Franklin & Washington by Edward J. Larson

Franklin & Washington by Edward J. Larson

Author:Edward J. Larson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-11-26T16:00:00+00:00


Book III

Working Together and Apart

Six

Rendezvous in Philadelphia

WITH CIVIC BOOSTERS INTENT on turning Philadelphia into the commercial, financial, and perhaps political capital of the newly independent states, the city looked better than ever by the spring of 1787. Residents had repaired damage caused by the British occupation and begun fresh construction. No longer hampered by prewar British restrictions on foreign trade and wartime harassment of American shipping, trade routes opened to Europe and the Caribbean. In 1785, the Empress of China, a three-mast sailing ship built during the war as a privateer and owned by a syndicate led by Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris, returned from China with the first direct commerce between the world’s newest republic and its oldest empire. Washington bought a set of porcelain tableware carried in the ship.

With peace, Morris had resigned as superintendent of finance for the Confederation but remained a power in state politics and America’s richest merchant prince. Washington depicted Morris’s three-and-a-half-story Georgian mansion, located only a block from the State House and boasting a half-acre walled garden, as the finest single residence in Philadelphia. Home to the resident governor prior to the Revolution and the British commander during the occupation, Morris bought and expanded it in 1781. Pennsylvania’s pro-federalist assembly picked Morris, who had led the failed fight to gain taxing authority for Congress, as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.

Two blocks east of Morris’s mansion on Market Street, Franklin had replaced three run-down, street-front rental buildings with two four-story row houses (one containing his ground-floor printing shop) and an archway through to his home. Also since returning from France, he had added to his house a three-story wing featuring a first-floor dining area seating twenty-four and a massive second-floor library and scientific study.

All this might seem improvident for someone of his age, Franklin acknowledged in a 1786 letter to his last surviving sibling, “but we are apt to forget that we are grown old, and building is an amusement.”1 That “amusement,” he noted on the eve of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, involved supervising “Bricklayers, Carpenters, Stonecutters, Plaisterers, Painters, Glaziers, Limeburners, Timber Merchants, Coppersmiths, Carters, Labourers, etc. etc.”2 In assuming this task, Franklin had in mind his daughter, son-in-law, and seven grandchildren, who all resided with him. Although a doting grandfather, Franklin confessed to enjoying the quiet of his new library where, as he put it, “I can write without being disturb’d by the Noise of the Children.”3 Writing to his sister with the house complete, he marveled at his good fortune, “When I look at these Buildings, my dear Sister, and compare them with that in which our good Parents educated us, the Difference strikes me with Wonder.”4

The fifty-year-old State House had changed too. The rotting steeple that towered over the symmetrical, Georgian-style structure when Washington, Franklin, and others had met there for the Second Continental Congress came down in 1781, replaced by a squat temporary cupola that would remain in place for five decades. New landscaping, paving, fencing, and copper spouts improved the exterior.



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