The Jews in America Trilogy (91 page)

The Frankses and Hayses and Gratzes and Ettings not only married “within the group” but, by the time of the Revolution, had begun making brilliantly social marriages to members of Philadelphia's non-Jewish elite. In the cities to the north, where the Sephardim remained more straitlaced and orthodox, the Philadelphia Jews' behavior was looked on with something close to horror. “The German influence” was blamed for this sort of laxity—the same Christianizing influence that would lead to the Reform movement in Judaism, in both Germany and in the United States. But these intermarriages of Philadelphia's Christian and Jewish families have meant that “Jewish blood,” as they say, flows in the veins of many an old American family, from Philadelphia Morrises and Newbolds and Ingersolls to the New York Verplancks.

Abigail Levy Franks, meanwhile—she was one half of the first Franks-Levy marriage—was not at all sure she approved of these developments, as she watched them unfold in Philadelphia. Abigail regarded herself as an eighteenth-century aristocratic lady. But in many ways she was also a prototype Jewish mother, so familiar in fiction of modern times. She was forever wrapping up and sending off to her sons packages of preserved relishes and “smoakt fish,” urging them not to forget to bathe regularly and eat three good meals daily. In correspondence to her son Naphtali Franks, covering the years 1733–1748, she repeatedly scolds him for his failure to write, or for spending too much money on gifts and “entertainments.” Addressing him always as “Heartsey” (not only a term of endearment, but also a play on her son's middle name, which was Hart), she was fond of delivering Polonius-like pronouncements and advice. “You are now launched out amongst strangers,” she told him upon his arrival in England on a business trip. “You must be exceeding circumspect in your conduct, be affable to all men but not credulous, nor too soon be led away by fair speeches. Be likewise a very just observer of your word in all respects, even in ye most trivial matters.” She was a woman from whom it was not difficult to obtain an opinion, whether it was on the quality of a certain medicinal water or which was the “best Scotch snuff.” She deplored the split between the Sephardic and the Ashkenazic Jewish communities (in New York, she had heard, Sephardic Jews were all in the East Ward, and Ashkenazic Jews were in the less fashionable Dock Ward). She disliked the noise of eighteenth-century horse-drawn traffic in the city, and complained of the gaming and drinking that went on “from Sunday night to Saturday morning.” She called the ladies of her synagogue a “stupid set of people.” She was literate, and fond of quoting, often inaccurately and in the erratic spelling that was typical of the age, advice from the contemporary novels of Fielding and Smollett,
and from the essays of Dryden, Addison, and her favorite, Pope. She directed “Heartsey” that “Two mornings a week should be entirely untill dinner time dedicated to some useful book besides an hour every week to that purpose.”

She was preoccupied with finding a suitable mate for each of her seven children, and marital matters take up much of the space in her letters to her son. She quotes Heartsey the little verse, the source of which is unknown:

Man the first happy favourite above,

When heaven endowed him with a power to love.

His God ne'er thought him in a blessed state

Till Woman made his happyness compleat.

And one of her great disappointments seems to have been the failure of her daughter Richa to complete a marriage alliance with David Gomez, and thereby with the illustrious Gomez family, even though David, Daniel's brother, was almost forty years Richa's senior. She adopts a sour-grapes attitude, speaking of David as “such a stupid wretch,” and adds to Heartsey that even if David had proposed, she and Richa would not have accepted him anyway, probably, not even “if his fortune were much more and I a beggar.” Better no marriage at all than marriage to
that
scoundrel, she seems to say, and Richa did indeed remain unmarried all her life, a heavy burden to her mother. Heartsey himself married his first cousin, Phila Franks, in a most satisfactory intramural manner.

Another marital calamity involved the marriage of Abigail's eldest daughter, also named Phila, to General Oliver De Lancey—who not only eloped with Phila but had her baptized. “Good God what a shock it was,” she wrote Heartsey, “when they acquainted me she had left the house and had bin married six months, I can hardly hold my pen whilst I am writting.…” She wrote that “Oliver has sent many times to beg leave to see me, but I never would.…
Now he sent word that he will come here.… I dread seeing him and how to avoid I know no way.” It would be difficult, since the Frankses and the De Lanceys lived next door to each other. Abigail announced that she had instructed her errant daughter never to darken her door again and said: “I am determined I never will see nor let none of ye family go near her,” but she added in almost the next sentence that “Nature is very strong, and it would give me a great concern if she should live unhappy, though it's a concern she does not merit.”

Abigail Franks's distress appears to have been entirely over the fact that Oliver De Lancey was a Christian, and to have had nothing to do with what might seem to have been certain deficiencies in the young man's character. Present-day members of the De Lancey family take their pre-Revolutionary ancestry very seriously but, from contemporary reports, Oliver De Lancey emerges as a scapegrace, a bounder, a drunk, and—if we are to believe the source—a murderer. It was said, at the time, that he married Phila Franks for her money—a considerable inheritance left to her by her uncle Isaac. Shortly after the marriage, on November 3, 1742, Oliver was indicted for assaulting one of his wife's relatives, Judah Mears, who was the brother of Abigail Franks's stepmother. He and his friends were accused of attacking “a poor Dutch Jew and his wife,” of breaking their windows, and “swearing that they would lie with the woman.” Using foul language, they warned the couple not to bring charges since De Lancey and his friends were members of prominent New York families. Later the same year, according to a report from Governor George Clinton, Oliver stabbed and killed a Dr. Colchoun in a drunken brawl. This, however, may be an exaggeration or even an untruth. The De Lanceys and the Clintons were bitterest enemies, the Montagues and Capulets of early New York. It is known that Oliver De Lancey was something of a dandy
and spent much of his time, and money, at the barber and at the wigmaker's.

After a while, Oliver seems to have settled down. He brought his wife to the De Lancey “country seat,” which was located on what is now West Twelfth Street, west of Hudson Street, in Greenwich Village.
*
Oliver and Phila had seven children, all of whom made socially important marriages, three of them to titled Englishmen. Susannah married Sir William Draper, Phila married the Honorable Stephen Payne-Gallwey, and Charlotte married Sir David Dundas. Stephen De Lancey married Cornelia Barclay, of another old New York family, and
their
son became Sir William Howe De Lancey. In the next De Lancey generation there appeared, in addition to a flock of Episcopal clergymen, Count Alexander Balmain.
†

Meanwhile, intermarriage—the thing which, despite her certain sophistication and attitude of tolerance, Abigail Levy Franks dreaded the most—occurred to the good Jewish mother a second time, when her son David, barely six months after his sister's marriage to De Lancey, married Margaret Evans of Philadelphia. His mother died convinced that she had been a failure as a parent.

It was the Franks-Evans union that produced the beautiful Franks sisters, Rebecca and Abigail, named after her grandmother. We see them in their portraits—Rebecca's by Thomas Sully, who later became Philadelphia's most popular society portraitist—pale, dark-haired, with high cheekbones, long thin noses, and arresting eyes, white and swanlike necks, white bosoms swelling over low-cut dresses.
They were unquestionably belles. Rebecca, the younger and probably the more beautiful of the two, was one of the stars, along with Peggy Shippen (who married Benedict Arnold), of one of the most extraordinary affairs in the annals of American entertaining, Philadelphia's “notorious Meschianza.”

The Meschianza was an altogether curious event. Just why, in the middle of a great war, British-occupied Philadelphia should have decided to treat itself to a lavish party has never been entirely clear. Perhaps everyone was tired of battles and torn loyalties, and a fancy-dress ball seemed the answer. In any case, appropriate or not, a group of British officers decided in the spring of 1779 to put on the most extravagant social entertainment the new world had ever seen. The party was to honor the British General Sir William Howe, who was returning home to England.

Within the family, to say nothing of within the Jewish community, the situation must have seemed grotesque. Cousins David and Esther Hays in Westchester were risking their lives and losing their home in order to smuggle provisions through to Revolutionary soldiers. Here, right in Philadelphia, Haym Salomon, whose wife was the Franks sisters' first cousin, was working to fill the Revolution's coffers—and all the while the two giddy girls were planning a party to toast an enemy general. Feelings must have run strong, to say the least.

The men in charge of arrangements for the party were Major John André and Captain Oliver De Lancey, Jr. Both were close friends of the Franks girls. De Lancey, of course, was another first cousin, and Major André had been a suitor, of sorts, of Rebecca's. After being captured at Saint John's in 1775, André had been paroled in Philadelphia. He had been a frequent guest at the Franks mansion, where he spent a long summer of infatuation with Rebecca, then a girl in her middle teens. Dreamily, he passed the warm
afternoons reading love poetry to her, and painting a delicate miniature of her face. Rebecca, like her De Lancey cousins, had already become decidedly Tory in her politics. Perhaps her affinity for kings had something to do with her ancestor whom George I had made “the Jew Broker of London.” Certainly Major André's attentions can only have bolstered her sentiments.

For weeks before the Meschianza was to take place, Philadelphia was caught up in a flurry of preparations. One London firm reported that it had sold more than £12,000 worth of costly silks and laces for the Philadelphia ladies' dresses. For the British officers, Savile Row shipped red-coated dress uniforms, powdered wigs, cutlasses in bejeweled scabbards.

The party was held at Walnut Grove, the country home of Joseph Wharton, a sedate Quaker, but the party was un-Quakerish in every detail. It turned out that what Major André and Captain De Lancey had in mind was a sort of medieval tournament-festival, along the lines of the one held at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The Philadelphia replica may well have outdone the original. There were jousts, duels, contests, and feats of strength among the young officers. There was a water festival, a regatta of brightly decorated sailboats on the river. There were parades and processions under triumphal arches. Blackamoor slaves in Oriental garb served nearly a thousand guests with fifteen varieties of champagnes and other wines, and buffet tables set up throughout the house and gardens offered an “indescribable assortment” of exotic foods, according to one report of the affair. No expense was spared, obviously, for what had been billed as “a medley of extravagance”—which it most certainly was.

The height of the gala was the moment when fourteen “knights”—young British officers—in fancy costumes were divided into two teams of seven men each for a
tourney. One team was called “the Knights of the Blended Rose,” the other “the Knights of the Burning Mountain.” After the tilting and jousting—which was all in a light-hearted spirit, and in which no one was even slightly bruised—each side of the tournament selected its “Queen of Beauty.” The Knights of the Blended Rose chose a Miss Auchmuty. The Knights of the Burning Mountain chose Rebecca Franks. She was gowned for the occasion in what was described as “a white silk gown, trimmed with black and white sashes, edged with black. It was a polonaise dress which formed a flowing robe and was open in front to the waist. The sash, six inches wide, was filled with spangles, as was the veil, which was edged with silver lace. The headdress was towering, in the fashion of the time, and was filled with a profusion of pearls and jewels.” She was nineteen years old.

After the tournament, there was a climactic grand ball with fireworks and a “royal repast.” The late spring weather—the date was May 18—was perfect for a party. It had started at four in the afternoon, and lasted all night long. It was midmorning the next day before the last of the revelers turned wearily homeward.

Not many miles away, in Valley Forge, a particularly harried and hard-pressed division of Continental troops was encamped where it had spent a parlous winter with heavy loss of life from disease and starvation.

A month later, the British left Philadelphia, and marched across New Jersey, to be met and defeated at Monmouth. But the memory of the lavish Meschianza rankled for a long time in the minds of the Continental generals, including General Anthony Wayne, who wrote sarcastically:

Tell those Philadelphia ladies who attended Howe's assemblies and
levees,
that the heavenly, sweet, pretty red-coats, the accomplished gentlemen of the guards and grenadiers, have been humbled on the plains of Monmouth. The Knights of the Blended Roses and the
Burning Mount have resigned their laurels to rebel officers, who will lay them at the feet of
those
virtuous daughters of America who cheerfully gave up ease and affluence in a city for liberty and peace of mind in a cottage.

Rebecca Franks had admirers on both sides of the Revolution, though she did seem to favor those with pro-British leanings or those who, intentionally or not, did things that helped the British cause. One rebel officer who fancied her was General Charles Lee. His conduct at Monmouth had been somewhat less than glorious. He took his orders from General Washington oddly lightly, and failed to do as he was told, which was to lead an attack on the British from the rear. Was this because Lee had originally been on the British side, and his loyalties still lay in that direction? Was he actually in collaboration with the enemy? There was that possibility. In any case, his behavior caused Washington to suspend him for twelve months. During this time, he engaged in a spirited correspondence with Becky Franks. Occasionally, however, General Lee overstepped himself in his letters, and he had a tendency to use double entendres in such a way that it was often possible to infer a vulgar, if not downright off color, meaning from his words.