“According to Dick Penns bon Mot”

As quoted here, in April 1776 Carter Braxton wrote home to Virginia from the Continental Congress: “It is a true saying of a Wit—We must hang together or separately.”

Was Braxton referring to a generic “Wit,” or had he heard this remark from a specific person, or attributed to a specific person? His letter didn’t say.

Editors of the Benjamin Franklin Papers suggested that Braxton might have been alluding to Franklin. But given how Alexander Graydon credited the remark to Richard Penn speaking in 1774 or 1775, Braxton might have been referring to that lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania instead.

Graydon didn’t publish his Memoirs of His Own Time until 1811, however. While that’s decades before anyone attributed the remark to Franklin, it’s also decades after Penn allegedly spoke. Is there any closer evidence?

Indeed, there is. In April 1786, John Adams wrote home from London to his brother-in-law Richard Cranch. At the time Britain and the new U.S. of A. were trying to sort out their trading arrangements, and states were starting to compete with each other.

Charles Jenkinson (1729–1808, shown here) was the new president of the Council for Trade and Plantations overseeing British overseas commerce. Jenkinson had served in the administrations of Lord Bute, George Grenville, and Lord North, and Adams viewed him as part of a cabal inimical to America. (Later in 1786 Jenkinson became Baron Hawkesbury, and in 1796 the first Earl of Liverpool.)

Adams wrote:

Mr Jenkinson, I presume, has, by his late Motions in Parliament, all of which are carried without opposition, convinced the People of America, that they have nothing but a ruinous Commerce to expect with England.

Our Crisis is at hand, and if the states do not hang together, they might as well have been “hanged Seperate,” according to Dick Penns bon Mot in 1784.

Did Adams write the wrong date, meaning 1774 instead of “1784”? That would be in accord with Graydon’s memory and Braxton’s 1776 mention of “a Wit.” Penn left Pennsylvania for Britain in 1775, carrying the Olive Branch Petition, and I don’t think he returned during the war (contra Graydon). Or did Adams hear Penn voice or repeat this remark in London in 1784?

TOMORROW: Looking for eighteenth-century uses.