Just a few minutes before his departure from Philadelphia on June 23, Washington scribbled one more quick note to Martha, mindful of the fact that time and circumstances might not permit him to communicate with her very frequently in the coming months. He expressed his “full confidence of a happy meeting with you sometime in the Fall”—a hugely overoptimistic prediction—and ended by repeating his “unalterable affection” for her—perhaps not a passionate and uninhibited expression of love and devotion, but, for the ever self-controlled Washington, perhaps as close to that as he was likely to come.27
The delegates to the Continental Congress assembled outside the State House on the morning of June 22 to bid Washington farewell and Godspeed. As Washington began to mount one of five new horses, Thomas Mifflin, a prominent member of Congress but now Washington’s new aide-de-camp, rushed out to help the general place his foot in the stirrup, an act of devotion that elicited a round of applause from the assembled crowd. Accompanied by Generals Charles Lee and Philip Schuyler, as well as Philadelphia’s City Light Horse Troop, outfitted in dress uniforms and on horseback, they rode northward, out of town. The entire Massachusetts delegation, which had the most at stake, was not content merely to bid Washington farewell outside the State House. They, along with members of the Connecticut delegation and several other members of Congress, piled themselves into carriages and accompanied Washington for the first few miles of his journey.28
John Adams, who was among those who accompanied Washington for a few miles, was moved by the display of martial pomp and ceremony, but at the same time, could not hide his feelings of inferiority and self-pity. As he described the glorious scene to Abigail, he couldn’t resist adding: “Such is the pomp of War. I, poor Creature, worn out with scribbling for my Bread and my Liberty, low in Spirits and weak in Health, must leave others to wear the Lawrells which I have sown; others, to eat the Bread which I have earned.”29
John Adams always stood at the center of the world of John Adams, but Washington, as he was taking his leave, had another, more ominous, and potentially momentous, subject on his mind. The previous evening an express rider from Boston had arrived in the city to deliver the news that yet another battle—far bloodier and perhaps more consequential than those at Lexington and Concord—had been fought on the outskirts of Boston, at Bunker Hill on the Charlestown Peninsula. As Washington made his way toward Boston, he knew that his new responsibilities would be far more taxing than his relatively leisurely schedule as a delegate to the Continental Congress.
FIFTEEN
DESPERATE EFFORTS AT RECONCILIATION AMIDST AN ESCALATING WAR
Bunker Hill
In the days before George Washington was chosen commander of the Continental Army, his British counterpart, General Thomas Gage, set in motion a plan to win a decisive victory over the insurgents in Boston. Gage ordered his troops to begin to make preparations to occupy the hills around Dorchester, which commanded a strategic position above Boston. The Massachusetts Committee of Safety, learning of the plan on June 13, 1775, ordered the New England militia, still under the command of Artemas Ward, to pre-emptively take up a position on Bunker Hill on the Charlestown peninsula. Lying to the north of Boston, and with its southern tip separated by only about 1,000 feet of water from the port of Boston, the Charlestown peninsula actually had two strategically important hills. The now immortal Bunker Hill, with an elevation of about 110 feet, was at the northern end. Breed’s Hill, with a height of a little over 60 feet, was 600 yards closer to the southern tip of the peninsula, and therefore nearer to Boston. Both hills could potentially be a useful bastion for artillery, which could then be used to bombard the town of Boston.
Ward was not at all confident of the soundness of the plan, fearing it was too risky, but urged on by Brigadier Israel Putnam—a grizzled veteran of many battles in the French and Indian War—as well as by General Seth Pomeroy of Connecticut and the Boston physician and president of the Massachusetts provincial congress, Joseph Warren, he moved forward with a plan to place some 1,200 troops there.
On the evening of June 16, the militiamen, most of them without uniforms and carrying their own muskets, occupied Bunker Hill, stopping short of Breed’s Hill. Once they reached Bunker Hill, the commanding generals decided to leave a small detachment there, and then to push on to Breed’s Hill with the bulk of the force in order to take advantage of its better location. Once on Breed’s Hill, the militiamen began frantically to fortify their position, digging deep trenches and then erecting six-foot-high walls with the earth they had dug for the trenches. Over the course of the next twelve hours, sometimes in the face of British cannon fire from ships anchored in Boston Harbor, the New England troops fortified both Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill.
General Gage awoke on the morning of June 17 to find that he had been beaten to the punch by the patriot militia. He immediately gave orders for British ships to fire on the patriot fortifications from the sea as well as to mobilize 1,500 British soldiers to mount a direct attack on the encampment from all sides. Waiting for them were the 1,200 patriot militiamen, only scantily protected by the dirt walls they had so hurriedly erected. The Americans repelled two British attacks that day, inflicting significant casualties on their adversaries. By the time of the third assault, coming at the end of the day on June 17, the Americans had nearly run out of gunpowder and were forced to retreat. As they did, the British forces, reinforced by additional troops, rained massive fire down on them. Unable to reply, the patriot forces would suffer most of their casualties during that retreat at Bunker Hill. Although the British gained control of both of those hills that day, they paid an extraordinarily heavy price for their victory—226 soldiers killed and 828 wounded, with a particularly heavy toll among the British officer corps—a toll that would have a dramatic effect on British military leadership for the duration of the Revolutionary War. The patriot militiamen had not escaped easily—with 450 casualties, of whom 140 died in the battle. Among those killed in the retreat across Bunker Hill was Joseph Warren, who, though he had been given the formal title of general, had volunteered to fight as a private in the ranks of the militiamen.1
General Washington received the first detailed reports of the battles at Bunker and Breed’s Hill in New York City, while en route to Boston. He was both distressed and angry that the shortage of gunpowder had been a major factor in the patriot army’s retreat—a retreat during which they had suffered most of their casualties. He immediately sent word to Congress pressing them to expedite the shipment of munitions to Boston—a request that would become a persistent refrain throughout the remainder of a long war in which the shortage of munitions and of the funds to pay for them would be a constant source of frustration for the general. Back in Philadelphia, the delegates reacted with a combination of alarm and pride. On the one hand, the patriot army had been forced to yield valuable ground, and the shortage of ammunition was a harbinger of many more supply problems to come. But the casualty reports were a cause for hope: the early reports suggested that the Americans had suffered fewer than 200 casualties, with between forty and seventy killed, with the British army suffering some 500 casualties. As more details of the battle became known, the delegates came to understand better the full magnitude of the British losses, but also of their own.2
The Massachusetts delegates were especially devastated by news of the loss of their compatriot Joseph Warren. Only thirty-four at his death, a medical doctor and patriot, Warren, as we have seen, was an orator famed for his fiery and poetic annual remembrances of the Boston Massacre. In his last such oration, he might be said to have foreseen his own end with the lines “Approach we then the melancholy walk of death.” At the same time, the Massachusetts as well as the other delegates celebrated what Sam Adams referred to as the “tried Bravery” of the Massachusetts militiamen who had fought at Bunker Hill. Such bravery suggested that the inherent virtue of the patriot cause would in the end prove triumphant. Indeed, most Americans would draw a similar conclusio
n. This perhaps made it all that much more difficult in the months and years to come, when the toll of hardship, bloodshed and defeat inflicted on the patriot army would be greater than anyone had imagined.3
On June 23, the day that Washington left Philadelphia to begin his journey to Boston, the Congress appointed a committee—John Rutledge, William Livingston, John Jay, Thomas Johnson and a notable newcomer, Benjamin Franklin—to draw up a Declaration to be published and read by the general upon his arrival in Boston. The purpose of the document was twofold—to rally the continental troops as they were readying themselves for further battles, and to explain the military conflict to the American people at large. Although the mood in Congress and across America was growing more militant in the aftermath of Bunker Hill, the composition of the committee was anything but that. There were no New Englanders on the committee and all of the members, with the exception of Franklin, a recent arrival who up to that point had seldom spoken in the Assembly Room in the State House, were advocates of moderation. John Rutledge composed a first draft the following day, but Congress sent the declaration back to the committee for further consideration. Secretary Thomson, true to form, seems to have lost the Rutledge draft, so we can only speculate as to whether the members of Congress thought it too mild, too militant or simply poorly composed.4
Obviously some new approach was needed. On Monday, June 26, the Congress, after debating another version of the declaration and still finding it wanting, not only sent it back to the committee, but also added two other members: another newcomer, Thomas Jefferson, and the distinguished and experienced John Dickinson. According to members of the Virginia delegation, the addition of Jefferson to the committee owed to the fact that he had already established “a reputation for literature.” In fact, the committee would ask Jefferson to write the next draft of the declaration, a move that would help propel the newly arrived Virginian into a position of prominence in the Congress.5
The Two Newcomers: Franklin and Jefferson
Though Benjamin Franklin had just returned to Philadelphia, he was well known personally by many, and by reputation to everyone there. By that time in his life, in his seventieth year, Franklin had already achieved international acclaim as a scientist and widespread respect in America as a shrewd and effective lobbyist for the colonies’ interests in London. And virtually everyone in the Congress, upon their first encounter with him, would be bowled over by his charm and his sense of humor.
Franklin had spent more than a decade in London as a colonial agent representing Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia and, eventually, Massachusetts. He had loved his time in London, and, indeed, at that stage in his life may have considered himself as much a Londoner as a Pennsylvanian. He enjoyed the high life of London politics and took pride in his close relationship with some of the most important royal officials in the empire. But as we have seen, in the wake of the Boston Tea Party and the scandal involving the publication of the letters from Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, Franklin’s relationship with royal officials, and, indeed, his very identity as an Englishman, underwent a dramatic transformation. His confrontation with Lord Wedderburn in the cockpit in late January of 1774 would change the course of Franklin’s life, and, in some senses, the course of American history. Franklin would remain in London for more than a year after his confrontation with Wedderburn, and, in spite of his humiliation that day, he would continue in his efforts to persuade British officials to relax their coercive policies up until the final hours before his departure back home to America.6
Franklin was elected to a seat in the Continental Congress on May 6, 1775, one day after he got back to Philadelphia, and, simply by an accident of timing, he was able to be present when the Congress began its business on May 10. For the most part, he remained uncharacteristically silent during the first few months of the Congress’s deliberations. Silas Deane, writing to his wife, observed that “Docr. Franklin is with Us, but he is not a Speaker.” Deane went on to note that though Franklin had added his approval to all of the measures adopted by the Congress, he had hoped for more from the illustrious American scientist and diplomat: “Times like these,” Deane noted, “call up Genius,” and thus far Franklin, so well-known for his genius, had remained largely passive. John Adams observed the same passivity, telling Abigail that thus far “he has had but little share farther than to cooperate and assist.”7
Franklin’s outward demeanor notwithstanding, John Adams, at least in his early interactions with the most famous man in America, praised the good doctor for his support of even “our boldest Measures.” Indeed, Adams believed that, should the Americans be “driven to the disagreeable Necessity of assuming a total Independency,” Franklin would support the decision. Even at this early stage though, Adams could not resist complaining that most people in England were wrongfully attributing the American resistance to imperial policies to Franklin’s influence. Adams noted that “there cannot be a greater Mistake,” for, of course in his mind, that principled opposition owed primarily to brave, outspoken sorts like John Adams. Adams’s jealousy of Franklin’s fame would continue to grow during the months leading to independence. Adams expressed his wonder that Franklin, “from day to day sitting in silence, a great part of the time fast asleep in his chair,” was being appointed to many of the most important committees, while he himself was unaccountably passed over. It was hardly a fair assessment. Franklin may indeed have been relatively silent in the public arena of the Assembly Room, but his deep knowledge of the intricacies of British politics across the Atlantic, combined with his shrewd abilities as a convivial dinner and drinking companion—both in City Tavern and in his spacious townhouse near Fourth and Market Streets—would prove invaluable in forging the consensus among the delegates that would eventually result in independence.8
Sometime around the end of June, Benjamin Franklin wrote a lengthy “Vindication” of the colonists’ resistance to British policies. Drawing on his vast experience as an observer and participant in the politics of Anglo-American relations, he refuted the notion that the American colonies had been settled at the “expense of Britain,” and that, by their present behavior, were displaying their ingratitude toward Great Britain’s benevolence. Franklin produced a long catalogue of facts to prove, at least to his satisfaction, that from their infancy the colonies had done far more for the British Empire than the empire had done for the colonies. Anticipating some of the arguments that would shake the world in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Franklin rejected the notion that anything done by the British for the colonies in their infancy could possibly justify the systematic violation of American liberties now that the colonies had reached a state of maturity.
Since Franklin’s “Vindication” was never formally presented to the Congress nor published, the audience for whom it was intended remains unclear. It is likely, however, that it did circulate privately among many members of Congress. Franklin wrote it with Lord North and his ministers in mind. Having so recently returned from England and still smarting from the humiliation he had suffered in the cockpit and up until the day of his departure, he clearly felt some need to vindicate his own behavior during that trying moment in his diplomatic career.9
The arrival of thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia on June 20, coinciding as it did with Bunker Hill and General Washington’s impending departure, received little notice. As we have seen, although Jefferson had begun to earn a reputation for his literary and intellectual skills through the publication of his Summary View of the Rights of British America, he was not yet a major player on the continental scene. He had traveled to Philadelphia on a brief trip nine years earlier in order to be inoculated against smallpox, but his journey there in 1775 would mark his first meaningful stay outside of Virginia.
When the Virginia Convention had balloted for delegates to attend the Second Congress, Jefferson’s name had not been included on the list of seven Virginians selected. But on the final day of its session, the Convention sel
ected Jefferson as an alternate in case Peyton Randolph should be forced to return to his duties as president of the Convention. Although he may not have ranked even among the top ten politicians in Virginia at the time (there were more than a dozen members of the legislature whose service in that body was more extensive), he was beginning to acquire a reputation for intellectual acuity that transcended the provincial boundaries of Virginia.10
Jefferson’s relatively modest family background would not have predicted an influential political career. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a surveyor and planter of some means. But to the extent that Jefferson could rely on social clout to advance his standing in Virginia, it was through his mother, Jane Randolph, a somewhat marginal member of one of the most powerful families in Virginia (her father was a distant cousin of the man Jefferson was replacing in the Continental Congress, Peyton Randolph). Unlike many sons of the Virginia gentry, Jefferson did not travel to England, or even to Princeton, for his education, instead riding the 120 miles eastward from his home in Shadwell (a few miles east of what is today Charlottesville) to Williamsburg to enter the College of William and Mary at the age of sixteen.11
Jefferson’s intellectual and social skills had blossomed during his time at William and Mary. His principal mentor at the college, the professor of natural philosophy William Small, taught him mathematics, metaphysics and philosophy, introducing Jefferson for the first time to the work of the English political philosopher John Locke. After his graduation in 1762, Jefferson stayed in Williamsburg to take up the study of law with George Wythe, the most respected lawyer in Virginia, an experience that would profoundly affect the future course of Jefferson’s life. Wythe recognized genius when he saw it, and he would enthusiastically not only serve as Jefferson’s legal mentor but also nurture Jefferson’s education in philosophy and classical literature. He would also introduce Jefferson to people at the highest level of Virginia society. Although never accomplished as an orator or public performer, at an early age Jefferson displayed an ability to charm and impress company in more intimate settings. Beginning in 1764, Jefferson became part of a regular dinner party with his two mentors, Wythe and Small, and the royal governor of Virginia, Francis Faquier. Looking back on those evenings fifty years later, Jefferson recalled that he had heard “more good sense, more rational and philosophical conversations” during those dinners than at any other time in his life. The combination of talents and experiences in that group—a learned, but practical-minded lawyer; a deeply intellectual professor; and a worldly, but also highly intelligent royal governor—must have made a deep impression on young Jefferson, just graduated from college.12
Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor Page 30
