Independence

by John Ferling

  Hat and went out of the Door of Congress Hall: Mr. Dickinson observed me and Darted out after me. He broke out upon me in a most abrupt and extraordinary manner. In as violent a passion as he was capable of feeling, and with an Air, Countenance and Gestures as rough and haughty as if I had been a School Boy and he the Master, he vociferated out, “What is the Reason Mr. Adams, that you New Englandmen oppose our Measures of Reconciliation.… Look Ye! If you don’t concur with Us, in our pacific System, I, and a Number of Us, will break off, from you in New England, and We will carry on the Opposition by ourselves in our own Way.” I own I was shocked by this Magisterial Salutation.… These were the last Words which ever passed between Mr. Dickinson and me in private. We continued to debate in Congress … But the Friendship and Acquaintance was lost forever … [through] Mr. Dickinsons rude Lecture.60

  A short time later, Adams, still seething at Dickinson’s tone and his threat to abandon New England, wrote a friend at home that a “certain great Fortune and piddling Genius whose Fame has been trumpeted so loudly, has given a silly Cast to our whole Doings.”61 Unfortunately for Adams, the bearer of his missive was taken into custody by the British as he crossed Narragansett Bay. Finding Adams’s letter, the British gleefully turned it over to a Tory editor in occupied Boston, who happily published it in the Massachusetts Gazette. It also appeared in two London newspapers in September, leading some readers to speculate that the “piddling Genius” was John Hancock. But Dickinson knew whom Adams had referred to, giving him further grounds for enmity. From this point forward these two congressmen never again spoke to one another. When passing in the State House hallway or on Philadelphia’s busy sidewalks, each in glowering silence looked straight ahead, never acknowledging the other.

  After Adams’s caustic letter appeared in public, he was shunned for a time by Quaker merchants and others in Philadelphia who saw him as an obstacle to reconciliation. According to one observer, he was also viewed with “nearly universal detestation” by the moderates in Congress, much as Galloway had been reviled by the radicals at the First Congress. But the incident did not cause lasting damage to Adams, and in fact, it appears to have immediately made him more popular among the foes of Dickinson. Adams continued to participate in Congress without missing a beat, and his colleagues continued to choose him for important committee assignments.62

  After the second day of debate, Congress approved the committee’s draft of the Olive Branch Petition. Back in May, when he had first raised the matter of a congressional appeal to the Crown, Dickinson had couched the issues of petitioning the king and creating the Continental army as trade-offs. The moderates would agree to the military preparations sought by the hard-liners; the hard-liners, in return, would consent to the Olive Branch Petition.63 Dickinson must have reminded the petition’s foes of the quid pro quid agreed to six weeks earlier. In fact, that is what he must have pointed out to Adams in the State House garden, to which he almost certainly added that the hard-liners could not now break their word without shattering unity within Congress. Dickinson had his way. Congress adopted the Olive Branch Petition as it was reported out of committee. At some point, perhaps on the day of the dustup with his rival or on the day that Congress approved the petition, Adams wrote to a friend at home: “I dread like Death” petitioning the king, but “We cant avoid it. Discord and total Disunion would be the certain Effect of a resolute Refusal to petition.” Adams’s only hope was that the monarch and his ministers “will be afraid of Negotiations as well as We [the congressional hard-liners], and therefore refuse it.”64

  But if Congress had agreed to seek the monarch’s intervention, it had not agreed to send envoys to London with the Olive Branch Petition. Instead, it asked Richard Penn, the son of Pennsylvania’s proprietor, to carry the petition across the sea. Penn lived in Philadelphia, had entertained several congressmen in his home, and was trusted by most deputies. Even so, Penn was instructed to deliver to Arthur Lee and other colonial agents in the metropolis the secret document that he carried with its seal unbroken.65

  Penn sailed three days later. As he departed, John Adams almost audibly sighed that Congress “is a great, unwieldy Body. Its Progress must be slow. It is like a large Fleet sailing under Convoy. The fleetest Sailors must wait for the dullest and slowest. Like a Coach and six—the swiftest Horses must be slackened and the slowest quickened, that all may keep an even Pace.”66 Now and again Adams was driven to despair, but he never lost hope that in time a majority in Congress would come around to see that reconciliation with Great Britain was unlikely, perhaps even undesirable. From the onset of hostilities he sensed that the war would alienate the colonists from the mother country. Inevitably, it would call forth decisions that would widen the breach between America and Great Britain. In short, the war would radicalize his countrymen. He was certain, too, that British officials would take steps that would be seen as “Cruelties more abominable than those which are practiced by the Savage Indians.” With each “fresh Evidence” of “Deceit and Hostility, Fire, Famine, Pestilence and Sword,” more and more Americans would “be driven to the sad Necessity of breaking our Connection with G.B.” With each British act of “War and Revenge,” the American people would better understand the immeasurable “Corruption to the System” of politics in the mother country, until most at last understood that the “Cancer is too deeply rooted, and too far spread to be cured by any thing short of cutting it out entire.”67

  Dickinson scored another victory—what would be his final major triumph—the very next day. On June 23, the day General Washington departed for the front, Congress had created a committee to draft what was tantamount to a declaration of war. Hoping to have Washington publish the statement when he arrived in Massachusetts, Congress must have directed the committee to work with haste, for the following day the panel submitted a draft penned by John Rutledge. However, Congress found Rutledge’s work unacceptable—the document has vanished, and its contents are unknown—and directed the committee to try again. It also added Dickinson and Jefferson to the committee. Dickinson no doubt wanted the assignment. The “famous Mr. Jefferson,” as one congressman referred to him, was chosen because others in the Virginia delegation had spread the word that he had a “reputation for literature.” In fact, the committee asked Jefferson to pen the new draft.68

  Jefferson agreed and within a few days shared his draft with his colleagues on the committee. Dickinson strenuously objected to some of its contents and over the next couple of days, using the Virginian’s handiwork as an outline, wrote his own statement. Adams would have thought it intolerable to have his work repudiated. Jefferson, who was both a newcomer to Congress and a less-confrontational individual, neither quarreled with Dickinson nor bore enmity toward him. Years later Jefferson said simply that he had acquiesced to Dickinson’s “scruples” as he “was so honest a man, and so able a one.”69

  At the time, New Jersey’s William Livingston, who sat on the committee, criticized what Jefferson had written as containing “faults common to our Southern gentlemen.” Southerners believe, he went on, that “a reiteration of [British] tyranny, despotism, [and] bloody” actions was all that was necessary when asking the citizenry’s support of the war.70 Livingston implied that the declaration must also stress that Great Britain had violated the imperial constitution. But in fact Jefferson had not ignored constitutional issues. Livingston—and Dickinson, the real power on the committee—in reality wished to have Congress embrace a declaration that espoused the moderates’ view of the limits of parliamentary authority.

  Jefferson, like John Adams, believed the king was the sole “link of union between the several parts of the empire.” Dickinson was critical of Parliament: It had evinced, he said, “an inordinate Passion for [unlimited] Power” over the colonies, including the hope “to extort from us, at the point of the Bayonet … unknown sums.” But while he blamed it for the imperial crisis and the war, he did not wish to proclaim that it possessed no authority over America. In
a lengthy section Dickinson explained to the monarch that the American people had taken up arms solely to defend their liberties. Furthermore, he underscored that Congress did not seek independence: “We have not raised Armies with ambitious Designs of separating from Great-Britain, and establishing Independent States.”

  But a declaration stating the reasons for war had to resonate with a people who were being asked to sacrifice, and possibly die, in that war. It also had to assure the people that the war could be won. Near its close, Dickinson retained a passage that Jefferson had written: “Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. Our internal Resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign Assistance is undoubtedly attainable.” Americans, it added, have “resolved to die Freemen rather than to live Slaves.” On July 6, Congress saw only the version of the Declaration on the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms that Dickinson had prepared. With some minor editing, but little debate, Congress adopted it.71

  In two bruising months the Second Congress had rejected the North Peace Plan, created an army, named its commander, declared war, and petitioned the king. Its one substantive link to the prewar First Continental Congress was that the dominant faction repudiated independence, insisting that America yearned to be reconciled with Great Britain, but on its own terms—the restoration of the imperial relationship as it had been before anyone had dreamed of the Stamp Act or other taxes and encroachments. Still, so sweeping, so revolutionary, had been Congress’s actions since Lexington and Concord that John Adams wrote on the day the declaration of war was adopted that he expected “Lord North [would] compliment every Mothers Son of us with a Bill of Attainder”—a decree of outlawry for having committed treason.72

  CHAPTER 7

  “THE KING WILL PRODUCE THE GRANDEST REVOLUTION”

  GEORGE III AND THE AMERICAN REBELLION

  WHEN THE PACKETS BROUGHT to London by the Quero were opened on May 28 and news of the losses suffered by the British force sent to Lexington and Concord spread across the city, members of the government reacted with skepticism. Most thought the reports must be American propaganda. Given a couple of days for reflection, the king privately allowed that General Gage might have dispatched an inadequate force to Concord. Possibly, there had been some trouble, but George III would not budge from his belief that the accounts in the Salem newspapers on display at the lord mayor’s office were exaggerated. Even so, while it awaited Gage’s official report, the government used friendly newspapers to counter the rebel allegations that the king’s soldiers had committed atrocities. The General Evening Post cautioned readers, “Impartiality cannot be expected from Men when they are giving an Account of their own rebellious Proceedings.” It added that the version spread by the “rebel Vermin” was “stuffed with many Falsities.”1 The London Gazette and London Magazine also ran unfounded stories claiming that the Americans had not only committed atrocities—they had both scalped wounded redcoats and cut off their ears, it was alleged—but also fired the first shot on April 19.2

  Two weeks later Gage’s own report on the bloody first day of war arrived in London. Lord North learned that the accounts carried across the sea by Captain Derby had not been overstated. Although Gage emphasized that the force sent to Concord had accomplished its mission of destroying the arsenal—after the colonists fired the first shot, he said—the general revealed that on the return to Boston his soldiers had been “a good deal pressed” as they took “Fire from … every Hill, Fence, House, Barn, &c.” The “whole country was Assembled in Arms” against the British army, he confided. Disconcertingly, Gage did not divulge his losses, but aside from the matter of the source of the first shot, his report more or less confirmed the colonists’ accounts of the action. North summoned his cabinet, which had not met in weeks, to his office on Downing Street.3 Having expected that a show of force would resolve the crisis, North instead had a war on his hands. He and his ministers now had to prepare for hostilities they had not foreseen.

  The mood was glum when the cabinet gathered on June 15—the very day that the American Congress, three thousand miles away, appointed General Washington to command the Continental army. Some were upset at learning just how erroneous had been the repeated bluster that the Americans would back down when confronted. Others were disturbed at discovering on the very eve of their meeting that New York, which they had been led to believe was safe from rebel control, was acting in “association with other colonies to resist Acts of Parliament.”4

  The ministers may have been in low spirits, but as far back as January 1774, when the cabinet considered the Coercive Acts as a response to the Boston Tea Party, they had known that a heavy-handed approach could lead to war. They had never wavered from the belief that if war came, Great Britain would be victorious. That attitude yet prevailed, and according to one account, Dartmouth alone, at that initial cabinet meeting after Lexington-Concord, urged an alternative to a military response.

  The American secretary got nowhere with his pleas for peace. His colleagues were certain that it would be disastrous for Great Britain to show a hint of weakness. Besides, they were convinced that American firebrands were to blame for the bloodshed. That view was confirmed by General Gage, who told them that this was “a preconcerted Scheme of Rebellion, hatched years ago in Massachusetts Bay.” The ministers knew, too, that going to war was popular in the British home islands. Driven by outrage that the colonists had killed British soldiers, the “nation … is in a manner unanimous against America,” Sandwich told friends. Edward Gibbon, the MP, described the mood as a “national clamour” to employ “the most vigorous and coercive measures.”5 At that June 15 meeting, and three others later in the summer, North’s government took steps to escalate the conflict.

  During the first meeting, the ministers agreed to reinforce Gage’s army by shifting troops from England and Ireland, recruiting one thousand Highlanders in Scotland, and directing Guy Carleton, a general and the governor of Quebec, to raise a force of two thousand citizen-soldiers—if the solicitor general deemed it legal to recruit Catholics—and to persuade his Indian allies to attack along the northern frontier of New York. The cabinet also discussed hiring upwards of three thousand foreign mercenaries, though it came to no decision. Finally, the ministry agreed to send four frigates to America.

  By the ministry’s second meeting, a week later, Wedderburn had ruled that Catholics could be recruited. North’s government then directed Carleton to raise six thousand Canadians—triple the number first contemplated—and assigned them the objective of retaking Fort Ticonderoga, the loss of which London had just learned. The ministers additionally voted to transfer three regiments from Gibraltar and Minorca to America, replacing them with soldiers hired in the German province of Hanover. The cabinet also contemplated how to utilize the Royal Navy in suppressing the American rebellion. The navy was directed to blockade not only the New England coast but also the ports of New York and Charleston and the entrances to Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bay. At this stage, Britain’s blockade was designed to obstruct commerce between the thirteen colonies. The colonies were allowed to trade with both the mother country and the British West Indies, though naval commanders were instructed to stop American vessels and search for arms and munitions, and for illegal foreign goods. The cabinet took two more steps at this busy meeting. It agreed to ship arms to the royal governors in the southern colonies. It also commanded Dartmouth to ask the northern Indian superintendent in New York to “lose no time in taking such steps as may induce” the Six Nations Confederation of Iroquois “to take up the hatchet against His Majesty’s rebellious subjects.”6

  The decision to raise Native American warriors was taken after Gage reported that Indians were part of the siege army at Boston. “You may be tender of using Indians,” the general had advised, “but the Rebels have shewn us the Example, and brought all [the Indians] they could down upon us.” Gage’s communiqué was accurate. The Stockbridge Indians, a tribe that had allied with the New England settlers during their eight
eenth-century wars with the French, had cast their lot with the Yankees once again. As the Grand American Army took shape in May, some fifty Stockbridge braves formed a light infantry company within the siege army. Prior to Washington’s arrival, the Indians were active in ambushing British outposts and surprising sentries. During April and May at least six redcoats died at the hands of the Indians and several others had been wounded (and plundered, according to British reports). Washington continued to utilize his Indian allies—his secretary, Joseph Reed, referred to them as “our Stockbridge Indians”—even though congressional policy after late June was to secure the “strict neutrality” of the Indians.7

  In the course of its two meetings the ministry had agreed to send some five thousand more regulars to Gage. North’s government had deployed two thousand troops to New England at the beginning of the year, when it directed Gage to use force. With the reinforcement agreed to in June, there would be an army of some thirteen thousand men in Boston by late autumn, nearly a 150 percent increase over the number posted in the city only a year earlier.8 The huge force raised in Canada was expected to bring the number of British under arms in America to nearly twenty thousand, more than double the number in service on the continent when the war broke out.

  When the weeklong second cabinet meeting concluded, North was confident that his ministry had done all that was necessary to cope with the American problem. He hurriedly departed London for Wroxton, his 150-year-old country house in Oxfordshire. As Parliament was not in session between May and October, North had spent the spring at his country estate and expected to remain there until autumn. His hopes were quickly frustrated. Late in July, London was jolted by tidings of the Battle of Bunker Hill. The prime minister once again called the cabinet to an emergency meeting and sped to Downing Street.