Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  Henry launched his assault on the first day of substantive debate and did not spare even Washington. Representing the country as being in “universal tranquility” prior to the Convention, Henry demanded to know why Virginia’s delegates—particularly Washington—had proposed replacing the confederation of states with a consolidated national government. “Who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States?” he asked. “I would demand the cause of their conduct,” he said, “even from that illustrious man who saved us by his valor.” Liberty, Henry charged, was at stake. “This proposal of altering our Federal Government is of a most alarming nature,” he declared, “for instead of securing your rights you may lose them forever.”43

  The public challenge to Washington drew gasps from federalists and brought Randolph to his feet for a two-hour-long oration. To this point, Henry still saw Randolph as an ally and expected his support.44 Instead, the governor defended the Constitutional Convention. “The gentleman,” he said of Henry, “inquires, why we assumed the language of ‘We, the people,’ I ask why not? The Government is for the people; and the misfortune was, that the people had no agency in the Government before.” With “the terror of impending anarchy” and no hope of saving the confederation, Randolph asked in defense of Washington, “Would it not have been treason to return without proposing some scheme to relieve their distressed country?” He withheld his signature from the Constitution thinking that the states would insist on amendments prior to ratification, Randolph explained, but the actions of eight states now showed otherwise.45

  As he would throughout the convention, Madison promptly reported to Washington. “The Governor has declared the day of previous amendments past, and thrown himself fully into the federal scale,” Madison wrote in a same-day letter to Mount Vernon. “The federalists are a good deal elated by the existing prospect.” Elated but cautious, Madison added, because the delegates from Virginia’s western districts seemed uniformly hostile—and given the close divide, even a small contingent could prove decisive. “Every piece of address is going on privately to work on the local interests & prejudices of that & other quarters,” Madison assured Washington.46

  Between letters and newspaper reports, Washington received a blow-by-blow account of the convention. For two weeks, it did not proceed in a systematic fashion but instead followed Henry’s lead as he discharged random “bolts,” as Henry Lee called them, raising all the familiar antifederalist complaints. The president would become a king, Henry charged, and the federal government, the people’s master. Property could be taxed into oblivion, he warned, and without a bill of rights, American liberty would be lost.

  Madison and his allies responded point by point. The convention picked up speed only after delegates began reviewing the document clause by clause.47 “Our progress is slow and every advantage is taken of the delay, to work on the local prejudices of particular setts of members,” Madison explained to Washington in mid-June.48 As the vote neared, Madison advised Washington, “We calculate on a majority, but a bare one.”49

  Although he never left Mount Vernon, Washington was a virtual presence within the assembly room at Richmond. His role in writing the Constitution and the prospect of his becoming president once again made all the difference. Alluding to him near the convention’s end, one antifederalist delegate complained, “Were it not for one great character in America, so many men would not be for this Government.”50 When the convention ended, another—the future president James Monroe—wrote about Washington, “His influence carried this government.”51 Washington’s assumed role as president made what they saw as a fatally flawed system appear attractive to others.

  ON JUNE 27, 1788, the evening stagecoach brought the news to Alexandria that Virginia had ratified the Constitution two days earlier. It had passed by a ten-vote margin. Using the Massachusetts model of ratifying with recommendatory amendments carried the day. Townspeople descended on Mount Vernon to invite Washington to festivities scheduled for the next day.

  Before dawn, an express rider arrived in Alexandria with word that New Hampshire had ratified on the twenty-first, making it, not Virginia, the ninth state to approve the Constitution. “Thus the Citizens of Alexandria, When convened, constituted the first public company in America, which had the pleasure of pouring libation to the prosperity of the ten States that had actually adopted the general government,” Washington noted. “The Cannon roared, and the Town was illuminated.” The Constitution would take effect whether or not the remaining three states joined, but Washington felt sure that they would rather than be left out altogether. “The point in debate has, at least, shifted its ground from policy to expediency,” he astutely observed.52

  Federalists in cities and towns across the country erupted in similar celebrations, typically hailing ratification as something between a rebirth of nationhood and the culmination of the revolutionary struggle. America was free, they cheered, and secure. Yet accounts and images of these festivities show mostly men participating, and virtually no Blacks or Natives. In Alexandria, for example, only white men attended the celebratory banquet, with women joining the subsequent dance. For Washington, that meant leaving Martha behind at Mount Vernon and attending the festivities with his nephew George and his longtime aide David Humphreys.53 Clearly, the American project remained unfinished.

  For their part, Philadelphia federalists celebrated ratification with a grand parade featuring Franklin on July 4—the twelfth anniversary of the signing of the great declaration that he had coauthored. Military corps, officeholders, and bands marched up Market Street near Franklin’s house. Units representing some forty male vocations followed in line. Carpenters on one carriage worked on a structure titled “GRAND FEDERAL EDIFICE”; printers on another struck off broadsheets bearing Franklin’s words. The pageant presented a cross section of the local economy except for women’s work and the labor of slaves. No female appeared in the list of participants and, even in Quaker Philadelphia, the only Native American represented was portrayed by a white man smoking a peace pipe with another white man on a horse-drawn carriage. Banners named the four great Revolutionary era events in which Franklin had a central role: Independence, Alliance with France, Treaty of Peace, and Constitution.54 The flags of allied countries did include one of Muslim Morocco, but, unlike the others, it was not carried by an immigrant from that place. As these pageants suggest, ratification came at a price.

  A TRIAL LAWYER renowned for winning cases by appealing to jurors’ emotions, Patrick Henry had raised one notable objection at Virginia’s ratifying convention that antifederalists in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts did not. “They’ll free your niggers!” he reportedly exclaimed to punctuate his harangue against the expansion of federal powers under the Constitution.55 “We ought to lament and deplore the necessity of holding our fellow-man in bondage,” Henry conceded, “but is it practicable by any human means to liberate them?” Emancipation would ruin the south, slaveholders argued. Henry himself owned some seventy slaves, and never freed one. But because “slavery is detested,” he declared, a fortified federal government controlled by nonslaveholding northerners would “clearly and certainly” end it. “Among the ten thousand implied powers which they may assume,” Henry thundered about Congress (using a plural pronoun for that composite body), “they may, if we be engaged in war, liberate every one of your slaves.”56

  Even without invoking war powers, Henry said of Congress under the Constitution, “Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?”57 At the very least, he declared, Congress will burden slave owners with ruinous taxes “so as to compel the owners to emancipate their slaves rather than pay the tax.”58 To white Virginians, the abolition of slavery represented the ultimate threat and free Blacks embodied a terrifying peril. Federalists had to answer.

  “I was
struck with surprise when I heard him express himself alarmed with respect to the emancipation of slaves,” Madison shot back about Henry. “There is no power to warrant it in” the Constitution. No American Congress would ever weaken the nation by abolishing slavery and thereby “alienate the affections of, five-thirteenth of the Union,” Madison insisted. “I believe such an idea never entered into any American breast, nor do I believe it ever will, unless it will enter into the heads of those Gentlemen who substitute unsupported suspicions to reasons.”59 This was a conspiracy theory hatched in the minds of southern antifederalists to discredit the Constitution, he asserted. “If any Gentleman be terrified by this apprehension, let him read the system. I ask, and I will ask again and again, till I be answered (not by declamation) where is the part [of the Constitution] that has a tendency to the abolition of slavery?” Randolph added. “Were it right here to mention what passed in the Convention on the occasion, I might tell you that the Southern States, even South Carolina herself, conceived this property secure.”60

  To calm the delegates, Madison and Randolph reviewed the various provisions inserted in the Constitution to protect and propagate slavery. The Three-Fifths Compromise augmented slave-state representation in Congress and the Electoral College while limiting the impact of a head tax on slaves, they noted. One clause abetted the return of fugitive slaves, another barred Congress from outlawing the slave trade until 1808, and a third limited the import tax on slaves.

  The ultimate protection for slavery lay in the structure of government under the Constitution, Madison and Randolph added. Congress holds enumerated powers, Madison noted, and “no power is given to the General Government to interpose with respect to the property in slaves now held by the States.”61 Randolph demanded of Henry, “Point out the clause whereby this formidable power of emancipation is inserted.”62 Concerns stemming from assaults on slavery by several northern delegates may explain why Randolph, midway through the Convention, orchestrated the substitution of the Virginia Plan’s broad assertion of federal authority “in all cases to which the separate States are incompetent” with an enumerated list of federal powers.63 And it may help account for the countermove by James Wilson, a critic of slavery, to add the sweeping necessary and proper clause to those listed powers. Slavery shaped the Constitution.

  Henry remained adamant. “He asked me where was the power of emancipating slaves. I say it will be implied,” Henry said of Madison and his Constitution. “He says that I am unfair and uncandid in my deduction, that they can emancipate our slaves, though the word emancipation be not mentioned in it. They can exercise power by implication.”64 Madison may not have satisfied Henry, but he stilled the waters enough for the Constitution to win the convention’s approval, and with it to become the law of the land, keeping Washington on track to the presidency. Yet while Madison won the battle for ratification, Henry had boxed him into an absolutist position on federal power. The now inflexible stance of Madison on slavery and the Constitution put him, and Washington, on a collision course with Franklin.

  EVENTS AT THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION belie Madison’s pledge in Richmond that he believed the idea of the new federal government’s abolishing slavery “never entered into any American breast.” He knew otherwise. Certainly the slaves themselves dreamed of freedom and often risked their lives to secure it. In 1780, Pennsylvania (where the Convention was held) became the first state to end slavery, doing so gradually by barring any new slaves born in or brought into the state. In 1784, a Quaker-led Philadelphia antislavery association reorganized itself into a more ambitious Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (or Pennsylvania Abolition Society), with a mission to free slaves throughout the United States. In 1787, before the Convention began, Franklin became the society’s president. Society members urged him to raise the issue of manumission at the Convention but, according to a society vice president, Franklin decided that “it would be a very improper season & place” to do so because of the opposition to constitutional reform it would generate in slave states.65 The most effective way to abolish slavery in southern states, Franklin believed, was to bring them into a fortified federal union, and then (just as Henry warned) have the government work toward that end.

  At the Convention, while Franklin remained quiet, other northern delegates railed against slavery. “It was a nefarious institution,” Pennsylvania’s Gouverneur Morris said. “And What is the proposed compensation to the Northern States for a sacrifice of every principle of right, of every impulse of humanity [in accepting it under the Constitution]. They are to bind themselves to march their militia for the defense of S. States; for their defense agst those very slaves of whom they complain.”66 Slaves would revolt, Morris assumed, and the nation would now have to suppress them.

  Rufus King of Massachusetts expanded on Morris’s point in a manner that echoed an old but well-known quip by Franklin. Noting that the main object of the union was defense against foreign invasions and internal insurrections, King challenged constitutional protections for the slave trade. “Shall all the States be bound to defend each,” he asked his fellow delegates, “& shall each be at liberty to introduce a weakness which will render defence more difficult?”67 Slavery created the ever present risk of slave revolts, every delegate knew, yet the Constitution barred ending the slave trade until 1808, limited the taxation of slaves, and forbade taxing exports, which disproportionately came from slave plantations. King thought the heightened risk of insurrections justified more, not less, taxes from the slave states.

  Franklin had raised a similar issue at the Continental Congress in 1776, when he defended apportioning taxes to the states by population, including slaves. “Our Slaves are our Property,” one South Carolina congressman retorted, “why should they be taxed more than . . . Sheep?” Sheep differ from slaves, Franklin replied, “Sheep will never make any Insurrections.”68 In that same month, Franklin defended passages in the draft Declaration of Independence condemning the slave trade—passages deleted at the demand of southern members. Franklin, Madison knew, harbored the dream of abolition in his breast.

  If the debate in Philadelphia did not alert Madison to the abolitionist designs of some delegates, then the deliberations at earlier ratifying conventions surely did—deliberations he followed closely. As a means to undermine support for the Constitution in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and other northern states where slavery was detested, some antifederalists railed against constitutional protections for slavery. Federalists countered by arguing that, to the contrary, the constitutional union offered the best possible means of eventually eradicating slavery from all the states. No delegate carried more weight on this score that James Wilson, who with Madison and Morris stood out as one of the key architects of the Constitution.

  Six months prior to the Virginia ratifying convention, when one antifederalist abolitionist at Pennsylvania’s convention damned the clause barring Congress from restricting the slave trade until 1808, Wilson had a ready response. “Under the present Confederation, the states may admit the importation of slaves as long as they please,” he said, “but by this Article, after the year 1808, the Congress will have power to prohibit such importation, notwithstanding the disposition of any state to the contrary. I consider this as laying the foundation for banishing slavery out of this country.” Wilson wished that slavery could end sooner, he added, “but from this I think there is reason to hope that yet a few years and it will be prohibited altogether; and in the meantime, the new states which are to be formed will be under the control of Congress in this particular; and slavery will never be introduced amongst them.”69 What to Henry was a dark threat to slavery, to Wilson was the bright promise of emancipation, and Franklin instinctively looked on the bright side.

  FRANKLIN HAD NOT ALWAYS OPPOSED SLAVEHOLDING. A global institution dating from time immemorial, slavery was a fact of life during Franklin’s youth, even though his own escape from an indentured apprenticeship—a form of involuntary servitude
—at age seventeen may have sensitized him to the plight of slaves. He later suggested as much.70 Yet in 1723, when Franklin arrived in Philadelphia to seek his fortune (as he put it) “from the Poverty and Obscurity in which [he] was born and bred,” even Quakers owned slaves.71 As a young printer, he published ads for slaves in his newspaper; as a middle-aged publisher, he owned one or more house slaves at any given time—perhaps seven in all. Franklin’s wife, Deborah, sent their young slaves to a mission school for enslaved children. Franklin was so impressed with the aptitude of students at this school that he became an advocate of Black education. “Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children,” Franklin commented on these students to a school official, attributing his prior contrary views to “my Prejudices.”72 In 1757, six years after publishing observations decrying the effects of slavery on society, Franklin changed his will to provide freedom for his slaves upon his death.73 Ten years later, he had none.

  Franklin’s thinking on slavery had evolved in the half century from 1720 to 1770, so that he was no longer comfortable owning slaves, but he was not yet an abolitionist. That took longer. As early as 1729, Franklin began publishing the writings of Quaker abolitionists—decades before their views became church dogma.74 A journalist at heart, Franklin believed in presenting all sides. “Printers are educated in the Belief,” he wrote in 1731, “that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence they chearfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute.”75 But Franklin did more than publish the views of abolitionists. He listened to them, particularly to Benjamin Lay, who lived like a hermit in a cave outside Philadelphia and persisted in shocking Quakers into confronting the sinfulness of owning people. Lay went so far as to kidnap children briefly from smug Quaker slaveholders, in order to show them how it felt to suffer abduction. By 1758, Deborah had hung Lay’s portrait in the Franklin home, and her husband was wondering where she got it.76