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), 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. 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), p.421, as “a true saying of a Wit — We must hang together or separately.”
Alula Australis (stars.astro.illinois.edu)ALULA AUSTRALIS (Xi Ursae Majoris). Ursa Major walks on legs identified by three pairs of close but unrelated stars that the ancient Arabs called the “springs (leaps) of the gazelle” that lie north of Leo Minor. From west to east they are Talitha and Kappa UMa, Tania Borealis and Australis, and Alula Borealis and Australis, the last a bright-end-fourth magnitude (3.78) star better known as Xi UMa.