FOOTNOTES:
[16] This lady, whose father was Lewis Evans, of Philadelphia, a surveyor and map-maker, was a god-daughter of Deborah, and, according to a letter from Franklin to Deborah, dated July 22, 1774, fell little short of being ubiquitous. He wrote: "She is now again at Tunis, where you will see she has lately lain in of her third Child. Her Father, you know, was a geographer, and his daughter has some connection, I think, with the whole Globe; being born herself in America, and having her first Child in Asia, her second in Europe, and now her third in Africa."
[17] A readable essay might be written upon the sea-voyages of Franklin. The sloop, in which he absconded from Boston, in 1723, was favored with a fair wind, and reached New York in three days. His voyage from Philadelphia to Boston in 1724 lasted for about a fortnight. The "little vessel," in which he sailed, he tells us in the Autobiography, "struck on a shoal in going down the bay, and sprung a leak." "We had," Franklin says, "a blustering time at sea, and were oblig'd to pump almost continually, at which I took my turn." The cabin accommodations and abundant sea stores that fell to the lot of Ralph and himself, under circumstances already mentioned by us, on their voyage from Philadelphia to England in 1724, in the London-Hope, Captain Annis, were rare windfalls; but the voyage was marked by a great deal of bad weather. The return voyage of Franklin from London to Philadelphia in 1726, in the Berkshire, Captain Clark, including obiter delays on the south coast of England, consumed the whole interval between July 21 and Oct. 12. All the incidents of this long voyage were entered in the Journal kept by him while it was under way, and there are few writings in which the ordinary features of an ocean passage at that time are so clearly brought before the reader: the baffling winds, the paralyzing calms; the meagre fare; the deadly ennui; and the moody sullenness bred by confinement and monotony. The word "helm-a-lee," Franklin states, became as disagreeable to their ears as the sentence of a judge to a convicted malefactor. Once he leapt overboard and swam around the ship to "wash" himself, and another time he was deterred from "washing" himself by the appearance of a shark, "that mortal enemy to swimmers." For a space his ship was in close enough companionship for several days with another ship for the masters of the two vessels, accompanied by a passenger in each instance, to exchange visits. On his second voyage, of about thirty days, to England, in 1757, the packet, in which he was a passenger, easily outstripped the hostile cruisers by which she was several times chased, but wore about with straining masts just in time to escape shipwreck on the Scilly rocks. Of his return to America in 1762, he wrote to Strahan from Philadelphia: "We had a long Passage near ten Weeks from Portsmouth to this Place, but it was a pleasant one; for we had ten sail in Company and a Man of War to protect us; we had pleasant Weather and fair Winds, and frequently visited and dined from ship to ship." At the end of his third voyage to England in 1764, Franklin wrote to Deborah from the Isle of Wight that no father could have been tenderer to a child than Captain Robinson had been to him. "But we have had terrible Weather, and I have often been thankful that our dear Sally was not with me. Tell our Friends that din'd with us on the Turtle that the kind Prayer they then put up for thirty Days fair Wind for me was favourably heard and answered, we being just 30 Days from Land to Land." Of his return voyage to America in 1775, he wrote to Priestley: "I had a passage of six weeks, the weather constantly so moderate that a London wherry might have accompanied us all the way." His thirty-day voyage to France in 1776 proved a rough and debilitating one to him at his advanced age, but Captain Wickes was not only able to keep his illustrious passenger out of the Tower, but to snatch up two English prizes on his way over. We need say no more than we have already incidentally said in our text of the seven weeks that Franklin gave up to his pen and thermometer on his return voyage to America in 1785. After the passage, he wrote to Mrs. Hewson that it had been a pleasant and not a long one in which there was but one day, a day of violent storm, on which he was glad that she was not with them.
[18] A copious note on the leading portraits of Franklin will be found in the Narrative and Critical History of America, edited by Justin Winsor, vol. vii., p. 37. The best of them resemble each other closely enough to make us feel satisfied that we should recognize him at once, were it possible for us to meet him in life on the street.
[19] Franklin was frequently the recipient of one of the most delightful of all forms of social attention, an invitation to a country house in the British Islands. On Oct. 5, 1768, he writes to Deborah that he has lately been in the country to spend a few days at friends' houses, and to breathe a little fresh air. On Jan. 28, 1772, after spending some seven weeks in Ireland and some four weeks in Scotland, he tells the same correspondent that he has received abundance of civilities from the gentry of both these kingdoms.
[20] Speaking of a portrait of Sally in a letter to Deborah from London in 1758, Franklin says: "I fancy I see more Likeness in her Picture than I did at first, and I look at it often with Pleasure, as at least it reminds me of her."
[21] The only blot upon the useful labors of Jared Sparks, as the editor of Franklin's productions, is the liberties that he took with their wording. Sometimes his alterations were the offspring of good feeling, sometimes of ordinary puristic scruples, and occasionally of the sickly prudery which led our American grandfathers and grandmothers to speak of the leg of a turkey as its "drum-stick." The word "belly" appears to have been especially trying to his nice sense of propriety. One result was these scornful strictures by Albert Henry Smyth in the Introduction to his edition of Franklin's writings: "He is nice in his use of moral epithets; he will not offend one stomach with his choice of words. Franklin speaks of the Scots 'who entered England and trampled on its belly as far as Derby,'—'marched on,' says Sparks. Franklin is sending some household articles from London to Philadelphia. In the large packing case is 'a jug for beer.' It has, he says, 'the coffee cups in its belly.' Sparks performs the same abdominal operation here."
[22] The maladies to which Franklin was subject, and the spells of illness that he experienced, like everything else relating to him, have been described in detail by at least one of his enthusiastic latter-day biographers. We are content, however, to be classed among those biographers in whose eyes no amount of genius can hallow an ague or glorify a cutaneous affection.
[23] "I must mention to you," Sally said in a letter to her father, dated Oct. 30, 1773, "that I am no longer housekeeper; it gave my dear mama so much uneasiness, and the money was given to me in a manner which made it impossible to save anything by laying in things beforehand, so that my housekeeping answered no good purpose, and I have the more readily given it up, though I think it my duty, and would willingly take the care and trouble off of her, could I possibly please and make her happy."
[24] The entire conduct of Franklin towards his son after the dismissal of the father from office by the British Government seems to have been thoroughly considerate and decorous. His wish that William Franklin would resign his office as Governor of New Jersey, which he could not hold without pecuniary loss to his father, and without apparent insensibility to the indignity to which his father had been subjected, was delicately intimated only. Even after William Franklin became a prisoner in Connecticut in consequence of his disloyalty to the American cause, Franklin, while giving Temple some very good practical reasons why he could not consent that he should be the bearer of a letter from Mrs. William Franklin to her husband, takes care to tell Temple that he does not blame his desire of seeing a father that he had so much reason to love. At this time he also relieved with a gift of money the immediate necessities of Mrs. William Franklin. The temper of his letters to Temple, when Temple went over to England from France, at his instance, to pay his duty to William Franklin, was that of settled reconciliation with his son. "Give my Love to your Father," is a message in one of these letters. When he touched at Southampton on his return from his French mission, William Franklin, among others, was there to greet him. In the succeeding year we find Franklin asking Andrew Strahan to send him a volume and to present his account for it to his son. But on one occasion during the last twelve months of his life, he speaks of William no longer as "my son" but as "William Franklin." On the whole, it would appear that it was not so much the original defection of the son from the American cause as the fact that he kept aloof from the father, after the return of the father from France, which was responsible for the asperity with which the latter refers in his will to the political course of William Franklin during the Revolution.
[25] Altogether Peter Folger must have been a man of sterling sense and character. He was one of the five Commissioners appointed to survey and measure the land on the Island of Nantucket, and in the order of appointment the following provision was inserted: "Whatsoever shall be done by them, or any three of them, Peter Folger being one, shall be accounted legal and valid."
[26] That Peter Franklin had some of the ability of his famous brother we may infer from a long letter written to him by Franklin in which the latter, after acknowledging the receipt of a ballad by Peter, descants upon the superiority of the old, simple ditties over modern songs in lively and searching terms which he would hardly have wasted on a man of ordinary intelligence.
[27] The first letter from the Commissioners to Jonathan Williams, dated Apr. 13, 1778, simply asked him to abstain from any further purchases as naval agent, and to close his accounts for the present. It was not until May 25, 1778, that a letter was addressed to him by the Commissioners expressly revoking his authority as naval agent on the ground that Congress had authorized William Lee to superintend the commercial affairs of America in general, and he had appointed M. Schweighauser, a German merchant, as the person to look after all the maritime and commercial interests of America in the Nantes district. In signing the letter, Franklin took care to see that this clause was inserted: "It is not from any prejudice to you, Mr. Williams, for whom we have a great respect and esteem, but merely from a desire to save the public money, to prevent the clashing of claims and interests, and to avoid confusion and delays, that we have taken this step." The result was that, instead of the uniform commission of two per cent., charged by Williams for transacting the business of the naval agency, Schweighauser, whose clerk was Ludlow Lee, a nephew of Arthur Lee, charged as much as five per cent. on the simple delivery of tobacco to the farmers-general. Later Williams, who was an expert accountant, was restored to the position which he had really filled with blameless integrity and efficiency. After his return to America, his career was an eminent one. He is termed by General George W. Cullum in his work on the campaigns and engineers of the War of 1812-15 the father of the Engineer Service of the United States. In the same work, General Cullum also speaks of his "noble character."
[28] In sending a MS. to Edward Everett, which he placed in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Thomas Carlyle said: "The poor manuscript is an old Tithes-Book of the parish of Ecton, in Northamptonshire, from about 1640 to 1700, and contains, I perceive, various scattered faint indications of the civil war time, which are not without interest; but the thing which should raise it above all tithe-books yet heard of is, that it contains actual notices, in that fashion, of the ancestors of Benjamin Franklin—blacksmiths in that parish! Here they are—their forge-hammers yet going—renting so many 'yard lands' of Northamptonshire Church-soil—keeping so many sheep, etc., etc.,—little conscious that one of the demi-gods was about to proceed out of them."