Benjamin Franklin is the Founding Father I find most remarkable and most admirable. The very notion of an "American" identity--the place where one has the opportunity to come from nothing at birth and ascend through discipline, education, diligence, industry and persistence to prominence, success and stature--is more directly attributable to Franklin than to any other Founder. Among the Founding Fathers, historians demark Franklin, Washington, Adams and Jefferson as the Big Four; all others are tiered below them. Born in Boston in 1706, Franklin was in fact a generation older than the others. While Adams commonly is regarded as the Revolution's head and Jefferson its heart, none save for General Washington himself was more directly responsible for and instrumental in securing America's victory against the British than Franklin. He was America's first diplomat, literally and figuratively. Arguably no envoy, ambassador or Secretary of State since is regarded by historians and political observers as commanding the diplomatic acumen and efficacy of Benjamin Franklin. He was the most famous American of the 18th Century (arguably, no American in the 19th Century was so well known the world over as BF), and one of its greatest scientists, though he possessed no formal education beyond age 10. He was without question a genius. Universities and academies in England and Europe conferred honorary doctorates on him. In the Colonies and Europe he came to be known as "Dr. Franklin." So great was Dr. Franklin's public stature, and so beloved was he on returning from France after the War that, in 1788-89 when the young nation was ready to elect its first president, the only real contenders were the Doctor and the General (Franklin and Washington.) In 1788, however, Franklin was already in his eighties and in poor health. Franklin died on April 17, 1790 at age 84. More than 20,000 mourners attended his funeral in Philadelphia, an enormous number in any Age, let alone in colonial America of 1790.
The following is an excerpt I transcribed from pages 108-11 of the chapter titled "The Silence"
in
Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis (2000). The "Silence" refers to the silence of the Constitution on the issues of slavery and the slave trade. The debates at the Constitutional Convention on those issues nearly tore asunder the fledgling Republic before it had even taken its first step in the form in which we know it. As we know, ultimately the drafters demurred, thus leaving the unresolved cancer of slavery to fester for the next 75 years and culminate in the Civil War. Ellis's gift as an author of American Revolutionary history is in his sagacious ability to depict the perspectives, events, exigencies and political realities as they existed and were perceived
at the time by the players involved, rather than from the perspective of an historian two centuries removed who sees the events with the benefit of knowing the outcome. Ellis gives us this anecdote involving Franklin, at the end of his life, confronting the issues of slavery and the slave trade at the Constitutional Convention. It provides a glimpse of the grandness of Franklin's stature in American society at the time, and the greatness of his mind and person. He is, far and away, my favorite among the Founding Fathers.
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"Any attempt to take decisive action against slavery in 1790 ... confronted great, perhaps impossible, odds. The prospects for success were remote at best. But then the prospects for victory against the most powerful army and navy in the world had been remote in 1776, as had the likelihood that thirteen separate and sovereign states would create a unified republican government in 1787. Great leadership had emerged in each previous instance to transform the improbable into the inevitable. Ending slavery was a challenge on the same gigantic scale as these earlier achievements. Whether even a heroic level of leadership stood any chance was uncertain because--and there was the cruelest irony--the effort to make the Revolution truly complete seemed diametrically opposed to remaining a unified nation.
One person stepped forward to answer the challenge, unquestionably the oldest, probably the wisest, member of the revolutionary generation. (In point of fact, he was actually a member of the preceding generation, the grandfather among the fathers.) Benjamin Franklin was very old and very ill in March 1790. He had been a fixture on the American scene for so long and had outlived so many contemporaries--he had once traded anecdotes with Cotton Mather and was a contemporary of Jonathan Edwards--that reports of his imminent departure lacked credibility; his last act seemed destined to go on forever; he was an American immortal. If a twentieth-century photographer had managed to commandeer a time machine and travel back to record the historic scenes in the revolutionary era, Franklin would have been present in almost every picture: in Philadelphia during the Continental Congress and the signing of the Declaration of Independence; in Paris to draft the wartime treaty with France and then almost single-handedly (assist to John Adams) conclude the peace treaty with Great Britain; in Philadelphia again for the Constitutional Convention and the signing of the Constitution. Even without the benefit of photography, Franklin's image--with its bemused smile, its bespectacled but twinkling eyes, its ever-bald head framed by gray hair flowing down to his shoulders--was more famous and familiar to the world than the face of any other American of the age.
What Voltaire was to France, Franklin was to America, the symbol of mankind's triumphal arrival at modernity. (When the two great philosopher-kings embraced amid the assembled throngs of Paris, the scene created a sensation, as if the gods had landed on earth and declared the dawning of the Enlightenment.) The greatest American scientist, the most deft diplomat, the most accomplished prose stylist, the sharpest wit, Franklin defied all the categories by inhabiting them all with such distinction and nonchalant grace. Over a century before Horatio Alger, he had invented the role and called it Poor Richard, the original self-taught, homespun American with an uncanny knack for showing up where history was headed and striking a folksy pose that then dramatized the moment forever: holding the kite as the lightening struck; lounging alongside Jefferson and offering witty consolations as the Continental Congress edited out several of Jefferson's most cherished passages; wearing a coonskin cap for his portrait in Paris; remarking as the delegates signed the Constitution that, yes, the sun that was carved into the chair at the front of the room did now seem to be rising.
...
This gift of exquisite timing continued until the very end. In April of 1787, Franklin agreed to serve as the new president of the revitalized Pennsylvania Abolition Society and to make the antislavery cause the final project of his life. Almost sixty years earlier, in 1729, as a young printer in Philadelphia, he had begun publishing Quaker tracts against slavery and the slave trade. Throughout the middles years of the century and into the revolutionary era, he had lent his support to Anthony Benezet and other Quaker abolitionists, and he had spoken out on occasion against the claim that blacks were innately inferior or that racial categories were immutable. Nevertheless, while his antislavery credentials were clear, at one point Franklin had owned a few household slaves himself, and he had never made slavery a priority target or thrown the full weight of his enormous prestige against it.
Starting in 1787, that changed. At the Constitutional Convention he intended to introduce a proposal calling for the inclusion of a statement of principle, condemning both the slave trade and slavery, thereby making it unequivocally clear that the founding document of the new American nation committed the government to eventual emancipation. But several northern delegates, along with at least one officer in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, persuaded him to withdraw his proposal on the grounds that it put the fragile Sectional Compromise, and therefore the Constitution itself, at risk. The petition submitted to the First Congress under his signature, then, was essentially the same proposal he had wanted to introduce at the Convention. With the Constitution now ratified and the new federal government safely in place, Franklin resumed his plea that slavery be declared incongruous with the revolutionary principles on which the nation was founded. The man with the impeccable timing was choosing to make the anomaly of slavery the last piece of advice he would offer his country.
For more, read Ellis's
Founding Brothers. For a magnificent read on Franklin specifically, I highly recommend Walter Isaacson's
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.
