In late 1772 Benjamin Franklin received a startling package from an unknown sender. It was a collection of letters from several high-ranking colonial officials in Massachusetts written to Thomas Whatley, an assistant to Britain’s prime minister. Their subject was the ongoing unrest caused by the Stamp Act, which imposed the first direct taxes on colonists, and by other legislation the people in Massachusetts judged oppressive and tyrannical. The officials reported that the colonists had started an insurrection: The king’s property was being vandalized and his officers harassed. Mobs controlled the streets, forcing British soldiers to seek safety on an island in Boston Harbor. Only a strong show of force, the officials insisted, would restore peace.



THE LOYAL SON: THE WAR IN BEN FRANKLIN’S HOUSE by Daniel Mark Epstein Ballantine Books, 464 pp., $30.00

Franklin understood the significance of the documents. One of the authors was the royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson. Although he was Massachusetts-born, Hutchinson was hated by Boston radicals. His plan to protect his fellow colonists was to weaken representative institutions and strengthen the royal hand, including the use of British troops as police. “I never think of the measures necessary for the peace and good order of the colonies without pain,” he wrote. “There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties.” More specifically, the republican constitution of Massachusetts must be carefully dismantled: “The government has been so long in the hands of the populace that it must come out of them by degrees.” Franklin knew how Massachusetts radicals like Samuel Adams would interpret these words: Their governor wished to deliver them into servitude. If the letters became public, they might lead to armed rebellion.

Considering his behavior up to this point—“Britain and her colonies should be considered as one whole,” he had written in the 1750s—Franklin’s next step appears baffling. From his diplomatic post in London, he sent the letters to the speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly, Thomas Cushing. The effect was predictably cataclysmic. Within the year, rebels were dumping the equivalent of millions of dollars of the East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor. Within two years, British subjects began killing each other wholesale at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The nearly two million British subjects living in the thirteen colonies had more individual liberty, more say in their government, more security, and more equitable taxation and administration of justice than any other large population in the world, perhaps in the history of the world. Franklin had put it all in danger.

One of Franklin’s most vocal critics was the royal governor of New Jersey—his own son. William Franklin had learned to be “a thorough government man” from his father, who was himself a government man until something happened in the early 1770s that prompted him take up the radicals’ cause. Until this time, Benjamin and William had been remarkably close: debate partners, scientific collaborators, business associates, and fellow servants of the Crown and colony. Now they would take different paths. One would become a rebel, a co-author of the Declaration of Independence, the new nation’s first ambassador to France, and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. The other would become a leader of the Loyalists seeking to protect the honor of the British Empire and the safety of its subjects. They became, curiously, a radical father and conservative son.

The Loyal Son is the first dual biography in over two decades, since Sheila L. Skemp’s Benjamin and William Franklin: Father and Son, Patriot and Loyalist. Epstein’s book is an elegant if slightly embellished narrative. (He has a habit, not unique to him, of adding details about things like weather and clothing that are not given in the sources he cites.) It is also a case study in a profound question about the revolutionary era. What caused Americans to choose one side or the other?