Reverend Samuel Cooper has an interesting item in his family history. His grandfather was Samuel Sewall, a judge in the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was involved with the Salem witch trials in 1692-3. Now, to be fair, Sewall did apologize for his part in that bit of foolishness, and he’s also known for writing an essay in 1700 criticizing slavery.

As far as Cooper himself, he was an active Patriot of the Revolutionary Era, who was good friends with many of the Founding Fathers. According to our friends at the Massachusetts Historical Society, when letters written by Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lt. Governor Andrew Oliver were stolen in 1773, they wound up in Benjamin Franklin’s hands.

Franklin in turn sent them to Samuel Cooper, who gave them to Thomas Cushing, the speaker of the Massachusetts assembly. Samuel Adams was the clerk of the Assembly and got to see them. They all knew that the letters were a bit of a bombshell (essentially, Hutchinson and Oliver were misleading Britain regarding conditions in the colonies), but because they were under strict orders not to copy or publish them, their hands were tied.

Samuel Adams, however, came up with the idea of leaking the contents by way of a propaganda campaign in the Assembly that didn’t actually disclose the letters themselves. That was enough to create a political firestorm in Massachusetts, which led to General Gage implementing the Coercive Acts.

Who stole the letters in the first place? It’s still not clear.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed