Independence

by John Ferling

54. BF, “Causes of the American Discontents before 1768,” January 5–7, 1768, PBF 15:12–13.

  55. DGW 1:338–40.

  56. GW to George Mason, April 5, 1769, PGWC 8:353, 354n; GW to Bryan Fairfax, August 24, 1774, ibid., 10:155; Arthur Lee to GW, June 15, 1777, PGWR 10:43; DGW 2:153n.

  57. Boston Gazette, October 17, 1768, in Harry Alonzo Cushing, ed., The Writings of Samuel Adams (reprint, New York, 1968), 1:252; John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician (Lanham, Md., 2002), 67; Jensen, Founding of a Nation, 351; Ferling, A Leap in the Dark, 71–72.

  58. Jensen, Founding of a Nation, 293, 344.

  59. BF to George Whitefield, September 2, 1769, PBF 16:192.

  60. The best account of the shooting can be found in Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country, 182–202. See also Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York, 1970), 164–205; William M. Fowler, Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan (New York, 1993), 106; John C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (Stanford, Calif., 1936), 186; Thomas, Townshend Duties, 180; Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York, 1982), 203; JA to William Tudor, April 15, 1817, WJA 10:251–52. The quotation urging the soldiers to fire can be found in Alexander, Samuel Adams, 81.

  61. Peter D. G. Thomas, The Townshend Duty Crisis: The Second Phase of the American Revolution, 1767–1773 (Oxford, 1987), 28–29, 149, 152, 156, 166, 177–78.

  62. Thomas, Townshend Duty Crisis, 165; Thomas, Tea Party to Independence, 2.

  63. James H. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 1746–1770: The Movement for Royal Government and Its Consequences (Princeton, N.J., 1972), 224–43; Ferling, A Leap in the Dark, 78–81; BF to William Franklin, March 13, 1768, PBF 15:76.

  64. Whitley, Lord North, 92–102; Thomas, Townshend Duty Crisis, 214–31; Jensen, Founding of a Nation, 439; Benjamin Woods Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York, 1964), 52.

  65. Whitley, Lord North, 103–14; Valentine, Lord North, 1:269–92.

  66. BF, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One,” September 11, 1773, PBF 20:391–99.

  67. BF to Galloway, July 2, 1768, August 22, 1772, PBF 15:164, 20:276; “Franklin’s Account of His Audience with Hillsborough,” ibid., 18:15; BF to Thomas Cushing, June 10, 1771, ibid., 18:122; Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 383; Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, 185.

  68. BF to Cushing, December 2, 1772, PBF 19:411–12; Wood, Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, 141–43; Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, 185–87; Brands, The First American, 453; Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Boston, 2010), 35–36.

  69. Benjamin Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (New Haven, Conn., 2010), 47.

  70. SA to Stephen Sayre, November 23, 1770, WSA 2:68. For a particularly good treatment of the evolution of American attitudes and political practices, see Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972).

  71. Good starting points on the South and the backcountry are Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), and Walter Edgar, Partisans and Redcoats: The Southern Conflict That Turned the Tide of the American Revolution (New York, 2001).

  72. Oliver Perry Chitwood, Richard Henry Lee: Statesman of the Revolution (Morgantown, W.Va., 1967), 54–55; Thomas Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Saul K. Padover, ed., The Complete Jefferson: Containing His Major Writings, Published and Unpublished, Except His Letters (reprint, Freeport, N.Y., 1969), 1122.

  73. Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 77, 79, 118, 130, 133.

  74. Rakove, Revolutionaries, 37–38.

  75. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, 122–38; Jensen, Founding of a Nation, 434–60; Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 8, 138–45; Arthur Young, “George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742–1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 38 (1981): 562–623; JA, Diary, December 17, 1773, DAJA 2:86.

  76. BF to the Massachusetts House Committee of Correspondence, February 2, 1774, PBF 21:76.

  77. Fairfax County Resolves, July 18, 1774, PGWC 10:122.

  78. On Hancock as the moneybags of the Yankee rebels, see Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, 40.

  79. For the two paragraphs on the anger sweeping England, see Fred Junkin Hinkhouse, The Preliminaries of the American Revolution As Seen in the English Press, 1763–1775 (reprint, New York, 1969), 159, 162, 168; Solomon Lutnick, The American Revolution and the British Press, 1775–1783 (Columbia, Mo., 1967), 36–41; Troy Bickham, Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen Through the British Press (DeKalb, Ill., 2009), 60, 74; William Allen, The American Crisis: A Letter … (1774); Dickinson, British Pamphlets on the American Revolution, 2:354, 405; [Anon.], A Letter to a Member of Parliament on the Unhappy Dispute between Great-Britain and the Colonies (1774), ibid., 3:117, 125; David H. Murdoch, ed., Rebellion in America: A Contemporary British Viewpoint, 1765–1783 (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1979), 129–30.

  80. BF to the New Jersey Assembly Committee of Correspondence, February 18, 1774, PBF 21:111; BF to Thomas Cushing, March 22, 1774, ibid., 21:152.

  81. North had said on the eve of taking power that no minister would “venture to declare open war but upon the last extremity.” He never deviated from that view. See PH 16:720.

  82. Stanley Ayling, George the Third (New York, 1972), 243; John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed (New York, 1976), 40; Verner Crane, ed., Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960), 263n.

  83. Bernard Donoughue, British Politics and the American Revolution: The Path to War, 1773–1775 (London, 1964), 38–42; Valentine, Lord North, 1:312–15. The Dartmouth quotation is in Lord North, 1:314–15.

  84. The quotations can be found in Valentine, Lord North, 1:319–20, 314.

  85. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence, 26–61; Whitley, Lord North, 137–41; Valentine, Lord North, 1:306–30; Jack Sosin, “The Massachusetts Acts of 1774: Coercive or Preventive,” Huntington Library Quarterly 26 (1963): 235–52; Dartmouth to John Thornton, February 12, 1774, in The Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth (reprint, Boston, 1972), 2:197.

  86. The texts of the four Coercive Acts can be found in David C. Douglas et al., eds., English Historical Documents (London, 1956–70), 9:779–85.

  87. Quoted in Lutnick, American Revolution and the British Press, 35.

  88. Quoted in Donoughue, British Politics and the American Revolution, 77, and Christie and Labaree, Empire or Independence, 186.

  89. Quoted in Donoughue, British Politics and the American Revolution, 79.

  90. Holton, Forced Founders, 32–36; Henderson, Party Politics in the Continental Congress, 41.

  91. Donoughue, British Politics and the American Revolution, 73–104; Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 200–203.

  92. Donoughue, British Politics and the American Revolution, 89.

  93. Carl B. Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the American Revolution (Lexington, Ky., 1957), 1–194.

  94. PH 17:1184.

  95. PH 18:1215–70. The quotations are on pages 1224, 1263, 1264, and 1267. On Burke and the Rockinghamite position, see the useful analysis in John Derry, English Politics and the American Revolution (New York, 1976), 78–80. For Burke’s suggestion that Parliament’s policies were driving the colonies to nationhood, see Rakove, Revolutionaries, 68.

  96. The Preliminary Hearing before the Privy Council Committee … the Removal of Hutchinson and Oliver, January 11, 1774, PBF 21:19–23; The Final Hearing before the Privy Council Committee …, January 29, 1774, ibid., 21:37–70. The text of Webberburn’s speech can be found in ibid., 21:43–68. The quotations can be found on pages 47, 48, and 58 and in Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 469. See also Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, 200–3; Brands, The First American, 1–2, 4–5, 469–75; and Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia, 226–27. For a description of Franklin in th
e Cockpit, see Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin, 467–68.

  97. Quoted in editor’s note, PBF 21:41.

  98. Valentine, Lord North, 1:311, 319–20.

  99. Examination of Doctor Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1766, PBF 13:142.

  100. BF, “A Letter from London,” Boston Gazette, April 25, 1774, PBF 21:79–83. The “Bull-baiting” quote can be found in BF, “Extract of a Letter from London,” Pennsylvania Gazette, April 20, 1774, ibid., 21:112.

  CHAPTER 3: “DEFENDERS OF AMERICAN LIBERTY”: SAMUEL ADAMS, JOSEPH GALLOWAY, AND THE FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS

  1. SA to Arthur Lee, January 25, 1774, WSA 3:79; Benjamin Woods Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York, 1964), 147–48; David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York, 1994), 25–26.

  2. Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 156–61.

  3. BF to Thomas Cushing, February 15[–19], March 22, 1774, PBF 21:95, 152; Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 218.

  4. “The Town of Boston to the Colonies,” May 13, 1774, WSA 3:107–8; The Committee of Correspondence to the Committee of Correspondence of Philadelphia, May 13, 1774, ibid., 3:110–11; American Archives, 1:331, 331n; Joyce Lee Malcolm, Peter’s War: A New England Slave Boy and the American Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 2009), 37; David Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 (Charlottesville, Va., 1974), 19.

  5. SA to Arthur Lee, January 25, April 4, May 18, 1774, WSA 3:79, 98–102; SA to Elbridge Gerry, March 25, 1774, ibid., 3:84; SA to John Dickinson, April 21, 1774, ibid., 3:104–5; SA to Silas Deane, May 18, 1774, ibid., 3:114–16; SA to Stephen Hopkins, May 18, 1774, ibid., 3:116–17; Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 220.

  6. Quoted in Ira Stoll, Samuel Adams: A Life (New York, 2008), 23.

  7. My assessment of Samuel Adams draws in part on several excellent biographies. See John C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (Stanford, Calif., 1936); William M. Fowler, Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan (New York, 1997); John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician (Lanham, Md., 2002); and Stoll, Samuel Adams, 13–78. See also the important essay on SA in Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Leaders in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York, 1982), 3–50. The Jefferson quotation can be found in Miller’s biography of SA, page 343. The “nervous eloquence” comment can be found in Cass Canfield, Samuel Adams’s Revolution, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972), 32. The “horned snake” quotation is from Alexander, Samuel Adams, page 72. Abigail Adams’s comments on SA can be found in AA to Mary Cranch, July 15, 1766, AFC 1:54. JA’s comments can be found in JA to William Tudor, June 5, 1817, WJA 10:263; JA to Jedidiah Morse, December 5, 1815, ibid., 10:190; JA, Diary, December 23, 1765, DAJA 1:271; JA to Benjamin Rush, August 1, 1812, in John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813 (San Marino, Calif., 1966), 253. See also John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (reprint, New York, 2010), 448–49. For Hutchinson on SA, see Thomas Hutchinson, A History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, ed. Lawrence S. Mayo (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 2:155–56.

  8. [Samuel Adams], Boston Gazette, April 4, 11, December 19, 1768, WSA 1:202, 205, 270. On the trends in the mother country, see J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, Md., 1950), 77–90; John Rule, “Manufacturing and Commerce,” in H. T. Dickinson, ed., A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 2002), 127–40; Gordon Mingay, “Agriculture and Rural Life,” ibid., 141–57; Peter Borsay, “Urban Life and Culture,” ibid., 196–208. The Plumb quotation can be found on page 83 of his book cited above.

  9. Miller, Sam Adams, 3–47; Maier, Old Revolutionaries, 5–11, 17–21; Edmund S. Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 24 (1967): 3–43.

  10. The Declarations of the Stamp Act Congress, October 19, 1765, in David C. Douglas et al., eds., English Historical Documents (London, 1956–70), 9:672–73.

  11. Alexander, Samuel Adams, 132–33; Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1968), 466–67; Ammerman, In the Common Cause, 24–25.

  12. Jack Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (Baltimore, Md., 1979), 23; Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 231–32; John Hancock, An Oration, Delivered March 5, 1774 (Boston, 1774), 17–18.

  13. Ammerman, In the Common Cause, 5–9.

  14. Jensen, Founding of a Nation, 474–79; Ammerman, In the Common Cause, 31–32; John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783 (Williamsburg, Va., 1988), 8–9.

  15. Jensen, Founding of a Nation, 470–73; Ammerman, In the Common Cause, 26, 45–47; Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 228–29, 240–42.

  16. BF to Galloway, August 20, 1768; January 9, 29, 1769; June 11, 1770, PBF 15:189–90; 16:15, 30; 17:168.

  17. JA, Diary, September 3, October 10, 1775, DAJA 2:121, 150; Raymond Werner, ed., “Diary of Grace Growdon Galloway,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 55 (1931): 87, 168; Ernest H. Baldwin, “Joseph Galloway, Loyalist Politician,” ibid., 21 (1902): 161–64; Benjamin H. Newcomb, Franklin and Galloway: A Political Partnership (New Haven, Conn., 1972), 11, 35, 46, 89, 94, 121.

  18. Newcomb, Franklin and Galloway, 35–70.

  19. Newcomb, Franklin and Galloway, 35–104. See also James H. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics: The Movement for Royal Government and Its Consequences (Princeton, N.J., 1972).

  20. PBF 12:219n; Galloway to BF, July 18, November 16–28, 1765; January 13, February 27, May 23, June 16, 1766, ibid., 12:217–18, 376–77; 13:35–37, 180–81, 285, 317; Galloway to William Franklin, November 14, 1765, ibid., 12:373–74.

  21. Galloway to BF, March 10, October 17, 1768, PBF 15:71, 231; Newcomb, Franklin and Galloway, 216–17.

  22. William Nelson, The American Tory (Oxford, 1961), 46; Newcomb, Franklin and Galloway, 225–26.

  23. Janice Potter, The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 112–27. The quotations can be found on page 127.

  24. Quoted in Nelson, American Tory, 44.

  25. Galloway to BF, June 21, 1770; October 12, 1772, PBF 17:177–78; 19:331.

  26. Richard A. Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776 (Philadelphia, 1978), 40–63.

  27. Nelson, American Tory, 46.

  28. Quoted in Rakove, Beginnings of National Politics, 23.

  29. Galloway to William Franklin, September 3, 1774, LDC 1:24: Alexander, Samuel Adams, 139.

  30. JA, Diary, August 10, 1774, DAJA 2:97–98, 97–98n; DGW, August 31, 1774, 3:272–74.

  31. Silas Deane to Elizabeth Deane, September 23, 1774, LDC 1:91.

  32. JA, Diary, August 10–25, 1774, DAJA 2:97–111.

  33. JA, Diary, August 29, 1774, DAJA 2:114–15.

  34. JA, Diary, September 1, 1774, DAJA 2:119; DGW, September 4, 1774, 3:274, 275n.

  35. JA, Diary, June 20, 1774, DAJA 2:96, 97.

  36. Silas Deane to Elizabeth Deane, August 31–September 5, 1774, LDC 1:15; JA, Diary, August 30, September 7, 22, 1774, DAJA 2:116, 127, 136; Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (New York, 1965), 1–28.

  37. JA, Diary, August 30, 1774, DAJA 2:116; Robert Treat Paine, Diary, September 5, 1774, LDC 1:13; Deane to Elizabeth Deane, August 31–September 5, 8, 9, 1774, ibid., 1:16, 18, 20, 50, 55.

  38. JA to AA, September 14, 18, 29, 1774, AFC 1:155, 158, 164; JA, Diary, September 8, 17, 22, 1774, DAJA 2:127, 134, 136.

  39. H. James Henderson, Party Politics in the Continental Congress (New York, 1974), 20–21.

  40. JA to AA, September 25, 1774, AFC 1:163.

  41. JA, Diary, August 23, 1774, DAJA 2:109.

  42. JA, Diary, September 2, 3, 1774, DAJA 2:119, 120, 121.

  43. JA, Diary, August 29, September 3, 8, 12, 1774, DAJA 2:114–15, 121, 127, 133.

  44. Ammerman, In the Common Cause, 47–48.

  45. J
A, Diary, August 30, 1774, DAJA 2:115. JA’s remark was first noted in Henderson, Party Politics in the Continental Congress, 35. Deane to Elizabeth Deane, August 31–September 5, 1774, LDC 1:19.

  46. Robert Secor and John Pickering, Pennsylvania 1776 (University Park, Pa., 1975), 274, 281, 301, 304, 322.

  47. JA to AA, September 16, 1774, AFC 1:156; JA, Diary, September 10, 1774, DAJA 2:131.

  48. James Duane, Notes of Debate, LDC 1:30.

  49. Quoted in Richard R. Beeman, Patrick Henry: A Biography (New York, 1974), 60.

  50. JA, Diary, September 6, 1774, DAJA 2:125.

  51. JA, Diary, September 6, 1774, DAJA 2:124–26.

  52. JA to AA, September 8, 14, 1774, AFC 1:150, 155.

  53. On the colonists’ affection for the British monarchy, see the detailed account of the “imperialization of political life” in America in Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006).

  54. Quoted in Robert Douthat Meade, Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1957), 1:331.

  55. Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (New York, 1986), 168, 194–95; Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Boston, 2010), 76, 98.

  56. AFC 1:136n.

  57. JA to William Tudor, September 29, 1774, PJA 2:177; Joseph Reed to [?], September 4, 1774, Joseph Reed Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Rakove, Beginnings of National Politics, 45; Thomas Lynch to Ralph Izard, October 26, 1774, LDC 1:247; SA to Joseph Warren, September 25, 1775, ibid., 1:100; Jerrilyn Greene Marston, King and Congress: The Transfer of Political Legitimacy, 1774–1776 (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 79; Alexander, Samuel Adams, 141.

  58. Galloway to William Franklin, September 3, 1774, LDC 1:24; Joseph Galloway, Historical and Political Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Revolution (London, 1780), 67–68. The section containing Galloway’s evaluation of SA can also be found in Douglas, English Historical Documents, 9:801.

  59. Galloway to William Franklin, September 3, 5, 1774, LDC 1:24, 27; Alexander, Samuel Adams, 138–39.