Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence
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Despite his well-earned reputation as a flaming radical, Adams now showed his true colors as that rarest of beasts, a conservative revolutionary. While completely committed to secession from the British Empire, he thought there had to be a conspicuous consensus within the American citizenry for the revolution to succeed. And popular opinion needed to “ripen on the vine” before that consensus became convincingly clear. Moreover, the transition from British colonies to American states must occur seamlessly rather than traumatically. “I have ever Thought it the most difficult and dangerous Part of the Business,” he warned, “to contrive some Method for the colonies to glide insensibly from under the old Government, into a peaceable and contented Submission to new ones.” He wanted to orchestrate, if you will, an evolutionary revolution, to control the explosion. His voracious reading of history was not much help, since it showed that no one else who had tried to do this had ever succeeded.24
ADAMS SAW HIMSELF as the responsible revolutionary who would defy that historical pattern. In the current context, that meant establishing a new political framework for the American colonies before independence was officially declared. Abigail had already anticipated the problem with a series of pointed questions: “If we separate from Great Britain, what code of laws will be established? How shall we be governed so as to retain our liberties? Can any government be free which is not administered by general laws? Who shall frame these laws? Who will give them force and energy?” For unless new political institutions were already in place, Americans ran the risk of escaping the tyranny of the British Empire for a homegrown version of anarchy.25
Throughout the spring of 1776, as he allowed the idea of independence to “ripen,” Adams focused his fullest energies on devising the framework of an American government after independence. A proper sequence of events that he saw in his mind’s eye would ensure a seamless transition from British rule to a stable American republic. “The colonies should all assume the Powers of Government in all its Branches first”; then, after they had revised their own constitutions along republican lines, “they should confederate with each other, and define the Powers of Congress next.” Only after each of these steps had been completed should a public declaration of independence be made. Events were about to make a mockery of this orderly scheme, but it accurately reflected Adams’s deep desire to control the explosive energies released by the repudiation of British authority. Before they leaped, the colonies needed to know where they would land.26
The first task, then, was for each colony to revise its own government in accord with republican principles. Because he was regarded as one of the leading constitutional thinkers in the congress, Adams was asked by delegates from three colonies—North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—to provide his wisdom. Adams drafted three memoranda for that purpose in late March and early April. He then decided to write a fourth draft for publication in order to make his advice available to all the colonies. Titled Thoughts on Government, it appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet on April 22.27
Though Adams later dismissed Thoughts as “a mere sketch” that was “done in haste,” it represented his attempt to propose a thoroughly republicanized version of the English “mixed Constitution.” Each state government should be comprised of three parts, on the English model of executive, bicameral legislature, and judiciary. But instead of a hereditary monarch, it would have an elected governor, and instead of a hereditary House of Lords, it would have an elected upper house or senate—a clear statement that political power flowed upward from its primal source in “the people” rather than downward from the king.
He was especially eager to oppose Thomas Paine’s prescription in Common Sense for a huge single-house legislature that purportedly embodied the will of “the people” in its purest form. For Adams, “the people” was a more complicated, multivoiced, hydra-headed thing that had to be enclosed within different chambers. He regarded Paine’s belief in a harmonious and homogeneous popular collective just as delusional as the belief in a divinely inspired monarch. Lurking within the Adams formulation was an early version of two overlapping principles—checks and balances and separation of powers—that would become core features of the federal Constitution eleven years later.28
There were many possible models for a republic, Adams was quick to observe, and the version he proposed in Thoughts ought not to be regarded as cast in stone. Different colonies had different histories and different traditions. Each ought to take from Thoughts what best fit its own political experience, whenever possible producing a republicanized adaptation of the old constitution in order to minimize the sense of change and maximize continuity.
A formal resolution by the congress to implement the Adams proposal for new state constitutions to replace the colonial constitutions sanctioned under the authority of the British Crown was approved on May 12. Adams described it as “the most important resolution that was ever taken in America.” Three days later he added a preface that, in both form and content, made the resolution a giant step toward independence.29
The preface began with a list of grievances against the king, emphasizing his rejection of the colonists’ petitions for redress of grievances, then his decision to assemble “the whole force of that kingdom, aided by foreign mercenaries, to be exerted for the destruction of the good People of these Colonies.” (This was the first time that an official document of the congress had implicated the king as an accomplice in the conflict.) It then followed that all British laws “and every kind of authority under the said crown should be totally suppressed,” and that the people of the United Colonies should fill the void with governments of their own making, “exerted under the authority of the people of the colonies for the preservation of internal peace, virtue and good order; as well as for the defence of their lives, liberties, and properties against the hostile invasions and cruel depredations of their enemies.”30
Adams immediately sensed that something truly historic had just happened. Two days later, on May 17, he wrote Abigail, brimming over with pride that he had just assured himself a page in the history books:
Is it not a saying of Moses, “Who am I, that I should go in and out before this great People?” When I consider the great events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may have been instrumental in touching some Springs, and turning some small Wheels, which have had and will have such Effects, I feel an Awe upon my Mind which is not easily described.31
Over the ensuing years, Adams liked to claim that the resolution of May 15 was the real declaration of independence, and that Jefferson’s more famous declaration six weeks later was a merely ceremonial afterthought. In effect, the lightning had already struck in May, and the July document was only a thunderous epilogue. This argument over authorship, over who deserved the credit for carrying the colonies “across the Rubicon,” distorts the complicated context of the political situation that existed in the late spring of 1776. Adams was certainly correct that the resolution of May 15 was a major step toward independence, and the fierce debate in the Continental Congress preceding the vote makes it clear that the delegates understood that, with passage of this resolution, there would be no turning back. Negative votes by the delegates from New York and Pennsylvania also showed that independence remained controversial within the congress.
If only in retrospect, the political crisis had reached the point of no return. For ten years (1765–75) the American colonists had engaged in a constitutional duel over the powers of Parliament, initially rejecting its authority to tax them, eventually opposing its authority to legislate for them at all. The outbreak of hostilities in the spring of 1775 had altered the political chemistry of the constitutional debate, leaving the connection with the king the last remaining link to the British Empire. Now George III’s hostile and aggressive actions severed that last link, effectively ending any realistic prospect of a negotiated political settlement. Both the resolution of May and the more famous declaration of July, then,
were rhetorical responses to a nonnegotiable political crisis that had already moved from the diplomatic desks of London and Philadelphia to the battlefield, which turned out to be New York. In April, Washington had moved the Continental Army to that location on the presumption, correct as it turned out, that the British invasion would happen there. Military events were dictating political decisions.32
That said, the resolution of May 15 was distinctive, and different from Jefferson’s later manifesto, in one significant sense. For it was not just a rejection of British authority but also an assertion of the need to create state governments to replace discredited British rule. In that sense, it was an invitation to declare what an independent American republic, or confederation of republics, should look like. Adams was reasonably confident that the former colonies would unite behind the call to independence and draft new state constitutions along the lines he had suggested. Beyond that, however, he was worried that he had lifted the lid of Pandora’s box and that the most ardent advocates of independence would attempt to implement a truly revolutionary agenda. He could only hold his breath and wait, but he had reason to fear that the war for independence would actually become the American Revolution.33
THAT FEAR WAS well-founded, indeed rooted in the very logic of the constitutional arguments that Adams and his fellow patriots had been hurling at Parliament for more than a decade. For at its core, the colonists’ argument insisted that all political power was arbitrary and illegitimate unless it enjoyed the consent of the governed. And once consent was established as the nonnegotiable essence of any republic worthy of the name, lights began to go on up and down the line, illuminating several dark corners of American society inhabited by groups that could claim, with considerable plausibility, that they were being denied their rights without their consent.
Slavery was the most blatant contradiction of everything the budding American Revolution claimed to stand for. It required herculean feats of denial not to notice that 20 percent of the American population, about 500,000 souls, were African Americans, and that fully 90 percent of them were slaves, the vast majority residing south of the Potomac. Adams received several requests to place this glaring anomaly on the agenda of the Continental Congress from petitioners who claimed that failure to address this issue would expose the entire case against British tyranny as fraudulent and hypocritical.
An anonymous petitioner from Virginia put the problem most succinctly: “Is it not incompatible with the glorious Struggle America is making for her own Liberty, to hold in absolute Slavery a Number of Wretches, who will be urged … to become the most inveterate Enemies of their present Masters?” Adams received perhaps the most poignant plea from a barely literate Pennsylvanian who styled himself “Humanity”: “What has the negros the afracons don to us that we shud tak them from thar own land and mak them sarve us to the da of thar death …? God forbit that it shud be so anay longer.”34
An even larger disenfranchised group, the entire female population, could neither vote nor own property if they were married. And the chief petitioner for women’s rights was none other than the ever saucy Abigail Adams. On March 31, 1776, in the midst of a newsy letter that touched on several different topics—the effects of the smallpox epidemic in Boston, the crops she intended to plant in their garden—Abigail unburdened herself in what became one of the most famous “by the ways” in American letters:
And, by the way, in the New Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.… Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no Voice, or Representation.35
This was a petition that Adams could not afford to ignore. He responded in a jocular tone, suggesting that Abigail’s proposal was intended as a playful piece of mischief. “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems,” he joked, “which would completely subject Us to the Despotism of the Petticoat.” Several volleys went back and forth between Braintree and Philadelphia, in which Abigail acknowledged that she was being playful but was also deadly serious in her insistence that the very arguments her husband was deploying against the arbitrary power of Parliament had profound implications for the status of women in an independent American republic. “But you must remember,” she concluded in her final volley, “that arbitrary Power is like most things that are very hard … and notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have in our Power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our Masters, and without violence, throw your natural and legal authority at your feet.”36
Just two weeks before Abigail launched her broadside on behalf of women’s rights, an editorial appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post in which yet another disenfranchised group, the working-class artisans and mechanics of Philadelphia, describing themselves as “men who wear leather aprons,” protested the long-standing property requirement to vote: “Do not mechanics and farmers constitute ninety-nine out of a hundred people of America? If these, by their occupations are to be excluded from having any share in the choice of their rulers or forms of government, would it not be best to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the British Parliament?”37
For the past two years, a large number of working-class residents of Philadelphia had become actively involved in the various revolutionary organizations and committees that seized control of the city government. Not so incidentally, the arrival of Thomas Paine gave this group an eloquent new voice, which took as its clarion call the obvious injustice of the property requirement to vote. For them, citizenship was not a privilege to be enjoyed only by those with landed wealth, but a right of every adult male, vested in his person rather than in his property.
In April 1776 Adams received a letter from James Sullivan, a prominent New Hampshire patriot, who was having similar thoughts. Sullivan claimed to be surprised at the conclusion he had reached, but the logic of the American argument against British imperialism carried him to a place that only a few years earlier he would have considered alien territory: “Laws and Government are founded on the Consent of the People.… Why a man is supposed to consent to the acts of a Society of which in this respect he is an absolute Excommunicate, none but a lawyer well Labeled in the feudal Sistem can tell.”38
Already reeling from Abigail’s salvo on behalf of women, Adams could only caution Sullivan that his case for broadening the electorate would have catastrophic consequences. “There will be no end to it,” Adams warned, “and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State.” Sullivan could only reply that, yes, it was a strange new world we were creating, but it followed naturally and inevitably from the republican principles that Americans claimed to stand for.39
Hindsight allows us to see that in the space of a very few months, the entire liberal agenda for the next century was inserted into the political conversation. It was, in effect, a preview of coming attractions. But for Adams, the most prominent presence in this superheated moment, the all-important item on the current American agenda, was independence from Great Britain. And if that failed, all the other political goals became meaningless pipe dreams.
Obsessed as he was with controlling the pace of the movement for independence, Adams now feared that the debates about to occur in the separate colonies-cum-states as they drafted new constitutions would get sidetracked by a more far-reaching political agenda that would make consensus on the core question of independence impossible. The chief threat on this score was slavery, since once it entered the discussion, every state south of the Potomac would have second thoughts about independence. Adams believed that the debate about the kind of republic America wished to become must be postponed until after the war for independence had succeeded. Raising such controversial issues now was like stopping your racehorse a few yards from the finish line in order to
engage in a debate about the size of the winner’s purse.
But the very resolution of May 15 that made Adams so proud essentially required each of the thirteen colonies to conduct a debate on independence that could easily fall victim to different notions about the future character of an independent American republic. And there was really nothing that Adams could do about it. For in the end, an aspiring republic had only one way to resolve such weighty questions, and that was to surrender control to the people out there in all those towns, villages, and farms. This was not easy for Adams, who harbored no illusions about the preternatural wisdom of the common man. But he really had no choice. The British government had made a top-down decision in the monarchical way to smash the American rebellion with an overwhelming display of military power, currently poised to cross the Atlantic and deliver the decisive blow. The Continental Congress had made a bottom‑up decision in the republican way to conduct an open-ended referendum on American independence and what it meant. It was a much messier way of proceeding, but it was also true to the principles the colonists claimed to stand for.
And so, as summer approached, all the revolutionary ingredients, like pieces of a puzzle, were falling into place. George Washington had just moved the Continental Army down from Boston to New York, where the British task force was expected to strike. The largest fleet ever to cross the Atlantic was assembling in several British ports under the command of Admiral Richard Howe, older brother of William Howe, who himself was coming down from Halifax with the seven regiments that Abigail Adams had watched sail out of Boston Harbor three months earlier. The legislatures of all the colonies were gathering to revise their constitutions and register their opinions on independence.