American Rebels

by Nina Sankovitch

  * * *

  After the final British vessel left the harbor, John and Eben Warren, brothers to Dr. Joseph Warren, made the trek from the close streets of Boston to the slopes of Breed’s Hill. They were accompanied by their longtime compatriot, Paul Revere. Under a blue April sky and with cool breezes coming off the sea, the brothers and the silversmith walked amidst dozens of shallow graves, searching for their fallen brother and compatriot.

  It was a gruesome task but the men were determined; they sifted through remains, in grave after grave shared by a number of dead, until they found what they believed to be Joseph’s body. It was badly decomposed but identifiable through the scraps of a familiar waistcoat and the remains of a canvas smock on the body beside him; the brothers had been told Joseph was buried beside a farmer wearing just such a smock.

  Paul Revere knelt to the ground to examine the skull. He saw in the jaw, still firmly attached with gold wiring, the ivory dentures he’d crafted for Warren in the early 1770s, an upper left canine and a first premolar. He looked up and nodded to John and Eben: the corpse before them was their brother. The men wrapped Joseph Warren’s body in canvas sacking and carried him down the hill, back to Boston.

  A few days later Joseph Warren was buried in the Granary Burying Ground adjacent to the Boston Common, after a funeral service in King’s Chapel. Abigail Adams, having heard from those who were present, described the scene for her husband. “The Masons walking in procession from the State House, with the Military in uniforms and a large concourse of people attending … the Dead Body like that of Caesars before their Eyes.”43

  William Phillips was there in King’s Chapel. He had traveled from Norwich to attend the service in honor of his daughter Abigail and her love for Dr. Warren, who had kept her husband alive as long as he could; and in memory of his son-in-law. Like Joseph Warren, Josiah was a man taken too young, who gave his all for a nation yet to be born.

  In one of his last letters to his wife, Abigail, Josiah had written, “O my dear friend! my heart beats high in the cause of my country. Their safety, their honor, their all, is at stake! I see America placed in that great tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Oh, snatch the glorious opportunity!”44

  The time had come to take the opportunity. Time to make that new nation. All eyes turned to Philadelphia, and to the men in Congress.

  32

  Debating Separation

  The People grew more and more sensible

  of the Wrong that was done them…,

  more and more impatient…,

  and determined at all Hazards

  to rid themselves of it.

  —JOHN ADAMS

  Toward the end of February 1776, John Adams returned from an evening of caucusing with Sam Adams and Richard Henry Lee. They had met to discuss the working paper recently introduced into Congress by John Dickinson and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, William Hooper of North Carolina, and James Duane of New York. To Adams’ disgust, the paper laid out in no uncertain terms that while the colonies sought redress from England for wrongs committed against them, independence was in no way their goal.

  John knew that the time for reconciliation between colonies and the mother country was long past. There was no support for it in England; not from Parliament, nor from the Crown, nor from Lord North. Did John Dickinson really believe that the clock could be turned back, that all would be forgiven on both sides of the Atlantic and things would return to how they had been before the Stamp Act? Too much blood had spilled, and too many lives lost.

  Although the hour was late, John set himself to work, determined to stay strong against those waffling legislators who dared not demand independence. He began to write a list of all that he wanted achieved in Congress over the coming weeks. “Government to be assumed in every Colony.… Coin and Currencies to be regulated.… Forces to be raised and maintained,” and so the list went on, every measure a step toward the self-sufficiency and self-defense of the American colonies.

  And then he wrote, in a quick scribble, almost an afterthought, which he quickly followed with other measures, “Declaration of Independency.”1

  But it was no afterthought. A Declaration of Independence, the document itself, and everyone in Congress signed on to it—was the crucial cornerstone to every plan of action he had listed. Define the new nation by its goals. State the reasons for it, the need for it, and the God-willed and man-made beauty of it—and everything else would follow.

  He had just one more letter to write before his day was done. A letter to Abigail, laying out a recipe for saltpeter. It was important that all the colonists do their bit to increase the amount of gunpowder available to the army, and so he carefully wrote, “Earth dug up from under a Stable [so as to be full of horse urine and feces], put into a Tub.… Filled with Water. Stand 24 Hours. Then leaked off Slowly. Then boil’d for one Hour. Then run thro another Tub full of ashes.… Then put into a Kettle and boiled, until it grows yellow. Then drop it on a cold stone or cold Iron, and it will christallise for a Proof. Then set it by in Trays in cool Places.… And the Salt Petre is formed.”2

  John folded the letter up and added it to a pile he hoped to have go by messenger to Boston the next day. He rose from his chair and made his way to bed.

  * * *

  Abigail answered his request for saltpeter with a soft jibe—“I find as much as I can do to manufacture clothing for my family which would else be Naked”—and then she turned the tables, telling John that she had “seen a small Manuscript describing the proportions for the various sorts of powder, fit for cannon, small arms and pistols.” She offered, “If it would be of any Service your way I will get it transcribed and send it to you.”3

  John was very busy at Congress, but Abigail was very busy at home; if he supposed her to have time to make gunpowder, she supposed he might have the time to do the same.

  Abigail’s confidence and frustrations had grown side by side in the past few years: she was responsible for so much at home, with the finances and in management of the farm, and yet she was too often denied decision-making power in any of those realms. She sacrificed as much for her colony as her husband had, but she doubted that she would enjoy the same freedoms and liberties that he was expecting as the just rewards for his sacrifices.

  Turning again to her letter, she wrote to her husband that in creating new laws for a new country, he should “Remember the Ladies.… 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.”

  Thinking perhaps of her friend and cousin, Hannah Quincy Lincoln, Abigail gave an example of just how poorly women faired under the current legal system—“the vicious and the Lawless [are able] to use us with cruelty and indignity”—and suggested that the pursuit of happiness ought to be as protected for women as for men.4

  A few days later, Abigail wrote again, perhaps to massage her request a bit and give it more context: she wrote about her busy days, so “encumbered about many things and scarcely know which way to turn myself. I miss my partner, and find myself unequal to the cares … of our Husbandry and farming.”

  She ended the note referring to the intimacy that passed between them—“to wake the Soul by tender strokes of art … to Ruminate upon happiness we might enjoy.”5

  She loved John, she missed him, and she acknowledged both the loneliness she suffered with him gone and the many inadequacies that plagued her as she attempted to carry on the farm without him. But all her sentiments only served to shore up her main argument: that women, in feelings and thoughts, physically and mentally, deserved the same respect and privileges as men.

  John answered her plea for equal rights with laughter and incredulity—“As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh”—and then compared her claims to those made by “Children and Apprentices … Indians … and Negroes” and concluded that “your Letter was the
first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented.”6

  Abigail was not amused: her husband had managed to insult not only women, but also Indians and blacks in just one paragraph. She reached for paper and pen and wrote her response.

  John’s final word on her suggestions for laws that recognized the rights of women—“We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems”—was answered by her with indignation: “you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives. But you must remember that Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, [that is,] very liable to be broken.”7

  And a few days later, she added in another note to her husband, “a Government of Good Laws well-administered should carry with them the fairest prospect of happiness to a community, as well as to individuals.”8

  How disappointing for Abigail to discover that John’s interests, in recognizing the rights of women, “when weigh’d in the balance,” were found wanting.9 But with no voice in government, nor any expectation of being given such a voice (her husband would argue vigorously to keep all voting rights reserved only to men of property), there was little Abigail could do to assert her own rights and those of all women.

  Nevertheless, she continued to write to John with advice for Congress, everything from military maneuvers in Massachusetts to the necessary optics in declaring independence to the price of tea. After all, she told John quite plainly, “notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without violence, throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.… ‘Charm by accepting, by submitting sway / Yet have our Humour most when we obey.’”10

  Her influence was greater than he might admit, and Abigail would exercise all her rhetorical skills to bring John to see things from her point of view.

  * * *

  After the surrender of Boston, George Washington reached out to Josiah Quincy Sr., asking for his help in monitoring the coastline of Massachusetts: “there is one evil I dread,” he wrote, “and that is … spies.” He asked that “the most attentive watch … kept to prevent any discourse with the [British] ships and the main land.… I wish a dozen or more honest, sensible, and diligent men were employed to haunt the communication between Roxbury and the different landing places … in order to question, cross-question, etc, all such persons as are unknown, and cannot give an account of themselves in a straight and satisfactory line.”11

  This request was right in Josiah’s bailiwick—questioning alleged evildoers—and he set himself to the task with all the diligence Washington had wanted. Within the month, Washington was thanking Josiah “for the intelligence” he’d shared.

  Josiah also received a letter from his old friend Benjamin Franklin, advising him to stay industrious on the part of the colonists and ever alert to acts of “increasing enmity.”12 Franklin added that in the end, nefarious acts committed by the British served the best goal of all: “every day furnished us with new causes … and new reasons for wishing an eternal separation; so there is a rapid increase of the formerly small party who were for an independent government.”

  Franklin was right: the number of delegates speaking out in favor of independence—and speaking on behalf of the colonies that they represented—was growing steadily in the spring of 1776. The provincial legislatures of South Carolina, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia all sent instructions to their delegates to pursue whatever means were necessary to protect the colonies and support the workings of Congress.

  Consensus was growing that the contract between the king and his colonies was broken past repair and that independence was the logical next step. South Carolina created its own state constitution and elected a governor; it was the first colony to make such a stand, and John Adams was overjoyed when he heard about it. “The News from South Carolina, has aroused and animated all the Continent,” he wrote to James Warren; “and if North Carolina and Virginia should follow the Example, it will Spread through all the rest of the Colonies like Electric Fire.”13

  To encourage the creation of new provincial governments, John wrote up a paper outlining his ideas on how to structure such government, all concepts that he had shared with Richard Henry Lee in the fall; the paper was passed around to various delegates and then published by Lee, with the title Thoughts on Government.14

  Adams was sure that as more colonies dissolved their royal governments, established provincial governments, and created their own constitutions, support for the final break from England would grow. But patience was required, as Adams wrote to Warren; the other colonies “are advancing by slow but sure steps, to that mighty Revolution, which You and I have expected for Some Time.”15

  John Hancock worried that the Continental Army was running out of time; the sooner the colonies acted to both unite and declare independence from England, the sooner he could appeal to foreign nations for much-needed help to fight the British.

  When rumors began to arrive in the colonies that Britain had hired German mercenaries to swell its ranks of soldiers to well over forty-five thousand men, Hancock became exasperated with the slow pace of Congress. In hiring mercenaries, the “Tyrant of Britain and his Parliament have proceeded to the last extremity,” he declared in a letter to the Massachusetts Assembly. He set to work once again cajoling and bullying the various colonial assemblies to send supplies and soldiers to help General Washington fight the English.16 The next stage of battle was certain to be New York, and Washington needed all the men who could be roused to defend against the British troops bearing down on the American colonies.

  “Our continental troops alone are unable to stem the torrent,” Hancock wrote in a desperate appeal to the assemblies of the colonies, asking that they send local militia to help: “They are called upon to say whether they will die slaves or die free men … the cause is certainly a glorious one.”

  Waste no more time, he scolded, but “Quicken your preparations and stimulate the good people of your government.” Together, he promised, we will be able to “lead them to victory, to liberty, and to happiness.”17

  * * *

  Dolly Hancock told John the good news in April, that she was pregnant with their first child and expected to give birth in the fall. Elated, John looked for more spacious accommodations for his wife and him; in addition to the baby, Dolly’s sister Katy was coming to Philadelphia to “accompany and be a comfort to” Dorothy in her confinement, and Aunt Lydia was also certain to come.18 John found a “large and roomy” house for them to move to, in “an airy, open part of the city, in Arch and Fourth Streets.”19

  Increasing tensions between John Hancock and the two Adams cousins might have been another reason for the change in habitation. John Adams was irked that Hancock had taken the side of Robert Treat Paine in a dispute between Paine and Adams, and Sam Adams had always disliked Hancock’s compromising with recalcitrant delegates.

  In November, when Dolly Hancock had planned a ball to celebrate the arrival of Martha Washington to Philadelphia, Sam Adams was outraged by the impropriety, in his view, of spending money for gaiety and dancing during wartime when soldiers were starving and without needed supplies. The ball was canceled, and hard feelings remained between the Hancocks and the Adamses.

  Never mind that Sam’s portrait still hung side by side with John Hancock’s in the Hancocks’ Beacon Hill mansion (and had survived the siege miraculously unscathed); Sam Adams was no longer a fan of the man who had been his protégé at one time and his financial savior many other times.

  But Hancock didn’t have the time or the inclination to assuage the egos of men in his own delegation; it was exhausting and time-consuming enough to have to worry about all the delegates from other colonies. Removing himself from the same domicile as the two Adamses would relieve the strain, Hancock reasoned; they all had the same goal, after all, and would continue the fight toward independence together but on separate paths.

  *
* *

  For the first time in five years, there had been no March commemoration of the Boston Massacre; perhaps the raising of forts on Dorchester Heights had been sufficient memorial—a military maneuver instead of an oration marking the date. But on April 19, a date Abigail Adams described as “ever memorable for America as the Ides of March to Rome and to Caesar,” a ceremony was held to remember the Battles of Lexington and Concord one year earlier.20

  The Reverend Jonas Clarke of Concord, with whom Hancock had sought refuge, gave the sermon, which he titled “The Fate of Blood-Thirsty Oppressors.” In it, he described the arrival of the British troops on the Lexington green, just outside the windows of his parsonage. “They approach with the morning’s light, and more like murderers and cutthroats, than the troops of a Christian king, without provocation, without warning, they draw the sword of violence upon the inhabitants of this town.”

  Such ravages against an innocent people would never be forgotten, he thundered from his pulpit, and would certainly be punished: “Surely there is one that avengeth, and that will plead the cause of the injured and oppressed; and in his own way and time, will both cleanse and avenge their innocent blood.”21

  No commemoration of the battles was held in Congress, and the date of April 19 went by unmarked. Business went on as usual, and there was much to do: fund the war through setting taxes; buy supplies and pay soldiers; build a navy; and employ diplomatic envoys to secure foreign support. Silas Deane had been sent to France to start forging ties between France and the colonies. But without a formal declaration of independence, support for the Americans would be limited. France could not take the chance that the colonies would reunite with England; nor would any other nation. The colonies had to make their intentions clear to all the world.