Independence (68 page)

Franklin’s attempt at mollification was, at best, only partially successful. In the notes he took as the editorial work proceeded, Jefferson raged at the “pusillanimous” character of his colleagues for having softened the charges he had brought against the king. He also took the trouble to make a handwritten copy of his draft and to send it to Richard Henry Lee so that he might “judge whether it [the Declaration of Independence] is the better or worse for the Critics.” In an effort to placate his simmering friend, Lee responded that Congress had “mangled” Jefferson’s draft, to which he added a measure of treacle: “However the
Thing
is in its nature so good, that no Cookery can spoil the Dish.”
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Nearly half a century later John Adams told an acquaintance that Congress had “obliterated some of the best” in Jefferson’s draft, though it had “left all that was exceptional.” (To which he added, in typical Adams fashion, “if any thing in it was” exceptional.)
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Sometime on July 4—Jefferson’s notes say “in the evening,” though the journal kept by Charles Thomson, Congress’s secretary, points toward late morning—Congress completed its editorial work.
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Adhering to proper parliamentary procedure, the committee of the whole made its recommendation that the document be approved. The Declaration of Independence was read in its entirety and adopted by Congress, after which it was ordered to be printed and distributed, including in handbill editions that were to be “Sent to the Armies, Cities, Countys, Towns, &c.”
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The members of Congress responded to what they had done in various ways. No reaction was more laconic than that of Robert Treat Paine, whose diary entry for July 4 was simply: “The Independence of the States voted & declared.” He was not so nonchalant in the letters he wrote to friends at home. Paine warned that the new nation could not be “saved by good words” alone. “Our hearts are full, our hands are full; may God … support us,” he added. William Ellery was of like mind. It “is one Thing for Colonies to declare themselves independent and another to establish themselves in Independency,” he cautioned. Elbridge Gerry was relieved that independence, “long sought for, solicited and necessary,” had at last been declared. John Adams thought the step “compleats a Revolution.” Samuel Adams fretted that much “has been lost by delaying to take this decisive Step.” Had independence been declared the previous autumn, he carped, the United States not only would now possess Canada; it also would be better prepared to defend against the impending blows of the British military. John Adams thought Samuel was correct with regard to the military situation, yet he believed it was for the best that the decision on independence had been delayed. By July 1776, he said, all “Hopes of Reconciliation” had been “totally extinguished.” By then, too, the question of independence had been thoroughly debated in newspapers and pamphlets, in town meetings, county committees, and provincial assemblies. The great majority of Americans, he was assured, were solidly in favor of independence. Rather than injuring the cause, John Adams said he was convinced that the delay in declaring independence “will cement the Union.”
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Forty-two months, almost to the day, had passed since Lord North had learned of the Boston Tea Party and summoned his cabinet to decide how to deal with the American colonists. The road from London in January 1774 to Philadelphia in July 1776 had been long. Leaders on both sides had many opportunities to choose an alternative course. But North and his ministers, and their king, had spurned every American proposal for change, accommodation, and negotiation, instead holding inflexibly to the position the colonists must submit to British sovereignty in all matters whatsoever. Americans had answered Britain’s rulers in stages. In the fall of 1774 Congress had embraced the rule of the king and Parliament’s regulation of trade. In 1775 the American people had mobilized for war and Congress repudiated Parliament’s authority over the colonies. In July 1776 Congress gave its final answer to a mother country that was bent on war, not concession. It voted unanimously for American independence.

E
PILOGUE

THE BROADSIDE CONTAINING
the Declaration of Independence, which Congress ordered on July 4, hit the streets of Philadelphia the next day. The only congressman whose name appeared on the Declaration was Hancock. (Congress did not publish a copy of the document containing the names of all the signatories until year’s end, when the Continental army scored its first victory following independence.)
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On July 6 the Declaration appeared in a newspaper, the
Philadelphia Evening Post
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Congress set Monday, July 8, for the official celebration of independence in Philadelphia. The festivities, attended by “a great Crowd of People” in the State House yard, kicked off at eleven A.M., when nine Pennsylvania soldiers ripped the royal crest from above the entrance to the State House and committed it to a roaring bonfire. Next, a member of Pennsylvania’s Committee of Safety read the Declaration of Independence. One resident noted in his diary that the Declaration was “received with general applause and heart-felt satisfaction,” including three loud cheers of “God bless the Free States of North America!” When the reading was complete, Philadelphia’s militia battalions, one of which was commanded by Colonel John Dickinson, paraded smartly and, according to John Adams, who could hardly have missed the irony of the occasion, “gave us the Feu de Joy, notwithstanding the Scarcity of Powder.” Throughout that day and into the night, bells at the State House and in every church steeple across the city rang out joyously. As night descended, bonfires were set and many Philadelphians celebrated by putting a lighted candle in every window in their homes.
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By the day of Philadelphia’s celebration, printed copies of the Declaration of Independence had already reached towns as far as seventy-five miles from the city. Thereafter, slowly but inexorably, the text appeared in handbills and newspapers in great towns and small. More than a month after July 4, word of the Declaration of Independence at last reached Savannah and its environs, among the last places in America where the citizenry learned that they were living in a new nation free of all links to Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence was printed in London newspapers at almost the same moment that Georgians first read the document, though in England it was reported to have provoked laughter.
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George Washington, in a print by Jenn-Baptiste Le Paon, ca. 1781, shown holding the Declaration of Independence. Washington served in the First and Second Continental Congress, but left to command the Continental army in June 1775. He ordered that the Declaration of Independence be read to his assembled soldiers in July 1776. (Brown University Library)

Soldiers posted here and there were assembled to listen as the Declaration of Independence was read. Sometimes the military commander made the reading part of a worship service. That was not the case with the principal contingent of the Continental army in and around New York City. On July 9 those soldiers marched to hear the document read “with an audible voice,” or so General Washington had ordered. When the reading was complete, the Declaration “was received by three Huzzas from the Troops,” according to one officer. Washington thought his men had given “their most hearty assent” both to American independence and the Declaration of Independence, an assessment confirmed by one of his colonels, who thought the document was “highly approved by the Army.”
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Public ceremonies were held in many villages and cities, always at a central location—the commons, the courthouse, a city square, or around the Liberty Pole. Abigail Adams heard it read from the balcony of the Massachusetts statehouse. As soon as the reading was completed, vessels in Boston Harbor fired salutes to American independence.
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In most places church bells pealed during the festivities, militia companies paraded, occasionally a few rounds of artillery were fired, clergy prayed and sometimes sermonized, dignitaries spoke, and a man of strong voice—in rural areas it was frequently the sheriff—read the Declaration of Independence. Listeners sometimes discovered a magical quality to the Declaration that was not always readily apparent to readers. Jefferson, who was a talented musician, possessed a genius for the cadence of composition, for what one scholar described as the “rhythmical pauses … comparable to musical bars.”
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Public readings were also in a sense theatrical events, and the audiences, as if attending a play, sometimes felt the pain, disappointment, reproach, and anger that had captivatingly flowed from Jefferson’s pen.
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In some locales effigies of the king or other royal officials were hung. In one town on Long Island the monarch’s effigy featured a black face to remind onlookers of Dunmore’s proclamation. Savannah staged a mock funeral for George III. Massachusetts directed all clergymen to read the Declaration of Independence to their congregations following the next worship service. One of the stranger ceremonies occurred in Watertown, Massachusetts, where the Declaration of Independence was interpreted to assembled Indian sachems. The translation went as follows: “You and we … have now nothing to do with Great Britain; we are wholly separated from her.”
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In some places the popular enmity toward Great Britain turned destructive. The king’s picture was often burned, crowds tore symbols of royal authority from the walls of public buildings and Anglican churches, and signs were ripped down at taverns, inns, and coffeehouses whose names were tainted with royal trappings. After the proprietor of the Kings’ Arms tavern in Worcester, Massachusetts, was made to remove his sign, the crowd helped itself to his liquor and drank twenty-four toasts, the last being: “May the Freedom and Independency of America endure until the Sun grows dim with age, and this Earth returns to Chaos.” A great statue of George III—one witness called it “the IMAGE of the BEAST”—was pulled down in New York City, after which it was sent to Litchfield, Connecticut, where it was recast into 42,088 cartridges for muskets. (One rebel was moved to write to Horatio Gates, a Continental army general, that the redcoats would have “melted Majesty fired at them.”)
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Independence was well received everywhere. New Jersey’s authorities reported that whereas the citizenry had been confused about fighting the king’s army while professing loyalty to the Crown, the break with Great Britain had given a “great turn to the minds of our people.… Heart and hand shall [now] move together.” General Washington expressed similar sentiments, adding that he thought it might make his soldiers act with greater “Fidelity and Courage,” as they knew that henceforth they would be fighting for their own country. Congress learned from state authorities in New Hampshire that the Declaration of Independence had transformed the thinking of many who only months before had been “greatly averse to anything that looked like independence.” A soldier at Fort Ticonderoga said that independence had been “well relished in this part of the world.” Abigail Adams noted that “every face appeard joyfull” in the crowd that heard the document read in Boston.
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Perhaps the most important approval for independence came from the New York Provincial Convention, which was meeting in White Plains. On July 9, the same day that Washington’s army heard the Declaration read, the Provincial Convention unanimously resolved that Congress’s action was “cogent and conclusive,” and it published the document, though it “lament[ed] the cruel necessity which has rendered that measure unavoidable.” On hearing of New York’s affirmation, one of the Yankee delegates in Congress exalted that “the Declaration of Independency … now has the sanction of the thirteen United States.”
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Once it learned that every state was in line, Congress on July 19 ordered “that the Declaration passed on July 4 be fairly engrossed on parchment” and “when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress.”
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The printing was completed on August 2, and on that day the delegates who were present signed the Declaration of Independence. John Hancock probably led off. With a bold flourish, he signed in large, easily distinguishable letters, as if to shout his approval of the break with the mother country. Thereafter, he must have summoned each delegation to the dais one at a time. It was a solemn and anxious moment, captured by Benjamin Rush, a new delegate from Pennsylvania, who later remembered “the pensive and awful silence, which pervaded the house when we were called up, one after another, to the table of the President of Congress to subscribe what was believed by many at that time to be our own death warrants.”
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