Quote:
Originally Posted by Taltarzac725
Franklin did not yield in his fight to save the friendship between the colonies and Mother England. In 1772, he had mistakenly hitched his wagon to someone who would steer it right into very dangerous ground when he sent some letters he received from a unnamed source to Thomas Cushing, one of his Massachusetts supporters and Speaker of the MA Assembly. Cushing was instructed by Franklin that these letters were not for the publication as they were from Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts. The Hutchinson letters would come to have a great stigma attached to them when they were published by John and Samuel Adams. Governor Hutchinson had advised on how to subdue the unrest in the colonies. Franklin had thought that by privately showing how misguided men like Hutchinson were he and his followers could save the colonies from going to war. Instead, what Franklin was afraid would happen did. The Hutchinson letters pushed the Massachusetts Assembly to pass a resolution declaring that it was not subservient to Parliament. Hutchinson Letters Affair | Ask.com Encyclopedia |
The furor over the publication of the Hutchinson letters landed Ben Franklin into the Cockpit in January 1794. The Privy Council had summoned him into a room where Henry VIII had watched birds try to kill one another probably much like the fights between factions trying to present potential fertile wives to him had been. On the
agenda of the Privy Council was the removal of Hutchinson from his post as Massachusetts Governor. What was really happening though was that they wanted a scapegoat for the whole Hutchinson letter mess and were looking at Ben Franklin to fit the role. Franklin did not even have legal representation in what to him looked like a trial. This made him
awfully
cranky. He figuratively
knelt before the Council and requested time to find counsel and to prepare his case. He asked for three weeks during which time news of the Boston Tea Party reached England.
http://www.benjaminfranklinhouse.org...s/2011news.htm