Friends urged Ben to use the long voyage home to finish his autobiography. He instead passed the time measuring the temperature of the North Atlantic waters and writing treatises on maritime navigation and the problem of smoky chimneys. It was Franklin’s favored form of procrastination. We all have one. I shop for bags online. Ben wrote scientific papers. Different methods, same results: an unfinished manuscript and boatloads of self-recrimination.
Franklin tolerated the Atlantic crossing remarkably well. He felt better after the journey than before. On September 13, 1785, the London Packet, flying the new American flag, sailed into the Delaware Bay, the “water smooth, air cool, day fair and fine,” Ben noted in his journal. He had returned, at long last, to his “dear Philadelphia.”
While Ben was at sea, rumors had spread that he had been captured and enslaved by Barbary pirates, so it was with both elation and surprise that crowds gathered at the Market Street wharf greeted Franklin. Cannons resounded. Bells rang. Tears flowed. Benny Bache, more demonstrative than his grandfather, chronicled the homecoming: “The joy I received at the acclaim of the people, in seeing father, mother, brothers and sisters can be felt, not described.” At Franklin’s home, his daughter, Sally, was waiting for him on the doorstep, along with four grandchildren he had never seen. He had been abroad so long he was now “almost a stranger in my own country.”
Ben imagined himself free of politics and able to “welcome again my dear philosophical amusements.” He was wrong. There would be no philosophical amusements. No retirement or repose. Busy Ben was back, and by popular demand. People needed him. He was soon elected chief executive (governor, in effect) of Pennsylvania, serving three terms. He was also president of the American Philosophical Society and a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, two institutions he founded. Then, in 1787, he was named a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.
He didn’t need to accept any of these assignments. Now nearly eighty years old, he had by any measure lived a long and useful life. He had advanced a new science, helped win a war, and made an international name for himself. Surely he had earned some rest.
Ben had his reasons. He wanted to remain faithful to his own tenet that when it came to public positions, one should never ask, never refuse, never resign. Then there were those smoldering embers of ambition he thought were long extinguished. Ben wanted to remain relevant, useful. He needed to be needed. But what about his advanced age and the fact that he likely had only a few years left? His rejoinder, in so many words, was pffft. “It has always been my maxim to live on as if I was to live always,” he told a French friend. “It is with such feeling only that we can be stimulated to the exertions necessary to effect any useful purpose.”
I’m not sure what to make of this. The Old Conjurer had concocted another illusion—in this case, immortality. He didn’t really believe he would live forever but pretended anyway. It was, I realize, another helpful deceit.
Growing old is never easy, not now and not during Franklin’s time. Some respond to creeping senescence by “acting their age,” whatever that means. Others stubbornly refuse to conform to society’s notion of how an old person is “supposed” to behave. Benjamin Franklin fell squarely in the latter category.
Andrew Ellicott, one of the surveyors of the Mason-Dixon Line, recalls visiting “this Venerable Nestor of America” at his Philadelphia home. Ben began to heat some water so he could shave. Ellicott offered to help, but the Nestor demurred. He was going to do it himself or not at all. “He was determined not to increase his infirmities by giving way to them,” Ellicott recalled. To his astonishment, Franklin worked the razor with the ease and skill of a much younger man. Shaving was one of those small pleasures that made life worth living, Franklin said. “I think happiness does not consist so much in particular pieces of good fortune that perhaps accidentally fall to [a person’s] lot, as to be able in his old age to do those little things which, was he unable to perform himself, would be done by others with a sparing hand.”
Ben was determined not to outsource his happiness. He would do what he could for as long as he could.
By mid-May 1787, delegates from twelve of the thirteen states (Rhode Island abstained) began to arrive in Philadelphia. Ben was not a typical delegate. He had traveled far more widely than the others. He had less formal education but more honorary degrees. Among the fifty-five delegates who traveled to Philadelphia, thirty-four were lawyers, ten were “planters,” and a handful were physicians. Franklin was one of the few tradesmen and the only journalist.
What really set him apart, though, was his age. At eighty-one, Franklin was old enough to be the father of all the others and the grandfather of most. The youngest delegate, New Jersey’s Jonathan Dayton, was twenty-six. Ben had a grandson older than that. When Franklin had first argued for colonial unity in 1754 (his so-called Albany Plan), James Madison was three years old.
The founding grandfather’s mind was as sharp as ever. One visitor, Manasseh Cutler, was struck by “the brightness of his memory, and the clearness and vivacity of all his mental faculties, notwithstanding his age.” Fellow delegate William Pierce said Franklin possessed “an activity of mind equal to a youth of 25 years.” One possible explanation is that as a young man, Ben invented magic squares, a kind of early sudoku, to occupy his mind during tiresome Pennsylvania Assembly sessions, a pastime he continued for the rest of his life. Perhaps this helped keep his mind sharp, the way crossword puzzles do today.
Ben’s age made him the object of both veneration and ridicule. The younger delegates admired Franklin’s past accomplishments but not necessarily his present contribution. “They listened to his suggestions, then with little or no debate quietly voted the other way,” one historian said.
The delegates, like many before, underestimated Benjamin Franklin. True, he did not play a major role in shaping the Constitution. That task fell to younger delegates, like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. Ben was no political theorist, but we should not confuse a lack of theories for a lack of principles. Ben had many. He just didn’t broadcast them, embodying, as he did, the seventeenth-century jurist John Selden’s dictum: “They that govern most make [the] least noise.”
Franklin was the Hippocrates of American politics. First, do no harm. He liked to tell the story of the farmers and the blackbirds. New England farmers were convinced blackbirds were harming their crops, corn in particular. They mercilessly wiped out the blackbird population, only to discover that a species of worm, free of its natural predator, began to devour the farmers’ precious grass. “Then finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn they wished again for their blackbirds,” Ben said. This was the type of earthy wisdom Franklin brought to the convention.
He brought something else too: a dispassionate curiosity. Comfortable in his own wrinkled skin, he had nothing to prove. During the proceedings, he maintained a quiet detachment. Buddha Ben was back. This didn’t mean he was uninterested in the proceedings—quite the contrary—but it did mean he could hover above the dust and noise of the convention hall and see what others could not. A man of a certain age, he said, “looks out upon the noisy passersby without becoming involved in their quarrels.” This mindset proved tremendously useful. With less ego invested in the outcome of the convention, Franklin was able to play a mediating role, nudging and cajoling competing factions toward compromise.
The summer of 1787 was unusually hot. Ben considered traveling to the convention site each morning by balloon. He was joking. Sort of. With Ben, you could never be certain. Most days, he walked the block or two to the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall). Occasionally, when his gout resurfaced or “the stone” acted up, he was carried in a sedan chair. It had enclosed, glass-paneled doors and was conveyed on long poles by four muscular bearers. More common in Europe than America, the chair was, like the man riding in it, an object of public curiosity.
The convention schedule was grueling. The delegates met in the sweltering summer heat for more than five hours a day, sometimes longer, and with little time for lunch or even a coffee break. The deliberations were often as heated as the weather. Nearly everyone was screaming to be heard.
Not Ben. Never a good public speaker, he said little during the convention, adhering to his virtue of silence. But when he did speak, it was “with great pertinacity and effect,” said James Madison, who sat near him. Ben also injected some levity into the tense deliberations. He told jokes—with a serious point, naturally—about two-headed snakes and Scottish lawyers and French sisters. At one point, he opened a cache of porter ale.
Ben proposed several intriguing ideas. He suggested, for instance, that members of the executive branch, including the president, receive “no salary, stipend, fee, or reward whatsoever for their services.” There are, Franklin explained, two passions that rule men: ambition and avarice, “the love of power, and the love of money.” Separately, each is a powerful force. Together they have “the most violent effect.” In London, he had witnessed firsthand the corrupting influence of money in politics. Surely America could do better.
Indeed, it already had, in the person of George Washington who, during eight years as commander of the Continental Army, never accepted a single dollar in compensation. To those who say Washington was a rare and exceptional man, Franklin parried, “I have a better opinion of our country.” The United States will never want for “a sufficient number of wise and good men” willing to serve their country without salary. “The less the profit, the greater the honor.”
The delegates listened politely to Franklin’s suggestion—more out of respect for the man than the idea. In the end, the motion failed. Franklin had overlooked its obvious flaw. By denying a salary to government officials, only the wealthiest of citizens could afford to serve. That ran counter to his own beliefs. Despite his age and stature, he was the most populist and egalitarian of the delegates. From his earliest writings, he expressed a love of equality, a fondness that deepened with age. Did he always live up to his own egalitarian ideals? Absolutely not, as his long-suffering wife, Deborah, or the people he enslaved would attest. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Franklin’s ideals out of hand simply because he failed to live up to them. He and the other founders laid down the markers for us to meet—or if not us, then our children, or their children. This is the way it has always been. One generation identifies the target (the higher the better) and the next takes aim.
Ben did score a few bull’s-eyes at the convention. He helped pass a motion that allowed for impeachment of the president and defeat one that would have restricted the right to vote and hold public office to property owners. Franklin knew a government’s legitimacy never rested on raw power alone. “There must be maintain’d a general opinion of its wisdom and justice, to make it firm and durable.” On that age-old question of whether it is better for a leader to be feared or loved, Franklin fell squarely on the side of love.
By late June, the proceedings had grown even more acrimonious. The delegates were deadlocked. Not to worry, Franklin said. This is merely “melancholy proof of the imperfection of the human understanding.” Admit your fallibility, your humanness, he urged. “We indeed seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running all about in search of it.”
Then Franklin proposed something wholly unexpected. Each session, he said, should open with a prayer, “imploring the assistance of heaven” and “humbly applying to the Father of Lights to illuminate our understandings.”
This did not seem Ben-like. Among all the delegates, he was probably the least religious, at least in the conventional sense. Look more closely, though, and you see it was not at all out of character. Franklin may not have been a churchgoer, but he always believed in the social utility of religion. If sermons and scripture motivated people to do good, then he was all for them. And in suggesting the delegates look outside themselves for political wisdom, he revealed another side of himself: Irrational Ben. He was, of course, a great proponent of reason as a means to navigate life, but he also knew it was an imperfect compass. Reason can lead us astray just as surely as emotions can. He “almost wish[ed] that mankind had never been endow’d with a reasoning faculty, since they know so little how to make use of it, and so often mislead themselves by it.” Besides, he said, there is an alternative: “a good sensible instinct.” Ben possessed that instinct and knew when to deploy it. Reason alone rarely swayed anyone. You must appeal to their passions too.
The delegates again listened respectfully, but few backed Franklin’s proposal. There was no money for a chaplain, one delegate said rather lamely. The larger concern, no doubt, was the optics. The people of Philadelphia already suspected the convention was floundering. Seeing a chaplain enter the hall would confirm that suspicion. Franklin’s prayer motion flopped (it was not even put up for a vote), but it did pause the rancor for a beat or two, just long enough for the delegates to cool off a bit. Ben’s speech had also reminded the men gathered inside that hot and airless convention hall of the importance of their task and the necessity for humility. In other words, it was useful.
Two days later, Franklin tried a different tack. In urging compromise, he deployed the metaphor of a carpenter fashioning a table. “When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit the artisan takes a little from both, and makes a good joint,” he said. “In like manner here both sides must part with some of their demands, in order that they may join in some accommodating proposition.”
When gauging the value of institutions, Ben deployed the eye of a craftsman. He poked and prodded, held up various parts to the light to see if they fit properly, and made alterations where necessary. His was a “manipulative, hands-on approach to the world.”
This is very different from my hands-off approach to, well, more or less everything. Given a choice, I would much rather think about something than do it. I now realize this approach is not very useful, and not very American. The United States was a child of the Enlightenment, and a willful child at that. The young nation didn’t only borrow ideas. It advanced them, manifested them. America’s founders built what European thinkers such as John Locke had only theorized about. If Europe was the Enlightenment’s library, America was its workshop.
Later, Ben proposed a more formal cooling-off period—a three-day recess. Delegates should spend the time, he suggested, mixing with colleagues they disagree with and lending a patient ear. His advice has a contemporary ring. On the one hand, this is reassuring. The states have never been fully united. We’ve always lived in silos. On the other hand, it raises a troubling question: Why have we evolved so little since Franklin’s day? You’d think our patient ears would have grown to elephant size by now, but if anything, they have shrunk. We don’t listen to one another. This would deeply worry Ben. Listening, he knew, is the most important part of any conversation.
Franklin also knew you can’t win over everyone, no matter how closely you listen. Friction is inevitable, but as a scientist and electrician, he appreciated friction’s helpful role: if harnessed wisely, it is a powerful force. “By the collision of different sentiments, sparks of truth are struck out, and political light is obtained.”
By early July, some six weeks into the convention, a dispute over representation threatened to torpedo the entire experiment. Larger states wanted population alone to determine representation in the new Congress. Smaller states insisted it be allocated by state, regardless of population.
In July, Franklin was appointed to the Grand Committee of Compromise. (What a marvelous name for a committee! I suggest we resurrect it.) After several days of closed-door deliberations, the committee lived up to its name, emerging with the Great Compromise. One body, the House of Representatives, would be determined by population, while another, the Senate, by state. The plan, whose conception Madison credited to Franklin, saved the day, and the infant nation.
On September 17, the convention was drawing to a close. The summer heat had finally abated. Morning light flooded the south windows of the convention hall. Franklin had prepared a speech but too weak, or perhaps too shy, to deliver it himself, he asked fellow delegate James Wilson to do so.
It is, I think, one of the greatest speeches of all time. It is a political speech, yes, but it is more than that. It is an impassioned plea for something rarely celebrated: doubt. Franklin doubted whether the Constitution drafted over the past few months was the best version possible. He doubted whether it was worth signing. Addressing George Washington, president of the convention, he explained why he was going to sign it anyway.
I confess that I do not entirely approve this constitution at present, but Sir, I am not sure I shall never approve it: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being oblig’d, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.
Franklin’s speech naturally contained a story, a brief one about a French woman embroiled in a dispute with her sister. “I don’t know how it happens, sister,” she said, “but I meet with no body but myself that’s always in the right.” Did the other delegates laugh when they heard this? I bet they did. A knowing laugh.
Franklin’s message is as vital today as it was in 1787. More vital. Doubting the views of others is easy. The real test of character is doubting your own positions. Doubt everything, including your own doubt. Don’t grow too attached to your intellectual castles, Franklin warned. They might be built of sand. What he once said of scientific theories holds true for political ones as well. “How many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves oblig’d to destroy!” The mark of a mature democracy is not only the institutions and policies it constructs but its readiness to modify those institutions and policies to fit new circumstances.
There’s much to recommend an open and fluid society like America, but there’s one significant downside: a “necessary uneasiness.” Franklin could live with that uneasiness for longer than most. He had a capacity that the English poet John Keats later called “negative capability”: the capacity to sit with uncertainty and doubt “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” That was pure Ben. If only it were us as well.
A life guided by doubt need not be a timid, circumspect one. It is possible, as Franklin’s life attests, to possess extreme self-confidence and continuous self-doubt. That unlikely admixture is what all great people and civilizations possess.
Whenever people assemble, Franklin’s speech continued, they assemble their prejudices, passions, failings, and selfishness too. The Constitutional Convention was no exception. “From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does.” It will astonish America’s enemies too, Franklin added, salivating as they were at the prospect of the young states “cutting one another’s throats.”
Franklin then urged each of the delegates, self-assured men not prone to misgivings, to “doubt a little of his own infallibility” and “put his name to this instrument.” Not a document. An instrument. The word choice was no accident (it never was with Ben). A document is a product. An instrument is a tool—not an end, but a means. Franklin saw the Constitution as an instrument, like a scalpel or fountain pen, an inert object in need of a skilled practitioner.
Ben’s European friends were eager to hear about this new nation and its new constitution. Would it stick, or would America backslide into monarchy? That was always a possibility, Franklin knew. “There is a natural inclination in mankind to kingly government,” he said. Later, in a 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, his former neighbor in France, Ben deployed what is perhaps his most memorable observation, though the context is often overlooked. “Our new Constitution is now established and has an appearance that promises permanency,” he said, “but in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.”
As the delegates filed out of the convention hall in late September, a local woman, Elizabeth Powel, is said to have buttonholed Franklin and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”
The United States Constitution, messily and courageously crafted during that broiling Philadelphia summer, was not a gift or an entitlement. It was not even a finished product. It was a work in progress, a challenge to future generations and, most of all, an instrument—precisely as good and useful as those who wield it.