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This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.
Benjamin Franklin was a History good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
"The famous remark attributed to BF at the signing of the Declaration, that “we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,” was in all likelihood not his; see Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiographical Writings (New York, 1945), pp. 418–19."
"Our Crisis is at hand, and if the states do not hang together, they might as well have been “hanged Seperate,” according to Dick Penns bon Mot in 1784.2 Your Brother, John Adams"
WikiQuote merely attributes it to Franklin, along with other sources - - -
"Statement at the signing of the Declaration of Independence (1776-07-04), quoted as an anecdote in The Works of Benjamin Franklin by Jared Sparks (1840). However, this had earlier been attributed to Richard Penn in Memoirs of a Life, Chiefly Passed in Pennsylvania, Within the Last Sixty Years (1811, p. 116). In 1801, "If we don't hang together, by Heavens we shall hang separately" appears in the English play Life by Frederick Reynolds (Life, Frederick Reynolds, in a collection by Mrs Inchbald, 1811, Google Books first published in 1801 [4]), and the remark was later attributed to 'An American General' by Reynolds in his 1826 memoir p.358. A comparable pun on "hang alone … hang together" appears in Dryden's 1717 The Spanish Fryar Google Books. The pun also appears in an April 14, 1776 letter from Carter Braxton to Landon Carter,Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, Vol.1 (1921)https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin, p.421, as "a true saying of a Wit — We must hang together or separately.""
Is it possible that this was a fairly common idiom of the time and not a particularly notable comment?
level-4 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
