Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

by Joseph J. Ellis

  By the early 1770s, then, the argument had reached a logical and legal impasse in which two conflicting views of the British Empire were forced to coexist: the resoundingly imperial view, in which sovereignty resided in Parliament; and the American view, in which consent was the ultimate priority and sovereignty resided in multiple locations, the only common American allegiance being to the king. The British model took its inspiration from European empires of the past, chiefly the Roman Empire. The American model had no precedents in the past, but foreshadowed what, a century later, became the British Commonwealth.

  In 1774 the British government decided that this impasse was intolerable, and in response to a wanton act of destruction in Boston Harbor called the Tea Party, it decided to impose martial law on Massachusetts. In retrospect, this was the crucial decision, for it transformed a constitutional argument into a military conflict. And it raised to relief the competing visions of a British Empire based on either coercion or consensus.

  But at the time—that is, early in 1775—voices on both sides of the Atlantic urged caution, fully aware that they had more to lose than to gain by a war and wholly committed to avoid it at all costs.

  On the British side, the arguments to change course came from two of the most prominent members of Parliament. In the House of Lords, no less a leader than William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, the acknowledged architect of the British victory in the French and Indian War, rose to condemn the decision to militarize the conflict. He recommended the withdrawal from Boston of all British troops, who could only serve as incendiaries for a provocative incident that triggered a war. The British government should then negotiate a political settlement in which “the sacredness of their property remain[s] inviolate and subject to their own consent.” Pitt was arguing that the American colonies were too valuable to lose, and that the British government would be well advised to give them everything they were asking for.6

  Edmund Burke rose in the House of Commons to make many of the same points, though Burke’s emphasis was on the Whig values that the American colonists embraced and on the more menacingly coercive values that the British ministry was advocating. As Burke saw it, the Americans had the better part of the argument, and if a war should ensue, they were likely to win. So the essence of political wisdom was to avoid such a war and the painful consequences it would entail.7

  Pitt and Burke were two of the most eloquent and respected members of Parliament, and taken together, by early 1775, they were warning the British ministry that it was headed toward a war that was unwise, unnecessary, and probably unwinnable.

  Voices on the other side of the Atlantic also counseled caution and compromise. Within the Continental Congress, most of the moderate delegates came from the middle colonies, chiefly Pennsylvania and New York. For at least two reasons this made excellent sense: first, the full wrath of British policy had been directed at Massachusetts, and while the residents of Philadelphia and New York felt obliged to make common cause with their brethren in Boston, that feeling did not translate into a willingness to be carried over the abyss into some brave new world of American independence; second, the population of the middle colonies was more diverse ethnically, politically, and religiously than New England’s, more a demographic stew in which Germans, Scotch-Irish, and French Huguenots coexisted alongside a Quaker elite to create a social chemistry that put a premium on live-and-let-live toleration.8

  As a result, the political as well as the seasonal climate was milder southwest of the Hudson. If the lingering vestiges of Calvinism gave New Englanders like John Adams a sharp edge, prominent leaders in the middle colonies tended to resemble smooth stones that skipped across the surface of troubled waters. It was no accident that Benjamin Franklin would become the self-invented paragon of benevolent equanimity only after moving from Boston to Philadelphia.

  The epitome of this moderate mentality in the Continental Congress was John Dickinson. Physically as well as psychologically, Dickinson was the opposite of Adams: tall and gaunt, with a somewhat ashen complexion and a deliberate demeanor that conveyed the confidence of his social standing in the Quaker elite and his legal training at the Inns of Court in London. His early exposure to the cosmopolitan world of British society had convinced him that the British Empire was a transatlantic family bound together by mutual interests and mutual affections. Unlike Adams, who regarded Parliament’s efforts to impose taxes on the colonies as a systematic plot to enslave them, Dickinson believed these impositions were temporary aberrations, merely another family quarrel, waves that would pass under the ship.9

  During the early years of the imperial crisis, Dickinson was perhaps the most prominent advocate for colonial rights within the empire, chiefly because of a series of pamphlets titled Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer (1768), which argued that Parliament not only lacked the authority to tax the colonists but also could not regulate trade for the purpose of raising revenue. Alongside Adams, he was generally regarded as the most impressive constitutional thinker on the American side, and his selection as a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1774 was a foregone conclusion.

  But whereas Adams believed that the denial of Parliament’s authority must inevitably lead to American withdrawal from the British Empire, Dickinson clung to the conviction that there must be some middle course that preserved colonial rights but averted American independence, which he regarded as an extremely dangerous course. The British were certainly not going to permit the colonists to go in peace, which meant a war that the Americans could not hope to win:

  We have not yet tasted deeply the bitter Cup called Fortune of War … A bloody battle lost … Disease breaking out among our troops unaccustomed to the Confinement of Encampment … The Danger of Insurrection by Negroes in the Southern Colonies … Incidential Proposals to disunite … False hopes and selfish Designs may all operate hereafter to our Disadvantage.10

  This was not an unrealistic vision. (Indeed, everything that Dickinson foresaw came to pass.) There was every reason, then, to find a way out of the impasse short of independence. And so, while Dickinson was resolute in his support of the beleaguered citizens of Massachusetts, to include the raising of money and men for a Continental Army, his fondest hope was for the appointment of a peace commission that would travel to London and negotiate some kind of sensible compromise.

  Though such a commission was never appointed, the outline of a Dickinsonian compromise was reasonably clear. The British ministry would recognize the sovereignty of the colonial legislatures over all questions of taxation and legislation. The colonists would voluntarily consent to Parliament’s regulation of trade, not for the purpose of raising a revenue but to ensure a privileged commercial relationship between the colonies and Great Britain. The colonists would also profess their loyalty to the king and their desire to remain within the protective canopy of his paternal affection. It was, in effect, a return to the status quo ante that existed in 1763, before the British ministry had attempted to impose its misguided imperial reforms.11

  As long as the imperial crisis remained a constitutional conflict, the Dickinsonian compromise provided an eminently viable solution, indeed the obvious answer that British statesmen like Burke and Pitt were prepared to embrace. But once the fighting started in April 1775, and even more so after Bunker Hill, the shift from a constitutional to a military conflict altered the political chemistry forever. Moderates on both sides of the Atlantic were swept to the sidelines, and the obvious compromise became a casualty of war.12

  Adams found Dickinson’s insistence on reconciliation in this new context both misguided and irritating. “A certain great Fortune and peddling Genius whose Fame has been trumpeted so loudly, has given a silly cast to our whole Doings,” he scoffed in a private letter to a friend. When the British intercepted the letter and then saw to its publication, Adams was embarrassed, though he insisted to friends that the controversy only exposed the futility of Dickinson’s vanishing hopes. For Dickinson’s moderate solution depended enti
rely on a conciliatory king, and the events of late 1775 and early 1776 had shown conclusively that George III had no interest in playing that role.13

  MANY YEARS LATER, when John Adams was asked who deserved the lion’s share of the credit for advancing the agenda toward independence in the Continental Congress, most of the questioners assumed that Adams would make a gesture of modesty, then claim the honor for himself. But he relished surprising them by bestowing the prize on George III. He was undoubtedly referring to the royal proclamation issued in August 1775 and the king’s address to both houses of Parliament the following October.14

  Apparently, George III was much shaken by the after-action reports on what was called “the ruinous victory” at Bunker Hill, which convinced him that events in the American colonies had moved past the point where any political settlement short of war was possible. And so he proclaimed the colonists to be in a state of rebellion and no longer under his protection. Then he froze all American assets in Great Britain, closed all British ports to American ships, and urged approval of a massive task force to crush the incipient rebellion with one decisive blow. In addition to 20,000 British regulars, he ordered the recruitment of another 10,000 mercenaries either from Russia or from those German principalities with professional soldiers trained in the highly disciplined tradition of Frederick the Great. When news of this last initiative reached America, Adams could not resist commenting on it with his customary irreverence. “By Intelligence hourly arriving from abroad,” he wrote one friend, “we are more and more confirmed that a Kind of Confederation will be formed among the Crowned Skulls, and Numbskulls of Europe, against Human Nature.”15

  By the start of the new year, then, George III had single-handedly undermined the reconciliation agenda of the moderate faction in the congress. For the moderates had invested all their hopes in a wise and loving monarch whose paternal affection for his American subjects would eventually bring the warmongers in the ministry and Parliament to their senses. Now George III had demonstrated that he was perhaps the most ardent advocate for war in the British government. The king had seized the initiative himself, and his advisers promptly lined up behind their sovereign. While the moderates were busy blocking any declaration of American independence from the British Empire, George III had in effect issued his own declaration of independence from them.

  The final blow to the prospect of a political accommodation—almost a coup de grâce, given the recent news from London—came in the form of a fifty-page pamphlet by an anonymous author titled Common Sense, which appeared in January 1776. Both the style and the substance of Common Sense were true to its title, since it was written in an idiom that was both accessible and electric, replicating the vocabulary of conversations by ordinary American in taverns and coffeehouses, where intricate constitutional arguments were replaced with straightforward assertions that “an island cannot rule a continent.” Common Sense was also a frontal attack on monarchy itself, poking fun at the ludicrous claim that the king spoke directly to God, describing the royal lineage as a criminal lineup of banditti, dismissing the notion that George III cared a whit about his American subjects as a fairy tale, or perhaps as a sentimental dream from which all responsible citizens needed to awake. The timing of Common Sense was perfect, for it provided a blanket indictment of British royalty in general and George III in particular just as the news of his plan to launch an enormous invasion began circulating in the American press. The pamphlet’s style, message, and timing combined to make it a sensation that sold 150,000 copies within three months.16

  The author, it turned out, was a thirty-nine-year-old Englishman named Thomas Paine, who had taken up residence in Philadelphia only two years earlier. Nothing in Paine’s background marked him as a candidate for greatness. He had failed as a shopkeeper, husband, and corset maker in Lewes and London, though he had internalized a keen sense of British injustice based on his experience as a member of London’s impoverished working class. As for his dazzling prose style, it was like a beautiful woman’s beauty, a God-given gift that was simply there. Since no one had ever heard of Paine, and since John Adams was the most visible and outspoken advocate for American independence, Adams was initially identified as the author of Common Sense. “I am innocent of it as a Babe,” Adams retorted. “I could not reach the Strength and Brevity of his style. Nor his elegant Simplicity nor his piercing Pathos.”17

  There were some features of Common Sense that Adams found troubling, chiefly Paine’s prescription of a large, single-house legislature as the proper form of government once the colonies had thrown off British rule. Paine struck Adams as “better at tearing down than building up.” But since the colonies were still in the “tearing down” phase of their relationship with George III and the British Empire, Common Sense was a highly visible and valuable contribution to “The Cause.” In part because of its influence, by the spring of 1776 support for an American declaration of independence had moved from a minority to a majority position in the congress. What remained unclear was the political opinion in the middle colonies, especially in the loyalist and moderate strongholds of New York and Pennsylvania.18

  THE MAN WHO, more than anyone else, would shape the answer to that question was John Adams, who had emerged as the leader of the radical faction in the Continental Congress. He did not look the part. By the time he turned forty-one in 1776, he was already losing his teeth and what remained of his hair. At five foot six he was shorter than most males of his time, with a torso that his enemies compared to a cannonball and that eventually led to the label “His Rotundity.” As a young man fresh out of Harvard, he began keeping a diary that made frequent references to the “raging bulls” he felt galloping through his soul. These interior surges periodically took the form of dramatic mood swings that declined but never wholly disappeared after his marriage to Abigail Smith in 1764, leaving an impression among friends and foes alike that he was, on occasion, slightly out of control. It was no accident that the beau ideal of his political philosophy was balance, since he projected onto the world the conflicting passions he felt inside himself and regarded government as the balancing mechanism that prevented those factions and furies from spinning out of control.19

  Adams entered the Continental Congress in 1774 already convinced that Great Britain’s imperial agenda left little room for negotiation or accommodation. The passage of the Coercive Acts (1774), which imposed martial law on Massachusetts, had pushed him over the line toward independence, and once beyond that formidable barrier, he never looked back. “I had passed the Rubicon,” he recalled. “Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.”20

  Adams was early to “The Cause” at least in part because he was looking for it. This, after all, was a young man who stood before mirrors practicing Cicero’s oration against Catiline, perfecting his body language and facial expressions to achieve the most dramatic effect. The constitutional crisis with Great Britain represented a providential opportunity to lash his enormous ambitions to a cause larger than himself and to a calling that would catapult him beyond the provincial horizons of a Boston lawyer to heights that were truly historic. He had been auditioning for the role of American Cicero in the privacy of his own mind for nearly a decade. Now a handful of incompetents in the British ministry, with an able assist from George III, had handed him a script eventually to be titled “The American Revolution.” He was poised to play a starring role.21

  From the very start, he alienated his moderate colleagues in the Continental Congress by telling them that the centerpiece of their strategy toward Great Britain—reconciliation on the basis of some kind of shared power with Parliament or some benevolent intervention by the king—was an illusion: “I have reasoned, I have ridiculed, I have fretted and declaimed against this fatal Delusion,” he lamented. “But a Torrent is not to be impedded by Reasoning, nor a Storm allayed by Ridicule.” For the moderates, who in 1774 and 1775 were a substantial majority in the congress, indep
endence meant war with the greatest military power on the planet, which was unthinkable. On the contrary, Adams replied; whatever the consequences might be, independence was inevitable. “We shall be convinced eventually that the cancer is too deeply rooted,” he predicted, “and too far spread to be cured by anything short of cutting it out entirely.” As he put it to Abigail, “We are waiting for a Messiah … who will never come.”22

  Adams acknowledged that he had made himself obnoxious to many of his colleagues, who regarded him as a one-man bonfire of the vanities. This never troubled Adams, who in his more contrarian moods claimed that his unpopularity provided clinching evidence that his position was principled, because it was obvious that he was not courting popular opinion. His alienation, therefore, was a measure of his integrity. Most frustrating to his opponents, events kept aligning themselves in accord with his predictions—this was why he gave George III so much credit as an indispensable ally—thereby reinforcing his claim to know where history was headed.

  Ironically, by the early spring of 1776, when events came his way in waves (i.e., George III’s rejection of political reconciliation in favor of war, the sensational impact of Common Sense), Adams had begun to sound a more cautious note. Despite his bravado in denouncing popularity and his ridicule of moderate delegates as hopelessly naïve, he worried that the accelerating pace of the movement for American independence had gotten too far ahead of popular opinion. Paine’s pamphlet had certainly helped “The Cause” on this score, but it was not at all clear that the majority of Americans, especially in the middle colonies, were ready for a break with the crown. The former firebrand became the prudent manager of revolutionary energies, dedicated not to speeding up the political process but to slowing it down. The American colonies were “advancing by slow but sure steps, to that mighty Revolution”—on that crucial point he remained confident—but “forced Attempts to accellerate their Motions would be attended with Discontent and perhaps Convulsions.”23