The intolerable acts demonstrated to all the colonists that their rights as Englishmen—the initial basis of their claim to freedom from taxation without representation—was not a fortress, but a sand castle. In fact, just as Parliament had claimed in 1766 in the Declaratory Act, the entire structure of the colonial government could be abrogated and replaced with a military governor, their assemblies could meet only at the will of the British, and the assemblies themselves could be made to consist of London’s appointees. Their property—which to southerners included slaves—was now subject to the will of Britain, “without the cause being glossed over by taxation.”13 At this point, concern for protection of property and their systems of self-government merged the interests of northern and southern colonies.
Once again, Virginia formulated the colonial reaction. It sounded out the colonies on the need for a meeting of a general congress of the colonies. Following the British occupation of Boston, the Virginia committee of correspondence, on May 28, 1774, sent letters to the other colonial committees “requesting their sentiments on the appointment of deputies to meet annually in general congress.”14 Then the committee called for observing June 15 as a day of prayer in support of the people of Boston. Massachusetts responded to the May 28 letter from Virginia by calling for a meeting in Philadelphia on September 1.15 The other colonies agreed. Delegates were selected informally, except in two colonies where the legislature acted.16
The Virginia delegates to the congress were instructed to insist that colonial legislatures possessed “the sole right of directing their internal polity,” thus directly challenging both the repugnancy clauses in colonial charters and the Declaratory Act which claimed such power for Parliament.17 The foundation for this claim of independence was provided by Jefferson’s “summary view” that Parliament never had legislative power over the internal affairs of the colonies.18
The instructions explained that the colonies had from the first acquiesced in British legislation concerning them, because the legislation was useful and reasonable:
Wanting the protection of Britain, we have long acquiesced in their acts of navigation restrictive of our commerce, which we consider as an ample recompense for such protection; but as those acts derive their efficacy from that foundation alone, we have reason to expect they will be restrained, so as to produce the reasonable purposes of Britain, without being injurious to us.19
This language offered a compromise whereby Britain could keep its regulation of trade if it gave up its control over colonial internal affairs and left the judgment of reasonableness to the colonies.
Thus the Virginians arrived in Philadelphia in September of 1774 with a fixed view that the outcome of the congress was to include the protection of slavery in each colony as an aspect of colonial control over “internal policies.” They had armed their delegates with the ammunition to assure that this outcome would be reached. The Virginia delegates could effectively veto any alternative proposals by maintaining that they were bound by the instructions and could agree to nothing less.
Because the British pressures in Boston required a collective response from the colonies, and because Virginia was the wealthiest of the colonies, these instructions were the requirements that Virginia demanded as the price of its participation in the Congress. This was the first time the Virginians would set the agenda and the intellectual structure of a national convention. As the next chapter will show, these instructions were the foundation for a decision by the Congress that virtually assured a war for independence between the colonies and Great Britain.
The events which unfolded after the call for colonial committees of correspondence demonstrate the intensity of the southern commitment to both independence and slavery. These developments evolved toward a joining of northern and southern interests around concepts of “liberty and property.” Because slavery was subsumed within the concept of property, the South did not need to make a public demand for colonial support of slavery.
Had the colonies based their claims only on the issue of Parliament’s power to tax, that issue could, and probably would, have been resolved along the lines of the two previous British efforts at taxation in the 1760s.20 The South made that impossible by its demand for internal freedom of action. In that sense, American liberty could be defined as the desire to protect black slavery.21
Chapter 5
* * *
John Adams Supports the South on Slavery
* * *
John and Samuel Adams, along with Robert Treat Paine and Thomas Cushing, were appointed Massachusetts delegates to the first Continental Congress in a closed meeting of the General Court. The doors were locked against the governor so he could not dismiss the court. He tried, but was too late.1 After the appointment, John Adams moved his family from Boston back to Braintree for safety.
On Wednesday, August 10, 1774, the Massachusetts delegates rode together in a coach from Boston toward Philadelphia. Their coach passed British troops who made no effort to stop them. Along the way, they were escorted by “anxious” and “expectant” local leaders. This was the first time either John or Samuel Adams had left Massachusetts for an extended period, but more importantly, it was proof of their role as the leading figures in the colony’s struggles with Britain.
While John had become a leading lawyer and spokesman for colonial rights, Samuel was the consummate agitator for independence, using his writing and verbal skills and taking advantage of every British misstep to encourage the people of Massachusetts to resent British interference of their rights. He did all this without crossing the line that would have resulted in a charge of treason or would have gotten too far ahead of public opinion.2 As long as they claimed their rights as Englishmen, a charge of treason was unlikely. The two Adams had become personal symbols of opposition to the British, especially since the British pressure on Boston during the summer of 1774.
John’s diary recorded the receptions, meetings, and a continuous parade as they left their home colony to meet leaders from other colonies. At each stop, they were met by local political figures and members of the committees of correspondence who provided advice, support, news, and gossip. When, on August 20, they arrived within fifteen miles of New York City, John was impressed, as first time visitors often are:
The streets of this town [Kingsbridge] are vastly more regular and elegant than those in Boston, and the houses are more grand as well as neat. They are almost all painted— brick buildings and all.3
On Monday, August 22, he encountered a large number of the New York delegation to Congress, who gave him some advice:
Mr. McDougal gave a caution to avoid every expression here, which looked like an allusion to the last appeal. He says there is a powerful party here, who are intimidated by fears of a civil war, and they have been induced to acquiesce by assurances that there was no danger, and that a peaceful cessation of commerce would effect relief.4
On Tuesday, August 23, after a day of visiting New York City and meeting many people, John Adams wrote in his diary:
With all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found. We have been treated with an assiduous respect. But I have not seen one real gentleman, one well-bred man since I came to town. At their entertainments there is no conversation that is agreeable. There is no modesty—no attention to one another. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you, again, and talk away.5
He reached Princeton on Saturday, August 27, examined the library and the planetarium, and drank a glass of wine with the president of the college, John Witherspoon, who would later sign the Declaration of Independence for New Jersey. He told Adams:
It is necessary that the congress should raise money and employ a number of writers in the newspapers in England, to explain to the public the American plea and remove the prejudices of the Britons.6
The eastern colonies through which they traveled were especially supportive. If the Briti
sh could destroy Boston’s commerce and strip her people of their political influence, they could devastate Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey as well. John Adams’s mission was to unify the colonies behind Massachusetts in its struggle with the British.
While Virginia had organized the committees of correspondence that created channels of communication between the colonies, Massachusetts had instigated the occasion—the Boston Tea Party—which made the British overreact and brought many people to the view that independence was a plausible solution to British arrogance. Adams and Jefferson, who represented two of the most powerful and politically significant colonies—Virginia and Massachusetts—had reached that same conclusion in the spring of 1773.
As Adams’s coach neared Philadelphia, the first hint of difficulties for their mission to Congress came from Dr. Benjamin Rush, who rode out five miles to meet them. Were it not for Benjamin Franklin, he would have been the most distinguished citizen of Philadelphia. A prolific writer and passionately antislavery, Benjamin Rush had studied medicine at Edinburgh. A man ahead of his time, he adopted modern medical techniques and taught that mentally ill people should be treated rather than locked up and that yellow fever was not an inevitable plague. Before it was known that mosquitoes carried malaria, he had recommended that the swamps around Philadelphia be drained, but his advice was not followed.7
Joining their coach, Rush explained to Adams that influential delegates in Pennsylvania believed that Adams intended to draw the colonies toward independence. Rush reported that a powerful group of delegates wanted to seek reconciliation with Britain. The group was headed by Joseph Galloway, a former speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly who had long been associated with Ben Franklin, but broke with him over the issue of independence.8
Rush warned Adams that if Massachusetts proposed bold measures that hinted at independence, Adams would be accused of seeking to drag all the colonies into war simply because of Massachusetts’s impetuous actions at the “tea party” and its aftermath.9 Those were the actions that had antagonized the British into taking drastic action against Massachusetts, such as closing the port of Boston, imposing a military governor, and reducing the influence of the elected legislature.
It was a bright, late-August afternoon when they were finally escorted down Broad Street in Philadelphia, “dirty, dusty, and fatigued.” Half a dozen delegates from the area took them to the city tavern on Second Street where they met other delegates, had an “elegant supper” and talked until 11 p.m.10 Philadelphia delighted Adams with its rectangular layout:
The regularity and elegance of this city are very striking. It is situated upon a neck of land, about two miles wide between the River Delaware and the River Schuilkill. The streets are all exactly straight and parallel to the river. Front Street is near the river, then 2 street, 3d, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th. The cross streets which intersect these are all equally wide, straight, and parallel to each other, and are named from forest and fruit trees; Pear Street, Apple Street, Walnut Street, Chestnut Street, &c.11
And the elegant style of living and eating impressed him as well. On September 22, he wrote:
Dined with M. Chew, chief justice of the province, with all the gentlemen from Virginia, Dr. Shippen, Mr. Tilghman, and many others. We were shewn into a grand entry and staircase, and into an elegant and most magnificent chamber, until dinner. About four o’clock we were called down to dinner. The furniture was all rich. Turttle, and every other thing—flummery, jellies, sweetmeats of twenty sorts, trifles, whip’d syllabubbs, floating islands...I drank Madeira at a great rate and found no inconvenience in it.12
Adams believed that twenty-two of the fifty-six members of the Congress were lawyers, and he enjoyed socializing and theorizing with them. On September 7 he wrote:
We had a large collection of lawyers, at table. Mr. Andrew Allen, the attorney general; a Mr. Morris, the prothonotory; Mr. Fisher; Mr. McKean; Mr. Rodney—besides these we had Mr. Reed, Govr. Hopkins, and Governor Ward.
We had much conversation upon the practice of law, in our different provinces, but at last we got swallowed up, in politicks, and the great question of parliamentary jurisdiction. Mr. Allen asks me, from whence do you derive our laws? How do you intitle yourselves to English priviledges? Is not Lord Mansfield on the side of power?13
At first he was also impressed with the intellect and wisdom of the delegates from the other colonies. But after some weeks, Adams grew restless at the seemingly endless arguments while Boston remained under occupation.
Adams worried as he arrived in the city after the warning from Rush and others. How would he be received by the delegates? Was he up to the task of representing Massachusetts, both intellectually and with good judgment? When he was appointed, he wrote to Abigail:
This will be an assembly of the wisest men upon the continent, who are Americans in principle, i.e., against the taxation of Americans by authority of Parliament.…I feel myself unequal to the business. A more extensive knowledge of the realm, the colonies, and of commerce, as well as of law and policy, is necessary, than I am a master of.14
As he considered Rush’s advice, Adams realized that his skills at legal reasoning and argument would have to be supplemented by caution and indirection.
After all, Rush’s warning was apt—John Adams was spokesman for the colony that had aggravated the British by the contest over taxes in the 1760s, the Boston Tea Party, and the struggle with Governor Hutchinson. If Massachusetts took the lead in organizing the challenge to Britain by seeking independence, other colonies might resent being asked to bail out Massachusetts from a mess of its own making.
Britain blamed Massachusetts, particularly the people of Boston, and especially the Adams cousins, for the disturbances in all the colonies. Adams was concerned that in Philadelphia, Massachusetts would appear to be pleading primarily for help in its own struggle against the mother country.
The delegates knew that Adams had bested Governor Hutchinson after he had lectured the Massachusetts assembly on the nature of the British Empire. Hutchinson had argued that there could be no intermediate position “between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies.” This belief that sovereignty was an “all or nothing” concept was central to the way Britain ruled the colonies—not by force, but by fostering the belief of the colonists that they were part of the empire.
The Massachusetts assembly, with John Adams’s advice, drew a different conclusion from Hutchinson’s premise. Since there was no original intention by the British to “reduce us to a state of vassalage, the conclusion is that it was their [original] sense that we were thus independent [of Parliament].”15 This jousting between a disliked governor and a restive House of Representatives was not far from an assertion of independence.
After only four days in Philadelphia, days filled with dinners and excursions as the delegates became familiar with one another, Adams identified a group of men who reminded him of Massachusetts governors Francis Bernard and Thomas Hutchinson, who had publicly “professed to be Friends of Liberty” until Hutchinson’s letters to British officials urging a reduction in colonial rights were discovered.16 Among them were Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania and James Duane of New York. They would pose the greatest challenge to the delegates who sought serious action against the British.
Adams sensed these difficulties when he began to mingle with the delegates. He wrote to his friend William Tudor in mid-September:
We have had numberless prejudices to remove here. We have been obliged to act with great delicacy and caution. We have been obliged to keep ourselves out of sight, and to feel pulses, and sound the depths—to insinuate our sentiments, designs, and desires by means of other persons, sometimes of one province and sometimes of another.17
Adams was not alone in his uncertainties about his new colleagues. All of them were “skitterish” during their first weeks together.18 For example, Joseph Galloway made a private report to New Jersey governor William Franklin, Be
njamin Franklin’s son, of a conversation he had with John Rutledge, leader of the South Carolina delegation. The report showed that Galloway and Rutledge withheld information from each other. Galloway did not think that Rutledge was among the supporters of the “Boston Commissioners” who wished for a non-importation agreement and a refusal to pay tea taxes. He explained that in his meeting with:
the elder Rutledge of South Carolina, whose sentiments and mine differ in no one particular so far as I explained myself—and I was reserved in no point save that of a representation in Parliament. He is a gentleman of an amiable character—has look’d into the arguments on both sides more fully than any I have met with, and seems to be aware of all the consequences which may attend rash and imprudent measures.19
Galloway did not tell Rutledge of his plan for a joint British-American Parliament and Rutledge concealed from Galloway that he was a staunch supporter of both slavery and independence.
In Philadelphia, each group took the measure of the men with whom they would share power if independence should ever come. They did this during the socializing that occupied most of their dinners taken after morning sessions, often elaborate affairs as Philadelphia hostesses showed the city’s cultivation. John Dickinson invited the delegates to his country estate. He was one of the richest Philadelphians, and was known for his “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” favoring the “no taxation without representation” principle. He had now joined in efforts to find a compromise with Britain.
In those early days, many delegates hesitated to express their views candidly. The Virginians may have brought the basis for revolution with them in their demand for independence from Parliament, but they, too, had to be cautious in how to present it. The threat that someone might make a charge of treason for seeking independence was never far from their minds.
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