◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

PART ONE: With All Its Faults I am Benjamin Franklin. Born in Boston, 1706, the fifteenth child of a candlemaker. I ran away from my apprenticeship at seventeen, which was a crime, and became a printer, which was a trade for men with ink on their hands and no expectations. I died in Philadelphia in 1790, at eighty-four. I have two things to tell you and they will not fit together. This one is about the document. The next is about the sin. I was the oldest man in that room. Eighty-one, too weak to walk the four blocks, carried to the State House each morning in a sedan chair by prisoners from the Walnut Street jail. Men with no share whatever in what we were making, carrying the men who made it. There is no painting of that. There are a great many paintings of the signing. On the final day I had a speech, and I was too feeble to deliver it, so James Wilson read it out while I sat there. I told them I did not entirely approve of the document, and was not certain I ever would. And then I said I consented to it, with all its faults, because I did not believe a better one was to be had, and because I had lived long enough to distrust my own judgment, having many times been obliged to change opinions I once held to be right. And I asked every man still holding an objection to doubt, with me, a little of his own infallibility. They signed. Nearly all of them. Men who despised each other's plans put their names to a paper not one of them fully wanted, because enough of them were willing to entertain the possibility of being wrong. That is not a sentiment. That is the mechanism. Your country exists because a room full of certain men agreed, for one afternoon, to be slightly less certain. But I would not tell them what I disliked. I said I would never whisper a syllable of it abroad, because a document under attack does not need its own signers handing out ammunition. I kept that promise the rest of my life. I am dead now. The ratifying is long over. So I will tell you. I did not want one man in that office. I wanted a council, several men answerable to one another, because one man alone at the top of a country is a king with the title filed off, and I had spent my life among kings and did not care for them. And I moved that he be paid nothing at all. Only his expenses. Here was my reasoning. There are two passions with real power over men: ambition and avarice. The love of power and the love of money. Each alone is strong enough. Put them together upon the same object and they produce the most violent effects in the human character. So place before such men a post of honour that is at the same time a place of profit, and they will move heaven and earth to obtain it. Then consider what sort of man moves heaven and earth. Not your steady ones. Not the men who would govern well and go home to their farms. You will draw the boldest and most grasping, the men of enormous appetite, and they will tear the country to pieces getting to that office, and tear it again holding on to it. They thought me an eccentric old man. The motion died without a vote. And still I signed. That is the part I want you to carry. I saw the flaw, I named it, I lost, and I signed anyway, because a flawed thing men will actually agree to is worth more than a perfect thing that exists in one man's head. There was one fault I did not stay quiet about. I waited until I was dying, but I did not stay quiet. That is the second of these. PART TWO: The Inconsistency I am Benjamin Franklin again. In the first of these I told you what I doubted in your Constitution, and that I never named those doubts aloud, to the end of my life, out of loyalty to a document that needed defending. That was a silence I chose for a reason. Now the other silence. For that one I have no reason at all. I owned human beings. I ran advertisements for their sale in my own newspaper, for money, for years. Not briefly, as a thoughtless young man. For decades. The most celebrated printer in America, selling people in small type between the ship notices and the almanacs. I came to abolition late. Very late. As an old man with nothing left to lose by it. Three months before I died I put my name to a petition to your first Congress. I asked it to remove the inconsistency from the character of the American people. I chose that word with care. Inconsistency. A printer's word. A proofreader's word. A country cannot set down two contradictory sentences and call them both true. It had little to do with mercy and everything to do with the plain fact that the thing did not scan. Congress would not hear it. They cited the very document I had signed with all its faults, the clause protecting the trade for twenty years, and used my Constitution to bury my petition. And a congressman from Georgia rose and explained that the country could not survive without slaves. That the labor was necessary. That the climate demanded it. That the men themselves were better off for it. I could not answer him as a petitioner. I had just tried that and been shown the door. So I answered him as a printer. Three weeks before my death I published a letter under a name that was not mine. I invented a man. Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, of Algiers. I invented for him a speech he never gave, a hundred years before, refusing to free his Christian slaves. Who will cultivate our lands in this hot climate, my invented man asks. Who will perform the common labors. Must we then become our own slaves? Would freeing them not ruin us? Every one of those arguments was the Georgia congressman's, in substance. I had simply moved them into the mouth of a Barbary slaver holding white Christians. That was the whole of the device. I could not make a man see his own argument. I could hand him the same argument wearing a different coat, and let him agree with it for half a column before he understood what he had agreed to. That was the last thing I ever published. I died three weeks later. It freed no one. It took six hundred thousand dead to finish what a petition could not. So do not admire me for the timing. I was eighty-four and beyond consequence. It cost me nothing. The men who said it plainly at thirty paid for it, and I was not one of them. Here is what I have, then. It is thin, and it is all of it. They tell a story that a woman stopped me outside that hall and asked what we had made, and that I answered: a republic, if you can keep it. I cannot swear I said it. But I will claim it now, because the word that matters is not republic. It is if. So doubt a little of your own infallibility.