The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (12 page)

For eighteen years Ben and Deborah were partners in a constantly expanding business. The store’s inventory eventually included goose feathers, Rhode Island cheese, Franklin-designed stoves, and lottery tickets. Even slaves flowed in and out of its busy doors. Quakers were only beginning to question the morality of slavery during these years. Like other shopkeepers in Philadelphia, Deborah opened at 5 a.m. and did business until darkness fell. The sales of
Poor Richard’s Almanac
topped ten thousand a year—the equivalent in today’s vastly more populous America of a million and a half copies annually.

Without Deborah’s help Ben could never have combined success as a newspaper and almanac publisher with politics, which enabled him to acquire the plum job of postmaster of Philadelphia. That entitled him to send copies of the
Pennsylvania Gazette
through the mail free. More important, hundreds of people came to the print shop and store, because it was the city’s post office.

During these years, the limitations as well as the advantages of their marriage slowly became apparent to both Franklins. Deborah remained the same poorly educated shopgirl who had married Ben in 1730. Her letters to him were a blizzard of misspellings. Ben was becoming a political and scientific thinker of world-class proportions. When he wrote a letter to Deborah, he addressed her as “My Dear Child.” There was affection in the words, but also more than a hint of paternal superiority.

In this unspoken drama, Ben played both a villain and a savior’s role. If he had remained faithful to his original promise to Deborah, she would not have married Rogers and undergone the public humiliation of discovering he was both a bigamist and a thief. She also undoubtedly knew, thanks to the gossip that pervaded the small business world of Philadelphia, that Ben had shopped around for a better marriage deal before retreating to her. These memories would not contribute to any woman’s peace of mind—especially one born with a hot temper.

By 1748, the Franklins were earning 2,000 pounds a year—the equivalent of about 300,000 modern dollars. Only very successful merchants and prominent lawyers made that much money. Franklin decided he and Deborah could relax. They closed the shop and moved to a bigger, more comfortable house. Ben handed the
Pennsylvania Gazette
to his well-trained assistant, David Hall, who agreed to pay him 650 pounds a year as his share of its profits.

It was the beginning of a new life for Ben, with ever-widening intellectual and political horizons. He resigned as postmaster of Philadelphia, making William his successor, and became deputy postmaster general for America, a job that required him to travel throughout the thirteen burgeoning colonies. Deborah never went with him. She did not share Ben’s exuberant delight in meeting new people and exploring distant colonies and towns. She preferred familiar Philadelphia, with the same friends and relatives she had known since girlhood.

We have only one portrait of Deborah, the work of an unknown Philadelphia painter. She looks prosperous; her dress is expensive and she has an ornament in her hair. Her fleshy face has not a hint of refinement, but she looks fiercely determined to be herself and deal with life’s problems on her own terms. It does not take much effort to imagine her brow furrowing, her thick lips curling, and angry words exploding from
them. Her figure verges on the plump—which did not displease her husband. When Ben’s penchant for travel took him to England again, he sent Deborah a large jug with a note explaining that he thought it resembled “a fat jolly dame, clean and tidy…and just put me in mind of—somebody.”

Franklin never faulted Deborah for her stubborn refusal to change her ways or broaden her interests. “Don’t you know a wife is always right?” he wrote wryly to a friend. In
Poor Richard’s Almanac
he published a song that paid tribute to his hardworking helpmate. It also inadvertently summed up their marriage:

My Plain Country Joan

V

Franklin’s trips as deputy postmaster general often took him to Boston, where he stayed in the mansion of his brother John, who had grown wealthy as a soap maker. There, in 1754, Franklin met a slim, flirtatious twenty-three-year-old brunette named Catherine Ray. She had grown up on isolated Block Island, the child of older parents, and was hugely excited by this opportunity to visit bustling Boston and meet an already famous American.

Catherine took delicious pleasure in tormenting men with her dancing eyes and low-cut gowns. Simultaneously she proclaimed her pride in her virginity, which she was determined to yield only to a man of surpassing charm and ability. The forty-nine-year-old Franklin found himself mesmerized. For the first time, Ben met a woman whose beauty and seeming availability made him realize a dimension of love that he had never encountered in his relationships with the lower class women of his early amours—or in his practical, self-interested marriage to Deborah.

This deeper attraction, known today as romantic love, was (and is) ancient and forever modern. It was just beginning to emerge in Europe as an experience that plumbed the depths and heights of human emotions and sometimes involved the surrender of a man or woman’s soul.

Ben plunged into a half real, half make-believe dance of desire and mutual delight. He and Katy, as he began calling her, talked about sex and love with a candor that came naturally to their era. Playing the sorcerer, a role that came naturally to him, Ben invented a game that required Katy to tell him every detail of her previous loves. He warned her that if she held anything back, he had powers that would enable him to penetrate her deception. Katy’s eyes gleamed with delight; she poured out her youthful heart to Franklin.

One night the sorcerer revealed he was human. He suggested that he could become a lover who would send Katy into transports beyond imaginative shivers. Katy recoiled and reminded the sorcerer that he was a married man. With a sigh, Franklin retreated to a bittersweet affection in which words remained ardent but actions were firmly within the bounds of propriety. His rational head had prevailed over his wayward heart.

After they parted, and Ben returned to Philadelphia, he wrote Katy a wry letter describing the experience from his side. For a while, on his
return journey, he “almost forgot I had a home.” He was lost in romantic visions of an ecstatic sojourn with Katy in some little-known inn or forest bower. But as he drew closer to his adopted city, he began driving his horse faster and faster until “a very few days brought me to my own house and to the arms of my good old wife and children.”
⁶

For a while their letters continued to glow with suppressed passion. Katy sought his advice on new affairs of the heart, and Franklin responded with warnings that she had better not appear “too knowing.” When Katy told him she would send him kisses on the wind, Ben replied that northeast storms, which traveled south from New England—one of his early scientific discoveries—were often blamed for depressing people. Now their gray clouds and freezing winds would no longer bother him. “Your favors come mixed with the snowy fleeces which are as pure as your virgin innocence, white as your lovely bosom—and as cold.”
⁷

Ben added that Deborah was aware of their correspondence and threatened to leave him to Katy in her will. “She is willing I should love you as much as you are willing to be loved by me.” The sorcerer was wryly reminding Katy that in the arithmetic of ordinary love, this added up to very little. But in the emerging world of romantic love, there were exquisite gradations of emotion that approached but did not reach physical expression yet could mean a great deal on both sides. Both Ben and Katy sensed that they had experienced feelings neither would forget.
⁸

VI

Absorbed in politics and business, Ben Franklin did little to protect William from his stepmother’s antagonism. At the age of fifteen, the boy advertised his unhappiness by trying to run away to sea. Ben heard about it before the ship sailed, rushed to the docks, and obtained William’s release from the captain. He protested in a letter to his sister Jane that “no one imagined it was hard use at home that made him do this.” The remark suggests that the busy father was not paying much attention to William’s trials with Deborah. But the attempted escape troubled him nevertheless. One of Ben’s older brothers had run away to sea and had never been heard from again.
⁹

Ben obtained a commission for William in a Pennsylvania regiment formed to help fight the French in Canada during a colonial clash called
King George’s War. William liked being a soldier and won a promotion to captain, but the war ended before he saw any battlefield action. Back home, he persuaded his father to let him move out of the house to a nearby set of rooms beyond the reach of his stepmother’s harangues.

William’s military bearing and aura of adventure, plus his good looks, enabled him to circulate with ease in the upper echelon of Philadelphia society. When Ben was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly, he made sure William was appointed to his former job as clerk. He also made him controller of the North American postal system. No one disapproved; in the eighteenth century it was customary to appoint relatives to political jobs. But Ben had larger ambitions for his son. He arranged for him to begin studying law with Joseph Galloway, one of Philadelphia’s best younger attorneys and a staunch political ally. He also wrote to friends in England, asking them to register William at the Inns of Court, where the elite of the British legal profession studied the intricacies of common law.

Meanwhile, William had become a member of Philadelphia’s exclusive Annual Assembly, which staged balls that attracted the wealthiest and most attractive young women in the city. Soon he was in love with Elizabeth Graeme, the vivacious, intelligent daughter of one of the city’s elite families. Their sumptuous country house, Graeme Park, was one of the showplaces of the Middle Colonies. Unfortunately, her pompous father violently opposed the match. Dr. Graeme was not put off by William’s illegitimate birth; he had sired two such “byblows” in his youth. But he did not like Ben’s Pennsylvania politics. Franklin invariably opposed the greedy, self-interested policies of the governors the Penn family appointed to run the colony. Elizabeth tended to side with her father, further complicating matters.

William soon revealed he was a romantic, eager to play the game of longing sighs and barely restrained passion. He wrote letters to his “dear Tormentor” and thanked her for her “agreeable vexatious [and undoubtedly flirtatious] little billet.” At one point, things grew so heated, they almost eloped. But William still had no serious means of support, and the lovers decided not to risk her father’s wrath. Ben apparently watched the burgeoning romance with bemused interest. His handsome son was enjoying an approach to love and marriage that had been beyond the reach of Ben’s cash-strapped youth. It did not bother him that William was spending his father’s money on fashionable clothes and books such as
The True Conduct of People of Quality
.
¹⁰

Ben’s politics remained strongly populist. He began calling for the dismissal of the heirs of William Penn as the colony’s proprietors. The Penns repeatedly ignored the resolutions of the assembly, and their appointed governors frequently vetoed them. Franklin’s stance made him even more obnoxious to the Graemes.

The assembly voted to send Franklin to England to plead their case with the British government. He took William along as his secretary, telling him, as an added inducement, that he could complete his law studies in London. Ben may have been hoping to cool the romance with Elizabeth Graeme, but before he departed, William became secretly—and perhaps defiantly—engaged to his dear tormentor.

Ben urged Deborah to accompany them to Britain. Her response was a vociferous
NO
. Like many people of the time, she had an obsessive fear of sea voyages. The thought of spending six weeks or two months on a ship with her detested stepson no doubt also played a part in her emphatic refusal. Ben warned her that they might be gone for several years, but Deborah still refused. It was the beginning of the end of their marriage. By this time, Deborah may have sensed that she was still Ben’s wife in name only. No longer a partner in their day-to-day business, she had little or nothing to share with him.

VII

Both Ben and William were delighted with London. The imperial capital was twice the size and ten times as wealthy as the city Ben had visited as a teenager in the 1720s. It spread along the north bank of the Thames for three miles, wrapped in sooty smoke that gave it, on cloudy days, an infernal appearance. On the south bank of the river, the town of South-wark was rapidly matching its parent; it would eventually become part of Greater London.