Provost in Prison! Franklin Accused!
Founders and Free speech at the College
In pamphlets and letters, and in the speech and conversation of the street, the coffee-house, and the tavern, Philadelphians employed satire, rhetorical disguise, and occasionally outright libel to attack their enemies. Smith’s Brief State enraged the Pennsylvania Assembly, but Smith did not tone down his rhetoric. In 1757 he was accused of assisting William Moore, a Chester County judge and political ally who would later become his father-in-law, with another defamatory attack on the Assembly. Both men were imprisoned in Philadelphia for four months, and Smith gave some of his College lectures while in confinement in the Market Street Prison.[1]
Smith and Benjamin Franklin had become embittered during the same years by political divisions and disagreements over the direction of the College. In 1758, Smith founded a short-lived literary magazine, the American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle, in which he printed a laudatory account of the Academy and College. But he also included a dig at Franklin the scientist, suggesting that Rev. Ebenezer Kinnersley, Professor of English and oratory at the College, was actually “author of a considerable part of those discoveries in electricity, published by Mr. Franklin to whom he communicated them.”[2] The charge of plagiarism would linger. Mathematics teacher Hugh Williamson, attacking Franklin in 1764, accused him of “Assuming the merit of other Men’s Discoveries.” Kinnersley, however, published a denial in The Pennsylvania Gazette.
Lloyd, UPA Smith Papers, 6–7: “In 1757 Smith found himself the focus of the ire of the Assembly when he assisted his future father-in-law, William Moore with the publication of a defamatory tract against the Assembly. The following year the Assembly arrested Smith and Moore and placed them in prison for publishing seditious libel. After four months of confinement, Smith was released and eventually exonerated by the Privy Council in London.” Hughes, “Duelling Quills”; Cheyney 107; Trustees Minutes 1:91. ↑
William Smith, “To the Proprietors &c.,” The American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle for the British Colonies 1 (October, 1758), 630. For an overview, see Lemay, “Franklin and Kinnersley.” ↑