Father and Son
William Franklin, the Last Royal Governor, June 1776
WILLIAM Franklin was appointed royal governor of New Jersey in 1763, partly as a reward to his father, and governed well. He was also his father's son in stubbornness. When the crisis came he chose the King, and his father chose the colonies, and each spent the last months before the break trying to convert the other. The collection holds William in the years the two men's interests still ran together — a letter of 1769 to the Philadelphia merchant Thomas Wharton, their partner in the Indiana land company — and at the moment they came apart.
Autograph Letter Signed, to Thomas Wharton
The governor writes to Wharton, his and his father's partner in the Indiana Company's claim to the Ohio lands — the last great speculation in which the Franklins were on the same side. Seven years later Wharton's Philadelphia was the seat of the Congress that arrested him.
On June 15, 1776, the Continental Congress declared William Franklin 'a virulent enemy to this country' and ordered his arrest. He answered two days later, in a letter to the Council and Assembly of New Jersey which the Burlington printer Isaac Collins issued as a broadside with a postscript of June 22. It is a proud, lawyerly, doomed document: the governor of a royal province refusing to recognize a Provincial Congress he called 'an illegal assembly.' That assembly arrested him on June 26. He was in a Connecticut jail when his father signed the Declaration a week later, and would spend two years there, part of it in solitary confinement at Litchfield. Father and son met once more, in England in 1785, and parted. The collection's copy belonged to Richard Smith, with contemporary manuscript notes on the verso.
A Letter from His Excellency William Franklin, Esquire, to the Honorable the Gentlemen of His Majesty's Council and to the Gentlemen of the House of Representatives of His Majesty's Province of New-Jersey
William Franklin's reply of June 17, 1776, to the Congress's resolution of June 15 branding him a traitor, printed with a postscript of June 22 — four days before his arrest and two weeks before his father signed the Declaration. The last public act of the last royal governor. Richard Smith's copy, with contemporary ink manuscript on the verso of the last page; a few lines professionally mended affecting eleven words. One of the two or three most important pieces of paper in the collection.
He was in a Connecticut jail when his father signed the Declaration.