Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

  AFTER THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE charged with considering the antislavery petitions finished its work in early March, the full House took up its report on the sixteenth. Congress had named one member from each state to the committee, but since no one from South Carolina and Georgia would serve and North Carolina was not yet a state, the group had a decidedly northern tilt. Without making any policy recommendations, the committee simply reported seven enumerated propositions of what, under the Constitution, Congress could do about slavery. Construing the Constitution narrowly, the first three propositions stated that Congress could not prohibit the importation of slaves until 1808, could never emancipate them, and could not interfere with the internal regulation of slavery in the states. The next four, however, said that Congress could impose a ten-dollar tariff on imported slaves, could regulate conditions on slave ships, could bar foreign carriers from the U.S. slave trade, and could exercise these powers humanely.

  The committee’s report outraged House members from Georgia and South Carolina. They moved to strike it and substitute one rejecting the petitions as “unconstitutional, and tending to injure some of the states.”101 The debate over this motion consumed a day and produced the most strident defense of slavery heard during the entire episode, most of it coming in one long harangue by Georgia’s James Jackson.

  Jackson denounced the Quakers as self-righteous zealots who (as pacifists) did nothing to win the Revolution. Unable to level a similar charge against Franklin, who everyone knew had played a critical role in the war effort, Jackson dismissed him as senile. Painting a grossly inaccurate picture of horrific conditions in Africa and an absurdly happy one of plantation life, he professed that Africans “would be better imported here by millions than stay in their own country.” Similar reasoning applied against returning them to Africa, where Jackson said they would be reenslaved by African despots. Pointedly but incorrectly asserting that white people would never intermix with Blacks, Jackson concluded that slavery was the best option for all concerned and perfectly compatible with the commands of “Jesus Christ, who allowed it in his day and his apostles after him.” Slavery being established in the south and essential to the regional economy, he declared, “Congress cannot interfere without endangering the whole system of government: that excellent constitution which we have so happily effected.”102 As members rose to refute Jackson’s various points, the chair ruled the motion to strike the committee’s report out of order, and the House settled down to address each proposition separately in the deliberate fashion that Madison wanted from the outset.

  The legislative process took five more days, but one by one by narrow margins—some by but a single vote with odd-fellow coalitions of slave-owning southerners and pragmatic northerners—the House pared the committee’s seven propositions to three. These declared Congress ineligible to ban the importation of slaves until 1808 or to interfere with slavery in the states but free to regulate foreign sales of slaves and conditions on slave ships.103 Not all agreed, of course. Some members insisted that Congress could end the slave trade earlier and emancipate slaves at any point, but a majority shepherded on the floor by arguments and motions made by Madison ruled otherwise.

  With the House report as precedent, Congress barred further debate on the slave trade and any discussion of emancipation. To seal the arrangement, Madison obtained consent to have the amended report memorialized in the House Journal, where it could stand as a guide to future action. Congressional power over slavery “has been so fully discussed,” the Journal stated, “it cannot be supposed that gentlemen will go over the same ground again.”104 On the most divisive issue in antebellum American politics, silence would reign in the halls of Congress.

  Philosophically opposed to slavery but seeing no way to end it, Madison (much like Washington) shuddered when politicians like Jackson defended it as a positive good or when reformers like the Quakers damned it as an intolerable evil. Either approach invited disunion. Madison simply wanted the issue to go away. At the Constitutional Convention, he had warned that the fundamental fault line dividing America was not between small and large states, or rich and poor ones, but between states with slaves and states without them. The debate over these petitions redoubled his concerns. As a member of Congress and later as secretary of state and president, Madison sought to paper over the problem of slavery and, by doing so, he perpetuated it.

  Franklin and the Quakers submitted their antislavery petitions before Washington had fully formed his cabinet or gained his footing in dealing with Congress. At that time, Madison served as the president’s chief advisor and legislative spokesperson. Hamilton eventually assumed the former role and Madison lost the latter one, but in 1790, he was known as Washington’s prime minister. As such, he surely conferred with Washington on the petitions, which preoccupied Congress for parts of February and March. Certainly, Washington approved of Madison’s handling of them, saying so privately.105

  Washington in-law David Stuart, a Virginia politician, complained about those petitions in a mid-March letter to the president in which he warned about the attitudes of Virginians toward northeastern (or “Eastern”) states, “A spirit of jealousy which may become dangerous to the Union . . . seems to be growing fast among us.”106 Washington replied to Stuart shortly after Madison had defanged the petitions with his House report. “That there is diversity of interests in the Union none has denied,” Washington conceded. “A spirit of accomodation was the basis of the present Constitution; can it be expected then that the Southern or the Eastern part of the Empire will succeed in all their Measures? certainly not. But . . . if the Eastern & Northern States are dangerous in Union, will they be less so in seperation?” The south, he warned, would “most unquestionably, be the weaker party.” Turning to Madison’s resolution of the matter of the petitions, Washington smugly added, “The Memorial of the Quakers (& a very malapropos one it was) has at length been put to sleep, from which it is not [likely] it will awake before the year 1808.”107 On this issue, he too favored silence.

  FRANKLIN DID NOT. Jackson’s defense of slavery stirred him to write one last sharp satire—perhaps his best. Diminished to bedridden skin and bones, the mind within his emaciated, pain-racked body was as vigorous (and wit as slashing) as ever. “Reading last night in your excellent paper the speech of Mr. Jackson in Congress,” Franklin wrote in a March 23 letter to the Federal Gazette under the pseudonym Historicus, “put me in mind of a similar one made about one hundred years since, by Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a member of the Divan of Algiers . . . against granting the petition of the Sect called Erika or Purists, who prayed for the abolition of piracy and slavery.”108 Europeans and Americans had long assailed north African Arabs for enslaved Christians captured in raids and at sea. In his published letter, Franklin related this fictional Arab’s purported speech, which mirrored Jackson’s in every respect except that the slaves were white instead of Black and the masters Muslim rather than Christian. The transposition may have fooled some readers; it certainly caught their eye and focused them on the core issue.

  “Have these Erika considered the consequences of granting their petitions?” Franklin quoted Ibrahim as asking. “If we cease our cruises against the Christians, how shall we be furnished with the commodities their countries produce, and which are so necessary for us? If we forbear to make slaves of their people, who, in this hot climate, are to cultivate our lands.” The speech went on, “And for what? to gratify the whim of a whimsical sect! who would have us not only forbear making more slaves, but even to manumit those we have.”109

  In words mocking Jackson, the speaker asked, “If we set our slaves free, what is to be done with them? . . . Our people will not pollute themselves by intermarrying with them: must we maintain them as beggars?” Then came Jackson’s defense of slavery as a positive good. “And what is so pitiable in their present condition? Were they not slaves in their own countries?” the speaker mused. “Is their condition then made worse by their falling into our hands? No, t
hey have only exchanged one slavery for another: and I may say a better: for here they are brought into a land where the sun of Islamism gives forth its light, and shines in full splendor, and they have an opportunity of making themselves acquainted with the true doctrine, and thereby saving their immortal souls.” Modern satire often relies on cultural relativism, and here Franklin displayed his modernity. “While serving us, we take care to provide them with every thing,” he had Ibrahim say about Arabs and their European slaves. “The labourers in their own countries, are, as I am informed, worse fed, lodged and clothed.” The speech concluded by affirming that the Qur’an condones slavery in a passage that Franklin drew from a biblical verse, Ephesians 6:5, cited by Jackson: “Slaves serve your masters with cheerfulness and fidelity.”110 No reader could mistake Franklin’s meaning.

  America’s first great humorist and essayist, as well as its leading diplomat, scientist, inventor, and popular philosopher, Franklin would pass away within a month of publishing this satire. “If to be venerated for benevolence—if to be admired for talent—if to be esteemed for patriotism—if to be beloved for philanthropy can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know that you have not lived in vain,” Washington had written to Franklin the previous fall, upon learning of his diminished physical condition.111

  For twenty-first-century Americans, Franklin’s final crusade served to confirm his benevolent, philanthropic, and forward-looking nature. The nation’s oldest founding father, Franklin also seems the most modern—the one who would feel at home in America today—while Washington’s attachment to slavery feeds his image as a marble icon from the past—a great but dated man. Franklin captured the eternally optimistic, fundamentally progressive, and essentially American aspects of his character when he wrote in one of his final letters to an old friend, “It is pleasant to see the World growing better and happier, tho’ one is about to quit it.”112 His optimism extended to his own future as well for, as he wrote in a two-sentence note to his worried sister, “With respect to the Happiness hereafter which you mention I have no Doubts about it, confiding as I do in the Goodness of that Being who thro’ so long a Life has conducted me with so many Instances of it.”113 Physically, as he assured his daughter shortly before his death, he was ready to go, but mentally—never.

  Franklin died at home from a ruptured abscess in his lungs on April 17, 1790, with his oldest grandchildren, Temple and Benny, holding his hands.

  Upon hearing of Franklin’s death, Madison moved that members of the House of Representatives wear black badges for a month. The motion passed unanimously. In the Senate, however, where Vice President John Adams presided, a similar motion was withdrawn and, when Jefferson proposed that the executive branch follow the House, Washington demurred. “He said he would not know where to draw the line, if once he began that ceremony,” Jefferson reported. “I told him the world had drawn so broad a line between himself & Dr. Franklin on the one side, and the residue of mankind on the other, that we might wear mourning for them, and the question still remain new & undecided as to all others.”114 A more logical reason for Washington’s response—circulated then and repeated ever after—attributed the coolness to pique following Franklin’s antislavery petition, which Washington depicted as “an ill-judged piece of business.”115 Yet once the seat of government moved from New York to Philadelphia later in 1790, Washington attended a eulogy for Franklin at the American Philosophical Society.

  When news of Franklin’s death reached France, the National Assembly decreed three days of mourning and a flood of tributes ensued. “The name of Benjamin Franklin will be immortal in the records of freedom and philosophy,” the assembly’s president declared in a letter to Washington.116 No foreigner had ever received such honors in France. Acknowledging the decree by the assembly, Washington replied to its president, “So peculiar and so signal an expression of the esteem of that respectable body for a citizen of the United States, whose eminent and patriotic services are indelibly engraved on the minds of his countryman cannot fail to be appreciated.”117 In Philadelphia, nearly twenty thousand mourners turned out for Franklin’s funeral procession—more than had ever gathered in the city for such an event. Franklin was the rare prophet honored both at home and abroad.

  Epilogue

  The Walking Stick

  IN A CODICIL TO HIS WILL drafted soon after Washington became president, Franklin wrote, “My fine Crab tree walking stick with a gold head curiously wrought in the form of the cap of Liberty I give to my friend & the friend of Mankind General Washington—If it were a sceptre, he has merited it, & would become it.”1 Marianne Cammasse, Countess of Frobach, had given Franklin the “thorn stick,” as she called it, or “le baton de Pommier savage,” as Franklin referred to it after receipt, in celebration of America’s independence.2 That a humble crab-apple staff could serve as an American leader’s scepter carried a meaning that Franklin surely appreciated. Presidents would rule by popular assent rather than military might or divine right. Topping it with a liberty cap rather than a crown reinforced the symbolism. American leaders are called to secure the people’s liberty, not their own aggrandizement. In a republican twist, Franklin suggested that, by wielding it, Washington gave authority to the scepter rather than its giving authority to him. Hailing Franklin as “great and invaluable,” Washington commented on receiving the bequest, “As a token of remembrance and a mark of friendship, I receive this legacy with pleasing sensations and a grateful heart.”3

  It seems altogether fitting for the Sage of Philadelphia to invest Washington with a wild-apple-tree scepter in a manner akin to the ancient Hebrew prophet Samuel’s anointing Saul as Israel’s first king. Familiar with scripture and conversant in biblical history, Franklin and Washington surely recognized the similarity. That each invoked their friendship in extending and receiving the scepter makes the ritual particularly American and distinctly republican. As a later generation of Americans might say, Franklin literally and figuratively passed “le baton” to Washington, and Washington gratefully accepted it.

  Assuming leadership of the world’s first extended republic, Washington adopted the title “Mr. President” rather than the more regal “Your Majesty” or “His Most Benign Highness” proposed by Vice President John Adams.4 To his friends, however, it remained General Washington and he continued signing his letters to Franklin as Go: Washington.

  AS THE FIRST PRESIDENT, Washington brought the full force of his personality and popularity to the controversial task of forming a federal union from diverse states. A conciliator by nature who favored leading by consensus, he chose prominent leaders from a spectrum of those who had supported ratification to head the executive departments and to form a cabinet of advisors. For the critical domestic policy post of treasury secretary, he turned to Alexander Hamilton, who would push the Constitution’s limits in creating a nation. For the State Department—the former office of foreign affairs—Washington picked the states-rights-minded Thomas Jefferson, who (much like Franklin) questioned the extent of federal and presidential power under the Constitution. Another Virginian, the off-and-on supporter of ratification Edmund Randolph, became attorney general. As secretary of war, Washington tapped his second in command from the Revolution, the ardent federalist Henry Knox. In dealing with Congress, Washington at first relied most heavily on James Madison in the House and Robert Morris in the Senate. To launch the judicial branch, Washington nominated New York federalist John Jay.

  The results transformed America. Working almost as a team under Washington, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches began the process of forging a unified republic. The principal policies for doing so came from Hamilton who, much to the dismay of Jefferson and the despair of antifederalists, emerged as Washington’s most influential advisor. However, Jefferson made his contributions to the emerging order, such as by devising a broad regime of federally protected intellectual property rights. With Knox, he also backed Washington’s efforts to open t
he Ohio Country for settlement, leading to prolonged warfare with the Western Confederacy of Native tribes until its capitulation in 1795. Madison took the lead in pushing a Bill of Rights through Congress. Although the final amendments were less protective of states’ rights than antifederalists wanted, they passed Congress in 1789 and Washington personally forwarded them to the states for ratification.

  Hamilton’s nationalizing policies were founded on funding the full debt run up by Congress and the states during the Revolutionary War. He viewed this as a means to align the interests of wealthy Americans with the central government, displace the states as independent economic actors, and enhance the country’s credit. To pay for it, Hamilton pushed a tariff on imported goods, which would have the side effect of sheltering American industry, and an excise tax on such domestic items as whiskey, which he saw as a means to exert authority over frontier distillers.

  As a capstone for his economic program, Hamilton wanted a quasi-independent central bank for the United States, co-owned by private investors, which would in effect regulate fiscal policy and provide a stable national currency. Here, Jefferson drew the line, claiming the Constitution did not authorize Congress to charter a bank. Invited by Washington to reply, Hamilton countered that the Necessary and Proper Clause, already reviled by antifederalists, authorized Congress to do virtually anything that advanced its express powers to lay taxes and regulate interstate commerce. Washington sided with Hamilton, and the bank was chartered in 1791. Two distinct factions had emerged, with the leaders of each—Hamilton and Jefferson—in Washington’s cabinet.