Two Thousand Two Hundred Shirts — Sarah Franklin Bache

The linen comes in bolts. It goes out in shirts. The parlor on Market Street has been turned into a cutting room, and the long table holds nothing now but cloth and the penciled slips of paper that say who will sew each piece and where it will go. The army is in New Jersey. The army is cold. The army has been cold for three winters.

It is 1780.

She does not just raise money. She leads sixty women through the streets of Philadelphia, door to door, collecting what the Continental Army cannot requisition and the Congress cannot fund.

She does not just organize. She oversees the cutting, the counting, the sorting by size, and the instruction that every seamstress will sew her own name into the collar of her shirt so the soldier who puts it on will know whose hands made it.

She does not just deliver. She writes to General Washington herself, in her own hand, that there are two thousand and five in number, and she wishes them to be worn with as much pleasure as they were made.

She does not just manage her father’s house while he negotiates in Paris. She is the reason his American correspondence stays alive, his network intact, his influence operable for seven years of absence.

Her Spark of Liberty was the work that does not look like work.

She counted shirts the way her father counted arguments, the way her country counted votes, with the knowledge that the number was the thing that mattered and that someone had to be the one who got it right.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

She was born in Philadelphia in September 1743, the only surviving daughter of Benjamin and Deborah Read Franklin. She married the merchant Richard Bache in October 1767 over her father’s initial objections and built a household that became the anchor of the Franklin family’s American life during the Revolution. When Esther DeBerdt Reed, co-founder of the Ladies Association of Philadelphia, died of dysentery in September 1780, she assumed leadership of the campaign and saw it through to completion. The two thousand two hundred linen shirts, each marked with the seamstress’s name, reached Colonel Miles at Trenton before the river froze. General Washington wrote to her on January 13, 1781, to acknowledge their receipt. After the war she cared for her father through the final five years of his life after his return from France, managing his household, his visitors, and his American affairs until his death in April 1790. She died in Philadelphia in October 1808.

Her name was Sarah Franklin Bache.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

The Speedwell’s Confession, Book One of the Sparks of Liberty series, is live on Amazon Kindle and free with Kindle Unlimited: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GZ5QH7L8

www.NowWeKnowEm.com

#NowWeKnowEm #SparksOfLiberty #TurningPointPress #QuietHands #AmericanRevolution #WomensHistory