The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (13 page)

The warm welcome Ben received from scholars and newspapermen with whom he had corresponded pleased him immensely. Universities gave him honorary degrees and members of the Royal Society, the elite of British science, rushed to shake his hand. Newspapers published his articles. This surge of admiration confirmed Ben’s conviction that England and America were one country, part of the triumphant British empire, which was on its way to ruling the globe. Father and son rented rooms in
the house of a charming well-to-do widow, Mrs. Margaret Stevenson, on Craven Street, just off the busy Strand, in the heart of the city. Her household included a pretty teenage daughter, Polly.

William reveled in London’s “infinite variety” and exulted in accompanying his father to dinners and receptions with “politicians, philosophers and men of business.” Within a few months, his letters to Elizabeth Graeme dwindled to brief scribbles. Elizabeth sent William an enraged letter, breaking their engagement. She accused him of dumping her because of their fathers’ political antagonism. William seems to have felt no more than a tremor of regret. He had enrolled at the Inns of Court and was studying law while working closely with his father in his political war with the Penns.

Not long after he arrived, Ben fell seriously ill with a cold that seemed to verge on pneumonia. London’s polluted air probably worsened his condition. For eight weeks he wheezed and coughed and often struggled for breath. Mrs. Stevenson nursed him day and night, winning his heartfelt gratitude. William was left in charge of their political operations, and impressed everyone with his energy and intelligence. He represented Ben at Court, where he made his bow to the king and his courtiers and ministers. When the Penns unleashed hired hacks to smear Franklin and the assembly in the newspapers, William wrote a blazing reply that was printed in three papers and in the prestigious
Gentleman’s Magazine
. Wealthy publisher William Strahan, Franklin’s closest friend in London, praised William’s “solidity of judgment” and declared that he was one of the most gifted young Americans he had seen in years.

The admiring Strahan remarked that William had become his father’s “friend, his brother, his intimate, and easy companion.” Over the next few years, this intimacy grew even more intense. Father and son traveled together to Scotland and to France. They visited the home village of the English Franklins and discovered an aged relative who knew Ben’s father before he emigrated. They found a Franklin of the previous generation who was a local leader with an uncanny resemblance to Ben. Their pride in their English heritage expanded exponentially.
¹¹

Unaware of Deborah Franklin’s hatred of William, the jovial Strahan launched a campaign to persuade her to join Ben in London with her daughter, Sarah. Along with enthusiastic descriptions of William’s warm relationship with his father, the publisher mentioned that he had a son
around Sarah’s age whom she might marry. He also warned Deborah that the “ladies of London” liked her “amiable” husband as much as his men friends. He described how Mrs. Stevenson had nursed Ben during his “severe cold…with an assiduity, concern and tenderness which perhaps only yourself could equal.” Strahan urged Deborah to risk the Atlantic to protect her “interests.” The printer assured her that Ben was “as faithful to his Joan as any man breathing.” But “who knows what repeated and strong temptation may in time…accomplish?”
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VIII

On Craven Street, the first stage of what would become Ben Franklin’s transatlantic divorce was already in progress. If he was not yet Mrs. Stevenson’s London husband, he was moving in that direction. He took over her house, setting up his electrical apparatus and giving demonstrations of his scientific prowess to dozens of friends and acquaintances. He invited people to musical evenings at which he played the harp or violin in a quartet. Then there were his air baths. Every morning Ben rose at dawn, shed his calico bed gown and flannel night trousers, and sat around for an hour totally naked. He did this summer and winter; occasionally he strolled the Stevensons’ secluded garden in the altogether. He was convinced that fresh air was good for his health. Not many landladies would have tolerated such a routine.

Deborah declined William Strahan’s invitation to London, as her husband knew she would. Groping for a compliment, Ben wrote he was “pleased” with her answer. She had not succumbed to Strahan’s “rhetoric and art”—even though her stubbornness left her three thousand miles away. Ben made no secret of Mrs. Stevenson’s presence in his life. He praised her as “very diligent” when he was “indisposed” but added that he still wished Deborah were with him, along with “my little Sally.” Only “sincere love” inspired a woman to nurse a sick man with “tender attention.” Meanwhile, more and more London friends were treating Ben and Mrs. Stevenson as a couple. They were regularly invited to dinner parties together.

Ben did everything in his power to reassure Deborah of his continuing affection. He found a Book of Common Prayer in large type that would save her the trouble of wearing spectacles in church. He shipped her
thousands of dollars worth of clothes, carpeting, china, silverware, bedding, and tablecloths. The goods arrived by the crate in ship after ship. But when Ben’s sojourn in England reached its third year, Deborah wrote him a plaintive letter, complaining that she was lonely and kept hearing rumors about him enjoying other women. Franklin smoothly assured her that “while I have my senses,” he would “do nothing unworthy of the character of an honest man, and one that loves his family.” This was an enigmatic guarantee, at best. If he and Margaret Stevenson were living as man and wife, as seems probable by this time, she was the last woman in the world who would betray him.
¹³

Mrs. Stevenson’s fatherless daughter, Polly, soon all but worshipped Franklin. She was a remarkably brainy young woman, far more intellectual than Catherine Ray, and Franklin became her semi-father, teacher, and at times, soul mate. At one point she told him she was inclined to remain single and devote herself to the study of science, but Franklin insisted every woman had a responsibility to have children. At times, he was playfully erotic in his letters to her, pretending they were lovers. These remarks have prompted some scholars to speculate that they conducted a secret affair. However, it is hard to believe Margaret Stevenson would have tolerated a star boarder who seduced her only daughter.
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Instead, Ben and Mrs. Stevenson both hoped that Polly might fall in love with William Franklin, and vice versa. But the two young people showed no inclination to comply with their elders’ wishes. On the contrary, toward the close of their third year in London, William informed his father that he, too, had found it difficult to control the passions of youth; an affair with an unnamed woman had produced an illegitimate son. Ben could hardly censure him for this lapse; all he could do was insist that William follow his example by giving the boy the family name and taking responsibility for him. They named the child William Temple Franklin, and Mrs. Stevenson found a temporary foster home for him. Ben promised to pay all his expenses.

William had completed his studies at the Inns of Court and had been “called to the bar.” He was now entitled to practice law in London or Philadelphia. But the Franklins did not depart for home, even though their war with the Penns had ended in a frustrating stalemate. They spent another two years in the imperial capital, pursuing a possibility, faint at first but growing stronger with the passing months, that William could obtain an
appointment as an official somewhere in the empire—perhaps as judge of an admiralty court or deputy governor of one of the colonies. This prospect soon became something even more attractive: through a series of improbable firings and refusals, the governorship of a colony opened up.

Ben went to work; one of his closest friends was an intimate of Lord Bute, tutor and confidant of the new king, George III. The negotiations were conducted in deepest secrecy. By now the Penns hated both Franklins and would have exerted all their influence to block the appointment. Not until the announcement was made in the newspapers did anyone learn that William Franklin was about to become the royal governor of New Jersey. William could justifiably feel that he had played a part in winning this prize; he had demonstrated to his father’s friends that he had the brains and good judgment that were essential to handling this important job.

IX

His self-confidence soaring, William proposed to a woman he had been courting for years, Elizabeth Downes, the pretty daughter of a wealthy Barbados sugar planter. She was sweet, dependent, and deeply religious. The contrast between her and outspoken, independent Polly Stevenson suggests that William had not entirely disposed of his inner insecurity about his illegitimate birth. On the other hand, marrying Elizabeth Downes may have been William’s way of declaring a limited independence from his role as his father’s alter ego. Above all Elizabeth was not from Philadelphia, which made her immune to the vicious local politics that had ruined his romance with Elizabeth Graeme, as well as nasty behind-the-back whispers about his illegitimate birth.

Ben barely managed to conceal his disappointment. He gave the match his “approbation”—he told a friend that Elizabeth was “a very agreeable West Indian lady”—but his enthusiasm was minimal. He had never stopped hoping William would choose Polly Stevenson; their combined brainpower would almost certainly have produced a brood of geniuses. Moreover, Elizabeth was thirty-four, an age at which she was unlikely to have more than one or two children, who might not survive the precarious first years of life. That was a potentially fatal wound to Ben’s dream of founding a famous American family.

Ben cooperated with William in telling Elizabeth Downes nothing
about the existence of William Temple Franklin, but he abruptly decided that it was time for him to go home without waiting for the wedding ceremony or William’s formal appointment as royal governor. Part of his decision made sense: it was already September, and it would be foolish for a man his age to venture onto the cold, stormy Atlantic in the winter. But there was also more than a hint of disapproval in this departure that a sensitive, intelligent woman like Elizabeth Downes would discern—and remember.

X

Five months later, there was only pleasure and pride on Ben’s face when he journeyed to New Jersey to watch William Franklin take office as New Jersey’s royal governor. Ben’s presence helped to promote the cordial welcome William and his British wife received from the colony’s leading citizens, despite vicious efforts by followers of the Penns in Philadelphia to poison people’s minds against “Ben’s bastard,” as they sneeringly called the new governor. William swiftly demonstrated he had inherited his father’s political skills, extracting a generous budget from the assembly and persuading them to vote a small increase in his salary, a rare accomplishment for royal governors.

Back in Philadelphia, the Penns and their supporters made an all-out effort to break Ben’s power in the assembly. They succeeded in defeating him and his right-hand man, Joseph Galloway, in the annual election. But Ben’s party retained a narrow control of the assembly, and under his guidance, they rammed through twenty-six resolutions condemning the Penns and calling for an end to their government. The legislators climaxed this blast by resolving to send Ben back to England to press their case. Once more he invited Deborah to come with him, and once again she said no.

At the age of fifty-eight, Franklin began his third crossing of the Atlantic. He had no way of knowing that he was parting with his Plain Country Joan for the last time. Nor could he foresee that the next time he returned to America, his dream of a triumphant British Empire uniting Britain and America would be in ruins. Instead, he would be a leader of a revolution that would inflict terrible wounds on his own heart and the hearts of those he loved.

B
y 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.”
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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:

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.
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