250 and Counting

Tag: Benjamin Franklin

  • The French Commission

    Cover art for September 26, 1776: 1785 portrait of Arthur Lee by Charles Willson Peale. via Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.

    The Continental Congress, in the wake of Washington’s recent letter, finally realized that they weren’t going to be able to defeat the British on their own. Some outside assistance would be needed.

    So on this day in 1776, they appointed a three-man commission to undertake a diplomatic mission to France, seeking money, arms and other materials.

    France, as we’ve mentioned before, was a good country to hit up. They were still salty about the way the French and Indian War ended up, and they’d already been assisting America through gray and black markets, in order to give themselves plausible deniability should someone get caught. Should this mission succeed, the activity would be much more overt, and could be perceived as France’s official recognition of the United States as a sovereign nation.

    It ultimately didn’t work out that way; that particular distinction went to Morocco and France became the second nation to officially recognize the US.

    As Mike notes, the trip itself wouldn’t get underway for another few months, but there’s no doubt that the meeting with French authorities marked a critical turning point for the American Revolution.

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  • The Staten Island Peace Conference–September 11, 1776

    Cover art for September 11, 1`776: The Billop House on Staten Island, where the aborted peace conference took place. Via Wikimedia Commons.

    The Staten Island Peace Conference was a bust almost from the beginning. Not because the sides were so opposed, but because one side didn’t have the authority to do any real negotiation.

    John Adams, Edward Rutledge and Benjamin Franklin had to row over from Perth Amboy, New Jersey to get to the Totten House, which is near the southernmost tip of New York State, on Staten Island. At the narrowest point I could find from the vicinity of the house, that’s nearly a half-mile across the mouth of the Arthur Kill River where it opens into Raritan Bay and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean.

    Unfortunately, Admiral Howe was so limited from a diplomatic standpoint that there wasn’t a lot he could do at that point, so after a few hours they broke up and the delegation was allowed to return to New Jersey. The war would continue for another severn years before concluding.

    In retrospect, we have multiple attempts for Admiral Howe to meet with George Washington, which failed on the basis of protocol (Howe wouldn’t refer to Washington as a General), so now we have to wonder what direction negotiations would have gone had one of those attempts succeeded. Would things be different, or would it wind up the same, and the events of today be obviated? If a meeting in July had ended in no agreement, would John Sullivan even have been paroled to go to Philadelphia and present the plan?

    I’ll leave that for you to chew on. In the meantime I’m still sounding pretty sultry, so enjoy that.

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  • The Peace Delegation–September 9, 1776

    Cover art for September 9, 1776: portrait of Edward Rutledge, ca. 1791 by James Earl. Via Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston SC.

    First off, my apologies to you, and to Mike (because it was his episode), for not double-checking that yesterday’s episode was actually loaded into the feed. I’ve been fighting off a ridiculous sinus infection and I think my medication had me woozy.

    On the bright side, I’m probably sounding extra sexy in today’s episode because my head still feels like a brick.

    Yesterday’s show should be in your podcast feed now, though, along with this one.

    Today we have a trio of delegates headed to New York to attempt peace talks with the British. Meanwhile back in Philadelphia, the Congress officially declares that our country’s name is the United States of America. Check out the story behind that.

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  • Getting The Finer Details–July 30, 1776

    Cover art for July 30, 1776: Portrait of Rev. John Witherspoon by Rembrandt Peale, c. 1794. via National Portrait Gallery.

    Both Dr. Benjamin Franklin and the Reverend John Witherspoon made good points when they discussed state representation in Congress under the Articles of Confederation they were trying to put together.

    The interesting thing is that the debate sounds very much like a modern-day discussion with regard to the nations that participate in NATO. Smaller nations are feeling a little “pushed out” by larger nations; the larger nations feel as though they’re dealing with most of the burden. And while those larger nations are correct in that the smaller nations aren’t making the contributions to which they initially agreed, it’s a matter of cure, not disengagement.

    At any rate, as Mike notes, the siguation won’t be fully addressed through the Articles of Confederation; ultimately they kicked the can down the road and, when the AoC finally collapsed, our current bicameral legislature attempted to address the large/wealthy states vs. small/poorer states representation conundrum. The system could still use some fixes (e.g. the current total number of Representatives in the House is unconstitutionally low, by literally a couple of decimal places), but it’s all in pursuit of a more perfect Union. We screwed up today but we’ll get it a little more right tomorrow.

    After Reverend John Witherspoon left Congress, he returned to Princeton, where the campus had been badly damaged by the British. He worked diligently to repair the damage. He was also a member of the New Jersey convention that ratified the US Constitution, and he organized the Presbyterian Church in the United States.

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  • The Declaration Begins–June 11, 1776

    Cover art for June 11, 1776: "Writing the Declaration of Independence 1776" by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, 1900. via Wikimedia Commons.

    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.

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  • From One Postal Official To Another–March 29, 1776

    Cover Art for March 29, 1776: a letter from Ben Franklin to the Secret Correspondence Committee, 1777.

    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.”

    The full text of Franklin’s letter can be found here.

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  • Taking Canada’s Temperature–March 5, 1776

    Cover art for March 5, 1776: Charles Carroll by Michael Laty. Created 1846, making this a posthumous portrait.

    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.

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  • Arrest of a Franklin–January 28, 1776

    Cover art for January 28, 1776: Portrait of William Franklin, 1790, attributed to Mather Brown. via Wikimedia.
    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.

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  • Ben Franklin Analyzes the Snake–December 27, 1775

    Cover art for December 27, 1775: the Gadsden Flag, featuring a rattlesnake warning people away.
    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.

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  • Congress Has A Busy Day–November 6, 1775

    Cover art for November 6, 1775: portrait of John Langdon by Hattie Elizabeth Burdette, 1916.

    There are going to be days when no truly big events happen, but that wasn’t going to stop the Second Continental Congress from getting stuff done.

    Today we have a bit of an image of that group as a bunch of men who are hard-drinking philosophers, ready—and maybe eager—to burst into fisticuffs, or perhaps the occasional song, depending on where you got your impressions.

    So for that reason, we do like to remind you that the Continental Congress, for all their weird little squabbles, was a serious group of men. They took their jobs seriously, and put a lot of thought into everything they did. They often put in long hours, working until after darkness fell many days, and they typically worked six days a week.

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