Franklin’s conversion culminated in 1787, when he accepted the presidency of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. The group tried to persuade him to present a petition against slavery at the Constitutional Convention, but knowing the delicate compromises being made between north and south, he kept silent on the issue. After that, however, he became outspoken.
One of the arguments against immediate abolition, which Franklin had heretofore accepted, was that it was not practical or safe to free hundreds of thousands of adult slaves into a society for which they were not prepared. (There were about seven hundred thousand slaves in the United States out of a total population of four million in 1790.) So his abolition society dedicated itself not only to freeing slaves but also to helping them become good citizens. “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils,” Franklin wrote in a November 1789 address to the public from the society. “The unhappy man, who has long been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains that bind his body do also fetter his intellectual faculties and impair the social affections of his heart.”
As was typical of Franklin, he drew up for the society a meticulously detailed charter and procedures “for improving the condition of free blacks.” There would be a twenty-four-person committee divided into four subcommittees:
A Committee of Inspection, who shall superintend the morals, general conduct, and ordinary situation of the free Negroes, and afford them advice and instruction…
A Committee of Guardians, who shall place out children and young people with suitable persons, that they may (during a moderate time of apprenticeship or servitude) learn some trade or other business…
A Committee of Education, who shall superintend the school instruction of the children and youth of the free blacks. They may either influence them to attend regularly the schools already established in this city, or form others with this view…
A Committee of Employ, who shall endeavor to procure constant employment for those free Negroes who are able to work; as the want of this would occasion poverty, idleness, and many vicious habits.42
On behalf of the society, Franklin presented a formal abolition petition to Congress in February 1790. “Mankind are all formed by the same Almighty Being, alike objects of his care, and equally designed for the enjoyment of happiness,” it declared. The duty of Congress was to secure “the blessings of liberty to the People of the United States,” and this should be done “without distinction of color.” Therefore, Congress should grant “liberty to those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage.”43
Franklin and his petition were roundly denounced by the defenders of slavery, most notably Congressman James Jackson of Georgia, who declared on the House floor that the Bible had sanctioned slavery and, without it, there would be no one to do the hard and hot work on plantations. It was the perfect setup for Franklin’s last great parody, written less than a month before he died.
He had begun his literary career sixty-eight years earlier when, as a 16-year-old apprentice, he pretended to be a prudish widow named Silence Dogood, and he made a subsequent career of enlightening readers with similar hoaxes such as “The Trial of Polly Baker” and “An Edict from the King of Prussia.” In the spirit of the latter of these essays, he anonymously published in a local newspaper, with appropriate scholarly source citations, a purported speech given by a member of the divan of Algiers one hundred years earlier.
It bore a scathing mirror resemblance to Congressman Jackson’s speech. “God is great, and Mahomet is his prophet,” it began realistically. Then it went on to attack a petition by a purist sect asking for an end to the practice of capturing and enslaving European Christians to work in Algeria: “If we forbear to make slaves of their people, who in this hot climate are to cultivate our lands? Who are to perform the common labors of our city, and in our families?” An end to the slavery of “infidels” would cause land values to fall and rents to sink by half.
Who is to indemnify their masters for their loss? Will the state do it? Is our Treasury sufficient?…And if we set our slaves free, what is to be done with them? Few of them will return to their countries; they know too well the greater hardships they must there be subject to; they will not embrace our holy religion; they will not adopt our manners; our people will not pollute themselves by intermarrying with them. Must we maintain them as beggars in our streets, or suffer our properties to be the prey of their pillage? For men long accustomed to slavery will not work for a livelihood when not compelled.
And what is there so pitiable in their present condition?…Here they are brought into a land where the sun of Islamism gives forth its light, and shines in full splendor, and they have an opportunity of making themselves acquainted with the true doctrine, and thereby saving their immortal souls…While serving us, we take care to provide them with every thing, and they are treated with humanity. The laborers in their own country are, as I am well informed, worse fed, lodged, and clothed…
How grossly are they mistaken in imagining slavery to be disallowed by the Koran! Are not the two precepts, to quote no more, “Masters, treat your Slaves with kindness; Slaves, serve your Masters with cheerfulness and Fidelity,” clear proofs to the contrary?…Let us then hear no more of this detestable proposition, the manumission of Christian slaves, the adoption of which would, by depreciating our lands and houses, and thereby depriving so many good citizens of their properties, create universal discontent, and provoke insurrections.44
In his parody, Franklin recorded that the Algerian divan ended up rejecting the petition. Congress, likewise, decided that it did not have the authority to act on Franklin’s abolition petition.
To Bed
It is not surprising that, at the end of their lives, many people take stock of their religious beliefs. Franklin had never fully joined a church nor subscribed to a sectarian dogma, and he found it more useful to focus on earthly issues rather than spiritual ones. When he narrowly escaped a shipwreck as he neared the English coast in 1757, he had joked to Deborah that, “Were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint; but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a lighthouse.” Likewise, when a town in Massachusetts named itself Franklin in 1785 and asked him to donate a church bell, he told them to forsake the steeple and build a library, for which he sent “books instead of a bell, sense being preferable to sound.”45
As he grew older, Franklin’s amorphous faith in a benevolent God seemed to become more firm. “If it had not been for the justice of our cause and the consequent interposition of Providence, in which we had faith, we must have been ruined,” he wrote Strahan after the war. “If I had ever before been an atheist, I should now have been convinced of the Being and government of a Deity!”46
His support for religion tended to be based on his belief that it was useful and practical in making people behave better, rather than because it was divinely inspired. He wrote a letter, possibly sent in 1786 to Thomas Paine, in response to a manuscript that ridiculed religious devotion. Franklin begged the recipient not to publish his heretical treatise, but he did so on the grounds that the arguments could have harmful practical effects, not on the grounds that they were false. “You yourself may find it easy to live a virtuous life without the assistance afforded by religion,” he said, “but think how great a proportion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced and inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice.” In addition, he noted, the personal consequences for the author would likely be odious. “He that spits against the wind, spits in his own face.” If the letter was indeed addressed to Paine, it had an effect. He had long been formulating the virulent attack on organized religious faith tha
t he would later title The Age of Reason, but he held off publishing it for another seven years, until near the end of his life.47
The most important religious role Franklin played—and it was an exceedingly important one in shaping his enlightened new republic—was as an apostle of tolerance. He had contributed to the building funds of each and every sect in Philadelphia, including £5 for the Congregation Mikveh Israel for its new synagogue in April 1788, and he had opposed religious oaths and tests in both the Pennsylvania and federal constitutions. During the July 4 celebrations in 1788, Franklin was too sick to leave his bed, but the parade marched under his window. For the first time, as per arrangements that Franklin had overseen, “the clergy of different Christian denominations, with the rabbi of the Jews, walked arm in arm.”48
His final summation of his religious thinking came the month before he died, in response to questions from the Rev. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale. Franklin began by restating his basic creed: “I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children.” These beliefs were fundamental to all religions; anything else was mere embellishment.
Then he addressed Stiles’s question about whether he believed in Jesus, which was, he said, the first time he had ever been asked directly. The system of morals that Jesus provided, Franklin replied, was “the best the world ever saw or is likely to see.” But on the issue of whether Jesus was divine, he provided a surprisingly candid and wry response. “I have,” he declared, “some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”49
The last letter Franklin ever wrote was, fittingly, to Thomas Jefferson, his spiritual heir as the nation’s foremost apostle of the Enlightenment’s faith in reason, experiment, and tolerance. Jefferson had come to call at Franklin’s bedside and provide news of their beleaguered friends in France. “He went over all in succession,” Jefferson noted, “with a rapidity and animation almost too much for his strength.” Jefferson praised him for getting so far in his memoirs, which he predicted would be very instructive. “I cannot say much of that,” replied Franklin, “but I will give you a sample.” Then he pulled out a page that described the last weeks of his negotiations in London to avert the war, which he insisted that Jefferson keep as a memento.
Jefferson followed up by asking about an arcane issue that needed resolving: Which maps had been used to draw America’s western boundaries in the Paris peace talks? After Jefferson left, Franklin studied the matter and then wrote his final letter. His mind was clear enough to describe, with precision, the decisions they had made and the maps they had used regarding various rivers running into the Bay of Passamaquoddy.50
Soon after he finished the letter, Franklin’s fever and chest pains began to worsen. For ten days he was confined to bed with a heavy cough and labored breathing. Sally and Richard Bache attended to him, as did Temple and Benny. Polly Stevenson was there as well, pressing him to make a clearer proclamation of his religious faith, pleased that he had a picture of the Day of Judgment by his bedside. Only once during that period was he able to rise briefly, and he asked that his bed be made up so that he could “die in a decent manner.” Sally expressed hope that he was recovering, that he might live many years longer. “I hope not,” he calmly replied.51
Then an abscess in his lung burst, making it impossible for him to talk. Benny approached his bed, and his grandfather reached out to hold his hand for a long time. At eleven that evening, April 17, 1790, Franklin died at the age of 84.
Back in 1728, when he was a fledgling printer imbued with the pride that he believed an honest man should have in his trade, Franklin had composed for himself, or at least for his amusement, a cheeky epitaph that reflected his wry perspective on his pilgrim’s progress through this world:
The body of
B. Franklin, Printer;
(Like the cover of an old book,
Its contents worn out,
and stripped of its lettering and gilding)
Lies here, food for worms.
But the work shall not be lost:
For it will, (as he believed) appear once more,
In a new and more elegant edition,
Revised and corrected
By the Author.52
Shortly before he died, however, he prescribed something simpler to be placed over the grave site that he would share with his wife. His tombstone should be, he wrote, a marble slab “six feet long, four feet wide, plain, with only a small molding round the upper edge, and this inscription: Benjamin and Deborah Franklin.”53
Close to twenty thousand mourners, more than had ever before gathered in Philadelphia, watched as his funeral procession made its way to the Christ Church burying ground, a few blocks from his home. In front marched the clergymen of the city, all of them, of every faith.
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
William Franklin: In his will, Franklin bequeathed to his only surviving son nothing more than some worthless land claims in Canada and the forgiveness of any debts he still owed him. “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.” William, who thought he had already paid off his debts by deeding over his New Jersey lands, complained about the “shameful injustice” of the will, and for the remaining twenty-five years of his life never returned to America. But he still revered his father’s memory, and he did not permit himself another harsh public word about him. Indeed, when his own son, Temple, dithered in producing an edition of Franklin’s life and writings, William began work on one of his own, which he hoped would honor his father by showing the “turn of his mind and variety of his knowledge.” It was not to be. He had married his Irish landlady, Mary D’Evelyn, but after she died in 1811 he was a broken and lonely man. He died three years later, estranged from his son, suffering in what he called “that solitary state which is most repugnant to my nature.”1
Temple Franklin: Having inherited a nice share of his grandfather’s estate and all of his important papers, Temple returned to England in 1792 and reunited temporarily with his father. Still a charming but aimless rogue, he chafed under his father’s pressure to get married and work on Franklin’s papers, and he brought the family’s dysfunctionality to new heights. He had another illegitimate child, a daughter named Ellen, whose mother was the younger sister of William’s new wife, and then he broke bitterly with them all and ran away to Paris, leaving little Ellen Franklin to be raised by William, who was both her uncle and grandfather. For fourteen years, Temple neither reestablished contact with his father nor published the papers of his grandfather, even as unauthorized portions of the Autobiography appeared in France. Finally, in 1812, he wrote his father to say he was about to publish the papers and wanted to come to London to consult with him. William, who remembered the cool response he had gotten when he wrote a similar letter to his own father twenty-eight years earlier, was overjoyed. “I shall be happy to see you,” he said, “not being able to bear the thought of dying in enmity with one so nearly connected.” But Temple never came to England. Instead, in 1817, he published the Autobiography (without the final installment) and a haphazard collection of some of his grandfather’s papers. He lived the next six years in Paris with yet another mistress, an Englishwoman named Hannah Collyer, whom he married a few months before he died in 1823. She later brought many of Franklin’s precious papers back to London, where they were rediscovered in 1840 in the shop of a tailor who was using them as patterns. The papers that Temple abandoned in Philadelphia were scattered to various souvenir hunters until the American Philosophical Society began the process of collecting them in the 1860s.2
Sally and Richard Bache: Franklin’s loyal daught
er and her husband got most of his property, including the Market Street houses, on the condition that Richard “set free his Negro man Bob.” (He did, but Bob took to drink, couldn’t support himself, and asked to be restored to slavery; the Baches declined, but they let him live in their home for the rest of his life.) Sally was also given the Louis XVI miniature encircled with diamonds, with the stipulation that she not turn “any of those diamonds into ornaments either for herself or daughters and thereby introduce or countenance the expensive, vain and useless fashion of wearing jewels in this country.” She sold the diamonds to fulfill her lifelong desire to see England. With her husband, she went to stay with William, with whom she had always remained close. On their return, the Baches settled on a farm in Delaware.
Benjamin Bache: Inheriting Franklin’s printing equipment and many of his books, he followed in his grandfather’s steps by launching, seventy years after the New England Courant was first published, a crusading Jeffersonian newspaper, The American Aurora. The paper became fiercely partisan on behalf of those who believed, with a passion that surpassed even Franklin’s, in pro-French and democratic policies, and it attacked Washington and then Adams for creating imperial presidencies. It was, for a while, the most popular paper in America, and has been the subject of two recent books. His politics caused a rift with his parents, as did his decision to marry against their wishes a feisty woman named Margaret Markoe. In 1798, he was arrested for sedition and for libeling Adams, but before he could stand trial he died of yellow fever at age 29. By then he was so estranged from his parents that his sisters had to sneak away to see him during his final illness. Margaret promptly married her late husband’s press-man, an argumentative Irishman named William Duane, and they kept the Aurora going. One of Benny’s sisters, Deborah Bache, then married one of Duane’s sons from his first marriage.3
Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein Page 126