4-minute read

• The 1st New Jersey Regiment, made up of local tradesmen and farmers, placed Franklin under house arrest after he refused to yield authority.
• Franklin later led Loyalist operations from Manhattan, using knowledge of New Jersey to target rebel homes and disrupt Patriot efforts.

On a bitter January morning in 1776, Patriot militia from the 1st New Jersey Regiment slogged through slush to the Proprietary House in Perth Amboy. Their target was William Franklin, the Crown’s highest-ranking civilian official between New York and Philadelphia.

Franklin was not a visiting British officer or a passing bureaucrat. He was the royal governor of New Jersey, and his arrest was a milestone that destroyed the bridge back to reconciliation.

His father, Benjamin Franklin, was already a figure of international renown. Printer, scientist, inventor and diplomat, he moved easily between Philadelphia and London. William had grown up in that orbit, trained in law and politics.

Unlike his father, who increasingly sympathized with the colonial cause, William sided with the Crown. He saw loyalty to Britain as vital to protect law, order and property.

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In the months before militiamen arrived at his door, Franklin steadfastly refused to yield authority as governor. While local Committees of Observation enforced boycotts and intercepted mail, Franklin continued issuing proclamations, corresponding with British officials and loyalists and asserting that the government was still under control of the Crown.

By early January, patience had ended among members of the state’s revolutionary committees. Allowing Franklin to operate inside New Jersey was no longer seen as tolerable.

Shoemakers, tanners and farmers

The men sent to detain him were not professional soldiers in the British sense. In the 1872 “Official Register of the Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Revolutionary War,” historian William Stryker wrote that the 1st New Jersey Regiment was drawn largely from Essex, Bergen and Elizabethtown.

Stryker noted that shoemakers and tanners from Newark, men who had watched their businesses tighten under British currency and customs policies, made up a significant portion of the early volunteers.

Alongside them were Dutch-descended farmers from the Hackensack Valley, many of whom viewed Franklin’s land agents and surveyors as a threat to their claims, historian Adrian Leiby wrote in the 1962 work “The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley.”

It also had members of the Elizabeth-Town Rifles, whose officers lived within sight of the British fleet in New York Harbor.

The group included men who had previously served during British campaigns during the French and Indian War, when Franklin held a captain’s commission. In her 1990 biography “William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King,” historian Sheila Skemp wrote that some had trained with him, while others had marched beside him.

Mission led by Lord Stirling from Basking Ridge

Primary source journals from the regiment describe the uncomfortable silence of the Jan. 8 mission, led by William Alexander, an aristocrat from Basking Ridge known as Lord Stirling. In the 1847 volume “The Life of William Alexander,” William Alexander Duer wrote that before the war, Stirling and Franklin had shared wine, discussed land deals and attended the same elite galas.

The group did not storm the Proprietary House. Contemporary journals describe a solemn encirclement. Guards were placed at the gates. According to the “New Jersey Archives” published in 1886, Franklin was informed by Stirling rather plainly that he “received orders… (and) to prevent your quitting the Province… I have therefore ordered a guard to be placed at your gates.”

Franklin objected immediately, calling the arrest a “high insult” and illegal.

The 1886 “New Jersey Archives” record that he argued that nobody in New Jersey possessed the right to restrain the king’s appointed governor, but it was no use. Authority had shifted.

Franklin signed a parole agreement restricting his movement. Within weeks, it nonetheless became clear that he had no intention of complying.

Seized and transported to Connecticut

He continued corresponding with loyalist figures and acting as governor in all but name. The Provincial Congress responded by ordering his removal from New Jersey. In June 1776, Franklin was seized again and transported under guard to Connecticut.

While Franklin remained imprisoned, events in New Jersey continued. Royal government collapsed. A new governor, William Livingston, assumed office. New Jersey moved formally into rebellion.

Franklin was released in a 1778 prisoner exchange and sent to British-occupied New York City. He did not return to New Jersey. Instead, he took up a new role as president of the Board of Associated Loyalists, an organization tasked with coordinating loyalist refugees and retaliatory actions against Patriot strongholds.

In research for the Online Institute for Advanced Loyalist Studies, Todd Braisted wrote that this organization operated as a paramilitary arm of the Loyalist cause.

From Manhattan, Franklin drew on his detailed knowledge of New Jersey’s geography and leadership. Raids authorized under the board targeted farms, barns and ironworks. Loyalist parties crossed the Hudson at night, seizing property and prisoners in Bergen and Essex counties.

Leiby documented that survivors later testified that attackers called out names as they approached, which provided evidence of the advanced knowledge Franklin had gathered as governor.

Franklin’s actions during these years ensured that he could never return. When the war ended, he relocated permanently to Britain, where he died in 1813.