Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  Jefferson’s last indictments were also open to debate, although it was undeniable that the king’s appointees had “excited domestic insurrection amongst us.” As Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunsmore had offered freedom to all slaves who would fight for Britain. And the king’s agents were recruiting Indians—Jefferson called them “merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” But George Washington and John Adams, along with other patriots, wanted to win the Indians to America’s cause.

  Since his declaration had begun by proclaiming all men equal, Jefferson opened himself to charges of hypocrisy by raising the question of slavery. Now his last accusation against the king was also the strangest: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” He contrasted King George’s professed Christianity with his protection of a market where men could be bought and sold.

  Jefferson himself was wholly the product of a slave society, and until he was nine years old blacks around him outnumbered whites by at least ten to one. As he drafted his statement, one third of Virginia’s population of 400,000 were slaves. His father’s will had bequeathed slaves to him, and when his wife’s father died, some eighteen months after the wedding, Jefferson had inherited another 135 blacks. Included in that number was Elizabeth Hemings, whose mother had been African and whose father an English sea captain passing through Williamsburg. Jefferson’s father-in-law had taken Elizabeth as his mistress after his wife died, and she bore him six children, all of them light-skinned. Virginians called them “bright mulattos.” One of Martha Jefferson’s unacknowledged half sisters was a girl called Sally, who promised to be as beautiful as her mother.

  Jefferson’s first legislation when he entered the Burgesses had been aimed at making it easier to free individual slaves. A slaveowner in North Carolina and Georgia could simply release a slave. Virginia law required that a slave be set free only for “meritorious service.” Jefferson asked a relative, Richard Bland, to introduce a motion to give Virginians an unrestricted right to release their slaves, and Jefferson seconded the motion. But outrage swept through the House, Bland was denounced as an enemy of his county, and the bill was defeated.

  Over the years, Jefferson had gone on deploring slavery and profiting from his slaves. He did not permit them to be whipped. But he advertised for a runaway he considered drunken and insolent and, after he got him back, sold him for a hundred pounds. Six years before he began drafting this declaration, Jefferson had argued as a lawyer for the freedom of a slave who claimed to have a white grandmother. In Virginia, with its gradations among mulattos, color counted less than the status of the mother. If she was free, her children were also free. Jefferson had argued then that under the law of nature all men were born free and that everyone came into the world with a right to his own person. The judge had interrupted his argument and held for the slave’s owner.

  His years of conflict now broke out across the page as Jefferson tried to blame Britain’s king for what he considered an infamous practice among Americans. George III had “prostituted” his authority to keep alive the “execrable commerce” of slavery. Now the king was compounding this “assemblage of horrors” by inciting America’s slaves “to purchase that liberty of which he deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of the people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

  Nothing had weighed heavier on Jefferson’s conscience than being an accessory to the slave trade, and he hoped that the Congress would endorse his view of slavery. When John Adams read the draft, he objected privately to calling George III a tyrant, but he didn’t protest because he assumed that the Congress would modify the phrase. Adams considered Jefferson’s denunciations of slavery among the best parts of the declaration. Benjamin Franklin also read the draft before it went to the Congress and made only slight changes. Thomas Jefferson then wrote out a fair copy, and it was laid before the Congress on June 28, 1776.

  —

  On the first of July, with Jefferson’s statement ready, delegates again took up Richard Henry Lee’s resolution that the American states declare themselves independent.

  Members from each faction rose and repeated their familiar positions. Some had labored long over their imagery. A Scottish preacher, Dr. John Witherspoon of New Jersey, said that the country was not only ripe for independence but in danger of becoming rotten for lack of it. John Dickinson had prepared one last protest. He argued that independence should be held up until the states were confederated, until the boundaries of the new nation had been fixed, until a pact could be reached with France. When he finished, John Adams waited for someone less partisan and less personally repugnant to Dickinson to answer him. When no one did, Adams rose once more.

  He started humbly. For once in his life, Adams said, he wished he were as eloquent as the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, because he was sure that none of them had ever faced a question of more importance to his country and to the world. Speaking without notes, Adams went through his usual arguments. Then new delegates arrived and asked to hear what they had missed. Adams was urged to begin over. He protested that he felt like an actor or a gladiator brought out to entertain an audience, but he reviewed his position still another time.

  At last even the latecomers were satisfied. With the Congress sitting as the committee of the whole, a vote was called. Nine of the thirteen colonies endorsed independence, but with the understanding that the final vote should come on the next day, the second of July. Before the session adjourned, however, a dispatch from General Washington arrived, which reported that the British seemed prepared to attack the American positions in New York. That alarm swayed the voters John Adams had not reached. The next day, South Carolina swung behind the resolution, along with Delaware’s delegates. John Dickinson and an ally stayed away from the hall so that Pennsylvania could also vote for independence. New York’s delegation had not received authority to vote, but, with one exception, her delegates favored Lee’s resolution.

  On July 2, 1776, with no dissenting votes, the Congress at Philadelphia voted that the American colonies were henceforth free and independent states.

  John Adams had never hesitated to remind his colleagues that their choice was momentous, perhaps the greatest decision that had ever faced mankind. The next evening he wrote home in triumph to Abigail Adams that the second day of July 1776 would “be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.” Adams knew how the day should be marked: “It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

  —

  Once again, John Adams was a little ahead of his countrymen. There was still Thomas Jefferson’s declaration to approve. For three days, even before Lee’s resolution was adopted, Jefferson had been mortified as delegates from South Carolina and Georgia tried to expunge his lines about slavery and leave that charge against the king bland and color blind—“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” The Southern colonies were joined by Northern delegates, and Jefferson observed that although Northerners might not have many slaves, their merchants had profited from shipping them.

  The Congress struck down another paragraph that held great sentiment for Jefferson. He had wanted to express something of the loss Americans felt as they turned their faces away from their homeland. Because their brethren in Britain, Jefferson had written, were indifferent to the agonies the Americans were suffering, “we must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we
hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, and in peace friends.” The Congress deleted the “love,” retained the threat and went on to cut out the rest of Jefferson’s wistful farewell:

  “We might have been a free and a great people together; but a communication of grandeur and of freedom it seems is below their dignity. Be it so, since they will have it: The road to glory and happiness is open to us too; we will climb it in a separate state and acquiesce in the necessity which pronounces our everlasting Adieu!” Jefferson may have found the anguish of that ending too naked—or too Gallic—for in his final draft he had changed it to “our eternal separation.”

  Each cut in his prose was a mutilation for Jefferson. Sitting nearby, Benjamin Franklin observed his distress. Franklin’s nature was at least as full-blooded as Jefferson’s, but he was more than twice Jefferson’s age. Over the years, he had imposed prudence and patience on himself and commended those virtues to readers of his popular Poor Richard’s Almanack. Now he offered what consolation he could. He told Jefferson that he made it a rule not to draft any paper that had to be reviewed by a public body. He had learned his lesson from this incident:

  When Franklin was a journeyman printer, one of his companions was an aspiring hatter who had served his apprenticeship and was about to open his own shop. He wanted a splendid sign for it with a proper inscription, and he wrote out: “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money.” Below that he wanted a drawing of a hat. Before he had his sign painted, Thompson took his proposal to his friends for their suggestions.

  The first man pointed out the redundancy of the word “Hatter,” since it would be followed by the words “makes hats.” Thompson struck it out.

  Another friend said the word “makes” could be omitted since his customers wouldn’t care who actually made the hats; if they were any good, they would buy them. Thompson took that out, too.

  A third friend said that since it was not customary to sell on credit, the words “for ready money” were useless. By now the proposed sign read, “John Thompson sells hats.”

  “Sells hats?” said his next friend. “Nobody will expect you to give them away. What is the use of that word?” Thompson struck it out, and then he took out the “hats,” since there was already a hat painted on the board. So his inscription ended up “John Thompson,” with the drawing of a hat beneath it.

  Franklin may have invented the story and very likely wasn’t telling it for the first time, but Jefferson remembered for the rest of his life the genial attempt to ease his irritation.

  When members of the Congress came to Jefferson’s stirring conclusion, a majority thought it should include one last appeal to the power even greater than George III. Growing up among the abuses of the official church of Virginia had bred in Jefferson a hostility to state religions, and any cant came hard to him. But some of the men in the Congress were devout, and some were politicians who knew that a document intended as propaganda would be stronger with an allusion to God, and they added one. They did not, however, meddle with Jefferson’s last oath, more solemn than anything they might devise:

  “And for support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

  On July 4, 1776, independence was declared in language worthy of it.

  —

  That same day, across the ocean, Thomas Hutchinson, former governor of Massachusetts, was receiving a great honor. The previous April his son and his family and the Peter Olivers had arrived safely at Falmouth after General Howe’s surrender of Boston to George Washington. The Hutchinson family was reunited—twenty-five people crowded into rooms on St. James’s Street. On the fourth of July, Oxford University further eased the pain of exile by awarding Hutchinson and former Chief Justice Oliver honorary doctorates of civil laws; Francis Bernard had received the same honor four years earlier. Despite Hutchinson’s volumes of history, the distinction was clearly political, not academic. Oxford’s chancellor was Lord North.

  —

  The Continental Congress ordered a handsome copy of Jefferson’s words prepared for the delegates to sign. While it was being lettered, the Declaration was read in the yard of Philadelphia’s State House on July 8 to widespread cheering. Jefferson sent copies that same day to Richard Henry Lee, who had gone back to Virginia. One was the draft he had written, and the second was the version Congress had approved. Jefferson asked Lee to judge whether the Declaration was better or worse for the changes. Samuel Adams had been exhausted by the session, but he was gratified by the public response to independence. “The people seem to recognize this resolution,” he wrote, “as though it were a decree promulgated from heaven.” When New York formally adopted the Declaration on July 9, the state celebrated by releasing its debtors from prison. In Baltimore, Americans burned George III in effigy. In Savannah, they gave him an official burial. Virginia ruled that a sentence be deleted from all morning and evening church services—“O Lord, save the king and mercifully hear us when we call upon Thee.”

  Since proceedings of the Congress remained confidential, the names of the men signing the Declaration were withheld, and only Jefferson’s fellow delegates knew he had written it. Entries in his journal for July 4 were sparse and uninformative. He noted that the day’s temperature had gone from 68 degrees at 6 A.M. to a high of 76. He also recorded that he had bought seven pairs of women’s gloves to take home.

  But legends were already beginning to gather around the signing. One story was that John Hancock signed his name in a bold hand, rose from his chair and exclaimed, “There! John Bull can read my name without spectacles and may now double his reward of five hundred pounds for my head.” Another account had Hancock turning to Charles Carroll of Maryland, the one delegate whose fortune dwarfed his own, and asking whether he would sign. “Most willingly,” said Carroll, taking up the pen. Nearby somebody remarked, “There goes a few millions!”

  Still another anecdote was accurate at least in conveying Franklin’s wit. Hancock had cautioned the other delegates, “We must be unanimous. There must be no pulling different ways. We must all hang together.”

  To which Dr. Franklin replied, “Yes, we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

  —

  On Saturday, August 10, 1776, the Evening Post in London scooped its competitors with the news of America’s defiance. The following Monday, the Morning Post announced that the vote had been carried by only a small majority and had set off widespread desertions within the patriot camp. The following week, with a copy of the Declaration to work from, a contributor to the newspaper composed what the editor labeled “A reply to the declaration of the representatives of the Disunited States in American Congress assembled.” The parody turned Jefferson’s language on its head:

  “When in the course of human events, pride, hypocrisy, dishonesty and ingratitude stimulate a subordinate community to shake off the duty and allegiances which in honor and in necessity they owe the superiority from whence they derive their existence; a fear of universal reprobation renders it necessary that they should declare causes to the world—no matter how ambiguous and falacious.

  “It is a self-evident truth that all men, tho created equal, are not intended to remain so. That, without a resignation of part of our natural liberty, we should continue in a state of ignoble barbarism, unacquainted with that pure happiness, which flows from order.”

  Other news accounts declined to reprint the specific charges against George III. The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser broke off the text of the Declaration to say, “Here they enumerated their several grievances, the substance of which have repeatedly appeared in all the public prints.” The Morning Post’s satirist printed each charge but twisted it to his own loyalist slant—for example, “He has invariably treated the applications of insolent, factitious and weak men with a dignified contempt.”

  Not every newspaper wa
s in the pay of the crown. The Public Advertiser wrote that the Declaration proved that “the despised Americans are manifestly not those cowards and poltroons which our over-hasty, ill-judging, wrong-headed Administration styled them.” For the most part, though, reaction to the Declaration fell into two categories: editorial reassurances that the other European powers would not unite with the rebels against England, and attempts to demonstrate the patent absurdity of a paean to the equality of man from a continent where four hundred thousand black people, some seventeen percent of the population, were bound in slavery.

  One London paper described a reading of the Declaration in Charleston, South Carolina, on an extremely hot July day. As a clergyman rose to speak, a black slave opened an umbrella and held it over his master’s head. With his other hand the slave fanned the sweating patriot as he extolled the Declaration of Independence.

  Lord Howe and the British Fleet entering the Narrows between Long Island and Staten Island

  THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

  Long Island

  1776

  AT THE AGE of fifty-four, Samuel Adams was working as hard as any delegate in Philadelphia. Men meeting him for the first time found that the perpetual tremor in his hands and the quaver in his voice gave his words a touching gravity, but the exertion was telling on him. Thomas Jefferson, more than two decades younger, watched him admiringly, but Adams made no efforts to recruit him as a protégé. Jefferson reflected a new spirit among the delegates, an indication that past strategies—caucuses, denunciations, even intimidation—might not be effective for the new nation. Pennsylvania had begun to draft a new state constitution, and conservatives worried that its terms wouldn’t allow enough protection for property and the state would succumb to a demagogue. Some Philadelphians blamed Samuel Adams for that democratic trend. They were sure he was meddling behind the scenes, and as their resentment rose, hints were dropped about the usefulness of an assassination.