Benjamin Franklin, Part 1: A Spark in the Powder

Charles Thomson

I'm Charles Thomson. For fifteen years I was Secretary of the Continental Congress, and I took the minutes at every debate. The minutes tell you who spoke. They don't tell you what it cost them. So I've asked the Founders to sit down with me and fill in the rest. Benjamin Franklin's story takes three parts, and this is the first. Doctor Franklin, here's what I want the listeners to know. The most famous American alive was a loyal Briton until he was sixty eight years old.

Benjamin Franklin

Sixty eight, and I'd have told you I was proud of it. People forget that now. They see the lightning rod and the Declaration and assume I came out of the womb ready to make trouble. I was born a subject of the King in 1706, and for most of my life I thought the British Empire was the finest political achievement in history. I didn't want to leave it. I wanted to fix it.

Charles Thomson

You spent nearly two decades in London doing it.

Benjamin Franklin

Off and on. 1757 to 1762, then 1764 to 1775, living on Craven Street and acting as agent for Pennsylvania, and later Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts too. An agent is a man who carries other people's complaints to people who would rather not hear them. My dream was an empire of equal British realms, each with its own assembly, all under one King. Not a master and a set of servants. A family. And after the Stamp Act, and the Townshend duties, and soldiers in Boston, and the shooting there in 1770, I still looked at the quarrel as a misunderstanding. A tragic one, but one that a patient man could mend.

Charles Thomson

Patient is one word for it. I've also heard that your mornings on Craven Street were not entirely conventional.

Benjamin Franklin

Ah. You mean the air baths. Yes. I never trusted cold water bathing, but I was very fond of cold air. So each morning I'd sit in my bedchamber with the window wide open and, well, nothing else on, for half an hour, sometimes a full hour. I read, I wrote letters, I thought through my correspondence. I maintain it opens the pores and keeps a man healthy.

Charles Thomson

I'd like to say that explains a great deal about your politics.

Benjamin Franklin

It explains why I was never short of ideas before breakfast. Some of them were even good. One of them was not.

Charles Thomson

Let's talk about that one. Late in 1772, a packet of letters lands in your hands.

Benjamin Franklin

About twenty of them. Thomas Whately, who had been an assistant to the old Prime Minister George Grenville, had died that year, and his papers passed to his brother William. Among them were private letters written years before, in 1768 and 1769, by Thomas Hutchinson, who was by then Governor of Massachusetts, and by Andrew Oliver, his lieutenant governor. Both were born in Massachusetts, mind you. They were writing to a man close to the ministry about the troubles in Boston.

Charles Thomson

And someone gave them to you. Who?

Benjamin Franklin

I never said, and I won't start now. Some of your historians have guessed at Thomas Pownall, who had been governor of Massachusetts before them. Mr. Bailyn leans that way, I'm told. Let them guess. A gentleman who passes along a paper should not be named by the man who receives it. That much I'll keep.

Charles Thomson

Then tell me what you read in them, and what you decided to do.

Benjamin Franklin

Hutchinson wrote that people living three thousand miles from the seat of government could not have every right an Englishman at home enjoys. There must be, he said, some abridgement of what are called English liberties. Oliver went further and proposed that the Governor's Council, which the Assembly elected, be appointed by the Crown instead. Now, I read that and I did not see a plot. I saw something more useful. I saw evidence that Parliament had been advised by Americans, by men from Boston itself. If the ministers had been misled, then the King was not the enemy and neither was the Empire. The anger in Massachusetts could be pointed at the right men.

Charles Thomson

So in December 1772 you sent them to Thomas Cushing, the Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly.

Benjamin Franklin

I did, and with conditions. A few trusted people only, the Committee of Correspondence among them. No copies. No printing. I told Mr. Cushing plainly he was not at liberty to make them public. I thought that was the whole trick. Let sober men read them quietly, let the temperature fall.

Charles Thomson

I'll keep the record straight, because it matters. The letters reached Boston in March 1773, and they went to Samuel Adams, who was clerk of the Assembly.

Benjamin Franklin

Yes. I had sent a lit match to a man who collected powder. Adams was a far better politician than I gave him credit for. He didn't print them at first. He announced that the letters existed, he let hints leak out, and he let Boston imagine the worst. Mr. Cushing wrote me that the restrictions were hard, and could they be eased? I allowed the letters to be shown, but I repeated, do not copy, do not publish. In mid June, the Boston Gazette printed them anyway.

Charles Thomson

I remember what followed. Hutchinson and Oliver burned in effigy on Boston Common. The letters were reprinted up and down the colonies, and there were protests as far off as Philadelphia. The Assembly petitioned for Hutchinson's removal.

Benjamin Franklin

And I should add, in fairness to the man, that Hutchinson insisted he had written nothing worse than he'd already said in public. Mr. Bailyn, who has studied him closely, agrees that much of it was not new. It didn't matter. A phrase like abridgement of English liberties, read aloud in a tavern, does not sound like a ruminating man. It sounds like a conspirator. I wanted to cool a fire, and instead I handed Boston the proof it had been looking for.

Charles Thomson

Then the news crossed the ocean, and men began to fight over it.

Benjamin Franklin

Yes, and this is the part nobody teaches. In London, everyone wanted to know who had stolen the letters. William Whately suspected John Temple, a customs official who had been allowed to look through Thomas Whately's papers. Temple denied it, and then he challenged Whately to a duel. They met in Hyde Park in early December 1773, and Whately was wounded. Neither man was satisfied. A second duel was being arranged.

Charles Thomson

Two men ready to kill each other over something you had done.

Benjamin Franklin

That is exactly how I saw it. I had said nothing for months. I told myself it was prudence, and perhaps it was, but there is a point where prudence turns into letting another man bleed for your conduct. So on Christmas Day, 1773, I published a letter in the Public Advertiser saying that I alone had obtained the letters and sent them to Boston, and that I was saying so to prevent further mischief. I argued that they were not private gossip. They were written by public officials to shape public policy, which made them public business.

Charles Thomson

That was a brave thing to put your name to. And a costly one.

Benjamin Franklin

Brave, or merely overdue. I'll let the historians argue. What I can tell you is that I went to bed in London as a philosopher the learned world admired, and I woke as a man half the city thought a thief. The ministry took it as an insult. The King's friends took it as a betrayal. And within weeks, in January, I received a summons to appear before a committee of the Privy Council.

Charles Thomson

Not a court of law.

Benjamin Franklin

No, something stranger. They would meet in a room at Whitehall called the Cockpit. Yes, where they used to stage cockfights. And I understood perfectly well that I would not be the one doing the questioning.

Charles Thomson

We'll stop there, because that is where the loyal Briton begins to come apart. Next time, Doctor Franklin walks into the Cockpit to face the Solicitor General, Alexander Wedderburn, and we'll find out what a man can lose in an hour while standing perfectly still. I'm Charles Thomson. Thank you for listening.