For the first time since Joseph Galloway’s rebuff in the First Continental Congress, a mood of personal animus crept into what had been a mostly civilized body. The months to come would see a more general decline in cordiality, which, along with the heat of the Philadelphia summer, would make the crucial deliberations of the late summer and early fall even more trying.
Benjamin Franklin’s Articles of Confederation
In spite of their occasional disagreements over the tone and substance of their responses to the events of the previous months, the delegates had accomplished a great deal: creating an army; appointing a commanding general and an extensive staff of subordinate officers; devising a temporary, and, as things would turn out, highly dubious, plan for financing the military effort against Great Britain; and churning out an array of additional petitions, addresses and declarations aimed simultaneously at justifying American resistance and bolstering the morale of American troops, while at the same time continuing to issue calls for reconciliation and resisting the desire of a radical few to move toward independence.
As the month of July was drawing to a close, many of the delegates were showing signs of exhaustion. The Congress had already been in session longer than most of them had expected. And their work hours—in session for six hours a day, six days a week, not to mention their after-hours discussions and negotiations at convivial meeting places like City Tavern—were, at least by the standards of these eighteenth-century gentlemen, grueling. But the delegates still had a few pieces of business with which to deal before they could adjourn.
Since 1754, Benjamin Franklin had sought to promote greater cooperation among the colonies. In those early days, with most colonies feeling a stronger connection to the imperial government in London than to one another, Franklin’s “Albany Plan of Union”—so named because he presented it at a meeting of representatives from the colonies in Albany, New York, to discuss ways of cooperating during the impending French and Indian War—went nowhere. But he never let go of the idea. On July 21, he circulated a plan for an Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union to the delegates. It called for the creation of an entity called “The United Colonies of North America.” Its aim and substance were not altogether different from the document of the same name that was eventually adopted by the independent American states in 1783. Franklin’s plan was intended as a “league of friendship” among the colonies, with the goal of promoting their general defense, safety and “mutual and general welfare.” The plan would, in essence, have converted the extra-legal Continental Congress into a duly constituted body, and, going even further than the eventual Articles of Confederation, it called for each colony to contribute revenues to a “common Treasury” in proportion to their populations.27
Franklin’s proposal is a testament to his wisdom and foresight. As perhaps the most cosmopolitan member of the Congress, he realized that some more formal union among the colonies—or, perhaps, eventually, the independent states—was essential to the common good. But he also had the foresight to realize that he was probably ahead of the game, and that Congress was not yet prepared to embrace his plan. Rather than formally proposing it to Congress, he simply asked Charles Thomson to circulate it among the delegates, believing it would at least get the delegates started in “turn[ing] the subject in their minds.”28
The final article of Franklin’s plan stipulated that the “Union thereby establish’d is to continue firm till the Terms of Reconciliation proposed in the Petition of the last Congress to the King are agreed to.” Franklin probably hoped that this article would deflect any fears among the delegates that the act of entering into a confederation of “United Colonies” would imply that independence from Great Britain was somehow inevitable. Whether or not he actually believed that that was the case, he did not reveal. Whatever he believed, Franklin was correct in his prediction that many of the delegates—indeed, probably a majority of them—were simply not ready to move forward in creating a formal union among their colonies.
Thomas Jefferson agreed with the plan’s general thrust, but he noted that “others were revolted by it.” As a consequence, both Franklin and Jefferson, realizing that the plan would not likely be adopted by the Congress, and not wishing to “startle many members so much that they would suspect we had lost sight of reconciliation with Great Britain,” were content merely to circulate it without asking the delegates to vote on it.29
A Final “NO!” to Lord North
Way back in February of 1775, Parliament had passed a set of resolutions endorsing Lord North’s plan of “reconciliation.” It was a plan so obviously unacceptable to the colonies that the Continental Congress had never gotten around to formally rejecting it. In late May, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures, still hoping to find some common ground with the British ministry, had asked the Congress to consider North’s resolutions. But the intervening events—especially the Battle of Bunker Hill and the firmly worded Declaration on Taking Arms—made the whole subject seem moot.
But the matter did not die. In late April of 1775, Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, in a move that would prove disastrously misguided, insisted that the colony’s provincial legislature take North’s proposals under consideration. On June 12, the House of Burgesses responded, in the form of a committee report drafted by Thomas Jefferson, who had not yet left for Philadelphia. Jefferson, backed unanimously by his Virginia colleagues, could not have been more emphatic: North’s proposals, when “viewed in every point of light,” brought nothing but “pain and disappointment.” The offer to forbear taxing the colonies if the colonies agreed, to Parliament’s satisfaction, to tax themselves, “only change[d] the form of oppression without lightening its burden.” Although Jefferson had already left for Philadelphia by the time his report was adopted by the Virginia Convention, it eventually found its way to the Continental Congress, prompting the Congress on July 22 to appoint a committee consisting of Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams and Richard Henry Lee to consider Lord North’s proposals. Jefferson would again be tasked with drafting a response.30
The committee’s report, presented to the Congress on July 31, reiterated the colonies’ longstanding commitment to the notion that they and they alone had the “sole and exclusive privilege of giving and granting their own money,” itself a flat-out rejection of the premise of Lord North’s proposal. Not content merely to reject the logic of North’s proposal, the report branded it as “unreasonable and insidious,” and then proceeded to a recitation of Great Britain’s evil deeds since North’s offer was first tendered. The report concluded with a determined assertion of intent: “nothing but our own exertions may defeat the ministerial sentence of death or abject submission.”31
Whatever their differences on the tone and substance of the Olive Branch Petition, there was no disagreement among the delegates on what virtually everyone considered to be Lord North’s insulting response to the American statement of grievances. Jefferson’s draft of the response to Lord North and Parliament, although toned down ever so slightly, was unanimously endorsed by the Congress on the day it was introduced, July 31. While somewhat anticlimactic, the passage did signify that the Congress, in spite of its conciliatory gesture with the sending of the Olive Branch Petition, was emphatic in its rejection of Lord North’s insulting “peace proposal.”
By this point, the Congress was truly exhausted. Many of the New York and North Carolina delegates had begun to leave by mid-July, the Maryland delegates had all left for home by July 23 and Richard Henry Lee was the only Virginia delegate who stayed around until the Congress officially adjourned on August 2. Connecticut’s Eliphalet Dyer confided to Joseph Trumbull, the son of his colony’s governor, Jonathan Trumbull: “We are all exhausted sitting so long in this place and being so long confined together that we feel pretty much as a Number of passengers confined together on board ship in a long Voyage.”32
On August 2, meeting at the unusually early time of eight in the morning, the Congress rushed thro
ugh its remaining business—relating primarily to the details of financing the activities of the Continental Army—and then adjourned until September 5. Although many of the delegates scurried home with relief and anticipation, a significant number, particularly those from the deep South, chose to venture northward to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see for themselves how the war with the army of their not-so-maternal mother country was faring.
The delegates had been in session for less than three months since the Congress reconvened on May 10, but to most of the delegates, as they headed home, it no doubt seemed much longer. It had been a grueling session, involving multiple decisions. Some of those decisions, the most important of which was the creation of an American army—would have the effect of moving the colonies closer to independence. But others—most notably the crafting and transmission of the Olive Branch Petition—were signs that many in America were a long way from abandoning their identity as subjects of the king to which that petition was sent. Although their recess was relatively short—only a month—the delegates would need their rest. Eleven months had passed since the First Continental Congress had convened in September of 1774. The next eleven months would prove even more trying.
SIXTEEN
MANAGING A WAR WHILE SEEKING PEACE
ALTHOUGH THE CONGRESS was supposed to reconvene on September 5, another week passed before enough delegates had managed to straggle back into Philadelphia to constitute a quorum. The Congress was then forced to delay its meeting because President John Hancock was suffering from “a Touch of the Gout.” Hancock had recovered by the following day, September 13, and when the delegates assembled they discovered that among those present were three newly appointed delegates from the colony of Georgia, which had finally admitted that the critical state of affairs had “roused the attention of this Province.” This was a significant turn of events, for, from this time forward, the Congress would be in a position to speak with greater authority for “the united colonies” of mainland British North America.1
We have only John Adams’s impression of those Georgia delegates. The Reverend Dr. John Zubly, a native of Switzerland, was a “Clergyman of the Independent Perswasion.” Adams judged him to be “a man of warm and zealous spirit,” one who spoke several languages—English, Dutch, French and Latin—in the bargain. The thirty-one-year-old John Houstounn was, in Adams’s view “sensible and spirited, but rather inexperienced.” Adams’s only comment about the third Georgia delegate to appear that day, Archibald Bullock, was to note approvingly that he was “cloathed in American Manufacture.”2 None of those delegates would play a significant role in the debates in the coming months, and, in fact, none would be present ten months later when it came to vote on the crucial subject of independence.
The compositions of one of the colonial delegations had changed significantly. Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee and Peyton Randolph returned as delegates from Virginia, but Patrick Henry, who had been an outspoken, but relatively ineffective member of the two sessions of the congress, had traded his place in the Virginia delegation for the position of colonel and leader of Virginia’s patriot militia. Although the extra-legal Virginia Convention had re-elected Richard Bland as a delegate, he declined to serve on account of his advanced age and illness. He was replaced by yet another Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee. Also added to the delegation were Jefferson’s legal mentor, George Wythe, and Thomas Nelson, another member of one of Virginia’s longtime ruling families. There were a few other substitutions. New Hampshire elected Josiah Bartlett to replace John Sullivan, who had left the Congress in July to serve alongside George Washington in the Continental Army, and North Carolina sent John Penn to take the place of Richard Caswell. Most of the remaining delegations stayed the same, and the tenor and temper of the body remained pretty much unchanged—which is to say, divided among militants, moderates and those still sitting on the fence.3
One of the most prominent delegates to the Congress had arrived in a somewhat altered condition. Sam Adams, a city boy all of his life, had steadfastly refused to learn to ride long distances on horseback. On his trip back to Philadelphia from Boston with John Adams, he had, as usual, chosen to travel in a small carriage. But soon after they left Boston, John persuaded him to try riding on horseback. According to John, Sam was “persuaded to put my Servant with his” into the carriage, and then to mount John’s horse, “a very genteel and easy little Creature.” Sam surprised everyone in the party by the “easy, genteel Figure” that he cut upon the horse, and he ended up riding 300 miles all the way to Philadelphia. But although he may have looked good upon the horse, apparently his bottom was not doing so well. When they stopped in Woodstock, New York for the night they saw that he “could not Sit So erect in his Chair as he had Sat upon his Horse,” a problem they remedied by making for him a heavy set of flannel drawers, which, apparently, not only “defended [him] from further Injury, but entirely healed the little Breach which had been begun.”4
The agenda of the Congress had not appreciably changed during the six-week adjournment. The delegates would spend most of their time dealing with the pressing business of financing and managing an ever-expanding war—a war that seemed at many times to be moving in a distinctly unfavorable direction from the patriot point of view. And, of course, the delegates were still awaiting the response of the king to what they believed to be their conciliatory petition. The contradictory tone and substance of the Declaration on Taking Arms on the one hand and the Olive Branch Petition on the other revealed their own divisions and uncertainty about the message they wished to convey, and while they would continue to wrangle about the most effective rhetorical strategy for dealing with the king and his ministers, there was little they could do until they had received the king’s response to the Olive Branch Petition.
Governing the American War Effort
It had been a little less than three months since George Washington departed to take command of the American military campaign. In June, when the Congress had taken its hasty first steps to create an army in response to the outbreak of armed warfare, it hadn’t had the time to deliberate with any care on the proper means of governing that army. Since the army itself was composed almost entirely of members of the Massachusetts militia, the Congress simply adopted the articles of war formulated by the extra-legal governments of the New England colonies. When Washington had arrived in Cambridge to take command of his Continental Army, he was appalled by the lack of discipline he found. In part his impression came from the cultural differences between Virginians and New Englanders. The militias of every American colony tended, by the standards of the British regular army, to be ragtag gatherings of relatively poorly trained civilians. In Virginia, notions of subordination and deference to officers of superior social standing encouraged at least a bare minimum of military discipline, but this seemed not to be the case in New England, where a more egalitarian ethic permeated the culture not only of the society, but of the militia as well. A New York physician, after observing the absence of any social or military distinctions between officers and enlisted men in the Connecticut militia, commented: “The popular form of Government & equality of condition” had created such a “level of sentiment and familiarity, that little or no discipline or subordination . . . exists among them.”5
This lack of hierarchy would have its costs. Washington’s general orders to his troops, which he felt compelled to issue with some frequency, give a hint of the behaviors he confronted: one requested that the militiamen refrain from the practice of wasting valuable ammunition by firing their muskets in the air “to no Purpose”; another ordered the men to cease urinating in public places; and yet another sought to put an end to bathing near the bridge in Cambridge, “where it has been observed and complained of, that many Men, lost to all sense of decency and common modesty, are running about naked upon the Bridge, whilst Passengers, and even Ladies of the first fashion in the neighbourhood, are passing over it, as if they meant to glory in their sh
ame.” More serious, many of Washington’s troops seemed to regard the term of their enlistments exceedingly casually, taking off for a week or two to visit their families, and then strolling back into camp as if such behavior were perfectly permissible.6
Washington, who perhaps more than any man in America was used to being honored with the respect and deference of those under his command, was simply appalled. In a letter to a distant cousin, Lund Washington, he complained that the New England militiamen were “an exceedingly dirty & nasty people.” His official reports from Cambridge insistently repeated the need for “exact discipline” and “due Subordination” throughout the whole army. But achieving that discipline was no easy matter. As much as American patriots extolled the virtues of a “citizens’ militia” as opposed to Great Britain’s “mercenary army,” Washington understood that an army composed of short-term volunteers, no matter how good their intentions, would be at a disadvantage in combat with a well-trained and well-armed regular British army. “To expect . . . the same service from Raw, and undisciplined Recruits as from Veteran soldiers,” he wrote plaintively to John Hancock, “is to expect what never did, and perhaps never will happen.”7
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