The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (35 page)

Franklin was no fool, and no prude. In the summer of 1745 he wrote a letter—or perhaps an essay in the form of a letter—to “My dear Friend,” an unnamed young man. The subject of this letter was so shocking to the sensibility of the several generations that followed Franklin’s that the piece was effectively suppressed for nearly two centuries. Yet Franklin considered it matter-of-factly, as though it were a topic as fit for reflection and inquiry as any other.

The question was, what sort of mistress was best for an unmarried young man? Franklin prefaced his remarks by declaring that marriage was the proper condition for man. If Deborah had read this passage, she would have been touched:

It is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid happiness…. It is the man and woman united that make the complete human being. Separate, she wants his force of body and strength of reason; he, her softness, sensibility and acute discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the world. A single man has not nearly the value he would have in that state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors. If you get a prudent, healthy wife, your industry in your profession, with her good economy, will be a fortune sufficient.

Yet Franklin would not have been writing were his correspondent—whoever he was—likely to be swayed by such rational arguments. Male youth would sow its oats, whatever Franklin might say.

Accepting this, Franklin advised the young gent on the sort of mistress he should choose. “In all your amours, you should
prefer old women to young ones,”
he said. He granted that this flew against inclination; consequently, on the premise that passion need not entirely banish practicality, he adduced eight reasons in favor of mature mistresses:

1. Because as they have more knowledge of the world and their minds are better stored with observations, their conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreeable.
   

2. Because when women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their influence over men, they supply the diminution of beauty by an augmentation of utility. They learn to do 1000 services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old woman who is not a good woman.
   

3. Because there is no hazard of children, which irregularly produced may be attended with much inconvenience.
   

4. Because through more experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an intrigue to prevent suspicion. The commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the affair should happen to be known, considerate people might be rather inclined to excuse an old woman who would kindly take care of a young man, form his manners by her good counsels, and prevent his ruining his health and fortune among mercenary prostitutes.
   

5. Because in every animal that walks upright, the deficiency of the fluids that fill the muscles appears first in the highest part. The face grows lank and wrinkled, then the neck, then the breast and arms, the lower parts continuing to the last as plump as ever. So that covering all above with a basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all cats are grey, the pleasure of corporal enjoyment with an old woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every knack being by practice capable of improvement.
   

6. Because the sin is less. The debauching a virgin may be her ruin, and make her for life unhappy.
   

7. Because the compunction is less. The having made a young girl
   miserable
   may give you frequent bitter reflections, none of which can attend making an old woman
   happy.
   

8thly and lastly. They are
so grateful!!

Perhaps
Debbie did read this; if so, she must have had mixed feelings. At thirty-seven her face was starting to sag, her neck and arms to lose their tone. Yet here her husband was singing praise to the woman she was becoming—unless he was singing praise to some
other
older woman. How did he know that all women looked alike from the girdle down? It sounded as though he had done a survey. Was he complimenting
her
in declaring that the “knack” of lovemaking improved with practice? Or someone else? And who, precisely, was
“so grateful”
for an illicit liaison?

The other women in Franklin’s life would occasion international comment, but there is little evidence of wandering at this stage in his life. On the contrary, he made much of his affection for Debbie. Franklin spent many, perhaps most, evenings in various taverns, meeting with members of the Junto and other associates. The distaste for alcohol he evinced in England had worn off; while never a lush, he hoisted a pint with his friends quite freely. As the tongues loosened, they often broke into song, to which Franklin contributed with voice and pen. One of his ditties he entitled “The Antediluvians Were All Very Sober”:

The Antediluvians were all very sober,
   For they had no wine, and they brewed no October [an autumn ale];
All wicked, bad livers, on mischief still thinking,
   For there can’t be good living where isn’t good drinking.

’Twas honest old Noah first planted the vine,
   And mended his morals by drinking its wine.
He justly the drinking of water decried,
   For he knew that all mankind, by drinking it, died.
From this piece of history plainly we find
   That water’s good neither for body or mind;
That virtue and safety in wine-bibbing’s found,
   While all that drink water deserve to be drowned.

The choristers often selected songs that spoke of relations between the sexes; frequently these extolled the virtues of women to whom the songs’ narrators were not married. One of Franklin’s friends remarked on the dearth of drinking music that made married life appear attractive. Franklin responded with another composition—the lyrics, anyway, for as with most such inventions, these were set to a tune the taverners already knew. The song praised his domestic existence with Debbie, who was discreetly rechristened as “My Plain Country Joan”:

Of their Chloes and Phyllises poets may prate;
   I sing my plain country Joan.
Now twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life;
   Blest day that I made her my own.

Not a word of her face, her shape or her eyes,
   Of flames or of darts shall you hear.
Though I beauty admire, ’tis virtue I prize,
   That fades not in seventy years….

Some faults we have all, and so may my Joan
   But then they’re exceedingly small.
And now I’m used to ’em, they’re just like my own,
   I scarcely can see ’em at all.

After
1743 Franklin had even more to be thankful to Debbie about. In the late summer of that year she gave birth to a daughter, named Sarah for her maternal grandmother. Eleven years after Franky’s birth, seven years after his death, and almost certainly long past the time when she had despaired of having any children to survive her—and any children of her own to offset the presence of Benjamin’s bastard William—Debbie delighted in little Sally. She insisted that the child be baptized at Christ Church, up Market Street past the market and around
the corner on Fifth (next to the burial ground where young Franky lay). She did not have to insist that Sally be inoculated against smallpox; her husband’s still-sore conscience made certain that his daughter would not suffer the fate of his second son. “Sally was inoculated April 18 [1746], being Friday at 10 o’clock in the morning,” he noted to himself, as if to confirm in writing that he had done for Sally what he should have done for Franky.

Sally proved a true Franklin. “Your granddaughter is the greatest lover of her book and school of any child I ever knew,” he wrote his mother just after Sally’s fourth birthday. Precocity persisted through the next three years. “Sally grows a fine girl, and is extremely industrious with her needle, and delights in her book,” he informed Abiah after Sally turned seven. “She is of a most affectionate temper, and perfectly dutiful and obliging, to her parents and to all. Perhaps I flatter my self too much; but I have hopes that she will prove an ingenious, sensible, notable, and worthy woman.”

Such hopes led Franklin lightheartedly to consider a match between Sally and William Strahan, the son of Franklin’s English correspondent, and increasingly his friend, of the same name. The idea appealed to William’s father, offering the two fathers an excuse to share details of the development of their children. “I am glad to hear so good a character of my son-in-law,” Franklin replied to one of Strahan’s letters, written when young William was ten and Sally seven. “Please to acquaint him that his spouse grows finely, and will probably have an agreeable person. That with the best natural disposition in the world, she discovers daily the seeds and tokens of industry and economy, and in short, of every female virtue, which her parents will endeavour to cultivate for him.” Talk of a dowry or other such arrangement was premature, but Franklin broached the subject obliquely, which was to say morally: “If the success [of his and Debbie’s parenting efforts] answers their fond wishes and expectations, she will, in the true sense of the word, be
worth
a great deal of money, and consequently a great fortune.”

Sally’s arrival added a life to Franklin’s universe; his father’s death subtracted one. Josiah Franklin died in January 1745 at the age of eighty-seven. “By an entire dependence on his redeemer and a constant course of the strictest piety and virtue,” the
Boston Weekly News-Letter
noted on his passing, “he was enabled to die, as he lived, with cheerfulness and peace.” What Josiah in his last years thought of his youngest son is impossible to ascertain; the father was as frugal with his emotions as with his money. He must have been proud of Benjamin’s worldly accomplishments, but he
likely worried at Ben’s lack of that piety Josiah’s obituarist applauded in him. Father and son had never been close, and they were not close at the end. Needless to say, by the time Ben heard of the death, it was too late to travel to Boston for the funeral. Yet the death goes unremarked in Franklin’s surviving correspondence. Although he must have written condolences to Abiah, the closest thing to an extant expression of feeling appears in a letter to his sister Jane, who lived near their father and mother. “Dear Sister, I love you tenderly for your care of our father in his sickness,” he said.

From
Philadelphia it was often easy to forget there was a war going on in the north and on the western frontier. After its enthusiastic commencement, the Louisbourg expedition settled down to a difficult siege. The summer soldiers from New England could not help being impressed—indeed awed—by the “Gibraltar of the New World,” with its thirty-foot-high stone walls; the 250 cannon protruding from the apertures in the ramparts; the curtain-wall that ran three-quarters of a mile across the neck of land that contained the town, anchored at one end in the harbor and buried at the other in the surf; the island battery commanding the harbor, positioned to blast any ships that slipped through the reefs jutting like the tines of a giant fork from the bottom, ready to rake the hulls of intruders ignorant of their exact position; the “Grand Battery” located a mile from the town, covering the entire harbor from mouth to head, eager to deliver a deadly crossfire against enemy forces.