1775 (76 page)

Decades later, with controversy growing over the Declaration and how
it had come together—the question of who had really penned what—Jefferson offered several compelling explanations. In 1822, reacting to a comment by Adams that “there is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before,” the Virginian did not disagree. He replied that the argument “that it contained no new ideas, that it is a commonplace compilation, its sentiments hacknied in Congress for two years before may all be true. Of that, I am not to be the judge. Richard H. Lee charged it as copied from Locke’s treatise on government…I know only that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”
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In 1825, a year before his death, Jefferson was slightly more forthright: “An appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments never before thought of.”
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In the press of a busy Congress, where the truly capable one third of the 50-odd members were grossly overworked, the notion of plagiarism is hard to take seriously. This is doubly so because what Jefferson called “commonplacing”—the copying over and rough memorization of great works, thoughts, and phrases—was an accepted skill, and in 1776 the Virginian and his colleagues were intending to blend and express widely held views.
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Of course they were on the lookout for ideas that were common wisdom and phrases that were well turned or felicitous; obviously they were inclined to borrow.

If Adams was reasonable in saying that most of the ideas and language in the Declaration were “hackneyed,” Jefferson was correct in essentially replying “So what?’ The imitation of past great documents was overt. In 1775, for example,
The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms
imitated the very similarly titled declaration made by Parliamentary rebels in 1642 with respect to taking up arms against King Charles and that era’s abuses-cum-tyranny. The American Declaration of Independence, in turn, drew notably on Virginia’s Declaration of Rights of June 12, 1776, which was itself inspired by the English Declaration of Rights published in 1689, after the Glorious Revolution that dethroned King James II. Such imitation was not merely convenient; it was also politically credentialing.

As one piece of evidence, the two short columns below compare Jefferson’s draft second paragraph in the Philadelphia Declaration with George Mason’s just-written draft of the Virginia Declaration.

Source: Stephen E. Lucas, “Justifying America,” in Thomas W. Benson,
American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 67–130.

To the reader who applies twenty-first-century yardsticks, Jefferson plagiarized Mason, whose words had appeared first. Amid the practices of the 1770s, though, Jefferson was doing his job. His words were neither inspired nor original. British commentators essentially ignored them in order to concentrate on the “black catalogue” laid out to justify revolution against tyranny. The indictment of a list of tyrannies was needed to overcome the legal handicap to the Americans of staging mere civil war. Tyranny was a required just cause for seeking independence. And as Samuel Adams explained, “No foreign Power can consistently yield Comfort to Rebels, or enter into any kind of Treaty with these Colonies until they declare themselves free and independent.”
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Jefferson performed well and with literary flair, accomplishing an important but somewhat cut-and-paste task. Luckily, most of the ill-judged phrases, paragraphs, and themes in his drafts were changed or dropped by his colleagues. The current term
boilerplate
—used to describe standard legal forms or typical, routine thoughts—clearly does not fit because of Jefferson’s manifest writing skills. However, as a political document for 1776, the Declaration was “deliberately unexceptional,” in the apt words of historian Pauline Maier.
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As such, it is not unfair to consider much of the text as historical boilerplate of an elevated sort.

“One of the problems with the early history of the Declaration is that there is so little of it,” said author Garry Wills in
Inventing America.
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Minimal attention was paid to who had authored the document or its key parts until Jefferson was seeking the presidency in 1796.
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Thereafter party politics and rhetoric gilded Jefferson’s role, although in 1819, 1822, and 1825, he was
put somewhat on the defensive by plagiarism charges. This is the period during which he emphasized trying
not
to be original.

During these years, Jefferson mounted a propaganda campaign of his own, seeking to be remembered for authoring the Declaration rather than for his controversial tenures as governor of Virginia and later as president. His 1824 celebratory visit to Monticello in company with the Marquis de Lafayette was a particular zenith of mythmaking and iconography.
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It was 1826, though, when the Declaration began to assume its quasi-religious status, after Jefferson and Adams both died on the same day, July 4, 1826, the supposed fiftieth anniversary of the signing. To Abraham Lincoln, orating a generation later, that had been a religious sign.

Understanding what the document was—and more important, what it was not—is vital to understanding what happened during the spring of 1776. By doing so, we can move beyond the worshipful preoccupation with the Declaration and the year 1776, which has distorted the study and memory of the early stage of the American Revolution.

The Two-Year Wait: June 1774 to June 1776

Simply put, the Patriotic faction’s objective during May and June 1776 was to finish building a new governmental structure to replace the colonial-era regimes, while pressuring the middle colonies to support full-fledged independence. Succeeding before the invasion came was vital. The colonies had to be out of the empire and accepted internationally before the huge British Army, as of July reaching New York in almost daily increments, could mount its grand invasion.

Springtime public opinion in the middle colonies had clearly been moving toward independence. However, no one can ever know how regional sentiment might have been cooling or turning timid in late June and July as the scarlet-clad British and blue-uniformed Hessians disembarked on bucolic, harborside Staten Island. That locale, officially Richmond County, was one of New York’s most stalwart Tory jurisdictions. Much of its population welcomed the king’s soldiers as liberators.

Staten Island’s position at the entrance to New York Harbor also put it right next mainland to New Jersey, which must have shivered politically and militarily. New Jersey had one of the North’s largest slave populations, and as ships filled the horizon, hundreds of runaways, maybe thousands, sought the British lines. Tories in Richmond County soon organized their
own Loyalist regiment. Even Pennsylvania was only 30 miles from Staten Island’s western tip.

Had those British and German regiments been able to land and bivouac by April or May, as originally planned and expected, the psychological impact could have been disastrous. Fence-sitting political moderates in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland would probably have reaffirmed the late 1775 instructions that ordered their congressional delegates to oppose any measures for independence.

Instead, the troops’ tardy arrival gave Patriots in Congress and elsewhere two to three vital months to maneuver. Leaders who might have faced treason charges—at very least opprobrium—took full advantage. Three pressures would have guided their arguments and actions.

To begin with, the Revolution was beyond backtracking or temporizing. As of June 1776, a full two years had passed since the initial American crisis of replying to the Coercive Acts, fourteen months since Lexington and Concord, a year since Congress had authorized the Continental Army, and ten months since the king had proclaimed the thirteen colonies in rebellion. This prolonged chronology had drawn the delegates in Philadelphia into strong commitments and governmental decision making that already smacked of de facto independence and its exercise.

By late 1775, the basic framework of the United Colonies was in place, and bolder amplifications were under way. On November 25, it was resolved that all valuables and cargo on captured British ships were to become the property of the United Colonies. On January 2, Congress recommended that provinces disarm and imprison their Tories. On January 12, a proposal to open American ports as of March 1 was postponed for later consideration. On March 14, Congress ordered the disarming of disaffected persons and nonassociators. March 23 saw the issuance of letters of marque and reprisal to American privateers. On April 6, Congress took up the discussion it had earlier postponed, voting to open ports of the United Colonies to ships of every nation but Great Britain. In all of the measures, independence was an unstated subtext.

Among the individual colonies, extralegal institutions were also gaining age and popular acceptance. Connecticut and Rhode Island, with their existing self-government, had not needed them, but the other eleven had. Extralegal groups played their most important role below the new line Messrs. Mason and Dixon had surveyed a few years earlier. They could not be stuffed back into Pandora’s box.

Surprisingly, these have not been catalogued. Virginia Patriots used extralegal conventions—the First Convention, the Second, and so forth—to control the province. The First began in August 1774, and the Fifth ended in June 1776, with the implementation of the Old Dominion’s new constitution. Maryland also held five Provincial Conventions, beginning in June 1774 and ending in June 1776. Of the five Provincial Congresses held in North Carolina, the first got under way in August 1774, and the last in November 1776. South Carolina had only two, in 1775 and 1776, because local Patriots employed other extralegal bodies in earlier years. Georgia came late to the game with a provincial congress in July 1775.

Both New England provinces with royal governors initially sidestepped their executive veto through provincial congresses—Massachusetts held three, beginning in 1774 but ending in 1775, when the General Court resumed. And New Hampshire employed five, beginning in 1774. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware all had one or more provincial congresses, but these did not play the same early and powerful role chronicled in the plantation colonies.

On the national and provincial levels alike, this was hardly the institutional profile of an insurgency about to, or even able to, shut itself down. On the contrary, by the spring of 1776, the lives and fortunes, and indeed the sacred honor, of too many influential and powerful colonial leaders were already irretrievably committed. The war had to be fought.

Pressure number two came from the ticking clock of practical politics. As of early May, instructions from home still reined in the five middle-colony delegations. And whatever the progress of public opinion in Perth Amboy or Annapolis, those procedural handcuffs were still in place on June 1. This is why Congress was obliged on June 7 to postpone consideration of Richard Henry Lee’s independence resolution. To act on the basis of favorable votes from just seven colonies was unthinkable. But letting the handcuffs stay on was just as unthinkable.

The third peril lay in the increasing nearness of the British transports, troopships, and escorting warships en route to New York Harbor. De jure independence had to be declared before their 1,000 or so menacing naval guns and their 30 or 40 regiments of professional soldiers swung the psychological balance. May was a month of mostly rumor, but June was more tense. Ships were already arriving in New York from Ireland and Canada. In midmonth, Washington received word that General Howe had sailed from Canada (Halifax) on June 9. Then on June 29, three white flags
flapping on the heights of Staten Island signaled that the British invasion fleet had been sighted, and by the next morning, 130 warships were in New York Harbor.
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Time had almost run out.

Congressional Realpolitik, May 1776–July 1776

Congress was between a rock and a hard place, but John Adams perceived an auspicious trend. Amid his periodic comments of “if only we had…,” the delegate from Massachusetts regularly pronounced in early 1776 that this or that action by Congress or Parliament represented a virtual or practical declaration of independence. In March, for example, responding to Parliament’s December Prohibitory Act, Adams characterized it as “the piratical act, or plundering act, or Act of Independency…It is a complete dismemberment of the British Empire.”
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On April 6, after Congress opened American ports to the trade of the non-British world, he enthused that “as to declarations of independency, read our privateering laws and our commercial laws. What signifies a word?”
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On May 15, the voluble Massachusetts lawyer succeeded in attaching a Revolutionary preamble to an already-radical congressional resolution that demanded new governments in provinces that still operated under British authority and auspices. Adams’s preamble, cutting to the political quick, further called for total suppression of the exercise of any kind of authority under the Crown. This meant governments like the ones still operating in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.