The True Benjamin Franklin

by Sydney George Fisher

American Philosophical Society Collection, vol. xlv., No. 80:

London Feb. 18, 1774

Mr. Foxcroft,

Dear Friend —

It is long since I have heard from you. I hope nothing I have written has occasioned any coolness. We are no longer Colleagues, but let us part as we have lived so long in Friendship.

I am displaced unwillingly by our masters who were obliged to comply with the orders of the Ministry. It seems I am too much of an American. Take care of yourself for you are little less.

I hope my daughter continues well. My blessing to her. I shall soon, God willing, have the Pleasure of seeing you, intending homewards in May next. I shall only wait the Arrival of the April Pacquet with the accounts, that I may settle them here before I go. I beg you will not fail of forwarding them by that Opportunity, which will greatly oblige.

Dear Friend
Yours most affectionately

It is to be observed of all these letters that, like the original letter of Foxcroft, they are entirely serious. They are business letters. They are not letters of amusement and pleasure, in which Franklin might joke and laugh with a young girl and in sport call her his daughter. They are not addressed to the woman in question but to her husband, and at the close of long details about business matters he simply says “give my love to my daughter,” or he refers to her, as in the letter next to the last, as about to have another child. Read in connection with Foxcroft’s original letter, they form very strong proof that Franklin believed Mrs. Foxcroft to be his daughter.

But the reviewer says that Mr. Fisher notes in two places that women correspondents in writing to Franklin called him father and signed themselves “your daughter.” Mr. Fisher notes on page 332 the letter of a girl written to Franklin in broken French and English, in which she begins by calling him “My dear father Americain,” and signs herself “your humble servant and your daughter J. B. J. Conway.” The letter is obviously childish and sportive. We do not find the other instance of a similar letter to which the reviewer alludes. The Conway letter is such a frivolous one that it amounts to nothing as proof to overcome the serious, solemn statements by Franklin and Foxcroft in their letters. A light-minded French girl calling Franklin her father is very different from serious, business-like statements by Franklin saying that a certain woman was his daughter.

The reviewer goes on to say that “a little more research would have shown him [Mr. Fisher] letters of Franklin couched in the same parental terms.” The meaning of this is presumably that Franklin was in the habit of calling the young women he corresponded with his daughters. This, however, it will be observed, is quite a different matter from Franklin’s writing to a husband and sending love to the husband’s wife as his daughter. But there are some letters to young girls on which a reckless, slap-dash reviewer would be likely to base the statement that Franklin habitually called women his daughters. Let us look into these letters and see what they are.

Franklin’s first correspondent of this sort was Miss Catherine Ray, of Rhode Island. They were great friends and exchanged some beautiful letters, almost unequalled in the English language. They are collected in Bigelow’s “Works of Franklin,” vol. ii. pp. 387, 414, 495. The letter at page 387 begins “Dear Katy,” and ends “believe me, my dear girl, your affectionate faithful friend and humble servant.” The letter at page 414 begins “My Katy,” speaks of her as “dear girl,” and ends with the same phrase as the previous one, except that the word “faithful” is left out. The one at page 495 begins “Dear Katy,” and closes “Adieu dear good girl and believe me ever your affectionate friend.” In none of these letters does he speak of her as his daughter.

The letters to Miss Catherine Louisa Shipley and to Miss Georgiana Shipley, the daughters of the Bishop of St. Asaph, are friendly but not very endearing in the terms used. He once calls Georgiana “My dear friend,” and in the famous letter on the squirrel addresses her as “My dear Miss.” He nowhere calls them his daughters.

The letters that come nearest to what the reviewer wants are those to Miss Mary Stevenson. There are quite a number of them, and she and Franklin were on the most affectionate terms. We will give the citations of them in Bigelow, although any one can look them up in the index: In vol. iii. pp. 34, 46, 54, 56, 62, 139, 151, 186, 187, 195, 209, 232, 238, 245; in vol. iv. pp. 17, 33, 212, 258, 264, 287, 332, 339; in vol. x. p. 285. These letters call Miss Stevenson “Dear Polly,” “My dear friend,” “My good girl,” and “My dear good girl.” The first of them, vol. iii. p. 34, begins by addressing her as “dear child,” and another, vol. iii. p. 209, closes by saying “Adieu my dear child. I will call you so. Why should I not call you so, since I love you with all the tenderness of a father.”

This may be what the reviewer had in his mind. But Franklin nowhere calls Miss Stevenson his daughter. The word daughter and child are very different. We all of us often call children we fancy “my child.” Franklin’s use of the word child as applied to Miss Stevenson has from the context of the letters a perfectly obvious meaning,—no one can mistake it; just as his use of the word daughter in the Foxcroft letters has, from the context and all the circumstances, a perfectly obvious meaning.

It would be endless to discuss all the reviewer’s irrelevant and extravagant statements. We shall call attention to only one other illustration of his methods. He closes one of his wild paragraphs by saying that if “Mr. Fisher wishes further knowledge on this subject for ‘speculation,’ we recommend him to read Franklin’s letter to Foxcroft of September 7, 1774.”