Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (63 page)

On only one issue did Franklin take what could be considered the less democratic position, though he did not recognize it as such. Federal officials, he argued, should serve without pay. In
The Radicalism of the American Revolution,
historian Gordon Wood contends that Franklin’s proposal reflected the “classical sentiments of aristocratic leadership.” Even John Adams, generally less democratic in his outlook, wrote from London that under such a policy “all offices would be monopolized by the rich, the poor and middling ranks would be excluded and an aristocratic despotism would immediately follow.”

Franklin, I think, did not intend for his proposal to be elitist or exclusionary, but instead saw it as a way to limit corrupting influences. In his many letters on the subject, he never considered, though he should have, that his plan might limit the jobs to those who could afford to work for free. Indeed, he seemed quite oblivious to this argument. Instead, he based his position on his faith in citizen volunteers and his long-standing belief that a pursuit of profit had corrupted English government. It was a case he had made in an exchange of letters with William Strahan three years earlier, and he used almost the exact same language on the floor of the convention:

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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:

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 unfulfilled 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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