Book of Ages (44 page)

Sparks’s
Collection of Familiar Letters and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Franklin
was published in June.
²⁵
Readers would have recognized
Familiar Letters
as an allusion to
Samuel Richardson. The collection consists of 128 letters; 21 are to Jane, including the letter Franklin wrote to her on January 6, 1727, the day he turned twenty-one.
²⁶
In 1833, Sparks had seen that letter; he’d copied it, edited it, and redacted it. What he printed is curiously preachy. And then: the original letter disappeared. It has never been seen by a scholar since.
²⁷

The first volume of Sparks’s twelve-volume
Writings of George Washington
appeared in 1833, just after Franklin’s
Familiar Letters.
Sparks adored Washington, and even his handwriting, which he found “close and handsome.”
²⁸
But he had not been pleased to discover that Washington was not often a forceful writer. In editing Washington’s papers, Sparks corrected Washington’s
spelling and punctuation. What he found badly expressed, he rewrote. When Washington called too little money a “flea-bite,” Sparks changed this to “a sum totally inadequate to our demands.”
²⁹
Passages in which Washington criticized New England men, as when he remarked on
the “unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people,” Sparks simply struck out. All this he did silently.
³⁰

Sparks’s problem with Franklin was different from his problem with Washington. Franklin was a delightful writer, the best writer in eighteenth-century America. Sparks much admired “the peculiar charm and simplicity of his style.”
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He did, nevertheless, make changes. Capitalizing nouns had gone out of style. So had the use of italics, except for emphasis. These changes had begun even before Franklin’s death and, as a printer, he greatly regretted them; he thought they made type much harder to read. “Lately another Fancy has induced some Printers to use the short round
s
instead of the long one,” Franklin complained to
Noah Webster. “Certainly the omitting this prominent Letter makes the Line appear more even; but renders it less immediately legible; as the paring all Men’s Noses might smoothe and level their Faces, but would render their Physiognomies less distinguishable.”
³²
Sparks shrank Franklin’s capitals, romanized his italics, and changed his long
s
’s to short ones. He cut off Franklin’s nose.

Sparks wished his collection of Franklin’s
Works
to be entire. In August 1833, he wrote to
Franklin Bache to tell him about Mrs. Loring, who, he said, had in her possession “about 25 original letters to Mrs Mecom.” (The number had diminished since he’d first learned of them.) In the
Familiar Letters,
Sparks explained, he hadn’t been able to print any of Mrs. Loring’s letters in full; she had allowed him to copy only small portions. (Mrs. Loring, Sparks told Bache, “has scruples about letting them be printed, though she permitted extracts to be taken.”) Sparks asked for Bache’s assistance: “I think she would give up these letters to Mrs. Mecom’s granddaughters, if they were to make a proper application.”

“Will you be the medium of this application?” Sparks asked. “It is desirable that the letters should be printed entire, & if the granddaughters obtain them, they would no doubt give copies for this purpose. You can write to
Caleb Loring, Esq
on the subject, who is Mrs Loring’s husband. They are highly respectable people. I wish you would keep my name entirely out of the matter, as I have made unavailing efforts to get the letters. The only objection is Mrs Loring’s conscientious scruples, as to her right to part with them unless it be to the descendants of Mrs Mecom.”
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At the time, “Mrs Mecom’s granddaughters” were the surviving daughters of Benjamin Mecom, who were, by 1833, three: Sarah, Abiah, and
Jenny.
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Sarah Mecom had married
Benjamin Smith, of Burlington, New Jersey; she was a widow, living in Philadelphia.
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Abiah Mecom, never married, was also living in Philadelphia. She kept a shop.
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In Boston, Jenny Mecom had moved out of the house in the North End not long after her grandmother’s death.
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In 1800, at the age of thirty-five, Jenny Mecom had married a shipwright named
Simon Kinsman. They had no children. Simon Kinsman had died in 1818.
³⁸

Sometime between 1836 and 1840, when
Jane Mecom Kinsman, now in her seventies, was living in either Boston or Philadelphia, Sparks went to see her. He asked her about her grandmother, who, she said, had had thirteen children, not twelve. In his notebook, he took down their names. Whatever else Sparks asked Kinsman, he didn’t record her answers. Instead, he wrote down names, and nothing more.
³⁹
He had no use for old wives’ tales. He cared not one whit about the lives of the obscure. He had no curiosity about the short and simple annals of the poor.

The first volume of Sparks’s
Works of Benjamin Franklin
appeared in 1836. Then he returned to Europe. “I have brought home rich treasures,—two large trunks full of his papers, which belonged to Franklin, which have slumbered in a garret 40 years,” Sparks wrote in 1837.
⁴⁰
The next year, he joined the faculty at Harvard as McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History. He was the first professor of history at Harvard, and the first professor of American history anywhere.
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The year Sparks published Franklin’s
Familiar Letters,
he launched a book series called
The Library of American Biography
. His plan was to publish “the lives of all persons, who have been distinguished in America, from the date of its first discovery to the present time.” He had the idea that a collection of biographies would add up to “a perfect history of the country.”
⁴²
Between 1833 and 1849, he oversaw the publication of twenty-five volumes. People called him the American Plutarch. In 1849, he became the president of Harvard.
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Lives have been written for centuries, but the word
biography
was coined only late in the seventeenth century, and the modern genre didn’t really begin to take shape until 1791, with the publication of Boswell’s
Life of Johnson.
The United States was new; the presidency was new; biography was new. How the lives of the founders would be written would set a precedent for the writing of biography in a republic. Sparks believed that the proper role of the historian was to burnish the reputation of great men, even
in the United States, a nation founded on the idea that all men are created equal. He held that the aim of biography was “to bring together a series of facts which should do justice to the fame and character of a man, who possessed qualities, and performed deeds, that rendered him remarkable and are worthy of being remembered.”
⁴⁴
Stories about nobodies he hated. “The present unfortunate propensity of filling tomes of quartos and octavos with marvellous accounts of the lives of men and women, who, during their existence, produced no impression on the publick mind, and who were not known beyond the circle of their immediate friends, or the mountains, which bounded the horizon of their native villages, is preposterous and absurd,” Sparks wrote. “Why should the world be called off from its busy occupations to listen to an ill told story of their little concerns?”
⁴⁵

He kept hunting for Franklin’s letters.
⁴⁶
The final volume of Sparks’s
Works of Benjamin Franklin
appeared in 1840. (That year,
Charles Fox gave his collection of Franklin papers to the
American Philosophical Society.) Trawling through archives in the United States,
England, and
France, Sparks had found 650 pieces of Franklin’s writing that had never been collected—450 of which had never before been printed.
⁴⁷

In the
Works,
Sparks published letters from Franklin to Jane that he had found in Philadelphia. And he included, too, some very short excerpts from letters from Jane to Franklin. In editing Jane’s prose, Sparks took far greater liberties than he had taken with either George Washington’s or Benjamin Franklin’s. In 1789, Jane wrote her brother a long letter, in the middle of which she wondered whether she should address him as “Exellency,” now that he was no longer governor of Pennsylvania:

Sparks’s extract reads:

Sparks had his reasons for correcting Jane’s writing, which is difficult to decipher. But in meddling, he erased her lack of learning, and put her remarks about titles and rank in a quite different light. Jane could be very funny. Not in Sparks.
⁵⁰

No one noticed Sparks’s editorial methods until 1851, when several of his emendations to Washington’s letters were observed by a British historian and by a contributor to the
New York Evening Post
. Sparks was accused of painting the president with “patriotic rouge” and “setting Washington on stilts.”
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Some critics remarked that the controversy might be an occasion to codify editorial standards: “The question, then, is—What are the rules?”
⁵²
But, others countered, the rules were already fairly well established. The
Democratic Review
concluded, “Mr. Jared Sparks has made biography what it never was before—the lie to history.”
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Another critic dubbed Sparks’s editorial work as “one of the most flagrant injuries” ever done by an editor to a writer or by a biographer to his subject.
⁵⁴
But it was of a piece with all of his work. Sparks believed that “the machinery of society and government is kept in motion by the agency of a few powerful minds.” He kept only what he valued: the worthy political writings of great men. Letters he didn’t find interesting he cut up, handing the scraps out as mementos.
⁵⁵
In the margin of a seventy-three-page draft of Washington’s first inaugural address, he wrote, “Washington’s handwriting but not his composition”; then he cut it up and gave the cuttings to friends.
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Sparks saw, but did not save, a letter Jane wrote to her brother in October 1767, just after her daughter Mary died, at the very moment when, in her grief, she had stopped writing in her
Book of Ages. Sparks printed an extract from that letter in
The Works of Benjamin Franklin,
editing it as he saw fit:

This is what Jane felt, in the depth of her mourning. It is not, however, what she wrote, which is lost.

No one ever noticed what Sparks had done to Jane’s papers. Or maybe Jenny Mecom Kinsman noticed, and kept quiet about it.
Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin’s, found Kinsman uncommonly canny.
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“Her cleverness is frequently spoken of by those who knew and respected her,” Gillespie remembered. And she was coy. “Once when asked by some impertinent friend what her income was, she answered, ‘If I were to tell you, you would know as well as I do myself, but I always like to keep a few secrets.’ ”
⁵⁹

Kinsman was still alive in 1856 when a notice about her appeared in the newspaper: “A great niece of Franklin, Mrs. Jane Kinsman,” it was reported, “resides in Philadelphia, born in Boston, and now in her ninetieth year; she is one of the few of those yet surviving who remember the famous ‘Tea Party.’ ”
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Kinsman made that year’s news because 1856 marked the 150th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s birth. To commemorate the occasion, an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Franklin was erected in Boston by a committee whose members included Jared Sparks. It was at Sparks’s urging that the statue had first been discussed, over dinner on Franklin’s birthday, January 17, in 1854.
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Two years later, on the day of the unveiling,
Robert Winthrop, a U.S. senator and former Speaker of the House of Representatives, delivered an oration celebrating Franklin as “the greatest of our native-born sons, and peculiarly the man of the People.” He described the
Ecton tithe book sent by
Thomas Carlyle to
Edward Everett, to prove that Franklin was “descended of from a sturdy stock of
blacksmiths, which this curious and precious relic enables us to trace distinctly back to their anvils and their forge-hammers.” The statue was draped with an American flag. “Let the Stars and Stripes no longer conceal the form of one who was always faithful to his country’s Flag, and who did so much to promote the glorious cause in which it was first unfurled!” cried Winthrop as the veil was drawn. “Behold him!”
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The Franklin statue was paid for by the
Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, whose members wanted to claim Franklin as one
of their own: a mechanic, an artisan. But the association’s real hero was
Paul Revere. When Revere died, in 1818, the notice of his passing in the “Deaths” column of the
Boston Gazette
was even shorter than Jane Franklin Mecom’s: “In this town, yesterday morning, Paul Revere, Esq., aged 83.” No mention was made of his ride.
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But he would soon have his rise.