The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (35 page)

In May 1783, Samuel Cooper, a clergyman friend in Boston, wrote Franklin that a party in America, based on information coming from John Adams, was casting doubt on his patriotism. Word was spreading, said Cooper, that Franklin was not to be trusted and that “it was entirely owing to the Firmness, Sagacity and Disinterestedness of M. Adams, with whom Mr. Jay united,” that prevented American interests from being sacrificed to those of France.
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These reports hurt Franklin deeply After the final peace treaty was signed in September 1783, he sent a letter to all his fellow commissioners poignantly denying such charges. He knew he did not have long to live, he said, but he did not want to go to his grave with the world thinking that he had less “Zeal and Faithfulness” to America than any of his colleagues. He was not willing to “suffer an accusation, which falls little short of Treason to my Country, to pass without Notice.”
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He asked each of his fellow commissioners to certify his contribution to the peace negotiations in order, he said, to destroy the effects of these accusations. That the aged diplomat should have been reduced to such a humiliating request says a great deal about how differently France and America had come to view the great Dr. Franklin.

Still, with the letters from James and Vaughan and the writing of the second part of his
Autobiography,
he now knew that his destiny was linked to America. He had come to realize that the “Revolution” that he had “hardly expected I should live to see” and that he had done so much to bring to success had become “an important Event for the Advantage of Mankind in general.”
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But the Continental Congress still had not answered his request to be recalled, leaving him uncertain about what to do. “During my long Absence from America,” he told the secretary of the Congress Charles Thomson in May 1784, “my Friends are continually diminishing by Death, and my Inducement to return in Proportion.”
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Not only were his close friends in America dying off, but he also knew he had acquired many enemies in their place. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris, Franklin wanted his grandson Temple, who had been the secretary of the peace commission, to deliver the treaty to Congress. Instead, that honor went to a protege of Adams who had not been involved in the peace negotiations at all. Since Franklin thought of Temple “as a Son who makes up to me my Loss by the Estrangement of his Father,” he next asked Congress to name his twenty-four-year-old grandson secretary of the new commission designed to sign commercial treaties with the European nations. He even hoped that Temple might be named his successor to France. Or perhaps his grandson could be appointed American minister to Sweden. But Congress was now in the hands of his enemies and the outlook was not promising. Richard Henry Lee had become president of Congress. As Franklin’s son-in-law, Richard Bache, dryly noted of Lee, “He is no friend to us, or our connections.”
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Franklin’s enemies in Congress now saw that they could get at Franklin through his grandson. Not only did Temple have “no Prospect of promotion,” but, wrote a gloating Elbridge Gerry to John Adams, Franklin’s grandson “has been actually superseded” by the appointment of Colonel David Humphreys, a protege of Washington, as secretary of the new commission. Once he saw these congressional actions, said Gerry, Franklin “will have no Reason to Suppose that his Conduct is much approved.” Indeed, said Gerry, Congress had ceased being “reserved ... with respect to the Doctor.” Franklin had become so useless that “it has become a matter of Indifference to Us, whether We employ him or the Count de Vergennes to negotiate our Concerns at the Court of Versailles.”
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Rumors now abounded in both America and Britain that Franklin and his loyalist son William had been in collusion all along—each taking a side in order to protect the family regardless of who won the war. In November 1784 a New Yorker friend of William Franklin warned Temple not to get too close to his grandfather, for the old man’s “Influence” in America was “very small.” Even the reputation of the Marquis de Lafayette had been injured by his attempts to keep Franklin in France during the peace negotiations. These efforts by Lafayette “led People to suspect that he meant only to retain a Man that was perfectly subservient to his Court.” Although this friend of William Franklin certainly exaggerated the weakness of Franklin’s influence among his countrymen, he was not entirely wrong. Franklin in 1784 was not the important Founder he would later become. This cynical New Yorker knew what the Revolution meant and had some parting words of advice for Temple: “Make friends of every American, for in Republican Governments, you have many to please.”
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Finally, in May 1785, Franklin received word from Congress that his mission was over and that he could return to America. Thomas Jefferson had arrived and was named American minister to France. Unlike Adams, Jefferson got along splendidly with Franklin. For Jefferson, Franklin was “the ornament of our country, and I may say, of the world.”
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He liked to tell the French that he could never be Franklin’s replacement as minister. He might succeed Dr. Franklin, but nobody could replace him.

Franklin’s reputation in Europe was extraordinary. A professor in Prague called him the Solon, the Socrates, and the Seneca of the present day. Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville called him “the ornament of the New World” and “a leader of modern philosophy.” Another European dubbed him “the Cato of his age.” From England, Erasmus Darwin (another great inventor and polymath and the grandfather of Charles Darwin) addressed him as “the greatest Statesman of the present, or perhaps of any century,” who single-handedly had spread liberty among his countrymen and “deliver’d them from the house of bondage, and the scourge of oppression.” From Florence, from Switzerland, from France, from all over Europe he was hailed as a great politician and scientist and the first man of the universe.
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Franklin knew that he was respected abroad, but he remained uncertain about his reputation in his own country. Jefferson too was uncertain of how his fellow Americans would regard the returning Franklin. Writing from Paris in 1785, Jefferson knew that Franklin was “infinitely esteemed” in Europe. But he was very anxious that his fellow Americans might not know just how much Europeans esteemed Franklin and thus might not treat him properly. Jefferson, who was always acutely sensitive to what liberal Europeans thought of America, more than once warned James Monroe, an influential member of the Congress, that “Europe fixes an attentive eye on your reception of Doctr. Franklin.” The way Americans receive Franklin, Jefferson told his fellow Virginian, “will weigh in Europe as an evidence of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of America with their revolution.”
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THE RETURN TO PHILADELPHIA

Franklin arrived home in Philadelphia on September 14, 1785, and was met by cheering crowds and ringing bells—an “affectionate Welcome” that he claimed “was far beyond my Expectations.”
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With a population of fewer than forty thousand people, Philadelphia was no Paris or London, but it was booming and had become not only the largest city in America but its commercial and cultural center as well. Philadelphia had the only bank and the only library in the country that was open to the public—the Library Company, which Franklin had helped to found. The city also was the center of medical education in the nation and contained the most well-known scientific society in the country, the American Philosophical Society, which Franklin had also founded. Franklin’s spirit was still present, for the city had just formed a society for the promotion of agriculture, and it was taking the lead in humanitarian reforms of various sorts. The city’s artisans were organizing as never before and were demonstrating more political strength than they had had in Franklin’s day

Franklin no sooner landed than Charles Willson Peale, a Philadelphia artist of many talents, painted his portrait (see page 214), which Peale displayed in a gallery of Revolutionary heroes. It was one of the most accurate portrayals done of Franklin as an old man, complete with the new bifocal spectacles he had invented. Peale issued mezzotint prints based on his portrait, and Franklin’s face was soon spread about the city. Peale attempted another portrait in 1789; but Franklin was too ill to sit, and Peale had to base his new picture on his original of 1785.

Philadelphia may have become the cultural and commercial center of the new nation, but it was still plagued by factional politics. Franklin, in fact, arrived in the middle of an election campaign between the two rudimentary parties that had emerged in Pennsylvania since 1776. On one side were the Constitutionalists, dominated by artisans and Scotch-Irish western farmers who supported the radical Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, which Franklin had helped to draft. On the other side were the Republicans, dominated by Anglicans and wealthy merchants and professionals who wanted to change the state’s constitution by introducing a governor

Franklin, by Charles Willson Peale, 1785

and an upper house and to bring the constitution more into line with those of the other states. In hopes of bringing unity to the state, both parties nominated Franklin for the executive council (a group of twelve that served as the executive in place of a governor). Franklin admitted that he “had not sufficient Firmness to refuse their Support.”
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Following his election, the council and assembly then elected him president of the council.

Thus, only a few weeks after his arrival he had become the head of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It all had happened so fast that he scarcely had time to think about what he had done. At seventy-nine he was old, tired, and suffering from gout as well as bladder or kidney stones, and yet he had gotten himself into a “Business more troublesome than that I have lately quitted.”
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George Washington, who had conspicuously retired from all public business in 1785, thought Franklin was out of his mind to accept any political office. But Franklin had heard so many stories of how suspicious many Americans had been of him that the enthusiastic reception in Pennsylvania had gone to his head. He knew he ought to quit public life and enjoy some of the well-earned rest that he had yearned for in France, but his desire to be thought well of was too strong. Accepting the office of president of Pennsylvania seemed to vindicate his virtue.

He accepted reelection to the office twice more, in 1786 and 1787 (with no dissenting vote except his own); and he perhaps avoided a fourth term only because the Pennsylvania Constitution prohibited it. Whatever his status might have been with some of the rest of the American people, most of the citizens of Pennsylvania, except for a fashionable few, revered him.
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“This universal and unbounded confidence of a whole People,” he told his sister after his third election to the presidency, “flatters my Vanity much more than a Peerage could do.”
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This emotional need to be elected to office in order to boost his morale was sad. Franklin had devoted much of his life to serving the American public, and yet some members of that public still seemed to doubt him. Despite praise from individual Americans and the naming of a renegade state in western North Carolina after him (later part of Tennessee), he was still uncertain about his reputation in his own country. Indeed, he found himself in the embarrassing position of having to write friends to find out what his fellow Americans really thought of him. He knew there were “Calumnies propagated” against him, “which appeared all to emanate from the Brantry Focus,” that is, the Adamses of Braintree, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, he also knew that at his age, and considering who he was and what he had done, he should not be so concerned with what people thought of him. “You see,” he admitted, “that old as I am, I am not yet grown insensible, with respect to Reputation.”
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THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

In March 1787 the Pennsylvania Assembly appointed Franklin to the state’s delegation to the Convention that was to meet in Philadelphia in May to revise the Articles of Confederation. Although Franklin was confident that America was growing and prospering even under the Confederation, he realized that America’s experiment in republicanism was on trial and that the Convention was designed to prove that free government could sustain itself. Even before the Convention met, Franklin organized the Society for Political Enquiries, which met weekly in Franklin’s home seeking to study political science as the American Philosophical Society studied natural science.

On May 16, 1787, Franklin, as he explained to an English correspondent, hosted a dinner for “what the French call
une assemblée des notables,
a convention composed of some of the principal people from the several states of our confederation.”
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On May 25 this Constitutional Convention, this assembly of notables, finally had a quorum and began meeting officially. Franklin, described by one observer at the time as “a short, fat, trunched old man, in a plain Quaker dress, bald pate, and short white locks,” was the oldest member in attendance. As the oldest he was supposed to nominate George Washington as president of the Convention, but heavy rain kept him home.
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Instead, the Pennsylvania delegation as a whole nominated Washington, which, James Madison noted, was an act of “particular grace, as Doctor Franklin alone could have been thought of as a competitor.”
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