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I am in the Justice business, of course, so one would think that this would have been a milestone for me on my way to moral perfection, a banner day on the road to virtue.

In fact, when I enlisted the help of my mentor, Chris, as a sort of expert guide in the land of ethics and morals, I suspected that this would be the one virtue in which I could give him a run for his intellectual money. (He’s much smarter than me, you see. To be frank, most of the time I have trouble understanding what he’s talking about.)

As usual, I was wrong.

It turns out that I was as lost about the notion of Justice (at least in the sense that Franklin meant it) as the average, non-Franklin-following citizen. I’m pretty sure that the Justice to which Franklin was referring had a far more personal, less throw-’em-in-jail quality than my type of Justice.

So what was Franklin’s Justice? The answer lies, I believe, in what Edmund Morgan described as “the end of his pragmatism.” After describing the essential practicality—the pragmatism—that seems to permeate our understanding of Franklin as “a willingness to compromise in pursuit of some goal,” Morgan poses the question, “Where did Franklin’s pragmatism end . . . ?”1 In answering his own question, Morgan acknowledges that even during Franklin’s pursuit of some of his most treasured goals, he remained prepared to be, well, pragmatic. There were instances, however, in which Franklin, refused to give in:

But there were occasions when he dug in his heels and refused to make concessions, occasions when his goal was nonnegotiable, when defeat was preferable to compromise, when his pragmatism came to an end, a stop.2

So what were those “occasions”? Certainly, his fight for the rights of “Americans” and, even before that, his fight against the Penn family in their capacity as proprietors of Pennsylvania. The most compelling to modern sensibilities, however, might be his last fight—his last cause. Franklin made his last act of public service a plea to the first U.S. Congress to end slavery. While some have questioned his sincerity on the issue, it seems to me that in this position, this last act of a public servant, we see Franklin’s sense of Justice. His petition to Congress said that “equal liberty was originally . . . the birth-right of all men.” These were the benefits that he saw as his duty, indeed the duty of his new country, to confer.

So that was the type of Justice that Franklin sought. It was a far more profound, foundational brand of Justice than what I had first envisioned when I examined the virtues. This virtue was going to be tougher than it first appeared.

Discovering My Justice Mantra

On the first day of Justice, Justice and Tranquillity met at a cross-roads and tried to beat each other senseless.

I had spent the better part of the day in a trial with a lawyer whose questioning style can best be described as glacial. What would normally take minutes takes hours, hours become days, and days turn into weeks. This is not good. Like milk, Justice gets smelly if it stays around too long.

But in the spirit of Franklin, I was trying to take a broad view of Justice. Perhaps my opponent on this day understood that too often in the criminal justice system, we settle for expediency when the goal should be truth. Maybe, in fact, my desire, at that moment, to strangle him was a reflection of my own poor character and lack of a holistic view of Justice rather than a reaction to his annoying courtroom style.

As I sat, head in hands, listening to the endless drone of his voice, lamenting the bad luck that assigned me to this court on this day, I realized that this was a Franklinian catch-22.

My obligation to participate in this process, to see that Justice was done, was running headlong into my inability, at the moment, to be tranquil. Justice required a fair trial, and my opponent seemed to have the view that a fair trial required him to ask the same questions of witnesses over