1775 (77 page)

Not surprisingly, it barely carried. According to one report, six or seven colonies were in favor—New England, Virginia, and one or two from the South—four were opposed, and one or two abstained. Practically speaking, as Adams wrote to his Abigail in Braintree, the preface and resolution together represented “a total, absolute Independence” from Parliament and Crown alike, although a formal declaration would have to follow.
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To historian Joseph Ellis, it was “a de facto declaration of independence, adopted only after a fierce debate occasioned by the clear realization of all the delegates that, with its passage, the die was cast.”
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For all that wishes had mothered many of Adams’s earlier thoughts, this time he was correct. The contrast between the de facto governance that Congress had increasingly undertaken and its seeming inability to take the final legal step was more than embarrassing. European newspapers carried report after report of British and mercenary troops leaving English, Irish,
and German ports. Commercial suppliers, diplomats, and potential European allies alike could fairly query: Are the colonists losing political cohesion? Are they frightened? Are they about to shrink from the final break?

After the decision on June 7 to postpone voting on the pivotal Lee resolution for another three weeks, leaders in Congress stepped up the pressure. To begin with, they appointed a committee to pull together an actual declaration. Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson were named on June 11, along with Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston; Jefferson inevitably became the penman. Book after book has described the conditions—location, desk, temperature and summer humidity, the pressure of events, and his preference to be back in Virginia—under which Jefferson wrote. Suffice it to say that he had a first draft in a few days; Adams and Franklin suggested changes, which were generally made; and the committee presented its draft to the full Congress on June 28.

The instructions from home that constrained the middle colonies were not so easily dealt with, and in the meantime South Carolina delegates also put that colony’s decision into the uncertain category. As of late June, Charleston was about to be attacked by a powerful British fleet and army—the supposed consummation of the Crown’s confused southern expedition—and news of its repulse on June 28 in a stunning Patriot victory did not reach Philadelphia in time to be a factor. With six colonies opposed or undecided on independence—much the same cleavage reported on May 15—canceling the middle colonies’ instructions became pivotal.

Back in May, Pennsylvania had been considered the linchpin, partly on the assumption that Delaware and New Jersey would follow its lead. On May 15, the die truly was cast when Congress passed a resolution under which Pennsylvania’s existing government was among those to be suppressed as representing royal authority. No guillotines went up on Market Street, but what independence supporters in Congress had done, albeit indirectly, was to hand provincial political power to Pennsylvania’s Radical faction. On June 8, the Pennsylvania Assembly, in its institutional death throes, tried to stave off fate by authorizing the delegates in Philadelphia to take any measures necessary, although independence was not specifically mentioned. The Assembly met for the last time on June 14.

The old order had been overthrown. Four days later the province’s extralegal Conference of Committees, reflecting a radical Patriot consensus, called a constitutional convention to be held in July. On June 24, members of the Conference unanimously expressed “willingness to concur in a vote of the Congress declaring the United Colonies free and independent states.”
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For many moderates, that did not resolve matters. However, when the final vote on the Lee resolution came on July 2, two reluctant Pennsylvania delegates, Robert Morris and John Dickinson, abstained. Their actions allowed a three-to-two plurality finally to put the province behind independence.

New Jersey, also required by the May 15 measure to rid itself of Crown-empowered government, in mid-June performed what amounted to a revolutionary two-step: the legislature arrested Royal Governor William Franklin and voted to form a new state government. Then on June 22, its delegates to Congress were told to act as necessary “in declaring the United Colonies independent of Great Britain.”
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As for Delaware, the Assembly ended its existence on June 15, authorizing its delegates in Philadelphia to concur with Congress in taking necessary measures, but not using the word
independence.
In practical terms, the balance within the three-man delegation swung in favor of independence on July 2, when Caesar Rodney’s arrival broke a one-one tie.

The Maryland Patriot faction rallied during June, with county after county sending petitions or instructions to the Provincial Convention asking that body to abandon its previous policy and support independence. On June 28, it did just that.

New York was the weakest link. By June, with a British invasion looming, many of the leading radicals had left the city, and leadership of the Patriot faction was in the hands of relative conservatives like John Jay, James Duane, Gouverneur Morris, and Philip Livingston. Enthusiasm for implementing Congress’s May 15 resolution was minimal. The Third Provincial Congress, deciding that it did not have authority to act, on May 31 handed off responsibility to a Fourth Provincial Congress that was to be elected in late June and convene in July. Until it met, New York’s congressional delegates continued to be bound by their year-old instructions. Accordingly, they abstained in both the July 1 and July 2 votes on the Lee resolution. And so it was on July 2 that the balloting for independence was twelve colonies in favor and one abstaining. Pennsylvania, Delaware, and South Carolina, opposed a day earlier, took supportive positions on July 2. The deed was done, even as battalion after battalion of redcoats began to disembark in New York after wearying May-June journeys of their own.

The wording of the Declaration was also moving toward acceptance. During several days of debate, Congress removed roughly a quarter of Jefferson’s language, deleting quirky notions and rough edges. However, the language that really mattered on July 1 and July 2 was the legal and commercial
phraseology Lee had put forward in June. Back then, he had explained the legal necessity: “No state in Europe will either Treat or Trade with us for so long as we consider ourselves subjects of G[reat] B[ritain]. Honor, dignity and the custom of states forbid them until we rank as an independant people.”
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France could aid the colonies illicitly but had to deny that relationship formally.

Scholars of the Declaration have for the most part affirmed the primacy of those international and commercial objectives.
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In January 1776, Thomas Paine had said as much in
Common Sense:
if independence is not declared, “we must in the eyes of foreign nations be considered as Rebels.”

By April and May, mere awareness of these needs was hardening into a sense of priority. That spring, noted chronicler Wills, North Carolina paired the two goals as a recommendation: “declaring independency and forming foreign alliances.” Virginia favored independence as part of “the assent by this colony to such declaration and to whatever measures may be thought proper and necessary by the Congress for forming foreign alliances and a confederation of the colonies.” New Jersey also came out for “declaring the United Colonies independent of Great Britain, entering into a confederacy for union and for common defense, making treaties with foreign nations for commerce and assistance, and to take such other measures as necessary.”
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In a different vein, to rebut a potential legal weakness in the United Colonies’ position, Jefferson’s first draft attempted to define the Americans and the British as two separate peoples. This was important, in one scholar’s words, “to re-inforce the perception that the conflict was not a civil war…If America and Great Britain were seen as one people, Congress could not justify revolution against the British government, for the simple reason that the body of the people (of which Americans would be only one part) did not support the American cause.”
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As put by another, “although they [the Americans] were now rebels in the eyes of the British king and Parliament, they were not yet legitimate belligerents in the view of the rest of the world. In order to turn a civil war within the British Empire into a war between states outside the empire, it was necessary to create legitimate bodies of combatants—that is, states—out of individual rebels and traitors.”
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Possibly because Jefferson’s notion of two peoples cried out for rebuttal, Congress deleted this phraseology in favor of a broader reference to one people dissolving the bonds that had connected them with another. That still left the argument that what was going on was actually civil war, but it never prompted much debate. British legalists, committed to defining the
Americans as rebels, may have regarded “civil war” as too respectful a description. On the other side, by early 1776 quite a few Americans, not least in Virginia and Maryland, had begun to see independence not as an ideal but as the only alternative to governmental chaos or submission to Britain.
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They may have had no more taste for legal quibbling.

Because of the hazards facing Patriot leaders should July bring no Declaration, a few historians have cast the sharp practices in Philadelphia between mid-May and July 1–2 as a thinly disguised seizure of power.
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Military historian John Shy, like others in his profession mindful of the weight of the imminent British attack, called the timing of the Declaration “in part, a Congressional coup intended to foreclose serious negotiations which the British seemed ready to undertake.”
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It is a plausible argument.

Trumpeting the Declaration that summer likewise had a collateral purpose. In various July and August meetings and parades, participants enthusiastically cast George III as tyrant and ogre. His name had already been stripped out of oaths, forms, and procedures in some colonies. The Rhode Island Assembly had done so as early as May 6, when its members renounced the colony’s allegiance.
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But during the summer, the disavowal turned physical. On July 9, demonstrators in New York famously toppled the king’s equestrian statue and sent the lead to Connecticut to make bullets. In Boston, said one report, “after dinner, the King’s Arms were taken down from the State House, and every vestige of him from every place in which it appeared, and burnt.” In Huntington, New York, an effigy of George III was “hung on a gallows, exploded and burnt to ashes.” Enthusiasts in Savannah, Georgia, staged a funeral procession and the interment of “George the Third” in front of the courthouse.
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These actions can also be seen as a celebration-cum-endorsement of Jefferson’s blistering case against George III, which took up more than half of the Declaration.

Once read to the soldiers and other crowds, the Declaration, while not forgotten, seems to have receded in importance. Only in the 1790s did interest grow in who had actually written what—Jefferson was running for president—and everyone knows how the legend developed during the nineteenth century. One thing, though, can be said with certainty about the events in Philadelphia on July 1 and 2: the British in New York were only days from disembarkation; Hancock, Lee, Adams, and Jefferson were just in time.

A
s William Howe replaced Thomas Gage as the British commander in North America in early October 1775, the two generals concurred on one imperative: to get the army out of Boston, move it to New York, and utilize that more strategic city as the base from which to regain control of the rebellious colonies. Boston, and beyond it Massachusetts, and perhaps all of New England, was a trap.

A year and a half earlier, a confident Cabinet and Parliament had
perceived the port of Boston and the province of Massachusetts as a radical, troublemaking, and vulnerable fringe of British North America. Teaching it a lesson would chasten the other colonies and get them back in line. The Coercive Acts were passed to close down the port, supplant the Massachusetts Charter of 1691, and make local government more subservient. Four additional regiments were added to the Boston garrison. However, the ensuing Battle of Boston—an appropriate way to clump the events between June 1774 and June 1775—was a five-step Patriot ladder to victory.

First came the more-than-expected rallying round of the other colonies, aiding Boston with food and funds. Next, in October, a surprising First Continental Congress tentatively embraced the maverick seaport. Spring 1775 brought Lexington and Concord. Then in June, the Second Continental Congress adopted the New England army besieging British-occupied Boston. A week later, 2,200 redcoated soldiers marched up a grassy hillside, and half were killed or wounded. That day’s disillusionment prompted Gage to write to Secretary at War Barrington on June 25 that “the loss we have Sustained, is greater than we can bear. Small Army’s cant afford such losses.”
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