Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1900, volume 2).djvu/560

530 ing December, before William Whately had opened or looked over the packet of letters from Hutchin- son and his friends, it was found that they had been purloined by some person unknown. It is not certain that the letters had ever really passed into William Whately's hands. They may have been left lying in some place w^here they might have attracted the notice of some curious busy- body, who forthwith laid hands upon them. This point has never been satisfactorily cleared up. At all events, they were bi-ought to Franklin as con- taining political -intelligence that might prove im- portant. At this time Massachusetts was furiously excited over the attempt of Lord, North's govern- ment to have the salaries of the judges fixed and paid by the crown instead of the colonial assembly. The judges had been threatened with impeachment should they dare to receive a penny from the royal treasury, and at the head of the threatened judges was Oliver's younger brother, the chief justice of Massachusetts. As agent for the colony, Frank- lin felt it to be his duty to give information of the dangerous contents of the letters now laid before him. Although they purported to be merely a private and confidential correspondence, they were not really " of the nature of private letters between friends." As Franklin said, " they were written by public officers to persons in public station, on public affairs, and intended to procure public measures " ; they were therefore handed to other public persons, who might be influenced by them to produce those measures ; their tendency was to in- cense the mother country against her colonies, and, by the steps recommended, to widen the breach, which they effected. The chief caution " from the writers to Thomas Whately " with respect to pri- vacy was, to keep their contents from " the knowl- edge of the colonial agents in London," who, the writers apprehended, " might return them, or copies of them, to America." Franklin felt as Walsingham might have felt on suddenly discover- ing, in private and confidential papers, the incon- trovertible proof of some popish plot against the life of Queen Elizabeth. From the person that brought him the letters he got permission to send them to Massachusetts, on condition that they should be shown only to a few people in authority, that they should not be copied or printed, that they should presently be returned, and that the name of the person from whom they were obtained should never be disclosed. This last condition was most thoroughly fulfilled. The others must have been felt to be mainly a matter of form ; it was obvious that, though they might be literally complied with, their spirit would inevitably be violated. As Or- lando Hutchinson writes, " we all know what this sort of secrecy means, and what will be the end of it " ; and, as Franklin himself observed, " there was no restraint proposed to talking of them, but only to copying." The letters were sent to the proper person, Thomas Gushing, speaker of the Massachusetts assembly, and he showed them to Hancock, Hawley, and the two Adamses. To these gentlemen it could have been no new discovery that Hutchinson and Oliver held such opinions as were expressed in the lettei's ; but the documents seemed to furnish tangible proof of what had long been suspected, that the governor and his lieuten- ant were plotting against the liberties of Massa- chusetts. They were soon talked about at every town-meeting and on every street-corner. The assembly twitted Hutchinson with them, and asked for copies of these and other such papers as he might see fit to communicate. He replied, some- what sarcastically, " It you desire copies with a view to make them public, the originals ai'e more proper for the purpose than any copies." Mis- taken and dangerous as Hutchinson's policy was, his conscience acquitted him of any treasonable pur- pose, and he must naturally have preferred to have the people judge him by what he had really writ- ten rather than by vague and distorted rumors. His reply was taken as sufficient warrant for print- ing the letters, and they were soon in the posses- sion of every reader in England or America who could afford sixpence for a political tract. On the other side of the Atlantic they aroused as much excitement as on this, and William Whately be- came concerned to know who could have purloined the letters. On slight evidence he charged a Mr. Temple with the theft, and a duel ensued in which Whately was wounded. Hearing of this affair, Franklin published a card in which he avowed his own share in the transaction, and in a measure screened all others by drawing the full torrent of wrath and abuse upon himself. All the ill-sup- pressed spleen of the king's friends was at once discharged upon him. Meanwhile the Massachu- setts assembly formally censured the letters, as evidence of a -scheme for subverting the constitu- tion of the colony, and petitioned the king to remove Hutchinson and Oliver from office. In January, 1774, the petition was duly brought before the privy council in the presence of a large and brilliant gathering of spectators. The solicitor- general, David Wedderburn, instead of discussing the question on its merits, broke out with a violent and scurrilous invective against Franklin, whom he derided as a man of letters, calling him a " man of three letters," the Roman slang expression for f-u-r, a thief. Of the members of government present, Lord North alone preserved decorum ; the others laughed and clapped their hands, while Franklin stood as unmoved as the moon at the baying of dogs. He could afford to disregard the sneers of a man like Wedderburn, whom the king, though fain to use him as a tool, called the greatest knave in the realm. The Massachusetts petition was rejected as scandalous, and next day Franklin was dismissed from his office of postmaster-general. They are in error who think it was this personal insult that led Franklin to favor the revolt of the colpnies, as they are also wrong who suppose that his object in sending home the Hutchinson letters was to stir up dissension. His conduct imme- diately after passing through this ordeal is sufficient proof of the unabated sincerity of his desire for conciliation. The news of the Boston tea-party arriving in England about this time, led presently to the acts of April, 1774, for closing the port of Boston and remodelling the government of Massa- chusetts. The only way in which Massachusetts could escape these penalties was by indemnifying the East India company for the tea that had been destroyed ; and Franklin, seeing that the attempt to enforce the new acts must almost inevitably lead to war, actually went so far as to advise Massachu- setts to pay for the tea. Samuel Adams, on hear- ing of this, is said to have observed : " Franklin may be a good philosopher, but he is a bungling politician." Certainly in this instance Franklin showed himself less far-sighted than Adams and the people of Massachusetts. The moment had come when compromise was no longer possible. To have yielded now, in the face of the arrogant and tyran- nical acts of April, would have been not only to stultify the heroic deeds of the patriots in the last December, but it would have broken up the nascent union of the colonies ; it would virtually have sur- rendered them, bound hand and foot, to the tender