Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the builders of Babel, and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats. Thus I consent, sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.

  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.”32

  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.”33

  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.”34

  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.35

  Endgame

  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.”36

  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.”37

  He also finally resumed work on his autobiography. He had written 87 manuscript pages in Twyford in 1771, and then added 12 more in Passy in 1784. Writing steadily from August 1788 until May of the following year, he completed another 119 pages, which brought him up to his arrival in England as a colonial agent. “I omit all facts and transactions that may not have a tendency to benefit the young reader,” he wrote to Vaughan. His purpose was still to provide a self-help manual for America’s ambitious middle class by describing “my success in emerging from poverty” and “the
advantages of certain modes of conduct which I observed.”38

  By now he was facing ever greater pain from his kidney stones, and he resorted to using laudanum, a tincture of opium and alcohol. “I am so interrupted by extreme pain, which obliges me to have recourse to opium, that between the effects of both, I have but little time in which I can write anything,” he complained to Vaughan. He also worried that what he had written was not worth publishing. “Give me your candid opinion whether I had best publish it or suppress it,” he asked, “for I am grown so old and feeble in mind, as well as body, that I cannot place any confidence in my own judgment.” He had now begun to dictate the work to Benny rather than write it by hand, but he was able to complete only a few more pages.

  Friends sent him various home remedies for kidney stones, including a suggestion from Vaughan, which amused Franklin, that a small dose of hemlock might work. At times, he could be cheerful enough about his maladies and repeat his maxim that those who “drink to the bottom of the cup must expect to meet some of the dregs,” as he did to his old friend Elizabeth Partridge. He was still, he said, “joking, laughing and telling merry stories, as when you first knew me, a young man about fifty.”39

  Yet Franklin was becoming resigned to the fact that he did not have much longer to live, and his letters took on a tone of sanguine farewell. “Hitherto this long life has been tolerably happy,” he wrote to Caty Ray Greene, the girl who had captured his mind and heart thirty-five years earlier. “If I were allowed to live it over again, I should make no objection, only wishing for leave to do what authors do in a second edition of their works, correct some of my errata.” When Washington became president that year, Franklin wrote to him that it made him glad he was still alive: “For my own personal ease, I should have died two years ago; but, though those years have been spent in excruciating pain, I am pleased that I have lived them, since they have brought me to see our present situation.”40

  He was also sanguine about the revolution now welling up in his beloved France. The explosion of democratic sentiments was producing “mischief and trouble,” he noted, but he assumed that it would lead to greater democracy and eventually a good constitution. So most of his letters to his French friends were inappropriately lighthearted. “Are you still living?” he wrote the French scientist Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, his friend and Passy neighbor, in late 1789. “Or have the mob of Paris mistaken the head of a monopolizer of knowledge for a monopolizer of corn, and paraded it about the streets upon a pole?” (It was also in this letter that he famously noted that “nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.”) He assured Louis-Guillaume le Veillard, his neighbor and closest friend in Passy, that it was all for the good. “When the fermentation is over and the troubling parts subsided, the wine will be fine and good, and cheer the hearts of those that drink it.”41

  Franklin was wrong, sadly wrong, about the French Revolution, though he would not live long enough to learn it. Le Veillard would soon lose his life to the guillotine. So would Lavoisier the chemist, who had worked with him on the Mesmer investigation. Condorcet, the economist who had accompanied Franklin to his famed meetings with Voltaire, would be imprisoned and poison himself in his cell. And la Rochefoucauld, who had translated the state constitutions for Franklin and engaged him in a lively correspondence since his departure, would be stoned to death by a mob.

  Slavery

  In the very last year of his life, Franklin was to embark on one final public mission, a moral crusade that would help ameliorate one of the few blemishes on a life spent fighting for freedom. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, slavery had been an institution that few whites questioned. Even in brotherly Philadelphia, ownership continued to climb until about 1760, when almost 10 percent of the city’s population were slaves. But views had begun to evolve, especially after the ringing words of the Declaration and the awkward compromises of the Constitution. George Mason of Virginia, despite the fact that he owned two hundred slaves, called the institution “pernicious” at the Constitutional Convention and declared that “every master of slaves is a petty tyrant; they bring the judgment of heaven on a country.”

  Franklin’s views had been evolving as well. He had, as we have seen, owned one or two household slaves off and on for much of his life, and as a young publisher he had carried ads for slave sales. But he had also published, in 1729, one of the nation’s first antislavery pieces and had joined the Associates of Dr. Bray to establish schools for blacks in America. Deborah had enrolled her house servants in the Philadelphia school, and after visiting it Franklin had spoken of his “higher opinions of the natural capacities of the black race.” In his 1751 “Observations on the Increase of Mankind,” he attacked slavery strongly, but mainly from an economic perspective rather than a moral one. In expressing sympathy for the Philadelphia abolitionist Anthony Benezet in the 1770s, he had agreed that the importation of new slaves should end immediately, but he qualified his support for outright abolition by saying it should come “in time.” As an agent for Georgia in London, he had defended the right of that colony to keep slaves. But he preached, in articles such as his 1772 “The Somerset Case and the Slave Trade,” that one of Britain’s great sins against America was foisting slavery on it.

  Franklin’s conversion culminated in 1787, when he accepted the presidency of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. The group tried to persuade him to present a petition against slavery at the Constitutional Convention, but knowing the delicate compromises being made between north and south, he kept silent on the issue. After that, however, he became outspoken.

  One of the arguments against immediate abolition, which Franklin had heretofore accepted, was that it was not practical or safe to free hundreds of thousands of adult slaves into a society for which they were not prepared. (There were about seven hundred thousand slaves in the United States out of a total population of four million in 1790.) So his abolition society dedicated itself not only to freeing slaves but also to helping them become good citizens. “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils,” Franklin wrote in a November 1789 address to the public from the society. “The unhappy man, who has long been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains that bind his body do also fetter his intellectual faculties and impair the social affections of his heart.”

  As was typical of Franklin, he drew up for the society a meticulously detailed charter and procedures “for improving the condition of free blacks.” There would be a twenty-four-person committee divided into four subcommittees:

  A Committee of Inspection, who shall superintend the morals, general conduct, and ordinary situation of the free Negroes, and afford them advice and instruction…

  A Committee of Guardians, who shall place out children and young people with suitable persons, that they may (during a moderate time of apprenticeship or servitude) learn some trade or other business…

  A Committee of Education, who shall superintend the school instruction of the children and youth of the free blacks. They may either influence them to attend regularly the schools already established in this city, or form others with this view…

  A Committee of Employ, who shall endeavor to procure constant employment for those free Negroes who are able to work; as the want of this would occasion poverty, idleness, and many vicious habits.42

  On behalf of the society, Franklin presented a formal abolition petition to Congress in February 1790. “Mankind are all formed by the same Almighty Being, alike objects of his care, and equally designed for the enjoyment of happiness,” it declared. The duty of Congress was to secure “the blessings of liberty to the People of the United States,” and this should be done “without distinction of color.” Therefore, Congress should grant “liberty to those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into
perpetual bondage.”43

  Franklin and his petition were roundly denounced by the defenders of slavery, most notably Congressman James Jackson of Georgia, who declared on the House floor that the Bible had sanctioned slavery and, without it, there would be no one to do the hard and hot work on plantations. It was the perfect setup for Franklin’s last great parody, written less than a month before he died.

  He had begun his literary career sixty-eight years earlier when, as a 16-year-old apprentice, he pretended to be a prudish widow named Silence Dogood, and he made a subsequent career of enlightening readers with similar hoaxes such as “The Trial of Polly Baker” and “An Edict from the King of Prussia.” In the spirit of the latter of these essays, he anonymously published in a local newspaper, with appropriate scholarly source citations, a purported speech given by a member of the divan of Algiers one hundred years earlier.

  It bore a scathing mirror resemblance to Congressman Jackson’s speech. “God is great, and Mahomet is his prophet,” it began realistically. Then it went on to attack a petition by a purist sect asking for an end to the practice of capturing and enslaving European Christians to work in Algeria: “If we forbear to make slaves of their people, who in this hot climate are to cultivate our lands? Who are to perform the common labors of our city, and in our families?” An end to the slavery of “infidels” would cause land values to fall and rents to sink by half.

  Who is to indemnify their masters for their loss? Will the state do it? Is our Treasury sufficient?…And if we set our slaves free, what is to be done with them? Few of them will return to their countries; they know too well the greater hardships they must there be subject to; they will not embrace our holy religion; they will not adopt our manners; our people will not pollute themselves by intermarrying with them. Must we maintain them as beggars in our streets, or suffer our properties to be the prey of their pillage? For men long accustomed to slavery will not work for a livelihood when not compelled.