Franklin's last act was a memorial addressed to Congress, signed by him in his capacity as president of the abolition society, and praying that body: "That you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people; that you will promote mercy and justice towards this distressed race; and that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow men." He had always spoken of slavery with the strongest condemnation, and branded the slave-trade as "abominable," a "diabolical commerce," and a "crime."
A large part of the last year or two of his life was passed by Franklin in his bed. At times when his dreadful suffering seemed to become intolerable, it was quelled, so far as possible, by opium. But at intervals it left him, and still whenever he thus got a respite for a few days he was again at work. It was in such an interval that he wrote his paper condemning the liberty, which was becoming the license, of the press. If the law permitted this sort of thing, he said, then it should restore also the liberty of the cudgel. The paper is not altogether antiquated, nor the idea altogether bad!
It was even so late as March 23, 1790, that he wrote the humorous rejoinder to the pro-slavery speech delivered in Congress by Jackson of Georgia. But the end was close at hand; and when this brilliant satire was composed, there lacked but a few days of the allotted term when that rare humor was to be stilled forever, and that broad philanthropy was to cease from the toil in which it had never tired alike for the free and the oppressed.
On April 12, 1790, a pain in the chest and difficulty of breathing, which had been giving him much trouble, ceased for a short while, and he insisted upon getting up in order to have his bed re-made; for he wished to "die in a decent manner." His daughter expressed the conventional wish that he might yet recover and live many years. "I hope not," he replied. Soon afterward the pain returned, and he was advised to change his position, so that he could breathe more easily. "A dying man can do nothing easy," he said; and these are the last words which he is known to have uttered. Soon afterward he sank into a lethargy, and so remained until at eleven o'clock, P. M., on April 17, 1790, he died.
A great procession and a concourse of citizens escorted his funeral, and Congress voted to "wear the customary badge of mourning for one month." The bits of crape were all very well, a conventional, insignificant tribute; but unfortunately the account of the country, or at least of Congress as representing the country, did not stand very honorably, to say nothing of generously, with one of its oldest, most faithful, and most useful servants.[103] Again and again Franklin had asked for some modest office, some slight opening, for his grandson, Temple Franklin. The young man's plans and prospects in life had all been sacrificed to the service of Franklin as his secretary, which was in fact the service of the country; yet he had never been able to collect even the ordinary salary pertaining to such a position. Throughout a long life of public service, often costly to himself in his own affairs, Franklin had never asked any other favor than this, which after all was rather compensation than favor, and this was never given to him. When one reflects how such offices are demanded and awarded in these days, one hardly knows whether to be more ashamed of the present or of the past. But this was not all nor even the worst; for Franklin's repeated efforts to get his own accounts with the government audited and settled never met with any response. It needed only that Congress should appoint a competent accountant to examine and report. Before leaving France Franklin had begged for this act of simple, business-like justice, which it was the duty of Congress to initiate without solicitation; he had the fate of the "poor unhappy Deane" before his eyes, to make him uncomfortable, but in this respect he was treated no better than that misused man. After his return home he continued his urgency during his last years, not wishing to die leaving malignant enemies behind him, and accounts open which he could no longer explain and elucidate. Indeed, stories were already circulating that he was "greatly indebted to the United States for large sums that had been put into [his] hands, and that [he] avoided a settlement;" yet this request was still, with unpardonable disregard of decency and duty, utterly ignored. He never could get the business attended to, and Benjamin Franklin actually could not extort from an indifferent Congress the small satisfaction of having his accounts passed. The consequence was that when he died the United States appeared his debtor, and never extricated itself from that painful position.[104] It was only in this matter that he ever showed the slightest anxiety concerning his reputation with posterity. He wanted to leave the name of an honest man; but otherwise he never was at the trouble of preparing a line to justify any of his actions, therein differing from many of his contemporaries.
France showed a livelier affection and warmer appreciation toward the great dead than did his own countrymen. At the opening of the National Assembly, June 11, 1790, Mirabeau delivered an impassioned eulogy in the rhetorical French fashion; and the motion to wear mourning for three days was carried by acclamation. The president of that body, M. Siéyes, was instructed to communicate the resolution to Washington. At the celebration of the municipality of Paris the citizens generally wore a mourning badge; and the grain market, where the oration was delivered, was draped in black. The Academy of Sciences of course did formal honor to his memory, as did likewise the revolutionary clubs. A street at what was in his day Passy, but is now included in Paris, near the Trocadéro, perpetuates by his name the admiration which France felt for him.
Among illustrious Americans Franklin stands preëminent in the interest which is aroused by a study of his character, his mind, and his career. One becomes attached to him, bids him farewell with regret, and feels that for such as he the longest span of life is all too short. Even though dead, he attracts a personal regard which renders easily intelligible the profound affection which so many men felt for him while living. It may be doubted whether any one man ever had so many, such constant, and such firm friends as in three different nations formed about him a veritable host. In the States and in France he was loved, and as he grew into old age he was revered, not by those who heard of him only, but most warmly by those who best knew him. Even in England, where for years he was the arch-rebel of all America, he was generally held in respect and esteem, and had many constant friends whose confidence no events could shake. It is true, of course, that he had also his detractors, with most of whom the reader has already made acquaintance. In Pennsylvania the proprietary party cherished an animosity which still survives against his memory, but which does not extend far beyond those who take it as an inheritance. It does him no discredit with persons who understand its source. In New England a loyalty to those famous New Englanders, John Adams and Samuel Adams, seems to involve in the minds of some persons a depreciation of Franklin. In English historical literature the patriotic instinct stands in the way of giving Franklin quite his full due of praise. But the faults and defects of character and conduct which are urged against him appear little more than the expression of personal ill will, when they are compared with the affection and the admiration given to him in liberal measure by the great mass of mankind both in the generations which knew him as a living contemporary and in those which hear of him only as one of the figures of history. It is not worth while to deify him, or to speak with extravagant reverence, as if he had neither faults nor limitations. Yet it seems ungracious to recall these concerning one who did for his fellow men so much as Franklin did. Moral, intellectual, and material boons he conferred in such abundance that few such benefactors of the race can be named, though one should survey all the ages. A man of a greater humanity never lived; and the quality which stood Abou Ben Adhem in good stead should suffice to save Franklin from human criticism. He not only loved his kind, but he also trusted them with an implicit confidence, reassuring if not extraordinary in an observer of his shrewdness and experience. Democrats of the revolutionary school in France and of the Jeffersonian school in the United States have preached an exaggerated gospel of the people, but their words are the dubious ones of fanatics or politicians. Franklin was of a different kind, and had a more genuine and more generous faith in man than the greatest democrat in politics who ever lived.
Franklin's inborn ambition was the noblest of all ambitions: to be of practical use to the multitude of men. The chief motive of his life was to promote the welfare of mankind. Every moment which he could snatch from enforced occupations was devoted to doing, devising, or suggesting something advantageous more or less generally to men. His detractors have given a bad, but also a false coloring to this trait. They say that the spirit of all that he did and taught was sordid, that the motives and purposes which he set before men were selfish, that his messages spoken through the mouth of Poor Richard inculcated no higher objects in life than money-getting. This is an utterly unfair form of stating the case. Franklin was a great moralist: though he did not believe in the Christian religion according to the straitlaced orthodox view, he believed in the virtues which that religion embodies; and he was not only often a zealous preacher, but in the main a consistent exemplar of them. Perhaps he did not rest them upon precisely the same basis upon which the Christian preacher does, but at least he put them on a basis upon which they could stand firm. In such matters, however, one may easily make mistakes, breed ill blood, and do harm; and his wisdom and good sense soon led him to put forth his chief efforts and to display especial earnestness and constancy in promoting the well-being of all men. It was an object sufficiently noble, one would think, worthy of the greatest brain and the largest heart, and having certain very commendable traits in the way of practicability and substantial possibilities. His desire was to see the community prosperous, comfortable, happy, advancing in the accumulation of money and of all physical goods, but not to the point of luxury; it was by no means the pile of dollars which was his end, and he did not care to see many men rich, but rather to see all men well to do. He was perfectly right in thinking that virtuous living has the best prospects in a well-to-do society. He gave liberally of his own means and induced others to give, and promoted in proportion to the ability of the community a surprising number of public and quasi public enterprises; and always the fireside of the poor man was as much in his thought as the benefit of the richer circle. Fair dealing and kindliness, prudence and economy in order to procure the comforts and simpler luxuries of life, reading and knowledge for those uses which wisdom subserves, constituted the real essence of his teaching. His inventive genius was ever at work devising methods of making daily life more agreeable, comfortable, and wholesome for all who have to live. In a word, the service of his fellow men was his constant aim; and he so served them that those public official functions which are euphemistically called "public services" seemed in his case almost an interruption of the more direct and far-reaching services which he was intent upon rendering to all civilized peoples. Extreme religionists may audaciously fancy that the judgment of God upon Franklin may be severe; but it would be gross disloyalty for his own kind to charge that his influence has been ignobly material.
As a patriot none surpassed him. Again it was the love of the people that induced this feeling, which grew from no theory as to forms of government, no abstractions and doctrines about "the rights of man." He began by espousing the cause of the people of the province of Pennsylvania against proprietary despotism, and for many years he was a patriot in his colony, before the great issue against England made patriotism common. His patriotism had not root in any revolutionary element in his temper, but was the inevitable outcome of his fair-mindedness. That which was unfair as between man and man first aroused his ire against the grinding proprietaries; and afterward it was the unfairness of taxation without representation which especially incensed him; for an intellect of the breadth and clearness of his sees and loves justice above all things. During the struggle of the States no man was more hearty in the cause than Franklin; and the depth of feeling shown in his letters, simple and unrhetorical as they are, is impressive. All that he had he gave. What also strikes the reader of his writings is the broad national spirit which he manifested. He had an immense respect for the dignity of America; he was perhaps fortunately saved from disillusionment by his distance from home. But be this as it may, the way in which he felt and therefore genuinely talked about his nation and his country was not without its moral effect in Europe.
Intellectually there are few men who are Franklin's peers in all the ages and nations. He covered, and covered well, vast ground. The reputation of doing and knowing various unrelated things is wont to bring suspicion of perfunctoriness; but the ideal of the human intellect is an understanding to which all knowledge and all activity are germane. There have been a few, very few minds which have approximated toward this ideal, and among them Franklin's is prominent. He was one of the most distinguished scientists who have ever lived. Bancroft calls him "the greatest diplomatist of his century."[105] His ingenious and useful devices and inventions were very numerous. He possessed a masterly shrewdness in business and practical affairs. He was a profound thinker and preacher in morals and on the conduct of life; so that with the exception of the founders of great religions it would be difficult to name any persons who have more extensively influenced the ideas, motives, and habits of life of men. He was one of the most, perhaps the most agreeable conversationist of his age.