Back then, news didn't break unless the town crier tripped over his own words. There were no "breaking reports," no special election coverage, no bickering pundits crammed into a single screen. News traveled so slowly that it took more than six months for word to spread across the thirteen colonies that the Revolutionary War was over.
No one denies the right of Edward Channing, professor of history in Harvard University, to make the statement to his class that George Washington had an unsurpassed temper, and did not have large brain power or education; that Benjamin Franklin dressed freakishly to be a social lion; that Alexander Hamilton became second in command through intrigues involving Washington and Adams, and that Patrick Henry, Jeremy Belknap and Noah Webster speculated on inside tips received from Congressmen.
“We hold these truths to be sacred,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in his first draft. Benjamin Franklin, who was on the five-person drafting committee with Jefferson, crossed out “sacred,” using the heavy backslash marks he had often used as a printer, and wrote in “self-evident.” Their declaration was intended to herald a new type of nation, one in which rights are based on reason, not the dictates or dogma of religion.
On the whole, the Founding Fathers, those towering patriarchs, fared poorly when it came to sons. George Washington and James Madison had none. Thomas Jefferson's only legitimate one died in infancy. Samuel Adams also outlived his. With the exception of John Quincy Adams, no other son of a Founder rose to his father's stature. The unluckiest of all may have been Benjamin Franklin, who, in the course of a deeply familial contest, lost a cherished son the hardheaded way: to politics.