The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Franklin reckoned himself blessed. “I have found my family here in health, good circumstances, and well respected by their fellow citizens,” he reported to Polly Hewson. The companions of his youth were almost all departed, but he enjoyed the company of their children and grandchildren. “I have public business enough to preserve me from ennui, and private amusement besides in conversation, books, my garden, and cribbage.” He played cards with friends for amusement. Occasionally he felt a twinge of compunction when he reflected on his idleness. “But another reflection comes to relieve me, whispering: ‘You know that the soul is immortal; why then should you be such a niggard of a little time, when you have a whole eternity before you?’ So, being easily convinced, and, like other reasonable creatures, satisfied with a small reason when it is in favour of doing what I have a mind to, I shuffle the cards again, and begin another game.”

  29

  Sunrise at Dusk

  1786–87

  In correspondence with British friends, Franklin took pains to defend America against reports of post-Revolutionary troubles. Many Britons, for reasons not difficult to fathom, liked to read that their wayward cousins had cause to rue their waywardness, and consequently their papers often carried such stories. Franklin regularly rebutted these tales. “Your newspapers, to please honest John Bull, paint our situation here in frightful colours, as if we were very miserable since we broke our connexion with him,” he wrote in the autumn of 1786, in one letter of many like it. “But I will give you some remarks by which you may form your own judgment. Our husbandmen, who are the bulk of the nation, have had plentiful crops; their produce sells at high prices and for ready, hard money—wheat, for instance,

  for 8 s. and 8 s. 6 d. per bushel. Our working people are all employed and get high wages, are well fed and well clad.” Philadelphia was growing; smaller towns were springing up in every part of the state. “The laws govern, justice is well administered, and property as secure as in any country on the globe. Our wilderness lands are daily buying up by new settlers, and our settlements extend rapidly to the westward.” European goods were never cheaper, with the British monopoly broken. Franklin spoke of Pennsylvania from personal observation; as to the other states, “When I read in all the papers of the extravagant rejoicings every 4th of July, the day on which was signed the Declaration of Independence, I am convinced that none of them are discontented with the Revolution.”

  To French friends, who were more sympathetic to the American Revolution, Franklin was more candid. “That there should be faults in our first sketches or plans of government is not surprising,” he said. “Rather, considering the times and the circumstances under which they were formed, it is surprising that the faults are so few.” To a pair of priests he had known in Passy, he explained, “Our public affairs go on as well as can be reasonably expected after so great an overturning. We have had some disorders in different parts of the country, but we arrange them as they arise, and are daily mending and improving, so that I have no doubt but all will come right in time.” He added significantly, and in keeping with many earlier comments, that all depended on the American character. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”

  Almost no one in America disputed Franklin’s assertion that freedom required virtue, but by this time many were questioning whether America possessed that requirement. The war had not even ended when unsettling tendencies surfaced. In March 1783 a group of disgruntled officers at Washington’s camp at Newburgh, New York, threatened to use military force to compel Congress to award them back pay and pensions. A shadowy group of conspirators within Congress itself vaguely encouraged the officers, hoping to employ their discontent to pry power from the states, which were the source of the inability of Congress to pay the soldiers.

  George Washington shared the frustration of his subordinates, as he had demonstrated on many occasions. But he would brook no hint of military coercion of the civil authorities. He summoned the officers to a meeting and told them to abandon their plans. “How inconsistent with the rules of propriety!” he declared. “How unmilitary! And how subversive of all order and discipline!” Washington decried the “blackest designs” and “most insidious purposes” behind the cabal. To act against the government of the United States—the government for which everyone present had endured such hardship and danger—would “cast a shade over that glory which has been so justly acquired, and tarnish the reputation of an army which is celebrated through all Europe for its fortitude and patriotism.” Urging his men to put aside every thought of disloyalty, he predicted (and implicitly ordered), “You will, by the dignity of your conduct, afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind, ‘had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.’” Washington rarely addressed his officers as a group, but he showed himself to be a natural at it. He closed by producing a letter from a member of Congress sympathetic to the army’s plight; as he began to read it, he stopped and pulled his glasses from his pocket. “Gentlemen,” he explained, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country.” None present could resist their leader; as one later recalled, Washington’s performance “drew tears from many of the officers.”

  Although the Newburgh conspiracy dissipated, certain of the sentiments behind it—particularly the notion that military officers possessed greater virtue than civilian officials—persisted. The officer corps of the Continental Army created something called the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary order that would honor the service its founding members provided during the war. Washington initially considered the society innocuous enough to accept its presidency, but many outsiders feared that such an organization would attempt to influence the political process.

  Franklin scorned what he called this “order of hereditary knights.” It insulted the American people, who had registered both legal and emotional opposition to the conferral of titles and ranks of nobility. Besides, like all schemes of hereditary honors, it put things just backward. “Honour, worthily obtained (as for example that of our officers) is in its nature a personal thing, and incommunicable to any but those who had some share in obtaining it.” If honor had to be assigned to families, it ought to be handed up to parents rather than down to children. The parents of a person who did good deeds might logically share some credit for the good deeds of their child, in that they were responsible for the child’s education and overall rearing; but the children of the one who did good deeds could not share any such credit. Besides, even granting the principle of descending honor, the mathematics of procreation rendered its application absurd. “A man’s son, for instance, is but half of his family, the other half belonging to the family of his wife. His son, too, marrying into another family, his share in the grandson is but a fourth.” And so on, till by the eighth or tenth generation, and allowing for “a reasonable estimation of the number of rogues and fools and royalists and scoundrels and prostitutes that are mixed with,” the contribution of the original Cincinnatus was diluted beyond recognition.

  Another argument against the Cincinnati was more whimsical. The group had adopted the bald eagle as an avian emblem; Franklin objected.

  He is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree, near the river where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labour of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him and takes it from him. With all this injustice he is never in good case; but, like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank coward; the little kingbird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest C
incinnati, who have driven all the King-birds from our country.

  Better if the Cincinnati had adopted the turkey, a more honest bird and a genuine American. “He is, though a little vain and silly, it is true, but not the worse emblem for that, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.”

  Many shared Franklin’s view of the Cincinnati, if not of the turkey; and after Washington, reconsidering, resigned, the order fizzled. Yet in other respects American society showed additional hangover effects from its wartime militarization. The siege of the State House in Philadelphia that prompted the flight of Congress to Princeton was one indication of a lingering propensity to violence. Another, more disturbing illustration emerged in Massachusetts. The disruption of trade consequent to the war had injured the entire state. With the British West Indies off-limits to American merchantmen, departures from the wharves Franklin wandered about as a boy had diminished drastically. Shipbuilding sagged for the same and related reasons. Yet the troubles of the state hit farmers the hardest, and western farmers hardest of all. The same sound-money interests that had joined Thomas Hutchinson in opposing paper currency thirty years earlier opposed paper now, and in addition endorsed an accelerated payoff of the state’s war debts. The vehicle for the redemption was the land tax, which fell most heavily on farmers, and which now rose by more than half. Meanwhile prices for agricultural commodities—commodities that formerly went to the West Indies but now went begging—plunged. Between rising taxes and falling prices, farmers felt peculiarly victimized.

  Their first appeal was to the state legislature. They cried for paper money to stimulate the economy, boost prices, and ease their debts. Failing that, they demanded stay laws to prevent seizure of property for nonpayment of debts. The lower house of the state legislature—the chamber more attuned to popular sentiment—responded to the farmers’ appeal, but the money men of Boston blocked the bills in the upper house. The machinery of the courts ground into motion, mandating foreclosures and auctions of land, farm tools, houses, even furniture and clothes of the luckless debtors.

  One such unfortunate was Daniel Shays, a thirty-nine-year-old veteran of the war, a former captain. Shays recalled how he and his fellows had refused to let London harry them into bankruptcy, and he saw no reason Boston should do what London had been prevented from doing. He rallied hundreds of men of like experience; by the end of August 1786 Shays’s band was a thousand strong. The insurgents forcibly redefined justice in Northampton County, closing the courts and preventing prosecutions of debtors. Echoes of the Stamp Act resistance and the Boston Tea Party rolled from the valley of the Connecticut to the foothills of the Berkshires.

  This time, however, respectable opinion opposed the insurgents. A Springfield merchant called the Shays crowd “a party of madmen.” A commercial colleague from Attleboro decried the “fury and madness of the people.” A Southampton creditor declared, “Monarchy is better than the tyranny of this mob.” Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin warned that the uprising was fraught with the “most fatal and pernicious consequences,” potentially including “universal riot, anarchy, and confusion, which would probably terminate in absolute despotism.” In the name of the ideals of the Revolution—“of lives, liberty and property”—but with rather more emphasis on property than on liberty, Bowdoin dispatched the militia to suppress the rebels.

  Shays and his battle-hardened fellows refused to be intimidated, not least because many militiamen refused to obey the governor’s order. During the autumn of 1786 the ranks of the rebels swelled, and they threatened to seize a federal arsenal at Springfield. Bowdoin sent more troops, and a suddenly alarmed Congress authorized General Henry Knox to raise a small federal army against the rebels.

  The nation watched in horror as Massachusetts, the cradle of American liberty, the most patriotic of all the colonies, dissolved into civil war. George Washington, observing the disorders from the distance of Mount Vernon, was appalled. “Good God!” he wrote Knox. “Who besides a Tory could have foreseen or a Briton predicted them!” Americans had prided themselves on a national character superior to that of Britain. The current events gave the lie to this claim. “Notwithstanding the boasted virtue of America, we are far gone in every thing ignoble and bad.” For the present, Massachusetts approached anarchy alone; but it might have company soon. “There are combustibles in every state,” Washington said, “which a spark may set fire to.”

  To many Americans, Shays’s rebellion revealed the need for a more energetic national government. Although the federal forces under Knox in fact played little role in eventually subduing the insurgency, the uprising demonstrated the vulnerability of the state governments to pressure by armed minorities. From classical times the argument against republicanism was that it degenerated into democracy—government not simply in the name of the people but by the people themselves. And democracy degenerated into anarchy, because the people were not fit to govern themselves. In Massachusetts the name of anarchy was Daniel Shays, and the lesson Shays taught was that if American republicanism did not take preventive measures soon, it might be lost.

  Other embarrassments to republicanism amplified the feeling. Three years after the Paris treaty the British had still not evacuated their forts in the northwest, claiming that the Americans had not fulfilled their commitments regarding prewar debts and treatment of the Loyalists. That the claim was accurate hardly mitigated the affront to the United States—debt issues were not insignificant, but territorial questions touched the heart of national sovereignty. Meanwhile the Spanish were intriguing on America’s southwestern frontier, to what end none could say, but certainly to no good. At the same time the states were intriguing against one another in matters of trade and navigation, deranging markets and destroying commerce. Finally, the states were more reluctant than ever to pay their share of the expenses of the national government, which threatened to grind to a halt.

  In September 1786 advocates of a stronger central government summoned the similarly minded to Annapolis. The harmonization of trade rules was the stated agenda; the unspoken aim was broader. Disappointingly for James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other organizers, only five states sent delegates; cleverly, the organizers doubled their bets by adjourning in favor of a more ambitious conference to convene at Philadelphia the following May. The job of delegates, according to the formal charge from Congress, would be the formulation of such amendments to the Articles of Confederation as would “render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government & the preservation of the Union.”

  Who would answer the summons was a matter of doubt during the next several months. Congress gave its approval, but hesitantly. Such enthusiasm as existed was almost balanced by skepticism. Madison, the prime mover of the project, did not know what to anticipate. “It seems probable that a meeting will take place, and that it will be a pretty full one,” he wrote at the end of February 1787. “What the issue of it will be is among the other arcana of futurity and nearly as inscrutable as any of them. In general I find men of reflection much less sanguine as to a new than despondent as to the present system.” Yet something had to be done. “The present system neither has nor deserves advocates, and if some very strong props are not applied will quickly tumble to the ground.”

  Franklin had lived much longer than Madison—much longer, in fact, than all but a handful of the other delegates to the constitutional convention. And he adopted a much less alarmist view of the future. He referred to Shays’s rebellion as merely the work of “some disorderly people,” and declared—this to a French friend, to whom he spoke candidly—“The rest of the states go on pretty well, except some dissensions in Rhode Island and Maryland respecting paper money.”

  Yet if he did not think doom at the door, Franklin heard its rumblings in the distance. Briefing Jefferson, still in France, he wrote that from what he knew of the delegates, they seemed to be me
n of prudence and ability. “I hope good from their meeting.” But the risks were great. “If it does not do good it must do harm, as it will show that we have not wisdom enough among us to govern ourselves, and will strengthen the opinion of some political writers that popular governments cannot long support themselves.”

  Anticipating the convention, Franklin organized a group called the Society for Political Inquiries, which met weekly in the library of his new home. Philadelphians made up the active membership, but the group enrolled various outside luminaries as honorary members. Among these was Washington, who was thought to be favorably disposed to constitutional revision yet was also known to be reluctant to take a leading role. The former general cherished his exalted reputation and was correspondingly hesitant to involve himself in any divisive venture. At the same time, however, he hardly desired the undoing of the cause to which he had devoted eight years of his life. Nor did he wish to appear derelict in his duty. Franklin was among those telling Washington that duty called him to Philadelphia. “Your presence will be of the greatest importance to the success of the measure,” Franklin wrote. Washington allowed himself to be persuaded.