Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2)

Another particular friend of Franklin was John Hughes of Philadelphia. This is the Hughes, out of whose debt as a correspondent Franklin, when in England, found it impossible to keep. He was a man of considerable political importance, for he served on the Committee of the Assembly, which was charged with the expenditure of the £60,000 appropriated by the Assembly, after Braddock's defeat, mainly for the defence of the Province, and on the Committee of the Assembly, which audited Franklin's accounts after his return from England in 1762; and was also one of the delegates appointed by the Assembly to confer with Teedyuscung, the King of the Delawares, at Easton in 1756. Even when Franklin, his party associate, was defeated as a candidate for re-election to the Assembly in 1764, Hughes contrived to clamber back into his own seat. The departure for England of Franklin, shortly after this election, was the signal for the most venomous of all the attacks made upon him by the class of writers which he happily termed "bug-writers"; that is, writers, to use his words, who resemble "those little dirty stinking insects, that attack us only in the dark, disturb our Repose, molesting and wounding us, while our Sweat and Blood are contributing to their Subsistence." But the friendship of Hughes was equal to the emergency. Incensed at the outrageous nature of the attack, he published a card over his signature, in which he promised that, if Chief Justice Allen, or any gentleman of character, would undertake to justify the charges against Franklin, he would pay £10 to the Hospital for every one of these charges that was established; provided that the person, who made them, would pay £5 for every false accusation against Franklin that he disproved. The assailants endeavored to turn Hughes' challenge into ridicule by an anonymous reply, but Hughes rejoined with a counter-reply above his own signature, in which, according to William Franklin, he lashed them very severely for their baseness. This brought on a newspaper controversy, which did not end, until Chief Justice Allen, who was drawn into its vortex, was enraged to find that it had cost him £25. Later, the recommendation of Hughes by Franklin, as the Stamp Distributor for Pennsylvania and the Counties of New Castle, Kent and Sussex, gave the worst shock to the popularity of the latter that it ever received. The fierce heat that colonial resentment kindled under the hateful office proved too much for even such a resolute incumbent as Hughes, but he was not long in finding a compensation in the somewhat lower temperature of the office of Collector of Customs for the Colonies, which he held until his death.

Thomas Hopkinson, of Philadelphia, too, was one of Franklin's particular friends. He shared his enthusiasm for electrical experiments, and was the first President of the Philosophical Society established by him. With his usual generosity, Franklin took pains in a note to one of his scientific papers to publish the fact that the power of points to throw off the electrical fire was first communicated to him by this friend, then deceased. Nor did he stop there, but referred to him at the same time as a man "whose virtue and integrity, in every station of life, public and private, will ever make his Memory dear to those who knew him, and knew how to value him." There is an amusing reference to Hopkinson in the Autobiography in connection with the occasion on which Franklin himself was so transported by Whitefield's eloquence as to empty his pockets, gold and all, into the collector's dish. Disapproving of Whitefield's desire to establish an orphan asylum in Georgia, and suspecting that subscriptions would be solicited by him for that object, and yet distrusting his own capacity to resist a preacher, by whom, in the language of Isaiah, the hearts of the people were stirred, as the trees of the wood are stirred with the wind, he took the precaution of emptying his pockets before he left home. But Whitefield's pathos was too much for him also. Towards the conclusion of the discourse, he felt a strong desire to give, and applied to a Quaker neighbor, who stood near him, to borrow some money for the purpose. The application was unfortunately made, the Autobiography says, to perhaps the only man in the company who had the firmness not to be affected by the preacher. His answer was, "At any other time, Friend Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely; but not now, for thee seems to be out of thy right senses."

Anyone who enjoyed Franklin's friendship experienced very little difficulty in passing it on to his son at his death. Francis Hopkinson, the son of Thomas Hopkinson, and the author of Hail Columbia, is one example of this. Franklin's letters to him are marked by every indication of affection, and he bequeathed to him all his philosophical instruments in Philadelphia, and made him one of the executors of his will with Henry Hill, John Jay and Mr. Edward Duffield, of Benfield, in Philadelphia County. In doing so, with his happy faculty for such things he managed to pay a twofold compliment to both father and son in one breath. After expressing in a letter to Francis Hopkinson his pleasure that Hopkinson had been appointed to the honorable office of Treasurer of Loans, he added: "I think the Congress judg'd rightly in their Choice, and Exactness in accounts and scrupulous fidelity in matters of Trust are Qualities for which your father was eminent, and which I was persuaded was inherited by his Son when I took the liberty of naming him one of the Executors of my Will." Franklin even had a mild word of commendation for Hopkinson's political squibs, some of which, when on their way across the ocean to him, fell into the hands of the British along with Henry Laurens. The captors, it is safe to say, attached very different degrees of importance to the two prizes, and Hopkinson himself accepted the situation with the cheerful observation, "They are heartily welcome to any performance of mine in that way. I wish the dose was stronger and better for their sake." Several of the letters from Franklin to Francis Hopkinson bring out two of the most winning traits of the writer, his ability to find a sweet kernel under every rind however bitter, and his aversion to defamation, which led him to say truthfully on one occasion that between abusing and being abused he would rather be abused.

As to the Friends and Enemies you just mention [he declared in one of them], I have hitherto, Thanks to God, had Plenty of the former kind; they have been my Treasure; and it has perhaps been of no Disadvantage to me, that I have had a few of the latter. They serve to put us upon correcting the Faults we have, and avoiding those we are in danger of having. They counteract the Mischief Flattery might do us, and their Malicious Attacks make our Friends more zealous in serving us, and promoting our Interest. At present, I do not know of more than two such Enemies that I enjoy, viz. Lee and Izard. I deserved the Enmity of the latter, because I might have avoided it by paying him a Compliment, which I neglected. That of the former I owe to the People of France, who happen'd to respect me too much and him too little; which I could bear, and he could not. They are unhappy, that they cannot make everybody hate me as much as they do; and I should be so, if my Friends did not love me much more than those Gentlemen can possibly love one another.

Every ugly witch is but a transfigured princess. This idea is one that was readily adopted by Franklin's amiable philosophy of life. The thought that enemies are but wholesome mortifications for the pride of human flesh is a thought that he often throws out in his letters to other persons besides Hopkinson. In one to the gallant Col. Henry Bouquet, who was also, it may be said in passing, a warm friend of Franklin, the pen of the latter halts for a moment to parenthesize the fact that God had blessed him with two or three enemies to keep him in order.

But there were few facts in which Franklin found more satisfaction than the fact that all his enemies were mere political enemies, that is to say, enemies like Dr. William Smith, who shot poisoned arrows at him, when he was living, and fired minute guns over his grave, when he was dead.

You know [he wrote to his daughter Sally from Reedy Island, when he was leaving America on his second mission to England], I have many enemies, all indeed on the public account (for I cannot recollect that I have in a private capacity given just cause of offence to any one whatever), yet they are enemies, and very bitter ones; and you must expect their enmity will extend in some degree to you, so that your slightest indiscretions will be magnified into crimes, in order the more sensibly to wound and afflict me.

The same distinction between personal and political hostility is drawn by him in a letter to John Jay of a much later date in which he uses the only terms of self-approval, so far as we can recollect, that a biographer might prefer him never to have employed.

I have [he said], as you observe, some enemies in England, but they are my enemies as an American; I have also two or three in America; who are my enemies as a Minister; but I thank God there are not in the whole world any who are my Enemies as a Man; for by his grace, thro' a long life, I have been enabled so to conduct myself, that there does not exist a human Being who can justly say, "Ben. Franklin has wrong'd me." This, my friend, is in old age a comfortable Reflection.

In one of the letters to Hopkinson, mentioned by us, he tells Hopkinson that he does well to refrain from newspaper abuse. He was afraid, he declared, to lend any American newspapers in France until he had examined and laid aside such as would disgrace his countrymen, and subject them among strangers to a reflection like that used by a gentleman in a coffee-house to two quarrelers, who, after a mutually free use of the words, rogue, villain, rascal, scoundrel, etc., seemed as if they would refer their dispute to him. "I know nothing of you, or your Affair," said he; "I only perceive that you know one another."

The conductor of a newspaper, he thought, should consider himself as in some degree the guardian of his country's reputation, and refuse to insert such writings as might hurt it. If people will print their abuses of one another, let them do it in little pamphlets, and distribute them where they think proper, instead of troubling all the world with them, he suggested. In expressing these sentiments, Franklin was but preaching what he had actually practised in the management of the Pennsylvania Gazette. This fact imparts additional authority to the pungent observations on the liberty of the press contained in one of the last papers that he ever wrote, namely, his Account of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Pennsylvania, viz.: the Court of the Press. In this paper, he arraigns the license of the press in his half-serious, half-jocular fashion with undiminished vigor, and ends with the recommendation to the Legislature that, if the right of retaliation by the citizen was not to be left unregulated, it should take up the consideration of both liberties, that of the press and that of the cudgel, and by an explicit law mark their extent and limits.

Doctor Cadwallader Evans of Philadelphia was also on a sufficiently affectionate footing with Franklin for the latter to speak of him as his "good old friend." When news of his death reached Franklin in London in 1773, the event awakened a train of reflection in his mind which led him to write to his son that, if he found himself on his return to America, as he feared he would do, a stranger among strangers, he would have to go back to his friends in England.

Dr. Evans' idea of establishing a medical library at the Hospital was so grateful to Franklin's untiring public spirit that, as soon as he heard of it from Dr. Evans, he sent him at once the only medical book that he had, and took steps to solicit other donations of such books for the purpose in England. There are some instructive observations on political and medical subjects in his earlier letters to Dr. Evans, but his later ones are mainly given over to the movement for the production of silk in Pennsylvania in which Dr. Evans was deeply interested. The industry, intelligence and enthusiasm with which Franklin seconded his efforts to make the exotic nursling a success is one of the many laudable things in his career.

Another close friend of Franklin was Abel James, a Quaker, and an active member of the society in Pennsylvania for the manufacture of silk, or the Filature, as it was called. When he returned to England in 1764, Abel James, Thomas Wharton and Joseph Galloway were the friends who were so loath to part with him that they even boarded his ship at Chester, and accompanied him as far as New Castle. The enduring claim of James upon the attention of posterity consists in the fact that he was so lucky, when the books and papers, entrusted by Franklin to the care of Joseph Galloway were raided, as to recover the manuscript of the first twenty-three pages of the Autobiography, which brought the life of Franklin down to the year 1730. Subsequently he sent a copy to "his dear and honored friend," with a letter urging him to complete the work. "What will the world say," he asked, "if kind, humane and benevolent Ben. Franklin should leave his friends and the world deprived of so pleasing and profitable a work; a work which would be useful and entertaining not only to a few, but to millions?"

The names of Thomas Wharton and Samuel Wharton, two Philadelphia friends of Franklin, are more than once coupled together in Franklin's letters. Thomas Wharton was a partner of Galloway and Goddard in the establishment of the Philadelphia Chronicle. It was his woollen gown that Franklin found such a comfortable companion on his winter voyage. He would seem to have been the same kind of robust invalid as the neurasthenic who insisted that he was dying of consumption until he grew so stout that he had to refer his imaginary ill-health to dropsy.

Our friend W – [Franklin wrote to Dr. Evans], who is always complaining of a constant fever, looks nevertheless fresh and jolly, and does not fall away in the least. He was saying the other day at Richmond, (where we were together dining with Governor Pownall) that he had been pestered with a fever almost continually for these three years past, and that it gave way to no medicines, all he had taken, advised by different physicians, having never any effect towards removing it. On which I asked him, if it was not now time to inquire, whether he had really any fever at all. He is indeed the only instance I ever knew, of a man's growing fat upon a fever.

It was with the assistance of Thomas Wharton that Thomas Livezy, a Pennsylvania Quaker, sent Franklin a dozen bottles of wine, made of the "small wild grape" of America, accompanied by a letter, which Franklin with his penchant for good stories, must have enjoyed even more than the wine. Referring to the plan of converting the government of Pennsylvania from a Proprietary into a Royal one, Livezy wrote that, if it was true that there would be no change until the death of Thomas Penn, he did not know but that some people in the Province would be in the same condition as a German's wife in his neighborhood lately was "who said nobody could say she wished her husband dead, but said, she wished she could see how he would look when he was dead." "I honestly confess," Livezy went on to say, "I do not wish him (Penn) to die against his will, but, if he could be prevailed on to die for the good of the people, it might perhaps make his name as immortal as Samson's death did his, and gain him more applause here than all the acts which he has ever done in his life."

The humor of Franklin's reply, if humor it can be termed, was more sardonic.

The Partizans of the present [he said] may as you say flatter themselves that such Change will not take place, till the Proprietor's death, but I imagine he hardly thinks so himself. Anxiety and uneasiness are painted on his brow and the woman who would like to see how he would look when dead, need only look at him while living.

With Samuel Wharton, Franklin was intimate enough to soothe his gout-ridden feet with a pair of "Gouty Shoes" given or lent to him by Wharton. This Wharton was with him one of the chief promoters of the Ohio settlement, of which the reader will learn more later, and the project was brought near enough to success by Franklin for his over-zealous friends to sow the seeds of what might have been a misunderstanding between him and Wharton, if Franklin had not been so healthy-minded, by claiming that the credit for the prospective success of the project would belong to Wharton rather than to Franklin. But, as Franklin said, many things happen between the cup and the lip, and enough happened in this case to make the issue a wholly vain one. Subsequently we know that Franklin in one letter asked John Paul Jones to remember him affectionately to Wharton and in another referred to Wharton as a "particular friend of his." His feelings, it is needless to say, underwent a decided change when later the fact was brought to his attention that Wharton had converted to his own use a sum of money placed in his hands by Jan Ingenhousz, one of the most highly-prized of all Franklin's friends.

There is a thrust at Parliament in a letter from Franklin to Samuel Wharton, written at Passy, which is too keen not to be recalled. He is describing the Lord George Gordon riots, during which Lord Mansfield's house was destroyed.

If they had done no other Mischief [said Franklin], I would have more easily excused them, as he has been an eminent Promoter of the American War, and it is not amiss that those who have approved the Burning our poor People's Houses and Towns should taste a little of the Effects of Fire themselves. But they turn'd all the Thieves and Robbers out of Newgate to the Number of three hundred, and instead of replacing them with an equal Number of other Plunderers of the Publick, which they might easily have found among the Members of Parliament, they burnt the Building.

The relations between Franklin and Ebenezer Kinnersley, who shared his enthusiasm for electrical experiments, John Foxcroft, who became his colleague, as Deputy Postmaster-General for America after the death of Colonel Hunter, and the Rev. Thomas Coombe, the assistant minister of Christ Church and St. Peter's in Philadelphia, were of an affectionate nature, but there is little of salient interest to be said about these relations. Malice has asserted that Franklin did not give Kinnersley due credit for ideas that he borrowed from him in his electrical experiments. If so, Kinnersley must have had a relish for harsh treatment, for in a letter to Franklin, when speaking of the lightning rod, he exclaimed, "May it extend to the latest posterity of mankind, and make the name of franklin like that of newton immortal!"

James Wright, and his sister, Susannah Wright, who resided at Hempfield, near Wright's Ferry, Pennsylvania, were likewise good friends of Franklin. Part at any rate of the flour, on which Braddock's army subsisted, was supplied by a mill erected by James Wright near the mouth of the Shawanese Run. Susannah Wright was a woman of parts, interested in silk culture, and fond of reading. On one occasion, Franklin sends her from Philadelphia a couple of pamphlets refuting the charges of plagiarism preferred by William Lauder against the memory of Milton and a book or tract entitled Christianity not Founded on Argument. On another occasion, in a letter from London to Deborah, he mentions, as part of the contents of a box that he was transmitting to America, some pamphlets for the Speaker and "Susy" Wright. Another gift to her was a specimen of a new kind of candles, "very convenient to read by." She would find, he said, that they afforded a clear white light, might be held in the hand even in hot weather without softening, did not make grease spots with their drops like those made by common candles, and lasted much longer, and needed little or no snuffing.

A sentiment of cordial friendship also existed between Franklin and Anthony Benezet, a Philadelphia Quaker, born in France, who labored throughout his life with untiring zeal for the abolition of the Slave Trade. This trade, in the opinion of Franklin, not only disgraced the Colonies, but, without producing any equivalent benefit, was dangerous to their very existence. When actually engaged in business, as a printer, no less than two books, aimed at the abolition of Slavery, one by Ralph Sandyford, and the other by Benjamin Lay, both Quakers, were published by him. The fact that Sandyford's book was published before 1730 and Lay's as early as 1736, led Franklin to say in a letter to a friend in 1789, when the feeling against Slavery was much more widespread, that the headway, which it had obtained, was some confirmation of Lord Bacon's observation that a good motion never dies – the same reflection, by the way, with which he consoled himself when his abridgment of the Book of Common Prayer fell still-born.

When Franklin took a friend to his bosom, it was usually, as he took Deborah, for life. But Joseph Galloway, one of his Philadelphia friends, was an exception to this rule. When Galloway decided to cast his lot with the Loyalists, after Franklin, in a feeling letter to him, had painted their "rising country" in auroral colors, Franklin simply let him lapse into the general mass of detested Tories. Previously, his letters to Galloway, while attended with but few personal details, had been of a character to indicate that he not only entertained a very high estimate of Galloway's abilities but cherished for him the warmest feeling of affection. Indeed, in assuring Galloway of this affection, he sometimes used a term as strong as "unalterable." When Galloway at the age of forty thought of retiring from public life, Franklin told him that it would be in his opinion something criminal to bury in private retirement so early all the usefulness of so much experience and such great abilities. Several years before he had written to Cadwallader Evans that he did not see that Galloway could be spared from the Assembly without great detriment to their affairs and to the general welfare of America. Among the most valuable of his letters, are his letters to Galloway on political conditions in England when the latter was the Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly. In one he expresses the hope that a few months would bring them together, and hazards the belief that, in the calm retirement of Trevose, Galloway's country place, they might perhaps spend some hours usefully in conversation over the proper constitution for the American Colonies. When Franklin learned from his son that hints had reached the latter that Galloway's friendship for Franklin had been chilled by the fear that he and Franklin would be rivals for the same office, Franklin replied by stating that, if this office would be agreeable to Galloway, he heartily wished it for him.

No insinuations of the kind you mention [he said], concerning Mr. G., – have reached me, and, if they had, it would have been without the least effect; as I have always had the strongest reliance on the steadiness of his friendship, and on the best grounds, the knowledge I have of his integrity, and the often repeated disinterested services he has rendered me.

In another letter to his son, he said, "I cast my eye over Goddard's Piece against our friend Mr. Galloway, and then lit my Fire with it."

The shadow of the approaching cloud is first noticed in a letter to Galloway in 1775, in which Franklin asks him for permission to hint to him that it was whispered in London by ministerial people that he and Mr. Jay of New York were friends to their measures, and gave them private intelligence of the views of the Popular Party. While at Passy, Franklin informed the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs that General and Lord Howe, Generals Cornwallis and Grey and other British officers had formally given it as their opinion in Parliament that the conquest of America was impracticable, and that Galloway and other American Loyalists were to be examined that week to prove the contrary. "One would think the first Set were likely to be the best Judges," he adds with acidulous brevity. Later on, he did not dispose of Galloway so concisely. In a letter to Richard Bache, after suggesting that some of his missing letter books might be recovered by inquiry in the vicinity of Galloway's country seat, he says, smarting partly under the loss of his letter books, and partly under the deception that Galloway had practised upon him: