Independence (34 page)

Three days before Congress learned of Bunker Hill, it received the committee’s draft of the Olive Branch Petition. In May, when Congress had approved Dickinson’s proposal to petition the king, it created a committee to draft the entreaty. That panel was packed with moderates—Dickinson, John Jay of New York, John Rutledge, and Johnson of Maryland. Franklin was the lone member who was inclined to a harder line. Not a single New Englander was placed on the committee, one of the few times in the long history of the Continental Congress that a section was denied a role in a substantive undertaking. Dickinson, the principal author of the committee’s draft, churned out the “humble and dutiful petition” he had advocated, but his hope that Congress would send peace commissioners to London to open negotiations with the Crown was stymied, doubtless because of Franklin’s opposition. Franklin knew all too well the games that officials in London could play when it came to negotiations. Furthermore, he had no wish to see Congress backed into a corner with an option of accepting or rejecting a bad accord sent home by negotiators in London. As a result, the petition’s final draft threw the ball into the king’s court. If there were to be negotiations, it was left to George III to “direct some mode” for beginning discussions.
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Congress received the committee’s draft on June 19, but it delayed considering it for fifteen days. By the time it took up the document, on July 4, it knew of Bunker Hill, the second time in as many engagements in this war in which colonial soldiers had inflicted great damage on the British army.

As all of Congress’s sessions were secret, it is not known for certain what occurred on July 4 and 5 when the delegates discussed the Olive Branch Petition. But as deliberations spun out over two days, tempestuous debates almost certainly ensued. It is likely that the more hard-line congressmen sought to recast the unctuous tone of Dickinson’s draft. It is also probable that the moderates waged a last-ditch fight to send peace commissioners to London.

The only record of what transpired was left by John Adams in memoirs penned a quarter century later. Adams’s memory sometimes betrayed him, and in his account of this battle he listed as a participant a congressman who had left Congress two weeks earlier. Nevertheless, Adams probably recaptured the essence of what had occurred. He recalled that the debate commenced with lengthy speeches by several moderates from Dickinson’s faction. They were answered by delegates from the other side, some of whom addressed Congress with “Wit, Reasoning and fluency.” Adams portrayed himself as the leader of the opposition to Dickinson, speaking with passion against what he privately depicted as a petition filled with “Prettynesses [and] Juvenilities, much less Puerilities” that were unbecoming “a great Assembly” in the midst of war.
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It was in this battle with Dickinson that Adams almost surely assumed the leadership of the faction opposed to the moderates’ conciliatory course.

Dickinson, Adams recalled, grew “terrified” that his petition would be emasculated, if not rejected altogether, by a Congress emboldened by Bunker Hill. In the course of the stormy session, Adams was called away into the yard outside the State House to meet with someone on some sort of business. Adams later recollected that he grabbed his

Hat and went out of the Door of Congress Hall: Mr. Dickinson observed me and Darted out after me. He broke out upon me in a most abrupt and extraordinary manner. In as violent a passion as he was capable of feeling, and with an Air, Countenance and Gestures as rough and haughty as if I had been a School Boy and he the Master, he vociferated out, “What is the Reason Mr. Adams, that you New Englandmen oppose our Measures of Reconciliation.… Look Ye! If you don’t concur with Us, in our pacific System, I, and a Number of Us, will break off, from you in New England, and We will carry on the Opposition by ourselves in our own Way.” I own I was shocked by this Magisterial Salutation.… These were the last Words which ever passed between Mr. Dickinson and me in private. We continued to debate in Congress … But the Friendship and Acquaintance was lost forever … [through] Mr. Dickinsons rude Lecture.
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A short time later, Adams, still seething at Dickinson’s tone and his threat to abandon New England, wrote a friend at home that a “certain great Fortune and piddling Genius whose Fame has been trumpeted so loudly, has given a silly Cast to our whole Doings.”
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Unfortunately for Adams, the bearer of his missive was taken into custody by the British as he crossed Narragansett Bay. Finding Adams’s letter, the British gleefully turned it over to a Tory editor in occupied Boston, who happily published it in the
Massachusetts Gazette
. It also appeared in two London newspapers in September, leading some readers to speculate that the “piddling Genius” was John Hancock. But Dickinson knew whom Adams had referred to, giving him further grounds for enmity. From this point forward these two congressmen never again spoke to one another. When passing in the State House hallway or on Philadelphia’s busy sidewalks, each in glowering silence looked straight ahead, never acknowledging the other.

After Adams’s caustic letter appeared in public, he was shunned for a time by Quaker merchants and others in Philadelphia who saw him as an obstacle to reconciliation. According to one observer, he was also viewed with “nearly universal detestation” by the moderates in Congress, much as Galloway had been reviled by the radicals at the First Congress. But the incident did not cause lasting damage to Adams, and in fact, it appears to have immediately made him more popular among the foes of Dickinson. Adams continued to participate in Congress without missing a beat, and his colleagues continued to choose him for important committee assignments.
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After the second day of debate, Congress approved the committee’s draft of the Olive Branch Petition. Back in May, when he had first raised the matter of a congressional appeal to the Crown, Dickinson had couched the issues of petitioning the king and creating the Continental army as trade-offs. The moderates would agree to the military preparations sought by the hard-liners; the hard-liners, in return, would consent to the Olive Branch Petition.
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Dickinson must have reminded the petition’s foes of the quid pro quid agreed to six weeks earlier. In fact, that is what he must have pointed out to Adams in the State House garden, to which he almost certainly added that the hard-liners could not now break their word without shattering unity within Congress. Dickinson had his way. Congress adopted the Olive Branch Petition as it was reported out of committee. At some point, perhaps on the day of the dustup with his rival or on the day that Congress approved the petition, Adams wrote to a friend at home: “I dread like Death” petitioning the king, but “We cant avoid it. Discord and total Disunion would be the certain Effect of a resolute Refusal to petition.” Adams’s only hope was that the monarch and his ministers “will be afraid of Negotiations as well as We [the congressional hard-liners], and therefore refuse it.”
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But if Congress had agreed to seek the monarch’s intervention, it had not agreed to send envoys to London with the Olive Branch Petition. Instead, it asked Richard Penn, the son of Pennsylvania’s proprietor, to carry the petition across the sea. Penn lived in Philadelphia, had entertained several congressmen in his home, and was trusted by most deputies. Even so, Penn was instructed to deliver to Arthur Lee and other colonial agents in the metropolis the secret document that he carried with its seal unbroken.
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Penn sailed three days later. As he departed, John Adams almost audibly sighed that Congress “is a great, unwieldy Body. Its Progress must be slow. It is like a large Fleet sailing under Convoy. The fleetest Sailors must wait for the dullest and slowest. Like a Coach and six—the swiftest Horses must be slackened and the slowest quickened, that all may keep an even Pace.”
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Now and again Adams was driven to despair, but he never lost hope that in time a majority in Congress would come around to see that reconciliation with Great Britain was unlikely, perhaps even undesirable. From the onset of hostilities he sensed that the war would alienate the colonists from the mother country. Inevitably, it would call forth decisions that would widen the breach between America and Great Britain. In short, the war would radicalize his countrymen. He was certain, too, that British officials would take steps that would be seen as “Cruelties more abominable than those which are practiced by the Savage Indians.” With each “fresh Evidence” of “Deceit and Hostility, Fire, Famine, Pestilence and Sword,” more and more Americans would “be driven to the sad Necessity of breaking our Connection with G.B.” With each British act of “War and Revenge,” the American people would better understand the immeasurable “Corruption to the System” of politics in the mother country, until most at last understood that the “Cancer is too deeply rooted, and too far spread to be cured by any thing short of cutting it out entire.”
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Dickinson scored another victory—what would be his final major triumph—the very next day. On June 23, the day General Washington departed for the front, Congress had created a committee to draft what was tantamount to a declaration of war. Hoping to have Washington publish the statement when he arrived in Massachusetts, Congress must have directed the committee to work with haste, for the following day the panel submitted a draft penned by John Rutledge. However, Congress found Rutledge’s work unacceptable—the document has vanished, and its contents are unknown—and directed the committee to try again. It also added Dickinson and Jefferson to the committee. Dickinson no doubt wanted the assignment. The “famous Mr. Jefferson,” as one congressman referred to him, was chosen because others in the Virginia delegation had spread the word that he had a “reputation for literature.” In fact, the committee asked Jefferson to pen the new draft.
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Jefferson agreed and within a few days shared his draft with his colleagues on the committee. Dickinson strenuously objected to some of its contents and over the next couple of days, using the Virginian’s handiwork as an outline, wrote his own statement. Adams would have thought it intolerable to have his work repudiated. Jefferson, who was both a newcomer to Congress and a less-confrontational individual, neither quarreled with Dickinson nor bore enmity toward him. Years later Jefferson said simply that he had acquiesced to Dickinson’s “scruples” as he “was so honest a man, and so able a one.”
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At the time, New Jersey’s William Livingston, who sat on the committee, criticized what Jefferson had written as containing “faults common to our Southern gentlemen.” Southerners believe, he went on, that “a reiteration of [British] tyranny, despotism, [and] bloody” actions was all that was necessary when asking the citizenry’s support of the war.
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Livingston implied that the declaration must also stress that Great Britain had violated the imperial constitution. But in fact Jefferson had not ignored constitutional issues. Livingston—and Dickinson, the real power on the committee—in reality wished to have Congress embrace a declaration that espoused the moderates’ view of the limits of parliamentary authority.

Jefferson, like John Adams, believed the king was the sole “link of union between the several parts of the empire.” Dickinson was critical of Parliament: It had evinced, he said, “an inordinate Passion for [unlimited] Power” over the colonies, including the hope “to extort from us, at the point of the Bayonet … unknown sums.” But while he blamed it for the imperial crisis and the war, he did not wish to proclaim that it possessed no authority over America. In a lengthy section Dickinson explained to the monarch that the American people had taken up arms solely to defend their liberties. Furthermore, he underscored that Congress did not seek independence: “We have not raised Armies with ambitious Designs of separating from Great-Britain, and establishing Independent States.”

But a declaration stating the reasons for war had to resonate with a people who were being asked to sacrifice, and possibly die, in that war. It also had to assure the people that the war could be won. Near its close, Dickinson retained a passage that Jefferson had written: “Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. Our internal Resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign Assistance is undoubtedly attainable.” Americans, it added, have “resolved to die Freemen rather than to live Slaves.” On July 6, Congress saw only the version of the Declaration on the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms that Dickinson had prepared. With some minor editing, but little debate, Congress adopted it.
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In two bruising months the Second Congress had rejected the North Peace Plan, created an army, named its commander, declared war, and petitioned the king. Its one substantive link to the prewar First Continental Congress was that the dominant faction repudiated independence, insisting that America yearned to be reconciled with Great Britain, but on its own terms—the restoration of the imperial relationship as it had been before anyone had dreamed of the Stamp Act or other taxes and encroachments. Still, so sweeping, so revolutionary, had been Congress’s actions since Lexington and Concord that John Adams wrote on the day the declaration of war was adopted that he expected “Lord North [would] compliment every Mothers Son of us with a Bill of Attainder”—a decree of outlawry for having committed treason.
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