Book of Ages (23 page)

CHAPTER XXI

S
he was fifty-two years old. She took out her Book of Ages:

Jane’s daughter Sarah had married a housewright named William Flagg. And then, just before her twenty-seventh birthday—almost exactly the same age at which Neddy and Eben had succumbed—she died, leaving four children: Jenny, seven; Josiah, three; Mary (called Polly), two; and Sally, one.

Sarah Mecom Flagg: beloved and deservedly lamented. “She always appear’d to me of a sweet and amiable Temper,” Franklin wrote Jane, consoling her. “She is doubtless happy:—which none of us are while in this Life.”
¹

The children came to live with their grandmother. The baby was sick.

Under my Care.
She thought it was her fault.
²
She wrote, at the beginning of March 1765,

“The sick child I mentioned to you in my Last Died the next Day,” Jane wrote to Deborah in April, “& the other childs Knee grows worce.” Josiah Flagg had fallen, badly, in Jane’s house. He would be lame for life.
³

Edward Mecom was in debt again. In 1764, he was sued twice. The
sheriff came knocking on Jane’s door. He left a summons. He took a chair. In January 1765, Mecom failed to show up in court.
⁴
He could scarcely rise from his bed.

Somehow, between March and May 1765, someone found the money to pay an artist named
Joseph Badger to paint three-quarter-length oil portraits of the two surviving Flagg children, Jenny and Josiah.
⁵
Badger, who started out as a glazier and sign painter, and who never signed his work, painted, mainly, houses. (He had nothing of the talent of the much younger
John Singleton Copley, whose
Boy with a Squirrel
was displayed in London that year.) He spent his sittings capturing faces, only later painting props and background and clothes, using a set of costumes he kept—a yellow dress for a girl, a blue cloak for a boy not yet breeched. Josiah, a fidgety four-year-old, would not have sat for long, and even his sober sister would have grown restless. In Jenny’s hands Badger placed a flower; in Josiah’s, an orange.
⁶

Jane’s grandchildren look very like each other, a great deal like Benjamin Franklin and probably a great deal like Jane: moon-faced, with dark hair, delicate brows, small features, and round blue eyes.

Badger painted charming portraits for very little money. For three-quarter-length portraits, he usually charged about two pounds, less for a pair.
⁷
This was a good deal of money for either Jane Franklin Mecom or
William Flagg. Possibly it was Jane’s brother who paid. Franklin had ties to Badger.
Thomas Cushing, who became the Speaker of the
Massachusetts General Assembly in 1766, had sat for Badger, and Franklin later acted in England as Cushing’s agent and maintained a correspondence with him.
⁸
Jane knew Cushing, too. In a letter to her brother, she once referred to having read one of Franklin’s letters to him.
⁹
Her cousins Jonathan and Grace Williams were Cushing’s neighbors.
¹⁰
Then, too, the Mecoms, the Williamses, and the Cushings all belonged to the
Brattle Street Church, and so did the Badgers. (Records of the
baptisms of the Mecom and Badger children appear near to one another in the church’s parish register.)
¹¹
Franklin also sometimes asked Cushing and, later, Cushing’s son to look after Jane. (“Mr Cushing has not been to see me as I understood by Mr Williams you Desiered Him,” Jane once wrote to her brother.)
¹²
Maybe Franklin made arrangements for the portraits, through Cushing.
¹³
Or maybe Jonathan Williams Sr. gave them to Jane, as a
gift.
¹⁴

However they were gotten, the portraits must have been a consolation. Meanwhile, the times only grew harder.
In Boston at midcentury, the rich grew richer, and the poor grew poorer. Never before in New England had such
inequality of wealth been known. The
French and Indian War had ended in 1763, leaving in its wake a crippling depression. Massachusetts had sent more men to that war than all of the other colonies put together. One in three men of age in Massachusetts went to fight.
¹⁵
Boston in the 1760s was a city of
widows and orphans.

The poor roamed the streets and huddled in doorways. A wooden
almshouse had been built before 1662, destroyed by fire in 1682, and replaced by a brick almshouse, built near the Common in 1686. A brick workhouse, also run by the
Overseers of the Poor, was erected in 1739, next door to the prison that housed, mainly, debtors. The
Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the Poor built the Manufactory House in 1754. At midcentury, the numbers of admissions soared, from an average of 93 a year between 1759 and 1763 to 144 between 1763 and 1769. Only the size of the building stopped the number from rising higher. At capacity, some 300 people lived in the almshouse every year; 600 more received poor relief at home. Hundreds more, refugees, were warned out of town, their names recorded in the city’s
Warning Out Book, where the number of names grew from an average of 65 per year between 1745 and 1752, to 200 between 1753 and 1764, to 450 between 1765 and 1774.
¹⁶
The ranks of the poor swelled.

In these dire times, Parliament decided to levy new
taxes on the colonies, passing, in 1764, the
Sugar Act, a duty on imported sugars, and a Post Act, reforming the
postal system. The next year brought the Stamp Act, requiring government-issued stamps on pages of printed paper—a tax on, that is, everything from indenture agreements and bills of credit to playing cards and newspapers. In London, Franklin, acting as an agent of the assemblies of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and New Jersey, lobbied Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. “It will affect Printers more than anybody,” he warned.
¹⁷
He knew, too, that printers, more than anybody, could fight back.
¹⁸

In Boston, printers filled their pages with protest. No newspaper, they insisted, could survive such a tax. With angry opinions about the Stamp Act, Jane reported to her brother, “You See the Newspapers full.”
¹⁹
The hellfire tradition begun by James Franklin had been carried on by a man named
Benjamin Edes, the son of a Charlestown hatter. In 1755, Edes,
with his partner,
John Gill, had taken over the
Boston Gazette
. Two years later, Boston’s selectmen scolded him: “You have printed Such Pamphlets & such things in your News Papers as reflect grossly upon the received religious principles of this People which is very Offensive.” Edes apologized, promising to “publish nothing that shall give any uneasiness to any Persons whatever.” He didn’t keep that promise. By the 1760s, Tories began calling Edes’s paper the “Weekly Dung Barge.”
²⁰

In the midst of all this, Benjamin Mecom had a very queer notion: he proposed to start a newspaper. The
Connecticut Gazette,
owned by
James Parker, had stopped publishing in April 1764, a casualty of the postwar depression. (“Benny Mecom says he gets a good deal of small Work, but does not print a News-paper,” Parker reported to Franklin in March 1765, adding, “He may make shift to rub along, but I believe will never do any great Matter.”)
²¹
But just when the Stamp Act made printing a newspaper less profitable than ever before, Mecom decided to revive the
Gazette
. Mecom ardently supported the growing resistance to Parliament: in 1764, he printed a treatise titled
Reasons why the British colonies, in America, should not be charged with internal taxes, by authority of Parliament.
²²
He thought a newspaper in New Haven would help the cause. “Perhaps there never was a more unpromising Time for the Encouragement of another News-Paper,” he admitted. “But, it is said there never was a Time when the Encouragement of such Papers was more necessary.”
²³
Mecom’s
Gazette
began appearing in July 1765, just four months before the Stamp Act was to take effect. Mecom promised that his paper would be lively: “Bare Articles of News are not all we look for in the Weekly Gazettes.”
²⁴
He looked for hellfire.

In Boston, there was much hellfire to be found. On the floor of the Massachusetts General Assembly, gentlemen argued that Parliament had no right to levy taxes on the colonists, who were not represented in Parliament. On the streets, tradesmen and artisans and the suffering poor rioted. On August 26, 1765, a
mob attacked
Thomas Hutchinson’s house on Hanover Street “with the rage of devils,” as furious at Hutchinson’s wealth as at his politics. Hutchinson barely escaped with his life, running through yards and gardens. “Nothing remaining but the bare walls and floors,” Hutchinson wrote, inventorying his losses.
²⁵
The rioters stripped the house of its contents and then began taking apart the house itself—tearing down walls and stripping slate from the roof. In the chaos, they set
loose, fluttering to the winds, the entire manuscript of a book Hutchinson was writing, a history. Hutchinson’s neighbor
Andrew Eliot, the minister of Boston’s New North Church, rescued the pages from gutters and puddles.
²⁶
Hutchinson’s losses ran to the thousands of pounds.

Jane’s sympathies did not lie with the assembleymen nor with the mob. Violence terrified her. In the aftermath of one tumult, one of her grandnieces had died of fear: “Cousen Griffeth can asign no cause for the
Death of her child Exept it was fright She Recved won Evening,” Jane wrote, “when some men in Liquer next Dore got to fighting & there was screeming murther.” (Cousin Griffith was Abiah Davenport Griffith, the daughter of Jane’s sister
Sarah Franklin Davenport.)
²⁷
Jane had in her care young children, Jenny and
Josiah Flagg. She wanted to keep them out of harm’s way. She feared war. She feared, too, for her brother’s family.

Before he left for London, Franklin had recommended his friend
John Hughes for the post stamp distributor, an appointment Hughes was granted, leaving many in Pennsylvania to believe that Franklin supported the Stamp Act.
²⁸
In September, a mob came to Franklin’s house. Deborah, armed with a gun, fended them off. “I am amaizd beyond measure,” Jane wrote. “I knew there was a Party that did not Aprove His Prosecuting the busness he is gone to England upon, & that some had used Him with scurrilous Language in some Printed Papers.” But she could hardly believe it had come to this.
²⁹

The world she knew was coming to another end, too. In Boston, Edward Mecom worsened. Soon, he was gone. Jane opened her Book of Ages:

“It Pleased God to Call my Husband out of this Troblesom world where he had Injoyed Litle & suffered much by Sin & Sorrow,” she wrote Deborah. Jane had been married for thirty-eight years and, at her husband’s death, she wrote only of his suffering, his sin, and his sorrow.

She thought she was to blame.
God sees meet to follow me with Repeeted corrections.
“In fiveteen months I have been bereved of four Near & Dear Relations,” she reckoned.
³⁰
She had very nearly lost her bearings. “Nothing but troble can you hear from me,” she warned.
³¹
Still, she kept her sorrow close.
Weep not.
“I never Informed you of half I met with,” she once
reminded her daughter Jenny, but “I have Buried the best of Parents, all my Sisters, & Brethren Except one, how many of my children & in what circumstances you know, & some small Remembrance of my difficulties before your Fathers death & after you must have.”
³²
The difficulties she had before and after Edward Mecom’s death: these were the darkest years of her life. She would not speak of them.