American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  When Cornwallis did what Washington had told Nelson not to do and the war ended, Washington was faced with the problem of preserving the great republic he had brought into being, and he had to begin with a resounding no to the officers of the army who had served him so loyally. Not all shared his vision of that great republic. They had thought and fought continentally, but they wanted a truly continental government more than they wanted a republican government. As the Continental Congress had shown itself to be uncontinental, Washington’s officers thought a monarchy or dictatorship was the only solution. There was only one man who could be at the top. Now he had to utter a most emphatic no. A yes could have resulted in the army’s putting him on a throne, as Oliver Cromwell’s army had in effect done for him in England in 1653. Washington gave an icy and vehement no. He told one officer who carried the proposal, “You could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable….” The general had not fought a war for republican government in order to destroy it himself.

  On the other hand he knew, perhaps better than anyone else, the danger that the republic would destroy itself and, with it, the honor he had earned in bringing it into existence. He had watched the enthusiasm of 1775 and 1776 fade into the fecklessness of 1783 and 1784. The timidity of the Continental Congress in governing the national republic had threatened the dissolution of his Continental army throughout the war. With the coming of peace and international recognition of the United States, the great republic he had fought for was inexorably dissolving into thirteen insignificant republics. People who believed in a great republic recognized the danger as he did. As they prepared to do something about it in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they knew that success would hinge on his participation. It went without saying that he would be invited to attend and preside over the Convention to rescue the republic. But it was not Washington’s way to insert himself into the process. He understood the need for the Convention, but he was not sure it could succeed. He had had a bellyful of the narrow provincialism of the state politicians who might dominate it. If he had taken the lead in bringing it about, he might be seen as the king-in-waiting his officers had wanted to make of him. His judgment told him to stay in the background. He debated with himself whether he should even attend the Convention. People everywhere saw Washington as the symbol of continental America. He must use the strength which that position gave him and use it to the best effect.

  So he attended the Convention, betting that it would succeed, and he presided over it but took no part in its deliberations. We all know that the members divided over many crucial issues, particularly over the so-called New Jersey plan empowering the separate states and the more nationalistic Virginia plan. Washington gave no indication where he stood on either. His only speech came at the end, after the disagreements had been worked out, when he suggested that the ratio of popular representation in Congress specified in the document be made more democratic. The Convention immediately changed the ratio from one representative for every forty thousand people to one for every thirty thousand. By not participating in the earlier debates, Washington avoided the appearance of favoring any side in any division. It was simply his presence, and indeed Benjamin Franklin’s presence, that mattered. Neither man had much to do with the terms of the Constitution that emerged from the Convention. It was their being there that mattered and mattered crucially. By standing aloof from the debates, Washington maintained his prestige as a national figure and could place it behind the creation of a national government to end the fragmentation of his beloved republic.

  In the campaign for ratification, Washington again kept himself above the fray. Virginia’s acceptance would be crucial, but Washington did not campaign for it in his home state or anywhere else. To close friends he intimated his strong approval of the new Constitution and his contempt for the small minds who opposed it. If the Constitution was adopted, he would be elected the first president of the new government. He must have known that. If he did not, there were plenty of people telling him. But to strive for its ratification could be seen as politicking. If he was to use his popular strength on behalf of the United States, he could not dilute it by publicly taking sides.

  When the new government was finally in place, it was time for Washington to enlist his prestige behind it. Once again he was in a position of command. He believed, as did most Americans, that the future of republican government in the world rested in his hands. The great doubt so long entertained about the inherent weakness of republics had to be dispelled by an executive who could act forcefully when action was needed. He would have no trouble showing his capacity for acting decisively in situations that required it. But in his early days in office much would depend on his daily behavior. As in the war, he had to draw a line between what would be good for the country and what people expected of their democratically chosen leader. Until governmental action was called for, he had to mind appearances, to give to his office a distinction, a character, to match the authority attached to it. His way of doing it was another instance of his knowing what not to do.

  As with Franklin in France, John Adams offers us the contrast between a man who wanted to do too much and a man who knew when to stand still. When it came time for the new United States Senate to address the president, Adams was eager to dignify the office he would one day hold by something resembling the extravagant phrases enjoyed by royalty, such as “your highness” or “your benign highness,” or “your majesty.” Washington made it plain that he would have none of this: dignity, yes, fulsomeness, no. He was the president of the United States. That was the title by which he and every subsequent president would be addressed and announced. Washington’s personal authority endowed it with a dignity that florid honorifics would have impaired.

  In conducting his new office, Washington knew that he was sailing an uncharted sea. What guided him still was his vision of a great republic. He had hopes that the new Constitution would embody that vision for all his countrymen. He believed in republican government, in government by the people. That meant that the people must make their own decisions, that he must not decide for them in making laws. He must not even try to influence the way they voted for their representatives. In 1792 when a candidate for Congress in the coming November election spread the rumor that he had Washington’s backing, Washington rebuked the man publicly and privately. To have expressed a preference for any candidate, he declared, “would have been incompatible with the rule I had prescrib’d to myself, and which I had invariably observed, of not interfering directly or indirectly with the suffrages of the people, in the choice of their representatives.” On the same principle Washington was loath to veto bills of which he did not approve. As he confided to his friend Edmund Pendleton, “I give my Signature to many bills with which my Judgment is at variance.” It was Washington’s misfortune to find the people and their representatives frequently at odds with his own views. His response was to blame party leaders for misleading and misinforming the people. To the end he believed that they would do the right thing if only they were fully informed. In the year he died, 1799, when the people seemed to be doing everything wrong, he reiterated his confidence in republican government. “I am persuaded,” he wrote, “the great mass of our Citizens require only to understand matters rightly, to form right decisions.”

  That Washington could retain such a view after the trials he endured in his presidency is a measure not only of his confidence in democracy but also of the deep humanity that lay behind his sense of when to say no. Underlying Washington’s aloofness, his refusal to do what people wanted him to, was a fundamental respect for mankind. It is not always apparent in the pressures of the moment when he had to say no to seemingly reasonable requests. This is most clearly visible, I think, in his conduct of foreign relations. The neutrality he preserved in the international conflicts that followed the French Revolution may have looked like indifference, simply a way of doing nothing. But its sources lay in an unwillingness to take advantag
e of other people’s misfortunes to gain favors for his own country. He explained it best in a letter to Gouverneur Morris in 1791, when the distress of Europe offered opportunities for the United States to gain benefits in treaties with countries needing assistance. Here is what he told Morris:

  Should a treaty be formed with a Nation whose circumstances may not at this moment be very bright much delicacy would be necessary in order to shew that no undue advantages were taken on that account. For unless treaties are mutually beneficial to the Parties, it is in vain to hope for a continuance of them beyond the moment when the one which conceives itself to be over-reached is in a situation to break off the connexion. And I believe it is among nations as with individuals, the party taking advantage of the distresses of another will lose infinitely more in the opinion of mankind and in subsequent events than he will gain by the stroke of the moment. (July 28, 1791)

  That was what republican government was all about. You had to say no to “strokes of the moment.” Washington had to say it often, but he still enjoys the good opinion of mankind that he won by saying it.

  —Unpublished

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The End of Franklin’s Pragmatism

  “PRAGMATISM” IS THE WORD most commonly used to describe Franklin’s way of dealing with the world. We don’t mean by it an adherence to the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce or William James, from which the modern word probably derived (it was not in Franklin’s vocabulary). We mean, I think, simply a willingness to compromise in pursuit of some goal, a willingness not to insist on some abstract principle in transactions with other people, a willingness to make concessions. A prime example would be Franklin’s best-known contribution to the proceedings of the 1787 Convention that created the federal Constitution, the so-called Great Compromise, which he proposed as a way to break the deadlock over representation between the small states and the large. The states would be represented equally in the Senate and in proportion to their populations in the House of Representatives.

  This compromise went against Franklin’s own beliefs. He would have preferred a single national representative assembly based strictly on population or, failing that, a bicameral legislature in which the members of both houses were apportioned that way. From the time when the states first joined in the Continental Congress, Franklin had objected to their voting by state: he thought it ridiculous for a state the size of Rhode Island or Delaware to have the same share in making decisions as Virginia or Pennsylvania. He did not prevail in the Continental Congress or in the Constitutional Convention, but he and those who thought like him at least got half of what they wanted—or, rather, more than half. They got the union, first of the colonies, then of the states. Like Abraham Lincoln after them, they put the union first, ahead of goals that could not in any case have been reached without it. Franklin’s pragmatism meant putting first things first, accepting half a loaf if he could not get the whole, and ungrudgingly accepting nothing at all if that was the price of carrying on an enterprise he believed in.

  Franklin learned his pragmatism in Philadelphia before he ever had need or opportunity to apply it on a continental or global scale. Putting first things first in his printing business doubtless contributed to the success that enabled him to retire at the age of forty-two, but his retirement is only one sign that he already had goals that he put ahead of making money. As he told his mother in 1750, “I would rather have it said, he lived usefully, than, He died rich.” It will be admitted that he succeeded in that goal, and his success was the result of a personal philosophy in which putting first things first often meant putting himself last. He organized a whole array of societies for improving life in Philadelphia: a fire company, insurance company, library, hospital, university. In these initiatives, guided by the insights into human psychology that he put in the mouth of “Poor Richard,” he learned to lead from the rear. As the instigator of so many projects for public benefit, he found it most effective to present them as coming from other people. He employed the same technique on a larger scale when his colony’s government failed to arm Pennsylvania against the threatened wartime invasion by the French in 1747. He organized a militia and raised money for fortifications while making it all seem the spontaneous work of other leading citizens. In his militia he served as a common soldier, declining any position of command. Pragmatism was not just a willingness to compromise; it was an art.

  By the end of his pragmatism I intend both the common meanings of the word “end”—a goal or purpose, and the place where something stops. Where did his pragmatism end, stop? For what goals was Franklin willing to compromise, and where did he draw a line and say no compromise or no further compromise? The answer is not easy, for there were many goals, many principles, he believed in but did not pursue or struggle to attain. He believed in free trade among nations. He believed that there should be an international law embodied in treaties to forbid privateering and also to forbid nations at war from interfering with the peaceful activities of farmers, sailors, and merchants. These were beliefs he did not hold lightly; as the principal United States negotiator in the treaty that ended the War for Independence, he made an effort to secure their recognition. But he was pragmatic. He did not draw a line and say no treaty without them. In early life Franklin had a plan for an international party of virtue, whose members would further goals like these. He was going to write a book on the art of virtue, which would be a kind of manifesto for an international movement. He was still thinking about it in the 1780s, but he never did write it. I think it is fair to say that Franklin recognized that his major goals for the good of mankind in general were unattainable, that even small steps toward them would be too small to be worth fighting for. He was not Don Quixote, and he would not waste his time breaking lances with the guardians of the status quo in contests he could not win.

  But there were occasions when he dug in his heels and refused to make concessions, occasions when his goal was nonnegotiable, when defeat was preferable to compromise, when his pragmatism came to an end, a stop. One of these was in his campaign to substitute royal government for proprietary government in Pennsylvania. The campaign had begun in the Pennsylvania Assembly’s attempt to tax the tax-exempt lands of the Penn family. Frustrated by the veto of the Penns’ appointed governor (the Penns themselves remained in England), the Assembly sent Franklin to England in 1757 to get the British government to require the Penns to allow the taxation. Franklin failed in this mission or, rather, won a very limited right to tax a portion of the Penn lands. He returned to Pennsylvania in 1764, determined to secure what he and his political allies may have had in mind from the beginning, a revocation of the Penn family’s authority over the colony in favor of direct royal control. Franklin and his allies dominated the Pennsylvania Assembly, and the Assembly sent him back to England with his desired petition for royal government. But it was not a popular move in Pennsylvania and unlikely to succeed in England. It did not succeed, and it was unrealistic to imagine it ever could have. In this case I think Franklin had already achieved a pragmatic halfway measure in making some of the Penn lands taxable. His new goal, the destruction of the Penns’ authority, could not be reached pragmatically. It was nonnegotiable.

  We have to ask why he thought it was a good idea anyhow. We cannot rule out the role of personal feelings. By the time he began his campaign, Franklin had developed a bitter hatred of the principal proprietor, Thomas Penn (son of William), and Penn returned the favor. Penn had seen Franklin’s organization of a militia to protect the colony as a threat to his authority, a “Military Common Wealth.” He wished that Franklin would take his role as tribune of the people somewhere else. When the two finally met in England, Franklin came away with “a more cordial and thorough Contempt for him than [he] ever before felt for any Man living.” Personal feelings may have raised the stakes in the contest, but Franklin’s eagerness to bring down the Penns had deeper roots, as will become evident if we consider another case in which his pragmatism ended.


  The two are closely linked, though they may seem at odds with each other. During the colonists’ quarrel with the mother country, which was just beginning when Franklin returned to England with his petition for royal government, he became the unofficial spokesman for the colonists in their protests against the British Parliament’s attempt to tax them. As will be seen, he came to view Parliament’s exercise of authority in America in the same way that he viewed the Penn family’s, as an unacceptable interposition of other Englishmen between the king and his American subjects. As he developed this view, his pragmatism was at first very much in evidence. He did not himself believe in the natural rights that the colonists kept affirming, and he hoped to work out a compromise, as in effect he did for a time. Largely through his efforts Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, while at the same time asserting in the Declaratory Act that it had a right to pass such an act.

  The Declaratory Act was not Franklin’s idea, but he was content to have Parliament claim the right, provided it was not exercised. In succeeding years, as Parliament again exercised it in the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773, he did his best to excuse and defend the colonists’ declarations and manifestos and to minimize the violence that accompanied them. At the same time in letters home, he urged the colonists to calm down, to avoid the confrontations that were giving them a bad name in England, to be patient until the mother country changed its policies, as he was urging it to do at every opportunity. His hope was that the British would recognize the need to adjust their policies to the reality of colonial opposition before the opposition hardened to the point of no return, to the point of withdrawing from the empire in independence.