He stayed in England, where he died in 1803 at the age of seventy-two or seventy-three—but not before he fought another quarrel, and wrote another pamphlet, because the Loyalist Claims Commission was suspicious of his true sentiments, and only would grant him a much smaller award than the £40,000 claim he submitted for the loss of his properties in America.
Incidentally, the Patriots who formed the new America saw fit to restore much of Galloway’s confiscated property to his daughter.
Jefferson Writhed
THE DOCUMENT CLEARED COMMITTEE WITH NO CHANGES. JOHN ADAMS AND Ben Franklin had already made their suggestions for changes in the draft.
Otherwise, the draft that Thomas Jefferson labored over was intact and still included his passionate antislavery clause when it went before the Continental Congress on June 28, 1776.
Nowadays, the attention is more on the signing and less on how it all came about. Little noted is how Jefferson, at thirty-three one of the youngest and most silent delegates to Congress, came to be on the Committee of Five; how he, instead of the better-known Adams or Franklin, came to be the author; how Congress, in two and a half days of often acrimonious debate, cut and added to the famous document, while Jefferson sat by “writhing” at what he later called “the depredations” and “mutilations” his fellow Patriots wrought.
Today, the Declaration of Independence stands as the nation’s lofty covenant, as one of humankind’s greatest statements, with Jefferson its renowned author. But the details of how this came to pass are less clear—the chain of events, the near chance that placed the pen in Jefferson’s hand and the textual changes ordered by Congress. Less clear, too, are the discrepancies, ironies, and small mysteries that still cloud our knowledge of the document’s adoption in the Pennsylvania colony’s statehouse—known as Independence Hall—at Philadelphia in 1776.
Of course, the colonial delegates had gathered there in response to the revolutionary movement that culminated in armed battle between British troops and American colonists the year before. By 1776, the momentum of events was leading inexorably toward independence, but not without reluctance, and even opposition, by some of the Patriot leaders.
In quick order, Virginia in May of 1776 adopted and sent the Continental Congress a resolution of independence—a simple but drastic statement “dissolving” the colonial ties to England. Virginia’s aristocratic Richard Henry Lee, widely considered second only to Patrick Henry as an impassioned orator, presented it to the Philadelphia gathering on June 7. After two days of debate, however, the leaders of the independence movement at Philadelphia postponed a vote on the measure. Support from some of the colonies still was too soft for a unanimous vote. The same Continental Congress, after all, only the year before had reaffirmed colonial allegiance to the British Crown.
However, Congress agreed to appoint three committees with tasks based on the premise that the proposed break with England would be adopted. One committee was assigned to draw up articles of confederation, the first step toward a U.S. Constitution. Another began consideration of foreign alliances and treaties. The third committee was charged with drafting a declaration explaining and justifying the independence resolution.
That resolution did come before the entire Congress in time, was debated hotly, and was adopted on July 2, a profound step that initially led some of those present, notably John Adams, to consider that date as America’s Independence Day.
Yet, there also was the matter of the statement to the world, the indictments to present against King George III, grave commitments to be made toward a new course of government, to human equality and liberty—the draft entrusted to the third committee.
Enter Jefferson, who came to that committee by a combination of what might be called destiny and chance. Here he was, fair, sandy-haired, a product of the Virginia Colony’s free-spirited frontier, yet a member of the landed gentry, a gentleman and a scholar imbued with the ideals and scientific logic of the Enlightenment. You could also call him a New World Leonardo da Vinci, already engaged in his lifelong project of building and rebuilding the home known as Monticello at Charlottesville.
A slave-owner, paradoxically enough, he had been a member of Virginia’s rebellious House of Burgesses since 1769 and was associated with that body’s most radical, liberty-loving group.
Unlike his Virginia colleagues Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, however, Jefferson never was a speaker. John Adams later said, “During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.”
But Adams also noted that Jefferson joined the colonial gatherings at Philadelphia in 1775 and 1776 with a reputation for a “peculiar felicity of expression.”
One reason for that reputation was Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British America written in 1774, a 6,500-word treatise in which he strongly asserted colonial America’s right to self-government and disputed Parliament’s legislative authority over the colonies…but did not go so far as to challenge British sovereignty.
If, as most historians agree, the revolutionary leaders wanted a Virginian at the forefront just now, Lee, after all, was the ranking member of the Virginia delegation to the Congress. But he wasn’t entirely popular, and there was the possibility he would be returning to Virginia because of a family illness.
Here is what Adams recalled of Jefferson’s selection: “Mr. Richard Henry Lee was not beloved by the most of his colleagues from Virginia, and Mr. Jefferson was set up to rival and supplant him. This could be done only by the pen, for Mr. Jefferson could stand no competition with him [Lee] or anyone else in elocution and public debate.”
It also happened that the influential Adams liked Jefferson personally. To wit: “Though a silent member in Congress, he was so prompt, frank, explicit and decisive upon committees and in conversation, not even Sam Adams was more so, that he soon seized upon my heart, and upon this occasion I gave him my vote and did all in my power to procure the votes of others. I think he had one more vote than any other, and that placed him at the head of the committee. I had the next highest number and that placed me second.”
Now, with the committee’s membership established, came the question of drafting. In his own autobiography, Jefferson gives a simple account of his selection for that task. “The committee for drawing a Declaration of Independence desired me to do it. It was accordingly done, and being approved by them, I reported it to the House on Friday the 28th of June, when it was read, and ordered to lie on the table.”
Adams, however, presents a more complex view in dialogue form. “Jefferson proposed to me to make the draught. I said I will not; you shall do it. Oh No! Why will you not? You ought to do it. I will not. Why? Reasons enough. What can be your reasons? Reason first. You are a Virginian and Virginia ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second. I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third. You can write ten times better than I can. ‘Well,’ said Jefferson, ‘if you are decided I will do as well as I can.’”
By most accounts, Jefferson wrote in the evenings at his lodgings in the home of Philadelphia bricklayer Jacob Graff, a brick home reconstructed in recent years by the National Park Service as a historic site. He wrote his draft, or drafts, there—no one today is sure how many there were—in the second-floor parlor. He wrote on a portable writing desk of his own design.
In all, seventeen days passed from the start of his assignment to the draft’s submission to Congress. Again, we don’t know how long it took Jefferson to produce his first version, but Adams once said it was done in only two days.
Jefferson then apparently took it to Adams and Franklin for their suggestions. He recalled their “alterations” as two or three only, and “merely verbal.” But historians examining the notes and papers of all three historic figures, as well as the rough draft now housed in the Library of Congress, say Adams made two changes and Franklin five.
At some point before Jefferson presented his text to the
full committee, also including Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York, his phrase “sacred & undeniable” in the second paragraph was improved to read “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The change on the rough draft appears to be in Franklin’s handwriting. In any case, debate on the declaration awaited disposition of Virginia’s resolution of independence. That proposal had been introduced on June 7, was debated June 8 to June 10, then held over until the first days of July.
Jefferson explained: “It appearing in the course of these debates, that the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and South Carolina were not yet matured for falling from the parent stem, but that they were fast advancing to that state, it was thought prudent to wait a while for them.”
A united decision for independence had been shrouded in doubt from the outset.
“Majorities were constantly against it,” Adams later wrote. But the momentum was building.
In one major development often cited by Adams, Joseph Hewes of North Carolina, an influential opponent of the proposed breach with England, suddenly and dramatically was converted to the cause by evidence of popular opinion among his own constituents. Adams tells the dramatic tale: “Mr. Hewes, who had hitherto constantly voted against it, started suddenly upright, and lifting up both hands to Heaven, as if he had been in a trance, cried out ‘It is done! and I will abide by it.’”
In the end, twelve of the thirteen colonial delegations voted for Virginia’s severance measure on July 2. The thirteenth, New York, abstained, because its delegation lacked recent instructions from home, but later did join in the action.
And now, finally, on the same day, the colonists took up Jefferson’s declaration in a debate that would last two and a half days, until the evening of July 4. By his own admission, Jefferson “writhed” under the criticism and the debate over one change or another. But he sat quietly, and contented himself by taking notes.
During the same period, he bought his wife seven pairs of gloves and, on July 4 itself, took the temperature of Philadelphia with a new thermometer. Carefully noted, his findings were: “A low 68 degrees at 6 A.M. to a high of 76 at 1 P.M.,” a cool day for early July.
Meanwhile, blunt John Adams carried the defense for the 1,800-word original text on the floor—“fighting fearlessly for every word,” as Jefferson gratefully acknowledged later.
While debate still raged, Ben Franklin allegedly told the suffering author a story about a hatmaker who asked his friends to edit a sign announcing his hattery. By the time they finished expunging one word after another as superfluous, only the hatter’s name and the picture of a hat were left.
An amusing story, but probably of little comfort to Jefferson, whose text suffered some 80 changes and lost 460 words from his start to the finish by Congress. In the opinion of most scholars, however, Congress largely improved Jefferson’s great document.
Still controversial in that respect, of course, is the most famous deletion of all, Jefferson’s impassioned, somewhat wordy clause that accused George III of waging “cruel war against human nature itself” by sanctioning the slave trade. The problem was with the colonial role in the same trade and enslavement of human beings. Many of the delegates felt that such a hypocritical posture would undermine the remainder of the document. Others simply were unwilling to indict slavery itself.
As Jefferson said in his autobiography: “The clause…reprobating the enslaving [of] the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
There were other changes, too. Congress added the text of its July 2 resolution of independence to Jefferson’s prose. In deference to American Scotsmen, it struck a reference to Scottish mercenaries, and it toned down censures of the British people and Parliament.
Most of the revisions were matters of style or wording, however. The delegates hardly touched Jefferson’s opening two paragraphs, the historic words that established the elevated tone of the entire document. They left the rhythmic drumbeat of his indictments against King George III largely intact. They apparently dared not alter his ringing close: “…we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
Despite all the changes, said Jeffersonian scholar Merrill Peterson, “in no way had Congress diminished Jefferson’s authorship of it.”
So it was, late on July 4, 1776, that bells rang out—Congress had adopted a most startling and historic document, then styled, “a Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in general Congress assembled.”
While Jefferson subsequently said a draft was signed by all present, modern historians say his memory on that point was faulty. Later, the declaration, with its title somewhat amended, would be engrossed in official parchment form for the historic signatures we know today. The Declaration of Independence!
But first, on July 4, John Hancock, as president of Congress, placed his you-know-what on the adopted draft. And that very night, it went to the printer.
Time Out for Another War
SOUTH CAROLINA GAZETTE, JULY 1776: “WE HAVE CERTAIN ACCOUNTS of the Cherokees having killed several white people, and taken some prisoners…” So began another war within the war, this one against the Cherokee Nation and certain British instigators.
From the South Tyger River, at a spot near today’s boundary between Spartanburg and Greenville Counties, came word, all too typical, of the Hampton family massacre—husband, wife, son, and infant grandson all killed on their farm, their house burned down, too. Away at the time was Revolutionary War hero Wade Hampton I, whose grandson by the same name would be a stellar Confederate general in another American war.
Wade I thus survived, but all up and down the backcountry of the Carolinas, even along the Georgia and Virginia frontier-lands, the Cherokees were on the warpath the summer of 1776. Resentful of aggressive white settlement of the country they once roamed at will, the Indians were easily persuaded by the British to strike out at the “Up Country” settlers. While small bands might attack a single farm home, larger groups picked bigger targets. In one such case, two hundred warpainted warriors mounted an assault upon Patriot Fort Lyndley in today’s Laurens County…and half or more of the “Indians” turned out to be white Loyalists posing as Cherokee braves.
In other areas, however, white Loyalists volunteered to serve with their Patriot brothers in a common war against the Indian predators. Settlers of all political persuasions had good reason to fear for their future safety. In South Carolina, reported Nat and Sam Hilborn in their book Battleground of Freedom: South Carolina in the Revolution, many abandoned their hard-won homesteads to take refuge in old stockade forts. “Plantations lie desolate, and hopeful crops are going to ruin,” said one South Carolina settler. Further, “…unless we get some relief, famine will overspread our beautiful country.”
Well, relief soon was on the way. By the end of July, South Carolina militia Major Andrew Williamson had gathered a force 1,200 strong to march against the Cherokees…but he then, with 350 men at his side, marched into an Indian ambush at Essenecca, or Old Seneca Town, close to the only fordable point on the Keowee River (now, at that location, the Seneca). His men scattered in confusion when the gunfire erupted in the dark. Williamson’s horse went down and so did the major’s compatriot alongside, Francis Salvador. Shot in the body and leg, Salvador fell among some bushes, out of sight from his fellow South Carolinians—but not from the Indians, who found and scalped him on the spot.
A friend had seen a human figure bending over the spot where Salvador disappeared in the dark and thought it was someone helping him. More likely, he later realized, it was an Indian scalping the wounded man.
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Largely hidden behind a fence and in nearby houses, the large party of Indians had every advantage in the nighttime fight…until one officer, Lieutenant Colonel LeRoy Hammond, “saved the day by rallying a party of about twenty men who marched right up to the fence where the heaviest fire originated,” reported the Hilborn book. “Shooting directly through the fence, Hammond’s men then leaped over and charged the enemy. The Indians were so surprised at this unexpected attack that they immediately turned and fled through the darkness for the safety of the deep forests.”
The ambush at Seneca Old Town (today the home of Clemson University) was only a temporary setback for the aroused colonists. First destroying that Indian town, Williamson and his militiamen in the next few weeks swept “relentlessly…through the mountain valleys, destroying all the Lower Towns of the Cherokee Nation that lay in their path.” The settlers offered little mercy. “Their savagery matched that of the Indians as they burned, plundered, slaughtered, and destroyed.”
By now, militiamen from Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina also had joined the fight against the Cherokees. Returning from his first Cherokee foray, east of the Blue Ridge, Williamson soon amassed a force of two thousand for a late summer drive against Cherokee villages throughout the southern Appalachians, “butchering the animals and destroying the crops of the shattered Cherokee Nation.” Finally, the Cherokees gave in and agreed to peace talks—which led in 1777 to a treaty by which the defeated Indians ceded immense chunks of their land and could “inhabit only a very small corner of the state.”
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Additional notes: Two and three years later, Patriot forces in the North also turned to war against Native Americans after intolerable deprivations along the frontier, a result of British encouragement that could be traced across the Atlantic to Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for American affairs in London. Blame lay also with his Loyalist allies, as noted by Willard M. Wallace in his 1951 book Appeal to Arms: A Military History of the American Revolution.Said Wallace:
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 18