Book of Ages (13 page)

A promise on paper is only as good as the man who makes it. Edward Mecom made many promises. (“He then Run in Debt, to all who would trust him,” Jane once wrote, about another debtor in her family.)
³⁸

Edward Mecom borrowed three pounds from
David Collson in June 1737. When Mecom failed to pay Collson what he owed him, Collson sought a remedy in court. The day the case was heard, Mecom neglected to show up and the court ruled in Collson’s favor, adding three pounds of damages to the original debt. The judge then issued to the
sheriff a writ, a set of instructions on a printed form, with blanks where the names and places and amounts were to be filled in: “We Command you to Attach the Goods or Estate of
Edward Mecom of Boston
in
Our County of Suffolk Sadler
to the Value of
Six
Pounds, and for want thereof to take the Body of the said
Edward Mecom
(if
he
may be found in your Precinct) and
him
safely keep.”
³⁹

When you run in Debt you give to another Power over your Liberty,
Poor Richard says.
⁴⁰
The sheriff and his deputies were authorized to collect the six pounds Mecom owed and, failing that, “to take the Body”—
habeas corpus
—of the debtor.

On December 20, 1737, when Jane was twenty-five, at home with Neddy, six; Benny, nearly four; Eben, two; and six-month-old Sally, the
sheriff knocked on her door. Her husband was out, or hiding. The sheriff had his orders. He was to get the money, Mecom, or six pounds’ worth of goods. He seized a wooden horse, a form used for making saddles.

By the end of the month, two more men—
Thomas Green, a merchant, and
Thomas Price, a saddler—had sued Mecom for still more debts. Mecom’s indebtedness to Price went back a decade. Mecom then filed a suit of his own, hoping to recover eleven pounds, seventeen shillings from a farmer from Watertown. While all these suits were awaiting the next meeting of the court, the Mecoms moved out of the Blue Ball. Maybe Edward thought it would be better if the sheriff didn’t know where he lived.

In January 1738, Jane left home for the first time in her life. Her husband rented a house on Sudbury Street from a printer named Samuel Kneeland, who charged him £25 a year in rent. They didn’t stay there long. Mecom’s creditors came calling and, then, his landlord.
Creditors have better memories than debtors,
says Poor Richard.
⁴¹
Once one creditor hauled a debtor into court, his other creditors, fearing his imminent insolvency, followed suit, bringing their account books as evidence. Aside from his debts to
Colson, Green, and Price, Mecom owed
Samuel Banister and Joseph Corbett nineteen pounds, seventeen shillings. Banister was a merchant and Corbett a brewer. To Edward Carter, a silk dyer, he owed twenty pounds, six pence. Each of these creditors sued Mecom, but Mecom never showed up in court. With most of these men, Mecom had business necessary to his livelihood. He had bought leather from Colson, and Price had paid him to make saddles. With others, he bought goods that had nothing to do with his trade. From Banister and Corbett, Mecom had bought a half a barrel of sage ale and two and a half barrels of small beer.

Near about that time, Franklin printed in the
Pennsylvania Gazette
a drinker’s dictionary, a glossary of euphemisms for “A MAN IS DRUNK.” The entries for the letter
R:

Edward Mecom might well have been too free with Sir Richard. His debts for small beer and sage ale don’t seem extravagant—everyone drank beer—but they’re not minor, either. Maybe he had lost his rudder. Maybe he had been raddled even before he married Jane.

On June 20, 1738, eight days before Sally Mecom’s first birthday, the deputy sheriff came to the house on Sudbury Street with another writ. Finding no Mecom and no money, he took a desk.
⁴³
If Benjamin Franklin’s sister wanted to write, she’d have to lean on a table.

She had more to worry about. One of her children was sick. “I hope my Sister Janey’s Child is by this time recovered,” Franklin wrote to his parents in April 1738. The child needed doctoring: another debt, this time to a doctor,
John Perkins.

Perkins, who was born in the colonies, had once traveled to London, to “see what they had in practice new, or better than we had.”
⁴⁴
He was one of the ablest physicians in Boston. In his case notes, he described an epidemic that hit Boston in the middle of the 1730s. “We had a great run of the malignant sore throat,” he wrote, describing an ailment that especially affected children. “Some Children were seized with a paralytic incapacity of using their Limbs, so that they would fall two or three times in walking across the floor.” Perkins recommended purging.
⁴⁵
It could have been any of them: Neddy, Benny, Eben, or Sally. The child recovered, and Edward Mecom signed another promissory note: “I acknowledge my self Indebted to Mr John Perkins Six pounds for Value Recd. which I Promise to pay upon Demand as Wtiness my hand this 29th Day of July 1738.” Mecom never paid. Perkins sued.

By fall, Jane was pregnant again. In all the months they had been living on Sudbury Street, her husband had never paid the rent. The landlord sued on December 22, 1738, for thirty-one pounds, five shillings.

The money was short, but the children kept coming.

Keeping her own book, Jane reckoned ages. Her husband was thirty-four. She was twenty-seven. Neddy, eight; Benny, six; Eben, four; Sally, almost two. In June, when Peter Franklin was just over a month old, the sheriff knocked on the door once more, looking for Mecom, this time for failing to pay the doctor’s bill. He was nowhere to be found. The sheriff left a summons. This time, he took the Mecoms’ horse.
⁴⁷

“I trembled at Every knock at the Dore least it should be some officer with demands on him,” Jane wrote.
⁴⁸

Very likely, Edward Mecom went to
debtors’ prison. In Boston, debtors were locked up in a stone jail on Queen Street, right next to the courthouse and near where, the decade before, James Franklin had opened his print shop.
⁴⁹
Debtors consigned to prison often found it very difficult to get out.
⁵⁰
When a man was arrested
for debt, his wife and children often went to prison with him, having no place else to go.
⁵¹
Debtors in New York City’s prison—where a man and his family might stay for years—established their own constitutions and courts and elected their own
sheriffs, to enforce the laws.
⁵²

Mecom lost his lease. Jane and the children went back to the Blue Ball.
⁵³
To get himself out of debtors’ prison, Mecom must have borrowed a substantial sum of money from his father-in-
law, because, by 1745, he owed Josiah Franklin twenty-three pounds, eight shillings, and two pence. He never paid him back.

Benjamin Franklin, keeping his own accounts, credited far more than he debited.
⁵⁴
In 1737, he was appointed
postmaster of Philadelphia, much to the advantage of his newspaper. Almost overnight, the number of advertisements in the paper doubled. He ran the post office out of his print shop.
⁵⁵
“My Business was now continually augmenting, and my Circumstances growing daily easier, my Newspaper having become very profitable,” he wrote. “I experienc’d the Truth of the Observation, that
after getting the first hundred Pound, it is more easy to get the second.
”
⁵⁶

He tallied his
wealth. His sister tallied her children.

She had filled the first page of her Book of Ages. It was four days past her twenty-ninth birthday. Her father was eighty-three, her mother seventy-three. They might have paid Mecom’s debts to get him out of prison, but they were hardly caring for Jane; she was caring for them. And what they paid to get her husband out of debtors’ prison wouldn’t pay the cost of food. What could she bring in? Other married women earned money by selling the milk in their breasts: “If any Family have Occasion for a good Wet Nurse with a good Breast of Milk, or to put out a Child to a Wet Nurse in
Boston,
may hear of one by inquiring of the printer hereof,” read the usual advertisement in the back of the newspaper.
⁵⁸
But Jane needed her milk for her own children.

To add to the family accounts, there wasn’t much else a married woman might do, unless her husband approved.
Widowed and unmarried women, who enjoyed a legal status known as
feme sole,
ran shops and taught at dame schools. But a married woman couldn’t earn a shilling without her husband’s permission. She could neither own property nor sign a
contract. Legally, any money she earned belonged to her husband. As
William Blackstone explained in his
Commentaries on the Laws of England,
“The
very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.”
⁵⁹
In the eyes of the law, a married woman was
feme covert:
a woman covered by a man.

Jane began to take in
boarders; the rent would belong to her husband, but she would do her best to mind it. There was little she could do, but she could do this: she knew how to take care of people living under her roof. One army captain who boarded with her on and off for thirty years never forgot her “past favors and acts of kindness.”
⁶⁰
She was practical and wise. She was warm. “We cannot Easely feel our Selves croweded with the company of those we Love,” she liked to say.
⁶¹
She was chatty. “I very often in imagination have a fine Dish of Chat with you,” her friend Caty Ray Greene once told her, missing her. She knew how to console. “If anything labors with me,” Caty wrote her, “I tell you the whole.”
⁶²

If, in these years, Jane wrote little more than cryptic entries in her Book of Ages and a handful of letters, it’s not hard to imagine why.

“My mind is keept in a contineual Agitation that I Dont know how to write,” she apologized.
⁶³

She had no time, no quiet, no solitude. But she loved to read.

“My litle wons are Interupting me Every miniut,” she wrote her brother, “& I can add no more but that I wish for the comfort of a leter from you.”
⁶⁴
Please write.

CHAPTER XIII