Independence (23 page)

Derby won the race. In a day when Atlantic crossings often took six weeks or more, the
Quero
sped across the white-capped ocean in thirty days. Despite his rival's head start, Derby outpaced the
Sukey
by nearly two weeks. Within forty-eight hours of the docking of the
Quero
, Arthur Lee, Richard Henry Lee's brother, who lived in the English metropolis, put a note in a London newspaper revealing that the depositions were available for public perusal at the office of the lord mayor of London. Edward Gibbon, a member of Parliament who later achieved greater renown as a historian, was one of many who read Lee's squib and hurried to the mayor's Mansion House to read what Derby had brought. Gibbon's reaction was not untypical. “This looks serious,” he exclaimed, but Gibbon was less startled by the bloodshed on April 19 than by the news that the “next day the Country rose” to besiege Boston.

During the next few days it was apparent that the Massachusetts Committee of Safety had won at least the initial battle of public opinion in London. Several newspapers printed accounts of atrocities supposedly committed by Gage's soldiers, and one cried out against the “cruel and inhuman proceedings of our army there,” adding that the conduct of the redcoats had “as never before disgraced the character of British soldiery.” A week after the
Quero
arrived, a despondent friend of the administration wrote in a London newspaper that the Yankees had persuaded many in England of American blamelessness. “The Bostonians are now the favourites of all the people of good hearts and weak heads in the kingdom,” he said, adding that the New Englanders “saint-like account of the skirmish at Concord, has been read with avidity … [and] believed.”
15

Within two weeks of the fighting, delegates from throughout America began their trek to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress. They found a country in the grip of war fever. Great Britain's unsparing callousness, said one congressman, had “roused a universal Military spirit.” Companies of soldiers greeted the congressmen on the edge of many towns and, with flags waving and often a small martial band playing spirited tunes, escorted them into the village. Sometimes the delegates reviewed the troops—the volunteers “go thro their Exercises extremely Clever,” gushed one deputy—and in the larger cities they were often part of a substantial parade, riding through downtown flanked by proudly marching soldiers and gaudily clad cavalrymen astride sleek mounts. (As the Massachusetts delegates rode through New York City, the sounds of the martial band spooked the horse pulling John Adams's carriage, causing the vehicle to overturn and be dragged for several yards; its driver was badly banged up in the accident, but only moments before, Adams had fortunately shifted to another carriage.) The grandest reception was the one that Philadelphia threw for the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York delegations, which approached the city together. The congressmen were escorted into Philadelphia by nearly three hundred city officials and soldiers, many bearing fearsome-looking swords. As they entered the city, the congressmen found the “Bells all ringing, and the air rent with Shouts and huzza's” from the large crowds that lined the streets.
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John Adams, who had anguished after discovering that a majority at the First Congress abhorred the thought of war, exulted at the militant spirit that he encountered en route to Philadelphia. He was especially happy to see the pugnacity on exhibit in Manhattan, whose delegates the previous autumn had been Galloway's greatest supporters. “The Tories are put to Flight here,” Adams rejoiced as he passed through New York City. By the time he reached Philadelphia, Adams was confident that every colony would join the war effort, and he was hopeful that the colonies could replace their lost British trade with commerce from Europe, for he was certain that America's “cause … interests the whole Globe.”
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Before it had adjourned in October, the First Congress had set Wednesday, May 10, as the day for reconvening. However, given the woeful state of America's roads, which were made worse by heavy spring rains, not every delegate reached Philadelphia on time. Congress began anyway. As the Massachusetts delegates circulated among their colleagues, recounting treacheries allegedly committed by the British soldiers and spreading the falsehood that Captain Parker's men had not returned the regulars' fire on that fateful morning, Congress spent a couple of days tending to housekeeping.
18
The delegates presented their credentials, reelected Peyton Randolph as president of Congress and Charles Thomson as secretary, agreed once again to meet in secret, and—with Galloway not in attendance—voted to meet in the capacious Pennsylvania State House rather than Carpenters' Hall. With sixty-five members expected, ten more than had attended in the fall, the delegates needed a larger space. “We have a very full Congress,” Washington noted, and when the Pennsylvania assembly once again offered to surrender its downstairs chamber and move upstairs, he and his fellow delegates readily accepted.
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Though larger than its predecessor, this Congress had a familiar look. Fifty of the delegates who had sat in the First Congress returned. They were joined by a delegate from Georgia, the only colony that had not been represented at the earlier meeting, and by congressmen from four colonies that had expanded their delegations. Two of the newcomers were already widely known: John Hancock had been added to the Massachusetts contingent and Benjamin Franklin, safely home from London, was elected to Pennsylvania's delegation shortly after he disembarked at the Philadelphia docks.

Within a week of landing, but before Congress assembled, Franklin used a carriage provided by Galloway to ride to Trevose, north of the city, to see his old political partner for the first time in more than a decade. Franklin's purpose was to persuade Galloway not to retire from public affairs. “[Y]our Abilities are so much wanted,” Franklin told him in a note that he sent a day or two prior to his visit. Franklin remained at Galloway's estate overnight, and the two men discussed the Anglo-American crisis into the wee hours of the morning. Franklin tried to convince Galloway that reconciliation with the mother country was impossible, save on London's terms, and as proof he read to his younger associate from the journal he had kept during his discussions in December and January with the surrogates of Lord Dartmouth. Galloway was unmoved. His health had been ruined by his public service, he said, and indeed he was gaunt and looked considerably older than age forty-five. Galloway had other, better, reasons for remaining detached from public life. While he wanted no part of a war against the mother country, he also realized that his public attacks on Congress and his published revelations of what had occurred in the First Congress's secret sessions had burned his bridges. He could never again be a power in the Continental Congress. Sullied with the taint of Toryism, he knew all too well that he was “despised and Contemned by all,” as a New England congressman in fact remarked in private that very week. Two days after Congress was gaveled into session, Galloway formally submitted his resignation. Franklin did not give up easily. On two other occasions during the ensuing months, he met with Galloway and pleaded with him to rejoin Congress. He also urged Galloway to support the war. Galloway was not swayed. He would remain neutral, loyal neither to Congress nor to Great Britain, he said.
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By the time Congress reconvened, the delegates were aware that Parliament had spurned Chatham's early-winter peace proposal. Every member believed that North's government wished the total subjugation of the colonies. General Gage's dispatch of his regulars on April 19 only confirmed in their minds that the ministry was unwilling to back down. Every delegate to the Second Congress was committed to waging war.

Even so, there were divisions among these delegates. The first difference to surface would be the greatest of all. In the initial days of this congress, South Carolina's John Rutledge asked his colleagues what America was fighting for: “do We aim at independency? or do We only ask for a Restoration of Rights & putting of Us on Our old footing?”
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A wide-ranging debate followed, in the course of which it was evident that the overwhelming majority remained committed to reconciliation. But it was just as plain that the delegates were divided over what steps to take, if any, beyond the use of force and the ongoing boycott to restore harmony with London.

The previous congress had been splintered, and the question of how to seek reconciliation with the mother country likewise split this congress into two factions. The more moderate faction was led by John Dickinson.

Dickinson, who was forty-three in 1775, was tall and slender and “pale as ashes,” so sickly looking that some of his fellow delegates at first thought “he could not live a Month.” The cause of his chronic health problems is unknown, though by this time his physical woes were exacerbated by gout, perhaps the reason that his gait was noticeably stiff and awkward. Dickinson's backswept hair had already turned gray, and his heavily lined face was dominated by an aquiline nose and warm eyes that shone with earnest sincerity. Although he was reserved, new acquaintances invariably thought him modest, friendly, restlessly intelligent, eloquent, and persuasive.
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Dickinson was born into an affluent Quaker family in Talbot County, Maryland. His father was a lawyer, magistrate, tobacco planter, and land baron who own owned more than sixteen thousand acres. When tobacco prices collapsed in the 1740s, the Dickinsons moved to Kent, Delaware, and shifted to grain production. Most of John's youth was spent at Poplar Hill, a handsome three thousand-acre estate not far from Philadelphia. At age eighteen, after years of study with a tutor, he moved to the city to read law with a practicing attorney, the conventional means of becoming a lawyer in the colonies. But ambitious and well-to-do, Dickinson after three years sailed for London, where in 1754 he enrolled in the Middle Temple, the only law school in the empire. If Samuel Adams was a rarity among colonists in that he earned two degrees, Dickinson was one of only a handful of eighteenth-century Americans who was awarded a formal law degree.

Dickinson was also one of the few native-born colonists who had experienced life in the mother country. He crossed the Atlantic alive with excitement at the prospect of living in the imperial capital. At first, he admitted his “awe & reverence” at nearly every thing he encountered, but soon Dickinson grew jaded. Early in his three-year stay, he exclaimed that the English “nobility in general are the most ordinary men I ever faced.” Their prominence, he concluded, was attributable more “to fortune than to their worth.” In due time he came to believe that England was in the throes of decadence. Traditional religion was on the wane. The gentility “despised” their social inferiors. The successful colonist was “nothing” in their eyes. He came to equate English political practices with those in Rome in its last, debased days. He noted that bribery was “so common” it was a mainstay in parliamentary elections; he estimated that more than a million pounds was spent buying votes each election. “It is grown a vice here to be virtuous,” he remarked. It took Dickinson less than six months to reach the same conclusion that took the reluctant Franklin more than a decade. The “corruption of the age” had eddied into nearly every corner of English life, Dickinson thought, but the political structure in particular had become a cesspool of degeneracy. It made him yearn for his homeland. “America is, to be sure, a wilderness, & yet that wilderness to me is more pleasing” and pristine than England.
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More than anything, he hoped to keep British officials out of America, lest the venality that spawned them spread to the New World.

John Dickinson by Charles Wilson Peale, 1770. Dickinson led the faction in Congress that sought reconciliation with Great Britain. He supported the war but refused to vote for independence. (Independence National Historical Park Collection, Philadelphia)

Dickinson was disillusioned with the mother country when he returned home in 1758, but he was not a revolutionary. He plunged into his legal practice in Philadelphia, which flourished immediately. Rapidly rising to the top of his profession, he surpassed other prominent lawyers, among them Galloway, who had been practicing law for the better part of a decade before Dickinson embarked on his legal career. Like Galloway, Dickinson became a member of several prestigious Philadelphia clubs and quickly entered politics. He served first in the Delaware assembly before being elected to Pennsylvania's legislature in 1762. He entered it together with Franklin, who had just returned from his initial long stay in London seeking to alter proprietary practices.

During his first year in the assembly, Dickinson sided with Franklin and Galloway on most issues. In fact, Dickinson's background was so remarkably similar to Galloway's that the two initially got along well enough. Only two years separated them, and both hailed from Quaker families that had moved in the same year from the same part of Maryland to Kent, Delaware. However, in 1764, when Galloway was thirty-four and Dickinson was thirty-two, politics turned them into bitter enemies. The break came when the Assembly Party petitioned the king to strip the proprietors of all authority and transform Pennsylvania into a royal colony.