Book of Ages (14 page)

S
he turned the page, and began again.

Another boy named after her father, who was, by now, bent and hobbled and weary.
¹

Her parents, leaning on their youngest daughter, were vexed by their youngest son. “You both seem concern’d lest I have imbib’d some erroneous Opinions,” he wrote them. “I think Opinions should be judg’d of by their Influences and Effects; and if a Man holds none that tend to make him less Virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded he holds none that are dangerous; which I hope is the Case with me.”
²

That year, in Philadelphia, Deborah Franklin gave birth to a girl. They named her
Sarah; they called her Sally. She was their last.

Meanwhile, Franklin printed
A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America
. In the history of the world, even on the far side of the ocean, the time had come, he believed, for improvement. “The first Drudgery of Settling new Colonies, which confines the Attention of People to mere Necessaries, is now pretty well over,” he wrote. Everywhere in America there were “Men of Speculation,” conducting experiments, recording observations, making discoveries. “But as from the Extent of the Country such Persons are widely separated, and seldom can see and converse or be acquainted with each other, so that many useful Particulars remain uncommunicated, die with the Discoverers, and are lost to Mankind.” He therefore proposed establishing a society “of Virtuosi or ingenious Men residing in the several Colonies, to be called
The American
Philosophical Society;
who are to maintain a constant Correspondence.” They would meet when they could but, more, they would write—letter after letter. He closed, “Benjamin Franklin, the Writer of this Proposal, offers himself to serve the Society as their Secretary, ’till they shall be provided with one more capable.”
³

The word, the book, the letter: knowledge. The American Philosophical Society was the colonies’ first learned society. This was Franklin’s world, the world he had escaped to, the world he was making, the world of Newton and Locke: a world that embraced a philosophy of progress based on the application of reason to nature. Freedom of opinion and the rights of man:
equality and
enlightenment. The light of truth, deduced. “The general spread of the light of
science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth,” as
Thomas Jefferson put it. And that palpable truth, Jefferson believed, was this: “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
⁴
Blacksmiths who forge shoes for horses and saddlers who stitch saddles: they were not men fated, forever, to be ridden. Their children were not born with saddles on their back.

That light did not fall on Jane’s world. Nor, though, was her world so very far away. The road Franklin traveled took him to her house; his letters reached her door; he sent her books. In May 1743, the month Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society, he and his son William left Philadelphia for a tour of New England, during which Franklin would inspect the post roads and spread word of his new society. In Boston, they stayed at the
Blue Ball, with Jane. Franklin had not been to Boston for ten years.
⁵
While he was there,
Archibald Spencer, a visiting Scottish empiricist, offered “a Course of Experimental Philosophy.” Spencer showed Franklin his experiments with
electricity. “They were imperfectly perform’d, as he was not very expert,” Franklin wrote, “but being on a Subject quite new to me, they equally surpriz’d and pleas’d me.”
⁶
He bought Spencer’s apparatus. He wanted, when he returned to Philadelphia, to do some experimenting of his own. He wished to discover the secrets of nature, and of nature’s God: the light of science, palpable truth. Maybe man could harness the very lightning that struck from the sky.

At the Blue Ball, William played with his cousins. He came to admire his aunt. But Franklin and his sister fought.
Talking against Religion is unchaining a Tyger,
says Poor Richard.
⁷
He couldn’t stop himself. Neither
the first nor the last man to act like a child in the house where he grew up, he was impious and irreverent. He taunted her. She was troubled. She had very little else, but she did have faith. Like her parents, she feared for his soul.

She worried that he thought that all he had to do, to achieve salvation, was do good in the world. After he left, she wrote him a letter, upbraiding him even as she apologized for her audacity. That letter is
lost. In July, he wrote back:

He had taken her seriously. He loved her no matter their differences, but he would neither ignore those differences nor slight her opinions. Instead, he recommended a course of study. He pressed upon her a book.

Franklin really had written his own
Book of Devotions. It ends with a prayer of thanks “For Knowledge and Literature and every useful Art.”
⁹
He had written, too, a Book of
Virtues. He had made it himself: he had folded it and stitched it. “I made a little Book in which I allotted a Page for each of the Virtues,” he explained. “I rul’d each Page with red Ink, so as to have seven Columns, one for each Day of the Week, marking each Column with a Letter for the Day. I cross’d these Columns with thirteen red Lines, marking the Beginning of each Line with the first Letter of one of the Virtues, on which Line and in its proper Column I might mark by a little black Spot every Fault I found upon Examination to have been committed respecting that Virtue upon that Day.”

He counted thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution,
frugality,
industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility. Soon the
Book of Virtues was a mess. Every week he marked his faults; at the end of the week, he tried to erase them. But in the eighteenth century,
writing could not be easily erased: “My little Book, which by scraping out the Marks on the Paper of old Faults to make room for new Ones in a new Course, became full of Holes.” In the end, he gave up, and that was his point: no life is without blemish and, after all, “a benevolent Man should allow a few Faults in himself, to keep his Friends in Countenance.”
¹⁰

Jane’s Book of Devotions was her
Book of Ages. Her devotions were prayers that her children might live. And her Book of Virtues was the
Bible, indelible. She explained her creed to her brother: “I profess to Govern my Life & action by the Rules laid down in the scripture.”
¹¹
The virtue she valued most was faith. It had no place on Franklin’s list. She placed her trust in Providence. He placed his faith in man.

Between Providence and freedom, between faith and reason, between
God and
nature, Franklin was forever straddling.
¹²
He and his sister disagreed. He suggested that she do some reading—a hint of their relationship, from childhood. They were living in the middle of what would come to be called the
Great Awakening. The greatest minister of the awakening,
George Whitefield, had come to Boston.
Benjamin Colman had even allowed Whitefield to preach at
Brattle Street. When Colman’s fellow pastor,
William Cooper, died, in 1743, the vestry appointed Cooper’s nineteen-year-old son,
Samuel Cooper, in his place. (Samuel Cooper was
Samuel Sewall’s grandson; his mother, Judith, was Sewall’s fourteenth child, one of the five who survived.) Young Samuel Cooper, Jane’s new minister, was less orthodox and more liberal even than Colman. He preached a practical religion, a religion of love and affection, and also a religion of prosperity:
wealth was no sin, so long as the wealthy remembered that it was their obligation to use their wealth to do good. Nor did
poverty mean damnation, so long as the poor sought faith: “a poor and mean Condition in this Life, is often the Lot of those who are yet the Favourites of Heaven,” Cooper said. With devotion came “sweet Peace.”
¹³

Preachers promised redemption from affliction. The standard of living, in the 1740s, was the lowest of the century. The “great Distress” in the colonies,
Jonathan Edwards preached, “gives us more abundant Reason to hope that what is now seen in America, and especially in
New England, may prove the Dawn of that glorious Day,” that day when
God would “turn the Earth into a Paradice.”
¹⁴

That, however, is not the part
of Edwards’s sermon that Franklin urged upon his sister. Instead, he recommended she read where Edwards had written, “It is incumbent upon God’s People at this Day, to take Heed, that while they abound in external Duties of Devotion, such as Praying, Hearing, Singing, & attending religious Meetings, there be a proportionable Care to abound in moral Duties, such as Acts of Righteousness, Truth, Meekness, Forgiveness & Love towards our Neighbour; which are of much greater Importance in the Sight of God than all the Externals of his Worship.” Deeds, Edwards argued, counted as much as words. Devotion, submission, obedience, resignation: these were not enough. He quoted the third chapter of First John: “Let us not love in Word, neither in Tongue, but in Deed.”
¹⁵

Dear Sister, dear Jenny. Do not wave your
Bible at me: my philosophy is to do good.
¹⁶
She thought that wasn’t good enough. This argument between them never ended.

CHAPTER XIV

J
osiah Franklin, who left the forges of Ecton to sing a new song of faith, died in Boston in January 1745. He was eighty-seven.

“Dear Sister, I love you tenderly for your care of our father in his sickness,” Benjamin Franklin wrote Jane. Whenever anyone in the family was unwell, Franklin offered cures: “I apprehend I am too busy in prescribing, and meddling in the Dr’s Sphere, when any of you complain of Ails in your Letters,” he once apologized. He sent recipes, but it was Jane who mixed remedies, made of tartar and wormwood and turpentine.
¹

Josiah Franklin was buried at the Granary Burying Ground, just past the Common.
²
The bulk of his small estate he had left to his wife; most of the rest he had divided into ninths, to be distributed to his remains: his surviving children or their heirs. To his youngest daughter, he left nothing above this portion. But even this meager bequest was generous because when Josiah Franklin died, Edward Mecom owed his father-in-law a debt the estate would never collect.
³
To his youngest son, the person who needed it least, Josiah left, above his ninth, the extraordinary sum of £30. He had taken him out of school; he had failed him; he meant to make it up to him. Franklin would not have it; he gave the money to Jane.
⁴