Thomas Lynch of South Carolina, who had allied himself with the more militant delegates from Virginia and New England from the moment he arrived in Philadelphia, wrote to a friend of his positive impression of the New England delegates. In spite of their reputation as hotheads, they had proceeded “without rashness,” advocating “a steady, manly, cool and regular conduct” throughout the whole of the Congress’s meeting. Lynch concluded that “America, though sincerely attached to England and desirous of perpetual union, will, by force only, be brought to admit of domination.”11
John Dickinson, though a late addition, had contributed impressively to the Congress’s proceedings. Assessing the situation as the Congress adjourned, he concluded that “Great Britain must relax, or inevitably involve herself in a Civil War.” While fully supporting America’s resistance to British policies of the past several years, he remained convinced—or perhaps was laboring mightily to convince himself—that the source of the conflict with England was all the fault of a few misguided or designing men. He cited the king’s ministers and the two most obnoxious of the royal governors of Massachusetts, “the Butes, Mansfields, Norths, Bernards & Hutchinsons &c whose Falsehoods and Misrepresentations have enflamed the People.” Dickinson continued to hold out the hope that if only those individuals could be removed from power and replaced by more virtuous leaders who would abide by the true principles of the English constitution, then the crisis would pass. “I wish for peace ardently,” he wrote to Arthur Lee of Virginia, “but must say, delightful as it is, it will come more grateful by being unexpected.”12
If peace was his wish, then his more realistic expectation was that any further outbreaks of violence, or any attempt by the British to send military reinforcements to General Gage in Boston, would “put the whole Continent in arms from Nova Scotia to Georgia.” Dickinson, like most of the departing delegates, was torn between hope and fear. “May God in his infinite Mercy,” he wrote, “grant a happy Event to these afflicting agitations.”13
Joseph Galloway, not surprisingly, left the Congress in a decidedly foul mood. Writing to his brother-in-law Thomas Nickleson, he complained that he had done everything possible to moderate the “Violent Temper of the Warm & indiscreet People here,” but to no avail. Although Galloway had grudgingly signed the various addresses and petitions passed by the Congress, he insisted that he did not approve of them: “They are too warm & indiscreet and in my Opinion have not pursued the right Path to Accommodation.”14
Sam Adams, who had been so instrumental in bringing many of the events of the previous year to pass, left Philadelphia almost immediately after the Congress adjourned. During his time in Philadelphia, Adams had always had one eye turned toward Boston; his correspondence with friends and family was nearly wholly preoccupied with the fate of his hometown. But he had, through forceful lobbying rather than public speaking, been as influential a presence in the Congress as any man there. He had not gotten all that he wanted. He had chafed when the Congress admonished Boston to resort to arms only for “defensive” purposes. He feared that the British military might overpower his town and his colony before the Congress had even completed its deliberations. He lamented that the Congress had limited its list of grievances to only those British violations of American rights beginning in 1763, and he would probably have preferred an even bolder denial of British authority in America. But by keeping his cool and letting others do most of the talking, he had helped to forge a rough consensus among the delegates that would pay off in a big way in the months to come.
Sam Adam’s cousin John had, as we have seen, gone through many mood swings during his seven weeks in Philadelphia. The delegates who gathered in Carpenters’ Hall beginning on September 5 may not have been, as John claimed, as contentious in their dealings with one another as “Ambassadors from a dozen belligerent Powers of Europe,” but upon their arrival in Philadelphia, the potential sources of difference among them might have operated as powerfully to divide them as their common grievances over the provisions of the Coercive Acts to unite them. With only a few exceptions, however, they understood that the suppression of individual egos and provincial interests was important if they were to achieve the sorts of compromises that would make common cause possible. Even Adams himself, though he may have indulged himself in private rants to his diary or to Abigail, restrained himself in his public utterances.
Looking back on the events of that first Congress, in fact John Adams found much to be pleased with. In his autobiography, which he began writing more than a quarter of a century later, he gave himself primary credit for the drafting of the Declaration of Rights and Grievances and, summing up his work that fall, he noted that while he had entered Philadelphia as an unknown Massachusetts lawyer, by the time he left Philadelphia on October 28, he had established a “reputation much higher than ever I enjoyed before or since.” As was often the case, Adams elevated excessively both his contributions to the Congress and the reputation he had gained from his contributions. But there is no doubt that he would never again enter the town of Philadelphia merely as an obscure Massachusetts lawyer.15
As the delegates took their leave of Philadelphia, none of them could with any confidence predict what the future would hold. Most probably occupied the same intellectual and emotional ground as John Dickinson—outraged at British infringements of their rights and deeply suspicious of the “designing” and “misguided” royal officials and members of Parliament who were, in their overwrought state of mind, intent on “enslaving” the king’s loyal subjects in America. But at the same time, they remained just that—loyal subjects—and for that reason they had, in addition to signing on to strong measures aimed at resisting British policies and practices, signed on as well to humble supplications to King George III.
A few, like Galloway, still opposed militant resistance. With 20/20 hindsight we can see that those like Galloway who wished to avoid independence at any cost were justified in their opposition to the course the Congress had adopted, for it was a course that would make it more difficult, not easier, to achieve any sort of accommodation. There were a few, but only a few—Sam Adams, Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee—who might have wished for even bolder action. In Sam Adams’s case, that desire was borne less out of a commitment to independence per se than it was out of the fear that British military power, directed at Boston, was not likely to be restrained by mere words, or even by economic boycotts. Henry’s and Lee’s positions were probably shaped more by temperament than by any sense of immediate danger to their colony, for in spite of Lord Dunmore’s increasing hostility toward Henry in particular, the threats to Virginia’s economy and polity were nothing like that confronted by the Bostonians.
The Evolution of a “Congress”
However much individual delegates to the First Continental Congress may have differed in their diagnoses of and prescriptions for Boston’s and America’s plight, the Congress, as a collective body, had made remarkable strides during the seven weeks that it had been in session. The delegates had come together as a group of strangers, vaguely in agreement on the need to respond in some way to the Coercive Acts, but also with a clear sense that they were coming to Philadelphia at least as much to defend the provincial interests of their individual colonies as they were to act in the name of a continental entity called “America.” But, gradually, most of the delegates began to think in continental, rather than provincial terms. The seven weeks that they had spent together inside Carpenters’ Hall hammering out the language of their various resolves, addresses and petitions helped create some of that cohesion. But equally important, the convivial experience of dining together in the city’s taverns, of being royally entertained almost nightly in the homes of Philadelphia’s most prominent and affluent citizens and even the discomfort of being crammed together in the tiny bedrooms of the city’s boardinghouses, acted in powerful ways to promote mutual respect and, in most cases, affection and friendship.
The First Continental Congress
operated on two levels—as America’s first response to an immediate economic and political crisis, and gradually, as the duly constituted government of the “united colonies” of America. Equally important, first in endorsing the Suffolk Resolves and subsequently in the specific prescriptions for resistance embodied in the Association, the First Continental Congress began to act like a government. The Association not only prescribed a specific course of action, dictating even the specifics of which items would or would not be included in the embargo on trade with Great Britain, but it also vested authority in specific institutions—most notably, the local committees—in the enforcement of American intentions. By empowering the local agencies to carry out its agenda, the Congress was able to increase its authority and its credibility as a body dedicated to serving the common good of the people of the colonies as a whole. As we will see in subsequent chapters, there would be occasions on which local committees would show excessive zeal in carrying out their enforcement obligations, but on the whole, congressional sanction tended to moderate, not agitate, the actions of local committees. The local committee of Hanover, New Jersey, for example, vowed to end “all unlawful, tumultuous and disorderly meetings of the people,” and in York County, Maine, the committee labeled “Riots, Disorders, or Tumults” as “subversive of all civil government [and] destructive to the present plan proposed and recommended by the Continental Congress for our deliverance.”16
On October 22 the delegates agreed that another session of the Congress would be convened on May 10, 1775, “unless the Redress of grievances, which we have desired be obtained before that time.” John Adams, as he was leaving Philadelphia on October 28, recorded in his diary that “it is not very likely that I shall ever see this Part of the World again.” It is not clear whether Adams genuinely believed this or whether it was simply an expression of wishful thinking, but of course, he would be mistaken. That redress of grievances would not be forthcoming. Indeed, by the time the Second Continental Congress convened, America would find itself at war with England. John Adams, along with many of those delegates who had spent that fall in Philadelphia, would find that their residence in that city would be of far longer duration than they had ever imagined.17
ELEVEN
ESCALATION
AS THE MASSACHUSETTS delegation to the Second Continental Congress prepared to set out for Philadelphia in late April of 1775, they knew already that their trip would be different from that of the previous year. There would be no leisurely pace, no relaxed and convivial evenings with local politicians along the way. Outright warfare had erupted in the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord on April 19. One of the sparks that ignited the military conflict in those towns was a widespread rumor that the British army had mobilized to arrest Sam Adams and another, new addition to the Massachusetts delegation, the wealthy Boston merchant and firebrand John Hancock.
Adams and Hancock, who had been meeting in the Lexington home of one of Hancock’s relatives, had intended to return to Boston in order to pack and prepare for their trip to Philadelphia. But with British soldiers actively seeking their arrest, they were now on the lam. They holed up in Woburn, a town a few miles from Lexington and Concord, for a few days, and then on April 24 made their way to Worcester, where they managed to stay out of sight until they were joined five days later by the other three Massachusetts delegates—John Adams, Thomas Cushing and Robert Treat Paine.
How had the climate of opinion, and the pace of events, changed so quickly in less than six months? The answer to that question lies in the behaviors of a wide swath of people—from King George III to his subjects in England, from provincial American leaders in the colonies’ legislatures to the people of the colonies at large. Events on both sides of the Atlantic after the adjournment of the First Continental Congress served only to widen the breach between, on the one hand, the king and his British subjects and, on the other, Americans of all social classes. With the benefit of hindsight, we find it hard to imagine how outright hostilities between British army regulars and American militiamen could have been avoided. But no one at the time possessed that acuity of vision, and the events of late October 1774 to early May 1775 unfolded in often chaotic and unpredictable ways.
The British React to America’s Plea for Peace and Harmony
The First Continental Congress had labored long and hard on its Address to the King. The closing lines of John Dickinson’s final draft, endorsed and signed by the delegates on October 26, wished “your majesty . . . every felicity through a long and glorious reign over loyal and happy subjects,” emphasizing that the delegates’ most “sincere and fervent prayer” was that “your descendants may inherit your prosperity and dominions ‘till time shall be no more.’”1
John Adams argued at the time that Dickinson went too far in his expressions of love and affection for the British sovereign, but, as later events would make clear, King George III felt otherwise. Three of America’s colonial agents in London—Benjamin Franklin, Arthur Lee and William Bollan—presented Congress’s Address to the King to the British secretary of state, Lord Dartmouth, on December 21. Dartmouth, seeing “nothing in it improper,” agreed to send it along to the king, and later reported back to Franklin that the king had received the petition “graciously” and would present it to both Houses of Parliament when they next convened. In fact, Dartmouth was being wholly disingenuous. He had heard no such thing from the king and had no expectation that the king would receive the Congress’s petition favorably. Indeed, on January 24, 1775, he had sent a message to the royal governors of the American colonies ordering them to “use your utmost endeavours to prevent” the appointment of delegates to the Second Continental Congress and to “exhort all persons to desist from such unjustifiable proceedings, which cannot but be highly displeasing to the King.”2
George III eventually transmitted the Congress’s Address to the House of Commons on January 19, along with a large packet of 148 other documents relating to the growing crisis in America, but aside from that nominal gesture, the king, far from responding “graciously” to the petition, refused to acknowledge that he had read it or even seen it. And most members of Parliament either ignored the Address or regarded it as treasonous. When Franklin, Lee and Bollan petitioned Parliament on January 26 asking for permission to speak before the body in support of the Address to the King, one indication of Britain’s mood was that their request was overwhelmingly rejected, by a vote of 218 to 68.3
Although few then or now have been inclined to attribute to King George impressive powers of intellect, he was neither stupid nor illiterate. Not only was he able to read beyond the words in the Continental Congress’s petition praising him and to understand the seriousness of the petition’s denial of parliamentary authority, but his eyes were focused even more sharply on another document that represented an even greater, and more concrete, threat to royal authority in America. When he read the language of the Association, he declared: “The New England governments are now in a state of rebellion; blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”4
Not surprisingly, members of the British Parliament who had been the direct target of the Congress’s wrath fully agreed with their king. Not only had their authority over the colonies been brazenly challenged, but, even more insulting, their motives and personal characters were being described with terms like “wicked,” “designing” and “dangerous.” During the previous disputes over the Stamp Tax and the Townshend Duties, Americans could count on at least a few influential friends in and out of Parliament. Men like William Pitt the Elder, who during the Seven Years’ War had been chief minister (an office that later would be called prime minister) and Edmund Burke, warned the king and his ministers about the dangers of abandoning a policy of salutary neglect. But although Pitt and Burke still sought to soften the harsher punishments laid down in the Coercive Acts, their efforts at persuading their fellow members of Parliament to adopt a more conciliatory policy toward the co
lonies were undercut by the language of the addresses and resolutions coming from the American Congress. When Pitt, the First Earl of Chatham, introduced a motion into the House of Lords asking the king to order General Gage to remove his troops from Boston in the hopes of easing tensions, his proposal was treated with contempt and overwhelmingly defeated. He also introduced legislation that would have restored some of the power to provincial juries taken away by the Coercive Acts, but accompanying that proposal was a statement asserting Parliament’s supremacy over the American colonies, a clear refutation of the central argument of all of the Congress’s addresses and petitions. Even that was too lenient for Chatham’s colleagues, and they rejected that attempt at conciliation as well.5
Frederick, Lord North, who would over the course of the next year become the object of intense hatred among nearly all Americans, had the dubious distinction of serving as the king’s chief minister during the years leading up to the American Revolution. Thus, it fell on his shoulders to respond to all of the Congress’s various addresses and petitions. His exceptionally poorly named “Peace Plan,” adopted by both houses of Parliament in mid-March of 1775, declared Massachusetts in a state of rebellion and imposed additional sanctions on American commerce, sparing only Georgia, which had not participated in the First Continental Congress, and New York and North Carolina, which North mistakenly believed to be on the Crown’s side. North later proposed that if a colony agreed to contribute its fair share for the “common defense and general government,” by which he meant that if the colonies were willing to voluntarily tax themselves in an amount equal to those taxes being imposed by the British government, the government would, upon the approval of the king and Parliament, not exercise its right to levy taxes directly on that colony. One of the few parliamentary critics of North’s proposal, David Hartley, a close friend of Benjamin Franklin, noted that North’s plan was “not free but compulsory”; its essence was to proclaim: “give us as much money as I wish, till I say enough, or I will take it from you.” Far from being the effort at “conciliation” that North claimed it to be, it further indicated how far the two parties on each side of the Atlantic were from one another.6
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