Made In America (11 page)

However, there were problems. To begin with, the delegates had no authority to form a constitution. Their assignment was to amend the Articles of Confederation, not replace them. (Which is why it wasn’t called the Constitutional Convention until afterwards.)
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Then, too, the scale of the American continent and the diversity of its parts seemed fated to thwart any hope of meaningful unification. With 1,500 miles of coastline and a vast inland wilderness, America was already one of the largest countries in the world – ten times larger than any previous federation in history –
and the disparities in population, wealth and political outlook between the states presented seemingly insurmountable obstacles to finding a common purpose. If proportional representation were instituted, Virginia and Pennsylvania between them would possess one-third of the nation’s political power, while Delaware would be entitled to a mere one-ninetieth. Little states thus feared big ones. Slave-owning states feared non-slave-owning states. Eastern states with fixed borders feared those to the west with an untapped continent on their doorsteps, suspecting that one day these western upstarts would overtake them in population and that they would find their destiny in the hands of rude frontiersmen in tassled buckskins – an unthinkable prospect. All the states, large and small, had proud, distinct histories, often going back nearly two centuries, and were reluctant to relinquish even the smallest measure of autonomy to an unproven central authority. The challenge of the Constitutional Convention was not to give powers to the states, but to take powers away from them, and to do it in a way that they would find palatable.

Some states refused even to entertain the notion. Rhode Island, which had declared independence from Britain two months before the rest of America had, now refused to send delegates to Philadelphia (and rather sulkily declined to join the union until 1790). Vermont likewise snubbed the convention and made it clear from the outset that it was disinclined to abide by its decisions. Others, like Maryland, could barely find people willing to go. The first five men selected as representatives all declined to attend, and at the opening of the convention the legislature was still trying to find willing delegates. New Hampshire was prepared to send two delegates, but refused to underwrite their expenses and as a result had no representatives at the convention for the first crucial weeks. Many delegates attended only fitfully, and six never came at all. Altogether only about thirty of the
sixty-one elected delegates attended from start to finish.
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Fortunately, those who attended included some of the most steady, reflective and brilliant intellects any young nation has ever produced: Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Roger Sherman, Gouverneur Morris, John Dickinson, Edmund Randolph, and of course the regal, rocklike George Washington whose benign presence as president of the convention lent the proceedings an authority and respectability they could not otherwise have expected. Of the leading political figures of the day only Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both abroad on state business, were not there.

In many ways the most interesting of the delegates was Benjamin Franklin. Aged eighty-one, he was coming to the end of his long life – and in the view of many of his fellow delegates had long since passed the useful part of it. But what a life it had been. One of seventeen children of a Boston soap and candle maker, he had left home as a boy after receiving barely two years of schooling, and established himself as a printer in Philadelphia. By dint of hard work and steady application he had made himself into one of the most respected thinkers and wealthiest businessmen in the colonies. His experiments with electricity, unfairly diminished in the popular mind to inventing the lightning rod and nearly killing himself by foolishly flying a kite in a thunderstorm, were among the most exciting scientific achievements of the eighteenth century and made him one of the celebrated scientists of the day (though he was never called a scientist in his lifetime, the word not being coined until 1840; in the 1700s scientists were
natural philosophers).
The terms he created in the course of his experiments –
battery, armature, positive, negative
and
condenser,
among others
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– show that he was a good deal more than a mildly quizzical fellow who just wanted to see what would happen if he nudged a kite into some storm clouds.
Franklin’s life was one of relentless industry. He invented countless useful objects (which we shall discuss in a later chapter), helped to found America’s first volunteer fire department, its first fire insurance company (the Hand-in-Hand), one of Philadelphia’s first libraries, and the respected if somewhat overnamed American Philosophical Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge to be Held at Philadelphia.
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He created an eternal literary character, the Richard of
Poor Richard’s Almanack,
filled the world with maxims and
bons mots,
corresponded endlessly with the leading minds of Europe and America, wrote essays on everything from how to select a mistress (take an older woman) to how to avoid flatulence (drink perfume), and in 1737 drew up the first list of American slang terms for drunkenness. (He came up with 228.) He represented America overseas with intelligence and skill and, of course, was one of the shapers of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He dabbled in property speculation and ran a printing business with holdings as far afield as Jamaica and Antigua. He became the largest dealer in paper in the colonies and made
Poor Richard’s Almanack
such an indispensable part of almost every American household that it was for twenty-five years the country’s second best-selling publication (the Bible was first). Such was his commercial acumen that he was able to retire from active business in 1748 aged just forty-two and devote himself to gentlemanly pursuits like politics, science and writing.

And in between all this he somehow managed to find time – quite a lot of time – to pursue what was his greatest, if least celebrated, passion: namely, trying
to roger
just about any woman who passed before him. This curious expression, you may be surprised to learn, appears to be an Americanism. The earliest reference to it is from eighteenth-century Virginia, though we have no idea now which hyperactive Roger inspired the term or why it faded from use in the New World.
We may as well have called it to
benjamin,
such was the portly Franklin’s commitment to the pastime. From earliest adulthood, Franklin showed an unwavering inclination to engage in ‘foolish Intrigues with low Women’, as he himself sheepishly put it.
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One such encounter resulted in an illegitimate son, William, born in 1730 or 1731 and raised in Franklin’s house by his long-suffering common-law wife, Deborah. Throughout his long life Franklin’s dynamic libido was a matter of wonder for his contemporaries. The artist Charles Willson Peale, calling on the great man in London, found him with a young woman on his knee
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– or at least he was discreet enough to say it was his knee – and others commonly arrived for appointments to find him
in flagrante
with a parlourmaid or other yielding creature.

During his years in England he became close friends with Sir Francis Dashwood, who presided over a notorious den called the Order of St Francis, but more popularly known as the Hellfire Club, at his country house at West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Members took part in black masses and other wildly blasphemous ceremonies that invariably culminated in drunken orgies involving pliant women garbed as nuns. In his quieter moments, Dashwood was joint postmaster general of England and co-author with Franklin of a revised version of the
Book of Common Prayer.
There is no certain evidence that Franklin took part in these debauches, but it would have been a wrenching break with his character had he not. It is certainly known that he was a frequent, not to say eager, visitor to Dashwood’s house and it would take a generous spirit indeed to suppose that he ventured there repeatedly just to discuss postal regulations and the semantic nuances of the
Book of Common Prayer.

The eighteenth century, it must be remembered, was a decidedly earthy and free-spirited age. It was a period that teemed with indelicate locutions –
pisspot
for a doctor,
shit-sack
for a Nonconformist,
groper
for a blind person,
fartcatcher
for a footman (because he followed behind), to name just four. Words and metaphors that would bring blushes to a later age were used without hesitation or embarrassment. At the Constitutional Convention Elbridge Gerry would make a famous remark (curiously absent from modern high school textbooks) in which he compared a standing army to an erect penis – ‘an excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure‘
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– and no one thought it inapt or unseemly, at least in the company of men. Franklin himself peppered his almanacs with maxims that were, to modern ears, coarse to the point of witlessness: ‘The greatest monarch on the proudest throne is obliged to sit upon his own arse’; ‘He that lives upon hope, dies farting’; ‘Relation without friendship, friendship without power, power without will ... are not worth a farto.’

It is worth noting that few of his aphorisms, coarse or otherwise, were of his own devising. Though a few cannot be traced to earlier sources – for example, ‘An empty bag cannot stand upright’ and ‘Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other’ – most were plundered without hesitation or scruple from other similar publications of the day, such as James Howell’s
Lexicon Tetraglotton,
Thomas Fuller’s
Gnomologia
and other writings, George Herbert’s
Outlandish Proverbs,
and, especially, Jonathan Swift’s
Bickerstaff Papers.
It was from Swift that Franklin took the droll idea of predicting in the almanac’s annual forecasts the imminent death of his leading competitor.
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‘Why should I give my Readers bad lines of my own when good ones of other People’s are so plenty?’ he quipped.
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(Nor did he hesitate to make up stories for his newspapers when the real news was thin and unarresting.)

He did, it must be said, often improve on others’ maxims. He took the proverb ‘God restoreth health and the physician hath the thanks’, and made it into the pithier ‘God heals and the doctor takes the fee.‘
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More often than not, however, he
merely embellished them with a reference to flatulence, incontinence, sexual intercourse or some other frailty. His remark above about friendship without power being ‘not worth a farto’ originated with Thomas Fuller as the rather more prim ‘A good friend is my nearest relation.’ James Howell’s ‘A Fort which begins to parley is half gotten’ he made into ‘Neither a fortress nor a Maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parly.‘
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No discussion of Franklin and language would be complete without a mention of his
Proposal for a Reformed Alphabet
of 1768. Though much is sometimes made of Franklin’s tinkering with English spelling, and though he did offer occasional statements sympathetic to the cause of reform (namely, ‘if Amendments are never attempted and things continue to grow worse and worse they must come to be in a wretched Condition at last’), it is not clear whether he regarded it as a serious attempt at orthographic reform or merely as an amusing way of writing mildly flirtatious letters to a pretty young correspondent.

Certainly there is no persuasive evidence that he worked very hard at the matter. The alphabet he came up with is a clumsy, illogical affair. It contained six additional letters, so it offered no improvements in terms of simplicity. Moreover, it was arbitrary, whimsical, hopelessly bewildering to the untutored, and routinely resulted in spellings that were far longer and more complex than those they were intended to replace. Under Franklin’s reforms, for example, ‘changes’ became ‘tseendsez’ and ‘Chinese’ became ‘Tsuiniiz.’ His first letter in the new alphabet, dated July 20,1768, is replete with spellings that suggest Franklin either had a peculiar sense of pronunciation or, more likely, carelessly applied his own pronunciation guide. According to his letter,
has
would be pronounced
’haze’, people
would be ‘pee-peel’, and
Richmond
would be ‘Reechmund’.
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So used are we to regarding Franklin as a sage and mentor
that it can come as a small shock to realize that he was not much venerated in his own day. John Adams, for one, detested him.
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After Franklin’s death in 1790, so little was his loss felt that the first edition of his collected writings did not appear until twenty-eight years later. His
Autobiography
aroused less interest still and did not appear in an American edition until 1868 – seventy-eight years after he died and long after it had been published elsewhere.
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At the time of the Constitutional Convention Franklin was generally held to be at best of no real account, at worst little more than a doddering old fool. His infrequent proposals to the convention that the President of the United States not be paid a salary, that each session be started with a prayer – were always roundly defeated. (His prayer motion failed to carry not because the delegates were ungodly but, as they patiently explained to him, because they had no funds to pay a chaplain.)

Franklin was merely a visible, wheezing reminder that the business of America had passed in large part to a new generation. With the principal exception of the fifty-five-year-old General Washington (who in any case didn’t take part in the debates), the delegates were strikingly youthful. Five were in their twenties, and most of the rest were in their thirties or forties. James Madison was thirty-five, Alexander Hamilton thirty-two. South Carolina’s baby-faced Charles Pinckney was just twenty-nine, but to enhance his air of extreme youth-fulness he vociferously insisted he was but twenty-four.
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The oddest and least prepossessing figure of all was perhaps the most important: James Madison. Nothing about the young Virginian bespoke greatness. He was almost ridiculously short – no more than ‘half a bar of soap’ in the words of one contemporary – squeaky-voiced, pale, shy, and neurotically obsessed with his health. But he had a towering intellect and he tirelessly shunted between rival factions squeezing and cajoling compromise out of often obdurate delegates.
No one else did more in that long, hot summer to make the Constitution a reality.