Book of Ages (31 page)

She likely read
Common Sense
. Everyone read it. Under its influence, the tide of public opinion began to change. So did the tide of the
war. The
British Army and the
Continental Army had been in a stalemate for months but in November 1775, Washington sent Henry Knox, who before the war had been a bookseller in Boston, to bring to Massachusetts artillery captured from the British at
Ticonderoga. In February 1776, Knox reached New England with sixty tons of artillery, and the Continentals fortified Dorchester Heights. On March 2, they began shelling the city. Two months after
Common Sense
was published, the Continental Army blasted the British out of Boston and ended the siege. Before the British left, they carried away what they could and destroyed what they couldn’t. They broke into Jane’s house and plundered its contents.
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On March 17, the British evacuated. Eleven thousand people, more than nine thousand of them soldiers, sailed out of Boston Harbor. The city was in ruins. Jane wondered whether she might go home. She decided against it. “I am afraid Boston is not sufficiently fortified yet,” she wrote Caty that spring.
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Between
Common Sense
and the liberation of Boston, the time seemed right, to a great many people, to declare independence from Britain. In March,
Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband. “I long to hear that you have declared an independency,” she began. She had another hope:

Adams wrote back in April. “As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh,” he returned. “We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that
children and
apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented.” He was hardly more than vaguely amused. “Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems.”
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One of the obstacles to declaring independence was William Franklin, who had forbidden Congress’s New Jersey delegation to support it. On June 7, Richard Henry Lee of
Virginia introduced a resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” On June 11, John Adams,
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and
Roger Sherman were chosen to serve on a committee—the
Committee of Five—charged with drafting a
declaration of independence. On June 14, New Jersey’s Provincial Congress—an extralegal body, formed as an alternative to the colonial assembly—urged members of the
New Jersey General Assembly to
boycott a meeting called by William Franklin. The next day, New Jersey’s Provincial Congress declared William Franklin “an enemy to the liberties of this country” and called for his arrest. The Continental Congress voted to order his arrest, too: Benjamin Franklin was absent that day. He’d stayed home with his sister.

Samuel Adams rode from Philadelphia to Burlington to inform the Provincial Congress of the vote. William Franklin was arrested on June 17. With New Jersey’s royally appointed and obdurate governor out of the way, the path to independence was cleared. The
New Jersey Provincial Congress elected a new set of delegates to the
Continental Congress and charged them with supporting independence.

Jefferson agreed to draft the declaration. On the morning of June 21, he sent Franklin a draft, with a note: “Will Doctr. Franklin be so good as to peruse it and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?”
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Jefferson’s draft begins, “When in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of
Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.” The Declaration of Independence, as
Adams always insisted, contained no new ideas. But this was its strength, not its weakness. Jefferson stated political truths derived from centuries of philosophical speculation.

“We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Jefferson wrote. A plowman was no less a man than a king.

Adams and Franklin undertook an initial set of revisions. Adams’s revisions did not include those requested by his wife. Franklin’s revisions were slight but crucial. He struck out “sacred and undeniable” and wrote, instead, “self-evident.”
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Franklin signed the declaration on July 4. Two weeks later, he received a letter from Burlington, written on behalf of Benjamin Mecom’s wife, who was by now so terrified of her husband that she sought relief from Franklin himself, two citizens of Burlington sending him this plea:

Betsy Mecom wanted her husband locked up. In the 1750s, Franklin had helped found
Pennsylvania Hospital, America’s first hospital “for the relief of the sick poor of this province and for the reception and cure of lunaticks.” Before the war, the hospital’s directors had placed a cap on the number of lunatics admitted; by the end of the war, the proportion of lunatics among the patient population had risen from 31 to 56 percent. Pennsylvania Hospital became a madhouse, but only for lunatics whose families could afford to pay; the insane poor were turned away.
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Benjamin Mecom did not end up in Pennsylvania Hospital. Instead, Franklin arranged for him to be confined to a house in Burlington. One month after William Franklin was arrested, Benjamin Mecom was locked up, too, Franklin’s son a traitor, Jane’s a madman.
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William Franklin spent much of the war in solitary confinement, beginning in Burlington.
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He would not renounce the Crown and refused to give his word that he would not try to escape. “No Office or Honour in the Power of the Crown to bestow, will ever influence me to forget or neglect the Duty I owe my Country,” he insisted, “nor the most furious Rage of the most intemperate Zealots induce me to swerve from the Duty I owe His Majesty.” He was thought to be so dangerous that, for years, he was denied the use of pen, ink, and paper.
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CHAPTER XXIX

O
n October 27, 1776, Benjamin Franklin left Philadelphia to sail to France, seeking an alliance.
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He brought with him two grandsons: Temple Franklin and
Benjamin Franklin Bache.

Franklin was seventy years old; Jane was sixty-four. He was tired, and suffering from gout. “The Publick having as it were eaten my Flesh,” he wrote to her, it “seem’d now resolv’d to pick my Bones.”
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The war consumed Jane differently. She spent years wandering. “I am Grown such a Vagrant,” she wrote.
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In Philadelphia, she tried to find her scattered family.
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At first, she remained in Franklin’s house, with Sally Franklin Bache and her family. She adored Sally’s children, including little three-and-a-half-year-old
William Bache. “Will as Harty & as lovely as ever,” Jane wrote her brother, and “Says He wants to go to france to grandpapa & He must send a Boat for Him.” But in the fall of 1776, as the British Army approached the city, Jane and Sally and the children fled Philadelphia. “On hearing the Enemy were advanting to wards us,” Jane wrote Franklin, “we thought it nesesary to Retire to this place where we hope we are saif & are very comfortable.”
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At Christmastime, Benjamin Mecom escaped the house in Burlington where he had been confined, “in His deplorable state,” as Jane described it.
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It was hard to keep a madman locked up in the chaos of war. “Poor Benjamin strayed a way soon affter the batle at Trenton & has never been heard of since,” Jane wrote to her brother, but this was scarcely more than a rumor; she had no idea what had happened to her son. She had also lost track of Betsy Mecom and the children: “I can hear nothing of His Famely tho I have wrot several times to Inquier.”
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By August 1777, Jane was back in Philadelphia, writing to Franklin to
tell him that William Franklin’s wife had died: “I loved her gratly, Temple will mourn for her much.”
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She said nothing of William, who had been carried to Hartford,
Connecticut, where he was a
prisoner of war. Stopping en route, in Hackensack, he had been allowed to write a letter to his wife. That letter was intercepted and handed over to George Washington. It detailed the governor’s plan to escape. In June 1777, when Elizabeth Franklin lay dying in
New York, her husband pleaded for permission to go to her. That permission had been denied.
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During the war, which Jane believed to have taken the lives of two of her sons, she succumbed to despair. “Dear Lady what Continued Sceenes of Misfortunes She has waded throw,” Caty wrote Franklin.
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Meanwhile, her conviction grew that all that had befallen her family was due to something other than the workings of fortune, chance, or
Providence. “I think there was hardly Ever so unfourtunate a Famely,” she wrote her brother. But “I am not willing to think it is all oing to misconduct.”
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While Jane was in Philadelphia, Caty, in Rhode Island, took care of Jane’s granddaughter Jenny Flagg. She taught her the ways of the country. “We have had another Killing lately our Spring Piggs and Jenny saw the whole process of them,” Caty wrote Jane. “She thinks She Shall not love Sasages any more nor has She eat Cheese Since She Saw what the Runnet is made of.” (“Im a tell tale you Know,” Caty added.)
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She learned to spin wool. “Jenny is gone to spinning,” Caty would write Jane.
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(Caty spun, too, and knit stockings, which Jane did as well. Caty wrote her, “Will you nit Brother a Couple of Pr of Very Nice Cotton ones if I Send the yarn”?)
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Jane worried about her granddaughter, but by June 1776, Caty had begun hinting that she ought not to, confiding, “I don’t Know but Jenny will be Provided for after a While by Somebody else.” That year, Jenny Flagg married
Elihu Greene, a cousin of Caty’s husband and a brother of Major General Nathanael Greene, one of Washington’s most trusted officers and the man in command of the city of Boston after the
British evacuation.
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(“I am told the Young Lady is very handsome and cleaver,” the general wrote to his brother. “God grant you much happiness.”)
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