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Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

Page 11

by Richard R. Beeman


  As we have seen, in the aftermath of the passage of the Coercive Acts, Dickinson occupied a middle ground between radicals like Charles Thomson, Thomas Mifflin, Joseph Reed and many of the artisans and mechanics of Philadelphia, on the one hand, and the group of conservative Philadelphia merchants and Quakers who continued to dominate the politics of the Assembly, on the other. He became chair of the Philadelphia Committee of Correspondence, drawing up three sets of resolutions laying out the grounds for America’s resistance to British policy and issuing a set of instructions to the soon-to-be elected members of Pennsylvania’s delegation to the Continental Congress. The instructions were classic Dickinson, urging the delegates on the one hand to be steadfast in providing relief for “our suffering Brethren [in Boston and] obtaining redress of grievances” while, on the other, insisting that a primary purpose of the gathering was to “restore harmony between Great Britain and her colonies on a constitutional foundation.”20

  When it came time for the Pennsylvania Assembly to choose delegates to the Continental Congress, Galloway, as Speaker of the Assembly, pushed through a resolution restricting the delegation to members of the Assembly. Although he would easily have been elected, Dickinson had chosen not to serve in the Assembly that year, so he along with Charles Thomson, the other Philadelphia politician whom Galloway disliked and feared, were deemed ineligible to serve. But even though he was not formally a member of the Congress, Dickinson was, with the sole exception of Benjamin Franklin, who was still in England, the most prestigious politician in Philadelphia, and his conspicuous presence in the city’s fashionable homes and taverns during the opening weeks of the Congress’s deliberations was noted by everyone.21

  No one was more cognizant of Dickinson’s prestige, reputation and presence than John Adams. The two men could hardly have been more different. Adams—short, pudgy and pugnacious—nearly always wore his emotions on his sleeve. Dickinson, as described by Adams, was “tall, but slender as a Reed.” But more important were the emotional differences between the two men. Though both had powerful, incisive intellects, Dickinson’s was more controlled; whether in his oratory or his writing, Dickinson strove for both a political and emotional moderation of which Adams was, quite simply, psychologically incapable. But, at that first meeting at least, Adams was nonetheless impressed not only with Dickinson’s reputation—he was, after all, the “Farmer in Pennsylvania”—but also by the “Springs of life” within Dickinson that, Adams opined, belied his apparent frailty. Those “Springs of life”—a strong sense of intellectual and moral rectitude that would cause Dickinson to defend with persistence and a carefully modulated passion his own political beliefs no matter how much others might disagree with him—would over the course of the next twenty-two months cause Adams more anguish and frustration than the traits of anyone else in the Congress. During those months, John Adams would discover that one of his most formidable adversaries was not George III or any of the king’s ministers, but the mild-mannered “Farmer in Pennsylvania.”22

  FIVE

  THE CONGRESS ORGANIZES

  PHILADELPHIANS AWOKE on the morning of September 5, 1774, to find the city enveloped in a mist. Light rain would fall most of the day. Those delegates who had wisely decided to stay at the City Tavern were no doubt especially pleased that they had only to walk up to the second floor where they were to meet in the tavern’s Long Room, the temporary meeting place of the First Continental Congress until the delegates could agree on a permanent location. Some forty-three of the Congress’s fifty-six delegates were in attendance that day (only North Carolina and Georgia went unrepresented), and the room, which had been jammed by over 200 Philadelphians on the day on which the Philadelphia Committee of Correspondence agreed to call for a Continental Congress, easily accommodated the group.1

  Their first order of business that day would be to choose a permanent meeting place for the new congress, but that item also produced the first bit of tension. The Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Joseph Galloway, had made clear he wanted the Congress to meet in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House, the building on Chestnut Street between Fifth and Sixth Streets that would, several decades after Americans had declared their independence, come to be known as Independence Hall. On the surface, his offer of that commodious public space to the new Congress seemed generous. Completed in 1753, it was, after all, Philadelphia’s most important public space, the longtime meeting place of the Pennsylvania Assembly. But to the more radical delegates, in particular most of the New Englanders and a few of the South Carolinians and Virginians, the State House was too closely associated with the Pennsylvania Assembly’s more conservative political leaders, who had dragged their feet on questions relating to a united opposition to British policies. And it didn’t help that the proposal came from Galloway, who was seen as the leader of Pennsylvania’s most reluctant patriots.

  Indeed, within a day of his arrival in Philadelphia, on August 30, John Adams had already begun to scout out alternative meeting places, including the newly completed guild hall for the Carpenters’ Company of the City, a group of Philadelphia’s master builders, located near Fourth and Chestnut Streets. After conversations with South Carolina’s Thomas Lynch and Christopher Gadsden and two of the more radical Pennsylvanians—Thomas Mifflin and Thomas McKean—Adams was likely instrumental in forming a coalition of southerners and New Englanders determined to hold the meetings in Carpenters’ Hall.2

  The delegates agreed to go on a brief inspection tour of both Carpenters’ Hall and the Assembly Room of the State House. They walked the two and a half blocks from the City Tavern to Carpenters’ Hall. A lovely, two-story brick building in the Georgian style recently constructed by Philadelphia’s carpenters as a showpiece of their craftsmanship, the hall would have struck all of them as both comfortable and spacious. Thomas Lynch, pushing the radicals’ agenda, proposed that the delegates agree then and there, “without further Enquiry” that the guild hall would provide an ideal venue for their meetings. James Duane—one of the conservative delegates from New York who had no doubt already bonded with Galloway—objected, arguing that the Assembly Room of the State House was equally convenient and commodious, and as a public rather than a private hall, it was more appropriate to a meeting of the sort on which they were embarking. He pointedly observed that Galloway, as Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, had been gracious enough to offer the State House for the delegates’ use; the very least they could do, he argued, was to inspect the site, as a “piece of respect” due the distinguished speaker. But for the first, and not the last, time, the delegates chose not to pay that respect to Mr. Galloway. By a “great Majority,” they decided they would conduct their business in Carpenters’ Hall for the remainder of their time in Philadelphia. In fact, from a practical standpoint, it would have made little difference whether the delegates met in Carpenters’ Hall or the State House, and the decision not even to walk the two blocks from Carpenters’ Hall to the State House must have seemed a great affront to Galloway and his supporters. The decision may have had some symbolic importance to the more radical delegates, but it did little to promote the eventual consensus on other matters that would prove so important to the Congress’s success.3

  The delegates would meet daily, except on Sundays, in the East Room of Carpenters’ Hall during the fifty-one days in which the Congress was in session. Meeting on the first floor of the building, they would share the space with one of Benjamin Franklin’s many contributions to his adopted city, the new Library Company, America’s first lending library, which occupied the second floor of the building.

  Once settled in the East Room, the delegates moved immediately, and unanimously, to elect as president of their Congress Peyton Randolph, Speaker of Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Randolph, a tall, well-fed Virginian, spent most of his time living in his handsome townhouse in Virginia’s colonial capital of Williamsburg. His wardrobe consisted of the latest in English fashions, and he could have been easily m
istaken for an English aristocrat rather than a provincial politician. Like the decision on where to meet, the decision to select Randolph seems to have been informally agreed to by a majority of the delegates before they had formally convened, but unlike the decision on where to meet, this one appears to have been arrived at amicably. Randolph’s reputation as a man of uncommon distinction and political acumen was already well-known outside of his home colony. His ancestors had begun to set down their roots in Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century, and from that time forward they had been involved in nearly every aspect of the economic, social and political life of the colony. In 1745 Peyton had consolidated the Randolph family’s power and authority in the colony by marrying Elizabeth Harrison, herself the eldest child of a union with two powerful Virginia dynasties, the Harrisons and Carters. And in 1748, at the age of twenty-six, he added two important public offices to his portfolio—he was elected a delegate to the House of Burgesses by the voters of Williamsburg and, simultaneously, was appointed by Lieutenant Governor William Gooch as attorney general of the colony. The practice of holding legislative office in the provincial government while at the same time serving in an appointive office in the royal government was one that typified the generally affable—one might even say cozy—relationship between the royal and provincial leadership classes of Virginia, and Randolph would continue to move easily between those two worlds almost until the moment that independence was declared.4

  The amiable relationship between royal and provincial political leaders in Virginia began to fray in 1765, when John Robinson, then Speaker of the House but also serving at royal pleasure as the colony’s treasurer, was involved in a scandal concerning the lending of government money to some of his closest associates. In 1766, after Robinson’s unexpected death, Randolph became Speaker and immediately put an end to the practice of serving in the legislature while at the same time holding high office in the royal government.5

  As events unfolded, it became clear that Randolph had assumed his colony’s most powerful office at precisely the moment when Virginia’s cordial relationship with royal officials in London was beginning to deteriorate. During the years between 1766 and 1774, his ability to broker compromises between firebrands like Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee and conservative men like Edmund Pendleton and Benjamin Harrison earned him the respect of all. As the leader of the provincial legislature whose petitions and resolutions to Parliament often served as a model for other colonies to follow, Randolph was no doubt seen by many outside of his colony as ideally qualified to be a broker of compromise and consensus in the First Continental Congress. That body would be confronted not only with different attitudes toward the proper means of resisting British policies but also with vast social, economic and cultural differences among delegates from twelve colonies (North Carolina’s delegates arrived on September 14, but Georgia’s remained absent) spread out over nearly 330,000 square miles of territory.

  But it was not Randolph’s distinguished lineage and talent for compromise alone that produced his unanimous election as the Congress’s president. The New Englanders—particularly John and Sam Adams—were all too aware of their reputations as wild-eyed radicals who had helped precipitate the present crisis, and they knew that selecting a Virginian—particularly one with the aristocratic bearing and dignified demeanor of Peyton Randolph—to preside over the Congress, would serve to set at least some delegates’ minds at ease.

  Toward a New Conception of a Congress

  The delegates’ decisions, made with apparent casualness, to call their gathering a Congress and the moderator of their proceedings a President were freighted with meaning. In Britain, the supreme legislative body was of course the Parliament; in America, most of the provincial legislative bodies were called assemblies. The eighteenth-century meaning of a “congress” signified a meeting of representatives from separate, autonomous political entities, gathered together for a limited purpose of formulating a common position on specific issues. As such, each of the delegations to the Congress felt bound to represent a specific entity—in this case each of the American colonies and, in particular, the provincial assemblies that served as the legislative bodies for those colonies. An “assembly” or “legislature,” by contrast, had more far-reaching authority to legislate on a wide—indeed, open-ended—range of issues in the name of the people. Strictly speaking, the First Continental Congress possessed no formal authority to make any decision binding on the legislatures of the individual colonies. Any legitimacy that the Congress might have would be entirely dependent on public opinion, as expressed in the provincial assemblies and, increasingly, in the rapidly expanding and more popularly based Committees of Correspondence. One of the truly significant developments of the period between 1774 and 1776, and, even more important, of the period from 1776 until the Continental Congress was succeeded by the First Federal Congress in 1789, was the Congress’s gradual acquisition of legitimacy and, as a consequence of that increased legitimacy, its gradual extension of authority to include a wide variety of legislative and administrative functions.6

  The delegates’ sense of their mission and the legitimacy of their increasing exercise of political power would evolve over both sessions. This evolution is reflected in the changing way they referred to their own body. As the delegates gathered on that first day, they called it either the “general congress,” or, more formally, the “Congress.” The fact that people often thought of it as a “general congress” even before it began its business suggests that at least some conceived of its mission as extending beyond a single issue. Over time, many delegates would come to refer to it as a “continental congress,” using the phrase in a purely descriptive sense to mean the vast geographical area it represented. But by the summer of 1775, when the second session of the Congress was under way, many Americans both within and outside the Congress had begun to refer to it as the “Continental Congress,” in capital letters. Although that phrase was never adopted as the official name of the body—it always remained, officially, “The Congress”—the increasing frequency with which it was called the Continental Congress suggests that it was in the process of becoming an institution whose scope of responsibilities and authority was steadily increasing.

  The delegates’ decision to assign the label of President to Peyton Randolph was consistent with their belief in the limited nature of the authority of both the Congress and its presiding officer. In 1774, the term “president” was understood to signify an individual who presided over the proceedings of either “a temporary or permanent body of persons”—in effect, a chairman or moderator lacking any of the executive authority that we associate with modern-day presidents and prime ministers. The powers of an American “president” would, of course, change dramatically with the ratification of the United States Constitution of 1788, and the nature of the relationship between the American president and Congress would change as well.7

  The Inconstant Record Keeper

  If Randolph’s election as president of the Congress proceeded without contention, the next item of business on that first day—choosing a secretary responsible for recording the minutes of the meeting—was another matter. And once again, Joseph Galloway would find himself on the losing side. Galloway had used his influence in the Assembly to prevent his fellow assemblyman, Charles Thomson, whom he considered an incendiary radical, from being elected a delegate to the Congress. But many other delegates, who admired Thomson as one of the leaders of the radical wing of Philadelphia’s resistance movement, decided that they would include him in the proceedings by nominating him as the Congress’s non-voting secretary. Thinking that he might be able to thwart Thomson’s election by putting forward the name of a relatively moderate New Englander, Silas Deane of Connecticut, Galloway sounded out other delegates about that alternative. But he didn’t like what he heard; it was pretty clear that most of the delegates preferred the appointment of Thomson. And so, after informal conversations among the delegates in the tave
rns and boardinghouses of Philadelphia, the venues where much of the business of the Congress would be conducted from that time forward, Thomson was unanimously elected secretary. Deane, who did not seem troubled by being passed over, wrote to his wife that Thomson’s election was “highly agreeable to the mechanics and citizens in general,” even if it was “mortifying to the last degree to Mr. Galloway.”8

  Charles Thomson had overcome a daunting history of hardship in order to reach the position of secretary of the Continental Congress. He had arrived in America from Ulster, Ireland, in 1739, in a desperate state. His father, John, mourning the recent death of his wife during childbirth and beset by financial problems, set sail for America with his sons, including the nine-year-old Charles, in search of a better life. Just before the ship carrying them to New Castle, Delaware, landed, however, John Thomson died from a shipboard fever. The ship’s captain, not wishing to deal with the bother of burying his passenger once they arrived, cast his body into the sea, making sure beforehand to take all of John’s money and his few possessions. When they arrived in Newcastle, Charles was separated from his brothers and sent to live with a local blacksmith, who immediately laid plans to make Charles his indentured servant. The boy got wind of the plans and escaped, heading up the post road toward Philadelphia. At that point, something good finally happened to Charles Thomson. Along the way to Philadelphia, he was befriended by a woman who took him under her care and arranged for him to attend a private academy run by Francis Alison, a Presbyterian minister in New London, Pennsylvania, twenty-five miles south of Philadelphia. Thomson would spend the next seven years living and studying with Alison, a man whom Benjamin Franklin praised as possessing “great ingenuity and learning.” By 1750, Thomson had been appointed a tutor in classical languages by Franklin, to whom Alison had introduced him, at the Academy in Philadelphia, later called the College of Philadelphia, and still later the University of Pennsylvania. At this point in his life, Thomson could feel grateful that he had escaped from a life as an impoverished orphan and, indeed, had acquired a classical education that might provide him with a foundation for a climb to success. He was clearly a young man with ambition, but he almost certainly did not know what path he might take in order to find the ladder that would enable him to make that climb.9

 

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