by John Ferling
The members of Congress had received “alarming Intelligence” that Great Britain’s army of invasion was coming, not only from Nova Scotia but from England and Europe as well. By midsummer there would be forty thousand British soldiers in North America, several times the number posted in the colonies when the war broke out. “Brittain is Determined to use her utmost endeavors this year to Subdue us,” said Congressman Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire. Like Bartlett, each congressman prayed that his fellow Americans would “play the man for their country & that kind Providence will give us success & victory.” There was much to pray for. A British army had landed at Quebec thirty days earlier and already had advanced as far as Three Rivers, on the St. Lawrence River. If that British army plunged farther south and crossed New York’s northern frontier, many in Congress feared that it might be unstoppable. America’s army was too small to simultaneously defend Manhattan and New York’s northern border. Some in Congress thought that Britain’s powerful military forces could be defeated only with foreign help. Those same congressmen, including Lee, also believed that only by declaring independence could Congress hope to receive life-sustaining assistance from a European belligerent.8
Once the reports were read and discussed, Congress turned to other matters. It voted to give compensation to a merchant whose property, including a vessel, had been seized by the American navy. It spent some time discussing the possibility of raising more men for the army, and it looked into its recent purchase of defective gunpowder from a mill in Frankford, Pennsylvania.9
An hour or so into the session, thinking that most of the day’s crucial war-related business had been concluded, Lee asked for the floor. When he was recognized, the Virginian indicated that he wished to introduce a resolution.
Lee was a veteran politician. Born in 1732, ten months after George Washington and only five miles below the general’s birthplace, Lee had been raised at Stratford Hall, an eighteen-room mansion situated about forty miles above the mouth of the Potomac River. One of six children of Thomas Lee, who held numerous public offices and, for a time, was the acting governor of Virginia, young Richard Henry had been sent to a private academy in England for his formal education. He lived and studied in the mother country for seven years before returning home at age eighteen. During the next six years, while he lived with his parents, Lee read widely and served as a justice of the peace. He married while in his midtwenties, after which he leased five hundred acres three miles downriver from Stratford Hall and built his own oversize mansion, Chantilly, a three-and-a-half story, ten-room frame dwelling that one visitor described as large, though not elegant. It was a working plantation. During most of Lee’s life, some fifty to sixty slaves lived and toiled at Chantilly, raising tobacco and grains. Lee lived there for the remainder of his life, fathering twelve children, nine of whom survived to adulthood and two of whom would serve in the Continental Congress.
In 1758, in the midst of the French and Indian War, Lee was first elected to the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s assembly. Newcomers customarily rose slowly in the Burgesses, but Lee’s ascent was uncharacteristically slow. His progress may have been hampered because he was not a lawyer, though it more likely was due to his transparent ambition, which put off many of his colleagues. Behind his back, some referred to him as “Bob Booty” for his habit of seeking every available lucrative office. Lee’s rise may also have been slowed by a yearlong absence from the Burgesses, forced on him while he recuperated from a hunting accident that cost him four fingers on his left hand. Whatever the cause, after eight years Lee still had not achieved a leadership position, ordinarily a telltale sign that a kingpin role was not to be.
However, the colonial protest against Great Britain changed Lee’s fortunes. At first, he had been indifferent when Parliament in 1765 passed the Stamp Act, the first time it had ever attempted to levy a direct tax on the American colonists. He had even solicited appointment as a stamp agent—a tax collector. But when he saw Patrick Henry’s spectacular leap to prominence as a result of his opposition to the Stamp Act, Lee opportunistically denounced parliamentary taxation as “pernicious to my Country.” Lee spoke openly, and often, against the Stamp Act. He unsparingly flayed Virginia’s stamp agent, accusing the man who obtained the same post that he had sought of having “endeavored to fasten chains of slavery on this my native country.” Lee additionally published a pamphlet condemning Parliament’s tax. By 1766 Lee had become not just a legislative leader; he and Henry were also widely seen as Virginia’s leading reformers.10
If the Stamp Act episode caused Lee to reconsider Anglo-American relations, the recurring frustrations that he experienced as a land speculator after 1765 stoked his burgeoning radicalism. He lost heavily when a land company in which he had invested was beaten out by London insiders in the battle to win legal title to a sprawling domain west of the Appalachians. He lost again in 1769 when the House of Burgesses’ appeal to the Crown to permit Virginia to annex a vast western tract—much of what today is western West Virginia and nearly all of Kentucky—ended in failure, with London turning a deaf ear to the Virginians. Beginning in the early 1770s, a series of decisions in London appeared to make it likely that the imperial authorities were bent on stripping Virginia of its land claims north of the Ohio River, a region in which Lee had also invested. Around this time Lee opened correspondence with those who were leading the protest against British imperial policies in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Vexed by London’s dismaying behavior, and its adverse impact on him and his province, Lee conspicuously displayed his disillusionment with those who ruled England. He hired an artist to paint an eight-foot-tall portrait of Lord Chatham, William Pitt, the leading foe of Britain’s ministry and hung the huge portrait in a central hall in Chantilly.11
By 1774, when Virginia elected delegates to the First Continental Congress, Lee had become a powerful figure within his province. In fact, he received the second-largest number of votes of the seven delegates that Virginia sent to Congress, outpacing both Washington and Henry.12 John Adams first met Lee, who was then forty-one years old, at that initial Congress. Adams privately assessed many of his congressional colleagues, describing some as handsome and others as odd-looking, and judging assorted delegates as bookish, talented, plain, unimpressive, lazy, transparently cunning, or “not very promising.” Adams was especially impressed by Lee, calling him “a masterly Man” who was earnest, thoughtful, prudent, and the equal of the best orators he had ever heard.13 Other Virginia deputies told Adams that Patrick Henry was a better public speaker than Lee, so good that his fellow burgesses called him Virginia’s “Demosthenes.” Lee, they said, was thought of as the colony’s “Cicero,” for like the ancient who had warned of the decay of the Roman republic, Lee had cautioned of the dangers America faced from the corruption that sullied England. But Virginia’s deputies also acknowledged that Lee was an effective and dramatic speaker. (He was known for wearing a black silk glove on the hand that had been disfigured in the hunting accident, a prop that he learned to use to his advantage as he made theatrical gestures while delivering speeches.)14
By 1776, Lee was seen by other congressmen as the most influential figure in his colony’s delegation. By then, too, he had become a quiet advocate for American independence. The oppressive doubts raised by London’s policies in the 1760s had by 1774 led Lee to believe that the colonists’ “most desirable connection” with Great Britain should be strictly commercial. When war broke out in 1775, he openly questioned the desirability of reconciliation but did not publicly advocate separation from the mother country. A year later, in the spring of 1776, Lee asserted that Great Britain had severed its ties with the colonies when it boycotted American trade as a war measure. In early June, five days before he took the floor to introduce the resolution calling on Congress to break all ties with the mother country, Lee told acquaintances that American independence was not a matter of choice, but of necessity. Whatever he had felt about independence previously, Lee had come to
think that a formal declaration of independence was imperative for gaining victory in what now seemed likely to be a long and profoundly difficult war. America, Lee had concluded, could not win the war without foreign help, and it could not secure adequate foreign assistance unless it offered Britain’s foes in Europe some enticement to enter the war. Only American independence, which would drastically weaken Great Britain, might bring European powers into the war on the side of the colonies.15 Lee and the other members of Virginia’s congressional delegation felt that Congress could wait no longer to proclaim American independence. Recognized by Hancock, Lee took the floor on June 7 and read his motion in resounding tones:
Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and Independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.16
Since the outbreak of hostilities, the colonists’ aim in fighting had been reconciliation with Great Britain on terms set by the Continental Congress. Lee was proposing a dramatically new war aim. His resolution urged that henceforth Americans wage this war to set themselves free of Great Britain and to establish a new and independent American nation.
During the past two years Congress had taken many momentous steps, but Lee’s motion brought this body face-to-face with the greatest—and most dangerous—decision of all.
CHAPTER 2
“A SPIRIT OF RIOT AND REBELLION”
LORD NORTH, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, AND THE AMERICAN CRISIS
FREDERICK NORTH, Lord North, was into his fifth year as prime minister during the cool, damp London spring of 1774, a time when war or peace between Great Britain and its American colonies hung in the balance.
In 1770 the king, George III, had turned to Lord North, a political veteran with a background in finance, to form a government. North had entered Parliament in 1755, four years following his graduation from Oxford. After four more years he was brought into the Duke of Newcastle’s cabinet as the Lord High Treasurer, a post he held for half a dozen years through several ministries. In 1767 the Duke of Grafton made North the chancellor of the exchequer, the official in charge of financial matters and the ministry’s spokesman in the House of Commons, a position for which he was tailor-made, as he had few peers as a parliamentary debater. North still held that post three years later, when the government collapsed and the monarch asked him to head a new ministry. Despite his long service, North was only thirty-five years old when he became the “first minister”—he disliked the title “prime minister”—and moved into the cramped and as yet unnumbered residence on Downing Street that for a generation had been available for the head of the ministry.
North was pleasant, witty, charming, industrious, efficient, and bright. Sophisticated though never pompous, he had a knack for getting on with others, and his performance as chief financial minister had earned nearly universal praise. His appointment to head the ministry was widely applauded. Robert Walpole, the acid-tongued son of the former prime minister, thought North was “more able, more active, more assiduous, more resolute, and more fitted to deal with mankind” than any other possible choice.
Even so, North had readily apparent limitations. He had neither leadership nor executive experience. While good at resolving small, isolated problems, North had difficulty understanding and grappling with larger, more complicated quandaries. When dealing with complexities, moreover, he often turned indecisive and was prone to vacillation. His weaknesses were exacerbated by frequent bouts of poor health and episodic periods of depression—what one member of his cabinet called “his distressing Fits”—that rendered him nearly inert for days on end. North was also utterly lacking in those qualities usually present in great leaders. He possessed not a single ounce of charisma, and lacking gravitas, he was anything but an intimidating figure. He was of average height, obese, awkward, disheveled in dress, and given to slurred speech. Contemporaries limned him as “blubbery” and a “heavy booby-looking” sort. One described him as having a fair complexion, light-colored hair, bushy eyebrows, and lackluster gray eyes. Another observer mentioned that his “large prominent eyes rolled to no purpose (for he was utterly short-sighted),” adding that with his “wide mouth, thick lips, and inflated visage,” North “gave the appearance of a blind trumpeter.” No one understood his deficiencies better than North himself, and when approached about forming a government, he had sought to persuade the king that he was unsuited for heading the cabinet. George III thought otherwise, and North, who was never able to stand up to the monarch, acquiesced, though on three occasions during his first three years as prime minister he offered his resignation. The king would have none of it.1
North had come to power convinced that earlier governments had mishandled the American problem. With better judgment, he said, they “might at first have … easily ended” the rebellion when the issue was no more than resistance to taxation. But with time the insurgents had grown bolder and more radical, and better organized, leaving him to face a crisis that was “now grown serious.” From the moment he assumed power, North believed the colonies and mother country had reached a deadly impasse. They now were contending “for no less than sovereignty on one side, and independence on the other.” He never wavered from that point of view. By the spring of 1774 the issue was “whether we have or have not any authority in that country.”2
With time and experience North’s self-assurance had grown. “I do not find my spirits flag” any longer, he confided to a friend in 1774. One reason for his confidence was that the king remained steadfastly supportive. George III bestowed honors on North and did good turns for his family and friends. The king also often wrote to North following his performance in a debate or an address to Parliament to say, “I thoroughly approve” or “very exactly my way of thinking.”3 But the prime minister was also more poised because he felt that he saw the American problem with clarity, and he believed that there was but one choice that could be made. “As to America,” he remarked in the spring of 1774,
Frederick Lord North by Nathaniel Dance. A veteran politician, North was asked to form a government in 1770. He remained the prime minister until near the end of the war. North privately doubted that Britain could easily crush the insurgency by military means. Engraving after portrait by Nathaniel Dance, ca. 1773–74. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
there is an unhappy necessity, but a great one. We must decide whether we will govern America or whether we will bid adieu to it, and give it that perfect liberty.… The dispute is now upon such ground, unless they see you are willing and able to maintain your authority, they will … totally throw it off. There is no man but must be conscious of the necessity to act with authority in that country in order to preserve the country as a subject country to Great Britain.4
For North in 1774, the “unhappy necessity” could not have been more apparent. He must take the steps necessary to hold America or it would declare its independence.
The road to American independence was long and twisted, and no one is certain where it began.
For more than a century before 1776, numerous English writers, and occasionally a royal official posted in the colonies, had reflected on the likelihood of the American colonies becoming independent. Some had warned that it was inevitable. Pointing to examples in antiquity when Greek and Roman colonies had thrown off their imperial yokes, many essayists predicted that sooner or later Britain’s colonies in America would to do the same. Others were influenced by the cyclical theory of history, quite popular at the time. According to this theory, nations went through the same sequences, or cycles, as humans, beginning as children, growing into young and vigorous adults, passing into a less robust but more enlightened middle age, and finally falling into senescence and decline. The devotees of the cyclical theory cautioned that when the American provinces reached adulthood, the colonists would seek independence. Other writers shunned fancy theories and s
aid simply that the colonists would seek to go on their own when they were convinced that they had become economically self-sufficient.
Still others warned that the descendants of the Puritans, radical Protestants who had migrated to New England in the seventeenth century to escape the Church of England, would not rest until they were entirely free of Great Britain. New England Yankees, it was said, were merely waiting for the right moment to act. Some writers saw the spectacular population growth in the colonies as a threat. They predicted a revolt for American independence when the colonists outnumbered the inhabitants of the parent state.
Not everyone who ruminated on the matter thought independence was probable. Economists and spokesmen for the mercantile sector often ridiculed those who prophesied American independence. They stressed the commercial benefits that the colonists derived from being part of the empire and insisted that proper trade policies would choke off separatist inclinations.
Many English and Europeans crossed the Atlantic to visit North America during the eighteenth century, and several wrote of America’s flora and fauna and of the living conditions and cultural practices in the far corners of the colonies. Many could not resist the temptation to ask the colonists whether they believed America would someday break away from the mother country. The colonists invariably answered that independence was inevitable, although all said the break lay in the distant future, a generation or two removed, possibly even a century down the road.
