Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  Spiritual pleas alone could not persuade a rationalist like Franklin. The self-evident sin of the slave trade—snatching people from their homes in Africa and transporting them in hellish holds into New World bondage—turned him against that practice by 1760, when he began attacking it in print. Only during his residence in France during the American Revolution, however, did the Enlightenment era arguments of such philosophes as Nicolas de Condorcet finally convince Franklin that slavery itself—not just the slave trade—should end. Returning in 1785 to a Philadelphia almost cleansed of slavery, he began, for the first time, speaking openly and unequivocally against the institution. Two years later, he accepted the presidency of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society—an office he held for the rest of his life. From this perch, he struck.

  DURING THE FALL OF 1788, the first federal elections for Congress and president coincided with the end of Franklin’s third term as Pennsylvania’s chief executive. Term limits barred him from serving again and, due to deteriorating health, Franklin welcomed retirement. The post would soon change to that of governor under a new state constitution. Franklin knew it was time for him to slow down. By then a firm believer in providence guiding America toward a noble destiny as the world’s first continental republic and a global beacon of liberty, Franklin embraced the transition from sovereign states to a federal union.77

  Franklin had planned to retire in 1787, at the end of his second term, but acceded to the unanimous vote of the state’s assembly to continue. At that earlier time, he had hoped to take one last trip to Boston, seeing his sister and revisiting sites of his youth. A bad fall in January 1788 had severely limited his mobility and aggravated his kidney stone, keeping him from meetings of the executive council in the State House for months and barring future travel. “It certainly would,” Franklin wrote in mid-1788, “be a very great Pleasure to me, if I would once again visit my Native Town, and walk over the Grounds I used to frequent . . . and where I might find some of my old Acquaintance.” He could no longer tolerate the long journey or bear walking on Boston’s cobbled streets, however, and added with a touch of heartache, “I should find very few of my old friends living.”78 Although Franklin’s mind remained agile and his wit sharp, he never again ventured far from his happy home on Market Street, where virtually his entire immediate family lived with him.

  Even as Franklin was retiring from public life, Washington reluctantly prepared to resume his. Over the autumn of 1788 and winter of 1789, the first federal elections went pretty much as Franklin and other astute observers expected, at least with respect to the presidency. Under the new Constitution, each state could determine its own means for choosing presidential electors, and all scrambled to do so. Four middle states opted for voters to elect them either by districts or at large. Five states entrusted the task to their state legislatures but in one of those states, New York, the process became so bogged down in partisan wrangling that it failed to choose any. Not yet having ratified the Constitution, North Carolina and Rhode Island did not participate in the elections. The two remaining states, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, used methods that mixed popular voting with legislative selection. The means did not matter. When the electors of the ten participating states met on February 4, 1789, all sixty-nine of them cast one of their two votes apiece for Washington. Their second votes scattered, but John Adams received enough of them to become vice president. Federalists aligned with Washington captured a majority of the seats in both houses of Congress even though, under Henry’s leadership, the Virginia legislature sent two antifederalists to the Senate.

  Although Washington knew by January that he would win the electoral contest, and by February that the count for him would likely be unanimous, the results could not become official until Congress convened and counted the votes. That took until early April. “On this day we went to business, and to my very great satisfaction I heard an unanimous vote of the electing States in favor of calling you to the honorable office of President,” Virginia senator Richard Henry Lee wrote to Washington on April 6, 1789. “I am sure that the public happiness, which I know you have so much at heart, will be very insecure without your acceptance.”79 After receiving official notice of his selection, Washington left Mount Vernon on April 16 on a ten-day carriage trip to New York for his inauguration. With formal receptions and cheering crowds at every town along the way, it became a grand federal parade honoring Washington and uniting the nation.

  Reaching Franklin’s Pennsylvania on the twentieth, Washington was greeted by the state’s new president at the border and—with other officials, two cavalry units, a detachment of artillery, and a body of light infantry—escorted through a festooned ceremonial arch into Philadelphia, which exploded upon his arrival. Cannons fired and bells rang through the day; fireworks lit the night’s sky. “The number of spectators who filled the doors, windows, and streets, which he passed, was greater than on any other occasion,” a newspaper noted. “All classes and descriptions of citizens discovered . . . the most undisguised attachment and unbounded zeal for their dear chief.”80 A banquet followed.

  Infirm to the point of being virtually bedridden, Franklin could not attend the public events for Washington but received him at his home. No record remains of what was said, even though both surely knew it would be their last meeting. After spending the night at Robert Morris’s mansion, Washington proceeded on to New York City, where Congress sat. There, on April 30, before thousands of spectators spread across the streets and spaces below, Washington took the oath of office on an outside balcony of the city’s newly renovated Federal Hall on Wall Street.

  After taking the oath in public, Washington returned to the Senate Chambers and, in a voice that the assembled dignitaries strained to hear, delivered an inaugural address setting out his vision for the new republic. “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of Government,” he said in lofty words that echoed Franklin’s beliefs, “are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Looking heavenward, Washington closed with a prayer for the American people to exhibit “the enlarged views, the temperate consultations, and the wise measures, on which the success of this Government must depend.”81 For Washington, those measures would include Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s ambitious plans of government-assisted economic development through protective tariffs, debt assumption, and a quasi-independent central bank. They did not include tackling such sectionally divisive and economically disruptive matters as the abolition of slavery or the slave trade. Here Franklin’s view of America’s lofty duty to preserve the sacred fire of liberty differed from Washington’s notion of the temperate consultations needed for successful government.

  SLAVERY WAS ONE MATTER that irreconcilably divided Franklin and Washington, just as it became the subject that, seventy years later, tore apart the states that they had worked so long to knit together. Coming from the south and knowing full well the issue’s divisiveness, temporizing on slavery was nothing new for Washington. It was his practice.

  Born into a slaveholding family, Washington owned more than one hundred slaves and controlled nearly two hundred more in his wife’s dower estate by the time of the American Revolution. During and after that fight for liberty, critics of slavery, from Quaker abolitionists to his much loved military aide Lafayette, pleaded with Washington to denounce the institution publicly or at least set an example by freeing his own slaves. While he sometimes sympathized with such views in private, he always equivocated or delayed acting. Meanwhile, the number of his own slaves increased, he never freed any during his lifetime, and he pursued those who ran away. Dozens fled, including seventeen in 1781 when a British warship approached Mount Vernon with promises of freedom for slaves who betrayed their masters.82 Those in human bondage who knew his private face never saw Washington as a liberator.

  Historians disagree on whether Washington was an unusually harsh maste
r. Certainly he clothed and housed his field slaves poorly, worked them hard from sunrise to sunset, and had them whipped for perceived infractions. Although he favored mixed-race slaves for personal tasks and kept those sired by his father-in-law, stepson, and other relatives in bondage at Mount Vernon, he appeared to abhor (and never practice) the acts that produced them—but Washington was not a lustful male, and did not have children by Martha either. Opportunity tempted him only in warfare and real estate. Franklin once observed that “almost every Slave [was] from the nature of slavery a thief.”83 Washington saw slaves as thieves as well but, lacking Franklin’s empathy, blamed them rather than their bondage. He distrusted his slaves, and they distrusted him. In short, he treated them like slaves. They were his human chattel.

  While serving as president after Philadelphia became the capital in December 1790, seven months after Franklin’s death, Washington began rotating his house slaves back to Virginia. He did this to avoid a Pennsylvania law liberating slaves held within the state for more than six months. “I wish to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public,” he wrote to his personal secretary about the rotation. “This advice may be known to none but yourself & Mrs Washington.”84 Deducing what was afoot, Washington’s chef, Hercules, so heartily protested his fidelity that Washington exempted him from the policy. When the time came for him to return to Virginia, Hercules fled. Martha’s favorite attendant, Ona Judge, did so too. By this time, Washington had signed the nation’s first fugitive slave act into law and used every means it offered to retrieve his runaway bond servants. He had been in no mood to cooperate earlier in 1790, when Franklin lashed out against slavery. Giving Washington the benefit of the doubt, one could attribute his response to prioritizing the preservation of the union over justice to slaves—but little in his prior public acts merit such a concession. To the people, he appeared a stout defender of slavery. When Franklin’s closest abolitionist friend had died in 1784, a eulogist declared, “I would rather be Anthony Benezet in that Coffin than George Washington, with all his fame.”85

  FRANKLIN DID NOT want to go to his coffin without one last swipe at slavery. Since taking the reins of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in the spring of 1787, he had assumed an ever more prominent position criticizing the slave trade and urging emancipation. He pleaded with influential slaveholders such as Virginia governor Edmund Randolph, who was named the nation’s first attorney general in 1789, to free their slaves, and he urged New Hampshire president John Langdon to discourage his state’s merchant shippers from participating in the slave trade. Franklin had hosted both men at his home during the Constitutional Convention and felt free to press them on the issue. Slavery “is so evidently repugnant to the political principles and form of government lately adopted by the citizens of the United States,” he wrote to Langdon, that it “cannot fail of delaying the employment of the blessings of peace and liberty by drawing down the displeasure of the great and impartial Ruler of the Universe upon our country.”86 Franklin believed that a republican people must exhibit civic virtue to prosper. Slavery threatened calamity.

  Revered as much in Europe as America, Franklin corresponded with leading abolitionists across the Atlantic to coordinate a global campaign against slavery. English industrialist Josiah Wedgwood sent him literary sketches about freed Blacks. “While relief is given to so many,” Wedgwood wrote, “the subject of freedom itself will be more canvassed and better understood.”87 To Lafayette, Franklin pleaded about slavery, “Nothing effectual will be done in this business untill France concurs in it.”88 In mid-1788, London classicist and social reformer Granville Sharp shared news that “[u]pward of a hundred petition having been presented to Parliament” against the slave trade, “the House of Commons pledged itself to take up the business.”89

  Perhaps this news from London inspired Franklin. His final assault on slavery took the form of a petition to Congress that he signed as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Declaring “that equal liberty was originally the Portion, and is still the Birthright of all Men,” it called on members of Congress to “step to the very verge of the Powers vested in you, for discouraging every Species of Traffick in the Persons of our fellow Men.” Paraphrasing the Constitution to say those powers included “promoting the Welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to the People of the United States,” the petition asserted, “These blessings ought rightfully to be administered, without distinction of Color, to all descriptions of People.”90

  Franklin’s petition reached the House of Representatives on February 12, 1790, one day after similar petitions arrived from two Quaker societies. At the time, Congress routinely referred citizens’ petitions to committee for consideration. The Quaker petitions stirred an immediate uproar, with some southern members opposing their referral. The petitions urged Congress to oppose the slave trade and discourage slavery, which these members claimed was beyond its power. In an instructive precedent for originalist interpretation of the First Amendment, they added that, because the petitions came from churches instead of citizens, acting on them would constitute a wrongful establishment of religion.91

  The vehemence of the opposition did not stem from these procedural concerns, however, but from the petitioners’ known objectives. “Do these men expect a general emancipation of slaves by law?” South Carolina’s Thomas Tudor Tucker thundered. “This would never be submitted to by the southern states without civil war.” Even referring antislavery petitions to committee risked disunion, Georgia’s Abraham Baldwin warned. “The moment we go to jostle on that ground,” he said, “we shall feel it tremble under our feet.” Yet by opposing referral, these members ignited the debate that they sought to avert by stirring northern members to rise in defense of the petitioners. “It was the cause of humanity they had interested themselves in,” Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts declared, “to wipe off the indelible stain which the slave trade had brought upon all who were concerned in it.” Then let them read the Bible, James Jackson of Georgia replied, and “they will find that slavery is not only allowed but commended.”92 Already in 1790, all of the major antebellum arguments for and against slavery sounded in Congress. “More masterly speeches could not have been heard, upon a similar subject, in any part of the world,” one newspaper observed.93

  Derailing the ongoing discussion of Hamilton’s landmark financial plan for restructuring government debt and boosting the national economy, the debate over referring the Quaker petitions extended into the next day, when the petition from Franklin arrived and effectively forced Congress to refer all three to committee. Franklin’s signature gave the lie to opponents’ procedural arguments, with Tucker vainly protesting that Franklin “ought to have known the Constitution better.”94 Quietly referring the petitions to committee was what James Madison wanted anyway. A shrewd political strategist then representing Virginia in the House of Representatives, he knew better than anyone that, while Congress could not constitutionally bar the slave trade until 1808, it could use its substantial powers to undermine slavery and that he could more effectively counter that effort by using (rather than resisting) legislative action. “The best way to proceed in this business is to commit the memorials without any debate,” the slaveholding congressman advised his House colleagues.95 Northern members wanted this result anyway and, with Madison on their side, they easily prevailed over divided southern opposition. And so the petitions went to committee. On this tinderbox issue, Madison sought to forestall action through process.

  BY THE TIME he submitted his petition to Congress, Franklin knew he was dying. He had written his last letter to Washington on September 16, 1789—several months before the antislavery petition was sent. “For my own personal Ease, I should have died two Years ago; but tho’ those Years have been spent in excruciating Pain, I am pleas’d that I have liv’d them, since they have brought me to see our present Situation,” Franklin wrote of the period that covered the Constitution’s ratification and new governmen
t’s founding. “I am now finishing my 84th and probably with it my Career in this Life; but . . . if I retain any Memory of what has pass’d here, I shall with it retain the Esteem, Respect, and Affection with which I have long been, my dear Friend, Yours most sincerely, B. Franklin.”96

  Washington replied a week later, expressing his prayer “that your existence might close with as much ease to yourself, as its continuance has been beneficial to our Country and useful to Mankind.” Echoing back Franklin’s esteem, Washington closed with the salutation, “So long as I retain my Memory, you will be thought on with respect, veneration and affection by Dear Sir Your sincere friend, G. Washington.”97 A fitting end to a three-decade-long relationship, it preceded their final letterless encounter over slavery.

  Franklin suffered from the stone and gout. To combat them, he wrote shortly before his letter to Washington, “I have been obligated to have recourse to Opium, which indeed has afforded me some Ease from time to time but then it has taken away my Appetite and so impeded my Digestion that I am become totally emaciated and little remains of me but a Skeleton covered with a Skin.”98 To his satisfaction, this relief allowed him to resume writing his autobiography, which became the best-selling American book of the next century and a worldwide classic of its genre. By November, Franklin complained that he no longer had “any faith in remedies,” and simply sought palliative relief to “make life at least tolerable.” Unable to sit, he added, “I now make use of the hands of one of my grandsons, dictating to him from my bed.”99 Visiting Franklin in early March during the break in the congressional battle over the antislavery petitions, Thomas Jefferson found him “much emaciated, but in good spirits,” and animated “almost too much for his strength.” Franklin’s mind remained sharp.100