Today in 1735, the birthday of John Adams, second President of the United States, first Vice President of the United States, and to our knowledge, the only president who ever spent a night bickering in bed with Benjamin Franklin.
Maybe the least surprising part of the story was the bickering.
While Adams was considered to be a lot crankier than Franklin, both men were very smart, very prominent and full of very strong feelings about lots of topics, in other words, the types that often butt heads when in close quarters.
And in September 1776, they were in extremely close quarters, at an extremely challenging time.
The British Army had just soundly defeated the untested American troops at what is now called the Battle of Long Island or the Battle of Brooklyn.
British Admiral Richard Howe proposed a meeting, essentially to see if the Americans might be talked into giving up the whole independence thing.
The Continental Congress agreed to the conference, mostly to give the army time to regroup and to show that their side wasn’t the one holding up a peace deal.
Franklin and Adams were part of the delegation, which traveled from Philadelphia to New York’s Staten Island.
Back then, this was a multi-day trip, which meant the delegates needed a place to stay for the night as they moved north.
They ended up at a tavern in Piscataway, New Jersey, one that only had two rooms left.
The third delegate, Edward Rutledge, got a room to himself, which meant Adams and Franklin had to share a small room with one bed.
The bed-sharing wasn’t the problem; their argument was over the room’s tiny window.
Franklin insisted the window had to stay open or the room air would turn stale.
Adams said his health was fragile and that he was concerned about cold night air.
Franklin replied, oh, I guess you’ve never heard my Theory of Colds!
And he started chattering away about how no one ever got a cold from cold air through an open window, and so on and so forth.
Adams wrote later of Franklin’s impromptu lecture that “I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep.”
The window stayed open, neither caught cold, and they got up the next morning and continued on to New York.
The conference, of course, didn’t lead to a peace deal, though it did convince Howe to leave the hard-headed Adams off a list of Americans eligible for pardon if the British won the war.
Starting tomorrow in Kansas City, it’s the World Series of Barbecue.
Hundreds of teams will show off their skills on grills.
Plus, the schedule includes, and I’m quoting here, “Bobbing In Baked Beans” and “BBQ Sauce Wrestling”?!?
Shouldn’t there also be a “meat and greet”?
That Time Ben Franklin Slept in the Same Bed With John Adams (Entrepreneur)