Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor
Page 52
[The 56 signatures on the parchment copy of the Declaration appear in the positions indicated.]
Column 1
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton
Column 2
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton
Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton
Column 4
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean
Column 5
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark
Column 6
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton
ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED WORKS
Adams, Diary and Autobiography: L.H. Butterfield et al., eds., The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. Cambridge, MA, 1961– .
Adams Family Correspondence: L.H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence. 10 vols. to date. Cambridge, MA, 1963– .
Adams Papers: Robert J. Taylor et al., eds, Papers of John Adams. 16 vols. to date. Cambridge, MA, 1977– .
American Archives, 4th ser.: Peter Force, ed., American Archives, 4th series, 6 vols., Washington, DC, 1837–1846.
Boyd, Jefferson Papers: Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. 38 vols. to date. Princeton, 1950– .
DAR: K.G. Davies, Documents of the American Revolution, 12 vols. Shannon, Ireland, 1972–1981.
GW Papers, R.S.: Philander Chase et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary Series. 20 vols. to date. Charlottesville, VA, 1985– .
GW Papers, C.S.: W.W. Abbot et al., eds., The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series. 10 vols. Charlottesville, VA, 1983–1995.
JCC: Worthington C. Ford et al., eds., The Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789. 34 vols. Washington, DC, 1904–1937.
Smith, Letters: Paul H. Smith et al., eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789. 29 vols. Washington, DC, 1976–2000.
Tyler, “The Common Cause of America”: Richard Tyler, “The Common Cause of America”: A Study of the First Continental Congress. Historic Research Study, National Park Service: Denver, 1974.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1.John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776, L.H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence (Cambridge, MA, 1963– ), 2: 27–28. Although the letter is dated July 3, it is possible that he wrote it late in the evening on July 2. For further details on this letter, see ibid., 2: 31n.
2.John Adams to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776, ibid., 2: 29–31.
3.Abraham Clark to Elias Dayton, July 4, 1774, in Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, 29 vols. (Washington, DC, 1976–2000), 4: 378–379; Robert Morris to Joseph Reed, July 21, 1776, in ibid., 4: 510. In spite of voting against independence, Morris would ultimately come around and sign the document sometime in August, and would later play a crucial role in the revolutionary war effort as the Director of Finance for the Confederation government.
4.John Drayton, A View of South Carolina (Charleston, SC, 1802), p. 217.
5.Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), pp. 130–133; John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Olden Time, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1909), 1: 206.
6.Benjamin Rush to Ebenezer Hazard, October 22, 1768, in L.H. Butterfield, The Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1951), 1: 68. I first discovered a fragment of Rush’s description of his experience gazing at the king’s throne in Gordon Wood’s magnificent study, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991), pp. 15–16. Wood’s study of the Revolution, along with all of his other work on the history of this period, has, more than the work of any other historian, done the most to enhance my understanding of the period of America’s founding.
7.The literature on the coming of the American Revolution is vast, but among the works covering the crucial period between 1774–1776, and in particular, the activities of the Continental Congress during that period, those that I have found most useful are John Ferling, Independence: The Struggle to Set America Free (New York, 2011); Jerrilyn Greene Marston, King and Congress: The Transfer of Political Legitimacy, 1774–1776 (Princeton, NJ, 1987); Richard Tyler, “The Common Cause of America”: A Study of the First Continental Congress (Denver, CO, 1974); David Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 (Charlottesville, VA, 1974). Among works on the Continental Congress more generally, the most helpful have been Edmund Burnett, The Continental Congress (New York, 1941) and Jack Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York, 1979).
CHAPTER 1—THE GENESIS OF REVOLUTION, 1763–1774
1.The most comprehensive accounts of the Boston Tea Party are Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (New Haven, CT, 2010); and Benjamin Woods Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York, 1964). My account of the Tea Party relies heavily on their research. Wyeth’s account is in Francis S. Drake, Tea Leaves: Being a Collection of Letters and Documents, Relating to the Shipment of Tea to the American Colonies in the Year 1773 by the East India Tea Company (Boston, 1884), pp. lxxi–lxxii.
2.Quoted in Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, p. 130.
3.Drake, Tea Leaves, p. lxxx.
4.Ibid., p. lxviii.
5.The literature on the political relations between the American colonies and British Imperial authority is vast. The definitive, monumental study of those relations is Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution, 15 vols. (New York, 1930–1970). Among the most recent works are David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000); and Jack P. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2011).
6.The standard account of the Stamp Act crisis is Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 1953); see also Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opp
osition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972), esp. pp. 51–112.
7.Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (Stanford, CA, 1961), p. 51. Among the many useful accounts of the political and social conflict between Great Britain and the colonies between 1763 and 1774 are, Maier, From Resistance to Revolution; Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967); Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1979); Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1968); and Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York, 2002).
8.Adair and Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin, p. 39; John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams: The Life of an American Revolutionary (Lanham, MD, 2011), p. 10; among the other biographies of Adams are Mark Puls, Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution (New York, 2006); and John C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (Boston, 1936). For an outstanding brief portrait of Sam Adams’s personality and political career, see Pauline Maier, “A New Englander as Revolutionary: Samuel Adams,” in The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York, 1980), pp. 3–50.
9.Puls, Samuel Adams, pp. 26–34.
10.Ibid., p. 34; Alexander, Samuel Adams, p. 18.
11.Puls, Samuel Adams, p. 30.
12.Nash, Urban Crucible, pp. 292–300.
13.Ibid., pp. 169–384; Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, pp. 51–228.
14.Sam Adams to Arthur Lee, September 27, 1771, Harry A. Cushing, ed., Writings of Samuel Adams, 4 vols. (New York, 1904–1908), 2: 234; Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 (New York, 1970), pp. 38–57.
15.Quoted in Puls, Samuel Adams, p. 130.
16.Brown, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 92ff.
17.Labaree, Boston Tea Party, pp. 111–112; Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, pp. 89–90.
18.Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, pp. 100–102.
19.Labaree, Boston Tea Party, p. 133.
20.L.H. Butterfield et al., eds., The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1961), 2: 85–86.
21.For the events following the Boston Tea Party in the other major American seaport cities, see Labaree, Boston Tea Party, pp. 146–169; Roger Champagne, Alexander McDougall and the American Revolution in New York (Schenectady, NY, 1975), pp. 45–51; Richard Alan Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776 (Philadelphia, 1978), pp. 36–40.
22.Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, p. 139.
23.Labaree, Boston Tea Party, pp. 184–194, 207; Peter D.G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773–1776 (Oxford, England, 1991), pp. 55–56. The speaker, Charles Van, was perhaps the most militantly anti-American member of Parliament. The text of his speech can be found in William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England, 36 vols. (London, 1806–1820), 17: 1178.
24.This account of Franklin’s confrontation in the cockpit draws substantially on the insightful analysis by Gordon Wood, in The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 2004), pp. 135–147; see also Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York, 2003), pp. 275–279.
25.Wood, Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, pp 135–147.
26.The most comprehensive account of the passage of the Coercive Acts can be found in Thomas, Tea Party to Independence, pp. 26–87. See also Labaree, Boston Tea Party, pp. 170–216.
CHAPTER 2—THE QUEST FOR A UNIFIED AMERICAN RESISTANCE
1.Richard Beeman, Patrick Henry: A Biography (New York, 1974), p. 43.
2.Oliver Kuntzleman, “Joseph Galloway: Loyalist” (Ph.D. Diss., Temple University, 1941), p. 96.
3.Labaree, Boston Tea Party, p. 238.
4.Champagne, Alexander McDougall, pp. 52–66; Carl Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (Madison, WI, 1909), pp. 112–141.
5.Peter Force, ed., American Archives, 4th series, (Washington, DC, 1837–1846), 1: 342.
6.Boston Committee of Correspondence to the Philadelphia Committee of Correspondence, May 13, 1774, Cushing, ed., Writings of Samuel Adams, 3: 109–111; Boyd Stanley Schlenther, Charles Thomson: A Patriot’s Pursuit (Newark, DE, 1990), pp. 102–104.
7.Schlenther, Charles Thomson, p. 104; Milton Flower, John Dickinson, Conservative Revolutionary (Charlottesville, VA, 1983), pp. 63–64, 102.
8.Flower, John Dickinson, p. 102; Schlenther, Charles Thomson, pp. 104–105.
9.Schlenther, Charles Thomson, pp. 104–105.
10.Ibid., p. 105; Charles Stille, The Life and Times of John Dickinson, 1732—1808 (Philadelphia, 1891), pp. 107–108.
11.Flower, John Dickinson, pp. 104–105; Ryerson, Revolution Is Now Begun, pp. 40–42; Tyler, “The Common Cause of America,” pp. 43–46.
12.Tyler, “The Common Cause of America,” pp. 45–46; Sam Adams to Charles Thomson, May 30, 1774, Cushing, ed., Writings of Samuel Adams, 3: 123–124.
13.Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time: Jefferson the Virginian, Volume One, 6 vols. (Boston, 1948–1981), 1: 171–173; Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, 7 vols. (New York, 1948–1957), 3: 356–358; Julian P. Boyd, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 38 vols. to date (Princeton, 1950– ), 1: 111–112.
14.Boyd, Jefferson Papers, 1: 137–141.
15.This estimate is taken from Gary B. Nash, Billy G. Smith, Merle Brouwer, and Norma Adams Price, “The Population of Eighteenth Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 99 (1975): 362–368. According to these scholars, the population of the city at this time depends on how one defines the boundaries of the city. Philadelphia’s population ranged from between 25,000 and 28,000, with that higher figure representing the population not only of the center of Philadelphia but the two areas to the north and south, Southwark and the Northern Liberties. I have used the 28,000 figure for the residents of those two adjoining areas certainly considered themselves residents of “Philadelphia.”
CHAPTER 3—THE DELEGATES GATHER IN PHILADELPHIA
1.Adams, Diary, Aug. 10, 1774, 2: 97–98; see also John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (Knoxville, TN, 1992), p. 102.
2.Benjamin Irvin, Clothed in the Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors (New York, 2011), p. 25; Puls, Samuel Adams, p. 157; William Vincent Wells, The Life and Public Service of Sam Adams, 3 vols. (Boston, 1865), 2: 207–210.
3.James Haw, John and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina (Athens, GA, 1997) pp. 61–62; Richard Barry, Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina (New York, 1942), pp. 157–158; William Duane, ed., Extracts from the Diary of Christopher Marshall, 1774–1781 (New York, 1969), p. 9.
4.E. Stanley Godbold, Jr., and Robert H. Woody, Christopher Gadsden and the American Revolution (Knoxville, TN, 1982), pp. 120–122. For Gadsden’s earlier involvement with the resistance to British policy, see pp. 50–119. Duane, ed., Diary of Christopher Marshall, p. 9.
5.Henry Mayer, A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic (New York, 1986), pp. 205–206; Freeman, George Washington, 3: 372; Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York, 2010), p. 171.
6.Chernow, Washington, p. 171; David John Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1721–1803: A Biography, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1952), 1: 277–278.
7.Barry, John Rutledge, pp. 157–158.
8.Adams, Diary, Aug. 16, 23, 1774, 2: 100, 109.
9.Ibid., Aug. 29, 1774, 2: 114.
10.Joseph Galloway to William Franklin, Sept. 3, 1774, Smith, Letters, 1: 24.
11.Adams, Diary, Aug. 29, 1774, 2: 114, 115n.
12.Mayer, Son of Thunder, p. 106; Mays, Pendleton, 1: 279–282.
13.Silas Deane to Elizabeth Deane, Sept. 10–11, 1774, Smith, Letters, 1: 62.
14.Mayer, Son of Thunder, pp. 206–207; Freeman, George Washington, 3: 373.
15.Only twelve of the thirteen colonies would send delegations to Philadelphia that fall. The colony of Georgia, which had been largely uninvolved with the protests of the previous years, would not send a delegation until the following year.
16.This description of the city relies on Billy G. Smith, Life in Early Philadelphia: Documents from the Revolutionary and Early National Period (University Park, PA, 1995), pp. 3–14; George W. Boudreau, Independence: A Guide to Historic Philadelphia (Yardley, PA, 2012), passim.; and Richard R. Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York, 2009), pp. 72–79.
17.Billy G. Smith, “The Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, NY, 1990), p. 207, and Appendix D. See also Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible, pp. 313–314; and Boudreau, Independence, pp. 287–288. Richard Penn’s house was later sold to the wealthy Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris and still later served as the executive mansion for George Washington and John Adams.
18.Adams, Diary, Aug. 30, 1774, 2: 116; Irvin, Clothed in the Robes, p. 17; Boudreau, Independence, pp. 209–213.
19.The best description of the Pennsylvania State House is Charlene Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory (Philadelphia, 2002), esp. pp. 4–8, 27–30, 61–62; see also Boudreau, Independence, pp. 187–197. For a description of the Walnut Street Jail, see Negley K. Teeters, The Cradle of the Penitentiary: The Walnut Street Jail at Philadelphia, 1773–1835 (Philadelphia, 1955), passim.