Book of Ages (62 page)

  
1.
  BF entertained this idea in 1778: “I have after a long year recved yr kind leter of nov 26—1778 wherin you like yr self do all for me that the most Affectionat Brother can be desiered or Expected to do, & tho I feel my self full of gratitude for yr Generousity, the conclution of yr leter Affectes me more; where you say you wish we may spend our last days together.” Years later, when Jane wrote something about the two living together, BF responded, “Your Project of taking a House for us to spend the Remainder of our Days in, is a pleasing one; but it is a Project of the Heart rather than of the Head. You forget, as I sometimes do, that we are grown old, and that before we can have furnish’d our House, and put things in order, we shall probably be call’d away from it, to a Home more lasting, and I hope more agreeable than any this World can afford us.” BF to JFM, September 13, 1783.

  
2.
  JFM to BF, July 27, 1779. See also JFM to Richard Bache, July 21, 1779. This letter was auctioned in 1892: S. V. Henkels,
Revolutionary Manuscripts and Portrait … To be sold April 5th and 6th, 1892
(Philadelphia, 1892), 61, item 468. Jane’s spirits at Warwick seem often to have been very high. A friend reported to Franklin after a visit to Warwick, “I had the pleasure of seeing, your Sister Mrs Mecom, in perfect health, gay as the Young Ladies, with whom she was incircled” (William Vernon Sr. to BF, Boston, April 3, 1779).

  
3.
  JFM to BF, June 13, 1781.

  
4.
  JFM to BF, June 23, 1779.

  
5.
  BF to JFM, October 25, 1779.

  
6.
  JFM to BF, March 27, 1780 (her sixty-eighth birthday).

  
7.
  BF to JFM, October 25, 1779. JFM to BF, March 27, 1780. Franklin sent Jane a series of likenesses. “Supposing it may be agreeable to you, I send you a Head they make here and sell at the China Shops,” he, at that time in London, wrote to her in 1775 (BF to JFM, February 26, 1775). A Wedgwood medallion of Franklin’s head in profile was made in London that year, and the one Franklin sent Jane is supposed to have been one of those. See Sellers,
Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture,
74, as well as the illustration on p. 11 of the plates. A Wedgwood medallion from this year is among the collections of the Fogg Museum at Harvard (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop, 1943.1217).

  
8.
  BF to JFM, October 25, 1779.

  
9.
  Jonathan Williams Sr. to BF, Boston, July 14, 1780.

10.
  
Peter Collas to BF, Boston, October 12, 1779. She decided to try to teach Peter Collas the art of making soap but found that he had no talent for it.

11.
  On sending soap by way of Collas, see JFM to BF, September 12, 1779. On sending soap by way of John Adams, see JFM to BF, March 27, 1780.

12.
  Sending subpar soap, she asked BF not to distribute it to his friends but to wait for a batch that met her exacting standards. See JFM to BF, September 12, 1779.

13.
  
JFM to BF, September 12, 1779.

14.
  JFM to BF, June 25, 1782.

15.
  JFM to BF, June 13, 1781.

16.
  JFM to BF, January 4, 1779.

17.
  JFM to BF, July 27, 1779.

18.
  See JFM to BF, June 13, 1781: “It is a year the 16th of last march since the last I receved from you was Dated & that was about Eight months coming to hand.”

19.
  JFM to BF, January 4, 1779.

20.
  E.g., see BF to JFM, October 5, 1777: “I suppose some of your kind Letters to me have miscarried.”

21.
  BF to JFM, April 22, 1779.

22.
  JFM to BF, January 4, 1779.

23.
  CRG to BF, Warwick, September 19, 1779.

24.
  CRG to BF, Warwick, December 28, 1780.

25.
  JFM to Sarah Franklin Bache, [October 1780].

26.
  JFM to BF, December 29, 1780.
PBF
gives December 24.

27.
  JFM to BF, March 3, 1781.

28.
  JFM to BF, January 4, 1779.

29.
  JFM to Sarah Franklin Bache, [October 1780].

30.
  Jonathan Williams Jr., in Nantes, to WTF, in Passy, April 10, 1781, Hays Calendar IV, 53, APS. Two weeks later, Williams wrote again (this time in French): “Les affairs pour madame Mecom sont achetés & soisant mises abord l’actif demain.” Jonathan Williams Jr., in Nantes, to WTF, in Passy, April 23, 1781, Hays Calendar IV, 54, APS.

31.
  CRG to BF, Warwick, June 24, 1781.

32.
  CRG to BF, Warwick, October 7, 1781: “Yr good Sister has been Very unhappy in not Receiving a line from you in So long a time but She is now gone to Boston to get a little Comfort for She thinks Mr Willms has heard from you.” On Caty’s perturbation at the infrequent letters from BF, see the same letter: “Will you believe I grow Very Jealous of you. I fear the french Ladies have taken you intirely from us for we dont have a Single line from you this long Very long time.”

33.
  JFM to BF, October 23, 1781.

34.
  “List of Letters remaining in the Post-Office,”
Independent Ledger,
October 22, 1781.

35.
  Jonathan Williams Jr., in Nantes, to WTF, in Passy, March 2, 1782, Hays Calendar IV, 75, APS.

36.
  “Aunt Mecom has been Some Time in Boston, on a Vissett to her Friends, I hear She is well, but have not had the pleasure of seeing her yet (as I have just Returned home, from a long Tour, that I took for my Health, which is much mended by it,) but I Expect to enjoy that Happiness to Morrow, and it will be a sweet Regail, for I Reaely Love her, for her one [own] Sake, as Well as Yours.” Elizabeth Partridge to BF, Boston, October 28, 1781. Elizabeth Hubbart Partridge was Franklin’s stepniece—that is, the stepdaughter of Franklin’s brother John. Jane did visit Partridge, who described the visit in her next letter to Franklin: “I wrote you in my last that I Expected to see Aunt Mecom, I have had that Happiness, she was Well, and happy in hearing from you and Receiving such Generous proofs of your affection;
She had not heard from you so long, that it gave her great Pain, She left us last Week to Return to her Grand Daughter, with whome, & the dear Babes, she is very happy.” Elizabeth Hubbart Partridge to BF, Boston, December 6, 1781.

37.
  JFM to BF, October 29, 1781.

  
1.
  CRG to BF, Warwick, May 8, 1782. JFM to BF, June 17, 1782. See also Nathanael Greene to CRG, South Carolina near Charlestown, December 5, 1782, in
Papers of General Nathanael Greene,
12:265.

  
2.
  “She left 3 Children the yonget a bout 8 or 10 weeks old at Nurs the name Jane the other 2 fine Children at home Sally and Franklin,” Caty told Franklin, when Jenny Flagg Greene died. “Poor Girl we all lovd and lament her.” CRG to BF, Warwick, May 8, 1782.

  
3.
  JFM to BF, June 17, 1782. The grief this reduced Jane to is hinted at in a letter from Jonathan Williams Sr. to BF, Boston, June 11, 1782: “Aunt Mecom paid us a Visit in the Spring & was so fourtunate as to receive your present wilest she was here & indeed apear’d as happy as I ever new her, but by a Late Letter from her I find she is sadly afflicted with the
Death of her most Amiable G—Daughter Mrs Green.”

  
4.
  CRG to BF, Warwick, May 8, 1782.

  
5.
  JFM to BF, June 25, 1782.

  
6.
  JFM to BF, December 26, 1782.

  
7.
  Ibid.

  
8.
  Jacob Greene to Nathanael Greene, Coventry, Rhode Island, May 4, 1783,
Papers of General Nathanael Greene,
12:643 and 644n.

  
9.
  JFM to BF, April 29, 1783. In the same letter she confessed that at other times she concluded that “it was Reasonable to Expect it & that you might with grate proprity After my Teazing you so often send me the Ansure that Nehemiah did to Tobias, & Sanbalet, who Endevered to obstruct His Rebuilding The Temple of Jerusalem, I am doing a grate work; why should the work ceace whilest I Leave it & come
Down
to you.”

10.
  BF to JFM, September 13, 1783: “I shall by this Opportunity order some more Money into the Hands of Cousin Williams, to be dispos’d of in assisting you as you may have Occasion.”

11.
  JFM to BF, April 29, 1783. Jane was self-deprecating: “How many Hours have I Laid a wake on nights thinking what Excruciating Pains you might then be Incountering while I a Poor Useles, and wrothless worm was Premitted to be at Ease.” JFM to BF, July 4, 1784.

12.
  JFM to BF, April 29, 1783. And then in a P.S., concerning Temple, Franklin’s amanuensis, and the
Treaty of Paris: “My Love to W T F whose Hand writing in your Leter & His name in the Signing the Trety as a Secratery gives me Pleasure.”

13.
  Skemp,
William Franklin,
268.

14.
  BF to WF, Passy, August 16, 1784. See also Mary Beth Norton,
The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 171–73, 186–87.

15.
  BF to WF, Passy, August 16, 1784.

16.
  Will and Codicil, July 17, 1788,
PBF,
unpublished.

  
1.
  What is now known as the
Old North Church, or Christ Church, on Salem Street was built in 1722. Jane called Christ Church “north church.” As Christ Church was (and remains) an Episcopalian church, Jane did not attend it. (See Van Doren’s editorial comment,
Letters,
323.) She did, however, live close enough to the church that parishioners could have seen her garden out its windows, and on a warm day she would have heard their psalm singing through hers. Jane’s house was so close to Christ Church that she asked BF to please “add to his Super scriptions of his Leters at the back of the north Church I might git them the Redier.” JFM to BF, July 23, 1789. Confusingly, the church Jane very likely did attend, a Congregational church known as the Second Church, was also sometimes referred to as “Old North.” The Second Church had been pulled down by the
British during the siege. In 1779, the congregation of the Second Church combined with that of the New Brick Church and moved into the latter’s building, on Hanover Street, with
John Lathrop as its pastor. John Nicholson Booth,
The Story of the Second Church
(Boston, 1959). Jane became quite close to Lathrop, and also to his wife, Elizabeth. What she heard at the Second Church each week can be traced: a great many
of Lathrop’s sermons from these years survive. See John Lathrop Sermons, Box 5 (1776–88) and Box 6 (1789–94), MHS. Jane’s name does not appear on his annual entries of newly admitted members, nor does it appear on a list of “Members of the Church,” which he wrote down in 1786, but she would have had membership status in the church because of her
baptism at Old South. John Lathrop, “Members of the Church,” 1786, in Record Book, 1650–1808, Second Church Records, Box 1, vol. 8, MHS. It seems possible that Jane would have attended the funeral for her former pastor, Samuel Cooper, held on January 2, 1784, but she makes no note of it, and her name does not appear on a list of eminent mourners found in Samuel Cooper Papers, Folder 6, MHS. Cooper’s death occasioned a poem by
Phillis Wheatley (whose married name was Phillis Peters, and whose owners, before she was freed, were the parents of John Lathrop’s first wife, Mary Wheatley). See Phillis Peters,
An Elegy Sacred to the Memory of that Great Divine, the Reverend and Learned Dr. Samuel Cooper
(Boston: E. Russell, 1784).

  
2.
  BF to JFM, June 17, 1784. Jane had visited Boston in the summer of 1780 and had checked in on the house, through Jonathan Williams Sr. She wrote to Franklin, “He continues to take care of the House & get what Rent from time to time that He thinks Reasonable, for my Part things runs so wild & I am so out of the world, I am no Judg of what is Right” (JFM to BF, December 29, 1780). By December 1783, Williams had cleared and cleaned the house, and Jane probably moved in right after the New Year: “I have Cleard your h[o]use agreeable to your Sisters desire, I expect Aunt with her Children to town Next week to take Possession and Live there Which I Conclude will be agreeable to you.” Jonathan Williams Sr. to BF, Boston, December 29, 1783. Franklin bequeathed the house to Jane in his will, written in 1788: “I give and devise to my dear sister Jane Mecom a house and lot I have in Unity Street, Boston, now or late under the care of Mr. Jonathan Williams, to her and to her heirs and assigns for ever.”

  
3.
  JFM to BF, August 16, 1784.

  
4.
  Ibid. Benjamin Mecom’s disappearance at the Battle of Trenton had left his wife
and children without any means of support. In 1784, Elizabeth Ross Mecom was living with her friend Hannah Callendar Sansom, outside of Philadelphia; before the year was out, she left to go live with her own mother, in Rahway, New Jersey. Sansom,
Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom,
280–92.

  
5.
  The house stood at 19 Unity Street; it was demolished in 1939. My description of the house comes from Jane’s letters, from her estate inventory, from photographs taken while the house was still standing, and from floor plans and descriptions and visits to 21 Unity Street, an adjoining row house, now owned by
Old North Church and known as the Clough-Langdon House. (Jane’s house was a half house: nearly identical to but only half as wide as the Clough-Langdon House.) Although purchased by the same fund as the Franklin-Mecom House (at 19 Unity Street), the Clough-Langdon House was subsequently the subject of preservation efforts, probably because of regret at the demolishing of 19 Unity Street. See Frank Chouteau Brown, “The Clough-Langdon House, 21 Unity Street, Boston,”
Old-Time New England
37 (April 1947): 79–85. Floor plans made by the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities were prepared in 1943, by Frank Chouteau Brown. Old North Church, Clough-Langdon House, 1943–1959, Old North Church Records, Box 21, Folder 33, MHS. See also Abbott Lowell Cummings, “The Domestic Architecture of Boston, 1660–1725,”
Archives of American Art Journal
9 (1971): 13–16; Abbott Lowell Cummings, “The Beginnings of Provincial Renaissance Architecture in Boston, 1690–1725: Current Observations and Suggestions for Further Study,”
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
42 (1983): 52–53; and Jill Lepore, “The Jane Franklin House,” unpublished ms., 2012.

  
6.
  The room-by-room inventory of JFM’s house, taken at her death, is reprinted in Van Doren,
Letters,
354–55.

  
7.
  Jane recalled these transactions in JFM to BF, January 8, 1788, in which she closed with a thought on “the shameles Impudence of the wretch” Peter Collas.

  
8.
  JFM to BF, October 21, 1784.

  
9.
  JFM to BF, July 21, 1786.

10.
  JFM to BF, July 4, 1784.

11.
  JFM to BF, October 21, 1784.

12.
  Ibid.

13.
  Silence Dogood, “No. 2,”
New-England Courant,
April 16, 1722, in
PBF,
1:11.

14.
  Benjamin Vaughan to BF, Paris, January 31, 1783.

15.
  Jonathan Williams Sr. to BF, Boston, June 12, 1785.

16.
  JFM to BF, October 21, 1784.

17.
  BF to
Richard Price, Passy, March 18, 1785.

18.
  Price’s Boston and Cambridge correspondents included John
Lathrop,
John Winthrop, Josiah Quincy Jr., Edward Wigglesworth,
James Bowdoin, and Charles Chauncy. A selection appears in
Letters to and from Richard Price, 1767–1790
(Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, University Press, 1903).

19.
  The books arrived early in 1786; they did not include any works written by Franklin. Town minister Reverend Nathanael Emmons wrote to Franklin in June 1786, thanking him for the books for the “Parish Library”: “This choice and valuable Collection of Books, your Excellency will permit us to say, not only flatters our Understanding and Taste, but displays the brightest feature in your great and amiable
Character. We only regret, that Modesty should deny us the celebrated Productions of the greatest Phylosopher and Politician in America.” Nathanail Emmons and Hezekiah Fisher to BF, Franklin, MA, June 22, 1786. There followed a controversy, in the town, about “who should be allowed to read the books” (“Early Books of the Franklin Library,” Finding Aid, Franklin Public Library, Franklin, MA). Emmons kept the books within his church’s own collection, the parish library, not allowing anyone outside his church to read them. In 1788, five townspeople wrote to BF, requesting his aid. Between 1788 and 1790, the question of who should be allowed to read the books came up at town meetings on ten separate occasions. At a town meeting held on November 26, 1790 (that is, following Franklin’s death), it was voted “That the Rev. Nathanael Emmons be directed to lend the Books presented to this town by the late Dr. Franklin to the Inhabitants of this town at large, and until the town shall order other ways, they being accountable to him for the use and improvement of said Books.” (John A. Peters and Nina C. Santoro,
A History of America’s First Public Library at Franklin, Massachusetts, 1790–1990
[Franklin, MA, 1990].) A few titles have since disappeared. In 1997, the volumes were cleaned and conserved by the Northeast Document Conservation Center, of Andover, Massachusetts. In 2000, a ten-foot-tall bronze statue of Benjamin Franklin reading an open book was erected in front of the library. Below, a plaque reads, “Genius without Education is like Silver in a mine” (one of Poor Richard’s
proverbs). But inside the library, the volumes Franklin gave to the town in 1786 are displayed behind glass, in a locked cabinet, and since 2000, it has been the library’s policy that no one can open the books, for any reason, ever again. Felicia Oti, e-mail to the author, February 26, 2012. Oti is the director of the library.

20.
  JFM to BF, October 19, 1785. Jonathan Williams Jr. collected the list of books from Price. See Jonathan Williams Jr. to WTF, London, May 3, 1785, in
PBF,
and also as reproduced in Arthur Winslow Peirce, “The History of the Town of Franklin,” in
The One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town of Franklin, Massachusetts
(Franklin, MA, 1928).

21.
  JFM to BF, October 19, 1785.

22.
  BF responded on October 27, “You shall have a Copy of the Catalogue of Books as soon as I can find it; but you will see it sooner in the Hands of Cousin Williams, to whom the Books were consigned. Those you recommended of Dr. Stennet are among them.” Jane wrote BF on November 30, “I received yours [a letter] by Cousen Jonathon Williams with the Catalogue for which I thank you.”

23.
  
A Catalogue of Those Books in Franklin Library Which Belong to the Town
(n.p., 1812). And see Richard Price to BF, Newington-Green, June 3, 1785.

24.
  Van Doren, ed.,
Letters,
27.

25.
  JFM to BF, November 7, 1785. JFM is alluding here to Alexander Pope’s
Essay on Man,
Epistle IV.

26.
  JFM to BF, January 8, 1788.

27.
  JFM to BF, May 29, 1786. There may not have been many knockers. While Franklin was at the
Constitutional Convention, Captain
Hugh Ledlie, who had boarded with Jane from 1742 to 1772, wrote him, wondering what had become of Jane. Despite various inquiries, he had not been able to find her. “I have never heard what became of her nor where She now lives, unto this day—notwithstanding all
the inquiry I have made by our Delegates to Congress vizt. Mr. Law, Mr. Dyer and Mr. Root, to each of whom I gave particular memorandums for that purpose. I also made enquiry of sundry Gentlemen from Boston, as well the Commissioners from Boston the winter past who were at this place to settle the line between that State and New York, but all to no purpose. I now in gratitude for the many past favors and acts of kindness formerly received from your Sister, when I lodged at her house, as above, embrace this opportunity by my particular good Friend Dr. Johnson, who is appointed and going to the Convention in your City, to beg the favour of your Excellency that you would be so kind as to favour me with a line and therein let me know what is become of your Sister and where She now lives, and if in good health, and also what is become of her family &c.” Hugh Ledlie to BF, Hartford, May 22, 1787.