Whistleblowers

In December of 1773, near the time of the Boston Tea Party, Benjamin Franklin admitted that he had passed on to the Boston Gazette twenty letters that the Massachusetts governor, Thomas Hutchison had written, calling for an “abridgment of the colonists’ rights.” In so doing, Franklin acted as a whistleblower, before the word was a word, or our country was a country.

In 1777, during the American Revolutionary War, ten naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, signed a petition that they addressed to the Continental Congress that stated the Commander-in-Chief of the Cont...