January 13, 2026 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, on January 29, 1774, Benjamin Franklin was summoned before the King’s advisers in an octagonal chamber at Whitehall Palace known as the Cockpit. Intended as a public humiliation, the encounter instead became a turning point. Franklin entered as a loyal servant of the British Empire and left deeply disillusioned, newly committed to the American cause.
Sheila Skemp, author of The Making of a Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit, tells the story of the extraordinary hour that helped turn one of Britain’s most famous subjects into an American patriot and set him on a collision course with his own son. We'd like to thank the U.S. Library of Congress for originally hosting this audio.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
A show where America is the star and the American people.
On January twenty ninth, seventeen seventy four, Benjamin Franklin was
called to appear in Britain before a select group of
the King's advisors in an octagonal shaped room in a
(00:30):
palace known as the Cockpit. Though Franklin entered the room
as a dutiful servant of the British Crown, he left
as a budding American revolutionary, and it was this event
that ultimately pitted Franklin against his own son, suggesting that
the revolution was in no small part a civil war.
(00:52):
Here to tell the story is renowned Franklin historian Sheila Skimp,
author of the Making of a Patriot. Benjamin Franklin at
the Cockpit, Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Benjamin Franklin was not a provincial man. As a young boy,
he had lived in England for eighteen mostly pleasurable months,
when he was still trying to figure out what he
wanted to do with his life. He returned in seventeen
fifty seven remained in London five more years. This time
he came not as a bewildered boy trying to find
(01:26):
his way in the big city. But as a man
whose intellectual credentials had dazzled men of letters throughout Western Europe.
He'd already conducted his famous kite experiment, becoming known everywhere
as the man who tamed the Lightning. He'd been admitted
to London's prestigious royal society and honor a few Englishmen
(01:50):
and even fewer Americans were ever able to attain, and
once in England he was wined and dined, and feted
and celebrated everywhere he went. It's not surprising that when
he finally left for home in seventeen sixty two, he
wasn't very happy about it. He might have missed his
wife and daughter, but he promised one London friend. He said,
(02:12):
I will return, and this time I will settle here forever.
He got back home, and he still missed London. He
told more than one person Pennsylvania, even Philadelphia is a
provincial backwater. It just doesn't compare to the big city.
(02:34):
And so he was delighted when less than two years
after he got back to Philadelphia for the second time,
he returned to England once more. He went there ironically
to try to get the King to turn Pennsylvania into
a royal colony. This at the very time when the
(02:56):
Stamp Act was just going into effect. So the irony there,
to my mind, is rather amazing. Franklin loved England not
just because of the friends he had, not just because
of the honors he received, not just because of the
stimulating conversations he enjoyed there, but because he had devoted
(03:21):
most of his adult life to the service of king
and country. Just a few examples, He'd helped raise money
for the King's army during the French and Indian War.
He'd used his influence to secure a job as Royal
Governor of New Jersey for his son William. He'd worked
(03:43):
long and hard, and ultimately fruitlessly to make Pennsylvania a
royal colony. He had made excuses over and over and
over again for King and Parliament when the government enacted
the Stamp Act the Townshend Acts, earning himself enemies in Pennsylvania.
(04:04):
As a result, he steadily sought to become a member
of the King's government to get a more important position
than that post office job. He did all this and
more not just because he was an ambitious man, though
I think he was a very ambitious man, but because
he really and truly believed that Englishmen on both sides
(04:27):
of the water would benefit from seeing themselves, as he
put it, not as belonging to different communities with different interests,
but as one community with one interest. He wanted an
Anglo American alliance based upon equality that would be, as
(04:48):
he put it, the awe of the world. And so
he was a real English patriot up until almost the end.
As late as seventeen seventy, the year of the Boston massacre,
he was urging the colonists to maintain a steady loyalty
(05:11):
to the king and claimed that George had the best
disposition toward us and has a family interest in our prosperity.
And not surprisingly, he moved in really, really august circles.
He knew personally many of the men whom political leaders
at home were saying, we're trying to destroy American liberty,
(05:35):
and he would say, yeah, a few of them. Maybe
there were some of them that he did despise, no
doubt about that. But he also knew because he was there,
and he knew these people personally and didn't just know
about them from rumors spread across the Atlantic Ocean. He
knew that there were many, many friends of America in England,
(05:58):
and he knew that most others were not out to
destroy colonial liberty. They might have been misguided, they might
have been stubborn. Some of them, he admitted, were not
very bright, but they were not evil. Thus, even when
he was frustrated by government policy, Franklin was always hopeful.
(06:22):
The popular inclination here, he would say, confidently, is to
wish us well and that we may preserve our liberties.
Benjamin Franklin changed his tune after seventeen seventy four. His
humiliation at the Cockpit was a critical encounter for Benjamin Franklin.
(06:43):
He was never again the same.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And you've been listening to Sheila Skimp, and she's a
renowned Franklin historian. In the book is the Making of
a Patriot Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
You're learning a lot about Franklin here that we were
not taught in school.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
I didn't know any of this until much later in life,
having read quite a number of books. We have a
terrific one about Franklin and the battle that he and
his son had called loyal son, and it's about the
war inside Ben Franklin's own family. So when anyone tells
you Americans have never been more divided, one need only
look at Ben Franklin's own to get the answer to that.
(07:22):
When we come back, we'll find out why. With Sheila
kemp here on our American Stories, leehabib here. As we
approach our nation's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, I'd like
to remind you that all the history stories you hear
on this show brought to you by the great folks
at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn't just a great school
for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you
(07:44):
as well. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to find out
about their terrific free online courses. Their series on communism
is one of the finest I've ever seen. Again, go
to Hillsdale dot edu and sign up for their free
and terrific online courses. And we continue with our American
(08:10):
Stories and the story of how Ben Franklin went from
being an Anglo file in the end to what we
might call an American file. Let's pick up where we
last left off with historian Sheila.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Skimer Franklin entered a tiny room in Whitehall Palace that
was known as the Cockpit on January twenty ninth, seventeen
seventy four. The room was built by Henry the Eighth
and he used it to stage cockfights, which is why
it became known as the Cockpit. Long since that was
(08:45):
no longer the case, the government used it to conduct
normal official business, but the old name stuck. Franklin's appearance
physical appearance that day was not designed to impress. He
had a very old fact wig on and wore a
simple blue coat of Manchester velvet. He entered the room,
(09:08):
he looked around, and he realized that all the seats
were taken, and so the sixty eight year old man
was forced to stand as a man young enough to
be his son harangued and berated him to the delight
of an overthrow crowd. For about an hour, everybody who
(09:30):
was anybody was there to watch Franklin be humiliated. Lord
North was there. General Thomas Gage also managed to make
it even the stray scientist or philosopher was squeezed into
the room. Most members of the prestigious Privy Council were
(09:51):
also there. Significantly, I think Crucially, Franklin knew most of
these people personally. He had hoped to be one of them.
He counted them among his friends, and so from the
beginning this was personal for him as well as political.
(10:12):
Why was he there, Ostensibly he came to defend a
petition from the Massachusetts legislature asking for the removal of
two men from office, Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor
Andrew Oliver. Franklin was there as an agent, which is
kind of like a lobbyist for Massachusetts, and he knew
(10:36):
when he walked in that this petition was going to
be rejected. In fact, he was surprised that he even
had to show up, but it was his job to
go through the motions defend it if he could, and
so he was there in that capacity. Two things made
what under any other circumstances would have been a mere
(10:57):
formality into a spec that captured the attention of everybody
in London. First, the timing could not have been worse.
Franklin had been originally prepared to defend the petition on
January eleventh, but when he found out on January eleventh
(11:18):
that Governor Hutchinson had hired a lawyer to defend him.
He thought, well, maybe I should get a lawyer to
defend me, too, and so he asked for a postponement.
Unfortunately for him, he got it, and so instead of
defending the petition on January eleventh, he defended it on
(11:40):
January twenty ninth, eighteen days. Eighteen days meant in this
case a lot, because it turned out that on January twentieth,
just nine days before he appeared at the Cockpit London,
received word about what we now know as the Boston
(12:01):
Tea Party. Had he gone on the original date, January eleventh,
he would have gotten there before news of the Boston
Tea Party arrived. Rightly or wrongly, English leaders were furious
at the Boston Tea Party. To them, this was the
(12:21):
last straw. They had done, from their standpoint, everything that
they could to be conciliatory towards the colonists for ten years,
and this was the thanks that they got. A bunch
of Boston ruffians had thrown private property into the ocean
and had shown that they had no respect for England,
(12:45):
its laws or its lawmakers. They were hurt, they were angry,
they were frustrated, they were out for blood. They were
looking for someone, anyone to blame for the ills that
beset the English Empire, and Benjamin Franklin was a convenient target.
(13:06):
But why Franklin? He clearly had no control over the
men who destroyed the tea. In fact, when he first
heard about it, he was furious and said, why did
they do this? He was not pleased at all, So
why Franklin. Franklin himself was partly to blame, which brings
us to our second reason for what happened in that room.
(13:30):
To understand this, you have to go back a little
bit and look at some background. Between seventeen sixty eight
and seventeen sixty nine, Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver had
written occasional letters to a man by the name of
(13:51):
Thomas Weightly. Weighty was a member of Parliament. He was
a supporter of the stamp Act. Both Oliver and Hutchinson
had been victims of mob violence during the stamp ACKed riots.
Their houses had been destroyed, their most prized possessions had
been ground into the dust. They had barely escaped with
(14:13):
their lives. Three years later, for some reason, they were
still angry, and so in letter after letter to Waitly,
they talked about the mob violence that characterized Boston, and
they insisted over and over again England must clamp down
on the colonies before it was too late, otherwise independence
(14:37):
would be inevitable. Thomas Weighty died in seventeen seventy two,
but the Hutchinson Oliver letters survived, and in the winter
of seventeen seventy two, someone Franklin never told anybody who
historians still don't know who it was. Somebody got possession
(14:59):
of those letters, gave them to Franklin and said do
with them what you will, and Franklin forwarded the letters
to Thomas Kushching, who was Speaker of the House in Massachusetts.
Franklin's explanation for his decision to send the letters back
(15:22):
to Massachusetts has been people just still shake their heads
at it. This is supposed to be a smart guy.
What was he thinking, he said, and he never stopped
saying this. He thought that when people saw these letters
that they would feel the same way that he had.
(15:42):
He said, when he saw them, light dawned, everything suddenly
made sense. Now he knew why King and Parliament were
so determined to destroy colonial liberties, which he just couldn't
figure out. Before Parliament's efforts to tax the colonies. The
government's decision to send redcoats to Boston in seventeen sixty eight,
(16:02):
which led to the Boston massacre, came because people like
Hutchinson and Oliver had intentionally misled London officials lying to them.
He thought sending these letters would bring England and America
closer together. It was about as wrong a prognostication as
(16:26):
anybody has ever made. Immediately, the Massachusetts legislature drew up
a petition asking the King to remove the governor and
Lieutenant governor from their offices. It was an audacious demand.
I mean, these people served at the discretion of the king.
(16:48):
This was not a democracy. It wasn't going to happen.
But they nevertheless sent this petition to London. And it
was this petition that Franklin was trying to defend at
the Cockpit.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
And you've been listening to renowned Franklin historian Sheila Skimp,
author of the Making of a Patriot, Benjamin Franklin at
the Cockpit, And now you know what the cockpit was
and how it got its name from a cockfighting tradition
long before this meeting. That there is Franklin in this
little room, walks in and it's a total setup. All
(17:22):
these people he'd known, people like Lord North, General Thomas Gage,
and there they are, not even leaving him a seat
to sit in, and he is going to take a beatdown.
Total humiliation he's about to experience when we come back
more of this remarkable story, the Making of a Patriot,
Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit. Here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we continue with our American stories and the story
of the Making of a Patriot. We're talking about Benjamin
Franklin's time at the Cockpit, and there he was. He
found himself in seventeen seventy four in that room with
all of British high society and every aspect of British society,
from the military to letters to lords and nobles. Let's
(18:30):
pick up when we last left off with Sheila Skimp,
author of the Making of a Patriot.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
And so when he walked into the cockpit, Franklin encountered
the perfect storm. The King's men were furious about the
tea party. They were furious about Franklin's use of the
Hutchinson Oliver letters. They had put two and two together
and they had come to the conclusion that it was
(18:56):
Franklin's fault that the relationship between massachue Use and England
was so bad. He was to blame for the petition.
He was even to blame for the Boston Tea Party. Still,
even though he knew that people were mad, Franklin was
not ready for what happened to him in the cockpit.
(19:19):
One man stood up to defend Hutchinson and Oliver. His
name was Alexander Wedderburn. He was the Attorney General of
the king. He was known everywhere for his ability to
(19:40):
use words as weapons. He was an orator par excellence,
and he was never in better form. General Gage said
Wedderburn was serious, pathetic, and severe by turns. And it
was the attack on Franklin, not a defense of Hutchinson,
(20:00):
which he hardly even mentioned, that was at the heart
of Wedderburn's performance. Franklin, he said, was the leader of
a secret cabal whose members were determined to destroy the empire.
He was a true incendiary who had intentionally set the
whole province in flame. On and on he went. I've
(20:24):
just picked a few of the worst things, he said.
I mean, it just went on just forever. It seemed
like I'm sure, especially to Franklin. By any standard, it
was a spectacular performance. The audience loved it. They hooted,
they applauded as Wedderburn and one man's words poured forth
such a torrent of virulent abuse on doctor Franklin as
(20:46):
no man had ever endured before. And through it all
Franklin stood said nothing, didn't even allow his facial expression
to change. He thought that a con and criminal would
not have been subject to the treatment he received at
the cockpit. Finally it was over, Wedderburn sat down. He
(21:12):
invited his victim to respond. Franklin simply said, I do
not choose to be examined, and there was nothing more
to say, and he walked out of the room. And
as he walked out, he looked at everybody gathered around Wedderburn,
congratulating him on his brilliant performance, shaking his hand, slapping
(21:33):
him on the back. No one in that room seemed
to understand what they had just done. They had turned
a loyal English subject into a patriot in less than
an hour's time. In short order, the Privy Council rejected
the Massachusetts petition, which they could have and should have
(21:56):
done without any of this grand display. Two days later,
Franklin was fired from his position as the King's Deputy
Postmaster of the American Colonies, a position he'd had for
two decades on his own. He resigned his position as
Massachusetts Agent, knowing full well that whatever use he had
(22:21):
been to the colony was at an end. He was
now a private man, with no one to serve, no
job to do. It's impossible to overstate the significance of
Franklin's humiliation at the cockpit. It was devastating. He was
(22:41):
a proud and loyal empire man, and now he was
a committed patriot. At the time, he tried to pretend
that it didn't matter. He said, I've not lost a
single friend as a result of this. People are coming
to my rooms every day and telling me that they
still support me and that they're indignant at the unworthy
(23:03):
treatment that I received. He told his sister Jane that
he was proud that he had lost his post office job.
This was a badge of honor. He said that he
never tried to defend himself, but just kept a cool,
sullen silence. That wasn't exactly true. After the cockpit Franklin's
(23:24):
mood darkened perceptibly. His vision changed in a variety of ways.
Let me just give you a couple of quick examples,
kind of the before and after picture. Before the cockpit.
He laughed when he heard people like Samuel Adams and
Patrick Henry say that the King and his ministers were
(23:46):
the masterminds of an insidious plot to destroy colonial liberty.
He said, this is paranoid. I know these people. This
is not true. They respect us, they love our liberties. Again.
They make a mistake now and then, but this does
not mean evil intention. After January of seventeen seventy four,
(24:08):
Franklin said, the men who hold the reins of power
in England look at Americans with total disdain. If somebody
like Wedderburn could sneer at him, a world renowned scientist,
a man of letters, a talented man, what must he
(24:32):
think of ordinary Americans? If ministers who had once told
him that they thought he deserved a position in the
government were laughing uproariously at Wetterman's jibes, how could Franklin
cling to the belief that Englishmen would ever join the
colonies in this pan empirical empire that would be the
(24:58):
envy of the world. I don't think it's an accident
that on the day he signed the Franco American Treaty
of Alliance in seventeen seventy eight, he put on that
same suit of Manchester velvet to sign the peace treaty.
It was like he was saying, you got me then,
(25:18):
I've got you now. So America would have survived without
Benjamin Franklin, as much as I think he would hate
to think that that was the case. But I don't
think Franklin would have done so well without America. He
made mistake after mistake after mistake, and somehow ended up
(25:41):
landing on his feet. And he landed on his feet
because he made one decision that allowed most observers then
and especially now, to forget all the other mistakes he
ever made. He embraced independent His poor son, William was
(26:03):
a loyalist and was on the losing side. And who
but me has ever heard of William Franklin. But Benjamin
Franklin made the right choice in doing this. He has
gone down in history as one of the most valuable
members of the New Nation's founding generation. And it was
(26:27):
the cockpit that made him make that decision when and
how he did, and a terrific.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Job on the editing and production by our own Greg Hengler,
and a special thanks to Sheila Skimp.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Author of the Making of a Patriot.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit, And we learned look he
was entering the cockpit.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
It was a perfect storm.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
I do not choose to be examined, were Franklin's words
after the beatdown he experienced.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
And then of course he turns.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And becomes what would become a major part of our
revolution and one of our founding fathers. But I love
what Kemp said. America could have survived without Franklin, No doubt.
Franklin could not have survived without America. The story of
the Making of a Patriot Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Here on our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
A show where America is the star and the American people.
On January twenty ninth, seventeen seventy four, Benjamin Franklin was
called to appear in Britain before a select group of
the King's advisors in an octagonal shaped room in a
(00:30):
palace known as the Cockpit. Though Franklin entered the room
as a dutiful servant of the British Crown, he left
as a budding American revolutionary, and it was this event
that ultimately pitted Franklin against his own son, suggesting that
the revolution was in no small part a civil war.
(00:52):
Here to tell the story is renowned Franklin historian Sheila Skimp,
author of the Making of a Patriot. Benjamin Franklin at
the Cockpit, Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Benjamin Franklin was not a provincial man. As a young boy,
he had lived in England for eighteen mostly pleasurable months,
when he was still trying to figure out what he
wanted to do with his life. He returned in seventeen
fifty seven remained in London five more years. This time
he came not as a bewildered boy trying to find
(01:26):
his way in the big city. But as a man
whose intellectual credentials had dazzled men of letters throughout Western Europe.
He'd already conducted his famous kite experiment, becoming known everywhere
as the man who tamed the Lightning. He'd been admitted
to London's prestigious royal society and honor a few Englishmen
(01:50):
and even fewer Americans were ever able to attain, and
once in England he was wined and dined, and feted
and celebrated everywhere he went. It's not surprising that when
he finally left for home in seventeen sixty two, he
wasn't very happy about it. He might have missed his
wife and daughter, but he promised one London friend. He said,
(02:12):
I will return, and this time I will settle here forever.
He got back home, and he still missed London. He
told more than one person Pennsylvania, even Philadelphia is a
provincial backwater. It just doesn't compare to the big city.
(02:34):
And so he was delighted when less than two years
after he got back to Philadelphia for the second time,
he returned to England once more. He went there ironically
to try to get the King to turn Pennsylvania into
a royal colony. This at the very time when the
(02:56):
Stamp Act was just going into effect. So the irony there,
to my mind, is rather amazing. Franklin loved England not
just because of the friends he had, not just because
of the honors he received, not just because of the
stimulating conversations he enjoyed there, but because he had devoted
(03:21):
most of his adult life to the service of king
and country. Just a few examples, He'd helped raise money
for the King's army during the French and Indian War.
He'd used his influence to secure a job as Royal
Governor of New Jersey for his son William. He'd worked
(03:43):
long and hard, and ultimately fruitlessly to make Pennsylvania a
royal colony. He had made excuses over and over and
over again for King and Parliament when the government enacted
the Stamp Act the Townshend Acts, earning himself enemies in Pennsylvania.
(04:04):
As a result, he steadily sought to become a member
of the King's government to get a more important position
than that post office job. He did all this and
more not just because he was an ambitious man, though
I think he was a very ambitious man, but because
he really and truly believed that Englishmen on both sides
(04:27):
of the water would benefit from seeing themselves, as he
put it, not as belonging to different communities with different interests,
but as one community with one interest. He wanted an
Anglo American alliance based upon equality that would be, as
(04:48):
he put it, the awe of the world. And so
he was a real English patriot up until almost the end.
As late as seventeen seventy, the year of the Boston massacre,
he was urging the colonists to maintain a steady loyalty
(05:11):
to the king and claimed that George had the best
disposition toward us and has a family interest in our prosperity.
And not surprisingly, he moved in really, really august circles.
He knew personally many of the men whom political leaders
at home were saying, we're trying to destroy American liberty,
(05:35):
and he would say, yeah, a few of them. Maybe
there were some of them that he did despise, no
doubt about that. But he also knew because he was there,
and he knew these people personally and didn't just know
about them from rumors spread across the Atlantic Ocean. He
knew that there were many, many friends of America in England,
(05:58):
and he knew that most others were not out to
destroy colonial liberty. They might have been misguided, they might
have been stubborn. Some of them, he admitted, were not
very bright, but they were not evil. Thus, even when
he was frustrated by government policy, Franklin was always hopeful.
(06:22):
The popular inclination here, he would say, confidently, is to
wish us well and that we may preserve our liberties.
Benjamin Franklin changed his tune after seventeen seventy four. His
humiliation at the Cockpit was a critical encounter for Benjamin Franklin.
(06:43):
He was never again the same.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And you've been listening to Sheila Skimp, and she's a
renowned Franklin historian. In the book is the Making of
a Patriot Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
You're learning a lot about Franklin here that we were
not taught in school.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
I didn't know any of this until much later in life,
having read quite a number of books. We have a
terrific one about Franklin and the battle that he and
his son had called loyal son, and it's about the
war inside Ben Franklin's own family. So when anyone tells
you Americans have never been more divided, one need only
look at Ben Franklin's own to get the answer to that.
(07:22):
When we come back, we'll find out why. With Sheila
kemp here on our American Stories, leehabib here. As we
approach our nation's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, I'd like
to remind you that all the history stories you hear
on this show brought to you by the great folks
at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn't just a great school
for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you
(07:44):
as well. Go to Hillsdale dot edu to find out
about their terrific free online courses. Their series on communism
is one of the finest I've ever seen. Again, go
to Hillsdale dot edu and sign up for their free
and terrific online courses. And we continue with our American
(08:10):
Stories and the story of how Ben Franklin went from
being an Anglo file in the end to what we
might call an American file. Let's pick up where we
last left off with historian Sheila.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Skimer Franklin entered a tiny room in Whitehall Palace that
was known as the Cockpit on January twenty ninth, seventeen
seventy four. The room was built by Henry the Eighth
and he used it to stage cockfights, which is why
it became known as the Cockpit. Long since that was
(08:45):
no longer the case, the government used it to conduct
normal official business, but the old name stuck. Franklin's appearance
physical appearance that day was not designed to impress. He
had a very old fact wig on and wore a
simple blue coat of Manchester velvet. He entered the room,
(09:08):
he looked around, and he realized that all the seats
were taken, and so the sixty eight year old man
was forced to stand as a man young enough to
be his son harangued and berated him to the delight
of an overthrow crowd. For about an hour, everybody who
(09:30):
was anybody was there to watch Franklin be humiliated. Lord
North was there. General Thomas Gage also managed to make
it even the stray scientist or philosopher was squeezed into
the room. Most members of the prestigious Privy Council were
(09:51):
also there. Significantly, I think Crucially, Franklin knew most of
these people personally. He had hoped to be one of them.
He counted them among his friends, and so from the
beginning this was personal for him as well as political.
(10:12):
Why was he there, Ostensibly he came to defend a
petition from the Massachusetts legislature asking for the removal of
two men from office, Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor
Andrew Oliver. Franklin was there as an agent, which is
kind of like a lobbyist for Massachusetts, and he knew
(10:36):
when he walked in that this petition was going to
be rejected. In fact, he was surprised that he even
had to show up, but it was his job to
go through the motions defend it if he could, and
so he was there in that capacity. Two things made
what under any other circumstances would have been a mere
(10:57):
formality into a spec that captured the attention of everybody
in London. First, the timing could not have been worse.
Franklin had been originally prepared to defend the petition on
January eleventh, but when he found out on January eleventh
(11:18):
that Governor Hutchinson had hired a lawyer to defend him.
He thought, well, maybe I should get a lawyer to
defend me, too, and so he asked for a postponement.
Unfortunately for him, he got it, and so instead of
defending the petition on January eleventh, he defended it on
(11:40):
January twenty ninth, eighteen days. Eighteen days meant in this
case a lot, because it turned out that on January twentieth,
just nine days before he appeared at the Cockpit London,
received word about what we now know as the Boston
(12:01):
Tea Party. Had he gone on the original date, January eleventh,
he would have gotten there before news of the Boston
Tea Party arrived. Rightly or wrongly, English leaders were furious
at the Boston Tea Party. To them, this was the
(12:21):
last straw. They had done, from their standpoint, everything that
they could to be conciliatory towards the colonists for ten years,
and this was the thanks that they got. A bunch
of Boston ruffians had thrown private property into the ocean
and had shown that they had no respect for England,
(12:45):
its laws or its lawmakers. They were hurt, they were angry,
they were frustrated, they were out for blood. They were
looking for someone, anyone to blame for the ills that
beset the English Empire, and Benjamin Franklin was a convenient target.
(13:06):
But why Franklin? He clearly had no control over the
men who destroyed the tea. In fact, when he first
heard about it, he was furious and said, why did
they do this? He was not pleased at all, So
why Franklin. Franklin himself was partly to blame, which brings
us to our second reason for what happened in that room.
(13:30):
To understand this, you have to go back a little
bit and look at some background. Between seventeen sixty eight
and seventeen sixty nine, Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver had
written occasional letters to a man by the name of
(13:51):
Thomas Weightly. Weighty was a member of Parliament. He was
a supporter of the stamp Act. Both Oliver and Hutchinson
had been victims of mob violence during the stamp ACKed riots.
Their houses had been destroyed, their most prized possessions had
been ground into the dust. They had barely escaped with
(14:13):
their lives. Three years later, for some reason, they were
still angry, and so in letter after letter to Waitly,
they talked about the mob violence that characterized Boston, and
they insisted over and over again England must clamp down
on the colonies before it was too late, otherwise independence
(14:37):
would be inevitable. Thomas Weighty died in seventeen seventy two,
but the Hutchinson Oliver letters survived, and in the winter
of seventeen seventy two, someone Franklin never told anybody who
historians still don't know who it was. Somebody got possession
(14:59):
of those letters, gave them to Franklin and said do
with them what you will, and Franklin forwarded the letters
to Thomas Kushching, who was Speaker of the House in Massachusetts.
Franklin's explanation for his decision to send the letters back
(15:22):
to Massachusetts has been people just still shake their heads
at it. This is supposed to be a smart guy.
What was he thinking, he said, and he never stopped
saying this. He thought that when people saw these letters
that they would feel the same way that he had.
(15:42):
He said, when he saw them, light dawned, everything suddenly
made sense. Now he knew why King and Parliament were
so determined to destroy colonial liberties, which he just couldn't
figure out. Before Parliament's efforts to tax the colonies. The
government's decision to send redcoats to Boston in seventeen sixty eight,
(16:02):
which led to the Boston massacre, came because people like
Hutchinson and Oliver had intentionally misled London officials lying to them.
He thought sending these letters would bring England and America
closer together. It was about as wrong a prognostication as
(16:26):
anybody has ever made. Immediately, the Massachusetts legislature drew up
a petition asking the King to remove the governor and
Lieutenant governor from their offices. It was an audacious demand.
I mean, these people served at the discretion of the king.
(16:48):
This was not a democracy. It wasn't going to happen.
But they nevertheless sent this petition to London. And it
was this petition that Franklin was trying to defend at
the Cockpit.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
And you've been listening to renowned Franklin historian Sheila Skimp,
author of the Making of a Patriot, Benjamin Franklin at
the Cockpit, And now you know what the cockpit was
and how it got its name from a cockfighting tradition
long before this meeting. That there is Franklin in this
little room, walks in and it's a total setup. All
(17:22):
these people he'd known, people like Lord North, General Thomas Gage,
and there they are, not even leaving him a seat
to sit in, and he is going to take a beatdown.
Total humiliation he's about to experience when we come back
more of this remarkable story, the Making of a Patriot,
Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit. Here on our American stories,
(18:08):
and we continue with our American stories and the story
of the Making of a Patriot. We're talking about Benjamin
Franklin's time at the Cockpit, and there he was. He
found himself in seventeen seventy four in that room with
all of British high society and every aspect of British society,
from the military to letters to lords and nobles. Let's
(18:30):
pick up when we last left off with Sheila Skimp,
author of the Making of a Patriot.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
And so when he walked into the cockpit, Franklin encountered
the perfect storm. The King's men were furious about the
tea party. They were furious about Franklin's use of the
Hutchinson Oliver letters. They had put two and two together
and they had come to the conclusion that it was
(18:56):
Franklin's fault that the relationship between massachue Use and England
was so bad. He was to blame for the petition.
He was even to blame for the Boston Tea Party. Still,
even though he knew that people were mad, Franklin was
not ready for what happened to him in the cockpit.
(19:19):
One man stood up to defend Hutchinson and Oliver. His
name was Alexander Wedderburn. He was the Attorney General of
the king. He was known everywhere for his ability to
(19:40):
use words as weapons. He was an orator par excellence,
and he was never in better form. General Gage said
Wedderburn was serious, pathetic, and severe by turns. And it
was the attack on Franklin, not a defense of Hutchinson,
(20:00):
which he hardly even mentioned, that was at the heart
of Wedderburn's performance. Franklin, he said, was the leader of
a secret cabal whose members were determined to destroy the empire.
He was a true incendiary who had intentionally set the
whole province in flame. On and on he went. I've
(20:24):
just picked a few of the worst things, he said.
I mean, it just went on just forever. It seemed
like I'm sure, especially to Franklin. By any standard, it
was a spectacular performance. The audience loved it. They hooted,
they applauded as Wedderburn and one man's words poured forth
such a torrent of virulent abuse on doctor Franklin as
(20:46):
no man had ever endured before. And through it all
Franklin stood said nothing, didn't even allow his facial expression
to change. He thought that a con and criminal would
not have been subject to the treatment he received at
the cockpit. Finally it was over, Wedderburn sat down. He
(21:12):
invited his victim to respond. Franklin simply said, I do
not choose to be examined, and there was nothing more
to say, and he walked out of the room. And
as he walked out, he looked at everybody gathered around Wedderburn,
congratulating him on his brilliant performance, shaking his hand, slapping
(21:33):
him on the back. No one in that room seemed
to understand what they had just done. They had turned
a loyal English subject into a patriot in less than
an hour's time. In short order, the Privy Council rejected
the Massachusetts petition, which they could have and should have
(21:56):
done without any of this grand display. Two days later,
Franklin was fired from his position as the King's Deputy
Postmaster of the American Colonies, a position he'd had for
two decades on his own. He resigned his position as
Massachusetts Agent, knowing full well that whatever use he had
(22:21):
been to the colony was at an end. He was
now a private man, with no one to serve, no
job to do. It's impossible to overstate the significance of
Franklin's humiliation at the cockpit. It was devastating. He was
(22:41):
a proud and loyal empire man, and now he was
a committed patriot. At the time, he tried to pretend
that it didn't matter. He said, I've not lost a
single friend as a result of this. People are coming
to my rooms every day and telling me that they
still support me and that they're indignant at the unworthy
(23:03):
treatment that I received. He told his sister Jane that
he was proud that he had lost his post office job.
This was a badge of honor. He said that he
never tried to defend himself, but just kept a cool,
sullen silence. That wasn't exactly true. After the cockpit Franklin's
(23:24):
mood darkened perceptibly. His vision changed in a variety of ways.
Let me just give you a couple of quick examples,
kind of the before and after picture. Before the cockpit.
He laughed when he heard people like Samuel Adams and
Patrick Henry say that the King and his ministers were
(23:46):
the masterminds of an insidious plot to destroy colonial liberty.
He said, this is paranoid. I know these people. This
is not true. They respect us, they love our liberties. Again.
They make a mistake now and then, but this does
not mean evil intention. After January of seventeen seventy four,
(24:08):
Franklin said, the men who hold the reins of power
in England look at Americans with total disdain. If somebody
like Wedderburn could sneer at him, a world renowned scientist,
a man of letters, a talented man, what must he
(24:32):
think of ordinary Americans? If ministers who had once told
him that they thought he deserved a position in the
government were laughing uproariously at Wetterman's jibes, how could Franklin
cling to the belief that Englishmen would ever join the
colonies in this pan empirical empire that would be the
(24:58):
envy of the world. I don't think it's an accident
that on the day he signed the Franco American Treaty
of Alliance in seventeen seventy eight, he put on that
same suit of Manchester velvet to sign the peace treaty.
It was like he was saying, you got me then,
(25:18):
I've got you now. So America would have survived without
Benjamin Franklin, as much as I think he would hate
to think that that was the case. But I don't
think Franklin would have done so well without America. He
made mistake after mistake after mistake, and somehow ended up
(25:41):
landing on his feet. And he landed on his feet
because he made one decision that allowed most observers then
and especially now, to forget all the other mistakes he
ever made. He embraced independent His poor son, William was
(26:03):
a loyalist and was on the losing side. And who
but me has ever heard of William Franklin. But Benjamin
Franklin made the right choice in doing this. He has
gone down in history as one of the most valuable
members of the New Nation's founding generation. And it was
(26:27):
the cockpit that made him make that decision when and
how he did, and a terrific.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Job on the editing and production by our own Greg Hengler,
and a special thanks to Sheila Skimp.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Author of the Making of a Patriot.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit, And we learned look he
was entering the cockpit.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
It was a perfect storm.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
I do not choose to be examined, were Franklin's words
after the beatdown he experienced.
Speaker 3 (26:57):
And then of course he turns.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And becomes what would become a major part of our
revolution and one of our founding fathers. But I love
what Kemp said. America could have survived without Franklin, No doubt.
Franklin could not have survived without America. The story of
the Making of a Patriot Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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