Independence (48 page)

Though John was writing home about twice each week, his letters miscarried at this critical juncture, leaving Abigail to worry yet again about his fate while she was ensconced in her sorrow. “[T]is only in my Night visions that I know any thing about you,” she lamented. His letters finally arrived—five in one day—and she drew sustenance from them, exclaiming that they “administer comfort to my wounded Heart.”
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John and his fellow congressmen were hundreds of miles from the front lines, but Abigail lived only a stone's throw from the British army in occupied Boston. Every conceivable sort of rumor about impending British or Continental actions swirled through her neighborhood. Some were not that fanciful. Hearsay had it that the Royal Navy might sail into Quincy Bay and shell Braintree, laying waste to it as it had destroyed Falmouth. The story circulated too that Howe might land an invasion force near Braintree in an attempt to outflank Washington's Continentals. In that event, Abigail knew that the battlefield would be very “near my dwelling.” During the first days of the siege of Boston, she had lived “in continual Expectation of Hostilities.” She moved her husband's library to his brother's house, which she thought might be in a safer location in the event of an attack, and she tried to be brave. “Danger they say makes people valiant,” she remarked. As it turned out, the closest thing to a battle in her locality was brought on by Washington's Dorchester Heights operation. The army was but a short distance from Braintree, and the heavy Continental bombardment shook her house. “No sleep for me to Night.… [M]y Heart Beat pace with [the cannonade] all night,” she wrote John. She said she had hurried up nearby Penn's Hill, “whence I could see every shell which was thrown.…'Tis now an incessant Roar.… My Hand and heart … tremble, at this domestick fury.”
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Abigail Adams by Benjamin Blyth. The wife of John Adams, she remained at home near Boston and was close to early fighting during the war. She was a proponent of independence and encouraged her husband to seek greater rights for American women following the break with the mother country. (Massachusetts Historical Society)

Though absorbed with the challenge of daily sessions of Congress, John responded with concern and sensitivity to Abigail's travails. “I long to know, how you fare, and whether you are often discomposed” by the war's dangers and disruptions, he said. He tried to be reassuring: “I think you are in no Danger—dont let the … fruitful Imaginations of others affect you.” He gently reminded her from time to time that American liberty was at stake and the struggle required sacrifice, to which he added his praise of how she was bearing up: “It gives … Pleasure … that you sustain with so much Fortitude, the Shocks and Terrors of the Times. You are really brave, my dear, you are an Heroine.” But John's letters were devoid of romantic sentiments, and it irritated his wife. After he had been absent for months, Abigail bluntly told him: “I want some sentimental Effusions of the Heart. I am sure you are not destitute of them.” The letters she received in return must have been disappointing. Perhaps fearing that his correspondence would be intercepted once again and published by some delighted Tory editor, John scrupulously avoided all evidence of amorous feelings.
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In the first days of the siege of Boston, Abigail notified John that she had permitted soldiers to lodge or take a meal at their home, and she had even taken in refugees from the city—total strangers—for up to a week at a time. John praised her “generous Solicitude.” He also asked her to try to extract information from those who had fled Boston about how the beleaguered British soldiers were faring. However, if she learned anything, John advised, she should discreetly pass it along to the local revolutionary government rather than send it through the mail to him. When the dysentery epidemic spread to Braintree, John was beside himself with anxiety and considered rushing home. “I tremble for you” and the children, he wrote, and pledged to come home for good or to transport his family to Philadelphia should he receive “more disagreable” news from her. He fell back on his religious beliefs for solace, counseling Abigail that God's “designs are often inscrutable,” though “always wise and just and good.” When he learned of the death of Abigail's mother, John wrote his wife a long, compassionate letter in which he extolled his late mother-in-law's “Purity … Piety and Virtue” and reflected on the heartaches of life. He also reminded her that the afflictions besetting so many colonists were the consequence of what he often called “the glorious struggle” to resist British tyranny.
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In the wake of the epidemic, John not only began to write his children but also poured out to Abigail his sorrow over his absence from his sons and daughter during their formative years. He advised her on how they should be raised: All must be properly educated and the boys must learn the meaning of courage, industry, and ambition. They must be taught “to scorn Injustice, Cowardice, and Falshood. Let them revere nothing but Religion, Morality and Liberty.” John may have borne a heavy burden of guilt over being away, but he never said that his public service was unmerited. In fact, he proclaimed that in the long run, his children would be the beneficiaries of his sacrifices, for his service in Congress was designed “to procure a free Constitution for them to solace themselves under.”
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Before Adams returned home in December for a brief vacation, he told Abigail that he would not serve again in Congress until others from Massachusetts took their turn. He also vowed never to return to Philadelphia unless accompanied by Abigail.
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But in February he resumed his seat in Congress and returned to Philadelphia alone. What privately transpired between John and Abigail in December and January cannot be known for certain. They probably agreed that he would continue to serve in Congress until independence was declared. Until then, Abigail must remain at home to care for the children and the farm. During the previous October, John had told Abigail that since the Stamp Act crisis, he had foreseen that the Anglo-American “Controversy was of such a Nature that it would never be settled” short of war and that ultimately “Things would be wrought up to their present Crisis” over “breaking our Connection” with Great Britain. At this decisive moment in American history, he had continued, “I dare not consent” to leave Congress.
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Having met with General Washington while at home, John gleaned that the siege of Boston was probably headed toward an impending showdown. He departed Braintree for Philadelphia late in January 1776 filled with “many Pains, on your Account,” he told Abigail. But in mid-March, when word of Washington's occupation of Dorchester Heights reached Congress, Adams also learned that the British were quitting Boston. With the liberation of the city and the unmistakable approach of independence, the tone of both John's and Abigail's letters changed. “I feel very differently … to what I did a month ago,” Abigail wrote early in April. With the British gone from Boston, she continued, all those in the vicinity of the city may “sit under our own vine and eat the good of the land.” But she wanted more: “I long to hear that you declared an independency.” John responded that America was all but independent. “[B]e patient,” he advised in April, for the formal declaration of independence could not be far away. Abigail's response was audacious: “Remember the Ladies” when independence was declared and the laws for the new nation were enacted. Protect the rights of women, she pleaded, and she additionally urged that Congress take steps to end slavery. “[Y]ou are so saucy,” John replied noncommittally, sounding very much like the pragmatic politician that he had become.
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The idea of declaring independence was coming to fruition in the spring of 1776, brought steadily closer by the groundswell of public opinion. As May approached, those congressmen who favored independence were confident that every New England delegation and all four from below the Potomac were ready “to declare off from Great Britain,” as one quaintly put it. There were signs as well that Maryland and New Jersey were coming around. “Every Post and every Day” brought fresh word of the fervor for independence, John Adams said, adding that the good news “rolls in upon Us … like a Torrent.” Independence was “unavoidable,” a Connecticut delegate remarked in April, but he and his fellow advocates for independence desperately wanted Congress's most significant decision to be by a unanimous vote.
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New York, Delaware, and Pennsylvania were seen as the greatest obstacles to unanimity, though most thought “there is but very little doubt of N. York” ultimately siding with those who favored independence. Everyone also thought that Delaware would do whatever Pennsylvania chose to do. As had been true since the First Congress, it was Pennsylvania above all that marched to a different drummer, but those in Congress who longed for independence radiated confidence in April that it too was “coming over with great Rapidity” to their position. In the very near future, Richard Henry Lee happily predicted, Pennsylvania would cease to “obstruct and perplex the American machine.”
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“It requires time to bring the Colonies all of one mind, but time will do,” John Adams said. (“It requires Time to convince the doubting and inspire the timid,” Samuel Adams had similarly remarked the previous day.) “I do not att all wonder, that so much Reluctance has been shewn to the Measures of Independency,” John Adams added. “All great Changes are irksome … especially those which are attended with great Dangers.” Be that as it may, as April drew to a close, Adams was confident that they were “hastening rapidly to great Events.”
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One reason for optimism was that May 1 was election day in Pennsylvania. Adams and others expected the pro-independence candidates to win control of the assembly and “repeal their deadly Instructions to their Delegates in Congress,” directions that—according to Adams—had made Pennsylvania “So exceedingly obnoxious to America in General.”
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But the outcome of the election was disappointing. Although the pro-independence candidates captured thirteen of seventeen contested seats, those who favored reconciliation retained a majority of the assembly seats. In Philadelphia, Thomas Willing, the reconciliationist congressman, was defeated, but a majority of those elected were foes of independence, who garnered a narrow 50.5 percent of the vote in the city. Thomas Paine, perhaps correctly, thought the outcome due to the fact that numerous pro-independence citizens were away in the Continental army and could not vote.
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Thwarted at the ballot box, the leaders of the pro-independence faction in Pennsylvania turned for help to John Adams, leader of the pro-independence faction in Congress. He was more than willing to do something. The “dullest and slowest” sailors, as he had once characterized the congressional faction that favored reconciliation, had too long inhibited the push for independence. First, Adams sought to have Congress pass a resolution discouraging all colonies from instructing their delegates. Congress rejected that idea as the antithesis of representative government. Next, on May 10, a day when Dickinson was absent—he had returned to his farm near Dover, Delaware—Adams introduced a resolution urging the colonies to create new governments if their old colonial charters were unable to meet “the exigencies of their affairs.”
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Adams's act was a thinly veiled maneuver to terminate Pennsylvania's government under its seventeenth-century charter. His objective was the creation of an assembly in which the western counties—home to roughly half of the colony's population, and the region that was the most supportive of American independence—were afforded equal representation. Such a government was virtually certain to be dominated by Pennsylvania's radicals, who would rewrite the instructions to Pennsylvania's congressmen.

Congress adopted the measure, but deferred its publication until a preamble could be written and adopted. Adams handled that as well, and his preamble gave a new meaning to the resolution passed five days earlier. The preamble stated that given the king's refusal to receive Congress's petitions and his willingness to make war on America in concert with German mercenaries, it was “absolutely irreconcilable to reason and good conscience” for Americans to any longer adhere to any government whose authority was derived from Crown-issued charters.

The debate, conducted while Dickinson remained absent, produced “much heat,” one delegate observed. But its foes no longer openly demanded reconciliation. (Later, Dickinson claimed that after the Olive Branch Petition had been rejected, not one deputy in Congress ever urged reconciliation.)
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Instead, the preamble's opponents urged that Congress go slowly. “Why all this Haste? Why … this driving?” James Duane asked. Samuel Adams played a major role in defending the preamble. Wartime realities demanded that the provincial governments be altered and modernized, and quickly, he said. It was miraculous, he added, that the people, bound by Crown charters, “have conducted so well as they have” against the king's “Fleets and Armies.” But now they are about to be confronted with his “Mirmidons from abroad.” Indeed, that morning the
Pennsylvania Gazette
had reprinted a story from a London newspaper that reported an armada of fifty-seven warships loaded with thirty-five thousand men—including German mercenaries—was crossing the Atlantic. The debate raged for three days before Congress adopted the preamble on May 15.
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