Volume I Part 8 (2/2)

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 s.m.u.t 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 p.r.i.c.king 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 apprentices.h.i.+p, it was as inc.u.mbent 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 pa.s.sionate 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 superst.i.tious 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 princ.i.p.al 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 friends.h.i.+p for Franklin's brother.

The _erratum_ into which Franklin fell in writing and publis.h.i.+ng 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, a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sistance 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 d.a.m.ned 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. s.e.xual 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 pa.s.sion 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 appet.i.tes, and this Franklin had too ingenuous a way of looking at s.e.xual 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 s.h.i.+rts and stockings, pa.s.sed up Market Street before the eyes of his future wife, which were alit with merriment as he pa.s.sed, 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. Courts.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p between London and Philadelphia was to sail. Of the fond parting we have no record except Franklin's old fas.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.ses 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.sed 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 courts.h.i.+p 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. G.o.dfrey, 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 coa.r.s.e, drab vesture of plain-spoken words with which Franklin clothes it.

Mrs. G.o.dfrey [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 courts.h.i.+p 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.

G.o.dfrey 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. G.o.dfrey 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 G.o.dfreys; 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 compa.s.sion 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, a.s.sisted 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 a.s.sisted me chearfully in my business, folding and st.i.tching 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 Mennagere, 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 circ.u.mstances at that time; his partners.h.i.+p 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.

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