 Greetings from the National Archives Select Shipbuilding in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with H.W. Brands about his new book, Our First Civil War, Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up next month on our YouTube channel. On Wednesday, December 1st, at 1 p.m., Faye Yarbrough will discuss Choctaw Confederates, her new book about the Choctaw Nation's role in the Civil War. And on Wednesday, December 8th, at 1 p.m., Bruce A. Ragsdale will tell us about his new book, Washington at the Plough, which takes a fresh, original look at George Washington as an innovative land manager whose passion for farming would unexpectedly lead him to reject slavery. When we glance back on the major events of American history, we may feel a sense of inevitability at the outcomes. As schoolchildren, we learn about the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Victory at Yorktown, and do not imagine any other outcome. The assumptions, however, mask the fact that North American colonists were not united in opposition to Great Britain. Those we revere as leaders of the revolution, men such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, were unlikely rebels, and a large number of colonists remain loyal to the crown. Those on both sides of the divide, including neighbors, family members, and friends, considered the other to be traitors. Franklin's own son was the royal governor of New Jersey, and after 1775 had no contact with him. In 1784, less than a year after the Battle of Yorktown, he reconnected, yet the years of ranker hadn't been forgotten. Quote, Indeed, nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen sensations as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son, and not only deserted but to find him taking up arms against me in a cause wherein my good fame, fortune, and life were all at stake, unquote. That letter and thousands of other writings by our revolution's leaders can be found on Founders Online, a website made possible through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. In the book, H.W. Brands acknowledges that, quote, anyone who writes about the founding of American history is now more deeply in debt to the National Archives for the creation of Founders Online. Without this marvelous source base, the present book would have been years longer in the research, unquote. H.W. Brands' new book, Our First Civil War, brings home the realization that the revolution was also a civil war, resulting in broken bonds within communities and family. H.W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Senior Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He's a regular guest on national radio and television programs and is frequently interviewed by the American and foreign press, a New York Times bestselling author. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography for the first American and traitor to his class. Now that's here for Professor Brands. Thank you for joining us today. Well, thank you. Thank you for that nice introduction. And I would like to repeat what was said about the importance of Founders Online. This was, the resource was absolutely essential to my ability to write the book that I wrote. I decided to write about the Civil War, excuse me, I decided to write about the American Revolution because I had been thinking and writing about the American Civil War. And it occurred to me that many of the issues, many of the questions that had to be answered by people during the Civil War of the 1860s were questions that had been asked and answered in various ways a couple of generations before. And I wanted to look at a fundamental question. And the question was, as the way I posted at the beginning of the book, is what causes a man to forsake his country and take arms against it? We just heard that quote from Benjamin Franklin. This was spoken about his son, William, at the end of the American Revolutionary War. And Franklin was wounded, he professed. He had never been hurt so deeply, as from the fact that his son had betrayed him. And not only that, but his son had taken arms against him. It's certainly seen that way to Benjamin Franklin. But William Franklin had perfectly just caused insane, wait a minute, father. You were the one who took up arms against me. You were the one who took up arms against our king. You were the one who made war to break up the British Empire. So this is the question that I examine. And one of the things that I do, one of the things that I ask of myself, and I also have been asked of readers, is to do something that sounds paradoxical to anybody investigating history or reading about history. And that is to abandon, to forsake what is often seen as an essential historian's tool. And that is the advantage of hindsight. I ask readers, I ask of myself when I go back doing this research, to act as though I don't know how it turned out. Because this makes all the difference in the world. When we know how things turned out, it's hard to get back in the minds of the people who were alive then. It's hard to recapture what it was like to make the decisions that were made. One abiding temptation for people looking back on the past is to feel rather smug, to feel somewhat superior to those people who were on the wrong side of history. I've observed in talking to people about history and just reading about history and all this other stuff that a lot of people, maybe most people, most people imagine that they would have been on the right side of history had they lived back in whatever time they were thinking about. I wrote a book about John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. And I intended to write, I thought I wrote a straight up account of here's John Brown, here's Abraham Lincoln, here's what they did and why they did it and so on. I took no preferential position between John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. I did not say that one was better, more progressive, more advanced or anything else than that. I was surprised, however, how many of the readers of the book and many of the listeners of the lectures that I gave found John Brown more engaging than Abraham Lincoln. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it sort of makes sense if you know how the story turned out and we know how the story turned out and we know that John Brown was on the right side of history. He came to the position of abolition of emancipation before Abraham Lincoln did. And because we know how it turned out and because we've all agreed that emancipation was the right decision, then the only fault that can be held against John Brown is that he got there a little bit too soon. And John Brown had the advantage of being decisive. He wasn't a trimmer. He wasn't one who had to compromise the way Abraham Lincoln, a politician and president of the United States, had to do. Lincoln had to bring the American people along. John Brown didn't act. But the striking thing was how many people I encountered sort of imagined that they would have been with John Brown had they looked back in. So you can only do that if you know how things turned out because John Brown did not command a majority when he was alive. He was quite a radical and extremist and one of a very small group. So the same thing sort of applies when we look at the American Revolution. Everybody knows about the American Revolution. Everybody knows the shorthand version, the one line account of what happened. And you learn this in 4th or 5th grade or sometime later. And basically Americans get fed up with British oppression. They declare independence, they fight for it and they win. And there you have it. And it's just straightforward as that. But it wasn't straightforward at all. And I mean, one of the reasons it wasn't straightforward is as soon as you say Americans get fed up with the British and declare their independence, you exaggerate enormously because not all Americans did. And the question, the question to me is why did some Americans decide we've had enough of Britain? And it sounds like a pretty sort of bloodless statement. We've had enough of Britain. No, but then they decided to declare war on the British Empire. So that's a huge step. What drove them to this step? That's part of the question. Or I'd say that's the question applied to part of the group that I'm studying. But the rest of the question is why did other people not make that decision? Again, when we look back on that, knowing how it turned out that the United States did win its independence. Not only that, but the United States went on to become this wealthy power, the most powerful, the wealthiest large nation in world history. And here we are almost 250 years away from that time. It's tempting to imagine in some sense it was all inevitable. When big things happen, it's hard to imagine that they might not have happened. That history might have taken a different course. And so it's hard to recapture the moment when this still hung in the balance. Would there be a rebellion? Would the Americans, the Americans again, I have to be careful. Would some Americans decide this is too much? We are going to make a stand and we're gonna make a break. Why did they do it? Why did others not do it? So this is the question that I examined. The book is called Our First Civil War. And the subtitle is Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution. And what I look at is several individuals who become patriots, several individuals who become loyalists. But wait, I said become loyalists. Now, that's the wrong way of putting it. They didn't become any, they remain loyalists. And again, this is an important thing to keep in mind. The burden of proof, so to speak, doesn't have to be on the loyalists. Or why did you stay loyalists? They just kept doing what they were doing. The burden of proof lies with the burden of the Mexican nation lies with the people who became patriots. And I look at several prominent patriots and several that are not so prominent. Same thing on the loyalist side. And I observed that among the patriots, there were some pretty unlikely rebels. By the way, patriots is the term that they apply to themselves or actually in some cases were later applied. They often called themselves Whigs. They were the Whigs and the Tories or the Patriots and the Loyalists. The Whigs and Tories, those labels were drawn from British politics. Which, by the way, brings in another element of the story here. When I say it wasn't just Americans against the British, no, it was some Americans against the British and other Americans with the British. But it was also some British against the American Patriots and other British who thought this isn't worth fighting for. So this is a political story, fully as much as it is a military story. Although I begin the book with an account of the campaign on the southern frontier in particular in the back country of the Carolinas. And some of the battles fought there, the Battle of the Loxas, the Battle of Kings Mountain were probably the most brutal battles of the war. And I give eyewitness accounts, participant survivor accounts of these battles. And it brings to mind that civil wars are very often more bitter than wars between separate nations and this certainly makes sense. If you're a national of one country and you fight against the national of another country, somebody you don't know, somebody who just happens to be in that position because you're two countries or four. You very likely have nothing personal against that individual. These are your roles. But if you're fighting against a member of your family, if a member of your family has turned against you and his Benjamin Franklin put it, taken arms against you, then that really does cut very deeply. And one of the striking things was that this question, which side are you going to go with? Where does your loyalty lie? This question cut through every community in America. It cut through every state. It cut through, I'm going to say, every family, but lots of families. It cut through Indian tribes. They had to make these decisions. So once again, the question is, which side are you going to choose? It was a question that almost everybody in America in the mid 1770s, going to the early 1780s, had to answer. And I point out that two of the leading rebels were very unlikely rebels. Now, I have a reminder here that on the scale of trying to elicit change in the status quo, there are conservatives who think the status quo is OK as it is. Then among the folks who want to make some changes, the first group you come to are reformers. They think that there's some problems, but the status quo overall is salvageable. And then you get to radicals and revolutionaries as they forget it. The status quo is not salvageable at all. We need to overturn it and create something new. So people who take up arms against the status quo, who become revolutionaries, oh, and this is another question that comes up anytime when it's talking about the American Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars. Just how revolutionary was this American Revolution? Perhaps I'll come back to examine this. But the question is, so if you think that things are bad enough that you will take arms and you will try to create a new system, then this puts you on the revolutionary end of the spectrum. And furthermore, in most cases, it suggests a very strong dissatisfaction with the status quo. And if you're going to fight a war against the status quo, you must think that the status quo is not serving you very well. And this is the unlikely part of the story. Because for George Washington to say the status quo is not serving my interests or my country's interests, this is quite a striking statement because George Washington was one of the most distinguished, wealthiest, respected men in Virginia, and Virginia being the largest of the colonies in all of America. So if anybody should have been happy with the status quo, it should have been George Washington. But he wasn't. And so the question is, why not? Did George Washington simply have inordinate demands? Was all his wealth and distinction not enough he wanted more? Well, this is a question I examine. And in doing so, I try to point out the distinction. Well, the distinction that I made to my students and, well, an audience today, about the difference between big history and little history. These are these two realms of human life and two realms of history. Big history is the history of war and peace. It's the history of presidential elections. It's the history of the founding of dynasties and empires. It's the history of industrial revolutions. It's the big stuff that gets whole chapters in history books. It's public life, but it's also sort of enduring public life. It's not just the stuff for today. It's the stuff that has effects that are going to last. So that's big history. And there's little history. Little history is a history of individual lives. It's history of private lives. What happens behind closed doors? What goes on in the heads of the individuals, sometimes very humble individuals, very often individuals you've never heard of, but every famous person has his or her own little history as well. And if you're going to try to figure out motivation, if you're going to try to figure out why did somebody do what he or she did, that's where you have to factor in little history. Because as it turns out, well, take it from your own experience. You decided to vote for one candidate or another in the last presidential race, and you decided to take a job doing this or that or whatever you did. And I suspect that if you're like most people, you'd realize that we do things for multiple reasons. And some of the reasons are big matters of principle. But sometimes they're just small matters of almost as capricious as which side of bed did you get out on this morning. How did you feel at the moment or something like that? So this is a critical element of the story. And here I'll look at Benjamin Franklin, who was an even less likely rebel than George Washington. Benjamin Franklin owed his great success to the British Empire. So here's a question for you. Suppose there had never been an American Revolution. Which of the founding generation would you, would we, have heard of today? George Washington? Well, no American Revolution. There is no Continental Army. And George Washington came to prominence because of the Continental Army. And he was the first president of the United States, but no Revolution, no United States, at least not during George Washington's lifetime, is entirely likely that the American colonies would have evolved to independence, but perhaps pretty much more the way Canada did. You just do it over time, and it doesn't take a big war. So without the American Revolution, it's quite possible the world never would have heard of George Washington. The world had not heard of George Washington before, the American Revolutionary War. Thomas Jefferson, how about John Thomas Jefferson? He wrote a five-word sentence that is probably as powerful as any sentence ever written by anybody in human history. All men are created equal. OK, this is one of the touchstones of modern conceptions of human rights. It's a touchstone of modern history. It became a founding principle of dozens of countries that became independence, in many cases, cribbing from Jefferson's Declaration of Independence in the next couple of centuries. But no American Revolution, no Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson is just back there in Monticello minding his business and trying out new crops and rebuilding the house and all this other stuff. But the world would not have heard of Thomas Jefferson. But Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin is the one member of that generation that we know we would have heard of, if not even if no American Revolution. Because the world had heard of Benjamin Franklin before there was an American Revolution. And here's another unlikely aspect of the Benjamin Franklin story. Revolution, radical change is usually what young people do. It is the cry of the younger generation against the older generation. Don't tell us what to do. We have to be our own people. But Benjamin Franklin became a revolutionary at the age of 70. And strikingly, in the Franklin household, it was not the younger generation, William Franklin, who was the revolutionary. It was the older generation, Benjamin Franklin, that became the revolutionary. So the question is, why? Well, I have to add here that Benjamin Franklin, or maybe to explain, Benjamin Franklin owed his success to the British Empire. Benjamin Franklin was born into a family of very modest means in Boston in the first decade of the 18th century. He ran away from home at the age of 17, ran away from Boston, got away from his father, broke an apprentice contract with his brother. And in his first act of defiance, fled Boston and landed in Philadelphia. Now, we can see a clue here, but now I'm not gonna take the simplistic approach to say Benjamin Franklin rebelled against his father at the age of 16. And then he rebelled against King George at the age of 17. There's straight line connecting to life is of course more complicated than that. But keep this in mind, because I am gonna come back to it. But Benjamin Franklin landed a job as a printer in Philadelphia. And it just so happened that Philadelphia really suited Benjamin Franklin. It was the most tolerant city in the British Empire, one of the most tolerant cities in the Western world at that time. And Franklin was a very tolerant, broad minded individual. If Franklin had managed to find a printer's job in New York, the first place he stopped after fleeing Boston, he might have grown up in New York, but New York is a very different place in Philadelphia. And his life might have been different because Franklin was in a position where he had to, had to fit himself to suit his circumstances. He was very good at this. But the circumstances in Philadelphia really suited his personality and his approach to life. So well that by the age of 42, he had built a printing empire that allowed him to retire from the active practice of business. And he could then indulge his other interests in particular in science. And he became an experimenter in this new cutting edge field of electrical studies. He called himself an electrician, but that didn't mean he changed your light bulb, light bulb obviously, they hadn't been invented yet. But this is what made Franklin a world famous figure. And he was known as a top scientist in Britain, in continental Europe and the world had heard of Benjamin Franklin. At the, in his fifties, he took a new job as the agent of the Pennsylvania assembly, the spokesman of the Pennsylvania assembly, which had gripes against the Pennsylvania governor who was a royal committee. And Franklin was sent to London to argue the case of the people of Pennsylvania in their assembly. When Franklin got to London, he thought he had died and gone to heaven. This was the best place in the world. This was even better than Philadelphia. Franklin's life story is sort of a, going from a small stage to a bigger stage to the biggest stage around in London. London was one of the great cities in the world at the time and it suited Franklin even better than Philadelphia had. Or maybe I should say, it suited Franklin at this stage of Franklin's life better than Philadelphia now did. And Franklin thought that London was the most agreeable place. He could talk with brilliant scientists, people who had an open mind about the world, people who were as engaging as could be. And in that circle, Benjamin Franklin made friends, he made allies, he fit in admirably. Well, to the point where he thought seriously about relocating from Philadelphia to London. Now, imagine if he had done this. The only thing that prevented it was that his wife Debbie didn't want to move away from Philadelphia. She claimed that she didn't like to sail, the way some people didn't like to fly. She was afraid to sail. She also recognized that Philadelphia suited her. London probably wouldn't. So she stayed home. Benjamin Franklin spent the last, most of the last 18 years of her life away in London. But if Debbie Franklin had agreed to pick up and move residents to London, then the trajectory of the American Revolution would have been quite different. Because George Washington and Benjamin Franklin are commonly considered the two indispensable characters in the American Revolution, to the extent that anybody is indispensable in anything. It was Frank, it was Washington who led on the military side, commander of the Continental Army, it was Franklin who led the American diplomatic and political effort to win an alliance with France. It was absolutely crucial to keeping Washington's army in the field and eventually effecting American independence. So imagine, imagine if Franklin's life story, if the little history of Benjamin Franklin had been different, if his wife had agreed to move to London. Then when troubles between Parliament and the Americans developed? Franklin would have been on the other side of the story. And Franklin would not have felt that his rights as an American were being a bridge because he was safely in the home capital of the British Empire. One last thing, Benjamin Franklin was not simply a subject of the British Empire. Benjamin Franklin was an enthusiast of the British Empire. He thought the British Empire was the most enlightened system of government that existed in the world at that time. And he had a vision, he had a dream for the British Empire and he tried to persuade his friends in London and his connections in political classes to allow the American colonies to grow and in growing to take a co-equal position with Britain at home. Because he had done, he was a pioneer of demography among other things. And he observed that the population of the American colonies was doubling every generation. And so at this rate, the population of British America would quickly outstrip the population of British Britain. And if the British were farsighted enough to see that their empire could have a pillar on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, then this empire could go on forever and this would be the best of all possible worlds. But it didn't happen there. The British political classes concluded that they weren't going to share equality with the Americans. They were gonna treat the Americans as second class, I can't call them citizens because these weren't republics, but as subjects, subject to being ordered around by parliament. Now from their perspective, this wasn't particularly onerous because that was a situation most people in Britain at the time. The Americans just had these strange notions. They ought to have rights that really were greater than the rights enjoyed by Englishmen at home. But anyway, things got personal. And this is the critical moment for Benjamin Franklin. It's not a matter of policy so much because Franklin understood that in politics, you don't get everything that you want. You argue your case. He argued the case against the Stamp Act. He made a strong argument that the Stamp Act was foolish, not necessarily that it was somehow unconstitutional or that it was wrong morally, but it was just a stupid policy because it would inflame the Americans while yielding few revenues. And in fact, he was absolutely right, even to the point where parliament eventually agreed with him and repealed the Stamp Act. But Franklin, Franklin remained in London and he continued to argue the case for the Americans. But there was a faction in America that was growing more radical. And this is an aspect of the story as well. Franklin spent so much time in London that he lost touch, he lost an understanding of feel for what was going on in America. Because things in America were getting more radical and Franklin wasn't. But Franklin found himself having to answer for the various protests and eventually the crimes committed by American extremists. And following the Boston Tea Party of 1773, Franklin was hauled before the British Privy Council. And he was criticized. He was liable, slandered for all of the sins committed by any of the Americans, any of the Americans over the previous decade. And Franklin stood there listening to this. And he concluded that the British Empire had fallen under the spell, under the power of some really thick-headed individuals who had only their narrow partisan interests at heart. And there would be no vision, there would be no broad broadening of the British horizons. For Franklin, the experience that he was made to withstand and suffer in this session of the Privy Council in January 1774, convinced him that he must become an American because the British would not let him be an Englishman. Now this is crucial. Because when it comes to the point of making a decision, are you going to break with your country? Will you take arms against your country? Proceeding that, or at least accompanying that, there almost is always a re-identification. There is a decision that I am no longer one of them. So in the case of Benjamin Franklin, he was well-in-fact. In the case of all of these people, they were born Englishmen essentially, but the ones who took up the cause of independence remained in America. They were born Englishmen and they died Americans, which is why I called my book by Benjamin Franklin, the first American, he's because of that first generation of Americans. But in Franklin's case, one can almost put your finger on a particular moment. It wasn't just this dawning realization. It was this at this moment. And I exaggerate a little bit when I say that Franklin walked into this session at the Privy Council. He walked into this session in Englishmen and he walked out an American. And it was because, it was because he had been personally insulted. And Franklin could forgive a lot of stuff, but this insult that sort of went to the heart of who he was and what he could be, this was something that he didn't forget and he didn't forgive. And sometimes I think that if the British government was so pigheaded as to alienate the likes of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, well, they certainly deserve to lose the American colonies. Any government that could so misgovernment that, because as I say, these individuals were predisposed to like the British empire. In the case of George Washington, it's not as clear cut. There's not a particular moment. There is something that lingers in the story of George Washington. Washington was a very gifted soldier. He was a brilliant horseman. He was brave. He could command man. He understood the kind of fighting that took place in America. And he fought side by side with British officers, commissioned British officers during the French and Indian war. And he concluded on the basis of this side by side observation that he was fully as gifted as any of them. In fact, he put most of them very deeply in shade. But Washington was made to understand that he could never hope for a top promotion in the British army because he was a provincial. He didn't have the political connections. The British military was sufficiently, some people use the word corrupt, that you had to buy your office, your rank, your post. And he didn't have, he had money, but he didn't have the connections to buy it. And so Washington concluded, boy, if this is what it takes to succeed in the British empire, then maybe the British empire is not for me, despite everything else that he had accomplished, everything else that he included. So Washington too comes to conclude that the British empire, at least as the way it's, the way it plays out in America has confined him. It's a stage that's too small. So he has to create a new stage. So those are the two people who find their way to the patriot position. Now how about some of the individuals who don't, who remain loyalists? What motivates them? Mention was made earlier of William Franklin. So William Franklin, one might think that William Franklin being of the Franklin family would absorb perhaps pyosmosis or by observation and imitation, the values of his father. And to a very large extent, he did, except that they didn't extend to politics or at least not this particular kind of politics at this particular moment. I mentioned that Benjamin Franklin had rebelled against his father as a young man. William Franklin did the same thing against his father. His father was Benjamin Franklin. William Franklin ran off to join the British army as a young man when Franklin thought it was a bad idea and counseled against him. But William said, nope, I'm gonna go do it. And off he went. William Franklin moved up the ladder, the career ladder, within the British system. I should add that so did Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin held various positions under the crown. He was postmaster general of North America at the time of the outbreak of the revolution. William Franklin eventually got a job as governor of New Jersey. This was a royal appointment. His father helped him get the job, his father recommended him to people who might be useful to William's career. And the two men, the father and the son, they saw eye to eye on most issues. And they were friends as adults. They were associates, they were business partners. They speculated together in Ohio land. And things seemed to be going very well. And then the troubles that gave rise to the American Revolution began. And William Franklin found himself on the opposite side of most of these issues from his father. His father generally took the position of the people first of Pennsylvania and then the other states that he was an agent for. But in part, that was his job. He was hired as the agent to take their side. William Franklin found himself on the other side, on the king's side, on the side of parliament, in part because that was his job. He was a governor and he answered to parliament. He answered to the king. So in one sense, the split between father and son could be ascribed to the different positions they held. But again, it was more than that because I mean, one of the reasons that William Franklin was comfortable being a royal governor of New Jersey was that he appreciated the values. He shared the values that the British government it was acting upon. So it wasn't just that he had this interest and that gave rise to his values. It also gave rise to interest. Anyway, so William Franklin is opposing what the emerging sort of rebel class in America is doing. And he is the one, he typically puts the blame on them whereas his father, in part because his father is not around, his father is in London, is seeing things through the eyes of the people. And so he puts the blame on the British. And so there is this difference. And the difference is manageable until, until Benjamin Franklin basically says, okay, I'm out of here. I'm gonna join the rebel side. I'm going to become a patriot. I'm going to opt for independence. Now, there was a meeting between Benjamin Franklin and William Franklin that took place after Benjamin Franklin returned from London in 1775. He had been staying there trying desperately to hold the empire together. But it didn't work. And he comes back to America and he meets with the Continental Congress and they're talking about, what are we gonna do? Fighting has broken out at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. So fighting is already underway. Nobody knows what the fighting is for exactly. It's gonna be another year before the patriots decide to declare independence. But in the meantime, people are basically choosing their sides. And William Franklin and Benjamin Franklin have a sit down meeting. And they meet at the home of a friend. There was no record made of the meeting. But one can certainly imagine what they might have said. In fact, I teach at the University of Texas at Austin. I teach undergraduates. And one of the exercises that I had my students do earlier this semester was to write the imagined dialogue between William Franklin and Benjamin Franklin. When Benjamin Franklin is saying, the British government is corrupt. I have decided to take up arms against it. And William Franklin saying, yeah, the British government has made some bad decisions, but it would be treason to take arms against it. And that's taking things way too far. So each man is trying to persuade the other of the justice of his position. And they don't come to an agreement. And when they separate at that point, they have basically chosen opposite sides of this issue. And the divide between the patriots and the loyalists has now become a divide that's splitting the Franklin family. And they don't see each other again, until the war is already over and Benjamin Franklin is leaving Paris where he's been during the war. And he's heading back. But before then, William Franklin has to deal with what it's like being a loyalist. And this is something that must have been extremely disorienting for people like William Franklin. Because essentially one day he went to bed and he was a loyal subject of King George and he was doing sort of everything that was expected of somebody in this position. The next day he woke up and he had been declared a traitor. He was now a traitor to his country. And he might very well have said, oh, I didn't do anything overnight. What happened? Well, what happened was his country had shifted on him when the American college eventually got around to declaring independence in July of 1776. New Jersey, this is Franklin, he was a governor of New Jersey. New Jersey created a new government. And the new government declared the old governor to be a traitor. They said, you've got to swear allegiance to the United States of America and to this new government of New Jersey. And William Franklin said, I will not do that. I will never do that. I'm not gonna betray my oath of office. I'm not gonna betray my king. And so William Franklin became this traitor. And as I say, it must have been extremely disoriented because treason is a big deal. It's a huge crime. And one normally thinks that this is a sin or a crime of commission. You did something, you sold out your country. You took arms against your country. But in this case, treason was being construed as a crime of omission. William Franklin had not changed his, he had not turned his coat along with this new majority in New Jersey. So William Franklin sticks to the British side and he's imprisoned, his property seized from him. He nearly dies in prison. He gets very sick, his teeth all fall out, his hair falls out. He's eventually exchanged in a prisoner swap and he winds up in New York City. And New York City was the focus of loyalism during the American Revolution. Early in the war of the British Army and Navy drive George Washington and the Continental Army out of New York City. And from then to the end of the war, New York City is loyalist territory and he becomes the home of William Franklin. And he engages in various loyalist kind of support activities for the British government. But eventually the war ends and the loyalists have lost. And William Franklin, he has to figure out what you're gonna do if you're a loyalist and you're a side law. So when I said that everybody had to make decisions, the decisions come down to, well, what do I think is right? That's part of it. What do I think is safe? What do I think is good for me? And then what's gonna happen to me? If I choose this, what's gonna happen if I choose one side and that side wins? What's gonna happen if I choose that side and that side loses? What do we do here? And I'll add that this decision was being made by almost everybody from the top to the bottom of American society. So George Washington made the decision. So did thousands of slaves. George Washington had hundreds of slaves, but thousands of slaves up and down the colonies had to make a decision. Which side are you going to choose? And this decision actually became a crucial one when the British government offered freedom to enslaved men, especially of military age, who owe and enslaved men of Patriot masters, of rebel masters. They would get freedom if they would cross the lines, come over and join the British and fight against their former masters. So in effect, what the British government did in the 1770s was what Abraham Lincoln did with the Emancipation Proclamation in the 1860s. You were going to use slavery or emancipation as a tool of part of the military war effort. And so individuals who heard of the British promise the British offer, they just said, okay, well, what do we do? Do we accept the offer? Do we take the British seriously? Will they follow through on their promise? If they win, will they win? What happens to us if we lose? One of the individuals that I examined is a man named Boston King. He was a slave on a plantation in Virginia. And he hears about the promise and he's trying to decide, okay, well, what do I do? Do I follow the, do I accept the promise? Do I cross the lines? And it certainly wasn't an automatic yes for everybody because there was a weighing of how dangerous is this? Will I get killed trying to get there? And again, will the British, they will like follow through? Will I get shot trying to get there? But he takes the chance and he joins the British and he fights on behalf of the British. And the British eventually lose the war and when the war ends, when the war ends, there's this question of what's gonna happen to Boston King and the other loyalists. I finished the book long before this last August. The book was at the printers by then. But as I was watching the ending of America's war in Afghanistan and the question of what happens to the Afghans who sided with the Americans? What's gonna happen to them? Will they get out? Will they be the objects of reprisal by the Taliban? So I was really taken back in my mind's eye to the end of the American Revolutionary War because after the Battle of Yorktown, the question for all of the loyalists who were still there was, what's gonna happen to us? And it was particularly acute for the former slaves because one of the articles of the Paris Treaty that was actually hammered out was that according to usual practice, at the end of wars, any property that has been taken by one side from the other is return. And the question was, were slaves going to be considered as property? And the clause was deliberately kind of fudged because the American side wanted the British to return these enslaved peoples who had come over and fallen on the British side because under American law and under most of British law then too, slaves are considered property. But the British concluded that they would not be property, they would be considered persons. And, but for somebody like Boston King, in fact, one of the reasons I'm able to write about him is he wrote a memoir with this story. And he talks about the terror that went through all of the population of Loyalist New York at the end of the war, but especially among the former slaves. Are they gonna be reinslaid? Are they gonna be punished for taking arms against their masters and so on? And he really worried. And it looked as though his everything was gonna be lost, but in fact, the British were true to their word and Boston King sailed away from New York along with between 60 and 100,000 oils. So I'm gonna stop and take some questions if there are any, but just one thing, one of the things that struck me about this story, and of course there's lots more of the story, but the struck me out the story is that ends of wars are almost always messy. And one of the things that you should pay attention to is how are these things gonna turn out? I'll just add on this final note, one of the main reasons that the Loyalists have largely been written out of American history is that they were driven out of America at the end of the war. And nobody after the war had an incentive, neither side, neither winners nor losers in the war had much incentive to pay attention to the Loyalists or to give them any opportunity to advance from for the Americans, I'll call them the Americans now, the victorious Americans, the Loyalists were these traders. And they didn't wanna have anything to do with them. If they caught them, they might kill them. They would certainly seize their property. And so the Loyalists had to flee for their lives. They went to other parts of British territory, Canada, the West Indies, Britain itself, Boston King eventually wound up in Sierra Leone, West Africa. But in Britain, nobody really wanted to pay attention to them. Their treatment was somewhat akin to the treatment of American veterans of the Vietnam War after that war ended in defeat. Their very presence reminded other Americans of this long unfortunate war that the rest of the country would rather forget. And that was the attitude that the American Loyalists experienced when they went to Britain. Nobody wanted to talk to them. Nobody wanted to remember them. And they were just, they were unfortunate. They were an unfortunate reminder of a war that everybody at Britain wanted to forget. So I'm gonna stop and see if we have any questions. So I think Susan has, are there any questions? No questions so far. Okay. Well, if you have any questions, please enter them. But meanwhile, until there are questions, I'll go a little bit further. And I will point out that this, this matter of which side are you gonna take? It was a question everybody had to choose. And I alluded earlier to the Indian tribes. So one of the individuals I focused on is a man named Joseph Brandt. Joseph Brandt was a chief of the Mohawk nation, part of the Iroquois Confederacy. And Brandt and the Mohawks, they had to make their choice too. Are you going to choose the British? Are you going to choose the Americans? Well, more precisely, are you gonna choose the British? Or which of the Americans are you gonna choose? Now for the Indian tribes, this question of choosing among people of European descent had been a big deal for more than a hundred years. Ever since the British and the French had started fighting for control of this Eastern part of North America, the various Indian tribes had aligned, some with the French, some with the Indians. I remind you that the French and Indian War was called the French and Indian War, not because it's between the French and the Indians, it was between the French and the Indians, the French and France's Indian allies on one side and Britain and Britain's Indian allies on the other side. And so they had always made this decision based on their own calculation of what's in the best interests of my people, what's in the best interests of me as an individual, which side is going to win, which side is gonna lose, and if the side that I choose wins, is that good or is that bad? And the questions were more complicated than one might think because, for example, tribes that sided with the British and the Americans, yeah, again, with the British, sided with the British and the British Americans, against the French in the French and Indian War, well, their side won. But then they discovered, wait a minute, we're worse off than they were before because now the Americans have nobody restraining them in seizing Indian land. And so somebody like Joseph Brandt had to try to figure this out. And his conclusion was that it was better for the Indians to hope that they're persistent of balance among the Europeans in North America, that there were the British and that there were Americans. And as long as the British and the Americans were against each other, then the Indians would be able to play the Americans off against the British. And so Joseph Brandt sided with the British because the last thing he wanted was for the Americans to drive the British out, then the Mohawk peoples, the Iroquois would have to deal with the Americans unaided by the British. So he chose the British side. There was another element too, I should add. Not all the Mohawks came to this same conclusion. And the Revolutionary War split the Mohawk people and the Iroquois Confederacy in much the same way it split colonies with states, cities, families. And but in the case of Joseph Brandt, there was another element that was a close personal element that he had been the protege of the man who was in effect Britain's Indian agent on the frontier, who saw great promise in this young man and paid for his education. So he learned English, he was well educated. And so there was a personal connection as well. And in all of these cases, there's a personal side to the decision as well as the public side. This is for everyone of them. There's this intersection of place where little history meets big history. So here's a question that comes in. In my research, what is the one question you would ask a character in your book in terms of why did you do this? The one question that I would ask is a question that I have had that I've been wanting to ask Benjamin Franklin for the 25 years since I first started looking at Franklin in sort of in close detail. And it had to do with, well, family connection. So I'd said that Benjamin Franklin was this great figure, a world celebrated world renowned individual, but he was certainly not a poster child for good family relations. He left his wife Debbie behind for over two decades when he was off in London. He didn't even come home after she had a stroke and his son William, who was Debbie's stepson was saying, father, you must come home. You know, mother is missing you tremendously. She will die soon. And she wants to see you before she dies. Benjamin Franklin, you'd be more of that. But the crux of the issue came when, so this is a part of the last part of the Benjamin Franklin William Franklin story. So the war is the loyalists and the British have lost. William Franklin is living in exile in England. Benjamin Franklin, his side has won. Benjamin Franklin is living in triumph in Paris. He liked Paris a lot during the Revolutionary War when he was there. And he decided to stay for a while. He was actually the American minister to the French court afterwards. But he finally decided in 1785, he was gonna come home. He was old. He was almost 80 years old. He was coming home to die. On his way home, however, the ship was going to stop in Southampton. And this is where the story gets more complicated because there's a third Franklin, Benjamin, William and then William Temple Franklin called Temple. Temple is the grandson of Benjamin Franklin and the son of William Franklin. And just as everybody else has been forced to choose between one side and the other William, assuming Temple Franklin has had to choose. But in addition, he had to choose between his father and his grandfather who were on opposite sides. The war ends, Temple Franklin desperately wants to put his family back together. And so he writes letters to his father who's in England saying, father, grandfather would like to reconcile. He didn't tell Ben Franklin he was doing this because Temple knew that Ben Franklin did not want to reconcile. But he thought maybe if I can bring the two together, then that proximity will cause grandfather to drop his guard and we can be one family again. So Ben Franklin and Temple go to England. They're stopping at Southampton. Ship is just stopping for a day or two. And William Franklin shows up. Ben Franklin is not expecting William. William has been led to believe that Ben Franklin is expecting him and is willing to reconcile. So when they meet on these different expectations, it's extremely awkward. Nonetheless, William Franklin, son's father, this was nothing against you. This was a political decision, both grown men. We were, the war separated us, but the war is over. Let us be one family again. And he reaches out his hand to Benjamin Franklin. Now, as the historian, as buyer for Benjamin Franklin, I do my best not to get closely involved. I try to keep my distance so I can maintain an objective point of view. But this was one case where I just wanted to reach across two centuries, two and a half centuries and take Franklin by that stubborn arm and shoulder and say, damn it, Ben, take your son's hand. But he wouldn't do it. He wouldn't do it. And they did not reconcile then. They never saw each other again. They were estranged until Benjamin Franklin's death. They were in fact estranged beyond death because Benjamin Franklin left William Franklin out of his will. And this was the part that puzzled me. If I somehow could have gotten Benjamin Franklin aside and gotten him to speak honestly, I'd wanna know what was it that you couldn't forgive in your son? Yeah, we saw that quote at the beginning. But I have children, I have three children. They're adults now. And I cannot imagine something that they would do that would cause me to say, you are not part of my family anymore. I want no connection with you anymore. I just, I can't imagine. But Benjamin Franklin did that. So after studying Benjamin Franklin as long as I have, there's still that part of him that I just don't get. I see the external actions, but I just can't get quite inside his head. I have time maybe for one last question. Was the Franklin story a common story? How many families were split? This is hard to say because nobody kept a census of who's a patriot, who's a loyalist. And for I think understandable reasons, unless you were compelled to make a public declaration of your position, a whole lot of people were happier just keeping their mouths shut because John Adams said at the beginning of the conflict, maybe a third of the Americans were patriots and a third were loyalists. And the other third, they hadn't decided and they didn't wanna decide. They just wanted to keep their heads down and the mouths shut and hope the world would pass them by. So it's really hard to say, but one of the other families that I do look at is the family of Joseph and Grace Galloway. Now in this case, these were husband and wife and Joseph Galloway was one of those prominent of the loyalists. His wife was a loyalist as well, but she was abandoned by him when the British evacuated Philadelphia. He was a Philadelphia and he lived in Philadelphia and he took off and he went to England leaving her behind and she discovered that she was now, well, she was a loyalist. She never changed her political views, but she had in effect been abandoned by her husband and she had to find her own independence of sorts amid the larger question of political independence or loyalty. And I'm not gonna spoil the story by explaining what happens to her, but to me it's a terrific story and it reveals a whole lot of what motivates people and it's one of the stories that's tellable because she kept a diary. So the answer to the basic question is most people didn't keep diaries. Ordinary people don't write letters to their loved ones because their loved ones are right there. So we historians are hard pressed to figure out what's going on. So the basic answer to the question is I really have no firm answer as to what, how many families were split by this, but there were enough that it was, it was a phenomenon that didn't surprise people afterwards when they ran across it. Well, I think we've run out of time, but I've enjoyed the opportunity immensely to speak to you and perhaps we'll have another chance in the future.