Elizabeth Willing Powel is the woman in one of the most quoted lines of the founding era: asked whether the Constitutional Convention had produced a republic or a monarchy, Benjamin Franklin is said to have answered, 'A republic, if you can keep it.' The source is the journal of James McHenry, a delegate from Maryland. In an entry dated 18 September 1787, the day after the delegates signed the Constitution, McHenry wrote that a lady asked Dr. Franklin what they had got, a republic or a monarchy, and that the Doctor replied: a republic, if you can keep it. He added a note naming her as Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia. She and her husband Samuel Powel lived in the house at 244 South Third Street, and the Library of Congress notes that the conversation might have taken place in it.
Whether McHenry heard the exchange himself or learned of it secondhand is not known. In an 1814 letter to a friend, Powel wrote that she had no recollection of any such conversations, yet could not deny, after so many years, that they had passed. Later retellings dropped her name for an anonymous lady and moved the scene to the steps of Independence Hall.
Powel was the daughter, sister and wife of mayors of Philadelphia. Samuel Powel bought the house, built in 1765, for 3,150 pounds in 1769, and the couple hosted political and social gatherings in it from the Revolution through Washington's presidency, with George and Martha Washington as regular guests. In November 1792 she urged Washington not to retire after one term, warning that his departure could be read as a sign that the republic had failed. Samuel died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, and she sold the house in 1798.
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