burnt_toast1 (@burnt_toast1)

At the Constitutional Convention on August 7, 1787, Franklin opposed a proposal to to restrict suffrage to white male property owners, arguing that it should be a state issue and ordinary people had demonstrated their capacity for political judgment and that elected officials had no right to “narrow the privileges of the electors” in the constitution. This fits a broader Hebraic-republican tradition that treated the Hebrew commonwealth as an important historical example of government under law rather than hereditary monarchy or aristocracy; recent scholarship argues that Franklin drew substantially on Josephus and rabbinic/Talmudic sources in his constitutional thought. Franklin’s position can also be understood as a deliberate refusal to settle the boundaries of the American political body at the national level. By opposing a federal qualification while leaving the precise electorate largely to the states, he preserved constitutional ambiguity that could later benefit political minorities seeking inclusion. This was historically significant because earlier republican and democratic systems had generally defined the demos explicitly—most commonly as a restricted body of male citizens—whereas the Constitution avoided providing a comprehensive national definition of who constituted the political people. Franklin could therefore recognize that an apparently modest decision not to constitutionalize suffrage restrictions would leave future generations greater room to expand political participation without first having to overcome an explicit constitutional exclusion. His position thus had a potentially forward-looking quality: rather than attempting to define the permanent boundaries of the republic in 1787, he helped leave those boundaries politically contestable. Hebraic republicanism could be read as resisting a nationally fixed demos because the Hebrew commonwealth was understood not simply as rule by an exclusive hereditary elite, but as a covenantal political community constituted under law. Franklin’s engagement with Jewish and Talmudic political thought likewise provided a historical model in which political membership and civic obligation were not reducible to a modern property-owning white male electoral class. His familiarity with classical and Hebraic political traditions would therefore have made him aware that leaving the Constitution without a comprehensive national definition of the electorate was not simply an omission but a meaningful choice. By refusing to establish a fixed national demos, he preserved an ambiguity through which Americans excluded from political participation could later argue that the constitutional community had never been permanently closed to them, ie niggers and women.