Patriots (53 page)

When members of the Congress came to Jefferson’s stirring conclusion, a majority thought it should include one last appeal to the power even greater than George III. Growing up among the abuses of the official church of Virginia had bred in Jefferson a hostility to state religions, and any cant came hard to him. But some of the men in the Congress were devout, and some were politicians who knew that a document intended as propaganda would be stronger with an allusion to God, and they added one. They did not, however, meddle with Jefferson’s last oath, more solemn than anything they might devise:

“And for support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

On July 4, 1776, independence was declared in language worthy of it.

—

That same day, across the ocean, Thomas Hutchinson, former governor of Massachusetts, was receiving a great honor. The previous April his son and his family and the Peter Olivers had arrived safely at Falmouth after General Howe’s surrender of Boston to George Washington. The Hutchinson family was reunited—twenty-five people crowded into rooms on St. James’s Street. On the fourth of July, Oxford University further eased the pain of exile by awarding Hutchinson and former Chief Justice Oliver honorary doctorates of civil laws; Francis Bernard had received the same honor four years earlier. Despite Hutchinson’s volumes of history, the distinction was clearly political, not academic. Oxford’s chancellor was Lord North.

—

The Continental Congress ordered a handsome copy of Jefferson’s words prepared for the delegates to sign. While it was being lettered, the Declaration was read in the yard of Philadelphia’s State House on July 8 to widespread cheering. Jefferson sent copies that same day to Richard Henry Lee, who had gone back to Virginia. One was the draft he had written, and the second was
the version Congress had approved.
Jefferson asked Lee to judge whether the Declaration was better or worse for the changes. Samuel Adams had been exhausted by the session, but he was gratified by the public response to independence. “The people seem to recognize this resolution,” he wrote, “as though it were a decree promulgated from heaven.” When New York formally adopted the Declaration on July 9, the state celebrated by releasing its debtors from prison. In Baltimore, Americans burned George III in effigy. In Savannah, they gave him an official burial. Virginia ruled that a sentence be deleted from all morning and evening church services—“O Lord, save the king and mercifully hear us when we call upon Thee.”

Since proceedings of the Congress remained confidential, the names of the men signing the Declaration were withheld, and only Jefferson’s fellow delegates knew he had written it. Entries in his journal for July 4 were sparse and uninformative. He noted that the day’s temperature had gone from 68 degrees at 6
A.M.
to a high of 76. He also recorded that he had bought seven pairs of women’s gloves to take home.

But legends were already beginning to gather around the signing. One story was that John Hancock signed his name in a bold hand, rose from his chair and exclaimed,
“There! John Bull can read my name without spectacles and may now double his reward of five hundred pounds for my head.” Another account had Hancock turning to Charles Carroll of Maryland, the one delegate whose fortune dwarfed his own, and asking whether he would sign. “
Most willingly,” said Carroll, taking up the pen. Nearby somebody remarked, “There goes a few millions!”

Still another anecdote was accurate at least in conveying Franklin’s wit. Hancock had cautioned the other delegates, “We must be unanimous. There must be no pulling different ways. We must all hang together.”

To which Dr. Franklin replied, “Yes, we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall
all hang separately.”

—

On Saturday, August 10, 1776, the
Evening Post
in London scooped its competitors with the news of America’s defiance. The following Monday, the
Morning Post
announced that the vote had
been carried by only a small majority and had set off widespread desertions within the patriot camp. The following week, with a copy of the Declaration to work from, a contributor to the newspaper composed what the editor labeled “
A reply to the declaration of the representatives of the Disunited States in American Congress assembled.” The parody turned Jefferson’s language on its head:

“When in the course of human events, pride, hypocrisy, dishonesty and ingratitude stimulate a subordinate community to shake off the duty and allegiances which in honor and in necessity they owe the superiority from whence they derive their existence; a fear of universal reprobation renders it necessary that they should declare causes to the world—no matter how ambiguous and falacious.

“It is a self-evident truth that all men, tho created equal, are not intended to remain so. That, without a resignation of part of our natural liberty, we should continue in a state of ignoble barbarism, unacquainted with that pure happiness, which flows from order.”

Other news accounts declined to reprint the specific charges against George III. The
Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser
broke off the text of the Declaration to say, “
Here they enumerated their several grievances, the substance of which have repeatedly appeared in all the public prints.” The
Morning Post
’s satirist printed each charge but twisted it to his own loyalist slant—for example, “He has invariably treated the applications of insolent, factitious and weak men with
a dignified contempt.”

Not every newspaper was in the pay of the crown. The
Public Advertiser
wrote that the Declaration proved that “
the despised Americans are manifestly not those cowards and poltroons which our over-hasty, ill-judging, wrong-headed Administration styled them.” For the most part, though, reaction to the Declaration fell into two categories: editorial reassurances that the other European powers would not unite with the rebels against England, and attempts to demonstrate the patent absurdity of a paean to the equality of man from a continent where four hundred thousand black people, some seventeen percent of the population, were bound in slavery.

One London paper described a reading of the Declaration in Charleston, South Carolina, on an extremely hot July day. As a
clergyman rose to speak, a black slave opened an umbrella and held it over his master’s head. With his other hand the slave fanned the sweating patriot as he extolled the Declaration of Independence.

Lord Howe and the British Fleet entering the Narrows between Long Island and Staten Island

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

A
T THE AGE
of fifty-four, Samuel Adams was working as hard as any delegate in Philadelphia. Men meeting him for the first time found that the perpetual tremor in his hands and the quaver in his voice gave his words a touching gravity, but the exertion was telling on him. Thomas Jefferson, more than two decades younger, watched him admiringly, but Adams made no efforts to recruit him as a protégé. Jefferson reflected a new spirit among the delegates,
an indication that past strategies—caucuses, denunciations, even intimidation—might not be effective for the new nation. Pennsylvania had begun to draft a new state constitution, and conservatives worried that its terms wouldn’t allow enough protection for property and the state would succumb to a demagogue. Some Philadelphians blamed Samuel Adams for that democratic trend. They were sure he was meddling behind the scenes, and as their resentment
rose, hints were dropped about the
usefulness of an assassination.

Samuel Adams wasn’t limiting himself to one state. He was named the Massachusetts representative to join with a member from each delegation in drawing up a form of government for America. Thomas Jefferson’s committee had been amicable; Adams’ was more rancorous and suspicious. During the month Jefferson had been preparing his Declaration, Samuel Adams, John Dickinson and the other eleven members were trying to patch together a plan for union.

Two other known opponents of independence served with Dickinson—Robert Livingston of New York and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina. Six others supported the idea of the Declaration but were conservative by temperament or wealth. Two more were simply cautious. As a result, Adams set out to shape the future with reliable support only from Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, who was even older than Adams and was impatient to leave the Congress.

Since Dickinson was representing Pennsylvania, there was no place on the committee for Benjamin Franklin. But Franklin’s views were already on record; ten years before the Stamp Act, he had drawn up a plan to confederate the British colonies during a conference held in Albany in June 1754. Although the delegates had come to reach an alliance with the Iroquois, they also adopted the ideas Franklin had prepared for their consideration: Parliament would form one government for all of the colonies, with a legislature called the Grand Council and a President-General to supervise its laws. In England, the ministers of George II considered the Grand Council, elected by vote in each colony, too democratic and refused to submit the plan to the king. In America, the assemblies objected to a President-General appointed and paid by the crown and rejected Franklin’s entire concept unanimously.

Franklin could be patient. Twenty-one years later, in the summer of 1775, he had drafted another version, “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.” Circulating it, Franklin said that his plan was meant merely to start the delegates thinking and that Congress would come up with a more perfect instrument.

His suggestions, however, were detailed, giving broad powers to an elected assembly from all the colonies. It could declare war and set terms for peace, conduct foreign affairs, operate a postal
system. Each state would send delegates to the Congress based on its population of male citizens between the ages of sixteen and sixty, and all delegates would have equal votes. This central government’s expenses would be prorated among the states on the same census of their male population.

Franklin took his plan from member to member, and Thomas Jefferson was one of those who were enthusiastic about it. But he also heard from those who were outraged. Although Franklin had provided for independence within the British Empire, the conservatives claimed that his plan proved that Franklin didn’t want to reconcile with Britain on any terms. Franklin decided that his blueprint would only antagonize members and laid it aside.

But now another eleven months had passed, and the mood in Philadelphia was different. John Dickinson and his supporters were resigned to independence, and the objections to a confederation were coming from the other faction. Some delegates had transferred their fear and suspicion of England to their fellow Americans. They detested any central power, whether it was held by Parliament or by a new body created in Philadelphia. Samuel Adams was determined that each state should remain sovereign within its own boundaries. With the people of the states sharing neither a common history nor a common vision of the future, how could there be a strong union? Massachusetts had its own charter, which the patriots revered, and a crown-appointed governor they had despised and run out of the colony. In two neighboring states, Connecticut and Rhode Island, the authority had been less drastically split. They also had charters, but they controlled their own executive branches. Seven other provinces—New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia—had been guided only by traditions and customs rather than by formal constitutions, and they had been headed by governors appointed in England. Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland had been managed by families who held most of the rights and benefits.

Next came differences in religion and racial stock. Some of Massachusetts’ three hundred thousand residents boasted that their bloodlines were more purely English than those in England itself. Virginia planters, who could not make that claim, wanted to exclude their blacks from any tax census and count them instead as property. The conflicting interests meant that nearly two years after Patrick Henry had proclaimed himself an American, the
Congress was again confronting questions of representation and voting.

John Dickinson drafted a confederation plan for the committee to work from, and the debate over each of its articles was angry and prolonged. After two and a half weeks, young Ned Rutledge was worried that Samuel Adams sought a government controlled by men who lacked a proper regard for money and position. To prevent any vast redistribution of property, Rutledge wanted the states to retain political control. Adams and Rutledge had opposing goals for their states, but they both hoped to keep the union weak and divided.

Other delegates on Dickinson’s committee were as conservative as Rutledge but saw another danger. They were less worried about the bad example Massachusetts had set than about the democratic movements springing up within their own states. They believed that a strong central government would help to subdue uprisings at home. As the debate ground on, the issue became sharpened. Men who already controlled their states were fighting for a confederation that would perpetuate their control. That drive for power wasn’t limited to the rich. Samuel Adams, who had given much of his life to deposing Bernard and Hutchinson, would never entrust his state’s destiny to men who wanted
George Washington as king of a new empire.