The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (67 page)

The citizens of Burlington, New Jersey’s other capital, were even more generous in their welcome than those of Perth Amboy—hoping to persuade the new governor to make his residence there. Bonfires burned far into the night; church bells rang; volleys of gunfire echoed along the frozen streets. And where would the governor be staying? the event’s organizers asked. William declined to commit.

His father could not have been prouder. “I am just returned from a journey I made with him through his government,” Franklin told William Strahan, “and had the pleasure of seeing him every where received with the utmost respect and even affection by all ranks of people. So that I have great hopes of his being now comfortably settled.”

Franklin
had his own official duties to tend. During his absence in England he had kept his job as deputy postmaster general for North America. Holding office in absentia was nothing unusual in the British empire in those days, when governors and other officials often managed for years at a time never to visit the territories under their care. That Franklin had a fellow deputy postmaster, William Hunter of Virginia, and a competent comptroller, James Parker of New York (taking the post previously held by William Franklin), eased both the task of directing the mails from a distance and the portion of his conscience that needed easing. Yet his conscience was not so calm that he did not feel obliged to cultivate his superiors in London on a regular basis, and to worry at times that his falling-out with the Penns might cost him his post-office job.

Another element that assuaged his conscience was the fact that at the time he left Philadelphia for London—after holding the postmaster’s position for four years—he still had not made any money at it. He and William Hunter had great hopes that their various improvements would pay for themselves and more, but until they did, the money came out of the postmasters’ pockets. By Franklin’s accounting, at the time he left for London the post office owed him and Hunter some £900.

Eventually the accounts improved, although not soon enough to yield full benefit to Hunter, who died in 1761. Franklin initially hoped Hunter would not be replaced—that the joint postmastership would become a
sole occupancy. He reminded his superior, the Earl of Bessborough, that his commission specified that upon the death of either himself or Hunter, full powers would pass to the survivor. “Notwithstanding the decease of Mr. Hunter,” he wrote, “there is properly no vacancy; unless you should think fit to make one by revoking that commission, which, when my long and faithful service of 24 years in the Post Office is considered, I hope will not be done.” Franklin touted the improvements he and Hunter had made, hinted—not inaccurately—that they were mostly his doing, and expressed the desire that “now that in the course of things some additional advantage seems to be thrown in my way, I cannot but hope it will not be taken from me in favour of a stranger to the office.”

His hopes were vain. The governor of Virginia, who had better connections than Franklin did, was not about to let this piece of patronage escape. In November 1761 Franklin learned that his new joint deputy postmaster would be John Foxcroft, lately secretary to the Virginia governor.

Franklin thereupon laid plans to meet with Foxcroft and review their partnership. The peace with France made the meeting more necessary, for upon war’s end certain innovations became possible, others necessary. The necessary ones included the extension of Franklin and Foxcroft’s territory to Canada; they were now responsible for delivery of the mail to Montreal, Quebec, and beyond. According to the rate schedule posted by Parliament, a single-sheet letter from New York to Montreal must be delivered for two shillings. (For comparison, a similar letter from Philadelphia to London, which benefited from the subsidies supporting the government packet ships, cost one shilling.) Whether Franklin and Foxcroft could make any money at those rates was one of the issues they had to discuss.

Another innovation was the commencement of night travel for postal riders. On certain central routes—from New York to Philadelphia, for example—this allowed an expeditiousness of delivery that would not be surpassed even two centuries later. A Philadelphia writer could post a letter for New York one day and receive a reply back the next.

Implementing these and other innovations required personal oversight; to this end Franklin embarked in the late spring of 1763 on a tour of his postal domain that lasted nearly five months. Foxcroft met him at Philadelphia; thence they traveled through New Jersey, where they were entertained by the governor. They spent several days in New York City before embarking for New England. Unusually hot weather convinced them to travel by water rather than overland, causing them to miss Connecticut on the way to Newport, Rhode Island. From there they took a coach to Boston, which became their base for journeys to nearby towns and villages.

Franklin joined post-office business to personal pleasure. Sally accompanied him most of the way; he was delighted to introduce her to her New England kin and them to her. Sally turned twenty in Boston; the trip also served as something of a coming-out for an eligible young woman.

In visiting with his sister Jane Mecom and reflecting on how few of their large family remained alive, Franklin doubtless reflected on his own mortality. Two unanticipated events of the trip made him feel more mortal than ever. In July in Rhode Island he managed to be pitched from the open chaise in which he was riding and to fall heavily on his right shoulder. Fortunately the house of Katy Ray, now Catharine Ray Greene, and her husband, William, was not far away, and he recuperated there. A month later he fell again, reinjured the shoulder, and was confined to bed and chair for much of his Boston visit—which for this reason persisted longer than expected. “I am not yet able to travel rough roads,” he explained to Katy Greene in September, “and must lie by a while, as I can neither hold reins nor whip with my right hand till it grows stronger.”

The lying-by lasted till October. Franklin, fifty-seven now and beginning to feel his age, healed slowly. Luckily Jane Mecom and her neighbors could tend to him—but this was a mixed blessing, as he alluded in a letter to her from Philadelphia following his eventual arrival back home. He explained that his shoulder still hurt (as it would for many more months) but was better than before. “I am otherwise very happy in being home, where I am allowed to know when I have eaten enough and drank enough, am warm enough, and sit in a place that I like, &c. and nobody pretends to know what I feel better than I do myself.” Lest this gentle jibe give the wrong impression, he immediately added, “Don’t imagine that I am a whit the less sensible of the kindness I experienced among my friends in New England. I am very thankful for it, and shall always retain a grateful remembrance of it.”

“Now I am
returned from my long journeys which have consumed the whole summer, I shall apply myself to such a settlement of all my affairs as will enable me to do what your friendship so warmly urges.” Franklin was writing to Strahan, and what Strahan’s friendship was urging was what it had been urging for years: for Franklin to relocate to London. “I have a great opinion of your wisdom …” Franklin said, “and am apt to think that what you seem so clear in, and are so earnest about, must be right; though I own that I sometimes suspect my love to England and
my friends there seduces me a little, and makes my own middling reasons for going over appear very good ones. We shall see in a little time how things will turn out.”

How things turned out depended in part on Debbie. As before, she adamantly resisted any transatlantic transplantation. She had been born in Philadelphia, had grown up in Philadelphia, intended to die in Philadelphia. Nothing Franklin said could change her mind.

Yet that did not quite resolve the issue. Over the years Franklin and Debbie had learned to get along without the physical presence of each other. Her letters to him in England have been lost, but from his responses she does not appear to have complained particularly at his absence. That he spent five years apart from her, and then another five months not long after his return, suggests that for all his sentimental attachment to home and hearth, the attachment did not run very deep.

Moreover, he had missed Sally as much as he had missed her mother, and now that Sally was of marriageable age, that tie to home grew more tenuous. By all odds Sally would be another man’s responsibility before long. Her father would continue to care about her, but—as his relationship with his own parents had demonstrated—his was an affection able to sustain itself at a distance.

In 1763 Franklin contracted with a builder to construct a house for him and Debbie. Until this point in their married life the two had always lived in rented quarters; for the first time the Franklins would own the roof that sheltered them. William Franklin interpreted the hammering and sawing as evidence that his father had come home to stay. “My mother is so averse to going to sea,” William told Strahan, “that I believe my father will never be induced to see England again. He is now building a house to live in himself.”

As events would demonstrate, William was not the best judge of his father’s mind (nor the father of the son’s). William may have been right that Franklin aimed to settle into his new house forever; he may have been wrong. Like many another renter in inflationary times, Franklin may have decided for financial reasons that owning beat renting. He may also have had in mind that Debbie ought to have a house of her own even if—
especially
if—her husband did not always occupy it with her.

The most likely explanation of the discrepancy between Franklin’s words and his actions is that he simply did not know what he was going to do. He loved England and longed to rejoin his friends there; he also loved Debbie, after his fashion, and Philadelphia. Nothing now forced
him to choose between the two sides of the Atlantic, and until something did, he would not.

Meanwhile
he insisted on being apprised of events in London. “I expected when I left England to have learnt in your letters the true state of things from time to time among you, but you are silent and I am in the dark,” he chided Strahan. The papers carried reports of faction, even sedition, in court and Parliament. What was the true story? “Think, my dear friend, how much satisfaction ’tis in your power to give me, with the loss only of half an hour in a month that you would otherwise spend at cribbage.”

“Not an hour have I spent on cribbage since you left us, nor shall it cost me one till you return, which I hope you still
seriously
think of,” answered Strahan. All the same, Franklin’s friend devoted a long letter to lamenting the sorry state of British politics. In the process he may have undermined Franklin’s inclination to return—a consequence that, anticipated, may have been a reason for Strahan’s reticence.

Strahan interpreted events of which Franklin had read. The most shocking of these events—shocking to conventional opinion, at any rate—was the inexplicable emergence of one of the most scurrilous characters—again the conventional judgment—to cross the stage of British politics in the eighteenth century. John Wilkes was a well-educated, uncommonly ugly man with a frightful squint who nonetheless, through wicked wit and ribald humor, managed to charm persons of both sexes. He himself liked to say it took him half an hour to “talk away his face” with any woman, but then she was his. He may have overstated his persuasiveness, but on the evidence of his conquests, not excessively. Among his male acquaintances Edward Gibbon declared that Wilkes had “inexhaustible spirits, infinite wit and humour, and a great deal of knowledge.” Samuel Johnson said, “Jack has a great variety of talk, Jack is a scholar, Jack is a gentleman.” Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, asserted that Wilkes had “an elasticity of mind that nothing can crush.”