Independence (59 page)

CHAPTER 12

“T
HE
C
HARACTER OF A
F
INE
W
RITER
”

T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON AND THE
D
RAFTING OF THE
D
ECLARATION OF
I
NDEPENDENCE

THE COMMITTEE CHARGED WITH
drafting a declaration of independence had to act rapidly. Formed on Tuesday, June 11, the Committee of Five, as many delegates referred to it, faced a deadline of Monday, July 1. During that time, a draft had to be written and a majority of the committee had to agree to its wording, and it all had to be done while those on the panel were busy with the daily sessions of Congress and committee assignments. Given the time constraints it faced, the Committee of Five probably met for the first time either late on the day it was established or before the next morning’s session of Congress.

The five committee members were hardly strangers. Adams and Sherman had known each other since the First Congress. Livingston and Franklin had entered Congress in May 1775, Jefferson a month later. Only the appointments of Franklin and Adams to this committee had more or less been a foregone conclusion. Franklin was Congress’s most renowned member and its most prolific writer. For the past year, Adams had led the faction that leaned toward independence. Livingston’s choice was curious. It may have stemmed in part from his competent service on other committees that had prepared documents for publication, but he was probably selected mostly because the proponents of independence thought his inclusion would sway votes among those delegates who still clung to the hope of reconciliation.

Jefferson enjoyed a deserved reputation as a writer, and that alone accounted for his selection to the Committee of Five. Most delegates were unknown outside their province when they entered Congress, but Jefferson was renowned for his flair with the pen when he arrived in Philadelphia in 1775. An essay that Jefferson had written a year earlier had gained notice in three London periodicals and sparked rumors—which were untrue—that his name had been added to a bill of attainder passed by the House of Lords.
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So great was Jefferson’s reputation as a wordsmith that he had barely unpacked his luggage before Congress assigned him to the committee that was to prepare the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms. His colleagues on that committee, in turn, asked Jefferson to draft the document. Pleased with his work, Congress a few days later asked him to write its response to the North Peace Plan.

Jefferson’s reputation as an essayist notwithstanding, happenstance played a crucial role in his inclusion on the Committee of Five. For one thing, Jefferson had written to the authorities in Williamsburg in mid-May requesting that he be recalled so that he might join in the writing of the state’s first constitution. The Virginia Convention had ignored his plea.
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Furthermore, had Richard Henry Lee wished to write the Declaration of Independence, or at least to have a hand in its composition, he almost certainly would have been chosen for the committee instead of Jefferson. The leader of Virginia’s delegation, Lee not only had introduced the motion on independence; he also had served in Congress considerably longer than Jefferson. But like Jefferson, Lee was anxious to return home and play a role in provincial affairs. Lee’s fervor to do so was quickened by his understanding that late in June the Virginia Convention would take up the proposed sale of lands in the Ohio Country, a region in which he had invested heavily. Lee simply announced that on June 13 he would be leaving Philadelphia for Williamsburg. His impending departure opened the way for Jefferson’s selection to the Committee of Five.
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If it seems odd today that Jefferson and Lee preferred to tend to state business rather than to seize the opportunity to gain immortality by writing the Declaration of Independence, it should be recalled that no one in Congress anticipated that the Declaration would long be remembered. Every delegate knew that declaring independence would be Congress’s most important act, but nothing that Congress had adopted and published in the two previous years had caught the public’s fancy. There was little reason to think its declaration on independence would be any different.

As two delegates on the Committee of Five had been chosen from mid-Atlantic colonies, the last member almost had to be either a Southerner from outside Virginia or a New Englander from one of the three provinces other than Massachusetts. Six delegates from the seven eligible colonies had served since the First Congress. Matthew Tilghman and Joseph Hewes were backbenchers who neither had risen to a leadership role nor were considered when crucial assignments were doled out. Maryland’s Samuel Chase did not return to Congress from his trying Canadian mission until the day the Committee of Five was named. Rhode Island’s Stephen Hopkins had begun his congressional career by supporting Joseph Galloway in 1774 and shrank from endorsing independence until May 1776. Twenty-six-year-old Edward Rutledge had taken a back seat in South Carolina’s delegation until his older brother, John, left Congress in the autumn of 1775. When he came into his own, Edward had steadfastly opposed independence.
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Congress, of course, was not committed to packing the Committee of Five only with those who had served since 1774, as the selection of Livingston, Franklin, and Jefferson demonstrated. But none among those who had become delegates since May 1775 especially stood out, and none overshadowed Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, who had been in Congress from its first day.

Fifty-five years old in 1776, Sherman was a native of Massachusetts who had moved to Connecticut when he came of age, eventually settling in New Haven. Sherman, who had grown up in a comfortable farm family, had only a “slender” formal education, as one of his congressional colleagues put it, but he was enterprising and a quick learner. By the time he was thirty, Sherman had farmed and worked as a cobbler, spent a few years as a self-taught surveyor, speculated in frontier lands, and published an almanac. Before he turned forty, Sherman had become a lawyer, launched a potash business on the side, continued as an absentee farmer, and ultimately opened several retail shops that sold books, cloth, tea, coffee, indigo, and assorted imported goods from England. By then too he had entered public life, serving first as a selectman—or town councilman, as it would be called today in most communities—then as a member of the Connecticut assembly.

Busy as he was, Sherman found time for family life. He married at the relatively late age of twenty-nine. His first marriage lasted eleven years. Following his wife’s death, he remained a widower for three years before marrying a second time. He fathered fifteen children in his two marriages.

A conservative in Connecticut’s internal politics, Sherman actively resisted parliamentary taxation from the outset. He joined the protest against the Stamp Act in 1765 and never wavered in his opposition to London’s policies. In 1772 he declared that it was “a fundamental principle in the British Constitution … that no laws bind the people but such as they consent to be governed by.” By then, at least in the view of his biographer, Sherman already favored American independence. He told John Adams that his constitutional views had been shaped by the writings of James Otis, Adams’s friend and legal mentor, and from the First Congress onward there was little difference in the outlook of Sherman and Adams with regard to the proper response to British policies. (That may explain why, from the day they met, Adams characterized Sherman as “a solid sensible Man.”) Once the war broke out, Sherman openly embraced a hard-line position. When he learned a few weeks after Bunker Hill that Lord North was sending massive military reinforcements to North America, Sherman declared that every colony ought to “take Government fully into their own hands.”
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Sherman was one of three Connecticut delegates who attended the First Congress. He was the last to be chosen, picked after four others declined to serve. In some respects, Sherman was an impressive figure. At six feet tall, he towered over most of his colleagues. Despite a slender build, he was surprisingly muscular and powerful. His eyes were a sparkling bright blue-gray. Even in his fifties, he still had a full head of hair, which had not yet turned from its youthful brown to gray. Sherman wore it close-cropped, and he shunned a wig, which some of his fellow congressmen insisted on wearing.
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Sherman’s striking attributes were counterbalanced by what many saw as shortcomings. He was conspicuously ungainly, prompting John Adams to remark that Sherman’s “Air is the Reverse of Grace. There cannot be a more striking Contrast to beautiful Action.” His movements,” Adams added, were “Stiffness, and Awkwardness itself.” He is as “Rigid as Starched Linen.” A colleague from Georgia found Sherman so inelegant in his gestures and gait that he thought there was something “unaccountably strange in his manner.” What is more, Sherman was unpolished as a public speaker and awkward as a conversationalist. One of his fellow deputies from Connecticut was embarrassed that Sherman was part of the delegation. He “is as badly calculated to appear in such a company [as the Continental Congress] as a chestnut bur is for an eye stone,” that congressman thought. Adams noted that Sherman spoke “often and long, but very heavily and clumsily.” If a fellow Yankee was put off by Sherman’s manner of speaking, it is hardly surprising that others from outside New England were repelled by it. Delegates from the middle and southern colonies were annoyed by Sherman’s “countrified cadence” and “strange New England cant.” One congressman disdained Sherman’s “vulgarisms”—his less-than-sterling grammar—which made everything that he said sound “grotesque and laughable.” While Sherman’s speech habits tried the patience of many, others were vexed by his pious Puritanism. He would not listen to off-color jokes, and once, when Congress was so busy that it contemplated an unheard-of Sunday session, Sherman headed off the proposed violation of the Sabbath out of “a regard for the commands of his Maker.”
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But Sherman’s failings were outweighed by his striking intelligence and consummate common sense. Adams thought that Sherman possessed “a clear Head and sound Judgment” and proclaimed that he was “one of the most sensible men in the world.” A southern delegate thought that “in his train of thinking there is something regular, deep and comprehensive.” Jefferson allegedly told an acquaintance that Sherman “never said a foolish thing in his life.”
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Trumbull’s
Declaration of Independence
. The Committee of Five is shown presenting the draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress. (Architect of the Capitol)

Sherman was never a leader in Congress, but his fellow deputies respected his diligence, industry, and pragmatism. Sherman was not absent from Congress for “So much as ten Minutes” between September 1774 and September 1775. He did not take a leave of absence until November 1775, and then he remained at home only half as long as did John Adams during his year-end sabbatical. Sherman’s only other absence before June 1776 came in the spring, when Congress asked him to deliver money to the authorities in Connecticut. His fellow congressmen may have looked on Sherman as inelegant and uncultivated, but they thought him dependable and assigned him to one committee after another. Before June 1776 he had served on panels created to deal with Indian affairs, raise shoes and clothing for the army, prepare instructions for the commissioners sent to Canada, and draft a statement on Lord North’s hiring of foreign mercenaries. About the same time that he was chosen for the Committee of Five, Sherman was selected for the Board of War and Ordnance, a committee for overseeing affairs in the Continental army, a panel that Congress thought was as important as any it ever created.
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