This Day in Colonial History (Benjamin Franklin Transformed into American Rebel)

January 29, 1774—The Massachusetts Assembly thought that it would be one step closer to seeing the last of their hated royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, by petitioning King George III for his dismissal. Instead, the petition furnished an excuse for reactionaries in Parliament to strike at the moderate agent for the firebrand colony, Benjamin Franklin.

The monarch’s advisory body, the Privy Council, may have felt it was removing a troublesome bit between its teeth by castigating Franklin from his role in leaking Hutchinson’s correspondence. Instead, it converted a colonial who thought of himself primarily as an Englishman into one of the Mother Country’s most dangerous enemies—a wily foe who gave the drive for American independence prestige, then won crucial support for the new nation as America’s diplomat to France.

Americans visiting London are understandably shocked to find Franklin’s home at 36 Craven Street preserved. Sites in Philadelphia, they can understand—this was the city to which he escaped as a teenage runaway apprentice and that, in turn, he devoted most of his philanthropy. Even sites in Boston, the city of Franklin’s birth, don’t nonplus tourists.

But London is the only city in the world to preserve, in original form, a home associated with Franklin. 36 Craven, just off Trafalgar Square, was where he lived for 18 years, from 1757 to 1775. The address reflected his desire to conquer the center of London as surely as he had the City of Brotherly Love.

He loved London—the adulation he received as a scientist, the friends he could meet in the fashionable new coffeehouses that were providing alternatives to alcoholic establishments, the society women he could flirt with—and his work as agent for the Massachusetts Assembly and as deputy postmaster-general for the colonies provided him with convenient excuses for why he couldn’t go home sooner. He had stayed away from home for more than a decade, constantly pleading urgent business, even when his wife suffered a partial stroke. Her death in late 1774, while he was still away from home, left him some guilt.

In the decade preceding the American Revolution, Franklin sought unsuccessfully to make King George III and his ministers see reason regarding the colonies. In 1774, he had dragged his feet on presenting Massachusetts’ petition to remove Governor Hutchinson and the latter’s lieutenant governor and brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, arguing that patience was the colonies’ best course.

But then came the Hutchinson letter controversy. You think that the Valerie Plame leaking imbroglio was bad—not to mention the one nearly 40 years ago involving Daniel Ellsburg and the Pentagon Papers? Well, take those two cases, multiply them, then take the product and square it. That’s how controversial the Franklin affair was.

Gov. Hutchinson had been indiscreet enough to write British minister Thomas Whately from 1768 through the following year on how to bring colonial agitators to heel by restricting their liberties. In Massachusetts, the tinderbox of the American Revolution, exposure of their contents would make a sensitive situation far worse than it already was.

Somehow, Franklin came into possession of this political nitroglycerin. He never said how, and we don’t know to this day. But he sent the dozen letters to friend Thomas Cushing, speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly. Don’t copy them, he warned—just show them around to a few trusted friends.

One of the friends Cushing trusted was Samuel Adams. Big, big mistake! The agitator, as thrilled by this correspondence as Count Dracula would be by the presence of a blood bank, copied and distributed it. The reaction, as Adams hoped, was strong and powerful enough that the letters were specifically cited in the assembly’s petition to remove Hutchinson and Oliver.

In England, things got really crazy because of the affair. By this time, Thomas Whately, the original recipient of the correspondence, had died. But his brother William thought he knew the culprit—an American named John Temple, former governor of New Hampshire, now deeply sympathetic to the colonists.

The incensed Temple didn’t sue William Whately for everything he had, as he would today. Instead, he challenged him to a duel. The two men had at each other in England’s Hyde Park. They survived for probably the most common reason why anyone did in those days: the participants’ incompetence with weapons. Neither Whately nor Temple could wield a sword very well, and when Temple nicked Whately, the requirements of honor were judged to have been met. Only Whately’s friends claimed that Temple hadn’t fought fairly, leading the American to reschedule a rematch with the minister.

Enough already, Franklin decided. He owned up in a public display that he’d been the only one responsible for the letters’ distribution. Early in January 1774, sensing that trouble was ahead, he had asked permission to have counsel by his side when he appeared before the Privy Council.

That may have been a mistake: by allowing counsel to represent him, he gave up the ability to speak on his own behalf. This turned out to be critical, because it soon became apparent that it would be him, not the Massachusetts petition, that would occupy the council’s attention.

Franklin’s supporters were outnumbered in the crowded room by detractors by a 4-to-1 margin. The British Solicitor-General, Alexander Wedderburn, subjected Franklin to more than an hour of abuse—rancor so bad, supposedly, that the worst of it never ended up being printed.

What we do know of it was bad enough. Wedderburn charged Franklin with being “the prime agitator” behind the controversy. As Wedderburn continued his assault, with the anti-Franklin crowd of peers hooting and hollering for all they were worth, Franklin remained silent, fuming. Though the court’s manner of conducting busy left him unable to speak, he also believed that the manifest unfairness of Wedderburn’s conduct would turn reasonable men away from the abuse.

The proud 68-year-old bottled up his emotions for as long as he could, then, as soon as the proceedings had adjourned for the day, with the council issuing its previously prepared report exonerating Hutchinson, turned on Wedderburn. Bumping into his tormenter outside the hearing room, he said, with unmistakable intent that would be fulfilled more than a year later: “I will make your master a little king for this.”

That he did. The day after the proceedings, the Council delivered another blow to Franklin by dismissing him from his postmaster job. By that time, he had crossed a mental Rubicon in his attitude toward the Mother Country. Taking off the clothes he had worn to the Privy Council hearings, he vowed that he would never wear them again until he could help dismember the British empire. It took ten years before he could make good on his claim, but he wore the clothes when he signed the Treaty of Paris ensuring American independence.

The breach with England also led Franklin to break off relations with his son William, the royal governor of New Jersey, who had become a confirmed Loyalist, as well as several friends in the U.K. who had not signed with him. It was part of the process that turned this long-loyal British subject into what biographer H.W. Brands termed “The First American.”

This Day in Revolutionary War History (Continental Congress Acts Against Theaters)

October 16, 1778—In the midst of a war fought by soldiers outnumbered, outgunned, and outprovisioned, America’s Continental Congress took decisive action: it voted to dismiss any soldier or officeholder caught attending a play or performing in one.

Let me tell you, if I were around back then, this theatrical ban would not have been a great recruiting pitch for me. Since college, I’ve been an inveterate playgoer, often even scheduling vacations to maximize my chances of catching one or more shows.

Lots of colonists felt the same way I did. Charleston, for instance, saw its first play in 1735 and its first regular playhouse a year later. (Sadly, as I discovered on a visit to this beautifully preserved city, theaters are no longer the force they were in the city before the Civil War.) There had even been plays performed in the new nation’s seat of government, Philadelphia, as far back as 1749, despite the disapproval of Quakers.

But as early as October 1774—before the onset of hostilities with the mother country, that is—the first Continental Congress had already passed a resolution meant to “discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation”—i.e., the “exhibition of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.” Similar resolutions followed, meaning that this hectoring didn’t work in the slightest.

Now, you’d think that the Continental soldier, risking everything he had for his country—very much including the lives, fortunes and sacred honor referred to in the Declaration of Independence—could use a little entertainment, even if it consisted of something less than, say, Sixties sexplots Raquel Welch, Ann-Margret or Joey Heatherton onstage for one of Bob Hope’s Vietnam Christmas morale boosters for the troops. (And I’m not even talking here about the appearances of Playboy bunnies like the one in Apocalypse Now, where cavorting with the young women was the least of problems for soldiers caught in sudden attacks, split-second atrocities, and constant questioning about what they were doing there in the first place.)

But no. The Continental killjoy politicians decided that such performances fostered “a fatal tendency to divert the minds of the people from a due attention to the means necessary for the defence of their country and preservation of their liberties.”

I mean, can you imagine the reaction of George Washington when he got wind of this resolution? You can bet that the first thought to sprang to mind was something like the great Dorothy Parker line, “What fresh hell is this?”

Indulge me for a minute as I perform something akin to one step beyond the Vulcan mind-meld of Star Trek, only this time across a few centuries, as I enter into the mind of the general of the Continental Army and future first President of the United States:

“Let me get this straight, gentleman. You’ve been having all kinds of trouble even forming a government that can collect taxes from the individual colonies and print money with value. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase ‘not worth a continental.’ Not so coincidentally, I see every day many of my men with shoes falling apart, if they still have any, not to mention tattered uniforms.

"At the same time, I myself haven’t been getting much support from the lot of you, what with all your conniving against me, hoping to put Horatio Gates in my place, all because he won one battle at Saratoga—a fight that Benedict Arnold had a lot more to do with winning than he ever did. Oh, all that muttering you’ve been doing has gotten back to me. I’m talking about you, Sam Adams. And that goes, too, for your cousin John. If I knew he’d be complaining about my leadership so much, I never would have worn my French and Indian War uniform that got your attention so much three years ago that he stood up and nominated me to head the army. Well, gentlemen, you can take this job and…”

But George said nothing of the kind. Instead, he agreed to the ridiculous ban, then quickly disregarded it, just like before.

Don’t believe the popular perception that Washington was nothing but a Big Stiff, with a capital B and a capital S. The concept was fueled by that unfortunate late-in-life portrait by Gilbert Stuart that highlighted the President’s dental imperfections more than his dignity, not to mention that Clint Eastwood squint he leveled during the Constitutional Convention at Gouverneur Morris when the Pennsylvania delegate clapped him on the back in an attempt to win a bet with Alexander Hamilton.

No, despite what those boring high school history texts might have led you to believe, ol’ George liked a good time, and I don’t mean the kind engaged in by his feuding Cabinet secretaries Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson with Maria Reynolds and Sally Hemings, respectively. Listen: any guy who spends one day of the day to the other thinking how to arm and train his men, keep that army alive and together for one more day against the forces of the world’s greatest imperial power, and keeping track of business operations at Mount Vernon needs to unwind, badly.

And Washington, to his credit, did this—throwing the ball around outside headquarters with aides, dancing with officers’ wives (like the vivacious spouse of his trusted general Nathanael Greene) for up to three hours at a time with barely a stop, and, best of all, attending plays.

Courtesy of that night at Ford’s Theater, everybody knows that Abraham Lincoln enjoyed plays. But I bet you never knew that the fellow usually ranked with Lincoln as our greatest President did, too.

David McCullough has the details in 1776: attending a theatrical with his older brother in Barbados at age 19; going to the theater regularly as a member of the Virginia legislature in Williamsburg; watching plays four nights out of five in an Annapolis visit; and attending the theater seven times while in New York, including Hamlet. His favorite production was Joseph Addison’s Cato, a show not produced much nowadays but, in its time, the most popular theatrical of them all.

It was a quintessential Virginia pastime, this playgoing, but a habit that stuck in the craw of Sam Adams. What a joke that the delegate from Massachusetts has a beer named for him, because, if he couldn’t be donning warpaint under cover of night and dumping British tea in Boston Harbor, or rabble-rousing in the streets against redcoats, the guy could be a pill. He took it as his personal mission to safeguard republican virtue, and to that end he and his allies in the Continental Congress passed this frivolous exercise in busybodyism.

Well, Washington and his soldiers went on defying the ban. In a way, it was kind of a point of honor to the men that they could mount amateur theatricals the equals of their British cousins. It would take nearly a century and a half more for Eugene O’Neill to make something really distinctive out of American drama, but already the instinct was there not to let Americans take a backseat to anyone. And by the end of the century, Washington—by this time, properly revered as the man who held his country together in the worst of times—had become a subject of theatricals himself.

Sam Adams didn’t fare as well—not, that is, when he got his nose bent out of shape about playhouses again. In 1792, now lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, he decided to go after a group of actors who had decided to circumvent a 42-year state ban by outfitting a stable in Broad Alley as a theater under the thin pretext that they were sponsoring “moral lectures.” Adams’ attempt to jail the actors was greeted with loud derision at one of those wonderful New England town meetings—especially wonderful in this case because the audience hooted at Sam that they wanted their “natural Theatrical rights,” as quoted in John C. Miller’s biography, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda.

In the end, the citizens of the new republic struck a blow for greater creative liberty, and the state theatrical ban was rescinded under the watch of the increasingly lonely old Puritan.