Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  II

  In the summer of 1776, when it occurred to the delegates assembled in Philadelphia that they needed a document to spell out the grounds of their dissatisfaction with Britain, the task was handed to Thomas Jefferson. To us, he seems the obvious choice. He was not.

  In 1776 Thomas Jefferson was a fairly obscure figure, even in his own Virginia. Aged just thirty-three, he was the second youngest of the delegates and one of the least experienced. The second Continental Congress was in fact his first exposure to a wider world of affairs beyond those of his native colony. He had not been selected to attend the first Continental Congress and should not have been at the second. He was called only as a late replacement for Peyton Randolph, who had been summoned home to Virginia. Jefferson’s reputation rested almost entirely on his Summary View of the Rights of British America written two years earlier. A rather aggressive and youthfully impudent essay advising the British on how they ought to conduct themselves in their principal overseas possession, it had gained him some attention as a writer. To his fellow Virginia delegates he was known as a dilettante (a word that did not yet have any pejorative overtones; taken from the Italian dilettare, it simply described one who found pleasure in the richness of human possibility) and admired for the breadth of his reading in an age when that truly meant something. (He was adept at seven languages.)

  By no means, however, did he have what we might call a national standing. Nor did he display any evidence of desiring one. He showed a distinct lack of keenness to get to Philadelphia, dawdling en route to shop for books and to buy a horse, and once there he said almost nothing. ‘During the whole time I sat with him I never heard him utter three sentences together,’ John Adams later marvelled. Moreover, he went home to Virginia in December 1775, in the midst of debates, and did not return for nearly five months. Had he been able, he would gladly have abandoned the Congress altogether, leaving the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to someone else in order to take part in drawing up a new constitution for Virginia, a matter much closer to his heart.27

  None the less, because he showed a ‘peculiar felicity for expression’, in John Adams’s words, he was one of five men chosen to draft the Declaration of Independence – John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston were the others – and this Committee of Five in turn selected him to come up with a working draft. The purpose, as Jefferson saw it, was ‘not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent’.28

  But of course the Declaration of Independence is much more than that. As Garry Wills has written, it stands as ‘perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great Iiterature’.29 Consider the opening sentence:

  When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

  In a single sentence, in clear, simple language that anyone can understand, Jefferson has not only encapsulated the philosophy of what is to follow, but set in motion a cadence that gradually becomes hypnotic. You can read the preamble to the Declaration of Independence for its rhythms alone. As Stephen E. Lucas notes, it captures in just 202 words ‘what it took John Locke thousands of words to explain in his Second Treatise of Government. In its ability to compress complex ideas into a brief, clear statement, the preamble is a paradigm of eighteenth century prose style.30

  What is less well known is that the words are not entirely Jefferson’s. George Mason’s recently published draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights provided what might most charitably be called liberal inspiration. Consider perhaps the most famous line in the Declaration:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

  Compare that with Mason’s Virginia Declaration:

  All men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which ... they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

  ‘Pursuit of happiness’ may be argued to be a succinct improvement over ‘pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety’, but even that compelling phrase wasn’t original with Jefferson. ‘Pursuit of happiness’ had been coined by John Locke almost a century before and had appeared frequently in political writings ever since.

  Nor are the words in that famous, inspiring sentence the ones that Jefferson penned. His original version shows considerably less grace and rather more verbosity:

  We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal and independant, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.31

  The sentence took on its final resonance only after it had been through the hands of the Committee of Five and then subjected to active debate in Congress itself. Congress did not hesitate to alter Jefferson’s painstakingly crafted words. Altogether it ordered forty changes to the original text. It deleted 630 words, about a quarter of the total, and added 146. As with most writers who have been subjected to the editing process, Jefferson thought the final text depressingly inferior to his original, and, like most writers, he was wrong. Indeed, seldom has a writer been better served. Congress had the wisdom to leave untouched those sections that were unimprovable – notably the opening paragraph – and excised much that was irrelevant or otiose.

  Though now one of the most famous passages in English political prose, the preamble attracted far less attention then than later. At the time the listing of grievances against the king, which takes up some 60 per cent of the entire text of the Declaration, was far more daring and arresting.

  The twenty-seven charges against the king were mostly – sometimes recklessly – overstated. Charge four, for instance, accused him of compelling colonial assemblies to meet in locales that were ‘unusual, uncomfortable and distant ... for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures’. In fact, in only three of the thirteen colonies were the assemblies ever compelled to move and in two of those it happened on only one occasion each. Only Massachusetts suffered it for an extended period and there the assembly was moved just four miles to Cambridge – hardly an odious imposition.

  Or consider charge ten: ‘He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.’ In fact, the swarms numbered no more than about fifty, and much of their activity, such as trying to stop smuggling (an activity which, incidentally, had helped to make John Hancock one of the richest men in New England), was legitimate by any standards.32

  In Britain, the Declaration was received by many as arrant hogwash. The Gentleman’s Magazine mocked the assertion that all men are created equal. ‘In what are they created equal?’ it asked. ‘Is it in size, strength, understanding, figure, moral or civil accomplishments, or situation of life? Every plough-man knows that they are not created equal in any of these. All men, it is true, are equally created, but what is this to the purpose? It certainly is no reason why the Americans should turn rebels.‘33 Though the writer of that passage appears to have had perhaps one glass of Madeira too many at lunch, there was something in his argument. No one in America truly believed that all men were created equal. Samuel Johnson touched on the incontestable hypocrisy of the American position
when he asked, ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?‘34

  Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration contains several spellings and usages that strike us today – and indeed appear to have struck at least some of his contemporaries – as irregular. For one thing, Jefferson always wrote it’s for the possessive form of it, a practice that looks decidedly illiterate today. In fact, there was some logic to it. As a possessive form, the argument went, its required an apostrophe in precisely the same way as did words like children’s or men’s. Others contended, however, that in certain common words like ours and yours it was customary to dispense with the apostrophe, and that its belonged in this camp. By about 1815, the non-apostrophists had their way almost everywhere, but in 1776 it was a fine point, and one to which Jefferson clearly did not subscribe.35

  Jefferson also favoured some unusual spellings, notably independant (which Thomas Paine likewise preferred), paiment and unacknoleged, all of which were subsequently changed in the published version to their more conventional forms. He veered with apparent indecisiveness between the two forms for the singular third person present indicative of have, sometimes using the literary hath (’experience hath shown’) and sometimes the more modern has (’He has kept among us ...’). Two further orthographic uncertainties of the age are reflected in Jefferson’s text – whether to write -or or -our in words like honour and whether to use -ise or -ize in words like naturalize. Jefferson was inconsistent on both counts.

  Much is sometimes made of the irregularity of spelling among writers of English in the eighteenth century. Noting that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations varied in its spellings between public and publick, complete and compleat, and independent and independant, David Simpson observes in The Politics of American English: ’Except for Samuel Johnson, no one in 1776, on either side of the ocean, seems to show much concern for a standard spelling practice.‘36

  This is almost certainly overstating matters. Although Thomas Jefferson did have some spelling quirks – among many others, he persistently addressed his letters to ‘Doctr. Franklyn’ when he must surely have realized that the good doctor spelled his name otherwise37 – to suggest that he or any other accomplished writer of his age was cavalier with his spelling does him an injustice. To begin with, such a statement contains the implied conceit that modern English is today somehow uniform in its spellings, which is far from true. In 1972, a scholar named Lee C. Deighton undertook the considerable task of comparing the spellings of every word in four leading American dictionaries and found that there are no fewer than 1,770 common words in modern English in which there is no general agreement on the preferred spelling. The Random House Dictionary, to take one example, gives innuendos as the preferred plural of innuendo, the American Heritage opts for innuendoes, Webster’s New World prefers innuendoes but recognizes innuendos, and Webster’s Seventh gives equal merit to both. The dictionaries are equally – we might fairly say hopelessly – split on whether to write discussible or discussable, eyeopener, eye opener or eye-opener, dumfound or dumbfound, gladiolus (for the plural), gladioli or gladioluses, gobbledegook or gobbledygook, licenceable or licensable, and many hundreds of others. (The champion of orthographic uncertainty appears to be panatela, which can also pass muster as panatella, panetela or panetella.) The principal difference between irregular spellings now and in Jefferson’s day is that in Jefferson’s day the number was very much larger – no less than you would expect in an age that was only just becoming acquainted with dictionaries. Just as we seldom note whether a particular writer uses big-hearted or bighearted, omelette or omelet, OK or okay, so I suspect Jefferson and Paine would think it singular that we had even noticed that they sometimes wrote honour and sometimes honor.

  That is not to say that spelling or any other issue of usage in this period was considered inconsequential. In fact, the opposite is true. The second Continental Congress contained within it many men – Jefferson, Adams, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, John Witherspoon (first president of Princeton University and the first authority on American English) – who constantly displayed a passionate interest in language and its consistent, careful application. They argued at length over whether the Declaration should use independent or independant, inalienable or unalienable, whether the principal nouns were to be capitalized as Franklin wished or presented lower case as Jefferson desired (and as was the rather racy new fashion among the younger set).*13 Anything to do with language exercised their interest greatly – we might almost say disproportionately. Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when the delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns – like how they were going to win the war and escape hanging – Congress quite extraordinarily found time to debate the business of a motto for the new nation. (Their choice, E Pluribus Unum, ’One From Many’, was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.) Four years later, while the war still raged, John Adams was urging Congress to establish an American Academy along the lines of the Académie française with the express purpose of establishing national standards of usage. To suggest that these men showed ‘not much concern’ for matters of usage and spelling is to misread them utterly.

  Where there was evident uncertainty was in what to call the new nation. The Declaration referred in a single sentence to ‘the united States of America’ and ‘these United Colonies’. The first adopted form of the Declaration was given the title ‘A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled’, though this was improved in the final published version to the rather more robust and assertive ‘The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America’. (It wasn’t in fact unanimous at all. At least a quarter of the delegates were against it, but voting was done by delegation rather than by individuals, and each delegation carried a majority in favour.) It was the first time the country – had been officially designated the United States of America, though in fact until 1778 the formal title was the United States of North America.39 Even after the Declaration, ‘united’ was often left lower case, as if to emphasize that it was merely descriptive, and the country was variously referred to throughout the war as ‘the colonies’, ‘the united Colonies’, the ‘United Colonies of America’ or ‘the United Colonies of North America’. (The last two are the forms under which officers were commissioned into the army.)

  That the signing of the Declaration of Independence is celebrated on 4 July is one of American history’s more singular mistakes. America did not declare independence on 4 July 1776. That had happened two days earlier, when the proposal was adopted. The proceedings on 4 July were a mere formality endorsing the form of words that were to be used to announce this breach. Most people had no doubt that 2 July was the day that would ring through the ages. ‘The second day of July, 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha in the History of America,’ John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail on 3 July. Still less was the Declaration signed on 4 July, except by the president of the proceedings, John Hancock, and the secretary, Charles Thomson.*14 It was not signed on 4 July because it had first to be transcribed on to parchment. The official signing didn’t begin until 2 August and wasn’t concluded until 1781 when Thomas McKean of Delaware, the last of the fifty-six signatories, finally put his name to it. Such was the fear of reprisal that the names of the signers were not released until January 1777, six months after the Declaration’s adoption.

  Equally mistaken is the idea that the adoption of the Declaration of Independence was announced to a breathless Philadelphia on 4 July by the ringing of the Liberty Bell. For one thing, the Declaration was not read out in Philadelphia until 8 July, and there is no record of any bells being rung. Indeed, though the Liberty Bell was there, it was not so called until 1847 when the whole inspiring episode was recounted in a book titled Washington and His Generals, written by one George Lippard, whose previous literary efforts had been confined almost
exclusively to producing mildly pornographic novels.41 He made the whole thing up.

  John Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer, hastily ran off an apparently unknown number of copies. (Until recently only twenty-four were thought to have survived – two in private hands and the rest lodged with institutions. But in 1992 a shopper at a flea market in Philadelphia found a copy folded into the back of a picture frame, apparently as padding. It was estimated to be worth up to $3 million.) Dunlap’s version was dated 4 July and it was this, evidently, that persuaded the nation to make that the day of revelry. The next year, at any rate, the great event was being celebrated on the fourth, and so it has stayed ever since. It was celebrated ‘with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other’, in John Adams’s words. The first anniversary saw the entrance of a new word into the language: fireworks. Fireworks themselves weren’t new, but previously they had been called rockets.

  America wasn’t yet a nation, but more a loose confederation of thirteen independent sovereignties – what the Articles of Confederation would later call ‘a firm league of friendship’. True nationhood would have to wait a further twelve perilous, unstable years for the adoption of the Constitution. Before we turn to that uneasy period, however, let us pause for a moment to consider the fate of poor Tom Paine, the man who set the whole process of revolution in motion.

  Despite the huge success of Common Sense, the publication brought him no official position. By the end of 1776, he was a common foot soldier. After the war, Paine travelled to France, where he performed a similar catalytic role in the revolution there with his pamphlet The Rights of Man before falling foul of the erratic Robespierre, who had him clapped into prison for daring to suggest a merciful exile for King Louis XVI (on the grounds that Louis had supported the American rebels). Unappreciated in France and a pariah in his own country, he returned to America and sank almost at once into dereliction and obscurity.