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

The sterner stuff in the character of Franklin, however, was to be still further tried. During the year succeeding his second return from England in 1762, the minds of the people in the western counties of Pennsylvania, and especially of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, whose passions were easily deflected into channels of religious fanaticism, were inflamed almost to madness by Indian atrocities, and this mental condition resulted in an act of abominable butchery, such as has rarely blackened even the history of the American Indian himself. Living not far from the town of Lancaster, on the Manor of Conestoga, was the remnant of what had once been a considerable tribe of the Six Nations. The members of this tribe sent messengers to welcome the first English settlers of Pennsylvania with presents of venison, corn and furs, and entered into a treaty of friendship with William Penn which, in the figurative language of the savage, was to last "as long as the Sun should shine, or the Waters run in the Rivers," and which in point of fact was faithfully observed by both parties. In the course of time, as the whites purchased land from them, and hemmed them in more and more closely, they settled down upon a part of the Manor assigned to them by William Penn which they were not allowed by the Provincial Government to alienate, and here they lived on terms of unbroken amity with their white neighbors. In the further course of time, the tribe dwindled to such an extent that there were only twenty survivors, seven men, five women, and eight children of both sexes, whose means of subsistence were supplied to some extent by mendicancy and the chase, but mainly by the sale to the whites of the brooms, baskets and wooden ladles made by the women. The oldest of the band, a man named Shehaes, was old enough to have been present when the original chain of friendship between the tribe and William Penn was brightened by a second treaty between the same contracting parties. The youngest were infants. There is good reason to believe that at least one or two of the band had been in secret commerce with the hostile Indians whose shocking barbarities had filled the souls of such of the Pennsylvania borderers as had not been tomahawked, carried off into captivity or driven from their homes with sensations little short of frenzied desperation. On Wednesday, the 14th of December, 1763, fifty men from the territory about Paxton, a small town in Pennsylvania, on the Susquehanna above Conestoga, all mounted, and armed with firelocks, hangers and hatchets, descended upon the squalid huts of this band, about dawn, and slaughtered in cold blood three men, two women and a young boy – the only members of the vagabond band whom they found at home. The firelocks, hangers and hatchets were all used in perpetrating the bloody work, and the miserable victims were scalped and horribly mangled besides. Shehaes himself was cut to pieces in his bed. Then, after seizing upon such booty as was to be found, and applying the torch to most of the huts, the murderers rode away through the snow-drifts to their homes. A shudder of horror passed through the whites in the vicinity, and a cry of bitter lamentation went up from the younger survivors of the band when they returned to the sickening spot, where the charred bodies of their parents and other relations, looking as one observer said like half burnt logs, told the hideous story.

We had known the greater part of them from children [said Susannah Wright, a humane white woman, who resided near the spot], had been always intimate with them. Three or four of the women were sensible and civilized, and the Indians' children used to play with ours, and oblige them all they could. We had many endearing recollections of them, and the manner of effecting the brutal enormity so affected us, that we had to beg visitors to forbear to speak of it.

The public officials of the Province appear to have faithfully performed their duty immediately after the tragedy. The survivors were gathered together by the sheriff of Lancaster, and placed in the workhouse for safety. A hundred and forty other friendly Indians, who had been converted by the Moravians, fearing that they might be visited with just such violence, had found, before the descent upon Conestoga, shelter near Philadelphia, at the public expense, under the guidance of a good Moravian minister. The Governor, John Penn, issued a proclamation calling upon all the civil and military officers of the Colony and all His Majesty's other liege subjects to do their duty. But the Governor soon found that he was reckoning with that Scotch-Irish temper, which, at its highest point of rigidity, is like concrete reinforced with iron rods, and which in this instance was more or less countenanced by the sympathy of the entire Province. Despite the proclamation of the Governor under the great seal of the Colony, the incensed frontiersmen, now fired by the fresh taste of blood as well as by the original conviction of the settlements from which they came that an angry God had turned his face from the inhabitants of Pennsylvania, because they had not smitten, hip and thigh, and utterly destroyed the red-skinned Amorites and Canaanites, again assembled, and riding into Lancaster, armed as on the previous occasion, broke in the door of its workhouse and dispatched every solitary one of the poor wretches who had escaped their pitiless hands. Thereupon, they mounted their horses, huzzaed in triumph, and rode off unmolested. The whole thing was like the flight of the pigeon-hawk, so swift and deadly was it; for, within ten or twelve minutes after the alarm was given, the borderers were again in their saddles. By a large part of the population of the Province the deed was applauded as the infliction of just vengeance upon a race which had many unspeakable enormities to answer for in its relations to the whites; by the people of the Province generally, except the Quakers, it was but languidly condemned, and the proclamations of the Governor proved to be mere paper trumpets, for all the efforts of the Government to bring the criminals to justice were wholly unsuccessful.

But there was one man in the Province, and he not a Quaker either, to whom justice, mercy and law had not lost their meaning. In his Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, Franklin, in words as burning as any ever inspired by righteous wrath, denounced with blistering force the assassins and their crimes. Anger, Lord Bacon tells us, makes even dull men witty. Just indignation in this case lifted one of the soberest and most self-contained of men to the level of impassioned feeling and of almost lyrical speech. With a firm yet rapid hand, Franklin sketched the history of the tribe, its peaceful intercourse with the whites, its decline until it numbered only the twenty creatures whom he brings vividly before us with a few familiar strokes of individual description, the infamous circumstances that attended the destruction of defenseless weakness in hut and workhouse. Then, along with illustrations of clemency and magnanimity derived from many different historical and national sources, and even from the annals of semi-civilized and barbarous communities, and graphically contrasted with the conduct of the ruthless men who had wreaked their will upon the Conestoga villagers, male and female, and their children, he poured out a tide of scathing execration upon the heads of the malefactors which showed as nothing else in all his life ever showed how deep were the fountains that fed the calm flow of his ordinary benevolence.

O, ye unhappy Perpetrators of this horrid Wickedness! [he exclaimed, rising with a natural crescendo of exalted feeling even into the sublimated province of the apostrophe] reflect a Moment on the Mischief ye have done, the Disgrace ye have brought on your Country, on your Religion, and your Bible, on your Families and Children! Think on the Destruction of your captivated Country-folks (now among the wild Indians) which probably may follow, in Resentment of your Barbarity! Think on the Wrath of the United Five Nations, hitherto our Friends, but now provoked by your murdering one of their Tribes, in Danger of becoming our bitter Enemies. Think of the mild and good Government you have so audaciously insulted; the Laws of your King, your Country, and your God, that you have broken; the infamous Death that hangs over your Heads; for Justice, though slow, will come at last. All good People everywhere detest your Actions. You have imbrued your Hands in innocent Blood; how will you make them clean? The dying Shrieks and Groans of the Murdered, will often sound in your Ears. Their Spectres will sometimes attend you, and affright even your innocent Children! Fly where you will, your Consciences will go with you. Talking in your Sleep shall betray you, in the Delirium of a Fever you yourselves shall make your own Wickedness known.

These were honest, fearless words, but, so far as we know, the Erynnes did not plant any stings of conscience in the breasts of the men from Paxton District whom Franklin elsewhere in this Narrative described as the Christian white savages of Paxton and Donegal. On the contrary, several hundred men from the same region, armed with rifles and hatchets, and clad in hunting shirts, marched towards Philadelphia with the avowed purpose of killing the Moravian Indians who had found refuge in its vicinity. The city was reduced to a state of terror, and Governor Penn, like his predecessors, could think of nothing more expedient to do than to invoke the advice and assistance of Franklin. He accordingly made Franklin's house his headquarters, and freely consulted with him touching every defensive measure required by the crisis. Again Franklin formed an association for the protection of Philadelphia; and, under his auspices, the citizens of Philadelphia were enrolled into nine companies, six of infantry, two of horse, and one of artillery. "Governor Penn," he afterwards declared in a letter to Lord Kames, "made my house for some time his headquarters, and did everything by my advice; so that, for about forty-eight hours, I was a very great man; as I had been once some years before, in a time of public danger." On came the insurgents until they reached Germantown, seven miles from the city. Here they were met by four citizens, of whom Franklin was one, who had been requested by the Governor and his Council to confer with them. While the conference was pending, Franklin's regiment, supported by a detachment of King's troops, remained in the city under arms, and even young Quakers labored incessantly to complete the intrenchments around the barracks, in which the menaced Indians with their Moravian shepherd had been placed. Indeed, now that the waves of the Presbyterian invasion were lapping his own doorsill, the Quaker of every age in Philadelphia appears to have entirely lost sight of the duty of non-resistance. The conference satisfied the insurgents that graver work was ahead of them than that of slaying and scalping old men, women and children, and they retraced their steps. "The fighting face we put on," said Franklin, in his letter to Lord Kames, "and the reasonings we used with the insurgents… having turned them back and restored quiet to the city, I became a less man than ever; for I had, by these transactions, made myself many enemies among the populace." He had, indeed, but not one whose enmity was not more honorable to him than the friendship of even all his host of friends.

Nor did the eagerness of Franklin to bring the Paxton assassins to justice cease with the conference at Germantown. Though pamphlets were sold in the streets of Philadelphia lauding their acts, and inveighing against all who had assisted in protecting the Moravian Indians, though the Governor himself was weak or wicked enough to curry political favor with the party which approved the recent outrages, Franklin still inflexibly maintained that the law should be vindicated by the condign punishment of the Paxton ringleaders. In another place we shall see what his resolute stand cost him politically.

CHAPTER IV

FRANKLIN'S FAMILY RELATIONS

When we turn from Franklin's philanthropic zeal and public spirit to his more intimate personal and social traits, we find much that is admirable, not a little that is lovable, and some things with quite a different aspect. His vow of self-correction, when he had sowed his wild oats and reaped the usual harvest of smut and tares, was, as we have intimated, retrospective as well as prospective. He violated his obligations, as his brother James' apprentice, by absconding from Boston before his time was up, and added aggravation to his original offence by returning to Boston, and exhibiting his genteel new suit, watch and silver money to his brother's journeymen, while he descanted to them upon the land of milk and honey from which he had brought back these indicia of prosperity; his brother all the time standing by grum and sullen, and struggling with the emotions which afterwards caused him to say to his stepmother, when she expressed her wish that the brothers might become reconciled, that Benjamin had insulted him in such a manner before his people that he could never forget or forgive it. In this, however, he was mistaken, as Franklin tersely observes in the Autobiography. Some ten years subsequently, on his return from one of his decennial visits to Boston, Franklin stopped over at Newport, to see this brother, who had removed thither, and he found him in a state of rapid physical decline. The former differences were forgotten, the meeting was very cordial and affectionate, and, in compliance with a request, then made of him by James, Franklin took James' son, a boy of ten, as an apprentice, into his own printing house at Philadelphia. Indeed, he did more than he was asked to do; for he sent the boy for some years to school before putting him to work. Afterwards, when the nephew became old enough to launch out into business on his own account, Franklin helped him to establish himself as a printer in New England with gifts of printing materials and a loan of more than two hundred pounds. Thus was the first deleatur of pricking conscience duly heeded by Franklin, the Printer; the first erratum revised. And it is but just to him to say that the erratum, if the whole truth were told, was probably more venial than his forgiving spirit allowed him to fully disclose. Under the indentures of apprenticeship, it was as incumbent upon the older brother to abstain from excessive punishment as it was upon the younger not to abscond. Franklin, in the Autobiography, while stating that James was passionate and often beat him, also states that James was otherwise not an ill-natured man, and finds extenuation for his brother's violence in the fear of the latter that the success of the Silence Dogood letters might make the young apprentice vain, and in the fact that the young apprentice himself was perhaps too saucy and provoking. Franklin almost always had a word of generous palliation for anyone who had wronged him. The chances, we think, distinctly are that the real nature of the relations between James and Benjamin are to be found not in the text of the Autobiography but in the note to it in which its author declares that the harsh and tyrannical treatment of his brother might have been a means of impressing him with that aversion to arbitrary power which had stuck to him through his whole life. Nor should it be forgotten that the younger brother did not bring the Canaan south of the Delaware, nor the watch and other evidences of the good fortune that he had found there, to the attention of James' journeymen until James, whom he had called to see at the printing house, where these journeymen were employed, had received him coldly, looked him all over, and turned to his work again. There is the fact besides, if Franklin is to be permitted to testify in his own behalf, that, when the disputes between the two brothers were submitted to their father, whose good sense and fairness frequently led him to be chosen as an arbitrator between contending parties, the judgment was generally in Benjamin's favor; either, he says, because he was usually in the right (he fancied) or else was a better pleader. Another erratum was revised when, after plighting his troth to Deborah Read on the eve of his first voyage to London, and then forgetting it in the distractions of the English capital, he subsequently married her. Still another was revised when he discharged the debt to Mr. Vernon, which occasioned him so much mental distress. The debt arose in this manner: On his return journey to Philadelphia, after his first visit to Boston, he was asked by Mr. Vernon, a friend of his brother, John, who resided at Newport, to collect the sum of thirty-five pounds currency due to Mr. Vernon in Pennsylvania, and to keep it until Mr. Vernon gave him instructions about its remittance. The money was duly collected by Franklin on his way to Philadelphia, but unfortunately for him his youthful friend Collins, before his departure from Boston, had decided to remove to Pennsylvania, too, and proceeding from Boston to New York in advance of him, was his companion from New York to Philadelphia. While awaiting Franklin's arrival at New York, Collins drank up and gambled away all his own money. The consequence was that Franklin had to pay his lodging for him at New York and defray all his subsequent expenses. The journey to Philadelphia could be completed only with the aid of the Vernon debt, and, after the two reached Philadelphia, Collins, being unable to obtain any employment because of his bad habits, and knowing that Franklin had the balance of the Vernon collection in his hands, repeatedly borrowed sums from him, promising to repay them as soon as he was earning something himself. By these loans the amount collected for Mr. Vernon was finally reduced to such an extent that Franklin was at a painful loss to know what he should do in case Mr. Vernon demanded payment. The thought of his situation haunted him for some years to come, but happily for him Mr. Vernon was an exception to the saying of Poor Richard that creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times. He kindly made no demand upon Franklin for quite a long period, and in the end merely put him in mind of the debt, though not pressing him to pay it; whereupon Franklin wrote to him, we are told by the Autobiography, an ingenuous letter of acknowledgment, craved his forbearance a little longer, which was granted, and later on, as soon as he was able to do so, paid the principal with interest and many thanks. Just why Mr. Vernon was such an indulgent creditor the Autobiography does not reveal. If, as Franklin subsequently wrote to Strahan, the New England people were artful to get into debt and but poor pay, Mr. Vernon at any rate furnishes evidence that they could be generous lenders. Perhaps Mr. Vernon simply had his favorable prepossessions like many other men who knew Franklin in his early life, or perhaps he had some of Franklin's own quick sympathy with the trials and struggles of youth, and was not averse to lending him the use, even though compulsory, of a little capital, or, perhaps, he was restrained from dunning Franklin by his friendship for Franklin's brother.

The erratum into which Franklin fell in writing and publishing his free-thinking dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, which was dedicated to his friend Ralph, he revised, as we have seen, by destroying all the copies upon which he could lay his hands and also, we might add, by a counter pamphlet in which he recanted and combated his own reasonings. In his unreflecting hours he mixed the poison; in his more reflective hours he compounded the antidote.

Franklin was guilty of another erratum when Ralph found that it was one thing to have an essay on Liberty dedicated to him by a friend and another thing to have the friend taking liberties with his mistress. This erratum was never revised by Franklin unless upon principles of revision with which Ralph himself at least could not find fault, as the history of the erratum is told in the Autobiography. The young woman in this case was a milliner, genteelly bred, sensible, lively, and of most pleasing conversation. Ralph, who, until Pope brought him back with a disillusioning thud to the dull earth by a shaft from the Dunciad, imagined himself to be endowed with an exalted poetic genius, read plays to her in the evenings, and finally formed a liaison with her. They lived together for a time, but, finding that her income was not sufficient to sustain them both and the child that was the fruit of the connection, he took charge of a country school where he taught ten or a dozen boys how to read and write at sixpence each a week, assumed Franklin's name because he did not wish the world to know that he had ever been so meanly employed, recommended his mistress to Franklin's protection, and, in spite of every dissuasive that Franklin could bring to bear upon him, including a copy of a great part of one of Young's satires, which set forth in a strong light the folly of courting the Muses, sent to Franklin from time to time profuse specimens of the magnum opus over which he was toiling. In the meantime, the milliner, having suffered on Ralph's account in both reputation and estate, was occasionally compelled to obtain pecuniary assistance from Franklin. The result was that he grew fond of her society, and, presuming upon his importance to her, attempted familiarities with her which she repelled with a proper resentment, and communicated to Ralph, who, on his next return to London, let Franklin know that he considered all his obligations to him cancelled. As these obligations consisted wholly of sums that Franklin had lent to Ralph, or advanced on Ralph's account from time to time out of his earnings from his vocation as a printer, Franklin, we suppose, might fairly conclude, in accordance with Ralph's method of reasoning, that he had revised the erratum by duly paying the penalty for it in terms of money, even if in no other form of atonement. At the time, he consoled himself with the reflection that Ralph's cancellation of obligations, which he had no means of paying, was not very material, and that Ralph's withdrawal of his friendship at least meant relief from further pecuniary loans. He does not say so, but exemption from further instalments of the laboring epic must have counted for something too. The cross-currents of human existence, however, were destined to again bring Ralph and Franklin into personal intercourse. It was after Franklin had arrived in England in 1757 as the agent of the People of Pennsylvania and Ralph, not a Homer or Milton, as he had fondly hoped to be, but a historian, pamphleteer and newspaper writer of no contemptible abilities, had gotten beyond the necessity of doing what Pope in a truculent note to the Dunciad had charged him with doing, namely, writing on both sides of a controversy on one and the same day, and afterwards publicly justifying the morality of his conduct. Indeed, he had gotten far enough beyond it at this stage of his life to be even a sufferer from the gout, and, remarkable as it may seem, in the light of the manner in which he had paid his indebtedness to Franklin, to be equal to the nicety of returning to the Duke of Bedford one hundred and fifty of the two hundred pounds that the Duke of Bedford had contributed to the support of the Protestor, a newspaper conducted by Ralph in the interest of the Duke of Bedford against the Duke of Newcastle. The Autobiography states that from Governor Denny Franklin had previously learned that Ralph was still alive, that he was esteemed one of the best political writers in England, had been employed in the dispute between Prince Frederick and the King, and had obtained a pension of three hundred a year; that his reputation was indeed small as a poet, Pope having damned his poetry in the Dunciad, but that his prose was thought as good as any man's. A few months after receiving this information, Franklin arrived in England, and Ralph called on him to renew the tie sundered for some thirty years. One sequel was a letter from Franklin to his wife in which he wrote to her as follows:

I have seen Mr. Ralph, and delivered him Mrs. Garrigues's letter. He is removed from Turnham Green, when I return, I will tell you everything relating to him, in the meantime I must advise Mrs. Garrigue not to write to him again, till I send her word how to direct her letters, he being unwilling, for some good reasons, that his present wife should know anything of his having any connections in America. He expresses great affection for his daughter and grandchildren. He has but one child here.

Other errata of Franklin were due to the amorous disposition over which he took such little pains to draw the veil of delicacy and reserve. Sexual ardor has doubtless exerted quite as imperious a dominion in youth over some other great men, but none of them have been so willing to confess the overbearing force of its importunities. Speaking of the time prior to his marriage, when he was twenty-four years of age, Franklin says in the Autobiography: "In the meantime, that hard-to-be-governed passion of youth hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience, besides a continual risque to my health by a distemper which of all things I dreaded, though by great good luck I escaped it." It was to his son, strangely enough, that this chapter of his personal history was unfolded. Franklin was writing a word of warning as well as of hope for his posterity, and he painted himself, as Cromwell wished to be painted, wart and all.

For such errata as these there was no atonement to be made except in the sense of self-degradation likely, in the case of every self-respecting man, to follow the illicit gratification of strong physical appetites, and this Franklin had too ingenuous a way of looking at sexual irregularity to feel very acutely. The only real reinforcement that a nature like his could find against what Ferdinand in the Tempest calls the suggestions of "our worser genius" was the sedative influence of marriage, its duties, its responsibilities, and its calm equable flow of mutual affection; and Franklin was early married and found in marriage and the human interests that cluster about it an uncommon measure of satisfaction and happiness.

It is an old, old story, that story of Benjamin and Deborah told in the Autobiography. It began on the memorable Sunday morning, when the runaway apprentice, shortly after landing at the Market Street wharf in Philadelphia, hungry, dirty from his journey, dressed in his working clothes, and with his great flap pockets stuffed with shirts and stockings, passed up Market Street before the eyes of his future wife, which were alit with merriment as he passed, clasping a great puffy Philadelphia roll under each arm and eating a third. She saw him from her father's door as he went by, presenting this "awkward, ridiculous appearance," and little realized that the ludicrous apparition which she saw was not only to be her lifelong consort, but, stranger as he then was to every human being in Philadelphia, was in coming years to confer upon that city no small part of the heritage of his own imperishable renown.

The pair were soon brought into close relations with each other. Keimer, the printer, with whom Benjamin found employment, could not lodge Benjamin in his own house for lack of furniture; so he found lodging for him with Mr. Read, Keimer's landlord and Deborah's father. And Benjamin was now in a very different plight from that in which she had first seen him; for he was earning a livelihood for himself, and his chest with better clothes in it than those that he had on when he was eating his roll under such difficulties had come around to him by sea. He was not long in forming "a great respect and affection" for Deborah, which he had some reason to believe were reciprocated by her. Courtship followed, but he was on the point of setting out for London on the fool's errand which Governor Keith had planned for him, he and Deborah were but a little over eighteen, and her mother thought that it would be more convenient for the marriage to take place on his return, after he had purchased in London the printing outfit that he was to buy upon the credit of Governor Keith, who really had no credit. "Perhaps, too," adds Franklin, "she thought my expectations not so well founded as I imagined them to be."

The fateful day came when the annual ship between London and Philadelphia was to sail. Of the fond parting we have no record except Franklin's old fashioned statement that in leaving he "interchang'd some promises with Miss Read." These promises, so far as he was concerned, were soon lost to memory in the lethean cares, diversions and dissipations of eighteenth century London. By degrees, Franklin tells us, he forgot his engagements with Miss Read, and never wrote more than one letter to her, and that to let her know that he was not likely to return soon. "This," he says, "was another of the great errata of my life, which I should wish to correct if I were to live it over again." Another of those errata of his life, he might have added, in regard to which, like his use of Mr. Vernon's money, his approaches to Ralph's mistress, and his commerce with lewd wenches, the world, with which silence often passes as current as innocence, would never have been the wiser, if he had not chosen, as so few men have been sufficiently courageous and disinterested to do, to make beacons of his own sins for others to steer their lives by. He did return, as we know, but Miss Read was Miss Read no longer. In his absence, her friends, despairing of his return after the receipt of his letter by Deborah (how mercilessly he divulges it all), had persuaded her to marry another, one Rogers, a potter, "a worthless fellow, tho' an excellent workman, which was the temptation to her friends." With him, however, Franklin tells us, "she was never happy, and soon parted from him, refusing to cohabit with him or bear his name, it being now said that he had another wife." One more concise statement from Rogers's marital successor, and Rogers disappears as suddenly as if shot through a stage trap-door. "He got into debt, ran away in 1727 or 1728, went to the West Indies, and died there." At that time, the West Indies seem to have been the dust-pan into which all the human refuse of colonial America was swept.

In a letter to his friend Catherine Ray, in 1755, Franklin told her that the cords of love and friendship had in times past drawn him further than from Rhode Island to Philadelphia, "even back from England to Philadelphia." This statement, we fear, if not due to the facility with which every good husband is apt to forget that his wife was not the first woman that he fell in love with, must be classed with Franklin's statement in the Autobiography that Sir Hans Sloane persuaded him to let him add an asbestos purse owned by Franklin to his museum of curiosities, his statement in a letter to his son that he was never sued until a bill in chancery was filed against him after his removal from the office of Deputy Postmaster-General, and his statement made at different times that he never asked for a public office. We know from Franklin's own pen that it was he who solicited from Sir Hans Sloane the purchase, and not Sir Hans Sloane who solicited from him the sale, of the asbestos purse; we know from the Autobiography that he was sued by some of the farmers to whom he gave his bond of indemnity at the time of Braddock's expedition long before his removal from the office of Deputy Postmaster-General, and we know, too, as the reader has already been told, that he sought Benger's office, as Deputy Postmaster-General of the Colonies, before death had done more than cast the shadow of his approach over Benger's face. There is a vast difference between the situation of a man, who relies upon his memory for the scattered incidents of his past life, and that of a biographer whose field of vision takes them all in at one glance. It is true that Franklin did not know, before he left London, that Deborah had married, but the reasons he gives in the Autobiography for desiring to return to Philadelphia are only that he had grown tired of London, remembered with pleasure the happy months that he had spent in Pennsylvania, and wished again to see it. The fact is that he did not renew his courtship of Deborah until the worthless Rogers had left the coast clear by fleeing to the West Indies, and he himself had in a measure been thrown back upon her by rebuffs in other directions. His circuitous proposal after his return to a young relative of Mrs. Godfrey, who with her husband and children occupied a part of his house, was, as described in the Autobiography more like a negotiation for a printing outfit than ordinary wooing. If the love that he brought to this affair had been the only kind of which he was capable, his most ardent biographer, and every biographer seems to adore him more or less in spite of occasional sharp shocks to adoration, might well ask whether his love was not as painfully repellent as his system of morals. The incident would lose some of its hard, homely outlines if clothed in any but the coarse, drab vesture of plain-spoken words with which Franklin clothes it.

Mrs. Godfrey [he says in the Autobiography] projected a match for me with a relation's daughter, took opportunities of bringing us often together, till a serious courtship on my part ensu'd, the girl being in herself very deserving. The old folks encourag'd me by continual invitations to supper, and by leaving us together, till at length it was time to explain. Mrs. Godfrey manag'd our little treaty. I let her know that I expected as much money with their daughter as would pay off my remaining debt for the printing house, which I believe was not then above a hundred pounds. She brought me word they had no such sum to spare; I said they might mortgage their house in the loan-office. The answer to this, after some days, was, that they did not approve the match; that, on inquiry of Bradford, they had been informed the printing business was not a profitable one; the types would soon be worn out, and more wanted; that S. Keimer and D. Harry had failed one after the other, and I should probably soon follow them; and, therefore, I was forbidden the house, and the daughter shut up.

Whether this was a real change of sentiment or only artifice, on a supposition of our being too far engaged in aflection to retract, and therefore that we should steal a marriage, which would leave them at liberty to give or withhold what they pleas'd, I know not; but I suspected the latter, resented it, and went no more. Mrs. Godfrey brought me afterward some more favorable accounts of their disposition, and would have drawn me on again; but I declared absolutely my resolution to have nothing more to do with that family. This was resented by the Godfreys; we differ'd, and they removed, leaving me the whole house.

This affair, however, Franklin tells us, turned his thoughts to marriage. He accordingly looked the matrimonial field, or rather market, over, and, to use his own euphemism, made overtures of acquaintance in other places; but he soon found, he further tells us, that, the business of a printer being generally thought a poor one, he was not to expect money with a wife unless with such a one as he should not otherwise think agreeable. Then it was that his heart came back to Deborah, sitting forlorn in the weeds of separation, though not unquestionably in the weeds of widowhood; for it was not entirely certain that Rogers was dead. A friendly intercourse had been maintained all along between Franklin and the members of her family ever since he had first lodged under their roof, and he had often been invited to their home, and had given them sound practical advice. It was natural enough, therefore, that he should pity Miss Read's unfortunate situation (he never calls her Mrs. Rogers), dejected and averse to society as she was, that he should reproach himself with his inconstancy as the cause of her unhappiness, though her mother was good enough to take the whole blame on herself because she had prevented their marriage before he went off to London, and was responsible for the other match, and that compassion and self-accusation should have been gradually succeeded by tenderness and rekindled affection. The result was a marriage as little attended by prudential considerations as any that we could readily imagine; and the words in which Franklin chronicles the event are worthy of exact reproduction:

Our mutual affection was revived, but there were now great objections to our union. The match was indeed looked upon as invalid, a preceding wife being said to be living in England; but this could not easily be prov'd, because of the distance; and, tho' there was a report of his death, it was not certain. Then, tho' it should be true, he had left many debts, which his successor might be call'd upon to pay. We ventured, however, over all these difficulties, and I took her to wife, September 1st, 1730. None of the inconveniences happened that we had apprehended; she proved a good and faithful helpmate, assisted me much by attending the shop; we throve together, and have ever mutually endeavour'd to make each other happy.

This paragraph from the Autobiography does not contain the only tribute paid by Franklin to his wife as a faithful helpmeet. Elsewhere in that work we find this tribute too: "We have an English proverb that says, 'He that would thrive, must ask his wife.' It was lucky for me that I had one as much dispos'd to industry and frugality as myself. She assisted me chearfully in my business, folding and stitching pamphlets, tending shop, purchasing old linen rags for the paper-makers, etc., etc." His letters are of the same tenor. In one to her after the repeal of the Stamp Act, he wrote, "Had the Trade between the two Countries totally ceas'd, it was a Comfort to me to recollect, that I had once been cloth'd from Head to Foot in Woolen and Linnen of my Wife's Manufacture." Many years after Deborah's death, he used these words in a letter to Miss Alexander: "Frugality is an enriching Virtue; a Virtue I never could acquire in myself; but I was once lucky enough to find it in a Wife, who thereby became a Fortune to me. Do you possess it? If you do, and I were 20 Years younger, I would give your Father 1,000 Guineas for you." And then he adds with the playful humor which came to him as naturally as a carol to the throat of a blithe bird: "I know you would be worth more to me as a Ménnagere, but I am covetous, and love good Bargains." Win an industrious and prudent wife, he declared on another occasion, and, "if she does not bring a fortune, she will help to make one." And when his daughter Sally married Richard Bache, he wrote to her that she could be as serviceable to her husband in keeping a store, if it was where she dwelt, "as your Mother was to me: For you are not deficient in Capacity, and I hope are not too proud." Sixteen years after his marriage, in a rhyming preface to Poor Richard's Almanac, he even penned this grateful jingle:

"Thanks to kind Readers and a careful Wife,
With plenty bless'd, I lead an easy Life."

Careful, however, as she had been in her earlier years, Deborah spent enough, as she became older and more accustomed to easy living, to make him feel that he should say a word of caution to her when the news reached him in London that Sally was about to marry a young man who was not only without fortune but soon to be involved in business failure. He advises her not to make an "expensive feasting Wedding," but to conduct everything with the economy required by their circumstances at that time; his partnership with Hall having expired, and his loss of the Post Office not being unlikely. In that event, he said, they would be reduced to their rents and interest on money for a subsistence, which would by no means afford the chargeable housekeeping and entertainments that they had been used to. Though he himself lived as frugally as possible, making no dinners for anybody, and contenting himself with a single dish, when he dined at home, yet such was the dearness of living in London in every article that his expenses amazed him.

I see too [he continued], by the Sums you have received in my Absence, that yours are very great, and I am very sensible that your Situation naturally brings you a great many Visitors, which occasion an Expence not easily to be avoided especially when one has been long in the Practice and Habit of it. If we were young enough to begin Business again [he remarks a little later in this letter], it might be another Matter, – but I doubt we are past it; and Business not well managed ruins one faster than no Business. In short, with Frugality and prudent Care we may subsist decently on what we have, and leave it entire to our Children: – but without such Care, we shall not be able to keep it together; it will melt away like Butter in the Sunshine; and we may live long enough to feel the miserable Consequences of our Indiscretion.

Eighteen months later, with studied good-feeling, he tells her that, if he does not send her a watch, it will be because the balance on his Post Office account was greatly against him, owing to the large sums that she had received. But Mrs. Franklin was failing, and a few years later, when her memory and other faculties had been enfeebled by paralysis, he found it necessary to give a keener edge to admonition in one of his letters to her. Referring to her disgust with the Messrs. Foxcroft, because they had not supplied her with money to pay for a bill of exchange for thirty pounds, he opened his mind to her with almost cruel bluntness as follows:

That you may not be offended with your Neighbours without Cause; I must acquaint you with what it seems you did not know, that I had limited them in their Payments to you, to the sum of Thirty Pounds per Month, for the sake of our more easily settling, and to prevent Mistakes. This making 360 Pounds a Year, I thought, as you have no House Rent to pay yourself, and receive the Rents of 7 or 8 Houses besides, might be sufficient for the Maintenance of your Family. I judged such a Limitation the more necessary, because you never have sent me any Account of your Expences, and think yourself ill-used if I desire it; and because I know you were not very attentive to Money-matters in your best Days, and I apprehend that your Memory is too much impair'd for the Management of unlimited Sums, without Danger of injuring the future Fortune of your daughter and Grandson. If out of more than 500 £ a Year, you could have sav'd enough to buy those Bills it might have been well to continue purchasing them. But I do not like your going about among my Friends to borrow Money for that purpose, especially as it is not at all necessary. And therefore I once more request that you would decline buying them for the future. And I hope you will no longer take it amiss of Messrs. Foxcrofts that they did not supply you. If what you receive is really insufficient for your support satisfy me by Accounts that it is so, and I shall order more.

Like an incision in the rind of a beech, which spreads wider and wider with each passing year, is, as a rule, every human failing, as time goes on, and poor Mrs. Franklin, now that senile decay was setting in, seems to have been but another confirmation of this truth. But faithful wife that she was, after the receipt of this letter from her husband, she was scrupulous enough to send him receipts as well as accounts; for in the early part of the succeeding year he writes to her: "I take notice of the considerable Sums you have paid. I would not have you send me any Receipts. I am satisfy'd with the Accounts you give." His letter to her about the Foxcrofts was doubtless not more pointed than the occasion required. In no scales was the salutary medicine of reproof ever weighed more exactly than in his. This letter begins as usual, "My Dear Child," and, after conveying its rebuke, lapses into the old happy, domestic strain. "I am much pleased," he said, "with the little Histories you give me of your fine boy (one of her grandsons) which are confirmed by all that have seen him. I hope he will be spared and continue the same Pleasure and Comfort to you, and that I shall ere long partake with you in it." One instance, perhaps, of inattention to money-matters upon the part of Mrs. Franklin, which helped to produce the climax of this letter, was in the case of a certain Sarah Broughton, who, if we may judge from a single specimen of her spicy humor, was something of a tartar. On July 1, 1766, she wrote to Franklin that his wife owed her a certain sum of money and also the price of a bed, which she had kept for two years, but now wanted to return, because there had been a decline in the price of feathers. She had written, the writer said, a letter to Mrs. Franklin on the subject, but had received the reply from her "that she did not know me, and that I might write to you she was an hegehog." "Now sir," continued Franklin's correspondent, "I don't think her a hegehog but in reallity she has shot a great many quills at me, but thank Heaven none of them has or can hurt me as I doubt not that your known justice will induce you to order the above sum of seven pounds, seven shillings payed." The keen eye that Mrs. Franklin had in this instance to fluctuations in the market price of an article, which her husband and herself had frequently bought and sold at their shop in the past, shows plainly enough that, even when she was on the eve of her grand climacteric, the thriftier instincts of her early life were not wholly dead. Nor does she seem to have reserved all her quills for obdurate creditors. From the Diary of Daniel Fisher we obtain the following entry:

As I was coming down from my chamber this afternoon a gentlewoman was sitting on one of the lowest stairs which were but narrow, and there not being room enough to pass, she rose up and threw herself upon the floor and sat there. Mr. Soumien and his wife gently entreated her to arise and take a chair, but in vain; she would keep her seat, and kept it, I think, the longer for their entreaty. This gentlewoman, whom though I had seen before I did not know, appeared to be Mrs. Franklin. She assumed the airs of extraordinary freedom and great humility, lamented heavily the misfortunes of those who are unhappily infected with a too tender or benevolent disposition, said she believed all the world claimed a privilege of troubling her Pappy (so she usually calls Mr. Franklin) with their calamities and distresses, giving us a general history of many such wretches and their impertinent applications to him.

Just what all this meant is not entirely clear. Perhaps it was only real sympathy excited by the harassments to which her husband, whom she devotedly loved, was incessantly subjected by his public activity, his reputation for wise counsel, and his ever-increasing renown. Perhaps it was the mere jealousy of affection inspired by her sense of her own unfitness in point of education and intellectual companionship to be the wife of a man whose doorstep could be so haunted. After this incident the diarist became Franklin's clerk, and lived in his house – a footing which enabled him to give us a truer insight than we should otherwise have had as to the extent to which William Franklin was at one time a festering thorn in the side of Mrs. Franklin.

Mr. Soumien [Fisher diarizes] had often informed me of great uneasiness and dissatisfaction in Mr. Franklin's family in a manner no way pleasing to me, and which in truth I was unwilling to credit, but as Mrs. Franklin and I of late began to be friendly and sociable I discerned too great grounds for Mr. Soumien's reflection, arising solely from the turbulence and jealousy and pride of her disposition. She suspecting Mr. Franklin for having too great an esteem for his son in prejudice of herself and daughter, a young woman of about 12 or 13 years of age, for whom it was visible Mr. Franklin had no less esteem than for his son young Mr. Franklin. I have often seen him pass to and from his father's apartment upon business (for he does not eat, drink or sleep in the house) without the least compliment between Mrs. Franklin and him or any sort of notice taken of each other, till one day as I was sitting with her in the passage when the young gentleman came by she exclaimed to me (he not hearing): "Mr. Fisher, there goes the greatest villain upon earth." This greatly confounded and perplexed me, but did not hinder her from pursuing her invectives in the foulest terms I ever heard from a gentlewoman.

It is pleasant, however, to state that in time Deborah's dislike for William Franklin seems to have considerably abated. In 1767, her husband could write to her, "I am glad you go sometimes to Burlington. The Harmony you mention in our Family and among our Children gives me great Pleasure." And before this letter was written, William Franklin had availed himself of an opportunity to testify his dutiful readiness to extend his protection to her. It was when she had just taken possession of the new house, built by her during her husband's absence in England, and his enemies, availing themselves of the brief unpopularity incurred by him through recommending his friend, John Hughes, as a stamp collector, had aroused the feeling against him in Philadelphia to the point of rendering an attack upon this house not improbable. As soon as William Franklin, then Governor of New Jersey, heard of the danger, to which his father's wife and daughter were exposed, he hastened to Philadelphia to offer them a refuge under his own roof at Burlington. Mrs. Franklin permitted her daughter to accept the offer, but undauntedly refused to accept it herself. This is her own account of the matter to her husband divested of its illiteracy.

I was for nine days [she said] kept in a continual hurry by people to remove, and Sally was persuaded to go to Burlington for safety. Cousin Davenport came and told me that more than twenty people had told him it was his duty to be with me. I said I was pleased to receive civility from anybody; so he staid with me some time; towards night I said he should fetch a gun or two, as we had none. I sent to ask my brother to come and bring his gun also, so we turned one room into a magazine; I ordered some sort of defense upstairs, such as I could manage myself. I said, when I was advised to remove, that I was very sure you had done nothing to hurt anybody, nor had I given any offense to any person at all, nor would I be made uneasy by anybody; nor would I stir or show the least uneasiness, but if any one came to disturb me I would show a proper resentment. I was told that there were eight hundred men ready to assist any one that should be molested.

Indeed, after his marriage, the correspondence of William Franklin indicates that, if the relations of Mrs. Franklin to him were not altogether what Franklin would fain have had them, that is the relations of Hagar rather than of Sarah, he at least bore himself towards her with a marked degree of respectful consideration. His letters to her were subscribed, "Your ever dutiful son," and, in a letter to his father, he informs him that he and his wife were "on a visit to my mother." When Deborah died, he was the "chief mourner" in the funeral procession, and, in a subsequent letter to his father, he speaks of her as "my poor old mother." After the paralytic stroke, which "greatly affected her memory and understanding," William Franklin expressed the opinion that she should have "some clever body to take care of her," because, he said, she "becomes every day more and more unfit to be left alone." No cleverer body for the purpose, of course, could be found than her own daughter, who came with her husband to reside with and take care of her. In his letter to Franklin announcing her death, William Franklin used these feeling words: "She told me when I took leave of her on my removal to Amboy, that she never expected to see you unless you returned this winter, for that she was sure she should not live till next summer. I heartily wish you had happened to have come over in the fall, as I think her disappointment in that respect preyed a good deal on her spirits." Poor Richard's Almanac had sayings, it is hardly necessary to declare, suitable for such an occasion. "There are three faithful friends; an old wife, an old dog, and ready money." "A good wife lost is God's gift lost."

In the light of what we have narrated, it is obvious that there were occasions in Franklin's nuptial life when it was well that he was a philosopher as well as a husband. "You can bear with your own Faults, and why not a fault in your Wife?," is a question that he is known to have asked at least once, and he did not have to leave his own doorstep to find an application for his injunction, "Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards." But if there was defect of temper there was never any defect of devotion upon the part of the jealous, high-spirited, courageous wife. It is true that she had no place in the wider sphere of her husband's existence. She did not concern herself even about such a political controversy as that over the Stamp Tax except to say like the leal wife she was that she was sure that her husband had not done anything to hurt anybody.

You are very prudent [he said to her on one occasion] not to engage in Party Disputes. Women never should meddle with them except in Endeavour to reconcile their Husbands, Brothers, and Friends, who happen to be of contrary Sides. If your Sex can keep cool, you may be a means of cooling ours the sooner, and restoring more speedily that social Harmony among Fellow-Citizens, that is so desirable after long and bitter Dissensions.

Her interest in her husband's electrical studies probably ceased when he wrote to her as follows with reference to the two bells that he had placed in his house in such a position as to ring when an iron rod with which they were connected was electrified by a storm cloud: "If the ringing of the Bells frightens you, tie a Piece of Wire from one Bell to the other, and that will conduct the lightning without ringing or snapping, but silently." She never became equal even to such social standing as her husband acquired for himself by his talents and usefulness in Philadelphia; and she would have been a serious clog upon him in the social circles to which he was admitted in Great Britain and on the Continent, if her aversion to crossing the ocean had not been insurmountable. Her letters are marked by a degree of illiteracy that make the task of reading them almost like the task of reading an unfamiliar foreign tongue; but it should be recollected that in the eighteenth century in America it was entirely possible for a person to be at once illiterate and a lady. Even Franklin with his penchant for simplified spelling must have felt, after meditating some of Deborah's written words, that the orthographical line had to be drawn somewhere. The following letter from her to her husband, dated October ye 29, 1773, and transcribed exactly as written is neither better nor worse than the rest of her epistles to her husband:

My Dear Child: – I have bin verey much distrest aboute you as I did not aney letter nor one word from you nor did I hear one word from oney bodey that you wrote to so I muste submit and inde (?) to submit to what I am to bair I did write by Capt Folkner to you but he is gon down and when I read it over I did not lik t and so if this donte send it I shante like it as I donte send you aney news now I dont go abrode.

I shall tell you what Consernes my selef our youngest Grandson is the foreed child us a live he has had the Small Pox and had it very fine and got a brod a gen. Capt All will tell you aboute him and Benj Franklin Beache, but as it is so difficall to writ I have deserd him to tell you, I have sent a squerel for your friend and wish her better luck it is a very fine one I have had very bad luck they one kild and another run a way all thow they are bred up tame I have not a Caige as I donte know where the man lives that makes them my love to Salley Franklin my love to all our Cusins as thow menshond remember me to Mr. and Mrs. Weste doe you ever hear anything of Ninely Evans as was.[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."] I thanke you for the silke and hat it at the womons to make it up but have it put up as you wrote (torn) I thonke it it is very prittey; what was the prise? I desier to give my love to everybodey (torn) I shold love Billey was in town 5 or 6 day when the child was in the small pox Mr. Franklin (torn) not sene him yit I am to tell a verey pritey thing about Ben the players is cume to town and they am to ackte on Munday he wanted to see a play he unkill Beache had given him a doler his mama asked him wuther he wold give it for a ticket, or buy his Brother a neckles he sed his Brother a necklas he is a charmm child as ever was Borne my Grand cheldren are the Best in the world Sally will write I cante write aney mor I am your a feckshone wife,

    D. Franklin.

But, in spite of the qualifications we have stated, there was a place after all, even aside from the joint care of the shop, in which the pair throve so swimmingly together, that Deborah could occupy in the thoughts of a man with such quick, strong affections, such liberality of mind and such a keen interest in the ordinary concerns of life as we find in Franklin. This place becomes manifest enough when we read the letters that passed between the two.

A more considerate, loving wife than these letters show her to have been it would be hard to conceive. Napoleon said of his marshals that only one of them loved him, the others loved the Emperor. The devotion of Deborah to her husband is all the more noteworthy because it appears to have been but slightly, if at all, influenced by his public distinction. Her attachment was to Franklin himself, the early lover with whom she had "interchanged promises" when but a girl, and who, after deserting her for a time, had come back to her in her desolation like day returning to the dark and lonely night, the business comrade to whom her industry and prudence had proved in effect a fortune, the most admired and beloved man in the circle of her social relationships, the patient, dutiful, affectionate friend and husband, the father of her daughter and son. Inarticulate as were her struggles with syntax and orthography, she was to him the most faithful of correspondents. Long after she had reached an age when the fond diminutives of early married life are usually exchanged for soberer language, she addressed him in her letters as "My Dear Child," and sometimes as "My Dearest Dear Child." "I am set down to confab a little with my dear child," was the way in which she began one of her letters, "Adue my dear child, and take care of your selef for mamey's sake as well as your one," was the way in which she ended another. So frequently, too, did she write to him when they were separated from each other that he repeatedly acknowledged in his replies her extraordinary constancy as a correspondent; on one occasion writing to her: "I think nobody ever had more faithful Correspondents than I have in Mr. Hughes and you… It is impossible for me to get or keep out of your Debts." When they had been married over twenty-seven years, he thanks her in one of his letters for writing to him so frequently and fully, and, when they had been married nearly forty years, he wrote to her that he thought that she was the most punctual of all his correspondents. And not only did she write often enough to him to elicit these acknowledgments, but her letters afford ample evidence that to lack a letter from him when she expected one was nothing less than a bitter disappointment to her. "I know," he said in a letter to her, "you love to have a Line from me by every Packet, so I write, tho' I have little to say." We have already seen how her failure to hear from, or of, him led her on one occasion to end her plaint with words strong enough to express resignation to the very worst trial to which human life is subject. On another occasion she wrote: "Aprill 7 this day is Cumpleet 5 munthes senes you lefte your one House I did reseve a letter from the Capes senes that not one line I due supose that you did write by the packit but that is not arived yit." The same hunger for everything that related to him, no matter how trivial, finds utterance in her petition in another letter that he wold tell her hough his poor armes was and hough he was on his voiag and hough he air and everey thing is with him wich she wanted verey much to know. Nor did her affection limit itself to letters. Whenever he was absent from her and stationary whether at Gnadenhutten, or London, his table was never wanting in something to remind him of home and of the attentive wife whose domestic virtues in spite of her deficiencies of education gave home so much of its meaning.

We have enjoyed your roast beef [he wrote to her from Gnadenhutten] and this day began on the roast veal. All agree that they are both the best that ever were of the kind. Your citizens, that have their dinners hot and hot, know nothing of good eating. We find it in much greater perfection when the kitchen is four score miles from the dining room.

The apples are extremely welcome, and do bravely to eat after our salt pork; the minced pies are not yet come to hand, but I suppose we shall find them among the things expected up from Bethlehem on Tuesday; the capillaire is excellent, but none of us having taken cold as yet, we have only tasted it.

Other letters of his written from Gnadenhutten testify that she missed no opportunity, so long as he was in the wilderness, to send him something better than the salt pork, to which her apples were such a brave sequel, to relieve the harsh privations of camp life for himself and his brother officers. He tells her in one of his letters that all the gentlemen send their compliments. "They drink your health at every meal, having always something on the table to put them in mind of you." Even when the Atlantic was between them, his life was kept continually refreshed by the same bountiful stream of supplies. A menu, made up of the items that she sent him, might well have softened the heart of even such a rank, swashbuckling enemy of the American Colonies as Dr. Johnson, who loved a good dinner even more than he hated the Americans. Dried venison, bacon, smoked beef, apples, cranberries, nuts, Indian and buckwheat meal, and peaches, dried with and without their skins, are all mentioned in his acknowledgments of her favors. Some of the nuts and apples he presented on one occasion to Lord and Lady Bathurst "a very great lady, the best woman in England," accompanied by a brief note which borrowed the point of its graceful pleasantry from the effort of Great Britain to tax the Colonies without their consent:

"Dr. Franklin presents his respectful compliments to Lord Bathurst, with some American nuts; and to Lady Bathurst, with some American apples; which he prays they will accept as a tribute from that country, small indeed, but voluntary."

Franklin's first absence from his wife in England lasted some five years, his second some ten; and such was Deborah's passionate attachment to him that it can scarcely be doubted that, if he had not, during these periods of absence, cheated himself and her from year to year with the idea that his business would soon permit him to return to Philadelphia, she would have joined him despite her aversion to the sea. This aversion was natural enough under the maritime conditions of that time; for even Franklin, whose numerous transatlantic voyages were usually attended by fair weather, and who was an uncommonly resourceful sailor, left behind him the statement that he never crossed the ocean without vowing that he would do so no more.[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.] As it was, the frequently recurring expectation upon her part that a few months more would restore her husband to his home checked any thought that she may have had of making a voyage to England. There is no evidence that she ever harbored any such intention. An interesting feature of Franklin's life in England in his maturer years is the effort of his friend Strahan to induce Mrs. Franklin to come over to that country with Sally and to take up her permanent residence there with her husband. As to Sally, it began with the half jocular, half serious, proposal from Franklin to Strahan, before the former left Pennsylvania for London in 1757, that Sally, then but a mere child, and Strahan's son should make a match of it. "Please to acquaint him," Franklin asked of Strahan on one occasion, after saying that he was glad to hear so good a character of his son-in-law, "that his spouse grows finely and will probably have an agreeable person. That with the best natural disposition in the world, she discovers daily the seeds and tokens of industry, economy, and, in short, of every female virtue, which her parents will endeavour to cultivate for him." Some years later he added that Sally was indeed a very good girl, affectionate, dutiful and industrious, had one of the best hearts, and though not a wit, was, for one of her years, by no means deficient in understanding. Many years later, after time and the cares of motherhood had told on her, a keen observer, Manasseh Cutler, is so ungallant as to speak of this daughter as "a very gross and rather homely lady," but there is evidence that, even if she was never the superbly handsome woman that James Parton says she was, yet in the soft bloom of her young womanhood the prediction of her father that she would have an agreeable person was unquestionably fulfilled.