The Whites of their Eyes (7 page)

“History is not the Province of the Ladies,” John Adams concluded, after reading Warren’s
History
.
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In the eighteenth century, even writing wasn’t the province of women. “The confusion & distres those Opresive Actts have thrown us Poor Americans into is un Discribable by me,” Benjamin Franklin’s sister, Jane Mecom, wrote to him from Boston, the month after the Stamp Act went into effect. Mecom could read—“I read as much as I Dare,” she once wrote to her
brother—and she could write, if not well. “I have such a Poor Fackulty at making Leters,” she apologized. Franklin would have none of it; he knew his sister’s pride well enough not to credit her humility. “Is there not a little Affectation in your Apology for the Incorrectness of your Writing?” he teased her. “Perhaps it is rather fishing for Commendation. You write better, in my Opinion, than most American Women.”
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He was, sadly, right.

Born in 1712, Jane Franklin was the youngest of seven daughters; Benjamin, born in 1706, was the youngest of ten sons. Jenny and Benny, they were called when they were little. Their father was a candle-maker and soap-boiler. One of the Franklin children drowned in a tub of suds, at the age of three, when everyone was so busy making soap and dipping candles that no one saw him fall in. Jenny and Benny had very different childhoods. In early America, boys learned to read and write; girls were taught to read and stitch. Boys held quills; girls held needles.

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

Who says my hand a needle better fits

wrote the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. In 1710, only two in every five women in New England could sign their names, and most could do no more writing than that. (To sign your name is one thing; to write prose is quite another.) Massachusetts Poor Laws required masters of apprentices to teach “males to write, females to read.” In 1744, a poem in the
Boston Evening Post
had a husband saying to his wife, concerning the education of their daughter,

Teach her what’s useful, how to shun deluding

To roast, to toast, to boil and mix a pudding

To knit, to spin, to sew, to make or mend,

To scrub, to rub, to earn and not to spend.

Teaching girls to write was frivolous. Even teaching them to read could be dangerous: it might make them poor wives. “My wife does hardly one earthly thing but read, read, read, almost from the time she gets up, to the time she goes to bed,” wrote an essayist in the
American Magazine
in 1769. “I hope all unmarried tradesmen, when they have read this letter, will take special care how they venture upon a bookish woman.”
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After her brother Benjamin ran away from home, Jane Franklin married her next-door neighbor, Edward Mecom, a saddler. She was fifteen; he was twenty-seven. Unlike her brother, she never wrote an autobiography, but she did keep a tiny, fourteen-page notebook she called her “Book of Ages.” In it, she recorded the births and deaths of her children. It begins,

Josiah Mecom their first Born on Wednesday June the 4: 1729 and Died May the 18-1730.
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Josiah Mecom died before his first birthday. Jane Mecom gave birth eleven times more. All but one of her children died before she did.

She also struggled, desperately, to stay out of the places you could go, in eighteenth-century Boston, if you didn’t have any money: debtors’ prison, the Manufactory House (a workhouse), and an almshouse run by the Overseers of the Poor. In 1763, 1764, and twice in 1765, the sheriff of Boston came to Jane Mecom’s house, looking for her husband and threatening to take him to debtors’ prison. But before the sheriff could catch him, Edward Mecom died. “Nothing but
troble can you hear from me,” Jane Mecom wrote in September of 1765. “It Pleased God to Call my Husband out of this Troblesom world where he had Injoyed Litle & suffered much by Sin & Sorrow.” In December, while Franklin was in London, answering parliamentary inquiries about the Stamp Act, his sister wrote to him: “my Income suplys us with vitles fiering candles & Rent but more it cannot with all the Prudence I am mistres of, but thus I must Rub along till Spring when I must strive after some other way but what at Present I cant tell.” Edward Mecom left his wife with nothing but debts
, not least because, long before he died, he had lost his mind. Whatever ailed him, it was heritable. When Jane’s son Peter fell prey to the Mecom madness, Benjamin Franklin paid a farmer’s wife to take care of him.
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Whenever I hear people like that nurse from Worcester talk about getting back to what the founders had, which she believes to be a government that won’t give money to people who don’t work, I think about Peter Franklin Mecom: he was tied up in a barn, like an animal, for the rest of his life. I don’t want to go back to that.

Benjamin Franklin had hopes for another of his nephews, his namesake, to become a printer. “The way to wealth, if you desire it, is plain as the way to market,” Franklin wrote, in “Advice to a Young Tradesman from an Old One”: “It depends chiefly on two words,
industry
and
frugality
.”
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I think Franklin wrote that advice for Benjamin Mecom. He placed him in an apprenticeship in New York. “I have a very good opinion of Benny in the main,” Franklin wrote his sister, “and have great hopes of his becoming a worthy man, his faults being only such as are commonly incident to boys of his years, a
nd he has many good qualities, for which I
love him.”
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In New York, the young apprentice proved ungovernable. Franklin next arranged for him to take over a printing business in Antigua. Still, he was worried. “In my opinion, if Benny can but be prevailed on to behave steadily, he may make his fortune there,” he wrote Jane, but “without some share of steadiness and perseverance, he can succeed no where.”
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In sending his nephew to Antigua, Franklin made the same arrangement that he had made with other junior partners: Franklin supplied the printing house and the types in exchange for one-third of the profits. But when Jane Mecom mov
ed to a house on Hanover Street, in Boston’s North End, Franklin proposed different terms: Benjamin Mecom need pay his uncle no more than a small amount of sugar and rum, so long as he would pay his mother’s rent.
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Unfortunately, in Antigua, Mecom printed little and sold less. It wasn’t long before Franklin began warning a bookseller in London not to front him too much inventory. “Pray keep him within Bounds,” Franklin cautioned, “and do not suffer him to be more than Fifty Pounds in your Debt.” He had by now begun to apologize for his errant nephew: “He is a young Lad, quite unacquainted with
the World.”
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Mecom failed in Antigua, and returned to New York. But Franklin didn’t abandon him. In 1757, when Franklin was stuck in New York, waiting to sail to England, he furnished his nephew, Benjamin Mecom, with a horse, to ride to Boston, where Franklin had established for him another printing shop. In New York, Franklin also wrote his sister three letters. And he wrote a new will, leaving to her both the mortgage on a house in Boston, and his share of their father’s estate.
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Finally, he wrote an essay that came to be called “The Way to Wealth.” The reason Rick Santelli thinks Benjamin F
ranklin would be rolling over in his grave over Americans paying
their neighbor’s mortgages is because “The Way to Wealth,” Franklin’s most famous essay, has been read as if Franklin were the Founding Father of free enterprise. But “The Way to Wealth” was, among other things, a set of rules Franklin was giving to his poor, profligate, and unsteady nephew. And it was also something of a parody of just that kind of advice as, finally, not worth much.

Franklin, who had launched his literary career as Mrs. Silence Dogood, loved pseudonyms, satires, and shams of every sort. Beginning in 1732, he had been printing
Poor Richard’s Almanack
, using the pseudonym Richard Saunders. (The word
poor
in the title of an almanac was an eighteenth-century term of art, a promise that a book would be funny and a warning that it might be vulgar. Poor Richard’s rivals included Poor Robin and Poor Will.) Almanacs forecast twelve months’ worth of weather; Franklin knew this for nonsense: in 1741, Poor Richard predicted only sunshine, explaining to
his Courteous Reader, “To oblige thee the more, I have omitted all the bad Weather, being Thy Friend R.S.”
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Franklin wrote all sorts of lampoons. He once wrote a parody of a gentleman’s conduct manual, a letter advising a young man suffering from “that hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth,” but unwilling to seek marriage as a remedy for what ailed him, to take only older women for mistresses because they’re wiser, better talkers, better at intrigue, and better at other things, too, “every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement”; not to mention, “They are
so grateful
!!” Another time, he wrote a fake chapter of the Old Testament, a parable attacking religious persecution, in pitch-perf
ect King James, and had it printed and bound within the pages of his own Bible so that he could read it aloud, to see who would fall for it.
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Franklin wrote “The Way to Wealth” in the voice of Richard Saunders; he told a story. He had recently stopped his horse at an auction, where one Father Abraham, “a plain clean old Man, with white Locks,” stood before a crowd. “
Pray, Father Abraham, what think you of the Times
?” the crowd asked the old man. “
Won’t these heavy Taxes quite ruin the Country? How shall we be ever able to pay them
?” Father Abraham then answered with a speech strung together from more than ninety of Poor Richard’s proverbs, endorsing thrift and hard work, including “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a M
an healthy, wealthy and wise.”
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The speech’s proverbs, though, were no fair sample of Poor Richard’s wisdom, which was not mostly or even very much about money and how to get it. If Franklin hadn’t been so worried about taxes, or about his wayward nephew, he might instead have pulled together some of Poor Richard’s many proverbs about equality: “The greatest monarch on the proudest throne, is oblig’d to sit upon his own arse.” Or hypocrisy: “He that is conscious of a Stink in his Breeches, is jealous of every Wrinkle in another’s Nose.” Or religion: “Serving God is Doing good to Man, but Pray
ing is thought an easier Service, and therefore more generally chosen.” Or, he might have chosen to collect the dozens of Poor Richard’s proverbs advising
against
the accumulation of wealth: “The Poor have little, Beggars none; the Rich too much, enough not one.”
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Instead, Franklin chose proverbs advising thrift. And then he sent a copy to Benjamin Mecom, in Boston, who, as Franklin must have urged him, issued Franklin’s essay as a pamphlet, becoming the first of very many printers to do so. “The Way to Wealth” was reprinted in at least 145 editions and six languages even before the eighteenth ce
ntury was over.
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But Benjamin Mecom couldn’t print his way to wealth. Nothing
could save him. By now, he was acting so strangely, setting type in his best dress—coat, wig, hat, gloves, and ruffles—that Boston’s printers gave him the nickname Queer Notions.
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Benjamin Mecom was going mad.

In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. When news of the repeal reached Boston, the city was lit up with candles, an obelisk was erected in the Common, and fireworks were set off. The spirit of liberty was in the air. The next week, Boston’s Town Meeting, following Worcester’s, voted to instruct its members “for the total abolishing of slavery from among us; that you move for a law, to prohibit the importation and purchasing of slaves for the future.”
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In Cambridge, students thumbed their noses at their tutors. Undergraduates calling themselves the Sons o
f Harvard walked out of Commons, protesting rancid butter and declaring, in the words of Asa Dunbar (Henry David Thoreau’s grandfather), “Behold our Butter stinketh!”
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Boston merchant Nathaniel Appleton hoped to honor the Stamp Act struggle otherwise. In
Considerations on Slavery
, printed by Edes and Gill, he urged the passage of an antislavery bill, arguing that it would be a fitting memorial. “The years 1765 & 1766 will be ever memorable for the glorious stand which America has made for her Liberties; how much glory will it add to us if at the same time we are establishing Lib
erty for ourselves and children, we show the same regard to all mankind that came among us?”
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Appleton thought the time had come to end slavery. He was off by a century.

In 1767, Parliament levied the Townshend Duties, taxes on tea, paper, and other goods. “Sorrows roll upon me like the waves of the sea,” Mecom wrote to her brother that year. She recorded another death in her Book of Ages: “Died my
Dear & Beloved Daughter Polly Mecom.” In her grief, she despaired:

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away oh may I never be so Rebelious as to Refuse Acquesing & & saying from my hart Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

And then she put down her pen. Those were the last words she ever wrote in her Book of Ages. God knows, there were more deaths, but she left them unchronicled.
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Bostonians set about boycotting British imports and spurning luxury of every sort just when Jane Mecom, who had also taken in boarders, was trying to rub along by making fancy bonnets to sell to merchants’ wives. “It Proves a Litle unlucky for me,” she wrote to her brother, “that our People have taken it in there Heads to be so Exsesive Frugal at this Time as you will see by the Newspapers our Blusterers must keep themselves Imployed & If they Do no wors than Perswade us to were our old cloaths over again I cant Disaprove of that in my Hart tho I should Like to have those that do
bye & can afford it should bye what Litle I have to sell.” Boycotting was all well and good, but it hit the poor hardest. By now, Benjamin Mecom was in debtors’ prison in Philadelphia.
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