Roger Sherman: This Connecticut politician was by the testimony of many of his colleagues one of the most physically ungainly specimens ever put on God’s earth. According to John Adams, his manner was “the reverse of grace,” yet in the same breath Adams declared him to be “one of the soundest and strongest pillars of the Revolution.” Jefferson echoed the praise, describing him as “a man who never said a foolish thing in his life.” Sherman, one of the few members of the Continental Congress who started his career in poverty—he was the son of a poor shoemaker who died when Sherman was just a young man. His down-to-earth manner and common-sense approach to the imperial crisis earned him a place alongside Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Robert Livingston on the committee charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence.
THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS: A CHRONOLOGY
December 16, 1773—Boston Tea Party.
January 29, 1774—Lord Wedderburn confronts Benjamin Franklin in the “cockpit.”
March–May 1774—Parliament passes the Coercive Acts in response to the Boston Tea Party.
May–June 1774—Boston Committee of Correspondence proposes a Solemn League and Covenant boycotting all British goods.
Political Leaders in Pennsylvania and New York call for a meeting of a “general congress” in response to the Coercive Acts.
September 5, 1774—First Continental Congress meets in Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia.
September 18, 1774—Congress endorses the Suffolk Resolves.
September 27, 1774—Congress agrees to ban imports from Great Britain.
September 28, 1774—Joseph Galloway presents his “Plan of Union.”
September 30, 1774—Congress agrees to ban exports to Great Britain, Ireland and the West Indies.
October 14, 1774—Congress adopts a Declaration of Rights and Grievances.
October 20, 1774—Congress approves of the creation of the Association.
October 21, 1774—Congress approves an address to the people of Great Britain.
Congress approves an address to the people of the colonies.
October 26, 1774—Members of Congress sign Address to the King. Congress adjourns, to reconvene on May 10, 1775, if the king and Parliament fail in a “redress of grievances.”
January 1775—King George III receives and rejects First Congress’s petition.
March 1775—The King’s chief minister, Lord North, formulates a “peace plan.”
April 19, 1775—Battles of Lexington and Concord.
May 10, 1775—Second Continental Congress convenes in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House, electing Peyton Randolph president.
May 18, 1775—Congress receives news of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga.
May 24, 1775—Congress elects John Hancock president.
June 9, 1775—Congress authorizes Massachusetts to organize its own government free of royal control.
June 14, 1775—Congress resolves to organize a Continental Army.
June 15, 1775—Congress appoints George Washington commander of the Continental Army.
June 17, 1775—Battle of Bunker Hill.
June 22, 1775—Thomas Jefferson arrives in Philadelphia as a delegate to the Congress.
July 5, 1775—Congress approves an Olive Branch Petition to the king.
July 6, 1775—Congress approves a “Declaration on Taking Arms.”
July 31, 1775—Congress responds to Lord North’s “peace plan.”
August 2, 1775—Congress temporarily adjourns until September 5, 1775.
August 23, 1775—King George III issues his Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition.
September 13, 1775—Congress reconvenes. The colony of Georgia sends a full delegation for the first time, adding the thirteenth member to the “united colonies.”
October 13, 1775—Congress authorizes fitting out of armed vessels, marking the beginning of the creation of an American navy.
November 7, 1775—Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, issues his proclamation promising freedom to slaves willing to fight on the side of the British.
November 9, 1775—Congress receives report of king’s rejection of the Olive Branch Petition.
November 1775—In the absence of British authority in those colonies, Congress authorizes New Hampshire and South Carolina to organize their own governments.
December 22, 1775—Parliament and the King approve the Prohibitory Act, effectively declaring war on the American colonies.
January 1776—The Continental Army suffers devastating defeats in Montreal, Canada.
January 10, 1776—Thomas Paine publishes Common Sense.
January–May 1776—The individual colonial legislatures discuss, and differ, on the question of independence from Great Britain.
March 4, 1776—General Washington and his troops occupy Dorchester Heights in Boston; British evacuate the city.
March–May 1776—The “phantom” British peace commissioners fail to arrive.
May 15, 1776—The Virginia Convention instructs its delegates to the Continental Congress to place before that body a resolution for independence.
June 7, 1776—Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee introduces a resolution for independence.
June 11, 1776—Congress appoints a committee to prepare a declaration of independence, with Thomas Jefferson as chair of the committee.
June 28, 1776—Draft of the Declaration of Independence is presented to Congress.
July 1, 1776—Congress begins debate on Lee’s resolution for independence.
July 2, 1776—Congress adopts Lee’s resolution for independence.
July 2–4, 1776—Congress debates, and edits, the draft of the Declaration of Independence.
July 4, 1776—Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence.
INTRODUCTION
ON JULY 3, 1776, a tired, but jubilant John Adams sat down at his desk in Sarah Yard’s boarding house on the corner of Second and Market Streets in Philadelphia to write to his beloved wife, Abigail. He had much to tell. The previous day, the Second Continental Congress had agreed to a resolution affirming that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states” and renouncing all allegiance to the British crown. Adams rejoiced in the “Suddenness, as well as Greatness of this Revolution” and proclaimed, “It is the Will of Heaven, that the two Countries should be sundered forever.” For many months leading up to that fateful moment, he had worked hard to persuade his fellow delegates to the Congress—indeed, he had often begged and cajoled them—to take that fateful step. Now, at last, no doubt with relief as well as jubilation, he was able to send Abigail the news of his success.1
Later that day, still in a state of jubilation, John wrote Abigail again, and envisioned future commemorations of America’s decision for independence. He predicted that “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.” While his prediction about the date of the “great anniversary Festival” was off by two days, Adams was correct in proclaiming that the decisions made during those days in early July would reverberate through the ages. In the decades following adoption of the Declaration of Independence, as Fourth of July celebrations became an important American ritual, it would become commonplace for American politicians and civic leaders to mount the speaker’s rostrum to invoke the “will of heaven”—to depict the American Revolution, and the creation of a democratic American nation that came into being in the aftermath of that Revolution, as part of a divine plan, the inevitable result of the efforts of a virtuous citizenry dedicated to freedom.2
In retrospect, it may seem that America’s decision to declare its independence from Great Britain, whether directed by the will of heaven or through some other more prosaic, but equally inexorable, force, was somehow inevitable. But it seemed anything but inevitable in September of 1774, when the First Continental Con
gress began the task of forging a united front against British threats to American liberties. It would take twenty-two agonizing months, from the opening session of the Congress on September 5, 1774 until those fateful days in early July of 1776, for the delegates to the Congress to reach the decision for independence. Many of those casting their vote in favor of independence on July 2 did so with a combination of fear, reluctance and even sadness. In their letters to friends and family, most seemed convinced that they had made the right decision, but they also expressed uncertainty about what lay ahead. John Adams himself, in the midst of his rejoicing, acknowledged that it might also be the will of heaven that “America shall suffer Calamities still more wasting and Distresses yet more dreadful.” Abraham Clark, one of the delegates from New Jersey, a colony that had only come around at the last minute to support independence, was apprehensive, too. “We are,” he wrote, “now embarked on a most Tempestious Sea, Life very uncertain, Seeming Dangers Scattered Thick Around us.” And Pennsylvania’s Robert Morris, who voted against the resolution for independence on July 2, but then reluctantly signed the Declaration several weeks after it was officially adopted, was overcome with sadness that his colleagues had taken such a drastic step; he continued to believe that “the Interest of Our Country and the Good of Mankind” would have been better served had the Congress gone that extra mile to achieve some sort of reconciliation with their mother country.3
To understand the radical nature—indeed, the audacity—of the Americans’ decision for independence, we need to put ourselves back into the minds and hearts of those delegates who traveled to Philadelphia for the opening of the First Continental Congress in September of 1774. That Congress was, in the words of John Adams, “a gathering of strangers,” a group of men who brought with them widely differing interests and cultural perspectives, and very little sense of themselves as “Americans.” Whether through their reading of their local newspapers or of the most recently published and avidly sought-after fashion magazines from London, the residents of Massachusetts, Virginia or South Carolina were much more familiar with the customs, fashions and contemporary happenings in their mother country than they were with events in neighboring colonies. As South Carolinian John Drayton observed, the residents of his colony were “too much prejudiced in favour of British manners, customs and knowledge, to imagine that elsewhere than in England, anything of advantage could be obtained.” Why then should the residents of his colony even bother to get to know anything about not only the manners and customs but also the aspirations of the residents of any other American colony?4
Perhaps the only thing that bound American colonists together at that moment in 1774 was their common identity as subjects of the British Crown and their loyalty, indeed, their love, of the British monarch. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, it had become standard practice to hang portraits of British monarchs and royal officials in the colonies’ legislative chambers and even in their country courts and town halls. As the power, prestige, and territorial expanse of the British empire grew over the course of the eighteenth century, Americans’ pride in their empire, and in their king, increased as well. Towns across America began to stage public ceremonies honoring the king’s birthday. As entrepreneurial printers began to reproduce large quantities of portraits of King George III, it became commonplace—even fashionable—for Americans of all social classes to display those portraits in their homes. Benjamin Franklin’s wife, Deborah, writing to her husband while he was serving as a colonial agent in London, reported with pride that she had decorated the main room of their house in Philadelphia “with brother John’s picture and one of the King and Queen.”5
One of the most dramatic examples of this devotion to the monarch, even as their relationship with the British Parliament began to deteriorate, occurred in October of 1768, when Benjamin Rush, the highly respected Philadelphia physician—and, later, a signer of the Declaration of Independence—visited the grand assembly room of the House of Lords in London. There he found himself gazing at the ornate golden throne of King George III. “I felt,” he reported, “as if I walked on sacred ground.” He stood, transfixed, overcome with “emotions I cannot describe.” In an act of uncommon boldness, Rush asked his guide if he might be permitted to sit upon the throne. The guide initially told him that that was out of the question, but such was the intensity of Rush’s appeal, that the guide reluctantly agreed to allow him to. When Rush first sat down on the throne, he was so overwhelmed with feeling, with “such a crowd of ideas” passing through his mind, that he could barely make sense of his experience. But, truly, he recalled, “this is the golden period of the worldly man’s wishes. His passions conceive, his hopes aspire, after nothing beyond this Throne.”
Rush next went to the chamber of the House of Commons, where he felt nothing but anger. This was the body that had recently enacted the much-detested Stamp Act and Townshend Duties. This was the “place where the infernal scheme for enslaving America was first broached. Here the usurping Commons first endeavored to rob the King of his supremacy over the colonies and to divide it among themselves.”6
Between 1768 and the early fall of 1774, when the delegates to the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, the conflict escalated still further, but even then, nearly all of the delegates who arrived in Philadelphia to attend that Congress were still holding on to the distinction made by Rush that October in London. However much they may have held the British Parliament in contempt, however overheated their rhetoric about the intent of the Parliament and the king’s ministers in Parliament to “enslave them,” they, like most of their fellow colonists, found themselves torn by mixed emotions—outrage at British invasions of American liberty and love for their mother country and their king. Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor begins with a brief account of the escalating conflict between the American colonies and the British imperial government during the years between 1763 and the fateful night of December 16, 1773, when a group of “Mohawk Indians” threw 90,000 pounds of East India Company tea in Boston Harbor. The outraged British reaction to that Tea Party in Boston—embodied in a series of punitive parliamentary laws that came to be known as the “Coercive Acts”—moved the conflict to new heights. But the thirteen American colonies were by no means united on how to combat those new threats to their liberties. Chapter Two describes first the indecision and then the reluctant agreement among the colonies to call a “general congress” to discuss the best means of defending American liberties while at the same time searching for a path toward reconciliation with their “mother country.” The next twenty-three chapters tell the story of the deliberations of that Congress during the critically important months between September 5, 1774, and July 4, 1776—during which time America’s political leaders worked their way through the often agonizing process that ultimately led to their audacious leap toward independence—shedding both their provincial and their imperial British identities and, in the process, transforming themselves into leaders of an American cause.7
Many of the principal characters in the drama of the decision for independence are familiar to most Americans. The passionate, mercurial and, in the eyes of many delegates, occasionally obnoxious John Adams seems to have been on center stage at nearly every moment in the drama. John’s older cousin Sam, reputed to be a wild-eyed radical, surprised many by the quiet and patient way in which he worked to persuade the more reluctant delegates that independence from England was the correct path. Few of the delegates to the Congress had ever met the reserved but powerfully dignified George Washington. From the moment of his arrival in Philadelphia, however, his very presence inspired respect, even awe. And Thomas Jefferson, a relative newcomer to the proceedings, in spite of his poor oratorical talents, would provide the elegant words that would justify American independence.
There were many other actors in the story who deserve greater attention than they have received. The Congress’s secretary, Pennsylvania’s Charles Thomson, was an ab
ysmal record keeper, but he was also a powerful advocate for independence in a Pennsylvania delegation that dragged its feet on that question until the very end; he would come to be admired as the “Sam Adams of Philadelphia.” Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee—the most active and outspoken member of his delegation—introduced the resolution for independence into the Congress and was an indispensable ally to the Adamses in persuading the delegates to sever their ties to Great Britain. Christopher Gadsden, an outlier radical in a South Carolina delegation dominated by wealthy and conservative planters, not only provided important support for the New Englanders in the Congress but also rallied the forces for independence on the streets of Charleston. Edward Rutledge, the leader of the South Carolina delegation and one of John Adams’s least favorite people, was an unrestrained Anglophile who enjoyed flaunting his Oxford University education and his subsequent legal training at the Middle Temple in London. He sat on the fence until the day before the July 2 vote, finally adding his support to the cause of independence. While Samuel Chase’s fellow Maryland delegates were marking time until receiving word from their legislature on how to vote on the question of independence, the Annapolis lawyer traveled back home and organized a grassroots campaign to pressure the legislature into supporting the resolution for independence. And then there was that recent English immigrant who was not even a member of the Congress, Thomas Paine. Paine’s life to that point had consisted of one failure after another. When he left England for America in the fall of 1774, no one could have imagined the impact he would have, both in his newly adopted home and around the world. In January of 1776, just a little over a year after his ship landed at the port of Philadelphia, he published Common Sense, a pamphlet that would change the course of history.
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