For the most part, the delegates shared a common cultural and religious experience. Every one of the fifty-six delegates who would eventually attend at least some of the sessions of the First Continental Congress had been born within the thirteen North American colonies. Among the fifty-six congressional delegates, thirty-eight could trace their primary ethnic heritage to England, seven to Ireland, three to Scotland, with the remainder having family connections in Holland, Sweden and Switzerland.27
The delegates’ religious affiliations largely reflected the religious composition of the colonies they were representing. The thirty-one Anglicans came largely from the middle and southern colonies, the eight Congregationalists from New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut, the five Presbyterians from the middle colonies, four of the five Quakers came, predictably, from Pennsylvania, the lone Baptist came from Rhode Island and two of the nine New York delegates—Simon Boerum and John Haring—were members of the Dutch Reformed Church. Five of the delegates did not leave a record of any religious preference.28
The average age of the delegates was a little over forty-five, pretty close to the average age of the adult population of America as a whole at that time. But averages do not tell the whole story—the age range among the delegates was considerable—from twenty-four (Edward Rutledge of South Carolina) to sixty-seven (Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island). There were relatively few delegates at the older end of the age spectrum—Stephen Hopkins and William Livingston at age sixty-three were the only delegates over sixty. The very young delegates—Rutledge at twenty-four, John Jay at twenty-eight—probably owed their selection more to impressive family connections than to distinguished records of achievement or of public service. In that regard, there was a slight concentration of younger delegates from the southern colonies, where a family’s social and economic standing often guaranteed service in high political office.
The most notable characteristic shared by nearly all the delegates was a record of past service in the politics of their home colonies. Indeed, the distinction of those records no doubt caused them to be selected to serve in the Congress in the first place. Forty-nine of the fifty-six delegates had served in the provincial assemblies of their colonies, and thirteen had served as Speaker of their assemblies, a position generally considered to be the highest elective office in their provinces. Most Americans thought of their elected assemblies as the provincial equivalents of the British Parliament and that members of those assemblies possessed the rights and prerogatives of members of Parliament. The men who had served in the provincial assemblies during the period from 1765 to 1774 had not only confronted the constitutional challenges to the interests and liberties of their constituents posed by British policies but also come to view parliamentary encroachments on their legislative prerogatives as both a violation of their constitutional rights and a personal affront to their dignity and prestige.29
In addition to service within their own colonies, ten of the delegates to the First Continental Congress—Sam Adams, John Dickinson, Eliphalet Dyer, Christopher Gadsden, Philip Livingston, Thomas Lynch, Thomas McKean, John Morton, Caesar Rodney and John Rutledge—were among the twenty-eight delegates from nine colonies who had attended the Stamp Act Congress in New York City in October of 1765. Those ten delegates had acquired at least some superficial familiarity with one another during the two weeks the Stamp Act Congress was in session. In a sense, the “general Congress” in Philadelphia that was to begin on September 5, 1774, was similar to the Stamp Act Congress. Both had been called in response to specific pieces of parliamentary legislation—the Stamp Act and the Coercive Acts. But surely most of the delegates gathered in Philadelphia realized just how much higher the stakes were now. While some may have held out a hope that their meeting might not last much longer than the two weeks of the Stamp Act Congress, most probably understood that the extent and the complexity of issues that they were likely to face would go far beyond the limited set of resolutions that came out of the Stamp Act Congress.
However inapt the comparison between the Stamp Act Congress and the upcoming Continental Congress may be, the men who were about to gather together in Philadelphia in September of 1774—both those who had attended the Stamp Act Congress and those who had not—shared an important common ground. Perhaps more than any group of men in America, they shared a common sense not only of the constitutional issues at stake in the conflict with England, but also an intensely personal interest in defending their legislative prerogatives. The men about to gather together in Philadelphia were mostly, though not exclusively, strangers to one another, but their common experience as legislators, more than matters of age, education, wealth, ethnicity or religion, would provide them with a solid foundation on which to build, in the first instance, a new legislative body—an American “Congress”—and, eventually, a new nation.
FOUR
TWO DIFFERENT PATHS TO LIBERTY
John Adams and John Dickinson
JOHN ADAMS’S AFTER-the-fact assessment of the composition of the First Continental Congress—that it consisted of “a third tories, another third whigs, and the rest mongrels”—was both glib and technically inaccurate. But like much of his hyperbole, it contained an element of truth. As we have seen, the delegates traveling to Philadelphia from across the vast American landscape arrived with a variety of objectives. Many, but not all of those from New England and Virginia hoped that the Congress would unite their neighboring colonies around a plan for bold resistance to the Coercive Acts; the delegates from New York and Pennsylvania hoped it would lead to a principled but moderate reconciliation with their mother country. Many of the representatives from other colonies—particularly from those colonies that did not have major seaports and were less affected by Great Britain’s new taxation policies—had been less engaged in the conflict of the previous decade and therefore came to Philadelphia less certain about the direction in which the Congress should move. They may have been most interested in observing the supposedly “radical” New Englanders first hand as a way of taking their measure about what the next steps should be. Although a few—Sam Adams and perhaps John Adams and Patrick Henry—may have entertained the thought that nothing short of independence could lead to a successful resolution of the Anglo-American conflict, no one attending the First Continental Congress came to Philadelphia with the goal of independence.
The escalating conflict between Great Britain and the colonies over the course of the months between September 5, 1774, and July 4, 1776, would move nearly all of the delegates to the Congress toward a more militant position. But over those months, there were two individuals whose differing opinions about how to respond to the growing crisis would be particularly important in framing the debate within the Congress.
John Adams, who had a long history of combat with royal officials within the politics of Massachusetts Bay, would consistently advocate responses that were destined to put Americans in an evermore combative posture vis-à-vis the mother country. John Dickinson, who stood at the pinnacle of a Pennsylvania society that had enjoyed generally cordial relations with the Crown, was no less committed to defending American liberties from encroachments at the hands of a corrupt Parliament and British Ministry. But more moderate in temperament and more deeply respectful of what he saw as the “true principles” of the beloved, but unwritten, English constitution, Dickinson devoted his considerable intelligence and powers of logic to finding a path toward reconciliation.
As the events of the next twenty-two months unfolded, Americans would choose Adams’s path, not Dickinson’s. It would be Adams who would be able to boast of being the “Atlas of Independence,” leaving Dickinson to defend himself against charges of pusillanimity, and even cowardice. In hindsight, it’s tempting to cast aside as unrealistic the attempts of men like Dickinson to find a path toward reconciliation that involved neither independence nor submission. But to do so is to ignore the contingent nature of America’s revolution against British rule. In order to reach a fa
ir assessment of those men most immediately involved in the decision for independence, we need to make the effort to cast ourselves back nearly 250 years in time and to attempt to inhabit the minds and hearts of the men entrusted with making that decision. One useful way to begin that effort is to acquaint ourselves with the careers and personalities of two of the principal American combatants.1
The Irascible John Adams
John Adams, unlike his older cousin Sam, was just beginning to establish his reputation, and his journey to Philadelphia would dramatically change his life. The younger Adams seemed the polar opposite of his cousin. Whereas Sam Adams had drifted aimlessly after graduating from Harvard, John—thirteen years younger and, like Sam, a Harvard graduate—had immediately shown the self-conscious ambition and purposefulness that would characterize his adult life. Although by his own characterization he was a lackadaisical and easily distractible student before entering college, he soon thereafter developed a deep love of learning and an impressive intellectual self-discipline that would stay with him until the day he died. After graduating from Harvard in 1755 he spent a year teaching school in Worcester, Massachusetts, a decision that may have been the only false turn that he made in his career. He hated teaching the “little runtlings” of Worcester, and, no doubt, his pupils reciprocated the feeling. At the end of that year he embarked on the study of law, not so much because of an instinctive love of the law, but because that profession would assure him a steady income and a respectable social position.2
While at Harvard, Adams had chafed at the fact that his social standing—he was ranked only sixteen in his class of twenty-five—prevented him from getting the recognition he felt he deserved. He railed against the artificial social distinctions that had enabled the egocentric John Hancock, who had entered Harvard a year ahead of him and was ranked fifth in his class, to enjoy a far more active social life. And his obsessive hatred of Massachusetts’s Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson owed at least as much to Hutchinson’s obvious favoritism for people of “high family” in his social and political patronage than it did to his constitutional differences with the governor. Fueled by those resentments, Adams yearned to rise above “the common Herd of Mankind.” Beginning right after his graduation from Harvard, Adams began to keep a diary into which he poured his soul, asking himself what it would take to become a “great Man,” one who might achieve “immortality in the Memories of all the Worthy.” His diary entries reflect not only his considerable aspirations and ambitions but also vanity and insecurity. He was simultaneously plagued by self-doubts about whether his talents were equal to his ambitions and by a self-loathing in which he chastised himself for even aspiring to such lofty goals. His struggle to overcome what he called “my natural Pride and Self Conceit” would be never-ending, and, on the whole, unsuccessful, but those same personality traits would drive him to work tirelessly to meet those goals he set for himself.3
In those days, legal training involved an apprenticeship—nearly a form of indentured servitude—to a lawyer in one’s region. If Adams had been more well-connected, he might have spent his legal apprenticeship with a prominent Boston lawyer, but, much to his chagrin, he had to settle for what would be two lonely years studying under James Putnam, a Worcester lawyer only a few years older than Adams himself. Putnam devoted so little time to his charge that when Adams completed his studies in 1758, Putnam, perhaps through negligence rather than animus, failed to write a letter of recommendation for him. But Adams nevertheless pursued his studies with diligence, if not passion, and, upon completing his training he set about the task of starting his legal career in his hometown of Braintree, just outside of Boston, but within its judicial district. In spite of the lack of a letter from his mentor, he knocked on the doors of the offices of Boston’s leading lawyers, managing to get a hearing from three of the city’s most successful attorneys—Jeremy Gridley, Oxenbridge Thatcher and, momentously as things would turn out, James Otis, Jr. With their support, Adams was admitted to the bar and certified as eligible to serve within Boston’s judicial district.4
Adams’s diary entries from this period reveal a young lawyer struggling to cope with the curse of ambition combined with self-doubt. It didn’t help when he lost his first case because he had improperly prepared the writ that he presented to the court. Adams, who went through life feeling that the whole world constantly had its eyes on him, felt totally humiliated, believing that the entire Boston legal profession was laughing at his ineptitude. Immediately following this legal setback, he berated himself in his diary, moaning: “I have insensibly fallen into Habits of affecting Wit and Humour, of Shrugging my Shoulders, and moving and distorting the Muscles of my face. My motions are stiff and uneasy, ungraceful, and my attention is unsteady and irregular. These are Reflections on myself that I make. They are faults. Defects, Fopperies, and follies, and Disadvantages.” But equally clear was a will to overcome his personal defects, and the very next week he predicted: “I will attempt some uncommon, unexpected Enterprize in the Law. Let me lay the Plan and arouse Spirit enough to push boldly. I swear I will push myself into Business. I will watch my Opportunity, to speak in Court, and will strike with surprise—surprize Bench, Bar, Jury, Auditors, and all. Activity, Boldness, forwardness, will draw attention.” But John would struggle to get his legal career launched, so much so that when he found himself falling in love with Hannah Quincy, the daughter of Colonel Josiah Quincy, the wealthiest and most prominent man in Braintree, he put off all talk of marriage on the grounds that he needed to devote his full attention to his legal practice. The consequence of this single-mindedness was that young Hannah found another man to whom to devote her affections, a development that threw Adams into despair and provided him with yet another proof of his own inadequacies.5
But gradually his law practice began to take off. He won his first case in front of a jury in the fall of 1760. From that time forward, as his confidence in his abilities as a litigator grew, he spared no effort in seeking to cultivate Boston’s most influential lawyers. Those efforts would not only prove helpful to his rise within his profession but, perhaps even more significantly, would lead him into the world of politics. He particularly cultivated James Otis, Jr., one of the most successful lawyers in the Boston judicial district and perhaps the most influential politician serving in the Massachusetts General Court, the colony’s provincial legislature. Having been spurned by James Putnam, Adams made a conscious attempt to win Otis’s respect. He was particularly admiring of Otis’s oratorical skills, which though deeply grounded in careful research and enriched by learned citations to classical literature were, he later recalled, displayed in “a torrent of impetuous eloquence.” Although Adams may not have possessed the instinctive charisma that Otis displayed both in the courtroom and on the floor of the legislature, he was so inspired by his senior colleague’s prodigious oratorical skills that he worked self-consciously, and successfully, to improve his own abilities as a performer on the public stage. Those efforts enabled Adams to take another step forward in November of 1761, when his success in the courtrooms of the Boston judicial district earned him a qualification to practice before the Massachusetts Superior Court, giving him access to a new range of cases.6
As prospects in Adams’s professional life began to brighten, so too, after some five years of neglect, did the outlook on his personal life. John Adams fell in love. Abigail Smith, the daughter of the Congregational minister Reverend William Smith from the neighboring town of Weymouth, Massachusetts, was not only a woman of high intelligence but also, considering the generally dismal opportunities that women of that age had to obtain an education, unusually well-educated. Beginning at the age of eleven, she was tutored by Richard Cranch, a friend of Reverend Smith, receiving an impressive grounding in classical as well as contemporary literature.
It was not love at first sight. Adams had first met Abigail in 1759, when she was only fifteen. He was still in the depths of depression over his unsuccessful wooing of Hannah
Quincy, and it was not until the spring of 1763 that the two began their courtship. As was the case with Hannah, Adams took his time, but the two were finally married on October 24, 1764, a partnership that would endure until Abigail’s death in 1818 and that would enrich John Adams’s life through every trial and tribulation he encountered. Nor is John Adams the sole person who should be thankful for his longtime relationship with his wife Abigail. Historians writing about this period of American history also owe her a huge debt of gratitude, for with her literary skills and her wit, she encouraged a correspondence with her husband John that has produced a rich record both of their personal life and of their reactions to nearly all of the public events of the era in which they lived.7
After he graduated from Harvard, John Adams spent an unusual amount of time putting pen to paper—not only preparing legal briefs but recording nearly every one of his thoughts and actions in his diary. In the spring and summer of 1763, he began to put his penchant for writing to a different use, drawing on his knowledge of law and his growing interest in politics (it was nearly impossible for a lawyer practicing in the Boston area not to be interested in the politics of that city at that time) to put some of his ideas into print. He began in a light-hearted way: under the pseudonym of “Humphrey Ploughjogger,” he wrote a set of satirical essays in which he ridiculed the “grate men” in the colony who “dus nothing but quaril with anuther.” He followed these essays with more serious ones speculating on government and human nature. Beginning in August of 1765, he began publishing, in four installments, his “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law.” Although he would later claim that the essays played an important role in igniting opposition to the Stamp Act, whose details were just beginning to be known at that time, in fact, they were aimed at more general topics relating to human nature, religion and government—in particular on the dangers of the arbitrary power exercised by religion and government. Even though he did not even mention the Stamp Act until the fourth installment of the essays, published in the Boston Gazette on October 21, 1765, he did emphasize that “British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments” but rather “inherent and essential, agreed upon as maxims and established as preliminaries, even before Parliament existed.” This emphasis on fundamental liberties, while not invoking the English philosopher John Locke’s notion of “natural rights,” would surface again and again in Adams’s writing and would, eventually, provide at least part of the basis for America’s justification of independence from Great Britain.8
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