Independence

  I N D E P E N D E N C E

  THE STRUGGLE TO

  SET AMERICA FREE

  J O H N F E R L I N G

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. “In the Very Midst of a Revolution”:

  The Proposal to Declare Independence

  2. “A Spirit of Riot and Rebellion”:

  Lord North, Benjamin Franklin, and the American Crisis

  3. “Defenders of American Liberty”:

  Samuel Adams, Joseph Galloway, and the First Continental Congress

  4. “It Is a Bill of War. It Draws the Sword”:

  Lord Dartmouth, George Washington, Hostilities

  5. “A Rescript Written in Blood”:

  John Dickinson and the Appeal of Reconciliation

  6. “Progress Must Be Slow”:

  John Adams and the Politics of a Divided Congress

  7. “The King Will Produce the Grandest Revolution”:

  George III and the American Rebellion

  8. “The Folly and Madness of the Ministry”:

  Charles James Fox, Thomas Paine, and the War

  9. “We Might Get Ourselves upon Dangerous Ground”:

  James Wilson, Robert Morris, Lord Howe, and the Search for Peace

  10. “The Fatal Stab”:

  Abigail Adams and the Realities of the Struggle for Independence

  11. “Not Choice, But Necessity That Calls for Independence”:

  The Dilemma and Strategy of Robert Livingston

  12. “The Character of a Fine Writer”:

  Thomas Jefferson and the Drafting of the Declaration of Independence

  13. “May Heaven Prosper the New Born Republic”:

  Setting America Free

  14. “This Will Cement the Union”:

  America Is Set Free

  Epilogue

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Appendix: The Declaration of Independence

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Imprint

  To Dee Donnelly and Michelle Kuhlman

  Who mean more to me than they will ever know

  PREFACE

  Nearly all of us at times fall into the trap of looking back on history’s pivotal events as inevitable. Were not the differences between the North and South destined to end in the American Civil War? Surely, Hitler’s coming to power was unavoidable. Was not the collapse of the Soviet Union inescapable?

  Well, perhaps not. Great events in history, and their outcomes, are seldom bound to happen. They hinge on happenstance, on complex twists and turns, and on choices made or unmade. Make one choice and history goes in one direction. Don’t make that choice and events may well veer in another direction.

  But once the end of the story is known, there is always a temptation to read history backward. Knowing how things turned out makes it easy to assume that the ending was foreordained.

  That may be especially true for many Americans with regard to the declaring of independence in 1776. In recent years popular culture—and not a few writers—has so lionized America’s Founding Fathers that many may see them as leaders whose indomitable will set them on an inexorable course toward independence.

  History is more complicated. It seems certain that most Americans did not favor independence when what we now know as the War of Independence broke out in April 1775. Even after the war had raged for several months, many Americans—again, probably most—still did not want American independence. At the beginning of 1776 a majority of those who served in the Continental Congress preferred reconciliation with the mother country to American independence. Had the Continental Congress voted on independence in January or February 1776, no more than five of the thirteen colonies would likely have favored a final break with Great Britain.

  This is a book about the evolution of the idea of American independence and about the events and decisions that ultimately led Congress, with the backing of most colonists, to set America free of the British Empire. The book’s subtitle contains the word “struggle,” and in fact those who favored severing all ties with Great Britain faced a long, difficult battle before, at last, they succeeded in declaring independence. Eleven years elapsed between Britain’s first attempt to tax the colonists and the Declaration of Independence. What we today call the War of Independence, or the Revolutionary War, had gone on for fifteen months before the Continental Congress declared independence. For more than a year the colonists fought, and died, not for American independence, but to be reunited with Great Britain on America’s terms.

  A struggle over Great Britain’s policy toward the colonies was played out in London as well. Battles were fought in Parliament and within the ministry at every turn, from the passage of the first American tax in 1765 to the decision a decade later to use force rather than to engage in peace negotiations with the Americans. Powerful and articulate members of Parliament always opposed the American policies of their government, fearing that additional provocations would only push the colonists toward independence. Some proposed solutions to the Anglo-American crisis that, if adopted, might have stanched the drift to American independence.

  This book is about the struggle in America over how best to resist British actions and secure American interests, and to secure the prevailing interest of individual colonies. It is also about the battles in London over how best to deal with, and respond to, the recalcitrant American colonists. It is a story filled with irony, for in the end the Americans opted for an independence that most of them had wished to avert, while Britain’s leaders were confronted with a declaration of American independence that they had sought to prevent, first by peaceful means, later through strident measures.

  The choices that were made on both sides were made by individuals, and this book evaluates the key players, important members of the Continental Congress as well as British ministers and their principal adversaries in Parliament. Public officials in that day were not unlike today’s officials. Some who held positions of authority were high-minded and sought what they thought was best for the nation. Some were visionaries. Some were inspired by deeply held philosophical convictions. Some were vengeful. Some acted on behalf of narrow provincial interests or sought to protect the entrenched elite. Some were motivated by the hope of enhancing their careers or reputations. Some sought economic gain. Many were driven by a combination of these motives. And no one had a crystal ball. No one could say unequivocally what the long-term results would be if the choice he advocated was adopted.

  On the American side, the members of Congress remained deeply divided over the best course to pursue all the way down to July 1776. Some congressmen desperately sought to avoid war and revolution, some held intransigently to the hope of reconciliation, some reluctantly accepted independence, and some surreptitiously yearned for independence years before it was declared. This is the story of able and ambitious politicians—including America’s Founders—scrambling to land on their feet; of members of Congress walking a political tightrope between the conflicting interests of New England, the mid-Atlantic colonies, and the South; of men who were daring and men who were timid; of men who were tied to the past and men who dreamed of what might be a glorious future.

  Britain’s ministers and those in Parliament who opposed them simultaneously groped for the means of saving Great Britain’s North American empire. It is a spellbinding tale of a great modern nation blundering into a disaster as its leaders become trapped by their earliest decisions, making them captives in a descent toward tragedy. How the hard and unbending British leaders steered their nation toward an epic disaster provides lessons for politicians in any time
period. Britain’s rulers coped with the welter of interests in a great modern state. At the same time, they sought to avoid the appearance of weakness. Their story, it seems now, is that of shortsighted leaders on a straightforward path to catastrophe.

  Above all, this is a story that could have ended differently. A declaration of American independence, at least in 1776, might never have occurred. There were ways that the imperial crisis might have been resolved, and this book tells the story of the options and alternatives that existed.

  But mostly it is a human story. Some forty years after 1776, Thomas Jefferson tried to set the record straight. He was troubled that subsequent generations had come to credit the Founding Fathers with “a wisdom more than human” and to view their achievements with “sanctimonious reverence.”1 With regard to independence, Jefferson knew that the story of what had transpired between the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was far more complex. He knew that the struggle to break America’s colonial shackles had been a very human story filled with shards of weakness, opportunism, accidents, deceit, fortuity, enmity, decisions wise and misguided, exemplary leadership, and ultimately heroic boldness.

  John Adams would have agreed with Jefferson. He, too, knew how difficult the struggle had been to bring Congress to declare independence, and not long after the battle had been won, he declared: “Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the [Revolutionary] Generation, to preserve your Freedom.”2

  The leaders on both sides were ordinary mortals who happened to be confronted with extraordinary challenges. This is the story of their response to the uncommon challenges they faced. It is not a story filled with heroes and villains so much as it a history of human beings of assorted virtues, beliefs, motives, and talents who could not see the future with the clarity with which we can see the past.

  This is not a history of the American Revolution. While it looks at the Anglo-American crisis from its inception down to the Declaration of Independence, the book largely examines the forty-month period between the Boston Tea Party, in December 1773, and Congress’s vote for independence, in July 1776. Its objective is to understand the major players on both sides, what drove them, the choices they faced, their successes and failures, and, above all, why the American Congress moved steadily—seemingly inexorably—toward a final break with Great Britain.

  Debts accumulate in the course of writing any book. I am particularly grateful to Matt deLesdernier and James Sefcik for reading the manuscript, pointing out errors, and offering guidance. Four good friends—Edith Gelles, Michael deNie, Keith Pacholl, and Arthur Lefkowitz—answered many questions that I posed. Lorene Flanders graciously found places for me to work in a library that was undergoing a major renovation during much of the time that I was writing the book. Angela Mehaffey and her staff in the Interlibrary Loan Office of the Irvine Sullivan Ingram Library at the University of West Georgia cordially met my rapacious requests for books and articles. Elmira Eidson helped me out of numerous scrapes with my computer and word processing program. Nathaniel Knaebel was an understanding, easy-to-work-with production editor. No author ever had a better copyeditor than Maureen Klier.

  Geri Thoma was crucial in the realization of my dream to write the book. Peter Beatty helped in many ways to bring the book to completion, all the while listening to my tales of woe about the Pittsburgh Pirates. This is my sixth book with Peter Ginna, a masterful editor who unfailingly provides encouragement, criticism, and a storehouse of wonderful ideas.

  As always, Carol, my wife, encouraged and supported my work, and she joined with me in our annual cookout to celebrate Independence Day on July 2 (yes, July 2—see chapters thirteen and fourteen).

  November 12, 2010

  CHAPTER 1

  “IN THE VERY MIDST OF A REVOLUTION”

  THE PROPOSAL TO DECLARE INDEPENDENCE

  RICHARD HENRY LEE, tall and spare, with a long, pasty face dominated by penetrating eyes and wayward receding hair, left his Philadelphia lodging on the spring-soft morning of June 7, 1776. He set out on the same walk he had taken six days a week for nearly a year. A member of Virginia’s delegation to the Continental Congress, Lee was heading for the Pennsylvania State House, the home of Congress.

  Philadelphia bustled with forty thousand inhabitants. It was the largest American city, more populous than Bristol, the second-largest city in England, and only slightly smaller than Dublin and Edinburgh, the leading urban centers after London in the British Empire. Philadelphia so impressed a widely traveled British army officer who visited the city in 1765 that he declared it to be “great and noble,” “one of the wonders of the world” that “bids fair to rival almost any city in Europe.” Colonel Adam Gordon marveled at how this planned city was so “wisely laid out,” and he was especially struck by its magnificent public buildings and ethnic and religious diversity.1

  Philadelphia was something of a melting pot. English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Germans, and Africans rubbed shoulders, their accents and dialects familiar throughout the city. Lee’s stroll on this bright June day was along brick sidewalks, something few American towns yet boasted, and down wide paved thoroughfares alive in midmorning with the rattle and rumble of carts, coaches, and wagons drawn by sweating horses that clattered loudly on the cobbled streets. Lee walked below streetlights that were set aglow only on moonless nights—this was, after all, a frugal Quaker city—under tall elms and lofty Italian poplars, past homes both elegant and modest, all made of brick, and close to the commons, where tethered milk cows grazed. Striding briskly, Lee passed inns, coffeehouses and dram shops, a church and cemetery, an outdoor market, the Quaker school, the city jail, and shops of assorted tradesmen, from which the noise of the workplace, and sometimes the sour odors, flowed through open doors into the streets.2

  Pennsylvania State House, a northwest view taken in 1778 and printed in the Columbian magazine, July 1787. Home to the Continental Congress in 1775–1776, the structure had opened about twenty years earlier and served as home to the Pennsylvania legislature before and after independence. As Congress met here when independence was declared, it was thereafter popularly called Independence Hall. Illustration from the Columbian magazine from 1787. (Library of Congress)

  After a few minutes, Lee glimpsed the light red brick State House, known today as Independence Hall. Located in a square bounded by Chestnut and Walnut streets on the north and south, and Fifth and Sixth streets on the east and west, the State House was the city’s most imposing structure. Constructed over a quarter century beginning in 1729, it stretched for more than one hundred feet, was forty-four feet wide, and was crowned by a sixty-nine-foot-tall masonry bell tower, making it the equivalent of a six-story building—a veritable skyscraper in an America in which hardly any structure topped two stories. Designed with careful attention to balance and ornament, this imposing building was meant to convey dignity and a sense of orderliness.3

  There was irony in this, for while Lee’s walk took him to the very symbol of order and authority, his purpose on this day was the essence of revolution. It was Lee’s intention to ask the Continental Congress to declare American independence.

  Every day Congress tended to the most vital business. For fifteen months, since April 1775, the thirteen American colonies had been at war with Great Britain, their parent state. Almost everything that Congress had done since the outbreak of hostilities had been related to the war effort. Lee, in fact, knew that the Iroquois and other tribes from the Six Nations Confederation were in town to discuss the war and that General George Washington, the commander of the Continental army, had just departed following several days of consultation with Congress. Lee was mindful, too, that Philadelphia, like a magnet, drew both wealthy merchants and smaller businessmen who were eager to obtain some of the money that Congress was spending to wage war.4

  The war overshadowed everything. While one congressional committee worked on plans to purchase a warship and looked after getting privateers to sea, anoth
er sought to acquire muskets, powder, and flints from abroad. Congressmen wrote home frequently to encourage steps that would help the war effort, urging the fortification of coasts, the construction of river craft to transport artillery, and the recruitment of more men for the army, among other things. On this very morning, John Hancock, the president of Congress, had begun his day by beseeching each colony to gather every scrap of available lead so that it could be recast into cartridges for the army. He also advised the provinces to “remove out of the Way” everything that the British armed forces might possibly utilize “to prosecute their Plans of Violence agt. us.”5

  Lee arrived at the State House a bit before ten A.M., the scheduled time for Congress to begin its daily session, and strode into the congressional chamber on the first floor. It was a spacious room, forty feet by forty feet, with a ceiling that was twenty feet high. Wide, tall windows ran along the north and south sides of the room; substantial fireplaces faced with marble stood on another wall. The walls were paneled and painted a light gray, though when the sun splashed into the room, they took on a bluish hue. One wall was adorned with captured flags and a British drum, seized when a colonial military force had taken Fort Ticonderoga the previous year. Thirteen round tables, one for each colony’s delegation, were scattered about the room. Every table was covered with green linen and encircled with hard, uncushioned Windsor chairs.

  Knots of delegates were engaged in animated conversations when the bell in the State House tower pealed at ten A.M. That was the signal for Hancock, who was seated on the dais in the president’s special cushioned armchair, to gavel the day’s session to order. The discussions around the room abruptly ended, and the delegates scurried to their seats. The doorkeeper stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him.6 The congressional chamber once again was a private reserve, sealed from the outside world.

  This day’s session began as they all did, with the reading of letters and reports, mostly dispatches from the army’s commanders. Lee waited patiently. It was hardly coincidental that he had chosen this grave moment in this desperate war to propose that America break permanently with the mother country. On this very day in Halifax, Nova Scotia, British soldiers were clambering up the gangplanks of troop transports, struggling with their weapons and heavy pieces of field equipment. Part of the greatest armada that Great Britain would assemble in the eighteenth century, these men expected to sail for New York within forty-eight hours. They anticipated a “bloody active campaign” to take Manhattan and seize control of the Hudson River.7 If they succeeded, the link between the four New England provinces and the nine colonies to the south would be severed and Great Britain almost certainly would win the war.