Franklin’s Lost Comments about His Armonica

Michael Hillegas (1729-1804) was one of Benjamin Franklin’s colleagues in Philadelphia. Son of immigrants from Germany, he became a merchant, then invested in refining both sugar and iron.

In 1775 the Continental Congress appointed Hillegas one of its two treasurers. The other, George Clymer, became a delegate to the Congress the next year, leaving Hillegas as the sole treasurer until 1789. 

Hillegas was an early member of Franklin’s American Philosophical Society, and he had a particular interest in music. Sources say he played the flute and violin, and he ran a shop offering musical instruments, printed music, staff paper, strings, and lessons.

Sometime in the late 1760s Hillegas asked his friend Franklin to send him that new glass instrument, the glassy-chord or armonica. Unfortunately, when it arrived, some of the glass bowls were broken, and in January 1769 Franklin promised to order replacement parts.

By November nothing had arrived, so Hillegas reminded Franklin of his request in a letter that also asked about other things. Franklin wrote back on 17 Mar 1770.

Some of those letters between Franklin and Hillegas no longer survive, but Hillegas and his nineteenth-century descendants made the documents now lost available to scholars.

The earliest publication of Franklin’s 17 Mar 1770 letter was in Mathew Carey’s American Museum, or, Universal Magazine in 1790. The same text appeared in William Temple Franklin’s 1817 set The Private Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin. That transcription contained a single paragraph about what sort of metal plates different European nationalities were using on their roofs. (Ah, the Enlightenment!)

In 1859, however, the Historical Magazine printed a longer text of what it said was the same letter. This transcription appears to have been made from the original since the article is prefaced with this comment:

LETTERS OF FRANKLIN.

The original of the following letters from Benjamin Franklin to Michael Hillegas, Esq., were found among the papers of the late Mr. Henry Kuhl, of this city, a son-in-law of Mr. Hillegas. Mr. Hillegas was an alderman of Philadelphia, and a prominent citizen.

W. D.

The paragraph printed in 1859 but not in 1790 or 1817 reads:

Charles James, who undertook to provide your Glasses, and the only Workman here acquainted with such Matters, was a very negligent, dilatory Man, and put me off from time to time. At length he died suddenly. And those who succeed him in the Shop cannot find the Directions. They were in your Letter which I left with him and I have no Copy. So I think you cannot do better than to go to my House and suit yourself out of the Glasses I left there. If you get one of the proper Size but too sharp, Mr. [Francis] Hopkinson will show you how to grind it down, tho’ it were a Note or two.

Obviously, that paragraph is significant in the history of Franklin’s glassy-chord/armonica. It also shows a less flattering side of the inventor, his annoyance at not receiving his order simply because the skilled artisan he relied on had died. Supply-chain problems!

Now we get into the mysteries of modern editorial practices. The current Papers of Benjamin Franklin project, as digitized at its own website and at the National Archives’ Founders Online, includes only the first paragraph of Franklin’s 17 Mar 1770 letter, quoted from The American Magazine. The paragraph about the late armonica builder is nowhere to be seen.

However, the Franklin Papers cites the Historical Magazine transcription as a source about the making of the armonica, even quoting from the missing second paragraph. At some points the Papers editors deemed the Historical Magazine transcription to be reliable, but they didn’t reprint the entire text.

The Franklin Papers’ truncated quotation of the second paragraph has proved misleading. The original sentences make clear that Franklin’s glassblower “died suddenly” before he could complete the order. The editors’ summary is ambiguous about who died, the artisan or the friend who was supposed to receive the instrument (i.e., Hillegas). William Zeitler at the thorough website glassarmonica.com guessed that the intended recipient died instead of the glassblower.

Now it’s possible that I’ve missed some explanation or supplemental material in the Papers of Benjamin Franklin because I’m relying on the electronic versions rather than the printed volumes. But for the sake of glassy-chord scholars everywhere, I’m making noise about the Historical Magazine transcription.

“She thinks her forte is the understanding”

Marie Anne Pierrette Paulze was only thirteen years old in 1771 when she was married to Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier.

Marie Anne’s family was under pressure to marry her to a powerful nobleman in his fifties, so Lavoisier—a twenty-eight-year-old colleague of her father’s—seemed preferable.

Marie Anne’s father and husband both worked as tax collectors for the French monarchy, a lucrative and unpopular profession. In 1775 Antoine Lavoisier was also appointed to oversee the manufacture of gunpowder at the Paris Arsenal, which stimulated his interest in science.

Over the following years the Lavoisiers worked together closely. Marie Anne helped Antoine set up laboratory experiments, took notes on the results, translated English scientific treatises into French (adding her own commentary), and created illustrations for the papers Antoine wrote. The image above shows Marie Anne’s own drawing of them and their staff at work.

Those papers included demonstrations of the conservation of mass, arguments against phlogiston theory, a new system for naming chemicals, and the first attempt to list the modern elements. Lavoisier also advocated for some social reforms, but of course he continued to collect taxes.

Gouverneur Morris arrived in Paris in 1789 and wrote about the Lavoisiers in his diary:

[8 June 1789:] Dine with Mr. deLavoisier. . . . Madame appears to be an agreeable woman. She is tolerably handsome, but from her manner it would seem that she thinks her forte is the understanding rather than the person.

In other words, she valued her brains over beauty.

[25 Sept 1789:] Go to the Opera according to my promise and arrive towards the close of the piece at the loge of Madame Lavoisier. . . . Go to the Arsenal and take tea with Madame Lavoisier en attendant le retour de Monsieur [while awaiting the return of Monsieur] who is at the Hôtel de Ville. As Madame tells me that she has no children I insist that she is une paresseuse [an idle girl], but she declares it is only a misfortune. Monsieur comes in and tells us of the obstination of the bakers. . . .

[6 Oct 1789:] Go to the arsenal. Admitted with difficulty. They are at dinner. Madame Lavoisier is detained in town, as all carriages were stopped and the ladies obliged to join the female mob. While we sit at table, we learn that the militia and the Régiment National are marching towards Versailles.

The French Revolution was breaking out around this upper-class set.

At first the Lavoisiers kept up. Antoine sponsored a press to publish political and scientific material, proposed education reforms, and helped to promote the new metric system. In 1791 the republic abolished the tax-collecting organization. The next year, Antoine lost his job overseeing gunpowder and had to move out of the Arsenal.

But the Lavoisiers were still very rich. Marie Anne hosted dinner parties and after-dinner salons. In 1791 Morris visited her gatherings with William Temple Franklin. At one the company discussed a “riot at Birmingham,” blaming it on British government policy. After another Morris wrote, “there are a number of Gens d’Esprit [wits] who are in general but so so company.”

In January 1793, the French government executed Louis XVI. That spring the radical Jacobin party took over, and in October the government executed Marie Antoinette. The next month, the authorities arrested Antoine Lavoisier and his former tax-collecting colleagues, including Marie-Anne’s father. They were convicted of defrauding the state and guillotined in May 1794.

Two months later, the Thermidorian counterrevolution began. Near the end of 1795 Antoine’s clothing was delivered to his thirty-seven-year-old widow with a note declaring that he had been “falsely convicted.”

TOMORROW: The widow Lavoisier.

“A good amount of the Franklin Papers”

For anyone who cares about preserving the papers of important Founders, Valerie-Anne Lutz recounted quite a heart-stopping adventure for the American Philosophical Society in January.

Lutz wrote about Benjamin Franklin’s surviving papers:

When Franklin left for London in 1764 1776, he left his papers with his friend and fellow Pennsylvania Assembly member Joseph Galloway. Galloway kept the papers in his vault, a stone building on his property, along with some of his family’s papers and early Bucks County records.

By the time of the American Revolution, Galloway, a Loyalist, believed that the colonies should remain under British rule. This led to his departure for England in 1778 and the confiscation of his estate in 1779. The property was raided by either British or Continental forces, or both, who broke into Galloway’s vault, stole some of the papers, and left others scattered about the grounds. . . .

The letterbooks were, unfortunately, never found. For this reason, most of Franklin’s papers consist of letters to Franklin, rather than letters from Franklin. However, [son-in-law Richard] Bache was able to rescue a large amount of materials, which represent a good amount of the Franklin Papers that eventually found their way to APS.

In his will, Franklin left his papers to his grandson, William Temple Franklin, known as Temple. Intending to publish his grandfather’s papers, Temple set off for London with a portion of them, but left the largest portion with family friends, the Fox family, near Philadelphia. . . . In 1840, Charles Pemberton Fox and his sister Mary Fox gave the collection to the American Philosophical Society, where they have been ever since. . . .

A somewhat smaller collection of Franklin Papers held by the Fox family was overlooked for another 25 years. During the Civil War, the family sold some old papers from their barn to a paper mill. A house guest, identified as Mrs. Holbrook, noticed that some of the papers bore Franklin’s handwriting. She rescued them and left the papers to her son, George O. Holbrook, who, with the encouragement of physician S. Weir Mitchell, sold the collection to the University of Pennsylvania in 1903.

As for the papers that William Temple Franklin took to London, they were discovered in the 19th century in a tailor shop below where Temple had lived, where they were being used as clothing patterns. They were rescued, and after a series of legal issues, eventually were donated to the Library of Congress.

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin project built from these collections and added documents saved elsewhere to create as full a picture of the man’s correspondence and writings as possible. And we can enjoy the result through Founders Online.

Also recommended, though not as adventure reading: Jack Hitt’s article “In the Franklin Factory,” about the Papers of Benjamin Franklin as it operated about twenty-five years ago, published in Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca.

“I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen”

Now it’s true that at one point Benjamin Franklin suggested that the turkey, rather than the bald or American eagle, should be the emblem of the new nation.

But Franklin didn’t make that remark in 1776 during the earliest discussions of the U.S. national seal. He wrote that in January 1784 after learning about the public debate over the Society of the Cincinnati, the new hereditary organization of Continental Army officers and their male heirs.

Still the U.S. minister to France, Franklin wrote to his daughter Sarah Bache (pronounced “Beach”):

I received by Captn. Barney those relating to the Cincinnati. My opinion of the institution cannot be of much importance. I only wonder that when the united wisdom of our nation had, in the Articles of Confederation, manifested their dislike of establishing ranks of nobility, by authority either of the Congress or of any particular state, a number of private persons should think proper to distinguish themselves and their posterity, from their fellow citizens, and form an order of hereditary Knights, in direct opposition to the solemnly declared sense of their country.

In interpreting this letter, it’s useful to recognize how Franklin handled it. Yes, he addressed his daughter and kept the tone folksy. But he rarely discussed politics with Sarah Bache, and this letter didn’t include any personal news that she would presumably want to hear. He was simply using the form of a family letter to get some political thoughts off his chest.

Even more significantly, Franklin actually never sent this letter to his daughter. Instead, in the spring of 1784 he shared it with a couple of French friends, the abbé André Morellet and the comte de Mirabeau. He also continued to revise the text.

All three men appear to have agreed that it would be impolitic for Franklin to publicize his views of the Cincinnati under his own name. Instead, Mirabeau quoted portions of the letter without attribution later that year in a London pamphlet titled Considérations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus, ou imitation d’un pamphlet anglo-américain. Morellet published a complete French translation after Franklin’s death in 1790. (The Society of the Cincinnati included a French branch as well as one for each of the thirteen states, so French noblemen knew about the debate.)

Franklin’s whole letter didn’t appear in English until his grandson William Temple Franklin published a collection of writings in 1817. By then the founding of the Cincinnati was no longer a burning political issue. The comments about the national emblem were more striking, even if Franklin had originally drafted them to make sarcastic points about a particular issue:

Others object to the bald eagle [of the Cincinnati medal, example show above], as looking too much like a Dindon or turkey. For my own part I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly.

You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. With all this injustice, he is never in good case, but like those among men who live by sharping and robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank coward: the little king bird not bigger than a sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district.

He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, who have driven all the king birds from our country, though exactly fit for that order of knights which the French call Chevaliers d’Industrie [i.e., “knights of the road”]. I am on this account not displeased that the figure is not known as a bald eagle, but looks more like a turkey.

For in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours, the first of the species seen in Europe being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, and served up at the wedding table of Charles the ninth. He is besides, (though a little vain and silly tis true, but not the worse emblem for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.

(Ironically, that American emblem the turkey was named after a European country, either because Turkish merchants sold New World turkeys in early modern Europe or because sixteenth-century Englishman conflated turkeys with guinea fowl that Turkish merchants imported from Africa.)

The musical 1776 therefore has a slight foundation for portraying Benjamin Franklin in the song “The Egg” as wanting the turkey to be the U.S. of A.’s national bird.

However, as I discussed yesterday, there’s no evidence for John Adams championing the eagle, as in that song. And I’ve found no evidence for Thomas Jefferson suggesting that the national symbol should be a dove.

The whole debate in “The Egg” was a last-minute creation of songwriter Sherman Edwards. During the tryouts of 1776 in New Haven, Edwards and his colleagues decided the show needed a light-hearted number in the second act. The musical’s poster, designed by Fay Gage, showed a patriotic eagle hatching. With the inspiration of that art and Franklin’s 1784 letter, Edwards imagined his lead characters arguing over the national bird.

And a few years later, I watched that scene as an impressionable schoolboy and assumed it had some solid basis in fact. Another Bicentennial myth shattered!