Gordon S. Wood on John Adams and Benjamin Franklin: Founding Fathers fall out in Paris

This month John Adams joins the ranks of Founding Fathers published by The Library of America. The two volumes of his Revolutionary Writings confirm editor Gordon S. Wood’s contention that “none of the other Founders passed on such a rich and revealing body of documents as Adams did.” This is particularly true about Adams’s dramatic—and colorful—reversal of feelings concerning fellow colonial leader Benjamin Franklin. Almost thirty years younger, Adams grew up admiring Franklin and worked closely and effectively with him in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia from 1774 through 1776. But living together in a chateau outside Paris as part of the American diplomatic delegation to France in 1778 magnified their considerable differences in working habits, lifestyle, and philosophy.

Gordon S. Wood reflects on Adams and Franklin in his exclusive interview with The Library of America.

LOA: Adams had occasion to work closely with Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington in the Continental Congress—and even more closely with Franklin and Jefferson on his diplomatic missions abroad. What portraits of the other Founders emerge from Adams’s writings? How accurate or skewed do you think they are?

Wood: Actually I think his descriptions of the personalities of Franklin and Jefferson and others were pretty accurate. It is only when he felt he was wronged by them that he lets loose his anger and resentment. He is impressed with Jefferson’s learning, but noted his silence during the debates in the Congress: “I never heard him utter three Sentences together.” His description of Franklin in a letter to Abigail in 1775 is laudatory. Only when he experiences all the adulation paid to Franklin in Paris does he begin to change his tune. Franklin may be a great philosopher, he told his diary in 1779, but “as a Legislator in America he has done very little.” By 1782 he had come to feel for Franklin “no other sentiments than Contempt or Abhorrence.”

LOA: Benjamin Franklin once described Adams as a man who “means well for his Country, is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.” Does this description tell us more about Adams—or Franklin?

Wood: Adams never hid his jealousy and resentment of the other Founders, especially Benjamin Franklin. In 1782 he wrote to an English friend about Franklin, who, he said, “must make himself a Man of Consequence by piddling with Men who had no title. . . . But thus it is, that Men of great Reputations may do as many Weak Things as they please, and to remark their Mistakes is to envy them. . . . His base jealousy of me and Sordid Envy of my commission for making Peace . . . have Stimulated him to attempt an assassination upon my character.” Franklin no doubt knew of Adams’s opinion of him, but what probably led to Franklin’s remark was Adams’s letters to the chief French minister, the Comte de Vergennes, in which he repeatedly lectured him on how he ought to treat the United States.

Read the entire interview (PDF).

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Benjamin Franklin, 21, creates one of the first American social networks
• 223 years ago today, 39 delegates signed the new U.S. Constitution
• Did George Washington swear during the Battle of Monmouth?

Related LOA works: John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1755-1775; John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1775-1783; Founding Fathers Set (12 volumes—plus a free book)

Benjamin Franklin, 21, creates one of the first American social networks

In an essay in the October 4 issue of The New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell challenged the claims that Twitter and Facebook have reinvented social activism by comparing them unfavorably with the low-tech achievements of Civil Rights activists in the 1960s. A recent post on Pilant’s Business Ethics Blog reminds us, however, that impressive social networks existed more than two hundred years earlier. James Pilant quotes biographer John Torrey Morse, Jr.’s account of how Benjamin Franklin used the Junto group he created to launch the first fire company in Philadelphia in 1736. He also used the network to develop a library.

Twenty-one-old entrepreneur Franklin formed the Leather Apron Club, self-dubbed the Junto, in 1727 as soon as he decided to settle in Philadelphia. The social elite had their gentlemen’s clubs; what Franklin sought was an association of working tradesmen and artisans who would gather once a week to discuss issues of common concern. As biographer Walter Isaacson describes them:

At first the members went to a local tavern for their Friday evening meetings, but soon they were able to rent a house of their own. There they discussed issues of the day, debated philosophical topics, devised schemes for self-improvement, and formed a network for the furtherance of their own careers. . .

The tone Franklin set for Junto meetings was earnest. Initiates were required to stand, lay their hands on their breast, and answer properly four questions: Do you have disrespect for any current member? Do you love mankind in general regardless of religion or profession? Do you feel people should ever be punished because of their opinion or mode of worship? Do you love and pursue truth for its own sake?

Those familiar with Facebook’s popular “25 Random Things about Me” may be amused to know that Franklin developed a guide listing useful conversation topics for Junto members. It consisted of twenty-four questions. Here are a few:

1. Have you met with anything in the author you last read, remarkable, or suited to be communicated to the Junto? . . .
2. What new story have you lately heard agreeable for telling in conversation?
17. Is there any man whose friendship you want, and which the Junto or any of them, can procure for you?

Junto members were encouraged to bring to meetings books for other members to read; but books were expensive so Franklin hit on the idea of recruiting subscribers outside the Junto who would pay for the right to borrow books. In soliciting subscriptions Franklin discovered that people were reluctant to support “a proposer of any useful project that might be supposed to raise one’s reputation.” So Franklin attributed the idea of the library to his friends. This approach worked so well that Franklin “ever after practiced it on such occasions.” The Library Company of Philadelphia was incorporated on November 8, 1731.

The Junto became so popular that Franklin encouraged members to form their own satellite groups, but these weren’t the only social networks in colonial America. Literary societies flourished all along the eastern seaboard. In an interview with The Library of America, David S. Shields describes the colonial and Revolutionary-era American literary scene:

One of the features of the world of the late 17th and all throughout the 18th century was that like-minded people who believed in [common] values gathered together in a number of associations: ladies’ tea tables and salons, tavern clubs, coffeehouse associations, societies for the promotion of some ideal, or subscribing libraries.

You can find a Google Map of many of these colonial salons, coteries, and literary clubs here.

Related LOA works: Benjamin Franklin: Silence Dogood, The Busy-Body, and Early Writings; American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

223 years ago today, 39 delegates signed the new U.S. Constitution

In May 1787 delegates from twelve states gathered in Philadelphia to begin the process of revising the Articles of Confederation (Rhode Island abstained). To ensure a free expression of opinions the proceedings were kept secret, but we know much of what transpired from James Madison’s detailed diary. In the course of often heated exchanges the delegates decided that what the country needed was not to amend the Articles but to design a new framework for the government and draft an entirely new Constitution.

After a long hot summer of debate the forty-two delegates met on Monday, September 17, 1787, with one item on the agenda: to sign the new Constitution. William Jackson, the convention secretary, read the final version. Then Benjamin Franklin rose. Eighty-one years old, he had not missed one session, but he was now too weak and thus handed his prepared speech to his friend James Wilson to deliver. It said, in part:

I confess that I do not entirely approve of 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....

In these Sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such: because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administred.... I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution: For when you assemble a Number of Men to have the Advantage of their joint Wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those Men all their Prejudices, their Passions, their Errors of Opinion, their local Interests, and their selfish Views. 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....

George Washington’s signature appears at the top. Thirty-eight delegates signed below, state by state, with Jackson witnessing their signatures. Three delegates refused to sign without a Bill of Rights: Edmund Randolph and George Mason of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts.

The Convention then submitted the document to the states for ratification. So began the bitter, sometimes rancorous nationwide fracas (even sparking unruly mob scenes such as the “riot” in Carlisle, PA) chronicled in the two Library of America volumes, The Debate on the Constitution.

According to Article VII of the new document, nine of the thirteen states were required to ratify the Constitution for it to go into effect. Delaware was the first to ratify, on December 7, by a unanimous vote (30–0). Federalists vied with antifederalists to lobby state legislators, and elsewhere the votes were often close; in Massachusetts the margin was 187 to 168. New Hampshire was the ninth state to ratify the Constitution on June 21, 1788, and on March 4, 1789, the new national government began operations. Rhode Island was the last of the thirteen states to ratify the Constitution on May 29, 1790.

On September 25, 1789, to address the concerns of the antifederalists—a vociferous cross-section of many citizens across the country—about “fundamental principles of human liberty,” James Madison introduced into the First Congress of the United States the Bill of Rights. With Virginia’s ratification on December 15, 1791, the Bill of Rights became the first ten amendments to the Constitution and the law of the land.

Read Wilson Carey McWilliams on how the Constitution reflected a “new science of politics.”

Related LOA works: The Debate on the Constitution (two volumes); James Madison: Writings