Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor
Page 37
News of the devastating defeat at Quebec reached Congress on January 17, 1776. As details trickled into Philadelphia in the next few days, the full magnitude of the defeat began to sink in. Americans, in spite of their anti-French and anti-Catholic biases, had genuinely hoped to recruit the English settlers of Quebec to join their common cause against the British army. Not only had the crushing defeat suffered by Montgomery’s and Arnold’s forces put a dent in that hope, but the behavior of many of Montgomery’s and Arnold’s soldiers, whose loyalty to the “patriot” cause was so weak that they deserted the army in droves, was anything but encouraging.5
In spite of the decisiveness of the American defeat, a substantial majority in the Congress wished to persevere, voting within just days of receiving the news to send reinforcements to the remains of a badly depleted American army camped outside of Quebec. Their determination to do this may at this point have been based more on a purely defensive desire to fortify the northern border of the American colonies from British attack from Canada than from an expectation that they could be successful in “liberating” Canada. Whatever the case, however, over the course of the next few months the Congress would send substantial resources—both human and material—to bolster what would prove to be an absolutely futile effort. On January 19, the Congress ordered General Washington to detach one of his battalions in Cambridge and send it to “with the greatest expedition possible to Canada.” At the same time it sent out requests to the colonies of New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania to send additional troops to the Canadian front.6
George Washington found himself in a quandary. He shared the common fear that British control of Canada would constitute a grave military threat to America’s northern border, and he had great confidence in Benedict Arnold, who, at least for the time being, remained in charge of the American troops encamped outside of Quebec. But he already faced desperate shortages of troops in Cambridge and could ill afford to divert any of those troops to Canada. Immediately after hearing the news of the debacle in Quebec, and without consulting the Continental Congress, he sent out a direct request of his own to the governments of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire to supply troops to reinforce the depleted forces in Quebec. Perhaps wary of having done this without authorization by Congress, he wrote to John Hancock, the president of the Congress, the same day explaining that he had acted only after considering “the fatal consequences of delay.”7
When Washington received from Hancock a congressional order that he supply a battalion of troops from his own meager supply, he emphatically rejected the request. He wrote Hancock on January 30 that as much as he might like to contribute to “the relief of our friends” in Canada, he simply could not, and would not, deplete his own forces in Cambridge any further. Washington’s relationship with Hancock, and through Hancock, with the entire Congress, was on balance a cordial and constructive one, but this would not be the last occasion during this critical period of the war that he would resist the efforts of the politicians in Philadelphia to tell him how to run his military operations.8
Bad News in the New Year: The Political Front
On January 8, nine days before receiving the news of the disastrous defeat at Quebec, the delegates to Congress had learned of King George III’s October 26 speech to Parliament emphatically rejecting their various overtures. Most of the delegates were not surprised. Virginia delegate Francis Lightfoot Lee, writing to Richard Henry Lee, interpreted the speech as proof positive of “the bloody intentions of the “King & ministry,” and Samuel Ward railed against the king as a “savage” who “ever meant to make himself an absolute despotic Tyrant.” He predicted that “every Idea of Peace is now over,” and urged his countrymen to begin preparations for all-out war.9
John Dickinson, perhaps more than any man in Congress, was powerfully affected by the news of the king’s intemperate denunciation of the colonies. He had put himself far out on the limb in persuading the Congress to send the Olive Branch Petition in the first place, and now he could see the king and his ministry busily sawing that limb. But still looking for bright spots, he read the king’s intimations of clemency for those colonists who ceased their rebellious behavior as an opening for possible peace negotiations. And perhaps he saw one glimmer of hope in the arrival in Philadelphia of Thomas Lundin, Lord Drummond.
Drummond, a Scotsman who had settled in New Jersey, enjoyed cordial relationships with at least a few royal officials in London. He went to London in late 1774 and sometime in the spring of 1775 gained an audience with Lord North to share with the British chief minister his ideas about achieving a reconciliation with the American colonies. North was still hoping to find some way to peel off “moderate” Americans from those “riotous” New Englanders whom he still believed to be responsible for the mess that they were in. He asked Drummond to serve as his unofficial envoy in America. Drummond’s own views about the best means of reconciliation were not all that different from North’s, which is to say, they were likely to be unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans. When Drummond arrived in Philadelphia in late December, he began meeting with delegates from those colonies that he and Lord North thought might be most amenable to some sort of peace plan.10
Not everyone was pleased with Drummond’s activities, and there was a move, possibly led by Sam Adams, to have him arrested as a British spy. In late December of 1775 and early January of 1776, Drummond held a series of informal discussions with James Duane and John Jay of New York, Thomas Lynch of South Carolina and James Wilson of Pennsylvania. Drummond reported on January 14 that his private conversations with the delegates had left him confident that at least seven of the thirteen colonies were prepared to accept the compromise proposal that he and Lord North had discussed. But however sincere Drummond may have been in trying to achieve some sort of reconciliation, his confidence was based more on wishful thinking than on a definitive head count of delegates within the Congress.11
James Wilson, and perhaps his Pennsylvania colleague John Dickinson, may have been among those members of Congress trying to move Drummond’s still vaguely formulated peace plan forward. Wilson had significantly enhanced his reputation as an insightful analyst of America’s relationship with Great Britain with the publication in 1774 of his Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament, a pamphlet that stood alongside Thomas Jefferson’s Summary View as the most sophisticated defense of the autonomy of America’s colonial legislatures. But Wilson, far more than Jefferson, remained committed to going the extra mile to seek reconciliation with Great Britain. On January 9, he proposed to Congress that they draft a response to the king’s speech announcing “to their Constituents and the World their present Intentions respecting an Independency.” By that Wilson meant an explicit denial of any intentions to seek independence unless absolutely compelled by British intransigence to do so. Discussion of Wilson’s proposal was deferred several times and, obviously finding no favor among the delegates, it was eventually tabled permanently. Wilson also prepared a lengthy “Address,” which according to Richard Smith, a delegate from New Jersey, was “very long, badly written, and full against Independency.” Wilson soon realized, however, that like his proposed resolution, it had no chance of finding favor with a majority of delegates, so he quickly withdrew it.12
John Dickinson, his spirits somewhat buoyed by the appearance of Lord Drummond, and, no doubt seeking to put a more favorable spin on the king’s October 26 speech, prepared a lengthy draft of “Proposed Resolutions for Negotiating with Great Britain.” The essence of his resolutions, which he apparently never presented, was that a small group of delegates to the Congress be sent immediately to Great Britain to give personal assurance to the king that the colonies were not seeking independence and, once those assurances were given, to use the king’s offer of clemency as an opportunity to place before him “the humble supplications of his faithful Colonists” to begin negotiations that would result in
a “perfect and lasting Accommodation.”13
Dickinson also drafted a set of instructions to be issued to these peace commissioners. But they, like his proposed resolutions, were never formally presented to or discussed by the Congress. The preface to the instructions reiterated the commitment of Congress (although at this point it was perhaps more an expression of Dickinson’s views than those of the Congress as a whole) to reconciliation and emphasized the humble character of the colonists’ supplications to the king. Then followed a lengthy set of instructions that the proposed American peace commissioners were to follow in their quest for a restoration of colonial governments, a return to the status quo ante 1763 and, it was hoped, a cessation of the armed conflict. Dickinson’s literary efforts, like Wilson’s, went nowhere. They were never presented to the Congress for discussion, and by mid-January, the efforts at reconciliation from both sides—from Lord Drummond and by men like Jay, Duane, Lynch, Wilson and Dickinson—had faded out of sight.14
The news reaching Philadelphia during those first weeks of 1776 had been truly dispiriting. Lord Dunmore’s assault on Norfolk; the horrendous losses suffered by the patriot forces in Quebec; the unyielding tone of the king’s speech to Parliament, together with the mounting evidence that “peace negotiations” were likely to prove chimerical—all of these developments suggested not only that reconciliation with Great Britain was very much a long shot but also that a successful military solution to the colonies’ differences with their mother country was by no means a sure thing.
Those most disappointed by these developments were moderates like Dickinson and James Wilson—men who were prepared to fight a war if necessary, but who still desperately sought some accommodation short of all-out war. Some of the militants in the Congress—men like Sam Adams and Samuel Ward—although no doubt disappointed by American military setbacks, channeled their disappointment into anger and a heightened determination to mobilize the American people into a full-scale effort aimed both at military victory and independence. That combination of anger and the increasing realization that there was no alternative to fighting for independence, no matter how difficult that battle might be, would, in those same few weeks in early January, find exquisite expression in the pen of an obscure, recently arrived immigrant from England. The first rounds of artillery fire at Lexington and Concord may have been shots heard round the world, but the verbal fusillade unleashed by Thomas Paine would have at least an equal, if not greater effect, in quite literally changing the world in which the Americans lived.
TWENTY
“THE SCALES HAVE FALLEN FROM OUR EYES”
ON JANUARY 17, 1776, the president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, writing to Thomas Cushing in Massachusetts, enclosed “a pamphlet which makes much Talk here, said to be wrote by an English Gentleman Resident here by the name of Paine. . . . I send it for your and Friends’ Amusement.” Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had appeared in Philadelphia seven days earlier. The greater part of Hancock’s letter was aimed at providing solace to his Boston neighbor, who had been replaced by a more fervent advocate of independence, Elbridge Gerry, probably at the instigation of Hancock’s more radical rival, Sam Adams, as a member of the Massachusetts delegation to the Congress.1
Hancock’s reference to Common Sense was almost an afterthought. But, in fact, by the time Hancock wrote to Cushing, the work was already having an explosive impact. “Its effects,” Benjamin Rush recalled, “were sudden and extensive upon the American mind. It was read by public men, repeated in clubs, spouted in Schools, and in one instance, delivered from the pulpit instead of a sermon.”2
A Most Angry Englishman
Thomas Pain (he did not add the “e” to his last name until the second edition of Common Sense appeared) was born in the small village of Thetford, in the eastern lowland county of Norfolk, on January 29, 1737. His Quaker father, Joseph Pain, earned his living making corsets, those contraptions that, with their ribs of steel or whalebone and laced together on the sides with ribbon, enabled (or constrained) the women of eighteenth-century England to present themselves as narrow-waisted and amply bosomed. Pain’s Anglican mother, Frances, was the daughter of one of the town’s most successful lawyers. An odd pairing it was—Quakers, a tiny percentage of the English population, were viewed as highly suspect dissenters by the established Anglicans, and Joseph Pain’s profession placed him permanently in the working class, whereas Frances came from a family comfortably situated in England’s upper middle class.3
The marriage of Joseph and Frances was a formula for downward mobility, and the only way the family could send young Tom to grammar school from the ages of six to thirteen was by borrowing money from Joseph’s sister-in-law. At the age of thirteen Tom left school to begin his apprenticeship in what was so often the fate of the son of a poor man—following, or being dragged, in his father’s footsteps. Although he would spend twelve years making corsets, he appears to have hated every minute of it. Indeed, at the age of sixteen he ran away from home and enlisted to serve as a buccaneer aboard the English privateer Terrible, under the command of a certain William Death. Pain’s father Joseph scurried to London and was able to talk his son out of his impulsive career change, which was fortunate, as the Terrible soon fell prey to the French privateer Vengeance; and more than 150 of the 175-man crew went down with the ship, including the appropriately named Captain Death.
Pain had escaped death, but after a brief return to his father’s trade, he again signed on as a crewman on a privateer, the King of Prussia. He would make the voyage this time, serving for six months and earning thirty pounds—a substantial sum in those days—in commissions. But the money didn’t last long—perhaps this was the time in which Pain began to develop his attraction to alcohol—and by 1758 he was back working as a journeyman staymaker in the southeastern town of Dover.4
The next several years of Pain’s life would be filled with disappointment, and even heartache. For much of that time he moved from town to town in southeastern England, plying his trade first as a journeyman staymaker and then attempting, unsuccessfully, to set up his own business. During that time he met and soon after married Mary Lambert, a maid to a local shopkeeper’s wife. Though it was a marriage made of love, only unhappiness and trauma followed. During her first pregnancy, Mary went into an early labor, which ended with her own death and that of her child. Tom Pain was genuinely grief-stricken and, with no wife, no money and few prospects, he slunk back to Thetford to live with his parents.
While living with his parents, Pain studied for an exam to qualify for a position as collector of the excise taxes, a profession described by Samuel Johnson as a low-paying and generally despised profession. He passed his exam in December of 1762, and for the next few years worked as a low-level collector in Lincolnshire. Bad luck, or poor judgment, struck once again, however, and in 1765 he was dismissed from the excise service for “stamping his ride”—the not uncommon practice of reporting that he had examined goods he had not in fact actually examined. It was back to stay-making for a while, and then, for a few years, he managed to eke out a living by teaching part-time at a local academy in London. In 1768, after sending a petition to the board of excise in which he “confess[ed] the justice of your honors’ displeasure” and “humbly begged” forgiveness, Pain was given another chance, this time as an inspector in the port of Lewes. During his four years in Lewes, Pain lodged at the home of Samuel Ollive, and when Ollive died in 1771, Pain married his daughter Elizabeth and helped to run Ollive’s tobacconist shop on top of his duties as an exciseman. Pain’s marriage to Elizabeth was a disaster. The union was never consummated, for reasons that Pain never revealed, and after a few years, the two separated for good. One of the benefits of his marriage to Elizabeth was that he became the owner of her deceased father’s tobacconist shop. And though Pain continued to perform his duties as an exciseman, he was becoming increasingly vocal in his discontent about the low wages and demeaning status associated with the position.5
Poverty, in defiance of principle, begets a degree of meanness that will stoop to almost anything. . . . He who never was an hungered [man] may argue finely on the subjection of his appetite; and he who never was distressed may harangue as beautifully on the power of principle. But poverty, like grief, has an incurable deafness, which never hears; the oration loses all its edge; and “To be or not to be” becomes the only question.6
After completing his petition, Pain traveled to London, where he would spend the better part of a year, without leave from the excise service, lobbying members of Parliament to pay heed to the plight of the excisemen. During that time his marriage was disintegrating, the business he had inherited from his father-in-law was collapsing and, not surprisingly, his employers were growing increasingly displeased by his absence. Although King George III was granted a raise in salary of 100,000 pounds that year, the excisemen would get nothing. Pain’s petition was not only ignored but considered incendiary and subversive, and on April 8, 1774, the Board of Excise, citing his absence from his post without leave, fired him, suggesting at the same time that he might be subject to arrest on account of his failure to collect the required excises that had accumulated in his absence. No wife, no job, facing the threat of imprisonment—Pain was by this time nurturing a deep-seated anger about the unfairness of life in the kingdom ruled by King George III.7