William Temple Franklin

Robert Morris, the financier, insisted Washington stay at his mansion on Market Street instead, and Washington accepted.

and on his first afternoon in the city before anything else, he called on Dr. Franklin at his home, the two most famous men in America with nothing yet to preside over.

The Society of the Cincinnati, his own officers, were meeting in Philadelphia that month, and he had begged off their gathering long in advance, pleading his retirement from public life.

Now here he was, in the same city, in the same weeks, attending to something else.

Well, the Virginians drafted, the Pennsylvanians, the only other full delegation in town, conferred with them.

Dinners, taverns, drawing rooms, the two largest states in the Union, getting to know each other's minds for 11 days before the convention ever opened.

Dr. Franklin did his part of the work at his own table.

In the middle of the waiting, he wrote to a friend in London, a brewer who had sent him a cast of porter, and described the company he was keeping.