Surprisingly, Sam’s cousin John did not comment on the king’s cavalier rejection of the Olive Branch Petition, even though his correspondence during the days and weeks following news of the rejection was filled with detailed information about the secret business of the Congress. And given his now-open contempt for John Dickinson’s timidity, it is also surprising that he did not use the occasion of the arrival of the news as yet another opportunity to disparage his Pennsylvania rival. One possible reason for his reticence may have been the adoption by Congress of a much more explicitly stringent rule regarding secrecy on November 9. Although there is no record of the debate that preceded the Congress’s decision, there is no mistaking that body’s heightened concern on the subject. The resolution, which every member of Congress was required to sign, not only reiterated the sentiment that “ties of virtue, honor, and love of his Country” obligated all members of Congress to abide by the rule of secrecy, but it went further, stipulating “that if any member shall violate this agreement he shall be expelled [from] this Congress and deemed an enemy to the liberties of America.” Certainly one reason for adopting the more stringent rule of secrecy was the fact that America was involved in an ever-expanding war, and the members of Congress were daily discussing and making both tactical and administrative decisions about how that war should be fought. As a consequence, the risks now posed by indiscretion among the delegates were no longer limited to minor embarrassments; the lives of soldiers were on the line, and any bit of indiscretion that might further endanger the lives of those soldiers was simply not tolerable.13
And the new secrecy rules seem to have accomplished their purpose. As one reads the letters back home from members of the Congress after the adoption of the stricter rule of secrecy, it is apparent that the delegates were more careful in what they reported. Even John Adams, though on occasion he continued to violate—or at least severely strain—the revised and more stringent rule of secrecy, seems to have been more constrained in his reporting to his wife and friends back home.14
John Dickinson was never as active or voluble a correspondent as his Massachusetts rival, but given the disappointment he must have felt over the news of the king’s rejection of his petition, it is not surprising that he kept his feelings to himself. When he made the trip to Burlington, New Jersey, with his fellow committee members John Jay and George Wythe, he was motivated not only by the determination to enforce a united front among the colonies but also to demonstrate that his zeal for defending America’s liberties had not diminished. In his speech to the New Jersey legislature Dickinson tried to walk the line that he had been walking in the Congress itself. He made it clear that the Congress had gone the extra mile in once again petitioning the king in the hope of achieving a peaceful solution to the conflict. But in the wake of the king’s rejection, the Congress had, Dickinson proclaimed, “drawn the sword and thrown away the scabbard.” It was imperative therefore that the British realize the strength of the Americans’ resolve to persevere in their military defense of their liberties. The New Jersey petition, he warned, might be misinterpreted as a sign of American weakness. Dickinson concluded his speech to the legislature with a comment that might have surprised critics like John Adams, for far from being naïve about British intentions, he told the New Jersey legislators that “neither Mercy nor Justice was to be expected from Great Britain.” Those words, coming from a man as respected for his moderation as for his political acumen, had their effect, and the New Jersey legislature decided not to send their petition to the king.15
Virginia Moves into Open Rebellion
Virginia’s provincial leaders had in past decades enjoyed unusually cordial relations with their royal governors, but as we have seen, their relations with their new royal governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, had been going steadily downhill since his arrival in 1771. Dunmore’s relationship with the most outspokenly radical and popular politician in Virginia, Patrick Henry, had deteriorated even further. By May of 1775, Dunmore had proclaimed Henry a rebel and subject to arrest, accusing him and “a number of deluded followers” of having “taken up arms, chosen their officers, and styling themselves an independent company . . . put themselves in a posture of war . . . to the great terror of his majesty’s faithful subjects, and in open defiance of law and government.” In fact, the opposition to Dunmore’s policies was hardly confined to a small cadre of “deluded followers.” Inspired by the leadership of Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee and, perhaps most important, General George Washington, the tide of opinion in Virginia was turning decisively toward the patriot cause.16
When Henry departed from the Continental Congress in September of 1775 to return to Virginia in a new role—colonel and commander of Virginia’s provincial militia—he became even more of a thorn in Dunmore’s side. On November 7, finding himself totally isolated from Virginia’s ruling elite and his military forces outnumbered by those who had enlisted in the provincial militia under Henry’s command, Dunmore took the one step that he hoped would change the balance of military power and allow him to impose his authority on the rebellious Virginians once and for all. Instead, it would do more than any other action to propel all Virginians—or at least all white Virginians—into revolution.
On that date, Dunmore issued yet another proclamation—this one aimed at Virginia’s slave population. Resorting in desperation to what he admitted was a “most disagreeable but absolutely necessary step,” Dunmore announced that all indentured servants and slaves “able and willing to bear arms” who deserted their masters to fight on the side of “his Majesty” would be granted their freedom. It is one of the great ironies of America’s revolutionary history that the one act, more than any other, that convinced Virginians, and, no doubt, many other southerners, that the British king and his minions were out to enslave them, was Lord Dunmore’s offer of freedom to slaves willing to desert their masters and fight for their own freedom on the side of the British. There was no act more threatening—not taxes or trade embargoes or dissolutions of colonial legislatures—to the “freedom” of America’s slaveowners than the promise of freedom to those ensnared in the Americans’ peculiar institution.17
Patrick Henry immediately denounced Dunmore’s offer to the slaves as “fatal to the public safety,” a warning that needed no explanation to any white resident—slaveowners and non-slaveowners alike—in the colony. At the same time, he ordered the Virginia militia to mobilize for war.18
By early December of 1775 more than 800 slaves, motivated by the prospect of freedom, had fled from their masters’ plantations and enlisted in Dunmore’s army. On December 9, Dunmore ordered a force of some 280 soldiers, including a significant number of “Volunteers and Blacks” to attack a small patriot militia force of seventy or eighty men led by Colonel William Woodford at Great Bridge, near Norfolk. It would prove to be a precipitous, and disastrous, military decision. The patriot forces held their ground, and in part because of the hasty and inadequate training of his new “volunteers,” Dunmore’s army suffered devastating losses, with sixty-seven soldiers killed or wounded and another fifteen captured. “Dunmore’s War,” as it came to be called, had lasted less than thirty minutes, ending in a British retreat.19
Americans had won a small military victory, but it was the psychological effect of the event that would have the greatest impact. Virginians (and other southerners) would never again rest easy in the assumption that their slaves could always be counted upon to be their “faithful servants.”20
One of the Virginians most powerfully affected by Dunmore’s Proclamation was residing 575 miles to the north, in Boston, at the time of the battle. In October of 1775, General George Washington, influenced in part by his fury at the lack of discipline among his troops in Massachusetts and in part by the prejudices and fears of a man who himself held more than 100 men in bondage, had issued an order explicitly excluding “Negroes”—slave and free—from service in the Continental Army. Upon hearing of Dunmore’s Proclamation, Washington ra
iled against Dunmore as “an arch traitor to the rights of humanity”—a denunciation, which, to our twenty-first century sensibilities, seems to contain a combination of irony and hypocrisy. But whatever Washington’s moral blindness on that subject, he was coming to understand some of the consequences of ceding this valuable source of manpower. On December 31, 1775, he wrote to John Hancock reversing his previous position, acknowledging that “the free Negroes who have served in this army are very much dissatisfied at being discarded,” and admitted the possibility that that dissatisfaction might well cause them to “seek employ in the ministerial army.” Washington informed Hancock that he had “given license” for those free blacks to be enlisted in the Continental Army, a decision endorsed by the Continental Congress two weeks later. It was a decision that would have enormous consequences, for during the course of the revolutionary war, free blacks would constitute at varying times between six and twelve percent of Washington’s army. That this reversal of policy owed at least in part to the actions of the “arch traitor” Lord Dunmore is just one of the many ironies surrounding the complicated history of slaveholding, liberty-loving white Americans as they found themselves engaged in conflict with their British adversaries.21
On December 4, even before “Dunmore’s War,” members of the Continental Congress began to think about the political consequences of the deteriorating political situation in Virginia. On that date the Congress recommended to the extra-legal Virginia Convention that they begin to take steps to organize a new government. Although it would be another six months before the Convention acted on Congress’s resolution, they had, by that time, in the wake of the battle near Norfolk and with the retreat of Lord Dunmore to one of the British naval ships in Norfolk harbor, effectively eliminated royal control over the governance of their colony.22
It might seem that in those closing months of 1775, Americans were being drawn inexorably, perhaps inevitably, toward independence. From Lexington and Concord to Bunker Hill to expanded military conflict in New England, Canada and, by the end of the year, in Virginia—more and more Americans found themselves at war. The consistent, emphatic refusal of the British king and Parliament to give even the most conciliatory American petitions a sympathetic review, or, indeed, any review at all, left the advocates of “moderation” in Congress with precious little ground on which to stand. And at least a few colonies—beginning with Massachusetts, then New Hampshire and then South Carolina—began to form their own governments, essentially independent of any authority from the Crown. Through it all, the Congress itself was acquiring increasing legitimacy as the political representative of the “united colonies.”
But no one in December of 1775 was gifted with the wisdom that hindsight affords, and many of America’s political leaders, both within the Congress and in the various colonial legislatures, were doing everything they could to avoid the last resort of independence. No colonial legislature had come out explicitly favoring independence, and, indeed, most of them had issued formal disavowals of any desire for independence. Some of those disavowals may have been perfunctory, but several—from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Maryland among them—were both emphatic and sincere.
And the delegates were getting tired. Although the Congress never formally adjourned for the remainder of its existence, as November dragged into December, attendance flagged—so much so that the Congress passed a resolution on November 16 stipulating that any member desiring to leave the Congress had to ask for formal permission before doing so. Going further, the Congress issued a statement to delinquent delegates that it “expect[ed] their immediate attendance.” In some senses the decrease in attendance was a consequence of the decision to adopt a system of voting in which each colony had a single vote, with the consequence being that many delegates felt no compunction to be present so long as at least one of their fellow delegates was on the floor. But by this time the business of the Congress involved much more than voting. The Congress had, in effect, asserted its authority as a “continental government,” and a huge part of that authority involved overseeing an increasingly expanding war through the device of a multitude of committees. It was essential therefore that there be a sufficient supply of committee members to allow the Congress to carry out its responsibilities.23
Although attendance at the Congress continued to wane during the month of December—among those departing were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson—most of the delegates kept at their task, working right through the end of the year. The delegates put in a long day on Saturday, December 23, and then took Sunday the 24th and Christmas day off. But they were back at it December 26, dealing with a host of military and financial issues relating to the war effort. It is of course unimaginable that our present Congress would return to work the day after Christmas, but the apparent diligence of their predecessors in the Continental Congress is more easily explicable, for Christmas was not viewed as such an important day of celebration in the eighteenth century. The delegates worked straight through to the end of the year, taking Sunday, December 31, off, but then went right back to work on the first of January.
NINETEEN
THE YEAR 1776 DAWNS
THE FIRST FEW weeks of the momentous year of 1776 brought nothing but bad news for the Americans. On January 7, an express rider from Baltimore brought word that Lord Dunmore had launched a major naval counterattack on Norfolk, Virginia, bombarding the city and burning it to the ground. In fact, those reports were only half-true. Although Dunmore’s forces did initiate the setting of fires in the town, it soon became apparent that Dunmore and his men were not solely to blame. Other reports indicated that members of the patriot militia seeking revenge, but also rioters and looters taking advantage of the chaos in the town, may have been primarily responsible for the destruction of Norfolk. It was not clear what was worse—the counteroffensive by Dunmore or the virtual anarchy that had been unleashed in the town.1
Worse news was still to come—this time from the north. When a coalition of Massachusetts and Connecticut militiamen captured Fort Ticonderoga in May of 1775, many delegates to the Continental Congress hoped that that victory might mark the beginning of American control of the Canadian provinces that had been acquired by the British in 1763 at the conclusion of the French and Indian War. Beginning in July of 1775, the Congress began to plan an invasion of Montreal and Quebec, the two principal population centers and the strongest of the British military garrisons in the Canadian provinces. General Richard Montgomery, a former officer in the British army who settled in New York in 1771 and now thoroughly committed to the patriot cause, was to command the attack on Montreal. The young, exceptionally talented Benedict Arnold—a favorite of General Washington—was to lead the assault on Quebec, some 140 miles away.
In late October, Montgomery and a force of 350 troops launched a successful assault on Fort Chambly, a gateway to Montreal. After a difficult march through water, snow and ice, his poorly equipped troops secured the surrender of the British forces guarding Montreal on November 13. They then boarded ships captured from the British and sailed up the Saint Lawrence River to meet Arnold’s forces outside of Quebec.2
Benedict Arnold and his men had trekked more than 400 miles from Boston and then through the Maine and Canadian wilderness. Confronting stormy, icy weather, an uncertain route involving upriver travel on largely uncharted waters and perilous portages through the heavily forested land, the only thing more disastrous than the toll on Arnold’s wrecked boats and the supplies they carried was that suffered by the men in his army—nearly half of his original force of 1,100 men either died or deserted en route to Quebec City. They arrived at the city in rags, their clothes and coats in tatters, boots so waterlogged that they simply fell apart. Moreover, they were ridiculously under-equipped. They had no heavy artillery, and many of the soldiers’ rifles had been rendered useless either by the horrendous weather conditions or by lack of ammunition. In spite of their pitiable condition, Arnold and his men approached the city’s w
alls and demanded its surrender. His demand being met by British cannon fire, Arnold retreated twenty miles downriver to Pointe-aux-Trembles to await the arrival of General Montgomery’s troops 3
The two men, with their badly depleted armies, joined forces at Pointe-aux-Trembles on December 2. They set out for Quebec four days later, arriving at the city’s walls on December 6. The Americans again demanded that the governor of the province and commander of the British forces, General Guy Carleton, surrender the city to them. Carleton, unimpressed by the ragged state of the patriot forces, would refuse not only on that occasion but several other times over the course of the month.
Finally, at about four a.m. on December 31, in the midst of a blizzard, the two American commanders attacked, hoping that the poor weather conditions would offer them cover. Their plan was for Montgomery’s and Arnold’s two sets of forces to converge in the lower part of the city and then to move over the walls protecting Quebec’s upper part. The plan failed miserably. General Montgomery was killed early in the battle in the lower part of the town, his head literally blown off by a fusillade of grapeshot fire. Arnold’s troops managed to breach the outer gates of the northern end of the lower part of the town, but as they reached the walls of the upper part of town they encountered a devastating assault from the British from above. Arnold himself was shot in the ankle and had to pass command of his forces to his subordinate, Daniel Morgan.
The battle was effectively over by seven that morning, with sixty American soldiers killed, as many as 100 wounded and over 300 captured—more than a third of their combined forces. The British casualties numbered only nineteen. Although Arnold would refuse to retreat, staying on the outskirts of Quebec until the spring in an unsuccessful attempt to lay siege to the city, the end result was an utter failure on the part of the Americans to capture Quebec.4
Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor Page 36
