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CCXXIII: TO MR. WHITEFORD - Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. III Letters and Misc. Writings 1753-1763 [1904]

Edition used:

The Works of Benjamin Franklin, including the Private as well as the Official and Scientific Correspondence, together with the Unmutilated and Correct Version of the Autobiography, compiled and edited by John Bigelow (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904). The Federal Edition in 12 volumes. Vol. III (Letters and Misc. Writings 1753-1763).

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CCXXIII

TO MR. WHITEFORD

Philadelphia, 7 December, 1762.

Dear Sir:—

I thank you for your kind congratulations on my son’s promotion and marriage.1 If he makes a good governor and husband (as I hope he will, for I know he has good principles and a good disposition), these events will both of them give me continual pleasure.

The taking of the Havana, on which I congratulate you, is a conquest of the greatest importance, and will doubtless contribute a due share of weight in procuring us reasonable terms of peace. It has been, however, the dearest conquest, by far, that we have made this war, when we consider the terrible havoc made by sickness in that brave army of veterans, now almost totally ruined. I thank you for the humorous and sensible print you sent me, which afforded me and several of my friends great pleasure. The piece from your own pencil is acknowledged to bear a strong and striking likeness, but it is otherwise such a picture of your friend as Dr. S—— would have drawn, black, and all black. I think you will hardly understand this remark, but your neighbour Mrs. Stevenson can explain it. Painting has scarce made her appearance among us; but her sister art, poetry, has some votaries. I send you a few blossoms of American verse, the lispings of our young Muses, which I hope your motherly critics will treat with some indulgence.

I shall never touch the sweet strings of the British lyre, without remembering my British friends, and particularly the kind giver of the instrument, who has my best wishes of happiness for himself and for his wife and his children, when it pleases God to send him any. I am, dear Sir, with the sincerest esteem, &c.,

B. Franklin.

[1 ]Very shortly after Franklin’s leaving England, his son William married and was appointed governor of New Jersey. This, his only surviving son, was born in Pennsylvania, in 1731. His father had married Miss Read on the 1st of September, in the year 1730. William may therefore be said to have been born in wedlock, though he was not reputed to be the son of Mrs. Franklin. He did not find a home in his father’s house until he was about a year old, from which time he was treated both by the doctor and Mrs. Franklin with all the tenderness and consideration to be expected from the most devoted of parents.

He was educated with care. He was at an early age appointed clerk of the House of Assembly of Pennsylvania and postmaster of Philadelphia. In the French war he attained the rank of captain and served with credit at Ticonderoga. He accompanied his father to England in 1756, where he studied law, and in due time was called to the bar. Not long after this, the University of Oxford accentuated the compliment which it paid to the father in conferring upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws, by conferring the degree of Master of Arts upon his son. On the 9th of September, 1762, his commission as “Governor of Nova Caesarea or New Jersey in America” was issued. He got on very well with his people until the news of the battle of Lexington reached them, and which greatly inflamed them. Lord Sterling, one of the members of the governor’s council, immediately accepted a military commission under the Provincial Congress. The governor suspended him. From this moment all harmony between the governor and the council was at an end. The Assembly, which had been prorogued on the 24th of May preceding, was called upon by proclamation to convene again June 20th. This was regarded as a contempt of the Continental Congress, and the governor was thereupon declared by the Assembly an enemy of his country, deprived of his salary, arrested, and finally sent to Connecticut a prisoner of war. He was detained a prisoner there two years and five months. He was then released and repairing to New York, became President of the Board of Associated Royalists.

After a sojourn of about four years in New York, he sailed for England in August, 1782. The personal estate which he was obliged to sacrifice to his loyalty, amounting to £1,800, was restored to him by the English government, and an annual allowance of £300 was made to him, in addition to a pension of £500, or half his salary and perquisites, which had been previously granted to him. He died Nov. 17, 1813, at the age of 82 years.

His marriage, referred to in the letter to Mr. Whiteford, was with a West Indian lady, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Downs. She is described as amiable and accomplished. She died on the 28th of July, 1778, in the 49th year of her age.

The fact that William Franklin received an appointment of so much dignity as that of governor of the province of New Jersey, at a time when the relations of the colonies and the mother country were already darkened by the shadows of coming dissensions, was regarded with some suspicion by some of the people of Pennsylvania. The appointment was no doubt intended to detach the doctor from the popular party. “I am told,” said Thomas Penn, one of the Proprietaries, writing to Governor Hamilton, “you will find Mr. Franklin more tractable, and I believe we shall, in matters of prerogative, as his son must obey instructions, and what he is ordered to do his father cannot well oppose in Pennsylvania.”

The artifice had its perfect work upon the son, who, to the infinite chagrin of the father, from that time forth became the servile instrument of the ministry, and in due course of time, as already stated, a pensioned refugee in London.

The ministers, however, were not long in discovering that their blandishments had been wasted upon the doctor, whose zeal and vigilance in maintaining the rights of the colonies increased with every new provocation.

Between the doctor and his son there was no intercourse from the beginning to the end of the war. A partial reconciliation, however, took place in 1784, and just before the former returned from Europe for the last time.—Editor.