The First American: The Life And Times Of Benjamin Franklin - Plot & Excerpts
For most of eighteen years London had been his home; he knew London now better than he knew Philadelphia. But the London he left by coach to catch the Pennsylvania packet at Portsmouth was not the London he had known just a few years earlier. Corruption had always troubled its politics, yet corruption now overwhelmed all else. The placemen, the toadies, the cynics had triumphed; honest seekers after the welfare of the empire as a whole had no place. For eighteen years he had resisted returning to America, for the last eleven successfully; he resisted no more.What he was returning to he could only guess. When he had left America in 1757 he was fifty-one, in the prime of his adult life. Now he was sixty-nine, an old man by anyone’s reckoning. Few of his contemporaries survived; for a decade or more his associates had been primarily of a younger generation.The latest, and most poignant, reminder of mortality was the death of Deborah. After her stroke six years earlier she had never been the same.
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