the great conciliator................

 

"When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair," he explained to his friend Cadwallader Colden, "one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater."  It was a sentiment he would express in similar words when he became the great conciliator at the Constitutional Convention thirty-three years later.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life