Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

by Richard R. Beeman

  The Rule of Secrecy

  The delegates adopted several other rules governing the way they would conduct their business that day, apparently without the controversy accompanying the question of voting. Although they may not have been aware of it at the time, most of their respective legislatures operated under the same basic rules of parliamentary procedure, so agreement on procedures—the method for appointing committees and rules governing debate—in the Congress came rather naturally. And that ready agreement extended to one decision in particular that seems out-of-place to modern observers. The delegates unanimously agreed that “the doors be kept shut during the time of business, and that the members consider themselves under the strongest obligation of honour to keep the proceedings secret, until the Majority shall direct them to be made public.”32

  In enjoining the delegates to secrecy, the Congress was, on the one hand, following a tradition that was commonplace in most of the colonies’ provincial houses of assembly. With only a few exceptions, America’s colonial legislatures did not provide visitors’ galleries and took steps to see to it that the legislators’ speeches on the floor of the assemblies were not transcribed or reported in the newspapers. While colonial legislators recognized their obligation as representatives of the people who elected them, in most colonies that responsibility extended only to publishing the final results of their deliberations—as embodied in the formal record of the laws or resolutions passed by that body—and not to the actual substance or tenor of debate.

  The meeting of the First Continental Congress differed, however, from meetings of colonial legislatures in at least two important ways. On the one hand, the delegates may have had an even greater reason to enforce secrecy in their proceedings; they were meeting in the midst of a genuine political crisis with imperial authority, and there was a real danger that royal officials in London, should they get wind of speech-making that they considered treasonous, might take punitive action against the offending speakers. Although the delegates no doubt would have insisted that they did not come to Philadelphia to advocate treason, there was every reason to believe that at least some royal officials in London would regard their actions in exactly that light. It was preferable, therefore, that the congressional delegates be free to speak without having to worry about being overheard by suspicious royal officials or royal sympathizers.

  On the other hand, the First Continental Congress was, perhaps more than any deliberative body in America that had preceded it, a response to a popular and not an elite movement. In most of the colonies, the direction of events was being determined by meetings “out of doors,” by committees of correspondence and spontaneously called town and county meetings, not by the formal deliberations of political elites within colonial legislatures. Indeed, in many of the American colonies the provincial legislatures were essentially defunct, having been dissolved by their royal governors. Insofar as America’s politicians claimed they were leading a people’s movement, one might think that the delegates would have at least considered opening their deliberations to the public. They did take the step of stipulating that the formal actions of the Congress—which would later appear in a series of resolutions and formal addresses aimed at a wide variety of constituencies ranging from the people of America to King George III—would be published and disseminated. But for the next seven weeks the discussions in the Congress would be shielded from the glare of public scrutiny.

  Shielded from public scrutiny perhaps, but not hidden altogether. Thirteen years later, during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the delegates adopted a similar rule, and scrupulously adhered to it—so much so that barely a word of their proceedings leaked out during that summer and, indeed, for many decades thereafter. But not all of the delegates to the First Continental Congress felt a similar “obligation of honour” on the matter of secrecy. During the proceedings from September 5 to October 26, many delegates wrote letters to friends and family reporting on what was happening inside Carpenters’ Hall, but none more so, nor more volubly, than John Adams, who emitted a steady flow of information—passionate, opinionated and often fiercely partisan—in his letters back home. Indeed, some of Adams’s reputation as the “Atlas of Independence” owes to his many indiscretions in reporting the events of the Congress, reporting that nearly always placed the Braintree lawyer at the center of the action. Historians writing about the events of the Continental Congress leading to independence have found in Adams a rich source for their accounts of the proceedings. But however much we might admire his passion and commitment to the cause of independence, his large, but delicate ego often led him into reportage that was anything but objective and dispassionate.

  But now, on the afternoon of September 6, having chosen the venue for their meetings, selected their officers and agreed on the rules that would govern their proceedings, the delegates were finally ready to confront the substance of the urgent business that had brought them together. The real work of the Congress was about to begin.

  SIX

  “FIGHT AGAINST THEM THAT FIGHT AGAINST ME”

  AT ABOUT TWO O’CLOCK on the afternoon of September 6, as the delegates were completing their work on the rules governing their deliberations, a horse galloped up to the door of Carpenters’ Hall. The express rider, who had begun his ride in New Jersey, was completing the last leg of a relay that had originated in Boston seventy hours earlier. Pushing his way into the East Room, he raced up to the members of the New Jersey delegation and delivered the news that Boston was under a state of siege. British soldiers had seized colonial gunpowder in one of the towns near Boston, and, in response, a party of Bostonians had gone after them. Six of the townspeople had been killed in the skirmish, after which all of Massachusetts and much of Connecticut had taken up arms. Faced with this uprising, the British, according to the report of the express rider, had bombarded the city of Boston all night long. Shocked, the delegates adjourned, scattering throughout the city in the hope that they could learn more. They would reconvene at five in the afternoon to decide how to respond to this alarming threat.1

  The news spread quickly. Within a few hours church bells were tolling throughout the city, their clappers muffled in a ritual mourning of calamity and crisis. At five, the delegates returned to Carpenters’ Hall, and Thomas Cushing of Massachusetts, no doubt hoping to emphasize the gravity of Boston’s situation, proposed that the Congress begin its meeting the next morning with a prayer. A few in the Congress—notably, more conservative members such as John Jay and Edward Rutledge, who may have wished to avoid overreacting to the news—objected, suggesting that it was improper to have members of the different religious groups attending the Congress join together in common worship. Sam Adams brushed aside these objections, saying that “he was no bigot, and could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country.” Adams suggested that the Reverend Mr. Jacob Duche, an Anglican minister from Philadelphia, be asked to lead them in prayer, a suggestion readily agreed to. With nothing left to do but wait for further news, they adjourned until the following morning, although we can be sure that their conversations over drink and dinner at the City Tavern were filled with anxious speculation.2

  The next morning, anxiety about a possible British invasion of Boston soared even higher when another express rider arrived from New York confirming, and most likely exaggerating, the report of the previous afternoon. According to Connecticut delegate Silas Deane, as the delegates began their session, there was an atmosphere of universal indignation, with “every Tongue pronounc[ing] Revenge.” It was in that atmosphere that the Reverend Duche appeared before the solemn group of delegates. He opened his sermon with a reading of the thirty-fifth psalm, which exhorted the followers of the Lord to “fight against them that fight against me” and “Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help. Draw out also the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me.”

  The Reverend Duche followed the reading of scrip
ture with a fiery extemporaneous prayer, resembling more an exhortation from a radical Baptist or New Light Congregationalist than the more sedate rituals associated with the Church of England. John Adams judged it to be as “pertinent, as affectionate, as sublime, as devout, as I have ever heard offered up to Heaven,” and Silas Deane, less given to hyperbole than Adams, recalled that it was a prayer “worth riding one hundred miles to hear.”3

  Joseph Reed, a Pennsylvania delegate who sympathized with the New Englanders’ radical agenda, would later note the strategic genius of Sam Adams’s decision to have Duche give the opening prayer; it was nothing less than “a masterly stroke of policy.” In this one symbolic act, Adams made the point that the wild-eyed, puritanical New England fanatics were a good deal more open-minded than many had made them out to be. Moreover, Sam Adams had made a shrewd assessment of local Pennsylvania politics; he knew that the most likely opposition to bold measures in the Congress would come from Pennsylvania Quakers, whereas members of the Church of England, he noted, were among “our warmest friends.” Perhaps more important, Duche’s sermon, though it was not linked to any of the formal business of the Congress, had an emotional impact that intensified the urgency with which the delegates began their discussion of the issues confronting them.4

  For the next two days, the city and the delegates remained in a panic. John Adams wrote to Abigail that all of the delegates in the Congress regarded “the Bombardment of Boston, as the Bombardment of the capital of his own Province.” “War! War! War! was the cry . . . and it was pronounced in a Tone which could have done honor to the oratory of a Briton or a Roman.” Although the delegates moved forward with their formal business during the days of September 7 and 8, their thoughts—and fears—were focused 300 miles to the north, on a city under siege. Boston, which had been an object of suspicion among many of the delegates, had, at least for a moment, become an object of sympathy, and more important, a source of unity.5

  A few days later, on September 9, the delegates discovered that the earlier reports of a British siege of Boston had been vastly overblown. There had been no gunfire, no bombardment by British naval ships, no killing of Boston residents. British troops, under orders from the Massachusetts Governor, General Thomas Gage, had seized gunpowder from a storehouse in Cambridge and militiamen from Massachusetts and Connecticut had mobilized for a possible confrontation, but no such confrontation occurred. There is no direct evidence that the Bostonians had manufactured the crisis, and, unfortunately, the initial report, which was said to have come from Israel Putnam, a colonel in the Connecticut militia who was in Boston at the time, has not survived. It is perhaps noteworthy that Putnam was one of New England’s most energetic political activists, and a strong ally of Sam Adams. Throughout the meeting of the First Continental Congress, Sam Adams seemed always to have a series of couriers prepared to ride to Philadelphia on a moment’s notice to apprise the Congress of any new developments in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the exaggerated reports emanating from Boston in the so-called Powder Alarm may have been part of his modus operandi, hoping to stir up the Congress and strengthen their resolve. If that was the case, it appeared to succeed, for, at least for those few days, the members of Congress were profoundly affected by the incident.6

  Not everyone was caught up in the moment. Joseph Galloway, for one, believed that the Powder Alarm had been deliberately manufactured by Sam Adams and his radical faction to “incite the ignorant and vulgar to arms.” He was convinced that Adams’s use of “continual expresses” between Boston and Philadelphia was part of his plan—really, more of a plot—to incite the otherwise moderate citizens of Philadelphia into “violent opposition” to British rule.7

  Yet in the wake of the Reverend Mr. Duche’s powerful prayer on September 7, the Congress turned to the main business at hand. President Peyton Randolph had moved to appoint two vitally important committees. The first, which would come to be known as the Grand Committee, would draft a statement cataloguing the fundamental rights and liberties of the colonies, listing the instances of British violations of those rights and liberties and, most important, recommending the most appropriate means of obtaining a redress of colonial grievances. The second, the Committee on Parliamentary Statutes, would provide a comprehensive list of the acts of Parliament affecting American trade and commerce, the target of so many of the obnoxious British taxes.

  Thomas Lynch of South Carolina proposed that appointments to the committees be made on the basis of who was “Best qualifi’d,” a proposal that “occasion’d much debate.” Choosing the “Best qualifi’d” was not as easy as it sounded, because once you got past the relatively small number of men who had reputations that extended across all of the colonies, you had a large number—probably more than three-quarters of the delegates assembled—whose qualifications were essentially unknown to one another. The solution, designed primarily to avoid offending delegates from the smaller colonies, was to give each colony equal weight on each of the committees, with the first to be composed of two delegates from each colony, and the second committee one delegate from each colony. This was modified a bit ten days later, when the Grand Committee was expanded slightly to include one additional delegate each from Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, an acknowledgment both of the importance of the business the committee was to consider and of the larger populations of those three colonies.8

  At this stage the Congress was still struggling to find the way to make its deliberations as efficient as possible, while at the same time giving due deference to the “one colony, one vote” policy it had adopted during its previous debate over rules. On committees such as the Grand Committee, there seemed to be a consensus that each colony was entitled to equal representation, with the composition of those committees determined by having each colony’s delegation caucus and then recommend a representative from that colony to serve on the committee. But over the course of the next twenty-two months, the Congress would find it necessary to appoint hundreds of ad hoc committees dealing with a myriad of specialized subjects. Delegates serving on those smaller, more select committees were to be elected by all the delegates, each voting as individuals. But as the number of ad hoc committees increased over the course of the months between September 1774 and July 1776, the need to have formal balloting for the composition of each of those committees was likely to slow the business of the Congress to a crawl. It is probable, therefore, that the delegates found more informal ways of composing some of those committees. As the delegates became more familiar with one another, and with their particular talents and weaknesses, they probably found ways to constitute those ad hoc committees without needing to have a formal vote each time one of those committees was appointed.9

  The selection by each colony’s delegation of its representatives to the Grand Committee would portend conflicts still to come. The Massachusetts contingent consisted of John and Sam Adams and Thomas Cushing; with the two Adamses dominating that delegation, it could be relied on to recommend militant steps. The representatives from the other New England colonies—Major John Sullivan and Nathaniel Folsom from New Hampshire, Stephen Hopkins and Samuel Ward from Rhode Island and Eliphalet Dyer and Roger Sherman from Connecticut—could be counted on to support their Massachusetts colleagues. Two militants, Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry, and one moderate, Edmund Pendleton, represented Virginia on the committee. The representatives on the Grand Committee from New York and Pennsylvania were of a different mind. James Duane and John Jay of New York had taken the lead in trying to calm tensions ever since news of the Coercive Acts reached America, and among the Pennsylvanians, Joseph Galloway was the most powerful, visible and vocal of those calling for moderation. Edward Biddle, a lawyer from Berks County, to the north and west of Philadelphia, was an unknown quantity but at that point was thought to be in the Galloway camp. The later addition of Thomas Mifflin to the Pennsylvania delegation provided at least some voice for more militant action, but, overall, the New York and Pennsylv
ania representatives on the committee would be inclined to seek reconciliation, not confrontation. The meetings of the Grand Committee, behind closed doors, were likely to be contentious, with the Virginians and the New Englanders emphasizing those instances in which the English Parliament had violated America’s fundamental liberties, and the delegates from New York and Pennsylvania seeking to moderate those objections.10

  The Grand Committee met between September 7 and September 24, dividing itself into two subcommittees, one to focus on articulating the colonies’ fundamental rights and the other to draw up a list of infringements of those rights. Since the combined membership of both the Grand Committee and the Committee on Parliamentary Statutes was nearly equal to the total number of delegates then present in the Congress, formal meetings of the Congress were suspended for much of the two weeks while the two committees carried out their deliberations.11

  Massachusetts Shapes the Agenda from Afar

  In the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party, Sam Adams had hoped to persuade other colonies in America to adopt his “Solemn League and Covenant,” thus striking back at the British forcefully and immediately. Having failed to do that, he was determined to use his presence in the Continental Congress to accomplish the same ends. But all the while he was serving in the Congress, he continued to keep close watch on what was going on in Massachusetts. The Coercive Acts had virtually eliminated the Massachusetts provincial legislature as the governing body of the colony. To fill that void, Sam Adams and the Boston Committee of Correspondence had urged the towns and counties in the colony to form their own “conventions” as a means of maintaining a united front against the British. During the summer of 1774, nine of Massachusetts’ twelve counties had called conventions; citizens in several of those counties gathered together to express their solidarity with Boston and their determination to resist the Coercive Acts. The very act of their meeting, in defiance of the provision of the Massachusetts Government Act prohibiting the calling of town meetings, was itself dramatic proof of that determination. Most of the resolutions passed in those extra-legal town and county meetings dealt with matters purely internal to the workings of government in the particular localities—for example, most of the towns and counties were determined not only to protect their own internal governance structures, but also to prevent the meeting of “unconstitutional” British courts in the colony.12