Battleground New Jersey: Vanderbilt, Hague, and Their Fight for Justice

Battleground New Jersey

Rivergate Regionals

Rivergate Regionals is a collection of books published by Rutgers University Press focusing on New Jersey and the surrounding area. Since its founding in 1936, Rutgers University Press has been devoted to serving the people of New Jersey and this collection solidifies that tradition. The books in the Rivergate Regionals Collection explore history, politics, nature and the environment, recreation, sports, health and medicine, and the arts. By incorporating the collection within the larger Rutgers University Press editorial program, the Rivergate Regionals Collection enhances our commitment to publishing the best books about our great state and the surrounding region.

Battleground New Jersey

Vanderbilt, Hague, and Their Fight for Justice

Nelson Johnson

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnson, Nelson, 1948–

Battleground New Jersey : Vanderbilt, Hague and their fight for justice / Nelson Johnson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–6972–7 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6974–1 (e-book)

1. Vanderbilt, Arthur T., 1888–1957 2. Hague, Frank, 1876–1956. 3. Judges—United States—Biography. 4. New Jersey—Politics and government—1865–1950. I. Title.

KF373.V3J64 2015

347.749'035092—dc23

[B]

2014004946

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2014 by Nelson Johnson

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The author received no compensation for work performed on this book since assuming judicial office in the state of New Jersey. All royalties on sale of this book will be paid to charities designated by the publisher.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

To my dear friend, John Bertman

No lawyer ever had a better mentor.

Good and great are seldom in the same man.

—Winston Churchill

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue. Power Doesn’t Corrupt: It Reveals

Chapter 1. Sadie’s Saga

Chapter 2. Roseville’s Prodigy

Chapter 3. The Lawyer as Public Person

Chapter 4. A Force in Four Worlds

Chapter 5. Up from the Horseshoe

Chapter 6. The Celtic Chieftain

Chapter 7. Clean Government versus Hagueism

Chapter 8. Box 96: Arthur and David

Chapter 9. The Inventor’s Son

Chapter 10. The Archbishop Shows His Gratitude

Chapter 11. Haddonfield’s Mensch

Chapter 12. Things Get Curious

Chapter 13. Summer at Rutgers

Chapter 14. The Chief

Chapter 15. The Chief Supreme

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Writing history is an adventure. At the end of my work I marvel at the surprises I’ve encountered and the new friends I’ve made. While researching the lives, and then telling the story of the people who populate my books, they visit my thoughts daily. When my work is over, I miss them, but know they will always be with me. That is especially true with this book. Arthur Vanderbilt and Frank Hague were giants; their deeds make me feel like a runt. The same is true of Alfred Driscoll. None of them have received their due from history. I hope my book encourages others to look further into their lives and times. There’s much to be learned.

One of the best gifts my mother gave me was my love for libraries. I feel at home the instant I enter a library. In researching Battleground New Jersey four libraries and their staffs were indispensable to my efforts. They are the Newark Public Library; the Jersey City Free Public Library; the Olin Library at Wesleyan University; and the New Jersey State Library and Archives. My initial research began at the Newark Public Library where I was aided in my efforts by the head librarian, George Hawley, and his assistants, James Lewis and Dierdre Schmidel. They helped me find early writings on Arthur Vanderbilt’s career and ancient volumes on the New Jersey Judiciary. The staff persons at the Jersey City Free Public Library who guided me through the many thousands of writings on Frank Hague’s career were the director of the New Jersey Room, Cynthia Harris, and her assistants, Daniel Klein and John Beekman. But for their wise advice, I would still be lost in the forest of learned treaties, scholarly profiles, and news articles on Hague’s life written by hundreds of authors. The magnificent Olin Library is where I found the treasure trove of Arthur Vanderbilt’s personal files, so essential to my work and understanding the Warrior Lawyer. Librarians Jennifer Hadley and Suzy Taraba appreciated the long distance I had to travel and always had the materials I requested waiting for me. Lastly, the staff at the New Jersey State Library in Trenton helped me find original documents critical to my research.

Finally, there are six people who were essential in making Battleground New Jersey a reality. Finding a friend in Arthur T. Vanderbilt II was the pleasantest surprise of my adventure. He is one of the finest gentlemen I know. His biography of his grandfather, Order in the Courts, is a gem and was my bible throughout my research. On all three of my books, the first people to read my work were the Hon. Steven P. Perskie (JSC, Ret.) and my go-to person of many years, Sheryl McGrotty. Steve is a rigorous editor; Sheryl is a tireless proofreader. I am indebted to both of them for the many hours they have donated to my writings. My friend Dennis Burroughs came through at crunch time, selecting the photos on Frank Hague. I can’t imagine writing a book without Dennis’s guidance on just the right images to compliment the narrative. My publisher, Marlie Wasserman, is a joy to work with. She must have known how much I enjoy challenges; why else would she have blown up my initial effort comprising twelve chapters and 250-plus pages and told me to start over? Marlie has a way of focusing my work as a writer unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. I am grateful to her and the entire staff at Rutgers University Press.

Finally, my wife, Johanna, is my port in the storm; she always knows what I need. I frequently remind her what a low-maintenance husband I am, especially when I spend vacation days in a library or squirreled away in my office writing. I’m grateful for her indulgence of my obsessions.

Prologue

Power Doesn’t Corrupt: It Reveals

Newark lawyer Arthur Vanderbilt was furious. He knew that Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague would do anything to control the New Jersey governorship, but this?

With twenty of twenty-one counties reporting, Essex County Republican Lester Clee was leading by more than 84,000 votes. Finally, long after everywhere else had reported, the vote out of Hudson County had Democrat Harry Moore besting Clee by nearly 130,000 votes. The numbers were bogus; the math said it all. If 90 percent of all eligible voters were registered and 90 percent of them had voted, Jersey City could have produced at most 119,000 votes—instead, they totaled 145,000. It was fraud beyond the Republicans’ worst fears. Clee had been blindsided in a street fight, and he demanded a recount; given who did the counting, Moore’s margin held up.

Litigation ensued; a nightmare followed. Every step of the way, as the Republicans fought to expose what a sham the vote count had been, they were met by a Hague judge or Hudson County Election Board official erecting one obstacle after another. Proof of election fraud was overwhelming: dead people had voted, patients in a mental hospital had voted, even a rabbi who had moved to Massachusetts three years earlier had voted—his affidavit confirmed he hadn’t. Yet the court ruled the evidence wasn’t enough to grant Clee a hearing to present testimony. As November became December, and then January, Lester Clee saw his victory slipping away.

In desperation, the Republican legislature appointed an investigative committee; it reaped only frustration. All the while, Mayor Hague was wintering in Florida. Finally, after months of stalling and a mere seven days before Inauguration Day, long-time Hague pal Chief Justice Tom Brogan formally dismissed Clee’s appeal, finding no basis for fraud and leaving no path for relief. The proxy war of Moore v. Clee was over. Hague won; Vanderbilt seethed. Worse still, the law meant nothing.¹

Controlling the governor’s chair was essential to Arthur Vanderbilt’s plans to overhaul New Jersey’s government. For years, he had bent the ear of anyone willing to listen on the need to dismantle the state’s antiquated court system. Newark’s Warrior Lawyer needed a governor of his own, and 1937 was supposed to be his year. Vanderbilt had anointed a Presbyterian minister, Lester Clee, to be his front man on rewriting New Jersey’s Constitution. But Hague hated Vanderbilt and his kind and would stop at nothing to hold onto power.

Arthur Vanderbilt wasn’t a patrician, but he had the bearing of one, and despite his surname (distant kin of the railroad tycoon), his beginnings were humble. An accomplished litigator and political reformer, distinguished law school professor, and former president of the American Bar Association, by age fifty-six Vanderbilt was one of the best-known and most respected lawyers in America. He was considered for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Beginning his career at a sprint and never looking back, Vanderbilt had a rare talent for getting close to the right people and for generating legal fees that were the envy of his peers. By age thirty, when most attorneys his age were churning out deeds, leases, and wills at five dollars each, he routinely earned fees in the tens of thousands of dollars. Within a decade of graduating from law school he commanded a far-flung law practice in Newark, hiring teams of lawyers working under his direction. One long-time ally, Alan Lowenstein, observed, I doubt that he had many close friends. He was a team player, but only if he could serve as captain. . . . He was a driven man, standing above his peers, admired by many and hated by some.²

While Vanderbilt had attained national stature in the legal community, he was obsessed with bringing New Jersey’s court system into the twentieth century; that was the legacy he craved. Arthur Vanderbilt dwarfs most of today’s lawyer-politicians. Nonetheless, scrutiny of his career yields conflicting reactions: admiration and skepticism. Were his hands as clean as portrayed by his biographers? Could the captain compromise for the sake of the team?

Vanderbilt’s nemesis, Frank Hague, wanted no part of reform. Hague had earned a Ph.D. in human nature on the streets of Jersey City and viewed the Newark lawyer and his ilk as a bunch of blueblood cranks. Hague too understood the critical role of the courts in New Jersey and wasn’t about to let go of the strings to the puppets he had appointed to the bench. For nearly thirty years Frank Hague was the single most powerful person in New Jersey, influencing who held the key positions in city, county, state, and federal offices, especially the judiciary. The Celtic Chieftain sneered at Vanderbilt’s obsession. Because of his mastery of the ballot box, no statewide election was considered over until the results from Hudson County were known.

In Hague’s own inimitable way, he had achieved national stature: he epitomized the rawest form of bullyboy political corruption in America. He was a favorite target of muckraking, reform-minded journalists, the frequent focus of stories in newspapers and magazines across the nation, and even the subject of a scholarly book by an Ivy League professor, still studied today. There’s no one else like him in American history. Yet Frank Hague’s life summons starkly different reckonings: disdain and fascination. How could he dominate his world as long as he did? Was he the monster historians have painted him?

By the end of the 1930s, history’s currents had brought New Jersey to a critical moment, and it was no accident that the fight had come down to Vanderbilt versus Hague. They were the faces of the two cities that had the most to say in New Jersey politics. American history offers no parallel where two dissimilar cities, so close to the other, had such influence in the development of their states. San Francisco and Los Angeles, Dallas and Houston, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh come to mind, but those are hundreds of miles apart. Newark and Jersey City are separated by Newark Bay and the Jersey Meadowlands, less than six miles. Nonetheless, in their prime these cities might as well have two different countries.

Newark was a city of grandeur, taking its role in New Jersey life seriously, setting the standard for everything from finance, insurance, and technology to architecture, law, and the media. Jersey City was a gritty town with a chip on its shoulder. Teeming with uneducated working poor, willing to follow a strong leader, it made its presence felt on Election Day. Appreciating the role of these cities in New Jersey’s history and how each influenced the principal players in our story is vital to understanding the struggle to overhaul a corrupt court system that had been outdated for more than a century.

Yet the gulf between their cities and the inability of Vanderbilt and Hague to compromise was part of a larger dynamic. Wherever America is going, New Jersey usually gets there first. Prior to the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Garden State’s mind-set was essentially white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in its outlook on life and the role of government. Industrialization had fractured a staid, agricultural society, igniting WASP fears of being overrun by foreigners whose first allegiance was to the pope of the Roman Catholic Church, or, equally troubling, to their rabbi. Out of confrontations over white Protestants’ fixed notions of how society ought to be structured versus the desires of newcomers hoping to grab a piece of the American dream, two very different political value systems emerged.

One system—exemplified by Vanderbilt and the Essex County Republicans—was grounded in centuries-old WASP political traditions that citizens had a duty to be engaged in public affairs and that government was best organized in accordance with the fundamental principles of the English common law and the U.S. Constitution. For WASP Republicans, government wasn’t about curing social ills but rather moderating society’s extremes by limiting people’s conduct and protecting their rights through the rule of law. Foreigners needed to fit in by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

Focusing on the urgent needs of strangers in a strange land, another system emerged from the immigrants’ inexperience—exemplified by Hague and the Hudson County Democrats. The peasants of Europe had survived for centuries by submitting to a hierarchy that protected them. Once in America, they had needs greater than simply keeping their employers happy: they hoped to make a place for themselves in this new world. As a result, many of the newly arrived immigrants placed far more reliance upon the ward heelers who came to their doors offering help in exchange for their votes than on allegiance to any high-sounding phrases out of American history.

Finally, religion was central to the confrontation: the WASPs detested the non-Protestant immigrants, sometimes branding them as papists and kikes.

These two political value systems and each side’s refusal to engage the other on a personal level led to conflicts occupying much of the twentieth century. This clash in cultures played out in voting booths not just in New Jersey but across America. Staggered by having one election after another stolen away, Arthur Vanderbilt despised Frank Hague for blocking his path to reforming New Jersey’s government.

Although they never met, the two dominant figures at this juncture shared a common sentiment: their disdain for each other. Were they living today, they’d be annoyed to find themselves side by side in this book. Hague, the ruffian outfitted in expensive hand-tailored suits that had the sheen of a tuxedo, with a diamond tie tack, versus Vanderbilt, the law professor attired in understated classic three-piece suits, with a Phi Beta Kappa key. Hague, loud and profane, spewing four-letter words with an Irish brogue, jabbing people in the chest for emphasis, versus Vanderbilt, an elegant orator with the common touch and a sense of humor, even when arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Both were renowned far beyond New Jersey; they were two of America’s great political bosses. Vanderbilt had enough self-esteem to match his several careers—he forged his stature by mastering the law, writing scholarly essays as dean of New York University’s law school, traveling nationwide preaching court reform, and deftly organizing the new suburban voters before other politicians recognized their importance. Hague may be the most successful sixth-grade dropout ever—he amassed his power by exploiting peoples’ foibles, crushing his rivals, accumulating a fortune through extortion, subverting the law, and taking care of business in his own backyard. Both lived by Machiavelli’s tenets.

Notwithstanding the enormous gap in their education, heritage, and style, they shared common traits. Neither had casual moments with anyone but trusted allies; neither had time for opinions that didn’t suit their agenda; neither drank alcohol or had dalliances with women. Both exuded an intensity that either attracted people or repelled them; both craved power to bend the world to their vision; and both were ruthless—Vanderbilt when he had to be and Hague because he knew no other way.

Despite being the punch line for countless jokes and its modern-day tag as a blue state, New Jersey has long been a battleground for competing visions of America where change comes through conflict. Rival interests dig trenches—some blatant, others subtler—that are the stuff of nightmares for reformers. Vanderbilt was tormented by the fact that most of the state’s judges and lawyers viewed him as an oddity. They were content with the archaic system that had come down from the eighteenth century, reaping fees by shepherding clients through the cockamamie mumbo jumbo that New Jersey’s courts wallowed in. No matter that the cozy relationships among bench, bar, and politicians made a travesty of justice; all was well with the ruling class.

Delays, confusion, and uncertainty brought about by two separate court systems, overlapping jurisdictions, ancient rules, and puppet judges created a Dickensian aura of absurdity that sent litigants from the state’s courthouses dreading the thought of returning. The hodgepodge of courts, which had evolved over the centuries at the whim of politicians, was at best hit or miss when it came to ensuring the rule of law. But the public’s frustration was for naught—the courts didn’t exist for the general public; rather, they existed to protect the powerful from change and to serve the people who made their incomes from the system. Vanderbilt bristled at such a mind-set and ached to set things right.

Brimming with self-importance, Arthur Vanderbilt believed he was the hinge on which New Jersey could swing in a new direction. While his deeds as an attorney, scholar, and reformer rank him at the top of his profession in American history, Vanderbilt’s role as a power broker is often overlooked. Like Hague, his clout in his home county made him a kingmaker for candidates of his party seeking statewide office. Yet politics was a means to an end. Vanderbilt had witnessed Hague and others of his sort wangle their way through the courts, making a mockery of the law, and realized that this ruthlessness had to be countered in kind.

Newark’s Warrior Lawyer was on a crusade. He believed that democracy could flourish only if people have faith in the rule of law. For him, the guarantee of a fair trial was an indispensable cornerstone of personal freedom. Everyone must be equal in the eyes of the law; otherwise no one’s rights are secure. And while free and honest elections are essential, politicians come and go. When people have legal problems—large or small—the courts, more personal than politics, must be a sanctuary, a place where all citizens know they will be treated fairly.

Vanderbilt regarded the law as sacred; his mission was to level the floors in New Jersey’s courtrooms by creating a professional and autonomous judiciary. Yet his obsession drove him to abandon his lofty ideals for a devilish undertaking that he managed to conceal during his lifetime.

Rummaging through New Jersey’s past and studying Arthur Vanderbilt’s battle with Frank Hague sheds light on more than this tiny portion of our republic. We see that while America is forever becoming something new, moving government to address changes in society is a struggle. For genuine reform to occur it must be pursued relentlessly, and sometimes that pursuit consumes the crusader. Finally, the rule of law is not a given; each generation must be vigilant. There will always be bullies eager to trample the rights of others and political insiders yearning to manipulate the law to their own ends. Vanderbilt grasped these truths tightly and persisted when others relented.

To understand how New Jersey arrived at this intersection in time and what Arthur Vanderbilt was up against we need to glimpse the workings of the court system that he found so alarming. A look back reveals that filing a lawsuit in the Garden State could be the start of a bizarre endurance test. A telling example is the ordeal of Sadie Urback.

Chapter 1

Sadie’s Saga

Sadie Urback hadn’t planned on being a widow so soon. Her husband Jack’s job—driving a laundry truck—wasn’t dangerous. When he suffered a fatal brain aneurism in November 1937 at age thirty-nine, Sadie was bereft. Despite the shock, she knew her husband had been paying premiums on a life insurance policy. Jack was conscientious about his health and went to doctors whenever he was ill and sometimes, as a precaution, when he was feeling well. Several years earlier he had seen his doctor for fainting spells. Newark, like the rest of the nation, was suffering through the Great Depression, and the diagnosis was that Jack’s blackouts were caused by hysteria due to stress from financial problems. In general, Jack Urback’s health was found to be perfectly normal. Sadie recalled that prior to issuing the policy, the insurance company had its own doctor do a physical exam: he found that the insured is a first class risk.¹

Yet Jack’s insurer, Metropolitan Life, didn’t respond in a first-class way upon learning of his death. Rather than paying the death benefits, the mighty insurance company put Sadie through the paces, ping-ponging her between courts for years on end.

Sadie’s saga begins with Metropolitan rejecting her claim based on its determination that Jack had committed fraud in answering the questions on his application little more than a year earlier. In addition to his fainting spells, Metropolitan was concerned that Jack had had his tonsils removed in 1934 and failed to disclose that when he completed the life insurance application. Without ever explaining what a tonsillectomy had to do with a brain aneurism, Metropolitan denied Sadie’s request for payment. Her only hope was the courts.

Her lawyer sued promptly for breach of contract in the Essex County Circuit Court, seeking payment of her death benefits, demanding a jury trial. Metropolitan countered with a lawsuit of its own in a different court, the Court of Chancery. The insurer claimed that Jack had defrauded them and sought a court order cancelling the policy, voiding it entirely. Initially, Chancery ruled it could take no action until a hearing is had and all the evidence presented.²

Sadie’s claim went to a jury the following year and the jurors found in her favor. On appeal, the Court of Errors and Appeals (the E & A), New Jersey’s highest court, ruled that the trial judge had erred in permitting the jury to decide whether Jack’s answers to Metropolitan’s questions when the policy was issued were material to the risk. On remand for a new trial, the trial judge ruled that the questions and answers were material and that the evidence was conclusive of fraud,³ entering a verdict in favor of Metropolitan.

Sadie persisted. On her second appeal to the E & A, the high court ruled again that the trial judge got it wrong. While the judge had to rule on materiality, only a jury could rule on fraudulent intent. A new trial was ordered for a second time for different reasons. At the same time, Metropolitan continued pressing its case in the Chancery Court. The insurer had already gone to the E & A on Chancery’s initial refusal to cancel Jack’s policy, a decision favoring Sadie. Having the benefit of both the first jury trial and the three decisions of the E & A, the Chancery Court entered a verdict denying Metropolitan’s demand to cancel the policy, finding no facts to support the claim of fraudulent intent by Jack.

Yet another appeal by Metropolitan was taken to the E & A, with the high court ruling that it agreed with the Chancery Court. There were no facts to support fraud. In May 1946, eight and one-half years after Jack’s death, Sadie finally got her money.

Why such an ordeal? Metropolitan knew something that anyone who has ever been a party to a lawsuit quickly learns: litigation fills the crevices of your mind. For the inexperienced layperson, getting involved in lengthy court proceedings is like having a stranger come to visit and then refuse to leave. You go to sleep at night and he’s in your bedroom. You wake up and he’s in the kitchen. Whenever you aren’t thinking of a loved one, or performing a task for work or at play with something you truly enjoy, the stranger dominates your thoughts. When you are a party to a lawsuit it becomes the default position of your brain. You think of nothing else, and the stranger doesn’t leave until the litigation is over.

Metropolitan was banking on wearing Sadie down. It had not only lots of lawyers to do its bidding but also a rickety, corrupt conglomeration of courts that legal scholars and historians alike cited as the most archaic judicial system in America. For her generation, Sadie Urback’s predicament wasn’t all that unusual. New Jersey’s court system was an old tree with many decaying branches. It was so incoherent that only the well-heeled, armed with lawyers learned in arcane rules and practices, were confident navigating its eccentric procedures. For anyone else, beware.

Why such a mess? Finding the answer requires a look at the tree’s roots.

New Jersey’s courts were a throwback to a long-forgotten era. In 1702, responding to conflict between aristocrats and commoners, who felt the courts favored the aristocrats, Queen Anne of England decided to appoint her cousin, Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, as royal governor of New York and New Jersey. He took the job because he needed an income. Although he is widely remembered as one the worst governors in the history of the British Empire, Lord Cornbury left his mark on New Jersey for the dual court system resembling that of England —common law and equity—that he put in place.⁴

That system created the basic framework that would control New Jersey’s legal system for more than two centuries. By the time Arthur Vanderbilt was practicing law, Jersey justice was the label attached to the legal shenanigans ensnaring people like Sadie Urback. Following the English system, the colonial courts included a Supreme Court, and the Courts of the Queen’s Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer. The other courts of the colony were the Justices Court, the County Courts of Sessions and Common Pleas, the Vice Admiralty Court, the Prerogative Writ Court, and, finally, the Chancery Court.

Despite the fact that the Supreme Court was supposedly the highest court, there was another one above it, the Court of Appeals (later Errors and Appeals), consisting of the governor and the legislative council, all structured to resemble their English counterparts. Having final say over everything—including the acts of the elected colonial assembly—was the royal governor himself. That was pretty much the status of things until the time of the American Revolution.

Conveniently ignored in both New Jersey and American history is the fact that Benjamin Franklin’s son was royal governor of New Jersey at the time the Revolution erupted. Benjamin Franklin was one of a tiny circle of patriots worthy of the label founding father, and during his life was the best-known and most influential person in the American colonies. Largely because of his writings, most Americans felt they knew Franklin personally. Illustrating this is his Thirteen Virtues, which appeared in Poor Richard’s Almanack and were read widely throughout the colonies. Franklin’s son William remains lost in his father’s shadow, absent from American history, and with good reason.⁵ Partly through his own guile and mostly because of his father’s prestige among London’s elite, William Franklin, in 1762, at age thirty-four, was appointed royal governor. With the coming of war his reign was overwhelmed by turmoil. William Franklin’s service as the last colonial governor of New Jersey was something his father tried to forget.

Little discussed in high school history classes is the concept that for several of the thirteen colonies—including New Jersey—the American Revolution was essentially a civil war between loyalists to the crown and patriots who had had enough of England’s meddling in their lives. Through it all, William behaved poorly. He relished being royal governor and knew his open-ended term would come to an end if the American colonies left the British Empire. Despite his father’s urgings, William couldn’t warm up to people he considered lawless rabble. Beginning in early 1776, William set upon a course that made him a disgrace to his father and enraged New Jersey’s patriots.

On January 2, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted a resolution urging speedy and effective measures to frustrate the . . . wicked practices of anyone attempting to undermine the principles of the friends of American liberty.⁶ Governor Franklin viewed the Continental Congress’s resolution as an act of rebellion and prepared a report to London including hostile remarks about the revolutionists.⁷ The report was intercepted by the rebel forces, and within days—six to be precise—Benjamin Franklin’s son was under house arrest. Then things got worse.

On June 14, 1776, William was asked to sign a parole and remain on his farm in Burlington County as a neutral. No one else’s son would have seen such deference. Following a bitter confrontation before a committee of the Continental Congress—William refused to answer their questions—the full Congress voted to deport William Franklin to Connecticut. He was now a prisoner of war. Then things got much worse.

While he was banished to Connecticut, William’s wife, Elizabeth, begged her father-in-law to intercede. She had remained in the governor’s mansion and was deeply troubled by the separation from her husband. Elizabeth Franklin wasn’t a strong person to begin with and the arrest of her husband left her completely distraught.⁸ She sent letters pleading for help. Benjamin Franklin was unmoved. A little more than a year later, in July 1777, she died, some say from nervous exhaustion, never to see her husband again, leaving William a broken and bitter man.

As time wore on, Governor Franklin became a bargaining chip. Because of the esteem in which his father was held, in 1780, four years after his arrest, he was exchanged for the rebel governor of Delaware who was being held by the British. The deposed governor, a bereaved widower, and spurned son, was obsessed with revenge. Upon his release, rather than going quietly into retirement, William Franklin created a semimilitary organization, the Board of Associated Loyalists, and convinced the British to join