B. Franklin’s Confession to Leaking Hutchinson’s Letters

If a finger had to be pointed at one person for causing the American Revolutionary War, a strong case can be made for pointing it at Thomas Hutchinson.

According to Thomas Hutchinson and the Origins of the American Revolution by Andrew Stephen Walmsley (1999):

Rarely in American history has a political figure been so pilloried and despised by his contemporaries as Thomas Hutchinson… Vilified, stigmatized, and ridiculed, he eventually became the pre-eminent bete noire or scapegoat of America’s most vigorous radical activists. By 1774 he was arguably the most unpopular man in North America. His name had become synonymous in the popular imagination with detested loyalism, hated toryism and treason… One of the greatest challenges to confront Massachusetts’ radicals throughout the years of imperial crisis was to develop an effective formula for ousting Hutchinson. Without him as their foil, Boston’s radicals would have had a far more difficult time engineering the crisis that produced the Revolution.

The Hutchinson letters affair was one of the most famous controversies tied to Hutchinson, as well as Benjamin Franklin. The Hutchinson letters that Franklin leaked to his friend in Boston were eventually published in June 1773 in the Boston Gazette. Likely used as war propaganda, the New-England Chronicle republished the Hutchinson letters in June and July of 1775 — click here to read some of the Thomas Hutchinson letters printed in the June 29 to July 6, 1775 issue of the New-England Chronicle.

Equally interesting about the Hutchinson letters affair is the Benjamin Franklin confession (but no apology).  According to Walter Isaacson’s biography on Franklin:

In December, two men engaged in an inconclusive duel in Hyde Park after one accused the other of leaking the letters.  When a rematch seemed imminent, Franklin felt he had to step forward… he wrote… a letter to the London Chronicle on Christmas Day (published December 27). But he did not apologize.

Franklin’s public confession led to his appearance before the Privy Council, which many historians point to as the moment when Franklin officially stopped supporting Britain and became an American revolutionary.

Below is Benjamin Franklin’s public confession to leaking the Hutchinson letters as published in the March 7, 1774 Boston Gazette.