Book of Ages (65 page)

  
1.
  This annotation can be read on the reverse of BF to Abiah Folger Franklin, Philadelphia, September 17, 1749. (
PBF
dates this letter September [7], 1749.) It may be that Jane saved it because it mentions her: Franklin signed off, “My Love to Brother & Sister Macom, & to all enquiring Friends.”

  
2.
  Envelope, Richard Bache to JFM, April 19, 1790.

  
3.
  Lathrop had read some of Franklin’s letters to his sister before. In 1788, pressing himself and his sermons upon Franklin, he had written to him: “You will allow me to consider myself in some sort acquainted by the way of your worthy sister Mrs Mecom, who is our neighbour and particular friend, and who allows me the pleasure of reading the very improving and entertaining Letters which she has recievd from you.”
John Lathrop to BF, Boston, May 6, 1788.

  
4.
  The election of officers is reported in “
American Academy of Arts and Sciences,”
Independent Chronicle,
June 9, 1791. Lathrop had been elected a member of the academy in 1790. The keeper of the cabinet was, by statute, both the librarian and the curator. “Statues of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,”
Memoirs
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1 (1783): chapter 6, clause 1, p. xvi. Although Lathrop donated some of his sermons to the academy’s archives, none of JFM’s papers ended up there (Michele M. Lavoie, archivist, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, e-mail to the author, March 14, 2012).

  
5.
  “Caleb Loring, Esq. to Miss Jane Tyler Lathrop, daughter of the late Rev. Dr. Lathrop,”
Salem Gazette,
May 29, 1821. Under marriages “At Boston.” And see also the notice in the
Independent Chronicle,
May 30, 1821.

  
6.
  The founding of the public library, later the Thayer Memorial Library, is related in Abijah Perkins Marvin,
History of the Town of Lancaster from the First Settlement to the Present Time, 1643–1879
(Lancaster, MA: The Town, 1879), 552–62. Leslie Perrin Wilson,
Thayer Memorial Library: Celebrating 150 Years of Public Library Service, 1862–2012
(Lancaster, MA: Thayer Memorial Library, 1985, 2012), 20.

  
7.
  
Flagg’s notations in JFM, “Book of Ages,” NEHGS.

  
8.
  On Flagg’s various town offices, see Henry S. Nourse,
The Birth Marriage and Death Register, Church Records and Epitaphs of Lancaster, Massachusetts, 1643–1850
(Lancaster, MA: W. J. Coulter, 1890), 6, 9, 121, 130, 232.

  
9.
  On the popularity of family trees and family records in family Bibles in the nineteenth century, see Maureen A. Taylor, “Tall Oaks from Little Acorns Grow: The Family Tree Lithograph in America,” in Simons and Benes,
The Art of Family,
75–89.

10.
  
The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocrypha
(Charlestown, MA, 1803), annotated by Josiah Flagg and Sally Flagg, Special Collections Room, Thayer. In his Bible’s Family Record, Flagg recorded, too, the survival of a family name: one of Josiah Flagg’s daughters named a daughter of hers
Jane Green.

11.
  BF,
Experiments and Observations on Electricity
(London, 1774), at the AAS. In 1827, Flagg also gave to the Society some Indian relics. On the AAS’s role in collecting Indian artifacts, see Judith Kertesz, “Skeletons in the American Attic: Curiosity, Science, and the Appropriation of the
American Indian Past,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2012.

12.
  
Columbian Centinel,
August 17, 1816.

13.
  Marvin,
History of Lancaster,
327, 373, 400, 429, 431, 540–44. “The records, accurately kept and legibly written, are his best monument,” noted one town historian. That monument remains in a locked cabinet in the basement of Lancaster Town Hall. His handwriting really is beautiful. It can be seen
in Lancaster Town Records, vol. 3, 1800–20, Town Clerk’s Office, Town Hall, Lancaster, Massachusetts. The manuscript records are kept in the basement of the town hall. I consulted this record book to be certain that Flagg had not written the words “Book of Age’s” on the cover of JFM’s book; he had not. His handwriting, both informal and clerical, is remarkably different from hers, and even from the “flourishing hand” with which she wrote on the cover of her book.

14.
  
The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New,
annotated by Josiah Flagg and Sally Flagg.

15.
  Norman Gershom Flagg and Lucius C. S. Flagg,
Family Records of the Descendants of Gershom Flagg
(n.p., 1907), 30. Flagg and Flagg refer to Josiah Flagg as “a voluminous letter-writer” (155), although I have not been able to find any of his letters aside from those deposited in the NEHGS.

16.
  
John M. Dodd, Boston, October 23, 1858. R. Stanton Avery Special Collections, NEHGS.

17.
  BF,
The Interest of Great Britain Considered
(Boston: Benjamin Mecom, 1760). Records of the bequests by Sally Flagg can be found in the acquisition books in the Special Collections Room of the Thayer Memorial Library.

18.
  According to the
Flagg family Bible,
Samuel Ward Flagg died on June 24, 1871.
Benjamin A. G. Fuller, “Letters of Dr. Franklin, Mrs. Jane Mecom,
Josiah Flagg, Richard Bache, &c,”
New England Historical and Genealogical Register
27 (1873): 246–54. Fuller was a descendant of Gershom Flagg, and therefore shared a common ancestor with Josiah Flagg. The bequest was presented on February 6, 1872, and is listed in the Society’s acquisition book in an entry dated September 4, 1872, where the Book of Ages is described as “Memo. book, containing family records by Mrs. Mecom and Josiah Flagg.” NEHGS, Accession Book. A brief biography of Fuller appears in the
New England Historical and Genealogical Register
39 (1885): 399. The provenance of the bequest is detailed in Benjamin A. G. Fuller to Marshall Pinckney Wilder, February 7, 1872, NEHGS, Mss. C 641.

  
1.
  The most comprehensive account of Sparks’s life and work is Herbert Baxter Adams,
The Life and Writings of Jared Sparks,
2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), but see also George E. Ellis,
Memoir of Jared Sparks
(Cambridge, MA: John Wilson, 1869). On the
North American Review,
see Van Wyck Brooks,
The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865
(New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1936), chapter 6.

  
2.
  Jared Sparks, “Materials for American History,”
North American Review
23 (October 1826): 276, 277, 292.

  
3.
  Adams,
Life of Sparks,
2:521.

  
4.
  Sparks, “Materials for American History,” 294.

  
5.
  Sparks had written to
Mount Vernon in 1816, a year after he graduated from Harvard, begging for “a scrap of General Washington’s handwriting.” Not long after, he made his first application to Washington’s nephew and literary executor,
Bushrod Washington, to see the whole collection and was turned down. Adams,
Life of Sparks,
1:389. For more on Sparks’s editing of Washington’s papers, as well as the controversy surrounding that work, see Lepore,
The Story of America,
130–45.

  
6.
  Galen Broeker, “Jared Sparks, Robert Peel and the State Paper Office,”
American Quarterly
13 (1961): 140–52.

  
7.
  
In London, Temple Franklin had had an affair and an
illegitimate child with
Ellen D’Evelyn, the sister of his father’s wife. This had led to a falling-out with his father, after which Temple abandoned both mother and child and moved to Paris. Skemp,
William Franklin,
273–74.

  
8.
  Temple proposed visiting his father in London, to consult his memory, but he never turned up.

  
9.
  
Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, LL.D.,
ed. William Temple Franklin (Philadelphia, 1808–18). Bache died in 1798, of yellow fever, at the age of twenty-nine, his health weakened by his having been arrested and imprisoned, under the terms of the
Sedition Act, for opposing
John Adams’s imperious and failed presidential administration.

10.
  
For more on these letters, see
appendix A
.

11.
  Possibly,
Jane Lathrop Loring already knew Sparks even before he knocked on her door, because in 1827 she had served on the ladies’ committee of the
Bunker Hill Monument Association, with which he was also involved. George Washington Warren,
The History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association
(Boston, 1827), 292, 305.

12.
  “Called on Mrs. Bache, the wife of Mr. Richd Bache, who is the great grandson of Dr Franklin,” he wrote in his diary on March 9. (This
Richard Bache was one of
Benjamin Franklin Bache’s sons.) “A few letters and other papers are in the hands of the present Mrs. Bache, which are originals of Dr. Franklin, and which I am to have.” March 10: “[Went“] to see Mr. Williams, the son of the late Jonathan Williams, a nephew of Dr. Franklin. He has the original picture of Franklin painted by Martin, in England, when Franklin was about 60 years old. It is the picture in a wig, of Franklin reading papers through Spectacles.” Then he went to see Franklin’s grave. He was disappointed: “a plain marble covers the spot.” Sparks, Diary 1829–31, March 9–10, 1831, Sparks Papers, MS Sparks 141g, part 1, pp. 263–65. Note that Sparks’s diaries can be confusing because he appears to have copied them. Some entries are also reproduced in Baxter,
Life of Sparks
. The original diaries, at Houghton Library at Harvard, are bound in volumes. The volumes are unnumbered but are cataloged together as part of a series referred to as MS Sparks 141. The volumes on which I relied are:

Most of these volumes have numbered pages. For ease of reference, I have supplied the date of the diary entry, the volume’s date range, and the page number, if available.

13.
  Sparks, Diary 1829–31, March 11, 1831, Sparks Papers, MS Sparks 141g, part 1, p. 266.

14.
  Sparks wrote:

Ibid. And for more on Fox’s collection, see
PBF,
1:xxi–xxii.

15.
  On this visit, Sparks met William Duane, who had some leads about some papers once in the possession of BF’s son
William Franklin. “He tells me that Govr. Franklin corresponded with him from London till the time of his death & promised to send him many of his father’s letters. But his death prevented & Mr. Duane does not know what became of his papers.” Sparks, Diary 1831–39, March 22, 1832, Sparks Papers, MS Sparks 141h, pp. 63–64. “He has a curious letter from him to his father and mother in 1738 on the subject of religion,” Sparks wrote—this is a letter that Franklin responded to, on April 13, 1738—but the letter from Josiah and Abiah that Duane had in 1832 is now lost. Duane’s edition of BF’s writing is BF,
The Works of Dr. Benjamin Franklin
(Philadelphia: W. Duane, 1808–18).

16.
  
PBF,
1:xxii.

17.
  Sparks, Diary 1831–39, March 22, 1832, Sparks Papers, MS Sparks 141h, p. 64.

18.
  He received Bache’s volume the following winter, acknowledging receipt in a letter to Bache dated February 11, 1833. Jared Sparks to
Franklin Bache, Boston, February 11, 1833, Misc. Ms. Collection, APS.

19.
  Jared Sparks to Franklin Bache, December 26, 1832, Misc. Ms. Collection, APS. Sparks also wrote in his journal for March 1833, “During the progress of my historical researches I have obtained original letters of Franklin amounting to more than one hundred, mostly to his relations and intimate friends. These are curious and interesting” (Misc. Ms. Collection, APS). While preparing the
Works,
Sparks had these originals in his possession and copied them into his notebooks. On the title page of a two-volume notebook filled with copies of letters, Sparks wrote, “Copied from the originals while they were in my hands for writing the Life of Franklin, Jared Sparks, 1843.” “Franklin, Benjamin. Letters from various correspondents,” Sparks Papers, MS Sparks 16.

20.
  Thomas Motley to Jared Sparks, January 24, 1833, Sparks Papers, MS Sparks 153. Motley’s relationship to Mrs. Loring is discussed in
appendix A
.

21.
  Jared Sparks to Franklin Bache, Boston, February 27, 1833, Misc. Ms. Collection, APS. In the original, Sparks wrote “forty or 50”; he then crossed that out and wrote, above it, “20 or 30.”

22.
  Sparks lived there from April 2 to August 26, 1833: “This day I began to occupy Mrs Craigie’s house in Cambridge. It is a singular circumstance, that while I am engaged in preparing for the press the letters of Genl Washington, which he wrote at Cambridge, after taking command of the
American Army, I should occupy the same rooms that he did at that time. Mrs. Craigie’s house is the one in which he resided, & which he made his Head Quarters during his residence in Cambridge. We propose to remain here during the summer, as well as account of its being a charming summer residence, as that my presence near the printing office is now very convenient. Washingtons Writings and the little volume of Franklins letters are now to the press at Mr. Folson’s office in Cambridge.” Sparks, Diary 1831–39, April 2, 1833, Sparks Papers, MS Sparks 141h, p. 108.

23.
  Green and Stallybrass,
Benjamin Franklin,
168.

24.
  
Jared Sparks to Franklin Bache, Boston, April 13, 1833, Misc. Ms. Collection, APS.

25.
  It was reviewed in literary journals and in ladies’ journals. See, e.g., “Familiar Letters of Dr. Franklin,”
Philadelphia Album and Ladies’ Literary Portfolio
7 (June 8 1833): 180, and “[Review of] Franklin’s Familiar Letters,”
American Monthly Review
4 (August 1833): 124–33.

26.
  A reviewer in Sparks’s
North American Review
called special attention to Franklin’s correspondence with his sister as the most remarkable element of the collection and proof against a prevailing suspicion—promoted by Franklin’s political enemies and, most especially, by John Adams—that Franklin was selfish and ambitious; his letters to Jane were taken as evidence that he was, instead, generous and loyal. “His correspondence with his sister,” this reviewer remarked, “was affectionate and unremitted till the last moment of his life.” The reviewer reproduces three of Franklin’s letters to Jane, beginning with the letter Franklin wrote to her on his twenty-first birthday, January 6, 1727, warning her to watch out for her virginity. The reviewer concludes, “Mr. Sparks, its editor, has placed the public under new obligations to himself, for the ability and diligence with which he is laboring to preserve from oblivion the facts and documents that may serve to illustrate our history, and of the characters of our distinguished men.” “Franklin’s Familiar Letters,”
North American Review
80 (July 1833): 249–62.

27.
  
BF,
A Collection of the Familiar Letters and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Franklin,
ed. Jared Sparks (Boston: C. Bowen, 1833). Not all, however, are identified as having been sent to JFM. Some letters to Jane Franklin Mecom Sparks refers to as “to a Friend in America” or “to a Relation in Boston.”

28.
  Adams,
Life of Sparks,
2:39–40. George Washington,
The Writings of George Washington,
ed. Jared Sparks, 12 vols. (Boston: American Stationers’, 1834–37). Also: George Washington,
The Writings of George Washington,
ed. Jared Sparks, 12 vols. (Boston, 1833–39); vols. 2 and 3 were published by Russell, Odiorne, and Metcalf (vol. 2) and Hilliard, Gray (vol. 3), and vols. 1 and 4–12 by Fedinand and Andrews. Sparks invested his small fortune in the American Stationers’ Company, which went bankrupt in the Panic of 1837, bankrupting Sparks.

29.
  Sparks’s defense against this last pair of charges is especially interesting. See Jared Sparks,
Letter to Lord Mahon
(Boston, 1852), 18–19.

30.
  These changes are recounted in many places, but the easiest place to find the ones Mahon cited is John Spencer Bassett,
The Middle Group of American Historians
(New York: Macmillan, 1917), chapter 2.

31.
  Jared Sparks to Franklin Bache, December 26, 1832, in Baxter,
Life of Sparks,
2:337.

32.
  BF to Noah Webster, Philadelphia, December 26, 1789.

33.
  Jared Sparks to Franklin Bache, Cambridge, August 6, 1833, Misc. Ms. Collection, APS, and reprinted in Van Doren,
Letters,
vi.

34.
  I believe that by 1833, four of Benjamin Mecom’s children had died. His son John Ross and his daughter Deborah died in childhood. His daughter Mary Mecom, who married a man named Carr, had been living in New York at the time of Franklin’s death. She was dead by 1833. Elizabeth, single at the time of Franklin’s death, married a man named Daniel Britt in 1798, but it appears that she was dead by 1833. See
A Calendar of Delware Wills, New Castle County, 1682–1800
(New York: Frederick H. Hitchcock, 1911), 144. For more on Jane’s descendants, see
appendix C
.

35.
  
Sarah Mecom seems to have married
Benjamin Smith sometime after 1773, as the name “Sarah Mecom” appears on a list of people for whom mail is waiting at the Philadelphia post office that year. “List of Letters remaining in the Post Office, Philadelphia, July 5, 1773,”
Pennsylvania Packet,
July 26, 1773.

36.
  “Abia Mecom, storekeeper, 63 Mulberry” is listed in James Robinson,
The Philadelphia Directory for 1807
(Philadelphia, 1806); the pages are not numbered but the listing is alphabetical. In the 1809 directory, her address is listed as 44 South Third (Robinson,
The Philadelphia Directory for 1809
).

37.
  By 1796 Jane Mecom Collas had started renting the house out and gone to live with Jenny Mecom, who was renting a house on Bridges Lane. Collas lived with her niece until her death in 1802, at the age of fifty-seven, whereupon the house on Unity Street was sold. Van Doren
, Letters,
357–59.

38.
  “Capt.
Simon Kinsman & Miss Jane Mecom,” Lathrop wrote in his record of marriages, under the date February 13, 1800.
John Lathrop, Record book, 1768–1815, Second Church Records, Box 1, vol. 7, MHS. The
marriage of Jane Mecom and Simon Kinsman is also recorded in
A Volume of Records Relating to the Early History of Boston, Containing Boston Marriages, 1752 to 1809
(Boston: Municipal Printing Office, 1903), 256. Simon Kinsman’s death and the lack of issue is noted in Lucy W. Stickney,
The Kinsman Family: Genealogical Record
(Boston, 1876), 69. In some instances, Simon Kinsman is rendered “Simeon Kinsman.”