IN 1785, on his way home from Paris, Benjamin Franklin stopped at Southampton and met his son for the first time in a decade. William had spent two years in prison and six more in occupied New York organizing Loyalist raids; he now lived in London on a British pension. The meeting settled the sale of some New Jersey land and nothing else. Franklin's will, five years later, left William almost nothing, 'the part he acted against me in the late war' being, he wrote, too well known to require explanation.
The collection holds the father's triumphs — the examination, the alliance, the treaty, the Declaration — and the son's answer to Congress, printed in the two weeks between his defiance and his arrest. Read together they are the Revolution at the scale of a family, which is the scale at which most people lived it.
The Revolution at the scale of a family, which is the scale at which most people lived it.
The Stamp Act and the Road to War
Morgan, Edmund S., and Helen M. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Examination of Doctor Benjamin Franklin … before an August Assembly, relating to the Repeal of the Stamp-Act. [London and Philadelphia], 1766. The source of the quotation that heads this catalog.
The Two Franklins
Skemp, Sheila L. William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Epstein, Daniel Mark. The Loyal Son: The War in Ben Franklin's House. New York: Ballantine, 2017.
The Cockpit and Paris
Schiff, Stacy. A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.
Brigham, Clarence S. Paul Revere's Engravings. Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1954.