Benjamin Franklin | Perhaps the only letter to his wife in private hands

Benjamin Franklin

Autograph letter signed (“BFranklin”) to his wife, Deborah Read Franklin (“My dear Child”), one page (216 x 204 mm) on a slip cut from a larger sheet of laid paper (watermarked JWhatman), London, 20 February 1774, assuring her of his good health and love. Half red morocco folding-case gilt, chemise.

One of Franklin’s last letters to his wife of more than four decades, with little news but thoughtfully fulfilling her desire “to have a Letter by every Ship.” His letters home usually sailed with Isaac All, a sea captain based in Philadelphia, active in all manner of marine commerce (and husband of Franklin’s niece, Elizabeth Franklin), but this letter was carried by Captain Nathaniel Falconer, another Philadelphian seafarer who would shortly serve on the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety and supervise the construction of vessels for the Continental navy. 

“I have written fully to you & several Friends by Capt. All; but as I know you like to have a Letter by every Ship, I add this Line by Capt. Falconer, just to let you know, that I continue, Thanks to God, in good Health and Spirits, and purpose setting my Face homeward in May next, God willing. My love to our children. I am ever Your affectionate Husband.” 

Franklin courted Deborah Read beginning in 1723 when they were both teenagers, but when he set out the next year for his first stay in London, working in various printing shops, she assumed he was not going to plight his troth and she wed one John Rogers, who soon after abandoned her, never to be heard from again. Franklin renewed his attentions when he returned to Philadelphia, and, because the fate of Rogers could not be determined, he and Deborah established a common-law marriage in 1730. Although Franklin was absent in London as a colonial agent for long stretches (1757–1762 and 1764–1775), their marriage was seemingly loving and contented. The couple had two children: a daughter, Sarah (“Sally”) and a son, Francis Folger, who died of smallpox shortly after his fourth birthday. They also raised as their own child, William, Franklin’s illegitimate son from a previous relationship; William’s mother has never been identified. 

Franklin did, as predicted here, arrive home in Philadelphia in May 1775, having departed London on 20 March, but his hoped-for reunion with Deborah never took place, as she died 14 December 1774 after a series of strokes and a period of poor health. Her husband was aware of her condition; she had written previously of her ill health and, as early as a November 1769 letter, she complained of Franklin’s extended absence as her “one dis satisfid distresed att your staying so much longer. …”  

But it might have been difficult for Franklin to leave London, even after his diplomatic work was largely accomplished, because during the period of his wife’s declining health he had gotten embroiled in one of the most controversial actions of his multifarious career: the transmission of the "Hutchinson Letters" to Boston. Principally the work of Thomas Hutchinson, royal Governor of Massachusetts (but including writings from other American Tories, including Hutchinson's brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver), these letters were circulated in London in support of a policy of weakening American liberties. "Hutchinson insisted that the only way to avert disaster was to remove government gradually from popular control, and to secure the dependence of the province at the cost, much as it pained him, of abridging 'what are called English liberties'; for no distant colony could be so governed as to give its inhabitants the same liberty as those of the mother country" (Willcox, ed., note in Papers 19:402).

Through circumstances still not fully known, copies of some of these letters came to Franklin's hands, beginning in 1770. On 2 December 1772, Franklin enclosed in a letter to Thomas Cushing copies of much of the Hutchinson correspondence, with the proviso that it "be seen by some Men of Worth in the Province for their Satisfaction only" and that it not be printed or otherwise reproduced (Papers 19:411). Inevitably, and perhaps as Franklin had intended, the letters were published almost immediately by Edes and Gill in Boston under the inflammatory title, Copy of Letters … by His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson … In which (notwithstanding His Excellency's Declaration to the House, that the Tendency and Design of them was not to subvert the Constitution, but rather to preserve it entire) the judicious Reader will discover the fatal Source of the Confusion and Bloodshed in which this Province especially has been involved, and which threatned total Destruction to the Liberties of all America. (ESTC W8846; Evans 12818). 

Two months before writing the present letter to his wife, Franklin had publicly admitted his role in the publication of the Hutchinson letters, for which he was denounced before the Privy Council and stripped of his post as deputy postmaster-general of the colonies. This is one of the very few letters—if not the only one—from Franklin to his wife in private hands. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin record 132 letters from Benjamin to Deborah; the vast majority of these are at the American Philosophical Society, with a few others scattered across several other institutions. No letters known to the editors of the Papers to be extant are located in private collections.

REFERENCES

Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Willcox, 21:116 (not locating the original, corrupt and paraphrased text taken from Mme. Henri Saffroy catalogue no. 19, February 1959)

PROVENANCE

RR Auction, 10 July 2019, lot 179 (undesignated consignor)