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THE GRANDEES: AMERICA'S SEPHARDIC ELITE |
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11. FIRST LADIES
IT COMES AS A SURPRISE to many people that there are Jewish Daughters of the American Revolution -- just as there are Sonsthough of course there are. Some of the Old Guard Sephardic families are a little sheepish about being DAR members, to be sure, since that organization has gained a reputation of making members of minority groups feel less than welcome. At the same time, these people keep their little certificates of membership, and show these to their children and grandchildren as well.
While men like Haym Salomon were raising and supplying money for Revolutionary coffers, and while Judah Touro was saving his money in New Orleans, a number of Sephardic women were gaining reputations as Revolutionary heroines. There was Mrs. David Hays, for example. Esther Hays and Judah Touro were second cousins by marriage; that is, Esther's husband, David, was a first cousin of Judah's mother. By the time of the Revolution, branches of the Hays family were well established in Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond, where they can still be found. Esther Hays was an Etting, of the Philadelphia Ettings -- a Sephardic family that had come to that city as early as 1758,and Ettings can still be found there (including the painter Emlen Etting, a seventh-generation Philadelphian). Esther Etting had met David Hays through Philadelphia connections, and theirs was the first Hays-Etling union (there would, of course, be others). It was considered an event of great social importance, creating as it did an even stronger tie among the Jewish communities of Philadelphia, New York, and Newport.
David Hays took his bride north to an extensive farm he operated in New York's Westchester County, near what is now the town of Bedford, and here the Revolution found them. The Hayses backed the Revolutionary cause and, one night in the winter of 1779, David Hays received word that a company camped not far from his farm had been surrounded by the British. Food and supplies were running low, and unless help reached them soon, the men would be forced to surrender or starve. With one of his young sons as a helper, Hays volunteered to try to drive a herd of seventy-five of his cattle through the enemy lines to the imperiled troops. He chose a moonless night for his mission. The cows were blindfolded, their jaws tied closed with rope so they could make no noise, and their hoofs wrapped in heavy sacking to muffle the sound of their march through the snow. The greatest risk came from the Hayses' own neighbors, many of whom were Tory sympathizers, and the exploit had to be carried out in utmost secrecy.
Nonetheless, somehow word of what David Hays was up to leaked out. He and his son had no sooner left the house than a group of angry and suspicious Tories gathered outside it, shouting for his wife. Esther Hays, still weak from the birth of her sixth child, had been in bed with a fever, but she rose and went to the door. When asked where her husband was, she refused to say. Even when the Tory group threatened to kill her small children, she refused to give the mob any information. She was then forced back inside her house; the windows and doors were barricaded, and the house was set afire. Fortunately, the Hayses' Negro slaves, who lived nearby, were able to rescue Esther and her children, and carry them to safety in the slave quarters. But when David Hays and his son returned the next morning -- after successfully completing their delivery of the cattle -- the farmhouse had burned to the ground.
Esther Hays was a woman not easily daunted. She showed her patriotic zeal on another occasion when she calmly walked through enemy lines in broad daylight. Ostensibly on a routine shopping errand, she was actually purveying a vital commodity to the Revolutionary soldiers. Her plump petticoats were heavily quilted with salt. Before the war was over, both Esther's husband and her eldest son had fought at the front, as had her brother, Reuben, who died as a prisoner of war of the British. A volunteer the moment he learned of the first shot at Lexington, Reuben Etting had left his bank clerk's job to join the American forces. After his capture he refused to eat pork, which, of course, was the chief staple supplied. He must have been as strong-willed as his sister, for his death was attributed to starvation.
A gaudier Revolutionary role, though more social than military, was meanwhile being played by the women of Philadelphia's Franks family, into which the entry -- by marriage -- had been such an important step for Haym Salomon. It had, in fact, by the time of the Revolution begun to seem as though Philadelphia's Sephardim were taking themselves even more seriously than their relatives in New York and Newport, even though the Philadelphia community was newer than -- and in many ways an offshoot of -- the other two. Philadelphians generally had begun to think of themselves as superior to New Yorkers, as, of course, they still do. New York and Newport were looked down on as "commercial" cities; Philadelphia was a city more devoted to culture, the arts and graces. Sephardim in the more northerly cities had already begun to speak with a certain awe of their Philadelphia kin, and on one occasion Mrs. Aaron Lopez wrote one of her daughters a long letter (or memorandum, since the girl was living at home at the time) on how to behave: "Not to forget yr. curtsies, how d'you dos and thank-yous," when meeting "our Philadelphia cousins."
The Franks family had settled in Philadelphia early in the eighteenth century, along with the Levys, to whom they were distantly related. The family, during its passage from fifteenth-century Spain to eighteenth-century Philadelphia, had been prominent elsewhere. Aaron Franks, grandfather of the first American Franks, had been a banker in Hanover, and, under the aegis of George I, who discovered his talent there, was brought to England as the king's personal financial adviser. He was known as "the Jew Broker of London." The Levys, meanwhile, could trace their lineage back to a number of prominent early American Jewish families. The two families became even more tightly entwined with each other when, in what was considered a dynastic union, Abigail Levy married Jacob Franks in 1712,and both families moved with great ease (certainly with more ease than the Jews of New York and Newport, who, socially, still kept to themselves) into the purlieus of Christian Philadelphia society. Both David Franks and his cousin, Samson Levy, were on the original list of the Assembly, Philadelphia's most exclusive social event and one of the oldest balls in America, when it was composed in 1748.
By the 1750's, Philadelphia's Jewish elite had added the Gratz family, along with the Ettings, and of course the Philadelphia branch of the Hayses. The Gratzes, like the Ettings and the Frankses, had come from Inquisitional Spain by way of Germany. In Spain, the name may have been Gracia, or Garcia. It was Philadelphia's large German-speaking population that attracted these Sephardim with German-sounding names, who had taken the German route out of Spain, and knew the language. By the mid-eighteenth century, no good Philadelphia club was without its Gratz, Etling, Franks, Levy, or Hays. They were members of the Philadelphia and the Rittenhouse clubs, the Union League, the Racquet, the Rabbit, and the City Troop, and their names decorated the membership lists -- and the lists of officers and directors and sponsors -- of such august institutions as the Historical Society, the Philosophical Society, the Academy of Art, the Academy of Science, and the Atheneum.
The Frankses and Hayses and Gratzes and Ettings not only married "within the group" but, by the time of the Revolution, had begun making brilliantly social marriages to members of Philadelphia's non-Jewish elite. In the cities to the north, where the Sephardim remained more strait-laced and orthodox, the Philadelphia Jews' behavior was looked on with something close to horror. "The German influence" was blamed for this sort of laxity -- the same Christianizing influence that would lead to the Reform movement in Judaism, in both Germany and in the United States. But these intermarriages of Philadelphia's Christian and Jewish families have meant that "Jewish blood," as they say, flows in the veins of many an old American family, from Philadelphia Morrises and Newbolds and Ingersolls to the New York Verplancks.
Abigail Levy Franks, meanwhile -- she was one half of the first Franks-Levy marriage -- was not at all sure she approved of these developments, as she watched them unfold in Philadelphia. Abigail regarded herself as an eighteenth-century aristocratic lady. But in many ways she was also a prototype Jewish mother, so familiar in fiction of modem times. She was forever wrapping up and sending off to her sons packages of preserved relishes and "smoakt fish," urging them not to forget to bathe regularly and eat three good meals daily. In correspondence to her son Naphtali Franks, covering the years 1733-1748, she repeatedly scolds him for his failure to write, or for spending too much money on gifts and "entertainments." Addressing him always as "Heartsey" (not only a term of endearment, but also a play on her son's middle name, which was Hart), she was fond of delivering Polonius-like pronouncements and advice. "You are now launched out amongst strangers," she told him upon his arrival in England on a business trip. "You must be exceeding circumspect in your conduct, be affable to all men but not credulous, nor too soon be led away by fair speeches. Be likewise a very just observer of your word in all respects, even in ye most trivial matters." She was a woman from whom it was not difficult to obtain an opinion, whether it was on the quality of a certain medicinal water or which was the "best Scotch snuff." She deplored the split between the Sephardic and the Ashkenazic Jewish communities (in New York, she had heard, Sephardic Jews were all in the East Ward, and Ashkenazic Jews were in the less fashionable Dock Ward). She disliked the noise of eighteenth-century horse-drawn traffic in the city, and complained of the gaming and drinking that went on "from Sunday night to Saturday morning." She called the ladies of her synagogue a "stupid set of people." She was literate, and fond of quoting, often inaccurately and in the erratic spelling that was typical of the age, advice from the contemporary novels of Fielding and Smollett, and from the essays of Dryden, Addison, and her favorite, Pope. She directed "Heartsey" that "Two mornings a week should be entirely untill dinner time dedicated to some useful book besides an hour every week to that purpose."
She was preoccupied with finding a suitable mate for each of her seven children, and marital matters take up much of the space in her letters to her son. She quotes Heartsey the little verse, the source of which is unknown:
[quote]Man the first happy favourite above, When heaven endowed him with a power to love. His God ne'er thought him in a blessed state Till Woman made his happyness compleat.[/quote]
And one of her great disappointments seems to have been the failure of her daughter Richa to complete a marriage alliance with David Gomez, and thereby with the illustrious Gomez family, even though David, Daniel's brother, was almost forty years Richa's senior. She adopts a sour-grapes attitude, speaking of David as "such a stupid wretch," and adds to Heartsey that even if David had proposed, she and Richa would not have accepted him anyway, probably, not even "if his fortune were much more and I a beggar." Better no marriage at all than marriage to that scoundrel, she seems to say, and Richa did indeed remain unmarried all her life, a heavy burden to her mother. Heartsey himself married his first cousin, Phila Franks, in a most satisfactory intramural manner.
Another marital calamity involved the marriage of Abigail's eldest daughter, also named Phila, to General Oliver De Lancey -- who not only eloped with Phila but had her baptized. "Good God what a shock it was," she wrote Heartsey, "when they acquainted me she had left the house and had bin married six months, I can hardly hold my pen whilst I am writing. . . ." She wrote that "Oliver has sent many times to beg leave to see me, but I never would.... Now he sent word that he will come here. . . . I dread seeing him and how to avoid I know no way." It would be difficult, since the Frankses and the De Lanceys lived next door to each other. Abigail announced that she had instructed her errant daughter never to darken her door again and said: "I am determined I never will see nor let none of ye family go near her," but she added in almost the next sentence that "Nature is very strong, and it would give me a great concern if she should live unhappy, though it's a concern she does not merit."
Abigail Franks's distress appears to have been entirely over the fact that Oliver De Lancey was a Christian, and to have had nothing to do with what might seem to have been certain deficiencies in the young man's character. Present-day members of the De Lancey family take their pre-Revolutionary ancestry very seriously but, from contemporary reports, Oliver De Lancey emerges as a scapegrace, a bounder, a drunk, and -- if we are to believe the source -- a murderer. It was said, at the time, that he married Phila Franks for her money -- a considerable inheritance left to her by her uncle Isaac. Shortly after the marriage, on November 3, 1742, Oliver was indicted for assaulting one of his wife's relatives, Judah Mears, who was the brother of Abigail Franks's stepmother. He and his friends were accused of attacking "a poor Dutch Jew and his wife," of breaking their windows, and "swearing that they would lie with the woman." Using foul language, they warned the couple not to bring charges since De Lancey and his friends were members of prominent New York families. Later the same year, according to a report from Governor George Clinton, Oliver stabbed and killed a Dr. Colchoun in a drunken brawl. This, however, may be an exaggeration or even an untruth. The De Lanceys and the Clintons were bitterest enemies, the Montagues and Capulets of early New York. It is known that Oliver De Lancey was something of a dandy and spent much of his time, and money, at the barber and at the wigmaker's.
After a while, Oliver seems to have settled down. He brought his wife to the De Lancey "country seat," which was located on what is now West Twelfth Street, west of Hudson Street, in Greenwich Village. [i] Oliver and Phila had seven children, all of whom made socially important marriages, three of them to titled Englishmen. Susannah married Sir William Draper, Phila married the Honorable Stephen Payne-Gallwey, and Charlotte married Sir David Dundas. Stephen De Lancey married Cornelia Barclay, of another old New York family, and their son became Sir William Howe De Lancey. In the next De Lancey generation there appeared, in addition to a flock of Episcopal clergymen, Count Alexander Balmain. [ii]
Meanwhile, intermarriage -- the thing which, despite her certain sophistication and attitude of tolerance, Abigail Levy Franks dreaded the most-occurred to the good Jewish mother a second time, when her son David, barely six months after his sister's marriage to De Lancey, married Margaret Evans of Philadelphia. His mother died convinced that she had been a failure as a parent.
It was the Franks-Evans union that produced the beautiful Franks sisters, Rebecca and Abigail, named after her grandmother. We see them in their portraits -- Rebecca's by Thomas Sully, who later became Philadelphia's most popular society portraitist -- pale, dark-haired, with high cheekbones, long thin noses, and arresting eyes, white and swanlike necks, white bosoms swelling over low-cut dresses. They were unquestionably belles. Rebecca, the younger and probably the more beautiful of the two, was one of the stars, along with Peggy Shippen (who married Benedict Arnold), of one of the most extraordinary affairs in the annals of American entertaining, Philadelphia's "notorious Meschianza."
The Meschianza was an altogether curious event. Just why, in the middle of a great war, British-occupied Philadelphia should have decided to treat itself to a lavish party has never been entirely clear. Perhaps everyone was tired of battles and torn loyalties, and a fancy-dress ball seemed the answer. In any case, appropriate or not, a group of British officers decided in the spring of 1779 to put on the most extravagant social entertainment the new world had ever seen. The party was to honor the British General Sir William Howe, who was returning home to England.
Within the family, to say nothing of within the Jewish community, the situation must have seemed grotesque. Cousins David and Esther Hays in Westchester were risking their lives and losing their home in order to smuggle provisions through to Revolutionary soldiers. Here, right in Philadelphia, Haym Salomon, whose wife was the Franks sisters' first cousin, was working to fill the Revolution's coffers -- and all the while the two giddy girls were planning a party to toast an enemy general. Feelings must have run strong, to say the least.
The men in charge of arrangements for the party were Major John Andre and Captain Oliver De Lancey, Jr. Both were close friends of the Franks girls. De Lancey, of course, was another first cousin, and Major Andre had been a suitor, of sorts, of Rebecca's. After being captured at Saint John's in 1775, Andre had been paroled in Philadelphia. He had been a frequent guest at the Franks mansion, where he spent a long summer of infatuation with Rebecca, then a girl in her middle teens. Dreamily, he passed the warm afternoons reading love poetry to her, and painting a delicate miniature of her face. Rebecca, like her De Lancey cousins, had already become decidedly Tory in her politics. Perhaps her affinity for kings had something to do with her ancestor whom George I had made "the Jew Broker of London." Certainly Major Andre's attentions can only have bolstered her sentiments.
For weeks before the Meschianza was to take place, Philadelphia was caught up in a Hurry of preparations. One London firm reported that it had sold more than £12,000 worth of costly silks and laces for the Philadelphia ladies' dresses. For the British officers, Savile Row shipped red-coated dress uniforms, powdered wigs, cutlasses in bejeweled scabbards.
The party was held at Walnut Grove, the country home of Joseph Wharton, a sedate Quaker, but the party was un-Quakerish in every detail. It turned out that what Major Andre and Captain De Lancey had in mind was a sort of medieval tournament-festival, along the lines of the one held at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The Philadelphia replica may well have outdone the original. There were jousts, duels, contests, and feats of strength among the young officers. There was a water festival, a regatta of brightly decorated sailboats on the river. There were parades and processions under triumphal arches. Blackamoor slaves in Oriental garb served nearly a thousand guests with fifteen varieties of champagnes and other wines, and buffet tables set up throughout the house and gardens offered an "indescribable assortment" of exotic foods, according to one report of the affair. No expense was spared, obviously, for what had been billed as "a medley of extravagance" -- which it most certainly was.
The height of the gala was the moment when fourteen "knights" -- young British officers -- in fancy costumes were divided into two teams of seven men each for a tourney. One team was called "the Knights of the Blended Rose," the other "the Knights of the Burning Mountain." After the tilting and jousting -- which was all in a light-hearted spirit, and in which no one was even slightly bruised -- each side of the tournament selected its "Queen of Beauty." The Knights of the Blended Rose chose a Miss Auchmuty. The Knights of the Burning Mountain chose Rebecca Franks. She was gowned for the occasion in what was described as "a white silk gown, trimmed with black and white sashes, edged with black. It was a polonaise dress which formed a flowing robe and was open in front to the waist. The sash, six inches wide, was filled with spangles, as was the veil, which was edged with silver lace. The headdress was towering, in the fashion of the time, and was filled with a profusion of pearls and jewels." She was nineteen years old.
After the tournament, there was a climactic grand ball with fireworks and a "royal repast." The late spring weather -- the date was May 18 -- was perfect for a party. It had started at four in the afternoon, and lasted all night long. It was midmorning the next day before the last of the revelers turned wearily homeward.
Not many miles away, in Valley Forge, a particularly harried and hard-pressed division of Continental troops was encamped where it had spent a parlous winter with heavy loss of life from disease and starvation.
A month later, the British left Philadelphia, and marched across New Jersey, to be met and defeated at Monmouth. But the memory of the lavish Meschianza rankled for a long time in the minds of the Continental generals, including General Anthony Wayne, who wrote sarcastically:
[quote]Tell those Philadelphia ladies who attended Howe's assemblies and levees, that the heavenly, sweet, pretty red-coats, the accomplished gentlemen of the guards and grenadiers, have been humbled on the plains of Monmouth. The Knights of the Blended Roses and the Burning Mount have resigned their laurels to rebel officers, who will lay them at the feet of those virtuous daughters of America who cheerfully gave up ease and affluence in a city for liberty and peace of mind in a cottage.[/quote]
Rebecca Franks had admirers on both sides of the Revolution, though she did seem to favor those with pro-British leanings or those who, intentionally or not, did things that helped the British cause. One rebel officer who fancied her was General Charles Lee. His conduct at Monmouth had been somewhat less than glorious. He took his orders from General Washington oddly lightly, and failed to do as he was told, which was to lead an attack on the British from the rear. Was this because Lee had originally been on the British side, and his loyalties still lay in that direction? Was he actually in collaboration with the enemy? There was that possibility. In any case, his behavior caused Washington to suspend him for twelve months. During this time, he engaged in a spirited correspondence with Becky Franks. Occasionally, however, General Lee overstepped himself in his letters, and he had a tendency to use double entendres in such a way that it was often possible to infer a vulgar, if not downright off color, meaning from his words.
Once, for instance, Lee wrote Rebecca a long letter about his trousers. In it, he said that she might have accused him of theft, of getting drunk, of treasonable correspondence with the enemy -- had he actually done things of this sort? -- or of "never parting with his shirt until his shirt parted with him," but that it had been unpardonably slanderous of Rebecca to say that he had worn green riding breeches patched with leather instead of green riding breeches reinforced with leather. "You have injured me in the tenderest part," he wrote to her, "and I demand satisfaction." He went on to say: "You cannot be ignorant of the laws of duelling.... I insist on the privilege of the injured party, which is to name his hour and weapons. . . . I intend it to be a very serious affair."
This sort of coarse talk -- "tenderest part" indeed! -- was too much for a properly bred Philadelphia lady like Rebecca Franks. She wrote him tersely to say that she considered his innuendos excessively vulgar, and that she wished to have no further correspondence with General Lee. He, however, quickly apologized and Rebecca eventually took him back into her circle.
Meanwhile, Rebecca's Tory and Tory-oriented friends were not doing her father any good at all, nor does Rebecca's behavior give any evidence that she was aware in the slightest of the trouble she was causing him. The British had left Philadelphia. The extravagant display of the Meschianza had left a poor impression. Public opinion associated David Franks with his party-loving daughter, and his business began to suffer. As one of Philadelphia's most important merchants, David Franks had been a logical choice for commissary to the British prisoners quartered in the city. Now the fact that he had fed and supplied the British -- even though they were prisoners of the United States -- began to be held against him. In September of 1778, for lack of cash, he was unable to deliver the prisoners their monthly rations and, this excuse being all they needed, the federal authorities promptly arrested David Franks and threw him into prison. The charge was treason against the United States of America.
A mysterious letter, which, if it ever existed, never appeared during the trial, and has never been seen since, was the chief piece of evidence against him. Allegedly written to his brother Moses in England, the letter was said to have contained "intentions inimical to the safety and liberty of the United States." David Franks may well have been in an inimical frame of mind about the United States and about England as well. The arrangement for him to be paid for feeding and quartering British prisoners had been a quaint one. He had been given the job by the Continental Congress. But he was to have been paid, his orders stipulated, by the British. The British, however, who had perhaps not been consulted in the matter, showed a certain reluctance when it came down to actually reimbursing Mr. Franks for his expenditures and, by December, 1778, Franks was in the dismaying position of owing his creditors for over 500,000 meals supplied to British prisoners in American hands. He had written to the British about this pressing matter. In a series of anxious letters to the Lords of the Treasury, he had outlined his plight; the Lords simply referred him back to Sir Henry Clinton in America, who did nothing.
With her father languishing in prison, Rebecca Franks went right on going to parties. At one ball, a high-ranking American officer made an entrance wearing a bright scarlet coat, and Rebecca Franks was overheard to comment sarcastically, "I see certain animals will put on the lion's skin." The story was printed in the paper, noting that Rebecca was "a lady well known in the Tory world." Though she might have done well to ignore the report, she instead decided to issue a snappy rejoinder, and in a succeeding issue of the newspaper she commented:
[quote]There are many people so unhappy in their dispositions that, like the dog in the manger, they can neither enjoy the innocent pleasures of life themselves nor let others, without grumbling or growling, participate in them. Hence it is we frequently observe hints and anecdotes in your paper respecting the commanding officer, headquarters, and Tory ladies. This mode of attacking characters is really admirable, and equally as polite as conveying slander and defamation by significant nods, winks, and shrugs. Poor beings indeed, who plainly indicate to what species of animals they belong, by the baseness of their conduct.[/quote]
To have defended her "innocent pleasures" at this particular moment, and in the public press, seems callous indeed. Soon after, however, her father's case was thrown out of court for lack of evidence, and he was released.
David Franks continued to try to collect his money from the British, and begged to be allowed to go personally to British-held New York to see what he could do. His daughter, he wrote, would like to accompany him and "would be very happy in taking a view of the Mall, or having a ramble under the holy old trees in the Broad-way." In October, 1780, he was arrested again for corresponding with the enemy in New York -- which he had most certainly been doing in an attempt to resolve his financial problems -- and this time his punishment was exile to New York, which was exactly what he wanted. He and Rebecca left Philadelphia late that year in high spirits.
Rebecca not only had her ramble on Broadway. She also had more parties with British officers.A captain's barge, she wrote, was ready down at the wharf to carry guests to General Robertson's summer home, up the river, for a gala weekend. Her letters were filled with chatter about her beaux. There was Captain Montague, for instance -- "Such eyes!" -- and she was always most impressed with a suitor who had a title. At one point she was being wooed by no less than three Honorables, one with an income of "£26,000 a year!" Her view of New York was somewhat condescending. She was irked to find that in New York it was impossible for her to step out unchaperoned by an older woman, that this was considered unsafe. "We Philadelphians," she wrote, "knowing no harm, fear'd none." The quality of New York entertaining, she felt, was beneath Philadelphia standards, and she found New York ladies short on conversation and addicted to card playing. In a long letter to her sister Abigail, Rebecca wrote:
[quote]Few N. York ladies know how to entertain company in their own houses unless they introduce the card tables. . . . I don't know a woman or girl that can chat above half an hour, and that's on the form of a cap, the color of a ribbon, or the set of a hoop stay or jupon [petticoat]. I will do our ladies, that is Philadelphians, the justice to say they have more cleverness in the turn of an eye than the New York girls have in their whole composition. With what ease I have seen a Chew, a Penn, Oswald, Allen, and a thousand others entertain a large circle of both sexes, and the conversation without the aid of cards not Hag or seem the least strained or stupid.
Here, or more properly speaking in N.Y., you enter the room with a formal set curtsy and after the how do's, 'tis a fine or a bad day, and those trifling nothings are finished, then all's a dead calm till the cards are introduced when you see pleasure dancing in the eye of all the matrons, and they seem to gain new life.[/quote]
Rebecca also had salty comments to make on the courting habits of young New York ladies and gentlemen:
[quote]The misses, if they have a favorite swain, frequently decline playing [cards] for the pleasure of making love, for to all appearances 'tis the ladies and not the gentlemen that show a preference nowadays. 'Tis here, I fancy, always leap year. For my part, that am used to quite another mode of behavior, cannot help showing my surprise, perhaps they call it ignorance, when I see a lady single out her pet to lean almost in his arms at an assembly or play house (which I give my honor I have too often seen both in married and single), and to hear a lady confes a partiality for a man who perhaps she has not seen three times. These women say, "Well, I declare, such a gentleman is a delightful creature, and I could love him for my husband," or "I could marry such and such a person." And scandal says with respect to most who have been married, the advances have first come from the ladies' side. Or she has got a male friend to introduce him and puff her off. 'Tis really the case, and with me they lose half their charms; and I fancy there would be more marriage was another mode adopted. But they've made the men so saucy that I sincerely believe the lowest ensign thinks 'tis but ask and have; a red coat and smart epaulet is sufficient to secure a female heart.[/quote]
Her appraisals of female contemporaries were frank and gossipy. Of a Miss Cornelia Van Horn, Rebecca wrote:
[quote]She is in disposition as fine a girl as ever you saw, a great deal of good humor and good sense. Her person is too large for a beauty, in my opinion (and yet I am not partial to a little woman). Her complexion, eyes, and teeth are very good, and a great quantity of light brown hair (Entre nous, the girls of New York excell us Philadelphians in that particular and in their form), and a sweet countenance and agreeable smile. Her feet, as you desire, I'll say nothing about; they are Van Horns' and what you'd call Willings. [iii] But her sister Kitty is the belle of the family, I think, though some give preference to Betsy.... Kitty's form is much in the style of our admired Mrs. Galloway, but rather taller and larger, her complexion very fine, and the finest hair I ever saw. Her teeth are beginning to decay, which is the case of most New York girls after eighteen -- and a great deal of elegance of manners.[/quote]
But it was the men and the parties that received most of Becky Franks's attention. "Yesterday," she wrote, "the grenadiers had a race at the Flatlands (Long Island), and in the afternoon this house swarmed with beaus and some very smart ones. How the girls would have envied me could they have peeped and seen how I was surrounded." Six months after the above was written, Rebecca married one of her handsome, titled swains, Sir Henry Johnson. The American Revolution ruined her father. He never succeeded in obtaining a fraction of the money the British owed him and, in later years, David Franks appears to have survived by obtaining a series of small loans from Michael Gratz, one of his fellow Sephardim in Philadelphia.
But his daughter had made a brilliant marriage and, in later years, she also appears to have changed her politics. In 1816, after England had lost both the Revolution and the War of 1812, Rebecca, now Lady Johnson, was visited in London by General Winfield Scott, the dashing hero -- a general at the age of twenty-eight -- of the latter war. She had lost her looks, but not her enthusiasm, and she said to Scott, "I have gloried in my rebel countrymen I Would to God I, too, had been a patriot!"
Rebecca and her sister Abigail were responsible for elevating the Franks family name into the highest society on both sides of the Atlantic. Rebecca's descendants, the Johnsons of Bath, stud Burke's Peerage as well as the officer corps of the British Army. Of her nine grandsons, three were generals, one was a major general, one a lieutenant general, two were colonels, one a captain. The ninth became an Episcopal clergyman.
Abigail, meanwhile, married Andrew Hamilton, the jurist of whom it is said that "All Philadelphia lawyers look on him as their exemplar." In addition to the American Hamiltons, not to be sneezed at, her family tree has become decorated with such imposing names as Sir Thomas Whichcote; the Honorable Henry Campbell Bruce, Lord Aberdare; Orlando Bridgeman, fifth earl of Bradford; Sir Robert Edward Henry Abdy, fifth baronet; Algernon Henry Strutt, third Baron Belper; Albert Edward Harry Mayer Archibald Primrose, sixth earl of Rosebery; and Edward Kenelm Digby, eleventh Baron Digby. The list of descendants of Abigail Franks is topped off by the former Mrs. Randolph Churchill, and by the actual entrance of the blood royal, which occurred when Lady Lavinia Mary, the earl of Rosebery's daughter, married Bernard Marmaduke Fitzalan Howard, sixteenth duke of Norfolk.
It seems a respectable enough collection of descendants for an eighteenth-century Philadelphia Jewish mother whose greatest ambition was for her daughter to marry a Gomez.
In retrospect, Becky Franks appears to us as a vain, frivolous, fickle woman, single-mindedly dedicated to her "innocent pleasures" and little else, committed to taking the center of the stage and getting what she wanted. Her contemporary in Philadelphia society, Rebecca Gratz -- also renowned for her beauty -- was a very different sort of person: serious, a do-gooder, a premature Victorian, a little stuffy, something of a bluestocking. The Gratzes were "connected" with the Franks family, via the Hayses and the Ettings. One of Rebecca Gratz's sisters, for example, had married Reuben Etting II (Esther Etting Hays's first cousin, named after Esther's brother who had died as a British prisoner), and another sister was Mrs. Samuel Hays. The Gratzes rather disapproved of the high-living Franks family, particularly the girls, and the Gratzes found it rather comforting to remember that David Franks, whose family had carried on in such a purse-proud manner, had had to turn to a Gratz-Rebecca Gratz's father -- for financial help in his latter years.
The Gratzes also disapproved of intermarriage, and they disapproved of what they heard about the Jewish community of New Orleans, of the loose and backsliding ways that seemed to prevail in that southern city. In 1807, Rebecca Gratz wrote her brother Joseph a cautioning letter before he set out for a trip south:
[quote]. . . At New Orleans, there are many who call themselves Jews, or at least whose parentage being known are obliged to acknowledge themselves such, but who neglect those duties which would make that title honorable and then respected -- among such as [you] my dear Jo, I hope you will never make one; be asured the worthy and the thinking part of the community will ever estimate a man, by his attention to the serious, domestic duties which speak more truly his character than the external forms in which he presents himself to the world; who would depend on a man's engagements with his fellow men, if he violates his more important engagements with God?[/quote]
She may well have had in mind just such men as Judah Touro, about whom it was already being said that he paid little attention to his religion. If Rebecca Franks liked to fill her days with party-going and flirtation, Rebecca Gratz preferred more serious pursuits. She was literary, and enjoyed the company of painters and writers, including William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Tuckerman, and Washington Irving. She was philanthropic. In her Sully portrait, we see a demurely smiling beauty: olive-skinned, with soft dark brown eyes, black hair under a heart-shaped hat from which falls a bit of white lace draping. Her yellow mantle is lined with white fur. John Sartain, in The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, described a visit to Rebecca Gratz: "Her eyes struck me as piercingly dark, yet mild of expression, in a face tenderly pale. The portrait Sully painted of her must have been a remarkable likeness, that so many years after I should recognize her instantly by remembrance of her." Meanwhile, according to her relative Gratz Van Rensselaer: "The Gratz family mansion was known far and "vide as the home of a refined and elegant hospitality. Gifted and distinguished guests -- illustrious statesmen, and eminent persons from abroad whom choice or vicissitude brought to this country -- found there an appreciative welcome."
A particularly close friend of Rebecca Gratz's was Matilda Hoffman. It was in the office of Matilda's father, Judge Ogden Hoffman, that Washington Irving studied law, and presently Miss Hoffman and Washington Irving became engaged. But before the pair could marry, Miss Hoffman became ill with "wasting disease," a common affliction of the day, and Rebecca went to live at the Hoffmans' to help nurse her friend. Rebecca was there to close Matilda's eyes at the end.
This devotion of one young woman to another impressed Irving. When he went to England to try to forget his sweetheart's death, Rebecca Gratz and her kindness to Matilda became almost an obsession with him. He could talk of little else but the Jewess' services to her Christian friend. One of the people he told the story to was Sir Walter Scott, and from this the legend has descended that Scott -- who never met Rebecca Gratz -- used her as his model for the character Rebecca in Ivanhoe. It is probably true, but the evidence is not as clear-cut as it might be. It has been said, for example, that when Ivanhoe was published, Scott sent Irving a first edition inscribed: "How does my Rebecca compare with yours?" Actually, Scott wrote Irving a letter saying, in somewhat different words: "How do you like your Rebecca? Does the Rebecca I have pictured compare well with the pattern given?" -- a small, possibly insignificant, difference.
Rebecca Gratz, meanwhile, was clearly pleased to think that she and Rebecca in Ivanhoe were the same person. She read the novel in 1820 and immediately wrote to her sister-in-law: "Have you received Ivanhoe? When you read it tell me what you think of my namesake Rebecca." A few weeks later she wrote again:
[quote]I am glad you admire Rebecca, for she is just such a representation of a good girl as I think human nature can reach. Ivanhoe's insensibility to her, you must recollect, may be accounted to his previous attachment -- his prejudice was a characteristic of the age he lived in -- he fought for Rebecca, though he despised her race -- the veil that is drawn over his feelings was necessary to the fable, and the beautiful sensibility of hers, so regulated yet so intense, might show the triumph of faith over human affection. I have dwelt on this character as we sometimes do on an exquisite painting until the canvas seems to breathe and we believe it is life.[/quote]
In later years, when asked -- and she frequently was -- whether she was Rebecca of Scott's romance, she would merely smile primly and change the subject.
One aspect of Rebecca Gratz's story that must have appealed to Scott's sentimental nature -- so much so that he may easily have been tempted to borrow it for his tale -- was that Rebecca, in life, like Rebecca in fiction, had had an unhappy love affair with a Christian. He had been young Samuel Ewing, the son of the Presbyterian provost of the University of Pennsylvania. He had escorted Rebecca to the Assembly ball of 1802. But Rebecca's parents, and Rebecca herself, had always opposed intermarriage with non-Jews. Rebecca's and young Ewing's love was star-crossed from the beginning. Faith, as she put it, had to triumph over affection.
Rebecca Gratz was nearly forty when she read Ivanhoe. She could look back on events of twenty years before with equanimity. In time, Sam Ewing had made a proper Philadelphia wedding, to one of the Redman girls. But it was not a happy union, and he died young. When he was lying in his coffin there was a sudden hush in the church as the heavily veiled figure of Rebecca Gratz appeared in the doorway. She moved swiftly to the coffin, placed a small object on his breast, and just as swiftly departed. The object was a miniature portrait of herself. With it were three white roses, crossed to form a six-pointed star.
She never married. She devoted her life to good deeds. She founded the Philadelphia Orphan Society, in 1815. She became secretary of the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances. She founded the Hebrew Sunday School Society, the first of its kind in America. She helped found the Jewish Foster Home. She began and ended each day with prayer. When her sister, Rachel Gratz Moses, died in 1823, Rebecca helped raise Rachel's nine small children. Her spirit showed in her face. After painting her, Thomas Sully said that he had "never seen a more striking Hebraic face. The easy pose, suggestive of perfect health, the delicately turned neck and shoulders with the firmly poised head and its profusion of dark curling hair, large, clear black eyes, the contour of the face, the fine white skin, the expressive mouth and the firmly chiselled nose, with its strength of character, left no doubt as to the race from which she had sprung. Possessed of an elegant bearing, a melodiously sympathetic voice, a simple and frank and gracious womanliness, there was about Rebecca Gratz all that a princess of the blood Royal might have coveted." What better description of a heroine of fiction?
The religious school she founded still operates, and Rebecca Gratz foundations continue to dispense funds in Philadelphia. In later Gratz generations, family strictures against marrying Christians relaxed considerably. Collateral Gratz descendants mday are named Wallace, Rowland, Taylor, Brewster, Marshall, McClure, and Gillette. Her brother's great-granddaughter is the present Mrs. Godfrey S. Rockefeller of Greenwich, Connecticut.
Helen Gratz Rockefeller is a handsome, cheerful woman in her sixties who recalls, of the Gratz relatives whom she knew: "We were a rather tempestuous, almost violent family. Life was hardly ever placid. My grandfather, Henry Howard Gratz, had a terrible temper and was something of a despot. He used to terrify us. He'd do things like throw his cane at you if he caught you eating an apple. He had three wives. The third one he married when he was seventy, and she was only thirty. She adored him, but when he was cross with her he'd throw all of her flowerpots out the window. But we had a terribly strong sense of family obligation. We stuck together through thick and thin."
Mrs. Rockefeller says: "The Gratz family fortune was pretty well diminished by the time it reached my grandfather's generation. My father, Benjamin Gratz III, left home with two dollars and fifty cents in his pocket when he was in his early twenties. The two dollars was stolen, but with the fifty cents he built up a whole new fortune for himself, and took care of everybody in the family -- aunts, uncles, relatives from miles around. We all lived together in Saint Louis. There was a great deal of singing together and reading aloud." Though Mrs. Rockefeller is proud of her Jewish heritage, the Gratzes she descends from have been Episcopalians from her grandfather's generation on, if not from even before. It strikes her as quaintly ironic that her collateral ancestor Rebecca Gratz should have remained unmarried for life because she loved a Christian, whereas Gratzes in subsequent generations have displayed a tendency to marry several times -- her grandfather three times, and her father twice. As a child, growing up in Saint Louis, she recalls her parents as stalwart churchgoers, and Bishop Tuttle of Saint Louis was a regular guest at the Gratz Sunday dinner table. Mrs. Rockefeller remembers her mother asking the deaf old bishop, "Do you like bananas, Bishop?" and the bishop cupping his ear to inquire, "What was that?" "Do you like bananas, Bishop?" Mrs. Gratz asked in a louder voice. "No," the bishop replied, "I prefer the old-fashioned nightshirt."
There is no question that the social distinction, and the charm, of early American Jewish women, as well as the financial assistance and business probity of the men, all helped George Washington who, after all, was an aristocratic Virginian and something of a snob -- to look with favor on Jews as a whole, as a people, as a valuable part of the new nation. Jewish officers, including two cousins of the Franks sisters, served on his staff. Colonel David Salisbury Franks-Haym Salomon's brother-in-law -- was Washington's emissary to Paris, where he carried dispatches between Washington and Ambassador Benjamin Franklin; he also delivered copies of the 1784 treaty of peace with England to the American embassies in Europe. Colonel Isaac Franks, called "the boy hero of the Revolution" (he was only sixteen when he enlisted), rose in the ranks until he was attached to headquarters as General Washington's aide-de-camp.
But at the war's end, the still relative minority of Jews in the country looked at their new government with a certain apprehensiveness. After all, not all had backed the Revolutionary cause. And for three hundred years, under a variety of monarchs and colonial leaders, under many Bags, these ancient, proud, and highly bred families from Spain and Portugal had received treatment that had been, at best, uneven and, at its worst, calamitous. Which way would the winds blow now?
When George Washington was inaugurated as first President of the United States of America, the heads of the Jewish communities in Philadelphia, New York, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah all wrote cautious letters to the new chief executive. They reminded him, as politely as possible, of the kind of country they hoped the United States would be. Moses Seixas, head of the Newport congregation, put it best. Would the world now see, he asked, :a Government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance, but generously affording to all liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship, deeming everyone of whatever nation, tongue and language, equal parts of the great government machine?"
Seixas' letter obviously impressed the President, for he actually borrowed some of Seixas' rhetoric in his reply:
[quote]GENTLEMEN:
While I receive with much satisfaction your address replete with expressions of esteem, I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you that I shall always retain grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced on my visit to Newport from all classes of citizens.
The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are passed is rendered the more sweet from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security.
If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government to become a great and happy people.
The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural right, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection shall demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my administration and fervent wishes for my felicity.
May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.
May the Father of all Mercies scatter light, and not darkness upon our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way, everlasting happy.
G. WASHINGTON[/quote]
In his sometimes jawbreaking prose, he was uttering almost dreamily noble sentiments, painting a picture of America's future that was close to utopian. But the heart of "G. Washington" was in the right place.
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[b]Notes:[/b]
i. Alexander Hamilton, a frequent traveler, wrote in the summer of 1744: "At twelve o'clock we passed a little town, starboard, called Greenwitch, consisting of eight or ten neat houses, and two or three miles above that on the same shore, a pretty box of a house with an avenue fronting the river belonging to Oliver De Lancey."
ii. Kin, though distantly, of the Paris couturier Pierre Balmain.
iii. The Willings, partners of Robert Morris, apparently had big feet.
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