Book of Ages (46 page)

In writing this book I have had to stare down a truism: the lives of the obscure make good fiction but bad
history. For an eighteenth-century woman of her rank and station, Jane Franklin Mecom’s life is exceptionally well documented, but, by any other measure, her paper trail is miserably scant. She was born in 1712. No letter written by her before 1758 survives; the earliest piece of her prose that survives is not a letter but an addendum to a letter, a sentence, a scrap—a postscript she wrote, when she was thirty-nine, on a letter written by her mother.

This is dispiriting. For a long time, I was so discouraged that I abandoned the project altogether. I thought about writing a novel instead. But I decided, in the end, to write a
biography, a book meant not only as a life of Jane Franklin Mecom but, more, as a meditation on silence in the archives. I wanted to write a history from the Reformation through the
American Revolution by telling the story of a single life, using this most ordinary of lives to offer a history of history and to explain how history is written: from what remains of the lives of the great, the bad, and, not as often, the good.

This book is a history, a biography, but, in the spirit of the age in which Jane lived, it borrows from the conventions of fiction. (The eighteenth century’s most influential historians, Hume and Gibbon, greatly admired the
novels of
Henry Fielding, and Fielding, in turn, considered reading history essential preparation for writing novels. “History, like tragedy, requires an exposition, a central action, and a denouement,”
Voltaire wrote in 1757. “My secret is to force the reader to wonder: Will Philip V ascend the throne?”)
¹
My difficulty was evidence. I searched for what there was to find. Then I pondered its insufficiency.

For different problems, I tried different solutions. Instead of skipping over Jane’s girlhood, I dwelled on it, making her silence the object of my investigation rather than an obstacle to it. In writing about the early years of her marriage and motherhood, I tried to bring her
Book of Ages to life. I relied on public records, too, like the records of Edward Mecom’s debts, and on newspapers, and especially on the writings of
Benjamin Franklin, to describe his sister’s world.

Throughout, I leaned heavily on what letters do survive. I rendered some epistolary exchanges in the form of dialogue, because that’s how Jane understood exchanging letters—as a conversation—and because that’s what Franklin thought was most remarkable about the
novels of his day, like
Pamela,
which “mix’d Narration and Dialogue, a Method of Writing very engaging to the Reader, who in the most interesting Parts finds himself as it were brought into the Company.”
²

Occasionally, in describing Jane’s early years, I quoted from letters she wrote much later in life. For example, there exists not a single description, in Jane’s own words, of what it was like to take care of all those
children in the 1730s and 1740s. (She
wrote
letters in those decades; the problem is that they are gone.) But she happens to have described the tumult of life with young children in letters that she wrote many decades later, when she was raising her great-grandchildren: “My litle wons are Interupting me Every miniut,” she wrote to her brother in 1782, “& I can add no more but that I wish for the comfort of a leter from you.”
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In the text, I quote this passage in a chapter about Jane’s life as a young mother. An endnote identifies the date of the letter and the circumstances under which it was written. I mean no sleight of hand; I mean only to allow the reader to enjoy Jane’s company.

This book aims to be at once a history and a work of literary criticism. It includes new readings of the principal writings of Benjamin Franklin, including his Silence Dogood essays,
Poor Richard’s Almanack, The Way to Wealth,
and his autobiography. I have attempted, too, to bring a new vantage to his contributions to the
Declaration of Independence, the
Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. But I have worked hard not to lose sight of Jane. Given Franklin’s staggering literary remains, a biography of his sister might easily become a book only about Franklin himself. The risk is of her voice being, at best, a murmur. That I have strived to avoid.

Finally, I have tried, throughout, to call attention to the conventions of different kinds of writing about lives—history, biography, autobiography, and fiction—in order to argue that Jane’s life doesn’t fit neatly into any one of those genres. Nor do most lives.

There are a great many Janes and Benjamins and Franklins and Mecoms in this book, as well as three different people named “Jane Mecom”: Jane, Jane’s daughter Jane, and Jane’s son Benjamin’s daughter Jane. I elected to refer to Jane Franklin Mecom, as “Jane” and to her brother Benjamin Franklin as “Franklin.” This seemed the best way to distinguish my two main characters from everyone else.

When referring to women before and after their marriages, I have used maiden
names as middle names to make it easier for the reader to keep track of women over the course of their lives, making it possible to distinguish, for instance, among Jane Franklin Mecom (1712–1794), Jane Mecom Collas (1745–1802), and Jane Mecom Kinsman (1765–1860). Similarly, when writing about Jane Colman, who later married Ebenezer Turell, I refer to her, after her marriage, as
Jane Colman Turell, just as I refer to Keziah Folger, after her marriage to
John Coffin, as Keziah Folger Coffin, which, in this instance, also helps to distinguish her from her daughter, Keziah Coffin.

Searching for Jane’s papers, I traced her descendants, reported in
appendix C
. (The better-known
genealogy of Benjamin Franklin’s ancestors is reproduced as
appendix B
.) I also spent a great deal of time trying to reconstruct Jane’s library, an inventory of all the books I believe she read or owned. That inventory is reproduced as
appendix F
. A
calendar of letters written to and from Jane is provided as
appendix D
. (That appendix also notes the early collections of Franklin’s writings in which correspondence between Jane and her brother appeared.)
⁴
Because fuller information about Jane’s letters, and also about Franklin’s letters to Jane, can be found in that appendix, I have, in the notes, listed for those letters only the writer, recipient, and date. Letters written to and from Benjamin Franklin through 1785 can be found in the printed volumes of the
Papers of Benjamin Franklin;
the online edition, at
franklinpapers.org
, includes letters through 1790. For Franklin’s letters to and from correspondents other than Jane, I have, in the notes, listed only the writer, recipient, place, and date. For all other correspondence, I have supplied standard citations.

In part 5 of this book, I relate much of the story of Jane’s
lost letters. Here I chronicle the fate of those letters more minutely, in the hope that, one day, more of her papers might be found.

After Jane Franklin Mecom’s death in May 1794, her minister,
John Lathrop, went through her papers and took what he wanted. Lathrop was given permission to do this by Jane’s granddaughter Jenny Mecom, later Jane Mecom Kinsman (“I find it was Mrs. Kinsman, that allowed Dr. Lathrop … to select what letters he chose from the Dr’s correspondence, from among Mrs. Mecom’s papers,”
Benjamin
Franklin Bache’s son Franklin Bache told
Jared Sparks in 1833). Before she allowed Lathrop to go through them, Kinsman would likely have looked through the papers herself. People tend to take back from a dead relative whose papers they have a chance to rummage through letters they themselves have written or letters that concern them. If, before allowing Lathrop to choose what he wanted, Kinsman kept a number of the papers for herself, she would most likely have selected
letters written by members of her own family: her father (Benjamin Mecom), her mother (Elizabeth Ross Mecom), and her sisters (
Sarah Mecom Smith, Abiah Mecom, and
Elizabeth Mecom Britt).

Noticeably missing from the letters that survive is almost any mention of the madness of Benjamin Mecom. Jane and Franklin had been, themselves, discreet on the subject. “That you may know the whole state of his mind and his affairs, and by that means be better able to advise him, I send you all the letters I have received from or concerning him,” Franklin had written to Jane on November 30, 1752, from Philadelphia, adding in a postscript, “Please return to me the letters.” None of these letters—not a single letter written by Benjamin Mecom to either his mother or his uncle—survive.
⁵
Not even this letter survives. But it was still in Boston in 1833, because Sparks saw it and made a transcription—doubtless a redaction—which he printed.
⁶
That Kinsman was in charge of the papers may explain why so few documents chronicling the madness of her father survive: she might have destroyed them. Or, if Benjamin Mecom was really still alive in 1794, she might have given those papers back to him. This remains a mystery.

The pick of the correspondence would have been any letter written by Benjamin Franklin. As early as the 1750s, letters in Franklin’s hand were prized, as
Mather Byles put it, as much as “the Paintings of Raphael.”
⁷
Fifteen letters that are known to have been written by Franklin to Jane—Franklin and Jane refer to them, by date—were unseen, even by Sparks. These fifteen letters might have ended up in the hands of members of Jane’s family and then vanished. The rest seem to have ended up with Lathrop. At John Lathrop’s death, his papers may have been scattered among all five of his children. Jane Franklin Mecom’s papers went to at least two of them.

Both Jared Sparks and
Carl Van Doren were confused and finally defeated by John Lathrop’s daughter Mrs. Caleb Loring. In 1830, Sparks heard that some of Franklin’s letters to his sister were still in Boston. “
Mr. Gray tells me that Mrs. Caleb Loring of Boston has in her possession 50 to 60 original letters of Dr Franklin to his sister Mrs. Williams, which have never been printed,” Sparks wrote in his diary in December 1830. (Hilliard, Gray was Sparks’s publisher.) “Mr G has seen them, and he says they are in Franklin’s peculiar manner, & highly interesting.” Who was this Mrs. Caleb Loring? Sparks asked Gray, who told him, “Mrs Loring is the daughter of the late
Dr. Stillman, who was the executor of Mrs. Williams, and thus the papers came into her hands.”
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This was a red herring. “Mrs. Williams” was not Franklin’s sister but his niece, Jane’s very dear friend
Grace Harris Williams. “Aunt Mecm was hear yesterday and Sends her love to you,” Grace Harris Williams had written to her uncle Benjamin Franklin in 1771, in the only letter of hers to him that survives. One of his to her survives, too, but that is all: two letters.
⁹
Gray was mistaken in more ways, too. Not only was “Mrs.
Williams” not Franklin’s sister, but Mrs. Caleb Loring was not “the daughter of the late
Dr. Stillman, who was the executor of Mrs. Williams,” either. Mrs. Caleb Loring was Jane Lathrop, the daughter of Jane’s minister and the executor of her estate. The Franklin letters still in Boston in 1830 weren’t letters to Grace; they were letters to Jane.

The source of Van Doren’s confusion was different. Van Doren was unable to figure out, first, how Jane’s papers had come into the hands of Mrs. Caleb Loring sometime before 1833 and, second, how they had ended up at an auction in London in 1928. “The course of the letters is obscure from the date of Sparks’s appeal to Dr.
Bache,” he concluded, “down to December 18, 1928, when they were sold at Sotheby’s in London as the property of Robert Harcourt, Esq.”
¹⁰
He also assumed—wrongly, I believe—that the letters Mrs. Loring had in 1833 were the same as the letters sold in London in 1928.

Van Doren made a series of errors. But his first, from which all the rest derive, is that he believed that Mrs. Caleb Loring was a woman named
Love Hawk.
¹¹
That sent him down the wrong path. He never found out that Mrs. Caleb Loring was really Jane Lathrop, because, although he read Sparks’s appeal to Bache, a letter housed in the
American Philosophical Society, he did not read Bache’s reply, which is among Sparks’s papers at Harvard.

Van Doren knew that on August 6, 1833, Sparks wrote to Bache, asking him to make an appeal to Mrs. Loring. “I wish you would keep my name entirely out of the matter, as I have made unavailing efforts to get the letters,” Sparks pleaded. “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.”
¹²
Van Doren did not know that, one week later, Bache wrote back, with specific instructions:

Bache had also gotten more information, probably by calling on one or more of Jane’s granddaughters—his cousins—whom he plainly knew well. He then explained to Sparks how it was that Mrs. Loring had come to have the letters in her possession: “I find it was Mrs. Kinsman, that allowed Dr. Lathrop, whom I presume was Mrs. Loring’s father, and was the Executor to Mrs. Mecom’s will, to select what letters he chose from the Dr’s correspondence, from among Mrs. Mecom’s papers. Mrs. Kinsman, after giving them, would not like to require their return.”
¹³