Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  By strange historical alchemy, they were in London at the very moment young George III and his new bride, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, were crowned in Westminster Abbey. Interestingly enough, it was Billy Franklin who sat inside the grand abbey for the event, in a VIP seat costing ten guineas, while his father, Ben, contented himself with a view of the royal procession from a curbside wooden booth.

  The father-and-son pair was in London for more than one reason, not so incidentally. For one thing, Ben Franklin, already famous for his scientific experiments, had seen his conclusions published in the proceedings of England’s most prestigious assembly of scientists, the Royal Society. “He had been made a member of this select body,” wrote historian Thomas Fleming in his book Liberty! The American Revolution, “and from the moment he came to England, the cultured and sophisticated members of English society had virtually adopted him. England’s Oxford and Scotland’s St. Andrew’s Universities gave him honorary doctorates. Oxford threw in a master of arts for William because he had assisted his father in many experiments—notably the risky feat of flying a kite in a thunderstorm.”

  As Fleming noted also, they both loved the “Mother Country,” and for handsome young Billy, still only thirty years of age, there was one further pleasure—“In London he met none of the social rebuffs he frequently encountered in provincial Philadelphia because he was illegitimate.”

  Indeed, Billy won such acceptance that he was able to resume his law studies at the Inns of Court, meet the king’s new prime minister, Lord Bute, and even, in 1762, marry Elizabeth Downes, a devotee to the Crown originally from the West Indies.

  He and his father, in the meantime, had achieved a major coup in a long-standing dispute with Thomas and Richard Penn, sons of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania. As historian Fleming explained the situation, “As proprietors of the colony, the Penns owned huge swaths of the countryside. With a greed that made it clear they disdained their saintly father’s Quaker faith, they instructed the governor, whom they appointed, to forbid the legislature to tax their lands.”

  The two Franklins made it their business to petition the Privy Council for relief—but Ben Franklin ran into a buzz saw when he approached council president John Carteret, the Earl Granville, a brother-in-law, it so happened, to Thomas Penn. “You Americans have wrong ideas on the nature of your constitution,” he grandly stated. “The King is legislator for the colonies.”

  Not quite, argued the wily elder Franklin. “As the [colonial] assemblies cannot make permanent laws without his [the king’s] assent,” he retorted, “so neither can he make a law for them without theirs.”

  Well, Lord Granville certainly couldn’t accept that notion, and Ben Franklin retired to his lodgings with nothing to show for his petitioning effort thus far. Clearly, a new strategy was needed.

  Putting their heads together, the two Franklins—and a British attorney they hired—came up with a typically American ploy, a publicity campaign. Fleming again: “It began with a full-length book on the history of the government of Pennsylvania, which William Franklin researched and [Attorney Richard] Jackson wrote. The most important thing about it was the motto on the title page, which was Benjamin Franklin’s contribution: ‘Those who give up essential liberty, to preserve a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’

  “Simultaneously, Jackson lobbied…on Franklin’s behalf. Franklin’s friends, who included Dr. John Pringle, Lord Bute’s personal physician, also spoke up on his behalf at St. James’s Palace. The coup de grace was a direct appeal to William Pitt himself. The Great Commoner sided emphatically with the Americans. The Penns were soon practically pleading for mercy, and in a final showdown before the chief justice of the King’s Bench, they feebly surrendered all their objections and agreed to let their lands be taxed.”

  Next, another coup, but a controversial one on both sides of the great water, the Franklins returned to America with Billy Franklin’s appointment as royal governor of New Jersey fresh in hand. He took office in 1763. Another chapter, another life thus began for the younger Franklin…but it also was a pathway eventually leading to estrangement from his father.

  As an early indication of the pending split, Royal Governor Franklin of New Jersey took occasion in the midst of colonial outrage against the infamous Stamp Act in 1765 to express his own umbrage over the “outrageous conduct” of the violent mob actions in Boston. While many a thoughtful citizen might have agreed, the fact is that Billy Franklin was already parting company with his famous father, now back in London.

  When the elder Franklin returned to the turbulent colonies in 1775, the year after his wife Deborah’s death, daughter Sarah greeted him with the bald statement: “Billy is a Tory!” Benjamin apparently had held hopes his son would have resigned his royal post in support of the long struggle for colonial liberties. But no, Sarah and her husband, Richard Bache, told Franklin, despite his advocacy in London, despite the recent fighting in Lexington and Concord, William’s loyalty was to Lord North and the Crown of England.

  Immediately made a member of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Continental Congress, Ben Franklin met shortly afterward with his son and Joseph Galloway, an old friend who refused to join the revolutionary body. It was a long meeting, during which William and Galloway would “denounce both sides in the dispute,” historian Fleming noted.

  When Ben Franklin told them he was “for independence,” wrote Fleming in Liberty, “The two younger men could only gasp and shake their heads.” In their view, “the Continental Congress was as wrongheaded as Parliament, with the worse handicap that the Congress had no legal right to exist.” They were stunned to learn that the elder Franklin, until now “a symbol of moderation and rational moderation,” could espouse “this radical idea [independence], which thus far only a few extremists dared to whisper in private.”

  In the Congress, assembled in Philadelphia, meanwhile, there were men as eminent as Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee who were suspicious of Benjamin Franklin’s sincerity, due to the fact that his own son remained a royal governor—of next-door New Jersey, for that matter. Shortly, too, William alarmed all his father’s fellow Patriots by talking his New Jersey legislators into endorsing a petition to the British king that, in Fleming’s words, “threatened to unravel the fragile American union.” A visit to Trenton by members of the Continental Congress “barely” managed to end that threat.

  As in her sister American colonies, the governing circles of New Jersey were in turmoil anyway. Governor Franklin, after firing the colonial treasurer in 1774 in a matter of theft, had been at odds with his legislators ever since. In early 1775, they tried to cut back his salary and the rental payments on his home unless he moved away from the capital. He, in turn, dissolved the assembly session.

  Then came bombshell news—ever since May of 1774, William Franklin had been sending informational reports to Colonial Secretary Lord Dartmouth, along with offers to serve as a peacemaker between the Mother Country and her colonials. Why this should have been surprising to anyone of the time is a mystery today, but the news was greeted as a final turning point, both by Franklin’s long-standing enemies and by more neutral observers. It didn’t help that he accused his critics of being “actuated by unmanly private resentment, or by the conviction that their whole political consequence depends upon a contention with their Governor.”

  He once more cut off the New Jersey Assembly’s session on May 23, 1775, with a call to meet again in a month. Only three days after his legislators went home, however, Franklin’s rule in New Jersey effectively and abruptly ended. A Provincial Congress of New Jersey assembled at Trenton on May 23 and took over the reins of government in all but name. William Franklin more formally was bereft of office when the Patriots adopted a state constitution in July and installed William Livingston as their new governor.

  For Ben Franklin’s son, events now only went from bad to worse. Charged with treason and arrested when he refused to live under p
arole, he was “exiled” to Connecticut, where he was confined for a time in the Litchfield jail. George Washington was somewhat agitated to learn that the guards escorting this enemy of the Revolution had allowed him a stop at Hackensack on the way out of New Jersey.

  Franklin’s wife, in the meantime, took up residence with the Loyalists and occupying British forces in New York. When she was suffering the next year from a terminal illness, George Washington would not relent in his enmity for William Franklin and permit him to visit the dying woman. She succumbed in August of 1777.

  In a prisoner exchange not long after, Franklin was allowed himself to take up residence in New York for the remainder of the war. But he wasn’t quite ready to sit out the hostilities quietly. Still an active apostle of the British Crown in 1780, he formed the militia group known as the Associated Loyalists to conduct guerrilla-like raids against Americans in New Jersey and Connecticut. As one action led to reprisal, and reprisal led to more reprisal in this bloody side war, Franklin’s militiamen outraged George Washington, Tom Paine, and Patriots in general by hanging a captured American officer in retaliation for the earlier shooting of a Loyalist. George Washington called the Loyalist action an atrocity and ordered the execution of a British prisoner as yet another reprisal. In the end, fortunately, the man picked for the hangman’s noose was spared and, on the British side, the controversial Associated Loyalists were disbanded.

  With the hostilities at last ended by treaty in 1783, William Franklin soon moved on to England, where he saw his venerable father for the first time in a decade. Theirs was only a lukewarm reconciliation, by most accounts. For one thing, according to historian Fleming, “[Ben] Franklin could not forget that William was wanted in America for murder and other crimes committed by the Associated Loyalists…”

  Further, by Fleming’s account again, the elderly Ben handed his son a bill for 1,500 pounds—loaned years before to help William keep up his lifestyle as royal governor of New Jersey. Other accounts say that Ben forgave William his debts—in any case, Ben Franklin did leave his son some land in Nova Scotia, but it’s not clear that the title was definitive enough to be fully valid.

  While his father returned to America in that same year of 1785 (and died there in 1790 at the age of eighty-four), son William passed his remaining years in England. After a protracted struggle to assure the Loyalist Claims Commission of a loyalty to the Crown unfettered by ties to his father, William finally was granted 1,800 pounds sterling in compensation for properties he lost in America. Also winning a government pension, he lived in London until his death in 1813—like his father, he died in his early eighties.

  William’s illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin, in the meantime, had spent years in France with grandfather Benjamin as a confidential secretary and aide, much as William once had done as an equally young man. By some accounts, Temple also fathered an illegitimate child—a daughter named Ellen. It was to her that William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin and onetime royal governor of New Jersey, left his estate.

  “Most Arbitrary Usurpations”

  THEY NEVER SHOULD HAVE BELIEVED THEIR MAN IN CAROLINA WHEN HE SAID just to send a few troops. Send them, he vowed, and the Loyalists of North Carolina would rise up against those infernal rebels and crush them! Not only North Carolina, but the entire South would be saved for the Crown. Just send the troops. Send them quickly!

  Back in London, it sounded reasonable enough. All those Scottish Highlanders over there—now considered absolutely loyal to the Crown they had fought in the past. Plus, there were other loyal subjects of His Majesty in the colony who surely would join the fight, and with one blow they all together would smite those presumptuous rebels who dared to raise their fist. And so…send the troops they, the managers in London, indeed would.

  Now it was Royal Governor Josiah Martin’s turn. He would send out the call, raise his army of adherents to the king, and all would be well. They had only to march, to meet the soon-arriving troops, and then turn their combined, righteous might against the ill-led, ill-clothed, ill-organized, ill-trained rebels. Against those so-called Patriots.

  It was true, of course, that Governor Martin had been forced a bit earlier to abandon the traditional colonial capital of New Bern. Spiking the palace guns and burying the royal powder beneath the cellar floor and in a cabbage patch, he had slipped away from the capital under the cover of darkness one night late in May 1775. He briefly took up residence in not-so-stout Fort Johnston on the Cape Fear River below Brunswick. And there he would have stayed for a while, except that the normal caretaker garrison of twenty-five men was down to less than half that number—except, too, that the pesky rebels served notice they would be coming any day to seize the fort’s guns.

  Martin then felt obliged to move on once more, this time to the Royal Navy’s offshore sloop Cruizer. And a good thing, too, since the rebels burned down the fort shortly afterward, on July 18, 1775. As a result, Royal Governor Martin was reduced to directing a shadow government from the only British warship in the vicinity.

  For a retired army officer tracing his lineage back to a follower of William the Conqueror, it was a damnable situation to be in…but by now not an entirely new one for the fifth and last of North Carolina’s royal governors. Hardly new, in fact.

  In the short four years since Josiah Martin had succeeded William Tryon as royal governor in 1771, the newcomer at New Bern had been subjected to the same steady erosion of authority experienced by virtually all the royal governors in the tumultuous 1770s.

  The very year of Martin’s arrival, the North Carolina Assembly, still a legitimate and royally sanctioned body, rescinded an unpopular colonial tax imposed since 1748. Martin, disagreeing in principle, vetoed his legislature’s action. The tax, for the moment, still stood.

  The Assembly quickly retaliated with instruction for the various county sheriffs to ignore their tax-collection duty, whereupon Martin, as royal governor, dissolved the Assembly. But he was foiled there, too. House Speaker Richard Caswell still managed to send out word instructing the sheriffs against collecting the controversial tax.

  More frustrating for the new governor, he issued a proclamation ordering the sheriffs to go ahead and collect the tax anyway, only to see his edict widely ignored.

  That was only the beginning of the downhill slide in Josiah Martin’s authority as royal governor, a descent ending with his lament in 1775 that “nothing but a shadow” of royal authority was left in North Carolina.

  After the sheriffs debacle of 1771, Martin had waited until January 1773 to call a new Assembly into session. The burning issue keeping the royal governor and the colonists at odds this time would be a courts-related measure allowing the Carolina colonists to seize local assets of nonresidents who owed local debts—that is to say, debtors safely located in distant England.

  With no agreement reached on the issue, a renewable law providing the foundation of the colony’s court system was left un-renewed—North Carolina found itself with no judicial system, other than lower magisterial chambers for petty crimes and small civil cases. When Martin tried to create emergency criminal courts by executive fiat, the Assembly refused to fund them. And so he had been foiled again.

  During the same period, both governor and citizens of North Carolina were reacting predictably to the larger pre-Revolutionary issues gripping all of colonial America—the Boston “Tea Party” was matched in North Carolina, as in other colonies, by public protest and boycotts of British tea. At the end of 1773 also, North Carolina’s Assembly joined Patriot leaders of other colonies in establishing Committees of Correspondence as a means of exchanging information with one another.

  For North Carolina, the most dramatic showdown yet came in the summer of 1774, when Martin refused to allow his Assembly to meet and choose delegates for the predictably hostile Continental Congress of Colonials soon to convene in Philadelphia. Undeterred—and now taking matters into their own hands with no legal authority to do so—North Carolina’s
colonists held a mass meeting in Wilmington to sanction by their own fiat a gathering in New Bern the next month, a gathering they boldly termed a “provincial congress independent of the governor.” The provincial body accordingly did meet, and it did choose three Carolina delegates to the First Continental Congress.

  By spring of the next year, Patriot militiamen had made their appearance in North Carolina, and Martin found his authority further eroding as he called his Assembly into session at New Bern on April 4. The defiant colonial leaders responded by convening their Second Provincial Congress in New Bern the day before—with all but one of the fifty-two legally constituted Assembly members also counted as Provincial Congress members.

  It was no surprise, then, to see the “legal” Assembly play exact copycat to the extralegal provincial body before a thoroughly frustrated Royal Governor Martin once again dissolved an Assembly session—dissolved it and despairingly wrote to his superiors in London that he was in a “most despicable and mortifying” position.

  He also took the time, incidentally, to add one of the most striking paeans to the British Crown to come out of the revolutionary period. Providing unwitting view of the loyalist motivation at its most pure, Josiah Martin wrote a statement of fidelity, almost of love, as he deplored the sight of “the Sacred Majesty of my Royal Master insulted, the Rights of His Crown denied and violated, His Government set at naught, and trampled upon, his servants of highest dignity reviled, traduced, abused, the Rights of His Subjects destroyed by the most arbitrary usurpations, and the whole Constitution unhinged and prostrate…”

  None of which is to say that Royal Governor Martin was ready to furl his flag and abandon the field—not at all, not even while relegated to a government “headquarters” aboard a wooden sailing ship plying a North Carolina river. No sir, so far as he was concerned, those “motley mobs,” those “promoters of sedition,” would yet rue the day.