Franklin: A Sketch

by John Bigelow

It was on the 12th of July 1785 that, accompanied by some members of his family and most intimate friends, he set out for Havre on his return to America. In view of his infirmities, the queen had placed one of her litters at his disposal; the next day he was constrained by a most pressing invitation to accept the hospitality of Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld at Gaillon. At Rouen, he was waited upon by a deputation of the Academy of that city. At Portsmouth, where the party joined the vessel that was to take them home, the bishop of St Asaph's, "the good bishop," as Franklin used to style him, an old friend and correspondent, came down with his family to see him, and remained with him for the two or three days before they sailed.

On the 13th of September Franklin, who had become by far the most widely known and the most eminent of Americans, disembarked again at the very wharf in Philadelphia on which, sixty-two years before, he had landed a homeless, homeless, friendless, and substantially penniless runaway apprentice of seventeen. The day succeeding his arrival, the assembly of Pennsylvania voted him a congratulatory address; the public bodies very generally waited upon him, and General Washington, by letter, asked to join in the public gratulations upon his safe return to America, and upon the many eminent services he had rendered. Sensible as his countrymen were of the magnitude of their obligations to him, and of his increasing infirmities, it never seems to have occurred to them that they could dispense with his services. In the month succeeding his arrival he was chosen a member of the municipal council of Philadelphia, of which he was also unanimously elected chairman. He was soon after elected by the executive council and assembly president of Pennsylvania, by seventy-six out of the seventy-seven votes cast. "I have not firmness enough," he wrote to an old friend, "to resist the unanimous desire of my country folks, and I find myself harnessed again to their service another year. They engrossed the prime of my life. They have, eaten my flesh, and seem resolved now to pick my bones." At the expiration of his term in 1786, he was unanimously re-elected, and again unanimously in 1787. He was also chosen a member of the national convention, of which Washington was a member and president, which met on the second Monday of May 1787, to frame a constitution for the new confederacy. To the joint influence of Franklin and Washington probably should be ascribed the final adoption of the constitution which this convention framed, and which continues to be the fundamental law of the United States. The most original, if not the most ingenious, and perhaps, in view of the grave difficulties it disposed of, the most important feature of the constitution they constructed—that which gave the States equal representation in the upper house or senate and in the lower house representation according to population—was the device of Franklin. For his three years' service as president of Pennsylvania Franklin refused to accept any compensation beyond a reimbursement of the postage he had paid on official letters, amounting to some £77, 5s. 6d., it being one of his notions, which he advocated in the convention, that the chief magistrates of a nation should serve without pecuniary compensation. Franklin survived his retirement from office two years, which he consecrated almost as exclusively to the public use as any other two of his life, although most of the time the victim of excruciating pain. His pen was never more actively nor more effectively employed. He helped to organize and was president of the first society formed on the American continent or anywhere else, we believe, for the abolition of slavery, and as its president wrote and signed the first remonstrance against slavery addressed to the American congress.

Franklin died in his own house, in Philadelphia, on the 17th of April 1790, and in the eighty-fifth year of his age. Since then, as in life, his fame has gone on increasing. No American has ever received such varied and extensive homage from his countrymen. There is no State in the United States, and there are few counties that have not a town called Franklin (Ohio has nineteen of them); scarce a town that does not boast of its Franklin Street, or its Franklin Square, or its Franklin hotel, or its Franklin bank, or its Franklin insurance company, and so on; his bust or portrait is everywhere; and some sort of a monument of Franklin is among the attractions of almost every large city.

When Franklin, the fugitive apprentice boy, in 1723, walked up Market Street on the morning of his first arrival in Philadelphia, munching the rolls in which he had invested a portion of the last dollar he had in the world, the curious spectacle he presented did not escape the attention of Miss Read, a comely girl of eighteen years who chanced to be standing in the door of her father's house when he passed. Not long after, accident gave him an introduction to her; they fell in love, and, soon after his return from his trip to England, he married her. By her he had two children, a son who died young, whom Franklin spoke of as the finest child he ever saw, and a daughter, Sally, who married Richard Bache, of Yorkshire, England. Mrs Bache had eight children, from whom are descended all that are now known to inherit any of the blood of Benjamin Franklin. Before his marriage Franklin had a son whom he named William, who acted as his secretary during his first official residence in England, and who, as a compliment to the father, was made governor of the province of New Jersey. When the rebellion broke out, William adhered to the mother country, which exposed him to serious indignities and was a source of profound mortification to his father. Next to the loss of his only legitimate son, this was perhaps the greatest sorrow of Franklin's life.

"You conceived, you say," wrote Franklin to him nine years after the rupture, "that your duty to your king and regard for your country required this. I ought not to blame you for differing in sentiments with me on public affairs. We are men all subject to errors. Our opinions are not in our own power. They are formed and governed much by circumstances that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible. Your situation was such that few would have censured your remaining neuter, though there are natural duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguished by them."

Without presuming to extenuate anything that was unfilial in Governor Franklin's conduct, we cannot help remarking that Franklin, with a blindness common to parents, quite overlooked the fact that his son, when he determined to adhere to the sovereign whom he had sworn loyally to serve, was a lusty lad of forty-five years.

In his will the father left William his lands in Nova Scotia, and forgave him the debts due to him. "The part he acted against me in the late war," continued the will, "which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavoured to deprive me of." Governor Franklin had a son who also was not born in wedlock, named William Temple Franklin. He was brought up by his grandfather and served him in the capacity of private secretary daring most of his residence in France, and after his return to the United States. Franklin tried repeatedly but unsuccessfully to have the young man appointed to some subordinate mission. He had been brought up in France, his education was strangely deficient, and he does not seem to have left an altogether favourable impression upon his countrymen abroad or at home after his return. It would not be strange if they judged him more correctly than his grandfather did. To this grandson Franklin bequeathed most of his books and all his manuscripts and papers, from which he published the first edition of the writings of his grandfather, purporting to be complete, in 1816, and after a delay never satisfactorily explained and apparently inexcusable. A criticism of this publication, attributed to Jeffrey, appeared in the Edinburgh Review, No. 56, August 1817.

Though spending more than half of his life in the public service, Franklin was never for a moment dependent upon the Government for his livelihood. With the aid of his newspaper, his frugality, and his foresight, he was enabled to command every comfort and luxury he desired through his long life, and to leave to his descendants a fortune neither too large nor too small for his fame, and valued at the time of his death at about £30,000 sterling. Though rendering to his country as a diplomatist and statesman, and to the world as a philosopher, incalculable services, he never sought nor received from either of these sources any pecuniary advantage. Wherever he lived he was the inevitable centre of a system of influences always important and constantly enlarging; and dying, he perpetuated it by an autobiography which to this day not only remains one of the most widely read ant readable books in our language, but has had the distinction of enriching the literature of nearly every other. No man has ever lived whose life has been more universally studied by his countrymen or is more familiar to them.

Though his pen seemed never idle, the longest production attributed to his pen was his autobiography, of less than 300 8vo pages, and yet, whatever subject occupied his pen, he never left the impression of incompleteness. He was never tedious, and an inexhaustible humour, a classic simplicity, an exquisite grace, and uniform good sense and taste informed and gave permanent interest to everything he wrote. Franklin was not an orator, but when he spoke, as he did occasionally in the several deliberative bodies of which he was a member, his word, though brief, was, like his writings, always clear, judicious, felicitous, and potential. No man ever possessed in a greater degree the gift of putting an argument into an anecdote.