Book of Ages (43 page)

He made his grandmother’s Book of Ages his own. On its blank pages, he recorded the story of his own life. “According to the best information I can obtain, there were two Brothers, Flagg, came over from England, one settled in Boston,” he began. “My father William Flagg married Sarah Mecom a Niece of the illustrious Dr Benjamin Franklin.” His own life
story was brief: “I was born Nov 12 1760 and married June 7 1789 to Dolly Thurston.” Then he recorded the births and deaths of his own children. He had, eventually, six. His first daughter, born in 1791, he named Sarah, after his mother.
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In 1800, he began serving on both the school committee and the board of selectmen. He was also appointed the town’s librarian.
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In 1801, he was elected
Lancaster’s town clerk, a position he held for thirty-four years. In the town books—books of ages—he recorded births, marriages, and deaths. He was curious about
history and found, in an attic, and copied out, an “ancient Record Book”—a list of births and deaths beginning in 1635. In 1803, he bought a beautiful edition of the King James Bible. In it, the printer had left, following Revelation, four blank pages headed “Family Record.”
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On those blank pages, Flagg recorded his family history, repeating there, and carrying much further, the record he had begun in his grandmother’s Book of Ages. “Blessed are the dead,” he wrote there, when his wife died.
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He kept careful records of his books. He purchased for the town library a collection of John Lathrop’s sermons. He signed the books he owned. When the
American Antiquarian Society opened in Worcester in 1812, to “encourage the collection and preservation of the Antiquities of our country,” he donated to its library his copies of Benjamin Franklin’s books.
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In 1816, he was nominated to serve as Worcester County’s register of deeds.
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In 1836, at the age of seventy-five, Josiah Flagg decided against seeking reelection to the office of Lancaster town clerk, whereupon the town gave public thanks for his service, noting that, among his many other talents, “his penmanship is almost as legibile as good print.” He died in 1840.
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His daughter Sally recorded his death in the family Bible. “Departed this life Feby 11th 1840 Josiah Flagg Esq in the 80th year of his age. The kind tender & affectionate Husband and the beloved Father. ‘The Dust shall return to the earth as it was and the Spirit to God who gave it.’ ”
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In 1845, a group of
Boston men founded the
New England Historic Genealogical Society, the nation’s first genealogical organization, dedicated to preserving the records of New Englanders’ ancestors. In 1853,
William Flagg Bliss, a genealogist researching the
Flagg family, went to Lancaster. He met two of Josiah Flagg’s children, Sally Flagg and
Samuel Ward Flagg, and was said to have “obtained much valuable genealogical history from them.”
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Sally Flagg had other kinds of treasures, too. A member of the
New England Historic Genealogical Society met her in 1858, when she was sixty-six. He wrote himself a note: “Miss Sarah Flagg, of South
Lancaster, has in her possession many letters written by Dr. Franklin to his sister.”
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Sally Flagg was known in town as a quirky, old-fashioned
spinster. In 1862, when Lancaster opened a public library, she made a gift of twenty books that had once belonged to her father. They included books that Josiah Flagg had inherited from his grandmother. Jane’s books ended up in a library.
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Samuel Ward Flagg died in 1871. In 1872, the Cambridge estate lawyer and New England Historic Genealogical Society member
Benjamin A. G. Fuller reported that “certain descendants of Josiah Flagg, late of Lancaster, Mass., with a view to their better preservation in the archives of some fitting institution,” wished to give six letters to the society. Fuller, presenting the gift, said, “These papers, I do not doubt, will be regarded as valuable, and worthy of a place in the archives of the society, by the side of the many rare and choice documents, already in the possession of this useful and honored institution.”
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Included in this bequest was Jane’s
Book of Ages.

It was not the last of her remains.

CHAPTER XLI

T
he letters Jane left behind were eventually collected and edited by the nineteenth century’s most important American historian, not because he was interested in her life but because he was interested in her brother’s.
Jared Sparks, a former chaplain of Congress and editor and owner of the United States’ first literary magazine, the
North American Review,
wanted to write the
history of America from original documents: unpublished manuscripts, like the papers of Benjamin Franklin. But first, he had to collect them.
¹

In 1826, in an essay called “Materials for American History,” Sparks explained his philosophy of history:

He measured the merits of Herodotus and Hume, of Gibbon and Lucian. Some of these historians had chosen unworthy subjects. Some had been good researchers, others good writers, but a great historian must be both. American historians, Sparks believed, suffered a disadvantage: the problem
wasn’t that they lacked talent or worthy subjects; the problem was that American historians lacked sources.

“Nothing is more obvious, than the scattered and loose condition of all materials for history in the United States,” he warned. “Many have been lost, and those which remain will gradually suffer the same fate, unless some special means shall be used to collect and preserve them.” He was especially concerned about documents chronicling the origin and progress of the revolution. “Two or three years ago,” he reported, “a large bundle of letters was brought to light in a baker’s shop in New York, which proved to be the private correspondence of
Paul Jones.”
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Sheaves of Benjamin Franklin’s papers had wound up in a tailor’s shop on St. James’s Street in
London; some of them had been cut into sleeve patterns.
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Sparks made a plea: “Individuals, who possess manuscripts of public interest as affording materials for history, should deposite them in the archives of public institutions, where the chance of their being preserved will be much greater than in private hands.”
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And he made a promise: he would dedicate his life to gathering the lost, scattered, and junked papers of the revolutionary generation.

In 1827, Sparks helped plan the erection of the Franklin monument. Then he left Boston for
Mount Vernon, where he read George Washington’s papers.
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After that, he embarked on a two-year tour of Europe.
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In London, Sparks found a great many papers written by Benjamin Franklin. In
Paris, he sought out Temple Franklin’s widow. Temple Franklin had died in
poverty in 1823. After having advertised in 1793 that he was in the midst of preparing a complete edition of his grandfather’s papers, Temple had proved a malingerer.
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William Franklin, despairing, died in exile in 1813.
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Temple Franklin’s six-volume
Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin
was published, between 1808 and 1818, by William Duane (the husband of the widow of Benjamin Franklin’s grandson
Benjamin Franklin Bache).
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But Sparks was disappointed to discover that Temple Franklin’s widow no longer had any of Benjamin Franklin’s papers.

Sparks sailed home. In Boston he heard rumors that there were Franklin papers in his very backyard: “50 to 60 original letters of Dr Franklin to his sister,” now in the hands of Mrs. Caleb Loring.
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Sparks went to see her. He wanted the letters. She refused to give them to him.
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In 1831, Sparks left Boston for Philadelphia, where he met with Baches and Duanes and with the descendants of Jonathan Williams.
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He also finally found out what had happened to the papers Benjamin Franklin
had left to his grandson. “Before Wm. T. Franklin went to Europe, after Dr. Franklin’s death,” Sparks wrote in his diary, “he put into the hands of Mr. Fox of Philadelphia a large collection of papers and articles which had belonged to Dr Franklin.”
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When Temple Franklin had left America for England, he had brought with him only a small number of his grandfather’s papers, leaving the great bulk of them behind in the hands of a friend, George Fox. Fox died in 1828; the papers descended to his son Charles. In 1831, Sparks went with
Charles Fox to his estate in Champlost, outside of Philadelphia, where he discovered that Fox had stored the papers—some thirteen thousand manuscripts—in a stable.
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Sparks returned to Philadelphia the next year.
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On this visit, he learned that Fox had given many of the papers from his stable to the physician Franklin
Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s great-grandson (the son of Benjamin
Franklin Bache).
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Sparks went to see Bache and wrote in his diary, “I visited Dr. Franklin Bache, who has a volume of Mss., containing copies of many letters from Franklin to his mother & sister, which have never been printed.”
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Sparks was delighted. He found Franklin’s family letters charming. He thought they ought to be published. When he got back to Boston, he began a correspondence with Franklin Bache and arranged to borrow the manuscript volume.
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“In my researches I have collected somewhat more than one hundred original letters of Dr. Franklin, which have not been printed, and these chiefly on private and domestic subjects,” Sparks wrote Bache in December 1832. “They exhibit the author in so amiable and engaging a light, that I have thoughts of publishing them separately in a small volume.… Kind feelings and an indulgent temper are everywhere manifested, and rendered doubly attractive by the peculiar charm & simplicity of his style.” He wondered whether Bache had any more unpublished letters; except “such as were written to his relations in Boston,” Sparks explained, “I probably have the originals.”
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In all, Sparks collected more than a hundred letters from Franklin to friends and family in Boston. But one set he had not been able to collect: Mrs. Loring’s letters. In January 1833, Sparks begged Mrs. Loring’s brother-in-law to intervene on his behalf. Sparks was able to
see
some of the letters, and to copy them, but not to have them.
²⁰
He wrote to Bache on February 27, 1833: “There are in this town in the hands of one lady 20 or 30 original letters from Dr. F. to Mrs Mecom. I should suppose they more properly
belonged to her granddaughters, & if applied for, I presume they would be given up to them.”
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Meanwhile, Sparks was busy working on Washington’s letters; he had eight boxes of manuscripts shipped from
Mount Vernon to Boston. On April 2, 1833, Sparks moved, with his boxes, into the house in Cambridge—now a boardinghouse—that had served as Washington’s headquarters in 1775, so that he could edit the papers where the great man himself had once written them.
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Harvard professor of belles lettres, boarded there, too. In that house, Sparks finished editing Washington’s papers and began editing Franklin’s, embarking on what would become a ten-volume edition of
The Works of Benjamin Franklin.
(It would be in the
Works
that Sparks established the custom of calling the story of Franklin’s life an “autobiography.”)
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But first he wanted to publish that set of more than a hundred delightfully charming family letters. Ten days after he moved into the house, Sparks wrote to
Bache, returning a volume of manuscript letters Bache had sent to him and promising to send Bache a copy of his volume of Franklin’s family letters as soon as it appeared, declaring, “It affords the best and most favorable exhibition of his private feelings and character, which has ever appeared.”
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