Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  Franklin took special pride in one particularly handy invention, a mechanical arm that could retrieve and replace books from upper shelves. He wrote a description of it, filled with drawings and diagrams and instructive tips, that was as detailed as the scientific treatises he had written on his ocean crossing. It was typical of Franklin. Throughout his life, he loved immersing himself in minutiae and trivia in a manner so obsessive that it might today be described as geeky. He was meticulous in describing every technical detail of his inventions, be it the library arm, stove, or lightning rod. In his essays, ranging from his arguments against hereditary honors to his discussions of trade, he provided reams of detailed calculations and historical footnotes. Even in his most humorous parodies, such as his proposal for the study of farts, the cleverness was enhanced by his inclusion of mock-serious facts, trivia, calculations, and learned precedents.11

  This penchant was on display in its most charming manner in a long letter he wrote to his young friend Kitty Shipley, daughter of the bishop, on the art of procuring pleasant dreams. It contained all of his theories, some more sound than others, on nutrition, exercise, fresh air, and health. Exercise should precede meals, he advised, not follow them. There should be a constant supply of fresh air in the bedroom; Methuselah, he reminded, always slept outdoors. He propounded a thorough, though not scientifically valid, theory of how air in a stifled room gets saturated and thus prevents people’s pores from expelling “putrid particles.” After a full discourse on the science and pseudo-science, he provided three important ways to avoid unpleasant dreams:

  By eating moderately, less perspirable matter is produced in a given time; hence the bed-clothes receive it longer before they are saturated, and we may therefore sleep longer before we are made uneasy by their refusing to receive any more.

  By using thinner and more porous bed-clothes, which will suffer the perspirable matter more easily to pass through them, we are less incommoded, such being longer tolerable.

  When you are awakened by this uneasiness, and find you cannot easily sleep again, get out of bed, beat up and turn your pillow, shake the bed-clothes well, with at least twenty shakes, then throw the bed open and leave it to cool; in the meanwhile, continuing undressed, walk about your chamber till your skin has had time to discharge its load, which it will do sooner as the air may be dried and colder. When you begin to feel the cool air unpleasant, then return to your bed, and you will soon fall asleep, and your sleep will be sweet and pleasant…If you happen to be too indolent to get out of bed, you may, instead of it, lift up your bed-clothes with one arm and leg, so as to draw in a good deal of fresh air, and by letting them fall force it out again. This, repeated twenty times, will so clear them of the perspirable matter they have imbibed, as to permit your sleeping well for some time afterwards. But this latter method is not equal to the former. Those who do not love trouble, and can afford to have two beds, will find great luxury in rising, when they wake in a hot bed, and going into the cool one.

  He concluded on a sweet note: “There is a case in which the most punctual observance of them will be totally fruitless. I need not mention this case to you, my dear friend, but my account of the art would be imperfect without it. The case is, when the person who desires to have pleasant dreams has not taken care to preserve, what is necessary above all things,A GOOD CONSCIENCE.”12

  Pennsylvania was prospering at the time. “The crops are plentiful,” he wrote a friend, “working people have plenty of employ.” Yet, as usual, the state’s politicians were split into two factions. On one side were the populists, made up mainly of local shopkeepers and rural farmers, who supported the very democratic state constitution, with its directly elected unicameral legislature, that Franklin had helped write; on the other side were those more frightened of rabble rule, including middle-and upper-class property owners. Franklin fit philosophically in both camps, both sought his support, and both he obliged. So both nominated him for the state executive council and then its presidency, the equivalent of the governorship, to which he was elected almost unanimously.13

  Pleased to find that he was still so popular, Franklin took great pride in his election. “Old as I am,” he told a nephew, “I am not yet grown insensible with respect to reputation.” To Bishop Shipley he conceded that “the remains of ambition from which I had imagined myself free” had successfully seduced him.

  He also enjoyed the fact that, after years of watching his reputation be pricked by partisan attacks, he could gain prestige by being above the fray. “He has destroyed party rage in our state,” gushed Benjamin Rush after dining with him, “or to borrow an allusion from one of his discoveries, his presence and advice, like oil upon troubled waters, have composed the contending waves of faction.” It was a talent that would soon serve him and his nation very well.14

  The Constitutional Convention

  of 1787

  The need for a new federal constitution became apparent, to those who wanted to notice, just a few months after the ratification of the Articles of Confederation back in 1781, when a messenger reached the Congress with the wondrous news of the victory at Yorktown. There was no money in the national treasury to pay the messenger’s expenses, so the members had to pull coins from their own pockets. Under the Articles, the Congress had no power to levy taxes, or do much of anything else. Instead, it attempted to requisition money from the states, the way colonial leaders had once wished the king would do, and the states, as the king and his ministers had once feared, often did not respond.

  By 1786, the situation was ominous. A former Revolutionary War officer named Daniel Shays led a rebellion of poor farmers in western Massachusetts against tax and debt collections, and there were worries that the anarchy would spread. The Congress, which was then meeting in New York, had been wandering from venue to venue, often unable to pay its bills or sometimes muster a quorum. The thirteen states were indulging in their independence not only from Britain but also from one another. New York imposed fees on all vessels coming from New Jersey, which retaliated by taxing a New York harbor lighthouse on Sandy Hook. Other states were in the process of being formed—including one called Franklin, later renamed Tennessee—that struggled to sort out their potential relationship with the existing states. When the settlers who wished to form the new state of Franklin sought his advice on how to deal with the rival claims of North Carolina, he told them to submit the whole matter to the Congress, which everyone knew would do little good.15

  After Maryland and Virginia were unable to resolve some border and navigation disputes, a multistate conference was convened in Annapolis to address them along with larger issues of trade and cooperation. Only five states attended and little was accomplished, but James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, along with others who saw the need for a stronger national government, used the gathering to call for a federal convention, ostensibly designed merely to amend the Articles of Confederation. It was scheduled for Philadelphia in May 1787.

  The stakes were enormous, as Franklin, who was selected as one of Pennsylvania’s delegates, made clear in a letter he sent to Jefferson in Paris: “Our federal constitution is generally thought defective, and a convention, first proposed by Virginia, and since recommended by Congress, is to assemble here next month, to revise it and propose amendments…If it does not do good it will do harm, as it will show that we have not the wisdom enough among us to govern ourselves.”16

  So they gathered in the abnormally hot and humid summer of 1787 to draft, in deepest secrecy, a new American constitution that would turn out to be the most successful ever written by human hand. The men there formed, in Jefferson’s famous assessment later, “an assembly of demi-gods.” If so, they were mainly young ones. Hamilton and Charles Pinckney were 29. (Vain about his age as well as his wealth, Pinckney pretended to be but 24 so he could pass for the youngest member, who was in fact Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, 26.) At 81, Franklin was the oldest member by fifteen years and exactly twice the average age of the rest
of the members.17

  When General Washington arrived in town on May 13, his first act was to pay a call on Franklin, who opened his new dining room along with a cask of dark beer to entertain him. Among the many roles that Philadelphia’s celebrated sage played at the convention was that of symbolic host. His garden and shady mulberry tree, just a few hundred yards from the statehouse, became a respite from the debates, a place where delegates could talk over tea, hear Franklin’s tales, and be calmed into a mood of compromise. Among the sixteen grand murals in the U.S. Capitol’s Great Experiment Hall depicting scenes of historical importance, from the Mayflower Compact to the suffragette marches, is a garden scene of Hamilton, Madison, and James Wilson talking to Franklin under the shade of his mulberry tree.

  If his health permitted and ambition desired, Franklin could have been the only person other than Washington with a chance of becoming the chairman of the convention. He chose instead to be the one to nominate Washington. Unfortunately, heavy rains and a flare-up of his kidney stones made him miss the opening day, May 25, so he asked another member of his delegation to nominate Washington. In his journal of the convention, Madison recorded that “the nomination came with particular grace from Pennsylvania, as Dr. Franklin alone could have been thought of as a competitor.”

  On Monday, May 28, Franklin arrived to take his seat at one of the fourteen round tables in the East Room of the statehouse, where he had spent so many years. According to some later accounts, it was a grand entrance: to minimize his pain, he was reportedly transported the block from his home in an enclosed sedan chair he had brought from Paris, which was carried by four prisoners from the Walnut Street jail. They held the chair aloft on flexible rods and walked slowly to prevent any painful jostling.18

  Franklin’s benign countenance and venerable grace as he took his seat every morning, and his preference for wry storytelling over argumentative oratory, added a calming presence. “He exhibits daily a spectacle of transcendent benevolence by attending the convention punctually,” said Benjamin Rush, who added that Franklin had declared the convention “the most august and respectable assembly he was ever in.”

  Franklin could be doddering at times, a bit unfocused in his speeches, and occasionally baffling in a few of his suggestions. Still, the delegates usually respected him and always indulged him. This mix of feelings was tellingly recorded by one member, William Pierce of Georgia:

  Dr. Franklin is well known to be the greatest philosopher of the present age; all the operations of nature he seems to understand, the very heavens obey him, and the clouds yield up their lightning to be imprisoned in his rod. But what claim he has to be a politician, posterity must determine. It is certain that he does not shine much in public council. He is no speaker, nor does he seem to let politics engage his attention. He is, however, a most extraordinary man, and tells a story in a style more engaging than anything I ever heard.

  Over the ensuing four months, many of Franklin’s pet proposals—a unicameral legislature, prayers, an executive council instead of president, no salaries for officeholders—were politely listened to and, sometimes with a bit of embarrassment, tabled. However, he brought to the convention floor three unique and crucial strengths that made him central to the historic compromise that saved the nation.

  First, he was far more comfortable with democracy than most of the delegates, who tended to regard the word and concept as dangerous rather than desirable. “The evils we experience,” declared Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, “flow from the excess of democracy.” The people, Roger Sherman of Connecticut concurred, “should have as little to do as may be possible about government.” Franklin was at the other end of the spectrum. Though averse to rabble rule, he favored direct elections, trusted the average citizen, and resisted anything resembling elitism. The constitution he had drafted for Pennsylvania, with its popularly elected single-chamber legislature, was the most democratic of all the new states’.

  Second, he was, by far, the most traveled of the delegates, and he knew not only the nations of Europe but the thirteen states, appreciating both what they had in common and how they differed. As a postmaster he had helped bind America together. He was one of the few men equally at home visiting the Carolinas as Connecticut—both places where he had once franchised print shops—and he could discuss, as he had done, indigo farming with a Virginia planter and trade economics with a Massachusetts merchant.

  Third, and what would prove most important of all, he embodied a spirit of Enlightenment tolerance and pragmatic compromise. “Both sides must part with some of their demands,” he preached at one point, in a phrase that would be his mantra. “We are sent hither to consult, not to contend, with each other,” he said at another. “His disarmingly candid manner masked a very complex personality,” the constitutional historian Richard Morris has written, “but his accommodating nature would time after time conciliate jarring interests.”19

  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 F
ranklin 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