These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  Much the same language found its way into resolutions passed by specially established colonial conventions, held so that the colonies, untethered from Britain, could establish new forms of government. “All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity,” read the Virginia Declaration of Rights and Form of Government, drafted in May 1776 by brazen George Mason. “All power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people.” James Madison, half Mason’s age, had been elected to the convention from Orange County. He proposed a revision to Mason’s Declaration. Where Mason had written that “all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion,” Madison rewrote that clause to instead guarantee that “all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it.” The proposed change was adopted, and Madison became the author of the first-ever constitutional guarantee of religious liberty, not as something to be tolerated, but as a fundamental right.75

  Inevitably, slavery cast its long and terrible shadow over these statements of principle: slavery, in fact, had made those statements of principle possible. Mason’s original draft hadn’t included the clause about rights being acquired by men “when they enter into a state of society”; these words were added after members of the convention worried that the original would “have the effect of abolishing” slavery.76 If all men belonging to civil society are free and equal, how can slavery be possible? It must be, Virginia’s convention answered, that Africans do not belong to civil society, having never left a state of nature.

  Within eighteenth-century political thought, women, too, existed outside the contract by which civil society was formed. From Massachusetts, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, in March of 1776, wondering whether that might be remedied. “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors,” she began, alluding to the long train of abuses of men over women. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,” she told him. She spoke of tyranny: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” And she challenged him to follow the logic of the principle of representation: “If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

  Her husband would have none of it. “As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh,” he replied. “We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters. . . . Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”77 That women were left out of the nation’s founding documents, and out of its founders’ idea of civil society, considered, like slaves, to be confined to a state of nature, would trouble the political order for centuries.

  AT THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS, in June, Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson drafted the Articles of Confederation. “The Name of this Confederacy shall be ‘The United States of America,’” he wrote, possibly using that phrase for the first time. It may be that Dickinson found the phrase “the united states” in a book of treaties used by Congress; it included a treaty from 1667 that referred to a confederation of independent Dutch states as the “the united states of the Low Countries.” In Dickinson’s draft, the colonies—now states—were to form a league of friendship “for their Common Defence, the Security of their Liberties, and their mutual & general Wellfare.” The first draft brought before Congress called for each state’s contribution to the costs of war, and of the government, to be proportionate to population, and therefore called for a census to be taken every three years. It would take many revisions and a year and a half of debate before Congress could agree on a final version. That final document stripped from Dickinson’s original most of the powers his version had granted to Congress; the final Articles of Confederation are more like a peace treaty, establishing a defensive alliance among sovereign states, than a constitution, establishing a system of government. Much was makeshift. The provision for a census of all the states together, for instance, was struck in favor of an arrangement by which a common treasury was to be supplied “in proportion to the value of all land within each state,” and since, in truth, no one knew that value, what the states contributed would be left for the states to decide.78

  Nevertheless, these newly united states edged toward independence. On June 7, 1776, fiery Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduced a resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” A vote on the resolution was postponed, but Congress appointed a Committee of Five to draft a declaration: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, New York delegate Robert R. Livingston, and Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman. Jefferson agreed to prepare a first draft.

  The Declaration of Independence was not a declaration of war; the war had begun more than a year before. It was an act of state, meant to have force within the law of nations. The Declaration explained what the colonists were fighting for; it was an attempt to establish that the cause of the revolution was that the king had placed his people under arbitrary power, reducing them to a state of slavery: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” Many readers found these words unpersuasive. In 1776, the English philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham called the theory of government that informed the Declaration of Independence “absurd and visionary.” Its self-evident truths he deemed neither self-evident nor true. He considered them, instead, “subversive of every actual or imaginable kind of Government.”79

  But what Bentham found absurd and visionary represented the summation of centuries of political thought and political experimentation. “There is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before,” Adams later wrote, jealous of the acclaim that went to Jefferson. Jefferson admitted as much, pointing out that novelty had formed no part of his assignment. Of the Declaration, he declared, “Neither aiming at originality of principles or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind.”80 But its ideas, those expressions of the American mind, were older still.

  “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable,” Jefferson began, “that all men are created equal & independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government.” He’d borrowed from, and vastly improved upon, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason. Having established that a right of revolution exists if certain conditions are met, it remained to establish that those conditions obtained. The bulk of Jefferson’s draft was a list of grievances, of charges against the king, calling him to account “for imposing taxes on us without our consent,” for dissolving the colonists’ assemblies, for keeping a standing army, “for depriving us of trial by jury,” rights established as far back as Magna Carta. Then, in the longest statement in the draft, Jefferson blamed George III for African slavery, charging the king with waging “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery,” preventing the colonies from outlawing the slave trade and, “that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in
arms among us.” This passage Congress struck, unwilling to conjure this assemblage of horrors in the nation’s founding document.

  The Declaration that Congress did adopt was a stunning rhetorical feat, an act of extraordinary political courage. It also marked a colossal failure of political will, in holding back the tide of opposition to slavery by ignoring it, for the sake of a union that, in the end, could not and would not last.

  In July, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud from town houses and street corners. Crowds cheered. Cannons were fired. Church bells rang. Statues of the king were pulled down and melted for bullets. Weeks later, when a massive slave rebellion broke out in Jamaica, slave owners blamed the Americans for inciting it. In Pennsylvania, a wealthy merchant, passionately stirred by the spirit of the times, not only freed his slaves but vowed to spend the rest of his life tracking down those he had previously owned and sold, and their children, and buying their freedom. And in August 1776, one month after delegates to the Continental Congress determined that in the course of human events it sometimes becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another, Harry Washington declared his own independence by running away from Mount Vernon to fight with Dunmore’s regiment, wearing a white sash stitched with the motto “Liberty to Slaves.”81

  III.

  DURING THE WAR, nearly one in five slaves in the United States left their homes, fleeing American slavery in search of British liberty. One American refugee renamed himself “British Freedom.” New lyrics to “Yankee Doodle,” rewritten as “The Negroes Farewell to America,” were composed in London. In the new version, fugitive slaves leave the United States “for old Englan’ where Liberty reigns / Where Negroe no beaten or loaded with chains.”82

  Not many succeeded in reaching the land where liberty reigned, or even in getting behind British battle lines. Instead, they were caught and punished. One slave owner who captured a fifteen-year-old girl who was heading for Dunmore’s regiment punished her with eighty lashes and then poured hot embers into the gashes.83 However desperate and improbable a flight, it must have seemed a good bet; the shrewdest observers expected Britain to win the war, not least because the British began with 32,000 troops, disciplined and experienced, compared to Washington’s 19,000, motley and unruly. An American victory appeared an absurdity. But the British regulars, far from home, suffered from a lack of supplies, and while William Howe, commander in chief of British forces, set his sights first on New York and next on Philadelphia, he found that his victories yielded him little. Unlike European nations, the United States had no established capital city whose capture would have led to an American surrender. More importantly, time and again, Howe failed to press for a final, decisive defeat of the Americans, fearing the losses his own troops would sustain and the danger of heavy casualties when reinforcements were at such a distance.

  Then, too, Britain’s forces were spread thin, across the globe, waging the war on many fronts. For the British, the American Revolution formed merely one front in a much larger war, a war for empire, a world war. Like the French and Indian War, that war was chiefly fought in North America, but it spilled out elsewhere, too, to West Africa, South Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Caribbean. In 1777, Howe captured Philadelphia while, to the north, the British commander John Burgoyne suffered a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Saratoga. This American victory helped John Jay, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, serving as diplomats in France, to secure a vital treaty: in 1778, France entered the conflict as an ally of the United States, at which point Lord North, keen to protect Britain’s much richer colonies in the Caribbean from French attack, considered simply abandoning the American theater. Spain joined the French-American alliance in 1779. Germany entered the conflict by supplying paid soldiers called, by Americans, Hessians. And, partly because the Dutch had been supplying arms and ammunition to the Americans, Britain declared war on Holland in 1780. The involvement of France brought the fighting to the wealthy West Indies, where, beginning in 1778, the French captured the British colonies of Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, Montserrat, Tobago, St. Kitts, and Turks and Caicos. The cessation of trade between the mainland and the British Caribbean exacted another kind of toll on Britain’s profitable sugar colonies: Africans starved to death. On Antigua alone, a fifth of the slave population died during the war.84

  This political cartoon, published in London, shows “Britain,” on one side of the scale, warning, “No one injures me with impunity,” while, on the other side, “America,” trampled by her allies (Spain, France, and the Netherlands), cries, “My Ingratitude is Justly punished.” To Americans, the Revolutionary War was not a world war but a civil war, between those who favored independence and the many who did not. John Adams, offhand, guessed that one in three colonists remained loyal to the Crown and another third hadn’t quite decided, but Adams’s guess did not begin to include the still greater numbers of Loyalists whom the British counted among their allies: the entire population of American slaves and nearly all Native American peoples. One reason the British continually failed to press their advantage was that they kept trying to change the field of fighting to a part of the colonies where they expected to find more Loyalist support, not only among the merchants and lawyers and farmers who remained loyal to the Crown but among their African and Indian allies. The battle, Howe’s successor, Henry Clinton, believed, was “to gain the hearts & subdue the minds of America.”85 That strategy failed. And when that strategy failed, Britain didn’t so much lose America as abandon it.

  At first, the Crown courted compliance. In 1778, the king sent commissioners authorized to offer to repeal all acts of Parliament that had been opposed by the colonies since 1763, but when Congress demanded that the king recognize American independence, the commissioners refused. At this point, although Clinton held New York City and fighting continued to the west, the theater of war moved to the South: British ministers decided to make a priority of saving the wealthy sugar islands, to give up on the northern and middle mainland colonies, and to try to keep the southern colonies in order to restore the supply of food to the West Indies. Clinton captured Savannah, Georgia, in December 1778 and set his sights on Charleston, South Carolina, the largest city in the South. In Congress, this led to a debate about arming slaves. In May 1779, Congress proposed to enlist three thousand slaves in South Carolina and Georgia and to pay them with their freedom. “Your Negro Battallion will never do,” warned John Adams. “S. Carolina would run out of their Wits at the least Hint of such a Measure.”86 He was entirely correct. The South Carolina legislature rejected the proposal, declaring, “We are much disgusted.”87 Clinton captured Charleston in May of 1780.

  Benjamin West, American-born History Painter to the King, began a painting of the British and American peace commissioners—including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay—but never finished the canvas. In 1781, in hopes of taking the Chesapeake, the British general Lord Cornwallis fortified Yorktown, Virginia, as a naval base. His troops were soon besieged and bombarded by a combination of French and American forces. The French were led by the dazzling Marquis de Lafayette, whose service to the Continental army and impassioned advocacy of the American cause had included lobbying for French support. Cornwallis was vulnerable because British naval forces were occupied in the Caribbean. He surrendered on October 19, not realizing that British forces were that very day sailing from New York to aid him. Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown ended the fighting in North America, but it didn’t end the war. The real end, for Great Britain, came in 1782, in the West Indies, at the Battle of the Saintes, when the British defeated a French and Spanish invasion of Jamaica, an outcome that testified not to the empire’s weaknesses but to its priorities. Britain kept the Caribbean but gave up America.

  Not surprisingly, the terms of the peace proved as messy and sprawling as the war. Loyalists confronted the same decision as the empire itself: whether to give up on America. “To go or not to—is that the
question?” one bit of Shakespearean doggerel went. “Whether ’tis best to trust the inclement sky . . . or stay among the Rebels! / And, by our stay rouse up their keenest rage.” Most, not near so indecisive as Hamlet, left if they could: 75,000, about one in every forty people in the United States, evacuated with the British. They went to Britain and Canada, to the West Indies and India: they helped build the British Empire. “No News here but that of Evacuation,” one patriot wrote from New York. “Some look smiling, others melancholy, a third Class mad.” None were more desperate to escape the United States than the 15,000–20,000 ex-slaves who were part of that exodus, the largest emancipation in American history before Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.88 In July of 1783, Harry Washington, who’d left Mount Vernon years before to join Dunmore’s regiment, managed to reach New York City, where he boarded the British ship L’Abondance, bound for Nova Scotia. A clerk noted his departure in a ledger called the “Book of Negroes,” listing the 2,775 runaway black men, women, and children who evacuated from the city with the British that summer: “Harry Washington, 43, fine fellow. Formerly the property of General Washington; left him 7 years ago.”89