Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  This circular letter, which Washington depicted as “the Legacy of One, who has ardently wished, on all occasions, to be useful to his Country,” read as his farewell to the people. For the first time in a public statement, he declared his firm intent to retire at war’s end. Not after power for himself, Washington noted, “I could have no sinister views” in promoting a strong central government.53 Hailed as “Washington’s Legacy,” the letter appeared in newspapers from New England to the deep south and became one of the most celebrated documents of the day.54 Although none of its nation-building recommendations bore fruit for more than five years, they at once became associated with Washington and linked him in the public mind with the cause of nationhood.

  On November 25, 1783, five months after Washington issued this circular letter and eleven weeks after Franklin and others signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War, the British army finally left New York and a residual force of Continental troops bolstered by the New York militia entered war-ravaged Manhattan to the cheers of its long-suffering citizens. During this period, while he spoke openly only about strengthening the Articles of Confederation, Washington privately was calling for “a Convention of the People” to draft a new “Federal Constitution.”55 To survive, he wrote to Lafayette, the United States must “form a Constitution that will give consistency, stability & dignity to the Union; and sufficient powers to the great Council of the Nation for general purposes.”56 To his brother John, Washington added, “Competent Powers for all general purposes shoud be vested in the Sovereignty of the United States, or Anarchy & Confusion will soon succeed.”57 In his farewell address to the army, issued upon the formal discharge of furloughed troops in early November, he warned, “Unless the principles of the Federal Government were properly supported, and the Powers of the Union encreased, the honor, dignity, and justice of the Nation would be lost for ever.” Washington urged the departing men—“one patriotic band of Brothers,” he called them—to return home as champions of “the Union.”58 He did so himself.

  Following the liberation of New York, where he held an emotional final banquet with his remaining officers, and a sentimental journey through battlefields in the middle states, Washington presented himself to Congress on December 23. Only twenty delegates representing but seven states remained in attendance at that little-respected and largely ineffectual body, which was then meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, after protests by unpaid troops drove it from Philadelphia. Even Hamilton and the like-minded federalist James Madison of Virginia had gone home in despair. Addressing its members, Washington treated Congress to the respect that he wanted it to have. “Having now finished the work assigned to me,” he stated, “I here offer my commission and take my leave of all the enjoyments of public life.”59 Then he was gone, racing toward Mount Vernon in time to reach it by Christmas. Unlike countless revolutionary generals before and after him, Washington retired.

  FRANKLIN’S RETIREMENT TOOK longer to effectuate than Washington’s but was similarly final. Citing age, he had offered to retire in 1781, but Congress urged him to stay through the negotiation of peace. “It is the desire of Congress to avail themselves of your abilities and experience at the approaching negotiation,” the president of Congress wrote at the time. “Should you find repose necessary after rendering the United States this further service Congress in consideration of your age and bodily infirmities will be disposed to gratify your inclination.”60 Upon sending Congress the signed preliminary peace treaty with Britain in November 1782, Franklin renewed his request to retire, and this time he meant it. Approaching the age of seventy-seven and increasingly incapacitated, he now wanted repose. “If I live to see this Peace concluded, I beg leave to remind the Congress of their Promise then to dismiss me. I shall be happy to sing with Old Simeon, Now lettest thou thy Servant Depart in Peace, for my Eyes have seen thy Salvation,” Franklin wrote to Congress’s secretary of foreign affairs, quoting scripture for emphasis.61 At the time, he did not know whether he would return to Philadelphia or remain in Paris. His health might preclude another ocean voyage and he was beloved in France. After more than six years away, Franklin could not know what might await him in America.

  Part of his concern about America stemmed from his despair over the confederation’s weakness. Even before the Revolution, Franklin had championed a strong central government with control over western expansion and military affairs, power to make laws and tax individuals, and popular representation in a congress. His 1754 Albany Plan of Union, offered during the French and Indian War, contained all of these features. In 1775, Franklin introduced an enhanced version of it as a plan of union to the Continental Congress and, when that body took up consideration of much weaker articles of confederation, he pushed to make them stronger until he left for France. There he suffered under an enfeebled Congress that he was charged with representing before the monarchies of Europe. Franklin was annoyed by the states interfering with his efforts on behalf of the union and pushing their own independent agendas in Europe, frustrated by their independent military programs, and driven to distraction by their unwillingness to pay their requisitions to Congress or give it the power to tax. Even though he served his state in nearly every conceivable capacity, Franklin always viewed himself more as an American than as a Pennsylvanian—and he wondered why others could not see their rational self-interest in a similar way. “No one else except George Washington had had such direct personal experience of the existing government’s incapacity,” Franklin biographer Edmund Morgan noted.62

  The inability of Congress to collect taxes upset Franklin most of all. Like Washington, he did not want French troops to fight American battles or French loans to fund the American government—he did not even want an entangling foreign alliance—but (like Washington) he was forced to accept them. In 1782, when (in pleading for yet another loan from France) Robert Morris informed him that the states had paid only $125,000 toward their $8,000,000 requisition for the year (or 1.6 percent), Franklin could not control himself.63 “I see in some Resolutions of Town-Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take as they call it, the People’s Money out of their Pockets tho’ only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money justly due from the People is their Creditors’ Money,” he wrote to Morris. “Property that is necessary to a Man for the Conservation of the Individual & the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who by their Laws have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition.”64 This statement may have said more than Franklin meant, but it reflected his outrage. Congress must have the power to tax for the public good, he believed.

  Like Washington, Franklin held that independence required union and, without an effective central government, freedom was at risk. On May 13, 1784, one day after the formal exchange of ratified copies of the peace treaty following their return from the British and American capitals, Franklin sent a warning to Congress. “Our future Safety will depend on our Union and our Virtue. Britain will be long watching for Advantages, to recover what she has lost,” he wrote. “If we do not convince the World that we are a Nation to be depended on for Fidelity in Treaties; if we appear negligent in paying our Debts, and ungrateful to those who have served and befriended us; our Reputation, and all the Strength it is capable of procuring, will be lost, and fresh Attacks upon us will be encouraged and promoted by better Prospects of Success.”65

  For Franklin, a people’s virtue rested on their dedication not only to individual liberty and equality of opportunity, but also to loyalty, hard work, frugality, and paying their debts. For the United States, this required union. “If it had not been for the Justice of our Cause, and the consequent Interposition of Providence,” he now wrote in a quasireligious explanation of the Revolution’s success, “we must h
ave been ruined.”66 This was how the Enlightenment era deist in Franklin thought: what is best for the individual naturally aligns with what is good for society. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” he later observed. “As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”67

  THE EXCHANGE OF TREATIES gave Franklin one more chance to press for retirement. John Jay and Henry Laurens, with whom he got along well, would soon return to America, and he asked them to plead his case. “I have reason to complain that I am so long without an Answer from Congress to my Request of Recall,” Franklin wrote to Laurens in March 1784. “I wish rather to die in my own Country than here; and tho’ the upper Part of the Building appears yet tolerably firm, yet being undermin’d by the Stone and Gout united, its Fall cannot be far distant. You are so good as to offer me your Friendly Services. You cannot do me one more acceptable at present, than that of forwarding my Dismission.”68 He made a similar plea to Jay in May: “Repose is now my only Ambition,” Franklin stated.69 The letter to Jay likely carried more weight than the one to Laurens because Congress had already tapped the New Yorker as its next secretary of foreign affairs. Still, it took time.

  Along with their duties as peace negotiators, Jay and Laurens had been working with Franklin and Adams to open trade with various European nations. Upon the departure of Jay and Laurens, and seeking sectional balance in crafting trade deals, Congress created a three-member commission to negotiate treaties of friendship and commerce with the nations of Europe, north Africa, and Asia Minor. Jefferson, who worked well with both Franklin and Adams, replaced Jay and Laurens, giving each region of the country—north, middle, and south—one representative. This compromise meant once again denying Franklin’s request to retire. Congress granted it only a year later, upon completion of the most pressing treaties. “You are permitted to return to America as soon as convenient,” Jay wrote in a letter received by Franklin in May 1785. “This Circumstance must afford great Pleasure to your Family and Friends here.”70 It did.

  As if to prove the comment in his 1784 letter about his mind being firm, during the period between the preliminary peace deal with Britain in November 1782 and his departure from France in July 1785, in addition to negotiating treaties of friendship with various nations and performing his duties as ambassador, Franklin resumed his pursuits in science and technology. In a remarkably original deduction, he attributed the unusually cold winter of 1783–1784 in Europe to the atmospheric impact of emissions from an Icelandic volcano. He also proposed the concept of daylight saving time, invented bifocals, played a role in the origins of human flight by hot-air and hydrogen-filled balloons, and served on a French royal committee investigating the medical claims of mesmerism.

  When it came time for Franklin to leave Paris, the queen supplied a cushioned litter to bear him with minimal discomfort to the coast. Crowds gathered along the route for one last look at the man many considered the greatest savant of the age. His friends wept openly and ladies of the court begged him to stay. “The United States will never have a more zealous and more useful servant than Mr. Franklin,” Vergennes noted.71 Jefferson, Franklin’s successor as American ambassador to France, heartily agreed.72 On hearing that Franklin would return, Francis Hopkinson, a fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence then living in Philadelphia, wrote to him, “Whilst there is any Virtue left in America the Names Franklin & Washington will be held in the highest Esteem.”73 Upon learning of Franklin’s arrival, Washington also wrote, “Amid the public gratulations on your safe return to America, after a long absence, and the many eminent services you have rendered it—for which as a benefited person I feel the obligation— . . . none can salute you with more sincerity, or with greater pleasure than I do.”74

  BY THE TIME FRANKLIN REACHED PHILADELPHIA in September 1785, Washington had been back at Mount Vernon for nearly two years. From the outset, Washington referred to it as his “seat of retirement from the bustle of the busy world.”75 Yet he had plenty to do there. Covering more than seven thousand acres, Mount Vernon was a vast business with hundreds of resident workers engaged in all sorts of plantation-related enterprises from planting through processing. “An almost entire suspension of every thing which related to my own Estate, for near nine years, has accumulated an abundance of work for me,” Washington observed only days after his return.76 He did not trust his slaves and regularly complained that they shirked work, stole supplies, and broke tools.77 He felt a need to watch them daily to keep them on task. Sometimes, he would measure their output in his presence and then demand similar productivity during the entire workday, which lasted from sunrise to sunset with two hours for lunch, or up to fifteen hours per day, six days a week, in summer.78 Washington often distrusted his hired overseers and paid workers as well and closely monitored their efforts. He was a hands-on manager by nature, but conditions at Mount Vernon accented this trait. “I made no money from my Estate during the nine years from it,” he explained, now wanting to right the situation.79

  Despite his formal retirement from public service and full-time occupation managing his plantation, Washington still carried the weight of a country on his shoulders. He had fought too hard to secure its independence not to care deeply about its survival, which he saw at risk under the Articles of Confederation. His earliest postretirement letters from Mount Vernon railed about Congress’s lack of authority, failure to pay public creditors, and inattention to business. During the first half of 1784, he sent scores of letters to governors, former military colleagues, and members of Congress urging greater union. In a letter to the wartime governor of Connecticut, who had also just stepped down, Washington no sooner mentioned “the serenity of retirement” than he began grousing about the “deranged state of public Affairs.”80 To his own governor in Virginia he predicted nothing but “the worst consequences from a half starved, limping [central] Government.”81 Barely three months after returning to Mount Vernon, Washington conceded to Jefferson, “How far upon more mature consideration I may depart from the resolution I had formed of living perfectly at ease—exempt from all kinds of [public] responsibility, is more than I can, at present, absolutely determine.”82

  Washington’s two postwar concerns—establishing his own estate and the United States—combined in his vision for the American west. Intent on securing his fortune in land, prior to the Revolutionary War, Washington had obtained large undeveloped tracts on the frontier in western Virginia and Pennsylvania. With peace, he sought to capitalize on his investment. Further, like Franklin, he viewed the west as key to America’s future by being a source of both individual opportunity and economic expansion. Thus, after spending the first nine months of his so-called retirement trying to restore order to his plantation, Washington headed west to inspect his frontier holdings. This trip crystallized his hopes and fears for the country and began his journey back from retirement to full-time public service.

  Washington traversed land that he knew from his days as a frontier surveyor and officer. Indeed, the outbound journey roughly followed Braddock’s route toward the Forks of the Ohio, from which point Washington planned to journey down the Ohio Valley to his farthest and largest holdings. He never got that far. At his first large tract beyond the Allegheny Mountains, Washington found surly settlers who had leased the land from his agent but had little ability to pay their rent. At a second, larger tract, he found illegal squatters unwilling to recognize his ownership. He never reached seven farther tracts, including his largest ones on the Great Kanawha River in western Virginia, because Native peoples had reoccupied much of this area and, he was warned, warriors were lying in wait to capture or kill him. Virginia had ceded its claims to land northwest of the Ohio to the confederation, but Congress had no resources to defend or develop it. Worse still, the British had not evacuated their forts on the Great Lakes and still traded with and supplied guns to Native hunters and trappers. Settlers in the Ohio Country could turn toward the British in Canada or Spanish in Louisiana fo
r protection and trade. Firsthand, Washington now confronted the consequences of a failing confederation and returned home ever more determined to address the problem.

  As he saw it, the danger was not limited to territory northwest of the Ohio River but encompassed the entire frontier. “The Western settlers, (I speak now from my own observation) stand as it were upon a pivot,” Washington wrote upon his return from the west, “the touch of a feather, would turn them any way.”83 Spain controlled the mouth of the Mississippi; Britain the St. Lawrence. He detected little loyalty to the United States or any individual state in the people whom he encountered on the frontier. “The ties of consanguinity which are weakening every day will soon be no bond,” he warned.84 “If then the trade of that Country should flow through the Mississipi or St Lawrence,” Washington cautioned a member of Congress, “[i]f the Inhabitants thereof should form commercial connexions, which lead, we know, to intercourse of other kinds—they would in a few years be as unconnected with us, indeed more so, than we are with South America; and wd soon be alienated from us.”85 For the good of the country and his personal financial well-being, Washington concluded, America must secure the frontier. It offered another urgent argument for enhanced national power based squarely on military might, economic expansion, and imperial pretensions.

  In the meantime, pending a fortified union, Washington initiated an ambitious effort to link Virginia to the frontier by improving navigation on the Potomac River as an alternative waterway to the west. The project would require dredging and canalling on a scale never before attempted in the states, but he offered to manage it personally as president of a private canal company. Within weeks of his return to Mount Vernon, Washington sent a shower of letters boasting of the profits that would flow from western navigation, warning of losing the west without it, and reporting on his observations that suggest its feasibility. Linking profit and patriotism, Washington hailed Potomac River navigation as “the cement of interest, to bind all parts of the Union together by indissoluble bonds—especially that part of it, which lies immediately west of us.”86 This was how the pragmatic providentialist in Washington thought: public policy should align individual self-interest with what is good for society as a whole.