Independence
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While Wilson and Dickinson wrangled, things continued to happen that hardened attitudes within Congress. Five days after the committee was formed, a packet of London newspapers from November reached Philadelphia. They contained two crucial bits of news. For the first time the congressmen learned what they had suspected all along: North’s government was sending large numbers of reinforcements to America for the military campaign of 1776. The papers reported that not only were twenty-five thousand additional redcoats crossing the Atlantic but also that there were indications some troops were to be deployed in the southern colonies. The congressmen also gleaned from the accounts of the autumn session of Parliament that North was sending what he called “peace commissioners” across the sea.14
John Adams, who returned to Congress in mid-February, noted that “a deep Anxiety, a kind of thoughtfull Melancholy” pervaded the southern delegations. The southern congressmen found themselves in the same disquieting situation that Bostonians had faced on the eve of hostilities nine months earlier. But it was not solely Southerners who were anxious. Every deputy knew that a “very critical time is approaching,” as one remarked, a time of the harshest tests on the battlefield, of talks with Lord North’s envoys, and possibly of further urgent discussions with the French.15 In this uneasy environment few members of Congress wished to risk making an unnecessary public pronouncement that might be attended with unforeseen, and possibly pernicious, consequences. What might seem innocuous in the winter could in the spring or summer prove to be injurious to wartime morale or unity, or it could undercut the most crucial negotiations that Congress would ever be called on to undertake, whether with London or Versailles.
Wilson’s proposed Address to the Inhabitants of America was dead on arrival when at last it was presented to Congress on February 13. It had defended using force to resist the “Calamities” that would result from Great Britain’s unconstitutional acts, and it denied that Congress had ever intended to establish “an Independent Empire.” “We disavow the Intention,” it stipulated. Instead, the address stated: “We declare that what we aim at … is the Defense and Re-establishment of the constitutional Rights of the Colonies.” It concluded with a rhetorical flourish: “That the Colonies may continue connected, as they have been, with Britain, is our second Wish: Our first is—THAT AMERICA MAY BE FREE.”16
Wilson’s proposal was “very long, badly written & full against Independency,” thought a New Jersey delegate, who added that “the Majority did not relish his Address & Doctrine.” That much was sufficiently clear after a brief discussion. Wilson never asked Congress to vote on his Address.17
Thirty days had elapsed between the moment when Lord Drummond believed that a majority of congressional delegations were prepared to make peace on the basis of North’s Peace Plan and the day that Wilson presented his draft document renouncing independence. During that month, sentiment for making peace and reconciling with the mother country—if Lord Drummond’s sense of congressional attitudes was correct—crested and began to recede.
The Drummond episode also underscores that, from 1774 onward, Lord North and the Crown missed one opportunity after another to resolve the quarrel with the colonies and, with only minimal concessions, to save the empire. Had peace commissioners been sent to America before the war began, as Dartmouth had wished, there might never have been a war. Had North and his ministers stood up to the king and softened, or prevented altogether, his strident proclamation in August 1775 and his speech to Parliament in October, reconciliation might have been possible even after hostilities had begun. Had North named and dispatched peace commissioners in November—when he told Parliament that he planned to do so—and had those envoys been entrusted with the authority to engage in authentic diplomacy, a majority in Congress might have consented to the terms that they were ostensibly willing to commit to with Drummond. Above all, the Drummond episode laid bare the desperation of many congressional delegates who favored reconciliation, raising the possibility that an artful government in London might have gained its ends by fatally dividing Congress, the very strategy that Burke had shrewdly urged North to pursue the previous fall.
But from the moment in January 1774 that they had learned of the Boston Tea Party through the end of 1775, and beyond, the king and an overwhelming majority of his ministers held inflexibly to the premise that all was lost if they conceded to the colonists even the slightest authority that London exercised over America. Beginning with its discussions over how to respond to the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, North’s government preferred coercion to making concessions. By 1776 North’s government was committed solely to the use of armed force to resolve its American problem. If it proved to be unavailing, Great Britain would lose its American colonies. Moreover, many believed that Great Britain had to succeed in 1776. If the Continental army survived 1776, it would thereafter be a seasoned and more formidable foe, and it might be joined by French or Spanish forces.
Though it is more apparent in hindsight than it was to contemporaries, Congress’s response to Wilson’s address on February 13, 1776, was a pivotal moment. The reconciliationists were finished. They had dominated Congress and constrained its actions from the beginning. No more. The war now controlled Congress, and a majority of delegates were prepared to do whatever had to be done to gain victory. With one event bringing on another, as Samuel Adams had remarked, the likelihood was considerable that wartime exigencies—as Wilson and Dickinson surely must have known—were moving Congress steadily, and rapidly, toward an irrevocable breach.
Forty-eight hours after Congress rebuffed Wilson and Dickinson, Robert Morris, a member of the Pennsylvania delegation who had been an unbending advocate for reconciliation, wrote a friend that it was inevitable that Congress would declare American independence, most likely sometime during 1776. In jumbled syntax, he allowed that war had “prepared Men’s minds for an Independency, that were shock’d at the idea a few weeks ago.” He also predicted that if Great Britain failed to crush the rebellion in 1776, it “may bid adieu to the American Colonies.”18 Morris was adapting like a chameleon. He was a congressman cut from different cloth, a man from a mercantile background who in large measure viewed the war and America’s break with the mother country from the perspective of its impact on countinghouse ledger books. That was not necessarily good news for those who favored reconciliation.
The forty-four-year-old Morris sported a middle-age spread, a thick mane of graying hair, and dark, furtive eyes. He was pallid, as might be expected of a man who spent his days indoors at a desk. His demeanor was that of a man obsessed with profits and losses. He tended toward briskness and formality. He was not unfriendly, but he was neither warm nor outgoing. He had few close friends, and no one who worked with him in business or public affairs ever characterized him as engaging or recalled any spark of humor or kindness on his part.
Born in Liverpool in 1735, Morris had emigrated to America with his father just as he entered adolescence. They settled in Maryland, where his father worked as a tobacco agent, but after only a year in the colonies young Morris was orphaned following his father’s death. The youngster’s guardian sent him to Philadelphia to begin an apprenticeship in the mercantile firm of Charles Willing. Morris and Willing’s son, Thomas, separated in age by less than two years, developed a close relationship and in 1757—following the elder Willing’s demise in a yellow fever epidemic—established their own firm, Willing, Morris and Company.
As was true of the Franklin and Galloway political partnership, Willing and Morris brought dissimilar but essential talents to their business partnership. Willing had ties to powerful Philadelphia families. His mother was a Shippen, a family that had long produced professional and civic leaders, including Philadelphia’s first mayor; his father was one of the city’s more influential merchants and had also held the post of Philadelphia’s mayor. Young Willing was well educated, having attended preparatory schools in the mother country and read law at the Inns of Court in London.
He was amiable, cosmopolitan, well connected, and quite affluent, if not wealthy. He was also politically active and deeply involved in the life of the city. Willing dabbled in Indian diplomacy, sat in the assembly between 1764 and 1767, and, like his father, served as mayor of Philadelphia. He was additionally a trustee for a charitable school, director of the College of Philadelphia, and judge of the Orphans’ Court.19
Robert Morris by Charles Willson Peale. A Philadelphia merchant, Morris entered Congress in 1775. He favored reconciliation and refused to vote for independence, but in August 1776 Morris signed the Declaration of Independence. (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art/ The Bridgeman Art Library)
Yet it was Morris who set his and Willing’s company apart from its rivals. Fortuity had brought him into a field of endeavor for which he was perfectly suited. Meticulous, industrious, and persevering, Morris seemed to have the Midas touch when it came to commerce. He landed government contracts for the nascent firm during the French and Indian War, turning that conflict into a bonanza for Willing, Morris and Company. The company continued to flourish during the dozen years before the Revolutionary War broke out, in part because Willing and Morris had an easy collaborative relationship. Early on Willing told his partner that “my house shall be your home and myself your friend.” After two decades in business together, Willing told Morris of his “esteem and friendship” for him, adding that his partner remained “the Man in the World I love most, and for whom I have every feeling of affection and regard.”20 By 1775 Willing, Morris and Company sent out some twenty ships annually, exporting grain from the Pennsylvania heartland (and from the Chesapeake and even Quebec) and importing wine, salt, and lemons from Portugal and Spain. But the heart of the company’s trade was with Great Britain and the West Indies. The company shipped corn, wheat, and flaxseed to Ireland and lumber, flour, and fish to the Caribbean, and its vessels returned home laden with manufactured goods, luxury items, and casks of rum. In the last years before the war, the company branched into land speculation schemes, investing in what the proprietors thought would be a citrus-producing tract near the Mississippi River. Before he turned thirty-five, Morris, with his wife (the daughter of a prominent lawyer) and two sons, lived in a stone mansion on an eighty-acre estate that sprawled along the Schuylkill River only three miles from downtown Philadelphia.21
Both Willing and Morris supported the nonimportation boycotts against the Stamp Act and Townshend Duties, and each shared the outlook of Dickinson with regard to opposing London’s policies. Willing was the more politically active of the two—he was a member of the provincial convention in 1774 that compelled Galloway to have the assembly consent to the First Continental Congress—and he was elected to the Second Congress in May 1775. Morris remained largely aloof from politics until war broke out, but in the first election thereafter he ran successfully for the assembly. He had hardly taken his seat before the legislature added him to the colony’s delegation in Congress in November 1775. Both Willing and Morris were unswerving advocates of reconciliation, but the two were businessmen who never lost sight of what their public service could do for Willing, Morris and Company’s earnings. They knew that war could be both good and bad for business. “[W]e judge that Business must be very valuable, so long as the other Colonies are shut up” by the Royal Navy, they said. Obtaining a sizable chunk of that business often appeared to be their guiding light.22
In September 1775 Willing was among the initial batch of delegates chosen to serve on the Secret Committee, Congress’s panel for making sub rosa arms purchases. However, hard on the heels of Morris’s election to Congress six weeks later, Willing resigned from the committee, and Morris—who not only had a proven track record in landing government contracts but also had been privately trading for munitions in the West Indies since the outbreak of the war—took his place. In no time, Willing, Morris and Company obtained several contracts from Congress for trafficking in gunpowder, gunlocks, arms, artillery, and bayonets. It also had a share of the nearly three hundred thousand dollars that Congress appropriated for opening trade in Europe and a guarantee of 5 percent of the profits turned by that commerce. Morris developed cozy ties with the army’s paymaster in Virginia, who channeled business to Willing, Morris and Company in return for government contracts that the congressman secured for him. Morris saw no ethical conflicts in his actions. “[I]t seems to me,” he said in 1776, that “the present opportunity of Improving our Fortunes ought not to be lost especially as the very means of doing it will Contribute to the Service of our Country at the same time.” By mid-February 1776, when Morris came to think that a congressional declaration of independence was a certainty, he was working hard to land a contract to export tobacco from the Chesapeake colonies to France, commerce that long had been illegal under Great Britain’s trade laws. Morris badly wanted a share of that trade.23
Morris appeared to be playing every angle. Early in 1776, he let business contacts in England know that he believed “the Power of Great Britain [was] insurmountable” and that he favored reconciliation. But what Morris really believed was that the war would not go on long before nearly every nation in Europe would “be glad to treat and trade with us on our own terms.” He wanted a role in that traffic, for as commerce with Great Britain dried up in the course of the war, the European trade would be his company’s salvation. Morris had another reason for wanting to get involved in trade with Europe. He thought the most likely outcome of the war would be a stalemate. Great Britain would be unable to crush the rebellion; the colonists would lack the ability to gain victory; a stalemated war would end in a negotiated peace. Morris appeared to believe that after all was said and done, the America colonies would remain part of the British Empire, but London would have to grant greater autonomy to the colonies, including more liberal trading rights outside the empire.24 Morris presumed that the European trade connections he forged during the war would serve him well following hostilities.
Robert Morris and Thomas Willing were still part of the anti-independence bloc in Congress. Each had lived in England, loved England, and was loyal to old country ties. Willing, Morris and Company had innumerable commercial contacts throughout the British Empire and had prospered within the Anglo-American union. As Morris observed just before Christmas 1775: “I abhor the Name & Idea of a Rebel. I neither want or wish a Change of King or Constitution.”25 But both men—Morris especially—were opportunists, and Morris in particular knew that a declaration of American independence was on the horizon. The colonists, he said, “have been drove into it step by step with a reluctance on their part that has been manifested in all their proceedings.”26 He also believed that American independence might serve his interests. If Willing and Morris were typical of the powerful Philadelphia merchants, and of merchants throughout America’s cities, they were a weak reed for Dickinson to depend on in his continued fight against American independence.
“Where the plague are these [peace] Commissioners,” Morris exclaimed as spring dawned in Philadelphia. Nearly one hundred days had passed since the colonists learned of the king’s address, with its vague reference to commissioners, and not a single envoy had been seen. Morris, who had been willing to make peace on the terms worked out with Lord Drummond, prayed for the arrival of a commission empowered to offer “terms fit for Freeman.” If and when the commissioners arrived, he added, they must be willing to negotiate with Congress. Should that not be the case, he said, “they may as well stay where they are.”27
When Morris offered his thoughts in April, the peace commissioners alluded to by the king in October had not been formally appointed. The long delay in dispatching the commissioners was not due to the novelty of the idea. The notion of sending an envoy to America to negotiate a settlement went back at least to early 1774, when Dartmouth, in the course of the debate over how to respond to the Boston Tea Party, had proposed that the ministry send an emissary to the colonies. A year later, during the cabinet’s final peacetime discussions on using force, Dartmout
h had again pressed for sending a representative across the sea armed with authority to conduct talks with the colonists. A mission of the sort had been politically untenable for North prior to the outbreak of hostilities, and the prime minister—and, above all, the monarch—also thought it ill-conceived. North had remained convinced that when confronted with the prospect of British force, the colonists would come to their senses, throw out the firebrands and demagogues who had come into power since the Stamp Act crisis, and accept London’s terms leading to reconciliation.
But as news of the bloody disasters suffered by the British army along Battle Road and on Bunker Hill poured into London in the summer of 1775, North quietly grew to think that a negotiated settlement offered Great Britain the best possible way out of its American dilemma. While North was unbending on the issue of parliamentary sovereignty, he privately considered almost everything else to be fair game for negotiations, though he was too adept politically to say so openly.
North’s first challenge was to secure authorization for a peace commissioner. As was customary, the prime minister had a hand in writing the king’s address that opened Parliament in October 1775, and it was North who inserted in the rough draft the puzzling sentence about “persons … so commissioned” to restore the rebellious colonies to the empire. For North, the passage meant that a commissioner would be sent to America to negotiate with the rebels. It is not clear what George III believed he was consenting to, but once the king agreed to the insertion of the passage, North set about naming a commissioner. Dartmouth, in one of his final acts as American secretary, offered Lord Howe the post of peace commissioner. He did so, of course, with North’s approval.28