The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White

      Founders: The Next Generation

      By the moment of the Constitutional Convention, these two mythological figures, Washington and Franklin, played parts on the political stage—the former called out of retirement to preside over the convention, the latter providing the most published written defense of the new system and the tactic of the unanimity resolution.³² Alexander Hamilton, assessing the prospects for ratification, listed Washington’s influence as the major advantage, and Luther Martin, an opponent, later published his convention notes in which he seemed to complain that “neither General Washington nor Franklin shewed any disposition to relinquish the superiority of influence in the Senate.”³³ Noah Webster’s October 1787 pamphlet concluded with a glorification of Washington and Franklin as “fathers and saviors” of the country; another piece in the Massachusetts Centinel warned anti-Federalists that Americans “will despise and execrate the wretch who dares blaspheme the political saviour of our country.”³⁴ If many essays did not refer to the two giants, they nonetheless suggest the tremendous influence of these figures in popular assessment of the Constitution. By November, Roger Sherman of Connecticut could write,

      It is enough that you should have heard that one party has seriously urged that we should adopt the new Constitution because it has been approved by Washington and Franklin, and the other, with all the solemnity of apostolic address to Men, Brethren, Fathers, Friends, and Countrymen, have urged that we should reject as dangerous every clause thereof, because that Washington is more used to command as a soldier than to reason as a politician—Franklin is old—others are young—and Wilson is haughty. You are too well informed to decide by the opinion of others and too independent to need a caution against undue influence.³⁵

      Washington and Franklin remained firmly iconic and still somewhat differentiated in their respective roles of executive actor and deliberative intellectual—useful formulations for supporters, dangerous ones for critics. When an early anti-Federalist piece, Samuel Bryan’s Centinel No. 1, challenged the icons, then, it had to characterize Washington as naive (that is, so much an actor as to lack intellect) and Franklin as senile (his mind having succumbed to his bodily aging).³⁶ Most anti-Federalists, though, passed over the two in silence or tried to characterize the convention with reference to a noniconic figure, as in the preceding allusion to Wilson or when a piece in Philadelphia’s Independent Gazetteer described the convention as a group of physicians directed by “John Adams, Esquire.”³⁷

      With the Revolution receding, however, both “Washington” and “Franklin” drifted into a somewhat bland period when their significance seemed to lose definition. Perhaps the best illustration of this loss of symbolic force is the poem written by young Charles Brockden Brown, titled “Inscription for Benjamin Franklin’s Tomb Stone.” When Philadelphians circulated the poem and learned that Franklin wanted to write his own epitaph, Brown’s brother apparently sent the poem to the State Gazette of North Carolina, where it appeared as “An Inscription for General Washington’s Tomb Stone”—Washington’s name was simply inserted in place of Franklin’s. If the references to the “Shade of Newton” and “Philosophy’s throne” today seem baffling, it appears that generalized platitudes about “American’s favorite . . . / Whose soul for the want of due room, / Has left us to range in the skies” could fit the one as easily as the other.³⁸

      As the war continued into the early 1780s, there had been signs of the generation of new positions emerging. The strongest versions of new positions centered on the figures of Benedict Arnold and Major John André. If Richard Snowden’s aforementioned The American Revolution ignored the Declaration of Independence, it gave great attention to Arnold, whose crucial turn is announced toward the end of the second volume: “And it came to pass, in the one thousand seven hundred and eightieth year of the Christian Hegira, in the ninth month, on the twenty-first day of the month, that Satan entered the heart of Benedict” (2.148–49). The final verses of the chapter speak of “the fatal fruit of treachery” and how “the monuments of thy victory on the plains of Saratoga, serve only to blaze forth the death of thy fame” (2.158). It is tempting to see in Arnold simply a crude evil counterpart to Washington, the Satan to the latter’s Christ—self-promoting in contrast to Washington’s self-denial and so forth. But again we must consider the Arnold position in relation to André, introduced by Snowden as “valiant in war, and where the brave were, there was he” (2.150). It is this positive coding that gives meaning to the full André narrative, in which two details were important. First, he was captured by American sentries who had misidentified themselves as Tories—“they spake in the subtilty of their hearts,” as Snowden puts it (2.153). Second, when tried by the Americans, he maintained his integrity—“he answered with dignity, composure, and truth; his magnanimity did not forsake him, in the hour of extremity” (2.155–56). Perceiving the prisoner as “a shining model of all that was excellent!” the Americans want to save him but execute him from a sense of duty (2.156). This drama is still more pronounced in William Dunlap’s 1798 play André, strongly declared a tragedy in the introduction: in Dunlap’s drama, the ranking American figure, the “General,” struggles to do his duty according to his larger cause and reluctantly orders André’s hanging.³⁹ The André figure thus requires a more complex relational understanding of Arnold, for the concern of this tentative constellation of the mid-1780s was not crude demonization but a formulation of sin and treason in a framework of Revolutionary republicanism. André was on the side of evil, was himself a good man, showed signs of great culture, was tricked by the American sentries and abandoned by Arnold—in all these details, this figuration attempted to express the moral challenges of postmonarchical justice in a politically divided society of patriots and tories. André’s position was important precisely because of its association with, and difference from, the Arnold position. The problem posed by the pair, then, was not one of evil but an important revision of the Washington and Franklin positions. Washington signified reluctant action, but Arnold represented less its opposite, after the fashion of George III, than the dangers of the Washington position for the ambitious and valiant: Arnold was less Washington’s antithesis than a figure generated from the Washington position, so constrained by the rigors of selflessness as to be driven to the enemy. André, meanwhile, signaled an important variant of Franklin—the cultured intellectual, a careful conduit of information, a figure of virtue . . . but for the wrong side. Relative to Arnold, André became the tragic traitor but perhaps more importantly allowed a vicarious staging of an encounter between Washington and Franklin. In any case, the historical persistence of these figures, especially of Arnold, should be read as a trace of this brief moment when the emergent Founders’ constellation was still largely military in orientation and the nascent national semiotics were organized around questions of loyalty.

      But if the Arnold-André pair marked a brief detour of the 1780s, a different and more decisive constellation was to emerge in the 1790s. Washington and Franklin were symbolically reinvested in important ways, and two different figures emerged. How did this happen? We would stress here three concurrent phenomena. The first Washington administration witnessed a series of political conflicts over national economic development and the related role of the government therein. In each instance, the stakes were high, while the terms of debate were abstract—concerned with constitutional hermeneutics, for example, or with the unintended consequences of state interventions in economic subsystems. The year 1790 witnessed a debate around Hamilton’s February “First Report on Public Credit,” concerned with the retirement of national debt; the following year saw this conflict extended to include the problems of banking and currency, this time focused on Hamilton’s “Report on