EIGHTEEN
SMALL STEPS TOWARD INDEPENDENCE
AS THE CONGRESS awaited the king’s response to the Olive Branch Petition and struggled to manage an undeclared and increasingly destructive war, it also sought to build a common ground on which the delegates of thirteen colonies—all of whom were committed to obeying the instructions of their respective legislatures—could find some basis for unified action. This was no small task, for the story of America’s agonizing decision for independence is not a single story, but rather, at least thirteen separate stories, involving differing conditions and differing responses in each of the mainland North American colonies.
In late October, the delegates lost one of their most widely admired colleagues, the man whom they had originally elected president of the Congress, Peyton Randolph. On the evening of October 22, Randolph and his wife Elizabeth, accompanied by Thomas Jefferson, were dining at the country home of Henry Hill, about three miles outside of town. Shortly after the meal, Randolph began to choke, and then was seized by what observers called “an apoplectic fit,” most likely a stroke. He died a few hours later. Genuinely saddened, the delegates arranged for a state funeral, which was held on October 24, presided over by the man who had become their on-call preacher, the Reverend Jacob Duche. Not only could they count on Duche to deliver a consoling and inspiring sermon, but he shared Randolph’s Anglican faith.1
The Move for Political Autonomy in New Hampshire and South Carolina
Although the Congress was steadily accumulating power and responsibility, the delegates from each of the colonies were well aware that they were just that—delegates. They were bound by each of their colonial legislatures to represent the particular interests and opinions of those bodies. And the mood of those legislatures often varied considerably. Not surprisingly, the New England colonies were in the radical vanguard with respect to their relationship with royal authority. Massachusetts had already organized itself as a quasi-independent government in the summer of 1775. Rhode Island and Connecticut, because their corporate charters had allowed them to act more independently of royal authority from their very beginning in the seventeenth century, were able to finesse the issue of their relationship with the mother country.
The remaining New England colony, New Hampshire, was chartered as a royal province in 1680. Its governor, the American-born John Wentworth, had spent most of his adult life in the service of the Crown and felt duty bound to uphold all of the directives of the king and his ministry. But New Hampshirites, perhaps even more than their neighbors in Boston, showed little respect for royal authority. By the summer of 1774 Wentworth had alienated most of the political leaders of the colony by dissolving the colonial legislature, and as early as December of 1774, well before the battles of Lexington and Concord, a group of some 350 armed New Hampshire militiamen stormed Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth, briefly imprisoning the British commander of the fort, John Cochran, and, according to Cochran, with a round of huzzas, “hauled down the King’s colors.” The following day the assault escalated. Some 2,000 New Hampshire colonists marched on the fort, stripping it of all of its armaments and virtually destroying it.2
Wentworth, watching helplessly as Fort William and Mary was destroyed, was furious. He demanded that the colony’s attorney general, Samuel Livermore, arrest those responsible for the “many treasonable Insults & Outrages.” Livermore, realizing that the royal forces of law and order were vastly outnumbered by those who had attacked the fort, replied that “a prosecution at this time would be altogether useless both for the impossibility of apprehending and securing the offenders and for the getting of them convicted in case they should be brought to a trial.” Livermore went on to observe, sagaciously, that “whenever civil power attempts things hazardous and fails in the execution, it becomes a miserable example of its own weakness.”3
Wentworth stayed on as royal governor for another seven months, but he was a governor in name only. As his orders were consistently ignored by the residents of his colony, he found himself living in virtual exile in his governor’s mansion. By the middle of June 1775, with his mansion surrounded by a patriot mob, he was forced to take refuge in a British fort in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, harbor and two months later sailed for England. From that time on, New Hampshire’s legal and political status was wholly unclear. The residents of provincial New Hampshire—a colony that was still composed of a collection of scattered, frontier communities—possessed the individualistic “Live Free or Die” attitude that has characterized the political culture of the state down to the present day. Thus it was difficult to persuade the people to cede much power to any government authority, be that a royal governor or a provincial assembly. But with the royal governor in exile, and a provincial legislature meeting on a purely ad hoc basis, the challenges to exercising any sort of government authority, including the collection of taxes, were even greater. To make matters worse, now that New Hampshire was actively involved in a war that required the raising and supplying of troops, it became necessary for the extra-legal provincial legislature to increase its demands on a reluctant and obstreperous population.4
On September 1, 1775, the New Hampshire provincial congress, the extra-legal successor to the colonial legislature, instructed the colony’s two delegates to the Continental Congress, John Sullivan and John Langdon, to ask the Congress for its “advice & Direction . . . with respect to a Method for our Administering Justice and regulating our civil Police.” The New Hampshire provincial congress was, in effect, asking the Continental Congress to allow it to create a government independent of British authority, much as the Continental Congress had earlier done when Massachusetts made a similar request. After some delay, on October 18 the New Hampshire delegates (Josiah Bartlett had by that time replaced Sullivan) presented their colony’s request to the Continental Congress, setting off a heated debate in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House. “The arguments on this matter,” the New Hampshire delegates reported to one of their colleagues back home, “were Truly Ciceronial.” It was one thing to grant Massachusetts, which was already in a state of war with the British, the authority to organize its own government. Many of the delegates, however, felt that New Hampshire’s situation—marked by vigilante violence to be sure, but not outright warfare—did not warrant the step of authorizing still another colony to declare its independence from royal authority. Facing down those who opposed New Hampshire’s request to form its own government, John Adams urged the Congress to direct all of the “states . . . to call Conventions and institute regular Governments.” His use of the word “states” was intentional, for by that time, as he later recalled, he “mortally hated the Words ‘Province, Colony, and Mother Country’,” and sought to “erase [them] out of our language.”
On October 26, Adams, along with John Rutledge, Samuel Ward, Richard Henry Lee and Roger Sherman, was chosen by the Congress to serve on a committee to draft a response to the New Hampshire request. On November 3, the committee recommended, and the Congress approved, a resolution encouraging the New Hampshire provincial convention to move forward to “establish such a form of government as, in their judgment, will best produce the happiness of the people, and most effectively secure peace and good order in the province,” although they stopped short of embracing Adams’s use of the term “state” to describe the government that was to be created.”5
The New Hampshire resolution was a critically important step in the process by which the American colonies began to establish governments independent of royal authority. The structures and methods of operation of the Massachusetts colonial government had been explicitly laid out in that colony’s charter of 1691, and the Congress had been equally explicit in laying out the terms under which the Bay Colony could form its own government. New Hampshire lacked a royal charter, and the Congress gave to the colony’s political leaders an open-ended endorsement to establish whatever form of government would best serve the needs of the people of the colony. It w
ould be a government without any vestige of royal influence or authority.
The following day, November 4, the Congress received a similar petition from South Carolina. In one sense South Carolina’s situation was like that of New Hampshire: the circumstances that paved the way for the request to form a new government were brought about by the forced departure of each colony’s royal governor—in South Carolina’s case, the unexpectedly speedy exit of Lord William Campbell, who had only assumed the governorship in mid-June of 1775 and initially attempted to work with the provincial leadership of the colony. But two sets of circumstances worked against those efforts. Although up to that point there had been no armed conflicts within South Carolina between British troops and South Carolina militiamen, virtually all of the residents of the colony’s principal port city of Charleston were painfully aware of the vulnerability of that port to British naval attack. The growing presence of British warships in Charleston harbor was visible to all.
Another, more complex set of events was occurring on South Carolina’s frontier. It did even more to undermine the relationship between the governor and the provincial leadership of the colony. Those events had little to do with America’s imperial crisis with Great Britain. It was a purely internal affair brought on by resentment among many of the ordinary settlers of the South Carolina backcountry. They were angry over what they believed to be the unresponsive, and in many cases outright corrupt, behavior of their local judges and political officials. The fact that many of those local officials were politically connected to the ruling political elite was not lost on the backcountry settlers. As tensions between royal and provincial officials increased, Governor Campbell attempted to win the backcountry settlers over to his side. By mid-July, rival military forces, some loyal to the governor and others to the patriot cause, began to jostle for position in the South Carolina backcountry, and in mid-September, those tensions exploded into brief, but bloody warfare. At that point, relations between the ruling provincial elite in Charleston went rapidly downhill, and Governor Campbell dissolved the South Carolina provincial assembly in Charleston and, with a small cadre of royal officials, fled the city, relocating their government to a British warship, HMS Tamar, in the Charleston harbor.6
The conflict was sufficiently unsettling to South Carolina’s delegation to the Continental Congress that the rival factions in that delegation—the radicals Christopher Gadsden and Thomas Lynch on the one hand and the two Rutledges on the other—came on November 4, 1775, to support a petition from the South Carolina Provincial Convention asking permission to organize a government of their own.7
John Adams, who had often bristled at what he saw as the Rutledges’ timidity, was exultant that John Rutledge “was now completely with Us, in our desire of revolutionizing all the Governments.” In fact, John Rutledge probably did not consider the move to reorganize South Carolina’s government as quite the revolutionary step that Adams believed it to be, nor did he believe that it was a step that should necessarily be imitated by other colonies. Indeed, Rutledge’s concerns were more parochial, relating to his commitment to remaining the most powerful politician in South Carolina. As soon as Congress passed the resolution authorizing South Carolina to organize its own government, Rutledge set sail for Charleston so that he could fend off any of his political rivals as his colony embarked on the process of creating a government independent of royal authority. But however much the actions of South Carolina’s provincial leaders both inside the colony and within the Congress may have been motivated by their desire to maintain their oligarchic power in their colony, the practical effect of those actions was to move the colony much closer to a position of virtual autonomy from royal authority.8
John Adams saw in the resolutions authorizing New Hampshire and South Carolina to reorganize their governments an opportunity to encourage other colonies to follow suit. Indeed, during the debate on those resolutions Adams argued that the Congress should “expunge the Word Colony and Colonies,” from the congressional journal altogether, substituting the words “State and States.” He also wanted the Congress to refer to the conflict with England as a “War” rather than a “Dispute.” During that same debate, he even tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Congress to pass an additional resolution urging the people of all the “states” to create new governments. Had he been successful in these efforts, the Congress truly would have taken a giant step toward revolution. But, Adams lamented, “the Child was not yet weaned,” and the Congress refused to take that step.9
New Jersey Bucks the Tide
Whatever the differences between the conditions and motives surrounding the decisions by New Hampshire and South Carolina, they had nevertheless moved in the same direction. But not all states were inclined to follow them. Indeed, New Jersey—whose royal governor was William Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son and a man who had for most of his life had a problematic relationship with his father—seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. On November 27, the New Jersey provincial assembly went so far as to draft its own olive branch petition to the king, “humbly beseeching him to use his interposition to prevent the effusion of blood; and to express the great desire this House hath to a restoration of peace and harmony with the Parent State.” The following day, the assembly passed another resolution explicitly disavowing any desire for “Independency,” a sentiment echoed by Governor Franklin in a letter to the British secretary of state, Lord Dartmouth, in which he assured Dartmouth that most of the people in New Jersey, as well as those in Pennsylvania, were opposed to independence.10
Although a majority of delegates to the Congress were still not ready to advocate independence in the late fall of 1775, most frowned upon New Jersey’s actions, which seemed a deliberate attempt to undermine congressional authority. New Jersey’s determination to disavow any sentiments leading toward independence was in some senses merely an echo of an earlier action by Pennsylvania’s assembly, where a prevailing conservative majority had on November 8 instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress to “dissent from and utterly reject, any Propositions . . . that may cause or lead to a Separation from the Mother Country or a Change of the Form of this Government.” But New Jersey’s actions were particularly annoying, for by the second week in November, the delegates to the Congress had learned of the king’s refusal even to read the Olive Branch Petition and of his Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition. And so, on December 4, the Congress unanimously passed a resolution rebuking that colony for even thinking about separately petitioning either the king or Parliament. The fact that the New Jersey congressional delegates joined in voting for that position was just one of many indications of the tensions that sometimes existed between those serving in the Congress and the colonial legislatures that had elected them. The Congress then dispatched a committee of three influential members—John Dickinson, George Wythe and John Jay—to the colonial capital in Burlington to persuade the New Jersey assembly to reverse course.11
John Dickinson’s Disappointment
John Dickinson had only rarely taken part in the proceedings of the Congress during the month of November. The Pennsylvania provincial assembly, of which he was also a member, had been meeting upstairs in the Long Room of the Pennsylvania State House while the Continental Congress remained in session and occupied the Assembly Room. But by the end of November, having received the news of the king’s cavalier dismissal of the petition on which he had labored so diligently and on which he had staked so much of his personal reputation, Dickinson was every bit as unhappy with New Jersey’s actions as were his fellow congressional delegates.
Although Dickinson left no record of his reaction upon receiving the news of the king’s refusal to read his petition, he was certainly acutely aware of the “I told you so’s” that were being uttered by those who had so strenuously opposed sending the petition in the first place. Rhode Island’s Samuel Ward, writing to his wife, Deborah, expressed relief that the king had spurned the Con
gress’s overtures, for it had the “Happy effect,” he said, of causing “those who hoped for Redress from our Petitions now [to] give them up & heartily join with us in carrying on the War vigorously.” The following day, in a long letter to his brother Henry, Samuel was even more ebullient, noting that “One of the Gentlemen”—most likely Samuel Chase of Maryland—“who has been most sanguine for pacific measures & very jealous of the N.E. Colonies, addressing me in the stile of Brother Rebel, told me he was now ready to join Us heartily. We have got says He, a sufficient Answer to our Petition.” As for Ward himself: “I want nothing more but am ready to declare Ourselves independent.” In a letter to his Massachusetts comrade-in-arms James Warren, Sam Adams could not contain either his relief or his pleasure at hearing the news of the king’s rejection. He had been more patient and restrained in his utterances than his younger cousin throughout the deliberations of both the First and Second Congresses. And feeling a constraint imposed by the rule of secrecy, he gave Warren no specifics of the king’s response to the Olive Branch Petition, but he nevertheless reported, exultantly, that the king and his ministers, by their actions, would “necessarily produce the grandest Revolutions the World have ever yet seen.” It is worth noting that Adams referred to the “grandest Revolutions” in the plural, indicative of the fact that he was thinking about the revolt against Great Britain as one of multiple revolutions carried out in individual colonies, rather than a single effort among the “united colonies.”12
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