The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

by Gordon S. Wood

  Philadelphia may have become the cultural and commercial center of the new nation, but it was still plagued by factional politics. Franklin, in fact, arrived in the middle of an election campaign between the two rudimentary parties that had emerged in Pennsylvania since 1776. On one side were the Constitutionalists, dominated by artisans and Scotch-Irish western farmers who supported the radical Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, which Franklin had helped to draft. On the other side were the Republicans, dominated by Anglicans and wealthy merchants and professionals who wanted to change the state’s constitution by introducing a governor

  Franklin, by Charles Willson Peale, 1785

  and an upper house and to bring the constitution more into line with those of the other states. In hopes of bringing unity to the state, both parties nominated Franklin for the executive council (a group of twelve that served as the executive in place of a governor). Franklin admitted that he “had not sufficient Firmness to refuse their Support.”33 Following his election, the council and assembly then elected him president of the council.

  Thus, only a few weeks after his arrival he had become the head of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It all had happened so fast that he scarcely had time to think about what he had done. At seventy-nine he was old, tired, and suffering from gout as well as bladder or kidney stones, and yet he had gotten himself into a “Business more troublesome than that I have lately quitted.”34 George Washington, who had conspicuously retired from all public business in 1785, thought Franklin was out of his mind to accept any political office. But Franklin had heard so many stories of how suspicious many Americans had been of him that the enthusiastic reception in Pennsylvania had gone to his head. He knew he ought to quit public life and enjoy some of the well-earned rest that he had yearned for in France, but his desire to be thought well of was too strong. Accepting the office of president of Pennsylvania seemed to vindicate his virtue.

  He accepted reelection to the office twice more, in 1786 and 1787 (with no dissenting vote except his own); and he perhaps avoided a fourth term only because the Pennsylvania Constitution prohibited it. Whatever his status might have been with some of the rest of the American people, most of the citizens of Pennsylvania, except for a fashionable few, revered him.35 “This universal and unbounded confidence of a whole People,” he told his sister after his third election to the presidency, “flatters my Vanity much more than a Peerage could do.”36

  This emotional need to be elected to office in order to boost his morale was sad. Franklin had devoted much of his life to serving the American public, and yet some members of that public still seemed to doubt him. Despite praise from individual Americans and the naming of a renegade state in western North Carolina after him (later part of Tennessee), he was still uncertain about his reputation in his own country. Indeed, he found himself in the embarrassing position of having to write friends to find out what his fellow Americans really thought of him. He knew there were “Calumnies propagated” against him, “which appeared all to emanate from the Brantry Focus,” that is, the Adamses of Braintree, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, he also knew that at his age, and considering who he was and what he had done, he should not be so concerned with what people thought of him. “You see,” he admitted, “that old as I am, I am not yet grown insensible, with respect to Reputation.”37

  THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

  In March 1787 the Pennsylvania Assembly appointed Franklin to the state’s delegation to the Convention that was to meet in Philadelphia in May to revise the Articles of Confederation. Although Franklin was confident that America was growing and prospering even under the Confederation, he realized that America’s experiment in republicanism was on trial and that the Convention was designed to prove that free government could sustain itself. Even before the Convention met, Franklin organized the Society for Political Enquiries, which met weekly in Franklin’s home seeking to study political science as the American Philosophical Society studied natural science.

  On May 16, 1787, Franklin, as he explained to an English correspondent, hosted a dinner for “what the French call une assemblée des notables, a convention composed of some of the principal people from the several states of our confederation.”38 On May 25 this Constitutional Convention, this assembly of notables, finally had a quorum and began meeting officially. Franklin, described by one observer at the time as “a short, fat, trunched old man, in a plain Quaker dress, bald pate, and short white locks,” was the oldest member in attendance. As the oldest he was supposed to nominate George Washington as president of the Convention, but heavy rain kept him home.39 Instead, the Pennsylvania delegation as a whole nominated Washington, which, James Madison noted, was an act of “particular grace, as Doctor Franklin alone could have been thought of as a competitor.”40

  Although most of the delegates did not know Franklin personally, they did know him by reputation—as, in the words of William Pierce of Georgia, “the greatest philosopher of the age.” Whatever Franklin’s reputation as a philosopher, his claim to be a politician, Pierce thought, would have to wait for posterity to judge. Franklin was certainly unimpressive in public council. “He is no Speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage his attention.” Nevertheless, said Pierce, he was “a most extraordinary Man,” who “tells a story in a style more engaging than anything I ever heard.”41

  Franklin did not often speak in the Convention, and when he did have more than a few words to say, he wrote out his speeches and had them read for him, since it was painful for him to stand. Most of his efforts were designed to conciliate and bring the delegates together, but he did make one important proposal concerning an issue that was dear to his heart. On June 2, he moved that all members of the executive branch in the new government should serve without pay.

  He had long believed that there were “two Passions which have a powerful Influence in the Affairs of Men ... Ambition and Avarice; the Love of Power and the Love of Money.” Each separately was a forceful spur to action, but when united in the minds of some men they had the most violent effects. “Place before the Eyes of such Men a Post of Honour, that shall at the same time be a place of Profit, and they will move Heaven and Earth to obtain it.”42 The result had always been continual struggles between factions and the eventual destruction of all virtue. Franklin’s evidence for his views was England. For many years he had believed, as he never tired of telling his English friends or anyone else who would listen, that “the Root of the Evil” in England’s politics lay “in the enormous Salaries, Emoluments, and Patronage” of its “Great Offices.”43 Although Americans may now start out with moderate salaries for their rulers, pressures would arise to increase them, and eventually, he feared, America would end up as a monarchy. There was, he said, “a natural Inclination in Mankind to kingly Government.”

  If some thought his idea that all executive officials serve without salary was too utopian, he offered the examples of sheriffs, judges, and the arbiters in Quaker meetings who served without pay. “In all Cases of public Service, the less the Profit the greater the Honour.” His final example was Washington, who as commander in chief had served eight years without salary. He was sure there were enough men of public spirit in America who would do the same in civil offices. (During his mission to France, Franklin had been on salary, although he had a hard time extracting it from the Congress.) Although his motion was seconded, it was tabled and never taken up again. “It was treated with great respect,” Madison noted, “but rather for the author of it than from any conviction of its expediency or practicability.”44

  Franklin’s proposal was classically republican, presuming, as it did, that civic life demanded virtue and self-sacrifice from its citizens. But this classically republican proposal was inevitably aristocratic and patrician in implication—one that would have confined the executive branch of the national government to wealthy gentlemen like Washington and himself who were rich enough to be able to devote themselves to public service. The proposal had gr
own out of his own experience, his own life, his own understanding of himself. Four decades earlier he as a wealthy tradesman had retired from business to dedicate his leisured life to philosophy and public service. In the future, could not others do the same? Only through such virtue and self-sacrifice could the pride, vanity, and desire for self-aggrandizement of ambitious individuals be prevented from destroying the state. He knew the power of his own pride and ambition and he knew how he had diverted that power into benevolence and good works. He had long believed in this aristocratic and classical notion of public service and had written it into the otherwise democratic Pennsylvania Constitution in 1776. It was as central to his life as anything he believed in. In a codicil to his will written a year before his death he once again stated his deeply held conviction that “in a democratical state there ought to be no offices of profit.”45

  But Franklin was no defender of a traditional aristocracy; indeed, he had a deep dislike of aristocratic pretensions, sharpened by the ways some Philadelphians had snubbed him since his return to America in 1785. Given his background, Franklin could have little interest in aristocratic claims of blood. His criticism of the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary organization of retired Continental army officers created in 1783, was as strong as anyone’s in America. He believed in honors and distinctions, but not in their being passed on to heirs. “For Honour worthily obtain’d, as that for Example of our Officers,” he told his daughter in 1784, “is in its Nature a personal Thing, and incommunicable to any but those who had some Share in obtaining it.... Let the Distinction die with those who have merited it.”46

  In 1789 plans were being laid for the meeting of a Pennsylvania state constitutional convention to revise the much criticized radical constitution of 1776. All sorts of proposals for reform, including creating a single independent governor and a two-house legislature, were flying about the press, and Franklin responded to one of these. In his remarks, which were never published, he laid out his political thinking with remarkable clarity, demonstrating once and for all that in the context of traditional eighteenth-century assumptions of politics he was an enthusiastic democrat.

  In his ardent defense of the 1776 document, which he had helped create, he opposed a single executive magistrate and any lengthening of the executive’s one-year term. Anything longer would put Pennsylvanians on the slippery slope toward monarchy, or at least a monarchy for life, like that of Poland. But it was the constitutional reformers’ desire to replace the unicameral legislature with a bicameral one, including an upper house or senate, that really provoked him and led to a series of angry and sprawling queries and protests. Wouldn’t the two houses fight with each other and cause expensive delays and promote factions among the people? Didn’t we Pennsylvanians learn a lesson from the mischief caused by the aristocratic proprietary council that acted as an upper house in the colony? he asked. Why couldn’t the wisdom that was supposed to exist in the upper house exist just as well in a single body? Haven’t we seen neighboring states torn apart by contention, their governments paralyzed by splits between the two houses of their legislatures? Has our single-house legislature committed any major errors that it hasn’t remedied by itself? A two-house legislature was like a twoheaded snake trying to reach a brook for a drink, he said; it had to pass through a hedge but was blocked by a twig. One head wanted to go right, the other left, and consequently “before the Decision was completed, the poor Snake died of thirst.”

  What really angered Franklin was the suggestion in the press that the proposed senate should represent property, with separate property qualifications both for the senators and for those who would vote for them; part of this suggestion resembled the highly regarded constitution of Massachusetts, whose senate was also designed to represent property. Although Franklin did not mention it, he well knew that his 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution contrasted in almost every particular with the conservative Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which had been largely written by none other than his nemesis John Adams. Franklin could not imagine having a legislative body representing a minority in the state attempting to balance and control the other legislative body chosen by the majority. “Why is this Power of Control, contrary to the Spirit of all Democracies, to be vested in a Minority, instead of a Majority?” Why is property to be represented at all? he asked.

  “Private property,” he declared, in a rousing expression of the most radical republican thinking of the day, “is a Creature of Society and is subject to the Calls of that Society whenever its Necessities shall require it, even to its last Farthing.” Civil society was not a mercantile company composed of richer and poorer stockholders; it was a community in which every member had an equal right to life and liberty. Franklin had no desire to give the wealthy any special legal privileges. Suggestions for an upper house for Pennsylvania that would represent the property of the state, he wrote, expressed “a Disposition among some of our People to commence an Aristocracy, by giving the Rich a Predominancy in Government, a Choice peculiar to themselves in one half of the Legislature.” To have wealthy officials serving in the executive branch without pay did not mean that such rich men should dominate the popular representative legislature.47

  Given Franklin’s passionate commitment to a unicameral legislature, it is remarkable that in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 he contributed as he did to the making of the so-called Connecticut compromise, which allowed for equal representation of the states in an upper house of the national legislature. But Franklin’s role in the Convention was generally limited by his age and health. Much of the time he seemed bewildered by the rapidity of the exchanges and the contentiousness of the debates. He was surprised by the extent of division in the Convention and continued to look for ways to bring people together. He had come to realize that “when you assemble a number of men, to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.” This appreciation of diversity and clashing self-interestedness in America was new; he had not talked like this in 1776.

  At the end of June 1787, he made the extraordinary proposal that the Convention from then on open its sessions with prayer. He had concluded that the confusion and divisions that he had witnessed in the Convention were “a melancholy Proof of the Imperfection of the Human Understanding. We indeed seem to feel our own want of political Wisdom, since we have been running all about in Search of it.” Since the delegates were “groping, as it were, in the dark to find Political Truth,” Franklin asked, why not apply “to the Father of Lights to illuminate our Understandings?” Such prayers had helped Americans during the struggle leading up to independence. Everyone engaged in the Revolution, he said, “must have observed frequent Instances of a superintending Providence in our Favour.”

  After some discussion, this proposal, like his earlier one concerning salaries, was allowed to die. Someone later claimed that Alexander Hamilton had declared that the delegates did not need the aid of any foreign powers.

  Franklin had never fully believed that reason was all that was needed to accomplish great deeds in public life; but as a result of his experience in the Convention, he now seemed less confident than ever in reason. He had come to believe, he told the Convention, that “God governs in the Affairs of Men” and that an empire could not be built out of “little, partial, local Interests” without God’s aid.

  At any rate, a year later, in June 1788, he had abandoned his earlier view that all life resembled a game of chess. The Convention’s forming of a new government had been anything but a game of chess. “The players of our game are so many,” he told a French correspondent,

  their ideas so different, their prejudices so strong and so various, and their particular interests independent of the general, seeming so opposite, that not a move can be made that is not contested; the numerous objections confound the understanding; the wisest must agree to some unreasonable things,
that reasonable ones of more consequence may be obtained; and thus chance has its share in many of the determinations so that the play is more like tric-trac with a box of dice.48

  FRANKLIN’S STRUGGLE WITH CONGRESS

  Perhaps his heightened sense that events had spun out of his control and were in the hands of God or Providence flowed from his nasty experience with the Confederation Congress, which still contained many of his enemies. Indeed, the Congress’s extraordinary treatment of him at the end of his life revealed just how ambiguous a figure he was to his fellow Americans. Other than being told by Jefferson and others that Franklin was “infinitely esteemed” in Europe, many of his countrymen did not know what to make of him.49 Temple realized that his grandfather’s “Reputation is great throughout Europe,” but, as he ruefully noted, this “Circumstance” was “possibly of no Consequence” in America.50

  What exactly had Franklin done for the country? He had not spearheaded the Revolutionary movement like John Adams. He had not led armies like Washington. He had not written a great document like Jefferson. His great diplomatic achievements as minister to France were actually denounced by his enemies and unappreciated by most of his countrymen. Compared with the fates of the other Founders his was singular. None of the other great men of the Revolution ever had to endure the kind of mortification Franklin experienced at the hands of the national government.

  After he had returned to America, he asked Congress to settle what it owed him and sent his grandson Temple to New York to meet with Congress. Franklin still hoped that Congress might offer a diplomatic post to the young man. Since Congress had refused to supply him with a secretary in France, he explained, he had been forced to employ his grandson as secretary; and the young man had thereby sacrificed an opportunity to study law. Franklin said that he was not alone in his opinion of Temple’s talents. “Three of my Colleagues, without the smallest Solicitation from me, chose him Secretary of the Commission for Treaties.” But Congress took no notice of his grandson. “This was the only Favour I ask’d of them,” Franklin said with as much resentment as he ever expressed; “and the only Answer I receiv’d was a Resolution superseding him and appointing Col. Humphreys in his place,” a man, he complained, who had no diplomatic experience and did not even speak French.51