Franklin's Closing Speech Asked Delegates to Doubt Themselves and Sign Anyway

Imagine a modern politician standing up at the end of a negotiation and saying: I have doubts about this deal, I have been wrong before, and so have you, so let us all admit we might be wrong and sign it anyway. He would be finished by lunchtime. The cable panels would call it weakness. His own party would call it surrender. And yet that is, more or less, what the most famous man in America said on the last day of the Federal Convention, and it may have been the most useful speech of the summer.

On Monday, September 17, 1787, Benjamin Franklin was 81 years old and too frail to deliver his own remarks. He had written them out, and his Pennsylvania colleague James Wilson read them to the delegates. James Madison copied the speech into his notes of the debates. What follows is a close reading of the text Madison preserved, passage by passage: what Franklin said, what it meant in that room, and what it asks of us.

The setting

By September 17 the Convention had been meeting in the Pennsylvania State House for nearly four months. The Committee of Style had delivered its final draft on September 12. The delegates had spent five days making last changes. Now the engrossed Constitution lay on the table, and the question was whether the delegates would sign it.

The danger was not that the Constitution would fail in the room. A majority of every state delegation present was ready to approve it. The danger was a public split. Three prominent delegates, Edmund Randolph and George Mason of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, had announced they would not sign. If others joined them, opponents in the states would point to a divided Convention and say even its authors did not believe in it. Franklin's job, which he gave himself, was to keep as many signatures as possible.

"I am not sure I shall never approve them"

The speech opens with a confession, not a boast:

I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.

Notice the double negative. Franklin does not say he will come to approve the parts he dislikes. He says he is not sure he never will. It is the language of a scientist, not a partisan. He had spent his life testing ideas against evidence, and he applied the same method to his own political opinions.

Then he turns it outward. The older he grows, he says, the more apt he is to doubt his own judgment and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. He notes that most men, and most religious sects, think themselves in possession of all truth. And he tells two jokes. The first is from the essayist Richard Steele, who told the Pope in a dedication that the only difference between their two churches was that the Church of Rome was infallible and the Church of England was never in the wrong. The second is about a French lady who, in a quarrel with her sister, said she met with nobody but herself who was always in the right.

These are not decorations. They are the argument. Franklin is telling every delegate who still has objections, and every delegate who thinks his objections are obviously correct, that he sounds like the French lady. It is very hard to stay self-righteous after someone has made you laugh at self-righteousness.

"With all its faults, if they are such"

The heart of the speech is a sentence that every student of the Constitution should know:

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 administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

Read it slowly, because it contains three distinct claims.

1. A general government is necessary. The Articles of Confederation had failed. The Union could not pay its debts, defend its interests or keep the states from fighting over trade. Something stronger was needed, and this was the something on offer.
2. Administration matters as much as form. Any form of government can be a blessing if it is well run. The Constitution is a frame, not a guarantee. Its success depends on the people who serve under it and the people who choose them.
3. The ultimate danger is the people's character. The Constitution will last, Franklin says, until the people become so corrupted that they need despotism, being incapable of any other kind of government. That is not a prediction about the document. It is a warning to the citizens.

That third claim is the most conservative sentence in the speech. Franklin, who was no churchman in the conventional sense, agreed with John Adams and George Washington that free government depends on a virtuous people. No parchment can save a nation that has lost the habits of self-government. For Washington's version of the same warning, see Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable.

"All their prejudices, their passions"

Next Franklin explains why he does not expect a better result from any other convention:

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?

This is the Founders' realism about human nature in its plainest form. It is the same insight that runs through Federalist 51, which says that if men were angels, no government would be necessary. Franklin applies it to the Convention itself. The men in the room were not angels. They were men with interests. A second convention would be the same men or men like them, with the same failings and fresh grudges.

That passage also answers a temptation that recurs in every generation: the idea that if only the right people met again, they would write a perfect document. Franklin's reply is that you cannot get a perfect product from imperfect makers. You can get a good one, and good is what you should be grateful for. For an honest weighing of the idea of a new convention, see A Convention of States Is the Founders' Safety Valve, Weighed Honestly.

"Confounded like those of the Builders of Babel"

Then comes the passage of praise:

It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats.

The image is from Genesis 11, where the builders of the tower lose their common language and scatter. Franklin's audience knew the story; he did not need to explain it. The enemies he meant were real. Britain and other European powers expected the American experiment to collapse into quarrelling states. The delegates had spent the summer proving them wrong, and Franklin wanted them to see that.

The next line is the one that sums up his position: "Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best." Consent without illusion. And then a pledge: the objections he had held he would sacrifice to the public good, and he had never whispered a syllable of them outside the room. "Within these walls they were born, and here they shall die."

That pledge is worth more attention than it gets. The Convention met in secret, and Franklin was telling his colleagues that the right thing to do with their lost arguments was to let them go, not to carry them into the ratification fight as weapons against the document they had all just finished.

"Doubt a little of his own infallibility"

The closing request:

On the whole, Sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

Franklin then moved that the Constitution be signed under a form of words that would let even doubters sign: "Done in Convention by the unanimous consent of the States present." The form, devised by Gouverneur Morris, made each signature a witness to the fact that every state delegation present had approved, not a personal endorsement of every clause. It was a clever bridge, and it won over some waverers.

It did not win over all. Randolph, Mason and Gerry still refused. But thirty-nine delegates signed, including John Dickinson of Delaware, whose name George Read added at his request because Dickinson had left. The Convention presented a nearly united front to the country.

The rising sun

While the last members were signing, Franklin looked at the chair from which Washington had presided all summer. A half sun decorated the top of its back. Madison recorded what Franklin said to the delegates near him: painters had found it difficult to distinguish a rising from a setting sun in their art. Franklin went on:

I have often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.

It is the most hopeful sentence the Convention produced, and it came from the oldest man in the room. The chair is still in Independence Hall.

"A republic, if you can keep it": the source

The most quoted Franklin line about the Convention is not in Madison's notes and not in the speech. It comes from the private notes of James McHenry, a Maryland delegate. McHenry recorded that a lady asked Franklin whether the delegates had given the country a republic or a monarchy, and that Franklin answered: a republic, if you can keep it. A note added later to McHenry's papers identifies the lady as Elizabeth Willing Powel of Philadelphia. McHenry's notes were published in the early twentieth century.

So the anecdote has a real source, a delegate writing at the time, but it is secondhand: McHenry reports what he heard. It deserves to be quoted, with that caveat. And it fits the speech exactly. Both say the same thing: the Constitution can last only as long as the people keep it.

The strongest objection

Here is the case against Franklin's counsel, put fairly. Doubting your own infallibility sounds wise, but it can become an excuse for signing anything. Mason and Gerry refused to sign because they believed the document lacked a bill of rights and concentrated dangerous power. They were partly vindicated: the Bill of Rights was added within four years precisely because of objections like theirs. If everyone had followed Franklin's advice to suppress their doubts, would the Bill of Rights have come at all?

The answer has three parts.

1. Franklin asked for humility, not silence forever. He urged delegates to sign, not to stop thinking. Article V existed so that later judgment could correct the text, and the First Congress used it within two years.
2. The dissenters' influence did not depend on refusing to sign. The pressure for a bill of rights came from the ratifying conventions, which proposed amendments, and from the voters. Madison, who signed, wrote and passed the amendments. For how that happened, see Madison Changed His Mind on a Bill of Rights, and His Reasons Still Teach.
3. The alternative to signing was not a better document. It was likely no document, or a public split that would have handed opponents a weapon. Franklin's realism about conventions applied here too. Another meeting would not have produced perfection.

The verdict: Franklin's advice was right for that day. Sign what is good, and use the amendment process to improve it. Mason's story is worth reading alongside his; see George Mason Refused to Sign, and His Objections Became the Bill of Rights.

What it means now

Franklin's speech teaches a kind of compromise that our politics has nearly forgotten. Not the compromise of abandoning principle, but the compromise of recognising that you are one of many fallible people, that the structure protects you from others' errors and them from yours, and that a good constitution with a way to amend it is better than a perfect one that never exists.

It also teaches where the danger lies. Franklin did not fear the text. He feared the day the people would become too corrupt for anything but despotism. That puts the burden on us: on what we teach our children, how we vote and whether we still read the document at all. For a guide to hosting a public reading, see How to Host a Constitution Day Reading in Your Town on September 17.

The case in brief

1. On September 17, 1787, Benjamin Franklin, 81, had James Wilson read a speech urging every delegate to doubt a little of his own infallibility and sign.
2. Franklin agreed to the Constitution "with all its faults," warning that it could end in despotism only when the people became too corrupted for anything else.
3. He argued that no assembly of fallible men could produce a perfect document, and that this one came astonishingly close.
4. His rising-sun remark is recorded by Madison; the "republic, if you can keep it" line comes from James McHenry's notes and is secondhand.
5. His counsel was right: sign the good, then improve it through Article V, as the Bill of Rights soon did.

What you can do: read Franklin's speech aloud at a Constitution Day gathering on September 17, then read the Preamble from the Constitution page and ask who is responsible for keeping the republic.