Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set

by Walter Isaacson

These three attributes proved invaluable in resolving the core issues facing the convention. The greatest of these was whether America would remain thirteen separate states or become one nation, or—if the demigods could prove so ingenious—some magical combination of both, as Franklin had first suggested in his Albany Plan of Union back in 1754. This issue was manifest in various specific ways: Would Congress be directly elected by the people or chosen by the state legislatures? Would representation be based on population or be equal for each state? Would the national government or the state governments be sovereign?

  America was deeply split on this set of issues. Some people, Franklin initially among them, were in favor of creating a supreme national government and reducing the states to a subordinate role. On the other side were those fervently opposed to any surrender of state sovereignty, which had been enshrined in the Articles of Confederation. The call for the convention expressly declared that its purpose would be to revise the Articles, not abandon them. The most radical proponents of states’ rights even refused to attend. “I smell a rat,” declared Patrick Henry. Samuel Adams justified his own absence by saying, “I stumble at the threshold. I meet with a national government instead of a federal union of sovereign states.”20

  The Virginia delegation, led by Madison and Edmund Randolph, arrived in Philadelphia early and proceeded to do just what the states’ rights camp feared: they proposed scrapping the Articles entirely and starting afresh with a new constitution for a strong national government. It would be headed by a very powerful House of Representatives elected directly by the people based on proportional representation. The House would select members of an upper chamber, the president, and the judiciary.

  Franklin had long favored a legislature with only one directly elected house, seeing little reason to place checks on the democratic will of the people, and he had designed such a system in Pennsylvania. But in its first week the convention decided this was, in fact, too democratic by half. Madison recorded: “‘The national Legislature ought to consist of two branches’ was agreed to without debate or dissent, except that of Pennsylvania, given probably from complaisance to Dr. Franklin, who was understood to be partial to a single House of Legislation.” One modification was made to the Virginia plan. To give the state governments some stake in the new Congress, the delegates decided that the upper chamber, dubbed the Senate after the Roman precedent, would be chosen by the state legislatures rather than by the House of Representatives. (This procedure remained in effect until 1913.)21

  The central issue, however, remained unresolved. Would votes in the houses of Congress be in proportion to population or, as per the Articles of Confederation, equal for each state? The dispute was not only a philosophical one between proponents of a strong national government and those who favored protecting the rights of the states. It was also a power struggle: little states, such as Delaware and New Jersey, feared they would be overwhelmed by the big states such as Virginia and New York.

  The debate grew heated, threatening to break up the convention, and on June 11 Franklin decided it was time to try to restore a spirit of compromise. He had written his speech in advance and because of his health asked another delegate to read it aloud. “Until this point [about] the proportion of representation came before us,” he began, “our debates were carried on with great coolness and temper.” After making his plea that members consult rather than contend, he expressed a sentiment that he had preached for much of his life, starting with the rules he had written for his Junto sixty years earlier, about the dangers of being too assertive in debate. “Declarations of a fixed opinion, and of determined resolution never to change it, neither enlighten nor convince us,” he said. “Positiveness and warmth on one side, naturally beget their like on the other.” He had personally been willing, he said, to revise many of his opinions, including the desirability of a unicameral legislature. Now it was time for all members to compromise.

  Franklin went on to propose a few suggestions, some of them sensible, others rather odd. He defended the idea of proportional representation with the historical example of how Scotland, despite its smaller representation in the British Parliament, had avoided being overwhelmed by England. Then, with his love of detail, he provided a lengthy mathematical set of calculations showing how smaller states could garner enough votes to match the power of larger ones. There were other remedies to be considered. Perhaps the larger states could give up some of their land to the smaller ones. “If it should be found necessary to diminish Pennsylvania, I should not be averse to the giving a part of it to New Jersey, and another to Delaware.” But if that was not feasible, he suggested an even more complex option: there could be equal tax contributions requisitioned from each state, and equal votes in Congress from each state on how to spend this money, then a supplemental requisition from larger states, with proportional votes in Congress on how to spend that fund.22

  Franklin’s speech was long, complex, and at times baffling. Were these all serious suggestions or were some of them merely theoretical discourses? Members seemed not to know. He made no motion to vote on his suggestion for adjusting borders or creating separate treasury funds, nor did any of the other delegates. More important than his specific ideas was his tone of moderation and conciliation. His speech, with its openness to new ideas and absence of one-sided advocacy, provided time for tempers to cool, and his call for creative compromises had an effect.

  A few minutes later, Roger Sherman of Connecticut rose to suggest another possible approach: the House of Representatives would be apportioned by population and the Senate would have equal votes for each state. Samuel Johnson, also of that state, explained the thinking behind what would become known as the Connecticut Compromise. The new country was, in some ways, “one political society,” but in other ways it was a federation of separate states, yet these two concepts need not conflict, for they could be combined as “halves of a unique whole.” There was, however, little discussion of the plan. By a 6–5 vote, the idea was rejected, for the time being, in favor of proportional representation in both chambers.

  As the days grew even hotter, so again did the dispute over representation. William Paterson of New Jersey proposed a counterplan, based on amending the Articles rather than supplanting them, that featured a single-house legislature in which each state, large or small, would have one vote. The larger states were able to defeat that idea, but the debate grew so intense that one Delaware delegate suggested that, if the large states sought to impose a national government, “the small ones will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith, who will take them by the hand and do them justice.”

  Once again it was time for Franklin to try to restore equanimity, and this time he did so in an unexpected way. In a speech on June 28, he suggested that they open each session with a prayer. With the convention “groping as it were in the dark to find political truth,” he said, “how has it happened that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings?” Then he added, in a passage destined to become famous, “The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?”

  Franklin was a believer, even more so as he grew older, in a rather general and at times nebulous divine providence, the principle that God had a benevolent interest in the affairs of men. But he never showed much faith in the more specific notion of special providence, which held that God would intervene directly based on personal prayer. So the question arises: Did he make his proposal for prayer out of a deep religious faith or out of a pragmatic political belief that it would encourage calm in the deliberations?

  There was, as usual, probably an element of both, but perhaps a bit more of the latter. Franklin was never known to pray publicly himself, and he rarely attended church. Yet he thought it useful to remind this assembly of demigods that the
y were in the presence of a God far greater, and that history was watching as well. To succeed, they had to be awed by the magnitude of their task and be humbled, not assertive. Otherwise, he concluded, “we shall be divided by our little, partial, local interests, our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a by-word down to future ages.”23

  Hamilton warned that the sudden hiring of a chaplain might frighten the public into thinking that “embarrassments and dissensions within the convention had suggested this measure.” Franklin replied that a sense of alarm outside the hall might help rather than hurt the deliberations within. Another objection was raised: that there was no money to pay a chaplain. The idea was quietly shelved. On the bottom of his copy of his speech, Franklin appended a note of marvel: “The convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary!”24

  The time had come for Franklin to propose more earthly measures. Two days after his prayer speech—on Saturday, June 30—he helped to set in motion the process that would break the impasse and, to a large extent, shape the new nation. Others had discussed compromises, and now it was time to insist on one and to propose it.

  First Franklin succinctly stated the problem: “The diversity of opinions turns on two points. If a proportional representation takes place, the small States contend that their liberties will be in danger. If an equality of votes is to be put in its place, the large States say their money will be in danger.”

  Then he gently emphasized, in a homespun analogy that drew on his affection for craftsmen and construction, the importance of compromise: “When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint. In like manner here, both sides must part with some of their demands.”

  Finally, he incorporated a workable compromise into a specific motion. Representatives to the lower House would be popularly elected and apportioned by population, but in the Senate “the Legislatures of the several States shall choose and send an equal number of Delegates.” The House would have primary authority over taxes and spending, the Senate over the confirmation of executive officers and matters of state sovereignty.25

  The convention proceeded to appoint a committee, which included Franklin, to draw up the details of this compromise, and by a close vote it was finally adopted, in much the form Franklin had proposed, on July 16. “This was Franklin’s great victory in the Convention,” declares Van Doren, “that he was the author of the compromise which held the delegates together.”

  That, perhaps, gives him a bit too much credit. He was not the author of the idea, nor the first to suggest it. It grew from proposals by Sherman of Connecticut and others. Franklin’s role, nonetheless, was crucial. He embodied the spirit and issued the call for compromise, he selected the most palatable option available and refined it, and he wrote the motion and picked the right moment to offer it. His prestige, his neutrality, and his eminence made it easier for all to swallow. The artisan had taken a little from all sides and made a joint good enough to hold together a nation for centuries.

  A few days after he offered his compromise, Franklin hosted some of the delegates for tea in his garden, including Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a leading skeptic of unfettered democracy. But Franklin’s shaded garden was a place where controversies could be cooled. Gerry invited along a Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler, a portly and congenial character who was in town pushing the territorial schemes of the Ohio Company, which he had helped found. In his journal Cutler noted that “my knees smote together” at the prospect of meeting the celebrated sage, but he was immediately put at ease by Franklin’s unassuming style. “I was highly delighted with the extensive knowledge he appeared to have of every subject, the brightness of his memory, and clearness and vivacity of all his mental faculties, notwithstanding his age,” Cutler recorded. “His manners are perfectly easy, and every thing about him seems to diffuse an unrestrained freedom and happiness. He has an incessant vein of humor, accompanied with an uncommon vivacity, which seems as natural and involuntary as his breathing.”

  Discovering that Cutler was an avid botanist, Franklin produced a curiosity he had just received, a ten-inch snake with two perfectly formed heads preserved in a vial. Imagine what would happen, Franklin speculated with amusement, if one head of the snake attempted to go to the left of a twig and the other head went to the right and they could not agree. He was about to compare this to an issue that had just been debated at the convention, but some of the other delegates stopped him. “He seemed to forget that everything in the convention was to be kept a profound secret,” Cutler noted. “But the secrecy of convention matters was suggested to him, which stopped him, and deprived me of the story he was going to tell.”

  The point Franklin was about to make, no doubt, was the same one he had made in the Pennsylvania state convention in 1776, when he argued against a two-chamber legislature because it might fall prey to the fate of the fabled two-headed snake that died of thirst when its heads could not agree on which way to pass a twig. Indeed, in a paper he wrote in 1789 extolling Pennsylvania’s unicameral legislature, he again referred to what he called “the famous political fable of the snake with two heads.” He had come to accept, however, that in forging the compromise needed to create a national Congress, two heads could be better than one.26

  On other issues as well, Franklin was usually on the side favoring fewer fetters on direct democracy. He opposed, for example, giving the president a veto over acts of Congress, which he saw as the repository of the people’s will. Colonial governors, he reminded the delegates, had used that power to extort more influence and money whenever the legislature wanted a measure approved. When Hamilton favored making the president a near-monarch to be chosen for life, Franklin noted that he provided living proof that a person’s life sometimes lasted longer than his mental and physical prime. Instead, it would be more democratic to relegate the president to the role of average citizen after his term. The argument that “returning to the mass of the people was degrading,” he said, “was contrary to republican principles. In free Governments the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors and sovereigns. For the former therefore to return among the latter was not to degrade but to promote them.”

  Likewise, he argued that Congress should have the power to impeach the president. In the past, when impeachment was not possible, the only method people had for removing a corrupt ruler was through assassination, “in which he was not only deprived of his life but of the opportunity of vindicating his character.” Franklin also felt that it would be more democratic for executive power to reside with a small council, as it did in Pennsylvania, rather than one man. This was a hard debate to have with Washington sitting in the chair, as it was widely assumed that he would be the first president. So Franklin noted diplomatically that the first man to take the office would likely be benevolent, but the person who came next (perhaps he had a sense that it could be John Adams) might harbor more autocratic tendencies. On this issue Franklin lost, but the convention did decide to institutionalize the role of the Cabinet.

  He also advocated, unsuccessfully, the direct election of federal judges, instead of permitting the president or Congress to select them. As usual, he made his argument by telling a tale. It was the practice in Scotland for judges to be nominated by that country’s lawyers, who always selected the ablest of the profession in order to get rid of him and share his practice among themselves. In America, it would be in the best interest of voters “to make the best choice,” which was the way it should be.27

  Many of the delegates believed strongly that only those who owned substantial property should be eligible for office, as was the case in most states other than Pennsylvania. Young Charles Pinckney of South Carolina went so far as to propose that the wealth requirement for president should be $100,000, until it was pointed out that this might exclude Washington. Franklin rose and, in Madison’s words, “expressed his dislike
of everything that tended to debase the spirit of the common people.” His democratic sensibilities were offended by any suggestion that the Constitution “should betray a great partiality to the rich.” On the contrary, he said, “some of the greatest rogues I was ever acquainted with, were the richest rogues.” Likewise, he spoke out against any property requirements on the right to vote. “We should not depress the virtue and public spirit of our common people.” On these issues he was successful.28

  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:

  There are two passions which have a powerful influence in the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice; the love of power and the love of money. Separately, each of these has great force in prompting men to action; but, when united in view of the same object, they have in many minds the most violent effects…And of what kind are the men that will strive for this profitable preeminence, through all the bustle of cabal, the heat of contention, the infinite mutual abuse of parties, tearing to pieces the best of characters? It will not be the wise and moderate, the lovers of peace and good order, the men fittest for the trust. It will be the bold and the violent, the men of strong passions and indefatigable activity in their selfish pursuits.