Independence (2 page)

CHAPTER 1

“I
N THE
V
ERY
M
IDST OF A
R
EVOLUTION
”

THE PROPOSAL TO DECLARE INDEPENDENCE

RICHARD HENRY LEE,
tall and spare, with a long, pasty face dominated by penetrating eyes and wayward receding hair, left his Philadelphia lodging on the spring-soft morning of June 7, 1776. He set out on the same walk he had taken six days a week for nearly a year. A member of Virginia's delegation to the Continental Congress, Lee was heading for the Pennsylvania State House, the home of Congress.

Philadelphia bustled with forty thousand inhabitants. It was the largest American city, more populous than Bristol, the second-largest city in England, and only slightly smaller than Dublin and Edinburgh, the leading urban centers after London in the British Empire. Philadelphia so impressed a widely traveled British army officer who visited the city in 1765 that he declared it to be “great and noble,” “one of the wonders of the world” that “bids fair to rival almost any city in Europe.” Colonel Adam Gordon marveled at how this planned city was so “wisely laid out,” and he was especially struck by its magnificent public buildings and ethnic and religious diversity.
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Philadelphia was something of a melting pot. English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Germans, and Africans rubbed shoulders, their accents and dialects familiar throughout the city. Lee's stroll on this bright June day was along brick sidewalks, something few American towns yet boasted, and down wide paved thoroughfares alive in midmorning with the rattle and rumble of carts, coaches, and wagons drawn by sweating horses that clattered loudly on the cobbled streets. Lee walked below streetlights that were set aglow only on moonless nights—this was, after all, a frugal Quaker city—under tall elms and lofty Italian poplars, past homes both elegant and modest, all made of brick, and close to the commons, where tethered milk cows grazed. Striding briskly, Lee passed inns, coffeehouses and dram shops, a church and cemetery, an outdoor market, the Quaker school, the city jail, and shops of assorted tradesmen, from which the noise of the workplace, and sometimes the sour odors, flowed through open doors into the streets.
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Pennsylvania State House, a northwest view taken in 1778 and printed in the
Columbian
magazine, July 1787. Home to the Continental Congress in 1775–1776, the structure had opened about twenty years earlier and served as home to the Pennsylvania legislature before and after independence. As Congress met here when independence was declared, it was thereafter popularly called Independence Hall. Illustration from the
Columbian
magazine from 1787. (Library of Congress)

After a few minutes, Lee glimpsed the light red brick State House, known today as Independence Hall. Located in a square bounded by Chestnut and Walnut streets on the north and south, and Fifth and Sixth streets on the east and west, the State House was the city's most imposing structure. Constructed over a quarter century beginning in 1729, it stretched for more than one hundred feet, was forty-four feet wide, and was crowned by a sixty-nine-foot-tall masonry bell tower, making it the equivalent of a six-story building—a veritable skyscraper in an America in which hardly any structure topped two stories. Designed with careful attention to balance and ornament, this imposing building was meant to convey dignity and a sense of orderliness.
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There was irony in this, for while Lee's walk took him to the very symbol of order and authority, his purpose on this day was the essence of revolution. It was Lee's intention to ask the Continental Congress to declare American independence.

Every day Congress tended to the most vital business. For fifteen months, since April 1775, the thirteen American colonies had been at war with Great Britain, their parent state. Almost everything that Congress had done since the outbreak of hostilities had been related to the war effort. Lee, in fact, knew that the Iroquois and other tribes from the Six Nations Confederation were in town to discuss the war and that General George Washington, the commander of the Continental army, had just departed following several days of consultation with Congress. Lee was mindful, too, that Philadelphia, like a magnet, drew both wealthy merchants and smaller businessmen who were eager to obtain some of the money that Congress was spending to wage war.
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The war overshadowed everything. While one congressional committee worked on plans to purchase a warship and looked after getting privateers to sea, another sought to acquire muskets, powder, and flints from abroad. Congressmen wrote home frequently to encourage steps that would help the war effort, urging the fortification of coasts, the construction of river craft to transport artillery, and the recruitment of more men for the army, among other things. On this very morning, John Hancock, the president of Congress, had begun his day by beseeching each colony to gather every scrap of available lead so that it could be recast into cartridges for the army. He also advised the provinces to “remove out of the Way” everything that the British armed forces might possibly utilize “to prosecute their Plans of Violence agt. us.”
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Lee arrived at the State House a bit before ten A.M., the scheduled time for Congress to begin its daily session, and strode into the congressional chamber on the first floor. It was a spacious room, forty feet by forty feet, with a ceiling that was twenty feet high. Wide, tall windows ran along the north and south sides of the room; substantial fireplaces faced with marble stood on another wall. The walls were paneled and painted a light gray, though when the sun splashed into the room, they took on a bluish hue. One wall was adorned with captured flags and a British drum, seized when a colonial military force had taken Fort Ticonderoga the previous year. Thirteen round tables, one for each colony's delegation, were scattered about the room. Every table was covered with green linen and encircled with hard, uncushioned Windsor chairs.

Knots of delegates were engaged in animated conversations when the bell in the State House tower pealed at ten A.M. That was the signal for Hancock, who was seated on the dais in the president's special cushioned armchair, to gavel the day's session to order. The discussions around the room abruptly ended, and the delegates scurried to their seats. The doorkeeper stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him.
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The congressional chamber once again was a private reserve, sealed from the outside world.

This day's session began as they all did, with the reading of letters and reports, mostly dispatches from the army's commanders. Lee waited patiently. It was hardly coincidental that he had chosen this grave moment in this desperate war to propose that America break permanently with the mother country. On this very day in Halifax, Nova Scotia, British soldiers were clambering up the gangplanks of troop transports, struggling with their weapons and heavy pieces of field equipment. Part of the greatest armada that Great Britain would assemble in the eighteenth century, these men expected to sail for New York within forty-eight hours. They anticipated a “bloody active campaign” to take Manhattan and seize control of the Hudson River.
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If they succeeded, the link between the four New England provinces and the nine colonies to the south would be severed and Great Britain almost certainly would win the war.

The members of Congress had received “alarming Intelligence” that Great Britain's army of invasion was coming, not only from Nova Scotia but from England and Europe as well. By midsummer there would be forty thousand British soldiers in North America, several times the number posted in the colonies when the war broke out. “Brittain is Determined to use her utmost endeavors this year to Subdue us,” said Congressman Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire. Like Bartlett, each congressman prayed that his fellow Americans would “play the man for their country & that kind Providence will give us success & victory.” There was much to pray for. A British army had landed at Quebec thirty days earlier and already had advanced as far as Three Rivers, on the St. Lawrence River. If that British army plunged farther south and crossed New York's northern frontier, many in Congress feared that it might be unstoppable. America's army was too small to simultaneously defend Manhattan and New York's northern border. Some in Congress thought that Britain's powerful military forces could be defeated only with foreign help. Those same congressmen, including Lee, also believed that only by declaring independence could Congress hope to receive life-sustaining assistance from a European belligerent.
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Once the reports were read and discussed, Congress turned to other matters. It voted to give compensation to a merchant whose property, including a vessel, had been seized by the American navy. It spent some time discussing the possibility of raising more men for the army, and it looked into its recent purchase of defective gunpowder from a mill in Frankford, Pennsylvania.
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An hour or so into the session, thinking that most of the day's crucial war-related business had been concluded, Lee asked for the floor. When he was recognized, the Virginian indicated that he wished to introduce a resolution.

Lee was a veteran politician. Born in 1732, ten months after George Washington and only five miles below the general's birthplace, Lee had been raised at Stratford Hall, an eighteen-room mansion situated about forty miles above the mouth of the Potomac River. One of six children of Thomas Lee, who held numerous public offices and, for a time, was the acting governor of Virginia, young Richard Henry had been sent to a private academy in England for his formal education. He lived and studied in the mother country for seven years before returning home at age eighteen. During the next six years, while he lived with his parents, Lee read widely and served as a justice of the peace. He married while in his midtwenties, after which he leased five hundred acres three miles downriver from Stratford Hall and built his own oversize mansion, Chantilly, a three-and-a-half story, ten-room frame dwelling that one visitor described as large, though not elegant. It was a working plantation. During most of Lee's life, some fifty to sixty slaves lived and toiled at Chantilly, raising tobacco and grains. Lee lived there for the remainder of his life, fathering twelve children, nine of whom survived to adulthood and two of whom would serve in the Continental Congress.

In 1758, in the midst of the French and Indian War, Lee was first elected to the House of Burgesses, Virginia's assembly. Newcomers customarily rose slowly in the Burgesses, but Lee's ascent was uncharacteristically slow. His progress may have been hampered because he was not a lawyer, though it more likely was due to his transparent ambition, which put off many of his colleagues. Behind his back, some referred to him as “Bob Booty” for his habit of seeking every available lucrative office. Lee's rise may also have been slowed by a yearlong absence from the Burgesses, forced on him while he recuperated from a hunting accident that cost him four fingers on his left hand. Whatever the cause, after eight years Lee still had not achieved a leadership position, ordinarily a telltale sign that a kingpin role was not to be.

However, the colonial protest against Great Britain changed Lee's fortunes. At first, he had been indifferent when Parliament in 1765 passed the Stamp Act, the first time it had ever attempted to levy a direct tax on the American colonists. He had even solicited appointment as a stamp agent—a tax collector. But when he saw Patrick Henry's spectacular leap to prominence as a result of his opposition to the Stamp Act, Lee opportunistically denounced parliamentary taxation as “pernicious to my Country.” Lee spoke openly, and often, against the Stamp Act. He unsparingly flayed Virginia's stamp agent, accusing the man who obtained the same post that he had sought of having “endeavored to fasten chains of slavery on this my native country.” Lee additionally published a pamphlet condemning Parliament's tax. By 1766 Lee had become not just a legislative leader; he and Henry were also widely seen as Virginia's leading reformers.
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If the Stamp Act episode caused Lee to reconsider Anglo-American relations, the recurring frustrations that he experienced as a land speculator after 1765 stoked his burgeoning radicalism. He lost heavily when a land company in which he had invested was beaten out by London insiders in the battle to win legal title to a sprawling domain west of the Appalachians. He lost again in 1769 when the House of Burgesses' appeal to the Crown to permit Virginia to annex a vast western tract—much of what today is western West Virginia and nearly all of Kentucky—ended in failure, with London turning a deaf ear to the Virginians. Beginning in the early 1770s, a series of decisions in London appeared to make it likely that the imperial authorities were bent on stripping Virginia of its land claims north of the Ohio River, a region in which Lee had also invested. Around this time Lee opened correspondence with those who were leading the protest against British imperial policies in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Vexed by London's dismaying behavior, and its adverse impact on him and his province, Lee conspicuously displayed his disillusionment with those who ruled England. He hired an artist to paint an eight-foot-tall portrait of Lord Chatham, William Pitt, the leading foe of Britain's ministry and hung the huge portrait in a central hall in Chantilly.
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