Since 1787 he had been president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, founded by the Quakers, and his signature was on a memorial which the society sent to Congress on February 12, 1790, advocating the abolition of slavery. Congress dismissed the memorial on the grounds that it had no authority to interfere in the internal affairs of the states. Whereupon Franklin promptly published an essay, “On the Slave Trade,” in which a mythical Algerian, Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, used the same arguments as the Negro slave owners to defend his right to Christian slaves! The piece showed the same barbs of wit and satire as his earlier writings. His campaign against slavery was his last public activity. His pain now kept him bedridden, but he did some work, using Benjamin Bache as his secretary, and he found the energy to listen to his nine-year-old granddaughter Deborah recite lessons from her Webster spelling book. In March, Thomas Jefferson, on his way to accept his post as Secretary of State under President George Washington, came to see him, and on April 8, he wrote Jefferson his last letter, a clear account of the map which he and the other peace commissioners used in fixing the boundary between Maine and Nova Scotia. He was now running a high temperature. Breathing became so difficult that he nearly suffocated. When, briefly, he felt a little better, he rose from his bed, begging that it might be made up fresh for him so he could die in a decent manner. His daughter Sally told him she hoped he would recover and live many years longer. “I hope not,” he said calmly. They put him back to bed and his physician advised him to change his position so he could breathe more easily. “A dying man can do nothing easy,” he commented. Soon afterwards he fell in a coma. Temple and Benjamin Bache, his grandsons, were alone with him when, on April 17, 1790, at the age of eighty-four and three months, the end came. His death brought an abrupt halt to the petty recriminations that had saddened his last months. In Philadelphia, the city that had grown up with him and because of him, muffled bells tolled, and flags on the ships in the harbor hung at half mast. Some 20,000 attended his funeral, the greatest number the city had ever seen gathered in one spot. As he was lowered into his grave in the Christ Church burying ground beside his wife, a company of militia artillery fired funeral guns in honor of the man who had organized Pennsylvania’s first militia. In New York, by a motion passed unanimously, the United States House of Representatives voted to wear mourning for a month. Neither the Senate nor the Executive Council followed the example of the House. Ironically, the man chosen to pronounce his funeral eulogy at the Lutheran German Church in Philadelphia was William Smith, his ancient enemy. Although Smith did not do him justice, the crowd before the pulpit sobbed openly.