Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (81 page)

3
. BF journal, Sept. 14, 1785, unpublished, Papers CD 43:310; BF to John Jay, Sept. 21, 1785.

4
. BF to Jonathan Shipley, Feb. 24, 1786.

5
. BF to Polly Stevenson, May 6, 1786.

6
. Manasseh Cutler, diary excerpt of July 13, 1787, in Smyth
Writings,
10:478.

7
. BF to Louis-Guillaume le Veillard, Apr. 15, 1787; BF to Ferdinand Grand, Apr. 22, 1787.

8
. BF to JM, Sept. 21, 1786; Manasseh Cutler, diary excerpt of July 13, 1787, in Smyth
Writings,
10:478. When he died, the 4,276 volumes in his library were valued at just over £184. See “An inventory and appraisement of the goods and chattels of the estate of Benjamin Franklin,” Bache papers, Castle Collection, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

9
. BF to JM, Sept. 20, 1787; BF to Professor Landriani, Oct. 14, 1787.

10
. BF to James Woodmason, July 25, 1780, in which he discusses with the London stationer the “new-invented art of copying” and orders three rudimentary machines from him for delivery to Passy. The machines from Woodmason came from Watt’s factory, and the stationer insisted that Franklin pay in advance before they were ordered. In a letter of Nov. 1, 1780, he tells Franklin he is sending three new machines and provides instructions for how to use the ink; Papers CD 33:579. See also Copying machine history, http://www.inc.com/articles/it/computers_ networks/peripherals/2000.html.

11
. “Description of An Instrument for Taking Down Books from High Shelves,” Jan. 1786, Papers CD 43:873; Lib. of Am. 1116.

12
. BF to Catherine (Kitty) Shipley, May 2, 1786; Lib. of Am. 1118.

13
. BF to David Hartley, Oct. 27, 1785.

14
. BF to Jonathan Williams, Feb. 16, 1786; to Jonathan Shipley, Feb. 24, 1786; Brands 661.

15
. BF to William Cocke, Aug. 12, 1786.

16
. BF to Thomas Jefferson, Apr. 19, 1787.

17
. www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/constitution/confath.html.

Much of the following relies on Max Farrand, ed.,
Records of the Federal Convention
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937) and, in particular,
Madison’s Journals.
There are many editions of this masterful narrative. Among the most convenient are the searchable versions on the Web, including www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/ debates/debcont.htm, and www.constitution.org/dfc/dfc_000.htm.

For good analysis of Franklin’s role at the convention, see William Carr,
The Oldest Delegate
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990); Gordon Wood,
The Creation of the American Public
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Clinton Rossiter,
1787: The Grand Convention
(New York: Macmillan, 1966); Catherine Drinker Bowen,
Miracle at Philadelphia
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1966); Richard Morris,
The Forging of the Union
(New York: Harper & Row, 1987).

18
. The oft-told story of Franklin arriving at the convention in a sedan chair is described most vividly in Catherine Drinker Bowen’s
Miracle at Philadelphia,
34. See also Smyth
Writings,
10:477; Brands 674; Van Doren 741. The careful scholar J. A. Leo Lemay writes that no evidence exists that Franklin was carried in a sedan chair to any meeting of the convention. See Lemay, “Recent Franklin Scholarship, with a Note on Franklin’s Sedan Chair,”
PMHB
76:2 (Apr. 2002): 339–40. In fact, however, there is an unpublished letter written by his daughter, Sally, to his grandson Temple during the convention in which she reports: “Your Grand Father was just getting into his Chair to go to convention when I told him I had received your letter” (SB to TF, undated in 1787, Papers CD 45:u350). We know that Franklin was feeling poorly at the outset of the convention, though not throughout it, and also that he owned a sedan chair. The list of items in his estate (“An inventory and appraisement of the goods and chattels of the estate of Benjamin Franklin,” Bache papers, Castle Collection, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia) lists a “Sedan Chair” valued at £20, and it is also listed as part of the items sold from Franklin’s house on May 25, 1792, two years after his death (
Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser,
May 21, 1792, copy in the American Philosophical Society, also reprinted in
PMHB
23 [1899]: 123). We also know that a friend requested permission to borrow “his sedan chair” in 1788 (Mrs. Powel to BF, unpublished, June 16, 1788, Papers CD 45:558). Thus, I think it is reasonable to believe the reports that he was carried in the chair to the convention that first day, May 28. However, Lemay makes the good point that it is unlikely that he regularly used the sedan chair to get to the convention. As Franklin wrote to his sister in September, “The daily exercise of going and returning from the state house has done me good” (BF to JM, Sept. 20, 1787, Papers CD, 45:u167). One friend wrote in late 1786, “Except for the stone, which prevents his using exercise except in walking in the house up and down stairs and sometime to the state-house, [he] still retains his health, spirits and memory” (Samuel Vaughan to Richard Price, Nov. 4, 1786,
Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings,
21.17 [May 1903]: 355).

19
. Benjamin Rush to Richard Price, June 2, 1787,
Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings
21.17 (May 1903): 361. For Pierce’s speech, see Farrand’s Records of the Convention, 3:91; Franklin speeches, June 30, June 11, Madison’s journal; Morris,
The Forging of the Union,
272.

20
. Bowen 18.

21
. Madison journal, May 31, 1787.

22
. Madison journal, June 11, 1787.

23
. Madison journal, June 28, 1787.

24
. “Motion For Prayers,” by BF, June 28, 1787; Madison’s journal, Farrand, 1:452; Papers CD 45:u77; Smyth
Writings,
9:600.

25
. Madison journal, June 30, 1787.

26
. Manasseh Cutler journal, July 13, 1787, in Smyth
Writings,
10:478; “Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the Constitution of Pennsylvania,” Nov. 3, 1789, Smyth
Writings,
10:57.

27
. Madison journal, July 26, 20, June 5, 1787.

28
. Madison journal, Aug. 7, 10, 1787.

29
. Madison journal, June 2, 1787; BF to Benjamin Strahan, Feb. 16, Aug. 19, 1784; Gordon S. Wood,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(New York: Random House, 1991), 199. See also chapter 5 n. 25; McCullough 400.

30
. Farrand’s Records of Convention, 3:85; Samuel Eliot Morison,
Oxford History of the American People
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1:398.

31
. BF to la Rochefoucauld, Oct. 22, 1788; BF to Pierre Du Pont de Nemours, June 9, 1788.

32
. Franklin closing speech, Sept. 17, 1787, Papers CD 45:ul61. There are a few versions of this speech, including a draft version, a copy, and Madison’s notes, each with minor variations. The one quoted here is that used by the Yale editors of Franklin’s papers.

33
. Farrand’s Records of Convention, 3:85; see memory.loc.gov/ammem/ amlaw/lwfr.html.

34
. Barbara Oberg, “Plain, Insinuating, Persuasive,” in Lemay
Reappraising,
176, 189; Rossiter,
1787: The Grand Convention,
234.

35
. Roger Rosenblatt,
Where We Stand
(New York: Harcourt, 2002), 70, citing Henry May,
The Enlightenment in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). The only major founding document Franklin did not sign was the Articles of Confederation, as he was then in France. Roger Sherman signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, as well as the Declaration of 1774, but he did not sign either of the treaties.

36
. BF to JM, Nov. 4, 1787, Aug. 3, 1789.

37
. BF to Noah Webster, Dec. 26, 1789.

38
. BF to Benjamin Vaughan, Oct. 24, 1788; see also BF to Louis-Guillaume Le Veillard, Oct. 24, 1788.

39
. BF to Benjamin Vaughan, June 3, Nov. 2, 1798; BF to Elizabeth Partridge, Nov. 25, 1788.

40
. BF to Catherine Ray Greene, Mar. 2, 1789; BF to George Washington, Sept. 18, 1789.

41
. BF to Jean Baptiste Le Roy, Nov. 13, 1789; BF to Louis-Guillaume le Veillard, Oct. 24, 1788.

42
. “An Address to the Public,” Nov. 9, 1789, Smyth
Writings,
10:66. Mason quote is in Farrand’s Records of the Convention, 2:370.

43
. Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, Petition to Congress, by BF, Feb. 12, 1790.

44
. “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade,” BF to
Federal Gazette,
Mar. 23, 1790.

45
. See chapter 11; BF to Richard Price, Mar. 18, 1785.

46
. BF to William Strahan, Aug. 19, 1784.

47
. BF to unknown recipient, July 3, 1786, Smyth
Writings,
9:520; the same letter, dated Dec. 13, 1757, Papers 7:293; Thomas Paine,
The Age of Reason,
first fully published in 1794, www.ushistory.org/paine/; libertyonline.hypermall.com/Paine/ AOR-Frame.html.

The Yale editors of the Franklin Papers note, “Both the date and the addressee of this letter have been subjects of much difference of opinion. Each of the three surviving manuscript versions bears a different date line. That on the draft, in Franklin’s hand, has been heavily scratched out, probably long after the letter was written, by someone other than Franklin.” That draft, now at the Library of Congress, has a note by Franklin calling it “Rough of letter dissuading———from publishing his piece.” Jared Sparks, one of the earliest editors and biographers, deciphered the blacked-out line as “Phila., July 3, 1786,” and he published it as addressed to Thomas Paine (Sparks 10:281). Sparks writes, “When a skeptical writer, who is supposed to have been Thomas Paine, showed him in manuscript a work written against religion, he urged him earnestly not to publish it, but to burn it; objecting to his arguments as fallacious, and to his principles as poisoned with the seeds of vice, without tending to any imaginable good.” John Bigelow in
The Works of Benjamin Franklin
(New York: Putnam’s, 1904) and Smyth
Writings,
9:520, also use that date. For a contrary assessment written by a student of Sparks’s, see Mon-cure Conway,
The Life of Thomas Paine
(New York: Putnam’s, 1892), vii–viii.

The Yale editors (Papers 7:293n, published in 1963) called that dating “plausible” but give six other possible years, ranging from 1751 to 1787. They tentatively use the 1757 date based on a transcription in French that appears to have been written and dated by the clerk Franklin used while living in Passy. In their note, however, they say, “The editors have not been able to identify any particular ‘infidel’ who might have sent Franklin a manuscript in 1757, nor have they located any particular tract which might be evidence that his advice against publication was disregarded.” The Yale editors, when I asked them in 2002, said that they remain uncertain about the date. In a letter to me commenting on some draft sections of this book, Dec. 2, 2002, Edmund Morgan wrote, “Your suggestion that it was written in 1786 to Paine makes more sense to me than the reasons offered by the former editors for placing it in 1757.”

My belief that the 1786 date is likely and that it was sent to Paine is based on the following. As early as 1776, Paine had expressed his “contempt” for the Bible and told John Adams, “I have some thoughts of publishing my thoughts on religion, but I believe it will be best to postpone it to the latter part of my life” (John Keane,
Tom Paine
[Boston: Little, Brown, 1995], 390). By 1786, Paine was writing frequently to Franklin (Sept. 23, Dec. 31, 1785, Mar. 31, June 6, 14, 1786) and even using the courtyard in front of Franklin’s house to display a bridge design Paine had made. In
The Age of Reason,
Paine favorably mentions Franklin five times (“The Proverbs which are said to be of Solomon’s…[are] not more wise and economical than those of the American Franklin”). He echoes the more general aspects of Franklin’s deist creed by saying that he believes in God and that the “moral duty of man” is to practice God’s beneficence “toward each other.” But he also engages in many heretical attacks on organized religion that would have elicited Franklin’s cautious response. He says that churches “appear to me to be no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.” He also says that “the theory of what is called the Christian church sprung out of the tale of heathen mythology” and decries Christian theology for its “absurdity.” And he begins his book by indicating that he had considered publishing his thoughts earlier but was dissuaded: “It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion. I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and from that consideration had reserved it to a more advanced period of life.”