Kenneth Penegar Lawing 
Political Trial of Benjamin Franklin 

Benjamin Franklin, it seems, was a reluctant revolutionary. In tracing the course of his political transformation, this book explores the social and political understandings and misunderstandings that both sustained and divided Britain and its colonies in North America. At the center of the story is Benjamin Franklin’s decision in late 1772 to use a cache of personal letters that had fallen in his lap in London for revelation in Massachusetts — essentially a Wikileaks for 1772 — and the consequences of that decision for himself and for the cause of an amicable settlement of differences between the colonies and the British government.