With sickness widespread in Philadelphia there was much hacking and coughing in Congress and many a long, sallow look. When some of the delegates protested that smoke from the wood stoves in the chamber was the cause of such poor health, the stoves were removed. Other ailments struck. Thomas Lynch of South Carolina suffered a stroke from which he would not recover. Smallpox reappeared in the city, putting everyone further on edge. In March one of New England’s most prominent delegates, Samuel Ward of Rhode Island, would die of the disease.
On February 27, word arrived that Parliament, in December, had prohibited all trade with the colonies and denounced as traitors all Americans who did not make an unconditional submission. The punishment for treason, as every member of Congress knew, was death by hanging.
A vast British armada was reported under way across the Atlantic and there were ominous rumors of the King hiring an army of German mercenaries. It was the New Englanders who held firm for independence, though two of the Massachusetts delegation, John Hancock and Robert Treat Paine, exhibited nothing like the zeal of either Samuel Adams or Elbridge Gerry. There were many, too, among the other delegations, who could be counted on, though unfortunately several of the most important were absent. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia would not appear at Philadelphia until the middle of March. Caesar Rodney of Delaware would be away until April. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia would not arrive for another three months, not until the middle of May. Meanwhile, time was wasting and a great deal needed doing.
Present nearly every day, notwithstanding his years and infirmities, was Benjamin Franklin, who, at age seventy, was popularly perceived to be the oldest, wisest head in the Congress, which he was, and the most influential, which he was not. Franklin wanted independence and considered Congress lamentably irresolute on the matter, as he told Adams. Franklin had no expectation of new terms from Britain and from long experience in London, as an agent for Pennsylvania, he knew the King and the Foreign Ministry as did no one else in Congress. But Franklin had no liking for floor debate. He was patient, imperturbable, and at times sound asleep in his chair. Never would he argue a point. Indeed, it was rare that he spoke at all or ventured an opinion except in private conversation, which to Adams, who was almost incapable of staying out of an argument, was extremely difficult to comprehend. “He has not assumed anything,” Adams wrote in frustration, “nor affected to take the lead; but has seemed to choose that the Congress pursue their own sentiments, and adopt their own plans.” That Franklin was quietly proposing to equip the Continental Army with bows and arrows must have left Adams still more puzzled.
For Adams any sustained equivalent of Franklin’s benign calm would have been impossible. Knowing his hour had come and that he must rise to the occasion and play a leading part, he would play it with all that was in him.
Among the opposition there were only two whom he disliked, Benjamin Harrison and Edward Rutledge. Harrison, an outspoken Virginia planter, six feet four inches tall and immensely fat, was a fervent champion of American rights who liked to say he would have come to Philadelphia on foot had it been necessary. To Adams, nonetheless, he was a profane and impious fool. Rutledge, the youngest member, was dandified, twenty-six years old, and overflowing with self-confidence. At first, Adams judged him “smart” if not “deep,” but the more Rutledge talked, the more he expressed disagreement with Adams, the more scathing Adams’s assessment became, to the point where, in his diary, he appeared nearly to run out of words. “Young Ned Rutledge is a perfect Bob o’ Lincoln, a swallow, a sparrow, a peacock, excessively vain, excessively weak, and excessively variable and unsteady — jejune, inane, and puerile.”
Yet Adams remained pointedly courteous to both men, as to others of the anti-independence faction. Among the surprises of the unfolding drama, as tensions increased, was the extent to which the ardent, disputatious John Adams held himself in rein, proving when need be a model of civility and self-restraint, even of patience.
In later years Adams would recall the warning advice given the Massachusetts delegation the day of their arrival for the First Congress. Benjamin Rush, Thomas Mifflin, and two or three other Philadelphia patriots had ridden out to welcome the Massachusetts men, and at a tavern in the village of Frankford, in the seclusion of a private room, they told the New Englanders they were “suspected of having independence in view.” They were perceived to be “too zealous” and must not presume to take the lead. Virginia, they were reminded, was the largest, richest, and most populous of the colonies, and the “very proud” Virginians felt they had the right to lead.
According to Adams, the advice made a deep impression, and among the consequences was the choice of George Washington to head the army. But Adams also wrote that he had “not in my nature prudence and caution enough” always to stand back. Years before, at age twenty, he had set down in his diary that men ought to “avow their opinions and defend them with boldness,” and he was of the same mettle still.
THE BULWARK OF THE OPPOSITION, of the “cool faction,” was the Pennsylvania delegation, and the greatly respected John Dickinson was its eloquent floor leader. Cautious, conservative by nature, Dickinson was, as Adams had noted, a distinctive figure, tall and exceptionally slender, with almost no color in his face. Because of his Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, an early pamphlet on the evils of British policy, Dickinson had become a hero. He was “the Farmer,” his name spoken everywhere, though he was hardly the plain man of the soil many imagined. Born to wealth and raised on an estate in Delaware, he had trained in the law at London and made his career in Philadelphia, where he had risen rapidly to the top of his profession. Married to a Quaker heiress, he lived in grand style, riding through the city in a magnificent coach-and-four attended by liveried black slaves. His town house, catercornered to the State House on Chestnut Street, was then undergoing extensive alterations and thought to be too large and showy even by his wife, who preferred their nearby country seat, Fairhill.
Dickinson had wished to make a good first impression on Adams, and he succeeded. As a dinner guest at Fairhill during the First Congress, Adams was charmed. Dickinson “has an excellent heart, and the cause of his country lies near it,” Adams had written. As for his initial concern that the rigors of Congress might be too much for someone of such delicate appearance, Adams had learned better. Though afflicted with the gout, Dickinson had since assumed command of a Philadelphia battalion with the rank of colonel. He had become the politician-soldier of the sort Adams so often imagined himself, yet it was with a determination no less than Adams’s own that Dickinson kept telling Congress that peaceful methods for resolving the current crisis were still possible and greatly preferable. He was not a Tory. He was not opposed to independence in principle. Rather, he insisted, now was not the time for so dangerous and irrevocable a decision.
Adams had come to believe that Dickinson’s real struggle was with his mother and his wife, both devout Quakers who bedeviled him with their pacifist views. “If I had such a mother and such a wife,” Adams would reflect years later, recalling Dickinson’s predicament, “I believe I should have shot myself.”
Outraged by Dickinson’s insistence on petitions to the King as essential to restoring peace, even after Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, Adams had strongly denounced any such step. Like many other delegates, he had been infuriated by Congress’s humble petition of July 8, 1775, the so-called Olive Branch Petition, that had been Dickinson’s major contribution. From the day he saw with his own eyes what the British had done at Lexington and Concord, Adams failed to understand how anyone could have any misconception or naïve hope about what to expect from the British. “Powder and artillery are the most efficacious, sure and infallible conciliatory measures we can adopt,” Adams wrote privately.
In a speech on the floor of Congress, Dickinson warned the New England delegates that they would have “blood . . . on their heads” if they excluded the possibility of peace. Adams, springing to his feet, responded so vehemently tha
t when he left the chamber Dickinson came rushing after, to confront him outside.
“What is the reason, Mr. Adams, that you New England men oppose our measures of reconciliation?” Dickinson angrily demanded, according to Adams’s later account of the scene. “Look, ye! If you don’t concur with us in our pacific system, I, and a number of us, will break off from you in New England and we will carry on the opposition by ourselves in our own way.”
Though infuriated by Dickinson’s “magisterial” tone, Adams replied calmly that there were many accommodations he would make in the cause of harmony and unanimity. He would not, however, be threatened.
Venting his “fire” in a private letter, Adams portrayed Dickinson as a “piddling genius” who lent a “silly cast” to deliberations. The letter was intercepted by British agents and widely published in Tory newspapers, with the result that Dickinson refused to speak when, one morning on their way to the State House, he and Adams passed “near enough to touch elbows,” as Adams recorded that day.
He passed without moving his hat or head or hand. I bowed and pulled off my hat. He passed haughtily by. . . . But I was determined to make my bow, that I might know his temper.
We are not to be on speaking terms, nor bowing terms, for the time to come.
Others refused to speak to Adams, so great was the respect for Dickinson in Congress and in the city. A British spy in Philadelphia named Gilbert Barkley reported to his contact in London, “The Quakers and many others look on him [Adams], and others of his way of thinking, as the greatest enemies of this country.” For weeks Adams was ostracized, “avoided like a man infected with leprosy,” he would remember. He felt as he had after the Boston Massacre trials, “borne down” by the weight of unpopularity. Benjamin Rush would write sympathetically of Adams walking the streets of Philadelphia alone, “an object of nearly universal scorn and detestation.”
Such was the support for Dickinson and the Olive Branch Petition that Adams and his colleagues were left no choice but to acquiesce. The petition was agreed to — only to be summarily dismissed by George III, who refused even to look at it and proclaimed the colonies in a state of rebellion.
Still, Dickinson and the anti-independents clung to the hope of a resolution to the crisis, insisting reconciliation was still possible, and so the wait for the peace commissioners had continued.
WHAT NEITHER JOHN DICKINSON nor John Adams nor anyone could have anticipated was the stunning effect of Common Sense. The little pamphlet had become a clarion call, rousing spirits within Congress and without as nothing else had. The first edition, attributed to an unnamed “Englishman” and published by Robert Bell in a print shop on Third Street, appeared January 9, 1776. By the time Adams had resumed his place in Congress a month later, Common Sense had gone into a third edition and was sweeping the colonies. In little time more than 100,000 copies were in circulation. “Who is the author of Common Sense?” asked a correspondent from South Carolina in the Philadelphia Evening Post. “He deserves a statue of gold.”
Written to be understood by everyone, Common Sense attacked the very idea of hereditary monarchy as absurd and evil, and named the “royal brute” George III as the cause of every woe in America. It was a call to arms, an unabashed argument for war, and a call for American independence, something that had never been said so boldly before in print. “Why is it that we hesitate? . . . The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth . . . for God’s sake, let us come to a final separation. . . . The birthday of a new world is at hand.”
The British spy, Barkley, reported its publication as he did such other vital news items as the arrival of shipments of gunpowder from the West Indies, or the sailing from Philadelphia of armed sloops and brigantines flying “what they call the American flag.”
The anonymous author was revealed to be a down-at-the-heels English immigrant, Thomas Paine, who had landed at Philadelphia a year earlier with little more than a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Paine had been encouraged in his efforts by Benjamin Rush, who was himself the author of a pamphlet on the evils of slavery, and it was Rush who provided the title.
Friends in Massachusetts reported to Adams that because of Common Sense the clamor for a declaration of independence was never greater. “This is the time . . . we have never had such a favorable moment,” wrote one. In a letter to Abigail, referring to the copy he had sent her, Adams said he expected Common Sense to become the “common faith,” and on learning that in Boston, he, Adams, was presumed to be the author, he felt flattered. Writing to a former law clerk, he declared himself innocent, saying he could never have achieved a style of such “strength and brevity.” But Adams was not without misgivings. The more he thought about it, the less he admired Common Sense. The writer, he told Abigail, “has a better hand at pulling down than building.”
That Paine had attempted to prove the unlawfulness of monarchy with analogies from the Bible, declaring monarchy to be “one of the sins of the Jews,” struck Adams as ridiculous. Paine had assured his readers that in a war with Britain, Americans, being such experienced seamen and willing soldiers and having such an abundance of war matériel at hand, would readily triumph. Adams had no illusions about the prospect of war with Britain. Almost alone among the members of Congress, he saw no quick victory, but a long, painful struggle. The war, he warned prophetically in a speech on February 22, could last ten years. What was more, as he confided to Abigail’s uncle, Isaac Smith, he thought “this American contest will light up a general war” in Europe.
But it was Paine’s “feeble” understanding of constitutional government, his outline of a unicameral legislature to be established once independence was achieved, that disturbed Adams most. In response, he began setting down his own thoughts on government, resolved, as he later wrote, “to do all in my power to counteract the effect” on the popular mind of so foolish a plan.
Meanwhile, for all the gloom and discord at the State House, Congress was making decisions. On February 26 there was enacted an embargo on exports to Britain. On March 2, Silas Deane was appointed a secret envoy to France to go “in the character of a merchant” to buy clothing and arms, and to appraise the “disposition” of France should the colonies declare independence. Oliver Wolcott, Deane’s fellow delegate from Connecticut, sensed the approach of a moment that could “decide the fate of this country.” Adams busily jotted notes:
Is any assistance attainable from F[rance]? What connection may we safely form with her. 1st. No political connection. Submit to none of her authority. . . . 2nd. No military connection. Receive no troops from her. 3rd. Only a commercial connection.
In the hope that the Canadians could be persuaded to join the American cause as “the 14th colony,” Congress organized a diplomatic expedition to Montreal with Benjamin Franklin at its head, and despite his age and poor health, Franklin departed on what was to be an exceedingly arduous and futile mission.
Adams joined in floor debate day after day, arguing a point, pleading, persuading, and nearly always with effect. No one spoke more often or with greater force. “Every important step was opposed, and carried by bare majorities, which obliged me to be almost constantly engaged in debate,” he would recall.
But I was not content with all that was done, and almost every day, I had something to say about advising the states to institute governments, to express my total despair of any good coming from the petition or of those things which were called conciliatory measures. I constantly insisted that all such measures, instead of having any tendency to produce a reconciliation, would only be considered as proofs of our timidity and want of confidence in the ground we stood on, and would only encourage our enemies to greater exertions against us.
Rarely did he prepare his remarks in advance other than in his mind, so that once on his feet he could speak from what he knew and what he strongly felt. He had tried writing his speeches but found it impossible. “I understand it not,” he would tell Benjamin Rush. “I never could write declama
tions, orations, or popular addresses.”
He had no liking for grand oratorical flourishes. “Affectation is as disagreeable in a letter as in conversation,” he once told Abigail, in explanation of his views on “epistolary style,” and the same principle applied to making a speech. The art of persuasion, he held, depended mainly on a marshaling of facts, clarity, conviction, and the ability to think on one’s feet. True eloquence consisted of truth and “rapid reason.” As a British spy was later to write astutely of Adams, he also had a particular gift for seeing “large subjects largely”
He would stand at his place, back straight, walking stick in hand, at times letting the stick slip between thumb and forefinger to make a quick tap on the floor, as if to punctuate a point. The “clear and sonorous” voice would fill the room. No one ever had trouble hearing what Adams had to say, nor was there ever the least ambiguity about what he meant. Nothing of what he or anyone said in the course of debate was officially recorded. But in later writings Adams recalled stressing certain points repeatedly:
We shall be driven to the necessity of declaring ourselves independent and we ought now to be employed in preparing a plan for confederation of the colonies, [here might come the sharp tap of the stick] and treaties to be proposed to foreign power [tap] . . . together with a declaration of independence [tap]. . . .
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