Book of Ages (37 page)

“I am sorry you are as it were forced to bare the Burden of soporting my whol Famely,” Jane wrote her brother. “He is the son of a Dear worthy Child; his sister was Remarkably Dutyfull & affectionat to me, & I wish him well but should never consented to his throwing himself upon you.” Still, she regretted having been so hard on him, in her first, and miffiest, letter.
²²
“I beleve I have wrote too sevre to Poor Josiah & as he is among all strangers & so much His Superours it may Depres his Spirits & I Realy think him a good young man in the main I know no fault he has but his Vanety.” She asked Franklin to guide the boy. “I beg my Dear Brother you will as far as you can without Interfering with your other Affairs Inspect his conduct, his Disposion, and his capasety, & Reprove, Advise, an Direct him, in what you see to be most Proper for him; which if he does not observe he need not Expect Prosperity any way.” (Nor was she stinting with her own advice: “I have allways made it my Pratice in my conduct towards my first children [to] Reprove & advise where it apeared to me to be Nesesary,” she wrote her grandson, “and I Still Presist in the beleif of its being Proper & usefull.” Be humble, she advised him, and do not despair: “By no meenes suffer your self to Dispond & Perticularly on account of the Lose of yr Leg.”)
²³

“Your Grandson behaves very well, and is constantly employ’d in
writing
for me,” Franklin reassured her. “As to my Reproving and Advising him, which you desire, he has not hitherto appeared to need it, which is lucky, as I am not fond of giving Advice, having seldom seen it taken.”

This stung. “I percive you have some Exeptions to the Lose of your Advice,” Jane wrote back, “& I flater my self I am won.”
²⁴

Maybe it had something to do with the
Fourth of July. But in the summer of 1786, some combination of events stirred in her a new spirit of
equality. It was the nation’s tenth birthday. “There is much Rejoicing in Town to day,” Franklin wrote to his sister, “it being the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which we sign’d that day Ten years, and thereby hazarded Lives and Fortunes.”
²⁵

Or maybe it had something to do with Franklin’s simplified spelling scheme.
Some times the Betys has the Brightst understanding,
Jane thought.

Or maybe it was thinking about her crippled grandson, struggling to make his way in the world. Doubtless it had something to do with the growing unrest in Massachusetts. Josiah Flagg had fled to Virginia in 1785 because he could no longer earn a living in Massachusetts. The state’s economy was failing. Revolutionary War
veterans were broke and, by the hundreds, were being hauled into court for unpaid debts.

But maybe, most of all, what led Jane to think differently about equality that summer stemmed from the reading she had been doing, using that list of books Franklin had intended for the library of the town of Franklin. She had been studying
Richard Price’s
Four Dissertations
. Franklin might have sent it to her. Or Price might have, after Franklin mentioned his sister in a letter to him. Or her minister,
John Lathrop, might have loaned her his copy; Lathrop had been corresponding with Price.
²⁶
Either she owned a copy or she had borrowed one from someone in
Boston, because, after Josiah Flagg wrote to her lamenting his condition, she recommended that, especially to avoid feeling sorry for himself, he read “The first Sec. of Dr Price’s Dessertations on Provedence,” suggesting, “My Brothers Liberary will firnish you with it I dont doubt if not try to borrow it.” She found it beautiful. She advised her grandson, “It will be a usefull Subject for your Reflection in your Laesure Hours, He thinks Every Persen Injoys more happynes than Adversity therefore take your share and be content.”
²⁷

In the passage Jane recommended to her grandson—Section I of the
first dissertation—Price attempted to prove that nothing happens in the world but that
God directs it, and for good ends. “I am, suppose, in affliction,” Price began. “The author of my existence, who is almighty and righteous, knows my condition, and sees what I feel. Would he, if he saw that my affliction is improper, or that I labour under any real grievance, suffer it for one moment? ’Tis utterly impossible. A God without a Providence is undoubtedly a contradiction.”
²⁸
It was in this argument that Jane had taken comfort, all her life.

But the passage that really caught her eye came in a section titled “On the Objections against Providence.” One objection to Providence, Price remarked, is the great waste in the natural world, in “the untimely deaths that happen among our own species”: “Many perish in the womb; and the greater part of those that see the light, and are put in the way to the enjoyments and happiness of grown men in the present life, fall short of them, and are nipped in their bloom.”

Jane must have marked these pages. She read them carefully. She even read Price’s footnote to this passage, in which he describes the findings of a member of the Royal Academy of
Sciences, who “computes that an elm every year, at a medium, produces 330,000 seeds, and, therefore, supposing it to live a hundred years, 33 millions during its whole age.” And yet so few, so few of those seeds ever grow into trees. “A spider lays, as naturalists tell us, five or six hundred eggs.” And yet so few, so few ever grow into spiders. “What an infinity then of these eggs must be lost for want of falling into favourable situations?” The same could be said of humanity, which exhibits every “
capacity of improvement
” and yet “the greatest part of men have, from the beginning of the world, been in a state of darkness and barbarism”—unenlightened “by the invention of arts and sciences, and the establishment of the best schemes of civil policy.”

What is true for elms and spiders and the human species is true, even, Price went on, for “the individuals of mankind”: “Thousands of Boyles, Clarks and Newtons have probably been lost to the world, and lived and died in ignorance and meanness, merely for want of being placed in favourable situations, and enjoying proper advantages.” But these, even these, “are capable of an
endless
future progress in knowledge and happiness.” There
was
no wasted humanity. There was only a “seeming waste”: “The
seeming waste
may, for ought we know, answer important ends.”
²⁹
No one dies for naught.

Richard Price was the eighteenth-century philosopher who spoke to Jane more clearly, more concisely, more forcefully, even, than her brother did.
³⁰
He supported civil
liberty; he denounced slavery; he advocated American independence.
³¹
But he believed in a providential god, and he explained to her, better than any other preacher or writer ever had, why she had given birth to twelve children and lost eleven.

She wrote to her brother. At her desk, in her own room at last, she had her paper, her pot of ink, a blotter, and Richard Price’s
Four Dissertations,
pressed open to a page she had marked. And then she copied out, letter by letter, word by word, the passage in Price on Providence that spoke so powerfully to her, except that, instead of following Price’s
spelling, she spelled the way she liked to spell. She wrote: “Dr Price thinks Thousand of Boyles Clarks and Newtons have Probably been lost to the world, and lived and died in Ignorans and meanness, merely for want of being Placed in favourable situations, and Injoying Proper Advantages.”

This was the most revolutionary thought Jane Franklin Mecom had ever put down in writing. But there was more. To this, she added an opinion of her own—in her own words.

“Very few we know,” she wrote, “is Able to beat thro all Impedements and Arive to any Grat Degre of superiority in Understanding.”
³²

Franklin knew, and Jane knew, very well, that very few people in their world ever beat through. Three hundred thousand seeds to make one elm. Six hundred eggs to make one spider. Of seventeen children of Josiah Franklin, how many had beat through? Very few. Nearly none. Only one. Or, possibly: two.

CHAPTER XXXV

J
osiah Flagg left Philadelphia on September 4, 1786, carrying in his pocket a recommendation praising his “great Ability, Diligence and Fidelity.” It was signed by B. Franklin.
¹
Jane had a different piece of paper to give her grandson. She had made for him a copy of her
recipe for soap.

“I porpose to Learn him the Art of makeing the Crown Soap if I can git an opertunity,” she wrote her brother.
²

“I think you will do well to instruct your Grandson in the Art of making that Soap,” he returned. “It may be of use to him, and ’tis pity it should be lost.”
³

That year, Josiah Flagg turned twenty-six; his cousin Jenny Mecom turned twenty-one. “I expect when I come to
Boston to have the pleasure of seeing you connected in the Hymeneal Band with some Gentleman of merit,” he wrote to her. “O, how does Mr. What dy’e call him do, that pretty little Lord who pleasured us with his company one Sunday Ev’ning at Grandma’s”? he wanted to know. “I began to think from his Ogles and manovres, he intended to make a Conquest.”
⁴
If Jenny Mecom had suitors, she denied them. She was to be the granddaughter of her grandmother’s old age.

Flagg reached Boston on September 9, probably having passed through Annapolis, where delegates from five states were about to begin meeting to discuss how to strengthen the
Articles of Confederation, which, drafted in 1776 and adopted in 1781, had governed the states during the war. In Boston, he gathered intelligence about the crisis in Massachusetts. Three days later, he sent a report to Franklin.

“Our affairs wear a very gloomy aspect, and Business is entirely at a stand, owing to the late illegal Conventions,” Flagg began. Led by poor, indebted,
and disaffected
veterans, gatherings had been held all over the state. It was a debtors’ rebellion. Resolutions had been passed, stating objections to the economic policies of the Massachusetts government. Armed protesters had forced courts—where debtors were arraigned and sentenced—to close their doors. “There has been a
Mob at Worcester, which prevented the supreme Court from proceeding in their Business,” Flagg reported. “This day, at Concord the Court sets for the County of Middlesex, provided they meet with no interruption, but the country People are determin’d they shall not, what the Consequences will be time will discover.” The governor,
James Bowdoin, was intent on suppressing the rebellion, whose strength lay in the western part of the state.
⁵

On September 19, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court indicted eleven leaders of the rebellion for
sedition; if captured, they were to be hanged. Revolutionary war veteran Captain
Daniel Shays began leading eleven hundred men to an arsenal in Springfield. Jane’s sympathies lay with the debtors, many of whom had been conscripted into military service and had never received the pensions they had been promised. More, she was weary of strife.

“I wish our Poor Distracted State would atend to the many good Lesons which have been frequently Publishd for there Instruction,” she wrote her brother, “but we seem to want Wisdom to Giued, & honesty to comply with our Duty, & so keep allways in a Flame.”

She never got the chance to give Josiah Flagg the
recipe for soap. “My Grandson was hear he went to Lancaster & I have not heard from him since,” she wrote to her brother.
⁶
But Mecoms were still making soap. In Elizabeth-town, New Jersey, Elizabeth Ross Mecom, Jenny’s mother, advertised that she was making and selling “Fine Crown Soap, For the washing of fine Linens, Muslins, Laces, Silks, Chintzes, Calicoes, And for the use of Barbers.”
⁷
(In some ads, she offered a
genealogy explaining how the Franklin family soap had become the Mecom family soap.)
⁸
In Boston, Jenny Mecom stitched her mother a pocketbook.
⁹