The First American

by H. W. Brands

  The finality of this left him wistful. A Boston admirer urged him to come; Franklin replied that it would be “a very great pleasure if I could once again visit my native town, and walk over the grounds I used to frequent when a boy, and where I enjoyed many of the innocent pleasures of youth, which would be so brought to my remembrance, and where I might find some of my old acquaintance to converse with.” But travel by land was too fatiguing, and travel by sea equally unappealing “to one who, although he has crossed the Atlantic eight times, and made many smaller trips, does not recollect his ever having been at sea without taking a firm resolution never to go to sea again.” Anyway, the reality would fall short of the memory. “If I were arrived in Boston I should see but little of it, as I could neither bear walking nor riding in a carriage over its pebbled streets.” As for acquaintances, “I should find very few indeed of my old friends living, it being now sixty-five years since I left it to settle here.”

  All the same, the thought of his first home would not leave him, and he would not let it go. “I enjoy the company and conversation of its inhabitants when any of them are so good as to visit me; for besides their general good sense, which I value, the Boston manner, turn of phrase, and even tone of voice and accent in pronunciation, all please and seem to refresh and revive me.”

  Sometimes New England simply made him laugh. In a letter to Jane Mecom he asked whether she ever saw any of their Folger relations from Nantucket. He said he himself had not of late. “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.”

  Franklin’s unfailing sense of humor helped him accept his afflictions. His stone was a large one, “as I find by the weight when I turn in bed.” Close friends, passing acquaintances, and people he hardly knew sent him recipes for medications and instructions for treatments, but all to no avail. “I thank you much for your intimations of the virtues of hemlock,” he wrote Benjamin Vaughan (who had suggested a sub-Socratic dose). “But I have tried so many things with so little effect that I am quite discouraged, and have no longer any faith in remedies for the stone.”

  Yet if he could not diminish the stone, at least he could try to prevent its increase. He ate less than before, largely abstained from wine and cider, and exercised with his dumbbell, which improved his circulation without requiring the kind of motion that gave him pain.

  For a time innocuous palliatives alleviated the worst symptoms. “As the roughness of the stone lacerates a little the neck of the bladder,” he told the Comte de Buffon, a fellow sufferer, “I find that when the urine happens to be sharp, I have much pain in making water and frequent urgencies. For relief under this circumstance I take, going to bed, the bigness of a pigeon’s egg of jelly of blackberries. The receipt for making it is enclosed. While I continue to do this every night, I am generally easy the day following, making water pretty freely and with long intervals.”

  But Franklin’s most potent medicine was his continuing curiosity and his irrepressible interest in life. “Our ancient correspondence used to have something philosophical in it,” he wrote James Bowdoin, a recently retired old friend, in May 1788. “As you are now more free from public cares, and I expect to be so in a few months, why may we not resume that kind of correspondence?” Bowdoin’s interest was the earth; Franklin proceeded to offer several questions for reflection. “How came the earth by its magnetism? … Is it likely that iron ore immediately existed when the globe was first formed; or may it not rather be supposed to be a gradual production of time?” Was the earth’s magnetism related to the iron it contained? If so, had that iron ever been nonmagnetic? And if that was so, how had it become magnetized? “May not a magnetic power exist throughout our system, perhaps through all systems, so that if men could make a voyage in the starry regions, a compass might be of use? … As the poles of magnets may be changed by the presence of stronger magnets, might not, in ancient times, the near passing of some large comet, of greater magnetic power than this globe of ours, have been a means of changing its poles?” Did not the presence in cold regions of the shells and bones of animals natural to warm regions indicate that the earth’s geographic poles had shifted? “Does not the apparent wrack of the surface of this globe thrown up into long ridges of mountains, with strata in various positions, make it probable that its internal mass is a fluid, but a fluid so dense as to float the heaviest of our substances?”

  Some of these conjectures—about the shifting of the earth’s magnetic and geographic poles, about the fluid nature of the earth’s interior and its relation to surface structures—were remarkably prescient, identifying a research agenda that would keep geophysicists busy into the twenty-first century. During Franklin’s day the conjectures stimulated discussion among the members of the American Philosophical Society, where this letter was read and which met in Franklin’s library when he could not get out. And they showed his mind to be as active at eighty-two as it had been at forty-two.

  And as it had been at forty-two, it was no less concerned with human welfare than with matters merely philosophical. For decades Franklin had been troubled by shabby treatment of Indians by whites. The unfair dealings had practical implications, as when they provoked the Indians to attack frontier settlements or assist the enemies (first France, then Britain) of the people of Pennsylvania and the United States. But there was also in Franklin’s thought a fundamental feeling that Indians, as members of the human race, ought to be treated better than they often were.

  On his press at Passy, Franklin had printed an essay entitled “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” in which his first sentence made plain the intended irony of his title. “Savages we call them,” he wrote, “because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.” The balance of the essay suggested that the Indians had the better of this argument. Franklin pointed out how admirably Indian ways suited the Indians. “Having few artificial wants, they have abundance of leisure for improvement by conversation. Our laborious manner of life compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the learning on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous and useless.” Plato himself could not have objected to the Indian mode of political organization. “All their government is by the counsel or advice of the sages; there is no force, there are no prisons, no officers to compel obedience or inflict punishment.” At council meetings the old men sat in the foremost ranks; when one of the old men rose to speak, everyone else observed a respectful silence. “How different this is from the conduct of a polite British House of Commons,” Franklin noted sardonically, “where scarce a day passes without some confusion that makes the Speaker hoarse in calling to order.”

  The Indians were exceedingly gracious to strangers, setting aside a special house in each village to accommodate visitors, and were exemplars of toleration. Franklin wrote of a missionary who told the Susquehanna the story of Adam’s fall, and how it had led to great travail and necessitated Jesus’ sufferings and death. “When he had finished, an Indian orator stood up to thank him,” Franklin related, with a twinkle in either his own eye or the Indian’s. “What you have told us, says he, is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider.” The Indian thereupon shared his people’s creation story with the missionary. The missionary grew impatient, then disgusted. “What I delivered to you were sacred truths,” he said. “But what you tell me is mere fable, fiction and falsehood.” The Indian replied, “My brother, it seems your friends have not done you justice in your education; they have not well instructed you in the rules of common civility. You saw that we who understand and practise those rules believed all your stories. Why do you refuse to believe ours?”

  As president of Pennsylvania, Franklin had occasion to apply his views to public policy. During the summer of 1
786 the young Wyandot chief Scotosh visited Philadelphia. Franklin, recalling the elaborate treaty ceremonies in which he had taken part on the frontier thirty years earlier, paid Scotosh the courtesy of recapitulating some of those ceremonies at his house on Market Street. Scotosh expressed concern that white surveyors (“measurers”) were encroaching on Indian country. His own people were peacefully inclined, but he could not say as much of others. “The bad people will, I fear, take occasion from the measuring to do more mischief. Perhaps the measurers will be killed. And it would give pain to me and my nation to hear such bad news.”

  Franklin assured the chief that Pennsylvania had no designs on his people’s lands. “This state of Pennsylvania measures no land but what has been fairly purchased of the Six Nations.” He explained that the land in question was under the control of Congress, then meeting in New York. He encouraged Scotosh to go to New York, and gave him money for the trip. He also sent a letter of recommendation to Foreign Secretary John Jay, explaining that Scotosh had been “always very friendly to our people” and hoping his fears could be assuaged. The young chief had expressed curiosity about France; Franklin suggested to Jay that Congress offer to send Scotosh overseas. This would benefit both Scotosh and American interests in the frontier regions. “It might be of use to our affairs in that part of the country if, after viewing the court and troops and population of France, he should return impressed with a high idea of the greatness and power of our ally.”

  Franklin’s judgment that savagery and civilization were no respecters of skin color led him, in the last years of his life, to embrace a movement that was by certain measures the most radical in America. Franklin came to abolitionism via anger at Britain. The American charges that Parliament intended to enslave the colonies led some among those making the charges to examine America’s own conduct in enslaving black Africans. Yet in a country where indentured servants and transported felons also provided a substantial part of the workforce, the mere existence of an institution of unfree labor was not as striking as it would seem later. Prior to his conversion, Franklin kept his slaves, George and King, as personal servants, and apparently thought little about it.

  The overseas slave trade was another matter. It was especially barbaric, and, in its barbarity, had no real counterpart in the traffic in indentured servants or felons. Moreover, it was something British slave traders tried to force on the American colonies—even colonies that wanted no part in it. Franklin made this argument in one of his pseudonymous pieces for the London press in the early 1770s. The piece put an Englishman, an American, and a Scotsman in conversation; the Englishman called Americans hypocrites for demanding liberty for themselves while denying it to their black slaves. The American acknowledged that his countrymen were not blameless, being, as it were, receivers to the theft of Africans from their native lands. But the Americans were not entirely willing receivers, having passed laws discouraging the importation of slaves—laws the British government had disallowed as being—in the words of Franklin’s American, “prejudicial, forsooth, to the interest of the African Company.”

  Franklin subsequently leveled sharper attacks on the slave trade. A British court ordered the freedom of a certain slave irregularly landed in England; the slave’s legal costs had been covered by “some generous humane persons,” in the words of Franklin, who went on, “It is to be wished that the same humanity may extend itself among numbers, if not to the procuring liberty for those that remain in our colonies, at least to obtain a law for abolishing the African commerce in slaves, and declaring the children of present slaves free after they become of age.” Franklin quoted a computation that one-third of the hundred thousand persons shipped from Africa each year to America died in passage.

  Can the sweetening our tea, &c. with sugar be a circumstance of such absolute necessity? Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste compensate for so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men? Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single slave that happens to be landed on thy coasts, while thy merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!

  Until independence, Franklin’s attacks on the slave trade doubled as attacks on Britain. He endorsed the section in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence that condemned the slave trade and Britain’s refusal to allow the American colonies to restrict it—although he apparently was not surprised that the southern colonies insisted on deleting that section. Franklin acquiesced in the compromises on slavery at the Constitutional Convention, believing, as he said in his closing speech, that the bargain struck was the best that could be achieved at that time and place. If waiting twenty years was the cost of killing the American slave trade—an institution nearly ten times that old—it was worth paying.

  Yet if the slave trade was evil, its evil reflected the evil of the underlying institution. By the mid-1780s Franklin was convinced slavery itself must be eradicated. To some extent his conversion to abolitionism was simply the logical consequence of his fundamentally generous view of human nature—a nature that long life and an open mind had showed him was no different in Negroes (such as those he had seen educated years before) or Indians than in whites. To an equal extent it revealed his continuing concern that unless American republicanism were founded on virtue, it would fail. As a Briton, Franklin had been able to countenance slavery as one public vice among many received from the past. As an American, he could no longer countenance it, for the new nation could not abide public vice—certainly not of the magnitude of slavery—without jeopardizing its very existence.

  Philadelphia Quakers had founded the first abolitionist group—what came to be called the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage—in 1775, but independence and the war distracted most of those who could have made the group a force. Franklin proposed to do just that, enlisting after his return from France and accepting the society’s presidency in 1787. A major stumbling block to emancipatory efforts was the question of what to do with the former slaves; Franklin advocated a carefully considered program of education. “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature,” he wrote, “that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.” Apologists of slavery pointed to former slaves who became a burden on society, and used this as an argument against emancipation. What do you expect?, Franklin answered. “The unhappy man who has long been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains that bind his body do also fetter his intellectual faculties and impair the social affections of his heart.” Lacking power of choice in his life, he never learned to choose; lacking responsibility, he became irresponsible. “Under such circumstances, freedom may often prove a misfortune to himself, and prejudicial to society.” But this was no argument against emancipation; it was an argument for education. Society must rid itself of slavery, but it must also make provision for the entry into free society of former slaves. Franklin and the antislavery group published a plan for the education of former slaves, and he solicited public support. “To instruct, to advise, to qualify those who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty; to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employment suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances; and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan which we have adopted, and which we conceive will essentially promote the public good, and the happiness of these our hitherto much neglected fellow-creatures.”

  “Our grand machine has at length begun to work,” Franklin wrote in the spring of 17
89 to Charles Carroll, his colleague from the 1776 expedition to Canada. The new government, headed by Washington as president, had taken office; Carroll himself was a senator from Maryland. “If any form of government is capable of making a nation happy, ours I think bids fair now for producing that effect.”

  Yet happiness required virtue—as it always did for Franklin. The new Congress was contemplating a bill of rights. Franklin supported such a bill, but he worried that in the enthusiasm for popular rights, popular responsibilities might be forgotten. “After all, much depends upon the people who are to be governed. We have been guarding against an evil that old states are most liable to, excess of power in the rulers; but our present danger seems to be defect of obedience in the subjects.” He offered this as a caution, not a condemnation. For himself he was willing to hope that “from the enlightened state of this age and country, we may guard effectually against that evil as well as the rest.”

  Happiness and virtue rested on reason. And reason advanced apace, which further encouraged Franklin. “I have long been impressed,” he wrote an admirer in 1788, “with the same sentiments you so well express of the growing felicity of mankind, from the improvements in philosophy, morals, politics, and even the conveniences of common living.” Present progress was rapid, and would continue far into the future. “I have sometimes almost wished it had been my destiny to be born two or three centuries hence.”

  The present was exciting enough. The summer of 1788 brought news of reforms in France conferring rights on non-Catholics. “The arrêt in favour of the non-catholiques gives pleasure here,” Franklin wrote a Paris friend, “not only from its present advantages, but as it is a good step towards general toleration, and to the abolishing in time all party spirit among Christians, and the mischiefs that have so long attended it.” As one who always deplored sectarian intolerance, Franklin was especially gratified. “Thank God, the world is growing wiser and wiser; and as by degrees men are convinced of the folly of wars for religion, for dominion, or for commerce, they will be happier and happier.”