Hello, I'm Forrest Sawyer. Welcome to our series, Liberty. We live in a time of fast-breaking news, which seems very far from the 18th century world, the subject of this series.
Yet if you pick up a newspaper on any given day, you'll see see items very familiar to the people who launched this country. Issues like taxes, freedom of speech, and the big theme that runs through this entire series, power. The power that government has over our lives. This series is a series of stories that will covers a span of 25 extraordinary years, a period when Americans transformed themselves from subjects of a king to citizens of a separate nation.
And on the way, they devised a totally new system of government. Nothing's more surprising than the beginnings of the conflict. The founding fathers, like George Washington, were wealthy patricians. The last thing they wanted was a revolution. Yet the rich and powerful came to lead this uprising.
One. one which would ultimately turn their privileged society upside down. As in all history, at the time, nobody knew where they were going, and they certainly didn't know how everything would turn out.
But without intending it, they came up with the most revolutionary idea of the modern world, the idea that without kings and noblemen, ordinary people could govern themselves. In the 1760s, a young American doctor, Benjamin Rush, is touring England. He is a future signer of the Declaration of Independence, but on this sunny October day, as he is led into the throne room of King George III, his king, the independence of America could not be further from his mind.
I gaze for some time at the throne with emotions that I cannot describe. I ask my guide if it is common for strangers to sit on it. He tells me no, but upon my importuning him... good deal, I convince him to allow me the liberty.
Accordingly, I advance towards the throne. I sit down on it. I am seized with a kind of awe.
I feel as if I'm on top of a mountain. All men's passions, all men's hopes aspire to nothing higher than this throne. Benjamin Rush, indeed all American colonists, consider themselves blessed to be part of the largest, most powerful empire in the world. The colonists revere their king and admire everything English.
Wealthy Virginia planters send their children to England to be educated. New Yorkers read British books and British newspapers. In Boston, they drink their tea from Wedgwood cups imported from England. Britain has just defeated its traditional enemy, France, in a conflict that has spanned the globe.
In North America, the French have been driven from Canada and much of the West. The colonists see this as a victory for their way of life. With British culture, civilization, and the protection of British military might, the colonial provinces of America look to a rosy future.
The future would bring freedom, it would bring prosperity, because it would be British. The tyrannical French and Spanish had been removed from the continent. How surprising this is to us. We don't think of this as the Great Division. Their view of the future seems naïve, so different than what we knew their future would have been, which tells us something.
What came was not expected, and it was certainly not desired. They were British. They wanted to be British.
They were proud of being British. That they would, 13 years later, be declaring their independence is enormously paradoxical. That they would be proud of being British. It did not have to be, it should not have been, from their perspective, that it happened is a great mystery that needs to be explained.
In the 1760s, the 13 American colonies are an outpost of the British Empire. Most of North America is a wilderness inhabited by Indian tribes. A few dirt paths link the colonies. It takes two weeks to get a letter from Boston to New York. And most colonists have never traveled more than 30 miles from the place where they were born.
You wouldn't recognize America, geographically or politically. It was a society strung out along the Atlantic seaboard. It was a totally rural society. There were only a handful of cities with as many as 10,000 people in them, New York being one, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston.
Now, with the end of the Long War, vast new tracts of land open for exploitation. The American colonies have, more than ever, become the land of opportunity. No one sees this better than the future founding fathers.
They all have great ambitions. George Washington, at 31, has recently married Martha Custis, an extremely wealthy widow. With a large tobacco plantation and a seat in the Virginia legislature, Washington is determined to become the richest and most influential man in Virginia.
John Adams of Massachusetts, the second president of the future United States, is a struggling country lawyer. I want to do something that will surprise the world. Something grand, wild.
To cut a flash. To strike amazement. To catch the attention of everyone. Will it be some quick action? Or a slow, silent, imperceptible move?
Shall I creep or shall I fly? The most famous American in the world is Benjamin Franklin. He, too, has big plans. He is trying to convince the British government to establish a colony in the newly conquered territories to the west. He will be the principal landowner.
Franklin offers a member of the cabinet a piece of the action. An application is about to be made for a grant of land in the territory on the Ohio River. This land will soon be settled by large numbers of people from the neighboring provinces.
One share will get you 40,000 acres and costs next to nothing. Shall I put your name down? Franklin has made a fortune in the printing business and has now gone on to the gentlemanly pursuits of science and politics. At 57, he has outgrown the provincialism of the colonies and has moved to the center of the empire. London, England.
I was traveling in a country town last Sunday and thought back to New England where a man might be thrown in jail for singing while walking down the street on the Sabbath. Here, I can go to an opera or play on Sunday, and it's not only singing, but fiddling and dancing. I look around for God's judgments, but I see no signs of them.
The markets are filled with plenty, the cattle fat and strong, the fences and houses all in good repair. I am beginning to suspect that the deity is not nearly as angry at the offence of breaking the Sabbath as your average New England magistrate. Franklin is Pennsylvania's unofficial ambassador to England. He is looking for some high office in the British government. He had numerous friends in England, in the intellectual world.
His problem, of course, was that he was outside. the inner circle of power within the country. He didn't mix on social terms with the people who exercised real power.
In Great Britain, real power is solidly in the hands of the aristocracy, men who owe their position not to merit and ability, but to family, their lineage. Franklin comes from very humble birth. The tenth son of a candle maker.
He may have discovered the cause of lightning, he may be the darling of the Enlightenment, but to the nobility he is, and always will remain, a commoner. He's an almanac maker, a chimney doctor, a printer's devil, an atheist, and the father of several bastards. Like Franklin, all the future founding fathers are seen as insignificant provincials. The George Washingtons and John Hancocks may be the most powerful men in the colonies. They may run their huge estates and their colonial governments, but they are painfully aware that they are looked down upon by the ruling gentry of England.
They try to compensate for their uncertainty. They try to effect a certain refinement. They are very attentive. to form and fashion, but they never get it quite right. And when the English gentry come, they make remarks about, well, they have fine carriages, but they don't have matched horses.
And then when they have matched horses, they don't have the right saddlery. There's always another level. They're never getting it quite right, these Virginians. To Charles Lawrence, London, August 10, 1764. Sir. You will send me the following item and charge it to my account.
One livery suit of worsted shag, of the enclosed color, and lined with red wool. Make the coat with plain white buttons and a collar of red shag with a narrow lace around it. I must note that, in prior shipments, instead of sending me goods which are fashionable, you have often sent articles that could only have been worn by our forefathers in days of yore.
And for these goods that you palm off on us, your prices are exorbitantly high. It will be impossible to continue to do business with you unless there is some alteration for the better. George Washington.
They know that by the standard of England, by the measure of England, they are not respected. They are not looked upon as great men. They are not looked upon as grand days. They are, at best, men of...
commercial wealth. And yet they have this pretension themselves within their society of their own self-importance. And this makes them uncomfortable when they confront England.
A sense of inferiority extends to all aspects of colonial life. American artists feel they must go to London to learn from the masters. They still try to copy the haughty pose of a Gainsborough portrait. But these Americans will never be part of the aristocratic world they aspire to.
They will create a new world, and sooner than anyone back then would ever have predicted. London, spring of 1765. A debate in Parliament over what seems to be a very small shift in colonial policy. Running the overseas provinces has become extremely expensive.
Parliament announces that for the first time, the Americans will pay a small tax. Not to their local legislatures, but directly to England. I think that's the first thing that one has to say, looking back on it.
Seeing now, as we must do, that this was the opening of something which was going to be very big and very important, is that nobody realised that at the time. The British government had a variety of bits of legislation in hand, dealing with a variety of problems, as governments do. This was one of them, a moderately prominent piece of legislative programme of 1765, tidying up various details of the administration of colonies.
but it wasn't really a subject of vast interest. It was rather technical. It was extremely remote.
If you had stopped the average man in the street and said, what do you think about the Stamp Act, my man, he would have said, what? It is called the Stamp Act because taxed items will have to carry a stamp, paid for by the user. Test pressings are made, and the new tax is set to go into effect in the fall. It takes six weeks by sailing ship for news of the tax to cross the ocean. When it arrives, the news creates a firestorm up and down the continent.
For the colonial elite, the men who run the local legislatures, the Stamp Act is an outrage. It seems to confirm their... worst suspicions that they are not respected in England, not worth even being consulted about this change in policy.
George Washington is a delegate sitting in the Virginia legislature. The Stamp Act, imposed on the colonies by the Parliament of Great Britain, is an ill-judged measure. Parliament has no right to put its hands into our pockets without our consent.
Even royal appointees like the highly regarded Thomas Hutchinson, Chief Justice of Massachusetts, are upset. You must not deprive the colonies of their right to make laws for themselves. Parliament should only make laws necessary for the people of Massachusetts. for the empire as a whole.
The larger meaning of their life was wrapped up in being Britons. They were proud not to be Dutch, not to be French, not to be Spanish colonists, but to be British colonists and to have... for 150 years, taxed themselves, governed themselves, behaved just like independent Englishmen did, although they were living in America. Now suddenly the Stamp Act implied that they were going to be governed, taxed by a parliament a long way away in which they had no representatives. Now the only people who were taxed without their consent in Britain were servants, people who didn't have any property, women, children.
And so the Stamp Act seemed to Americans to reduce Americans to the same status as servants and women and all those dependent people who were civilly emasculated. That is, they didn't have any public role in their own governance. George Washington and other colonial leaders clearly see what will become of them unless they take action.
A line should be drawn between Great Britain and the colonies, clearly establishing our rights. We must either assert our rights or submit and become tame and abject slaves like the Negroes over whom we rule with such arbitrary sway. This tax is going to touch everyone. It's probably one of the dumbest political acts in the history of government. They tax dice and cards, so the rowdiest group of people there are.
the world, sailors in port with nothing to do are going to be angry. They tax legal documents, which means that lawyers, the most articulate and argumentative people in America, are up in arms also. If that man tells you to kiss his ass, shall he get away with it and live? Don't let your courage cool, or a few bullies scare you. We've nothing to fear but slavery.
Love your liberty, and fight for it like men who know its value. Once lost, it will never, never be regained. The question, in any case, was never the immediate amount of taxation that the British were asking of the colonists. The question was whether the British had the right to do it at all.
We are talking about people with enormous sensitivity to the dangers of power. If you conceded the right to Parliament to tax, and if there was no check on it, no limit, it could go on indefinitely. You could be bled white. The power to tax was the power to destroy.
The colonial legislators send official petitions to the British Parliament, petitions that are completely ignored. The colonists had been saved from the specter of French Indians, and there certainly were a lot of people in Britain who thought that... they should be properly grateful for all this effort that had been expended on their behalf, mostly at the expense of the British taxpayer, and that it wasn't unreasonable that they should pay a modest share, greatly less than 100%, of the cost of imperial defence in the future.
The Stamp Act was a bad idea, but what could you do? That was the problem. Massachusetts came up with the answer, and it was a very good answer, a very simple answer.
August 14, an effigy of the Stamp Man appears, hanging from what became Liberty Tree. Mobs collected, they bring coercion on him. In short, they force the Stamp Man, Andrew Oliver, to resign. Now, if you got one man to resign, if the stamp stamps were not going to be distributed, the act couldn't be put into effect.
The popular fury spreads. Thomas Hutchinson. Chief Justice of Massachusetts is a passionate believer in law and order. Privately, he is against the stamp tax. Publicly, he makes it clear that he intends to enforce it.
On August 26, 1765, a mob assembles outside his house, one of the most elegant in Boston. Hutchinson and his family have just finished high tea. Hutchinson escapes with his life and little else.
Hutchinson thought the Stamp Act was a very bad policy, but it wouldn't have crossed his mind that you therefore would resist it. That you'd resist it with violence. It was unthinkable.
Everyone will suffer if the peace and order in the community are destroyed. I hope everyone will see how easily the people may be duped, inflamed, and carried away with madness. The intimidation of royal officials spreads to other colonies.
Would-be stamp distributors are attacked. Stamp paper is seized when it arrives from England. Colonial leaders propose a joint boycott of British goods. A Philadelphia lawyer, John Dickinson, supports this idea.
The taxes and duties imposed on us by Parliament must be instantly opposed. The only effective opposition is through the concerted efforts of all the provinces. By uniting, we stand.
By dividing, we fall. In faraway London, Benjamin Franklin is surprised by the fervor of colonial reaction to the tax. Moreover, the crisis is interfering with important business he has before the government.
He lobbies for the repeal of the Stamp Act. He reminds the Parliamentary Committee that the colonies are England's biggest market. Our buying your manufactured goods depends very much on our affection for you.
Pride will induce Americans like me to wear our old clothes. And when we buy new clothes, they will be made by us. Franklin has powerful allies in Parliament.
Among them, Edmund Burke. What are we doing with our constant insisting on taxing the Americans? We're not getting any revenue from them.
Instead, we're pushing them to disorder and disobedience. You can wait up to your eyes in blood and you'll be back where you started. With no revenue, we make money from trade, not taxes.
Let the Americans tax themselves. Pressure brings results. In February 1766, Parliament repeals the Stamp Tax.
Throughout the 13 colonies, there is a sigh of relief. Americans look around the world and think how lucky they are to be the subjects of King George III. In a time when the French king regards himself as the direct representative of God on earth, when the Spanish king can tax his subjects without limit, and Catherine the Great of Russia deals with political opponents by cutting off their heads and displaying them at the end of a stake, the British king stands alone. The pride, the glory of Britain, the direct end of its constitution, is political liberty.
All through the 1760s, a steady stream of immigrants will arrive in the New World in search of their fortunes. One such visitor is the son of an English sheep farmer, Nicholas Cresswell. He keeps a detailed diary recording his impressions of his travels. Americans in general are good-natured and agreeable, but confoundedly lazy. Although they come from different countries, it is remarkable, they speak English better than the English do.
Except, of course, for the New Englanders, who have a sort of whining cadence that I find hard to describe. They're tall and graceful. particularly the women, who are remarkably well-shaped. But they all have very bad teeth, decayed by the time they're 25. It is perhaps the hot bread they bake at every meal.
The growth in population of this country is amazing. With the emigration from Europe, they are said to double their numbers every 16 years. Anyone with the least spark of industry can support a family.
No-one fears poverty here. The American colonies, with their vast tracts of land, are extremely valuable to England. Their forests supply the tall, straight pine trees that become the masts for Britain's sailing ships.
The farms and plantations export food and tobacco to England. Americans import virtually all finished goods from England. It is an arrangement that benefits everyone.
But there are those in the mother country who fear that this relationship will not last. There was often a notion that the colonies had come of age, and if they were let out from the restraining hand of England, would produce a rival to England instead of a dutiful child. Americans were referred to as ungrateful children.
What you really see is people on one side who believe that their potential ...was being squashed and people on another side who were a little wary about this creation that had gotten out of hand, this monster that had gotten out of hand. And it is not unlike what happens when your 16-year-old storms out of the house over some restraint or restriction or regulation that they believe is no longer appropriate for their age. The protests over the Stamp Act ended in victory for the colonists.
Many members of Parliament feel that this is a dangerous precedent, one that will encourage further disobedience. These presumptuous colonials will have to be brought under control. On the same day that the Stamp Act was repealed, they had passed a new piece of legislation, the Declaratory Act, asserting the absolute right of the British Parliament to make laws for the American colonies in all cases whatsoever.
A year later, Parliament puts teeth in the Act with a new set of taxes on the colonies, this time in the form of stiff duties on manufactured goods from England, everything from paint to window panes to tea. Benjamin Franklin fears there is going to be another firestorm of colonial protest and sends this poem to American newspapers urging moderation. We have an old mother who peevish is grown. She snubs us like children that scarce walk alone.
She forgets that we're grown with sense of our own. If we don't obey orders, whatever the case, she frowns and she chides and loses all patience, and sometimes she hits us a slap in the face. Her orders are so, we often suspect, that age has impaired her of sound intellect. But still, an old mother should have due respect. The idea that a body of men in England, who know nothing about the colonies, who see nothing of the misery that their taxes will inflict upon us, have given themselves the right to command our lives and our property at all times and in all cases whatsoever.
This is the logic of robbers and highwaymen. The declaratory act strikes terror in their hearts. Earlier in the century an almost identical act had been used to subjugate Ireland. The colonists will have to take action. They know they have the power to hit England where it hurts.
They will boycott British goods. George Washington. Block English goods.
Starve their trade in manufacturing. Yes, the more I think about this plan, the more ardently I wish it success. Gentlemen in their several counties should explain matters to the people and urge them to adhere to the non-importation agreement. For the boycott to be effective, the entire population will have to be mobilized. But up to now, the leaders have not involved the common people in the workings of government.
Indeed, they think that ordinary people have no capacity for political thought. Gentlemen lead. Commoners know their place. One of the hardest things, I think, for us to recapture of this distant, different world is the distinction between commoners and gentlemen, a kind of distinction that we find hard to understand because...
For us, almost all adult males are gentlemen. We put it on our restroom doors, the term, but these gentlemen saw themselves as separate from the rest of the populace. Eighteenth-century men, women, and children of every race, class, and region actually believed that hierarchy was the norm in nature and in society.
Some people were better than other people. Some people were placed in circumstances that were better. Poor people were thought of as the poor. If you were wealthy, you were superior.
That was how the world operated. This world is beginning to change as common people take an active role in the protest movement. For many of the colonial elite, it seems to threaten the very stability of society. There are these town meetings. which people of wealth and character do not even attend, because they are sure to be outvoted by men of the lowest order.
So it is government by the mob. This has given the inferior people such a sense of their own importance that a gentleman does not get from them even common civility anymore. As the boycott grows and shops once filled with British merchandise begin to empty, more and more people are choosing to make do without imported manufactured goods. I have cut back on every superfluous expense. I haven't even bought a new cap or gown since last Christmas.
I'm even learning how to knit, something I've never done before. Making stockings out of good New England wool. Throwing my might for the public support.
The very idea that their American cousins are involving commoners, and now even women in politics, is a subject for hilarity by London cartoonists. But the merchants and manufacturers in England are not amused. Their factories and counting houses are feeling the pinch. The British Ministry blames a few ringleaders for all the troubles, particularly a Boston radical who celebrates popular protest, Samuel Adams.
I am no friend of riots and tumults, but when people are oppressed, when their rights are infringed upon, when arbitrary rulers are put over them, when government is secret, the people become alarmed. If they have any spirit of freedom, they'll fight for their liberties, and they're justified in doing so. Unofficial courts, run by popular committees, begin dispensing a rough form of justice.
It is more than some gentlemen have bargained for. A few days ago, we got a taste of committed justice. They got hold of a customs officer by the name of Malcolm. It was the coldest night of the winter.
He's stripped stark naked, his body covered all over with tar and then with feathers. They drag him through town in a cart, crowds beating him with clubs. They say they'll hang him unless he'll curse the governor and the parliament, which they couldn't make him do.
The doctors say his flesh was coming off his back in slabs. It's impossible that the poor creature can live long. Throughout the colonies, daily battles with the committees are causing royal officials great distress. In Massachusetts, Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson fears that his beloved province is heading for mob rule.
He secretly writes to a friend in the British Parliament that firm measures are needed from England. It is a letter that will come back to haunt him. A thirst for liberty seems to be the ruling passion of the present age.
This restless spirit can cause anarchy and confusion unless some external power restrains it. I've always known that bringing peace and good order to Massachusetts would involve some pain. Perhaps there must be an abridgment of our English liberties for the good of the colony. The letter confirms what the British government is already thinking. Order must be restored in Massachusetts.
In what they consider merely a police action, they send a brigade of troops to Boston to quell the rioters and arrest the ringleaders. Sending troops to Boston is asking for trouble. You are putting young soldiers, who are by nature insolent, in the midst of a people who consider themselves threatened and oppressed.
It's like setting up a blacksmith's forge in a magazine of gunpowder. March 5th, 1770. An angry crowd begins throwing snowballs at British soldiers. The soldiers fire back, and five Bostonians are killed. Paul Revere produces a wildly inaccurate illustration of the event.
In his version, soldiers are shooting completely innocent civilians. The incident becomes known as the Boston Massacre. It galvanizes people throughout the colonies. In England, Benjamin Franklin's love affair with the mother country is beginning to turn sour.
He was drawn to its sophistication and culture, but is starting to see the ugly realities of its social order. I recently took a tour of Ireland and Scotland. In those countries there are a small number of noblemen and gentlemen living in the highest opulence, while the bulk of the people, their tenants, live in the most sordid wretchedness. While traveling, I often thought of the happiness of New England, where every man owns some land, has a vote, and lives in a tidy, warm house, with plenty of food and fuel, and has sturdy clothes from head to foot.
Long may we continue. continue in this condition. The more he lived in England, the more intimate he became with Parliament and with the whole system. He saw very stupid people put in power. He saw arrogance.
He saw discrepancy between the rich and the poor. He saw all kinds of wrong things about England that he hadn't noticed at the beginning. The dispute is dragging on year after year. It becomes clear that the British attempt to tax is not working. Neither side has really backed down.
Benjamin Franklin sees that this war of words can easily slip into open conflict. He is looking for a way to calm passions on both sides. In December of 1772, an astonishing packet of letters falls into his hands.
Among them is the very one written by Thomas Hutchinson several years earlier to a member of Parliament. Franklin knows that the British have been relying on advice from Hutchinson. In fact, they have just appointed him Royal Governor of Massachusetts. He reads the letters in a fury, convinced that the ministry has been disastrously misled. It is better to submit to some abridgment of our English liberties than to break off our connection with our protector, England.
One mischievous man is the cause of all our troubles. This coward trades the liberties of his native country for jobs and profit. Franklin realizes that if these letters were to become public in Massachusetts, The radicals would shift the blame for the events of the past decade away from Parliament and lay it at the feet of Hutchinson himself. Let's make him, like the scapegoats of old, carry into the wilderness all the bad feeling that he's stirred up between our two countries. He makes a momentous decision.
He sends the damning letters to the Boston Radicals. Franklin was a very wily character. He knew they would be published, though he sent them over saying, don't publish them. He was deliberately sacrificing Hutchinson. In order to stabilize the situation and calm the uproar, the idea being that if you pin the whole thing on him, that it was Hutchinson who had been instigating all of this thing, there would be a cooling off period, and the English government would be able to work out some kind of accommodation.
Publication of the letters causes a sensation. The Massachusetts legislature sends a petition to London demanding Hutchinson's removal. The petition takes six weeks to cross the ocean. In the meantime, the king is beginning to support the idea of reigning in the colonies. He writes to the prime minister.
I am very fond of the measures you are taking with the end of bringing the Americans to their duty. I do not, however, want to drive them to despair, only to submission. In the fall of 1773, the British government hits on what it thinks will be a way of taxing the colonies that they will actually welcome.
The East India Company has a surplus of tea. Parliament decides to ship half a million pounds of this tea to America at an extremely low price, with a nominal tax of three pennies a pound. The colonists, they reason, could not possibly object to paying less for their tea. In every colony where the tea is landed, there are loud protests.
It is either sent back or stored unsold in warehouses. In Massachusetts, where Thomas Hutchinson is governor, the story will be different. Hutchinson was the key figure in the major events of 1773, which really precipitated the American Revolution.
And I think it's fair, it's not an exaggeration to say that if he had acted differently... I'd have a different passport. November 28th, 1773. The first ship loaded with East India tea arrives in Boston Harbor.
By law, the tea tax must be paid within three weeks. The decision over what to do next is squarely in the hands of Governor Thomas Hutchinson. I lie awake whole night in fear that I shall be called to account in England for my neglect of duty to the king.
Hutchinson could have written to England and said, I know the law, I know my duty, but I cannot enforce the law. It's physically impossible. But he didn't.
It's a standoff between the radicals. We dare you to have this tea unloaded. We're strong enough, we're powerful enough now, we're organized enough to make... to make a power play against you. And Hutchison, who says, you will not humiliate me, you will not defy English law like this.
I will see this tea unloaded and delivered as it should be. Then, on December 16, 1773, the day the tax must be paid, a group of men dressed up as Mohawk Indians dumped 340 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The Tea Party was a very limited act of violence, in fact. They do nothing but dump tea. A padlock is broken, it's replaced.
We think of this as a lot of yahooing and yelping and noise. It was just sort of ploop, ploop, ploop. They were very, very careful to keep this from getting out of hand. We're all throwing the tea overboard. We catch someone in our party trying to stuff some of the tea into his pockets.
He is stripped of his booty and his clothes and we send him home naked in disgrace. Then we went home in an orderly fashion. Boston and Joy is the most peaceful night it has had in many a month.
There was a lot of anger in London about the dumping of the tea. What this is, is a public display of defiance. And that kind of element of defiance, more than the constitutional formulations, is more important. This is gesture politics on the big scale, and it's very successful.
We still to this day remember the Boston Tea Party. It's one of the most successful examples of gesture politics, and it was a gesture that the British government understood. January 29th, 1774. The King's Privy Council.
A hearing to consider the Massachusetts petition for the removal of Thomas Hutchinson as governor. The room is packed with London society, and all eyes are on Benjamin Franklin, the center of a storm of controversy. He has admitted that it was he who had leaked Hutchinson's letters to the Boston Radicals. This is going to be a great show. The acid-tongue Solicitor General, Alexander Wedderburn, is representing Thomas Hutchinson.
He focuses the full fury of British frustration on the colonial representative standing mutely in a full dress suit of Manchester velvet. It is not to be Hutchinson who will be the scapegoat, but Benjamin Franklin himself. When a governor presumes to write to a friend that he thinks it somewhat more than the moderate exertion of English liberty to destroy shops, attack her officers, plunder her goods, to pull down their houses, it is Mr. Hutchinson who should be removed because he is interrupting the harmony between Great Britain and her colonies?
Franklin stood conspicuously erect. The muscles of his face had previously been composed to afford a placid, tranquil expression. He didn't change his expression in the slightest during the entire speech.
It was as if his face was made of wood. In truth we have standing before us the real incendiary. The man behind those committees who are inflaming the whole province against his majesty's government. They have well learned the lessons taught in Dr. Franklin's school of politics.
This wily American. This man without honor. This thief.
This... Man of letters. The attack got very personal, referring to Franklin as someone other than a gentleman. Who else would open other people's mail, steal other people's letters, and so on? And Franklin is said to have walked out of the cockpit and turned to Wenderburn and said, I'll make your king a little man for this.
They have begun killing the messengers. What I feel for myself is lost in what I feel for my country. It seems that I am too much an American. It took Franklin a very long time to become a revolutionary. It was a very slow evolution, step by step and slowly.
He was profoundly attached to England. You could call it the love affair what he had with England. But this love which had been so deep was now turning to implacable hatred. It was the reaction of a rejected social.
Franklin, in disgrace, is threatened with further prosecution for the theft of the letters. He realizes that he must leave England. His friend and fellow scientist, Joseph Priestley, is with him at the end.
We spent his last day in London alone together. Much of the time we looked through the American newspapers. As he read the speeches by the inhabitants of Boston, the tears trickled down his cheek.
Now, in Parliament, the hardliners take charge. The British send a fleet of warships to Boston. They encircle the harbor as if it were an enemy port.
The ships clear their guns, ready for firing. The greatest fear of the colonists, British tyranny, seems to have come true. The port of Boston is closed. Massachusetts is put under military rule.
It's government enforced at the point of a gun. I woke last night shaking from a frightful dream. We have come to the edge of the ocean, and there is no advancing or retreating.
My own sons may sink in the torrent. I wish... I pray that there be some decent, honorable way to put an end to this conflict.
To be once again reconciled with old friends. Our cause is righteous, and I have no doubt of final success. But I see our generation, and perhaps our whole land, drowned in blood.