GOVERNOUR FRANKLIN TO LORD STIRLING.

Perth-Amboy, September 15, 1775.

MY LORD: I have just received yours of yesterday. I am sorry to find that you are prevented, by the gout, from attending your duty in Council. It likewise gives me concern that you should conceive you had been treated with any indelicacy or impropriety in the request signified to you by Mr. Secretary Pettit. You well know that he is no Clerk of mine, that he is Clerk of the Council, and that the letters he writes by my orders, or by order of the Council, are always on matters of publick concern, or respecting the proper business of Government and Council. In the instance in question, though he may have mentioned it only as by my orders, yet the letter was wrote in pursuance of the advice of the Council, who were then sitting at Amboy. He might, it is true, and perhaps with more propriety, have sent you a copy of the minutes. He probably would have done it, could he have supposed that there was any danger that a man of your Lordship’s understanding would consider such a letter from him as a private application from me, to be gratified in a mere matter of private curiosity. The application took its rise in this manner. The Council being of opinion the matters I had recommended to their consideration were of such importance that a general meeting of all the Members ought to be called on the occasion, I thought it proper to mention to them that it was publickly reported, and generally believed, that your Lordship had accepted a Colonel’s commission from the Provincial Congress, and I desired to know of them if they could inform me whether the report was true or not. They all acknowledged that they had heard the report, and believed it to be well founded, but unanimously advised me to order the Clerk of the Council to write to you respecting it, at the same time that he sent you the summons to attend the general meeting. You might have had some reason to complain against the Board, had they proceeded to consider the matter on no other ground than publick report or general belief. You would likewise have had some cause for your astonishment, had the affair been of a private nature, respecting only your Lordship’s private conduct, and I had directed a publick officer to catechise you thereon in the peremptory manner you represent. This would not have been consistent with the becoming behaviour you acknowledge I have always treated you with, nor with that friendship and regard I have constantly professed and shown for your Lordship, during a long acquaintance. Your Lordship’s answer, to the question proposed to you, I shall lay before the Council this evening. Whether or not your conduct, in accepting the commission, has my approbation, can, I think, appear but of little consequence to your Lordship, as you intimate that it has met with the approbation of your own conscience, and as you never thought proper to consult me, either directly or indirectly, before you took so extraordinary a step. It is true, as you say, I have repeatedly declared, publickly and privately, “that the right of the people and the prerogative of the Crown were equally dear to me, and equally my duty and inclination to preserve,” nor can any motive be sufficient to induce me to sacrifice one at the shrine of the other. Your Lordship will not, however, pretend to say that it is not the sole prerogative of the Crown to grant military commissions in the Province, or that it is not your as well as my duty to prevent any infringements of that prerogative, as far as may be in our power, and to signify your disapprobation of such infringements whenever it may be necessary. Cases may possibly happen, wherein some men may think it their duty so far to fly in the face of prerogative as to accept of commissions from a power set up in opposition to it; but I have not yet met with any person, who makes the least pretensions to honour or honesty, but what readily allows that a man cannot act consistently with either, unless he previously resigns any commission or trust which he holds by virtue of that prerogative he has determined to act in defiance of. This has been the conduct of not only such men as General Lee, but of many of the inferiour officers of militia in this and the neighbouring Colonies. It was this consideration, and an unwillingness to entertain any idea the least derogatory to your Lordship’s honour, which induced me to suspend my belief of the report you have now thought proper to authenticate.

I am, my Lord, your Lordship’s most obedient humble servant,

WM. FRANKLIN.

Right Honourable the Earl of Stirling.

P. S. Since writing the above, Mr. Pettit has shown me a copy of the letter he wrote to your Lordship, which he remembers comparing with the one sent. I have compared it with your quotation, and find it to be materially different. There was a time, my Lord, when great would have been my surprise and astonishment at such a discovery. After informing your Lordship that the Council had advised the calling a full meeting, and requiring your attendance, he adds, “I have it further in command from his Excellency in Council to acquaint you,” &c. Had you left the words “further,” and “in Council,” stand in your quotation, there would not have appeared even a colourable pretence for your considering it in any other light than as an official letter, nor the least excuse for the style and manner of your Lordship’s letter to an old friend, who had on many occasions shown he was happy in an opportunity of obliging you, and in thinking you possessed an equal regard for him. But it seems that “the most grateful feelings of a man” happened to be “roused” in your Lordship, and you were of course anxious to convince “the good people of the country” that their “confidence” in you was not misplaced. Some proofs of this, too, I will allow to be the most necessary, as your Lordship’s “frequent publick as well as private declarations,” that a man ought to be damned who would take up arms against his Sovereign on the present occasion, might happen to be recollected. But, my Lord, was there no other means now left in your power, which might have a chance of effecting your desired purpose, but disrespectful treatment of a Governour? Though the present crisis might promise success to such an expedient, was there no danger that your mutilation of Mr. Pettit’s letter might be discovered, and consequently that all good people would consider such conduct as an instance of contemptible meanness and dishonesty, although your Lordship might “think it one of the most satisfactory and honourable events of your life?”

LORD STIRLING TO GOVERNOUR FRANKLIN.

Baskinridge, September 25, 1775.

SIR: Your Excellency’s letter of the 15th of this month was delivered to me last Saturday afternoon. At the time I wrote you my letter of the 14th instant, I did not know that Mr. Pettit was either Secretary or Clerk of the Council for this Province, for it was a matter of publick report, some months since, that he was displaced from every office he held under the Crown, and I have some other authority to believe that the report was true. I had therefore great reason to believe he wrote me the letter of the 7th as your private Secretary or Clerk, especially as he did not sign that letter with the additions of his office, which he generally did when he wrote officially. I shall not at present say any thing further in answer to your Excellency’s letter, as it would probably involve us in a long epistolary dispute, upon a subject which is already sufficiently understood by the generality of mankind. I cannot so easily pass over the postscript you have, on a sight of a copy of Mr. Pettit’s letter of the 7th instant, been pleased to add to your letter. The sight of this copy of Mr. Pettit’s letter seems to have had a very strange effect. “Surprise, astonishment, mutilation, contemptible meanness, and dishonesty,” are all jumbled together in a most violent agitation; and for what? Because, as you say, I have committed the heinous sin of leaving out the words further and in Council, in quoting Mr. Pettit’s letter. Let me beg a few minutes of your Excellency’s dispassionate attention, while we examine into the importance of these words being left out or not. In the preceding part of the letter Mr. Pettit does not say that he has any thing in command from your Excellency, in Council or out of it, and had begun the second part of his letter with the words “I have it further in command.” I believe your Excellency would have thought it nonsense; and, in quoting that paragraph, I believe your Excellency would have taken the liberty to have made sense of it. Where, then, could have been the important difference between his saying “I have it further in command,” or “I have it in command,” unless it be to preserve as far as it is