The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  In Passy, Temple had fathered an illegitimate son by the daughter of a French neighbor. The baby died of smallpox a few months after it was placed in the care of a country family. Instead of sympathizing with the heartbroken mother, Temple blamed her for the child’s death and broke off the affair. This was not the sort of conduct that would persuade Congress’s numerous puritans to approve Temple as a representative of the United States in France or any other European country. Temple’s plight played an important part in Franklin’s decision to go home. If he could not find a place for the young man in Europe, he would do his best to help him in America.

  Also in the picture was Sally Franklin Bache’s oldest son, fourteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache. He had spent most of his time in Europe at school in Geneva, Switzerland, where he had often been miserably homesick. Franklin had brought him to Passy when peace arrived and found Benny a startling reproduction of himself. He had his grandfather’s intelligence and wry humor, and he became an ardent and expert swimmer. Swimming had been Ben’s favorite hobby in his Boston boyhood. Franklin decided to train him as a printer and set him up in the newspaper business in America.

  So the day of departure arrived. The queen of France, Marie Antoinette, sent a special litter pulled by snow-white Spanish mules to carry Franklin to the seacoast. His bladder stones made riding in a jolting carriage agony. King Louis XVI sent a miniature of his royal personage, encircled by more than four hundred diamonds. On July 12, 1785, Franklin climbed into his traveling bed while his Passy neighbors gathered to say farewell. “A solemn silence reigned around him, interrupted only by sobs,” Benny Bache wrote in his diary. The leave-taking at Auteuil had been equally mournful. “Many honorable tears were shed on both sides,” wrote the young doctor, Cabanis.

  Madame Helvetius found the separation almost unbearable. A day later, she dashed off a frantic letter and sent it in pursuit of her rejected lover. “I picture you in the litter…already lost to me and to those who love you so much…I fear you are in pain…If you are, mon cher ami, come back to us.”22

  But the decision was irrevocable. In a week Franklin was in Le Havre, waiting for 128 crates of baggage to be loaded onto a ship from London. The ex-ambassador’s thoughts were of Madame Helvetiuis. “I am not sure I will be happy in America,” he wrote. “But I must go back. I feel sometimes that things are badly arranged in this world when I consider that people so well matched to be happy together are forced to separate.

  “I will not tell you of my love. For one would say there is nothing remarkable or praiseworthy about it, since everybody loves you. I only hope you will always love me some…”23

  IX

  In Southampton, many of Franklin’s English friends gathered to say goodbye to him. Refreshed by the voyage across the channel, Franklin partied and joked and drank with them for four days at the Star Tavern. Then came a visitor who dampened everyone’s spirits: William Franklin. In the privacy of Ben’s room, father and son faced each other and both saw there would be no forgiveness. There was not even an attempt to achieve it. The only subject they discussed was money.

  Ben had decided that Temple might be happiest living on the six-hundred-acre farm that the ex-governor still owned in New Jersey. The state had never confiscated it, probably because William was Benjamin Franklin’s son. There may also have been some twinges of conscience for New Jersey’s role in Elizabeth Downes Franklin’s death. Ben announced he wanted to buy the farm for Temple—and drove the hardest imaginable bargain. He paid less than William had paid in the 1760s. Then he presented William with a bill for fifteen hundred pounds—money he had advanced to him during his governorship. With Parliament still sitting on his claims, William was virtually penniless. He was forced to sign over to Temple valuable lands he had purchased in northern New York. Another parcel of good farmland in New Jersey went to Ben in return for cancelling the remainder of his debt. It was Ben’s bitter way of severing William’s last connections with America. In a letter to his sister Sally a few days later, William wrote: “My fate has thrown me on a different side of the globe.”

  The voyage across the Atlantic was smooth and pleasant. The ship glided up the Delaware River to Philadelphia, where Ben’s son-in-law, Richard Bache, came aboard to greet the travelers. Another ship had outrun Franklin’s vessel and informed the city of his imminent arrival. There was a cheering crowd on the dock as they came ashore. Church bells rang and cannon boomed. Joy coursed through Franklin’s aged heart. His enemies’ smears about his love life had not ruined his fame, as he feared. An enormous crowd lined the streets and applauded until Sally Franklin Bache embraced her father in the doorway of his house. The greeting was “far beyond my expectations,” he admitted in a letter a few days later.

  Even better news awaited him. Within six weeks his friends had nominated and elected him chief executive of Pennsylvania. “This universal and unbroken confidence of a whole people” was immensely pleasing to him. It was some compensation for the ambassador’s secret wounds.

  X

  The next three years added fresh achievements to Franklin’s fame. When the new nation’s rickety constitution, The Articles of Confederation, proved inadequate, he joined the call for a constitutional convention. The conclave met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, with George Washington as the presiding officer. Franklin played a key role in working out compromises that persuaded deadlocked delegates to agree on thorny issues such as a strong presidency and equal representation for small states in the senate. In a witty speech at the close of the convention, Franklin admitted there were some things he disliked in the final version of the charter, but he planned to sign the document and urged everyone to do likewise. This spirit of compromise played a crucial role in persuading the states to ratify the Constitution and launch the new government in 1789, with George Washington as the first president.

  Alas, this added fame could not prevent the slow decline of Franklin’s body. The bladder stones that tormented him in France became more and more painful. Soon he was confined to his bed most of the time. His daughter, Sally, was constantly at his bedside. Polly Stevenson Hewson had followed him to America with her three children, and was another hovering presence. Temple frequently visited from his farm in New Jersey, concealing from his grandfather his unhappiness with rural life.

  After Franklin’s death, Temple sold his farm and returned to England, where he tried to become reconciled with his father. William had married again, and Temple seduced the second wife’s sister, who became pregnant. After the child, a girl, was born, William and Temple quarreled. Temple deserted mother and child and retreated to his favorite city, Paris, for the rest of his troubled life. William raised the abandoned child as his daughter.

  In Paris, Temple lived for most of his later years with an Englishwoman whom he married on his deathbed, to give her a claim on his meager estate. More than once, he expressed his detestation of marriage as a source of unique misery. Was he haunted by guilt for deserting Elizabeth Downes Franklin? When Franklin’s sister, Jane, heard about Elizabeth’s death, she had remarked, “Temple will mourn for her much.”

  XI

  Toward the close of these final years, Franklin said farewell to the women he had loved. To Madame Helvetius, he wrote: “I cannot let this chance [to send a letter] go by, my dear friend, without telling you that I love you always…I think endlessly of the pleasures I enjoyed in the sweet society of Auteil. And often, in my dreams, I dine with you, I sit beside you on one of your thousand sofas, or I walk with you in your beautiful garden.”

  Madame Helvetius spoke of her love for him with the same frankness: “I am getting old, my dear, but I don’t mind it, I am coming closer to you, we will meet again all the sooner.”

  He did not forget the woman who had first stirred romantic yearning in his soul. Catherine Ray had married William Greene, a member of one of Rhode Island’s most distinguished families. After the Revolution, Greene served as governor of the state for eight years. Catheri
ne had six children, but neither motherhood nor a busy social life prevented her from writing occasional letters to Franklin. She signed them “your friend who loves you dearly.” In one letter she told him, “I impute [a] great part of the happiness of my life to the pleasing lessons you gave me.” Franklin responded by telling her, “Among the felicities of my life I reckon your friendship.”24

  XII

  Polly Stevenson Hewson was at Franklin’s bedside when he died. For her he was an incandescent combination of lost father and almost lover, the man she wished she could have married. After his death, she became disenchanted with America. Without Franklin, the country repelled her. She thought women could look forward to only “insignificance or slavery” here. The political brawls of the 1790s convinced her that the nation was only a step removed from anarchy.

  Polly told one of her children that “I…repent I ever brought you to this country.” But the three young Hewsons differed emphatically with their mother. They all married Americans. Even the son who went back to England to study medicine returned to Philadelphia, declaring that Dr. Franklin had inspired an “enthusiasm for America” that became the lodestar of his life. Margaret Stevenson would have been pleased by this denouement of her troubled love story.

  XIII

  Of all the women who loved Benjamin Franklin and tried to express the complexity of their affection, Madame Brillon said it best. When Franklin was eighty-three, she wrote to him from Passy about her family’s happiness, which had only one troubling aspect: his absence. But her regret had “a certain sweetness,” because Franklin had told her he was happy in America. “To have been, to still be, forever, the friends of this amiable sage who knew how to be a great man without pomp, a learned man without ostentation, a philosopher without austerity, a sensitive human being without weakness, yes, my dear papa, your name will be engraved in the temple of memory but each of our hearts is, for you, a temple of love.”25

  BOOK THREE

  John Adams

  AN AMOROUS PURITAN FINDS A WIFE

  Friday, June 21, 1775, was hot and muggy, a typical Philadelphia summer day. But the weather did not prevent excitement from coursing through America’s largest, wealthiest city. General George Washington, the newly appointed commander in chief of the American Continental Army, was leaving to take command of the thousands of New England militiamen who had rushed to Boston after British troops clashed with Massachusetts men at Lexington and Concord on April 19. The choice of Washington was a brilliant political move. It made Virginia, the largest colony, a visible, unmistakable partner in the confrontation with Great Britain.

  Numerous Philadelphians and not a few congressmen such as Thomas Jefferson were waiting on horseback, eager to accompany the new general out of town to testify to their enthusiastic approval of him and his willingness to assume the leadership of the nation’s embryo army. The Philadelphia Light Horse, cavalrymen drawn from the best families, were acting as Washington’s official escort. They were wearing their expensive uniforms—light-brown jackets, white breeches, gleaming high-topped black boots, and flat round hats bound with silver. Bugles blared, drums beat, and Washington, looking magnificent on a big bay horse, began his journey with cheers from hundreds of spectators.

  One of the escorting congressmen was having very different thoughts. John Adams had been the man behind Washington’s appointment. He had persuaded his cousin Samuel Adams and other New England delegates to accept the Virginian, in spite of vehement objections from several men. Samuel Adams’s emphatic approval—he had seconded John’s nomination speech in Congress—was decisive. Most men would have felt a quiet exultation, watching the results of this shrewd, enormously important politicking. But John Adams felt nothing but a gnawing mixture of depression and disappointment.

  Back in his hot, dingy room after his brief ride, Adams gazed in the mirror at his pudgy middle-aged torso, with its potbelly and stumpy legs, and tried to accept the fact that he would never be a soldier. He sat down and scrawled a letter to his wife, Abigail. He described the departure of Washington and his subordinate generals, stressing how almost everyone, even officers of the militia, was wearing a uniform. “Such is the pride and pomp of war,” he wrote. “I, poor creature, worn out with scribbling, for my bread and liberty, low in spirits and weak in health, leave others to wear laurels which I have sown; others to eat the bread which I have earned….”1

  This anguished sense of inferiority, which became more and more tinged with raw envy as the Revolutionary War lengthened, is the little understood leitmotif of John Adams’s life. Earlier in 1775, when Ben Franklin returned to America and was immediately elected to the Continental Congress, Adams morosely noted that “from day to day [he was] sitting in silence, a great part of the time asleep in his chair.” But John was sure the already famous sage would get most of the credit for everything achieved in Congress. Adams was too self-absorbed to appreciate that Franklin’s policy of remaining silent was a shrewd tactic aimed at disarming the numerous congressman who suspected he might be a British spy because his son William was loyal to the king.

  II

  “Honest John” Adams, as he liked to call himself, was born on October 30, 1735, three years after George Washington. His father, John Adams Sr., was a small farmer and leatherworker in the town of Braintree, ten miles south of Boston. A sober, industrious puritan, the elder John traced his lineage back to Pilgrims John and Priscilla Alden. He served the town in various local capacities, including lieutenant of the militia.

  Behind his solemn facade lay a warm and loving parent, who paid close attention to the personalities of his three sons and loved to play with them. One of his favorite stunts was rapping out reveille on the kitchen table with a pair of drumsticks he had learned to use in the militia at the age of fifteen. His sons loved it, but his wife, Susanna Boylston Adams, violently objected, claiming it hurt her ears—and may have left a few nicks in her table, which, as a compulsive housekeeper, she would feel obliged to wax smooth.

  John’s mother was a far more turbulent spirit than his steady, methodical father. Susanna Boylston Adams had a fiery temper that exploded at anyone who crossed her. She and her husband had numerous arguments about money. John called them “rages and raves” that made him fear “all was breaking into flame.” Often he fled the house or retreated to his room to try to lose himself in a book.

  From other glimpses of her in John’s diary, Susanna was a woman whose mood swings were wild and unpredictable. She would fly through the house, dusting, polishing, and scrubbing, scolding her sons to be neater and more careful with their toys and clothes—and then relapse into fits of blank gloom and lassitude in which housework was neglected and the slightest question could trigger tears and disproportionate rage.

  John Adams inherited this temperament. In one of his earliest diaries, he wrote: “ballast is what I want. I totter before every breeze. My motions are unsteady.” Several biographers have suggested that he—and Susanna—were manic depressives. Whether or not he or she deserves that diagnosis, John’s unstable emotions would cause him—and his country—not a little political turmoil in years to come.

  III

  In his voluminous youthful diary, John admitted he had “an amorous disposition” and as early as eleven was “very fond of the society of females.” Growing up on a farm, he had no need for sex education. But he retained his self-control with his many “favorites” throughout his Harvard years. Thereafter his “disposition” toward the opposite sex “engaged [him] much.”2

  As a new attorney, John found it especially hard to concentrate on his law books whenever his thoughts wandered to a certain house in nearby Germantown, where Hannah Quincy lived. Hannah was beautiful—and not at all shy. At twenty-three, she had matrimony on her mind and was determined to get it into John Adams’s head. She teased him relentlessly about his studious habits, flatly declaring he would make a very poor husband in her opinion.

  “Suppose you was in your study,” she aske
d him, “and your wife should interrupt you accidentally and break off your chain of thought?” Would he snarl at her? Rebuke her? Or welcome her?

  “Should you like to spend your evenings at home in reading and conversing with your wife rather than to spend them abroad in taverns or with other company?” Hannah demanded.

  By the time he replied to these challenges, John was drenched in perspiration. He found it extremely difficult to discuss love and marriage with Hannah without asking her to be his wife. Among her other charms, Hannah could discuss Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer or John Milton’s Paradise Lost with a perspicacity that John Adams had seldom heard, even at Harvard. Whenever he found Hannah’s lovely head bent over a book, he was so overwhelmed with desire that he almost asked the fatal question.3

  But the law was a sterner mistress—in theory at least. Practice was another matter. After a weekend with Hannah, John desperately lectured himself in his diary: “Here are two nights and one day and a half spent in a softening, enervating, disapating [sic] series of bustling, prattling poetry, love, courtship, marriage…” A portion of those nights was almost certainly spent strolling with Hannah in “Cupid’s Garden,” a lover’s lane not far from her house. His inability to resist the opportunity to steal a kiss led him into gloomy doubts about his future. He yearned to play a part on a larger stage, to win fame, to become a rich lawyer and great man. How could he hope to do it when he wasted so much time with a mere woman?

  Frantic, John tried to deny the reality of Hannah’s charms to her face. He lectured her and her equally pretty cousin, Esther Quincy, who lived across the road, on the folly and futility of love. He announced that he despised the whole idea of submitting to such a petty passion. The Quincy women laughed in his face. He reeled home to spend another night denouncing himself in his diary.