Independence

by John Ferling

  repudiation of Parliamentary taxation of the colonies;

  recognition of the Continental Congress;

  suspension of all American legislation enacted since 1763;

  never again keeping a standing army in America during peacetime;

  never again changing a colony’s charter without the colonists’ consent;

  assistance to help the colonies retire their war debt; and

  consideration of American representation in the House of Commons.26

  North’s proposals were generous, but they came too late. America not only had decided in 1776 that it wanted to be free of Great Britain, but flushed with the great victory at Saratoga, it also knew that its long-coveted alliance with France was at hand. Furthermore, Congress was certain that the Franco-American allies could procure American independence. So the war continued until Yorktown.

  It was left to Lord Germain, who, like North, had stayed on through the long war, to bring the prime minister the news of the catastrophe at Yorktown. North, Germain said later, received the tidings “as he would have taken a ball in the breast.” Pacing the floor in agitation, North exclaimed: “Oh God, it is all over!”27 He had never been more correct.

  Eight who signed the Declaration of Independence did not live to see the peace treaty that ended the Revolutionary War in 1783. Two were dead within a year of July 4, 1776. John Morton perished of natural causes. Button Gwinnett was killed in a duel. More than half of the signers were gone by the time John Adams was sworn in as president of the United States in 1797. By the time Jefferson’s presidency ended in 1809, only sixteen were left. Adams and Jefferson, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who had not been in Congress to vote for independence, were the last of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence still living in America’s jubilee year, 1826.

  One reason Elbridge Gerry had been so eager to sign the Declaration of Independence was that he anticipated doing so would further his ambition for a long, successful public career and might catapult him to lofty heights.28 But for the most part, those who had risen to the top in Congress by 1776 continued to predominate in American public life, and those who were lesser congressmen remained secondary figures. To be sure, all who sat in Congress in 1776 were already important figures in their colonies, and most continued to play substantive roles in their states following independence.

  The majority of those who sat in Congress on July 2 were gone from that body within a couple of years, but nearly all went on to hold a state office at one time or another after 1776, mostly in the legislature or on the bench. In 1789, Robert R. Livingston gained a minute of national prominence. The chief judicial officer in New York, Chancellor Livingston, as he was called, administered the oath of office to President Washington. Seven signers became state governors. Five sat in the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and three others served in their state’s ratification convention that passed on the Constitution. Five sat in Congress after 1789 under the new Constitution, two in the House and three in the Senate. President Washington appointed Samuel Chase to the United States Supreme Court in 1796; he was impeached eight years later but was acquitted in the Senate trial. Seven signers served as soldiers during the Revolutionary War; at least two—Wolcott and Lewis Morris—were on the front lines during major campaigns. Franklin and Adams helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the accord that ended the war and garnered British recognition of American independence. According to legend, Franklin attended the signing ceremony wearing the same suit of spotted Manchester velvet that he had worn on the day of his public humiliation in the Cockpit in January 1774. Subsequently, he, Adams, Jefferson, and Gerry all served as United States ministers to European nations.

  Some signers experienced rough going during the War of Independence. Several who lived near the fighting had their homes plundered or destroyed. Four were captured by the British. Rutledge, Heyward, and Middleton endured nearly two years of captivity in Florida. Richard Stockton was taken prisoner late in 1776 and during his few weeks of confinement renounced American independence.

  Some in Congress who had opposed independence quickly faded into obscurity, but four flourished politically. George Read, whose opposition made it imperative that Caesar Rodney hurry back to Philadelphia before the vote on July 2, went on to serve as Delaware’s chief executive and in the 1790s as its United States senator. Likewise, Rutledge served as governor of South Carolina. Robert Morris and James Wilson were the longtime foes of independence who went on to wield the greatest national influence.

  Before July 1776, Morris thought his mercantile company more likely to prosper within the British Empire. Afterward, he reluctantly supported independence and openly acknowledged his hope for peace and the restoration of America’s pre-war commerce with the former mother country. Morris played a crucial role in keeping the army supplied in late 1776 and 1777. It was his good fortune to grow steadily wealthier throughout the war, until by its end, he was widely thought to be the richest man in the United States. He was also thought by many to have thrived from insider information and the sale of comestibles to the French armed forces while ignoring the Continental army, which after 1778 increasingly lacked the means of paying for needed items. Morris’s business ethics eventually provoked Thomas Paine to publish an attack on his “low dirty Tricks,” which the essayist thought had introduced a “degree of corruption” into American life. Morris may have acted unethically, but he was wealthy, powerful, and unquestionably shrewd. Those qualities led first to his appointment as the nation’s superintendent of finance during the final years of the war and later to his selection as part of Pennsylvania’s delegation to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.29

  Until the last moment, Wilson had resisted independence, fearing the radical political and social change that might be unleashed by the American Revolution. He voted for independence and signed the Declaration, but he spent the Revolution fighting against the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, which established the most democratic government in America. He and Pennsylvania’s other conservatives eventually won their fight, replacing the state’s first constitution with a charter that virtually guaranteed control by the elite. Thereafter, Wilson joined the fight to create a strong central government. He, too, sat in the Constitutional Convention, where he played a more substantive role than Morris. Indeed, political scientist Clinton Rossiter concluded that Wilson was second only to James Madison in importance at the Convention, where he worked tirelessly, and ultimately successfully, to fashion a national government under which it would be extremely difficult to bring about meaningful change. He was subsequently nominated for the United States Supreme Court by President Washington and served as an associate justice for nine years.30

  America’s political history has always been filled with unexpected twists and turns. Among the most astonishing was that John Dickinson went on to play a greater role in shaping the new American nation than did Samuel Adams. Even Dickinson, in his final speech against independence, had said that he suspected his political career was over. He left Congress following the vote on independence and commanded his militia battalion for three months. He resigned his commission in September, having lost the confidence of his men and the Pennsylvania government, neither of which thought it right for a foe of independence to lead soldiers in a war that was being waged to set America free of Great Britain. Dickinson took up arms again as a private in a militia company and he was in harm’s way during the campaign that was fought after the British army invaded Pennsylvania in 1777. Subsequently, Dickinson served as the chief executive of Delaware, sat on its Supreme Executive Council, and in 1787 was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, where he worked for the federal system that he had cherished and longed to bring about within the Anglo-American Empire.

  Samuel Adams left Congress in 1781. In the years that followed before his death in 1803, he served repeatedly as the moderator of Boston town meetings, sat in the state legislature, and eventually became the
governor of Massachusetts, but he never again held a national office. The conservative faction that dominated the state in the 1780s refused to add him to Massachusetts’s delegation to the Constitutional Convention. He sought election to the United States House of Representatives in December 1788 from a Boston district, but his fellow Bostonians spurned him in favor of Fisher Ames, a staunch foe of democracy.

  No one lost more as a result of the American Revolution than Samuel Adams’s great foe at the First Congress, Joseph Galloway. He had retired from public life and proclaimed himself a neutral in the spring of 1775, but late the following year, as Washington’s army retreated across New Jersey, Galloway concluded that a British victory was inevitable. He opportunistically came out of retirement and fled behind British lines, offering the redcoats his help. General Howe subsequently utilized Galloway as an intelligence official, and when Philadelphia fell to the British in September 1777, the former congressman became the police commissioner of the occupied city. Two revolutionaries were executed on Galloway’s watch. When the British abandoned Philadelphia in June 1778, Galloway fled with them. In 1779 he went to London, where he wrote countless pamphlets in the hope of keeping British morale from flagging. Following the war, Galloway wished to return to America, but the victorious Pennsylvania authorities threatened him with arrest and trial for his activities in occupied Philadelphia. Galloway might have fared as well as Wilson had he possessed the latter’s political sagacity, and especially his uncanny chameleonlike qualities. Instead, he died in exile in England in 1803.

  In the long years after 1776, John Adams appears to have given more thought than any other Founder to when and why the colonists embraced the idea of American independence. He was never of one mind on the question. Most famously, he said that the “Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.” The “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the People, was the real American Revolution,” and those changes occurred “in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.”31 He was suggesting that support for independence evolved slowly in response to a series of British provocations, and that indeed would be an accurate description of the profound changes in outlook that he experienced in the course of nearly a decade after the Stamp Act. But on other occasions Adams said he thought the idea of independence had germinated in the 1740s, when London betrayed American interests in the peace settlement following King George’s War; or in the 1750s, when France was driven from Canada as a result of the Seven Years’ War; or even as late as 1774, when Parliament enacted the Coercive Acts. In his final years, Adams contended that the idea of independence could be traced back to the first colonists in the seventeenth century. They had been spurred to move to the wilds of America, he said, by a hunger for “Independence [from] English church and state.” This led him to conclude: “When we say, that … Adams … Jefferson, &c., were authors of independence, we ought to say they were only awakeners and revivers of the original fundamental principle of colonization.”32

  Adams did not say that American independence was inevitable, and to be sure, he never suggested that it was certain to occur in his lifetime. No one knew better than Adams how difficult the struggle had been to secure Congress’s assent to every defiant step from 1774 onward. The First Congress’s statement of American rights had passed by only two or three votes, he subsequently recollected, and he remembered as well that “all the great critical questions” down to the spring of 1776 had been decided by the slimmest of margins. Not infrequently, he recalled, the passage of pivotal measures had hinged on the vote of a single delegate.33 Adams knew that as late as January 1776 no more than five of the thirteen delegations in Congress, and perhaps not that many, supported American independence.

  No one in Congress was more important than Adams in the long struggle for independence. He had rapidly emerged in the Second Congress as the leading figure within the faction of hard-line delegates. Samuel Adams may have initially coached him from behind the curtain, but by sometime in the summer of 1775 John Adams was adroitly managing affairs on his own terms. He wisely understood that Congress could not be pushed toward one truculent stand after another. That would only have created divisions, and it might possibly have driven the more conservative delegates back into the arms of the British government. Instead, John Adams had sought to assuage the reconciliationists, to permit them to play out their hopes, until at long last they discovered what he and Franklin and Jefferson, and all the more radical delegates, had long since come to believe: The mother country would never agree to reconcile with its colonies on fair and just terms. Adams had intuitively understood that time was on his side, for the war would unavoidably radicalize Americans, gradually ripening them for independence.

  Adams’s greatest virtue was the patience to permit these occurrences to play out, but like any great leader, he understood when the time for final action had arrived. By the late spring and early summer of 1776, Adams knew that the American people were ready for independence, and so too were most congressmen. The time had come, he remarked early in the summer of 1776, to “make thirteen Clocks, strike precisely alike, at the Same Second.”34

  Looking back from the perspective of more than two centuries, it is at first glance astonishing that Great Britain failed to prevent America’s independence. Britain’s rulers had many opportunities from 1766 onward to make choices that could have peacefully terminated the American protest and restored not only the tranquility that had previously existed within the empire but also the affection that most colonists felt toward their mother country. Had the king and his ministers taken to heart the Virginia Resolves, or Franklin’s warning in 1766 that they risked losing the colonists’ respect and admiration, the Stamp Act would never have been followed by an inflammatory pronouncement claiming the unlimited authority of Parliament. The American protests against the Townshend Duties in the late 1760s afforded Britain’s rulers with a second opportunity to abandon further provocative taxes. Even as the crisis mounted in the wake of the Boston Tea Party, Britain in 1774, or again in 1775, might have chosen the path of reform rather than stridency. Edmund Burke and a handful of others in Parliament understood that a sincere offer of imperial reform might meet with American approval or, at the very least, it could conceivably so divide the colonists that Congress could be forced into an accommodation. To be sure, Great Britain would have had to grant a greater measure of self-government to the colonists, and the colonists, in turn, would have had to accept a lesser degree of autonomy than their most radical leaders desired. But had London pursued such an enlightened course, it is inconceivable that American independence would have been declared in 1776, or probably even within the lifetimes of those whom we call the Founding Fathers. As Burke charged in one of his first speeches after American independence was declared, the British government “drove them [the colonists] into the declaration of independency; not as a matter of choice, but necessity—and now they have declared it.”35

  On reflection, America’s declaration of independence, which at first blush appears to have been avoidable, was in fact nearly inevitable. Time and again throughout history, rulers in the thrall of nationalistic fervor, fearful of appearing weak and indecisive, beholden to the interests of the few that are reaping fortunes from the status quo, and above all spurred by a sense of potency and superiority have been unwilling to bend in the face of changing times. That was the case with Lord North and his king, and with the majority in Parliament. Only forty days before independence was declared, the king in a speech before Parliament made the preposterous claim that Great Britain “can have no safety or security but in that constitutional subordination for which we are contending.”36 Inexorably, myopically, George III and his ministers led Great Britain down a path that they believed would save the British Empire. Instead, the fatal course they chose—that they seemingly could not avoid choosing—led to the loss of most of Brita
in’s Empire in North America.

  Today, the best-remembered aspect of the American Revolution may be the Declaration of Independence. However, as historian Pauline Maier has pointed out, the Declaration was quickly “all-but-forgotten” by the Revolutionary generation. The merrymaking in America’s cities and hamlets in the summer of 1776 had far more to do with Congress’s having declared independence than for the stirring Declaration of Independence itself. Little or nothing was said about the Declaration of Independence during the remainder of the war—or for that matter, until the 1790s. Only then did Americans care enough about the Declaration of Independence even to wonder for the first time who had been its principal author.37

  It seems odd that a document that came to mean so much to Americans in the centuries that followed could have been so ignored by the Revolutionary generation. It may have been that Jefferson, who had said that his design was to avoid “aiming at originality of principle or sentiment,” had succeeded too well.38 What Jefferson had written about the rights of humankind, as well as the charges he leveled against Britain’s leaders, had been broached previously by colonial assemblies, local revolutionary committees, and the Continental Congress. What Jefferson had written was commonplace to his wartime audience.