Ben Franklin's world is a production of the Omaha-Hundro Institute and is sponsored by the Colonial Weemsburg Foundation.

September 12, 1777. This has been a day of great confusion to many in the city of Philadelphia,

which I have in great measure been kept out of by my constant attention on my sick child.

Part of Washington's army has been routed and have been seen coming into town in great numbers.

The particulars of the battle I have not attended to. The slain is said to be very numerous,

hundreds of their muskets laying in the road, which those that made off have thrown down.

The wounded have been brought in this afternoon to what amount I have not learned.

September 26, 1777. While here are the English and earnest, about two or three thousand came in through second street

without opposition or interruption, no plundering on the one side or the other.

What a satisfaction would it be to our dear absent friends? Could they but be informed of it?

The British occupation is a very important moment in our study of the American Revolution

because it reveals the extent to which people, at least in that region, were not strongly committed either to the Revolution or to the Empire.

And it's because we see the power structure change so drastically that the revolutionaries are in complete control,

and then the British are in control, and the revolutionaries are back in control.

Though we can see these people who for the most part were just taking the path of these resistance.

They would mount with revolutionary slogans, if the revolutionaries were in control, and they would stop doing that when the British were in control.

It helps us realize in this crucial vulnerable moment the extent to which these people were just trying to get along.

They were not partisans for independence, they certainly were not loyalists.

And I think that opens our eyes and makes us reconsider the American Revolutionary, generally.

In September 1777, just 14 months after the Continental Congress had declared the United States's independence from Great Britain.

The British Army captured an occupied Philadelphia, the New Nations capital.

In the days between the Continental Army's defeat at the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777,

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