On October 4, Franklin rode off to visit Washington’s camp at Cambridge, on a Congressional mission with Thomas Lynch of South Carolina and Benjamin Harrison of Virginia. If he was a little flabbergasted at the motley assembly of backwoodsmen, farmers and teenage youths to whom Washington was trying to teach military discipline, he did not say so. These were his people. He was proud of them and what they had set out to do.
On his return, he stopped in Warwick, Rhode Island, where his sister Jane Mecom, an old woman now, had taken refuge from British-occupied Boston with their old friends, the Greenes. Besides himself, she was the only one of Josiah Franklin’s seventeen children who was still living. Happily, she did not yet know that her Boston home was being looted in her absence.
“Sorrows roll over me like the waves of the sea,” she had written Franklin a few years before on the death of her adored daughter Polly. She was worried now about her son Benjamin, who was unable to hold a job and whose wife and children were destitute (the same whom Debby had written her husband that she had had to tea). Only a few months later, his mind completely gone, Benjamin wandered out in the dark, never to be seen again.
In spite of the repeated blows of a cruel fate, Jane had remained warmhearted and thoughtful. Franklin, who had the tenderest affection for her, brought her back to Philadelphia, where she stayed with him for the next year. Always he had humored her, given her and her inevitably needy family material help, written her long and loving letters—and occasionally fretted at her constant solicitude.
On this same trip he distributed a hundred pounds, sent by English friends to aid the wounded of Lexington and Concord and the widows and orphans of those who had been killed. It is possible that one of the generous donors was Joseph Priestley, to whom Franklin wrote about this time:
“Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees in this campaign, which is twenty thousand pounds a head.... During the same time sixty thousand children have been born in America.”
His letter was quoted throughout England, where the hearts of many lay not with their own corrupt Parliament, but with those who had the courage to oppose it.
13
THE SPLENDID WORD INDEPENDENCE
As Franklin had foreseen, the King paid no heed to the “olive branch” petition of the Second Continental Congress. By Royal proclamation all Americans were declared Rebels. The British had burned Charlestown in June and Falmouth in October 1775. It was hinted they were buying mercenaries from German princes. That foreigners should be paid by the English to kill English subjects seemed the greatest insult of all.
Franklin composed a short letter to William Strahan, his English printer friend: