“We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

—  Benjamin Franklin

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 http://books.google.com/books?id=TwYFAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA116&vq=%22hang+together%22). 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 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=egsLAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA176 first published in 1801 http://www.lib.muohio.edu/multifacet/record/mu3ugb2568779), and the remark was later attributed to 'An American General' by Reynolds in his 1826 memoir p.358 http://books.google.com/books?id=_MQEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA358&dq=general's. A comparable pun on "hang alone … hang together" appears in Dryden's 1717 The Spanish Fryar Google Books http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PgoOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PT19. 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) http://books.google.com/books?id=7TMSAAAAYAAJ, p.421, as "a true saying of a Wit — We must hang together or separately."
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American author, printer, political theorist, politician, p… 1706–1790

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