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The next day Washington wrote Lafayette regarding the new Constitution, “It is now a child of fortune, to be fostered by some and buffeted by others. What will be the general opinion on, or the reception of it, is not for me to decide, nor shall I say any thing for or against it. If it is good I suppose it will work its way good, if bad it will recoil on the framers.”
Washington forecast accurately. The infant Constitution received both cuffs and caresses. The cuffs came from advocates of state authority who disliked yielding power to the central government, from radical democrats who saw insufficient guarantees of the people’s rights, and from assorted others who were, for one reason or another, attached to the status quo. Sam Adams had trouble getting past the first words of the preamble—“We, the People”—which he thought should have been, “We, the States.” Said Adams, “As I enter the building I stumble at the threshold.” Elbridge Gerry explained his refusal to sign at Philadelphia: “The constitution has few federal features, but is rather a system of national government.” This was precisely what worried another New England Antifederalist (as the opponents of the Constitution came to be called): “The vast continent of America cannot be long subjected to a democracy if consolidated into one government. You might as well attempt to rule Hell by prayer.” A Pennsylvanian, noting that the proposed Constitution would amplify the power of government, warned, “The natural course of power is to make the many the slaves to the few.” A South Carolina Antifederalist demanded of his audience, “What have you been contending for these ten years? Liberty! What is liberty? The power of governing yourselves! If you adopt this constitution, have you the power?” To which the audience thundered, “No!” Another South Carolinian recorded the reception of the proposed charter in the backcountry: “The people had a coffin painted black, which, borne in funeral procession, was solemnly buried, as an emblem of the dissolution and interment of public liberty…. They feel that they are the very men, who, as mere militia, half-armed and half-clothed, have fought and defeated the British regulars in sundry encounters. They think that after having disputed and gained the laurel under the banners of liberty, now, that they are likely to be robbed both of the honour and the fruits of it.”
Proponents of the Constitution rallied to its defense. The most important body of argument in favor of the new government was a series of essays by Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay entitled The Federalist. Perhaps inevitably, the affirmative case was more complicated than the negative (the opponents simply had to shout “Liberty!”); whether from this cause or some other, the Federalist papers were complex and closely reasoned, and together provided a thoughtful introduction to the theory of constitutional government. The most telling installment may have been the tenth, in which Madison countered the Antifederalist argument that the federal government would be intrinsically less democratic than the state governments. In fact, just the opposite was true, Madison asserted.
“The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression.” A government comprising more people would be safer. “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.”
The morning after the convention adjourned, the Pennsylvania Assembly reclaimed its quarters in the State House. Franklin, in his dual role as Pennsylvania president and senior delegate to the Constitutional convention, expressed his “very great satisfaction” at presenting the convention’s handiwork to the people of Pennsylvania for approval. He added his expectation that the Constitution would produce “happy effects to this commonwealth, as well as to every other of the United States.” Further happy effects for Pennsylvania, he judged, would follow from locating the new federal government in Pennsylvania. To this end, and pursuant to the clause in the Constitution about a federal district, he recommended that Pennsylvania offer the new government one hundred square miles for such a district. (Pennsylvania agreed, but the national politics of ratification eventually resulted in the federal district’s being carved out of Maryland and Virginia.) Beyond his formal recommendation, Franklin conspired in lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding the convention far enough to smuggle out his closing speech, which became a powerful argument in favor of the Constitution. Many people assumed that Franklin was the primary author of the proposed charter; his prestige added to its momentum.
It also shielded him from Antifederalist criticism. In Pennsylvania the politics of ratification was complicated by the preexisting dissension over the state constitution. Confusingly—but not illogically, given their populist predilections—most Constitutionalists in Pennsylvania politics adopted an anti-Constitutionalist position vis-à-vis the proposed national government, while most Pennsylvania anti-Constitutionalists (or Republicans) embraced the federal Constitution. Pennsylvania Antifederalists bitterly attacked the (federal) Constitution as a plot by Robert Morris and his rich friends to subvert the states and the people, the better to line their own pockets. Yet Franklin, despite his support for the Constitution, emerged largely untouched. There was good political reason for this, of course, namely, the recognition—in the words of one Antifederalist piece—that Franklin was “highly reverenced by all the people.” To the extent that Franklin’s federalism required explaining away by the Antifederalists, it was attributed to the “weakness and indecision attendant on old age.”
The Antifederalists employed other tactics instead. When ballots were circulated for delegates to the Pennsylvania convention that would decide for or against ratification, Antifederalist Constitutionalists listed Franklin’s name on their ticket, against his wishes. Antifederalists in other states turned Franklin’s words against him. “Doctor Franklin’s concluding speech, which you will meet with in one of the papers herewith enclosed,” Madison wrote to Washington from New York, “is both mutilated and adulterated so as to change both the form and the spirit of it.”
In Pennsylvania the Antifederalist efforts failed fairly quickly. The state convention met in November, and though the Antifederalists managed to stall a final vote till the following month, on December 12 forty-six members voted in favor of the Constitution, against twenty-three opposed. That afternoon a gang of celebrating sailors and shipbuilders (two groups that stood to benefit from improved commerce under the new federal government) put a boat on a wagon and hauled it through the streets of Philadelphia, shouting, “Three and twenty fathoms, foul bottom”—referring to the negative votes—and “Six and forty fathoms, safe anchorage!”
Pennsylvania’s approval enhanced the Constitution’s prospects but hardly guaranteed them. Ratification in February 1788 by Massachusetts (where Sam Adams, after stumbling at the threshold, picked himself up and endorsed the new charter) left the ratifiers three states shy of the nine specified for the Constitution to take effect. More troubling than the shortfall—which seemed almost certain to be made good—was the identity of two of the holdouts, New York and Virginia. If New York remained aloof, New England would be as cut off from the rest of America as it would have been during the Revolutionary War had Burgoyne’s expedition succeeded. And an American union was hard to imagine without Virginia, the home of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, and the heart of the south.
Franklin entered the fray at a critical moment. In April he wrote a piece for the Federal Gazette reminding readers that even the most inspired instance of constitution-writing in all of history had come under harsh attack. When Moses descended from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments under his arm, had not the Israelites resisted? The Talmud told how jealous factions resented Moses and the laws he brought, saying Israel had freed itself from bondage under Pharaoh; should it now accept slavery at the hands of Moses? Franklin recognized that he was treading on treacherous, even blasphemous ground. “I beg I may not be understood to infer that our General Convention was divinely inspired when it formed the new federal Constitution, merely because that Constitution has been unreasonably and vehemently opposed.” Yet, as he had said in the convention, he could not help thinking the Deity had something to do with the project. “I must own I have so much faith in the general government of the world by Providence that I can hardly conceive a transaction of such momentous importance to the welfare of millions now existing, and to exist in the posterity of a great nation, should be suffered to pass without being in some degree influenced, guided, and governed by that omnipotent, omnipresent, and beneficent Ruler.”
Aided by Franklin’s argument, Virginia’s convention ratified in the early summer of 1788. Virginia’s approval gave heart to New York Federalists, including the merchants of New York City, who threatened secession by their city from the state if the state failed to ratify. This tipped the balance in favor of the Constitution.
Although some final vote counting remained, on the twelfth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Federalists of Philadelphia held a grand celebration. A ship conveniently called the Rising Sun was anchored in the Delaware; at sunrise on the Fourth of July it fired a cannon salute to the new government and the city that gave it birth. An elaborate procession began at eight o’clock, headed by the Light Horse Troop and including units representing “Independence,” the “Alliance with France,” and the “New Era.” State and local officials marched, as did members of every conceivable guild in the city.
The place of highest honor was reserved for “His Excellency the President.” Unfortunately, Franklin’s stone kept him home that day, although he may have stirred to the sidewalk to see the procession turn onto Market Street just west of his house, and he almost certainly heard the music and singing. The printers’ guild had put a press on a cart, and as it rolled along, those tending the press struck off and distributed the lyrics of a song written for the occasion by Philadelphia’s most famous printer, President Franklin himself.
Ratification of the Constitution marked the end of the Revolutionary era in American history, and a most fitting climax to Franklin’s public life. The previous October the Pennsylvania Assembly had reelected him again. He had intended to retire after his second term but lacked the resolve. “I must own that it is no small pleasure to me, and I suppose it will give my sister pleasure,” he wrote Jane Mecom the week after his reelection, “that after such a long trial of me, I should be elected a third time by my fellow citizens, without a dissenting vote but my own. This universal and unbounded confidence of a whole people flatters my vanity much more than a peerage could do.”
Yet to his relief, the Pennsylvania constitution forbade a fourth term, and as the weeks ran down to the end of October 1788, he looked forward to the retirement he had so long postponed. But because he postponed it so long, he discovered he had less to look forward to than he hoped. The excitement surrounding the Constitutional Convention had temporarily rejuvenated him. “Some tell me I look better, and they suppose the daily exercise of going and returning from the State House has done me good,” he told Jane just afterward. He even thought he might make a last trip to Boston. But a bad fall on the steps of his garden that winter sprained his wrist, bruised his hip, and aggravated his stone. His afflictions kept him away from the meetings of the Executive Council and canceled all plans to travel.
The finality of this left him wistful. A Boston admirer urged him to come; Franklin replied that it would be “a very great pleasure if I could once again visit my native town, and walk over the grounds I used to frequent when a boy, and where I enjoyed many of the innocent pleasures of youth, which would be so brought to my remembrance, and where I might find some of my old acquaintance to converse with.” But travel by land was too fatiguing, and travel by sea equally unappealing “to one who, although he has crossed the Atlantic eight times, and made many smaller trips, does not recollect his ever having been at sea without taking a firm resolution never to go to sea again.” Anyway, the reality would fall short of the memory. “If I were arrived in Boston I should see but little of it, as I could neither bear walking nor riding in a carriage over its pebbled streets.” As for acquaintances, “I should find very few indeed of my old friends living, it being now sixty-five years since I left it to settle here.”
All the same, the thought of his first home would not leave him, and he would not let it go. “I enjoy the company and conversation of its inhabitants when any of them are so good as to visit me; for besides their general good sense, which I value, the Boston manner, turn of phrase, and even tone of voice and accent in pronunciation, all please and seem to refresh and revive me.”
Sometimes New England simply made him laugh. In a letter to Jane Mecom he asked whether she ever saw any of their Folger relations from Nantucket. He said he himself had not of late. “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.”
Franklin’s unfailing sense of humor helped him accept his afflictions. His stone was a large one, “as I find by the weight when I turn in bed.” Close friends, passing acquaintances, and people he hardly knew sent him recipes for medications and instructions for treatments, but all to no avail. “I thank you much for your intimations of the virtues of hemlock,” he wrote Benjamin Vaughan (who had suggested a sub-Socratic dose). “But I have tried so many things with so little effect that I am quite discouraged, and have no longer any faith in remedies for the stone.”
Yet if he could not diminish the stone, at least he could try to prevent its increase. He ate less than before, largely abstained from wine and cider, and exercised with his dumbbell, which improved his circulation without requiring the kind of motion that gave him pain.
For a time innocuous palliatives alleviated the worst symptoms. “As the roughness of the stone lacerates a little the neck of the bladder,” he told the Comte de Buffon, a fellow sufferer, “I find that when the urine happens to be sharp, I have much pain in making water and frequent urgencies. For relief under this circumstance I take, going to bed, the bigness of a pigeon’s egg of jelly of blackberries. The receipt for making it is enclosed. While I continue to do this every night, I am generally easy the day following, making water pretty freely and with long intervals.”
But Franklin’s most potent medicine was his continuing curiosity and his irrepressible interest in life. “Our ancient correspondence used to have something philosophical in it,” he wrote James Bowdoin, a recently retired old friend, in May 1788. “As you are now more free from public cares, and I expect to be so in a few months, why may we not resume that kind of correspondence?” Bowdoin’s interest was the earth; Franklin proceeded to offer several questions for reflection. “How came the earth by its magnetism? … Is it likely that iron ore immediately existed when the globe was first formed; or may it not rather be supposed to be a gradual production of time?” Was the earth’s magnetism related to the iron it contained? If so, had that iron ever been nonmagnetic? And if that was so, how had it become magnetized? “May not a magnetic power exist throughout our system, perhaps through all systems, so that if men could make a voyage in the starry regions, a compass might be of use? … As the poles of magnets may be changed by the presence of stronger magnets, might not, in ancient times, the near passing of some large comet, of greater magnetic power than this globe of ours, have been a means of changing its poles?” Did not the presence in cold regions of the shells and bones of animals natural to warm regions indicate that the earth’s geographic poles had shifted? “Does not the apparent wrack of the surface of this globe thrown up into long ridges of mountains, with strata in various positions, make it probable that its internal mass is a fluid, but a fluid so dense as to float the heaviest of our substances?”
Some of these conjectures—about the shifting of the earth’s magnetic and geographic poles, about the fluid nature of the earth’s interior and its relation to surface structures—were remarkably prescient, identifying a research agenda that would keep geophysicists busy into the twenty-first century. During Franklin’s day the conjectures stimulated discussion among the members of the American Philosophical Society, where this letter was read and which met in Franklin’s library when he could not get out. And they showed his mind to be as active at eighty-two as it had been at forty-two.
And as it had been at forty-two, it was no less concerned with human welfare than with matters merely philosophical. For decades Franklin had been troubled by shabby treatment of Indians by whites. The unfair dealings had practical implications, as when they provoked the Indians to attack frontier settlements or assist the enemies (first France, then Britain) of the people of Pennsylvania and the United States. But there was also in Franklin’s thought a fundamental feeling that Indians, as members of the human race, ought to be treated better than they often were.
On his press at Passy, Franklin had printed an essay entitled “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” in which his first sentence made plain the intended irony of his title. “Savages we call them,” he wrote, “because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.” The balance of the essay suggested that the Indians had the better of this argument. Franklin pointed out how admirably Indian ways suited the Indians. “Having few artificial wants, they have abundance of leisure for improvement by conversation. Our laborious manner of life compared with theirs, they esteem slavish and base; and the learning on which we value ourselves, they regard as frivolous and useless.” Plato himself could not have objected to the Indian mode of political organization. “All their government is by the counsel or advice of the sages; there is no force, there are no prisons, no officers to compel obedience or inflict punishment.” At council meetings the old men sat in the foremost ranks; when one of the old men rose to speak, everyone else observed a respectful silence. “How different this is from the conduct of a polite British House of Commons,” Franklin noted sardonically, “where scarce a day passes without some confusion that makes the Speaker hoarse in calling to order.”
The Indians were exceedingly gracious to strangers, setting aside a special house in each village to accommodate visitors, and were exemplars of toleration. Franklin wrote of a missionary who told the Susquehanna the story of Adam’s fall, and how it had led to great travail and necessitated Jesus’ sufferings and death. “When he had finished, an Indian orator stood up to thank him,” Franklin related, with a twinkle in either his own eye or the Indian’s. “What you have told us, says he, is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider.” The Indian thereupon shared his people’s creation story with the missionary. The missionary grew impatient, then disgusted. “What I delivered to you were sacred truths,” he said. “But what you tell me is mere fable, fiction and falsehood.” The Indian replied, “My brother, it seems your friends have not done you justice in your education; they have not well instructed you in the rules of common civility. You saw that we who understand and practise those rules believed all your stories. Why do you refuse to believe ours?”
As president of Pennsylvania, Franklin had occasion to apply his views to public policy. During the summer of 1786 the young Wyandot chief Scotosh visited Philadelphia. Franklin, recalling the elaborate treaty ceremonies in which he had taken part on the frontier thirty years earlier, paid Scotosh the courtesy of recapitulating some of those ceremonies at his house on Market Street. Scotosh expressed concern that white surveyors (“measurers”) were encroaching on Indian country. His own people were peacefully inclined, but he could not say as much of others. “The bad people will, I fear, take occasion from the measuring to do more mischief. Perhaps the measurers will be killed. And it would give pain to me and my nation to hear such bad news.”
Franklin assured the chief that Pennsylvania had no designs on his people’s lands. “This state of Pennsylvania measures no land but what has been fairly purchased of the Six Nations.” He explained that the land in question was under the control of Congress, then meeting in New York. He encouraged Scotosh to go to New York, and gave him money for the trip. He also sent a letter of recommendation to Foreign Secretary John Jay, explaining that Scotosh had been “always very friendly to our people” and hoping his fears could be assuaged. The young chief had expressed curiosity about France; Franklin suggested to Jay that Congress offer to send Scotosh overseas. This would benefit both Scotosh and American interests in the frontier regions. “It might be of use to our affairs in that part of the country if, after viewing the court and troops and population of France, he should return impressed with a high idea of the greatness and power of our ally.”
Franklin’s judgment that savagery and civilization were no respecters of skin color led him, in the last years of his life, to embrace a movement that was by certain measures the most radical in America. Franklin came to abolitionism via anger at Britain. The American charges that Parliament intended to enslave the colonies led some among those making the charges to examine America’s own conduct in enslaving black Africans. Yet in a country where indentured servants and transported felons also provided a substantial part of the workforce, the mere existence of an institution of unfree labor was not as striking as it would seem later. Prior to his conversion, Franklin kept his slaves, George and King, as personal servants, and apparently thought little about it.
The overseas slave trade was another matter. It was especially barbaric, and, in its barbarity, had no real counterpart in the traffic in indentured servants or felons. Moreover, it was something British slave traders tried to force on the American colonies—even colonies that wanted no part in it. Franklin made this argument in one of his pseudonymous pieces for the London press in the early 1770s. The piece put an Englishman, an American, and a Scotsman in conversation; the Englishman called Americans hypocrites for demanding liberty for themselves while denying it to their black slaves. The American acknowledged that his countrymen were not blameless, being, as it were, receivers to the theft of Africans from their native lands. But the Americans were not entirely willing receivers, having passed laws discouraging the importation of slaves—laws the British government had disallowed as being—in the words of Franklin’s American, “prejudicial, forsooth, to the interest of the African Company.”
Franklin subsequently leveled sharper attacks on the slave trade. A British court ordered the freedom of a certain slave irregularly landed in England; the slave’s legal costs had been covered by “some generous humane persons,” in the words of Franklin, who went on, “It is to be wished that the same humanity may extend itself among numbers, if not to the procuring liberty for those that remain in our colonies, at least to obtain a law for abolishing the African commerce in slaves, and declaring the children of present slaves free after they become of age.” Franklin quoted a computation that one-third of the hundred thousand persons shipped from Africa each year to America died in passage.
Can the sweetening our tea, &c. with sugar be a circumstance of such absolute necessity? Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste compensate for so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men? Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single slave that happens to be landed on thy coasts, while thy merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!
Until independence, Franklin’s attacks on the slave trade doubled as attacks on Britain. He endorsed the section in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence that condemned the slave trade and Britain’s refusal to allow the American colonies to restrict it—although he apparently was not surprised that the southern colonies insisted on deleting that section. Franklin acquiesced in the compromises on slavery at the Constitutional Convention, believing, as he said in his closing speech, that the bargain struck was the best that could be achieved at that time and place. If waiting twenty years was the cost of killing the American slave trade—an institution nearly ten times that old—it was worth paying.
Yet if the slave trade was evil, its evil reflected the evil of the underlying institution. By the mid-1780s Franklin was convinced slavery itself must be eradicated. To some extent his conversion to abolitionism was simply the logical consequence of his fundamentally generous view of human nature—a nature that long life and an open mind had showed him was no different in Negroes (such as those he had seen educated years before) or Indians than in whites. To an equal extent it revealed his continuing concern that unless American republicanism were founded on virtue, it would fail. As a Briton, Franklin had been able to countenance slavery as one public vice among many received from the past. As an American, he could no longer countenance it, for the new nation could not abide public vice—certainly not of the magnitude of slavery—without jeopardizing its very existence.
Philadelphia Quakers had founded the first abolitionist group—what came to be called the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage—in 1775, but independence and the war distracted most of those who could have made the group a force. Franklin proposed to do just that, enlisting after his return from France and accepting the society’s presidency in 1787. A major stumbling block to emancipatory efforts was the question of what to do with the former slaves; Franklin advocated a carefully considered program of education. “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature,” he wrote, “that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.” Apologists of slavery pointed to former slaves who became a burden on society, and used this as an argument against emancipation. What do you expect?, Franklin answered. “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.” Lacking power of choice in his life, he never learned to choose; lacking responsibility, he became irresponsible. “Under such circumstances, freedom may often prove a misfortune to himself, and prejudicial to society.” But this was no argument against emancipation; it was an argument for education. Society must rid itself of slavery, but it must also make provision for the entry into free society of former slaves. Franklin and the antislavery group published a plan for the education of former slaves, and he solicited public support. “To instruct, to advise, to qualify those who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty; to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employment suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances; and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan which we have adopted, and which we conceive will essentially promote the public good, and the happiness of these our hitherto much neglected fellow-creatures.”
“Our grand machine has at length begun to work,” Franklin wrote in the spring of 1789 to Charles Carroll, his colleague from the 1776 expedition to Canada. The new government, headed by Washington as president, had taken office; Carroll himself was a senator from Maryland. “If any form of government is capable of making a nation happy, ours I think bids fair now for producing that effect.”
Yet happiness required virtue—as it always did for Franklin. The new Congress was contemplating a bill of rights. Franklin supported such a bill, but he worried that in the enthusiasm for popular rights, popular responsibilities might be forgotten. “After all, much depends upon the people who are to be governed. We have been guarding against an evil that old states are most liable to, excess of power in the rulers; but our present danger seems to be defect of obedience in the subjects.” He offered this as a caution, not a condemnation. For himself he was willing to hope that “from the enlightened state of this age and country, we may guard effectually against that evil as well as the rest.”
Happiness and virtue rested on reason. And reason advanced apace, which further encouraged Franklin. “I have long been impressed,” he wrote an admirer in 1788, “with the same sentiments you so well express of the growing felicity of mankind, from the improvements in philosophy, morals, politics, and even the conveniences of common living.” Present progress was rapid, and would continue far into the future. “I have sometimes almost wished it had been my destiny to be born two or three centuries hence.”
The present was exciting enough. The summer of 1788 brought news of reforms in France conferring rights on non-Catholics. “The arrêt in favour of the non-catholiques gives pleasure here,” Franklin wrote a Paris friend, “not only from its present advantages, but as it is a good step towards general toleration, and to the abolishing in time all party spirit among Christians, and the mischiefs that have so long attended it.” As one who always deplored sectarian intolerance, Franklin was especially gratified. “Thank God, the world is growing wiser and wiser; and as by degrees men are convinced of the folly of wars for religion, for dominion, or for commerce, they will be happier and happier.”
It was the following summer, of course, that produced the great changes in France. From the distance of Philadelphia the initial view was cloudy and confused. “The revolution in France is truly surprising,” Franklin wrote Benjamin Vaughan. “I sincerely wish it may end in establishing a good constitution for that country. The mischiefs and troubles it suffers in the operation, however, give me great concern.” Some of his concern, naturally, was for the welfare of those he had come to know in Paris. “It is now more than a year since I have heard from my dear friend Le Roy,” he wrote his old chess partner in November 1789. “What can be the reason? Are you still living? 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?” On the assumption that Le Roy retained his head (he did), Franklin went on to say he found the news of the violence “very afflicting.” He hoped for the best, but feared for the country he cherished second only to America. “The voice of Philosophy I apprehend can hardly be heard among those tumults.”
Yet if France survived the tumults, it—and the world—would benefit in the end. “I hope the fire of liberty, which you mention as spreading itself over Europe,” he wrote an English friend, “will act upon the inestimable rights of man, as common fire does upon gold: purify without destroying them; so that a lover of liberty may find a country in any part of Christendom.” To David Hartley he wrote, “The convulsions in France are attended with some disagreeable circumstances, but if by the struggle she obtains and secures for the nation its future liberty and a good constitution, a few years’ enjoyment of those blessings will amply repair all the damages their acquisition may have occasioned. God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the Earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say, ‘This is my country.’”
In his letter to Le Roy, Franklin explained that the new government in America gave an appearance that promised permanency. “But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
Taxes had been important in his past; death was the larger concern now. In the summer of 1789 he answered a French friend who had inquired of his health, “I can give you no good account. I have a long time been afflicted with almost constant and grievous pain, to combat which I have been obliged to have recourse to opium, which indeed has afforded me some ease from time to time, but then it has taken away my appetite and so impeded my digestion that I am become totally emaciated, and little remains of me but a skeleton covered with a skin.”
His family and friends did what they could to alleviate his pain. Sally tended him with diligence and care. Her sons took dictation from their grandfather when he felt too weak to write. Polly Hewson—who had finally succumbed to Franklin’s arguments that her children would have better prospects in America than in England, and had moved her family to Philadelphia—read to Franklin when the pain or medication prevented him from concentrating.
For years he had been too busy to finish his memoirs; now he was too ill. He reviewed what he had written—“which, calling past transactions to remembrance, makes it seem a little like living one’s life over again,” he told Abbé Morellet. And he contemplated what he might add. (“Canada—delenda est,” he noted to himself, recalling his long struggle to win Canada for Britain.) But the sustained effort required to finish the job was beyond him.
That many were interested in his life story was evident from the queries he received. Ezra Stiles of Connecticut was one of the more forward. “As much as I know of Dr. Franklin, I have not an idea of his religious sentiments,” Stiles wrote Franklin. Would he be so kind as to enlighten an old friend?
“It is the first time I have been questioned upon it,” Franklin replied.
Here is my creed. I believe in one God, creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion, and I regard them as you do [Stiles shared Franklin’s tolerance] in whatever sect I meet with them.
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed, especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any peculiar marks of his displeasure.
I shall only add, respecting myself, that, having experienced the goodness of that Being in conducting me prosperously through a long life, I have no doubt of its continuance in the next, though without the smallest conceit of meriting such goodness.
To this Franklin added a postscript requesting that Stiles not publish this letter, which doubtless would upset the orthodox. “I have ever let others enjoy their religious sentiments, without reflecting on them for those that appeared to me unsupportable and even absurd. All sects here, and we have a great variety, have experienced my good will in assisting them with subscriptions for building their new places of worship; and as I have never opposed any of their doctrines, I hope to go out of the world in peace with them all.”
His flagging strength did not diminish his zest for political combat. He continued to seek to expand the scope of human liberty, and he resisted efforts to diminish it. Propertied groups were trying to revise the Pennsylvania constitution to grant special privileges to property; Franklin responded much as before: “Is it supposed that wisdom is the necessary concomitant of riches?” Far from claiming special privileges, property ought to accept special responsibilities. He recapitulated his earlier argument about the origins of property, and asserted, “Private property therefore is a creature of society, and is subject to the calls of that society, whenever its necessities shall require it, even to its last farthing.”
He entered the fight over the college. “I am the only one of the original trustees now living, and I am just stepping into the grave myself,” he declared, by way of reintroducing himself to the debate over what the young scholars should learn. As at the founding, he rejected the teaching of Latin and Greek to any but specialized scholars as an anachronism from an age that knew no other literature. Referring to the French habit of carrying hats on the arm, simply as ornaments, long after wigs displaced them from French pates, Franklin dubbed the vestigial teaching of the classics “the chapeau bras of modern literature.”
He left the field of combat as he had entered it seven decades before—leading with his pen and his wit. In February 1790 he forwarded an antislavery petition to Congress. “Mankind are all formed by the same Almighty Being, alike objects of his care, and equally designed for the enjoyment of happiness,” the petition read. At a time when the “spirit of philanthropy and genuine liberty” was abroad in America, a legislature explicitly chartered to secure the blessings of liberty to the American people could not ignore this gross denial of liberty to slaves. “These blessings ought rightfully to be administered without distinction of colour to all descriptions of people.” To tolerate any less was to contradict the meaning of the Revolution. “Equal liberty was originally the portion, and is still the birthright of all men.” Americans of goodwill looked to Congress for “the restoration of liberty to those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage, and who amidst the general joy of surrounding freemen groan in servile subjection.”
This petition, and the fact that it arrived over Franklin’s signature, prompted Representative James Jackson of Georgia to leap to the defense of slavery. The Bible endorsed slavery, he said, as well it might, for it allowed the bringing of barbarians to the Gospel. If not slaves, who would work the fields of the south? The abolitionists should be silenced as subversive of social order.
Jackson delivered himself into Franklin’s hands. Franklin wrote to the Federal Gazette to say that the congressman’s speech “put me in mind of a similar one made about 100 years since by Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a member of the Divan of Algiers.” For the benefit of the readers of the Gazette, Franklin reproduced Ibrahim’s speech, which decried attempts to ban Barbary piracy and free the Christians enslaved as a result. The speech, of course, was a hoax, but, as with Franklin’s other hoaxes, the bait went down before the barb was felt. Franklin took the arguments of such American apologists for African slavery as Jackson and placed them in the mouths of Muslim apologists for piracy and Christian slavery. “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?” To emancipate the Christian slaves would deprive them of continued exposure to the true Muslim faith, “sending them out of Light in Darkness.” And so on, to a conclusion derisively parallel to that reached by Jackson: “Let us then hear no more of this detestable proposition, the manumission of Christian slaves.”
Though the pen was still sharp, the hand that held it was failing. Franklin’s friends and colleagues wrote what they and he knew to be their farewells. “Would to God, my dear Sir,” declared Washington, “that I could congratulate you upon the removal of that excruciating pain under which you labour, and that your existence might close with as much ease to yourself as its continuance has been to our country and useful to mankind.” If the united wishes of Americans, and the prayers of all friends of science and humanity, could effect a cure, then Franklin would indeed be cured. Sadly, such could not be. Yet Franklin should rest easy in mind if he could not rest easy in body.
If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for talents, 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. And I flatter myself that it will not be ranked among the least grateful occurrences of your life to be assured that, so long as I retain my memory, you will be recollected with respect, veneration, and affection by your sincere friend,
George Washington
In March 1790 Franklin received a visit from Jefferson. The former minister to France was on his way from Monticello to New York, to take up his new post as Washington’s secretary of state. “At Philadelphia I called on the venerable and beloved Franklin,” Jefferson recorded. The two shared stories of friends in France, with Jefferson supplying the latest intelligence as to how they were surviving the revolution there. “He went over all in succession, with a rapidity and animation almost too much for his strength.” Jefferson expressed pleasure that Franklin had committed as much of his life story to paper as he had; the world would greatly benefit from reading it. “I cannot say much of that,” replied Franklin, “but I will give you a sample of what I shall leave.” Thereupon he instructed his grandson William Bache to hand Jefferson the account he had written aboard ship on the way back from London in 1775, regarding the failed negotiations with Lord Howe. Jefferson said he would gratefully read it, then return it. Franklin insisted he keep it. “Not certain of his meaning,” Jefferson recounted, “I again looked into it, folded it for my pocket, and said again I would certainly return it. ‘No,’ said he, ‘keep it.’” Not till later did Jefferson realize this was the only copy of a crucial account of the last moment when separation between Britain and the American colonies might have been averted.
Early in April, Franklin showed signs of a pulmonary infection. Whether this was related to the pleurisy he had suffered earlier in his life was (and is) unknown. His general inactivity did not help matters, nor the opium, which in its sedative influence prevented the full expansion of the lungs. He ran a fever, his breathing grew heavy, and he developed a painful cough. Yet he remained remarkably alert and good-humored.
Benjamin Rush, Franklin’s greatest admirer among Philadelphians, and a physician, attended his friend during the final days. “The evening of his life was marked by the same activity of his moral and intellectual powers which distinguished its meridian,” Rush noted. On April 8 Franklin dictated a letter—his last—to Jefferson, displaying his continued command of important details of the peace negotiations with Britain. As his strength ebbed further, he accepted his approaching end with characteristic—and characteristically wry—equanimity. “His conversation with his family upon the subject of his dissolution was free and cheerful. A few days before he died, he rose from his bed and begged that it might be made up so that he might die ‘in a decent manner.’ His daughter told him that she hoped he would recover and live many years longer. He calmly replied he hoped not. Upon being advised to change his position in bed that he might breathe easy, he said, ‘A dying man can do nothing easy.’”
Briefly before the end his symptoms abated. Sally and some of the others allowed themselves optimism. But then the abscess that had been growing in his lung burst, and in his weakened condition he could not expel the fluid. He slipped into unconsciousness, and at eleven o’clock on the night of April 17, 1790, three months after his eighty-fourth birthday, with his grandsons Temple and Benny at his bed, he quietly died.