American Heroes (27 page)

He faced the problem even in the deployment of his troops. With a much smaller force in the field than the British, Washington wanted to keep it as concentrated and as mobile as possible. The Congress and the several states were continually asking him to detach troops to defend or fortify towns or regions threatened by the redcoats. Washington had again and again to say no. As he explained to one state governor who begged for help against British raids, “A few hundred Continental Troops, quiet the minds and give satisfaction to the people of the Country; but considered in the true light, they rather do more harm than good. They draw the attention of the Enemy, and not being able to resist them, are obliged to fly and leave the Country at the Mercy of the foe.”

In 1775, with the British holding both New York and Philadelphia, and Washington with his army in between in New Jersey, there were clamors for him to attack either one city or the other. But his troops, many of them raw recruits, needed training. They also, as Elizabeth Fenn has shown in her remarkable book
Pox Americana
, needed inoculation against smallpox. The British had already been inoculated or retained immunity from previous bouts with the disease, but most of Washington's troops were vulnerable to the epidemic then raging. Withdrawing to winter quarters, he took the opportunity to have them inoculated, making possible their future health and mobility when the time came for a decisive move. While acknowledging that “popular expectations should always be complied with where injury in the execution is not too apparent; especially in such a contest as the one we are engaged in, where the Spirit, & willingness of the People must, in a great measure, take [the] place of coercion,” he nevertheless did
not
attack New York or Philadelphia.

The failure of Congress to supply him with adequate troops on long service required him to fight a defensive war. But he was often obliged to risk some kind of minor action in order to mollify popular opinion. One example was the attack on Stony Point in 1779. As he explained to Congress, he authorized the action because of “the necessity of doing something to satisfy the expectations of the people and reconcile them to the defensive plan we are obliged to pursue, and to the apparent inactivity, which our situation imposes upon us.”

He had to say no not only to popular demands but also to misguided proposals by his own subordinates. In 1777 when Brigadier General Thomas Nelson in the southern department wanted to station troops on the York peninsula to watch for a British move by sea there, Washington sent a quick no. Nelson's troops could easily have been cut off from the rear and forced to surrender, a scenario that did not occur to Lord Cornwallis four years later when he encamped at Yorktown. When to say no to a Canadian expedition was another example. At the outset of the war it would have been a great advantage to bring the Canadians in on the American side, and Washington sent a detachment of troops there under General Montgomery. He had not yet had them inoculated against smallpox, and the expedition was sorely defeated. More of them fell victim to smallpox than to shot and shell. After sending Benjamin Franklin to assess the situation, Washington ordered them back and gave up on Canada. The next year, with the Marquis de Lafayette on hand and keen to lead a French force on the same mission, Washington had to give another no. He recognized that Lafayette, as a Frenchman, might succeed where Montgomery had failed. But for that very reason he did not want it. If French troops took possession of Canada, they might never give it up.

When Cornwallis did what Washington had told Nelson not to do and the war ended, Washington was faced with the problem of preserving the great republic he had brought into being, and he had to begin with a resounding no to the officers of the army who had served him so loyally. Not all shared his vision of that great republic. They had thought and fought continentally, but they wanted a truly continental government more than they wanted a republican government. As the Continental Congress had shown itself to be uncontinental, Washington's officers thought a monarchy or dictatorship was the only solution. There was only one man who could be at the top. Now he had to utter a most emphatic no. A yes could have resulted in the army's putting him on a throne, as Oliver Cromwell's army had in effect done for him in England in 1653. Washington gave an icy and vehement no. He told one officer who carried the proposal, “You could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable….” The general had not fought a war for republican government in order to destroy it himself.

On the other hand he knew, perhaps better than anyone else, the danger that the republic would destroy itself and, with it, the honor he had earned in bringing it into existence. He had watched the enthusiasm of 1775 and 1776 fade into the fecklessness of 1783 and 1784. The timidity of the Continental Congress in governing the national republic had threatened the dissolution of his Continental army throughout the war. With the coming of peace and international recognition of the United States, the great republic he had fought for was inexorably dissolving into thirteen insignificant republics. People who believed in a great republic recognized the danger as he did. As they prepared to do something about it in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they knew that success would hinge on his participation. It went without saying that he would be invited to attend and preside over the Convention to rescue the republic. But it was not Washington's way to insert himself into the process. He understood the need for the Convention, but he was not sure it could succeed. He had had a bellyful of the narrow provincialism of the state politicians who might dominate it. If he had taken the lead in bringing it about, he might be seen as the king-in-waiting his officers had wanted to make of him. His judgment told him to stay in the background. He debated with himself whether he should even attend the Convention. People everywhere saw Washington as the symbol of continental America. He must use the strength which that position gave him and use it to the best effect.

So he attended the Convention, betting that it would succeed, and he presided over it but took no part in its deliberations. We all know that the members divided over many crucial issues, particularly over the so-called New Jersey plan empowering the separate states and the more nationalistic Virginia plan. Washington gave no indication where he stood on either. His only speech came at the end, after the disagreements had been worked out, when he suggested that the ratio of popular representation in Congress specified in the document be made more democratic. The Convention immediately changed the ratio from one representative for every forty thousand people to one for every thirty thousand. By not participating in the earlier debates, Washington avoided the appearance of favoring any side in any division. It was simply his presence, and indeed Benjamin Franklin's presence, that mattered. Neither man had much to do with the terms of the Constitution that emerged from the Convention. It was their being there that mattered and mattered crucially. By standing aloof from the debates, Washington maintained his prestige as a national figure and could place it behind the creation of a national government to end the fragmentation of his beloved republic.

In the campaign for ratification, Washington again kept himself above the fray. Virginia's acceptance would be crucial, but Washington did not campaign for it in his home state or anywhere else. To close friends he intimated his strong approval of the new Constitution and his contempt for the small minds who opposed it. If the Constitution was adopted, he would be elected the first president of the new government. He must have known that. If he did not, there were plenty of people telling him. But to strive for its ratification could be seen as politicking. If he was to use his popular strength on behalf of the United States, he could not dilute it by publicly taking sides.

When the new government was finally in place, it was time for Washington to enlist his prestige behind it. Once again he was in a position of command. He believed, as did most Americans, that the future of republican government in the world rested in his hands. The great doubt so long entertained about the inherent weakness of republics had to be dispelled by an executive who could act forcefully when action was needed. He would have no trouble showing his capacity for acting decisively in situations that required it. But in his early days in office much would depend on his daily behavior. As in the war, he had to draw a line between what would be good for the country and what people expected of their democratically chosen leader. Until governmental action was called for, he had to mind appearances, to give to his office a distinction, a character, to match the authority attached to it. His way of doing it was another instance of his knowing what not to do.

As with Franklin in France, John Adams offers us the contrast between a man who wanted to do too much and a man who knew when to stand still. When it came time for the new United States Senate to address the president, Adams was eager to dignify the office he would one day hold by something resembling the extravagant phrases enjoyed by royalty, such as “your highness” or “your benign highness,” or “your majesty.” Washington made it plain that he would have none of this: dignity, yes, fulsomeness, no. He was the president of the United States. That was the title by which he and every subsequent president would be addressed and announced. Washington's personal authority endowed it with a dignity that florid honorifics would have impaired.

In conducting his new office, Washington knew that he was sailing an uncharted sea. What guided him still was his vision of a great republic. He had hopes that the new Constitution would embody that vision for all his countrymen. He believed in republican government, in government by the people. That meant that the people must make their own decisions, that he must not decide for them in making laws. He must not even try to influence the way they voted for their representatives. In 1792 when a candidate for Congress in the coming November election spread the rumor that he had Washington's backing, Washington rebuked the man publicly and privately. To have expressed a preference for any candidate, he declared, “would have been incompatible with the rule I had prescrib'd to myself, and which I had invariably observed, of not interfering directly or indirectly with the suffrages of the people, in the choice of their representatives.” On the same principle Washington was loath to veto bills of which he did not approve. As he confided to his friend Edmund Pendleton, “I give my Signature to many bills with which my Judgment is at variance.” It was Washington's misfortune to find the people and their representatives frequently at odds with his own views. His response was to blame party leaders for misleading and misinforming the people. To the end he believed that they would do the right thing if only they were fully informed. In the year he died, 1799, when the people seemed to be doing everything wrong, he reiterated his confidence in republican government. “I am persuaded,” he wrote, “the great mass of our Citizens require only to understand matters rightly, to form right decisions.”

That Washington could retain such a view after the trials he endured in his presidency is a measure not only of his confidence in democracy but also of the deep humanity that lay behind his sense of when to say no. Underlying Washington's aloofness, his refusal to do what people wanted him to, was a fundamental respect for mankind. It is not always apparent in the pressures of the moment when he had to say no to seemingly reasonable requests. This is most clearly visible, I think, in his conduct of foreign relations. The neutrality he preserved in the international conflicts that followed the French Revolution may have looked like indifference, simply a way of doing nothing. But its sources lay in an unwillingness to take advantage of other people's misfortunes to gain favors for his own country. He explained it best in a letter to Gouverneur Morris in 1791, when the distress of Europe offered opportunities for the United States to gain benefits in treaties with countries needing assistance. Here is what he told Morris:

That was what republican government was all about. You had to say no to “strokes of the moment.” Washington had to say it often, but he still enjoys the good opinion of mankind that he won by saying it.

—Unpublished

“P
RAGMATISM
”
IS THE WORD
most commonly used to describe Franklin's way of dealing with the world. We don't mean by it an adherence to the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce or William James, from which the modern word probably derived (it was not in Franklin's vocabulary). We mean, I think, simply a willingness to compromise in pursuit of some goal, a willingness not to insist on some abstract principle in transactions with other people, a willingness to make concessions. A prime example would be Franklin's best-known contribution to the proceedings of the 1787 Convention that created the federal Constitution, the so-called Great Compromise, which he proposed as a way to break the deadlock over representation between the small states and the large. The states would be represented equally in the Senate and in proportion to their populations in the House of Representatives.

This compromise went against Franklin's own beliefs. He would have preferred a single national representative assembly based strictly on population or, failing that, a bicameral legislature in which the members of both houses were apportioned that way. From the time when the states first joined in the Continental Congress, Franklin had objected to their voting by state: he thought it ridiculous for a state the size of Rhode Island or Delaware to have the same share in making decisions as Virginia or Pennsylvania. He did not prevail in the Continental Congress or in the Constitutional Convention, but he and those who thought like him at least got half of what they wanted—or, rather, more than half. They got the union, first of the colonies, then of the states. Like Abraham Lincoln after them, they put the union first, ahead of goals that could not in any case have been reached without it. Franklin's pragmatism meant putting first things first, accepting half a loaf if he could not get the whole, and ungrudgingly accepting nothing at all if that was the price of carrying on an enterprise he believed in.

Franklin learned his pragmatism in Philadelphia before he ever had need or opportunity to apply it on a continental or global scale. Putting first things first in his printing business doubtless contributed to the success that enabled him to retire at the age of forty-two, but his retirement is only one sign that he already had goals that he put ahead of making money. As he told his mother in 1750, “I would rather have it said,
he lived usefully
, than,
He died rich
.” It will be admitted that he succeeded in that goal, and his success was the result of a personal philosophy in which putting first things first often meant putting himself last. He organized a whole array of societies for improving life in Philadelphia: a fire company, insurance company, library, hospital, university. In these initiatives, guided by the insights into human psychology that he put in the mouth of “Poor Richard,” he learned to lead from the rear. As the instigator of so many projects for public benefit, he found it most effective to present them as coming from other people. He employed the same technique on a larger scale when his colony's government failed to arm Pennsylvania against the threatened wartime invasion by the French in 1747. He organized a militia and raised money for fortifications while making it all seem the spontaneous work of other leading citizens. In his militia he served as a common soldier, declining any position of command. Pragmatism was not just a willingness to compromise; it was an art.

By the end of his pragmatism I intend both the common meanings of the word “end”—a goal or purpose, and the place where something stops. Where did his pragmatism end, stop? For what goals was Franklin willing to compromise, and where did he draw a line and say no compromise or no further compromise? The answer is not easy, for there were many goals, many principles, he believed in but did not pursue or struggle to attain. He believed in free trade among nations. He believed that there should be an international law embodied in treaties to forbid privateering and also to forbid nations at war from interfering with the peaceful activities of farmers, sailors, and merchants. These were beliefs he did not hold lightly; as the principal United States negotiator in the treaty that ended the War for Independence, he made an effort to secure their recognition. But he was pragmatic. He did not draw a line and say no treaty without them. In early life Franklin had a plan for an international party of virtue, whose members would further goals like these. He was going to write a book on the art of virtue, which would be a kind of manifesto for an international movement. He was still thinking about it in the 1780s, but he never did write it. I think it is fair to say that Franklin recognized that his major goals for the good of mankind in general were unattainable, that even small steps toward them would be too small to be worth fighting for. He was not Don Quixote, and he would not waste his time breaking lances with the guardians of the status quo in contests he could not win.

But there were occasions when he dug in his heels and refused to make concessions, occasions when his goal was nonnegotiable, when defeat was preferable to compromise, when his pragmatism came to an end, a stop. One of these was in his campaign to substitute royal government for proprietary government in Pennsylvania. The campaign had begun in the Pennsylvania Assembly's attempt to tax the tax-exempt lands of the Penn family. Frustrated by the veto of the Penns' appointed governor (the Penns themselves remained in England), the Assembly sent Franklin to England in 1757 to get the British government to require the Penns to allow the taxation. Franklin failed in this mission or, rather, won a very limited right to tax a portion of the Penn lands. He returned to Pennsylvania in 1764, determined to secure what he and his political allies may have had in mind from the beginning, a revocation of the Penn family's authority over the colony in favor of direct royal control. Franklin and his allies dominated the Pennsylvania Assembly, and the Assembly sent him back to England with his desired petition for royal government. But it was not a popular move in Pennsylvania and unlikely to succeed in England. It did not succeed, and it was unrealistic to imagine it ever could have. In this case I think Franklin had already achieved a pragmatic halfway measure in making some of the Penn lands taxable. His new goal, the destruction of the Penns' authority, could not be reached pragmatically. It was nonnegotiable.

We have to ask why he thought it was a good idea anyhow. We cannot rule out the role of personal feelings. By the time he began his campaign, Franklin had developed a bitter hatred of the principal proprietor, Thomas Penn (son of William), and Penn returned the favor. Penn had seen Franklin's organization of a militia to protect the colony as a threat to his authority, a “Military Common Wealth.” He wished that Franklin would take his role as tribune of the people somewhere else. When the two finally met in England, Franklin came away with “a more cordial and thorough Contempt for him than [he] ever before felt for any Man living.” Personal feelings may have raised the stakes in the contest, but Franklin's eagerness to bring down the Penns had deeper roots, as will become evident if we consider another case in which his pragmatism ended.

The two are closely linked, though they may seem at odds with each other. During the colonists' quarrel with the mother country, which was just beginning when Franklin returned to England with his petition for royal government, he became the unofficial spokesman for the colonists in their protests against the British Parliament's attempt to tax them. As will be seen, he came to view Parliament's exercise of authority in America in the same way that he viewed the Penn family's, as an unacceptable interposition of other Englishmen between the king and his American subjects. As he developed this view, his pragmatism was at first very much in evidence. He did not himself believe in the natural rights that the colonists kept affirming, and he hoped to work out a compromise, as in effect he did for a time. Largely through his efforts Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, while at the same time asserting in the Declaratory Act that it had a right to pass such an act.

The Declaratory Act was not Franklin's idea, but he was content to have Parliament claim the right, provided it was not exercised. In succeeding years, as Parliament again exercised it in the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773, he did his best to excuse and defend the colonists' declarations and manifestos and to minimize the violence that accompanied them. At the same time in letters home, he urged the colonists to calm down, to avoid the confrontations that were giving them a bad name in England, to be patient until the mother country changed its policies, as he was urging it to do at every opportunity. His hope was that the British would recognize the need to adjust their policies to the reality of colonial opposition before the opposition hardened to the point of no return, to the point of withdrawing from the empire in independence.

His hopes were frustrated, of course, though only because the British proved blind to the realities of the situation. Again, his frustration may have been aggravated by personal feelings about the people he had to deal with. Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for the colonies from 1768 to 1772, he described as “proud, supercilious, extreamly conceited,…fond of every one that can stoop to flatter him, and inimical to all that dare tell him disagreeable Truths.” Lord Dartmouth, who succeeded Hillsborough, was effusive in expressions of good will but no more capable than the other great lords of comprehending what was going on in North America. The men governing Great Britain and the empire, Franklin concluded at last, had “scarce Discretion enough to govern a Herd of Swine.”

By the time he left England, late in 1774, his pragmatic efforts to save the empire had reached an end. From that time forward he knew that independence was the only way Americans could gain the rights they claimed and would never give up. He waited for other Americans to catch up, as the Continental Congress made pragmatic efforts to save the empire in petitions to the king that he knew were useless. But in July 1776, in the document he helped to draft, independence became nonnegotiable. After his colleagues in Congress sent him as their envoy to France, he gave a frosty answer to all British overtures to win the colonies back. There was now no room for pragmatism, no room for concessions, no halfway house on the road to independence. But what had been the end, in the sense of purpose, of his pragmatic efforts to smooth relations between Britain and the colonies before they reached the point of no return?

Franklin has been called a reluctant revolutionary, and so he was, reluctant to break up the empire. But that label is a little misleading, for he was never a reluctant American. Throughout his public career, whether he was making compromises or stubbornly refusing to, the end, the goal, of his pragmatism was a vision that others only gradually learned to share and none ever fully shared. Franklin's vision, his ultimate goal, first began to take shape in an essay he wrote in 1751, but did not publish until 1755, entitled “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries &c.” The immediate occasion of it may have been the British Iron Act of 1750, limiting iron manufacturing in the colonies. Most Americans at that time, and right through their quarrel with the British Parliament over taxation, had taken care not to object to the restrictions imposed by Parliament on American manufacturing. There was no public outcry against the Iron Act when it was passed. Even the Declaration of Independence, in its catalog of tyrannical British actions, made no mention of the limitations placed on colonial trade and manufactures. Franklin objected to them in 1751 because they would inhibit a growth that he saw as the most significant development in modern history.

The growth that he foresaw in the immediate future was not a growth of manufacturing iron or anything else that would compete with British products. It was a growth in the number of Americans, who would actually, for the foreseeable future, become customers for those products. British policy, he argued, should take account of something that the policy makers had not noticed—namely, the increase of population in America from causes unique to new countries. To understand the impact of Franklin's argument and its implications both for him and for the American future, it has to be seen in the context of a continuing discussion in print among writers of the time on British economic policy.

It was a basic premise of the discussion that a country's prosperity and strength were to be measured by the size of its population. Anything that increased population was good; anything that decreased it was bad. Immigration was good; emigration was bad. Another premise was that the population within a settled country could be increased only by adding manufacturing enterprises and the laborers engaged in them—at the lowest possible wage that would keep them alive. Colonies in this formula were by nature bad, because any number of people emigrating to them weakened the mother country by that much. But it could be argued, and was, that if the colonists could be required to buy all their manufactures from the mother country, their trade would make up for the loss in numbers at home by expanding the number of laborers needed to supply them. Colonies could be, in effect, foreign countries whose economies you could control, as England had been doing all along with the American colonies, in the Navigation Acts of the seventeenth century and in the acts forbidding or penalizing colonial manufactures: the Woollen Act of 1699, the Hat Act of 1732, and the Iron Act just passed.

Some writers, but by no means all, were convinced by this reasoning. Many continued to regard colonies as more of a burden than a benefit to England's population. Franklin entered the discussion with a new slant on the sources of population increase. The argument of his essay was that population in new countries, that is, America, did not depend on the same forces that governed population in old, urbanized countries like England. Americans occupied a continent originally peopled by natives who could maintain only the numbers that a life of hunting and gathering could support (a misconception about Indian economies but not about their post-Columbian numbers). The English settlers, by farming the land, could grow in numbers as fast as they could marry and have children, which they did at an early age in large families. Sustained only by farming the abundant land, they doubled their numbers every twenty-five years. It was foolish and needless for the English (and irritating to the Americans, or at least to Franklin) to limit manufacturing in America, because Americans were too busy farming to spend their time on any but the crudest manufactures. They bought English goods in quantities that grew with their numbers and would continue to do so as they continued to grow, and thus would enable the English manufacturing population to grow. It was also foolish to allow immigration to English colonies from other countries, foolish to admit the Germans who were swarming to Pennsylvania and the Africans who were dragged forcibly to the southern colonies. America should be an extension of England, peopled by the prolific American Englishmen already there.