On this issue he found almost no support, and the idea was put aside with no debate. “It was treated with great respect,” Madison recorded, “but rather for the author of it than from any conviction of its expediency or practicability.”29
There were, through the long and hot summer, some occasions for humor. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, who wrote with a taut and serious pen but at times acted as the congressional jester, was dared by Hamilton, for the price of a dinner, to slap the austere and intimidating Washington on the shoulder and say, “My dear general, how happy I am to see you look so well!” Morris did, but after weathering the look from Washington’s face declared that he would not do so again for a thousand dinners. Elbridge Gerry, arguing against a large standing army, lasciviously compared it to a standing penis: “An excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.”30
When it was all over, many compromises had been made, including on the issue of slavery. Some members were distressed because they felt that the final result usurped too much state sovereignty, others because they thought it did not create a strong enough national government. The cantankerous Luther Martin of Maryland sneered contemptuously that they had concocted a “perfect medley,” and left before the final vote.
He was right, except for his contemptuous sneer. The medley was, indeed, as close to perfect as mortals could have achieved. From its profound first three words, “We the people,” to the carefully calibrated compromises and balances that followed, it created an ingenious system in which the power of the national government as well as that of the states derived directly from the citizenry. And thus it fulfilled the motto on the nation’s great seal, suggested by Franklin in 1776, of E Pluribus Unum, out of many one.
With the wisdom of a patient chess player and the practicality of a scientist, Franklin realized that they had succeeded not because they were self-assured, but because they were willing to concede that they might be fallible. “We are making experiments in politics,” he wrote la Rochefoucauld. To Du Pont de Nemours he confessed, “We must not expect that a new government may be formed as a game of chess may be played, by a skillful hand, without a fault.”31
Franklin’s final triumph was to express these sentiments with a wry but powerful charm in a remarkable closing address to the convention. The speech was a testament to the virtue of intellectual tolerance and to the evil of presumed infallibility, and it proclaimed for the ages the enlightened creed that became central to America’s freedom. They were the most eloquent words Franklin ever wrote—and perhaps the best ever written by anyone about the magic of the American system and the spirit of compromise that created it:
I confess that I do not entirely approve this Constitution at present; but sir, I am not sure I shall never approve it: For, having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment and pay more respect to the judgment of others.
Most men, indeed as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them, it is so far error. Steele, a Protestant, in a dedication, tells the Pope that the only difference between our two churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrine is, the Romish Church is infallible, and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But, though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who, in a little dispute with her sister said: “I don’t know how it happens, sister, but I meet with nobody but myself that is always in the right.”
In these sentiments, sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults—if they are such—because I think a general government necessary for us…I doubt, too, whether any other convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution; for, 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. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected?
It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the builders of Babel, and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats. Thus I consent, sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.
He concluded by pleading that, “for the sake of our posterity, we shall act heartily and unanimously.” To that end, he made a motion that the convention adopt the device of declaring that the document had been accepted by all of the states, which would allow even the minority of delegates who dissented to sign it. “I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would, with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.”32
And so it was that when Franklin finished, most of the delegates, even some with doubts, heeded his urgings and lined up by state delegation for the historic signing. As they did so, Franklin turned their attention to the sun carved on the back of Washington’s chair and observed that painters often found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising sun from a setting one. “I have,” he said, “often in the course of the session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
According to a tale recorded by James McHenry of Maryland, he made his point in a pithier way to an anxious lady named Mrs. Powel, who accosted him outside the hall. What type of government, she asked, have you delegates given us? To which he replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”33
The historian Clinton Rossiter has called Franklin’s closing speech “the most remarkable performance of a remarkable life,” and the Yale scholar Barbara Oberg calls it “the culmination of Franklin’s life as a propagandist, persuader and cajoler of people.” With his deft and self-deprecating use of double negatives—“I am not sure I shall never approve it,” “I am not sure that it is not the best”—he emphasized the humility and appreciation for human fallibility that was necessary to form a nation. Opponents attacked Franklin’s compromising approach as lacking in principle, yet that was the point of his message. “A stand for compromise,” Oberg points out, “is not the stuff of heroism, virtue, or moral certainty. But it is the essence of the democratic process.”34
Throughout his life, Franklin had, by his thoughts and activities, helped to lay the foundation for the democratic republic that this Constitution enshrined. He had begun as a young man by teaching his fellow tradesmen ways to become virtuous, diligent, and responsible citizens. Then he sought to enlist them in associations—Juntos, libraries, fire departments, neighborhood patrols, and militias—for their mutual benefit and the good of the common community. Later, he created networks, from the postal service to the American Philosophical Society, designed to foster the connections that would integrate an emerging nation. Finally, in the 1750s, he began pushing the colonies to gain strength through unity, to stand together for common purposes in a way that helped shape a national identity.
Since that time, he had been instrumental in shaping every major document that led to the creation of the new republic. He was the only person to sign all four of its founding papers: the Declaration of Independence, the treaty with France, the peace accord with Britain, and the Constitution. In addition, he devised the first federal scheme for America, the unfu
lfilled Albany Plan of 1754, under which the separate states and a national government would have shared power. And the Articles of Confederation he proposed in 1775 were a closer approximation of the final Constitution than were the weak and ill-fated alternative Articles adopted in 1781.
The Constitution, wrote Henry May in his book The Enlightenment in America, reflected “all the virtues of the moderate Enlightenment, and also one of its faults: the belief that everything can be settled by compromise.” For Franklin, who embodied the Enlightenment and its spirit of compromise, this was hardly a fault. For him, compromise was not only a practical approach but a moral one. Tolerance, humility, and a respect for others required it. On almost every issue for more than two centuries, this supposed fault has served the Constitution, and the nation it formed, quite well. There was only one great issue that could not, then or later, be solved by constitutional compromise: slavery. And that indeed was the issue on which Franklin, as his life neared its end, chose to take an uncompromising stand.35
Endgame
Franklin’s role in the miracle at Philadelphia could have been a fitting finale to a career spent creating the possibility of a free and democratic republic, and for most people, or at least most people of his era approaching 82, it would have been enough to sate any ambition. Now he could, if he wanted, retire from public life knowing that he was widely revered and had outlasted any enemies. Nevertheless, a month after personally presenting a copy of the new federal Constitution to the Pennsylvania Assembly, he accepted reelection for a third one-year term as the state’s president. “It was my intention to decline serving another year as president, that I might be at liberty to take a trip to Boston in the spring,” he wrote his sister. “I have now upwards of fifty years employed in public offices.”
He would, in fact, never travel nor see his sister again. His kidney stones and her health, he noted, made it so they would have to be satisfied by letters rather than visits. In addition, as he freely admitted, his pride made him still appreciate public recognition. “It is no small pleasure to me, and I suppose it will give my sister pleasure, that after such long trial of me, I should be elected a third time by my fellow citizens,” he wrote. “This universal and unbounded confidence of a whole people flatters my vanity much more than a peerage could do.”
Franklin’s letters to his sister were filled with such candid comments, especially during his later years. At one point he scolded that “your Post Office is very badly managed” and decried her propensity to get into little feuds. This led to an amusing riff on how the Franklins “were always subject to being a little miffy.” What had happened, he asked, to the Folger cousins in Nantucket? “They are wonderfully shy. But I admire their honest plainness of speech. About a year ago I invited two of them to dine with me. Their answer was that they would—if they could not do better. I suppose they did better, for I never saw them afterwards.”36
To Noah Webster, the famous lexicographer who had dedicated his Dissertations on the English Language to him, Franklin lamented the loose new word usages infecting the language, a common complaint of curmudgeonly writers but a bit atypical of the jovial Franklin, who had once taken pleasure in inventing new English words and, with even more pleasure, amusing the ladies of Paris with new French ones. “I find a verb formed from the substantive notice; ‘I should not have noticed this, were it not that the gentleman, etc.’ Also another verb from the substantive advocate; ‘the Gentleman who advocates or who has advocated that motion, etc.’ Another from the substantive progress, the most awkward and abominable of the three; ‘the committee, having progressed, resolved to adjourn…If you should happen to be of my opinion with respect to these innovations, you will use your authority in reprobating them.”37
He also finally resumed work on his autobiography. He had written 87 manuscript pages in Twyford in 1771, and then added 12 more in Passy in 1784. Writing steadily from August 1788 until May of the following year, he completed another 119 pages, which brought him up to his arrival in England as a colonial agent. “I omit all facts and transactions that may not have a tendency to benefit the young reader,” he wrote to Vaughan. His purpose was still to provide a self-help manual for America’s ambitious middle class by describing “my success in emerging from poverty” and “the advantages of certain modes of conduct which I observed.”38
By now he was facing ever greater pain from his kidney stones, and he resorted to using laudanum, a tincture of opium and alcohol. “I am so interrupted by extreme pain, which obliges me to have recourse to opium, that between the effects of both, I have but little time in which I can write anything,” he complained to Vaughan. He also worried that what he had written was not worth publishing. “Give me your candid opinion whether I had best publish it or suppress it,” he asked, “for I am grown so old and feeble in mind, as well as body, that I cannot place any confidence in my own judgment.” He had now begun to dictate the work to Benny rather than write it by hand, but he was able to complete only a few more pages.
Friends sent him various home remedies for kidney stones, including a suggestion from Vaughan, which amused Franklin, that a small dose of hemlock might work. At times, he could be cheerful enough about his maladies and repeat his maxim that those who “drink to the bottom of the cup must expect to meet some of the dregs,” as he did to his old friend Elizabeth Partridge. He was still, he said, “joking, laughing and telling merry stories, as when you first knew me, a young man about fifty.”39
Yet Franklin was becoming resigned to the fact that he did not have much longer to live, and his letters took on a tone of sanguine farewell. “Hitherto this long life has been tolerably happy,” he wrote to Caty Ray Greene, the girl who had captured his mind and heart thirty-five years earlier. “If I were allowed to live it over again, I should make no objection, only wishing for leave to do what authors do in a second edition of their works, correct some of my errata.” When Washington became president that year, Franklin wrote to him that it made him glad he was still alive: “For my own personal ease, I should have died two years ago; but, though those years have been spent in excruciating pain, I am pleased that I have lived them, since they have brought me to see our present situation.”40
He was also sanguine about the revolution now welling up in his beloved France. The explosion of democratic sentiments was producing “mischief and trouble,” he noted, but he assumed that it would lead to greater democracy and eventually a good constitution. So most of his letters to his French friends were inappropriately lighthearted. “Are you still living?” he wrote the French scientist Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, his friend and Passy neighbor, in late 1789. “Or have the mob of Paris mistaken the head of a monopolizer of knowledge for a monopolizer of corn, and paraded it about the streets upon a pole?” (It was also in this letter that he famously noted that “nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.”) He assured Louis-Guillaume le Veillard, his neighbor and closest friend in Passy, that it was all for the good. “When the fermentation is over and the troubling parts subsided, the wine will be fine and good, and cheer the hearts of those that drink it.”41
Franklin was wrong, sadly wrong, about the French Revolution, though he would not live long enough to learn it. Le Veillard would soon lose his life to the guillotine. So would Lavoisier the chemist, who had worked with him on the Mesmer investigation. Condorcet, the economist who had accompanied Franklin to his famed meetings with Voltaire, would be imprisoned and poison himself in his cell. And la Rochefoucauld, who had translated the state constitutions for Franklin and engaged him in a lively correspondence since his departure, would be stoned to death by a mob.
Slavery
In the very last year of his life, Franklin was to embark on one final public mission, a moral crusade that would help ameliorate one of the few blemishes on a life spent fighting for freedom. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, slavery had been an institution that few whites questioned. Even in brotherly Philadelphia, ownership contin
ued to climb until about 1760, when almost 10 percent of the city’s population were slaves. But views had begun to evolve, especially after the ringing words of the Declaration and the awkward compromises of the Constitution. George Mason of Virginia, despite the fact that he owned two hundred slaves, called the institution “pernicious” at the Constitutional Convention and declared that “every master of slaves is a petty tyrant; they bring the judgment of heaven on a country.”
Franklin’s views had been evolving as well. He had, as we have seen, owned one or two household slaves off and on for much of his life, and as a young publisher he had carried ads for slave sales. But he had also published, in 1729, one of the nation’s first antislavery pieces and had joined the Associates of Dr. Bray to establish schools for blacks in America. Deborah had enrolled her house servants in the Philadelphia school, and after visiting it Franklin had spoken of his “higher opinions of the natural capacities of the black race.” In his 1751 “Observations on the Increase of Mankind,” he attacked slavery strongly, but mainly from an economic perspective rather than a moral one. In expressing sympathy for the Philadelphia abolitionist Anthony Benezet in the 1770s, he had agreed that the importation of new slaves should end immediately, but he qualified his support for outright abolition by saying it should come “in time.” As an agent for Georgia in London, he had defended the right of that colony to keep slaves. But he preached, in articles such as his 1772 “The Somerset Case and the Slave Trade,” that one of Britain’s great sins against America was foisting slavery on it.
Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein Page 125
