DURING THOSE YEARS, WILLIAM Franklin’s longing to maintain contact with his family in Philadelphia and France never waned. A few unpublished letters between Sally Bache and her nephew Temple that have come to light reveal how much effort to communicate was made on both sides, from the time William was exchanged until his last days in New York.
Sally informed Temple on September 16, 1779, that she had received two letters from his father that summer. The governor was perfectly fine and always inquired affectionately about Grandfather’s health as well as Temple’s. William sent his two-year-old niece Betty, his late wife’s namesake, the birthday gift of a little bonnet. Sally felt free to write to William in New York, and whenever she received any news from Temple in Paris she made a point of relaying it to his father. Richard Bache felt no such freedom to correspond with the loyalist—although he did inform Benjamin, on November 2, that “By a gentleman lately out of New York we hear that his [Temple’s] father is well.” This is, significantly, the last we hear of William Franklin from Bache until the war is over.
Letters were constantly being intercepted. Soon after Sally wrote the one to Temple quoted above, she and William were advised to correspond no more. It was dangerous. As Governor Franklin’s activism in the war mounted, the family was under mortal pressure to avoid him. What could not be trusted to the mails had to be communicated by a faithful intermediary, behind closed doors. Answering Aunt Sally’s letter on March 18, 1780, Temple was so bold as to write: “It gives me infinite satisfaction, to hear that my father enjoys his health. I have never wrote him since I left Philadelphia: for several reasons.” His grandfather had warned him not to. “I certainly might have done it without injuring the American Cause, but I thought it might give suspicions: and I was desirous of avoiding them.” He admitted he had not been wholly successful in this.
By the time Sally wrote to her nephew again, on October 30, the only news she could offer about his father was hearsay. A Mrs. Lewis who came to visit from New York had often been with him and said he was in fine spirits. William had asked Mrs. Lewis the name of Sally’s newborn. “She told him Louis, after the King of France.” He smiled but said nothing. Sally reassured Temple that his reasons for not writing to his father were sound, and that whenever she had news of Temple, or Grandfather, she would find a way of conveying it to William without paper. “I am sure it makes him happy….I do not now write—Peace I hope will soon restore to us the pleasure of corresponding with, and seeing our friends, along with many other pleasures and comforts that this cruel war has deprived us of.”
THE SURRENDER OF GENERAL Cornwallis at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, came as a surprise to most of the world—but not to General Clinton. He had begun to despair a year earlier, after a third of Cornwallis’s army was routed at the battle of King’s Mountain, South Carolina. He later wrote that that defeat was “the first link in a chain of evils” that resulted in the loss of America. Yet George Washington’s own despair, expressed soon after King’s Mountain, is also well known, so clearly there was fear on both sides.
Most Americans, weary of war, inflation, conflagration, and terrorism, were hopeful but hardly confident the Continental Army would prevail at the beginning of that year. In mid-January 1781, Richard Bache had informed Benjamin of Benedict Arnold’s march to Richmond, burning public buildings and destroying all the public records. The war, Bache explained, had been so far away that the colony of Virginia “almost forgot there was such a thing existing in America; being long unmolested, she lulled herself into security and was thence unprepared for an attack.” This might be said of all the provinces north of the Carolinas, with the exception of New Jersey and New York, where hand-to-hand fighting was a daily reality.
In the summer of 1781, William had still been hopeful. He knew General Clinton had decided to send a fleet of ships with reinforcements to save Cornwallis in August, and William had confidence in the plan. What no one knew, because of Washington’s trickery, fake dispatches, and lightning speed, is how rapidly his army of seven thousand soldiers would march from Newport to Philadelphia. It was miraculous. While Clinton dawdled in the harbor, Washington and Rochambeau began, on August 19, what came to be known as the celebrated march, delivering the army to Philadelphia—two hundred miles in two weeks. From there they would sail to Virginia. No one, including his generals, could have predicted Washington’s luck and ingenuity, or Clinton’s folly and misfortune—the storm that delayed his armada. By the time the fleet set sail, Cornwallis, overwhelmed, had surrendered his troops at Yorktown—a defeat so crippling the British would not recover from it.
The news of the surrender, arriving in England on November 25, would put an end to British hopes for victory. By April 15, Benjamin Franklin was in secret negotiations with Richard Oswald, a special agent for Lord Shelbourne, the new secretary of state, to secure a peace. In America these events were widely anticipated; Sally Bache, writing to her father on November 29, was jubilant. “You have heard so much of the late glorious news from all quarters, that I need not repeat it, only congratulate you on an event that I think must procure us a happy peace.” She wrote that she was all dressed up to visit Martha Washington, in town celebrating with her husband and Congress.
William Franklin heard of the terms of surrender from the loyalists who had escaped Yorktown, the lucky soldiers who shouldered their way aboard the British ship Bonetta moored in the York River. One could hear their mournful voices in the City Arms Tavern. Cornwallis had thrown over his American brothers in arms, sold them to the rebels to save his English regulars and Hessian mercenaries! Clinton himself wrote of the horror and dismay with which the American refugees who had joined forces with his troops or expected their protection read Article X of the surrender. This denied American loyalists the immunity from punishment that was guaranteed to foreign soldiers. They were to be treated as criminals. General Washington—to ease his own conscience and appease Cornwallis—had included one little sentence, a loophole about the Bonetta: “It might sail without examination, with such soldiers as he may think proper to send to New York.” There were hundreds of loyalists, and not room enough on the Bonetta for half of them. Men who rowed after the ship in boats, crying for their lives, were beaten back with curses, and many were soon seized by the patriots. Some faced the gallows and others were whipped. Most lost their property.
William Franklin wrote to the colonial secretary on November 6: “Of far more consequence than the loss of ten such generals, and ten such armies, is the confidence of almost every rank and denomination of people throughout the British Provinces.” One high-ranking Associator, Colonel Joshua Upham, wanted to know if he and his men were also to be sacrificed.
The Board of Associated Loyalists asked Governor Franklin to sail to England at once and plead their case. He agreed to go. But at the last minute General Clinton talked him out of it, promising that if Franklin would stay and keep the peace among his people, he, the commander in chief, would issue a public order that the loyalists would never be treated any differently than the king’s troops. Taking Clinton at his word, Franklin answered his ranking officer, Colonel Upham, at Lloyd’s Neck, reassuring him that this new order was in effect.
When General Clinton heard that Franklin had informed Upham of the promised order of protection, airing the substance of their private conversation, he was furious. William protested that the order that might restore the faith of thousands was worthless if only the two of them knew of it. Clinton stalled. He wanted a formal petition from the board and insisted on waiting for Cornwallis’s return to New York to explain, or apologize for, the odious Article X. Cornwallis came and went, sailing for England on December 15 without explaining his choice to anyone’s satisfaction. William wrote to Lord Germain that if the blunders committed in the management of the king’s affairs in this country were not yet plainly obvious, he was at a loss to know what could convince Parliament. On January 23, Clinton agreed to issue the order against any discrimination between the loyalists and the British regulars. But he never did. He just wanted to go home, to follow Cornwallis to England, to be anywhere other than this hellish place. In March he authorized Franklin to publish the order as president of the Board of Associated Loyalists.
Desperate to gain some tool of leverage for his refugees, William begged Clinton to issue a public letter addressed to General Washington and the congress vowing retaliation. If any American taken prisoner at Yorktown was executed, the British would square accounts by hanging a rebel prisoner in New York. At the very least, he pleaded, Clinton might authorize the Associated Loyalists to deal with their own prisoners as they saw fit, an eye for an eye. Nothing less than retributive justice, he advised, would restore confidence and a sense of security among the Tories.
Clinton would do nothing of the sort. He would not publicly criticize his own general for the conditions of his surrender, nor would he make a public policy of the Mosaic lex talionis. General Clinton knew very well that retributive justice would follow, inevitably, from civil war. As so many suffering patriots and loyalists would live to tell—soldiers driven mad by violence and privation, innocent men and women caught in the crossfire, widows and orphans—the war of rebellion was over but the civil war would rage on.
While Benjamin Franklin was in France negotiating the peace, William Franklin was fighting for his life and the lives of the king’s good subjects. They had no choice, these men with prices on their heads. And despite General Clinton’s cynicism and gloom, the Associated Loyalists had not given up hope that the British might win the war after all. If this seems irrational, so it was. Sane men were out of their element. News traveled unreliably and distant battles offered seeds of hope. At Clouds Creek, South Carolina, a troop of two hundred loyalists crushed a company of patriots on November 17; only two rebels survived the massacre. On January 25, 1782, Rear Admiral Samuel Hood commanding twenty-two British battleships defeated a larger French fleet at the sea battle of St. Kitts. This was a significant victory. And William Franklin was plotting an uprising in Duchess County; he was strengthening the garrison at Lloyd’s Neck and designing a stronghold at Sag Harbor as a base for spring campaigns in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
Governor Franklin reported to Lord Germain on March 23 (not knowing Germain had been replaced) that Cornwallis’s failure had resulted not from military disadvantage but from blundering, delay, and failure to cooperate with American loyalists. He believed he and his men could do better. That very day a convoy of Associated Loyalists was under sail from Lloyd’s Neck down to Toms River, deep in Monmouth County, under orders to destroy a nest of rebel pirates, the garrison of the infamous Jack Huddy.
Captain Huddy commanded a small fort guarding Dover, a coastal hamlet seventy miles south of New York. On the hill overlooking Toms River, the fort was a square palisade of logs seven feet high garrisoned by twenty-six rebels, who manned cannon mounted on the four corners. The deep harbor there, camouflaged by marsh grasses, made perfect anchorage for privateers, like Huddy himself, who could lie in wait for British vessels sailing north to New York with provisions, arms, or treasure.
By the end of the winter, March 1782, Huddy had caused such loss of life and property along the coast that the Associated Loyalists vowed to put him out of business. The expedition deployed three armed whaleboats bearing eighty seamen, under guard of a brig, the Arrogant, shipping its crew and thirty more soldiers ready to fight.
The convoy sailed from Lloyd’s Neck on the vernal equinox, arriving near the mouth of Toms River on Saturday, March 23. A sentry spied their landing at midnight and ran to awaken Huddy. When the Tories attacked at dawn, the rebels behind the notched palisades were armed with muskets, pistols, and long pikes. In the fight that ensued the sailors swarmed over the fort and its cannon, losing nine men to bullets and bayonets while killing seven rebels.
Huddy escaped to look for shelter in the village, running from house to house as the Tories set fire to one after another. They burned the warehouses and tavern, and every house in Dover except for two dwellings belonging to Tory relations, before finding Joshua Huddy barricaded in Randolph’s mill, with Justice of the Peace Daniel Randolph. The two men laid down their arms, and were led in irons to the Intrepid bound for New York.
At last Captain Jack Huddy, the man who had greased the noose for Stephen Edwards, was a prisoner of war. Arriving in New York on April 1 under guard, he was held in a British military jail.
That same day rumors drifted up from Monmouth County that the loyalist Philip White had been captured near Snag Swamp, off the coast, and tortured. White reminded everyone of the late Stephen Edwards, his loyalist kinsman from Shrewsbury. Twenty-six years of age, he, too, had a wife, a son, and a baby daughter. A carpenter by trade, he also commandeered a privateer called The Wasp. This was the same man who had joined the raid on Shrewsbury that killed rebel John Russell’s sixty-year-old father and wounded his little boy. White’s ship had been anchored off Long Branch and he was about to board her when a party of rebel cavalry took him by surprise. One of these was John Russell, Jr.—the son of the man he had killed. As Russell chased Philip White over the sedge and dunes, White turned to fire his musket and dispatched one of his pursuers. The others overtook him.
John Russell, Jr., rancorous, and vengeful, commanded the guards that conducted the Tory White from Snag Swamp to Freehold, where he was to be held in the jail at Monmouth Courthouse. It satisfied Russell’s desire for revenge that Philip White did not get to Freehold alive or even in one piece. Russell and two other militiamen pierced him with swords until he ran; Russell then overtook White three miles from Freehold, at Pyle’s Corner, and murdered him piecemeal. What remained of the young husband and father lay bleeding upon a long table in the Monmouth Courthouse for the gaping mob as a public show and a warning to traitors. So grisly was the sight that when the victim’s sister drove over from Shrewsbury with a coffin to bury him, she was turned away.
The agonizing martyrdom of Philip White in Monmouth coincided with the loyalists’ worst fears of persecution. They wanted revenge, and as news of White’s murder reached Governor Franklin, so did demands for Joshua Huddy. So Franklin agreed that as soon as he had custody of Huddy, he would hand him over, to one Captain Richard Lippincott, who had a formal commission from the Board of Associated Loyalists.
John Tilton was one loyalist passionately concerned in the affair, because his brother Clayton Tilton, and his friend Aaron White, the late Philip’s brother, were in the Monmouth jail in danger of hanging, and Huddy’s life might be exchanged for their freedom. So Tilton spoke to Captain Lippincott, who Governor Franklin said “would be fond of going”; both knew Captain Richard Lippincott took a hearty interest in Huddy’s fate, having been both a lifelong friend and a kinsman to Philip White.
When Lippincott reported to the board on Nassau Street on the morning of April 8, 1782, William Franklin was absent. Captain Lippincott told the board that Clayton Tilton was a prisoner in Freehold about to be hanged. He requested an order to remove Joshua Huddy and two other rebels in chains down to Sandy Hook, where he would use them to bargain for Tilton’s freedom. A little later Governor Franklin entered, greeted the company, and glanced at the document on the table. Lippincott had in his pocket a piece of paper that unfolded to the size of a man’s heart with some writing upon it. He pressed the note upon the governor and asked him to read it, inquiring if it would do. At this, Daniel Coxe, the vice president of the board, angrily objected, telling him to put it away.
So the captain went away with his orders to Provost Jail. There the marshal bound Huddy, and two other prisoners, over to Lippincott and his company of loyalists, headed for the bay in a schooner. But instead of running the three men straight to Freehold to negotiate a prisoner exchange, Captain Lippincott stowed them safely aboard an armed ship, the Britannia, anchored off Sandy Hook, where the captain agreed to hold them. Lippincott then set off with his soldiers to free Tilton and White by force of arms from Freehold Prison. Failing in the attempt, Lippincott returned to the Britannia in a rage and asked for one prisoner, Joshua Huddy.
What happened in the next few hours on the beach at Gravelly Point, was witnessed by no fewer than twenty-four men, the April sunlight on the Navisink hills behind them, strong light upon the sand and sea. They would never forget the weirdness of the scene. Carpenters hammered up a gallows of several stout planks above a barrel and fastened a noose to the top brace. The rope, which had come from the Britannia, made a curious shadow on the sand. Joshua Huddy was given a quill and paper and invited to write his last will upon the barrel head. He wrote it, maintaining an admirable composure. Then most of the men stood back to watch Huddy, Lippincott, and a black slave in a queer pantomime against the sea and sky.
Huddy and Lippincott were conversing softly. There was no sign or sound of anger, no pleading or condemnation. The slave put the noose around Huddy’s neck and tightened it. Huddy climbed up on the barrel. He put his hand out to Richard Lippincott for him to shake it, and he did. The black man pulled the rope tight, fastened it, and kicked over the barrel.
THERE HAD BEEN HUNDREDS of murders just as barbarous on both sides of the conflict. But this is the one beyond all others that got the attention of George Washington, Henry Clinton, America, and all of Europe.
The paper that Captain Lippincott had unfolded at the board meeting on Monday morning was pinned to Huddy’s shirt as he hung on the gallows on Friday the twelfth.
We, the Refugees, having long with grief beheld the cruel murders of our brethren and finding nothing but such measures daily carried into execution, we therefore determined not to suffer without taking vengeance for the numerous cruelties; and thus begin having made use of Captain Huddy as the first object to present to your view; and we further determine to hang man for man while there is a refugee existing.
UP GOES HUDDY FOR PHILIP WHITE
The body was discovered the next morning, still hanging. The rebels cut him down and marched with the corpse the seventeen miles to Freehold, gathering mourners along the way and delivering Captain Huddy’s remains to the courthouse, where he lay in state for three days. The two loyalists, Tilton and White, for whom Lippincott had come days before were released from the Freehold jail in exchange for Huddy’s two fellow prisoners aboard the Britannia.
Retaliation, Aaron White swore, had saved his life and Tilton’s.
Whatever sins Joshua Huddy had committed in his troubled life, in death he was a hero to his countrymen. The crowd of mourners was so enormous that no building in town could hold a quarter of them. The eulogy for the military martyr concluded with a thundering condemnation of the hanging—and an appeal to General Washington for justice.
George Washington was properly outraged. On April 21, he wrote a letter of protest to General Clinton enclosing testimonials from the people of Monmouth, who believed Clinton had ordered the hanging. Washington called Huddy’s death “the most brutal, unprecedented, and inhuman murder that ever disgraced the arms of a civilized people” and demanded that Captain Lippincott be given up. Do it speedily, he added, or he would consider himself justified in the eyes of God and man for the measures he would then take—in other words, Washington would hang an English officer in retaliation.
Sir Henry Clinton was also provoked: first, by the unauthorized execution of a prisoner of war, and second, by Washington’s insinuating that he, General Clinton, would authorize such a “barbarous outrage against humanity.” As soon as he had heard of the deed he had ordered an investigation. Lippincott was already under arrest and would soon be tried by a court-martial. Clinton could not resist some moralizing of his own: Washington’s threatening to sacrifice an innocent man to prevent further bloodshed would be to magnify barbarity. Furthermore, if one wanted examples of cruelty, there were plenty of those in Washington’s own jurisdiction, worse, in fact, and probably inciting this recent horror.
Clinton had written to William Franklin on April 20, a polite letter reporting the murder and enclosing a copy of the note that had been pinned to Huddy’s shirt. He asked for an inquiry and a report, at once. He waited for five days for a response before writing again on the twenty-fifth, demanding an answer. The general informed President Franklin that he had just appointed a Board of Generals to investigate the hanging. When taken into custody, Lippincott claimed he had orders from the Board of Loyalists dated April 8 to carry Huddy and other prisoners to Sandy Hook and arrange a prisoner exchange.
This time Governor Franklin replied, explaining that as soon as he got the first letter he had read it to his board, who directed Captain Lippincott to prepare a report. This took him a few days, as he had to take depositions from people living in different places; and by the time he had gotten it all organized and copied fair—just yesterday evening—he was seized and carried to the Provost Jail. Now Lippincott was powerless to make his report, and so the board was powerless to comply with His Excellency’s request. He enclosed the letter that had informed Clinton’s adjutant of the planned expedition, and the original instructions that had gone to Captain Lippincott.
For General Clinton, this would not do. In light of the furious threats from General Washington, this would not do at all. Clinton insisted on having every bit of information the Board of Associated Loyalists could provide by ten o’clock the next morning.
The letters that followed may be summed up in a sentence of Franklin’s statement on behalf of the board: “The three prisoners delivered to Captain Lippincott on the 8th were not exchanged according to the intentions of the Board, but…they were nevertheless disposed of in a manner which the Board are clearly of opinion was highly justifiable.” The board denied giving orders to Lippincott to kill Huddy. Yet, given that hundreds of British subjects had been murdered without their government’s lifting a finger to defend them, no wonder they felt justified in retaliating. Men placed in such dire circumstances will act out of emotion rather than reason.
It is quite simply, Franklin declared, a law of nature and self-preservation that justifies such measures, and in the present case no other means could address the purpose. Such an argument, written in blood, was unanswerable. It was probably for the best that Franklin’s words were not included in the public discourse, or in the transcripts of the court-martial that commenced on May 3. Clinton would not have to answer Franklin’s letter, or the board’s objections to the court-martial of Lippincott, which they said was illegal and offensive because Captain Lippincott was not a British officer but an American loyalist. Clinton would not have to deal with any more of this, because he was mercifully relieved of his command the very day, Saturday, April 27, that he received the terrible letter—terrible because it was sad, unanswerable, and true—from William Franklin.
One of Clinton’s last acts as commander in chief was to summon Philip White’s brother Aaron, and two other loyalists, William Murdock and Isaac Alyay, to headquarters. Under oath, these Tories testified as eyewitnesses to atrocities committed by rebel soldiers. Their depositions were meant to accompany a letter to be composed by Clinton’s successor as governor, General James Robertson, to George Washington.
Washington found himself in the worst political predicament he had ever faced. On April 19, he had promised the citizens of Monmouth, and his own generals at a council of war, that he would retaliate. If Captain Lippincott was not surrendered, then some British officer of equal rank must die in his place. Washington’s sensibilities shrank from the heartless lunacy of such an action, but the people had given him no choice. After Huddy’s funeral the citizens of Monmouth had issued the Monmouth Manifesto, threatening to act on their own and “open to view a scene at which humanity itself may shudder.”
General Robertson did write to Washington on May 1, begging him to agree that each man would punish war crimes in his own camp—and renounce retaliation. He pointed to the gruesome testimony of Aaron White concerning his brother. Then he called attention to an incident in Westchester County that had become notorious, of great interest to William Franklin because he knew the parties involved. Loyalists Alyay and Murdock testified that they were among five civilians brought before a major general in the rebel service upon suspicion of treason. The commander asked the guard who the men were. Told that they were prisoners, the general said, “Damned rascals, they shall every one be hanged,” and, pointing to Daniel Current, said, “You shall be hanged first.”
Without further discussion apart from the order “See him kicking on the tree,” Daniel Current was led to a locust tree next to the house. An aide-de-camp put the noose around his neck and bade him stand upon a cart, as the general stood by under the tree giving directions. Current begged to speak in his defense but was silenced by the general, who cursed him. Current cried out he wanted a priest and a little time to prepare for such a great change, but those requests, too, were refused—likewise when he pleaded for time to say his prayers. The order was given for him to be hung up and the cart was kicked away.
Either the rope was tied too loosely, or in stretching caused the hanged man to fall on the ground, where they let him lie until he came to his senses. Realizing where he was, Daniel Current cried out again, piteously, for a little time and a clergyman; he was no spy, only a man who came out of the British lines to visit his wife and child in the country. But once more the noose was tied and the prisoner commanded to mount the cart, “and he was accordingly executed.” The entire proceeding took less than half an hour.
It pained George Washington to read these depositions all the more because the major general who had presided over this procedure was none other than William Alexander, Lord Stirling, one of his most valiant and trusted generals. General Washington had given away Stirling’s daughter at her wedding. At one time William Franklin’s honored friend—turned mortal enemy—Lord Stirling was considered to be among the most civilized gentlemen in the colonies, a mathematician, astronomer, and master winemaker. War had unhinged him.
The Lippincott affair caused General Washington considerable grief during a season when it seemed likely that peace was at hand. Governor Franklin and his infernal Board of Associated Loyalists had wrecked the channels of reconciliation. Washington answered Robertson on May 4, saying that far from retreating from his previous decision, he had designated a British officer for retaliation. “The time and place are fixed.” Yet he told the general he still hoped that the result of the British court-martial would prevent this awful alternative.
Actually, he had lied—the place and time had not been fixed. Washington had written to the commander of the prison camp only the day before ordering him to select an officer to be hanged, and legal technicalities delayed the process until May 25. That Sunday, all the British officers held captive at Little York across the Susquehanna were summoned to Lancaster to meet with British major James Gordon at his quarters. There were thirteen of them. The major explained to the young men at his dinner table that “Washington has determined to revenge upon some innocent man the guilt of a set of lawless banditti.”
The next day the men were ordered to report to the Black Bear Inn on the cobblestone square. Indoors in the dim light the American commandant awaited them; by his side stood an aide-de-camp, the commissary of prisoners, and a drummer boy. The aide and the commissary each held out a hat: in one were slips of paper with thirteen names, the other with a dozen blanks and one that read “unfortunate.” The drummer boy drew a name out of one hat, read it aloud, then drew a blank from the other and handed it to the lucky prisoner.
Ten times the boy read names and drew blank papers from the hat. Three names were left. On the eleventh drawing the unfortunate lot fell to Captain Charles Asgill, nineteen years of age, the youngest of them all. “Lively, brave, handsome—an only son—and an especial favorite with his comrades,” wrote Samuel Graham, one of the lucky twelve.
WHAT BENJAMIN FRANKLIN DID not know about his son’s business in New York he gratefully relinquished. He had a great deal to do in the year 1782, negotiating with Richard Oswald and other peace emissaries. A treaty lay within their grasp.
But the Asgill affair and William Franklin’s likely part in the sordid events were too prominent for anyone to ignore—especially the American minister whose duties it affected. Like no other incident of the war, this fatal lottery appealed to the French sense of melodrama, thrilling the public from the palace of Versailles to the back streets and cafés of Paris.
It took seven weeks for word of the young soldier’s predicament to reach the ones it most concerned, his mother, Lady Theresa, his father, Sir Charles Asgill, Baronet, knighted as Lord Mayor of London, and his sisters, Amelia and Caroline. One can imagine their horror in July upon learning that the boy had been marked for death in May. After appealing first to the English ministers, Lady Theresa wasted no time in composing a very moving letter to the French foreign minister, Count Vergennes, sending it across the Channel on July 18:
My son (an only son) and dear as he is brave, amiable as deserving to be so, only nineteen, a prisoner under articles of capitulation of York-Town, is now confined in America, an object of retaliation! Shall an innocent suffer for the guilty? Represent to yourself, Sir, the situation of a family under these circumstances…distracted by fear and grief…my husband given over by his physicians a few hours before the news arrived and not in a state to be informed of the misfortune; my daughter seized with a fever and delirium, raving about her brother….Let your own feelings, Sir, suggest & plead for my inexpressible misery.
She begged Vergennes to write to General Washington asking for her son to be released.
A week passed, ten days. Newspapers all over the Continent illustrated the story with images of the distraught mother and mad girl, the young man gazing through bars at the gibbet, General Washington sternly raising his sword. Every ship that made port was greeted with the cry: “What news of Captain Asgill?” For the time being there was no news, which was good news, for Washington was awaiting the outcome of the Lippincott trial.
Time was of the essence, yet the days passed without action in Europe. Vergennes shared the mother’s letter with Marie Antoinette and King Louis at Versailles. He later said they were deeply moved by Lady Asgill’s trouble and wished she might be relieved. Yet nothing was done. Vergennes also shared the letter with his counterpart Benjamin Franklin as soon as it came to him, for the American was the man whose business was most affected by this terrible turn of events. French sympathy was vital to his success, and he was also the man most likely to know how to deal with this crisis in the New World.
On Sunday, July 28, Franklin met with Richard Oswald at Passy. Both were deeply concerned with the Asgill family’s plight as well as the political implications of the son’s fate. Everyone hoped that something might be done to save him, but no one had a plan. “The situation of Captain Asgill and his family afflicts me,” said Franklin, “but I do not see what can be done by anyone here to relieve them.” He did not think for one minute that General Washington had the least desire to take the gentleman’s life. His goal was to punish a cold-blooded murder of an American prisoner by Captain Lippincott. Franklin knew that his son was president of the board that supervised Lippincott. “If the English refuse to deliver up or punish the murderer,” Franklin continued, “it is saying that they choose to preserve him rather than Captain Asgill.” So he advised Oswald to apply to the English ministry for a command to surrender Lippincott to General Washington.
The orders must go out immediately on the swiftest sailing vessel at His Majesty’s service. No other means could produce the desired end. Franklin explained that the English had committed so many cruel murders without retaliation that Washington had finally yielded to what his people demanded, for their common security. “I am persuaded nothing I could say to him on the occasion would have the least effect in changing his determination.”
Scientist, conjuror, hoaxer, Benjamin Franklin pondered. He did not want this boy Asgill to die on the gallows because of his own son’s recklessness. He told Oswald to send a courier to London—the post was too slow. Now, if he might be excused, he had other urgent business nearby which “I would not give a moment’s delay.” What this was, exactly, Dr. Franklin would not divulge for fear of being caught in a lie. There was in fact a thing that could be done here in France that might possibly relieve the Asgill family, and he would not rest until that, too, was accomplished.
The road from Passy to Versailles, Vergennes’ residence, was thirteen miles. A man could walk it in three hours. An old man with gout in a painted horse-drawn carriage could make it painfully in one. The innocent youth sweating in the shadow of the gallows, his mother and father and sisters, the general’s conscience, the very peace itself—all might be saved by a timely appeal launched from Versailles. But it required an argument so subtle, passionate, and forceful that Count Vergennes might not think of it.
The very next day, July 29, 1782, a courier galloped out of Versailles with a letter bound for Le Havre, with orders to put it on the fastest ship sailing for New York and gold enough to induce the captain to weigh anchor. This letter to George Washington was a masterpiece of the epistolary art. There were not five men in France who could have composed such a letter, and one of them was a foreigner. Franklin’s friend Voltaire had been dead three years; and Vergennes, for all his eloquence and good sense was no match for Voltaire or Franklin when it came to the art of letters.
Sir.—It is not in quality of Minister of a King, the friend and ally of the United States (tho with the knowledge and consent of His Majesty) that I now have the honor to write to Your Excellency—It is as a man of sensibility and as a tender father who feels all the force of Paternal Love…
And so the writer addressed his “solicitations in favor of a mother and a family in tears—her situation seems the more worthy of notice on our part as it is to the humanity of a Nation at War with her own that she has recourse for what she ought to receive from the impartial Justice of her own Generals.” This sentence so distinctly expresses Franklin’s intelligence that it is difficult to believe anyone else wrote it. How well he knew the strained humanity of a nation at war with her own! How deeply had he known the heartache in his own house, and the senseless cruelty of the British!
The writer drew attention to Mrs. Asgill’s letter, which he enclosed. Not Lady Asgill or Madame, he called her, but Mrs. Asgill. His Excellency General Washington would not read this letter without being deeply moved, he averred it had had that effect on the king and queen when he read it to them. Marie Antoinette wept. The king expressed his desire that the poor mother might be calmed and reassured. The general’s character was too well known, the letter went on, for the writer to believe he desired anything more than a pretext to avoid the unpleasant necessity.
And so the king’s minister held out the lifeline that would, if it traveled swiftly enough across the ocean, save them all. Rochambeau, commander of the French army, had let General Washington know in June (and probably Vergennes) that of course Captain Asgill was Washington’s prisoner, but he was one whom the French king’s army had assisted in capturing at York Town. Rochambeau had signed the Articles of Surrender, protecting prisoners. And His Majesty preferred that Charles Asgill, Lady Theresa’s only son, not be hanged in violation of those articles.
That was the pretext, and it would suffice if Washington used it. Nothing more was required. The letter went on, diplomatically, passionately, to appeal to the general’s humanity and common sense. Count Vergennes put his name to it and handed the papers over to the messenger. No historian has ever suggested that the famous document was not, from beginning to end, the work of the French minister of foreign affairs.
GEORGE WASHINGTON FOUND PLENTY of excuses not to hang Captain Asgill during the spring and summer of 1782. When Clinton, and then his successor as commander in chief, Guy Carleton, refused to surrender Lippincott, General Washington agreed for the time being to await the outcome of the court-martial. For the next two and a half months he publicly displayed his impatience at the court’s delay, his anger that the British command was trifling with him. Privately he was grateful for every day that passed without a verdict. Asgill was confined in a log hut in a prison camp near Chatham, New Jersey, not far from the site where Huddy had been executed. His suffering in the shadow of the gallows was harrowing, and there was very little the general could do, at first, to comfort him.
When at last General Carlton informed Washington on July 25 that the court-martial was concluded, Washington quibbled over the messenger’s passport to the Newburgh headquarters, buying more time. The verdict was kept secret, then the official papers did not reach headquarters until August 13: Captain Lippincott had been acquitted. Although Joshua Huddy had been executed without proper authority, what Lippincott had done was not malicious; he had acted out of a sense of duty to obey the orders of the Board of Associated Loyalists.
In an accompanying letter, Carlton stated that both he and Clinton had denounced the hanging as a barbarity. He was ordering the judge to conduct a further investigation and prosecute others who may have been complicit in the crime. He also reminded Washington of the fact that General Clinton had stripped the Board of Loyalists of every power that had enabled them to act independently. Now Washington had two more pretexts not to hang Asgill: General Carlton’s promise to pursue the real murderers, and the fact that the terrorist organization had been dismantled. Above all, Washington informed the Continental Congress, on August 19, the Asgill affair was no longer a regional matter, it had become a grave national concern, too important for any one person to decide. So he was leaving it up to the congress. They referred the matter to a committee, who quarreled over it, and set it aside, and picked it up to quarrel again, then ignore, for months while Charles Asgill paced, perspired, and tossed and turned upon his pallet in Chatham.
General Washington hoped for a miracle. At last it arrived, in that envelope posted from Versailles, the tear-jerking letters from Mrs. Asgill and Count Vergennes. In the way that history sometimes mirrors the style of melodramas and Highland ballads, the miracle descended upon George Washington at his Newburgh headquarters on Friday, October 25. The timing was eerie. His own note enclosing the letters went out at once and arrived upon the desk of John Hanson, president of the Continental Congress, five days later, just in time to disrupt the scheduled vote upon the motion to execute Asgill. It would have passed. But first that morning those pleas from Europe were read aloud in the State House. According to Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, the power of the messages was “enough to move the heart of a savage….This operated like an electric shock.” Congressmen examined the envelope, and Washington’s signature. They interrogated President Hanson. They looked at one another in wonder.
“In short, it looked so much like something supernatural that even the minority, who were much pleased with it, could scarcely think it real.” When everyone was fully convinced that the letter was legitimate, “a motion was made that the life of Captain Asgill should be given as a compliment to the King of France.”
That is how General Washington escaped his dilemma. And indeed it seemed to all involved that this had been the work of a conjuror.
Months would pass before William Franklin heard of Asgill’s good fortune—which would affect him, probably, more than anyone outside Asgill’s immediate family. By then William would be long gone, in England, upon his own mission of mercy. Although Charles Asgill and the Lippincott trial had been the talk of New York in the summer of 1782, news had arrived then from England that cast all other matters in its shade. King George had ordered the peace commissioners to treat with America as an independent state. General Guy Carlton called a public meeting at the foot of Broadway and read aloud a letter he had sent to George Washington notifying him of the momentous developments in Paris and London and preparations for an exchange of all prisoners. After seven years of suffering, destruction, carnage, and incalculable loss, the war was over.
Nowhere was the shock and burden of this news felt as strongly as in New York City where the colony of American loyalists perceived themselves in grave danger. Officers of the martial government urged them not to panic. As the living symbol of the loyalist cause, William Franklin was the obvious choice to plead for their community in England, and on August 10, at a meeting of a few dignitaries in Manhattan, he was formally deputed to present their concerns to Parliament. His long residence in America as a public figure, his knowledge of the people, and the passion which he had shown affecting the king’s loyal subjects had induced them to place full confidence in him.
Some did not agree. Franklin’s alleged role in the hanging of Captain Huddy might weaken him at the royal court. The verdict and the transcripts of the Lippincott trial were not made public until August 13, but William Franklin knew every detail of the proceedings by the time the court adjourned, and he knew even more about the underlying events. While he was never officially indicted for complicity in the murder, it seemed possible that his friend Guy Carleton—investigating Huddy’s murder—would soon be obliged to arrest him.
And so on Sunday, August 18, 1782, as church bells tolled from the towers of St. Paul’s, St. George’s Chapel, and the New Dutch Church, William Franklin packed up his trunks and crates and sent them to the wharf. He had received Carlton’s permission to sail that day, on the Roebuck, for England. He asked the general to settle the rent on the house where he had lived. He wanted it paid through October so that he might leave his furniture and other valuables there until he could sell them at the best price. He was leaving in haste, attended by his servant Thomas Parke. Their ship was one day out to sea at the moment General Washington was forwarding Carleton’s letters—about Lippincott’s acquittal and the plan to punish the true culprits—to the president of the congress. Later, the committee that considered Asgill’s case discussed sending to England for extradition of the “absconded” Governor Franklin to try him for murder; but this was never formally resolved, and the matter was relegated to an undated footnote in the minutes.
A MAN ON A sea voyage of thirty-five days, in fair weather, has leisure to reflect, to grieve, scheme, and worry. By day on the windswept quarterdeck with no sound but the breeze in the cracking, brilliant topsails and the sight of the earth’s curve above the glittering waves; by night beneath the stars of Sagittarius, and Capricorn, and those tragic heroes Perseus and Hercules.
William had lost nearly everything but his pride, his wits, and his will to live. At the age of fifty-two, he was utterly disillusioned. He was justly satisfied with his conduct as royal governor and servant of the king during the last twenty years—not excepting his work for the Board of Associated Loyalists. He was just as sorry as the generals that Asgill was condemned, but that had not been his intention or his fault. His conscience—expressed in his letters to Clinton—was clear. If the man died on the scaffold, the world would seize upon the president of the board for a scapegoat. This was inevitable. Although there was no longer any court with jurisdiction to convict or exonerate William Franklin, there was always the court of public opinion. So if some miracle did not deliver Charles Asgill from the hangman in the next few weeks, Franklin’s name would be blackened even in England, where for the time being he was a hero.
William looked forward to being back in London. He had fond memories of living there with his father in Craven Street; of glittering Northumberland House on Charing Cross, where he had met his bride-to-be, Elizabeth Downes; of studying at the Inns of Court. He had been young and happy and altogether fortunate to marry such a woman, and to be appointed a royal governor.
Two of his best friends lived there, William Strahan and Joseph Galloway, with whom he had continued corresponding. And there were many others in and out of government who knew and admired him. In fact, there was a good deal to hope for in his last years of life. He had his pension and reason to believe it would increase. As chief lobbyist for Tory reparations he intended to give full attention to his own claim, losses that amounted to more than £48,000 sterling ($6.5 million). As far as his family was concerned, he had the unflagging devotion of his sister as well as of the entire Bache family, who would visit him as soon as they could. His son still loved him. Temple had found ways of communicating during the years when it was forbidden, when no mail was safe. He would entrust notes to personal messengers bound for New York, or he would encrypt endearments in letters to his aunt Sally, who had her own private line to Governor Franklin.
That very summer, Temple had confided to Benjamin Vaughan, Prime Minister Shelburne’s agent in Paris, that he had “hopes to see something done for his father…something in the corps diplomatique…”
Aunt Sally’s letter to Temple informing him of his father’s departure for England is the most poignant of their long dialogue, as that brave and wise lady flouts the cruel hand of censorship that has come between them. “Your father was well the 18th of last month when he sailed for England. You must not mind what Bradford put in his papers about him.” Thomas Bradford, publisher of the Pennsylvania Journal and a long-standing enemy of both Franklins, had pinned Huddy’s murder on William, as well as the fate of Asgill, who was still confined. Whether Asgill lived or died, William Franklin might be forgiven but never vindicated. She turns to Temple:
It’s a long time since I have had a letter from you. When your dear father was in England, and a very young gentleman, he found means of writing to me very often, and long entertaining letters. I should hope the son had as much affection for me; I feel no less for him than I did and now do for the Father—I care not into what hands this letter falls, nor who sees it for I should despise the person who could not make a distinction between a political difference and a family one.
A wise woman to think such thoughts, and a brave one to write them in a letter. She had seen such sad confusion in other houses, “and hope and believe will never happen in ours, I ever held those people cheap, who were at variance with their near connections.” Somehow Sally still hoped and believed that her father and brother would rise above their differences, that love would prevail over fear and fury sooner or later; and if she would not give in to despair, then there was hope for Temple.
And what did William Franklin dare to hope from his father, who for seven years had been so antagonistic and distant? The healing would take time. No communication was possible at present, for fear of appearances. Enemies suspected a sinister partnership. Not until peace was finalized, and well established in America, might father and son rebuild their cherished relation.