The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (54 page)

All these conclusions and the ones which found corruption and sin in the Massachusetts Government Act, the Boston Port Act, indeed the entire array of British actions against America since 1764, repeated old concerns. They also employed a familiar vocabulary and referred to the deepest values of Americans. What was different in 1774 was the air of near hopelessness; the corrosive feeling that almost nothing worked, nothing would recall Britain to its senses, recall it to the service of the good and the freedom that once filled Anglo-American life. Yet much could be done -- a virtuous self-denial would help keep Americans free of corruption, a rejection of placemen and troops would aid in keeping their institutions pure, and a principled defense of their right to govern themselves gave the only hope possible that their liberty might be preserved.

The bitterness so obvious in the essays and pamphlets published throughout the summer did not show itself immediately in the meeting of the first Continental Congress. The delegates who rode into Philadelphia in late August and early September felt excitement and pride and even awe at what they were doing -- not rage at Britain. The Massachusetts delegates, John and Sam Adams, differed from their colleagues in their feelings but they kept their anger in check. They and their colleagues Robert Treat Paine and Thomas Cushing were shrewd men who proposed to serve Massachusetts and America without any display of self.

Keeping in the background came hard to John Adams, almost as hard as holding his anger in check. He was a warm, often irascible and impulsive man, open to the world, eager for its praise and recognition but throughout his life often stung by its barbs of disapproval.
Historians

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often compare John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, a man he admired, except for one difficult period in their lives, and to whom as an old man he poured out his heart. Jefferson possessed a serene surface that the perpetually uneasy Adams never developed, even for a moment. Jefferson was elegant; Adams was rough though never coarse. He lacked Jefferson's versatility, but within its range his intelligence cut as deeply as Jefferson's did. And in two fields of knowledge, the history of religion and politics, Adams's learning surpassed Jefferson's.

John Adams did not consider life a search for salvation but he felt many of the compulsions and drives of his Puritan forebears. In particular he felt the urge to work and to accomplish something -- something in public life. He craved fame and reputation. But he would not do anything just for the sake of the world's approval. His conduct was governed by the moral code of his culture, a code that was still largely Puritan. While he valued honor and wealth and learning, he believed that piety and virtue were more important.

Adams's interest in public affairs was closely connected to the Puritan values that controlled so much of his life. The first essays he wrote as a young man were attacks on taverns. His objections to taverns echoed the traditional Protestant concern that thrift be observed and time and talent not be wasted. Taverns ran people into debt, took them away from their work, and offered tempting places in which to squander time.

Opposing the Stamp Act and the British measures that followed came as naturally to Adams as did criticizing the immorality of taverns. The political issues of the 1760s and 1770s were never simply matters of law or equity or constitutionalism, they were matters of moral principle. The British presented a threat because they were corrupt as well as powerful. They had to be resisted with everything America had; if they were not, virtue, piety, and liberty would be lost. These convictions governed Adams's conduct throughout the Revolution.

Despite his obsessive concern with public questions, despite his rage at the British, despite his anxiety and his fears, John Adams was a happy man when he attended Congress. He loved and received in turn the love of Abigail Smith Adams, whom he had married in 1764. Abigail Adams had wit and warmth to match his own, and on the eve of the Revolution she had a maturity of judgment that he would not attain for years. Nine years younger than he, she was the daughter of a wellto-do clergyman in Weymouth, a village close to John Adams's Braintree.

John Adams was born in 1735 in Braintree, the son of John Adams, a farmer, and Susanna Boylston. The Boylstons were socially better than the Adamses and they had more money. Young John had a happy boyhood, was sent to grammar school and Harvard College ( A.B. 1755), taught school at Worcester, studied law for two years, and was admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1758. When he rode to Philadelphia to attend the first Continental Congress he was an experienced attorney. He had held several minor offices in Braintree and one important one -- he had been elected a selectman in 1766 -- and after moving to Boston in 1768 he had begun to play a larger part in provincial politics. Boston had made him its representative to the General Court in 1770, the year he defended Captain Preston and the soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials. He was well known in Massachusetts and, though he never felt that he received his due, highly respected by its citizens.

The delegates that John Adams and his cousin Sam met in the Congress were hardly less capable than themselves. In fact several could claim much more in the way of attainments than either Adams.

The Virginians especially impressed their colleagues. They were an elegant lot, distinguished in bearing and apparently steady in purpose. That vainest of men, John Adams, called them "the most spirited and consistent, of any"; Richard Henry Lee was a "masterly Man," Peyton Randolph, a "well looking Man," Richard Bland, "a learned bookish Man." Others shared these impressions. To Silas Deane of Connecticut, Peyton Randolph's appearance was "noble"; and George Washington, though "hard" in countenance," had "a very young look, and an easy, soldier-like air and gesture." Washington had long since taken on the proportions of legend for his exploits in the French and Indian War. Now while the Congress met, his reputation grew as the story spread that "on hearing of the Boston Port Bill, he offered to raise and arm and lead one thousand men himself at his own expense, for the defense of the country, were there need of it." Deane reported that Washington's fortune was "equal to such an undertaking." The entire group of Virginians drew praise from Caesar Rodney of Delaware, who declared that "more sensible, fine fellows you would never wish to see."
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In an age that relished oratory, the Virginians performed brilliantly. Deane gave way to ecstasy in describing Patrick Henry -- "the completest speaker I ever heard" -- and admitted that he could not convey the "music" of Henry's voice "or the highwrought yet natural elegance of his style and manner."
Richard Henry Lee brought to the Congress a reputa-

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tion for eloquence as great as Henry's -- both Deane and John Adams called them the "Cicero" and the "Demosthenes of the Age."

If the Virginians stood out in more than one way, it is fair to say that virtually all the delegates who left personal accounts of the Congress confessed to admiring the ability and the character of the others. John Adams wrote his wife, Abigail, that "The magnanimity and public spirit which I see here make me blush for the sordid, venal herd which I have seen in my own Province."
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Adams's praise of the Congress is completely understandable. Besides the Virginians it included John Dickinson and Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania, both formidable men; James Duane and John Jay of New York whose talents must have been obvious even then; Samuel Chase of Maryland, Christopher Gadsden and Edward and John Rutledge of South Carolina, less able surely but impressive in their own ways nonetheless. Moreover these men were meeting in an extraordinary gathering where the petty concerns of the "venal herd" which brought a blush to Adams were missing. Still, they were not completely disinterested men; they may not have had the conventional spoils of office on their minds but they were very much concerned to defend local -- as well as continental -- interests.

Nor did they give up familiar ways of working the political engines. The two Adamses, aware that they and their colleagues from Massachusetts were objects of suspicion as well as of sympathy, took care to wear masks of modesty. Early in their stay in Philadelphia they were disconcerted by having to defend their colony's religious establishment against charges that it persecuted the Baptists, but even this embarrassment did not force them from their pose as political innocents. Behind the scenes they plotted and schemed almost as if they were home in Boston. "We have been obliged to keep ourselves out of sight, and to feel pulses, and to sound the depths," John Adams reported, and added that they had used others to "Insinuate our sentiments, designs, and desires."
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The full extent of those "sentiments, designs, and desires" is not known. They clearly included a conviction that all colonial trade with Britain should cease until the Intolerable Acts were repealed, and they may have extended to a hope that the Congress would call upon the

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colonies to arm themselves for a war should Parliament refuse to yield. This second "sentiment" had little chance of being made part of the Congress's designs. Most delegates favored a policy of economic coercion, though the exact terms proved difficult to define, but aside from an occasional hothead like Christopher Gadsden, who seems to have proposed an attack on British troops in Boston, almost none wished to see war break out. Their reluctance arose not from an overpowering desire to remain within the British empire, but from fear -- fear of losing the war and thereby inviting a full-scale despotism.
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The probability of war does not seem to have been discussed in official sessions; rather it was a subject taken up at the dinners and parties the delegates attended every day. Much was arranged at these affairs: the meeting place of the Congress, Carpenter's Hall rather than the state house which Joseph Galloway, speaker of the Pennsylvania assembly had offered; the selection of the president of the Congress, Peyton Randolph, the choice of the Massachusetts men and of the delegates of the southern colonies. A similar deal made Charles Thomson secretary, though he was not a delegate. Whether to give each colony a vote or to apportion votes according to population was doubtless discussed outof-doors, but the question also received a full discussion in formal session. The decision -- each colony would have one vote -- was essential to preserve unity among the colonies, large and small.
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Formal sessions began on September 5. From that day until the Congress dissolved itself on October 26, two major questions occupied it: what was the basis of American rights and how should they be defended? Both questions were given to a committee which promptly began discussions which, it discovered, could not be brought to an easy agreement.

The debate on the basis of American rights, serious and informed as it was, had on one side a curiously detached quality, almost as if nothing had taken place between Britain and the colonies in the previous ten years. That "side" was represented by James Duane, John Rutledge, and Joseph Galloway, all three refusing to consider that colonial rights should be founded upon the laws of nature. Galloway indeed seemed unwilling to accept any part of the constitutional argument the colonists had made, announcing that I never could find the Rights of Americans, in the Distinctions between Taxation and Legislation, nor in the Distinction between Laws for Revenue and for the Regulation of Trade. I have looked for our Rights in the Laws of Nature -- but could not find