John Adams Page 14

He wished now as never in his life, Adams began, that he had the gifts of the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, for he was certain none of them ever had before him a question of greater importance. Outside, the wind picked up. The storm struck with thunder, lightning, and pelting rain. In his schoolmaster days at Worcester, Adams had recorded how such storms “unstrung” him. Now he spoke on steadily, making the case for independence as he had so often before. He was logical, positive, sensitive to the historic importance of the moment, and, looking into the future, saw a new nation, a new time, all much in the spirit of lines he had written in a recent letter to a friend.

  Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, measures in which the lives and liberties of millions, born and unborn are most essentially interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.

  No transcription was made, no notes were kept. There would be only Adams's own recollections, plus those of several others who would remember more the force of Adams himself than any particular thing he said. That it was the most powerful and important speech heard in the Congress since it first convened, and the greatest speech of Adams's life, there is no question.

  To Jefferson, Adams was “not graceful nor elegant, nor remarkably fluent,” but spoke “with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.” Recalling the moment long afterward, Adams would say he had been carried out of himself, “ ‘carried out in spirit,’ as enthusiastic preachers sometimes express themselves.” To Richard Stockton, one of the new delegates from New Jersey, Adams was “the Atlas” of the hour, “the man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independency.... He it was who sustained the debate, and by the force of his reasoning demonstrated not only the justice, but the expediency of the measure.”

  Stockton and two other new delegates from New Jersey, Francis Hopkinson and the Reverend John Witherspoon, famous Presbyterian preacher and president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, had come into the chamber an hour or so after Adams had taken the floor and was nearly finished speaking. When they asked that Adams repeat what they had missed, he objected. He was not an actor there to entertain an audience, he said good-naturedly. But at the urging of Edward Rutledge, who told Adams that only he had the facts at his command, Adams relinquished and gave the speech a second time “in as concise a manner as I could, 'til at length the New Jersey gentlemen said they were fully satisfied and ready for the question.” By then he had been on his feet for two hours.

  Others spoke, including Witherspoon, the first clergyman to serve in Congress, whose manner of speech made plain his Scottish origins. In all, the debate lasted nine hours. At one point, according to Adams, Hewes of North Carolina, who had long opposed separation from Britain, “started suddenly upright, and lifting up both his hands to Heaven, as if he had been in a trance, cried out, ‘It is done! and I will abide by it.’ ”

  But when later that evening a preliminary vote was taken, four colonies unexpectedly held back, refusing to proclaim independence. The all-important Pennsylvania delegation, despite popular opinion in Pennsylvania, stood with John Dickinson and voted no. The New York delegates abstained, saying they favored the motion but lacked specific instructions. South Carolina, too, surprisingly, voted no, while Delaware, with only two delegates present, was divided. The missing Delaware delegate was Caesar Rodney, one of the most ardent of the independence faction. Where he was or when he might reappear was unclear, but a rider had been sent racing off to find him.

  When Edward Rutledge rescued the moment by moving that a final vote be postponed until the next day, implying that for the sake of unanimity South Carolina might change its mind, Adams and the others immediately agreed. For while the nine colonies supporting independence made a clear majority, it was hardly the show of solidarity that such a step ought to have.

  The atmosphere that night at City Tavern and in the lodging houses of the delegates was extremely tense. The crux of the matter was the Pennsylvania delegation, for in the preliminary vote three of the seven Pennsylvania delegates had gone against John Dickinson and declared in the affirmative, and it was of utmost interest that one of the three, along with Franklin and John Morton, was James Wilson, who, though a friend and ally of Dickinson, had switched sides to vote for independence. The question now was how many of the rest who were in league with Dickinson would on the morrow continue, in Adams's words, to “vote point blank against the known and declared sense of their constituents.”

  To compound the tension that night, word reached Philadelphia of the sighting off New York of a hundred British ships, the first arrivals of a fleet that would number over four hundred.

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  THOUGH THE RECORD of all that happened the following day, Tuesday, July 2, is regrettably sparse, it appears that just as the doors to Congress were about to be closed at the usual hour of nine o'clock, Caesar Rodney, mud-spattered, “booted and spurred,” made his dramatic entrance. The tall, thin Rodney—the “oddest-looking man in the world,” Adams once described him—had been made to appear stranger still, and more to be pitied, by a skin cancer on one side of his face that he kept hidden behind a scarf of green silk. But, as Adams had also recognized, Rodney was a man of spirit, of “fire.” Almost unimaginably, he had ridden eighty miles through the night, changing horses several times, to be there in time to cast his vote.

  Yet more important even than the arrival of Rodney were two empty chairs among the Pennsylvania delegation. Refusing to vote for independence but understanding the need for Congress to speak with one voice, John Dickinson and Robert Morris had voluntarily absented themselves from the proceedings, thus swinging Pennsylvania behind independence by a vote of three to two. What private agreements had been made the night before, if any, who or how many had come to the State House that morning knowing what was afoot, no one recorded.

  Outside, more rain threatened, and at about ten came another cloudburst like the day before. New York continued to abstain, but South Carolina, as hinted by Edward Rutledge, joined the majority to make the decision unanimous in the sense that no colony stood opposed. The vote went rapidly.

  So, it was done, the break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence. If not all thirteen clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and with the other silent, the effect was the same.

  It was John Adams, more than anyone, who had made it happen. Further, he seems to have understood more clearly than any what a momentous day it was and in the privacy of two long letters to Abigail, he poured out his feelings as did no one else:

  The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn 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.

  Lest she judge him overly “transported,” he said he was well aware of the “toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration.” Still, the end was more than worth all the means. “You will see in a few days,” he wrote in the second letter, “a Declaration setting forth the causes, which have impelled us to this mighty revolution, and the reasons that will justify it in the sight of God and man.”

  That the hand of God was involved in the birth of the new nation he had no doubt. “It is the will of heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever.” If the people now were to have “unbounded power,” and as the people were quite as capable of corruption as “the great,” and thus high risks were involved, he would submit all his hopes and fears to an overruling providence, “in which unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe.”

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  THE “BAR OF SECRECY” notwithstanding, the news spread rapidly through the city. “This day the Continental Congress declared the United Colonies Free and Independent States,” recorded a young artist newly established in Philadelphia, Charles Willson Peale, exuberant over the news. The facts, wrote Elbridge Gerry, were as well known in the taverns and coffeehouses of the city as in Congress itself.

  But there could be no pause. There was too much still to be done. Congress had to review and approve the language of the drafted declaration before it could be made official. Deliberations of a different kind commenced at once, continuing through the next morning, July 3, when mercifully the temperature had dropped ten degrees, broken by the storm of the previous day.

  For Thomas Jefferson it became a painful ordeal, as change after change was called for and approximately a quarter of what he had written was cut entirely. Seated beside Benjamin Franklin, the young Virginian looked on in silence. He is not known to have uttered a word in protest, or in defense of what he had written. Later he would describe the opposition to his draft as being like “the ceaseless action of gravity weighing upon us night and day.” At one point Franklin leaned over to tell him a story that, as a printer and publisher over so many years, he must have offered before as comfort to a wounded author. He had once known a hatter who wished to have a sign made saying, JOHN THOMPSON, HATTER, MAKES AND SELLS HATS FOR READY MONEY, this to be accompanied by a picture of a hat. But the man had chosen first to ask the opinion of friends, with the result that one word after another was removed as superfluous or redundant, until at last the sign was reduced to Thompson's name and the picture of the hat.

  Beyond its stirring preamble, most of the document before Congress was taken up with a list of grievances, specific charges against the King—“He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns.... He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny...” And it was the King, “the Christian King of Great Britain,” Jefferson had emphasized, who was responsible for the horrors of the slave trade. As emphatic a passage as any, this on the slave trade was to have been the ringing climax of all the charges. Now it was removed in its entirety because, said Jefferson later, South Carolina and Georgia objected. Some northern delegates, too, were a “little tender” on the subject, “for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers....”

  In truth, black slavery had long since become an accepted part of life in all of the thirteen colonies. Of a total population in the colonies of nearly 2,500,000 people in 1776, approximately one in five were slaves, some 500,000 men, women, and children. In Virginia alone, which had the most slaves by far, they numbered more than 200,000. There was no member of the Virginia delegation who did not own slaves, and of all members of Congress at least a third owned or had owned slaves. The total of Thomas Jefferson's slaves in 1776, as near as can be determined from his personal records, was about 200, which was also the approximate number owned by George Washington.

  John Dickinson, who owned eleven African men and women, was understood to be Philadelphia's second-largest slaveholder. Even Benjamin Franklin, who adamantly opposed slavery, had once owned two black house servants and had personally traded in slaves, buying and selling from his Market Street print shop. And though in recent years the Quakers of the city had been freeing more and more of their slaves, such notices as Franklin once published, offering “a likely wench about fifteen years old,” were still to be seen in Philadelphia newspapers. One appearing that July in the Pennsylvania Journal read:

  TO BE SOLD: A large quantity of pine boards that are well seasoned. Likewise a Negro wench; she is to be disposed of for no fault, but only that she is present with child, she is about 20 years old... and is fit for either town or country business.

  The president of Congress, John Hancock, had only in recent years freed the last of the slaves who were part of his lavish Boston household, and it was well known, as Jefferson said, that New Englanders had been “considerable carriers” in the lucrative slave trade. At one point, earlier in the century, approximately half the tonnage of New England shipping had been in transporting slaves, and the port of Boston prospered from the trade.

  But it was also New Englanders who had assailed slavery in the most vehement terms. As early as 1700, before Jefferson or anyone in Congress was born, Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston, an eminent Puritan known for his role as a judge in the Salem witch trials, had declared in a tract called The Selling of Joseph, that “all men, as they are sons of Adam... have equal right unto liberty,” and saw no justification, moral or economic, for making property of human beings. Slavery was evil. Of the slave trade, he wrote: “How horrible is the uncleanness, immorality, if not murder, that the ships are guilty of that bring crowds of these miserable men and women.”

  James Otis, in his famous speech on writs of assistance in 1761, had called for the immediate liberation of the slaves. “The colonists [of Massachusetts] are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are white and black.... Does it follow that it is the right to enslave a man because he is black?” When Samuel Adams and his wife were presented with a black slave girl as a gift in 1765, they had immediately set her free.

  Of John Adams's circle in Philadelphia, the one to have taken the most assertive stand against slavery was the young physician Benjamin Rush, who from the time of the First Congress had been as close to all that went on as anyone not a delegate could have been and who, in another few weeks, would himself be elected to Congress, as one of the new Pennsylvania delegation. Rush—high-spirited, handsome, and all of thirty—had studied medicine in Edinburgh and in London, where he came to know Benjamin Franklin and once dined with Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. Overflowing with energy and goodwill, he was ardent for reform of all kinds: smallpox inoculation for the poor, humane care for the insane, reform of the penal code, but especially for the abolition of slavery. In 1773, Rush had published a pamphlet attacking slavery, and in 1774, the year the First Congress convened, he had helped organize the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. He had appealed to the clergy to recognize slavery as a sin, and urged all legislators, “ye advocates for American liberty,” to work for the liberty of blacks as well. The eyes of the world were watching, Rush charged. Yet he himself owned a slave.

  On first meeting, Adams and Rush had misjudged each other. Adams thought Rush “a sprightly, pretty fellow,” but “too much a talker to be a deep thinker,” while Rush found Adams “cold and reserved.” But they had quickly changed their minds, discovering much in common besides the love of talk. Like Adams, Rush was without affectation and unafraid to speak his mind, sometimes to the point of tactlessness. (Prudence, he was fond of saying, “is a rascally virtue.”) Like Jefferson, the young physician seemed to take limitless interest in nearly everything under the sun.

  Adams and Rush were of the same mind on slavery. Adams was utterly opposed to slavery and the slave trade and, like Rush, favored a gradual emancipation of all slaves. That it was, at the least, inconsistent for slave owners to be espousing freedom and equality was not lost on Adams, any more than on others on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In London, Samuel Johnson, who had no sympathy for the American cause, had asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” Abigail, in her letters that spring, had questioned whether the passion for liberty could be “equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of theirs,” and had earlier pondered whether the agonies of pestilence and war could be God's punishment for the sin of slavery.

  In time, Adams and Jefferson would each denounce slavery. Jefferson was to write of the degrading effects of the institution on both slave and master. Adams would call slavery a “foul contagion in the human character.” In years past, as an attorney, Adams had appeared in several slave cases for the own
er, never the slave, but he had no use for slavery. He never owned a slave as a matter of principle, nor hired the slaves of others to work on his farm, as was sometimes done in New England. He was to declare unequivocally in later years that “Negro slavery is an evil of colossal magnitude,” and like Abigail, he felt this at the time.

  But neither he nor any other delegate in Congress would have let the issue jeopardize a declaration of independence, however strong their feelings. If Adams was disappointed or downcast over the removal of Jefferson's indictment of the slave trade, he seems to have said nothing at the time. Nor is it possible to know the extent of Jefferson's disappointment, or if the opposition of South Carolina and Georgia was truly as decisive as he later claimed. Very possibly there were many delegates, from North and South, happy to see the passage omitted for the reason that it was so patently absurd to hold the King responsible for horrors that, everyone knew, Americans—and Christians no less than the King—had brought on themselves. Slavery and the slave trade were hardly the fault of George III, however ardently Jefferson wished to fix the blame on the distant monarch.

  Of more than eighty changes made in Jefferson's draft during the time Congress deliberated, most were minor and served to improve it. The King's conduct was called one of “repeated” rather than “unremitting” injuries. The accusation that the King had “suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these states” was edited to a simpler “He has obstructed the administration of justice.”

  But one final cut toward the conclusion was as substantial nearly as the excise of the passage on the slave trade, and it appears to have wounded Jefferson deeply.

  To the long list of indictments against the King, he had added one assailing the English people, “our British brethren,” as a further oppressor, for allowing their Parliament and their King “to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch and foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us.” And therein, Jefferson charged, was the heart of the tragedy, the feeling of betrayal, the “common blood” cause of American outrage. “These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us renounce forever these unfeeling brethren,” he had written. “We must endeavor to forget our former love for them.”