The Glorious Cause, page 40
There may have been something approaching a “whimsical cast” to these summer proceedings—so John Adams characterized them. Congress could not seem to make up its mind. It prepared for war while it begged for peace; it proclaimed its determination to protect American liberties while it petitioned for reconciliation; it expressed respect for the king while it promised death to his armies.7
Yet there was nothing whimsical in the tendency of action in these hot weeks. Men died at Bunker Hill, and each time an American died so did some part of moderation. Death and suffering had more than a local effect in New England. The news of the fighting spread, and soldiers from the middle and southern colonies began to march toward Boston. As they left home so also did the spirit of compromise.
Blundering British officials also helped destroy whatever support moderation possessed. Few in the ministry seem to have kept their balance once the war began. North’s impulses remained peaceful, though hardly strong enough to soothe an angry king. Dartmouth might have helped North contain the ugly desires for war, but Dartmouth was not widely trusted and left office in the autumn. His successor, Lord George Germain, was genuinely tough and fed the vulgar desire to put the Americans in their place.8
News of the battles at Lexington and Concord had made compromise all the more unlikely, and Bunker Hill had hardened resolves. Late in August the king expressed much of the public, and private, outrage at American behavior by proclaiming that the colonies were in “an open and avowed rebellion.” Two months later in an accounting to Parliament he explained that a “desperate conspiracy” existed in America to make a rebellious war which is “manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire.”9
Many in Parliament had doubtless come to the same conclusion when fighting began in America. They now followed the lead of the ministry and just before the year ended passed, on December 22, 1775, the American Prohibitory Act, which ordered all trade with the colonies stopped. This statute made American ships and their cargoes fair game for the Royal Navy; all ships trading with the colonies were to be “forfeited to his Majesty, as if the same were the ships and the effects of open enemies, and shall be so adjudged, deemed, and taken in all courts of admiralty, and in all other courts whatsoever.”10
Had the king, his ministry, and the Parliament attempted to persuade the Americans to separate themselves from the empire they could not have chosen much more effective means than those of April onward. The British army had marched and killed on two dreadful occasions; the petition of the Congress had been considered unworthy of answer; the Americans had been described as traitors and rebels who must be subdued by force. At first sight, shutting off American commerce may not seem such a portentous act. Yet Americans considered it to be, and rightly so, for it demonstrated once more that the king’s government meant what it said about crushing rebellion. Words such as “traitors,” “conspiracy,” and “enemies” allowed little room for negotiation, and what little there was shrank as the months slipped by. The British army continued to menace New England, and the resolve of Parliament and the ministry to destroy the American economy became clear.11
When news of British actions began arriving in October, Americans learned that the king had proclaimed them rebels. Not long afterward, news came of the king’s refusal to receive the petition Congress had approved in July, and then came word that more troops were on the way. By February 1776, when Congress received the Prohibitory Act, the possibility of a reconciliation was remote.
Still Congress held back from declaring independence. It was waiting for unmistakable evidence that the American people favored a permanent separation. And it hesitated to act while a remnant of its membership retained hope that negotiations that might heal the terrible wounds of the last year were possible.
In several colonies, British officials proved that the king’s ministry had no monopoly on blundering. During the summer the governors of North Carolina and South Carolina, after heavy-handed attempts at coercing their assemblies, simply turned tail and fled to warships off the coast. They may have consciously followed the example of Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, who had preceded them to the safety of a royal warship. There he sat while the Convention, the old House of Burgesses under a new name, took over the task of governing. Dunmore had dissolved the Burgesses when they rejected North’s conciliatory proposal. By November, Dunmore was feeling frustration as he sat on a swaying deck and contemplated British power, which like himself was very much at sea. Early in the month he called upon the slaves in Virginia to rebel and promised them their freedom if they joined his forces and fought their masters. Whatever loyalty there was in Virginia pretty much flickered out with Dunmore’s call. The possibility of a slave rebellion was never far out of white consciousness, a possibility regarded with horror. Dunmore added to white revulsion on January 1, 1776, when he ordered Norfolk shelled by ships of the British navy. The town burned in a fire which, in a sense, was seen all over Virginia.12
II
During these months of British mistakes, the old colonial governments searched for a new basis of authority. Massachusetts felt especially hard pressed: in the preceding year Parliament had revised its government in unacceptable ways. Now facing the war around Boston, the Provincial Congress asked the Continental Congress what it should do—abide by statutes which had helped provide the fighting or return to the charter of 1691? In June the Provincial Congress was advised that Massachusetts need not observe the requirements of the Massachusetts Government Act, one of the Intolerable Acts, but might in effect revert to its old practice, though of course it would not have a royal governor. This “solution” was realistic in that it satisfied prevailing opinion within Massachusetts and maintained a traditional basis of authority. Five months later Congress edged a little closer to telling the colonies to act as if they were independent by advising the New Hampshire Convention to call for a representation of the people. The people in convention would, if they thought it necessary, “establish such a form of government, as, in their judgement, will best produce the happiness of the people,” governing as long as the “present dispute” with Britain continued. Soon after, the same recommendation was made to South Carolina in response to a request for guidance. 13
These actions worried congressional opponents of independence, worried John Dickinson in particular. At his instigation a few days after Congress gave the lead to New Hampshire, the Pennsylvania assembly instructed its delegation not to agree to a separation from Britain or to a change in the form of Pennsylvania’s government. The legislatures of Delaware and New Jersey gave similar instructions to their delegations before the end of the year, and Maryland’s followed in January 1776.14
III
Even as these legislatures acted, a mood grew which would shake their prudence. The mood was, more precisely, a loss of faith in all things British, a mood increasingly disposed to favor independence. By January it had found able spokesmen, most notably Thomas Paine in one of the great tracts of the Revolution—Common Sense.15
Thomas Paine, the son of an English Quaker who earned his living as a corset-maker, had arrived in America only thirteen months before publication of Common Sense. He was thirty-nine years old, and he had failed at everything he had ever tried. He had tried, like his father, to earn a living making corsets—and failed. He had tried teaching—and failed. He had served as a tax collector, only to be dismissed from the service. He had also tried shopkeeping—and failed. He had even tried marriage—twice. His first wife died in childbirth; his second was a wife in name only, for the marriage was never consummated.16
Paine’s friend George Scott, an excise official, had introduced him in 1774 to Benjamin Franklin, who was then finishing his mission as a colonial agent. Franklin apparently saw something in Paine, some talent that had not yet found its medium, and when he learned that Paine wanted to go to America, he wrote a letter introducing him to his son-in-law Richard Bache, a Philadelphia merchant. Paine probably did not intend to go into business in America, though after his arrival on November 30, 1774, he sought out Bache. Soon he was contributing verses and essays to local newspapers.17
Somehow, perhaps in his various failures, Paine had learned to write. Now he put this skill to work in the service of a cause he hoped would benefit mankind. His message to Americans challenged several of their profound convictions—that their rights were rooted in the ancient constitution and that their interests were protected by the traditional connection to Britain. Paine called these convictions “illusions.” None of the old political truths, it seemed, were any longer true. The British constitution, far from being one of the glories of civilization, was founded on “the base remains of two ancient tyrannies”—monarchy and aristocracy. For the most part American writers had avoided attacking the monarchy even after war began, and they professed to believe that the king was in the hands of an unscrupulous ministry. Paine disdained to honor such fictions. The monarchy, he explained, was “the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.” As for the hereditary succession of monarchs, the practice violated nature which “disapproves of it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an Ass for a Lion.” There was much more of this sort of wit in Common Sense along with shrewd attacks on the institutions that Americans had long believed tied them to Britain. Much of the demolition was placed in a context, or a language, sure to appeal to the mass of Americans. Thus Paine rang in the Old Testament history of monarchy, and if his readers missed the linkage to heathenism, he told them flatly that monarchy was the Popery of government.18
For those presumably immune to shock and for those devoid of Protestant prejudice, Paine offered “simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense” of the American condition—that it would only deteriorate should some temporary reconciliation be achieved. To back this contention Paine cited several conventional arguments, all demonstrating the divergence of British and American interests. But perhaps his most compelling point—not much noticed since—reminded Americans that blood had recently been spilled, and with its loss American affection for the “mother country” had drained away. American passions had been engaged in the struggle, and the passion that was directed toward Britain was hatred. The conclusion to this analysis seemed obvious: “Reconciliation is now a fallacious dream.”19
Much of what Paine wrote had already been said in the nine months following Lexington. The events of those months, giving evidence of the stubbornness and hostility of king and Parliament, made belief in reconciliation difficult to sustain. Common Sense helped Americans see just how far they had come in the struggle to protect their rights, made them see that they could not go back to the old relationship of 1763. If Paine was right not the king, nor the Parliament, nor the English people had any desire for the old arrangements. A part of what Paine was saying had been said by pamphleteers for a dozen years—there was a conspiracy afoot to enslave the colonies. But Paine went farther: he showed that the conspiracy inhered in the very structure of the Anglo-American arrangements. Because the conspiracy could not be separated from the monarchy or from the British constitution, the Americans, it seemed, had no choice. They must declare their independence.
A declaration of independence might be only common sense, but Paine clearly believed that it would be more—it would indeed be a break in history. He told Americans of the importance of what they were doing in only a few sentences: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.” How seriously this phrasing was taken is impossible to say. There is no doubt that it was calculated to appeal to the residue of Christian millennialism from the American past, and while it proposed a rupture in history it also offered a balm, the assurance that the American Revolution should take its place in Christian history.20
Inevitably there were answers. Inevitably the answers and the answers to the answers (by Paine and others as well) plumbed the depths of invective. But those who took part in the debate also reached toward the truth and caught glimpses of the American future. The critics of the contention of Common Sense that independence must be declared immediately offered a variety of refutations. The timing was off, some said; others argued that the idea was bad because American liberties could never attain the security long provided by the ancient constitution. Several answers sensed the importance of Paine’s dream of beginning anew in America and discussed it with such scare words of eighteenth-century politics as “innovation,” “Utopian,” “visionary,” and “anarchy.” Paine responded as the “Forester,” a name chosen perhaps to evoke images of a life in America free of European corruptions, with the contention that an independent America had “a blank sheet to write upon.” What, he asked, did America have to fear “but her GOD”; for America, “remote from all the wrangling world, may live at ease, Bounded by the ocean and basked by the wilderness. . . . ”21
Paine published Common Sense in Philadelphia, and his Forester essays first appeared in that city’s newspapers. His friends also chose Philadelphia newspapers, and so did his political enemies. But since the controversy involved the “continent,” Common Sense was reprinted in all the major American cities and the minor ones as well. Of course the debate spread, drawing in big men, John Adams, for example, and small ones as well. Within a few months over 100,000 copies of Common Sense had appeared, and the debates between independence and reconciliation dominated the newspapers.22
A part of the common sense offered by Thomas Paine was the observation that Britain’s old enemies in Europe would be more likely to provide support to the colonies if they declared their independence. No European power wanted to meddle in an internal dispute which might be settled by Britain and her colonies joining forces, as they had in the past, against an external enemy. Declaring independence would reassure Europe, reassure in particular France, the nation that some in Congress looked to for money and arms.
IV
By the first months of 1776, the group in Congress which was disposed to seek foreign aid was adding to its numbers. These radicals—their radicalism consisted of their belief in American independence rather than reconciliation—agreed upon a schedule of actions which they believed gave promise of a successful war for independence. The two Adamses, the Lees, and their followers thought that the formation of new state governments was the crucial first step. Although they had no clear idea about the shape of these governments, these men saw in their creation a means of tying the American people to independence. Once the colonies had given themselves new governments the next steps should be, as John Adams proposed to Patrick Henry, “for all the colonies to confederate and define the limits of the continental Constitution; then to declare the colonies a sovereign state, or a number of confederated sovereign states; and last of all, to form treaties with foreign powers.” Adams was to write to Henry on June 3, when it was fairly clear that all these measures would soon follow, that perhaps, their order was not very important.23
In February the radicals had considered the sequence of action as critical to their plans. And their plans, though centering on the measures Adams disclosed to Henry, included a variety of moves which only solid governments could take. A memorandum drafted by John Adams listed them: an alliance should be made with France and Spain; ambassadors should be sent to both countries; coins and currencies were to be regulated; armed forces were to be raised and maintained in Canada and New York; the production of hemp, duck, saltpeter, and gunpowder was to be encouraged; taxes were to be levied; treaties with France, Spain, Holland, and Denmark were to be concluded; British ships were to be declared fair game for American privateers; independence was to be declared as was war on Britain. There were other items on the radicals’ agenda, but their overriding concern remained a declaration of independence.24
The radicals faced determined, though shrinking, opposition in Congress after Common Sense signaled that the drift of public opinion was away from reconciliation. Just how the radicals should deal with such men remained a perplexing question. These moderates were no less patriotic than the radicals; nor were they any less concerned to protect American liberties which—they agreed—had been savagely trampled on in the previous year. Still they preferred to see America free within the empire rather than outside it. Several in fact seemed to doubt that the colonies could gain sufficient strength to survive as free states without the protection of the mother country.
Congress appointed five moderates—James Wilson, Robert Alexander of Maryland, James Duane of New York, William Hooper of North Carolina, and John Dickinson—to a committee commissioned to provide an answer to the king’s charge that the colonies intended to separate themselves from Britain. The radicals probably agreed to this composition in order to force the moderates to make their position clear on independence. Wilson wrote the committee report, a much maligned statement then and since, which said that the colonists wished to remain British subjects but were determined to continue as free men. This by now time-worn formula would no longer serve, and when the committee reported, on February 13, the radicals succeeded in tabling it. The tabling of Wilson’s statement does not seem to have aroused much opposition among the moderates, who were losing hope as news of British hostility continued to come in. Fresh evidence of the king’s anger shook them, and then they learned that foreign mercenaries were on the way.25
