Independence (3 page)

By 1774, when Virginia elected delegates to the First Continental Congress, Lee had become a powerful figure within his province. In fact, he received the second-largest number of votes of the seven delegates that Virginia sent to Congress, outpacing both Washington and Henry.
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John Adams first met Lee, who was then forty-one years old, at that initial Congress. Adams privately assessed many of his congressional colleagues, describing some as handsome and others as odd-looking, and judging assorted delegates as bookish, talented, plain, unimpressive, lazy, transparently cunning, or “not very promising.” Adams was especially impressed by Lee, calling him “a masterly Man” who was earnest, thoughtful, prudent, and the equal of the best orators he had ever heard.
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Other Virginia deputies told Adams that Patrick Henry was a better public speaker than Lee, so good that his fellow burgesses called him Virginia's “Demosthenes.” Lee, they said, was thought of as the colony's “Cicero,” for like the ancient who had warned of the decay of the Roman republic, Lee had cautioned of the dangers America faced from the corruption that sullied England. But Virginia's deputies also acknowledged that Lee was an effective and dramatic speaker. (He was known for wearing a black silk glove on the hand that had been disfigured in the hunting accident, a prop that he learned to use to his advantage as he made theatrical gestures while delivering speeches.)
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By 1776, Lee was seen by other congressmen as the most influential figure in his colony's delegation. By then, too, he had become a quiet advocate for American independence. The oppressive doubts raised by London's policies in the 1760s had by 1774 led Lee to believe that the colonists' “most desirable connection” with Great Britain should be strictly commercial. When war broke out in 1775, he openly questioned the desirability of reconciliation but did not publicly advocate separation from the mother country. A year later, in the spring of 1776, Lee asserted that Great Britain had severed its ties with the colonies when it boycotted American trade as a war measure. In early June, five days before he took the floor to introduce the resolution calling on Congress to break all ties with the mother country, Lee told acquaintances that American independence was not a matter of choice, but of necessity. Whatever he had felt about independence previously, Lee had come to think that a formal declaration of independence was imperative for gaining victory in what now seemed likely to be a long and profoundly difficult war. America, Lee had concluded, could not win the war without foreign help, and it could not secure adequate foreign assistance unless it offered Britain's foes in Europe some enticement to enter the war. Only American independence, which would drastically weaken Great Britain, might bring European powers into the war on the side of the colonies.
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Lee and the other members of Virginia's congressional delegation felt that Congress could wait no longer to proclaim American independence. Recognized by Hancock, Lee took the floor on June 7 and read his motion in resounding tones:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and Independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
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Since the outbreak of hostilities, the colonists' aim in fighting had been reconciliation with Great Britain on terms set by the Continental Congress. Lee was proposing a dramatically new war aim. His resolution urged that henceforth Americans wage this war to set themselves free of Great Britain and to establish a new and independent American nation.

During the past two years Congress had taken many momentous steps, but Lee's motion brought this body face-to-face with the greatest—and most dangerous—decision of all.

CHAPTER 2

“A S
PIRIT OF
R
IOT AND
R
EBELLION
”

L
ORD
N
ORTH,
B
ENJAMIN
F
RANKLIN, AND THE
A
MERICAN
C
RISIS

FREDERICK NORTH,
Lord North, was into his fifth year as prime minister during the cool, damp London spring of 1774, a time when war or peace between Great Britain and its American colonies hung in the balance.

In 1770 the king, George III, had turned to Lord North, a political veteran with a background in finance, to form a government. North had entered Parliament in 1755, four years following his graduation from Oxford. After four more years he was brought into the Duke of Newcastle's cabinet as the Lord High Treasurer, a post he held for half a dozen years through several ministries. In 1767 the Duke of Grafton made North the chancellor of the exchequer, the official in charge of financial matters and the ministry's spokesman in the House of Commons, a position for which he was tailor-made, as he had few peers as a parliamentary debater. North still held that post three years later, when the government collapsed and the monarch asked him to head a new ministry. Despite his long service, North was only thirty-five years old when he became the “first minister”—he disliked the title “prime minister”—and moved into the cramped and as yet unnumbered residence on Downing Street that for a generation had been available for the head of the ministry.

North was pleasant, witty, charming, industrious, efficient, and bright. Sophisticated though never pompous, he had a knack for getting on with others, and his performance as chief financial minister had earned nearly universal praise. His appointment to head the ministry was widely applauded. Robert Walpole, the acid-tongued son of the former prime minister, thought North was “more able, more active, more assiduous, more resolute, and more fitted to deal with mankind” than any other possible choice.

Even so, North had readily apparent limitations. He had neither leadership nor executive experience. While good at resolving small, isolated problems, North had difficulty understanding and grappling with larger, more complicated quandaries. When dealing with complexities, moreover, he often turned indecisive and was prone to vacillation. His weaknesses were exacerbated by frequent bouts of poor health and episodic periods of depression—what one member of his cabinet called “his distressing Fits”—that rendered him nearly inert for days on end. North was also utterly lacking in those qualities usually present in great leaders. He possessed not a single ounce of charisma, and lacking gravitas, he was anything but an intimidating figure. He was of average height, obese, awkward, disheveled in dress, and given to slurred speech. Contemporaries limned him as “blubbery” and a “heavy booby-looking” sort. One described him as having a fair complexion, light-colored hair, bushy eyebrows, and lackluster gray eyes. Another observer mentioned that his “large prominent eyes rolled to no purpose (for he was utterly short-sighted),” adding that with his “wide mouth, thick lips, and inflated visage,” North “gave the appearance of a blind trumpeter.” No one understood his deficiencies better than North himself, and when approached about forming a government, he had sought to persuade the king that he was unsuited for heading the cabinet. George III thought otherwise, and North, who was never able to stand up to the monarch, acquiesced, though on three occasions during his first three years as prime minister he offered his resignation. The king would have none of it.
1

North had come to power convinced that earlier governments had mishandled the American problem. With better judgment, he said, they “might at first have … easily ended” the rebellion when the issue was no more than resistance to taxation. But with time the insurgents had grown bolder and more radical, and better organized, leaving him to face a crisis that was “now grown serious.” From the moment he assumed power, North believed the colonies and mother country had reached a deadly impasse. They now were contending “for no less than sovereignty on one side, and independence on the other.” He never wavered from that point of view. By the spring of 1774 the issue was “whether we have or have not any authority in that country.”
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With time and experience North's self-assurance had grown. “I do not find my spirits flag” any longer, he confided to a friend in 1774. One reason for his confidence was that the king remained steadfastly supportive. George III bestowed honors on North and did good turns for his family and friends. The king also often wrote to North following his performance in a debate or an address to Parliament to say, “I thoroughly approve” or “very exactly my way of thinking.”
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But the prime minister was also more poised because he felt that he saw the American problem with clarity, and he believed that there was but one choice that could be made. “As to America,” he remarked in the spring of 1774,

Frederick Lord North by Nathaniel Dance. A veteran politician, North was asked to form a government in 1770. He remained the prime minister until near the end of the war. North privately doubted that Britain could easily crush the insurgency by military means. Engraving after portrait by Nathaniel Dance, ca. 1773–74. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

there
is an unhappy necessity, but a great one. We must decide whether we will govern America or whether we will bid adieu to it, and give it that perfect liberty.… The dispute is now upon such ground, unless they see you are willing and able to maintain your authority, they will … totally throw it off. There is no man but must be conscious of the necessity to act with authority in that country in order to preserve the country as a subject country to Great Britain.
4

For North in 1774, the “unhappy necessity” could not have been more apparent. He must take the steps necessary to hold America or it would declare its independence.

The road to American independence was long and twisted, and no one is certain where it began.

For more than a century before 1776, numerous English writers, and occasionally a royal official posted in the colonies, had reflected on the likelihood of the American colonies becoming independent. Some had warned that it was inevitable. Pointing to examples in antiquity when Greek and Roman colonies had thrown off their imperial yokes, many essayists predicted that sooner or later Britain's colonies in America would to do the same. Others were influenced by the cyclical theory of history, quite popular at the time. According to this theory, nations went through the same sequences, or cycles, as humans, beginning as children, growing into young and vigorous adults, passing into a less robust but more enlightened middle age, and finally falling into senescence and decline. The devotees of the cyclical theory cautioned that when the American provinces reached adulthood, the colonists would seek independence. Other writers shunned fancy theories and said simply that the colonists would seek to go on their own when they were convinced that they had become economically self-sufficient.

Still others warned that the descendants of the Puritans, radical Protestants who had migrated to New England in the seventeenth century to escape the Church of England, would not rest until they were entirely free of Great Britain. New England Yankees, it was said, were merely waiting for the right moment to act. Some writers saw the spectacular population growth in the colonies as a threat. They predicted a revolt for American independence when the colonists outnumbered the inhabitants of the parent state.

Not everyone who ruminated on the matter thought independence was probable. Economists and spokesmen for the mercantile sector often ridiculed those who prophesied American independence. They stressed the commercial benefits that the colonists derived from being part of the empire and insisted that proper trade policies would choke off separatist inclinations.

Many English and Europeans crossed the Atlantic to visit North America during the eighteenth century, and several wrote of America's flora and fauna and of the living conditions and cultural practices in the far corners of the colonies. Many could not resist the temptation to ask the colonists whether they believed America would someday break away from the mother country. The colonists invariably answered that independence was inevitable, although all said the break lay in the distant future, a generation or two removed, possibly even a century down the road.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Americans—mostly colonial businessmen engaged in transatlantic commerce—who wrote on the question of American independence said it was unlikely. Nearly all, in fact, extolled the mutual benefits of the imperial relationship and argued that the Americans were happy to be part of the British Empire.
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In the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin, the best-known colonist, took up the matter of the striking growth of America's population. In two thoughtful and widely read essays, Franklin forecast with amazing accuracy that by the mid-nineteenth century America's population would surpass that of the mother country. When that occurred, the imperial capital should be moved from London to Philadelphia, he said, perhaps tongue in cheek. While never predicting that America's swelling population would lead to independence, Franklin did offer pithy counsel to the imperial rulers. A “wise and good Mother,” he wrote, would loosen her grip on her maturing offspring, lest tight restraints “distress … the children” and “weaken … the whole Family.”
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In the glow of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which recognized the Anglo-American triumph in the Seven Years' War (sometimes called the French and Indian War), the colonists appeared to think of themselves as blessed to be British subjects. Americans reveled in the glorious peace, which drove the French from North America and Spain from Florida. Great Britain was left in possession of every square foot of territory from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. Many Americans shared their king's pride at “glory[ing] in the name of Britain.” They also dreamed of sharing in the coming prosperity they believed would flow from the spoils of victory. Not a few hailed their “indulgent Mother” and praised Great Britain as the freest nation on the planet.
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Joyous colonists named towns after British heroes. Massachusetts sent a donation to London to help cover the expense of erecting a memorial to a British officer who had fallen in the conflict. When word arrived in 1760 of the sudden death of the king, George II, the colonists mourned. The following year they rejoiced with heartfelt celebrations at the news of the coronation of the new king and queen, George III and Charlotte. As the decade of the 1760s got under way, several royal governors reported that the colonists were loyal and happy. No one captured America's spirit better than Jonathan Mayhew, perhaps the most influential cleric in Boston. He saw colonists and parent state linked in “a mighty empire (I do not mean an independent one) in numbers little inferior to the greatest in Europe, and in felicity to none”
8

The colonists did not know that sometime around 1740 officials serving in Sir Robert Walpole's ministry had begun to consider steps to expand and tighten Britain's control over its distant colonies. The officials were all too aware that many American merchants engaged in a lucrative illegal trade, ignoring Parliament's century-old commercial regulations and diverting some of their profits into non-British pockets. Rightly or wrongly, Walpole's ministers also believed that America was inexorably drifting toward independence. London was distracted by domestic woes and repeated wars, and its administrative control over the colonies had long been lax. The result, these brooding officials concluded, was that the colonists—three thousand miles away and for generations left to their own devices—had grown steadily more autonomous. Unless checked, the ministers convinced themselves, the colonies would continue to drift apart from the parent state, both politically and culturally, until America could no longer be kept within the empire. To stop this putative slide toward American independence, these ministers wished to tighten London's grip on the colonies as soon as circumstances permitted.
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However, wars with France and Spain in the 1740s and 1750s, including the Seven Years' War, posed roadblocks to the imposition of more rigorous control of the colonists. But with the Peace of Paris, which finally ended nearly twenty-five years of warfare, there was nothing to prevent London from exerting greater control over its American colonies.

Like their predecessors, Britain's postwar ministers were concerned about America's drifting away from London's control, a worry that took on an additional urgency once France had been removed from the picture in America. Many in London had believed that the French presence, and the threat it had posed, had kept the northern colonies, and especially New England, in line. The Yankees, it was often said, had known that they needed London's protection if they were to be secure. That no longer was the case. In the bright glow of peace, many in the ministry felt that Great Britain not only could act to resolve its potential colonial problem but also that it must act.