Franklin, Benjamin, Ambassador to France

Letter signed ("BFranklin"), 3 pages (9 x 7 1/4 in.; 230 x 185 mm), Passy, 13 September 1781, to his son-in-law Richard Bache, commenting on Samuel Wharton's pamphlet about the Grand Ohio Company debacle, regretting his friendship with Joseph Galloway and the possible loss of his papers in the latter's possession, also gives advice about grandson William's education; washed and pressed, a few neat repairs to fold separations (one affecting the "B" in the signature), a few holes left unrepaired, minor loss to lower right corner of first leaf. Folding case of patterned paper over boards, red and black morocco spine.  

Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 36:472

"Moral and Political right sometimes differ; and sometimes are both subdued by might." In this letter to his son-in-law Richard Bache, Franklin mentions that he has read a pamphlet on the Ohio Company or Walpole Company land grant debacle with Virginia, written by Philadelphia merchant Samuel Wharton, who was involved in the speculation. "The facts, as far as I know them, are as he states them. Justice is, I think, on the side of those who contracted for the lands. But moral & political rights sometimes differ ..." In 1768 during negotiations leading to the Treaty of Fort Stanwix,  Wharton represented merchants who had lost goods and property during the French and Indian War. To compensate their losses, the Iroquois granted them a tract of land that now comprises a fourth of modern West Virginia.  In 1769 Franklin, then in London, helped organize a consortium known as the Grand Ohio Company, which included some of London's richest businessman. In 1772, the Grand Ohio Company received from the British government a grant of a large tract lying along the southern bank of the Ohio as far west as the mouth of the Scioto River. A colony to be called Vandalia was planned.  When the Grand Ohio Company announced the sale of the land in 1776, Virginia objected, claiming title to the land by virtue of the Treaty of Lancaster (1744). Virginians believed the terms of the treaty called for the Iroquois to cede all claim to lands within the 1609 chartered boundaries of Virginia (up to the Pacific or at least up to the Ohio river). In any event, The Revolutionary War interrupted colonization and nothing was ever accomplished.

"I thought he was become a stanch Friend to the glorious Cause. I was mistaken." Franklin regrets entrusting some twenty years' worth of his papers to an erstwhile friend in Philadelphia, Joseph Galloway, and worries that they might now be destroyed. "I should not have left them in his Hands, if he had not deceived me, by saying 'that tho' he was before otherwise inclined, yet that since the King had declared us out of his Protection, & the Parliament by an Act, had made our Properties Plunder ...' As he was a Friend of my Son's, to whom in my will I had left all my Books and Papers, I made him one of my Executors, and put the Trunk of Papers in to his Hands, imagining them safer in his House ... than in my own. —It was very unlucky." Galloway had served in the first Continental Congress during which he had proposed a joint American and British legislature, equal in power and loyal to the king. When rejected, he declined election to the second Continental Congress. In 1776 he joined General Howe and accompanied him for the capture of Philadelphia. In 1778, he fled to England and became a spokesman of American Loyalists.