this same Mr. Whately. I then considered him as a banker to the treasury for the pension money, and thence as having an interested connexion with the administration, that might induce him to act by direction of others in harassing me with this suit; which gave me if possible a still meaner opinion of him, than if he had done it of his own accord.

What further steps he or his confederates, the ministers, will take in this cause, I know not. I do not indeed believe the banker himself, finding there are no profits to be shared, would willingly lay out a sixpence more upon the suit; but then my finances are not sufficient to cope at law with the treasury here; especially when administration has taken care to prevent my constituents of New England from paying me any salary, or reimbursing me any expenses, by a special instruction to the governor, not to sign any warrant for that purpose on the treasury there.

The injustice of thus depriving the people there of the use of their own money, to pay an agent acting in their defence, while the governor, with a large salary out of the money extorted from them by act of Parliament, was enabled to pay plentifully Mauduit and Wedderburn to abuse and defame them and their agent, is so evident as to need no comment. But this they call GOVERNMENT!

NOTE BY THE EDITOR,

CONTAINING OTHER PARTICULARS RESPECTING HUTCHINSON'S

LETTERS.

MUCH curiosity has beer. expressed, and much inquiry made, as to the mode in which Dr. Franklin obtained possession of these letters; but nothing more is positively known on this point, than what he has related in the preceding narrative. Having received them under an injunction of secrecy, and a solemn pledge not to reveal the names of the persons concerned, he maintained a perfect silence on the subject to the end of his life. It is not certain from any facts hitherto published, that he was himself informed of the manner in which they were procured, or the place where they were found. It is indeed probable, that he was purposely kept ignorant of these particulars, that he might not in any event be involved in personal difficulties on their account. This may be inferred from the circumstance, that, when the letters were put into his hands, the name of the person to whom they had been addressed was erased. Their genuineness was proved by the handwriting, and the signatures of their authors, which were familiar to him.

In the year 1820, Dr. Hosack, of New York, published a Biographical Memoir of Dr. Hugh Williamson, a gentleman well known for his scientific attainments. In that Memoir the author endeavours to establish the fact, on what he deems good authority, that Dr. Williamson was the person, who obtained the letters in question, and communicated them to Dr. Franklin. The following is Dr. Hosack's statement.

"Dr. Williamson had now arrived in London. Feeling a lively interest in the momentous questions then agitated, and suspecting that a clandestine correspondence, hostile to the interest of the colonies, was carried on between Hutchinson and certain leading members of the British Cabinet, he determined to ascertain the truth by a bold experiment.

"He had learned, that Governor Hutchinson's letters were deposited in an office different from that in which they ought regularly to have been placed; and, having understood that there was little exactness in the transaction of the business of that office, (it is believed it was the office of a particular department of the Treasury,) he immediately repaired to it, and addressed himself to the chief clerk, not finding the principal within. Assuming the demeanor of official importance, he peremptorily stated, that he had

come for the last letters that had been received from Governor Hutchinson and Mr. Oliver, noticing the office in which they ought regularly to have been placed. Without any question being asked, the letters were delivered. The clerk doubtless supposed him to be an authorized person from some other public office. Dr. Williamson immediately carried them to Dr. Franklin, and the next day left London for Holland.

"I received this important fact from a gentleman of high respectability now living; with whom, as the companion and friend of his early days, Dr. Williamson had intrusted the secret."

Dr. Hosack inserts a letter from this gentleman, dated October 26th, 1819, containing the facts here related, in which the writer says he received them from Dr. Williamson himself, " some time after his return from Europe." But there are circumstances which would seem to prove, that this gentleman either misunderstood Dr. Williamson, or that in the lapse of thirty or forty years his memory had confounded this subject with some other of a different kind. Such an inference is necessarily made from a comparison of dates.

The letter written by Dr. Franklin to Thomas Cushing, Speaker of the House of Representatives in Massachusetts, enclosing Hutchinson's letters, was dated December 2d, 1772. Six months afterwards, that is, in June, 1773, they were publicly acted upon by the legislature of Massachusetts, and on the 15th of that month the resolves occasioned by them were adopted. Now it appears in the Memoir of Dr. Williamson's life, that he went to the West Indies in the year 1772, and did not return till the autumn of 1773, when he was appointed, as an associate with Dr. Ewing, to go to Great Britain for the purpose of soliciting benefactions for an academy at Newark in Delaware. He repaired to Boston in order to take passage from that port, and was present at and saw the destruction of the tea, which occurred on the 16th of December, 1773. He sailed a week afterwards, and arrived in England near the end of January; that is, fourteen months after Dr. Franklin had sent Hutchinson's letters from London.

These facts afford conclusive evidence, that Dr. Williamson could not have had any agency in procuring the letters. That a result apparently so obvious should escape Dr. Hosack, is the less remarkable, perhaps, as he placed entire confidence in the respecta ble authority from which he derived his intelligence; and the mistake, as mentioned above, can be explained only by supposing a misapprehension or defect of memory on the part of the gentleman,

by whom it was communicated. It is proper to add, however, that Mr. John Williamson, brother to Dr. Williamson, had received the same impression from the latter, as he declared to Dr. Hosack in conversation.

There is a mode of reconciling these discrepances, which at least has probability on its side. One of the conditions enjoined by Dr. Franklin, in sending these letters, was, that they should be returned to London. At the time Dr. Williamson sailed from Boston, the letters had been copied and printed, and there was no longer any motive for retaining the origina's. These may have been intrusted to Dr. Williamson, with the request, that, on his arrival in London, he would put them into the hands of Dr. Franklin. His relation of this circumstance might easily lead to the error of connecting him with the previous transactions.

Mr. John Adams, after reading the first edition of Dr. Hosack's Memoir, wrote a letter to him, dated January 28th, 1820, which contains some interesting facts touching this subject.

"I was one of the first persons," says Mr. Adams, "to whom Mr. Cushing communicated the great bundle of letters of Hutchinson and Oliver, which had been transmitted to him, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, by Dr. Franklin, their agent in London. I was permitted to carry them with me upon a circuit of our Judicial Court, and to communicate them to the chosen few. They excited no surprise, excepting at the miracle of their acquisition. How that could have been performed nobody could conjecture; none doubted their authenticity, for the handwriting was full proof; and, besides, all the leading men in opposition to the ministry had long been fully convinced, that the writers were guilty of such malignant representations, and that those representations had suggested to the ministry their nefarious projects. I doubt not the veracity of Dr. Williamson's account of the agency in procuring those letters, but I believe he has omitted one circumstance, to wit, that he was employed upon that occasion by Mr. Temple, afterwards Sir John Temple, who told me, in Holland, that he had communicated those letters to Dr. Franklin. "Though I swear to you,' said he, that I did not procure them in the manner represented.' This I believe, and I believe further, that he did not deliver them with his own hand into Dr. Franklin's, but employed a member of Parliament, very possibly Mr. Hartley, for that purpose; for Dr. Franklin declared publicly, that he received them from a member of Parliament."

In his narrative Dr. Franklin says, that three persons in England

1

besides himself saw the letters, and were acquainted with the circumstances under which they were procured and sent. Mr. Temple was doubtless one of the three; but the part he acted, and who were the other two, can only be conjectured.

Governor Hutchinson, in the third volume of his History of Massachusetts, which remained many years in manuscript, and was first published in 1828, gives a long account of the proceedings of the Massachusetts legislature in regard to these letters. "The manner in which they were obtained," he says (p. 418), "was never fully discovered. Dr. Franklin asserts, that they were not in Mr. Whately's possession at the time of his death. Mr. Whately's character will not admit of a supposition, that he suffered to be put into the possession of another person, letters written in confidence of not being communicated. They were, therefore, unfairly obtained from Mr. Whately in his lifetime, and unjustly withheld from his executor after his death. The removal of Dr. Franklin from office seems to have been occasioned by his public acknowledgment, that he laid hands on them, and sent them to his constituents; and that of Mr. Temple, by information given to the ministry, by a person intrusted with the secret, that he was privy to the plan of procuring and sending them over. From some circumstances there were strong grounds to suppose, that they had been in the possession of anothe person, a member of Parliament, by whom they had been communicated to Dr. Franklin."

The suggestion in this extract, that the letters were unfairly obtained from Mr. Whately during his lifetime, is supported by an insufficient reason. They might naturally be lent to a friend, who had not returned them at the time of his death; and this is the more probable, as they were evidently intended to be read by different persons, and to influence public measures, although their contents were of a nature to require secrecy. In his political sentiments, also, Mr. Whately was opposed to the existing ministry, and he might be willing the letters should be seen by others of his party, many of whom were friendly to the claims of America. In this way they may have falen into the channel, by which they were conveyed to Dr. Franklin, without any unfairness to Mr. Whately before his death, whatever may be thought of the disposition that was made of them subsequently.

After the resolves of the Massachusetts legislature and their petition to the King arrived in England, the newspapers were filled with speculations concerning the mysterious manner in which the letters had found their way across the Atlantic; for as yet