As Mike notes, we haven’t talked about the Royal Governor of New Jersey, William Franklin, in quite some time. But matters were quickly coming to a head, and it was decided that he needed to be imprisoned. The biggest reason for this is that he not only remained loyal to the Crown, he actively reported to the British anything he heard about American movements and plans.
William Franklin was finally placed under house arrest in January for these shenanigans, but as things heated up and New Jersey replaced its provincial government, it was determined that he still posed a threat to operational security, and he was sent to Connecticut for imprisonment. And, as Mike also tells you, even prison in Connecticut wasn’t quite getting the job done.
I guess we have to admire his ability to commit to the bit.
As Mike notes, marking today as the day that the first draft of the Declaration of Independence was presented to Congress is largely a matter of interpoloation on the part of historians working from incomplete information. But who are we to argue?
The writing you see in today’s cover art is, in fact, Thomas Jefferson’s, mostly. Some of it is corrections made by Benjamin Franklin. It’s also worth noting that this image came from Wikimedia Commons and is color-adjusted. The original image has the paper looking much whiter, but the parchment coloring makes for a little bit better contrast against the ink.
Incidentally, some documents from this era do look very good still while others are quite faded. The original Declaration of Independence, for example, is rather faded. This is because over time, the ink oxidized from black to a brownish color. In addition, it was displayed under relatively bright light for many years, and the ultraviolet radiation from those lights further faded the ink. The specific paper can also have an effect; some documents are written on a kind of cotton rag, which allows the ink to “bleed” over time and start to look rather smeared, whereas other documents written on vellum (which was basically calfskin) hold their shape better. In both cases the color holds better unless UV gets to it.
Oddly enough, paper from the 19th through mid-20th centuries made use of wood pulp, which turns color and becomes more brittle over time, and is more acidic, which will damage the ink as well. So it’s possible that there could be a “hole” in our historical records unless steps are taken to preserve, or at least digitize, some of them.
After temporarily tabling the Lee Resolution, which called for our independence from Great Britain, the Second Continental Congress identified its Declaration Committee. Five men were chosen to articulate why we were asking King George to go screw himself in the politest possible terms.
While the Committee involved five men—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston—most of the work fell to three of them: Jefferson, Adams and Franklin. Jefferson spent a few days working on the first draft in isolation, then Adams and Franklin began reviewing and revising his work.
The Declaration Committee worked steadily for over two weeks before presenting their finished product to the Congress, though John Hancock did get to see an earlier draft.
Ben Franklin in Canada isn’t completely unreasonable, even though he was already the oldest delegate to the Continental Congress at 70. He was America’s first diplomat and a very skilled one at that, with oodles of charm.
But Franklin in Canada was also a bad idea, because his health was bad and it’s not like he could just shoot up the New York Thruway to get there. He had to head up the Hudson River through Albany and Saratoga, and then across Lake Champlain. And he had to do it in wartime, in hostile territory.
For all that, however, Franklin’s failure in Canada eventually led to the Battle of Saratoga and in turn got the French on our side.
If nothing else, the tenacity of the Continental Congress has to be admired, because sending a delegation to Canada, especially after the recent New Year’s Eve disaster in Quebec, and then the “who knows how well it went” trip in March, was a sign of either eternal optimism or an inability to get the hint.
It was probably a little of Column A and a little of Column B.
At any rate, Ben Franklin, Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll headed up to Montrèal to see if relations with Canada could be smoothed over a little bit. And perhaps they could, but the Canadians still weren’t interested in the events going on to their south.
While we’re focusing on one letter written by Benjamin Franklin today, written to Anthony Todd, it’s rather impressive the sheer number and breadth of letters written by, or to, Franklin during his lifetime as a statesman.
There is a collaborative effort going on between Yale University and the American Philospohical Society, among others, to search, collect and publish the various works of Benjamin Franklin. So far over forty volumes have been published since 1959, and the scholars involved are pretty sure that number will surpass 50.
Important to this effort is the fact that Franklin saved a lot of his correspondence specifically for the sake of posterity. As a result we have perhaps a more complete collection of what historians like to call “primary sources” of materials than for any other Founding Father. What’s more, Franklin didn’t just dash off quick notes; he treated them like miniature works of art and crafted their composition. This came in handy when he edited the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. It was his suggestion that the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident” whereas Jefferson had described them as “sacred and undeniable.”
So here’s a fun story about Charles Carroll. As I’ve mentioned many times before, lots and lots of place names in Baltimore have strong historical connections and Charles Carroll is no exception.
There is, of course, a Carroll Street, which starts in the southeast neighborhood of Morrell Park. It doesn’t go quite through that neighborhood though; it gets broken up by a couple of blocks’ worth of houses and resumes again. There’s another break as a railroad right-of-way comes through—but there’s no train crossing; the road just terminates. Carroll Street resumes (we’re still in Morrell Park) on the other side, however, before it’s interrupted yet again.
Now as I understand it, this particular part of the neighborhood was wiped out completely by Hurricane Agnes in the early 1970s, so the rebuild was kind of haphazard. Plus, I-95 was first constructed through this part of Baltimore City around this time, so you have to jump almost 3500 feet before Carroll Street resumes again.
But now you’re not in a residential neighborhood; it’s series of warehouses and industrial buildings for a stretch until it gets back into a residential neighborhood known as Pigtown, so called because on Market days, pigs would be led through the streets to the market for sale and eventual slaughter. Carroll Street meets with Cross Street in that neighborhood, and that’s the northern terminus.
However.
There’s an elementary school in the area that’s also named after Charles Carroll. It’s not on Carroll Street (of course) but is about two blocks away, in Pigtown. Now, remember, Charles Carroll was a lawyer, or a “barrister” as the old-timey types like to say. So Elementary School #34 is officially “Charles Carroll, Barrister Elementary School”. Except everybody forgets the comma is there and says it like one long name. And chances are, they think there was a guy actually named Charles Carroll Barrister somewhere in history.
And wasn’t that a long walk for a short drink of water.
Portrait of William Franklin, 1790, attributed to Mather Brown. via Wikimedia.
It used to be rumored that Benjamin Franklin had over 30 children out of wedlock, but that’s since been debunked. (And there goes a perfectly good “lightning rod” joke.)
But William Franklin was considered illegitimate, though he was raised by his father and his common-law wife Deborah Read. There are some breadcrumbs here and there that lead some historians to believe that Deborah was, in fact, William’s mother, but nothing thick enough exists to confirm that.
At any rate, William was one of the last great Loyalists, and while his arrest and move to Connecticut was alluded to in the play 1776, it didn’t quite happen the way it was described there. Or at the time the viewer was led to believe. Tune in to get the real story from Mike.
Yeah, I cheated and used the same image from last week.
While he didn’t use a rattlesnake, Benjamin Franklin was the guy who came up with the original “Join or Die” snake image [right]back in 1754. (At least most people give him credit for it.)
It was based in a superstition that if you cut up a snake into pieces and then reassembled those pieces before sunset, the snake could be resurrected. In 1754, during the French and Indian War, Delaware was part of Pennsylvania and New England’s four colonies were simply grouped together. Georgia was altogether omitted and nobody knows why.
At any rate, it’s only fitting that when the Gadsden Flag, which we talked about in the December 20th episode, made its debut, Franklin was the one who took the time to opine on why a snake was so appropriate; what’s more why a rattlesnake was the best choice. He published an essay in a local newspaper under a pen name, but his identity was figured out anyway.
Ben Franklin and Gabriel de Borbón had corresponded with one another previously, so while the letter that is the subject of today’s episode has a very specific (and relevant) ask in it, it was also just another in a chain of correspondence between the two.
For his part, Prince Gabriel was probably receptive to Franklin’s suggestions, but he wasn’t likely to be in a position to act on them in the way that Franklin hoped. As the fourth son of Charles III, the throne was a long way off, though he was considered the heir apparent for some time.
When Spain provided assistance the following year, they did so because Spain and France were allies and France was providing assistance to the Americans; furthermore they had their own bone to pick with the British, so Two Birds and all that. So they sent over lots of assistance, mostly in the form of money so that the Continental Army could purchase cannons, mortars, gun carriages and other ordinance.
It’s possible that Prince Gabriel had some influence on his father, but more likely is that Charles III was simply maintaining existing alliances.
