The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The height of the gala was the moment when fourteen “knights”—young British officers—in fancy costumes were divided into two teams of seven men each for a tourney. One team was called “the Knights of the Blended Rose,” the other “the Knights of the Burning Mountain.” After the tilting and jousting—which was all in a light-hearted spirit, and in which no one was even slightly bruised—each side of the tournament selected its “Queen of Beauty.” The Knights of the Blended Rose chose a Miss Auchmuty. The Knights of the Burning Mountain chose Rebecca Franks. She was gowned for the occasion in what was described as “a white silk gown, trimmed with black and white sashes, edged with black. It was a polonaise dress which formed a flowing robe and was open in front to the waist. The sash, six inches wide, was filled with spangles, as was the veil, which was edged with silver lace. The headdress was towering, in the fashion of the time, and was filled with a profusion of pearls and jewels.” She was nineteen years old.

  After the tournament, there was a climactic grand ball with fireworks and a “royal repast.” The late spring weather—the date was May 18—was perfect for a party. It had started at four in the afternoon, and lasted all night long. It was midmorning the next day before the last of the revelers turned wearily homeward.

  Not many miles away, in Valley Forge, a particularly harried and hard-pressed division of Continental troops was encamped where it had spent a parlous winter with heavy loss of life from disease and starvation.

  A month later, the British left Philadelphia, and marched across New Jersey, to be met and defeated at Monmouth. But the memory of the lavish Meschianza rankled for a long time in the minds of the Continental generals, including General Anthony Wayne, who wrote sarcastically:

  Tell those Philadelphia ladies who attended Howe’s assemblies and levees, that the heavenly, sweet, pretty red-coats, the accomplished gentlemen of the guards and grenadiers, have been humbled on the plains of Monmouth. The Knights of the Blended Roses and the Burning Mount have resigned their laurels to rebel officers, who will lay them at the feet of those virtuous daughters of America who cheerfully gave up ease and affluence in a city for liberty and peace of mind in a cottage.

  Rebecca Franks had admirers on both sides of the Revolution, though she did seem to favor those with pro-British leanings or those who, intentionally or not, did things that helped the British cause. One rebel officer who fancied her was General Charles Lee. His conduct at Monmouth had been somewhat less than glorious. He took his orders from General Washington oddly lightly, and failed to do as he was told, which was to lead an attack on the British from the rear. Was this because Lee had originally been on the British side, and his loyalties still lay in that direction? Was he actually in collaboration with the enemy? There was that possibility. In any case, his behavior caused Washington to suspend him for twelve months. During this time, he engaged in a spirited correspondence with Becky Franks. Occasionally, however, General Lee overstepped himself in his letters, and he had a tendency to use double entendres in such a way that it was often possible to infer a vulgar, if not downright off color, meaning from his words.

  Once, for instance, Lee wrote Rebecca a long letter about his trousers. In it, he said that she might have accused him of theft, of getting drunk, of treasonable correspondence with the enemy—had he actually done things of this sort?—or of “never parting with his shirt until his shirt parted with him,” but that it had been unpardonably slanderous of Rebecca to say that he had worn green riding breeches patched with leather instead of green riding breeches reinforced with leather.” You have injured me in the tenderest part,” he wrote to her, “and I demand satisfaction.” He went on to say: “You cannot be ignorant of the laws of duelling.… I insist on the privilege of the injured party, which is to name his hour and weapons.… I intend it to be a very serious affair.”

  This sort of coarse talk—“tenderest part” indeed!—was too much for a properly bred Philadelphia lady like Rebecca Franks. She wrote him tersely to say that she considered his innuendos excessively vulgar, and that she wished to have no further correspondence with General Lee. He, however, quickly apologized and Rebecca eventually took him back into her circle.

  Meanwhile, Rebecca’s Tory and Tory-oriented friends were not doing her father any good at all, nor does Rebecca’s behavior give any evidence that she was aware in the slightest of the trouble she was causing him. The British had left Philadelphia. The extravagant display of the Meschianza had left a poor impression. Public opinion associated David Franks with his party-loving daughter, and his business began to suffer. As one of Philadelphia’s most important merchants, David Franks had been a logical choice for commissary to the British prisoners quartered in the city. Now the fact that he had fed and supplied the British—even though they were prisoners of the United States—began to be held against him. In September of 1778, for lack of cash, he was unable to deliver the prisoners their monthly rations and, this excuse being all they needed, the federal authorities promptly arrested David Franks and threw him into prison. The charge was treason against the United States of America.

  A mysterious letter, which, if it ever existed, never appeared during the trial, and has never been seen since, was the chief piece of evidence against him. Allegedly written to his brother Moses in England, the letter was said to have contained “intentions inimical to the safety and liberty of the United States.” David Franks may well have been in an inimical frame of mind about the United States and about England as well. The arrangement for him to be paid for feeding and quartering British prisoners had been a quaint one. He had been given the job by the Continental Congress. But he was to have been paid, his orders stipulated, by the British. The British, however, who had perhaps not been consulted in the matter, showed a certain reluctance when it came down to actually reimbursing Mr. Franks for his expenditures and, by December, 1778, Franks was in the dismaying position of owing his creditors for over 500,000 meals supplied to British prisoners in American hands. He had written to the British about this pressing matter. In a series of anxious letters to the Lords of the Treasury, he had outlined his plight; the Lords simply referred him back to Sir Henry Clinton in America, who did nothing.

  With her father languishing in prison, Rebecca Franks went right on going to parties. At one ball, a high-ranking American officer made an entrance wearing a bright scarlet coat, and Rebecca Franks was overheard to comment sarcastically, “I see certain animals will put on the lion’s skin.” The story was printed in the paper, noting that Rebecca was “a lady well known in the Tory world.” Though she might have done well to ignore the report, she instead decided to issue a snappy rejoinder, and in a succeeding issue of the newspaper she commented:

  There are many people so unhappy in their dispositions that, like the dog in the manger, they can neither enjoy the innocent pleasures of life themselves nor let others, without grumbling or growling, participate in them. Hence it is we frequently observe hints and anecdotes in your paper respecting the commanding officer, headquarters, and Tory ladies. This mode of attacking characters is really admirable, and equally as polite as conveying slander and defamation by significant nods, winks, and shrugs. Poor beings indeed, who plainly indicate to what species of animal they belong, by the baseness of their conduct.

  To have defended her “innocent pleasures” at this particular moment, and in the public press, seems callous indeed. Soon after, however, her father’s case was thrown out of court for lack of evidence, and he was released.

  David Franks continued to try to collect his money from the British, and begged to be allowed to go personally to British-held New York to see what he could do. His daughter, he wrote, would like to accompany him and “would be very happy in taking a view of the Mall, or having a ramble under the holy old trees in the Broad-way.” In October, 1780, he was arrested again for corresponding with the enemy in New York—which he had most certainly been doing in an attempt to resolve his financial problems—and this time his p
unishment was exile to New York, which was exactly what he wanted. He and Rebecca left Philadelphia late that year in high spirits.

  Rebecca not only had her ramble on Broadway. She also had more parties with British officers. A captain’s barge, she wrote, was ready down at the wharf to carry guests to General Robertson’s summer home, up the river, for a gala weekend. Her letters were filled with chatter about her beaux. There was Captain Montague, for instance—“Such eyes!”—and she was always most impressed with a suitor who had a title. At one point she was being wooed by no less than three Honorables, one with an income of “£26,000 a year!” Her view of New York was somewhat condescending. She was irked to find that in New York it was impossible for her to step out unchaperoned by an older woman, that this was considered unsafe. “We Philadelphians,” she wrote, “knowing no harm, fear’d none.” The quality of New York entertaining, she felt, was beneath Philadelphia standards, and she found New York ladies short on conversation and addicted to card playing. In a long letter to her sister Abigail, Rebecca wrote:

  Few N. York ladies know how to entertain company in their own houses unless they introduce the card tables.… I don’t know a woman or girl that can chat above half an hour, and that’s on the form of a cap, the color of a ribbon, or the set of a hoop stay or jupon [petticoat]. I will do our ladies, that is Philadelphians, the justice to say they have more cleverness in the turn of an eye than the New York girls have in their whole composition. With what ease I have seen a Chew, a Penn, Oswald, Allen, and a thousand others entertain a large circle of both sexes, and the conversation without the aid of cards not flag or seem the least strained or stupid.

  Here, or more properly speaking in N.Y., you enter the room with a formal set curtsy and after the how do’s, ’tis a fine or a bad day, and those trifling nothings are finished, then all’s a dead calm till the cards are introduced when you see pleasure dancing in the eye of all the matrons, and they seem to gain new life.

  Rebecca also had salty comments to make on the courting habits of young New York ladies and gentlemen:

  The misses, if they have a favorite swain, frequently decline playing [cards] for the pleasure of making love, for to all appearances ’tis the ladies and not the gentlemen that show a preference nowadays. ’Tis here, I fancy, always leap year. For my part, that am used to quite another mode of behavior, cannot help showing my surprise, perhaps they call it ignorance, when I see a lady single out her pet to lean almost in his arms at an assembly or play house (which I give my honor I have too often seen both in married and single), and to hear a lady confes a partiality for a man who perhaps she has not seen three times. These women say, “Well, I declare, such a gentleman is a delightful creature, and I could love him for my husband,” or “I could marry such and such a person.” And scandal says with respect to most who have been married, the advances have first come from the ladies’ side. Or she has got a male friend to introduce him and puff her off. ’Tis really the case, and with me they lose half their charms; and I fancy there would be more marriage was another mode adopted. But they’ve made the men so saucy that I sincerely believe the lowest ensign thinks ’tis but ask and have; a red coat and smart epaulet is sufficient to secure a female heart.

  Her appraisals of female contemporaries were frank and gossipy. Of a Miss Cornelia Van Horn, Rebecca wrote:

  She is in disposition as fine a girl as ever you saw, a great deal of good humor and good sense. Her person is too large for a beauty, in my opinion (and yet I am not partial to a little woman). Her complexion, eyes, and teeth are very good, and a great quantity of light brown hair (Entre nous, the girls of New York excell us Philadelphians in that particular and in their form), and a sweet countenance and agreeable smile. Her feet, as you desire, I’ll say nothing about; they are Van Horns’ and what you’d call Willings.* But her sister Kitty is the belle of the family, I think, though some give preference to Betsy.… Kitty’s form is much in the style of our admired Mrs. Galloway, but rather taller and larger, her complexion very fine, and the finest hair I ever saw. Her teeth are beginning to decay, which is the case of most New York girls after eighteen—and a great deal of elegance of manners.

  But it was the men and the parties that received most of Becky Franks’s attention. “Yesterday,” she wrote, “the grenadiers had a race at the Flatlands (Long Island), and in the afternoon this house swarmed with beaus and some very smart ones. How the girls would have envied me could they have peeped and seen how I was surrounded.” Six months after the above was written, Rebecca married one of her handsome, titled swains, Sir Henry Johnson. The American Revolution ruined her father. He never succeeded in obtaining a fraction of the money the British owed him and, in later years, David Franks appears to have survived by obtaining a series of small loans from Michael Gratz, one of his fellow Sephardim in Philadelphia.

  But his daughter had made a brilliant marriage and, in later years, she also appears to have changed her politics. In 1816, after England had lost both the Revolution and the War of 1812, Rebecca, now Lady Johnson, was visited in London by General Winfield Scott, the dashing hero—a general at the age of twenty-eight—of the latter war. She had lost her looks, but not her enthusiasm, and she said to Scott, “I have gloried in my rebel countrymen! Would to God I, too, had been a patriot!”

  Rebecca and her sister Abigail were responsible for elevating the Franks family name into the highest society on both sides of the Atlantic. Rebecca’s descendants, the Johnsons of Bath, stud Burke’s Peerage as well as the officer corps of the British Army. Of her nine grandsons, three were generals, one was a major general, one a lieutenant general, two were colonels, one a captain. The ninth became an Episcopal clergyman.

  Abigail, meanwhile, married Andrew Hamilton, the jurist of whom it is said that “All Philadelphia lawyers look on him as their exemplar.” In addition to the American Hamiltons, not to be sneezed at, her family tree has become decorated with such imposing names as Sir Thomas Whichcote; the Honorable Henry Campbell Bruce, Lord Aberdare; Orlando Bridgeman, fifth earl of Bradford; Sir Robert Edward Henry Abdy, fifth baronet; Algernon Henry Strutt, third Baron Belper; Albert Edward Harry Mayer Archibald Primrose, sixth carl of Rosebery; and Edward Kenelm Digby, eleventh Baron Digby. The list of descendants of Abigail Franks is topped off by the former Mrs. Randolph Churchill, and by the actual entrance of the blood royal, which occurred when Lady Lavinia Mary, the carl of Rosebery’s daughter, married Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan Howard, sixteenth duke of Norfolk.

  It seems a respectable enough collection of descendants for an eighteenth-century Philadelphia Jewish mother whose greatest ambition was for her daughter to marry a Gomez.

  In retrospect, Becky Franks appears to us as a vain, frivolous, fickle woman, single-mindedly dedicated to her “innocent pleasures” and little else, committed to taking the center of the stage and getting what she wanted. Her contemporary in Philadelphia society, Rebecca Gratz—also renowned for her beauty—was a very different sort of person: serious, a do-gooder, a premature Victorian, a little stuffy, something of a bluestocking. The Gratzes were “connected” with the Franks family, via the Hayses and the Ettings. One of Rebecca Gratz’s sisters, for example, had married Reuben Etting II (Esther Etting Hays’s first cousin, named after Esther’s brother who had died as a British prisoner), and another sister was Mrs. Samuel Hays. The Gratzes rather disapproved of the high-living Franks family, particularly the girls, and the Gratzes found it rather comforting to remember that David Franks, whose family had carried on in such a purse-proud manner, had had to turn to a Gratz—Rebecca Gratz’s father—for financial help in his latter years.

  The Gratzes also disapproved of intermarriage, and they disapproved of what they heard about the Jewish community of New Orleans, of the loose and backsliding ways that seemed to prevail in that southern city. In 1807, Rebecca Gratz wrote her brother Joseph a cautioning letter before he set out for a trip south:

  … At New Orleans, there are many who call themselv
es Jews, or at least whose parentage being known are obliged to acknowledge themselves such, but who neglect those duties which would make that title honorable and then respected—among such as [you] my dear Jo, I hope you will never make one; be asured the worthy and the thinking part of the community will ever estimate a man, by his attention to the serious, domestic duties which speak more truly his character than the external forms in which he presents himself to the world; who would depend on a man’s engagements with his fellow men, if he violates his more important engagements with God?

  She may well have had in mind just such men as Judah Touro, about whom it was already being said that he paid little attention to his religion. If Rebecca Franks liked to fill her days with party-going and flirtation, Rebecca Gratz preferred more serious pursuits. She was literary, and enjoyed the company of painters and writers, including William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Tuckerman, and Washington Irving. She was philanthropic. In her Sully portrait, we see a demurely smiling beauty: olive-skinned, with soft dark brown eyes, black hair under a heart-shaped hat from which falls a bit of white lace draping. Her yellow mantle is lined with white fur. John Sartain, in The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, described a visit to Rebecca Gratz: “Her eyes struck me as piercingly dark, yet mild of expression, in a face tenderly pale. The portrait Sully painted of her must have been a remarkable likeness, that so many years after I should recognize her instantly by remembrance of her.” Meanwhile, according to her relative Gratz Van Rensselaer: “The Gratz family mansion was known far and wide as the home of a refined and elegant hospitality. Gifted and distinguished guests—illustrious statesmen, and eminent persons from abroad whom choice or vicissitude brought to this country—found there an appreciative welcome.”