Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence Read online

  In fact, he had before him, or at least in his mind’s eye, his recent draft of a new constitution for Virginia, which contained a long list of grievances against George III. His draft of the Declaration represented an expansion of that list, following a well-established formula enshrined in English history whenever a king needed to be restrained or deposed. Upon reading the published version of the Declaration, Edmund Pendleton, who was chairing the Virginia Convention, apprised Jefferson that the bill of indictment against George III in the draft constitution he had sent to Williamsburg had apparently “exhausted the Subject of Complaint against Geo. 3d. and [I] was at a loss to discover what the Congress could do … without copying, but find that you have acquitted yourselves very well on that score.” Jefferson had, in truth, been practicing the long grievances section of the Declaration ever since Summary View, had refined the draft in his version of Virginia’s constitution, and had then made his final revision for the Continental Congress. In that sense, he was the most experienced prosecutor the congress could have appointed to make the case against George III.25

  Jefferson completed his draft of the Declaration sometime during the third week of June. (Adams later remembered, perhaps exaggerating, that it took him only “a day or two.”) He showed that draft to Adams and Franklin, two of the most prominent leaders in the congress, whose judgment he respected. They suggested only one change. Instead of “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” they made the truths “self-evident,” an alteration that Jefferson apparently accepted as an improvement.26

  Then the committee placed the document before the full congress on June 28. (The famous painting by John Trumbull that hangs in the Capitol Rotunda, titled The Declaration of Independence, depicts this moment, not July 4 as most viewers presume.) A debate then ensued (July 1–2) on the Virginia Resolution for independence, in which John Dickinson spoke eloquently for delay, repeating the moderate mantra that diplomacy had not yet run its course, that secession from the British Empire meant war against the most formidable military power on the planet, and that any attempt to conjure up the vision of an independent American republic produced only a series of political nightmares in his mind. Unfortunate for Dickinson’s message, indeed fatal for his increasingly anachronistic agenda, was the quite real nightmare of British troops and ships assembling on Staten Island, which did not need to be conjured up. Adams argued, in his best Ciceronian style, that the time for American independence had obviously arrived. (It was the most significant speech in Adams’s long political career but was delivered without notes, and no record of it exists.) The vote was nearly unanimous, 12–0, with the New Yorkers abstaining on the grounds that they were still bound by the instructions of their legislature. Then the congress immediately put itself into a committee-of-the-whole format in order to debate Jefferson’s draft.27

  Over the next two days, the committee made eighty-five revisions or deletions in the text, a rather remarkable editorial feat that, most historians have concluded, improved the clarity and cogency of the final document. Jefferson, on the other hand, sat silently and sullenly throughout the debate, regarding each revision as a defacement. At one point Franklin leaned over to console him, reminding Jefferson that this was the reason he never wrote anything that would be edited by a committee. On July 4 the congress approved its revised version, and the Declaration of Independence was sent to the printer for publication. There was no signing ceremony on that day, as Jefferson later claimed. The parchment copy was signed by most members on August 2.28

  The major editorial changes all occurred in the lengthy grievances section of the document, which the delegates focused on for the understandable reason that it provided the political and legal rationale for independence; this was, after all, the whole point of the Declaration. The delegates found three of the charges against George III either too Virginian or too Jeffersonian for their taste.

  First, Jefferson accused George III of waging “cruel war against human nature itself, by rejecting efforts to end the slave trade,” then “exciting those very people [i.e., slaves] to rise in arms against us … by murdering the people on whom he has also obtruded them.” This was Jefferson’s attempt to rephrase Virginia’s somewhat tortured claim that the slave trade, and implicitly slavery itself, was the fault of George III, and that he was also to blame for Lord Dunmore’s offer of emancipation to Virginia’s slaves, a purportedly criminal act.

  This might have made sense in the Old Dominion, where the plantations were overstocked; so ending the slave trade was popular among the Tidewater elite, though ending slavery itself was unimaginable. But in the Deep South, most especially in South Carolina, ending the slave trade was a deal breaker. And for all the states north of the Potomac, the very inclusion of slavery in the bill of indictment was inadmissible, even more so when coupled with condemnation of Dunmore’s emancipation proposal, which contradicted the antislavery implications of the paragraph. Best to delete the entire passage and let slavery remain the unmentionable elephant in the center of the room.29

  Second, Jefferson attempted to insert one of his own fondest beliefs into the draft, which he had developed more fully in Summary View. He called it the doctrine of “expatriation,” and it claimed that the original English migrants to America came “at the expense of our own blood and treasure; unassisted by the strength of Great Britain … but that submission to their parliament was no part of our constitution.” In Jefferson’s scenario, the American colonists were all descendants of the Saxon race, itself with origins in the Germanic forests, where all coercive forms of government were rejected as despotic, so all claims of royal or parliamentary authority over American colonists were latter-day violations of the original understanding. This represented a rather preposterous rewriting of American colonial history in the once-upon-a-time mode, and the Continental Congress struck it out as an embarrassing piece of romantic fiction.30

  Third, and finally, the end of Jefferson’s draft featured a highly emotional condemnation of George III for abdicating his role as affectionate parent by “sending over not only soldiers of our common blood but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us.” Parental love had somehow been replaced by despotic cruelty: “These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren.” Jefferson was trying to give expression to the multiple resolutions from state, town, and county precincts that lamented the sudden transformation of George III from benevolent monarch into belligerent tyrant. That really was the dominant message conveyed by ordinary Americans, and its inclusion suggests that Jefferson had been reading the resolutions pouring into the congress in response to the May 15 request. But the Jeffersonian version of the message struck most members of the congress as excessively sentimental. So it too was deleted.31

  THE MOST IMPORTANT OCCURRENCE during the editorial debate within the congress was an event that did not happen, another dog that did not bark. Fixated as they were on the long grievances section, the delegates ignored altogether the first two paragraphs of the text, which they presumably regarded as Jefferson’s rhetorical overture, the flamboyant windup before the real pitch. They made no comment whatsoever on the following words:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.32

  Since these were destined to become the most important fifty-five words in American history, the seminal statement of the “American Creed,” and perhaps the most inspiring words in all of modern history, it is difficult for us to comprehend the total indifference and inattention of the delegates. But that is because we possess the advantage of hindsight and therefore realize what the natural rights section of the Declaration would eventually become. Starting in the 1
790s, several prominent Americans began to notice the implications of Jefferson’s language, but the culmination of the creeded interpretation of the document was articulated by Abraham Lincoln in 1859:

  All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecaste, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.33

  But what Lincoln, surely with tongue in cheek, called “a merely revolutionary document” was for all the delegates in Philadelphia the whole point of the exercise and the major reason why the document is called the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln’s phrase “embalm it there” implies that Jefferson knew what he was doing, but there is no evidence that he did. His primary attention over the ensuing weeks was devoted to ensuring that his unedited draft—that is, before it was “mangled” by his fellow delegates—was preserved for posterity, but that meant focusing exclusively on his language in the grievances section.34

  Nevertheless, what Jefferson had done, albeit inadvertently, was to smuggle the radical implications of the American Revolution into the founding document, planting the seeds that would grow into the expanding liberal mandate for individual rights that eventually ended the property qualification to vote, ended slavery, made women’s suffrage inevitable, and sanctioned the civil rights of all racial minorities. Adams had worried himself sick that all the state, county, and town resolutions of May and June would raise this radical agenda, and in the process complicate the all-important vote on independence. Now Jefferson’s lofty and lyrical prose had surreptitiously inserted the latent implications of the American Revolution into the Declaration so deftly that no one noticed. Before he died in 1826, Jefferson had begun to glimpse ever so faintly what he had done, insisting that “Author of the Declaration of Independence” top the list of achievements engraved on his tombstone.

  As the core statement of America’s most elemental principles, the natural rights section of the Declaration has stood the test of time, just as Lincoln predicted it would. And it has done so for reasons that Lincoln was one of the first to fully comprehend.

  For while the idea that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed is clearly indebted to John Locke’s formulation of the doctrine and “the right of revolution” that followed from it in his Second Treatise on Government (1688), a more utopian dimension lurks in the second paragraph of the Declaration that is very much an expression of Jefferson’s imagination. It envisions a perfect world, at last bereft of kings, priests, and even government itself. In this never-never land, free individuals interact harmoniously, all forms of political coercion are unnecessary because they have been voluntarily internalized, people pursue their own different versions of happiness without colliding, and some semblance of social equality reigns supreme. As Lincoln recognized, it is an ideal world that can never be reached on this earth, only approached. And each generation had an obligation to move America an increment closer to the full promise, as Lincoln most famously did. The American Dream, then, is the Jeffersonian Dream writ large, embedded in language composed during one of the most crowded and congested moments in American history by an idealistic young man who desperately wished to be somewhere else.

  IN ONE OF THOSE chronological coincidences that would not be believed in fiction, the first wave of the British fleet carrying General William Howe and his 9,000 troops was sighted off the Long Island coast on June 28, the day the drafting committee presented the Declaration to the Continental Congress. As the fleet approached, sentries in the Continental Army were stunned by its size: 113 ships led by Howe’s flagship, Greyhound. “I thought all London was afloat,” exclaimed one of the sentries. Little did he know that Admiral Howe was coming on with an even larger fleet.35

  After an initial probe of the Long Island coast, General Howe decided that Staten Island was a more secure location. Troops began to disembark there on July 2, the day the congress voted on independence, and completed the landing on July 4, the day the Declaration was approved and sent out to the world. As the Howes were soon to discover, by arriving just as the climactic vote on independence was cast, their preferred role as peace commissioners became decidedly more problematic, because now they would not be asking American colonists to avoid taking that fateful step, but rather asking Americans who no longer regarded themselves as colonists to reconsider their decision.

  Although Washington had been worried about New York’s tactical vulnerability for weeks, the actual presence of the enormous British force was now striking home much in the manner of his worst nightmare. He put his entire army on alert, assuming that Howe intended to attack immediately, especially after loyalist spies had apprised him of the location and unfinished condition of the American defenses. He did not yet realize that Howe had prudently decided to wait for his brother’s arrival with a much larger force.

  The political drama reaching a climax in Philadelphia now had its military equivalent in New York, with the sharp edge of life-and-death danger building up for all to see. Obviously shaken, and not yet aware of what was transpiring in Philadelphia, Washington summoned up his own rhetorical energies in his General Orders on July 2, in his own way matching Jefferson’s visionary message and tone:

  The time is now at hand which must probably determine, Whether Americans are to be, Freeman, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses and Farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of the unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the conduct of this army.… Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world, that a Freeman contending for Liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.36

  This was Washington’s own declaration, rendered pressingly relevant by the recognition that Jefferson’s Declaration would be quickly forgotten if the war was lost that same summer. The ideals that Jefferson had so eloquently articulated were designed to be universal and eternal. But whether they would endure forever or die an early death over the next few weeks was a question soon to be decided by soldiers on the battlefield and not by an inspired young statesman in his study.

  4

  Etc., Etc., Etc.

  I consider this War against us therefore, as both unjust, and unwise, and I am persuaded that cool dispassionate Posterity will condemn to Infamy those who advised it; and that not even Success will save from some degree of Dishonour, those who voluntarily engaged to conduct it.

  —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN TO LORD RICHARD HOWE, July 20, 1776

  The men disembarking onto Staten Island had just endured a harrowing monthlong ordeal at sea that eventually proved more dangerous than any of the battles they would fight on land. The close quarters, poor diet, and bad sanitary conditions had created outbreaks of malaria and accompanying high casualty rates. Slightly more than 1,000 soldiers and sailors had been buried at sea, together with almost as many horses and livestock. In most military histories, the term killing zone refers to that most lethal location on the battlefield where advancing troops are exposed to waves of metal projectiles propelled at high velocity from the state-of-the-art weapons of mass destruction. But in the late eighteenth century, and for more than a hundred years thereafter, the most lethal “killing zones” were the hospitals and confined conditions aboard ships, where the weapons of mass destruction were germs, microbes, and viral strains against which medical science had yet to develop any defensive network of prevention or cure. Leaving those disease-ridden ships for the bucolic hills and clean air of Staten Island meant that for the British Army the most dangerous part of the American campaign was over.1

  Ambrose Serle, the secretary to Admiral Howe, has left the fullest account
of his impressions of Staten Island. “The People of this Island, like their Soil, are thin and meager; the Voices faint, and their whole Frame of a loose and languid texture,” Serle observed, adding that “the Soil is mostly poor, and receives a very inferior Cultivation than our Lands in G. Britain.” Serle obviously observed the people and overall American environment, which he had never seen before, through the lens of presumed superiority and studied condescension appropriate for an overbearing British aristocrat. It was all part of the mental package he carried from the London courts and Whitehall corridors, where American resistance to British authority was regarded as a preposterous violation of the divinely sanctioned political order and George Washington was viewed, in Serle’s words, “as a little paltry Colonel of Militia at the Head of a Banditti of Rebels.”2

  If Serle’s political prejudices were just as predictable as they were insufferable—and, in truth, they provided a nice window into one reason American independence had become inevitable—ordinary British soldiers harbored several strange preconceptions of their own. Some were surprised that the colonists wore clothes, thinking they would dress like Indians. Others had expected to encounter roving bands of wild animals in the manner of African jungles. And when a loyalist came aboard one ship to help pilot it into port, the British crew and troops were dumbfounded. “All the People had been of the Opinion,” they exclaimed, “that the inhabitants of America were black.”3

  But the dominant impressions were more sensible and strategic. The Staten Island landscape was dotted with highly productive farms and impressive herds of cattle and sheep that—Serle’s comments to the contrary notwithstanding—ensured an immediate improvement in the diet of the soldiers of the British Army. Indeed, given their recent experience crossing the Atlantic, the British troops could be excused for believing that they had arrived at paradise.