Independence (62 page)

Samuel Adams left Congress in 1781. In the years that followed before his death in 1803, he served repeatedly as the moderator of Boston town meetings, sat in the state legislature, and eventually became the governor of Massachusetts, but he never again held a national office. The conservative faction that dominated the state in the 1780s refused to add him to Massachusetts's delegation to the Constitutional Convention. He sought election to the United States House of Representatives in December 1788 from a Boston district, but his fellow Bostonians spurned him in favor of Fisher Ames, a staunch foe of democracy.

No one lost more as a result of the American Revolution than Samuel Adams's great foe at the First Congress, Joseph Galloway. He had retired from public life and proclaimed himself a neutral in the spring of 1775, but late the following year, as Washington's army retreated across New Jersey, Galloway concluded that a British victory was inevitable. He opportunistically came out of retirement and fled behind British lines, offering the redcoats his help. General Howe subsequently utilized Galloway as an intelligence official, and when Philadelphia fell to the British in September 1777, the former congressman became the police commissioner of the occupied city. Two revolutionaries were executed on Galloway's watch. When the British abandoned Philadelphia in June 1778, Galloway fled with them. In 1779 he went to London, where he wrote countless pamphlets in the hope of keeping British morale from flagging. Following the war, Galloway wished to return to America, but the victorious Pennsylvania authorities threatened him with arrest and trial for his activities in occupied Philadelphia. Galloway might have fared as well as Wilson had he possessed the latter's political sagacity, and especially his uncanny chameleonlike qualities. Instead, he died in exile in England in 1803.

In the long years after 1776, John Adams appears to have given more thought than any other Founder to when and why the colonists embraced the idea of American independence. He was never of one mind on the question. Most famously, he said that the “Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.” The “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the People, was the real American Revolution,” and those changes occurred “in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.”
31
He was suggesting that support for independence evolved slowly in response to a series of British provocations, and that indeed would be an accurate description of the profound changes in outlook that he experienced in the course of nearly a decade after the Stamp Act. But on other occasions Adams said he thought the idea of independence had germinated in the 1740s, when London betrayed American interests in the peace settlement following King George's War; or in the 1750s, when France was driven from Canada as a result of the Seven Years' War; or even as late as 1774, when Parliament enacted the Coercive Acts. In his final years, Adams contended that the idea of independence could be traced back to the first colonists in the seventeenth century. They had been spurred to move to the wilds of America, he said, by a hunger for “Independence [from] English church and state.” This led him to conclude: “When we say, that … Adams … Jefferson, &c., were authors of independence, we ought to say they were only awakeners and revivers of the original fundamental principle of colonization.”
32

Adams did not say that American independence was inevitable, and to be sure, he never suggested that it was certain to occur in his lifetime. No one knew better than Adams how difficult the struggle had been to secure Congress's assent to every defiant step from 1774 onward. The First Congress's statement of American rights had passed by only two or three votes, he subsequently recollected, and he remembered as well that “all the great critical questions” down to the spring of 1776 had been decided by the slimmest of margins. Not infrequently, he recalled, the passage of pivotal measures had hinged on the vote of a single delegate.
33
Adams knew that as late as January 1776 no more than five of the thirteen delegations in Congress, and perhaps not that many, supported American independence.

No one in Congress was more important than Adams in the long struggle for independence. He had rapidly emerged in the Second Congress as the leading figure within the faction of hard-line delegates. Samuel Adams may have initially coached him from behind the curtain, but by sometime in the summer of 1775 John Adams was adroitly managing affairs on his own terms. He wisely understood that Congress could not be pushed toward one truculent stand after another. That would only have created divisions, and it might possibly have driven the more conservative delegates back into the arms of the British government. Instead, John Adams had sought to assuage the reconciliationists, to permit them to play out their hopes, until at long last they discovered what he and Franklin and Jefferson, and all the more radical delegates, had long since come to believe: The mother country would never agree to reconcile with its colonies on fair and just terms. Adams had intuitively understood that time was on his side, for the war would unavoidably radicalize Americans, gradually ripening them for independence.

Adams's greatest virtue was the patience to permit these occurrences to play out, but like any great leader, he understood when the time for final action had arrived. By the late spring and early summer of 1776, Adams knew that the American people were ready for independence, and so too were most congressmen. The time had come, he remarked early in the summer of 1776, to “make thirteen Clocks, strike precisely alike, at the Same Second.”
34

Looking back from the perspective of more than two centuries, it is at first glance astonishing that Great Britain failed to prevent America's independence. Britain's rulers had many opportunities from 1766 onward to make choices that could have peacefully terminated the American protest and restored not only the tranquility that had previously existed within the empire but also the affection that most colonists felt toward their mother country. Had the king and his ministers taken to heart the Virginia Resolves, or Franklin's warning in 1766 that they risked losing the colonists' respect and admiration, the Stamp Act would never have been followed by an inflammatory pronouncement claiming the unlimited authority of Parliament. The American protests against the Townshend Duties in the late 1760s afforded Britain's rulers with a second opportunity to abandon further provocative taxes. Even as the crisis mounted in the wake of the Boston Tea Party, Britain in 1774, or again in 1775, might have chosen the path of reform rather than stridency. Edmund Burke and a handful of others in Parliament understood that a sincere offer of imperial reform might meet with American approval or, at the very least, it could conceivably so divide the colonists that Congress could be forced into an accommodation. To be sure, Great Britain would have had to grant a greater measure of self-government to the colonists, and the colonists, in turn, would have had to accept a lesser degree of autonomy than their most radical leaders desired. But had London pursued such an enlightened course, it is inconceivable that American independence would have been declared in 1776, or probably even within the lifetimes of those whom we call the Founding Fathers. As Burke charged in one of his first speeches after American independence was declared, the British government “drove them [the colonists] into the declaration of independency; not as a matter of choice, but necessity—and now they have declared it.”
35

On reflection, America's declaration of independence, which at first blush appears to have been avoidable, was in fact nearly inevitable. Time and again throughout history, rulers in the thrall of nationalistic fervor, fearful of appearing weak and indecisive, beholden to the interests of the few that are reaping fortunes from the status quo, and above all spurred by a sense of potency and superiority have been unwilling to bend in the face of changing times. That was the case with Lord North and his king, and with the majority in Parliament. Only forty days before independence was declared, the king in a speech before Parliament made the preposterous claim that Great Britain “can have no safety or security but in that constitutional subordination for which we are contending.”
36
Inexorably, myopically, George III and his ministers led Great Britain down a path that they believed would save the British Empire. Instead, the fatal course they chose—that they seemingly could not avoid choosing—led to the loss of most of Britain's Empire in North America.

Today, the best-remembered aspect of the American Revolution may be the Declaration of Independence. However, as historian Pauline Maier has pointed out, the Declaration was quickly “all-but-forgotten” by the Revolutionary generation. The merrymaking in America's cities and hamlets in the summer of 1776 had far more to do with Congress's having declared independence than for the stirring Declaration of Independence itself. Little or nothing was said about the Declaration of Independence during the remainder of the war—or for that matter, until the 1790s. Only then did Americans care enough about the Declaration of Independence even to wonder for the first time who had been its principal author.
37

It seems odd that a document that came to mean so much to Americans in the centuries that followed could have been so ignored by the Revolutionary generation. It may have been that Jefferson, who had said that his design was to avoid “aiming at originality of principle or sentiment,” had succeeded too well.
38
What Jefferson had written about the rights of humankind, as well as the charges he leveled against Britain's leaders, had been broached previously by colonial assemblies, local revolutionary committees, and the Continental Congress. What Jefferson had written was commonplace to his wartime audience.

Only two tracts written during the American Revolution, both penned by Thomas Paine, gained widespread traction with contemporaries.
Common Sense
, the first publication to openly denounce reconciliation and enumerate sound reasons for independence, was fresh and bold, and it electrified the public. In January 1777, in the midst of the despair that flowed from Washington's humbling defeats in New York and his desperate retreat through New Jersey, Paine did it again with the initial essay in
The American Crisis
, a pamphlet that boosted the morale of the the shaken but hopeful Americans.

It was not until the 1790s that the Declaration of Independence first began to be seen as what has been called America's “holy writ” and “sacred text.” Speeches or documents that win immediate acclaim are sometimes prized by subsequent generations. That was true of the majestic inaugural addresses of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King Jr.'s inspirational “I have a dream” speech. More frequently, that which is hailed by contemporaries fails the test of time, as was the case with General Douglas MacArthur's “Old soldiers never die” speech in 1951, now a largely forgotten oration. It is extremely rare indeed for something that was initially largely ignored to be exalted by subsequent generations.

Widespread appreciation of the Declaration of Independence initially became evident only when more than half the population was too young to have remembered 1776 or the bitter events leading to it. That, not coincidentally, occurred during the fierce party battles in the 1790s. The Republican Party, largely Jefferson's creation, not only celebrated the Declaration; it also made sure that the public knew the identity of its author.

Starting around 1815, leading Americans, fearful that the memory of the American Revolution was in danger of being lost as the Revolutionary generation passed from the scene, made a concerted effort to preserve as much as possible about America's struggle for independence. Documents and recollections were published, and paintings of events during the Revolution were commissioned. John Trumbull, for instance, painted four scenes commemorating the American Revolution for the new capitol in Washington. His initial work depicted the Committee of Five presenting the draft Declaration of Independence to the Continental Congress.
39

The striking coincidence of the deaths of Adams and Jefferson on July 4, 1826—the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—additionally helped to reacquaint that generation with the document and to preserve the memory of those two revolutionaries. For that time period, the great triumvirate of the American Revolution, as broadcast by countless orators, came to be Washington, the Revolution's mighty “sword”; Adams, its resounding “tongue”; and Jefferson, its eloquent “pen.”
40

But it was not mere happenstance or politics that caused the Declaration of Independence to become America's most treasured text. The Declaration's content, and Jefferson's felicitous composition, caused those who came after 1776 to embrace and sanctify it. Jefferson wrote about the threats faced by his generation, but he succeeded in penning a timeless message, an affirmation of human liberty and dignity that has captured the hopes of succeeding generations. In time, new generations emerged and faced their own battles against tyranny and injustice, whether the struggle was against slavery or racial oppression, or for the rights of workers or women. In the course of these crusades, people born long after 1776 discovered the Declaration of Independence's ringing passages on equality and natural rights. As they drew sustenance from what Jefferson had said America stood for, the Declaration of Independence at last came to be a living document for Americans, a statement that embodied the national credo and gave an enduring meaning to the American Revolution.

A
BBREVIATIONS