This Day in Philadelphia History (Ben Franklin Mourned by City, Not Congress)

April 21, 1790—Approximately 20,000 people—half of Philadelphia’s population—turned out to pay last respects to Benjamin Franklin, who came to the city as a runaway 17-year-old indentured servant, going to become an international symbol of the Enlightenment and, in the words of biographer Walter Isaacson, “the first American.” A deist, Franklin privately doubted the divinity of Christ. But he not only never publicly disparaged any religious faith, but whenever the city’s churches launched a fundraising drive, he always contributed—even to Roman Catholic and Jewish houses of worship, when those religions were still barely tolerated. Not surprisingly, then, representatives of the city’s major religions not only paid tribute to Franklin at his passing but led the procession to Christ Church, the Anglican (later Episcopal) Church he attended whenever he was in town—and whose steeple he had financed with three lotteries he organized. Though the mourning for the 84-year-old patriot was intense and widespread, it was not universal. Philadelphia honored a printer, publisher, best-selling author, postmaster, entrepreneur, philanthropist, educator, scientist, inventor, musician, politician, and diplomat who left his thumbprint on the City of Brotherly Love, and even beyond. The Surprising Group of Franklin-phobes But anyone with that amount of energy is bound to cross someone who interferes with all this ceaseless striving, or even calls it into question. One such person with decidedly mixed feelings for “Dr. Franklin” was his illegitimate son, William Franklin, exiled in England and disowned by his father for loyalist sympathies as royal governor of New Jersey at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War favored by Benjamin. Five years after their last, strained meeting, Franklin couldn’t resist dissing his son in his last will and testament: “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.” Somewhat more surprising to today’s Americans, the Congress of the new republic that Franklin helped bring into being did not honor him. According to Gordon S. Wood’s The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, a resolution introduced by James Madison in the House of Representatives, calling for a month of national mourning for his aged colleague at the Constitutional Convention, sailed through the House. But when the same measure was introduced in the Senate, it was denounced immediately by Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut. Richard Henry Lee (yes, of the famed Virginia dynasty) had tangled with Franklin in the Continental Congress. Lee’s New England ally, John Adams—who, as Vice-President, presided over the Senate—was even more resentful of Franklin, having not only disagreed with his style of diplomacy in winning the French to the American side in the war and then negotiating the peace with Britain, but also feeling jealous of him and George Washington for the credit they received as the ones crucially responsible for the success of the revolution. Remember, again, that the resolution was now in the U.S. Senate. It’s been said that Willie Mays’ glove is where triples went to die. The Senate is where House measures go to die. And that’s what happened this time, too. The City as Franklin’s Social Science Laboratory No matter. If his son and many colleagues had issues with Franklin, that feeling is not shared today, as I discovered repeatedly on a visit to Philadelphia four years ago. A Boston native, Franklin remained an unapologetic city dweller all his days (including in London and Paris, where he served in crucial lobbying and diplomatic posts for nearly 30 years). While Washington and Jefferson were country aristocrats, Franklin delighted in Philadelphia, refusing to leave it even during its sweltering (and disease-inducing) summers. The issues that Franklin confronted early in his career—safety, health, poverty and education—resulted from his city’s expansion. His solutions--among them fire insurance, inoculation campaigns, and the University of Pennsylvania--represented a pioneering attempt at urban planning— a fresh approach to making the city more livable. If, as many historians maintain, Franklin was America’s first great scientist, then Philadelphia was his social science laboratory. Three centuries of fame and moral injunctions (“early to bed and early to rise…”) turned Franklin for a long time into a figure scorned either for platitude-spinning or for ceaseless womanizing. My tour of Philadelphia’s proudly preserved cobblestone streets revealed a Franklin more vital and complex than either Sunday-school teachers or revisionists acknowledge. Although his tolerance and wit continue to endear him to Americans, his drive and tangled family relationships also remind us of his frailties—a person closer to all of us. The Only Home Franklin Owned The best starting point for Franklin’s Philadelphia is Market Street—called, when he first came here, High Street. Conveniently located near Independence Hall, this section of the city is also where he worked and lived. Delicatessens, Italian restaurants, and service businesses have taken the place filled in the eighteenth century by tailors, saddle-makers, joiners, wig-makers, innkeepers and printers. But Market Street still beckons to newcomers just as it did on the morning of Franklin’s arrival, when he walked up this hothouse commercial district, with one loaf of bread tucked under one arm, a second loaf crammed into a jacket pocket, and a third stuffed in his mouth. Future wife Deborah Read burst out laughing at the sight. Today, on the same street, Franklin Court, run as part of Independence National Historic Park, commemorates the drive that made him rich and famous. Yet it also underscores the fragility of even his dreams for his posterity, for in a city that has gone to enormous lengths to preserve its past, his home was razed only twenty-two years after his death. In fact, the only building associated with Franklin that remains standing today is at 36 Craven Street in London, in the country he rebelled against. When Franklin Court was excavated in the 1950s, it was an alleyway running from Chestnut to Market Streets known as Orianna Street. With no building contract or architectural plan surviving and little physical evidence, the architectural team on the project decided they did not want to make something that was inaccurate or misleading. Instead, they preserved what they could and erected a structure that was frankly conjectural. Behind the alley, a “Ghost Structure” sweeps over Franklin Court. Architect Robert Venturi designed painted steel frames that suggest Franklin’s house and print shop, with quotations set into the pavement. Many items in the reimagining of his home would have been familiar to Franklin: flower beds, gravel and brick pathways, benches, fences, garden walls, and a mulberry tree mentioned in his correspondence. Of 13 houses Franklin lived in, Franklin Court was the only one he ever owned. Building began in 1765, supervised by Deborah, since Franklin was serving in London as an agent for several colonies. It embodied his typically practical maxim, “If you are going to build a house, build it modern.” Franklin, Uncharacteristically, at Rest Nearly a decade as Philadelphia’s colonial agent in London, then nearly another as a diplomat abroad, took Franklin away from the city he loved. During that time, a lonely Deborah died. Following a wearying, two-year battle with pleurisy and gout, Benjamin joined her in death sixteen years later and was laid to rest on Fifth and Arch Streets, in the graveyard of Christ Church. In addition to his own grave and those of his daughter and son-in-law, Franklin’s plot also contains the remains of Deborah and their son Francis, whose death from smallpox at the age of four devastated his father—and, predictably, launched him on a crusade for inoculation against the disease. More than 4,000 people are buried in the graveyard. During my visit, I spotted numerous flags across the soggy ground, indicating the final resting places of generals, admirals, politicians, and signers of the Declaration of Independence. Only 1,400 of the graves bear inscriptions. Many of the sandstone grave markers have disintegrated as a result of weather and pollution damage. The lettering in Franklin’s original tombstone has been retouched at least twice, much like his image has been continually revisited by generations of historians. I chuckled at all the pennies dropped on his tombstone, in homage to perhaps his best-remembered aphorism, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Like his resting place, Franklin’s impact on his city and country is in no danger of fading from Americans’ memories.