Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

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Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor Page 15

by Richard R. Beeman


  But as the delegates made their way to Philadelphia, at least a few of the county conventions had made clear their wish to shape the course of events beyond their own localities. On August 30, the Middlesex County Convention, meeting in Concord, drafted a lengthy set of resolutions directed at the Congress in Philadelphia. While avowing that they were “true and loyal subjects of our gracious sovereign, George the Third,” the Middlesex residents went on to lambaste the British Parliament for its attempt to render them “the most abject slaves.” The convention adopted eighteen resolutions, among them one expressing scorn for the Massachusetts Government Act as an “artful, deep-laid plan of oppression and despotism.” Vowing to disobey all features of the act that affected their fundamental liberties, the Convention boldly proclaimed that “no danger shall affright, no difficulties intimidate us; and, if in support of our rights, we are called to encounter even death, we are yet undaunted, sensible that he can never die too soon who lays down his life in support of the laws and liberties of his country.”13

  The Middlesex Resolutions reached the Continental Congress on September 14, in the midst of the deliberations of the Congress’s various committees. According to Sam Adams they were there “read by the several Members of this Body with high Applause.” But while Adams was pleased with the sentiments expressed by his Middlesex County neighbors, he was annoyed that the Boston Committee of Correspondence had not taken the lead. Boston was, after all, his home base; he knew that if he had been back home, Boston would have been out front on the issue, and he was disappointed that his political lieutenants in the town had not seized the initiative.14

  But he would not have to wait long. Two days later, Paul Revere galloped into Philadelphia after a six-day ride, delivering to the delegates in the Congress a set of resolutions from Suffolk County, of which Boston was the principal town. It would be the Suffolk Resolves, not those from Middlesex, that proved to be the catalyst for bold action in the Congress. Though Sam Adams was in Philadelphia when the Suffolk County Convention met on September 9 in Dedham, ten miles west of Boston, he had already set the wheels in motion for the convention before he left for Philadelphia. His hand was easily visible in the resolutions passed that day.15

  Adams’s principal ally in the effort to use the Suffolk Resolves as the means of radicalizing the Continental Congress was Dr. Joseph Warren, a respected Boston physician who, among other things, had the distinction of having inoculated Sam Adams’s cousin John against smallpox, the most deadly disease afflicting the residents of America’s cities at that time. More important, Warren (who would be killed on June 17, 1775, at Bunker Hill, at the young age of thirty-four), was gaining a reputation as the most dramatic (and, from the British point of view, demagogic) speaker at the gatherings occurring with increasing frequency in Boston. As the conflict between British soldiers and the townspeople of Boston had begun to escalate during the 1770s, Warren devoted at least as much attention to propagandizing against the British as he did to his medical practice. Although not as visibly active in organizing the Boston mob against the British soldiers as Sam Adams, Warren had proven invaluable in publicizing the excesses of the British soldiery. After the Boston Massacre of 1770, Warren delivered a series of commemorative speeches of extraordinary power and vituperation. On March 5, 1772, at the Old South Meeting House on the second anniversary of the melee, Warren declared:

  the fatal fifth of March, 1770 can never be forgotten. The horrors of that dreadful night are but too deeply impressed on our hearts. Language is too feeble to paint the emotions of our souls, when our streets were stained with the blood of our brethren, when our ears were wounded by the groans of the dying, and our eyes were tormented with the sight of the mangled bodies of the dead.

  When our alarmed imagination presented to our view our houses wrapped in flames, our children subjected to the barbarous caprice of the raging soldiery; our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion; our virtuous wives, endeared to us by every tender tie, falling sacrifice to worse than brutal violence, and, perhaps like the famed Lucretia, distracted with anguish and despair, ending their wretched lives by their own fair hands.

  Warren would continue with these orations every year, each more graphic and inflammatory than the one before, until his death. In his final oration, heard by a packed audience in the Old South Meeting House on March 5, 1775, he said:

  Approach we then the melancholy walk of death. Hither let me call the gay companion; here let me drop a farewell tear upon that body which so late he saw vigorous and warm with social mirth; hither let me lead the tender mother to weep over her beloved son: come widowed mourner, here satiate they grief; behold thy murdered husband gasping on the ground, and to complete the pompous show of wretchedness, bring in each hand thy infant children to bewail their father’s fate: take heed ye orphan babes, lest, whilst your streaming eyes are fixed upon the ghastly corpse, your feet slide on the stones bespattered with your father’s brains.

  A horrible, vicious massacre indeed! Of course, the Boston mob had done every bit as much to provoke what amounted to a street brawl that had gotten out of hand, and Warren conveniently overlooked the fact that all five of the Bostonians who were killed were bachelors—there were no mourning widows or weeping orphans! Because of his rhetorical gifts, Warren seemed to Sam Adams an ideal substitute in the drafting and presentation of the resolutions at the Suffolk County Convention.16

  On September 6, a large crowd of men not merely from Boston itself, but also from a wide radius of towns surrounding Boston, convened at the Woodward Tavern in Dedham for the formal opening of the Suffolk Convention. In the minds of both Sam Adams and Warren, the resolves that they hoped to emerge from the Convention had two audiences—the first was General Gage, to whom the resolves were officially, if also undiplomatically, directed, and the second was the delegates in Philadelphia. Warren opened the proceedings by reading a draft of the resolutions. After three days of discussion, the delegates, now meeting in Daniel Vose’s tavern in nearby Milton, adopted a revised version of those resolutions, which, largely drafted by Warren, were far more inflammatory in tone. Among the most important items in the resolves were: a vow to refuse to obey either the Massachusetts Government Act or the Boston Port Bill; a declaration that the edicts of any court operating under the terms of the Massachusetts Government Act should be ignored; a call to put the colony’s militia in a state of readiness, and, finally, a renewed proposal for a boycott of all British imports, together with an injunction that all citizens “abstain from the consumption of British merchandise and manufactures.”

  The Suffolk Resolves went further than those of Middlesex in their threat of armed resistance to British policies and actions, but the most striking difference was one of tone. The Suffolk preamble was unusually belligerent, asserting that the Coercive Acts reflected “the power, but not the justice, the vengeance, but not the wisdom of Great Britain.” It went on, in language that only Joseph Warren could have crafted, to describe the situation in Boston:

  the streets . . . are thronged with military executioners . . . our coasts are lined and harbours crowded with ships of war . . . the charter of [our] colony, that sacred barrier against the encroachments of tyranny, is mutilated and, in effect, annihilated, . . . a murderous law is framed to shelter villains from the hands of justice . . . and the constitution of Britain, and the privileges warranted to us in the charter of the province, is totally wrecked, annulled, and vacated.17

  Both Sam and John Adams must have been immensely relieved to see their trusted messenger Paul Revere gallop into town on September 16 with the Suffolk Resolves, and they eagerly presented them to the Congress the following day. John Adams would write in his diary that “this was one of the happiest days of my life,” and he was made even happier when he saw the overwhelmingly favorable reception that they received from the assembled delegates. Even Joseph Galloway supported them, and, indeed, Adams facetiously reported, “I saw tears gush in to
the eyes of the old grave pacific Quakers of Pennsylvania.” On September 18 the delegates unanimously endorsed a resolution approving the “firm and temperate conduct” of the citizens of Suffolk, affirming their deep sympathy over “the suffering of their countrymen in the Massachusetts-Bay, under the operation of the late unjust, cruel and oppressive acts of the British Parliament” and endorsing the “fortitude, with which opposition to these wicked ministerial measures has hitherto been conducted.”18

  Much of the success, both in formulating the Suffolk Resolves and then in gaining their unanimous approval from the Congress, owed to Sam Adams’s hard work, mostly behind the scenes in the taverns and boardinghouses of Philadelphia. But beneath the display of united support for Boston, there still lurked, particularly among some of the New York and Pennsylvania delegates, deep concern that Americans were moving too far, too fast and, in the process, dimming the prospects for reconciliation with their mother country. Galloway, though he voted for the expression of support for Boston, did so with gritted teeth, his suspicion of the riotous New Englanders unabated. Moreover, at that point, the Congress had only offered Boston its moral support; the delegates would spend the next ten days haggling over how they would back up their expressions of good will with meaningful measures designed to persuade the British to abandon their coercive policies.

  From Words to Action

  On September 8, ten days before the Congress unanimously endorsed the Suffolk Resolves, the Grand Committee had begun its discussion of the constitutional challenges facing America. New York’s James Duane presented an outline of the task confronting them. It seemed obvious, Duane argued, that they had to define the colonists’ rights, then draw up a list of violations of those rights by Parliament and the Ministry and finally agree on how best to persuade Parliament to provide a redress of American grievances. Although Charles Thomson’s sloppy record keeping once again makes it difficult to follow what happened next, it appears likely that Duane’s outline did shape the general structure of the ensuing debate.19

  Duane next traced the evolution of America’s conception of their rights, from the imposition of internal taxes in the form of the Stamp Act to the imposition of external taxes in the form of the Townshend Duties, to the present threats posed by the Coercive Acts, which, he argued, required that the Congress “place our rights on a broader & firmer Basis.” In defining American rights, Duane, known to be among those willing to go the farthest in seeking reconciliation, praised the mother country not only for providing the “Blessings of Protection” but also for the many commercial advantages she had provided, a result, he claimed, of the colonies’ “connection and Dependence.” Proceeding from his expression of both affection and dependence on his mother country, Duane nevertheless agreed with his more radical congressional counterparts that the principles of English common law and the rights enumerated in the various colonial charters guaranteed to the colonies certain fundamental rights—one of the most important of which being that “it is essential to Liberty that the Subject be bound by no Laws to which he does not assent by himself or his Representative.” Read literally, Duane’s observations might appear to be a denial of all parliamentary authority, a line of argument that, if carried to its logical conclusion, would have led to a declaration of the colonies’ complete independence from the British government. But Duane was no radical; he denied that the colonists were seeking to proclaim themselves exempt from all parliamentary authority, for, he insisted, the colonies owed Parliament some “advantages” in return for the protection provided by the “parent state.”20

  But how could the colonies reconcile what were essentially two different lines of logic—one stressing America’s independence of parliamentary authority, the other acknowledging America’s dependence? For Duane, the path toward reconciliation required that both sides recognize that the king ultimately possessed sovereign power over all of his subjects and that “Ties of Friendship & Common Interest” required that the colonists acknowledge that superior power. In its essence, Duane’s path toward reconciliation depended not on logic, but on hope and affection for the mother country—emotions that would, over the course of the next twenty-two months, be sorely tested.

  John Adams had a very different view. He argued that the colonies’ claims to their rights were based not only on Duane’s rather narrow formulation of the “British Constitution and our American Charters and Grants,” but on the “Law of Nature” as well. Richard Henry Lee agreed, arguing that “we should lay our rights on the broadest Bottom, the Ground of Nature.” Adams then went further, arguing that the colonists’ resort to a reliance on natural rights—which he admitted was a last resort—had been driven only by Parliament’s intransigent violations of the fundamental principles of the English constitution.

  To the more moderate delegates, reliance on the principles of natural law was fraught with danger. Joseph Galloway, James Duane, John Jay and John Rutledge all flatly opposed any reference to that last resort. Far more than their radical opponents, they cherished their connection to the British Empire and to the ideal of a “true British Constitution” by which that Empire was to be governed. And so, in Joseph Galloway’s words, they could never find American rights “in a State of Nature, but always in a State of political Society.” Galloway, Jay, Duane and Rutledge, still clinging not only to their loyalty to the king but also to their identity as Englishmen, had no desire to give up their status as English subjects. For them, the British constitution was no mere abstraction but a settled body of law and custom to which any disinterested party could turn as an indisputable source for settling all legal and constitutional disputes between the mother country and her colonies.21

  Many Americans, however—particularly those Bostonians in the firing line facing Great Britain’s punitive policies—were beginning to have at least an inkling that the much-vaunted English constitution, seemingly revered by all, was in truth a phantom. It was an unwritten constitution based on a jumble of parliamentary statutes, common-law precedent and simple custom. There was in fact no definitive English constitution to which opposing parties could turn to settle their differences. Fifteen months later, Tom Paine’s Common Sense would force Americans to confront that truth directly, but most colonists were not yet prepared to give up either their faith in the protections offered by that unwritten constitution or their loyalty to and affection for the king who was the symbol of the principles embodied in it. The argument between Galloway, Jay, Duane and Rutledge on the one hand, and Richard Henry Lee and John Adams on the other, foreshadowed a fundamental division in the Congress that would last right up until the moment that the delegates voted on Lee’s resolution for independence on July 2, 1776.

  In the midst of the discussions about the English constitution and natural rights, the Grand Committee had divided itself into two subcommittees, one on “rights” and the other on “infringements,” with the former being constituted on September 9 and the latter gathering on September 17, the day before the endorsement of the Suffolk Resolves. Thanks once again to the poor record keeping by Charles Thomson, we do not have a complete list of the members of either subcommittee, although we do know from their own writings that John Adams, Samuel Ward of Rhode Island and John Rutledge all served on the subcommittee on rights. According to the ever-egocentric Adams, it was by far the most important group of men in the Congress, so much so that it was an “Object of Jealousy” to all the other members of Congress who were not serving on it.22

  John Adams and other militant members serving on the subcommittee on rights were successful in inserting the “Law of Nature” as one of the sources of American rights in the subcommittee’s recommendation to the Congress, but the issue of the precise limits of Parliament’s authority over the colonies provoked a protracted set of disagreements. The alternatives, as Adams put it, were “whether We should deny the Authority of Parliament in all Cases: whether We should allow any Authority to it, in our Internal Affairs: or whether We should allow
it to regulate the Trade of the Empire, with or without any restrictions.” At stake in that discussion was the definition of America’s place—if it had any place at all—within the British Empire.23

  In September of 1774, there was no consensus among the delegates, or among people throughout the colonies, on the question of America’s place in the empire. As a consequence, the discussion in the rights subcommittee on the alternatives was, in Adams’s words, “drawn and spun out to an immeasurable length.” Because of all the back and forth, when the subcommittee presented its report to the reconvened Congress on September 22, some of the most important issues about American rights remained unresolved for the next several weeks.24

 

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