Nor did it match Franklin’s thoughts on other non-European peoples, especially Indians. In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, he had defended their rights. Now, he assumed that they would and should vanish from the land. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that Indians did not use the land to its full capacity. “The World is large,” he told an English friend, “and a great Part of it still uncultivated,” which would have surprised the thousands of Indians who now found themselves under U.S. control. Franklin was not, in this matter, a disinterested party. He had retained his shares in the Walpole Company, one of many groups that had claimed western land after the Seven Years’ War. Even during the War of Independence, Franklin had sought information about the British company under the pseudonym Mr. Moses, for whom North America was the Promised Land.88
Franklin nevertheless hoped the states and the Republic would avoid conflict with Indians. In late 1787, he wrote Samuel Elbert, the governor of Georgia, that “almost every War between the Indians and Whites has been occasion’d by some Injustice of the latter toward the former.” This statement was a nod toward the defense of Indians he had made after the Paxton Massacre.89
Yet in a section of his autobiography, composed just after he wrote to Elbert, Franklin was less conciliatory. Remembering a 1753 treaty ceremony at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Franklin described how the Indians got drunk afterward. “Their dark-colour’d Bodies, half naked” and “their horrid Yellings,” he had stated, resembled “our Ideas of Hell.” Franklin had forgotten what he had actually written about the incident in 1753: that the fault lay with the traders who plied Indians with liquor, threatening all the careful diplomacy. His selective memory served his opinion, circa 1788, that “if it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed Means.” It had already “annihilated all the Tribes who formerly inhabited the Sea-coast.”90
Franklin was not alone—many white Americans made this mordant, self-interested prediction. Certainly, it supported his vision of a settler population inexorably filling North America. Through his antislavery activities, Franklin significantly modified his earlier racism against people of African descent. But he did not reassess Indians in the same way. Indeed, he continued to see their bodies as significantly weaker than those of rum-resistant whites. He had always used political arithmetic aggressively to champion white Americans as North America’s true inhabitants. He never lost a taste for doing so.
RETIRED from the Pennsylvania Executive Council in the fall of 1788, Franklin told a French friend, “I begin to feel myself a Freeman, and to enjoy the little Leisure that the Remnant of Life may afford me.” This time, he was right. At the age of eighty-two, Franklin left public service.91
He used his “little Leisure” to work on his memoirs. He had written a long section of them in 1774, then a shorter one starting in 1784. Beginning in 1788, he wrote another section, similar in length to the first. He enjoyed the task: “Calling past Transactions to Remembrance makes it seem a little like living one’s Life over again.” He relived one of the best parts. In the penultimate section of his autobiography, Franklin summarized his electrical experiments. He began with Collinson’s gift of the electric “Tube,” recalled the breathless months of experimentation, and detailed his eventual success in France (including the old battle with the Abbé Nollet) . Finally, he noted his “sudden and general Celebrity” and “infinite Pleasure” over his successes.92
But he had waited too long. The autobiography ends in 1759. Franklin had just time to get to his experience aboard Walter Lutwidge’s General Wall in 1757. He recounted how Ludwidge fiddled with his ship until it proved “the best Sailer in the Fleet.” From this experience, he recommended uniformity in ships’ construction, rigging, lading, and sailing. “I think a Set of Experiments might be instituted” to discover optimal standards for all this, much as Cadwallader Colden had long ago recommended. “Erelong,” Franklin hoped, “some ingenious Philosopher will undertake it: to whom I wish Success.”93
This passage is the autobiography’s final reference to the sciences, falling within a dozen pages of its end. Its placement and Franklin’s leaving it to others are valedictory, very much in the spirit of his admonition to “enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others.”
Franklin laid aside his autobiography (as he had done his philosophical work) and would write his final thoughts in letters. As he had done at the start of his life, Franklin mixed personal letters with ones to fellow men of letters and ones written under pseudonyms. His second to last letter was a March 23, 1790, diatribe against the slave trade, published in the Federal Gazette. Significantly, it was an indication both of Franklin’s abolitionist resolve and of the heated public debate over the slave trade. With this letter, he invented one last alias, Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. Ibrahim parodied southern pro-slavery arguments in the guise of refuting protests against North African enslavement of Europeans. Mere hypocrisy, Ibrahim declared : “Even England treats its Sailors as Slaves.” (Around this time, Franklin signed his last public document, a Pennsylvania Abolition Society petition to Congress.)94
Franklin also used letters to say good-bye to his scattered family, especially his beloved sister, Jane Mecom, who still lived in Boston. He asked her whether she knew anything of their Nantucket relations and gingerly noted his estrangement from them. For years, he said, none “were disposed to be acquainted with me, except Captain Timothy Foulger.” The war had divided Franklin from his loyalist kin, and he had, of course, broken with his last connection to Nantucket, Folger. Franklin had invited some other of the island cousins to dinner a year earlier: “Their answer was, that they would, if they could not do better.” “I admire,” he wryly allowed, “their honest plainness of Speech.” They never showed up. Franklin’s penultimate letter, of March 24, 1790, was again to Jane and was again a plea for news of their extended family.95
Franklin’s very last letter was to a fellow man of letters. Thomas Jefferson had asked about the boundary between British and U.S. territories in the northern maritimes. Jefferson reported that British settlers had been appearing on what U.S. officials considered the wrong side of the line. On April 8, 1790, Franklin wrote that he “was perfectly clear in the remembrance” of the map used in the peace deliberations in Paris. He assured Jefferson that Congress probably had a copy of the map. Also, John Adams would surely remember this point of the Paris deliberations, and Jefferson could consult him. Franklin apologized for his delay in answering Jefferson—“your letter found me under a severe fit of my malady.”96
It was amazing that Franklin could still write or even dictate letters. Gout and the kidney stone were still his companions. The appetite-suppressing opiates he took against the pain had reduced him to skeletal frailty. But the critical problem was congestion in his lungs, his old weakness. On April 2, fifteen days before he died, he grew feverish and his breathing was more labored—he wrote his letter to Jefferson just in time. Six days before his death, an abscess in his lungs burst, releasing fluid. That ended the chest pains, but Franklin could no longer speak. Lucid before, he became lethargic and was unconscious for his last half day. We have no way of knowing his final thoughts—whether of family, philosophy, eternity. He died at about eleven o’clock at night on April 17, 1790.97
Franklin perished, John Adams jibed, as “a Sacrifice” to “his own theory; having caught the violent Cold, which finally choaked him, by sitting for some hours at a Window.” At the Constitutional Convention, Franklin had claimed to abjure theory, in the form of political “system.” Adams, however, had not forgotten Franklin’s earlier career, in which the natural philosopher had made his name by theorizing about forms of circulation. Adams claimed his version of events came from Franklin’s own doctor. But the story bore a nasty similarity to accounts of the death of Francis Bacon in 1625. According to rumors, Bacon had wanted to test his theory that cold would preserve meat.
Equipped with a dead chicken, out he went into the snow. He stuffed the bird with snow and, while he did so, caught a cold. The cold turned into pneumonia, and he died—thus the folly of natural philosophers. Franklin’s interest in theories of nature, Adams mocked, had been his death.98
At the least, Adams had neatly diagnosed Franklin’s lifelong dread of “colds.” Work backward through Franklin’s health crises: his death from pleurisy in 1790, the severe “cold” that confined him to bed in London in 1757, the bout of pleurisy in 1735 (when another lung abscess had burst), and then the possible root of the problem, the “Pleurisy that nearly carried me off” at twenty-one in 1727, after the longest and most grueling of his Atlantic passages. Now work forward through Franklin’s persistent analysis of “colds” and of the circulation of breathable air: his fascination with Hales, his 1732 Pennsylvania Gazette discussion of colds, his imagining a way to heat rooms that would prevent cold- and pleurisy-producing drafts, his wandering examination of the causes of colds as he faced disgrace in the Cockpit in 1774, his dispute with the window-closing Adams two years later, his concern for Priestley’s gasping mice, and his delight with Ingenhousz’s air-emitting plants.
He had made his body his first object of study, and Franklin, a gifted student of nature, had figured out that body’s fatal flaw. Unlike his eyesight, this flaw could not be repaired. Circulation of air, his first problem in the sciences, was his last problem in life.
About his physical mortality, Franklin had always been suitably philosophical. He and his weak lungs had, after all, managed to elude death for eighty-four years. And Franklin had always counted on immortality. His epitaph of 1728 had predicted his body would be “Food for Worms” but his soul bound to appear in “a new & more perfect Edition.” He was no less hopeful in his first surviving will, of 1750. He imagined himself in death—“reposing my self securely in the Lap of God and Nature as a Child in the Arms of an affectionate Parent.” He would become, again, a newborn baby.99
Chapter 10
AFTERLIFE
WHAT is Franklin’s monument? In 1790, when he delivered a eulogy on Franklin for the Commune of Paris, the Abbé Claude Fauchet imagined a monument in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There, a pyramid would bear Franklin’s image and would be inscribed, on the sides facing Europe and America, “Men, love humanity; be free and open the doors of the nation to all.” Fauchet’s idea for a memorial celebrated the centrality of the Atlantic to Franklin’s life. And it suggested that it would take a whole ocean to provide a sufficiently impressive backdrop for that life. Certainly, Franklin would have enjoyed the idea of being commemorated in the middle of the North Atlantic, the ocean that he had crossed eight times, had studied, and had put at the center of his life. But the monument would have had a kind of built-in obsolescence. In the age of sail, travelers would have seen it as they crossed the Atlantic. In the age of steam, even more people could have paid it a visit. But in the age of flight, the pyramid would have much less visibility. Most people would hear about it but could not actually examine it themselves. It would have become like Franklin himself, who was first monumental, then overlooked.1
Franklin hoped to be remembered and in quite specific ways. Attentive to his legacy, he had been writing and rewriting his will since 1750. In the final version of 1788, he traced his upward rise. Opening his will with “I, Benjamin Franklin, of Philadelphia, printer, late Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States of America to the Court of France, now President of the State of Pennsylvania,” he celebrated his progress from his head-and-hands trade to his glory in Paris and command over his home state. But in death, he would return to simplicity. In the 1789 codicil to his will, Franklin requested that his and Deborah’s grave be covered with “a marble stone” engraved only with their names.2
The monument was frugal—Franklin was saving his money for his heirs. He ordered that most of his wealth go to his family, especially his daughter and son-in-law, Sarah and Richard Bache; he excluded his loyalist son. He then made two bequests of £1,000 sterling apiece to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia. Franklin specified that these sums should be loaned “upon interest” to “young married artificers,” such as he had been. After one hundred years, the trustees in each city were to lay out most of the accumulated money in “public works” (which was indeed done); after two hundred years, Franklin left it to each city (and its state government) to spend the funds as needed. He also left a small sum to Boston’s public schools, perhaps proportionate to his brief education there.3
Then Franklin distributed the artifacts of his life. The books required careful division, starting with how-to guides and compendia. The folio Arts et métiers went to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Massachusetts, the quarto version of that work went to the Library Company, and the “History of the Academy of Sciences” in Paris went to the American Philosophical Society. Franklin designated books for his young companions in France, Benny, Temple, and Jonathan Williams. One of Polly Hewson’s sons received a bound set of London newspapers, including the Spectator, from which Franklin had learned to write. He gave all his “philosophical instruments” to Francis Hopkinson (son of his electrical collaborator), his press and printing materials to Benny, and his London-made telescope to Philadelphia astronomer David Rittenhouse. There were provisos. Sarah Bache received the miniature of Louis XVI (after whom she had named a son), but Franklin asked her never to use its diamonds as jewelry—aristocratic extravagance—for herself or her daughters. Sarah’s husband, Richard, owned a slave, “Bob,” whom Franklin specified had to be freed for Bache to claim his inheritance.4
It is all there: reading, writing, printing, wealth (and moderation), science, public service, social reform. Any good will should document the life that has just ended; Franklin’s will remarkably restated his life’s events and ambitions. It was a fitting memoir.
But Franklin could not quite believe he would really die. His faith in immortality was a testament to his Christian belief, which had survived his youthful irreligion and mature deism. But his conviction also revealed his ideas about matter itself, which, he thought, never ended but only changed. And his fame, which continued after death, has certainly given him a kind of immortality. Franklin’s afterlife has its own rich history, one that poses a fundamental question: What good is science, anyway?
FRANKLIN’S friends and admirers had kept telling him he would live on after death. In a 1769 letter, later published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Richard Price had assured Franklin that “the world owes to you many important discoveries; and your name must live as long as there is any knowledge of philosophy among mankind.” Boston minister Samuel Fayerweather had likewise written the living Franklin, in devout and devoted capitals, that “So long As Natural and Experimental Philosophy have Any footing in the Understanding, [I] will Bless GOD ALMIGHTY THE INFINITE AUTHOR of all Wisdom for Raising Up So Great And So Good A Man As DOCTOR FRANKLIN.” Fayerweather hoped Franklin would “be Dignified with a Lawrell in Heaven.”5
Heavenly laurels did not satisfy Franklin—he wanted an earthly afterlife, too. He fantasized that he would be able to witness the future, perhaps through resurrection or the preservation of his body. Franklin expected that the improvements he had witnessed would continue, if not accelerate. In a 1783 letter to Joseph Banks, he confessed, “I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known 100 years hence.” Five years later, Franklin told the Reverend John Lathrop of his faith in “the growing felicity of mankind, from the improvements in philosophy, morals, politics, and even the conveniences of common living.” Again, there is a tone of regret: “I have sometimes almost wished it had been my destiny to be born two or three centuries hence.” It seems an odd wish—hadn’t Franklin seen (and created) marvels enough? But “invention and improvement are prolific,” he believed,” and beget more of their kind”; “many of great importance, now unthought of, will befor
e that period be produced.”6
Maybe science could conquer even death. Franklin had a teasing correspondence with his sister’s neighbor in Boston, the Reverend Samuel Danforth, in which the two men discussed the philosopher’s stone, which would transform base matter into gold and cure all human ills. In 1773, a year of tremendous uncertainty for all colonists, Franklin thanked Danforth for his “kind Intentions of including me in the Benefits of that inestimable Stone, which curing all Diseases, even old Age itself, will enable us to see the future glorious State of our America, enjoying in full Security her own Liberties.” That same year, Franklin wrote Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg that he wished to know the future state of America; perhaps he could be preserved “with some friends in hogsheads of Madeira,” until such time that he (and they) could be “restored to life by the heat of the sun of my beloved country.”7
But if alchemy or fortified wine failed Franklin, perhaps matter itself might guarantee his immortality. “Finding myself to exist in the World,” he told George Whatley, “I believe I shall, in some Shape or other, always exist.” When Linnaeus named a plant for Cadwallader Colden, Franklin offered congratulations. “No Species or Genus of Plants was ever lost, or ever will be while the World continues,” he assured Colden, “and therefore your Name, now annext to one of them, will last forever.” Learning that Linnaeus had named a plant for him, Peter Collinson declared that he had been granted “a species of eternity.” Franklin himself received the honor when John Bartram named the Franklinia alatamaha, a fragrant flowering tree from the southern part of North America, for him.8
Eternity was a comforting hypothesis—nothing in nature would end. To Danforth, Franklin claimed that matter simply underwent metamorphosis, as when wood “dissolved” by fire would “again become Air, Earth, Fire, and Water.” He declared that “the natural Reduction of compound Substances to their original Elements” was perfectly evident; “when I see nothing annihilated, and not even a Drop of Water wasted, I cannot suspect the Annihilation of Souls.”9
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