by Stephan A. Schwartz

Excerpt:

The sudden illness of his wife Martha called his travelling companion Thomas Jefferson back to Monticello. So on a Saturday in late October 1776 Benjamin Franklin, almost 70, exhausted and afflicted by gout and boils went aboard without him, and sailed for France in the 16-gun sloop Reprisal.[i] He did so in the certain knowledge that if Reprisal was taken by a British warship he would be hanged for High Treason. His name was on the inflammatory Declaration of Independence, a document he had just helped Jefferson to write.

Franklin had been home less than a year, after almost two decades spent in the belly of the most powerful empire in the world representing first Pennsylvania’s and, eventually, America’s case at the court of King George II then, when he died, his grandson George III. The experience had made him more familiar with the ways of Europe than anyone else in the new American government, and he was going to need all the expertise he could muster. If he could not convince the French to fund and support the war, those who were leading the revolution all knew their cause would fail. It would be almost a decade before he returned to the country he had worked so long to create.

There was never any real question as to whether Franklin would accept this appointment to represent the newly declared United States at the court of Louis XVI. He never turned down a request that he work for America. He had come late to the idea of Independence, but early to America as a distinct union. Once he had embraced independence, he had passionately held to a distinct vision of the kind of country he wanted it to be: a democratic republic whose political power flowed from its middle class. To build such a society he had been working with three simple practical steps: the creation of “virtuous” citizens, the formation of small groups with a common purpose and commitment to the collective good, and the establishment of networks that grew from these groups connecting. “I have always thought,” he once wrote a friend, “that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan and… makes the execution of that same plan his sole study.”[ii]
Publication history: Smithsonian Magazine June 2001. Also selected by the U.S. Department of State
for inclusion on the 225th anniversary website commemorating the signing of the Declaration of
Independence.
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It had rained over the weekend, breaking the sweltering heat that had made Philadelphia a caldron for most of the spring and summer of 1787. The air was cool and fresh on the Monday morning the delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered for a last time at the war-worn State House (now Independence Hall). They had argued amongst themselves up to the last minute, and even now not one of them was entirely happy w0ith the results they had achieved. Forty one of the 61 delegates originally appointed were present. The aristocratic Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, 29 but claiming he was only 24 to make his accomplishments seem all the more remarkable was dressed in his usual flamboyant silks. The redoubtable Benjamin Franklin representing Pennsylvania at 81 was dressed in plain unembroidered brown, and was easing tensions with humorous stories. Lanky raw boned Roger Sherman from Connecticut, a powerful force at the convention, though a poor man, was dressed in black, his thick muscular wrists sticking out from his too short sleeves.

It was after three o’clock before they finally got everything organized, and what they achieved set the pattern for our peculiarly American way of conducting public ceremonies: No costumes or symbols. No class differences. Only the barest hint of ceremonial behavior. For all the democratic simplicity though, no one doubted that something of great importance was taking place.

Publication History: Smithsonian Magazine. May 2000, pp.143-153.