Book of Ages (24 page)

She dressed in black. About his sister’s loss, Franklin said very little. “I condole with you on the Death of your Husband, who was I believe a truly affectionate one to you, and fully sensible of your Merit,” he wrote.
³³
No more than this. To be sensible was to be wise, but it had another meaning, too. To be sensible was to be sane. Mecom was sensible of Jane’s merit. Was he sensible of anything more? Had he lost his mind?

Edward Mecom was either a bad man or a mad man. Every one of Jane’s children who had children named a child after her. Not one of them named a child after their father.

She paid for a funeral and had her husband buried. Her minister, Samuel Cooper, preached a funeral sermon. Franklin, as a young man, writing as Silence Dogood, had mocked
Puritan elegies, by writing a recipe for one: “Having chose the Person, take all his
Virtues, Excellencies, &c., and if he have not enough, you may borrow some to make up a sufficient Quantity: To these add his last Words, dying Expressions, &c. if they are to be had; mix all these together, and be sure you
strain
them well. Then season all with a Handful or two of Melancholly Expressions, such as,
Dreadful, Deadly, cruel cold Death, unhappy Fate, weeping Eyes,
&c.” Then, “having prepared a sufficient Quantity of double Rhimes, such as,
Power, Flower; Quiver, Shiver; Grieve us, Leave us; tell you, excel you; Expeditions, Physicians; Fatigue him, Intrigue him;
&c. you must spread all upon Paper, and if you can procure a Scrap of Latin to put at the End, it will garnish it mightily; then having affixed your Name at the Bottom, with a
Mœstus Composuit,
you will have an Excellent Elegy.”
³⁴

Cooper offered no such encomium to the excellences of Edward Mecom. Jane, after hearing Cooper’s sermon for her husband, copied down, in a letter to Deborah, the verse from which he had preached, 2 Corinthians 4:17: “for our Light Afflictions which is but for a moment worketh for us a far more Exceding and Eternal weight of Glory.” Her husband was afflicted. Her husband
was
an affliction. But no matter: this life was hard that the next might be soft. “To me,” Jane wrote, “the Sermon was a master Peec.”
³⁵

If 1765 was a dark year, for Jane, it was also an especially dreadful time to be
widowed. From the moment of her husband’s death, she was no longer a
feme covert
. A widow was a
feme sole;
she could own property; she could sign
contracts; she could earn money; she had to pay
debts; she was on her own. Jane was fifty-three years old when her husband died. For the first time in her life, she was, legally, alone. But she was also in trouble. Her husband had died without leaving a will. And he’d died in debt. She had still at home two daughters and two grandchildren. She ran a boardinghouse, but the house itself she did not own. Female heads of household did not fare well in Boston. More than a quarter of the city’s households were headed by women, but less than 10 percent of the city’s taxpayers were women.
³⁶
Women in Jane’s circumstances often ended up in the poorhouse.

In September 1765, the month Jane was widowed, “Sarah Burk & her Grand Child Sarah Cowley” were admitted to the
almshouse. So was Ann Johns, “a poor Woman”; Edward Tavenue, “a little Boy”; George Glean; “Lydia Richardson big With Child”; Mary McGouin; and Anna Murrey, alias Taylor, “A Negrow Woman.” Boston’s population, in these years, held steady at about fifteen thousand. Over the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, more than ten thousand people were admitted to the almshouse. Some stayed for only a matter of days; over half stayed for more than three months. About a quarter of those admitted to the almshouse died there.
³⁷

On October 30, 1765, assessors came to Jane’s house and made an inventory of everything in it. Downstairs: a desk, a table with nine chairs, a looking glass, and a tea chest. Upstairs: a case of drawers, five chairs, five beds, a great deal of bedding, and another looking glass. In the kitchen: pewter plates and dishes, tinware, a skillet, a kettle, a water pot, a coffee mill, pots and pans, andirons, bellows, gridirons, two old tables, two chairs, and Edward’s clothing: “thickset coat 2 old coats, 1 Beaver hat 1 old hat 2 old wigs.” In the shop: old saddlers’ tools, girths, bridles, saddle trees, a bench, and a lamp. Edward Mecom’s entire estate was valued at £41, placing him within the poorest tenth of the city’s population. Then, too, this was an overestimate of his
wealth: the claims on his estate were great. Very likely, he owed more than he owned.
³⁸

Two days after assessors came to Jane’s house, the Stamp Act—the “fatal
Black-Act,
”
James Parker called it in a letter to Franklin—was to go into
effect.
³⁹
November 1 would be a Black Day; to mark it, newspapers dressed in mourning. A Baltimore paper changed its title to
The Maryland Gazette, Expiring
and adopted a new motto:
In uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life again
. The printer of the
Pennsylvania Journal
replaced his newspaper’s masthead with a death’s-head and framed his front page with a thick black border in the shape of a
gravestone. “Adieu, Adieu!” whispered the
Journal
to its readers. The printer of the
New-Hampshire Gazette
edged his newspaper with black mourning borders and, in a column on
this page
, the paper lamented its own demise, groaning, “I must
Die
!”
⁴⁰

In Boston, Benjamin Edes refused to buy stamps, draped his
Gazette
in black mourning ink, and changed the paper’s motto to “A free press maintains the majesty of the people.”
⁴¹
On November 1, Bostonians staged a
Funeral for
Liberty, burying a coffin six feet under the Liberty Tree. Edes’s
Gazette
reported on similar funerals held all over the colonies. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a coffin was stamped with the word “LIBERTY.” Everywhere the story ended the same way, with a resurrection. At Boston’s Funeral for Liberty, the eulogy “was hardly ended before the Corps was taken up, it having been perceived that some Remains of Life were left.”
⁴²

Jane’s fate, too, turned on the imperial crisis. Her case—the matter of what was to be done with her husband’s estate—went to court on December 19, 1765.
Thomas Hutchinson served as a judge on the probate court. Out of Edward Mecom’s
estate of forty-one pounds, Jane requested four pounds, twelve shillings, to pay for his funeral, and five pounds “for what I am to pay the Dr for the last Sickness.” These were her debts, not her husband’s. Hutchinson, who that summer had lost the entirety of his own estate to rioters, and who knew very well that Edward Mecom’s wife was Benjamin Franklin’s sister, allowed her both of these expenses. Instead of impounding her husband’s estate to pay his creditors—and remanding yet another
widow to the poorhouse—he deeded to her the remainder of the estate, about thirty pounds, “for necessary Implements and her trouble as Administratrix.”
⁴³

Hutchinson, as Jane wrote to her brother, “has shewn me the Gratest Clemency.”
⁴⁴
She was extraordinarily grateful. She also admired Hutchinson and regretted what he had suffered. She could not have known that, even while Hutchinson refused, publicly, to take the side of the
mob in defying the Stamp Act, he had argued against it, privately, in letters to England.
⁴⁵
But Franklin knew it.
⁴⁶
“To my certain Knowledge,” he told
his sister, Hutchinson had written “warmly in favour of the Province and against that Act, both before it pass’d and since.”
⁴⁷

Lest Franklin conclude that her opinion of Hutchinson was “Influenced by His Goodnes to me in perticular,” Jane assured her brother, “my opinyon of the Gentileman was the same before I had any Busness with Him.”
⁴⁸
Something had changed: she had begun expressing her political opinions.

“I never atempt to give any acount of Publick affairs,” she once wrote.
⁴⁹
This was more than coy. Her education was slight, her intellect stunted, her vantage provincial, her views narrow. But she had opinions, and they were growing stronger.

“I do not Pretend to writ about Politics,” she once wrote her brother, “tho I Love to hear them.”
⁵⁰
She did much more than listen.

CHAPTER XXII

H
er house was full. Her daughters Jenny and Polly, twenty and almost eighteen, long ill, seemed to be gaining. (“If I should now Repine or Distrust Provedenc I should be most ungratfull of all His Cretures,” Jane wrote to Deborah, grateful that she had “two Daughters in Helth.”)
¹
Her grandchildren Jenny and Josiah Flagg, nine and five, were growing fast, the boy learning to walk with crutches. Then there were the
boarders. In a December 1765 letter to her brother, she listed them: “I have son Flagg boards with me” (her daughter Sarah’s bereaved and distracted husband,
William Flagg), “cousen Ingersols two Daughters” (her grandnieces, the orphaned daughters of Elizabeth Davenport Ingersoll, a daughter of Jane and Benjamin’s sister
Sarah Franklin Davenport), and “Mrs. Bowls is also Returned after a twelve months absence” (Sarah Bowles, the
widowed stepdaughter of Sarah Franklin Davenport). Her boarders, that is, were relatives who were worse off than she was: she charged them very little. “I have them all at a Low Rate,” she explained, “because I can Do no beter.” She was barely getting by: “my Income supys us with vitles fiering candles & Rent but more it cannot with all the Prudence I am mistres of.” There wasn’t much to be done about it, especially in the middle of the winter. “I must Rub along till Spring when I must strive after some other way.”
²

In 1766, she had a few better-paying boarders. When the
Massachusetts General Assembly met, a half dozen of its members boarded at her house. Feeding them at her table, she listened avidly to their talk. “I have six good Honist old Souls who come groneing Home Day by Day at the Stupidety of there Bretheren,” she wrote to her brother, adding, “I cant help Interesting my self in the case.” Of one motion, she reported, they “cant yet git
a Vote for it tho they sitt Late in the Evening.”
³
The woman who read as much as she dared listened as much as she dared, too—day and night.

That spring, the assembly’s first order of business was to elect a new speaker. Under the terms of the royal charter, the governor had to approve that election. When the assembly elected James Otis Jr., a fiery patriot, Governor
Francis Bernard refused to accept him. Eventually,
Thomas Cushing was elected and approved in Otis’s place. But the divide between the governor and the assembly grew.
⁴

Meanwhile, word of the Stamp Act protests had reached London. On February 13, 1766, Franklin was questioned by Parliament on the subject of colonial resistance. He made sure the transcript of his examination found its way across the ocean. It was printed all over the colonies:
in Boston, by
Benjamin Edes; in New York, by
James Parker; and in
Connecticut, by Benjamin Mecom.
⁵

Why, Parliament wanted to know, did colonists object to paying for stamps on newspapers but not to paying for postage on letters?
⁶

Franklin was asked, “Is not the post-office, which they have long received, a tax as well as a regulation?”

“No,” Franklin insisted. “The money paid for the postage of a letter is not of the nature of a tax; it is merely a quantum merit for a service done.” A colonist could avoid paying postage by delivering letters himself or having a servant or a friend do it.

“If the Stamp Act should be repealed,” another minister inquired, “would it induce the assemblies of America to acknowledge the rights of Parliament to tax them, and would they erase their resolutions?”

“No, never.”

“Is there no means of obliging them to erase those resolutions?”