The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  THE OLDEST REVOLUTIONARY

  By the end of December 1764, Benjamin Franklin was sitting in Margaret Stevenson’s parlor on Craven Street. He had arrived without warning her in advance. He wanted to make her wonder, if only for an instant, whether he had magical powers that had transported him across the wintry Atlantic. When Margaret returned from a shopping trip, her astonishment delighted him. Polly Stevenson was visiting friends in the country; Ben dashed off a letter telling her how much he enjoyed the surprise on her mother’s face. Polly hurried back to London and they resumed their happy family life on Craven Street.

  The house was soon thronged with Franklin relatives from England and America as well as numerous English friends. Mrs. Stevenson never lost her good humor and managed to keep everyone happy, especially her star boarder. Her importance to Franklin—and the intimate depth of their relationship—was visible in a letter Franklin wrote to her when she took a much needed rest in the country. He reminded her of an old adage from Poor Richard’s Almanac, “fish and visitors smell after three days,” and urged her to “return with the stage tomorrow.”

  With deadpan humor, Ben added that he was by no means confessing that he could not manage without her. In fact, he would be perfectly happy if he could get rid of “Nanny” [a difficult servant] and the cat. Then he would have an empty house, which he would enjoy immensely. However, such happiness was “perhaps too great” to be given to anyone except saints and holy hermits. “Sinners like me, I might have said US, are condemned to live together and tease one another.”1

  At one point, during another Stevenson sojourn in the country, Ben published a newspaper, The Craven Street Gazette, to keep her in touch with his doings. In its pages she became “Queen Margaret” and her departure left the Great Person (“so called because of his enormous size”) grumpy at the “new administration” even though they promised him one of his favorite dishes, roasted shoulder of mutton, for dinner. Another edition reported that in spite of an “order in council” requiring everyone to attend church, on Sunday “The Great Person’s broad-built bulk lay so long abed that breakfast was not over until it was too late.” Other editions referred to the Great Person as “Dr. Fatsides” and reported he “begins to wish for Her Majesty’s return.”2

  Clearly, Mrs. Stevenson was a far more sophisticated woman than Deborah. Her intellectual daughter, Polly, did not acquire her brainpower and passion for science by accident. Margaret circulated comfortably in London’s upper-middle-class business and artistic world. Among her close friends were the American-born painter Benjamin West and his wife. She had excellent taste and helped Ben select the china, silver, and other presents he sent Deborah and Sally. Thanks to her tact and good humor, Franklin was able to convince himself he was keeping both women happy.

  II

  Politics suddenly transformed Franklin’s mission from a war with the Penns into a struggle to preserve his dream of a British empire in which Americans were treated as equals. To pay off the huge debt created by the Seven Years’ War with France, Parliament decided to tax the Americans directly rather than request grants from the various colonial assemblies. Their first attempt was a Stamp Act, which would require a royal stamp on every conceivable public document. American reaction was violently hostile, but it took Ben several months to realize this was an issue that transcended his feud with the Penns.

  The law did not cause serious pain to Franklin’s ample personal exchequer. He advised friends in America to accept it. Frantic letters from Philadelphia told him he was being slandered as one of the sponsors of the act. Deborah described how she had defended their house against an angry mob with a loaded pistol in her hand. Faced with a choice between Britain and America, Ben joined the opposition. His facile pen—and his shrewd, carefully rehearsed testimony before Parliament—played a key role in persuading the legislature to repeal the Stamp Act. But at George III’s insistence, Parliament added a clause that affirmed its right to tax Americans “in all cases whatsoever.” An ugly wedge of hostility had been inserted between England and America.

  This new situation made Ben Franklin a semipermanent boarder on Craven Street for the next ten years. From Philadelphia, Deborah’s letters became more and more plaintive, as age and illness darkened her days. Again and again Franklin promised to return home, only to apologize because a new political crisis required his presence in London. He gradually became the spokesman not only for Pennsylvania but for all the American colonies in their growing antagonism to the mother country.

  In the midst of this turmoil, Ben and William did not forget William Temple Franklin. When the boy was about four years old, Ben began bringing him to Craven Street. William approved of this decision and a few years later wondered if “Temple” could be brought to America to live with him. William had no intention of acknowledging him as his son; he intended to describe him as the “son of a poor [English] relative” that he was raising as his own child. Ben’s repeated postponements of his return to America and William’s second thoughts slowly let this proposal slide into oblivion. The royal governor realized there was a good chance that people would start whispering that the boy was the bastard father of a bastard son. On Craven Street, the boy was known only as William Temple—he was not told that William was his father and Ben his grandfather. But Ben assured him he was a member of the Franklin family. He was sent away to school, returning only for holiday visits.3

  III

  Back in America, William had assumed leadership of the Franklin family, dealing with quarrels and pleas for help from some of his father’s aging brothers and sisters, and even offering Deborah advice and assistance when she asked for it. But his modest income severely limited his largess, and he got into a full-fledged quarrel with Deborah when she asked him to investigate a merchant named Richard Bache, whom Sally Franklin wanted to marry. William found Bache had gone bankrupt several times and dismissed him as a fortune hunter. His father agreed with him at first, but when Deborah backed her daughter, Ben wisely decided he was too far away to play a role and agreed to the match. William was hurt by the way Ben disregarded his advice; father and son exchanged angry letters before jointly deciding to drop the subject. But William’s hard feelings persisted; he claimed he was too busy to attend his half sister’s wedding.

  As the quarrel between England and America grew more complex and intense, William had to deal with a restless and often defiant New Jersey assembly. It did not make him happier to know that his father was being viewed in some circles as an agent provocateur, urging ever greater resistance. Crown officials viewed William with suspicion and hostility, and at one point there was a serious attempt to harass him into resigning. William was proud of the way he repeatedly soothed New Jersey’s angry voters. He was doing a good job, but Ben’s role as the spokesman for America’s complaints deprived the governor of the credit he felt he deserved.

  More and more, William began to wonder whether his father had lost his perspective on what was happening in America. The complainers and defiers were a noisy minority, many of them bankrupts like Sam Adams of Boston, who were trying to blame their failures on the king and Parliament. The best people, men of wealth and judgment, with whom William associated, did not share their views. Ben was also getting old, reaching a time of life when it was difficult for a man to change his opinions.

  William shared these thoughts with Elizabeth Downes. She had not given him a son or daughter, and as the years passed it became obvious that she was not going to do so. This lack of a family only drew them closer together as a couple. Soon, William became a member of the Church of England and shared her fervent faith in a Christian God. With that step, remarkable for a son of Ben Franklin, William crossed a spiritual divide. A devout Anglican saw the king as the incarnation of God’s plan for an ordered, peaceful society. Faith reinforced reason to make men and women deeply committed to the world that had emerged from the Glorious Revolution of 1688—an era in which Britain had achieved global power and wealth.


  IV

  Meanwhile, Ben was changing his mind about the British empire. In 1773 he told William that he now thought Parliament had no right to make laws for the colonies; the Americans could and should govern themselves. The king was the only figure to whom Americans owed allegiance. He casually added that he knew William did not see things this way. “You are a thorough government man,” he wrote, “which I do not wonder at, nor do I aim at converting you.”4

  Upheavals in Boston and London soon disrupted this precarious harmony. Yankee radicals dumped tea in Boston harbor, and the British reacted with mindless anger and brutality. In London, crown officials turned on the man they considered the source of much if not all of America’s defiance: Benjamin Franklin. They converted a hearing before the king’s Privy Council on a petition Franklin had submitted to them on behalf of Massachusetts into an impromptu trial. No less a personage than the king’s attorney general assailed Ben Franklin with sarcasm and insults for over an hour, while courtiers crowding the chamber laughed and applauded. Franklin never said a word.

  The next day, the government stripped him of his job as deputy postmaster general for America. Ben wrote a letter to William, advising him to resign. Two weeks later, he changed his mind. Another letter told William to sit tight; better to wait until the American-haters in George III’s cabinet fired him as they had dismissed Ben. “One can make something of an injury but nothing of a resignation,” he wrote.

  Less than a year later, he received dismaying news from Governor Franklin: Deborah was dead. William had struggled through snow drifts to attend her funeral on December 19, 1774. She had suffered a stroke in 1773 that left her enfeebled in both mind and body; a second stroke had carried her into eternity. She had been a pathetic sight in her last days. Even William referred to her as “my poor old mother.” Deborah lamented that Ben had not come home immediately after his humiliation before the Privy Council. She had often wept and sighed that she would never see her Pappy again.

  The drift to war continued, with Ben still in London desperately trying to negotiate a settlement. But the British were intransigent, and he finally decided to sail for home. On his last day in England, tears streamed down his face as he said goodbye to Mrs. Stevenson, Polly, and numerous friends. He promised them he would come back as soon as possible to continue his political struggle with the king and his parliamentary allies. But in his heart he doubted he would ever return to this imperial city, where he had found love and admiration.

  Ben was also weeping for the death of his dream of a united British empire. With him to the port of embarkation went William Temple Franklin. Ben had decided he would take the sixteen-year-old with him to America. It was a silent signal of his intention to center his hopes for the future on an independent America. For the first time, he told Temple that he was not merely a Franklin—he was an American Franklin.

  On shipboard, Ben spent much of his time writing the longest letter of his life—it eventually totaled ninety-seven pages. It began “Dear Son.” It was a narrative of his final, hitherto secret negotiations with the British government. He thought it might be used to justify America’s decision to declare independence. But those opening words made it clear that Governor William Franklin was the one person Ben wanted to read it. His chief purpose was to persuade William he had done everything in his power “to preserve from breaking that fine and noble China vase, the British Empire.” 5

  When the ship reached Philadelphia on May 5, 1775, Ben heard news that did not entirely surprise him: war had begun. Blood had been shed on Lexington Green and on Concord Bridge. Pennsylvania appointed him a delegate to the Continental Congress, but he found that many people eyed him with uneasy suspicion. William was still the royal governor of New Jersey. Where did his father’s loyalty lie?

  Ben quickly sent a messenger to William and arranged a meeting. He was thunderstruck to discover that William was still loyal to the king and Parliament. The governor denounced extremists in both London and America, but he felt “obligations” to the ministers who had trusted him in spite of his father’s opposition to their policies. William was stunned to hear his father say—or at least strongly intimate—he favored American independence. He angrily warned Ben against trying to “set the colonies in a flame”—words he had already used with some success in a speech to the New Jersey legislature.6

  Only William Temple Franklin prevented a violent quarrel. William was almost pathetically overjoyed to claim the young man as his son. He took Temple with him when he returned to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where the colony had recently built him a splendid new house. Mournfully, Ben could only remember a letter he had written to William a year earlier:

  I don’t understand it as any favour to me or to you, [your] being continued in an office by which, with all your prudence, you cannot avoid running [financially] behindhand if you live suitably to your station. While you are in it I know you will execute it with fidelity to your royal master, but I think independence more honourable than any service, and in the state of American affairs, you will find yourself in no comfortable situation and wish you had disengaged yourself.

  That prophecy would soon be fatefully fulfilled.7

  V

  Ben quickly learned that independence was not a popular idea in the Continental Congress or in many homes in Philadelphia. When Ben chose to say little or nothing in Congress, some of his former enemies in Pennsylvania’s politics wondered aloud whether he might be a spy, sent by the ministry to identify the leaders of the rebellion. “He wants to discover our weak side,” these Franklin-haters said. Richard Henry Lee, leader of the Virginia delegation to Congress, declared himself “highly offended” by Franklin’s reticence.8

  In distant England, a drama of longing and eventual heartbreak was unfolding. Margaret Stevenson was hoping that Deborah’s death meant that she and Ben could now marry. She wrote fervent letters to him, looking forward to the “hapey day” when he would return to England as he had promised and they would become man and wife.

  A letter from a mutual friend, Dolley Blunt, leaves little doubt of the nature of Margaret’s relationship with Ben. Dolley told him Margaret was hoping desperately for a letter that would tell her when he would return. Mrs. Blunt urged him to send “the strongest assurances” of an early arrival, adding, “I am firmly persuaded that without the animating prospect of spending the remainder of her life with you, she [will] be very wretched indeed.” It was not that Margaret lacked friends, but “all of us are less to her than you.” With the kind of irony that history seems to favor, Mrs. Blunt wrote these words on April 19, 1775, the day the shooting war began at Lexington and Concord.

  Franklin wrote a warm letter to “My dear dear Friend,” but he offered Margaret only financial advice—to take her money out of government bonds and put it into private investments. He did not respond to her suggestion that she and Polly might join him in Philadelphia. He could not explain that marrying an English wife would be tantamount to political suicide for him in the atmosphere of doubt and suspicion swirling through the city.9

  VI

  When British and American soldiers clashed at Bunker Hill, leaving over a thousand men dead and wounded, Franklin wrote an angry public letter to his friend William Strahan, with a mordantly witty closing line: “You are now my enemy and I am yours, B Franklin.” In Perth Amboy, William Franklin became more and more isolated as New Jersey’s allegiance shifted to the rebel cause. His peril only increased William’s stubbornness. In August 1775, Ben visited him and again tried to change his son’s mind. Ben spoke without reserve, telling William it was now or never. The swing to independence was growing stronger every day. If he joined his father, William could become one of the leaders of a new nation.

  Governor Franklin remained intransigent. One suspects that deep in William’s heart smoldered a hidden anger for his illegitimate birth—and his father’s failure to protect him from Deborah’s nasty tongue when he was a boy. A more immediate motive may ha
ve been a reluctance to trust his fellow Americans, who were all too ready to fling the epithet “bastard” at him. Some weight must be also be given to the influence of Elizabeth Downes Franklin, who remained devoted to the church and the king. Ben went back to Philadelphia a very disappointed man.

  Meanwhile, William was exerting his formidable charm on Temple. Elizabeth was equally persuasive. William had told her that Temple was his son and asked her to accept him. She was soon calling herself Temple’s “mamma” and urging him to admire his father’s courage. In the fall of 1775, Temple returned to Philadelphia to begin studying at the College of Pennsylvania. Early in 1776, musket-wielding rebel militiamen surrounded the governor’s mansion in Perth Amboy and pounded on the door at two a.m. to demand his surrender. Elizabeth was terrified by this possibly murderous intrusion. William wrote his son an emotional letter aimed at winning Temple’s sympathy by dwelling on his stepmother’s distress:

  I hope you will never be wanting in a grateful sense of her kindness to you. I should be able to keep up my spirits in struggling through all the present and expected difficulties if it was not on her account. Her constitution is naturally weak and delicate and the late brutal treatment she has received, and her anxious concerns for me, have nearly deprived her of her life…. Her spirits continue so agitated that the least sudden noise almost throws her into hysterics…She has no relations of her own in this country to whom she can resort, or from whom she can receive any comfort in a time of distress and she cannot but take notice that mine do not at present seem disposed to give themselves any concern about her.10