The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (57 page)

The first thing observed was an immediate greater sensible warmth in the lame limbs that had received the stroke than in the others; and the next morning the patients usually related that they had in the night felt a pricking sensation in the flesh of the paralytic limbs, and would sometimes shew a number of small red spots which they supposed were occasioned by those prickings. The limbs too were found more capable of voluntary motion, and seemed to receive strength; a man, for instance, who could not, the first day, lift the lame hand from off his knee, would the next day raise it four or five inches; the third day higher, and on the fifth was able, but with a feeble languid motion, to take off his hat.

Needless to say, the patients were ecstatic, and Franklin was most encouraged. Unfortunately, the positive effects wore off.

I do not remember that I ever saw any amendment after the fifth day; which the patients perceiving, and finding the shocks pretty severe, they became discouraged, went home and in a short time relapsed, so that I never knew any advantage from electricity in palsies that was permanent. And how far the apparent temporary advantage might arise from the exercise in the patients’ journey and coming daily to my house, or from the spirits given by the hope of success, enabling them to exert more strength in moving their limbs, I will not pretend to say.

Franklin had long been intrigued by the principle that would underlie refrigeration, namely, the capacity of an evaporating liquid to absorb heat. One hot summer day in 1750, when the thermometer in the shade stood at 100 (of the degrees devised earlier in Franklin’s life by the German instrument-maker Fahrenheit), he had observed how as long as he wore a shirt wetted with his sweat, and sat in the breeze of an open window, he remained relatively cool; but when he changed his wet shirt for a dry one, he grew noticeably warmer.

In the spring of 1758 he traveled from London to Cambridge, where he collaborated with another physician-scientist and fellow of the Royal Society, John Hadley. Franklin and Hadley took turns wetting the ball of a thermometer with ether, which they then evaporated off the ball by means of a bellows. With each round of wetting and evaporating, the mercury dropped. Though the air in the room remained at 65 degrees, the thermometer fell below the freezing point. Hadley and Franklin terminated the experiment when the thermometer read 7 degrees, or 25 degrees below freezing, and the ice on the ball was a quarter inch thick. “From this experiment,” Franklin concluded, “one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day, if he were to stand in a passage through which the wind blew briskly, and to be wet with ether.”

This conclusion prompted other speculations. “May not this be a reason why our reapers in Pennsylvania, working in the open field, in the clear hot sunshine common in our harvest-time, find themselves well able to go through that labour, without being much incommoded by the heat, while they continue to sweat, by drinking of a thin evaporable liquor, water mixed with rum; but if the sweat stops, they drop, and sometimes die suddenly?” It was generally believed of Africans that they bore heat better than whites. “May there not be in negroes a quicker evaporation of the perspirable matter from their skins and lungs, which, by cooling them more, enables them to bear the sun’s heat better than whites do?” Might not evaporation from leaves serve to cool trees, even in the summer sun? Might not evaporation from the earth’s surface tend to mitigate summer temperatures?

Franklin’s interest flattered his hosts at Cambridge, who invited him back for commencement in the summer of 1758. He was flattered in turn. “My vanity was not a little gratified by the particular regard shown me by the chancellor [the Duke of Newcastle] and vice chancellor of the university, and the heads of colleges,” he reported to Deborah.

His vanity was gratified the more several months later when the University of St. Andrews awarded him an honorary doctorate of laws. “The ingenuous and worthy Benj. Franklin has not only been recommended to us for his knowledge of the law, the rectitude of his morals and sweetness of his life and conversation,” the citation read, “but hath also by his ingenious inventions and successful experiments, with which he hath enriched the science of natural philosophy and more especially of electricity which heretofore was little known, acquired so much praise throughout the world as to deserve the greatest honours in the Republic of Letters.” The governing body of the ancient university went on to declare that henceforth said Franklin should be addressed and treated by all as “the most Worthy Doctor.” Neither in that era nor later were the recommendations of educators always followed, but this recommendation took, and Franklin thereafter was generally referred to as “Dr. Franklin.”

With each
honor that came his way, Franklin felt farther from home. The feeling evoked ambivalence, for while he missed his wife and daughter and the familiar sights of Philadelphia, the larger circles in which he now moved possessed an undeniable appeal.

Franklin acknowledged his ambivalence to Debbie. “You may think
perhaps that I can find many amusements here to pass the time agreeable,” he wrote in January 1758. “’tis true, the regard and friendship I meet with from persons of worth, and the conversation of ingenious men, give me no small pleasure. But at this time of life, domestic comforts afford the most solid satisfaction, and my uneasiness at being absent from my family, and longing desire to be with them, make me often sigh in the midst of cheerful company.”

Certainly the first part of Franklin’s statement—about the pleasure of the company he now kept—was true; undoubtedly the second part was true as well. Yet he could say no less, especially in a letter in which he informed his wife that “I shall hardly be able to return before this time twelve months.” The work was slow, and he was determined to do it properly, which required “both time and patience.”

Franklin appreciated Debbie’s efforts to keep him abreast of events at home. “I thank you for sending me brother Johnny’s journal,” he wrote. “I hope he is well, and sister Read and the children. I am sorry to hear of Mr. Burt’s death…. I am not much surprized at Green’s behaviour. He has not an honest principle, I fear…. I regret the loss of my friend Parsons. Death begins to make breaches in the little Junto of old friends that he had long forborne, and it must be expected he will now soon pick us all off one after another.”

Similarly he sought to include Debbie in his life in London, at least vicariously. She had asked about his accommodations; he responded, “We have four rooms furnished, and every thing about us pretty genteel, but living here is in every respect very expensive. Billy is with me, and very serviceable. Peter has behaved very well. Goodies I now and then get a few; but roasting apples seldom. I wish you had sent me some.” She had urged him to hire a coach to have on hand; he answered that he had done just that, to avoid foul weather and preserve appearances. “The hackney coaches at this end of town, where most people keep their own, are the worst in the whole city, miserable dirty broken shabby things, unfit to go into when dressed clean, and such as one would be ashamed to get out of at any gentleman’s door.” He had lamented the smoke from coal fires; she suggested burning wood. “It would answer no end,” he explained, “unless one could furnish all one’s neighbours and the whole city with the same.” Smoke was London’s bane, and would become Franklin’s while there. “The whole town is one great smoky house, and every street a chimney, the air full of floating sea-coal soot, and you never get a breath of what is pure, without riding some miles for it into the country.”

He sent her presents, that she might enjoy the bounty of the metropolis
even if she could not be there. “Bowl remarkable for the neatness of the figures,” he wrote, in a partial inventory. “Four silver salt ladles, newest, but ugliest, fashion … six coarse diaper breakfast cloths: they are to spread on the tea table, for no body here breakfasts on the naked table … a little basket, a present from Mrs. Stevenson to Sally, and a pair of garters for you which were knit by the young lady her daughter, who favoured me with a pair of the same kind, the only ones I have been able to wear, as they need not be bound tight, the ridges in them preventing their slipping.” He sent carpeting for the floor at home, blankets and bed linen, napkins, and “7 yards of printed cotton, blue ground, to make you a gown. I bought it by candlelight, and liked it then, but not so well afterwards; if you do not fancy it, send it as a present from me to Sister Jenny.” Two sets of books and some sheet music were for Sally. A candle-extinguisher was “for spermaceti candles only.” A large jug was for beer. “I fell in love with it at first sight, for I thought it looked like a fat jolly dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white calico gown on, good natured and lovely, and put me in mind of—Somebody.”

Franklin must have thought he knew his Debbie to be able to liken her to a beer jug, even if he declined the explicit reference at the last word. He also knew her well enough to recognize her reluctance to come over to England. William Strahan, with whom Franklin obviously discussed the matter, continued to urge her to join her husband. Writing to David Hall, Strahan said, “Tell her I am sorry she dreads the sea so much…. There are many ladies here that would make no objection to sailing twice as far after him.”

Perhaps it was her dread of the deep that kept Deborah away. But something else was almost certainly involved as well. She had watched her husband grow over the years, from the promising but penniless journeyman she married in 1730 to a public figure honored by many of the greatest men and institutions of the British empire. Debbie was the same simple soul she had been at the start: a thrifty housewife, a good mother (if a sometimes testy stepmother), a competent business partner (who was now handling her husband’s affairs in his absence). Philadelphia was not merely her home; it was her world. Franklin could move in another, larger world, and do so comfortably. Debbie could not, and she knew enough not to try.

13
Imperialist
1759–60

On the Plains of Abraham, high above the St. Lawrence River, where the St. Charles River entered the larger stream and formed a point on which the French had built the fortress of Quebec, in the summer of 1759 the struggle for North America drew to a climax. That it did so was the work of one man more than any other.

William Pitt first won fame with a wicked tongue in the House of Commons. When George II put 16,000 troops from his native Hanover on the British payroll, Pitt denounced the move as reducing England to the status of “a province to a despicable electorate.” Pitt characterized John Carteret, the courtier generally held responsible for the king’s pro-German policy (and a man with a weakness for burgundy), as one who “seemed to have drunk of the potion described in poetic fictions, which makes men forget their country.”

George did not appreciate having his favorites so described; still less did he like hearing his homeland called a “despicable electorate.” But such was Pitt’s strength in Commons that after the disappointments of first phase of the Seven years’ War (as Europe dubbed the struggle that began with Braddock’s defeat in western Pennsylvania), the monarch decided he had no choice but to turn to the “Great Commoner.” Pitt agreed; with typical egotism he asserted, “I am sure I can save the country and nobody else can.”

What Pitt knew—besides the fact that he must be England’s savior—was that salvation would be found not in Europe but overseas. The American colonies might occupy the frontier of the British empire, but they became the center of Pitt’s strategy. He ordered an attack on Louisbourg, which succeeded in July 1758. He sent a new force against Fort Duquesne; this effort also succeeded. When the retreating French blew up the fort, the victorious British troops built a fort of their own and named it for Pitt.

But the hinge of Pitt’s American strategy, and the fulcrum of empire for both Britain and France, was the assault on Quebec. Pitt’s ministry gave the command to James Wolfe, a major general just thirty-three years old, who would lead a force of some 8,000 against the Canadian town. He would, that is, if he could get the men up the St. Lawrence from the sea. Admiral Charles Saunders had overall authority for transport, but the hazardous negotiation of the shallows and eddies of the vexing river fell to Captain James Cook. Although Cook’s destiny awaited him in the Pacific, the French were plenty impressed at his work in the St. Lawrence. “The enemy have passed sixty ships of war where we dare not risk a vessel of a hundred tons by night and day,” declared the suddenly worried Canadian governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil.