Adams, Franklin, and a Bed in New Brunswick 

By Silence Dogood

By September 1776, the Continental Congress had declared independence from Great Britain, and fighting between the two sides had begun in earnest. The Revolutionary War was fully underway.

After defeating George Washington and the Continental Army at the Battle of Long Island, British forces pushed the Americans off Long Island (present-day Brooklyn) and into Manhattan.

Commanding those British forces were two brothers: Admiral Richard Howe, leading the navy, and General William Howe, at the head of the army. While tasked with suppressing what the British government still considered a simple rebellion among its colonies, the Howe brothers retained a degree of sympathy for the Americans and their grievances. They believed that peace could still be negotiated before the conflict went too far.

After an unsuccessful attempt to open negotiations with Washington and his army, Admiral Howe tried again, this time sending a letter directly to Benjamin Franklin, now a member of Congress.

Howe and Franklin were not strangers. The two had spoken at length several years earlier about colonial concerns while Franklin served as a representative for several colonies in London at the Court of St. James’s.

Franklin received the letter and dutifully brought it before the full Congress, where it was read aloud. After some debate, the delegates agreed to send a small committee to meet with the Howe brothers and explore whether an end to the war might still be possible.

The delegation would consist of Franklin, John Adams of Massachusetts, and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina.

The long and short of the meeting—known to history as the Staten Island Peace Conference—is that the Howes were empowered to offer little more than pardons and a return to the status quo ante. That was not acceptable to the American commissioners, who now saw themselves as representatives of independent states, not rebellious subjects. The war was too far along to turn back.

The meeting itself was cordial, even respectful, but it ultimately amounted to nothing.

There was, however, one truly fascinating story to come out of this brief moment in history. A story that did not involve the British and did not even take place on Staten Island.

It happened, rather, along the way.

While the three American commissioners were traveling from Philadelphia to the meeting, they stopped for the night in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The town was at capacity, and in the end, all that could be procured was, as Adams recorded in his diary, one bed at an inn “for Dr. Franklin and me, in a chamber little larger than the bed, without a chimney and with only one small window.”

Adams and Franklin found themselves not only sharing a room, but a bed.

Though both men were unquestionably committed to the cause of American independence, they did not always see eye to eye on how best to achieve it. They were about as different as two people of their time could be, seeing the world through entirely different lenses. Their most notable disagreements would come later, across the Atlantic, when they served together as commissioners in France.

But even in these early days, Adams and Franklin differed in both temperament and outlook—differences that, as it turned out, extended beyond politics.

What followed is one of the more charming chapters of the American founding. It is fortunately preserved for us thanks to Adams himself, who recorded the exchange in his diary.

Ready for bed and concerned about catching a cold from the night air, Adams shut the window before turning in. This immediately drew a response from Franklin: “Oh! Don’t shut the window. We shall be suffocated.”

Unlike many of his time—a common theme throughout his life—Franklin doubted the prevailing belief that cold air caused illness. Instead, he argued that fresh air, regardless of temperature, helped prevent it.

“Come!” he beckoned. “Open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds.”

Adams, skeptical of Franklin’s forward-thinking ideas but ever curious, relented. He left the window open and, “leaping into bed,” as he put it, settled in beside the great American polymath to hear his explanation.

Franklin, it seems, wasted no time getting to the point. As Adams later recalled: “The Doctor then began an harangue upon Air and cold and Respiration and Perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his Philosophy together: but I believe they were equally sound and insensible, within a few minutes after me, for the last Words I heard were pronounced as if he was more than half asleep.”

And just like that, these two giants of the cause of American independence were fast asleep, sharing a bed at an inn in New Brunswick. It is perhaps worth noting that, in the end, Franklin got his wish: the window remained open.

The next morning, they continued on their way to an ultimately futile peace conference.

In the grand scheme of things, this episode is little more than a comedic interlude in the broader drama of the American founding. But it also serves an important purpose: it reminds us that these almost mythical figures were, in fact, very human.

These two Founding Fathers—each a “colossus of independence” in his own right—were forced to share a bed and were petty enough to bicker over whether a window should be left open for the night. Before American victory was secured, before they became the legends we know today, they were simply two men arguing over a window before falling asleep in an inn in New Jersey.