Authors: Jill Lepore
1.
JFM to DRF, January 29, 1758. Looking at the physical letters, it’s clear that Jane’s capacity to write improved greatly between the
writing of this first letter and the letters she wrote, at a furious clip, in the last decade of her life. Compare this letter, for instance, to JFM to BF, July 4, 1784.
2.
See, e.g., JFM to BF, December 30, 1765, or November 8, 1766.
3.
BF, “On Titles of Honor,”
New-England Courant,
February 18, 1723.
4.
JFM to DRF, February 27, 1766.
5.
DRF to JFM, [May 1772?].
6.
JFM to DRF, February 27, 1766. JFM was gossiping about Grace Harris Williams
here. According to
The Manifesto Church
(183), Sarah, daughter of Jonathan Williams, was baptized in the
Brattle Street Church by Samuel Cooper on March 30, 1766.
7.
JFM to DRF, February 27, 1766.
8.
JFM to DRF, [before August 1770?].
9.
JFM to DRF, November 24, 1766.
10.
Ibid.
11.
CRG to JFM, February 7, 1776.
12.
JFM to Sarah Franklin Bache, [October 1780].
13.
JFM to DRF, [before August 1770?].
14.
JFM to BF, February 14, 1779.
15.
JFM to BF, July 4, 1784.
16.
JFM to Jonathan Williams Jr., Boston, August 11, 1792.
17.
JFM to BF, August 29, 1789.
18.
JFM to BF, August 16, 1784.
19.
JFM to BF, September 26, 1788.
20.
George Fischer,
The American Instructor; or, Young Man’s Best Companion,
9th ed., rev. and corr. (Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1748), 45.
21.
Samuel Richardson,
Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the most Important Occasions
(London, 1741; 4th ed., 1750), letters 138 (p. 181) and 139 (p. 182).
22.
Thomas Keymer, introduction to Samuel Richardson,
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xiv.
23.
Richardson,
Pamela
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), letter 1 (p. 1); letter 2 (p. 13).
24.
BF to Jane Franklin, January 6, 1727.
25.
Richardson,
Pamela
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), letter 5 (p. 17); letter 1 (pp. 12–13).
26.
Green and Stallybrass,
Benjamin Franklin,
63–64; 68–69. In
Poor Richard
for 1752, Green and Stallybrass point out, Franklin “quoted no fewer than twenty-one sayings from Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa,
a novel that Franklin and his partner, David Hall, had imported from
England and advertised for sale in seven volumes in 1751” (113).
27.
Samuel Richardson,
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. In a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel, To her Parents,
5th ed. (London; repr., Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1742). BF’s copy text was the fourth London edition and printing, not completed until the summer of 1744. BF to DRF, London, November 22, 1757.
28.
BF,
Autobiography,
18.
29.
On BF’s printing of
Pamela,
see Green and Stallybrass,
Benjamin Franklin,
68–70; and BF, “Observations on Mr. Parker’s State of the Account,” 1766, in
PBF,
13:110–16.
1.
JFM to BF, March 3, 1781.
2.
BF to JFM, August 29, 1765. Also BF to JFM, July 7, 1773: “I believe it is long since I have written any Letters to you. I hope you will excuse it. I am oppress’d with too much Writing.”
3.
JFM to BF, December 30, 1765.
4.
JFM to Sarah Franklin Bache, May 29, 1786.
5.
JFM to DRF, [August?] 1770.
6.
JFM to Sarah Franklin Bache, October 1780. Van Doren,
Jane Mecom,
75.
7.
Stewart, “Intercourse of Letters,” chapter 2.
8.
BF to JFM, July 10 and July 24, 1764.
9.
BF to JFM, August 3, 1789.
10.
BF to JFM, April 27, 1789.
11.
JFM to BF, November 7, 1768.
12.
JFM to DRF, [August 1770?].
13.
JFM to BF, November 21, 1774.
14.
JFM to BF, July 27, 1779.
15.
JFM to DRF, [August?] 1770.
16.
JFM to BF, February 21, 1786.
17.
JFM to BF, November 3–21, 1774.
18.
JFM to BF, October 21, 1784. BF to JFM, July 28, 1774.
19.
BF to JFM, September 26, 1774.
20.
JFM to BF, November 3–21, 1774.
21.
David Hume to BF, Edinburgh, May 10, 1762.
22.
Mather Byles to BF, 1765–66. See BF to Elizabeth Hubbart, February 22, 1756, concerning the letter of condolence Franklin wrote to John Franklin’s widow,
Elizabeth Hubbart Franklin (the woman Jane would have a beef with concerning the family soap), which circulated in manuscript in the 1760s and was published in
Massachusetts Magazine
in 1789.
23.
Hannah Callender Sansom,
The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom: Sense and Sensibility in the Age of the American Revolution,
ed. Susan E. Klepp and Karin Wulf (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 86. At the beginning of 1759, Sansom cited passages from BF to JFM, September 16, 1758. The diarist was a friend of Elizabeth Ross Mecom, the wife of Jane’s son Benjamin, which suggests the route a copy of the letter might have taken: from Jane to Betsy, from Betsy to Hannah. Emerging evidence suggests that a great deal of
women’s writing circulated only in manuscript. See
Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America,
ed. Catherine LaCourreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). Moore (1740–1829), who lived most of her life in Philadelphia, wrote three commonplace books, including one she titled “Martha Moore’s Book”; in it, she transcribed the writings of many of her female friends. Moore also copied out a letter from BF to Joseph Huey, June 6, 1753; BF’s epitaph; and the inscription BF placed over his parents’ graves (217–20). The last two of these items she might have come across in Benjamin Mecom’s
New-England Magazine
.
24.
Envelope, Richard Bache to JFM, April 19, 1790, NEHGS.
25.
JFM to BF, October 23, 1781. Nor did she keep any kind of summary of letters she had written, as suggested by JFM to BF, March 3, 1781, explaining that she had written to him before but couldn’t remember what about: “I wrot a Sheet full on Every thing concerning my self that I thought you would wish to know but have no coppy & can now Recolect but litle of it.”
26.
BF to JFM, July 7 and November 1, 1773; February 17, 1774.
1.
BF to DRF, January 21, 1758. And see
Charles Coleman Sellers, “Jane Mecom’s Little Picture,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
99 (1955): 433–35, and Sellers,
Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture,
236–37. The miniature is now at the Museum of Fine Arts, accession no. 43.1318. Sellers’s account of its provenance, in
Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture,
appears to be in error. He believes that the miniature descended through Jane’s granddaughter Sally Flagg and then somehow, at Sally Flagg’s death in 1881, to the descendants of Jane’s great-grandson Franklin Greene. I believe the Franklin miniature in Sally Flagg’s possession in 1858 was different from the miniature that descended through the family of Franklin Greene.
2.
BF to JFM, September 16, 1758.
3.
Benjamin Franklin the Elder, Commonplace books, AAS. Volume 1. Flyleaf.
4.
BF to JFM, July 14, 1759.
5.
BF to JFM, January 9, 1760.
6.
BF to JFM, November 11, 1758.
7.
On Keziah Folger Coffin visiting Jane, see Abiah Folger Franklin and JFM to BF and DRF, October 14, 1751.
8.
JFM to BF, November 8, 1766.
1.
I don’t think Ebenezer Mecom and his wife, Susanna Hiller, had any children, but I do think Susanna Hiller Mecom might be the Susanna Mecom who married Benjamin Somes of Gloucester on October 28, 1762—that is, nine months after Eben’s death—and with whom she had five children.
2.
JFM to BF, August 18, 1777.
3.
JFM to DRF, March 17, 1760.
4.
BF to
John Perkins, Philadelphia, February 4, 1753.
5.
John Perkins,
The True Nature and Cause of the Tails of Comets
(Boston: Edes and Gill, 1772). Perkins was elected in January 1774: “Early Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, Compiled by One of the Secretaries, from the Manuscript Minutes of Its Meetings from 1744–1838,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
22 (July 1885): 87.
6.
John Perkins,
Thoughts on Agency
(New Haven: B. Mecom, 1765), 7–8. And see also John Perkins,
Theory of Agency; or, An Essay on the Nature, Source and Extent of Moral Freedom
(Boston: printed for and sold by John Perkins, 1771). And see Gordon Wood,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(New York: Knopf, 1992), 239–40 and note 22.
7.
Perkins mentions sending the essay in John Perkins to BF, Boston, March 12, 1770, but the treatise itself is among Perkins’s papers at the American Antiquarian Society and is dated 1768: “A Few Thoughts on Epidemic Colds or Catarrh Fevers. Inscribed to B.F. Esq. L.L.D. with the following Epistle.” It begins, “Some time since, in conversation, you was pleas’d to introduce the Subject of Catarrh Fever, commonly call’d epidemic Colds, & did me the honour of recommending them to my consideration, particularly with effect to the causes of them, which seem to have been too little enquir’d into.”
8.
Perkins, “Of the Diseases & casualtys incident to Mankind,” in the volume of his
notebooks titled “Memoirs of the life writings and opinions of John Perkins physician lately of Boston, begun March 1777, and continued to 1778,” AAS. Perkins did not trust his patients to diagnose their own ailments. “People often mistake a beginning Fever for a cold,” he warned, “& immediately give such things as they use for this, either a Sweat or some Spiritous Draught, either of which in a good constitution often fires the distemper.” Franklin’s medical library is discussed in Edwin Wolf II, “Frustration and Benjamin Franklin’s Medical Books,”
Science and Society in Early America,
ed. Randolph Shipley Klein (1986), 57–91.
9.
BF to Jonathan Williams Sr., Philadelphia, November 25, 1762. And on the harpsichord, see BF to Jonathan Williams Sr., New York, June 26, 1763.
10.
As Eric H. Christianson has warned, “Any attempt to classify the diseases of the 17th and 18th centuries involves hazards for the historian because diagnosis was often imprecise. As one medical historian has noted, it is difficult, if not impossible, even to distinguish between such diseases as diphtheria and scarlet fever ‘when eighteenth century doctors themselves made no attempt to separate them.’ ” “Medicine in New England,” in
Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health,
ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers, 3rd ed., rev. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 47–71; quote is from 47.
11.
On its later history, see Katherine Ott,
Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture Since 1870
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
12.
JFM to DRF, February 27, 1766.
13.
Mass. Arch., Mass. Arch. Collection (SC1/Series 45X), 98B, pp. 421–36, “Coll. Jno. Phillip’s Acct./Mustering Men/ 23.66/[Augt. 30?] 1761”; “466 Men were Muster’d & Sworn & Many of them had the Articles of War Read to them according to the Within Dates By John Phillips Commissary of Musters” (p. 426), “Return of Men inlisted for His Majesty’s Service for the Protection and Security of His Majesty’s Dominions and Conquests in North-Amarica [
sic
], 1761.” Peter Mecom, enlisted May 19, 1761, attested May 19, 1761, mustered May 19, 1761, resident of Boston, 22 years of age, enlisted by Lieutenant Abraham Tuckerman; v. 99A, pp. 135–36, Pay roll for Captain Simon Jeffres’s Company, 1761; p. 135, “PAY-ROLL of the Company in His Majesty’s Service, Under the Command of [Blank] Captain, Viz.,” Boston, March 24, 1762, [signed] [Lieut.] Thaddeus Trafton, Peter McComb [read Mecom], resident of Boston, entered into service May 21, [1761], left service June 28, [1761], served 5 weeks, 4 days, deserted.
14.
JFM to DRF, [August?] 1770.
15.
Benjamin Franklin the Elder, “Short Account” in Huang, “Franklin’s Father Josiah,” 108.
16.
Barbara J. Logue, “In Pursuit of Prosperity: Disease and Death in a Massachusetts Commercial Port, 1660–1850,”
Journal of Social History
25 (1991): 314.
17.
For the treatment of tuberculosis in the eighteenth century, see Cecil D. Drinker,
Not So Long Ago: A Chronicle of Medicine and Doctors in Colonial Philadelphia
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), chapter 4, “The Tuberculosis of William Drinker.” And on TB present in the colonies since Jamestown, see “Sickness and Health in America: An Overview,” in Leavitt and Numbers,
Sickness and Health in America,
5.
18.
Perkins, “Of the Diseases & casualtys incident to Mankind,” in the volume of his
notebooks titled “Memoirs of the life writings and opinions of John Perkins physician lately of Boston, begun March 1777, and continued to 1778,” AAS.
19.
JFM to CRG, Philadelphia, November 24, 1775. JFM to BF, November 24, 1789. Jane complained about suffering from asthma more later in life. See, e.g.: “Aunt mecom wrote to you the other day and of course answered all your enquiries relative to her, she appears to me in better health than from her discription in her letter to me I expected; she is troubled with a complaint of the Astmatic kind, but it does not seem to be in a degree to indicate the presence of disease, further than as a common attendant to her age. She is in good Spirits, which is the best remedy that any Physician could prescribe.” Jonathan Williams Jr. to BF, Boston, September 6, 1789.
20.
BF to JFM, July 7, 1773.
21.
Perkins, “Of the Diseases & casualtys incident to Mankind,” in the volume of his notebooks titled “Memoirs of the life writings and opinions,” AAS.
22.
James Carmichael Smyth,
An Account of the Effects of Swinging, employed as a Remedy in the Pulmonary Consumption and Hectic Fever
(London, 1787).
23.
DRF to BF, Philadelphia, [October 13–18?], 1767. BF was in London.
24.
This is from the first (untitled and unpaginated) separate volume of Perkins’s case notes, AAS. There are eleven unnumbered volumes.
25.
Massachusetts Judicial Archives, Suffolk Files Collection, Reel 733, v. 1272, no. 172092, Recognizance, Case of Peter Franklin Mecom. Genl. Sessions, Suffolk, Oct. 1759.
26.
Benjamin Mecom, Boston, to Deborah Franklin, Philadelphia, February 9, 1761, Franklin-Bache Collection, APS.
27.
BF to JFM, June 28, 1756.
28.
William Franklin to BF, ca. January 2, 1769.
29.
BF to Catherine Shipley, Philadelphia, May 2, 1786. JFM to BF, December 26, 1782.
30.
BF to Catherine Shipley, Philadelphia, May 2, 1786. BF to JFM, October 25, 1779. See also BF to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, June 22, 1773.
31.
JFM to BF, July 27, 1779.
32.
Later research would suggest that the immune cells that fight
tuberculosis do so much better in the presence of
vitamin D. The human body produces vitamin D in response to
sunlight. Low levels of vitamin D during brain development, including prenatally, have also been related to the adult onset of some forms of mental illness, including depression and schizophrenia. See, e.g., Susan Realegeno and Robert L. Modlin, “Shedding Light on the Vitamin D–Tuberculosis–HIV Connection,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
108 (2011): 18861–62; D. Itzhaky et al., “Low Serum Vitamin D Concentrations in Patients with Schizophrenia,”
Israeli Medical Association Journal
14 (2012): 88–92; B. L. Gracious et al., “Vitamin D Deficiency and Psychotic Features in Mentally Ill Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study,”
Biomed Central Psychiatry
9 (2012): 38; and J. P. Kesby et al., “The Effects of Vitamin D on Brain Development and Adult Brain Function,”
Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology
5 (2011): 121–27.