INDEPENDENCE: The Birth of a New America

At 6 o'clock last Tuesday morning in Philadelphia, Virginia Delegate Thomas Jefferson looked out at the gray sky and then noted that his thermometer registered 70DEG. Soon afterward, there came a crack of lightning and a sudden deluge. By 9 o'clock, the city was awash. Nearly 50 delegates to the Second Continental Congress slowly filled the ground-floor meeting room of the State House on Walnut Street. They conversed quietly but kept a watchful eye on everyone who came through the door. The room steamed. The only consolation in keeping the windows closed against rain was that they also excluded the horseflies from a nearby stable.

The day before, a preliminary vote on Virginian Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independence showed nine of the colonies in favor, two (South Carolina and Pennsylvania) opposed, New York abstaining and Delaware deadlocked. To decide such momentous business--cutting much of a continent and its 2.5 million inhabitants free from the British Empire--the Congress hoped for virtual unanimity. Anything less might poison the enterprise with disunity. Hence the delegates' anxiety on the morning of July 2.

A rumor passed through the hall that Pennsylvania would come over. South Carolina's Edward Rutledge entered smiling--ins colony, too, would vote for independence. New York's men still awaited instructions from home, but they would not dissent. That left only Delaware stalemated--one delegate in favor, one opposed, and one back home on business. Bostonian John Hancock, President of the Congress, rapped his gavel. Secretary Charles Thomson began rereading the resolution aloud prior to a vote.

Then over the cobblestones outside came a rattle of horse's hoofs. Soaking wet and mud-splattered, his face gray with fatigue, Delaware's third delegate, Farmer Caesar Rodney, had ridden all night from Dover after an express rider informed him of his colony's stalemate. He wore a green silk handkerchief, now nearly black with road dirt, to cover the lower part of his face, which is afflicted by a cancer. "The thunder and rain delayed me," Rodney said matter-of-factly as he entered the hall.

There, without dissent, the disparate colonies of America at last took the step that severed their 169-year-old political ties with the mother country, proclaiming that they "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states." Independence--the process as painful and bloody as birth--represents a unique historic experiment, a visionary gamble that a various people can literally will themselves into a separate political being on a new continent. Boston's John Adams is already predicting exultantly: "The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America."

Although independence had been months, even years, in coming, the week's events seemed startling in their sudden finality. July 2 declared the fact of separation. In another two days, on July 4, the Congress endorsed an extraordinary document, a Declaration that stated the Colonies' numerous reasons for leaving the imperial embrace. That date and that document may eventually loom larger in the American mind than what happened on July 2, for the Declaration, written by Jefferson, endows the revolt with a philosophical foundation and justification.

All this week, however, Americans will be celebrating the fact of independence and not the reasons for it. After the public reading of the Declaration.Philadelphians sounded their church bells all day and night. Battalions marched to the State House yard. Muskets cracked a feu de joie. Early this week the news had traveled only as far as New York and Dover, Delaware; it will probably not reach Georgia before August. In Dover, the Committee of Safety presided over a ceremonial burning of a portrait of George III. Said the committee's president: "Thus we destroy even the shadow of that King who refused to reign over a free people." In small towns like Easton, Pennsylvania, crowds gathered at local courthouses and greeted a reading of the Declaration with three loud huzzas. John Adams wrote to Maryland's Samuel Chase: "You will see by this post that the river is passed and the bridge cut away."

So it was. But the Americans come to independence with divergent interests and reasons: the fishermen, shipbuilders and merchants of New England, the traders and small farmers of the Middle Colonies, the planters and farmers of the south. The newly united states stretch 1,300 miles from Massachusetts' rocky Maine coast to the sand hills of Georgia. Sometimes regional differences, suspicions and hostilities among the colonies have been stronger than the antagonisms between England and the new continent. The celebrated old drawing depicting the colonies as separate segments of a serpent's body is hardly an exaggeration.

Two weeks ago, South Carolina's Rutledge wrote privately of his dismay at the New Englanders' "overruling influence in council --their low cunning, and those levelling principles winch men without character and without fortune in general possess." Virginia's Carter Braxton worried similarly about the "democratical" tendencies of New Englanders. Some men in the north, meantime, scorn the southerners for their dependence on slave labor. In all sections, there persists a powerful streak of Toryism. In the Congress itself are men like Pennsylvania's John Dickinson, who, though not a Tory, held out for reconciliation with England, arguing that the break was unnecessary, or at least too sudden.

But the time had come. In the 15 months since Lexington and Concord, the colonial psychology has changed profoundly. Radicals like Boston's Samuel Adams and other revolutionary leaders played a canny waiting game, delaying the call for outright independence until popular sentiment clearly swung away from King George and reconciliation. The radicals declared until nearly the last moment that the Colonists wanted only their rights within the British Empire, thus denying the Tories the chance to brand them as extremists who were misleading the people. Counseled Sam Adams: "Wait till the fruit is ripe before we gather it."

Events have worked a revolution in the American mind long before the formal break; they have called a new hierarchy of loyalties into being. The American invasion of Canada last fall produced two political effects: 1) because of the idealistic rhetoric that Congress used to describe the enterprise, liberty took on, to American ears, strong and even official overtones that it had not previously possessed; 2) the British decided that the Americans were obviously incendiaries who must be stopped. In January, Thomas Paine's Common Sense issued a loud, clear call for independence, condemning George Ill as "the greatest enemy this continent hath."

So fervent was Paine's message and so swift its circulation that by the beginning of March, Congress found itself behind the people. It hurried to catch up. On March 3, it sent Connecticut Delegate Silas Deane to France to negotiate for military aid; on the 14th, it voted to disarm all Loyalists; on the 19th, it authorized privateers to intercept British merchantmen; on the 26th, it placed an embargo on exports to Britain and the British West Indies. On April 6, it opened ports of trade to all nations except Britain. By May 10, John Adams was writing to James Warren, president of Massachusetts' Provincial Congress, "Every post and every day rolls in upon us, independence like a torrent."

Since February, rumors have floated that Britain was sending commissioners to America to negotiate a reconciliation. An influential Pennsylvanian, and now George Washington's adjutant general, Joseph Reed, wrote to his chief: "To tell you the truth, my dear Sir, I am infinitely more afraid of these commissioners than of their generals and armies. If their propositions are plausible, and behaviour artful, I am apprehensive they will divide us." (As is now believed, Admiral Lord Howe may have got from King George a commission to negotiate; see page 22.)

By mid-April, Elder Statesman Benjamin Franklin advised a friend: "Nothing seems wanting but that 'general consent.' The novelty of the thing [independence] deters some, the doubts of success, others, the vain hope of reconciliation, many. But our enemies take continually every proper measure to remove these obstacles, and their endeavors are attended with success, since every day furnishes us with new causes of increasing enmity, and new reasons for wishing an eternal separation."

Throughout the spring, the colonies' legislatures adapted themselves to once traitorous ideas. South Carolina and Georgia considered direct assertions of independence, but held back. North Carolina broke the dam when its Provincial Congress empowered its delegates in Philadelphia "to concur with the delegates of the other colonies in declaring independency."

The proprietary colonies (Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland, where the heirs of William Perm and Lord Baltimore still control vast tracts of land received from the Crown) delayed. Pennsylvania's James Wilson argued before the Congress: "Before we are prepared to build the new house, why should we pull down the old one, and expose ourselves to all the inclemencies of the season?" But on May 15, at the suggestion of John Adams, the Congress recommended that the colonies form new governments "where no government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs has been hitherto established." John Adams wrote at the end of the month: "The Middle Colonies have never tasted the bitter cup; they have never smarted, and are therefore a little cooler ... The proprietary governments are not only encumbered with a large body of Quakers, but are embarrassed by a proprietary interest; both together clog their operations a little."

Also in May, Congress received copies of the treaties by winch George had hired more than 12,000 Hessian mercenaries for his American war. The event was decisive. Redcoats were one thing, but hired Germans, professionals righting for pay, destroyed in many American minds the vestiges of loyalty to the King.

Thus the last act began. Virginia, the continent's most populous colony, precipitated it. The 112 members of its convention in Williamsburg voted unanimously on May 15 "that the delegates appointed to represent this colony in General Congress be instructed to propose to that respectable body to declare the United Colonies free and independent states ..." With that, Virginia set about establishing an independent state government and adopting a bill of rights.

On June 7 Richard Henry Lee rose and made a motion to the Congress: "Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; and that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."

Consideration was postponed until the 8th, then until the 10th, when congressional moderates succeeded in having the question postponed until July 1. But on June 11, the Congress appointed "a committee to prepare a declaration to the effect of the said resolution." Its members: Thomas Jefferson, 33, John Adams, 40, Benjamin Franklin, 70, Connecticut Lawyer and Merchant Roger Sherman, 55, and New York Lawyer Robert R. Livingston, 29.

In some ways, it was an accident of politics that the young Jefferson came to write the Declaration. According to one story, Jefferson urged the task on John Adams, the brilliant, truculent Boston lawyer who had proved himself the ablest debater of the revolutionary cause. By this account, Adams demurred on grounds that he was personally "obnoxious" to many members of Congress, that a Virginian should write the document since Virginia had first moved for independence, and that, in any case, Jefferson was the superior writer.

The story is plausible. Although no one in Congress argued the case for separation better than Adams, his very zeal and bull-necked honesty did indeed make him obnoxious to many. Besides, the men from Massachusetts, being so far advanced in their enthusiasm, have been wise enough to adopt the habit of deferring to Virginia. As one of the more acute delegates explained it to Adams two years ago: "You must be very cautious ... You must not pretend to take the lead. You know Virginia is the most populous state in the Union. They are very proud. They think they have a right to take the lead."

As for Jefferson's writing talents, he proved them two years ago in A Summary View of the Rights of British America--a trenchant and almost bellicose pamphlet reviewing the history of America in the British Empire. Some say, however, that Jefferson was only named to the committee as part of a compromise, after John Adams had nearly choked on the idea of working with Virginia's Benjamin Harrison, who was comparatively lukewarm to independence.

Jefferson is a formidably learned man with a meticulous and graceful mind. The tall, red-haired Virginian was elected a delegate to Congress last year--when just 32 and only recently a father--and he first appeared in Philadelphia riding in a phaeton and accompanied by two black servants. John Adams may have regretted Jefferson's silence during debate, but he found him so quick in smaller councils that he was charmed. The two have formed an extraordinary partnership: Adams arguing the case for independence in the day-to-day clutches of debate, and Jefferson formulating the argument in private and on paper.

When Jefferson returned to crowded Philadelphia last month, he was impressed anew with the bustle of the Colonies' largest city (population about 40,000). To get some quiet, he took lodgings in the new three-story house of a bricklayer named Jacob Graff, at the corner of Market and Seventh streets. Jefferson has the second floor--a bedroom and parlor with stairs and a passageway between them. Rent: 35 shillings a week. He dines out.

Between June 11 and 28, Jefferson labored over the Declaration, writing on a portable writing box that he himself designed. The document that he produced--later amended slightly by the rest of the drafting committee and further altered by the Congress itself --combines solemnly elevated thought with artful political stratagem. Its philosophy is not novel, nor did Jefferson intend it to be. The same general ideas, most completely developed by English Philosopher John Locke, have been a kind of political gospel in the Colonies for some years. Jefferson intended to state the common American sense, not to invent political theory--an exercise that would have been inappropriate anyway, since the Declaration was to be, as nearly as possible, what he calls "an expression of the American mind."

Jefferson began on a note of grave courtesy and lofty historical purpose: "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands winch have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to winch the laws of nature and of nature's god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes winch impel them to the separation."

Thus at the outset, Jefferson stated, or implied, the major assumptions on winch separation is based. First, that the Americans are "one people" dissolving political ties with another. They are not British subjects in open revolt against their own government but already a distinct entity unto themselves; independence is not sedition but something like the dissolving of a partnersinp, under the rules of the social compact by winch people originally instituted their political structures.

Jefferson specified the political aspects of natural law in the Declaration's stately second paragraph: "We hold these truths to be self-evident [Jefferson first wrote "sacred and undeniable," a phrase later changed]; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." To secure these rights, Jefferson went on, men establish governments winch derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." And when any government becomes destructive of the safety and happiness of the people, "it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government."

In its emphasis on the idea that legitimate power must be "just power," the Declaration thus states a people's right to dissolve any government that has become tyrannical. In great measure, this idea draws upon the examples of Great Britain's own revolutions of 1642 and 1688 --winch included the execution and exiling of kings--and beyond that, upon a vast background of sometimes bloody tradition in winch Englishmen asserted their rights against the authority of their rulers.

Aside from its political origins, the pinlosophical roots of the Declaration are deep and varied. Even though Jefferson says, "I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it," the document reflects such classical ideas as Aristotle's perception of an unchangeable natural law pertaining to all men, and the Stoics' even more explicit assertion of a natural law knowable by men and thus capable of directing them, as rational and social animals, toward perfection. Such ideas took Christian form in the minds of teachers like St. Thomas Aquinas, who accepted from classical writers the concept that there is "an inclination in man to the good, according to the rational nature winch is proper to him; as, for example, man has a natural inclination to know the truth about God, and to live in society." Some mysteries of heaven remained in the province of faith, but reason could bear on others and was of prime use to illuminate the mysteries of the world. And in Sir Isaac Newton's subsequent work, the next step was obvious: the entire universe is susceptible to rational inquiry.

At the end of the Middle Ages, when feudalism had bound lord to vassal as well as vassal to lord, apologists for the ever mightier monarchs of Europe increasingly used "right reason" to interpret God's will as a mandate for the divine right of kings--a sacred and descending chain of authority. In 1680, Sk Robert Filmer's Patriarcha or the Natural Power of Kings expressed this idea according to a metaphor of relative power: "Kings are as absolute as Adam over the creatures." A king, thought Filmer, rules his people as a father rules ins children. In 1681, the writer James Tyrrell, a friend of Locke's, replied in Patriarcha non Monarcha that on the contrary, a king is as much under the law as are ins subjects: all are bound by the social compact.

That formulation was crucial; it signified at least the intellectual end of the era epitomized by King Louis XIV of France: "L'etat, c'est moi." Locke carried Tyrrell's idea much farther in his Two Treatises of Government, written partly as a refutation of Filmer and published just after the revolution in 1688. In the Second Treatise, Locke based all political theory upon a rationally ordered universe. The thought was not impiously secular but in fact was the re-verse--a conception of human order deriving entirely from the infinite and infinitely discoverable mind of God. Yet, in effect, Locke burdened man's intelligence with an absolute freedom that implies absolute responsibility.

Studying the nature of man, Locke wrote, leads to the discovery of what God has willed governments to be. "The state of nature," he said, "has a law to govern it, winch obliges everyone: and reason, winch is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions." (This grouping of life, liberty and material wealth is fundamental to Locke, who also declared that "government has no other end but the preservation of property." Similar pronouncements have often appeared in the Colonies. "Life, liberty and property" were cited as "natural rights" by the Massachusetts Council in 1773 and the First Continental Congress in 1774. It was Jefferson himself who changed the familiar sequence to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and he has not given any reason for doing so.)

Since men form political compacts with winch to govern themselves, when any ruler transgresses the laws of nature or reason, then the governed may dissolve the compact. "In transgressing the law of nature," Locke wrote, "the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity, winch is that measure God has set to the actions of men."

Although some of Jefferson's ideas can be traced back to European origins, Jefferson and his colleagues are also men of considerable experience in public affairs and the law. Their arguments are therefore based solidly on that American experience. As a matter of practical politics, the Colonists for the past decade directed their complaints against Parliament or the King's ministers, not against George himself. They attacked the Townshend Revenue Act, the so-called "Intolerable Acts" and other impositions as being the unconstitutional measures of a misguided Parliament, but not as the illegitimate usurpations of a ruler. In fact, the Colonists before 1764 enjoyed a freedom from parliamentary control that was denied to Englishmen at home. The English, for example, have long paid stamp taxes, against winch the Americans rioted. In claiming extraordinary privileges, however, the Americans argued they were not properly represented in Parliament, and therefore Parliament had no right of control.

But now, Jefferson and Congress have fundamentally changed the argument. To make independence plausible, they have had to attack the authority of George himself, to demonstrate that royal as well as parliamentary abuses of the Colonies represent crimes sufficient to justify dissolving the social compact between King and Colonists.

Thus the lengthy middle section of the Declaration never mentions Parliament by name--a curious but absolutely necessary omission. Instead, it is a long litany of the King's offenses, made especially effective by relentless repetition:

"He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good... He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly and continually for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people... He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers ... He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislatures ... He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns and destroyed the lives of our people."

The list of 27 charges against King George is in some ways polemical and exaggerated. Its intent, however, is not a strict and balanced accuracy but a maximum political effect to justify the conclusion: "A prince whose character is thus marked by every act winch may define a tyrant is unfit to be a ruler of a free people." The case thus stated, the Declaration stirringly ends with the words of Richard Henry Lee's June 7 resolution that the Colonies should be "free and independent."

Such at least is the document as finally endorsed by the Congress on July 4. Jefferson's draft went through a long editing process, although the document remains essentially ins. First he submitted his rough draft to Franklin, who made one or two minor changes and passed the document along to Adams, who made one of his two changes and then made a copy for himself. Jefferson took the draft back, revised it somewhat, submitted it again to Franklin and Adams, and finally laid it before the whole Committee of Five, winch made no other changes. Jefferson then made a fair copy, and without further change it was presented to the Congress on June 28.

On July 2, after the vote for independence, Congress pushed on to consider the Declaration. The process continued for two more days, with Jefferson sitting nervously silent. For propriety's sake, he never rose to defend a word or thought in the document; John Adams undertook that task and argued the case against all critics. Sometimes, however, the critics proved victorious.

At the end of his long list of grievances, Jefferson, a slaveowner himself, inserted a somewhat illogical passage vitriolically accusing the King of abetting the slave trade and thus waging "cruel war against human nature itself and violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty." In deference to the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, the passage was struck. In his complaint about foreign soldiers being used against the Colonies, Jefferson referred to "Scotch and other mercenaries," a phrase that angered one or two Scotsmen in the Congress. Thus "Scotch" was deleted from the Declaration.

The various changes on the whole improved the document by making it more austere and spare. Nonetheless, Jefferson's pride of authorship seems to have been wounded. After the Congress adjourned last week, he sent copies of his original document to several friends, patently assuming that they would see for themselves that it was superior to the one finally adopted. At one point during the session, the mellow Franklin attempted to console Jefferson by telling him an anecdote about a Philadelphia hatter named John Thompson who had a sign made for his shop that read: JOHN THOMPSON, HATTER, MAKES AND SELLS HATS FOR READY MONEY, with a picture of a hat underneath. But before hanging the sign. Thompson showed it to friends, each of whom criticized some word or phrase ("Sells hats!" cried one. "Why nobody will expect you to give them away"). At last, said Franklin, the sign showed merely JOHN THOMPSON with the figure of a hat beneath his name.

Finally, on July 4, the Congress adopted the Declaration and ordered it "authenticated" and printed. As President of the Congress, John Hancock signed the Declaration, and the congressional secretary, Charles Thomson, attested to his signature. Oddly, no member of the drafting committee seems to have gone along to John Dunlap's shop to supervise the printing--which accounts, perhaps, for the caprices of punctuation, capitalization and spelling that occur in the printed document. On July 5 and 6, the Declaration was sent out to all the colonies, and one copy was inserted into the Congress's "rough" (secret) journal.

Thus last week the dangerous enterprise of American independence began. Besides Hancock, none of the members of Congress signed the Declaration --that will perhaps come later and may depend somewhat on the American fortunes in the war: if they sign, the members could be hanged for treason.

John Adams observed last week: "I am surprised at the suddenness as well as the greatness of this Revolution. Britain has been filled with folly, and America with wisdom, at least this is my judgment. Time will determine ... I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these states." Thomas Jefferson, too, understands the immense stakes of the American gamble. To him, "all eyes are open, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs." For all Americans, Jefferson wrote at the end of the Declaration, it is a matter of "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.