Franklin & Washington

by Edward J. Larson

Endorsed by both camps and encouraged to run as the only one able to bridge the growing partisan divide, Washington was unanimously elected to a second four-year term in 1792. Under the façade of unity, however, two distinct political parties were forming. It showed in a growing tendency for federal and state-level office seekers to align themselves with one of the two factions and then adhere to the party line if elected. Jefferson’s partisans began calling themselves Republicans while Hamilton’s followers formalized their designation as Federalists. The appearance of local newspapers closely identified with each of the opposing parties hardened divisions everywhere, with Franklin’s grandson Benny publishing the Republicans’ flagship paper, the Aurora, out of his grandfather’s Market Street printing office.

  Events pushed partisanship during Washington’s second term. Frustrated by Hamilton’s domination over the administration, Jefferson left the cabinet in 1793. A year later, Republicans denounced the government for suppressing resistance to the whiskey tax in western Pennsylvania with a thirteen-thousand-soldier army personally led by Washington. Then convulsions caused by the French Revolution and ensuing war between republican France and royalist Britain engulfed domestic politics. Washington’s decision to proclaim neutrality without consulting Congress outraged Republicans, who viewed the United States as bound by Franklin’s treaty to support its Revolutionary War ally. Here was presidential excess, they charged. When the Royal Navy nevertheless seized hundreds of American merchant ships bound for French ports in the West Indies, and impressed American sailors to boot, many Republicans favored a second war with Britain. Instead, in 1794, Washington sent Chief Justice Jay to resolve differences between the United States and its former colonial master. Bargaining from a weak position, Jay’s treaty did little more than accept British limits on American trade with France in exchange for seemingly meaningless concessions. For the first time, Washington’s popularity sagged. He was excoriated in the Republican press, and permanently embittered.

  IN 1796, AT AGE SIXTY-FOUR, Washington announced that he would not accept a third term as president. He wished to retire, again, to Mount Vernon. His farewell address, printed in newspapers as a letter to the people, denounced partisanship, embraced economic nationalism, and discouraged permanent foreign alliances. Speaking to all Americans, Washington wrote, “The unity of Government which constitutes you one people, is also now dear to you. It is justly so; for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; and of that very Liberty which you so highly prize.”5 This address joined his circular letter of 1783 as one of Washington’s two most significant public writings.

  By this point, Washington’s legacy as president was secure. His initiatives had restored American credit, opened the Ohio Country for settlement, fostered economic expansion, and established the presidency as a powerful office of overarching significance. Perhaps most important of all, he had kept the United States at peace with Europe during a period of widening transatlantic war. In the election of 1796, Federalist John Adams narrowly beat Thomas Jefferson in America’s first contested election for president. Under the Constitution as then written, by coming in second, Jefferson became vice president, and the partisan split only deepened, especially after the worsening conflict in Europe led Adams and the Federalist-led Congress into waging a costly naval war with France and passing a series of laws to suppress domestic dissent, including the much maligned Alien and Sedition Acts that Republicans denounced as unnecessary, unwise, and unconstitutional. They would ride them to victory in the tumultuous election of 1800.

  Back at his beloved Mount Vernon in 1797, Washington threw himself into farming and even became a whiskey distiller. No product ever netted him a larger return on his investment than this potent, rye-based intoxicant that he sold straight from the still. His distillery became the largest in the United States by 1799. On December 12 of that year a heavy snow started falling during Washington’s daily ride around his plantation’s five farms. He returned home wet and cold. By the thirteenth, a Friday, Washington’s trusted aide Tobias Lear reported about his longtime employer, “He had taken cold (undoubtedly from being so much exposed the day before) and complained of having a sore throat.”6

  Washington’s condition grew worse by the next morning. He struggled for breath and could scarcely speak. To counter the inflammation that strangled him, he asked for a bleeding by the overseer who generally treated Mount Vernon’s slaves. When they arrived, Washington’s doctors repeated the procedure three more times and administered two laxatives. Nothing helped. In all likelihood Washington had contracted epiglottitis, which no available medical treatment could cure. He accepted his fate.

  After reviewing two draft wills that he had prepared in anticipation of his demise, Washington confirmed the one that would free his slaves upon his wife’s death, had the other destroyed, and waited for his passing.

  “Doctor, I die hard, but am not afraid to go,” he said at dusk. The end came late that night. His final words were, “’Tis well.”7

  News of the unexpected death touched off an outpouring of grief unprecedented in the country’s history. “Every paper we received from towns which have heard of Washington’s death, are enveloped in mourning,” one journalist reported near the year’s end. “Every city, town, village and hamlet has exhibited spontaneous tokens of poignant sorrow.”8

  DELAYING UNTIL DEATH to reveal his intention of freeing his slaves, and then postponing their release still longer, drained the act of its potential political and social significance. Trusted aides (like Lafayette) and prominent abolitionists (including Virginia Quaker Robert Pleasants) had urged Washington to act earlier—ideally during the idealistic fervor of the American Revolution—when it might have made a difference. “Remember the cause for which thou wert call’d to the Command of the American Army, was the cause of Liberty and the Rights of Mankind,” Pleasants wrote to Washington in 1784. “How strange then must it appear to impartial thinking men . . . that thou . . . should now withhold that enestimable blessing from any who are absolutely in thy power.”9 Other chances for Washington to take a public stand came at the Constitutional Convention or, along with Franklin, upon the founding of the federal republic.

  Once dead, Washington could neither explain his motives nor present his final act as a model for other slaveholders. Even his wife, who owned most of the slaves at Mount Vernon as her dower property, did not follow his lead and kept even the mixed-race children allegedly sired by her father (her half sisters) and her son (her grandchildren) enslaved. Southern slaveholders easily dismissed Washington’s deathbed act and northern abolitionists struggled to give it meaning.

  In any event, by 1800, the moment (if there ever was one) to end slavery in America without civil war had passed. The new federal republic facilitated the opening of rich farmland west of coastal Georgia for settlement. New technologies for processing the short-staple strains suitable for cultivation there greatly expanded southern cotton production—making it the nation’s leading export and fueling the demand for slaves. Constitutional protection for the slave trade through 1808 and the development of textile production in the northeast under Hamilton’s protective tariffs created ideal conditions for integrating slavery into the national market economy. Nothing Washington might do with slaves on his tidewater Virginia wheat farms could speak to the economics of slavery in the cotton south. Others would suffer for these sins.

  No one can know what might have happened had the two icons of the Revolution, Franklin and Washington, stood together against slavery at the nation’s founding. Certainly some of their contemporaries thought it could have made a difference. As it happened, they split over the issue and with them the nation. Washington and the southern states retained their slaves. Franklin and the northern states rejected the institution.

  Despite Washington’s decision to free his slaves after his death, during the antebellum period, so
uthern slaveholders counted him among the founders who owned slaves. Upon secession, the official seal of the Confederate States of America featured the mounted figure of a uniformed George Washington at its heart. To launch the slaveholding republic, Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as the president of the Confederacy on Washington’s birthday, 1862. After his surrender in 1865, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee (who was married to Martha Washington’s great-granddaughter) became president of a Virginia college named for Washington that, upon Lee’s death, school officials renamed for Washington and Lee. The new name carried meaning. Postbellum architects of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy often linked Washington to the heroes of the Confederacy, such as when Lee’s son George Washington Custis Lee reviewed the 1907 grand parade of Confederate veterans. More than a century later, objecting to the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Donald Trump sharply asked, “I wonder, is it George Washington next week?”10 The question is stark. Its answer involves balanced assessments of each figure’s contributions and character that successive generations perform anew.

  PLEASANTS CLOSED HIS 1784 LETTER to Washington with a warning: “Notwithstanding thou art now receiving the tribute of praise from a grateful people, the time is coming when all actions will be weighed in an equal ballance, and undergo an impartial examination; how inconsistant then will it appear to posterity, should it be recorded, that the Great General Washington . . . [would] keep a number of People in absolute Slavery, who were by nature equally entitled to freedom as himself.”11 This same examination applies to all the founders.

  Despite their flaws, Franklin and Washington have held up better under examination than most leaders of any age. Theirs was the founding partnership that launched a nation. Over the years, the harshest critics of Franklin have focused on his promotion of stultifying, middle-class virtues. “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise,” he wrote in an archetypal Poor Richard’s Almanack aphorism for 1735, and added a year later, “Poverty, Poetry, and new Titles of Honour, make Men ridiculous.”12 Generations of Americans took Franklin’s maxims to heart, with some like publisher James Harper and banker Thomas Mellon crediting them as their way to wealth. Just as surely, generations of intellectuals from Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to F. Scott Fitzgerald and D. H. Lawrence mocked Franklin as a pedestrian prophet of pragmatism. Yet Franklin was a man of many faces, who as an author hid behind masks ranging from his first, the witty widow Silence Dogood, to his last, the Arab slaver Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. Judging Franklin solely in his Richard Saunders guise fails to do him justice.

  Washington did not wear multiple masks but so carefully cultivated the firm face of republican virtue that he believed his countenance never betrayed his true feelings.13 He viewed favorable public opinion as a formidable but fickle foundation for leadership in a republic, and endeavored to foster it. Washington’s success led the less popular Adams, with a mixture of esteem and envy, to view the general as an actor playing a role: a “Character of Convention,” Adams called him, designedly made “popular and fashionable with all parties and in all places and with all persons as a center of union.”14 Indeed, after observing him up close as president, Adams described Washington as the finest political actor he ever witnessed in action.15 This aspect of Washington’s personality can make it as difficult to see behind his public image as it is to look beyond Franklin’s multiple guises and middle-class manners. Then as now, the Pennsylvania printer and the Virginia planter appeared too dissimilar to establish and maintain a lasting friendship, especially since the former posed as a man of the people while the latter preened as one above them.

  Yet focusing on their distinct public images obscures their fundamental similarities. Hardworking and entrepreneurial, Franklin and Washington had successful business careers outside government and never viewed themselves primarily as politicians. Both prospered as colonists and supported royal rule until realizing that Britain would not extend basic English rights to Americans. Jealous of their liberties, they turned against the crown and never looked back. Each nurtured deep, lifelong relationships with both men and women. Natural leaders, people trusted them and they trusted others. Both men listened more than they talked, compromised on means to secure ends, relied on others, sacrificed for the common good, and never wavered on principle. And both were reformers—Franklin compulsively so. They saw problems and tried to fix them. Franklin’s fixes ranged from mechanical to moral—lightning rods, stoves, and bifocals to constitutions, ethical codes, and popular philosophy. Washington’s included constitutions, of course, but also military and agricultural reforms.

  Shaped by the Enlightenment, Franklin and Washington shared a republican ideology and progressivist faith that relied on human reason and divine providence rather than traditional ways and established dogmas. They sought truth and accepted facts. Life could get better, they believed. Theirs did.

  As the old order collapsed around them, they crafted a better one to replace it—one that has lasted for more than two centuries. They did not see it as perfect and never thought it would last forever. If the people allowed it, Franklin warned, even the Constitution, for all its virtues, would lead to tyranny, with the presidency serving as “the fetus of a King.”16 The example of Franklin and Washington, however, shows what individuals can do in times of faction, fracture, and failure to address problems and improve the state of affairs. “We will not be driven by fear,” the legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow would later say about Americans, “if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.”17 Murrow surely had the likes of Franklin and Washington in mind. And so, at the onslaught of World War II—the war that made Murrow famous—in his Four Freedoms speech, a resolute Franklin D. Roosevelt quoted Franklin, “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”18

  Franklin was more than a Philadelphia printer. Washington much more than a tidewater planter. They were larger-than-life American originals whose partnership in revolutionary times laid the foundation for the world’s first continental republic, which has lasted for nearly 250 years. Each recognized the other’s goodness and greatness, and they viewed one another as partners in the fight for liberty. Others saw this too. Despite their critics, Franklin was elected to his state’s highest office unanimously and Washington was elected to his nation’s highest office unanimously. Central to their republican conception of service, both men willingly relinquished their public stations to return to their private positions. Indeed, both preferred private life to public power. For each, so long as it had a liberty cap instead of a crown, a crab tree walking stick served as a fitting scepter.

  Notes

  List of Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Works

  AFC: L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence, 13 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963–).

  Annals of Congress: The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 42 vols. (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834).

  DAJA: L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961).

  DGW: Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976–1979).

  DHFFC: Linda Grant DePauw et al., eds., The Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America, 22 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972–).

  DHRC: Merrill Jensen et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, 27 vols. (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976–).

  Farrand: Max Farrand, ed., The Record of the Federal Convention of 1787, 4 vols., rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937).

  JCC: Library of Congress, Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, 34 vols. (Washington
, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904–1937).

  PAH: Harold C. Syrett and Jacob Cooke, eds, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 27 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–1987).

  PBF: Leonard W. Labaree et al., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 43 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–). The first forty-three volumes in this series, running through March 15, 1785, have been published as of 2019. The unpublished volumes are available unpaginated online at franklinpapers.org and are cited here by date and projected volume number with page numbers left blank.

  PGM: Robert A. Rutland, ed., The Papers of George Mason, 1725–1792, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970).

  PGW-CfS: W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Confederation Series, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–1997).

  PGW-CS: W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series, 10 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983–1995).

  PGW-PS: W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Presidential Series, 19 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987–).

  PGW-RS: Dorothy Twohig et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Retirement Series, 4 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998–1999).

  PGW-RWS: W. W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, 26 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985–).

  PJA: Robert J. Taylor et al., eds., Papers of John Adams, 19 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003–). The first nineteen volumes in this series, running through May 1789, have been published as of 2019. The unpublished volumes are available unpaginated online at the Adams Papers section of founders.archives.gov and are cited here by date with volume and page numbers left blank.

  PJM: Robert A. Rutland et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago and Charlottesville: University of Chicago Press and University Press of Virginia, 1962–).