published them. All indications suggest that Franklin hoped to effect a reconciliation between the colonies and the empire by casting Hutchinson as a scapegoat, but the public drama cast Franklin very differently. With the 1773 publication of the Hutchinson letters, and relations inflamed by the Boston Tea Party, Franklin himself became the scapegoat and was famously called before the Privy Council—in the “Cockpit”—to receive criticism and insults from Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn. Franklin famously received an hour of abuse in total silence, while the audience cheered and laughed. Two days later, Franklin was fired from his position as deputy postmaster general of North America; relations between Great Britain and the colonies continued to deteriorate. Meanwhile, as Michael Warner notes in his account, “The incident greatly recuperated Franklin’s colonial reputation, which had suffered in the mid-1760s, and did much to inflame revolutionary sentiment.”29
The Hutchinson affair—or the Wedderburn-Franklin exchange, as it was frequently presented in the early republican press—proved fundamental to the formation of “Franklin” not because of its biographical significance but because it took the famous figure of the intellectual and encoded it in relation to the figure of Lord Bute. The Cockpit humiliation made this distinction hard to avoid: Wedderburn was one of Bute’s alleged minions and as solicitor general embodied the position of imperial intellectual—the schemer using his wits to insult, mislead, manipulate, and misdirect. In this confrontation, the intellectual Franklin’s behavior was recast in a contrasting position: he had used his formidable gifts to expose the schemings of Bute and company. This use of his intellect—to bring bad political advising to light and therefore check it, rather than to obscure it further—was then doubly encoded as he refused to use his famous wit to respond to the Privy Council, opting instead for silence. In this respect, “Franklin” answers and corrects the figure of Lord Bute much as “Washington” answers and corrects the figure of the king. Where Bute was a figure of considerable culture and learning complementing, enabling, and amplifying the executive symbolic position, Franklin suddenly rises to significance as a corrective figure. A perfect illustration may be found in John Trumbull’s 1774 poem “An Elegy on the Times,” which Elihu Hubbard Smith featured prominently as the opening piece of his 1793 anthology American Poems, Selected and Original. The poem laments the “mock debate,” “servile vows,” “well-dissembled praise,” and generally “fruitless offerings” of English politics (ll. 48–52)30 and then transitions to this description of Franklin’s encounter:
While Peers enraptur’d hail the unmanly wrong,
See Ribaldry, vile prostitute of shame,
Stretch the brib’d hand and prompt the venal tongue,
To blast the laurels of a franklin’s fame!
But will the Sage, whose philosophic soul,
Controul’d the lightning in its fierce career,
Hear’d unappal’d the aerial thunders roll,
And taught the bolts of vengeance where to steer;—
Will he, while echoing to his just renown
The voice of kingdoms swells the loud applause;
Heed the weak malice of a Courtier’s frown,
Or dread the coward insolence of laws? (3)
In the event, Franklin remains silent “While Infamy her darling scroll displays, / And points well pleas’d, oh, wedderburne, to thee!” (4). Characteristics later associated with Franklin—most notably his ribald humor and his expressiveness about wealth—are at this moment English vices one could never associate with the seemingly puritanical and disinterested scientist. Franklin stands an impassive scientific observer, his response to hostile questioning akin to his “unappal’d” assessment of the thunderstorm. Nonetheless, we may see glimmerings of mythical elements later to accrue to Franklin—for example, the adoption of the Poor Richard persona, in which intelligence assumes an assertive modesty; or the crucial figure of the printer (as distinct from the author), who publishes but also maintains a kind of modest silence; or the scientist, who tries to describe things as they are, as opposed to the political theorist describing how they should be; or the creator of the public library, trying to make information available to all. Indeed, the famous 1778 portrait of Franklin by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis—Franklin in simple coat, lips noticeably clamped shut—pictorially codifies this symbolic moment.31
Let us be clear about our argument. The symbolic relational pairing of George III and Lord Bute generated not one new position (Washington) or an infinite series of countersymbols (Washington, his generals, various political leaders, and so on) but a decisively answering pair: Washington-Franklin. Washington was not a substitution for George III but an important correction and therefore a new relational position, just as Franklin signaled a relational corrective to the Bute figure. Consequently, the emergence of these new figures retroactively confirmed and clarified the original generative roles of king and Bute. Aggressive action and shadowy insinuation were reworked as reluctant action and intellectual illumination, at least for the time being. If biographical behaviors provided raw material for these new positions, so much the better; but these symbolic configurations were not dependent on such data and drew easily on fictional and apocryphal embellishments, selective distortions of the historical record, and composite biographical details of adjacent and subordinate figures.
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
