Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (43 page)
Read Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Online
Authors: Walter Isaacson
Tags: #Azizex666, #General, #United States, #Historical, #Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), #Biography & Autobiography, #History
As for Franklin, he was still laid up in bed with boils and gout when the committee first met. Besides, he later told Jefferson, “I have made it a rule, whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body.”
And thus it was that Jefferson had the glorious honor of composing, on a little lap desk he had designed, some of the most famous phrases in history while sitting alone in a second-floor room of a home on Market Street just a block from Franklin’s home. “When in the course of human events…” he famously began. Significantly, what followed was an attack not on the British government (i.e., the ministers) but on the British state incarnate (i.e., the king). “To attack the king was,” historian Pauline Maier notes, “a constitutional form. It was the way Englishmen announced revolution.”
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The document Jefferson drafted was in some ways similar to what Franklin would have written. It contained a highly specific bill of particulars against the British, and it recounted, as Franklin had often done, the details of America’s attempts to be conciliatory despite England’s repeated intransigence. Indeed, Jefferson’s words echoed some of the language that Franklin had used earlier that year in a draft resolution that he never published:
Whereas, whenever kings, instead of protecting the lives and properties of their subjects, as is their bounden duty, do endeavor to perpetrate the destruction of either, they thereby cease to be kings, become tyrants, and dissolve all ties of allegiance between themselves and their people; we hereby further solemnly declare, that whenever it shall appear clearly to us, that the King’s troops and ships now in America, or hereafter to be brought there, do,
by his Majesty’s orders,
destroy any town or the inhabitants of any town or place in America, or that the savages have been by the same orders hired to assassinate our poor out-settlers and their families, we will from that time renounce all allegiance to Great Britain, so long as that kingdom shall submit to him, or any of his descendants, as its sovereign.
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Jefferson’s writing style, however, was different from Franklin’s. It was graced with rolling cadences and mellifluous phrases, soaring in their poetry and powerful despite their polish. In addition, Jefferson drew on a depth of philosophy not found in Franklin. He echoed both the language and grand theories of English and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, most notably the concept of natural rights propounded by John Locke, whose
Second Treatise on Government
he had read at least three times. And he built his case, in a manner more sophisticated than Franklin would have, on a contract between government and the governed that was founded on the consent of the people.
Jefferson also, it should be noted, borrowed freely from the phrasings of others, including the resounding Declaration of Rights in the new Virginia constitution that had just been drafted by his fellow planter George Mason, in a manner that today might subject him to questions of plagiarism but back then was considered not only proper but learned. Indeed, when the cranky John Adams, jealous of the acclaim that Jefferson had gotten, did point out years later that there were no new ideas in the Declaration and that many of the phrases had been lifted from others, Jefferson retorted: “I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”
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When he had finished a draft and incorporated some changes from Adams, Jefferson sent it to Franklin on the morning of Friday, June 21. “Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it,” he wrote in his cover note, “and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?”
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People were much more polite to editors back then.
Franklin made only a few changes, some of which can be viewed written in his own hand on what Jefferson referred to as the “rough draft” of the Declaration. (This remarkable document is at the Library of Congress and on its Web site.) The most important of his edits was small but resounding. He crossed out, using the heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
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The idea of “self-evident” truths was one that drew less on John Locke, who was Jefferson’s favored philosopher, than on the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and on the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. In what became known as “Hume’s fork,” the great Scottish philosopher, along with Leibniz and others, had developed a theory that distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact (such as “London is bigger than Philadelphia”) and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition (“The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees”; “All bachelors are unmarried”). By using the word “sacred,” Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. Franklin’s edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality.
Franklin’s other edits were less felicitous. He changed Jefferson’s “reduce them to arbitrary power” to “reduce them under absolute despotism,” and he took out the literary flourish in Jefferson’s “invade and deluge us in blood” to make it more sparse: “invade and destroy us.” And a few of his changes seem somewhat pedantic. “Amount of their salaries” became “amount and payment of their salaries.”
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On July 2, the Continental Congress finally took the momentous step of voting for independence. Pennsylvania was one of the last states to hold out; until June, its legislature had instructed its delegates to “utterly reject” any actions “that may cause or lead to a separation from our Mother Country.” But under pressure from a more radical rump legislature, the instructions were changed. Led by Franklin, Pennsylvania’s delegation, with conservative John Dickinson abstaining, joined the rest of the colonies in voting for independence.
As soon as the vote was completed, the Congress formed itself into a committee of the whole to consider Jefferson’s draft Declaration. They were not so light in their editing as Franklin had been. Large sections were eviscerated, most notably the one that criticized the king for perpetuating the slave trade. The Congress also, to its credit, cut by more than half the draft’s final five paragraphs, in which Jefferson had begun to ramble in a way that detracted from the document’s power.
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Jefferson was distraught. “I was sitting by Dr. Franklin,” he recalled, “who perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations.” But the process (in addition to in fact improving the great document) had the delightful consequence of eliciting from Franklin, who sought to console Jefferson, one of his most famous little tales. When he was a young printer, a friend starting out in the hat-making business wanted a sign for his shop. As Franklin recounted:
He composed it in these words, “John Thompson, hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,” with a figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word “Hatter” tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats,” which showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats…He struck it out. A third said he thought the words “for ready money” were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Everyone who purchased expected to pay. They were parted with; and the inscription now stood, “John Thompson sells hats.” “Sells hats!” says his next friend; “why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What then is the use of that word?” It was stricken out, and “hats” followed, the rather as there was one painted on the board. So his inscription was reduced ultimately to “John Thompson,” with the figure of a hat subjoined.”
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At the official signing of the parchment copy on August 2, John Hancock, the president of the Congress, penned his name with his famous flourish. “There must be no pulling different ways,” he declared. “We must all hang together.” According to the early American historian Jared Sparks, Franklin replied: “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Their lives, as well as their sacred honor, had been put on the line.
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Having declared the collective colonies a new nation, the Second Continental Congress now needed to create, from scratch, a new system of government. So it began work on what would become the Articles of Confederation. The document was not completed until late 1777, and it would take another four years before all the colonies ratified it, but the basic principles were decided during the weeks following the declaration of independence.
In the Articles of Confederation plan he had submitted a year earlier, Franklin proposed a strong central government run by a popularly elected congress based on proportional representation. By temperament and upbringing, he was among the most democratic of the colonial leaders. Most of his ideas did not prevail in the new Articles, but the arguments he made in the debate—and in the concurrent meetings at which the Pennsylvania Assembly wrote a new constitution for that state—were eventually to prove influential.
One of the core issues, then and throughout American history, was whether they were creating a confederacy of sovereign states or a single unified nation. More specifically: Should each state have one vote in Congress, or should representation be in proportion to population? Franklin, not surprisingly, favored the latter, not merely because he was from a big state, but also because he felt that the power of the national congress should come from the people and not from the states. In addition, giving small states the same representation as large ones would be unfair. “A confederation upon such iniquitous principles will never last long,” he correctly predicted.
As the argument got heated, Franklin attempted to add some levity. The smaller states had argued that they would be overwhelmed by the larger ones if there was proportional representation. Franklin replied that some Scots had said, at the time of the union with England, that they would meet Jonah’s fate of being swallowed by a whale, but so many Scots ended up being part of the government “that it was found, in the event, that Jonah had swallowed the whale.” Jefferson noted that the Congress laughed heartily enough to regain its humor. Nevertheless, it voted to keep the system of one vote per state. Franklin initially threatened to persuade Pennsylvania not to join the confederation, but he eventually backed down.
Another issue was whether slaves should be counted as part of a state’s population for the purpose of assessing its tax liability. No, argued one South Carolina delegate, slaves were not population but property, more akin to sheep than to people. This drew a rebuke from Franklin: “There is some difference between them and sheep: Sheep will never make any insurrections.”
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At the same time the Congress was debating the new Articles, Pennsylvania was holding its own state constitutional convention, conveniently in the same building. Franklin was unanimously chosen as its president, and his main contribution was to push for a legislature composed of only one house. The idea of balancing the power of a directly elected legislature with an indirectly chosen “upper” house, he contended, was a vestige of the aristocratic and elitist system against which America was rebelling. Franklin likened a legislature with two branches to “the fabled” snake with two heads: “She was going to a brook to drink, and in her way was to pass through a hedge, a twig of which opposed her direct course; one head chose to go on the right side of the twig, the other on the left; so that time was spent in the contest, and, before the decision was completed, the poor snake died with thirst.” His fingerprints were also visible in the list of qualifications that Pennsylvania’s officeholders must meet: unlike in other states, they did not have to own property, but they should have a “firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality.”
Franklin’s preference for a unicameral legislature would eventually be discarded both by Pennsylvania and the United States, but it was greeted with great acclaim in France, which implemented it (with dubious results) after its own revolution. Another ultrademocratic proposal Franklin made to the Pennsylvania convention was that the state’s Declaration of Rights discourage large holdings of property or concentrations of wealth as “a danger to the happiness of mankind.” That also ended up being too radical for the convention.
In his spare time, Franklin served on a variety of congressional committees. He helped design, for example, the Great Seal of the new nation, working once again with Jefferson and Adams. Jefferson proposed a scene of the children of Israel being led through the wilderness, and Adams suggested a depiction of Hercules. Franklin’s proposal was to have the motto
E Pluribus Unum
on the front and an ornate scene on the reverse of Pharaoh being engulfed by the Red Sea with the phrase “Rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God.” Jefferson then embraced Franklin’s plan, and much of it was adopted by the Congress.
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Franklin’s negotiations in London with Adm. Richard Howe—the ones that began under the cover of chess matches at Howe’s sister’s house at the end of 1774—had ended in failure, but they did not destroy the respect the two men felt for each other. What particularly frustrated Lord Howe was that the impasse had dashed his dream of being designated a peace envoy to the colonies. By July 1776, the admiral was commander of all British forces in America, with his brother, Gen. William Howe, in charge of the ground troops. In addition, he had gotten his wish of being commissioned to try to negotiate a reconciliation. He carried with him a detailed proposal that offered a truce, pardons for the rebel leaders (with John Adams secretly exempted), and promises of rewards for any American who helped restore peace.