When did Ben Franklin say "A republic. If you can keep it."
Executive summary
Benjamin Franklin is reported to have said, "A republic, if you can keep it," when asked about the government created by the Constitutional Convention as he departed in 1787, a line preserved in the diary of delegate James McHenry and reiterated by many historical institutions, but its exact wording, setting, and contemporaneous documentation remain debated by historians [1][2][3].
1. The basic claim: who said what and when
The familiar anecdote holds that on or immediately after September 17, 1787—the day delegates finished work on the Constitution—Benjamin Franklin was approached and asked whether the new government was a republic or a monarchy, and replied, "A republic, if you can keep it," an exchange that appears in James McHenry’s journal of the Constitutional Convention and is cited by educational and archival institutions such as the National Constitution Center and the Library of Congress [1][3][2].
2. The primary source behind the story
The linchpin for attributing the line to Franklin is McHenry’s notes, which report that a lady—identified later as Elizabeth Willing Powel by McHenry—asked Franklin “Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy” and that Franklin answered, “A republic if you can keep it,” a passage the Library of Congress and related blogs reproduce and analyze while querying the eyewitness basis of McHenry’s account [1][4].
3. Why historians dispute the precision and context
Scholars and fact-checkers point out that the quotation does not appear in Franklin’s own writings, in the published debates of the Convention, or in contemporary newspapers, and that the phrasing’s first printed circulation came much later when McHenry’s notes were published in the American Historical Review in 1906—raising questions about transmission, memory, and editorial shaping of the anecdote [5][4].
4. Variations and elaborations of the remark
McHenry’s later account and other retellings sometimes append an exchange in which Powel asks how to keep the republic and Franklin warns that the people may overindulge in the "dish" of liberty—versions that expand the terse epigram into a fuller admonition about popular appetite for power; historians caution that such elaborations may reflect later commentary rather than a verbatim 1787 transcript [5][4].
5. Where institutions stand and why the story persists
Major cultural and educational institutions—the National Park Service, the American Philosophical Society, the Library of Congress, and university presses—repeat the anecdote while acknowledging uncertainty about exact wording and circumstances, treating McHenry’s journal as the canonical source even as they use the phrase pedagogically to illuminate founders’ anxieties about republican government [2][6][1][7].
6. Motives, uses, and modern political resonance
The phrase’s enduring appeal owes as much to its rhetorical power as to historical provenance: it functions as a warning and a civic touchstone invoked across the political spectrum, which encourages repetition and occasional embellishment; commentators and partisan actors alike have used the line to press contemporary agendas, a dynamic critics highlight when cautioning against uncritical reliance on the anecdote’s exact wording [5][8].
7. Bottom line on "when" he said it
The most defensible answer is that the remark is reported to have occurred as Franklin left the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787, and is preserved in James McHenry’s diary, but no contemporaneous independent record confirms the exchange, so historians treat the date and attribution as plausible yet not incontrovertibly documented [2][1][5].