According to the recollection of Rodney’s Delaware colleague Thomas McKean, after the vote on July 1, he immediately sent a message to Rodney, who was about seventy miles away in Dover, Delaware, to hightail it back to Philadelphia by early the next morning. McKean’s recollection may have been blurred by the passage of time, for it would have taken a miracle for McKean’s message, which could not have been sent any sooner than the early evening of July 1, to have reached Rodney, and then for Rodney to have mounted his horse and made the ride to Philadelphia in time to show up at the State House on the morning of July 2. It is more likely that the messenger sent to get Rodney moving left sometime earlier in the day on July 1, while the debate in the Congress was still going on. But whatever the precise timing of the journey from Philadelphia to Dover, there is no doubt that Rodney undertook a hurried, perhaps even perilous ride, to make it to the State House on time. By his testimony and that of several others, he rode all night through thunder and rain, to arrive at the State House still wearing his boots and spurs. Again according to McKean, after taking his seat in the Congress, Rodney announced: “As I believe the voice of my constituents and of all sensible and honest men is in favor of Independence and my own judgment concurs with them, I vote for Independence.” Although this version of Rodney’s midnight ride may not be quite as dramatic as that portrayed in the Broadway musical, his appearance that morning at the State House, expected by few other than his colleague Thomas McKean, was nevertheless both a surprise and a pleasure to the assembled delegates.14
The change in Pennsylvania’s vote on July 2 was the most surprising to the members of Congress at the time and remains a source of some puzzlement to the present day. As the vote on independence neared that day, John Dickinson and Robert Morris left the table around which the Pennsylvania delegates were seated, pulling themselves “behind the bar,” that rail which to this day keeps visitors to the Assembly Room of Independence Hall from actually walking into the space where the delegates to both the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention of 1787 carried out their deliberations. This removal left the decision up to the remaining five Pennsylvania delegates—John Morton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Willing, Charles Humphries and James Wilson. Morton and Franklin were clearly in favor of independence, Willing and Humphreys clearly opposed. James Wilson, although John Dickinson’s protégé and a strong supporter of Dickinson’s arguments in favor of reconciliation over the course of the past two years, had already made a reluctant break with his mentor on the July 1 vote, and once again on July 2 became the decisive vote within the Pennsylvania delegation in favor of independence, thus assuring a unanimous endorsement (with New York still abstaining) of that epochal decision in American history.15
James Wilson explained his decision to vote for independence as an act of respect to the power of the people of his colony, who had made their will apparent in the dramatic changes in the Pennsylvania government over the course of the previous weeks. Just a few years later, the “people” would be less than respectful to him when they launched a full-scale attack on his Philadelphia residence in protest against what they believed to be his excessive sympathy toward Loyalists, but Wilson, whatever the ups and downs of his personal relations with his fellow Philadelphians, was a sincere believer in the ultimate power of the people.16
Robert Morris, writing to a fellow Pennsylvanian three weeks after the Congress had voted in favor of independence, repeated his belief that that vote had been premature. He continued to hold out hopes that a peace commission would arrive from England and present General Washington with acceptable terms for a reconciliation between the two sides in the conflict. But, he added, if that did not come to pass, it would then be clear that “our United Efforts” to combat British tyranny and to “support the Independency” would be necessary. Although he was not persuaded that that moment had not yet come to pass, on that critical day, July 2, he apparently felt strongly enough about the importance of presenting to the world the appearance of American unity, that he absented himself from the vote. In the end, when the Declaration of Independence was finally put on parchment and presented to the delegates sometime in August, Morris would affix his signature to the document.17
John Dickinson never explained his decision not to vote that day. But one thing is certain: his decisions not to support independence and to absent himself from the vote that day were based entirely on his own moral sense of what was right. In spite of the decision of the Pennsylvania Provincial Congress supporting independence, Dickinson could be reasonably confident that his constituents would respect any decision that he might make on that question. His speech of July 1 was a necessary display of his conscience and integrity, and having made that speech, he simply could not, either emotionally or morally, reverse himself and vote in favor of independence the following day. But, like Morris, he recognized the need for the Congress to speak with a single, united voice, and for that reason, withdrew himself.18
He would pay a price. Ezra Stiles, a contemporary Connecticut minister who would soon become the president of Yale College, as it then was known, commented that Dickinson “now goes into oblivion or a dishonorable reminiscence with posterity,” and John Adams, ever spiteful toward his rival, was still ranting about the “timid and trimming Politicks of some men of large Property here.” But neither of those assessments was a fair measure of either Dickinson’s motives or his actions during that critical time. It is noteworthy that immediately after America declared her independence, Dickinson led his Philadelphia battalion to Elizabethtown, New Jersey, to do battle with the British, while Adams, expressing his desire to “leave the War to be conducted by others” and complaining about being “weary, thoroughly weary” and in need of “a little Rest,” planned to return home to Massachusetts as soon as possible.19
Dickinson never explained his failure to vote that day and never attempted a public defense of it. But he did, in a letter to an unknown correspondent written in August of 1776, defend the principled nature of his conduct during those trying weeks leading up to independence. “What can be more evident than that I have acted on Principle?” he asked. “Was there a Man in Pennsylvania that possessed a larger share of the public Confidence . . . than I did? Or that had a more certain Prospect of personal advantages from Independency, or of a small chance of advantages from Reconciliation?” He went on to recall his prediction in his July 1 speech that he would surely “lose a great deal of my popularity” by opposing independence, and asked, rhetorically, “What would be my object & whom was I trying to please?” He then ran through the list of possibilities. The supporters of the proprietary governor of the colony? Hardly, for they had been “uniformly my deadly foes throughout my Life.” The Quakers? John Adams, who always linked Dickinson with the “broad brims,” would have answered “surely,” but Dickinson, although sympathetic to Quaker principles and closely connected to the religion through family ties, had never been afraid to stand up to the religious sect of which he was not a member. And besides, Dickinson noted, “All things were converging to a Revolution in which they would have little Power.” Dickinson’s prediction about the future decline in the popularity and political power of the Quakers in post-revolutionary Pennsylvania was right on target, but, unfortunately for him, though not a Quaker and not a spokesman for that religious sect, Dickinson’s reputation and popularity would suffer in much the same way. As Dickinson himself put it, perhaps a bit self-righteously and hyperbolically, “I have so much of the spirit of Martyrdom in me, that I have been conscientiously compelled to endure in my political Capacity the Fires & Faggots of persecution.”20
On the day after the July 2 vote on independence, John Adams wrote two letters to Abigail. The first was primarily concerned with local matters in and around Boston, but he concluded with some reflections about the extraordinary events that occurred during the past fifteen years of his professional and public life. Looking back to the year 1761, when he was involved in a legal argument ove
r the British issuance of Writs of Assistance and which he regarded as “the Commencement of the Controversy” between the two countries, he marveled at “the Suddenness, as well as Greatness of this Revolution,” a revolution which, he believed, was divinely ordained, for, he said, “it is the Will of Heaven that the two Countries should be sundered forever.”
Adams’s second letter to his wife was devoted entirely to the events leading to independence, but far from marveling at the “Suddenness” of the decision for independence, he complained that “Had a Declaration of Independency been made seven months ago, it would have been attended with many great and glorious effects”—alliances with foreign states, the successful conquest of Quebec and, indeed, the possession of all of Canada. Once again he railed against the “jarring Views, Wishes, and Designs” of others, which slowed the progress of “many salutary Measures” that would have given American greater advantage in the military engagements still to be fought. But the ever-mercurial Mr. Adams concluded on a note of optimism and with one of the most famous mis-predictions in all of American history. “But the Day is past,” he wrote.
The Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
He was close, but slightly off the mark. John Adams had been on center stage in the Pennsylvania State House for much of the past twenty-two months, but he would now have to share, perhaps even yield, the stage to a young Virginian from Albemarle County.21
TWENTY-FOUR
THOMAS JEFFERSON’S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
IT IS, ALONG WITH the United States Constitution, America’s most cherished document. It succeeds masterfully in laying out the reasons for America’s audacious decision to break all ties of constitutional and emotional connection with the king and the empire over which he ruled. But the Declaration of Independence does more than that—in its eloquent preamble it lays out an idealistic, if idealized, vision of America’s future, as a country committed to the principle of equality and to the protection of mankind’s “unalienable rights.” Its author, Thomas Jefferson, went on to accomplish many extraordinary things in his long and productive life, but among all of those accomplishments, his writing of the Declaration of Independence would come to be the most remembered, most revered, by successive generations of Americans.
But during the last few weeks in June and the first days of July in 1776, few in the Continental Congress were aware either of the importance of the task assigned to Jefferson, or of its lasting impact on the American consciousness. And, as these two concluding chapters will demonstrate, the remarkable achievement of the Declaration of Independence was not Thomas Jefferson’s alone. America’s Declaration of Independence was the collective accomplishment of the members of the Continental Congress, a congress that had been struggling to define America’s future for the past twenty-two months.
Thomas Jefferson left Philadelphia in late December of 1775, eager to return home to his wife and family, as well as to his newest passion in life—his plantation-in-progress, Monticello. Although he did not set any specific timetable for his return to Congress, his mother’s unexpected death on March 31, 1776, followed by an acute onset of what we would today call a migraine headache, caused him to delay his return to Philadelphia for nearly six weeks.
Whatever the sadness provoked by the death of his mother or the intensity of his headaches, at least some of his delay in returning was the result of his deep infatuation with his pastoral life at Monticello. At his hilltop estate in the western Virginia county of Albemarle, he was safely removed from the military conflict that had erupted in Norfolk in early January, where the combination of Lord Dunmore’s naval forces and riotous Norfolk residents had essentially burned the town to the ground. Jefferson’s correspondence later in life was voluminous—indeed, so much so that it is a wonder he had any time left over to accomplish all of the things that he was able to during his long career. But the written record during his five-month retreat at Monticello in the first half of 1776 is remarkably sparse. We know that he received occasional reports of the disastrous military campaigns in Canada, and that a few of his friends wrote him about issues relating to Virginia’s military preparations, but he apparently was not moved to comment on those reports, at least in writing. Indeed, three days after he arrived in Philadelphia, he wrote his friend John Page that “I have been so long out of the political world that I am almost a new man in it.”1
Jefferson did undertake one extended piece of political writing during his retreat at Monticello, a “Refutation of the Argument that the Colonies Were Established at the Expense of the British Nation,” apparently written after he had received news of the content of the king’s speech to Parliament denouncing the colonies on October 26, 1775. Jefferson wrote the piece at nearly the exact time of the publication of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, although he did not receive a copy of Paine’s pamphlet until three or four weeks later. Although Jefferson, unlike John Adams, came to hold a high opinion of Paine’s contributions to the cause of independence, there is no evidence that Paine’s pamphlet had much of an influence on Jefferson’s thinking at the time. Indeed, whatever mutual admiration may have existed between Paine and Jefferson, their temperaments, and their writing styles, were entirely different. Jefferson’s refutation of the king’s speech, which was never published, was a scholarly, historical treatise, aimed not at rallying the American people to action, but, rather, at clarifying in his own mind some of the historical details relating to the founding of the American colonies. Although some of the logic of his privately composed treatise would ultimately find its way into the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was content, at least at that time, to keep his thinking to himself.2
Returning to Philadelphia
Jefferson left Monticello, accompanied by his slave Bob, the brother of his servant and future companion, Sally Hemings, for Philadelphia on May 6. On his trip to Philadelphia in 1775 he had traveled with a veritable entourage—three slaves, a carriage and four horses—but having discovered that the cost of boarding his horses in Philadelphia was nearly twice that of his own lodgings in the city, this time he and Bob were on horseback, riding for eight days through the Shenandoah Valley and upland to reach Philadelphia from the west. Upon his arrival he would take up lodgings, at least temporarily, once again at the boardinghouse of Benjamin Randolph, but after eight days he moved to a three-story brick house on Seventh and Market Streets, completed just the year before by Jacob Graff, a recently married bricklayer. Jefferson lived in two rooms—a bedroom and a parlor, on the second floor. Visitors to the Graff House today see a compact house, snugly positioned on the corner of a bustling thoroughfare, but in May 1776, its location was quite literally on the outskirts of the city, with fields and a stable located just across the street.3
Although Jefferson may not have realized it at the time, the timing of his arrival was propitious. On May 15, the day after he arrived but perhaps before he had taken his seat inside the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House, the Congress agreed to the preamble to the May 10 resolution requesting the colonies to begin to organize their own governments. The preamble stated that it was “irreconcilable to reason and good conscience” for any colony to give support to any government under the authority of “the crown of Great Britain.” This was the same day that some 290 miles to the south, in Williamsburg, the Virginia Convention had instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress to introduce a resolution into that body proposing independence. Although Jefferson no doubt had some sense of the direction in which the political winds in his home colony were blowing, he was probably not aware of t
he specific nature of the Virginia Convention’s action when he arrived in Philadelphia. But he soon would be.
Although upon his arrival in Philadelphia he had claimed to have felt removed from the political world, he immediately threw himself into the maelstrom of political activity in Philadelphia. Although only distantly aware of the events in Canada while at Monticello, he immediately became actively involved in committee work aimed at mitigating the debacle there, drafting reports and recommendations, as well working with George Wythe in the drafting of a letter to German mercenaries, who were being sent by the British to bolster their army in America. This last missive was hardly a friendly one. The two Virginians announced, “with no small pleasure . . . that we can affirm you to be unprovoked enemies,” and then went into a tirade at their willingness to “undertake the bloody work of butchering” the innocent inhabitants of America.4
As much as he was preoccupied with continental affairs, Jefferson soon became aware that the Virginia Convention, on the same day that it had passed the resolution advocating independence, had agreed to begin drafting a new constitution for the aspiring-to-be-independent colony. Jefferson was at this stage in his career every bit as much a Virginian as he was an American political leader and felt torn between his desire to be part of that effort and his duties in the Continental Congress. On May 16 he actually suggested to his friend Thomas Nelson that the entire Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress return home for the purpose of assisting in the writing of a new constitution—“a work of the most interesting nature”—for the colony. Given the important business facing the Congress, this was a wholly unrealistic suggestion, but Jefferson nevertheless spent much of his time in early June writing multiple drafts of a constitution for his homeland, the final version of which he sent to the Virginia Convention, probably on June 13.5
Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor Page 46
