To Benjamin Franklin from Zachariah Hood, 23 September 1765
From Zachariah Hood5
Extract: Public Record Office6
Extract of a Letter from Mr. Zachary Hude [Zachariah Hood],
Distributor of Stamps for the Province of Maryland,
dated at New York, Sept. 23. 1765.
Our Province (Maryland) is extreamly heated. They have cut an Officer of the Tender in a shocking manner, pull’d down my House, and obliged me to flie (with a single Suit) or expect the same Fate as the Officer.7
5. Stamp distributor for Maryland, who had fled to New York.
6. This is one of the extracts from several correspondents that BF sent to the ministry in November 1765; see above, p. 263.
7. Pa. Jour., Sept. 19, 1765, reported from Annapolis that on the night of September 2 “a number of People unknown, assembled in this town, and pulled down a house lately rented by a certain unwelcome officer.” From letters by Governor Horatio Sharpe it appears that the injury to the naval officer commanding a tender of H.M. Sloop Hornet was primarily the result of a tavern brawl, only indirectly brought on by high feeling over the Stamp Act. Archives of Maryland, XIV (Baltimore, 1895), 225–7, 229.