Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

by Richard R. Beeman

  Revere’s message from Boston came in the form of a petition. It ostensibly sought the advice of the Congress as to whether, in the face of Gage’s display of military force, the residents should evacuate the town altogether. Alternatively, and this appeared to be the more serious proposal contained in the message, the residents might, “by maintaining their ground . . . better serve the public cause.” The Boston petitioners must have realized that outright warfare between the British troops and the townspeople was the likely consequence of this latter strategy, and they vowed not to “shrink from hardship and danger” should this be the course chosen. They noted too that the suspension of civil government in Massachusetts had “made it impossible that there should be a due administration of justice.” Although the petition concluded with a request to Congress for “advice” on how to respond to the vacuum in governmental authority in the colony, Massachusetts’ political leaders—and in particular the leaders of the Boston Committee of Correspondence—were prepared to take matters into their own hands.16

  As the committee drafting the petition to the king met, the remaining members of Congress spent most of the next week discussing a response to the Boston petition and to General Gage. This probably infuriated the conservatives in Carpenters’ Hall, for not only did it seem to be a diversion from the Congress’s main business, but to some, among them Galloway, Duane and Low, it was clearly a ruse planned by the likes of Sam Adams to “throw a veil” over their plans to provoke a military confrontation and hasten the move toward independence.17

  The Adamses, for their part, tried to keep themselves “out of sight” on the question of aid to Boston. But they both recorded their views on how far the Congress should go in confronting General Gage. Sam Adams, far more radical on this point, composed an inflammatory draft of a letter to Gage for Congress’s consideration. Describing the closing of Boston Harbor as “unjust and cruel” and the suspension of provincial government as a deliberate effort to destroy the liberty of all British subjects, Adams warned Gage that the resistance that he faced in Boston was not confined to a small faction, but, in fact, was supported by “the united voice and Efforts of all of America.” Adams took particular aim at the continuing efforts of the British to fortify Boston, an action that, if it did not cease, would send all of America and Great Britain into the “Horrors of a Civil War!”18

  The draft response composed by John Adams was more conciliatory in tone than his cousin’s. The younger Adams repeated the assertion that the people of the “whole of the Continent” were determined to resist enforcement of the Massachusetts Government Act, and while he too denounced the increased British fortification of Boston as likely only to excite “the Jealousies and Apprehensions of the People,” he ended with a more humbly worded entreaty that General Gage reverse course and “desist from further Fortifications.”19

  Richard Henry Lee offered yet another alternative, as combative as Sam Adams’s, but which led in a different direction. Asserting that it was “inconsistent with the honor and safety of a free people to live within the Controul and exposed to the injuries of a Military force not under government of the Civil Power” and citing the increased danger to Boston’s residents from Gage’s military garrison, Lee proposed that the Bostonians “quit their Town and find a safe asylum among their hospitable countrymen.” While it’s unclear whether Lee’s draft of the letter to Gage was ever put to a vote, it is likely that both the Massachusetts delegates and the more conservative middle-colony delegates opposed it. John Adams acknowledged that the mass departure of Boston’s residents would produce a dramatic effect, but he did not think that it was practicable—“how 20,000 people can go out,” taking with them all their necessary personal property, “I know not,” Adams averred.20

  More generally, Adams voiced frustration at the Boston Committee of Correspondence’s failure to provide the Continental Congress with clear directions on how best to respond to the heightened military threat posed by General Gage’s actions. He complained that the enigmatic quality of the committee’s petition to the Congress had left the delegates to “Guess at its meaning.” In a letter to William Tudor, a member of the Boston Committee, he cautioned his colleague not to be under any delusion that the Congress would support “offensive Measures” against the British troops. Indeed, Adams wrote, he had “clear evidence that the Congress would “not vote to raise Men or Money for Arms or Ammunitions.”21

  The final version of the Congress’s letter to General Gage, agreed to on October 10, was toned down even further from John Adams’s already toned-down version of his cousin’s more belligerent response. It protested the increased fortification of the city but merely expressed the hope that “you will discontinue the fortifications in and about Boston.” And, in a separate resolution intended to give Boston advice on how to proceed in the future, the Congress advised Boston’s residents “still to conduct themselves peaceably toward his excellency General Gage and his majesty[’s] troops now stationed in the town of Boston, as far as can possibly be consistent with their immediate safety and the security of the town.” The townspeople were to avoid any unprovoked attacks “on his Majesty’s property” or any insult to his troops and were advised to “peaceably and firmly persevere in the line they are now conducting themselves, on the defensive.” Clearly the Congress wished to avoid doing anything to cause the strained relationship between General Gage and Boston’s citizens to become even worse. In agreeing to the more conciliatory version of the letter to Gage, the Congress preserved a fragile unity among the delegates, but they had yet to make progress on some of the most difficult issues still confronting them.22

  Amid the confused and occasionally acrimonious debates over the situation in Boston and enforcement of the boycott on all trade with Great Britain, John Adams’s mercurial temperament swung from ebullience to despair. His weary letter of October 9 to Abigail bemoaned the difficulty of getting things accomplished in a room full of natural politicians.

  The Business of the Congress is tedious, beyond Expression. This Assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every Man is a great Man—an orator, a Critick, a statesman, and therefore every Man upon every Question must show his oratory, his criticism, and his Political Abilities. The Consequence of this is; that Business is drawn and spun out to an immeasurable Length. I believe if it was moved and seconded that We should come to a Resolution that Three and two make five We should be entertained with Logick and Rhetorick, Law, History, Politics and Mathematicks, concerning the Subject for two whole Days, and then We should pass the Resolution unanimously in the Affirmative.23

  Adams’s sour mood carried over to other aspects of his stay in Philadelphia. “Phyladelphia,” he confided to his diary, “with all its trade and Wealth, and Regularity, is not Boston. The Morals of our People are much better, their Manners are more polite, and agreeable—they are purer English. Our Language is better, our Persons are handsomer, our Spirit is greater, our Laws are wiser, our Religion is superior, our Education is better. We exceed them in everything, but in a Markett, and in charitable public foundations.”24

  Just as John Adams the provincial Puritan had felt guilty pleasure at the lavishness of the feasts on his many social outings among Philadelphia’s gentry, so too was he finding it difficult not to be carried away by the magnificence of the trappings, and even some of the ritual, of the Catholic Church. He disapproved of the Catholic faith—it was aimed, as he wrote, at seducing the “simple and ignorant”—but he was not immune to its attractions. He confessed to his diary that its “Scenery and the Musick is so callculated to take in Mankind, that I wonder, the Reformation ever succeeded. The Paintings, the Bells, the Candles, the Gold and Silver. Our Saviour on the Cross, over the Altar, at full Length, and all his Wounds a bleeding. The Chanting is exquisitely soft and sweet.”25

  In elections to the Pennsylvania colonial legislature, John Dickinson, Thomas Mifflin and Charles Thomson, all “warm in the cause of liberty,” won over the opposition o
f the Quakers, “the Broadbrims,” as they were called for the hats the men wore. Those results would, Adams predicted, “change the Balance in the Legislature here against Mr. Galloway.” And some of the consequences of that shift in power were felt immediately. For example, on October 15 the Pennsylvania legislature elected John Dickinson to join that colony’s delegation to the Continental Congress. In the short term, Adams was correct, for Dickinson’s presence in the Congress would help him move some of his agenda forward. But in the longer term, there would be no member of Congress more exasperating to the Braintree lawyer than the distinguished “Farmer in Pennsylvania.”26

  NINE

  POWER TO THE PEOPLE

  Slow but Steady Progress

  From October 12 to its adjournment on October 26, the Congress labored over six documents: the statement of American rights and grievances, final drafts of the much-debated plans for the imposition of economic sanctions on British trade, an address to the people of Great Britain, an address to the people of Quebec, another new message to “the inhabitants of British North America” and the petition to the king. Discussions of these documents occurred more or less simultaneously, both in committees and on the floor of the Congress. It was a busy, confusing time, for there was considerable overlap among the six documents, and there was still substantial disagreement among the delegates not only on the content of each of them, but also on the overall message that should emerge from the Congress once its business had been completed.

  On October 12, the delegates returned to the essential—but still unresolved—question of American rights. On that day, John Dickinson presented a draft report on that subject. In fact, Dickinson had not yet officially joined the Congress as a member, but such was his influence that this technicality did not prevent him from taking the lead in working with other delegates—most notably John Adams—in crafting the language of the report.1

  Many of the items in the report on rights were familiar and non-controversial. Those involving the right of representation in all cases relating to taxation and the colonies’ internal governance had been accepted by Americans as constitutional orthodoxy beginning with the resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress in 1765 and further elaborated by Dickinson himself in his Letters from a Farmer in 1767–1768. That orthodoxy included a willingness of the colonies to submit to some regulation of trade in order to “secure commercial advantages” for the “whole empire.” But one phrase in the report, probably written by John Adams, drew the delegates’ attention. It acknowledged that the colonists would “cheerfully consent” to some forms of the regulation of their trade, implying that the colonists had the right to withdraw that consent should they find it against their interests. Along with the specific denials of Parliament’s right to impose taxation for revenue purposes or to pass legislation without the colonists’ consent, this voluntary concession to allow Parliament to regulate the trade of the empire—a concession that they might presumably withdraw—came very close to a complete denial of parliamentary authority.

  For the next three days, the delegates would debate, occasionally acrimoniously, the report on rights, with Adams’s phrase of “cheerfully consent” being the focus of much of that acrimony. James Duane, on guard as usual for any hint of language that might widen the breach between England and her colonies, insisted that parliamentary authority to regulate American trade was a fundamental part of the colonists’ “compact”—meaning, for Duane and others, a fundamental principle in the unwritten English constitution—with their mother country and could not be withdrawn at the whim of any colony. Duane warned that Great Britain would quite justifiably defend her right to such regulation “at the expense of the last drop of her blood and the last farthing of her treasure.” Focusing on the distinction between Adams’s “consent” and Parliament’s “right,” Duane insisted that “there must be some supreme controlling power over our trade, and that this can only rest with Parliament.”2

  Samuel Ward, a stalwart member of the radical New England coalition from Rhode Island, rose and delivered an impassioned speech asserting that the question before the Congress was one on which “the Happiness or Misery not only in the present Generation of Americans, but of Millions yet unborn,” might well depend. Basing his argument both on his interpretation of the constitutional compact between the Crown and its colonies and on the higher principles of the “Society of Nature,” he was in effect denying that Parliament had any right whatsoever to regulate American trade. Skirting very close to advocating outright independence, Ward asserted that “one kingdom should not be governed by another.” He then went on to impugn the character of the British nation as a whole. The Parliament was now irredeemably corrupt, “subject to the Frowns, Flatteries & Bribes” of a venal and self-serving ministry. “The people of England, formerly a sober frugal industrious & brave People” had, he observed, become “immersed in Luxury, Riot & Dissipation.” Indeed, the nation at large, once “wholly free from debt,” was now mired in debt, all the result of bribery and corruption. “Would you,” he asked, “put your all into such hands?”3

  As the debate moved forward, it became clear that in the choice between a few words—“cheerfully consent” versus “right by compact”—the very nature of America’s relationship with her mother country hung in the balance. Although Charles Thomson failed to make a formal entry in the congressional journal on October 13, it appears that at some point on that day the draft report, containing Adams’s language, was put to a vote, with the tally standing at five colonies in favor, five opposed, and two, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, divided. Although John and Sam Adams and Samuel Ward had voted to include the language implying that Parliament did not have an unqualified authority to regulate trade, their New England colleagues Thomas Cushing and Robert Treat Paine from Massachusetts and Stephen Hopkins from Rhode Island were apparently not prepared to go that far. By the rules of the Congress, it appeared that the body had rejected Adam’s more militant statement of American rights.4

  On the evening of October 13 John Dickinson hosted a dinner including John Adams, Samuel Chase, William Paca, Isaac Low, Thomas Mifflin, Richard Penn and Charles Lee, representing a range of views on Adams’s language, and the discussion that evening may have had the effect of winning over some to support the more radical verbiage. The following day, Charles Thomson recorded in the congressional journal the approval of a Declaration of Rights and Grievances that included Adams’s phrase “cheerfully consent.” Thomson’s horrible record keeping makes it unlikely that we will ever know what caused the discussion over the Declaration of Rights to move from a deadlock to a narrow endorsement of the more radical position, but, in fact, in spite of Thomson’s journal entry, the debate over the limits of British authority over the colonies did not end with that fragile agreement. Some delegates continued to spar over the language respecting Parliament’s right to regulate trade for some time thereafter. Joseph Galloway later recalled that the debate continued on for “better than a fortnight,” with the “violent party” eventually getting its way.5

  Accompanying the enumeration of American “rights” was a catalogue of American grievances, which were all packaged into the eleventh resolution in the Declaration of Rights and Grievances. The committee charged with listing American grievances had uncovered many infringements on American rights that occurred prior to 1763, but, “from an ardent desire that harmony and mutual intercourse of affection and interest may be restored,” they agreed to pass over the pre-1763 grievances “for the present.” For the most part, the list was a familiar one to anyone who had followed the deteriorating state of America’s relations with Great Britain since 1763—all of the various acts of taxation “for the purpose of raising a revenue in America”; the establishing of an American board of customs commissioners; the act requiring Americans to quarter British soldiers in their homes; orders increasing the size and presence of a British standing army in the colonial seaport cities; and, of course, the package of punitive acts i
ncluding the Boston Port Bill and the Massachusetts Government Act that Parliament had passed in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party.

  The one new, and to twenty-first-century eyes, jarring addition to the American grievances was the condemnation of the Quebec Act, which Parliament had passed two months after the Coercive Acts in 1774. The condemnation of the Quebec Act, though phrased in terms of fundamental American rights and liberties, was infected with anti-Catholic sentiments. The act itself was aimed both at bringing some of the Indian territory in what is now the upper Midwest of the United States under firmer British control and at winning the allegiance of the settlers of what had previously been the French colony in Canada, now a British colonial possession. The principal means of winning the allegiance of the settlers of that region was to guarantee some continuity in the legal structure of the former French colony and to guarantee to those settlers the freedom to continue to practice their Catholic religion. But the delegates chose to view the Quebec Act as an attempt to abolish the English system of laws altogether and, worse, to establish the “Roman Catholick Religion in the province of Quebec.” Both of these charges were unfair. The Quebec Act merely assured toleration for Catholics in the province who wished to practice their religion. Similarly, the guarantees that French, not English civil law would be used in some legal proceedings between individuals was yet another attempt at a conciliatory gesture to the French residents of Quebec. In all public matters, including all criminal proceedings, English common law was to be supreme.6