Adams was especially distraught to discover that unanimity about independence should be followed by total disagreement about what an independent American government might look like. “Thus we are sowing the Seeds of Ignorance, Corruption, and Injustice,” he lamented, “in the fairest Field of Liberty ever appeared upon Earth, even in the first attempts to cultivate it.” Two conclusions seemed to be clear: first, Americans were united, or at least mostly united, in opposition to the policies of the British ministry; second, they were divided along regional and state lines once their common enemy was taken out of the equation. They knew what they were against, but did not know what they were for.18
Adams had been extremely adroit at managing the delegates in the Continental Congress between advocates of reconciliation and proponents of independence in 1775 and 1776. Now, however, the divisions within the congress had become more complicated and cut in several directions. Moreover, the political adrenaline that had energized their collective response to British policy had run its course. Winning the war, of course, remained a common goal. Beyond that, however, the colonists had no agreed-upon political agenda, several competing versions of how an independent American republic should be configured, and some skepticism about whether any union of the states should continue after the war was won. In his capacity as de facto secretary of war, Adams’s chief job was to prevent these emerging sectional and state divisions from undermining the military alliance. On the very eve of the battle in New York, he got a glimpse of just how difficult that job had become. Beyond independence, Americans had no consensus on what being an American meant.
The exposure of the deep differences that had lain latent beneath the surface since the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord fifteen months earlier moved the American Revolution into a new phase. The idealistic, quasi-religious political mentality suggested by elevated expressions like “The Cause,” and moralistic references to the superiority of American virtue as contrasted with British corruption, had provided a rhetorical platform on which the different and disparate state and regional interests could congregate as a self-proclaimed collective. Like Joseph Warren at Bunker Hill, patriots were prepared to sacrifice everything—in Jefferson’s lyrical rendering, “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor”—on behalf of a higher goal.
The exalted and almost operatic character of this mentality was heartfelt but unsustainable. It was like the honeymoon phase of a marriage, blissfully romantic but of short duration. The divisive debates in midsummer 1776 marked the end of virtue and the beginning of interest as the dominant influence in shaping debates in the Continental Congress. To be sure, the Howe brothers had to be defeated and American independence won. But after that, nothing was clear. And everything would have to be negotiated.
AMID THESE DISPIRITING political developments came one expected and unqualified success. A committee charged with defining the contours of an American foreign policy, most urgently to explore a Franco-American alliance that would give the wartime government an invaluable European partner, delivered its report on July 18. The committee had delegated the task to Adams, who single-handedly wrote the report, which was titled “A Plan of Treaties.” Unlike the Dickinson Draft, which was an incoherent expression of differing opinions, the Plan of Treaties spoke clearly and with a singular voice. Almost inadvertently, it defined the framework for American foreign policy that remained in place for over a century.19
The first thirteen articles of the plan described the terms of a wholly commercial treaty “between the most Serene and mighty Prince, Lewis the Sixteenth, the most Christian King, His Heirs and Successors, and the United States of America.” Adams adopted the courtly language of European diplomacy in its most affected style, presumably to demonstrate that the upstart American government knew how to play the European diplomatic game. In effect, France was being invited to recognize the freshly created United States, and both countries would eliminate all import duties and tariffs in order to foster a more robust commercial connection.20
The Plan of Treaties explicitly rejected any diplomatic or military alliance with France. At least in retrospect, this seems strange, knowing as we do that French military assistance was utterly essential in winning the war for independence. But in July 1776 Adams and the other delegates in Philadelphia did not believe that French troops and treasure would be necessary to defeat Great Britain. Confidence in the prowess of the Continental Army and in a virtually bottomless supply of manpower had yet to be exposed as wishful thinking.21
Articles 8 and 9 of the plan underlined the chief reason why any military alliance with France posed potential problems, for they prohibited any French claims to territory on the North American continent. A military alliance that put French troops on American soil ran the risk that, once here, they would never leave. Adams was fully aware of France’s desire to recover some portion of its lost American empire, and he wanted to foreclose that possibility.22
Two years later, when the military situation on the ground looked more problematic, Adams was dispatched to Paris to negotiate the very diplomatic and military alliance that the Plan of Treaties sought to avoid. (Franklin, in fact, had already negotiated the Franco-American alliance before Adams arrived.) Concern about French imperial ambitions on the North American continent, especially Canada, would not dissolve until the last French ship and soldier sailed home.
The truly visionary contribution of the Plan of Treaties, to which the Franco-American alliance of 1778 was the unavoidable exception, was that the lodestar of American foreign policy for the foreseeable future would be neutrality. All treaties, most especially with any of the European powers, would be exclusively commercial in character, with no binding diplomatic or military commitments. The Plan of Treaties was the first formulation of a neutral and isolationist posture subsequently enshrined in Washington’s Farewell Address (1796). This centerpiece of American foreign policy remained in place until World War I and was not officially abandoned until after World War II.
The debate over the Plan of Treaties went as smoothly as the debate over the Dickinson Draft went badly. The Continental Congress adopted it on September 17 with only a few minor revisions. Its passage created a rather anomalous situation, namely that this new entity called the United States had a reasonably clear vision of how it wished to interact within the world of nations, but lacked anything like a consensus on whether it was a nation itself.23
ANY HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION of the crowded political agenda of the Continental Congress in midsummer 1776 inevitably imposes an ex post facto sense of coherence that the delegates at the time, doing their best to manage events that were coming at them from multiple angles and at very high velocity, did not share. They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to recover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown.
In Jefferson’s case, the editorial changes made in his draft of the Declaration preoccupied him more than the debates over the Dickinson Draft and the direction of American foreign policy. He devoted considerable energy to making copies of his unedited version of the document, restoring the sections deleted by the congress, placing their revisions in the margins so as to differentiate his language from the published version circulating throughout the country. He then sent these copies to friends in Virginia, complaining that the congress had diluted the purity of his message, suggesting that all the revisions were defacements designed to appease the faint of heart, who still harbored hopes of reconciliation with Great Britain. This was not really true—the revisions were intended to clarify rather than compromise—but Jefferson’s wounded pride required a more compelling rationale than thin skin.24
His obsession with preserving his original language eventually waned, but it never completely disappeared. Nea
r the end of his life, he went back to this moment in his autobiography and reiterated his sense of being badly treated by the congress. At the time, he came off as a rather self-absorbed young man, though his early recognition that the language of the Declaration mattered a great deal proved to be prescient.25
If his head was focused on defending his own words, his heart was at Monticello, where he himself desperately wanted to be. “I am sorry that the situation of my domestic affairs renders it indispensably necessary that I should solicit the substitution of some other person here,” he explained to Edmund Pendleton back in Williamsburg, adding that “the delicacy of the house will not require me to enter minutely into the private causes which render this necessary.” These “private causes” surely referred to his wife’s health. Martha Jefferson was pregnant and, in fact, on the verge of suffering a miscarriage. “For God’s sake, for your country’s sake, and for my sake,” he wrote to Richard Henry Lee, “I am under a sacred obligation to go home.” Ironically, if his plea to be replaced in the Virginia delegation had been promptly answered, he would not have been present to sign the Declaration on August 2, thereby tarnishing his lasting reputation as its author.26
If his correspondence is any indication, Jefferson was more interested in the debates over the Virginia constitution occurring at Williamsburg than in the political debates at Philadelphia. He had sent his own draft constitution to Pendleton, who was chairing the Virginia Convention, and was especially concerned that the right of suffrage be extended to “all who had a permanent intention of living in the country.” When rumors began to circulate in Williamsburg that he harbored radical ideas about the inherent wisdom of “the people,” Jefferson was quick to point out that he opposed the direct election of senators in his draft constitution. “I have ever observed,” he wrote Pendleton, “that a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom. The first secretion from them is usually crude and heterogeneous.”27
Another libelous rumor suggesting that he had no stomach for tough-minded politics against Indian tribes allied with the British produced a spirited response that he would subsequently act on a quarter century later as president: “Nothing will reduce those wretches so soon as pushing the war into the heart of their country. But I would not stop there. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side of the Mississippi.” He obviously cared most about his reputation back home within the Tidewater elite and did not wish to be regarded as a romantic idealist.28
Finally, like all the delegates in the congress, Jefferson received regular updates on the military situation in New York. The new information made him more aware of the discrepancy in troop strength between the British and American armies, but he remained confident that the last-minute arrival of militia would even the odds. “Washington discovers a confidence, which he usually does only on high ground,” he reported to Pendleton. “He says his men are in high spirits. Those ordered to Long Island went with the eagerness of men going to a dance.” Military matters did not command the fullest attention of his formidable intellectual energies, and he accepted at face value the patriotic propaganda issuing from Washington’s headquarters.29
ADAMS HAD A wholly different temperament and a range of responsibilities within the congress that did not allow him the luxury of indulging his personal feelings. If Jefferson preferred to levitate above the waves of political and military challenges roiling through the Continental Congress after independence was declared, Adams was predisposed to dive into them all at once. In the debates on the Dickinson Draft, he favored a more unified American confederation. His leadership in drafting the Plan of Treaties, as we have seen, charted the future course for American foreign policy. On every political issue, he was both prepared and pugnacious, a one-man volcano ready to overwhelm his opponents in a lava flow of words. His stature in the congress was equal to Franklin’s, who also had his enemies, and his responsibilities were second to none. Working eighteen hours a day, he came across to his colleagues as the indefatigable and inexhaustible revolutionary spirit, running a marathon at the pace of a sprinter.
Most demanding were his duties as chair of the Board of War and Ordnance, for they made him the pivotal connection between the Continental Congress and the Continental Army. He was burdened with a cascade of specific requests. Washington needed thirty thousand flints for muskets, then an additional five tons of gunpowder; promotion decisions for senior officers created bruised egos that he had to soothe; militia units from Massachusetts originally ordered to the northern front on Lake Champlain had to be diverted to bolster Washington’s army in New York.30
Beyond managing these pressing if nettlesome details, Adams was literally forced by his position as the civilian most responsible for military affairs to engage with the larger strategic issues. Both Joseph Reed and Nathanael Greene wrote him to warn that confidence that the militia would bolster the fighting strength of the Continental Army was misplaced, arguing that the militia were untested amateurs whose numbers did not translate on equal terms with British or Hessian professionals on the battlefield. Reed and Greene urged larger bounties to recruit more soldiers with longer enlistments into the Continental Army.31
Adams agreed with their assessment but apprised them that political opinion in the congress was resolutely opposed to the creation of a large standing army. “I am convince that Time alone, will persuade Us to this measure,” he explained. “And in the mean Time We shall be forced to depend upon temporary calls upon Militia.” More than anyone else in the congress, Adams recognized that the current model of a relatively small Continental Army, supplemented at each engagement with a surge of militia from surrounding states, was risky. Just how risky was about to be discovered on Long Island and Manhattan.32
But he could not afford to focus exclusively on the looming battle in New York. For example, a congressional hearing on the failed campaigns against Quebec became a search for scapegoats. Adams concluded that the debacle at Quebec was the result of several uncontrollable factors, chiefly bad weather and a virulent smallpox epidemic. More significantly, he came to regard the entire Canadian campaign as delusional, a misguided use of America’s limited military resources based on the presumption that Canada was somehow destined to become part of the United States.33
He ordered General Horatio Gates, recently appointed commander of what was being called the Northern Army, to abandon the Canadian campaign and consolidate his position farther south on Lake Champlain. “We are very anxious, for you and your Army,” he wrote Gates, “as well as for the General [Washington] and his at New York.” Then he added a highly revealing insight: “We expect some bold Strokes from the Enemy, but I don’t believe that Howe and Burgoyne will unite their forces this year.”34
Adams clearly grasped the central goal of British strategy, which was to isolate New England by capturing the Hudson corridor in a two-pronged campaign, with Howe’s larger force coming up from New York and General John Burgoyne’s 7,000 troops coming down through Lake Champlain. While Washington contested Howe’s capture of New York, Adams wanted Gates to forget Canada and focus on stopping Burgoyne’s march down the Hudson Valley. More than any other delegate in Philadelphia, he had a panoramic perspective of the entire American theater.
No one was juggling more political and military responsibilities than Adams. No one else recognized the all-or-nothing character of this decisive moment or raised his pulse to match the impossible demands of that moment. He was the revolutionary spirit incarnate, and despite a lengthy career of considerable achievement, this was his finest hour.
But, like Jefferson, Adams found his overcrowded mind diverted by personal distractions about his family. As we have seen, in mid-July he had learned that his wife, Abigail, and their four young children were undergoing inoculation for smallpox in Boston. Abigail’s descriptions of their eleven-year-old daughter, Nabby, nearly brought him to tears. “She has about a thousand pustules as large a great Green Pea,” a
nd could neither stand nor sit without pain. Then word arrived that Charles, the younger son, had caught the smallpox “in the natural way,” meaning by contagion rather than inoculation, and was “in delirium for 48 hours,” on the edge of death.35
Adams felt that he was failing in his role as a husband and father in order to fulfill his role as an American statesman and patriot. “It is not possible for me to describe … my Feelings on this occasion,” he wrote Abigail. “I shall feel like a Savage to be here, while my whole Family is sick at Boston.” But despite the temptations to head for home, he was like a soldier who could not leave his post. “My Sweet Babe Charles, is never out of my Thoughts—Gracious Heaven preserve him,” he wrote to Abigail, but then concluded that “the two Armies are very near each other, at Long Island.”36
IF JEFFERSON WAS disposed to levitate above the political struggles within congress, and if Adams preferred to embed himself in them all at once, Franklin brought his own distinctive mix of floating engagement to the task. In any meeting he was always the most famous man in the room—an internationally acclaimed scientist, a renowned essayist and wit, the senior statesman par excellence. “I am glad to find that notwithstanding your Countrymen have had so many good slices of you those forty years past,” James Bowdoin wrote Franklin with a wink, “there’s enough of you to afford them good Picking Still.… They still expect to feast upon you, and to feast as usual most deliciously.”37
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