The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (48 page)

Franklin offered an analogy to the situation in which the colonies currently found themselves. At the eastern entrance to the Strait of Dover lay a line of shoals called the Goodwin Sands. Low tide exposed a stretch of the sands, lending the appearance that England’s land area had grown.

Could the Goodwin Sands be laid dry by banks, and land equal to a large country thereby gained to England, and presently filled with English inhabitants, would it be right to deprive such inhabitants of the common privileges enjoyed by other Englishmen, the right of vending their produce in the same ports, or of making their own shoes, because a merchant or a shoemaker, living on the old land, might fancy it more for his advantage to trade or make shoes for them? Would this be right, even if the land were gained at the expence of the state? And would it not seem less right, if the charge and labour of gaining the additional territory had been borne by the settlers themselves?

The American colonies stood in an even stronger position than the hypothesized province, for unlike the imagined Goodwinites, the British Americans produced raw materials unavailable in England’s latitude, and their distance across the sea served to strengthen Britain’s shipping, essential to national defense.

The present habit of thinking of old England and New England as distinct diminished them both. “What imports it to the general state whether a merchant, a smith, or a hatter grow rich in
Old
or
New
England?” In either case the empire gained. Imperial laws ought to recognize this reality and reward effort wherever it occurred. “If, through increase of people, two smiths are wanted for one employed before, why may not the
new
smith be allowed to live and thrive in the
new Country, as
well as the
old
one in the
old
?” Britain must eventually realize the fundamental truth: “The strength and wealth of the parts is the strength and wealth of the whole.”

Franklin’s
exchange with Governor Shirley followed a personal meeting between the two men. In the autumn of 1754 Franklin returned to Boston on a trip that combined public and private affairs. Abiah Franklin had died in May 1752 after some years of declining health. “I am very weeke and short bretht so that I cant set to rite much,” she informed her son several months earlier, in her untutored manner. She was not one to complain, though, and was thankful for what was left to her. “I slepe well anits [a-nights] and my coff is better and I have a prity good stumak to my vettels.”

News of her death came as no great surprise the following spring; and as in the case of Josiah seven years before, the news arrived too late for Benjamin to attend the funeral or do more than commiserate with his siblings. “I received yours with the affecting news of our dear good
mother’s death,” he wrote Jane. “I thank you for your long continued care of her in her old age and sickness. Our distance made it impracticable for us to attend her, but you have supplied all. She has lived a good life, as well as a long one, and is happy.”

After his own fashion Franklin sought to repay his familial debt to his sister and her husband, Edward Mecom. The couple had eleven children; for reasons not hard to fathom, Franklin took a special shine to the third, who was named after him. Benjamin Mecom possessed the same independent mind as his uncle, the same impatience with life close to kin, the same desire to get out of Boston. Franklin arranged for the lad to apprentice with James Parker, Franklin’s New York printer-partner. “I am confident he will be kindly used there,” Franklin assured the boy’s mother, “and I shall hear from him every week.” By way of admonition, the uncle added, “You will advise him to be very cheerful, and ready to do every thing he is bid, and endeavour to oblige every body, for that is the true way to get friends.”

If Jane relayed the advice to Benny, it failed to make an impression. The apprenticeship with Parker yielded numerous complaints from both apprentice and master, complaints that usually intersected in the correspondence of Franklin. Whether Benny was more fractious than Franklin himself had been at the same stage of his career is impossible to tell from the distance of more than two hundred years; it was almost as hard for Franklin to tell from the distance of one hundred miles. Benny’s mother heard her son’s complaints and echoed them back to her brother; Parker related his side of the story directly.

Franklin found himself at something of a loss as to how to handle the matter. The best he could do was reassure Jane that her son’s sufferings were exaggerated in the telling and really nothing out of the ordinary, while inquiring of Parker to determine whether such was indeed the case. His own visits to New York supplemented his inquiries of his partner.

“I am frequently at New York,” he wrote Jane, exaggerating for soothing effect, “and I never saw him unprovided with what was good, decent, and sufficient.” Benny had complained of being sent on petty errands. “No boys love it, but all must do it,” his uncle said. Benny made a habit of staying out all night; Parker had good reason for reprimanding him. “If he was my own son, I should think his master did not do his duty by him, if he omitted it, for to be sure it is the high road to destruction.” Benny had been beguiled by a privateer that brought rich prizes into port, prizes shared among the crew; like William Franklin, he determined to have done with dreary terrestrial existence and make for the
open sea and the life of the licensed pirate. Parker had to pull him off, as Franklin pulled William off; now Franklin explained the attempted escape to the attempter’s mother: “When boys see prizes brought in, and quantities of money shared among the men, and their gay living, it fills their heads with notions that half distract them and put them quite out of conceit with trades and the dull ways of getting money by working.”

Having essentially said Benny was making up the stories of his poor treatment, Franklin offered his sister a comforting estimate of the boy. “I have a very good opinion of Benny in the main, and have great hopes of his becoming a worthy man, his faults being only such as are commonly incident to boys of his years, and he has many good qualities, for which I love him.”

Franklin was willing to gamble on those good qualities when it became apparent that the apprenticeship to Parker would not work out. In 1748 Franklin had dispatched a journeyman to Antigua to establish a print shop there; shop and printer thrived until 1752, when a tropical fever carried him off. Franklin thought to solve two problems by relieving Parker of Benny and sending the young man to Antigua to fill the vacancy. Especially as the boy was not yet twenty, his mother was mildly appalled.

The uncle attempted to assuage her fears. “That island is reckoned one of the healthiest in the West Indies,” he declared. “My late partner there enjoyed perfect health for four years, till he grew careless and got to sitting up late in taverns, which I have cautioned Benny to avoid.” The opportunity trumped anything Benny would encounter closer to home. “He will find the business settled to his hand, a newspaper established, no other printing-house to interfere with him or beat down his prices, which are much higher than we get on the continent.” Yet despite his assuring tone, Franklin had to grant that human provision would warrant only so much. “Having taken care to do what
appears to be for the best,
we must submit to God’s Providence, which orders all things
really for the best
.”

Perhaps God got distracted, or simply had other ideas regarding Benny. Independence suited the young man no better than apprenticeship, and he quickly found trouble in Antigua. He ran up debts to Franklin’s friend William Strahan in London, failed by any reasonable measure of diligence, and nonetheless blamed his uncle for his problems. Even as Franklin decried such misbehavior, he accepted responsibility for at least part of it. “I fear I have been too forward in cracking the shell,” he told Jane, “and producing the chick to the air before its time.”

If nephew
Benny’s course ran crooked, son William’s was somewhat straighter, if not always less difficult. In Philadelphia, William adopted the pose of the demobilized war hero. “William is now 19 years of age, a tall proper youth, and much of a beau,” Franklin had written Abiah in the spring of 1750. The beau was living off his father—to his stepmother’s distress—and hoped to continue to do so. The father disabused him. “I have assured him that I intend to spend what little I have, my self, if it please God that I live long enough.”

The friction between William and Deborah was no secret. Daniel Fisher, a clerk who worked for Franklin during the 1750s, kept a diary in which he recorded the stepmother’s complaints.

I have often seen pass to and from his father’s apartment upon business (for he does not eat, drink or sleep in the house) without the least compliment between Mrs. Franklin and him or any sort of notice taken of each other, till one day, as I was sitting with her in the passage when the young gentleman came by, she exclaimed to me (he not hearing): “Mr. Fisher, there goes the greatest villain upon earth!” This greatly confounded and perplexed me, but did not hinder her from pursuing her invectives in the foulest terms I ever heard from a gentlewoman.

William read law with Joseph Galloway, the scion of a respected Philadelphia family and a man who would become one of Franklin’s closest political allies before the American Revolution estranged them. When Franklin was elected to the Assembly in 1751, he got William appointed to the clerkship he was vacating.

He found the young man better work two years later. Since his appointment as Philadelphia postmaster in 1737, Franklin had moved in rather desultory fashion up the postal ranks, eventually becoming comptroller of the American posts. In 1751 he set his mind more determinedly to advancement. He wrote his English friend Peter Collinson that the deputy postmaster general of America, Elliott Benger of Virginia, who had been in poor health for some time, “is thought to be near his end.” Franklin asked Collinson to use his influence to secure the position for him. “I would only add that as I have a respect for Mr. Benger, I should be glad the application were so managed as not to give him any
offence, if he should recover.” Benger did no such thing—although he took his time about dying—and two years later Franklin got the job, albeit in conjunction with William Hunter of Virginia.

Half the deputy postmaster position afforded Franklin the opportunity to improve mail service throughout the colonies, to increase his knowledge of conditions across America, and to engage the leading citizens of the different provinces. Eventually the job would earn him a fair income, but for the time being the investments required to put the American mails on an efficient footing ate up all profits and more.

The job also gave Franklin the ability to throw work to his son. Franklin was no stickler for disinterest in appointments to office; he was happy to keep within the family the perquisites of whatever positions he acquired. In this case he exercised his authority as deputy postmaster to appoint William postmaster of Philadelphia. A year later he named William continental comptroller.