When the Committee of Fifty-One had its first meeting on May 23, Sears and McDougall asked it to consider endorsing a complete boycott of all British trade. Gouverneur Morris, a twenty-two-year-old graduate of New York’s King’s College (later Columbia University) and thirteen years later to become one of the most influential members of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, was in the gallery observing the jockeying for position between radicals and conservatives that evening. Morris himself was a scion of one the wealthiest and most privileged families of New York’s Hudson Valley, but, as he witnessed the clash of ideas and interests between the wealthiest and the ordinary citizens of the city, his sympathy appeared to be with the latter. “I stood in the balcony,” he wrote, “and on my right hand were ranged all the people of property and on the other, all the tradesmen &c. who thought it worth their while to leave their labour for the good of the Country.” As Morris observed, “The mob [began to] think and reason” and the “gentry began to fear this.” But, Morris noted, the “gentry” held most of the cards. In the discussion and decision that followed, the New York committee, now led by more traditionally minded politicians such as John Jay, James Duane and James DeLancey, agreed that their colony should come to Boston’s aid. But rather than explicitly endorsing the call for an inter-colonial boycott of all British trade, they instead proposed the convening of an intercolonial congress to discuss the best course of action. Such a congress, likely to be composed of the most distinguished political leaders of each of the colonies, would, many among the Committee of Fifty-One reasoned, be more deliberative and less prone to be swayed by the immediate passions of the moment.5
For astute observers like Gouverneur Morris, both the character of the debate and the decisions of the Committee of Fifty-One on that day suggested that New York’s resistance to the recent British threats was anything but unified; the varied reactions of New York’s citizens to those threats revealed a colony divided by interests, ideology and social class. If the dynamic of events in New York were any indication, the challenges facing any effort to bring Americans together in common cause in defense of their liberties would be formidable indeed.
Drama in Philadelphia
Like many of New York’s leading merchants and politicians, the political leaders of Philadelphia were widely suspected of having dragged their heels in earlier protests against the Stamp Act and, later, the Townshend Duties, a new set of taxes imposed by Parliament in 1767 on a long list of goods imported into America. Now, once again they were leaning toward caution in the aftermath of the Coercive Acts. On May 19, 1774, the Massachusetts silversmith and Tea Party participant Paul Revere completed the first of his famous rides. The Boston Committee of Correspondence sent him to Philadelphia to deliver a plea, most likely drafted by Sam Adams, for that city’s Committee of Correspondence to support Boston’s cause. “The single question,” Adams wrote “is whether YOU consider Boston as now suffering in the common cause.” If that was the case, he argued, then “suspending your trade with Great Britain . . . will be a great, but necessary sacrifice to the cause of liberty.” A few of the radicals on Philadelphia’s Committee, among them Charles Thomson, Thomas Mifflin and Joseph Reed, may have been prepared to throw their support behind the proposal for a boycott, but they were well aware that many of the most powerful political groups in the city were suspicious of the Bostonians. Among those were the leaders of the Pennsylvania Assembly, including the Speaker, Joseph Galloway, a sizable number of the city’s merchants, who had long been uneasy about any measure that might disrupt their trade, and members of the Society of Friends, who, according to Charles Thomson, were “principled against war, saw the storm gathering, and therefore wished to keep aloof from danger.”6
With those fears in mind, Thomson, Mifflin and Reed turned to the one man in the colony whose reputation as a principled, but moderate, opponent of recent British policies exceeded that of any other, not only in Pennsylvania, but perhaps in all of America. Whereas Sam Adams had gained a reputation as the boldest and most visible political activist in America, John Dickinson was widely recognized as the most intellectually astute and carefully modulated defender of America’s constitutional liberties. In 1767–1768, in response to Parliament’s enactment of the Townshend Duties, Dickinson had written a series of essays, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which had, at least from the American point of view, utterly demolished the validity of the Parliament’s claim to have a constitutional right to tax the colonies. While Dickinson would come to play a vitally important, if controversial, role in the movement for independence, at that particular moment, in the late spring of 1774, the wealthy, genteel and well-educated lawyer had kept his own views about America’s growing crisis with England to himself.7
On May 18 Thomson paid a visit to Dickinson to try to persuade him that “now was the time to step forward.” The following day, May 19, Paul Revere arrived in Philadelphia with the resolutions from the Boston Committee of Correspondence asking for support of the boycott on British trade. Prompted by the news from Boston, Thomson, Reed and Mifflin arranged for a public meeting to be held the following evening at City Tavern, the city’s largest and most popular hostelry, to discuss Boston’s plight and the best way to respond to it. On the morning of May 20, the three men paid another call on Dickinson at his stately home, Fair Hill, two miles outside of Philadelphia, to enlist his aid in a plan “to sound the sentiments of the people, but not to cause divisions or create parties.”8
The plan, as they outlined it to Dickinson, was for Reed, a lawyer trained in England who had recently set up practice in Philadelphia, and Mifflin, a young merchant from one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest Quaker families, to take the lead at that evening’s public meeting. Each would make speeches expressing sympathy for Boston, and then Thomson, who was widely known as being a “rash man,” would make a fiery speech pleading for unequivocal support of the resolutions from the Boston Committee of Correspondence. The three men knew that Thomson’s plea was likely to be rejected by most of the men present at that meeting, and therefore the key element in their plan was to persuade Dickinson to speak immediately after Thomson, opposing Thomson’s radical plan and instead press “for moderate measures, and thus, by an apparent dispute, prevent a further opposition, and carry the point agreed upon.” Dickinson was uneasy about the plan, and according to Reed, it was only after “a generous circulation” of glasses of wine from Dickinson’s own cellar, and further pleading by the three visitors, that he agreed to participate.9
On the evening of May 20, between two and three hundred men “of all ranks and interests” jammed into the Long Room of City Tavern to decide on a response to the Boston resolutions. The Long Room was by far the largest space in the tavern, taking up nearly the whole of the second floor, but it was still a very close and uncomfortable space given the size of the crowd and the unusual warmth of that May evening. The proceedings initially unfolded as scripted, with Reed first speaking in support of Boston “with temper, moderation, but in pathetic terms,” and then Mifflin echoing Reed’s sentiments but “with more warmth and fire.” At that point the carefully orchestrated drama unraveled a bit. Thomson began an impassioned plea for full support of Boston, but in the middle of his speech, overcome by the intense heat in the overcrowded room and lack of sleep during the previous two nights, he fainted dead away. His speech nevertheless had its effect. According to his recollection, after he was revived, the crowd in the room had been thrown into a state of “tumult and disorder past description,” with the more conservative merchants and Quakers railing against “the violence of the measures proposed.” At that point Dickinson stepped up to the head table and the front of the room and, speaking with what one of the attendees described as “great coolness, calmness, moderation, and good sense,” proposed both that a petition be sent to Deputy Governor John Penn asking for an immediate summoning of the Pennsylvania Assembly into session and that a Committee of Correspondence be appointed in order to send a l
etter of support to Boston. Both of these proposals seemed to satisfy most of the people in the room, but at that moment Dickinson apparently left the meeting, leaving those crowded into the room to argue about the composition of the committee. At that point, the two opposing sides each nominated their own slates of committee members—one composed of those inclined toward supporting Boston’s call for the boycott of British goods and the other made up of those favoring more tepid language offering Boston moral support but little else. In the end, those gathered in the room decided simply to combine the two slates, resulting in a reconstituted, nineteen-member Committee of Correspondence, relatively evenly divided between radicals and conservatives, with radicals like Thomson, Mifflin and Reed, moderates like John Dickinson and conservative merchants such as Thomas Wharton and Henry Drinker.10
When the committee met the following day, the letter of support for Boston they drafted reflected the divisions that had surfaced but then had been temporarily submerged by Dickinson’s attempts at moderation the night before. Although we have no record of what transpired in that secret meeting, Dickinson himself almost certainly carried the burden of trying to broker some sort of compromise position between the radical and conservative Philadelphians. The letter, most likely written by Dickinson, expressed the Philadelphians’ sympathy with Boston’s plight and spoke of all of the colonies being united “in common cause” with the suffering Bostonians. But at the same time, its tone was restrained, even condescending. It urged the Bostonians to exercise “prudence and moderation” and noted that the very seriousness of the crisis required not immediate action but “more mature deliberation.” That mature deliberation could be best accomplished, the Philadelphia Committee of Correspondence wrote, by the calling of “a general Congress of Deputies from the different Colonies, clearly to state what we conceive our rights and to make claim or petition of them to his Majesty, in firm, but decent and dutiful terms.” Although the Philadelphia response did not reject outright a boycott of trade with Great Britain, it made clear that such a boycott should be a “last resource” if the petition to the king failed to produce a favorable result. The Philadelphia response, which clearly fell short of what radicals like Thomson, Reed and Mifflin desired and went further than many of Philadelphia’s mercantile and political leaders would have preferred, was in some senses precisely the sort of “decent and respectful” communication that moderates such as John Dickinson thought most appropriate at the time.11
Coalescence
Upon reading a report from Charles Thomson, Sam Adams felt disappointment with the moderate response from the Philadelphia meeting. Thomson and Thomas Mifflin tried to console him by emphasizing the positive effects that the calling of a congress might have, but he was not persuaded. He agreed that the calling of a congress was an “absolute necessity” but lamented that it was nevertheless insufficient. “From the length of time it will take to bring it to pass,” Adams conjectured, “I fear it cannot answer for the present Emergency.” Only a thoroughgoing boycott of trade with Britain, implemented immediately, could prevent the British from starving Boston into submission.12
The Bostonians would receive more encouraging news further south. At a meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, about events in Philadelphia, a group of citizens, including some of the colony’s most powerful political leaders, pledged their support for a thoroughgoing boycott of British goods in support of Boston. And, crucially, the political leaders of Virginia, unlike their counterparts in New York and Pennsylvania, were united in their determination to support Boston’s cause. In mid-May of 1774 Virginians learned of the passage of the Boston Port Bill. Some younger burgesses, including Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason and a relative newcomer to the political scene, Thomas Jefferson, “cooked up a resolution” to designate June 1, when the act was to take effect, as a day of “fasting, humiliation, and prayer.” On May 26, Virginia’s royal governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, ordered the House of Burgesses dissolved for what he considered to be an act of disrespect to “his Majesty and the Parliament of Great Britain,” but that did not prevent the burgesses from meeting in an extra-legal session in Williamsburg’s Raleigh Tavern the following day, at which time they passed resolutions denouncing the governor for his actions and agreeing to a partial boycott of British imports from the East India Company. On May 30, after Speaker of the House Peyton Randolph received a formal request from Sam Adams and the Boston Committee of Correspondence asking Virginia to join Boston in a total boycott of British Goods, the House of Burgesses, again meeting in a rump session, agreed to convene a special convention on August 1 to appoint delegates to the “general Congress” recently proposed by New York and Pennsylvania and, equally important, to consider whether to support the plan for a general boycott.13
Virginia’s commitment to support a “general Congress” may have been decisive in persuading other southern colonies to send delegates as well, thus assuring that a truly “Continental” Congress would become a reality. And, when the Virginia Convention met in early August and threw its support behind a total boycott of all English goods, Sam Adams and his fellow Bostonians could be sure that when that Congress convened, they would have a powerful ally at their side.14
By mid-June of 1774 it was clear that the next step in addressing the threats posed by the Coercive Acts was an inter-colonial congress. It was also clear by that time that all the colonies, except for Georgia, which had been less involved in previous protests against British policies and was also at that time preoccupied by warfare with Indians on its western frontier, would be sending delegates to that Congress. And there seemed to be uniform consent that the Congress would be held in Philadelphia—a logical choice in the sense that Philadelphia, with a population of approximately 28,000 in 1774, was the largest city in America and, if not in the geographic center of the colonies, was more conveniently located than any other important American city. On the other hand, the location may not have pleased Sam Adams and the Bostonians, for they knew all too well Philadelphia’s reputation as the most conservative city in America—with a large concentration of merchants and Quakers who seemed prepared to protect either their pocketbooks or their pacifistic principles at the price of American liberty.15
Many in New York and Philadelphia clearly intended the Congress as a means of dampening the militant, even revolutionary, ardor of the Bostonians. But as the implications of the Coercive Acts began to sink in, many colonists throughout America were beginning to understand that Boston’s plight really could become theirs. And Virginia’s strong support of Boston’s more aggressive plan of resistance would carry a great deal of weight once the Congress convened. Although it would take almost two years for the fact to reveal itself, the “general Congress,” initially conceived by many of its proponents in Philadelphia and New York as a temporizing measure, would ultimately become the principal institutional agency of the world’s first popular revolution.
THREE
THE DELEGATES GATHER IN PHILADELPHIA
MOST OF THEM had never met, never even heard of one another. But during the month of August 1774, many of America’s most powerful men were making preparations to embark on an unprecedented journey to an unprecedented gathering. From the forests and mountains of New Hampshire to the rice fields of South Carolina, the political leaders of Great Britain’s colonies in North America prepared to head to Philadelphia to attend the “general Congress” charged with the task of responding to the newest, and by far the most serious, British threats to American liberty. They were all aware of the gravity of the business in which they were to engage, but few could have imagined that they would set in motion a series of events that would lead to the first popular revolution in the history of the world.
The Massachusetts, South Carolina and Virginia Delegates Depart
It is perhaps not surprising that the first colonial delegation to leave for Philadelphia to attend the general Congress was from Massachusetts. Ten years earlier it had been that
colony’s vigorous, and sometimes violent, response to Great Britain’s attempts to tax the American colonies that had set in motion the events that had led to the crisis the colonies now faced.
The four delegates from Massachusetts—Sam Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine and Thomas Cushing, all Bostonians—began their 300-mile trip to Philadelphia on August 10. Paine, as a youthful, aspiring merchant, had traveled both to the Carolinas and to Spain and the Azores, and Sam Adams had made a brief trip to New York to attend the Stamp Act Congress nine years earlier, but neither John Adams nor Thomas Cushing had ever traveled outside of their own colony. And with the exception of Cushing, the Massachusetts delegates were, at best, men of modest means. It would have been easier and faster to make the trip to Philadelphia by sea, but the port of Boston had recently been ordered closed by the British government, so that was out of the question. And so, on the day of their departure they crowded into the coach provided by Thomas Cushing and began their journey.1
The Massachusetts delegates knew they were heading toward a gathering of some of the wealthiest and most sophisticated men in America, so it’s likely that all of them took special care in packing their finest clothing for the trip. But in Sam Adams’s case, the selection of apparel had a special significance. In spite of his increasing prominence as one of the leaders of the opposition to British policies in Boston, Adams had always been notoriously unconcerned with his personal appearance. Indeed, he was widely viewed as among the most slovenly dressed residents of Boston. Apparently the Boston Sons of Liberty decided they had to do something about this before they sent their spiritual and political leader off to plead their case. A few weeks before he was due to leave for Philadelphia, Adams was interrupted during his dinner by a “well-known tailor,” who asked him if he might take his measurements. Although the tailor “firmly refused” to explain why, Adams agreed. After the measurements were made and Adams and his family sat down again to their dinner, they were interrupted yet again by a knock on the door from the “most approved hatter in Boston,” who made a similar request. And then, in succession, there appeared a shoemaker and a wigmaker, each taking the appropriate measurements and each refusing to tell Adams who had sent them. Before Adams departed for Philadelphia, he received a “large trunk” containing a full suit of clothes, two pairs of shoes “of the best style,” a set of silver shoe-buckles, six pairs of “the best silk hose,” a set of gold knee buckles, a set of gold sleeve-buttons, a gold-headed cane, a red cloak, a new wig and an “elegant cocked hat.” The only hint that Adams had of the identity of his benefactors was contained in the embossing upon the buttons of his new suit of clothes, for each of the buttons contained a Liberty Cap, the emblem of the Sons of Liberty. (The Sons of Liberty also arranged to make repairs to his house and to build him a new barn.)2
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