Benjamin Franklin, Part 2: Humiliation at the Cockpit

Charles Thomson

Welcome back. Last time, Dr. Franklin, we left you in London at Christmas of 1773. You'd printed that letter in the Public Advertiser taking sole responsibility for getting the Hutchinson letters, to stop two gentlemen from killing each other in a duel, and London turned on you at once. Which brings us to a Saturday in January. The Cockpit.

Benjamin Franklin

The Cockpit. Named for the cockfights Henry the Eighth held there, which I thought was fitting, since I was about to be the bird. January the twenty ninth, 1774, a room in Whitehall, and it was packed. Thirty five Privy Councilors, Lord North among them, Lord Dartmouth, who had always talked so nicely about conciliation, and Earl Gower in the chair. Then the public squeezed in around the edges. Edmund Burke was there, Joseph Priestley, Edward Bancroft, even General Gage. Officially, the business was the Massachusetts petition to remove Governor Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor Oliver.

Charles Thomson

Officially.

Benjamin Franklin

Officially. Everyone knew the petition would be refused. The only question was how the government would go about it, and they went about it by putting me on trial without a trial. Solicitor General Wedderburn stood up and spoke for more than an hour, and hardly a word of it was about whether Hutchinson should be governor. It was about me. The sacredness of private letters, how I'd forfeited the respect of honest men, how no one would ever trust me with a paper again. He called me a man of three letters, which is the Latin for thief. He said I was the prime conductor of the whole contrivance, which was a little joke at my electrical experiments. And he compared me to Zanga, the vengeful villain in Dr. Young's play, who confesses he forged the letter and hated and destroyed.

Charles Thomson

And the room?

Benjamin Franklin

The room laughed. Lords chuckled, some of them laughed out loud, and some applauded. I said afterward it felt like a bull baiting, with me as the bull. Only Lord North kept a straight face, and I credit him for that. Priestley noticed it too.

Charles Thomson

Bancroft was standing near you. He wrote that you stood perfectly erect, in a suit of spotted Manchester velvet, and that your face never changed.

Benjamin Franklin

I'd arranged my face before I walked in, like a man arranging his cravat. Years earlier I'd taken a trouble over a bit of wood in the same spirit, and I decided my features would be as stiff as one. So, you ask why? Two reasons. First, my counsel, Mr. Dunning, advised me not to answer. Second, and this took me longer to understand, that room wasn't a court. A court weighs evidence. This was theater, and every word I spoke would have been a new line for the next performance. Silence was the only thing they couldn't quote against me.

Charles Thomson

When Wedderburn finished and called you to be examined, you declined.

Benjamin Franklin

I said I did not choose to be examined. Then the spectators were cleared out, and the Council threw out the petition. Called it groundless and scandalous, if I remember the words. The next day, or the day after, I was notified that I was no longer Deputy Postmaster General for North America. I'd held that office since 1753. I'd taken a post that lost money and made it pay, and sped up the mails besides. Gone, in a morning. I'll tell you what I wrote to Priestley, because it surprised me. I said I'd never felt so sensible of the power of a good conscience. I knew I'd acted for the public good, and that was a warm thing to hold in a cold room.

Charles Thomson

But the humiliation cost you something besides a salary.

Benjamin Franklin

It cost me a dream. For nearly twenty years I'd imagined an empire of equal partners, assemblies in America and Parliament in London, all of them bound together by one Crown. I'd defended that picture in print and in drawing rooms. And in that room, I watched the people who governed Britain laugh at it, and at me, which in the end was the same thing. Dr. Priestley and others have said that day made a rebel of me, and I won't argue. Though I'll add a smaller piece of satisfaction. I kept that velvet suit. Four years later, on the sixth of February, 1778, I put it on again in Paris to sign the treaty of alliance with France.

Charles Thomson

Patience as a form of revenge.

Benjamin Franklin

Revenge is a strong word for a man of my temperament. Call it good tailoring.

Charles Thomson

You sailed in March of 1775 and landed in Philadelphia on the fifth of May, two weeks after Lexington and Concord. Congress put you on committees almost before you'd unpacked.

Benjamin Franklin

They did, and I was glad to be useful. By June of 1776 I was one of the five on the committee for the declaration, with Jefferson, Adams, Sherman and Livingston. Mr. Jefferson wrote it, and he wrote it beautifully. I only made small changes. One I'm fond of. He had written that we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. I suggested we say self evident instead.

Charles Thomson

Why does one word matter so much?

Benjamin Franklin

Because sacred rests on a church, and undeniable invites a quarrel. Self evident rests on reason. It says a man can look at the matter himself, with no priest or king required, and see that equality is true. That seemed to me the stronger footing for a new nation. My own opinion, I should say, and I wouldn't claim the committee debated it for hours.

Charles Thomson

Now, I've read John Adams's account of the trip to Staten Island that September, when Lord Howe invited Congress to send envoys. The inns were full. You and Adams were given one bed.

Benjamin Franklin

New Brunswick, the ninth of September. A room hardly bigger than the bed, no chimney, and one small window. Mr. Adams, who was feeling poorly and had a deep respect for the dangers of night air, shut it. I told him we'd be suffocated. You may remember from our last conversation that I took my air baths every morning with the window open, so this was a matter of principle. I told him to open it, come to bed, and I'd explain my theory of colds.

Charles Thomson

Which is?

Benjamin Franklin

That cold air doesn't give you a cold. Foul air does. Two men in a small shut room breathe over and over what their lungs and skin have thrown off, and that is the real trouble. He opened the window, jumped in, and said he'd read my letters on the subject and thought it a paradox, but he was curious enough to risk a chill. So I explained, at some length, about respiration and perspiration.

Charles Thomson

Adams wrote that he fell asleep in the middle of it, and that the last words he heard were spoken by a man more than half asleep himself. He also wrote that he never got a satisfactory answer to his objections.

Benjamin Franklin

Then the lecture worked on him, at least as a sleeping draught. He's a better man than his opinions about drafts. I'd sooner share a bed with John Adams than argue with him in Congress. In bed, he only argued until he nodded off.

Charles Thomson

Doctor, there's one more cost from that Saturday at the Cockpit. Your son.

Benjamin Franklin

William. Yes. I'll be as honest as I can, since I'm near the end of my days and have no reason to dress it up. William had been my partner. He worked beside me on the electrical experiments, he studied law in London, and I lobbied hard to get him made Governor of New Jersey, which he did well. When I was humiliated at the Cockpit, I expected him to be furious on my behalf, and to resign. Instead, he advised me to take my medicine and retire quietly.

Charles Thomson

So the same event pushed you in opposite directions.

Benjamin Franklin

Exactly. I left the Empire behind. He held to it, out of loyalty and conviction, and I try to say that fairly. In June of 1776, New Jersey arrested him. He was held in Connecticut for two years, and when he was exchanged, he went to New York and led the loyalists there. In 1784 he wrote to me, hoping to mend things, and I answered him. I told him nothing had ever hurt me so much as to be deserted in my old age by my only son, and to see him take up arms against me when my fortune and my life were at stake. I said I would try to forget it, as well as I could. I haven't managed it very well. When I wrote my will, I left him almost nothing, and I said so plainly in it. I'm not proud of the will, and I'm not ashamed of the grief behind it.

Charles Thomson

That's an honest answer, Doctor. I'll leave it there.

Benjamin Franklin

Thank you. It's a quieter subject than my theory of colds, but I think about it more.

Charles Thomson

We'll stop here. In late October of 1776, Congress sent a seventy year old man across a wartime Atlantic on a ship called the Reprisal, to ask the King of France for money, guns, and an alliance. Next time, Doctor, Paris.

Benjamin Franklin

And the velvet suit, Mr. Thomson. Don't forget the suit.