John Adams

by David McCullough

  This most emotional passage of all was too much for many in Congress, and to it Jefferson had added a final poignant note: “We might have been a free and great people together.” Nearly all of this was removed. There was to be no mention of a “last stab,” or “love,” or of the “free and great people” that might have been. Nor was there to be any mention of Scottish mercenaries, James Wilson and John Witherspoon both being Scots.

  To no one's surprise, Adams did not sit silently by. He was present every hour, “fighting fearlessly for every word,” as Jefferson would write.

  No man better merited than Mr. John Adams to hold a most conspicuous place in the design. He was the pillar of its support on the floor of Congress, its ablest advocate and defender against the multifarious assaults encountered.

  Finally, to Jefferson's concluding line was added the phrase “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” an addition that Adams assuredly welcomed. Thus it would read:

  And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

  But it was to be the eloquent lines of the second paragraph of the Declaration that would stand down the years, affecting the human spirit as neither Jefferson nor anyone could have foreseen. And however much was owed to the writings of others, as Jefferson acknowledged, or to such editorial refinements as those contributed by Franklin or Adams, they were, when all was said and done, his lines. It was Jefferson who had written them for all time:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

  • • •

  IN LATER YEARS the excessive summer heat of Philadelphia would frequently figure in accounts of Thursday, July 4, 1776. In fact, the day, like the one before, was pleasantly cool and comfortable. In Congress, discussion of the Declaration appears to have continued through the morning until about eleven o'clock, when debate was closed and the vote taken. Again, as on July 2, twelve colonies voted in the affirmative, while New York abstained. Again, John Dickinson was absent. It all went very smoothly.

  Congress ordered that the document be authenticated and printed. But it would be another month before the engrossed copy was signed by the delegates. For now, only the President, John Hancock, and the Secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, fixed their signatures.

  With passage of the Declaration of Independence thus completed, and having thereby renounced allegiance to the King and proclaimed the birth of a new United States of America, the Congress proceeded directly to other business. Indeed, to all appearances, nothing happened in Congress on July 4, 1776. Adams, who had responded with such depth of feeling to the events of July 2, recorded not a word of July 4. Of Jefferson's day, it is known only that he took time off to shop for ladies' gloves and a new thermometer that he purchased at John Sparhawk's London Bookshop for a handsome 3 pounds, 15 shillings.

  But by the following morning, the fifth, printer John Dunlap had broadside editions available and the delegates were busy sending copies to friends. On July 6, the Pennsylvania Evening Post carried the full text on its first page.

  The great day of celebration came Monday, July 8, at noon in the State House Yard, when the Declaration was read aloud before an exuberant crowd. With drums pounding, five battalions paraded through the city and “on the common, gave us the feu de joie [thirteen cannon blasts], notwithstanding the scarcity of powder,” as Adams recorded. Bells rang through the day and into the night. There were bonfires at street corners. Houses were illuminated with candles in their windows. In the Supreme Court Room at the State House, as planned, a half dozen Philadelphians chosen for the honor took the King's Arms down from the wall and carried it off to be thrown on top of a huge fire and consumed in an instant, the blaze lighting the scene for blocks around.

  “Fine starlight, pleasant evening,” recorded Adams's friend Christopher Marshall. “There were bonfires, ringing bells, with other great demonstrations of joy upon the unanimity and agreement of the Declaration.” Another Philadelphia patriot, Charles Biddle, a wealthy merchant who had joined the crowd in the State House Yard to hear the Declaration read, recorded only that he had seen “very few respectable people present.”

  As mounted messengers carried the news beyond Philadelphia, celebrations broke out everywhere. In New York the next day, the Declaration was read aloud to Washington's assembled troops, and it was that night, at the foot of Broadway, that a roaring crowd pulled down the larger-than-life equestrian statue of George III. As in Philadelphia, drums rolled, bonfires burned, prayers were said, and toasts raised in town after town, North and South. When the news finally reached Savannah, Georgia, in August, it set off a day-long celebration during which the Declaration was read four times in four different public places and the largest crowd in the history of the province gathered for a mock burial of King George III. The feeling was that the air had been cleared at last. “The Declaration,” said the Reverend Samuel Cooper of Boston, “must give new spring to all our affairs.”

  The actual signing of the document would not take place until Friday, August 2, after a fair copy had been elegantly engrossed on a single, giant sheet of parchment by Timothy Matlack, assistant to the secretary of Congress. Nothing was reported of the historic event. As with everything transacted within Congress, secrecy prevailed. To judge by what was in the newspapers and the correspondence of the delegates, the signing never took place.

  In later years, Jefferson would entertain guests at Monticello with descriptions of black flies that so tormented the delegates, biting through their silk hose, that they had hurried the signing along as swiftly as possible. But at the time Jefferson wrote nothing of the occasion, nor did John Adams. In old age, trying to reconstruct events of that crowded summer, both men would stubbornly and incorrectly insist that the signing took place July 4.

  Apparently there was no fuss or ceremony on August 2. The delegates simply came forward in turn and fixed their signatures. Also, a number of the most important figures in Congress were absent—Richard Henry Lee, George Wythe, Oliver Wolcott, Elbridge Gerry—and would sign later. A new representative from New Hampshire, Matthew Thornton, who had not been a member when the Declaration was passed, would add his name in November, and Thomas McKean of Delaware appears not to have signed until January 1777, which made him the last.

  Like the others, Adams and Jefferson each signed with his own delegation, Adams on the right, in a clear and firm, plain hand, Jefferson at lower center with a signature more precise and elegant, but equally legible.

  The fact that a signed document now existed, as well as the names of the signatories, was kept secret for the time being, as all were acutely aware that by taking up the pen and writing their names, they had committed treason, a point of considerably greater immediacy now, with the British army so near at hand.

  Whether Benjamin Franklin quipped “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall hang separately” is impossible to know, just as there is no way to confirm the much-repeated story that the diminutive John Hancock wrote his name large so the King might read it without his spectacles. But the stories endured because they were in character, like the remark attributed to Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island. Hopkins, who suffered from palsy, is said to have observed, on completing his spidery signature, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not.”

  The most encouraging result of the decision for independence was its almost immediate effect on “spirit,” within Congress and among the people, but also among the rank-and-file militia. “The Declaration of Independence has produced a new era in this part of America,” wrote Benjamin Rush, who had since taken his place in Congress in time to be a “si
gner.” “The militia of Pennsylvania seem to be actuated with a spirit more than Roman. Near 2,000 citizens of Philadelphia have lately marched to New York.” Such influence as the Declaration had had would have been “inconceivable” earlier. To Abigail, Adams wrote of the “gallant spirit prevailing in these middle colonies,” and described the militia turning out in “great numbers and in high spirits.” Samuel Adams, to whom the Declaration was “the decisive measure,” wished only that it had come sooner.

  Even those in Congress who had been so ardently opposed, now, by word or deed, committed themselves to the “Glorious Revolution.” Robert Morris continued in his duties without pause, working as strenuously as anyone. “I think an individual that declines the service of his country because its councils are not comfortable to his ideas makes a bad subject,” he wrote, still unable to see himself as other than a “subject.” John Dickinson, though ill and exhausted from the strain of the past weeks, departed at the head of the first troops to march out of the city to join in the defense of New Jersey, a scene that made a deep impression on many, including John Adams. “Mr. Dickinson's alacrity and spirit,” he told Abigail, “certainly becomes his character and sets a fine example.”

  • • •

  THE SHIPS FLYING the Union Jack that arrived off New York at the end of June 1776—the fleet from Halifax that one eyewitness described as looking like “all London afloat”—had been only the start of an overwhelming show of British might come to settle the fate of the new United States of America.

  By July 3, 9,000 troops led by General William Howe had landed on Staten Island, where hundreds of Tories were on hand to welcome them. Howe himself had gone ashore on July 2, the very day that Congress had voted for independence, and in the days following, up the Narrows between Staten Island and Long Island, came ever more British sails, including an armada of 130 warships and transports from England under command of the general's brother, Admiral Richard Lord Howe. By mid-August, 32,000 fully equipped, highly trained, thoroughly professional British and German (Hessian) soldiers—more than the entire population of Philadelphia—were ashore on Staten Island, supported by ten ships-of-the-line and twenty frigates, making in all the largest, most costly British overseas deployment ever until that time.

  By contrast, the American army gathered in defense of New York, digging in on Manhattan and Long Island, was optimistically thought to number 20,000 troops, these nearly all poorly equipped amateurs led by Washington, who in his year as commander-in-chief had yet to fight a battle. From Long Island, one of Washington's ablest divisional commanders, Nathanael Greene, wrote to tell John Adams that in reality the American force might number 9,000; and as Adams knew, they had no naval support—not a single available warship or transport. When, on July 12, with the wind and tide in their favor, the British sent two men-of-war up the Hudson River to demonstrate who had control, there was nothing to stop them. As the huge ships passed upstream, American militia stood gawking onshore, which evoked an angry general order from Washington declaring such “unsoldierly conduct” could only give the enemy a low opinion of the American army.

  From the flow of dispatches arriving at the War Office in Philadelphia, Adams was more aware of the situation than anyone in Congress and he was miserable, thinking about the consequences of a defeat at New York. He had not wanted the responsibility of heading the Board of War and felt “vastly unequal” to the multitude of problems and decisions to be grappled with. But it was also clear that they were all unequal to the task. No one in Congress was qualified. “We are all inexperienced in this business,” he emphasized to Nathanael Greene.

  The War Office consisted of rented space two blocks from the State House on Market Street. To a board of five members of Congress—Adams, Harrison, Rutledge, Sherman, and Wilson—fell the burden of virtually running the war. They were responsible for ordnance and fortifications, for appointing and promoting officers, for recruitment of enlisted men and raising rifle companies, for pay, provisions, and for somehow resolving the constant demand for flints, saltpeter and gunpowder, horses, wagons, tents, shoes, soap, and blankets. They dispatched ship carpenters where needed, appointed chaplains, and faced the incessant day-to-day frustrations of bickering, jealousies, and corruption. It was arduous, thankless work. He must be “very exactly and minutely acquainted with the state of every regiment,” Adams was lectured by General Horatio Gates. And as all decisions required the approval of Congress, it was for the Board to prepare the reports on which to vote. It would be resolved that five tons of powder be sent to Williamsburg; or that British prisoners be moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania; or that new positions of drum major and fife major be created; or that special commissioners be appointed to audit the accounts of the army of New York.

  There were the ever-vexing complications of dealing in various colonial currencies of differing value, and the increasing worry over inflation and the fate of the new Continental money, the unbacked paper currency being produced in Philadelphia in steadily greater quantity. (One Nathan Sellers, a scrivener whose job it was to sign every bill by hand, recorded signing 4,800 bills in a single day that July.) “If that [the Continental currency] suffers in its credit, the Cause must suffer,” Adams warned. “If that fails, the Cause must fail.”

  One of the committee assignments he shared with Jefferson was the Committee on Spies, charged with, among other things, drawing up a set of Articles of War—regulations and rules of discipline for the army. Knowing discipline to be a difficult and unpopular subject, Adams had recommended that they present a complete system at once and “let it meet its fate.” And since, in his view, there was but one system of merit, that which had “carried two empires to the head of mankind,” the Roman and the British (the second being drawn directly from the first), he recommended a straight-on borrowing of the British Articles of War, with only a few modifications. According to Adams, writing years later, “Jefferson in those days never failed to agree with me in everything of a political nature, and he very cordially concurred in this.” But by midsummer the matter of the Articles of War had been passed over to the Board of War and had still to be considered by Congress.

  Strongly opposed to the existing policy of short-term enlistments, Adams declared himself adamantly in favor of a regular army. But of his many worries the greatest was disease. Responding to the medical theories of young Dr. Rush, he pleaded for greater cleanliness among the troops. Smallpox worried him most of all. Smallpox was the “King of Terrors,” the enemy to be feared more than any other. “Smallpox! Smallpox! What shall we do with it?” he asked Abigail. In a dispatch of July 11, Washington reported that an outbreak of smallpox in Boston had infected some of the troops and that every precaution was being taken to prevent the spread of infection to New York.

  Adams's labors on the Board of War began usually at six in the morning and continued until nine, then resumed again in the evening. Between times, he was in the thick of debate in Congress over the Articles of Confederation. He knew it to be work of the greatest importance, but the strain was beginning to take a toll. He needed rest and for the first time hinted to Abigail the possibility of a “furlow.”

  Then, on July 16, came a letter from Abigail's uncle, Isaac Smith, reporting that Abigail, acting on her own, had decided that she and the children must be inoculated for smallpox. They had come to Boston to undergo the treatment, Smith himself having provided his large house on Court Street for their time of isolation.

  Adams was beside himself. “Never—never in my life, had I so many cares upon my mind at once,” he wrote to her. Under any other circumstances he would leave for Boston at once. As it was, he had no choice—he could only pray for their health. “I cannot leave this place, without more injury to the public now, than I ever could at any other time, being in the midst of scenes of business, which must not stop for anything.”

  Her letter of explanation, written July 13, did not reach Philadelphia for another week. Because of the outbreak of smallp
ox in Boston, thousands of people had come in from the surrounding countryside to be inoculated. It was there, in Boston, that smallpox inoculation had been introduced in America more than half a century earlier, and by a kinsman of Adams, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, Adams's great uncle on his mother's side. The idea had come from a slave belonging to Cotton Mather, an African named Onesimus, who had said the practice was long established in Africa, where those with the courage to use it were made immune, and he had his own scar on his arm to show. The technique, the same as still practiced by Dr. Boylston, was to make a small incision, then with a quill scoop the “pus from the ripe pustules” of a smallpox patient into the open cut. A generally mild case of smallpox would result, yet the risk of death was relatively slight. The ordeal of the patient, however, could be considerable, as Adams knew from all he had seen at the time he was inoculated, and largely because of various purges that were thought essential to recovery.

  “Such a spirit of inoculation” had never been known, Abigail reported. “The town and every house in it are as full as they can hold.”

  She and the children were part of a family contingent numbering seventeen that included the Cranches and their three children, Abigail's sister Elizabeth, a three-year-old daughter of brother William Smith, named Louisa, whom Abigail had taken under her wing, three servants, and two cousins—Cotton Tufts, Jr., and John Thaxter, Jr., a former law clerk of Adams's who had lately become the tutor for the Adams children.