Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  For Washington, the presidency of the canal company became a consuming occupation, although one that he pursued while also managing his plantation and investment properties. Not only did he raise money through selling stock but he threw himself into deciding between cutting sluices through rapids or digging bypass canals around them, hiring supervisors and workers, and personally overseeing the glacial progress of reshaping a river with primitive tools. “Retirement from the public walks of life has not been so productive of the leisure & ease as might have been expected,” Washington wryly remarked in a 1785 letter to the newly returned and supposedly retired Benjamin Franklin.87

  The prospect of commercial traffic on the upper Potomac brought to the fore long-simmering jurisdictional disputes between Virginia and Maryland. By virtue of their colonial charters, Maryland claimed the river but Virginia controlled its southern bank. Under the Articles of Confederation, states were republics unto themselves. Each could have its own taxes and tariffs, rules and regulations, and currency, regardless of their impact on interstate commerce. Unless states cooperated, travel along an interstate boundary like the Potomac River could impose insuperable problems for people and products. To facilitate such cooperation, Virginia and Maryland appointed commissioners to address legal barriers to Potomac River commerce. Because their work impacted his company, Washington invited them to deliberate at Mount Vernon. A gracious and interested host who liberally lubricated his guests with good wine, he made sure that the commissioners reached agreement on critical matters of tolls, tariffs, and trade. They also agreed on shared funding for navigational aids, common fishing rights, and cooperation on protecting travelers. Breaking down barriers to interstate commerce, the commissioners reasoned, would benefit both states.

  Known as the Mount Vernon Compact, it was quickly ratified by the legislatures of both states. James Madison served as floor manager for the compact in the Virginia assembly and received credit for its passage, even though Washington had a larger hand in crafting it. “We are either a United people, or we are not,” he wrote to Madison shortly before the legislative debate began, and “if the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation.”88

  Building on this success and likely at Washington’s urging, Madison persuaded the Virginia assembly to call for all the states to send delegates in September 1786 to a convention in Annapolis “to consider how far an uniform system in their commercial intercourse and regulations might be necessary to their common interest and permanent harmony.”89 At the time, trade disputes like those dividing Maryland and Virginia afflicted many states. Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey battled over their respective rights to use the Delaware River, for example, while New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut clashed over tariffs imposed by New York on goods passing through New York harbor on their way to or from other states.

  Delegates from only five states showed up on time for the Annapolis Convention but they included Madison and Hamilton. Even before it began, both men recognized that any convention limited to commercial issues could not resolve the array of problems facing America, especially since, under the Articles of Confederation, Congress and all the states would need to approve whatever it did. Nothing but a complete overhaul of the Articles, drafted by an unbounded convention and ratified in a manner that would neither have to pass Congress nor require the approval of every state, could achieve the desired results. They wanted this first meeting to serve as a prelude to a second that (even before going to Annapolis) Madison had depicted as “a plenipotentiary convention for mending the Confederation.”90

  When the Annapolis meeting failed to attract delegates from enough states to proceed, Hamilton proposed that those present simply call for a second convention and go home. All told, the delegates met for three days. Their closing report, drafted by Hamilton and approved by the delegates on September 14, urged their states to “use their endeavors to procure the concurrence of the other States, in the appointment of Commissioners, to meet at Philadelphia on the second Monday in May next, to take into consideration the situation of the United States, to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.”91 This proposed conclave, its proponents hoped, would be a true constitutional convention leading to the establishment of a true national government.

  Some already charged that the Annapolis meeting could have attracted more delegates and achieved more results if Washington had participated, as he had for the Mount Vernon accords. The challenge for federalists became getting him to Philadelphia in 1787 for the proposed grand convention. No one then knew if he would—not even Washington. In the meantime, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware pushed ahead with efforts to reduce trade barriers and improve navigation in the lower Delaware and upper Chesapeake Bays. In instructions to his state’s delegates, Franklin embraced the spirit of compromise that would guide his own actions at the Constitutional Convention. “The States,” he wrote, “have the same general objects, but as each may be attached to ways of accomplishing them particularly favorable to itself, unless a spirit of mutual concession take place among the Negociators, a partial biass may tend to disappoint the main purpose.” Therefore, he directed Pennsylvania’s delegates to “sometimes yield in points not materially disadvantageous to the State when it may be necessary to procure a general concurrence.”92

  WASHINGTON WAS ONLY FIFTY-ONE and in good health (except for his rotten teeth and recurrent headaches) when he resigned his military commission, so people reasonably expected him to do more for his country, but Franklin was seventy-nine and physically infirm upon his retirement as ambassador. Repose seemed fitting. Indeed, Washington wrote at the time about Franklin’s “setting himself down in the lap of ease, which might have been expected from a person of his advanced age.”93 Accordingly, when the retired general wrote from Mount Vernon to welcome home the aged patriot, he observed, “It would give me infinite pleasure to see you: at this place I dare not look for it; tho’ to entertain you under my own roof would be doubly gratifying.”94 Washington assumed any meeting between the two preeminent heroes of the Revolution would have to occur in Philadelphia. Yet Franklin’s mind was still sharp and he retained a youthful exuberance and optimism. Washington in fact acted older than Franklin and brooded more about death.95

  Franklin did not waste a moment of his final transatlantic crossing. He devised and used instruments to measure sea temperature at various depths in order to determine that the Gulf Stream, which he had “discovered” years earlier, operated as a warm surface current over colder deep water. He tinkered with his by then famous stove to reduce smoke when burning soft coal. He worked on various ideas of watertight bulkheads, twin hulls, and other innovations for ship safety, stability, and efficiency. These and other shipboard researches by Franklin drew on his seemingly instinctive understanding of energy, fluid, and air flow and applied it to practical concerns. Commenting on the rigors of an ocean voyage for a person of Franklin’s age, Washington could not but marvel, “A Man in the vigor of life could not have borne the fatigues of a passage across the Atlantic, with more fortitude, and greater ease than Doctor Franklin did.”96

  After arriving in Philadelphia following what he called “a pleasant Passage of 5 Weeks & 5 day,” Franklin published his scientific findings from the ocean voyage in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, an organization he founded in 1743 and now set about to revive and expand as the signal scientific association of the new republic.97 It had continued to elect him as its president throughout his absence in France. Although focused on the natural sciences, the society ventured into the mechanical arts, social sciences, and political theory.

  Politics took a practical turn as well. No sooner had Franklin disembarked than each faction in Pennsylvania’s bitterly divided assembly asked him to run as its candidate for the state’s executive council from Philadelphia. One faction mainly represented the
farmers and artisans, the other the commercial class. Both claimed Franklin, who won by acclamation. Under the state’s constitution, which Franklin had largely written in 1776, members of the unicameral legislature and executive council annually elected the state’s president by joint ballot from among the council’s twelve members. Franklin then won that election too, with only one dissenting vote.

  “He has again embarked on a troubled Ocean; I am persuaded with the best designs, but I wish his purposes may be answered—which, undoubtedly are to reconcile the jarring interests of the State,” Washington noted at the time.98 “If he should succeed, fresh laurels will crown his brow; but it is to be feared that the task is too great for human wisdom to accomplish.”99

  Washington underestimated Franklin. “He has destroyed party rage in our state,” famed Philadelphia physician and former congressman Benjamin Rush observed late in Franklin’s first term. “His presence and advice, like oil on troubled waters, have composed the contending waves of faction which for so many years agitated the State of Pennsylvania.”100 In 1786, Franklin won reelection unanimously. After a third election in 1787, term limits barred him from serving again. By the end of his tenure as his state’s chief executive, Franklin was eighty-two.

  Franklin’s three terms as Pennsylvania’s president spanned the nadir of the confederation period, but his state fared relatively well. The main problems of the era were economic, which fell to the states to address. Wartime and postwar spending on foreign goods had carried off much of America’s hard currency, with the inability of Congress to impose protective tariffs or pay its wartime debts to domestic creditors worsening the situation. A deflationary spiral led to recessions in states like Massachusetts that did not stimulate spending by increasing the money supply, but doing so too aggressively by excessive issuances of unbacked paper money fueled chaotic inflationary cycles in states like Rhode Island and Georgia.

  Before Franklin’s return, Pennsylvania forged a clever middle course by unilaterally assuming the obligation to make interest payments on Congress’s debts to in-state creditors through the issuance of negotiable IOUs (or indents), which creditors could use to pay state taxes. Although (unlike Rhode Island’s widely disparaged paper money) not legal tender, these indents had sufficient intrinsic value to circulate like cash in Pennsylvania until used to pay taxes, thus enlarging the state’s money supply in a sustainable way.101 Once redeemed, Pennsylvania credited the indents toward payment of its annual requisition to Congress, which assured that its contributions went toward paying off Pennsylvania creditors rather than foreign debts or new expenses. Of course, Congress received no hard cash. Some other states soon implemented similar schemes.

  In 1785, Congress tried to bar states from paying requisitions with indents, but Pennsylvania got around it by exchanging national securities held by its citizens for state bonds paying interest in the form of state tax credits. Under Franklin’s leadership, it then fulfilled its requisitions to Congress by offsetting the interest paid or principal owed on these securities. The negotiable interest coupons on these state bonds continued to feed the in-state money supply in a stable fashion that kept the Pennsylvania economy growing without excessive inflation at a time when many other states suffered recessions or worse. All the while, Franklin boasted about his state’s being one of few paying its full requisition. By 1786, Pennsylvania was Congress’s single largest creditor.

  Despite Pennsylvania’s relative prosperity, Franklin knew that the ongoing political situation held back the country. Congress lacked power to address issues of general concern. “The Disposition to furnish Congress with ample Powers augments daily, as People become more enlightened,” Franklin advised Jefferson early in 1786, adding a year later that the Articles of Confederation are “generally thought defective.”102 Regarding the defects in the Articles, or “errors” as he called them, Franklin wrote in November, “Those we shall mend.”103 After all, going back to his 1754 Albany Plan and subsequent efforts at the Second Continental Congress, Franklin had lobbied for an effective federal union longer than any living American.

  Accordingly, under Franklin’s leadership, Pennsylvania was one of the five states represented at the Annapolis Convention on interstate commerce. He approved when his state’s delegate, Trench Coxe, backed the aborted conclave’s closing call for a plenipotentiary constitutional convention in Philadelphia for May 1787. As Pennsylvania’s president, Franklin would host it in his state’s capitol building. Of course, this assumed that the Pennsylvania legislature would endorse the idea and appoint delegates to attend. That remained uncertain.

  On December 1, 1786, after his state became the first to back the call for a plenary convention, Virginia governor Edmund Randolph dispatched two urgent letters to Franklin imploring Pennsylvania to act too. The first asked for Franklin’s “co-operation in this trying moment.” The second informed Franklin that Virginia had chosen its delegates to the Philadelphia Convention, and pleaded, “I have only to wish the presence of Pennsylvania by her deputies at this intended meeting.” The call, Randolph assured Franklin, “breaths a spirit truly foederal and contains an effort to support our General Government, which is now reduced to the most awful crisis.”

  Five days later, Randolph sent Franklin a third letter, which repeated his earlier request and stated that Washington would head the Virginia delegation. “My anxiety for the well being of the foederal government will not suffer me to risque so important a consideration upon the safety of a single letter,” Randolph wrote to explain the multiple entreaties.104

  Randolph need not have worried so much about Franklin’s support for the Philadelphia Convention. Upon receiving his first letter, Franklin assured Randolph on December 21, “I communicated it to the Council, and it was sent down recommended to the Assembly. They took it into Consideration, and yesterday pass’d a Bill appointing seven Commissioners to meet yours in May next.”105 For health reasons, Franklin’s name was not yet on the list, but soon joined it. Indeed, by April 1787, Franklin was hailing the pending convention as “an assembly of Notables” and cautioning Jefferson, “If it does not do Good it must do Harm, as it will show that we have not Wisdom enough among us to govern ourselves.”106

  For his part, Franklin was fully invested in the cause.107 Despite his gout and gravel (as he termed his ailments), Franklin rarely missed any of the four-month-long marathon proceedings. Much as the crises of the French and Indian War and American Revolution drew Franklin and Washington together in the past, the crisis over union and reforming the confederation propelled them on converging paths toward the Constitutional Convention of 1787. As the delegates gathered in Philadelphia and word of the meeting spread among republican-minded European intellectuals, the English polymath Erasmus Darwin wrote to Franklin, “Whilst I am writing to a Philosopher and Friend, I can scarcely forget that I am also writing to the greatest Statesman of the present, or perhaps any century[,] Who spread the happy contagion of Liberty among his countrymen.”108 In America and Europe, many friends of liberty (as they liked to call themselves) looked on the Convention as the next stage for establishing a working model for republican rule. The presence there of Franklin and Washington gave reason to hope for transformative results—and ultimately proved essential to realizing them.

  Book III

  Working Together and Apart

  Six

  Rendezvous in Philadelphia

  WITH CIVIC BOOSTERS INTENT on turning Philadelphia into the commercial, financial, and perhaps political capital of the newly independent states, the city looked better than ever by the spring of 1787. Residents had repaired damage caused by the British occupation and begun fresh construction. No longer hampered by prewar British restrictions on foreign trade and wartime harassment of American shipping, trade routes opened to Europe and the Caribbean. In 1785, the Empress of China, a three-mast sailing ship built during the war as a privateer and owned by a syndicate led by Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris, returned from China
with the first direct commerce between the world’s newest republic and its oldest empire. Washington bought a set of porcelain tableware carried in the ship.

  With peace, Morris had resigned as superintendent of finance for the Confederation but remained a power in state politics and America’s richest merchant prince. Washington depicted Morris’s three-and-a-half-story Georgian mansion, located only a block from the State House and boasting a half-acre walled garden, as the finest single residence in Philadelphia. Home to the resident governor prior to the Revolution and the British commander during the occupation, Morris bought and expanded it in 1781. Pennsylvania’s pro-federalist assembly picked Morris, who had led the failed fight to gain taxing authority for Congress, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.

  Two blocks east of Morris’s mansion on Market Street, Franklin had replaced three run-down, street-front rental buildings with two four-story row houses (one containing his ground-floor printing shop) and an archway through to his home. Also since returning from France, he had added to his house a three-story wing featuring a first-floor dining area seating twenty-four and a massive second-floor library and scientific study.

  All this might seem improvident for someone of his age, Franklin acknowledged in a 1786 letter to his last surviving sibling, “but we are apt to forget that we are grown old, and building is an amusement.”1 That “amusement,” he noted on the eve of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, involved supervising “Bricklayers, Carpenters, Stonecutters, Plaisterers, Painters, Glaziers, Limeburners, Timber Merchants, Coppersmiths, Carters, Labourers, etc. etc.”2 In assuming this task, Franklin had in mind his daughter, son-in-law, and seven grandchildren, who all resided with him. Although a doting grandfather, Franklin confessed to enjoying the quiet of his new library where, as he put it, “I can write without being disturb’d by the Noise of the Children.”3 Writing to his sister with the house complete, he marveled at his good fortune, “When I look at these Buildings, my dear Sister, and compare them with that in which our good Parents educated us, the Difference strikes me with Wonder.”4