Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

by Richard R. Beeman

  Moving the Ball Forward in Congress

  In the middle of May, John Adams, writing to James Warren, gave his assessment of the state of play across the country. He claimed that “the four Colonies to the Southward”—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia—had come around to agree with the four New England colonies—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut—that independence was the only course. He noted, though, that the “five in the middle”—New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland—were not quite there. Though he expressed frustration at New York and Pennsylvania’s continued obstinacy, he was confident that Delaware and New Jersey would soon come around to his side. He was less optimistic about Maryland: “That is so excentric a Colony—sometimes so hot, sometimes so cold—now so high, then so low—that I know not what to say about it or to expect from it.” In fact, Adams may have been a bit overoptimistic. South Carolina and Georgia were not nearly as solid in their commitment to independence as he believed them to be, and it would be many weeks before New Jersey and Delaware would begin to tip in that direction.1

  But Adams, and many other members of the Congress who were now openly advocating independence, were not willing to sit by passively and wait for the tide of opinion in many of the more reluctant colonies to change. On May 10, led by Adams, the advocates of independence made a move that would spur at least some of the legislatures into action. Meeting as a committee of the whole, the Congress unanimously adopted the following resolution:

  Resolved, That it be recommended to the respective assemblies and conventions of the United Colonies, where no government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs have been hitherto established, to adopt such government as shall, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular, and America in general.

  There was nothing in the resolution that spoke of independence per se. But five days later, after a significantly more contentious debate, the Congress adopted a preamble to the resolution, and its intent was clear. The preamble was significantly longer than the resolution itself. It began with a familiar list of the many incursions on American liberties committed by the king and Parliament. Added to the list, however, was a new one—a denunciation of one of Great Britain’s most recent provocations, the hiring of German mercenaries to bolster their armed forces in America—an action the preamble declared to be solely intended “for the destruction of the good people of these colonies.”

  The preamble’s final section made clear that the purpose of the May 10 resolution was not simply to establish “governments sufficient to [the colonies’] affairs.” It defended the call to establish new governments on the grounds that it was “absolutely irreconcilable to reason and good conscience, for the people of these colonies now to take the oaths and affirmations necessary for the support of any government under the crown of Great Britain.” Going even further, it asserted that “every kind of authority under the said crown should be totally suppressed . . . for the preservation of internal peace, virtue and good order, as well as for the defence of their lives, liberties, and properties, against the hostile invasions and cruel depredations of their enemies.”2

  Although the preamble was drafted by a committee consisting of John Adams, Edward Rutledge and Richard Henry Lee, Adams, predictably, claimed full credit for its content, and, indeed, later in life, criticized George Washington among others for not giving him such credit. One of the reasons for his insistence on authorship is that he considered its language and its passage by the Congress a virtual declaration of independence, something he had been fighting for, if not explicitly admitting that he was doing so, for more than a year. Looking back on that moment a quarter of a century later, in his autobiography, he had lost none of his passion, or his sense of aggrievement:

  It was a measure which I had invariably pursued for a whole Year, and contended for, through a Scaene and Series of Anxiety, labour, Study, Argument, and Obloquy, which was then little known and is now forgotten. . . . Millions of Curses were poured out upon me, for these Exertions and for these Tryumphs over them, . . . for there were such at that time and have continued to this day in every State in the Union; who whatever their pretences may have been have never forgotten nor cordially forgiven me. 3

  A Revolution in Pennsylvania

  Of all of the colonies north of the Mason-Dixon line, Pennsylvania was the one with the greatest population, wealth and political prestige. It, along with New York, was also a colony where the political ruling class that dominated the provincial legislature was most resistant to any move that might lead to independence. During the months of May and June, the conflict among Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Continental Congress, the members of its provincial assembly and the people at large would escalate to a level far higher than in any other colony in America. By the beginning of July of 1776, those conflicts would culminate in a genuine internal revolution in the politics and governance of the colony.

  One of the sparks that ignited many underlying differences of political opinion within Pennsylvania into open conflict was the Congress’s May 10 resolution. During the debate over it, James Wilson acknowledged the appropriateness of earlier actions by the Congress giving the colonies of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Virginia permission to organize their own governments. But he was deeply disturbed by the implications of the preamble for his own province of Pennsylvania. “In this Province,” he predicted, “if that Preamble passes there will be an immediate Dissolution of every Kind of Authority. The People will be instantly in a State of Nature. Why then precipitate this Measure? Before We are prepared to build the new House, why should We pull down the old one, and expose ourselves to all the Inclemencies of the Season?”4

  In the context of the highly conflicted politics of Pennsylvania, James Wilson had ample cause for concern. In most colonies, the substance of the resolution authorizing the creation of new governments was relatively uncontroversial. Ardent advocates of independence like John Adams hoped it would be a spur to colonies sitting on the fence to get off that fence by the act of creating their own, independent governments. And most moderates in the Congress could support it on the grounds that it merely gave their colonies permission to reorganize their governments, without requiring that they do so. And, indeed, in most colonies governed by a royal charter, the steady dissolution of any semblance of royal authority heightened the urgency of taking some step to reconstitute their governments.

  Pennsylvania, as a proprietary colony without a royal charter, with a governor who did not have to answer directly to the king and with a provincial assembly that was still dominated by opponents of a too-hasty move toward independence, presented an altogether different situation. Pennsylvania’s proprietary governor, John Penn, the grandson of the colony’s founder, William Penn, had maintained generally cordial relations with the colony’s ruling elite, thus mitigating some of the personal and political animosity that caused relations between Crown officials and provincial leaders in most of the colonies governed by a royal charter. Further, moderates John Dickinson, Robert Morris and James Wilson had retained their positions as the province’s political leaders and viewed the language of the preamble with grave concern, believing it amounted to an open call for an internal revolution in Pennsylvania.

  And the fears of Dickinson, Morris and Wilson seemed to be well grounded. Virginia’s Carter Braxton, in a letter to his neighbor Landon Carter, noted that “those out of doors” in Pennsylvania were interpreting the May 10 resolution and the May 15 preamble as not only a call for independence but also as a mandate to dissolve the existing Pennsylvania government. Indeed, as news of James Wilson’s opposition to the preamble became public, the residents of his legislative district in Carlisle turned out for a public protest of his behavior, and the attacks on him in Philadelphia were so great that twenty-two delegates to the Congress, including, interestingly, John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson, felt compelled to sign a formal “Defense” of his integrity.5

  On a rainy Monday, May 20, some 4,000 citizens gathered in the State House Yard, to rally not just for repeal of the Pennsylvania Assembly’s instructions to its delegates to vote against any resolution for independence but also in support of a change in the Pennsylvania government. Thomas McKean, who owned property both in Pennsylvania, where he was a colonel in the militia, and in Delaware, where he served as a delegate from that colony to the Congress, delivered a passionate speech denouncing the sluggishness of the Pennsylvania Assembly in rallying behind the common cause. He then proposed both the creation of a new government through the means of a constitutional convention and a resolution demanding that the Pennsylvania Assembly, still bound by its instructions proclaiming their allegiance to the king, be replaced by a government instituted by the people. The crowd enthusiastically endorsed the proposals. William Bradford, Jr., a young militia captain who attended the meeting, recorded in his diary that the meeting’s outcome marked “a coup de grace to the King’s authority.”6

  John Dickinson traditionally left the city in the late spring to spend time at Fair Hill, on the city’s outskirts, and he was not inclined to allow any turmoil in Philadelphia to interrupt his usual schedule. Accordingly, he departed for Fair Hill sometime in the early May. Thus, he did not participate in the debate in Congress over the resolution calling for the establishment of new colonial governments, and he was absent from the Pennsylvania Assembly during that same period. Nor was Dickinson seen on the streets of Philadelphia during the boisterous town meeting of May 20. But he could not stay clear of the fray for long. In yet another sign that the mood of the people out-of-doors was much more militant than that of the cautious majority in the Pennsylvania Assembly, the residents of the western Pennsylvania county of Cumberland (which included James Wilson’s legislative district of Carlisle) petitioned the assembly on May 28 demanding that it repeal the instructions opposing independence it had given to the Pennsylvania delegation to the Continental Congress. That petition, along with news that Virginia was about to establish a new government and to instruct its delegates to support independence, would energize those calling for change in Pennsylvania.7

  On June 5 the Pennsylvania Assembly, meeting upstairs in the Long Room of the Pennsylvania State House at the same time that the Congress was meeting downstairs, voted to appoint a committee to deliberate on a new set of instructions for its congressional delegates. John Adams was among those keeping a close watch on the deliberations occurring on the floor above him. For more than a year he had been castigating the Quaker “broad brims” in the assembly for “clogg[ing]” any and all efforts toward independence, but when he heard that the assembly was in the midst of drafting new instructions to its congressional delegates, he exulted: “these cloggs are falling off, as you will Soon see.” But Adams may have been a bit premature in his exultations. When the Assembly moved on June 5 to appoint a committee to draft the new set of instructions, its members named none other than John Dickinson as the committee’s chairman. Whatever popular pressure they were feeling from outside their walls, a majority of members in the Assembly still retained their faith in Dickinson not only as the most able, but also the most reasonable, member of their body.8

  There was never any doubt that Dickinson, as the committee’s chair, would be the person to draft the new set of instructions. He completed the draft the next day, June 6, and submitted it to the Assembly. He knew that the change going on around him, from the agitation in his own colony, to Virginia’s impending endorsement of independence, required something more than a simple reiteration of the Assembly’s previous position to be acceptable, both within the Assembly and out of doors. But still, he was not ready to embrace independence.

  Dickinson began his draft by acknowledging that “the situation of public affairs is greatly altered.” The contemptuous rejection of the Olive Branch Petition, the passage of the Prohibitory Act, the hiring of foreign mercenaries—these indicated that “all hopes of a reconciliation, on reasonable terms, are extinguished.” But then the next sentence seemed to contradict what had preceded it: “Nevertheless,” Dickinson wrote, “it is our ardent desire that a civil war, with all its attending miseries, could be ended by a secure and honorable peace.” The operative section of the new set of instructions then authorized Pennsylvania’s delegates to “concur with the other Delegates in Congress in forming such further compacts between the United Colonies, concluding . . . treaties with foreign kingdom and states, and in adopting such other measures as shall be judged necessary for promoting the liberty, safety, and interests of America.” There was little point in giving the Pennsylvania delegates to the Congress permission to enter into treaties with foreign nations, for it had already agreed to do that without Pennsylvania’s permission. But the Congress had not yet moved to form “compacts between the United Colonies.” Since Dickinson had been among those members of Congress most strenuously opposing Benjamin Franklin’s and Sam Adams’s proposal in mid-January for an intercolonial union, the new instructions signified that the events of the past month had moved him a little closer to accepting the possibility that independence might be America’s only option.

  The draft of the instructions concluded with what could be considered, at best, a highly equivocal endorsement of independence as an extreme last resort. Echoing sentiments expressed by Dickinson in the past, it asserted that the “happiness” of the colonies had always been the Assembly’s first wish, and “reconciliation with Great-Britain our next.” As much as Dickinson and his colleagues “prayed for the accomplishment of both . . . , if we must renounce the one or the other, we humbly trust in the mercies of the Supreme Governor of the Universe, that we shall not stand condemned before his throne, if our choice is determined by that over-ruling law of self-preservation, which his divine wisdom has thought fit to implant in the hearts of his creatures.” It came close perhaps, but it stepped back from the precipice; nowhere in those instructions could one find the word “independence.”9

  The Pennsylvania Assembly apparently put all other business aside and devoted three days to discussing Dickinson’s draft, after which, with dissenters on both sides, it endorsed the instructions. But Dickinson’s attempt to straddle the line between continuing delay and an outright endorsement of independence, in addition to raising the hackles of both radicals and conservatives within the Pennsylvania Assembly, was clearly insufficient to change the tide of opinion in the other body in which he had laid a claim to leadership—the Continental Congress. As Dickinson would discover, on June 7, the day after he presented his draft of the instructions to the Pennsylvania Assembly, Richard Henry Lee, acting on the instructions of Virginia’s extra-legal provincial legislature, the Virginia Convention, introduced a resolution to the Congress that would provide a more urgent focus on the debate relating to Americans’ relationship with their mother country.10

  Virginia Forces the Issue

  On May 6, 1776, the opening day of the meeting of the Virginia Convention, Patrick Henry showed up with a set of resolutions formally proposing the independence of the “United Colonies” from Great Britain. More conservative members of the Convention such as Edmund Pendleton delayed discussion of Henry’s resolutions until May 14, but, after undergoing extensive revisions, and after considerable debate, they were put to a vote the following day. The final version proclaimed:

  These United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

  The nine days of behind-the-scenes discussion of Henry’s original resolutions, though perhaps annoying to the radical Virginia patriot, would prove important to the unity of the revolutionary movement in that colony and beyond. When the Virginia Convention finally voted on the resolutions on May 15, it unanimously endorsed them. The
importance of the strong consensus behind Virginia’s recommendation favoring independence could not have been lost on the delegates to the Continental Congress.11

  The Delegates Debate Independence—Briefly

  On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee formally introduced the Virginia resolutions for independence into the Continental Congress. In addition to their call for the end to all political connection between the colonies and Great Britain, they also urged the Congress to move forward as quickly as possible to form foreign alliances and for it to begin to prepare a “plan of confederation” for submission to the colonies. In fact, it would be another two years before the “united States” would be successful in negotiating a treaty with a foreign power, and another five years after that before all thirteen states could come to an agreement on their “plan of confederation.”12