Note 24 — Chapter IV · (continued 2)

The entire conduct of Franklin towards his son after the dismissal of the father from office by the British Government seems to have been thoroughly considerate and decorous. His wish that William Franklin would resign his office as Governor of New Jersey, which he could not hold without pecuniary loss to his father, and without apparent insensibility to the indignity to which his father had been subjected, was delicately intimated only. Even after William Franklin became a prisoner in Connecticut in consequence of his disloyalty to the American cause, Franklin, while giving Temple some very good practical reasons why he could not consent that he should be the bearer of a letter from Mrs. William Franklin to her husband, takes care to tell Temple that he does not blame his desire of seeing a father that he had so much reason to love. At this time he also relieved with a gift of money the immediate necessities of Mrs. William Franklin. The temper of his letters to Temple, when Temple went over to England from France, at his instance, to pay his duty to William Franklin, was that of settled reconciliation with his son. "Give my Love to your Father," is a message in one of these letters. When he touched at Southampton on his return from his French mission, William Franklin, among others, was there to greet him. In the succeeding year we find Franklin asking Andrew Strahan to send him a volume and to present his account for it to his son. But on one occasion during the last twelve months of his life, he speaks of William no longer as "my son" but as "William Franklin." On the whole, it would appear that it was not so much the original defection of the son from the American cause as the fact that he kept aloof from the father, after the return of the father from France, which was responsible for the asperity with which the latter refers in his will to the political course of William Franklin during the Revolution.