiocratic philosophy may grow and increase till it becomes the governing philosophy of the human species, "as it must be that of superior beings in better worlds."

41

Franklin had many intimate friends besides those mentioned in our text. In two letters to Samuel Rhoads he refers to his "dear old Friend Mrs. Paschal." In a letter to Thomas Mifflin, congratulating him upon his election as President of Congress, he speaks of their "ancient friendship." William Hunter he addresses in 1786 as "my dear old friend." In a letter to him in 1782, Thomas Pownall, the former Colonial Governor, says: "Permett me to say how much I have been your old invariable friend of four or five and twenty years standing." Jean Holker and his wife, of Rouen, were "dear friends" of his, and he was on terms of intimacy with John Joseph Monthieu, a Paris merchant, and Turgot, the French statesman. He writes to Miss Alexander from Passy that he has been to pay his respects to Madame La Marck, "not merely," he says, "because it was a Compliment due to her, but because I love her; which induces me to excuse her not letting me in." One of Franklin's friends, Dr. Edward Bancroft, a native of Massachusetts, who kept one foot in London and one foot in Paris during the Revolution, for the purpose, as was supposed by those of our envoys who were on good terms with him, of collecting, and imparting to our mission, information about the plans of the British Ministry, has come to occupy an equivocal position in the judgment of history. George Bancroft, the American historian, has set him down as "a double spy," and the view of Bancroft has been followed by others, including Henri Doniol, in his work on the participation of France in the establishment of the United States. But it would seem difficult for anyone to take this view after reading the acute and vigorous discussion of the subject by Dr. Francis Wharton in the Diplomatic Correspondence of the Revolution. In a letter to David Hartley of Feb. 22, 1779, Franklin pronounced Bancroft a "Gentleman of Character and Honour."