Book of Ages (15 page)

The spring after her father died, Jane gave birth to a daughter: a namesake.

Before baby Jenny was seven months old, Jane was pregnant again. This boy she named after her brother, James, who had died in Newport in 1735.

And then there were nine. Neddy, Benny, Eben, Sally, Peter, Johnny, Josiah, Jenny, and Jemmy.
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But the littlest, born so soon after his sister, wilted.

And then there were eight.

She bundled him and kissed him and buried him. “Dost thou sit alone and mourn to think whitherto thy Hopes and Comforts are now come?” asked
A Token for Mourners
. Do not. Instead, “let the Covenant
God hath made with thee, comfort thee in this thy desolate Condition.”
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Weep not.

She would have had to teach her children this lesson: how to bound sorrow, how to silence grief. In a sermon called
A Devout Contemplation on the Meaning of Divine Providence, in the Early Death of Pious and Lovely Children,
Benjamin Colman preached that parents ought to remind their children, again and again, that they could die any time. Death will knock, like a sheriff with a warrant for a debtor. “There’s no locking our Doors against this Officer, when he comes to Arrest,” Colman warned. But if your children are prepared to die, Colman said, “you’ll have the more peace and comfort in their death, if they are
suddenly
taken from you.”
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And there was no better occasion for preparing a child to die than the death of a brother or sister. As
The New-England Primer
had it, in verses Jane might have taught her children:

She taught her children how to die.

Death and birth: she watched both. She sat by the bedsides of friends as
they delivered. Her niece and closest friend, Grace Harris (the daughter of Jane’s half sister
Anne Franklin Harris), had married a Boston
merchant named Jonathan Williams in 1746. Jane might have been with Grace when she gave birth to a son named Josiah, in December of the next year. He either was born blind or lost his sight in infancy. When Grace delivered Josiah, Jane was seven months pregnant.
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She prayed her child would be spared such a calamity.

And then there were nine. Another girl, named after another sister. She called her Polly.
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In 1748, Jane turned thirty-six. She had been pregnant or nursing, almost without pause, since she was sixteen.
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In 1748,
Benjamin Franklin turned forty-two, and retired from his printing business. He had become the largest bookseller
in Philadelphia and the most important paper merchant in the colonies. He had his
portrait painted by Robert Feke, standing placid and composed, wearing a brown curled wig and a black cloak trimmed with white ruffles.
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He had done what very few eighteenth-century men ever could; the son of a
chandler, the grandson of a
blacksmith, he had climbed out of the trades: a franklin had become a gentleman.

He retired from business to devote himself to
science. Having purchased Spencer’s electrical apparatus, he had begun conducting a series of experiments with
electricity. He proved that there were not two kinds of electricity but one, a single force, with two variants; these he labeled plus and minus. He demonstrated, too, what came to be called the
law of conservation of charge: electricity travels but, within a closed system, is never lost or gained. In 1749, his letters describing his experiments were read at the
Royal Society in London.

Everywhere, Franklin’s rise as a philosopher of nature, a scientist, was celebrated as all the more extraordinary for his having begun life at a rank so low. In an age of empiricism, Franklin was, himself, a proof, a palpable truth: the light of science had penetrated even the darkness of the “Lowly Dweling we were brought up in,” as Jane described it, a crowded
and cramped house in a small and crooked town, an ocean away from the magnificence of London.
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Across that distance, and into that obscurity, had shone a shaft of light.
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It helped the story—light into darkness—that his father had made
candles and that Franklin had harnessed lightning. Eighteenth-century philosophers believed they were living in an age of enlightenment that had followed an age of darkness. Dark and light were more than metaphors. Franklin believed this to be as true of politics as it was of science. Free speech was like
electricity. His
reading of
history had taught him that there would always be parties, discord, error, and factions, but so long as speech was free, truth would prevail: light would be cast. “By the Collision of different Sentiments,” Franklin wrote, “Sparks of Truth are struck out, and political Light is obtained.”
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No eighteenth-century philosopher united science and politics the way Franklin did. As the French statesman
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot put it, “He seized the lightning from the skies and the scepter from the tyrants.”
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He held the light.

In 1750, when Franklin’s daughter
Sally was six—the age Jane had been when Franklin had moved out of the Blue Ball to begin his apprenticeship at his brother’s print shop—Franklin reported to his mother that Sally “delights in her Book,” adding, “Perhaps I flatter my self too much, but I have Hopes that she will prove an ingenious sensible notable and worthy Woman like her Aunt Jenney.”
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The next year, when Jane was pregnant for the twelfth time in twenty-two years, Franklin’s
Experiments and Observations on Electricity
was printed
in London. Later, he sent her six copies, five to distribute to men in Boston and “one for your Trouble.” On its title page, she wrote, “Mrs Jane Mecom Her Book.”
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He was its author, but it was her book. She had begun, maybe even as a girl, collecting a library of everything he ever wrote. She might have kept copies of his Silence Dogood columns. She certainly saved his letters. When he sent her
books, she kept them if she could; when she couldn’t keep them, she read them before she had to give them away.

“I Read it my self before I sent it,” she once wrote him about a volume he had posted to her—his
Maritime Observations,
which he had asked her to send to a friend—“and found a grat deal of Pleasure in it as I do in all
you write as far as my capasety Enables me to under stand it.”
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His books; her capacity.

Franklin devoted himself to his experiments. But he had more plans, too. In May 1751, he found out that the position of deputy
postmaster general of America had been vacated. “My Friends advise me to apply for that Post,” he wrote to the English naturalist Peter Collinson, suggesting that,
as postmaster, he would be able to enlarge the work of the
American Philosophical Society. But he was far from insensible of the fact that the position carried an annual salary of £150.
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Jane, in Boston, nursing her ailing mother, was living off what she could
make by taking in
boarders. She kept close to Grace Harris Williams and her growing family. They belonged to Jane’s church, too. Grace, raising blind Josiah, had another son, Jonathan Williams Jr., in 1750. She would eventually have seven sons and three daughters. Grace’s husband, Jonathan Williams Sr., was a successful
merchant who sold cider, vinegar, and Madeira on Cornhill. His brother was Boston’s customs inspector, which gave Jonathan, as an importer, a leg up.
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Jane’s husband had no such success. Edward Mecom had announced that he intended to open a singing school in 1744 but, if it ever got under way, it didn’t last. He was still making saddles, though not well, or not fast enough. Franklin ordered a horse’s collar from him and was left to pester when it didn’t come. “I doubt not but brother Mecom will send the collar as soon as he can conveniently,” he wrote delicately.
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She took out her Book of Ages.

Abiah was her last child. The year she gave birth, her brother wrote “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries,” in which he argued that the promise of America was to be measured in its fertility:

Jane had given birth to twelve
children. Benjamin, with a
mistress, and then with his wife, had fathered three. That made fifteen children between them, an average of almost eight. According to Franklin’s calculations
on population, four might grow up to have children of their own. As it turns out, he reckoned nearly right.
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The week Jane gave birth to Abiah, Franklin took a seat in the
Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly. “I am very weeke and short bretht so that I Cant set to rite much,” his eighty-four-year-old mother wrote him that October. “I am too old to rite letters. I can hardly se and am groud so deff that I can hardly hear any thing that is sed.” To this letter, Jane added a postscript:

Aside from her
Book of Ages, and the inscription she wrote in
The Ladies Library,
this postscript is the first writing in Jane’s hand that survives, a single sentence, written—abashedly, reluctantly—when she was thirty-nine years old: a single sentence, not about herself, but about her brother’s good fortune.
I bles god for you in all your prosperity.

Ten days later, Franklin sent a reply by way of William, who traveled to Boston in his father’s stead.

“My compliments to my new niece, Miss Abiah,” he wrote Jane, “and pray her to accept the enclosed piece of gold, to cut her teeth.”
I wish your daughter a fortune, too,
he was telling her. By winter,
smallpox had hit Boston.
John Perkins visited the house that February. (He also borrowed Jane’s copy of
Plain Truth,
her brother’s treatise on colonial defense.)
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Abiah Franklin wrote to her son that Jane’s baby had grown sick.

“The account you give of poor little Biah grieves me,” he wrote back.
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During the outbreak, Perkins estimated that only one in eleven of his patients died.
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Abiah Mecom was among them. By the time Franklin’s letter arrived, Jane had added a line to her Book of Ages:

Two weeks later, Abiah Franklin followed her granddaughter and namesake to the grave. She was eighty-four. This page of Jane’s Book of Ages reads like a tombstone, the engraving on a family crypt:

“I thank you for your long and continued care of her in her old age and sickness,” Franklin wrote to his sister after their mother died. “Our distance made it impracticable for us to attend her, but you have supplied all.”
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My Dear mother,
Jane wrote in the Book of Ages. She loved her; she fed her; she washed her. And then, she buried her.

“I never knew either my Father or Mother to have any Sickness but that of which they dy’d,” Franklin later wrote, though it was something he could hardly say with any authority: he was never there. When they were sick, it was Jane who nursed them. She named her first child after her father, and her last after her mother. Benjamin, unlike nearly all of his brothers and sisters, did not name any of his children “Josiah” or “Abiah.”
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But it was Franklin who paid for a marble tablet to be erected in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground above their parents’ graves, bearing an extraordinarily elaborate inscription: