I too [he wrote to his friend, Mather Byles] have a Daughter, who lives with me and is the Comfort of my declining Years, while my Son is estrang'd from me by the Part he took in the late War, and keeps aloof, residing in England, whose Cause he espous'd; whereby the old Proverb is exemplified;
"My Son is my Son till he take him a Wife;
But my Daughter's my Daughter all Days of her Life."
We are the quicker to place the blame for the recrudescence of the former bitterness upon William Franklin because the life of Franklin is full of proofs that he had a truly forgiving disposition.[24] It is a fact, however, that his unrelenting antipathy to Loyalists is the one thing in his career unworthy of a sense of justice and breadth of intellectual charity, otherwise well-nigh perfect. We cannot but regret that anything should have shaken the poise of a character which Lecky has truthfully termed "one of the calmest and best balanced of human characters." But it is not given even to a Franklin to see things in their ordinary colors through a blood-red mist, and quite as true as any saying that Poor Richard ever conceived or borrowed is Acerrima proximorum odia.
In still another letter, one to Madame Brillon, he says, "A dutiful and affectionate Daughter, with her Husband and Six Children compose my Family. The Children are all promising, and even the youngest, who is but four Years old, contributes to my Amusement"; and, about a year and a half before his death, he records in a letter to Elizabeth Partridge, the "Addition of a little good-natured Girl, whom I begin to love as well as the rest." In yet another letter, this time to his friend, Alexander Small, after the birth of this little girl, there is a revelation of the domestic quietude in which his long life closed. "I have," he said, "seven promising grandchildren by my daughter, who play with and amuse me, and she is a kind attentive nurse to me when I am at any time indisposed; so that I pass my time as agreeably as at my age a man may well expect, and have little to wish for, except a more easy exit than my malady seems to threaten." By this time, Benjamin Franklin Bache was old enough to be turning to the practical purposes of self-support the knowledge of printing which he had acquired in France. "I am too old to follow printing again myself," wrote Franklin to Mrs. Catherine Greene, "but, loving the business, I have brought up my grandson Benjamin to it, and have built and furnished a printing-house for him, which he now manages under my eye." The type used by Benjamin in his business were those which his grandfather had cast with the aid of his servants in Paris, and had employed in printing the brilliant little productions penned by his friends and himself, which created so much merriment in the salon of Madame Helvétius.
The seven children of Sarah Bache were Benjamin Franklin Bache, who married Margaret Marcoe, William Hartman Bache, who married Catharine Wistar, Eliza Franklin Bache, who married John Edward Harwood, Louis Bache, who married first Mary Ann Swift, and then Esther Egee, Deborah Bache, who married William J. Duane, Richard Bache, who married Sophia B. Dallas, a daughter of Alexander J. Dallas, and Sarah Bache, who married Thomas Sargeant.
Besides being a good husband, father and grandfather, Franklin was also a good son. His father, Josiah, had seven children by his first wife, Anne, and ten by his second, Abiah Folger, Franklin's mother. Of this swarm, we are told by the Autobiography that Franklin could remember thirteen children sitting at one time at his father's table, who all grew up to be men and women, and married. Franklin himself was the youngest son, and the youngest child but two. In few subjects was his adult interest keener than in that of population, and the circumstances of his early life were certainly calculated to stimulate it into a high degree of precocious activity. It is a pleasing portrait that he paints of his father for us in the Autobiography. After describing his physique in the terms already quoted by us, Franklin says:
He was ingenious, could draw prettily, was skilled a little in music, and had a clear pleasing voice, so that when he played psalm tunes on his violin and sung withal, as he sometimes did in an evening after the business of the day was over, it was extremely agreeable to hear. He had a mechanical genius too, and, on occasion, was very handy in the use of other tradesman's tools; but his great excellence lay in a sound understanding and solid judgment in prudential matters, both in private and publick affairs. In the latter, indeed, he was never employed, the numerous family he had to educate and the straitness of his circumstances keeping him close to his trade; but I remember well his being frequently visited by leading people, who consulted him for his opinion in affairs of the town or of the church he belonged to, and showed a good deal of respect for his judgment and advice: he was also much consulted by private persons about their affairs when any difficulty occurred, and frequently chosen an arbitrator between contending parties. At his table he liked to have, as often as he could, some sensible friend or neighbour to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse, which might tend to improve the minds of his children. By this means he turned our attention to what was good, just, and prudent in the conduct of life; and little or no notice was ever taken of what related to the victuals on the table, whether it was well or ill-dressed, in or out of season, of good or bad flavour, preferable or inferior to this or that other thing of the kind, so that I was bro't up in such a perfect inattention to those matters as to be quite indifferent what kind of food was set before me, and so unobservant of it, that to this day if I am asked I can scarce tell a few hours after dinner what I dined upon. This has been a convenience to me in travelling, where my companions have been sometimes very unhappy for want of a suitable gratification of their more delicate, because better instructed, tastes and appetites.
A story is credited to Josiah by Franklin which is quite in the manner of the son. When Charles the First ordered his proclamation authorizing sports on Sunday to be read in all churches, many clergymen complied, some refused and others hurried it through as indistinctly as possible. But a certain clergyman to the surprise of his congregation read it distinctly. He followed the reading, however, with the Fourth Commandment, Remember to keep holy the Sabbath Day, and then said, "Brethren, I have laid before you the Command of your King, and the Commandment of your God. I leave it to yourselves to judge which of the two ought rather to be observed."
It is to be wished that Franklin could have given us in the Autobiography a companion portrait of his mother also; but this he has not done. He tells us little more than that she was the daughter of Peter Folger, a resident of Nantucket, had, like her husband, an excellent constitution, and suckled all her ten children—a point of capital importance with her son. Franklin further tells us that he never knew either his father or his mother to have any sickness but that of which they died, he at eighty-nine and she at eighty-five. They were both buried in Boston, and rested for many years under a monument, erected over their graves by Franklin, with a happy inscription from his pen, until this monument, having fallen into a state of dilapidation, was replaced in 1827 by a more durable one, erected by a number of citizens of Boston, who were desirous, as their supplementary inscription states, of reminding succeeding generations that he was born in Boston. In his inscription, Franklin, true to his ideals, states with pride that Josiah and Abiah lived lovingly together in wedlock fifty-five years, and, without an estate, or any gainful employment, by constant labor and industry, with God's blessing, maintained a large family comfortably, and brought up thirteen children and seven grandchildren reputably. In the light of the altered domestic standards of the present time, it requires some little effort, after reading these words, to accept the subsequent statement in the inscription that Josiah was not only a pious but a "prudent" man.