Book of Ages (59 page)

  
1.
  Benjamin Mecom’s own family was growing. His wife, Elizabeth, brought their baby, Sarah, to be baptized at the
Brattle Street Church on October 1, 1758, probably by Samuel Cooper.
Manifesto Church,
178.

  
2.
  
“To the honourable Republic of LETTERS, in New-England,”
New-England Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure,
August 1, 1758, 6.

  
3.
  “Introduction,”
Gentleman’s Magazine; or, Monthly Intelligencer
(London: F. Jefferies, 1731). The best history of the magazine in early America remains Frank Luther Mott,
A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).

  
4.
  “The Design, &c.”
New-England Magazine,
August 1, 1758, 9–10.

  
5.
  The magazine’s cover said it was written “By Urbanus Filter”; its motto was “E Pluribus Unum.” Both were nods to the
Gentleman’s Magazine,
whose putative author was “Sylvanus Urban,” and whose motto was also “E Pluribus Unum” (a phrase Franklin would put to another use when, on July 4, 1776, he and fellow
Continental Congress delegates
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams served on a committee whose charge was “to prepare a device for a Seal of the United States of America”). See Monroe E. Deutsch, “E Pluribus Unum,”
The Classical Journal
18 (1923): 387–407, and Holman S. Hall, “The First New England Magazine,”
New England Magazine,
n.s. 33 (January 1906): 520–25.

  
6.
  Benjamin Mecom printed “Advice to a Young Tradesman” on March 1, 1759, in the
New-England Magazine,
27–28. He printed the gravestone inscription under “Supplement to No. 1,”
New-England Magazine,
August 1, 1758, p. 58.

  
7.
  This tale is recounted in John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman,
The Magazine in America, 1741–1990
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–4. And see Carl Van Doren,
Benjamin Franklin
(New York: Viking, 1938), 119–20.

  
8.
  James Parker, “Proposals for Printing by Subscription, a New
American
Magazine,”
New-York Gazette; or, The Weekly Post-Boy,
September 12, 1757.

  
9.
  Webster is in Mott,
History of American Magazines,
13.

10.
  
New-England Magazine,
August 1, 1758.

11.
  Advertisement for the
New-England Magazine
,
Boston Evening-Post,
September 4, 1758.

12.
  Benjamin Mecom, “Good Wages & Accommodation for a Journeyman-Printer,”
Boston Post-Boy,
March 16, 1761.

13.
  Benjamin Mecom, advertisement in the
Boston Evening-Post,
February 8, 1762.

14.
  Mecom wrote to DRF, apologizing that he was unable to pay her money he owed her. “You may depend upon it gives me no great Deal of Pain that I cannot send you any Money yet, but when the Psalter is done ’tis very likely I shall be able to send you some, which will always be very chearfuly and thankfully don.” Benjamin Mecom to DRF, Boston, April 10, 1758, APS. And see Isaiah Thomas,
The History of Printing in America
(Albany, 1874), 1:142–44.

15.
  Benjamin Mecom to DRF, February 9, 1761, APS.

16.
  Thomas,
The History of Printing in America,
1:142–44.

17.
  Joseph Steward,
Poor Joseph. 1759. Being An Almanack and Ephemeris of the Sun and Moon
(Boston: B. Mecom, 1758);
The Prodigal Daughter
(Boston: B. Mecom, 1758); John Perkins,
An Essay on the Agitations of the Sea
(Boston: B. Mecom, 1761); BF,
The Beauties of Poor Richard’s Almanack
(Philadelphia; Boston: B. Mecom, 1760); BF,
Advice to a Young Tradesman
(Boston: B. Mecom, 1762); and BF,
The Interest of Great Britain Considered
(London; Boston: B. Mecom, 1760).

18.
  JFM to DRF, April 6, 1765.

19.
  
JFM’s copy of BF’s
The Interest of Great Britain Considered
descended through her grandson Josiah Flagg to his daughter Sally Flagg, who gave it to the Thayer Memorial Library in
Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 1862, where it remains.

20.
  BF to JFM, November 25, 1762.

21.
  The tour would take five months (June 7 to November 5, 1763) and cover some eighteen hundred miles. At its close, Franklin established continuous mail between the trading cites. Post riders left Philadelphia and Boston every day, making it possible to get a letter between the two cities in six days. Stewart, “Intercourse of Letters,” chapter 2.

22.
  BF to JFM, June 19, 1763.

23.
  BF visited CRG from around July 13 to 18, 1763, and took a bad fall. See editorial comment,
PBF,
10:278n2 and 10:338n5. For BF thanking the Greenes for their hospitality, see BF to William Greene, Providence, July 19, 1763, and BF to CRG, Boston, September 5, 1763. Writing to Caty from Jane’s house in September, Franklin sent greetings. “Sally and my Sister Mecom thank you for your Remembrance of them.” BF to CRG, Boston, September 5, 1763.

24.
  BF to Jonathan Williams Sr., Philadelphia, November 28, 1763. And see the state of the accounts relative to the house, and to BF’s payments to JFM, in Jonathan Williams Sr. to BF, October 1763. On the lack of public institutions for relief of the poor, see Ruth Wallis Herndon,
Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

25.
  The first issue appeared on July 11, 1763, and the last on August 22 of that year. Franklin expected to visit Mecom in the city. See BF to DRF, New York, June 16, 1763: “I have not yet seen B. Mecom, but shall to day.”

26.
  “To be Sold at Auction,” advertisement,
New-York Gazette,
April 23, 1764. (Up for grabs as well, interestingly: “a Mahogany Tea Table.”) Before closing down shop, B. Mecom printed Noah Welles,
Animadversions, Critical and Candid, Some Parts of Mr. Beach’s Late “Friendly Expostulation,” in A Letter, From a Gentleman in New-England to his Friend in New-York
(New York: B. Mecom, 1763).

27.
  
John Mecom sold goods in Newport, for a matter of days, in 1763; see “Lately Imported from London (Via New-York),” advertisement,
Newport Mercury,
July 18, 1763, selling earrings, necklaces, rings, buckles, watches, “Hair Sprigs,” and “Heart Lockets.” His shop in New Brunswick is described in “To be Sold By John Mecom,” advertisement,
New-York Mercury,
June 18, 1764. This ad ran through 1765.

28.
  See
PBF,
11:241n5.

29.
  See, e.g., Thomas Fitch,
Viro Præstantissimo
(New Haven: Excudebat B. Mecom, 1764) and
Quæstiones Pro Modulo Discutiendæ Sub Reverendo D. Thoma Clap, Collegii Yalensis
(Novo-Portu: Excudebat Benjamin Mecom, 1764).

30.
  
James Parker to BF, Burlington, January 4, 1766; Woodbridge, March 27, 1766; and New York, May 6, 1766. Parker relates his losses in detail in a letter to BF, New York, dated June 11, 1766.

31.
  BF to Jonathan Williams Sr., Philadelphia, February 24, 1764.

  
1.
  BF to JFM, July 10, 1764.

  
2.
  Jane must at this point have written to Deborah,
because on January 8, 1765, Deborah wrote to her husband, “I have had one letter from Sister mecom her youngest grand child is dead” (DRF to BF, Philadelphia, January 8, 1765).

  
3.
  JFM to DRF, April 6, 1765. On Josiah Flagg using crutches from the age of five until his death, see the Lancaster historian A. P. Marvin’s remarks, inserted into a flyleaf of the
Flagg family Bible, which is discussed in the last chapter of this book.

  
4.
  Mass. Arch., Suffolk Files, Document 85880, Reel 274. “Ruddock vs. Mecom. January 1765. Suffolk. November ye 12 1764.” And on the back of the document: “I Attach a Chair of the Estate of the within named Edward Mecom and I left a summons at the place of his abode. Benjamin Cudworth Deputy Sheriff.” See also Document 85846, Reel 274, Mecom v. Dalton, January 1765.

  
5.
  Lawrence Park,
Joseph Badger (1708–1765): And a Descriptive List of Some of His Works
(Boston: University Press, 1918), 3–8. Park does not mention the Flagg
portraits, which were, at the time, unknown to art historians. Nor have they become much better known since. The Flagg portraits are listed, but not described, in Richard C. Nylander, “Joseph Badger, American Portrait Painter” (MA thesis, State University of New York at Oneonta, 1972), p. 54; the sitters are identified as “Flagg, Boy” and “Flagg, Girl.” Nylander had evidently not seen the actual portraits, as he was unable to specify their size or to describe them in any way. (The paintings measure 31 inches by 26 inches.) He found a record of them in a magazine; the portraits are listed, and again the sitters not named, although the images are reproduced in black-and-white, in “Lancaster Anniversary,”
Antiques,
September 1953, 218. In 1953, the bicentennial of Lancaster’s founding, the paintings were presumably exhibited; their current location is discussed in the final chapter of this book. Badger never signed his works, but Ellen Miles of the National Portrait Gallery agrees with the attribution of the Flagg portraits to Badger (e-mail to the author, February 7, 2012).

  
6.
  Between the decline of John Smibert in 1748 and the rise of
John Singleton Copley in 1756, according to Frank W. Bayley, “Badger was the only portrait painter of any consequence in Boston” (
Five Colonial Artists of New England
[Boston: Privately printed, 1929], 1). And see Ellen G. Miles, “Joseph Badger,”
American National Biography Online,
February 2000.

  
7.
  In 1755, Badger charged five pounds, five shillings, altogether, for the three children of Isaac Foster. The portraits of Eleanor Foster, age nine, and Isaac Foster Jr., age nineteen, are the same size as the portraits of Josiah and Jane Flagg (31 inches by 25 inches). A
portrait of William Foster is slightly larger (35 inches by 27 inches). Badger charged six pounds for a portrait of Foster (measuring 35 inches by 27 inches), and six pounds for a portrait of Foster’s wife (also 35 inches by 27 inches). Badger must have painted the Flagg children between Polly’s death, in March, and his own death, on May 11, 1765. On the prices Badger charged, see also Park,
Joseph Badger,
5, and Nylander, “Joseph Badger,” 23–29. In 1756, Badger charged Timothy Orne six pounds each for portraits of Orne and his wife (both 48 inches by 38 inches) and five pounds, five shillings for a set of four portraits of his children (all presumably 25 inches by 20 inches, although only two of the Orne children portraits survive). Orne was a wealthy merchant from Salem. Closer to Jane’s rank was a Boston baker named George Bray, whom Badger charged twelve pounds for five pictures (the portraits have not survived, nor is their size known). He also
sometimes accepted bartered goods in payment for portraits (Nylander, “Joseph Badger,” 29–31). Badger’s own estate was small, and he died insolvent. His widow, Katherine, went to probate court on August 23, 1765. The inventory of the estate is reprinted in Nylander, “Joseph Badger,” 10–12. She later claimed debts equal to the total value of the estate, £140 10s. Katherine Badger signed with a mark (Nylander, “Joseph Badger,” 12–14).

  
8.
  Badger’s portrait of Cushing is in the Peabody Essex Museum.

  
9.
  “I saw one of your letters to the Speaker.” JFM to BF, December 5–15, 1774.

10.
  Jonathan Williams Sr. to BF, Boston, December 13, 1771.

11.
  Badger’s church membership is discussed in Nylander, “Joseph Badger,” 7–8. According to Miles, Badger had at least seven children, of whom at least four were baptized at
Brattle Street. On the proximity of the Mecom and Badger
baptisms in the parish register, see
The Manifesto Church:
Josiah Mecum, 151; Edward Mecom, 153; Benjamin Mecum, 155; Samuel Badger, 156; Ebenezer Mecum, 157; Joseph Badger Jr., 159; Sarah Mecom, 160; Peter Mecom, 162; John Mecom, 163; William Badger, 165; Josiah Mecom, 166; Jane Mecom 168; Elizabeth Badger, 169; James Mecom, 169; Mary Mecom, 171.

12.
  JFM to BF, November 11, 1788. This is
Thomas Cushing Jr.; Cushing Sr. died in February 1788.

13.
  If this is the case, it would be difficult to prove, as most of Cushing’s papers were destroyed during the siege of Boston.

14.
  Telling in that regard might be this: “Sister Mecom speaks very affectionately of you, and gratefully of your kindness to her in her late Troubles.” BF to Jonathan Williams Sr., London, April 28, 1766.

15.
  Fred Anderson,
A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). For an overview, see chapter 1.

16.
  Gary Nash, “Urban Wealth and Poverty in Pre-Revolutionary America,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
6 (1976): 561–63. See also Carl Bridenbaugh,
Cities in the Wilderness: Urban Life in America, 1625–1742
(1955; repr., New York: Capricorn Books, 1964), 392–94.

17.
  BF to David Hall, London, February 14, 1765.

18.
  They founded more
newspapers, at twice the rate the population was growing. Pasley,
Tyranny of Printers,
33. In the wry words of David Ramsay, a South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress who wrote, in 1789, the first American history of the Revolution, “It was fortunate for the liberties of America, that News-papers were the subject of a heavy stamp duty. Printers, when uninfluenced by government, have generally arranged themselves on the side of
liberty, nor are they less remarkable for to the profits of their profession.” Ramsay,
History of the American Revolution
(Philadelphia, 1789), 1:61–62.

19.
  JFM to BF, December 30, 1765.

20.
  On Edes, see Rollo G. Silver,
Benjamin Edes: Trumpeter of Sedition
([New York?], 1953). But see also the entries for Edes in Thomas,
History of Printing,
1:136–39 and 2:53–56. Edes’s career is summarized in Tebbel,
Compact History,
37–39. Very useful is the detailed discussion in Joseph T. Buckingham,
Specimens of Newspaper
Literature: With Personal Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Reminiscences
(Boston, 1850), 1:165–205. Finally, Pasley discusses Edes briefly (
Tyranny of Printers,
37–40).

21.
  James Parker to BF, Woodbridge, NJ, March 22, 1765. Parker corresponded with Franklin at great length, and with great frequency, on the subject of Benjamin Mecom’s ailments and his indebtedness to Parker. “As to Benny
Mecom,
he and I have had abundance of Altercations in Letters,” Parker reported to Franklin in 1766. “He promises fair, but performs but little. I threaten to displace him and sue him: He says he will try to pay it, but if I sue him, he must go to Goal, and that will pay none” (James Parker to BF, New York, December 15, 1766). This went on for several years.

22.
  Thomas Fitch,
Reasons why the British colonies, in America, should not be charged with internal taxes
(New Haven: B. Mecom, 1764).

23.
  Benjamin Mecom,
To the Publick of Connecticut
(New Haven: B. Mecom, 1765).

24.
  C, “To Mr. Mecom,”
Connecticut Gazette,
July 12, 1765. On Mecom’s politics, see, e.g., “Enquiries concerning the Constitution of the English Colonies in Relation to Great-Britain,”
Connecticut Gazette,
January 10, 1766. Nevertheless, Benjamin Mecom was hardly solvent. “The young Gentleman is much to be pitied, as it woud appear that his Circumstances in a good measure have gone wrong thro an Act of Providence,” an Edinburgh bookseller wrote to Franklin in September 1765, reporting on the scandalous state of his account with Jane’s son. John Balfour, Edinburgh, to BF, London, September 2, 1765. Balfour was preparing to sue, and wrote to Franklin, “I do think indeed Sir that you have acted generously, in suffering Mr. Mecoms effects to be equally divided amongst his Creditors; most willingly I give you power to act for us as you think proper, where coud we have our Affairs in better hands. I shall be glad to know if it is necessary to send up Mr. Mecom’s letters, the last I had from him settled the Account, which I admitted in his own way, after various deductions which I did not lay my Account with.”

25.
  Thomas Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, August 30, 1765.

26.
  John Eliot,
Biographical Dictionary
(Salem, 1809), 191–92. Edwin Monroe Bacon,
Boston: A Guide Book
(Boston, 1903), 59. On Eliot, see Clifford K. Shipton, “Andrew Eliot,” in
New England Life in the Eighteenth Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 397–428.

27.
  JFM to DRF, February 27, 1766. And on the genealogy, see Van Doren,
Letters,
88, and
PBF,
1:lx–lxi.

28.
  A good account of BF’s views, at the time, on the Stamp Act is contained in BF to WF, London, November 9, 1765.

29.
  JFM to DRF, February 27, 1766.

30.
  JFM to DRF, September 28, 1765.

31.
  Ibid.

32.
  JFM to Jane Mecom Collas, May 16, 1778. A corrected version of this letter appears in Van Doren (
Letters,
180–82); he relied on a corrected copy in the NEHGS. The original was sold at auction in 1934; the auction catalog includes a brief excerpt, which is uncorrected, and I have therefore quoted the uncorrected version where possible.
The Library of the Late Rev. Dr. Roderick Terry of Newport, Rhode Island
(New York: American Art Association, 1934), 132, catalog 218. A manuscript note
in the margin of the copy of the catalog in the Harvard Library indicates that this letter sold for $17.50 to “Heartman,” doubtless Charles F. Heartman, a rare-book dealer and the editor of the
American Book Collector.

33.
  BF to JFM, March 1, 1766. Emphasis mine, to call out the unpunctuated quotations within the quotation.

34.
  BF, Silence Dogood, “No. 7,”
New-England Courant,
June 25, 1722,
PBF,
1:25–26. And see also Jeffrey A. Hammond,
The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Hammond’s argument is that the power of Puritan elegies lay in their conventionality, the very conventionality Franklin—and modern critics—have found so contemptible.

35.
  JFM to DRF, September 28, 1765.

36.
  Accounts of
Boston in the 1760s and 1770s include Carl Bridenbaugh,
Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776
(New York: Knopf, 1955); Gary Nash,
Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and Benjamin Carp,
Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). On the fire, see William Pencak, “The Social Structure of Revolutionary Boston: Evidence from the Great Fire of 1760,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
10 (Autumn 1979): 267–78; and on taxpayers versus women householders, see 274–75. On the effects of the
French and Indian War, see Anderson,
A People’s Army
.

37.
  Eric Nellis and Anne Decker Cecere, eds.,
The Eighteenth-Century Records of the Boston Overseers of the Poor
(Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2007), 33–35, 57, 165–66, 635.

38.
  “An Inventory of the Estate of Edward Mecom … Taken by the Subscribers,” October 30, 1765, Suffolk County Probate 13744. See also Nash, “Urban Wealth,” 549, 553.

39.
  James Parker to BF, Philadelphia, June 14, 1765.

40.
  
Pennsylvania Gazette,
October 31, 1765.
Maryland Gazette,
October 10, 1765.
Connecticut Courant,
July 24, 1765.
New-Hampshire Gazette,
October 31, 1765. For other newspapers in mourning, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Colonial Newspapers and the Stamp Act,”
New England Quarterly
8 (March 1935): 63–83. Printers’ responses to the Stamp Act are also briefly discussed in Tebbel,
Compact History,
35–37, and in Smith,
Printers and Press Freedom,
136–41.

41.
  Isaiah Thomas gives a very brief account of what happened in Halifax during the Stamp Act crisis in his outline for the autobiography he never wrote.
Three Autobiographical Fragments by Isaiah Thomas
(Worcester, 1962), 8.

42.
  
Boston Gazette,
November 11, 1765. See also Hannah Adams,
A Summary History of New-England
(Dedham, [MA]: H. Mann and J. H. Adams, 1799), 249–50.

43.
  Inventory of the Estate of Edward Mecom, October 30, 1765, with Hutchinson’s additions. “Edward Mecom’s Adm. Acc,” December 19, 1765, Suffolk County Probate, 13744.

44.
  JFM to BF, December 30, 1765.

45.
  Jane could not have known this, and Hutchinson was never able to find copies of those letters—even though he looked, to vindicate himself—but some of the papers Hutchinson lost that night, along with others he lost when patriots seized his country home, were saved. They eventually found their way to the Massachusetts
Archives. In 1764, Hutchinson had written to England opposing Parliamentary taxation by arguing that the colonists “claim a power of making Law and a Privilege of exemption from
taxes except by their own Representatives”: no taxation without representation. See Edmund S. Morgan, “Thomas Hutchinson and the Stamp Act,”
New England Quarterly
21 (1948): 459–92.