by Jill Lepore
“The whol conversation of this Place turns upon Politics,” Jane reported to her brother. The Boston Town meeting resolved that “a series of occurrences . . . afford great reason to believe that a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.” When troops fired into a crowd in March 1770, killing five men, the Sons of Liberty called it a “massacre” and cried for relief from the tyranny of a standing army. But on the islands, planters called not for less military presence but more, the colonial assembly on St. Kitts begging the king to send troops to protect the colonists from “the turbulent and savage dispositions of the Negroes ever prone to Riots and Rebellions.”51
And still, the zeal for liberty raised the question of ending slavery. The Worcester Town Meeting called for a law prohibiting the importing and buying of slaves; by 1766, an antislavery bill had been introduced into the Massachusetts Assembly. But, mindful of how the question of slavery had severed the island colonies from the mainland, many in Massachusetts feared that further antislavery sentiment would sever the northern colonies from the southern. “If passed into an act, it should have a bad effect on the union of the colonies,” one assemblyman wrote to John Adams in 1771, when the bill came up for a vote.52 The next year, the Court of King’s Bench in London took up the case of Somerset v. Stewart. Charles Stewart, a British customs officer in Boston, had purchased an African man named James Somerset. When Stewart was recalled to England in 1769, he brought Somerset with him. Somerset escaped but was recaptured. Stewart, deciding to sell him to Jamaica, had him imprisoned on a ship. Somerset’s friends brought the case to court, where the justice, Lord Mansfield, found that nothing in English common law supported Stewart’s position. Somerset was set free.
The Somerset case taught people held in slavery two lessons: first, they might look to the courts to secure their freedom, and, second, they had a better shot at winning it in Britain than in any of its colonies. They began to act. Relying on the same logic that James Otis Jr. had expounded, they petitioned the courts for their freedom: “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them,” read a petition filed by four black men in Boston in April 1773. And they tried to escape to England: in Virginia that September, a slave couple ran away hoping to secure their freedom by reaching London, holding, as one observer put it, “a notion now too prevalent among the Negroes.”53
This struggle for liberty was lost as the colonists returned, instead, to their battles with Parliament. The London-based East India Company was at risk of bankruptcy, partly due to the colonial boycott, but more due to a famine in Bengal, the military costs it incurred there, and collapsing stock value consequent to the empire-wide credit crash of 1772. In May of 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, which reduced the tax on tea—as a way of saving the East India Company—but again asserted Parliament’s right to tax the colonies. Townspeople in Philadelphia called anyone who imported the tea “an enemy of the country.” Tea agents resigned their posts in fear. That fall, three ships loaded with tea arrived in Boston. On the night of December 16, dozens of colonists disguised as Mohawks—warring Indians—boarded the boats and dumped chests of the tea into the harbor. To punish the city, Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, which closed Boston Harbor and annulled the Massachusetts charter, effective in June of 1774.
A British minister with the 1774 bill closing the port of Boston in his pocket pours tea down the throat of “America”—here, and often, depicted as a naked Indian woman—while another looks under her skirt. In Virginia, James Madison Jr., twenty-three, eyed the events in Massachusetts from Montpelier, his family’s plantation in the Piedmont, east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He’d graduated from Princeton two years before and was home tutoring his younger siblings. Far from the scene of action, he followed the news avidly and took pains to understand why the response to the tea tax was different in the northern and middle colonies than in the southern colonies. At Princeton, a Presbyterian college—a college of a dissenting faith—he’d made a study of religious liberty, and, after the dumping of the tea, he concluded that Massachusetts and Pennsylvania had resisted parliamentary authority in a way that Virginia did not because the more northern colonies had no established religion. Religious liberty, Madison came to believe, is a good in itself, because it promotes an independence of the mind, but also because it makes possible political liberty. Hearing word of the Coercive Acts, he began to think, for the first time, of war. He wrote to his closest friend, William Bradford, in Philadelphia, and asked him whether it might not be best “as soon as possible to begin our defense.”54
Meanwhile, at Mount Vernon, George Washington, who’d been elected to the Virginia legislature in 1758, had chiefly occupied himself managing his considerable tobacco estate.55 He hadn’t been much animated by the colonies’ growing resistance to parliamentary authority until the passage of the Coercive Acts. In September, fifty-six delegates from twelve of the thirteen mainland colonies met in Philadelphia, in a carpenters’ guildhall, as the First Continental Congress. Washington served as a delegate from Virginia. But if protest over the Stamp Act had temporarily united the colonies, the Coercive Acts appeared to many delegates to be merely Massachusetts’s problem. To Virginians, the delegates from Massachusetts seemed intemperate and rash, fanatical, even, especially when they suggested the possibility of an eventual independence from Britain. In October, Washington expressed relief when, after speaking to the “Boston people,” he felt confident that he could “announce it as a fact, that it is not the wish or interest of that Government, or any other upon this Continent, separately or collectively, to set up for Independency.” He was as sure “as I can be of my existence, that no such thing is desired by any thinking man in all North America.”56
From Philadelphia, James Madison’s friend William Bradford passed along fascinating tidbits of gossip about the goings-on at Congress. Bradford proved a resourceful reporter, and a better sleuth. From the librarian at the Library Company of Philadelphia—which supplied Congress with books—he’d heard that the delegates were busy reading “Vattel, Burlamaqui, Locke, and Montesquieu,” leading Bradford to reassure Madison: “We may conjecture that their measures will be wisely planned since they debate on them like philosophers.”57
Wise they may have been, but these philosophers immediately confronted a very difficult question that has dogged the Union ever since. Congress was meant to be a representative body. How would representation be calculated? Virginia delegate Patrick Henry, an irresistible orator with a blistering stare, suggested that the delegates cast a number of votes proportionate to their colonies’ number of white inhabitants. Given the absence of any accurate population figures, the delegates had little choice but to do something far simpler—to grant each colony one vote. In any case, the point of meeting was to become something more than a collection of colonies and the sum of their grievances: a new body politic. “The distinction between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders is no more,” Henry said. “I am not a Virginian, but an American.”58 A word on a long-ago map had swelled into an idea.
II.
THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS neither suffered the disunion and chaos of the Albany Congress nor undertook the deferential pleading of the Stamp Act Congress. Preparing for the worst, this new, more ambitious, and more expansive—continental—Congress urged colonists to muster their militias and stockpile weapons. It also agreed to boycott all British imports and to ban all trade with the West Indies, a severing of ties with the islands. The month the boycott was to begin, the Jamaica Assembly sent a petition to the king, with a bow and a curtsey. The Jamaicans began with an assurance that the island had no intention of joining the rebellion: “weak and feeble as this Colony is, from its very small number of white inhabitants, and its peculiar situation from the incumbrance of more than two hundred thousand slaves, it cannot be supposed that we now intend
, or ever could have intended, resistance to Great Britain,” the Jamaicans explained. And yet, they went on, they did agree with the continentals’ fundamental grievance, declaring it “the first established principle of the Constitution, that the people of England have a right to partake, and do partake, of the legislation of their country.”59
Unmoved, Congress offered Jamaica halfhearted thanks: “We feel the warmest gratitude for your pathetic mediation in our behalf with the crown.” Neither the king nor Parliament proved inclined to reconsider the Coercive Acts. The tax burden against which the colonists were protesting was laughably small, and their righteousness was grating. Lord North, the prime minister, commissioned the famed essayist Samuel Johnson to write a response to the Continental Congress’s complaints. Plainly, the easiest case to make against the colonists was to charge them with hypocrisy. In Taxation No Tyranny, Johnson asked, dryly, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Johnson’s opposition to slavery was far more than rhetorical; a free Jamaican, a black man named Francis Barber, was his companion, collaborator, and heir. (“To the next insurrection of negroes in the West Indies,” Johnson declared, in a toast he offered during the war.) But Johnson’s charge of hypocrisy amounted to no more than the charges made by Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush the year before: “Where is the difference,” Rush wondered, “between the British Senator who attempts to enslave his fellow subjects in America, by imposing Taxes upon them contrary to Law and Justice, and the American Patriot who reduces his African Brethren to Slavery, contrary to Justice and Humanity?”60
By now, the seed planted by Benjamin Lay had borne fruit, and Quakers had formally banned slavery—excluding from membership anyone who claimed to own another human being. On April 14, 1775, one month before the Second Continental Congress was to meet in Philadelphia, two dozen men, seventeen of them Quakers, founded in that city the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. But once again, as in 1773, whatever the urgency of ending slavery, the attention of all the colonies was called away. Five days later, on April 19, 1775, blood spilled on the damp, dark grass of spring, on Lexington Green.
It began when General Thomas Gage, in charge of the British troops, seized ammunition stored outside of Boston, in nearby Charlestown and Cambridge, and sent seven hundred soldiers to do the same in Lexington and Concord. Seventy armed militiamen, or minutemen—farmers who pledged to be ready at a moment’s notice—met them in Lexington, and more in Concord. The British soldiers killed ten of them, and lost two men of their own. The rebel forces then laid siege to Boston, occupied by the British army. Loyalists stayed in the city, but Loyalists in Boston were few: twelve thousand of the city’s fifteen thousand inhabitants attempted to escape, the ragged and the dainty, the old and the young, the war’s first refugees.
John Hancock, John Adams, and Samuel Adams rode in haste to Philadelphia. The evacuation cleaved families. Boston Gazette printer Benjamin Edes carted his printing press and types to the Charles River and rowed across while, in Boston, his eighteen-year-old son was taken prisoner of war.61 Jane Franklin, sixty-three, rode out of the city in a wagon with a granddaughter, leaving a grandson behind. “I had got Pact up what I Expected to have liberty to carey out intending to seek my fourtune with hundred others not knowing whither,” she wrote to her brother, who was on his way back to America, after years in England, to join Congress.62
Shots having been fired, the debate at the Second Continental Congress, which convened that May, was far more urgent than at the First. Those who continued to hope for reconciliation with Great Britain—which described most delegates—had now to answer the aggrieved, more radical delegates from Massachusetts, who brought stories of trials and tribulations. “I sympathise most sincerely with you and the People of my native Town and Country,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to his sister. “Your Account of the Distresses attending their Removal affects me greatly.”63 In June, two months after bullets were first fired in Massachusetts, Congress voted to establish a Continental army; John Adams nominated George Washington as commander. The resolute and nearly universally admired Washington, a man of unmatched bearing, and very much a Virginian, was sent to Massachusetts to take command—his very ride meant as a symbol of the union between North and South.
All fall, Congress was occupied with taking up the work of war, raising recruits and provisioning the troops. The question of declaring independence was put off. Most colonists remained loyal to the king. If they supported resistance, it was to fight for their rights as Englishmen, not for their independence as Americans.
Their slaves, though, fought a different fight. “It is imagined our Governor has been tampering with the Slaves & that he has it in contemplation to make great Use of them in case of a civil war,” young James Madison reported from Virginia to his friend William Bradford in Philadelphia. Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, intended to offer freedom to slaves who would join the British army. “To say the truth, that is the only part in which this colony is vulnerable,” Madison admitted, “and if we should be subdued, we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret.”64
But the colonists’ vulnerability to slave rebellion, that Achilles’ heel, was hardly a secret: it defined them. Madison’s own grandfather, Ambrose Madison, who’d first settled Montpelier, had been murdered by slaves in 1732, apparently poisoned to death, when he was thirty-six. In Madison’s county, slaves had been convicted of poisoning their masters again in 1737 and 1746: in the first case, the convicted man was decapitated, his head placed atop a pole outside the courthouse “to deter others from doing the Like”; in the second, a woman named Eve was burned alive.65 Their bodies were made into monuments.
No estate was without this Achilles’ heel. George Washington’s slaves had been running away at least since 1760. At least forty-seven of them fled at one time or another.66 In 1763, a twenty-three-year-old man born in Gambia became Washington’s property; Washington named him Harry and sent him to work draining a marsh known as the Great Dismal Swamp. In 1771, Harry Washington managed to escape, only to be recaptured. In November 1775, he was grooming his master’s horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when Lord Dunmore made the announcement that Madison had feared: he offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty’s troops in suppressing the American rebellion.67
In Cambridge, where George Washington was assembling the Continental army, he received a report about the slaves at Mount Vernon. “There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape,” Washington’s cousin reported that winter, adding, “Liberty is sweet.”68 Harry Washington bided his time, but he would soon join the five hundred men who ran from their owners and joined Dunmore’s forces, a number that included a man named Ralph, who ran away from Patrick Henry, and eight of the twenty-seven people owned by Peyton Randolph, who had served as president of the First Continental Congress.69
Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina’s delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dunmore’s declaration did “more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies—than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.”70 Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence.
Not that it ever tipped them definitively. John Adams estimated that about a third of colonists were patriots, a third were Loyalists, and a third never really made a decision about independence.71 Aside from Dunmore’s proclamation of freedom to slaves, the strongest impetus for independence came from brooding and tireless Thomas Paine, who’d immigrated to Philadelphia from England in 1774. In January 1776, Paine published an anonymous pamphlet called Common Sense, forty-seven pages of brisk political argument. “As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand,” Paine explained, “I
shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet.” Members of Congress might have been philosophers, reading Locke and Montesquieu. But ordinary Americans read the Bible, Poor Richard’s Almanack, and Thomas Paine.
Paine wrote with fury, and he wrote with flash. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” he announced. “’Tis not the affair of a city, a country, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent—of at least one eighth part of the habitable globe. ’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time.”
His empiricism was homegrown, his metaphors those of the kitchen and the barnyard. “There is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island,” he wrote, turning the logic of English imperialism on its head. “We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat.”
But he was not without philosophy. Digesting Locke for everyday readers, Paine explained the idea of a state of nature. “Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance,” he wrote, a schoolteacher to his pupils. The rule of some over others, the distinctions between rich and poor: these forms of inequality were not natural, nor were they prescribed by religion; they were the consequences of actions and customs. And the most unnatural distinction of all, he explained, is “the distinction of men into kings and subjects.”72
Paine made use, too, of Magna Carta, arguing, “The charter which secures this freedom in England, was formed, not in the senate, but in the field; and insisted upon by the people, not granted by the crown.” He urged Americans to write their own Magna Carta.73 But Magna Carta supplies no justification for outright rebellion. The best and most expedient strategy, Paine understood, was to argue not from precedent or doctrine but from nature, to insist that there exists a natural right to revolution, as natural as a child leaving its parent. “Let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest, they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world,” he began, as if he were telling a child a once-upon-a time story.74 They will erect a government, to secure their safety, and their liberty. And when that government ceases to secure their safety and their liberty, it stands to reason that they may depose it. They retain this right forever.