Book of Ages (25 page)

“None that I know of; they will never do it unless compelled by force of arms.”

“Is there no power on earth that can force them to erase them?”

“No power, how great soever, can force men to change their opinions.”

Finally, Parliament and Franklin had this exchange:

“What used to be the pride of the Americans?”

“To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of G. Britain.”

“What is now their pride?”

“To wear their old cloaths over again till they can make new ones.”
⁷

·    ·    ·

New clothes.
The month Franklin was examined by Parliament, Jane received from her brother a trunk of new clothes. Franklin had shipped her three sets of fashionable English clothes—“credible cloathing,” she called it. For “Each of us a Printed coten Gownd a quilted coat a bonit,” she noted, and for “Each of the Garls,” her daughters Jenny and Polly, “a cap & some Ribons.” The bonnet, Jane wrote Deborah, “is very suteable for me to were now”—she was still in mourning—“being black & a Purple coten.”
⁸

Old clothes.
In Philadelphia, Franklin’s wife packed up Franklin’s old clothes and sent them to be worn by Jane’s deranged son Peter, who was being cared for in the country by a farmer’s wife. Deborah wrote to her husband that she had sent “sume of yours for poor Petter who is still a live,” explaining, “I shold not a disposed of aney thing of yours but the mothe is got in them.”
⁹

Since the
death of her husband, Jane had wondered what she could do to bring in more income. She wanted to open a business. “I know my Dear Brother is allways Redey to asist the Indogent and I now Intreat your advice and Direction,” she had written to him. At the
almshouse in Boston, the
Overseers of the Poor helped
widows get business licenses. Jane had the same idea. “I feel now as if I could carey on some Biusnes if I was in it but at other times I fear my years are two far advancd to do any thing but jog on in the old track.”
¹⁰

Maybe it was the
bonnets that she had lately unwrapped from their packing that gave her the courage to start a business. She gathered material and, with her daughters, began
sewing. Jane, who wrote so ill, could stitch very well, and, she told her brother, “my Daughter Jeney with a litle of my asistance has taken to makeing Flowrs for the Ladyes Heads & Boosomes with Prity good acceptance.”
¹¹
She would turn her needle to profit.
¹²

On March 17, 1766, Parliament, blindsided by the fervor of the colonial opposition, repealed the Stamp Act. “I congratulate you & my Countrymen on the Repeal,” Franklin wrote Jane from London.
¹³
The times seemed hopeful. “I have a small Request to ask,” she wrote her brother in November. Or, rather, she asked him to relay the request to his London landlady,
Margaret Stevenson. “It is to Procure me some fine old Lining or cambrick (as a very old shirt or cambrick hankercheifs) Dyed into bright colors such as red & green a Litle blew but cheafly Red.” She knew how to
dye. She also kept, in her house, a little book she had brought with her from the
Blue Ball: her uncle Benjamin’s book of recipes, which he had carried with him from
Banbury. But, she admitted, “with all my own art & good old unkle Benjamins memorandoms I cant make them good colors.” She thought that with such vivid linen and cambric, “we shall git somthing by it worth our Pains if we live till Spring.”
¹⁴
No gains without pains
.

In March 1767, Franklin arranged for Mrs. Stevenson to send the fabrics, at his expense. “I send you per Capt. Freeman a little Box containing some few Articles of Millenery, which Mrs. Stevenson has bought for you,” he wrote.

She and her daughters were to stitch their way from rags to riches. The fabrics—fine English linens and lace and ribbons—were lovely. “They apear to me to be Extroydnary good of the kind,” Jane wrote to Mrs. Stevenson in May, sending her “complyments & thanks” and adding, “& tho the fashons are new to most of us I make now Doubt they will Obtain by Degrees when our Top Ladys sett the Example.” She begged for more material, requesting, further, that “if opertunity Presents & any new Fashon comes out of Caps, or Hankerchifs, Ruffels, Aprons, Cloaks, hatts, shaids or Bonets, & you will be kind anouf to send me Paterns cut in Paper with Directions how to make them, & how they are worn, it will Add still Grater obligations & shall be Gratfully Acknolidged.”
¹⁶

Jane and her daughters, sometimes sick, sometimes well, stitched and stitched. But the month after the fabric arrived, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, instituting taxes on all
tea, paper, glass,
paint, and lead imported from England and mandating the establishment of a customs board to enforce the new
taxes and regulate trade; the board was to be located in Boston. It would take weeks for word of the new taxes to reach
Boston. But when it did, Jane was faced with the grim and certain knowledge that she could not possibly have decided to venture into the business of making and selling new clothes at a worse time. Bostonians resolved to
boycott not just
tea, paper, glass,
paint, and lead but everything imported from England—including fine fabrics, especially luxury items like ribbons, lace, and cloth. The boycott began in October 1767.

She had gone too far, had invested too much to abandon her stock of goods. That November, she took out an advertisement in the
Boston Evening-Post
. It was the first time her name appeared in print.
¹⁷

But in Boston, where the boycott had inspired even the women Jane called the city’s “Top Ladys” to spin flax and wear homespun—ostentatiously performing their civic
virtue—there wasn’t much money to be made in selling fancy hats of the latest English fashion and finest English fabrics.

Franklin offered his sympathy. “We suppose you did not then know, that your People would resolve to wear no more Millinery,” he wrote her in December. And then he wanted to know, “Pray are those Resolutions like to be steadily stuck to?”
¹⁸

She was vexed, sorely vexed.

“It Proves a Litle unlucky for me,” she grumbled, “that our People have taken it in there Heads to be so Exsesive Frugal.”
¹⁹

What price,
liberty? In 1766, Benjamin Mecom had begun using for his newspaper’s motto something Franklin had once printed: “Those who would give up ESSENTIAL LIBERTY, TO PURCHASE A LITTLE TEMPORARY SAFETY, deserve neither LIBERTY nor SAFETY.”
²⁰
But no aphorism of Franklin’s was better remembered, in these years, than his answer to Parliament when asked what was Americans’ pride:
To wear their old cloaths over again till they can make new ones.

Jane’s trials during these years were, in her accounting, the price she paid for a boycott led by blusterers. She thought bluster usually came at the expense of the poor. She knew very well that her brother himself had fanned the boycotting fervor; she had read his examination before Parliament. She admired it. “Yr Ansurs to the Parlement are thought by the best Judges to Exeed all that has been wrot on the subject,” she told him, “& being given in the maner they were are a Proof they Proceeded from Prinsiple.”
²¹

It was a pickle. “Our Blusterers must keep themselves Imployed & If they Do no wors than Perswade us to
were our old cloaths over again
I cant Disaprove of that in my Hart,” she wrote her brother. Still, she added, “I should Like to have those that do bye & can afford it should bye what Litle I have to sell & Imploy us to make it.”
²²
She understood the principle behind the boycott. But did it have to ruin her?

CHAPTER XXIII

S
he picked up her Book of Ages:

These are the last lines she ever wrote in her Book of Ages: lines from the
Book of Job.

From childhood, Jane had been close to her relatives on Nantucket. (“My Nantuckett,” she called it.) Her cousin Keziah Folger Coffin was one of the island’s richest
merchants, a shrewd and well-known tradeswoman.
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, who, in
Letters from an American Farmer,
asked, “What then is the American, this new man?” asked another question, too: “Who is he in this country, and who is a citizen of Nantucket or Boston who does not know Aunt Kesiah?”
¹

Jane and Keziah had traded daughters. Polly went to live on Nantucket, to get well; Keziah Folger Coffin’s daughter Keziah came to live with Jane in Boston, to go to school.
²
Keziah thrived; Polly died. “Poor Aunt Mecom has meet with a Verry Severe affliction in the
Death of her Daughter Polly Who Died in Nantucket at her Cousin Coffins,” Jonathan Williams Sr. wrote to Franklin.
³
“Realy my Spirits are so much Broken with this Last Hevey Stroak of Provedenc that I am not capeble of Expresing my self as
I ought,” Jane wrote to her brother. She had loved this daughter best. “Oh my Brother she was Every thing to me, Every word & Every Action was full of Duty & Respect, & I never Lookd on Her but with Pleasur Exept when she was sick or in troble.” Polly was exactly the kind of daughter Jane had tried to be. “How to make me Easey & Happy was what she had most at Heart,” Jane wrote. For her death, Jane blamed herself: “Rather than Give me Pain she concealed her own Infirmities & Did so much more than she was Able that it Increased Her Disorder & Hastened Her End.”
⁴
Maybe stitching bonnets had made her worse. Jane could scarcely bear it. “Sorrows roll upon me like the waves of the sea.” What had she done to so offend
God? She read the
Book of Job, again and again. “I am hardly allowed time to fetch my breath,” she wrote. “I am broken with breach upon breach, and I have now, in the first flow of my grief, been almost ready to say, ‘What have I more?’ ”
⁵

She began to wonder whether the fate of her family might not have been her fault. Maybe her daughter had died because, as sick as she was, she stitched bonnets for rich women unwilling to buy them. Maybe her sons had failed not for lack of merit but because they were unable to overcome the disadvantage of an unsteadiness they had inherited from their father. Maybe her children had died because they were poor and lived lives of meanness and
filth and crowding and squalor. Maybe. Maybe not only
Providence but also men in power—politics—determined the course of human events. She wondered and wondered.