To Benjamin Franklin from Sarah Bache, [before 19 June 1784]
From Sarah Bache
ALS: American Philosophical Society
[before June 19, 1784]6
Honoured Sir
This will be handed to you by Major Du Pontier, Aid of your Friend Baron Stuben’s,7 who I shall thank you for your attention to, we have found him a very amiable young Gentleman, he will tell you how the Children all look, and what a delightful retreat I have brought them to,8 till a few days ago I flattered myself you would have been with us on Schuilkill Banks this Summer, I shall in a few days write you a long letter,9 one to my Nephew1 and another to my Son they must now be contented with my Love at present, I have been very busy nursing little Richard who has been at the point of death but is now getting quite well and lovely came here but yesterday, and the Major has been polite enough tho going tomorow to come out to see us and take this, so that I could not request him to stay till I wrote all I have to say, I beg therefore Temple will take this as an introduction of the Gentleman to him as well as to you as much as if I wrote. Mr B: is well I expect to see him at dinner.
I am as ever your dutiful and afectionate Daughter
S Bache
Addressed: Dr: Franklin / Passy / [Maj?] Depontiere
6. This is the first of three letters from SB that refer to one another and follow in quick succession. Only the last one is dated, thanks to her husband’s intervention; it was begun on June 20. There SB mentions that she had just finished a letter to BF; we date that one [on or before June 20]. In that undated letter, SB states that she had written BF “a short letter the other day” which she entrusted to Maj. de Pontiére, a clear reference to the present text. If we assume that “the other day” meant something other than “yesterday,” she had to have written the letter before June 19.
7. Louis de Pontière, a Frenchman who had served as aide-de-camp to Baron von Steuben starting in February, 1778, and been promoted to the rank of brevet major by Congress in September, 1783, was by this time retired from his service in the American military and apparently on the verge of returning to France: Asa B. Gardiner, The Order of the Cincinnati in France … (n.p., 1905), p. 175; Heitman, Register of Officers, p. 332; JCC, XXVI 43, 65.
8. The Baches were renting the Cliffs, a modest house overlooking the Schuylkill River outside Philadelphia that the Quaker merchant Joshua Fisher had built in 1753. Fisher died in 1783, leaving the property to his son Samuel Rowland Fisher. On June 25, 1784, RB, drawing on BF’s account, made a £60 rent payment to the lawyer Miers Fisher, Samuel’s younger brother: Harold D. Eberlein and Cortlandt V. D. Hubbard, Portrait of a Colonial City: Philadelphia, 1670–1838 (Philadelphia, 1939), pp. 310–12; Penrose R. Hoopes, “Cash Dr to Benjamin Franklin,” PMHB, LXXX (1956), 64; Anna W. Smith, Genealogy of the Fisher Family, 1682 to 1896 (Philadelphia, 1896), pp. 27, 34, 50.
9. We date that letter [on or before June 20, 1784].
1. SB’s letter to WTF was dated June 21, 1784 (APS).