That the laws made by them for the purposes aforesaid shall not be repugnant, but, as near as may be, agreeable to the laws of England, and shall be transmitted to the King in Council for approbation, as soon as may be after their passing; and if not disapproved within three years after presentation, to remain in force. That, in case of the death of the President-General, the Speaker of the Grand Council for the time being shall succeed, and be vested with the same powers and authorities, to continue till the King's pleasure be known.
That all military commission officers, whether for land or sea service, to act under this general constitution, shall be nominated by the President-General; but the approbation of the Grand Council is to be obtained, before they receive their commissions. And all civil officers are to be nominated by the Grand Council, and to receive the President-General's approbation before they officiate. But, in case of vacancy by death or removal of any officer, civil or military, under this constitution, the Governor of the Province in which such vacancy happens may appoint, till the pleasure of the President-General and Grand Council can be known.
That the particular military as well as civil establishments in each Colony remain in their present state, the general constitution notwithstanding; and that on sudden emergencies any Colony may defend itself, and lay the accounts of expense thence arising before the President-General and General Council, who may allow and order payment of the same, as far as they judge such accounts just and reasonable. The Growth of the American Republic : Volume 1. Seventh Edition.
The colonial governments were to select members of a "Grand Council," while the British Government would appoint a "president General. Acknowledging the tendency of royal colonial governors to override colonial legislatures and pursue unpopular policies, the Albany Plan gave the Grand Council greater relative authority. The plan also allowed the new government to levy taxes for its own support.
Despite the support of many colonial leaders, the plan, as formulated at Albany, did not become a reality. Colonial governments, sensing that it would curb their own authority and territorial rights, either rejected the plan or chose not to act on it at all.
The British Government had already dispatched General Edward Braddock as military commander in chief along with two commissioners to handle Indian relations, and believed that directives from London would suffice in the management of colonial affairs.
The Albany Plan was not conceived out of a desire to secure independence from Great Britain. The former was the projection of Dr. If Hutchinson was correct in , he was wrong three times in the s, and Franklin was wrong twice in and once in Both these drafts are in the handwriting of Jonathan Trumbull, not an Albany commissioner but a member of the Connecticut Council who apparently served as secretary of the committee appointed by the Assembly to report on the Albany Plan after it was brought back by the commissioners.
Internal evidence establishes that the shorter of the two plans is the earlier in composition, though they are bound in reverse order among the Trumbull Papers. Merely for convenience, they will be called here the Trumbull Short Plan and the Trumbull Long Plan, without any intention of ascribing authorship by these names. No contemporary document has been found that mentions a written plan prepared by Hutchinson or any other person in Massachusetts before the Albany meeting.
No proof of either assumption has been found. Certainly the Massachusetts commissioners arrived with some plan in mind, whatever its content and form. After careful study of all the available evidence, the present editors believe that neither the Trumbull Short Plan nor the Trumbull Long Plan, with or without the emendations appearing on the manuscripts, represents the text of a paper written before the Albany meeting and presented to the Congress or its committee for consideration.
A complete exposition of the reasons for this conclusion would require far more space than is appropriate for this headnote. A major reason for rejecting the Gipson identification is found in a detailed textual analysis of the five central documents concerned. They are: 1. The Trumbull Short Plan; 5. The Trumbull Long Plan. For this purpose an arrangement of the five documents in parallel columns is necessary, with those phrases or sentences relating to the same topics placed together, without regard to their order in the different documents.
Gipson has used the similarities within each of the two groups and the differences between the two as a major basis for his hypothesis. In this way Gipson both explains the similarity in wording of the final Albany Plan and the Trumbull plans and supports his hypothesis that the Trumbull plans were written before the Congress met.
Just why Franklin should have made such a borrowing is not clear. By he had been writing for the public—and writing fluently and well—for more than thirty years; moreover, as an active member of the Pennsylvania Assembly he had repeatedly taken part in the drafting of committee reports, messages to the governor, and bills, which embodied the results of discussions of a deliberative body.
In short, he was an old hand at just the sort of writing the Congress asked him to undertake. With all this background, he certainly would have felt no need to resort to the phraseology of a document written by another man which had not served as the basis for the Congress debates.
Such a suggestion must be rejected unless positive evidence in its favor can be produced. Closer examination of the wording of the five documents, arranged in parallel columns by topics, suggests strongly that both Trumbull plans were written after the Albany Plan, not before it.
They are almost certainly two stages of an attempt to revise it into something more acceptable to many New Englanders. They were also key players in the Covenant Chain, the alliance that kept the peace between the Iroquois and the northern British colonies. Albany had long served as the geographic center of the Covenant Chain, and it had hosted many previous intercolonial treaty conferences.
This one, which eventually became known as the Albany Congress, was different because of the unprecedented number of colonies represented and because of the urgency of the situation. Britain could not afford to go to war against France if the Iroquois were not willing at least to remain neutral.
The colonial delegates turned their attention first to renewing the Covenant Chain, which involved exchanging speeches with the Iroquois and providing them with presents. The Crown and colonial governments donated trade goods as material evidence of British regard for their Indian allies.
In addition to conducting their business with the Iroquois, the delegates addressed the issue of intercolonial union. Unity among the colonies was an elusive goal because of their many political, economic, religious, and cultural differences. The political cartoon showed a snake cut into several pieces, which Franklin used to warn his readers about the dangers of division in the face of French encroachments on British claims to the Ohio Valley.
Note that some of the Colonies are not listed, because Franklin lumped the New England Colonies together, and excluded Georgia and Delaware, the latter of which was then part of Pennsylvania. Other delegates also arrived in Albany ready to discuss forging such a union to counter the growing threat on the frontier.
Other colonial governments were more suspicious of any plans that might limit their autonomy, however, so most of the delegates arrived in Albany either without authorization to discuss union or with express instructions not to do so.
The Albany Plan of Union was a creative response to the problems facing the colonies on the eve of the French and Indian War, but it failed to impress the colonial governments or policymakers in Britain. When the delegates carried the plan back to their home governments, they found their efforts greeted mostly by indifference or hostility. None of the colonial assemblies endorsed it. During the Revolutionary era, creating an American political union again became important, but patriots did not cite the Albany Plan as an influence when they attended the Stamp Act Congress , adopted the Articles of Confederation , or ratified the Constitution Despite his presence in the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention, Franklin never explicitly linked the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution to the Albany Plan either.
Rather, in his Autobiography , he postulated that had the Albany Plan been adopted in , it might have very well prevented the crisis that drove the colonies and Britain apart a generation later.
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