The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (31 page)

As he
surely guessed, Franklin’s defense of his conduct did not put the matter to rest. Bradford’s
Mercury
ran a rejoinder, and before long, papers in other cities had picked up the story. Josiah and Abiah Franklin read of Rees’s death and of the trial at which their son testified. Abiah,
especially, had long questioned this Freemasonry foolishness; her doubts now appeared confirmed. A letter to their son conveyed her worries, and Josiah’s.

“They are in general a very harmless sort of people,” Franklin replied, regarding the Masons, “and have no principles or practices that are inconsistent with religion or good manners.” Unfortunately, Abiah would have to take her son’s word for this, since the secrets of the order were not vouchsafed to women. “I must entreat her to suspend her judgment till she is better informed, and in the mean time exercise her charity.”

Franklin took the opportunity of this letter to attempt to assuage his parents’ concern over the larger and continuing issue of his lapse from orthodoxy. “I am sorry you should have any uneasiness on my account, and if it were a thing possible for one to alter his opinions in order to please others, I know none whom I ought more willingly to oblige in that respect than your selves.” But such was not possible. “It is no more in a man’s power
to think
than
to look
like another.”

Franklin granted that some of his opinions were probably wrong. “When the natural weakness and imperfection of human understanding is considered, with the unavoidable influences of education, custom, books and company, upon our ways of thinking, I imagine a man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds, are true, and all he rejects, are false.” The same applied to churches and councils, sects and synods. Yet though truth, in some transcendent sense, might elude mere mortals, efficacy need not. “I think opinions should be judged of by their influences and effects; and if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded he holds none that are dangerous; which I hope is the case with me.”

Here Franklin missed the point, either inadvertently or by design. Devout Calvinists like his parents believed that truth—in matters of faith—was everything, works next to nothing. All their son’s good works and all he might encourage others to perform would avail him nothing at the final judgment. Did he
believe?
That was the question. And by his own admission, if only oblique in this letter, he did not. They could hardly help being concerned.

Franklin anticipated their objections, which were the same ones he had been tilting against for years. “I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. And the Scripture
assures me that at the last day, we shall not be examined what we
thought,
but what we did; and our recommendation will not be that we said
Lord, Lord,
but that we did
GOOD
to our fellow creatures. See Matth. 26.”

Josiah and Abiah knew their Gospels (better than Benjamin: the chapter he meant to cite was Matthew
25
), and they knew the appropriate Protestant riposte to his essentially Roman Catholic dependence on works. Franklin knew they knew, knew they would not be convinced, and threw himself on their love and understanding. “Methinks all that should be expected from me is to keep my mind open to conviction, to hear patiently and examine attentively whatever is offered me for that end; and if after all I continue in the same errors, I believe your usual charity will induce you rather to pity and excuse than blame me. In the mean time your care and concern for me is what I am very thankful for.”

He might
also have said he was thankful for their health and longevity, for such fundamental blessings were not bestowed upon all the members of his family. From birth, little Francis was his mother’s darling and his father’s delight. When he learned to crawl, and then walk, Franky doubtless followed his father from the upstairs bedroom to the downstairs print shop; he certainly marveled at the mysteries of composing, inking, pressing, and cutting. By all evidence Franklin indulged him; recollecting his own precocious curiosity, he was hardly one to chase his child away from the objects of such fascination. Besides, he almost certainly expected Franky to enter the printing trade, at least on a trial basis. The earlier he learned the basics, the better.

But fate, in the form of infectious disease, disrupted these plans. In 1736 Franky contracted smallpox. Since the days when Franklin had joined James to assault the Mathers for promoting inoculation against the disease, he had altered his view; he now advocated the practice as beneficial to private and public health. Yet he was a busy man, and Franky was not always in the most robust of health; between finding his own time and waiting for the boy to get stronger, he never got around to inoculating him. When the disease swept through the city in the autumn of the child’s fifth year, it carried Franky off.

His father was devastated. “I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation,” he wrote a half century later. With a grim sense of civic duty, he noted in the
Gazette
that Franky
had not died following inoculation, as was widely assumed of the son of a known supporter of the practice, but following failure to inoculate.

It was part of Franklin’s credo to look forever forward, to dwell not on the past but on the future. On most subjects he followed this aspect of his own advice. For Franky he made an exception. The grieving father allowed himself—or perhaps he simply could not help it—to wonder what the boy would have become. For the rest of his life the sight of other boys caused him to reflect on Franky. In 1772 he responded to reports that one of his grandsons was growing up to be a fine lad, by declaring that such information “brings often afresh to my mind the idea of my son Franky, though now dead thirty-six years, whom I have seldom seen equaled in every thing, and whom to this day I cannot think of without a sigh.”

What effect Franky’s death had on Deborah can only be imagined. She did not keep a diary, and although she certainly shared her sorrow with her husband, and perhaps even more with her mother, still living with them, neither of them recorded her feelings for posterity.

The pain of losing a child is always excruciating, but for Debbie it was all the more excruciating from the fact that she confronted the real possibility that she might never have another. At the time of Franky’s death she and Franklin had been married for more than six years. There is no reason to believe they were
not
trying to have more children; certainly Franklin, he of the dozen siblings plus two, looked forward to numerous progeny. (Debbie was one of seven children, four of whom died before reaching adulthood.) But in those six years the two had been able to produce just one child. And now that one was gone. In little more than a year Debbie would be thirty, her best childbearing years probably behind her. She might never see a child of hers grow up, might never have grandchildren. It was a bleak prospect.

The effect of Franky’s death on Franklin’s other son is harder to guess. Billy was six or nearly so at his half brother’s passing. He may have been too young to appreciate that his situation was different from Franky’s—specifically, that he was Franklin’s son but not Debbie’s. The loss of Franky likely made his father appreciate Billy more than ever, but the effect it had on Debbie’s feelings toward Billy is problematic. She would have been more than human not to feel a certain resentment that
her
son had been taken but not that other woman’s. In the close quarters of the crowded house—which sheltered not only Franklin, Debbie, Billy, and Sarah Read but also one or more apprentices and journeymen and, at
various times, Debbie’s siblings John and Frances—this resentment must have been palpable. Franklin would have felt it and understood. Billy would have felt and not understood.

Full as it was
, the house would soon be fuller—but not of the children of Debbie. In 1733 Franklin had journeyed to New England to visit his parents and sister Jane (and Jane’s children, including a son named Benjamin) in Boston, and his brothers John and Peter (the soap-makers) and James (who had finally given up on Boston) in Newport. A decade had diminished the antagonism between Ben and James; so also did a decline in James’s health. Though not yet forty, James felt himself failing, and after evincing his love and affection for his younger brother, he implored Ben to look after his ten-year-old son and namesake when he was gone. In particular he wanted the lad brought up in the printing trade, to carry on his father’s work—and his uncle’s. Ben, who had never forgotten that he had absconded from James with time left on his indenture, could hardly refuse.

What Debbie thought of the arrangement when Ben got back to Philadelphia is open to speculation. Perhaps she judged that another body in the household—especially a relatively small one—would scarcely be noticed. On the other hand, it may have been Debbie who was behind the decision to send young James off to school for a few years following the elder James’s death in 1735. Not till 1740 was he brought into the household as an apprentice. Ben duly taught him the trade while his mother, James’s widow, Ann, carried on the business in Rhode Island. When the lad achieved the appropriate age and expertise, his uncle updated the Newport shop with new types and got him off to a fair start. “Thus it was that I made my brother ample amends for the service I had deprived him of by leaving so early.”

7
Arc of Empire
1741–48

“We have had a very healthy summer, and a fine harvest. The country is filled with bread, but as trade declines since the war began, I know not what our farmers will do for a market.”

Franklin was writing to his parents in September 1744, and the war he referred to was the fourth installment of the colonial contest that formed the backdrop—and frequently the foreground—to the history of the Atlantic basin during Franklin’s lifetime. The contest had roots in the struggles of the rising nation-states of Europe for control of the new discoveries across the seas. Portugal and Spain were the early leaders, with the Portuguese monopolizing the trade routes to the East via the South