Albany Plan of Union: Ben Franklin's First Draft of America
Near Albany, New York
Long before the Constitution, Albany was the site of America's first serious proposal for a unified colonial government.
In seventeen fifty-four, delegates from seven colonies gathered here for the Albany Congress, called in the shadow of looming war with France. Benjamin Franklin arrived with a bold idea: a single intercolonial council with the authority to raise armies, make treaties with Native nations, and levy taxes. The Albany Plan of Union was debated, agreed upon by the delegates, and then promptly rejected, by the colonial assemblies, who feared giving up power, and by the British government, which feared the colonists gaining too much.
Franklin later reflected that if the plan had been adopted, the bloody contest with Britain might have been avoided.
The Albany Plan's architecture of shared sovereignty and distributed authority, balancing central power against local autonomy, did foreshadow adjustments that the framers built into the seventeen eighty-seven Constitution thirty-three years later.
