About this Issue

One summer day in his 80th year, ex-President John Adams wrote to his old friend and former rival, Thomas Jefferson. "Who shall write the history of the American Revolution?" Adams asked. "Who will ever be able to write it?" Answered Jefferson: "Nobody; except merely its external facts ... The life and soul of history must for ever be unknown ..."

historians cannot quite accept that judgment, and neither can journalists. This issue is an attempt to reconstruct, with the tools of both history and journalism, and in our distinctive newsmagazine format, at least part of the life and soul of the events that gave birth to our nation. As one of TIME'S contributions to the Bicentennial celebration, we began over a year ago to plan an issue devoted to the news in those sultry first days of July 1776, written and edited more or less as it would have been if TIME had existed in those days. Under the supervision of Senior Editor Otto Friedrich, a team of 14 researchers set to work poring through archives, letters, diaries and contemporary newspapers, seeking the myriad colorful details that would have been sought by a good reporter transplanted into the 18th century. As the research accumulated--a mountain of some 1,600 pages, over 50 percent more than the amount filed by our correspondents for a regular issue--a dozen writers were assigned to apply, figuratively, their quill pens. Scholarly judgment and historical guidance were provided by Robert A. Rutland of the University of Virginia, editor of the Madison papers.

Trying to move TIME two centuries back presented problems. A typical one: how to explain what 18th century money was worth. Answer: the 1776 dollar, which meant either the Spanish silver dollar or Continental paper redeemable in Spanish silver, would be worth, on the basis of new U.S. Commerce Department figures, about eleven of today's dollars, and the pound sterling about 50 dollars.

We were able to retain most of our usual department headings, with some obvious omissions (Television, Cinema). Apart from these, the Law section was left out because law and lawyers had burst the bounds of the legal profession and were making news in all the great political events of the moment.

No issue of TIME is confined entirely to one week's news. Background and trends leading up to the present must be included, and so it is in this case. But we are not attempting to deal with the whole Revolution. The Battle of Bunker hill is old news by now, and Valley Forge is yet to come. Here are the other main ground rules we established:

> We held our presses until Tuesday, July 9, so we could report that day's proclamation of the Declaration of Independence--which Congress had voted the previous Thursday --in front of George Washington and his troops in New York. Any event that happened after that, we could not have known, but we made use of later documents in which actors in the drama of 1776 wrote their recollections.

> News traveled slowly in 1776--the American victory at Fort Sullivan on June 28, for example, was not reported in Philadelpihia until July 19. But we assumed that there was a way of getting distant American news into print within a week of the event. For overseas news, we allowed a month.

> We did not try to write in 18th century style or to follow the day's usage--David Hume, for example, complained of such neologisms as "colonize" and "unshakable." We did try, however, to avoid glaring anachronisms.

> Most of our pictures are from the 18th century. In some cases, when no illustrations of some key scene or figure existed, we assigned artists to produce them specially for this issue. Since there is no known Jefferson portrait earlier than 1786, for example, we showed Charles Willson Peale's 1791 portrait to Illustrator Louis Glanzman and asked him to use it as a model for the younger man on our cover. James Wyeth's similarly commissioned painting appears on page 6. And on a few occasions we accepted a chronological lapse: the Trumbull painting of Jefferson before Congress was painted in 1787 and contains inaccuracies, but so many Americans have seen the replica in the Capitol that it has become an image of the era.

This 1776 issue has been a very entertaining and immensely stimulating project for us, and we hope that it will be the same for our readers. But we also hope that it will be far more. At a tune when Americans are questioning the very meaning of their nation's basic beliefs, it is refreshing and reassuring to return to our origins, to our fundamental values, and to try to illuminate how earlier Americans saw the world and their place in it. Above all, it is fascinating to see how they dealt with issues that still confront us today. "Taking a retrospective view of what is passed," said George Mason, author of the Virginia declaration of rights, "we seem to have been treading upon enchanted ground."

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