Authors: Joseph J. Ellis
What Voltaire was to France, Franklin was to America, the
symbol of mankind’s triumphal arrival at modernity. (When the two great
philosopher-kings embraced amid the assembled throngs of Paris, the scene
created a sensation, as if the gods had landed on earth and declared the
dawning of the Enlightenment.) The greatest American scientist, the most deft
diplomat, the most accomplished prose stylist, the sharpest wit, Franklin
defied all the categories by inhabiting them all with such distinction and
nonchalant grace. Over a century before Horatio Alger, he had invented the role
and called it Poor Richard, the original self-taught, homespun American with an
uncanny knack for showing up where history was headed and striking a folksy
pose that then dramatized the moment forever: holding the kite as the lightning
struck; lounging alongside Jefferson and offering witty consolations as the
Continental Congress edited out several of Jefferson’s most cherished
passages; wearing a coonskin cap for his portrait in Paris; remarking as the
delegates signed the Constitution that, yes, the sun that was carved into the
chair at the front of the room did now seem to be rising.
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In addition
to seeming eternal, ubiquitous, protean, and endlessly quotable, Franklin had
the most sophisticated sense of timing among all the prominent statesmen of the
revolutionary era. His forceful presence at the defining moment of 1776 had
caused most observers to forget that, in truth, Franklin was a latecomer to the
patriot cause, the man who had spent most of the 1760s in London attempting to
obtain, of all things, a royal charter for Pennsylvania. He had actually lent
his support to the Stamp Act in 1765 and lobbied for a position within the
English government as late as 1771. But he had leapt back across the Atlantic
and onto the American side of the imperial debate in the nick of time, a
convert to the cause, who, by the dint of his international reputation, was
quickly catapulted into the top echelon of the political leadership. Sent to
France to negotiate a wartime alliance, he arrived in Paris just when the
French ministry was ready to entertain such an idea. He remained in place long
enough to lead the American delegation through the peace treaty with England,
then relinquished his ministerial duties to Jefferson in 1784, just when all
diplomatic initiatives on America’s behalf in Europe bogged down and
proved futile. (When asked if he was Franklin’s replacement, Jefferson
had allegedly replied that he was his successor, but that no one could replace
him.) He arrived back in Philadelphia a conquering hero and in plenty of time
to be selected as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.
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This gift of
exquisite timing continued until the very end. In April of 1787, Franklin
agreed to serve as the new president of the revitalized Pennsylvania Abolition
Society and to make the antislavery cause the final project of his life. Almost
sixty years earlier, in 1729, as a young printer in Philadelphia, he had begun
publishing Quaker tracts against slavery and the slave trade. Throughout the
middle years of the century and into the revolutionary era, he had lent his
support to Anthony Benezet and other Quaker abolitionists, and he had spoken
out on occasion against the claim that blacks were innately inferior or that
racial categories were immutable. Nevertheless, while his antislavery
credentials were clear, at one point Franklin had owned a few household slaves
himself, and he had never made slavery a priority target or thrown the full
weight of his enormous prestige against it.
Starting in 1787, that
changed. At the Constitutional Convention he intended to introduce a proposal
calling for the inclusion of a statement of principle, condemning both the
slave trade and slavery, thereby making it unequivocally clear that the
founding document of the new American nation committed the government to
eventual emancipation. But several northern delegates, along with at least one
officer in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, persuaded him to withdraw his
proposal on the grounds that it put the fragile Sectional Compromise, and
therefore the Constitution itself, at risk. The petition submitted to the First
Congress under his signature, then, was essentially the same proposal he had
wanted to introduce at the Convention. With the Constitution now ratified and
the new federal government safely in place, Franklin resumed his plea that
slavery be declared incongruous with the revolutionary principles on which the
nation was founded. The man with the impeccable timing was choosing to make the
anomaly of slavery the last piece of advice he would offer his country.
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Though his
health was declining rapidly, newspaper accounts of the proslavery speeches in
the House roused him for one final appearance in print. Under the pseudonym
“Historicus,” he published a parody of the speech delivered by
James Jackson of Georgia. It was a vintage Franklin performance, reminiscent of
his bemused but devastating recommendations to the English government in 1770
about the surest means to take the decisive action guaranteed to destroy the
British Empire. This time, he claimed to have noticed the eerie similarity
between Jackson’s speech on behalf of slavery and one delivered a century
earlier by an Algerian pirate named Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim.
Surely the
similarities were inadvertent, he suggested, since Jackson was obviously a
virtuous man and thus incapable of plagiarism. But the arguments and the very
language were identical, except that Jackson used Christianity to justify
enslavement of the Africans, while the African used Islam to justify
enslavement of Christians. “The Doctrine, that Plundering and Enslaving
the Christians is unjust, is at best
problematical,
” the
Algerian had allegedly written, and when presented with a petition to cease
capturing Europeans, he had argued to the divan of Algiers “that it is in
the Interest of the State to continue the Practice; therefore let the Petition
be rejected.” All the same practical objections to ending slavery were
also raised: “But who is to indemnify their Masters for the Loss? Will
the State do it? Is our Treasury sufficient … ? And if we set our Slaves
free, what is to be done with them … ? Our people will not pollute
themselves by intermarrying with them.” Franklin then had the Algerian
argue that the enslaved Christians were “better off with us, rather than
remain in Europe where they would only cut each other’s throats in
religious wars.” Franklin’s pointed parody was reprinted in several
newspapers from Boston to Philadelphia, though nowhere south of the Potomac. It
was his last public act. Three weeks later, on April 17, the founding
grandfather finally went to his Maker.
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Prior to his
passing, however, the great weight of Franklin’s unequivocal endorsement
made itself felt in the congressional debate and emboldened several northern
representatives to answer the proslavery arguments of the Deep South with
newfound courage. Franklin’s reputation served as the catalyst in an
exchange, as Smith of South Carolina attempted to discredit his views by
observing that “even great men have their senile moments.” This
prompted rebuttals from the Pennsylvania delegation: “Instead of proving
him superannuated,” Franklin’s antislavery views showed that
“the qualities of his soul, as well as those of his mind, are yet in
their vigour”; only Franklin still seemed able “to speak the
language of America, and to call us back to our first principles”;
critics of Franklin, it was suggested, only exposed the absurdity of the
proslavery position, revealing clearly that “an advocate for slavery, in
its fullest latitude, at this stage of the world, and on the floor of the
American Congress too, is
a phenomenon in politics.…
They defy,
yea, mock all belief.” William Scott of Pennsylvania, his blood also up
in defense of Franklin, launched a frontal assault on the constitutional
position of the Deep South: “I think it unsatisfactory to be told that
there was an understanding between the northern and southern members, in the
national convention”; the Constitution was a written document, not a
series of unwritten understandings; where did it say anything at all about
slavery? Who were these South Carolinians to instruct us on what Congress could
and could not do? “I believe,” concluded Scott, “if Congress
should at any time be of the opinion that a state of slavery was a quality
inadmissible in America, they would not be barred … of prohibiting this
baneful quality.” He went on for nearly an hour. It turned out to be the
high-water mark of the antislavery effort in the House.
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In
retrospect, Franklin’s final gesture at leadership served to solidify his
historic reputation as a man who possessed in his bones a feeling for the
future. But in the crucible of the moment, another quite plausible definition
of leadership was circulating in the upper reaches of the government. John
Adams, for example, though an outspoken enemy of slavery who could match his
revolutionary credentials with anyone, concurred from his perch as presiding
officer of the Senate when that body refused to permit the Quaker petitions to
be heard. Alexander Hamilton, who was a founding member of the New York
Manumission Society and a staunch antislavery advocate, also regretted the
whole debate in the House, since it stymied his highest priority, which was
approval of his financial plan. And George Washington, the supreme Founding
Father, who had taken a personal vow never to purchase another slave and let it
be known that it was his fondest wish “to see some plan adopted, by which
slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible
degrees,” also concurred that the ongoing debate in the House was an
embarrassing and dangerous nuisance that must be terminated. Jefferson probably
agreed with this verdict, though his correspondence is characteristically quiet
on the subject. The common version of leadership that bound this distinguished
constellation together was a keen appreciation of the political threat that any
direct consideration of slavery represented in the still-fragile American
republic. And the man who stepped forward to implement this version of
leadership was James Madison.
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If
Franklin’s great gift was an uncanny knack for levitating above political
camps, operating at an altitude that permitted him to view the essential
patterns and then comment with great irony and wit on the behavior of those
groveling about on the ground, Madison’s specialty was just the opposite.
He lived in the details and worked his magic in the context of the moment,
mobilizing those forces on the ground more adroitly and with a more deft
tactical proficiency than anyone else. Taken together, he and Franklin would
have made a nearly unbeatable team. But in 1790, they were on different
sides.
Madison’s position on slavery captured the essence of what
might be called “the Virginia straddle.” On the one hand, he found
the blatantly proslavery arguments “shamefully indecent” and
described his colleagues from South Carolina and Georgia as “intemperate
beyond all example and even all decorum.” Like most of his fellow
Virginians, he wanted it known that he preferred an early end to the slave
trade and regarded the institution of slavery “a deep-rooted
abuse.” He claimed to be genuinely embarrassed at the stridently
proslavery rhetoric of the delegates from the Deep South and much more
comfortable on the high moral ground of his northern friends.
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But a fault
line ran through the center of his thinking, a kind of mysterious region where
ideas entered going in one direction but then emerged headed the opposite way.
For example, when urged by Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician and
abolitionist, to support the Quaker petitions in the House, Madison responded,
“Altho I feel the force of many of your remarks, I can not embrace the
idea to which they lead.” When pressed to explain the discrepancy between
his hypothetical antislavery position and his actual dedication to self-imposed
paralysis, he tended to offer several different answers. Sometimes it was a
matter of his Virginia constituents: “Those from whom I derive my public
station,” he explained, “are known by me to be greatly interested
in that species of property, and to view the matter in that light.”
Sometimes it was a matter of timing: He concurred with the progressive segment
of Virginia’s planter class that “slavery is a Moral, and political
Evil, and that Whoever brings forward in the Respective States, some General,
rational and Liberal plan, for the Gradual Emancipation of Slaves, will deserve
Well of his Country—yet I think it was very improper, at this time, to
introduce it in Congress.”
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Any effort
to locate the core of Madison’s position on slavery, therefore, misses
the point, which is that there was no core, except perhaps the conviction that
the whole subject was taboo. Like Jefferson and the other members of the
Virginia dynasty, he regarded any explicit defense of slavery in the mode of
South Carolina and Georgia as a moral embarrassment. On the other hand, he
regarded any effort to end slavery as premature, politically impractical, and
counter-productive. As a result, he developed a way of talking and writing
about the problem that might be described as “enlightened
obfuscation.” For example, consider the following Madisonian statement,
written during the height of the debate in the House: “If this folly did
not reproach the public councils, it ought to excite no regret in the patrons
of Humanity & freedom. Nothing could hasten more the progress of these
reflections & sentiments which are secretly undermining the institution
which this mistaken zeal is laboring to secure agst. the most distant approach
of danger.” The convoluted syntax, multiple negatives, indefinite
antecedents, and masterful circumlocutions of this statement defy
comprehension. What begins as a denunciation of those defending slavery somehow
doubles back on itself and ends up in worrisome confusion that the matter is
being talked about at all. What is meant to sound like an antislavery argument
transforms itself in midpassage into a verbal fog bank that descends over the
entire subject like a cloud.
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