CHAPTER IX.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

No sooner was the great man dead than his life and works fell a prey to biographers and editors. For this he was himself to blame. Long before he died, he saw many of his letters and pieces published and republished, in magazines and newspapers, both at home and abroad. He well knew that, do what he might, they would live. Yet he would not arrange and publish them himself, nor gather them with a view to being published by his executors. The great discoveries with which his name was joined, the events in which he had borne so striking a part, made his life of no common interest to his countrymen. Yet it was only by pestering that he was led to go on with an Autobiography begun with diffidence, and never brought to a close.

So much as now makes the five opening chapters was written during a visit to the Bishop of St. Asaph, at Twyford, in 1771. The visit over, the writing stopped, and the manuscript was left to begin a career more strange than any in the history of literature.

When Franklin set out for Paris in 1776, he left his papers in the care of his friend Joseph Galloway. Galloway carried the trunk containing them to his home in Bucks County, and placed it in an outhouse that served as an office, turned loyalist, and hurried to the army of Clinton at New York. Abandoned thus to the care of his wife, his property fell a prey to the vicissitudes of war. Pennsylvania confiscated the estate. The British raided the house, smashed the trunk, and scattered the papers of Franklin over the floor, where they lay for months. A few were picked up by Benjamin Bache, and in time a bundle of them fell into the hands of Abel James, a Quaker, and an ardent admirer and warm friend of Franklin. James found the packet to consist of a quantity of notes, and twenty sheets of closely written manuscript. It was that part of the Autobiography which had been written at Twyford in 1771. Delighted that such a treasure should have come in his way, James made a careful copy and sent it in 1782 to Franklin at Passy. With it went an urgent letter begging him to go on with so profitable and pleasing a work. The warmth of the appeal, the sight of the fragment long thought lost, were not without effect upon him. His labor had not been wasted. A purpose once abandoned might yet be accomplished. He hesitated, sent both letter and manuscript to his friend B. Vaughan, and from Vaughan, in 1783, came back a still more urgent entreaty to go on.

Franklin was then deep in affairs of state. Peace negotiations were on foot. The treaty was being framed. He was too busy making the history of his country to find time to write the history of his life. But in 1784 he undertook the task, and worked with diligence till he went home in 1785, when he once more put the work aside. But his friends would not suffer him to abandon it. Again and again Benjamin Vaughan and M. le Veillard besought him to go on. Again and again he promised and excused himself. His papers were in disorder. His office left him no time. He would go on with the work when the Constitutional Convention rose. But when it rose he was suffering too much from the stone. At last, in 1788, the promise was kept. The Autobiography was brought down to 1757, and a fair copy sent to Dr. Price and Benjamin Vaughan. The original went to M. le Veillard and Rochefoucauld-Liancourt at Paris. Thus a second time the manuscript left the author, and a second time was doomed to a series of strange adventures.

Pennsylvania Gazettes for 1786. He observed that the British public were growing clamorous on the subject of the debts due their merchants before the war. But there was a debt of long standing about which nothing was said, and which might now be paid. Everybody remembered the time when the mother country, as a mark of paternal tenderness, emptied her gaols into America for "the better peopling," as she termed it, of the colonies. America was therefore much in debt on that account; and as Great Britain was eager for a settlement of old accounts, this was a good one to begin with. Let every English ship that comes to our shores be forbidden to land her goods till the master gave bonds to carry back one felon for every fifty tons of burden. These remittances could easily be made, for the felons she had planted had increased most amazingly.

The "Retort Courteous" also treats of the debts. The clamor which had so long been going the rounds of the British press had now been taken up by the ministry, and the Americans made to understand that the posts along the frontier would not be given up till the debts due the British were paid. The justness of this conduct is coolly and honestly examined in the "Retort." The substance of the paper is, that, having brought America, by their own wicked acts, to the very brink of ruin, they now cry out that old scores are not settled. General Gage takes possession of Boston, shuts the gates, cuts off communication with the country, brings the people to the verge of starvation, and then tells them if they will deliver up their arms they may leave with their families and their goods. The arms are given up, and they are then told that "goods" mean chairs, tables, beds, but not merchandise. Merchant goods he seizes, and the cry at once goes up, "Those Boston people do not pay their debts."

One act of Parliament shuts the port of Boston; another destroys the New England fishery; a British army harries the country, burns Falmouth and Charlestown, Fairfield and New London; and the whole world is told, "Those knavish Americans will not pay us."

The humane Dr. Johnson, in his "Taxation no Tyranny," suggests that the slaves be excited to rise, cut the throats of their masters, and come to the British army. The thing is done, and the planters of Virginia and the Carolinas lose thirty thousand of their laboring people, and are in turn denounced as men who do not pay their debts. War having put a stop to the shipment of tobacco, the crops of several years are piled up in the inspecting warehouses, and in the private stores of the Virginia