Independence (40 page)

Thomas Paine by John Wesley Jarvis, ca. 1806–1807. Paine's
Common Sense,
issued in January 1776, was the first pamphlet to openly advocate independence. He wrote that independence would be the birthday of a new world, and that it would lead to peace and prosperity for the American people. (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)

The first few pages of
Common Sense
, which are no longer well remembered, were not unimportant. Paine explained that government was much simpler than the common people had been led to believe by the best educated and socially elite, who, of course, wished to continue monopolizing power. As government's purpose was to secure the safety and well-being of the citizenry, Paine wrote, it was only “common sense” that the citizenry should share in the governing process. In sketchy terms, he outlined republican governance. All that America needed for its government was a unicameral assembly (which it had in Congress) that was broadly representative of the people (which was not particularly true of Congress, though Paine did not point this out). In such a system, Paine continued, the elected representatives would have “the same concerns at stake [as] those who have appointed them” and would share “a common interest with every part of the community.”

Great Britain's system was the very antithesis of what he had described, Paine told his readers. Dominated by a monarch—who came to the throne through hereditary succession—and a titled nobility who inherited seats in one house of Parliament, Britain's rulers seldom displayed “fidelity to the public” and “contribute[d] nothing towards the freedom of the State.” The Crown—the monarchy—was the “overbearing part in the English constitution,” the engine that drove the entire system, Paine added. As
Common Sense
appeared at the same moment that word of the king's October speech to Parliament arrived in the colonies, what Paine said appeared to be dead on target.

“The evil of monarchy,” Paine asserted, was that it had left England groaning under kings who all too often were “foolish … wicked, and … improper,” sometimes too young, over and again too old, on many occasions “ignorant and unfit,” their “minds … early poisoned” by the belief that they were “born to reign, and others to obey.” Not least among the iniquities of monarchy was that royal families were sequestered from their subjects to the point that they were unfamiliar with the wants and needs of the people. Kings, Paine went on, had little to do but create titles and make wars, and the wars they had started had “laid … the world in blood and ashes.” The staggering result of war after war, not to mention the cost of creating sinecures for favorites and sycophants, was that the citizenry had been shackled with oppressive taxes to pay for it all.

But above all else, if monarchy contributed little of benefit to the people of England, it was actively baneful to colonists who lived three thousand miles away and whose outlook and interests were usually strikingly different from those of the English Crown and nobility.

However, by remaining tied to Great Britain, Americans were victimized by far more than monarchs and aristocrats. The American people and the British nation had dissimilar interests, but imperial governments sought almost solely to advance the interests of the latter. As a result, the connection to royal Britain left Americans to suffer “injuries and disadvantages.”

This moved Paine to challenge Congress's very reason for fighting the war: to reconcile with Great Britain. To remain tied to the mother country would not only inhibit American commerce; it would also subject the American people to a “second hand government” on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. “America is only a secondary object” to that British government, he contended. “England consults the good of this country no further than it answers to her own purpose.” It will drag America into European wars that are of no concern to the colonists. It would fight those wars as long as it wishes. It would make whatever peace on whatever terms it pleases without consultation with the provincial authorities.

There were those who said that “America has flourished under her … connection with Great Britain [and] the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness,” Paine wrote. This was a “fallacious” assertion, he responded. “We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat.” Others said that Britain has protected America. True, Paine wrote, but London safeguarded the colonies in order to exploit their wealth and trade. Dependence was no longer necessary. America was capable of standing on its feet.

Paine took a swipe at “all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation,” including those in Congress and none more clearly than Dickinson. He charged that they were “Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men, who
cannot
see; prejudiced men, who
will not
see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this continent, than all the other three.”

He then threw down the gauntlet: “I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation to show a single advantage that this continent can reap by being connected with Great Britain.” None existed, Paine insisted. Once independent of Great Britain, Americans could govern themselves and secure the true interests of America. Peace and prosperity would ensue. “Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port.” The time had come to declare American independence. “ 'TIS TIME TO PART.”

Once it was independent, republican America would be an example to the world. American independence would strike “a new era for politics”—it would be nothing less than the ‘birthday of a new world.” Sounding very much like the revolutionary that he was, Paine proclaimed, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

In the final section of
Common Sense
, Paine maintained that victory in a prolonged war for independence could be won. America was unified and debt-free, and it had the resources and manpower for creating powerful armies and a sturdy navy. (America needed a fleet only one-twentieth the size of the Royal Navy to be “an over-match for her,” he claimed.) Paine implied—he was careful not to make this a categorical argument—that help from Great Britain's traditional European enemies, France and Spain, could be had and that it would be useful. What he did say unreservedly was that it was “unreasonable” to expect French and Spanish assistance so long as reconciliation—“strengthening the connection between Britain and America”—was the object of the war. When Congress declared independence, he implied, Versailles and Madrid would find that intervention on America's behalf was desirable; for if London lost its colonies, Great Britain would be seriously weakened. Aside from Paine's assaults on monarchy and reconciliation, it was this cogent passage—merely one long sentence—that made
Common Sense
so timely. The pamphlet had no more than appeared before word arrived of the disaster at Quebec. Where once many would have taken umbrage at the thought of a foreign alliance, the horrific failure in Canada led many to see that close ties with France were perhaps America's only hope of saving itself.
43

Four days after
Common Sense
hit the streets, a New Hampshire delegate reported that it had been “greedily bought up and read by all ranks of people” in Philadelphia. Another congressman related that it “has had a great Sale.” John Hancock said that the pamphlet “makes much talk here.” Franklin informed a correspondent that it “has made a great Impression here.” Samuel Adams, one of the first to purchase the tract, immediately sent copies to friends in Massachusetts, informing them that it had “fretted some folks here.” Other delegates eagerly wished to learn what the authorities back home thought of “the general spirit of it,” and some explicitly asked provincial leaders if they had been converted by
Common Sense
to “relish independency.”
44

Common Sense
hit like a bombshell. Some 250 pamphlets on the Anglo-American crisis had been published in America during the previous decade, and none had come close to equaling the sales of Paine's tract. Dickinson's
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
had outsold all rivals before 1776, but within a few months, nearly one hundred times more copies of
Common Sense
may have been sold than Dickinson's immensely popular leaflet had realized during its eight-year life span. Timing was obviously crucial for Paine's success, as was his crisp and lucid writing style. But so too was his palpable rage at Great Britain. Unbridled fury seemed to leap from the pages of the pamphlet. Paine's wrath struck a responsive chord with Americans who were beside themselves with anger at a mother country that made war on its colonies and willfully destroyed port cities, incited Indian attacks, and fomented slave insurrections.

Paine's euphoria at an American Revolution—a term that had not yet come into common usage—also transported readers. He provided a transcendent meaning for the events that were churning up the lives of the inhabitants of the colonies. Not only did the fate of contemporaries hang in the balance, Paine said; unborn generations of Americans and Europeans also depended on the creation of an independent America. “ 'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now,” Paine wrote. He proclaimed that “a new era” had begun on April 19, 1775—the day the war began—an epoch that would be ushered in by cleansing changes, none more important than the republicanism that would supplant rule by monarchy and privileged nobility, preserving “the RIGHTS OF MANKIND.” “The
time hath found us
,” he declared, and it had brought forth the “seed-time of continental union, faith, and honor,” and above all of American nationhood and American independence. No one had said such things in print previously, but across the broad landscape countless Americans took to heart what Paine had written, and their ready acceptance of his radical message quickened the pace toward American independence.
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CHAPTER 9

“W
E
M
IGHT
G
ET
O
URSELVES UPON
D
ANGEROUS
G
ROUND
”

J
AMES
W
ILSON,
R
OBERT
M
ORRIS,
L
ORD
H
OWE, AND THE
S
EARCH FOR
P
EACE

ONE “EVENT HAS BROT ANOTHER ON,”
Samuel Adams remarked early in 1776.
1
He understood that the war was driving nearly every step that Congress took. The dynamic of hostilities was reshaping attitudes and shredding the already tattered remnants of the colonists' devotion to the mother country. The hard and bitter feelings that had swept over Great Britain in the wake of Lexington and Concord were now matched in an America that had learned of Falmouth and Lord Dunmore's proclamation. But nothing to this point in the war had shaken the reconciliationists as badly as the simultaneous blows of the king's fierce and unbending stance and Thomas Paine's assault on the very idea of maintaining ties with the mother country.

With the tide running against those who favored reconciliation, and with their options increasingly limited, Dickinson and his followers launched a final initiative at the outset of 1776. In August, and again in October, the king had justified the use of force on the premise that Congress was committed to American independence. On January 9, the day after the text of the monarch's address to Parliament reached Philadelphia, James Wilson, a Pennsylvania delegate who looked on Dickinson as his mentor, moved that Congress “declare to their Constituents and the World their present Intentions respecting an Independency.” A New Jersey congressman noted in his diary that Wilson was “strongly supported,” and it is a safe bet that at a minimum all four delegations from the mid-Atlantic colonies backed his motion.
2
Wilson and his adherents had two objectives. They wished to show America's friends in England that the king was wrong to insist that the American rebels secretly planned to declare independence when the time was right. In addition, by disavowing independence, Wilson hoped to lay the groundwork for talks with the envoys that George III in October had so tantalizingly suggested were to be sent to America. On the day after Wilson spoke,
Common Sense
appeared. That provided the reconciliationists with an additional—and especially urgent—reason for acting. They prayed that a congressional repudiation of independence would derail whatever groundswell might be aroused by Paine's persuasiveness.

The thirty-four-year-old Wilson, who served as the point man for this latest sally to halt America's drift out of the empire, had grown up in a farming family in Caskardy in the Scottish Lowlands. Provided with a formal education that was to prepare him for the clergy, Wilson instead fell under the influence of the Enlightenment during his years at the University of St. Andrews. He endured one listless year of theological study following graduation, after which he dropped out of school and worked briefly as a tutor and bookkeeper. Unhappy and adrift, he sailed for America in 1765, hoping, like numerous other immigrants, to find some purpose to his life. Wilson landed in New York, though he quickly moved to Philadelphia, the larger of the two cities. Not long after his arrival, the
Letters from a Farmer
appeared and Dickinson bolted to fame. Ambitious and drawn to politics himself, Wilson in 1767, at age twenty-five, applied to study law with Dickinson. Completing his apprenticeship in less than a year, Wilson moved to Reading, a town of a few hundred inhabitants northwest of Philadelphia, and opened a legal practice. With little competition, he rapidly succeeded. Filled with confidence, Wilson after two years moved to Carlisle, a larger frontier town teeming with immigrants, including many from Scotland. He prospered there as well. Within two years he had the largest caseload of any attorney in town, and in 1771, merely six years after crossing the Atlantic, he married a wealthy heiress, the stepdaughter of an influential ironmaster.

Like John Adams, Wilson largely remained aloof from politics until the Tea Act and Intolerable Acts crises, when he served on local committees that opposed parliamentary taxation. Later, he was part of the movement that pressured Galloway to have the assembly sanction the Continental Congress. Also like Adams, Wilson published a pamphlet in 1774 that attacked Parliament's claims of unlimited power over the colonies. In most respects, Wilson shared Dickinson's outlook, especially with regard to American independence. The one significant difference in their outlook was that, by the eve of the war, Wilson denied that Parliament could exercise any authority over the colonies.

Dickinson and his former student remained close. When Galloway resigned from the Pennsylvania delegation to the Second Continental Congress, Dickinson had a hand in securing Wilson's appointment to the vacant seat in May 1775. Wilson remained a backbencher throughout his first year in Congress, in part perhaps because his somewhat standoffish manner and forbiddingly cold exterior prevented close relationships with delegates from other colonies. In addition, like Adams at the First Congress in 1774, Wilson, somewhat unsure of himself, likely was overawed for a time by his more experienced colleagues. Yet while Wilson seldom entered debates, he served on numerous committees, where he established a reputation as a bright, thoughtful, and dependable colleague. In the summer of 1775 John Adams pronounced that Wilson's “Fortitude, Rectitude, and Abilities too, greatly outshine” those of Dickinson.
3

James Wilson. A staunch reconciliationist and follower of John Dickinson, Wilson opposed independence until the last minute, when he voted to break with Great Britain. He had a long career as an American public official following independence. (Private Collection/ The Bridgeman Art Library)

When Wilson took the floor in January 1776, he may have felt that the time had arrived for him to play a more prominent role. He may also have been driven by desperation, given the increasing plight of the reconciliationists. The possibility exists, too, that those who shared his outlook selected him to take the lead in this fight not only because he was a fresh face but also because his outlook on Parliament's supremacy was slightly more progressive than Dickinson's. Or, Wilson may have acted when he did because of the role he was playing at the time in a largely forgotten episode—negotiations with a self-appointed emissary of Lord North.

Through contacts with talkative New York and New Jersey delegates who had attended the First Congress, Thomas Lundin, Lord Drummond, had learned in December 1774 of the narrow defeat of Galloway's compromise proposal. Drummond, a Scotsman who had crossed to America and settled in New Jersey three years after Wilson's emigration, also appears to have gleaned that the initial Congress had been deeply divided and that many moderate congressmen distrusted their more radical colleagues from New England. Armed with this inside information, Drummond hurried to London shortly after the First Continental Congress adjourned. During the winter of 1775, hard on the heels of Dartmouth's failure to lure Franklin into meaningful negotiations, Drummond was given an audience with Lord North and the American secretary. The Scotsman presented a peace proposal that he had drafted, a plan that bore a striking similarity to the so-called North Peace Plan recently presented to Parliament. Both North and Dartmouth thought Drummond might be useful, but the prime minister made no decision about using him as an emissary for another six months.

In the wake of Lexington-Concord and Bunker Hill, with the ministry scrambling to find additional troops to send to America, and with North at least privately despairing of ever suppressing the American rebellion by force, the prime minister decided to put Drummond to use as an unofficial envoy. North asked him to return to Philadelphia. Drummond was to use his contacts to determine what Congress would accept, and what London would have to relinquish, to settle Anglo-American differences. No doubt, too, Lord North was searching for a means of sowing fatal divisions among the congressmen. It seems clear that Drummond was instructed not to drag his feet. North wanted to know whether any chance existed for fruitful negotiations before substantive military operations began in the spring or summer of 1776. The thirty-three-year-old Scottish nobleman sailed from London in September and reached Philadelphia late in December, arriving in the city around the same time as Bonvouloir, Penet, and Pliarne. Within days, possibly hours, Drummond had quietly opened discussions with delegates from at least four colonies: New York, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania. One of the delegates with whom he met was James Wilson.

Not every member of Congress welcomed Drummond's presence or wanted his colleagues to meet with the Scotsman. Samuel Adams hurriedly demanded that Drummond be arrested, as did the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety, which feared that the Scotsman might share with the British military what he learned of Philadelphia's defenses. However, several congressmen from the middle and southern colonies objected with “grt Warmth” to Adams's proposal and by an eight-to-three vote—if Drummond is to be believed—Congress sanctioned the unofficial talks.
4

Drummond told the congressmen with whom he met that North's ministry was “heartily tired of the controversy” with America and “astonished at the Union and Strength of the Colonies.” The prime minister, he added, was confident that the differences between the colonies and mother country “might be easily settled.” Drummond advised that under North's conciliation plan the amount of revenue each colony would be asked to provide would be “a very small sum Annually so as to save appearances.” If Congress would consent, Drummond went on, North would ask Parliament to repeal the Tea Act and the Coercive Acts.

The discussions between Drummond and several delegates spun out for nearly two weeks until, in mid-January, North's envoy was convinced that seven congressional delegations were willing to accept what North had offered. Drummond may have been so eager to succeed as a peacemaker that he imagined greater support for North's offer than actually existed, but at that point he was certain that a majority of congressional delegations were prepared to accept the Declaratory Act if, in turn, Parliament renounced the right to tax America, agreed to remove some restraints on colonial trade, and relaxed the restrictions on American manufacturing. Drummond also believed that the seven delegations with which he had supposedly reached an accord would ask Congress not only to approve the terms that had been hammered out but also to send a three-member delegation—consisting of John Jay of New York, Thomas Lynch of South Carolina, and Andrew Allen of Pennsylvania—to London to conduct formal negotiations.
5
Reading between the lines of Drummond's sketchy notes, it seems likely that the seven provinces with which the Scotsman believed he had come to an agreement were New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. It is a safe bet that James Wilson was ready to make peace with the mother country on these terms. Wilson also doubtless saw his motion to have Congress declare where it stood on the issue of American independence as inextricably linked with the Drummond negotiations.

Tall, ruddy, and solidly built, Wilson, as was his custom, wore thick glasses and a white wig when he addressed Congress on January 9. Like many lawyers, he had polished his speaking talents before countless juries, but Wilson surpassed most rivals, winning a reputation in Pennsylvania as a consummate orator blessed with “the powers of a Demosthenes and a Cicero.”
6
Wilson had been in Congress long enough to know that his oratory was unlikely to win any converts, but there can be little doubt that what he said that day in his thick Scottish accent was well organized and carefully crafted.

Wilson hoped that a congressional repudiation of independence would lead to successful negotiations with Drummond. An agreement with Drummond, he thought, would make it easier for both North and the king to accept the terms desired by a majority of the congressional delegations. Eighteen months after Galloway had failed to persuade the First Congress to adopt a compromise scheme, another Pennsylvanian—and an archfoe of Galloway at that—was deeply involved in yet another attempt to preserve the Anglo-American union through negotiation and compromise.

Congress deferred consideration of Wilson's proposal for three days, which was not uncommon, then delayed action for twelve additional days. The second postponement likely occurred in part because talks with Lord Drummond were still in progress. In addition, Samuel Adams may have had a hand in putting off consideration of Wilson's surprise proposal. Adams wanted time to better organize the opposition. It was rare for Adams to emerge from the shadows to play an open and leading role in a floor battle, but he did so in this instance because John Adams, like several congressmen, had returned home in December for a visit with his family. It quickly was apparent that Samuel Adams's method of coping with the reconciliationists was considerably different from that of his cousin. Patience and negotiation had been John's watchwords, as he had steadfastly believed that if Congress's unity behind the war could be maintained, events would in time transform most of his foes into advocates for independence. Samuel was more confrontational. He countered first by pulling strings with his allies at home to have Thomas Cushing recalled as a member of the Massachusetts delegation. Cushing was replaced by Elbridge Gerry, who was thought to be favorably disposed to American independence. Before January ended, all of Congress knew of the change among Massachusetts's representatives, and all knew what it meant. Previously, three of the Bay Colony's five congressmen—Cushing, Hancock, and Robert Treat Paine—had been either staunch reconciliationists or willing to consider concessions in order to restore ties with the mother country. Those three Yankees found a peaceful Anglo-American reunion on acceptable terms preferable to declaring independence and waging a long, costly, and uncertain war. But a change of one individual in Massachusetts's delegation altered everything. Gerry and the two Adamses barely hid their yearning for independence.
7
But this was not Samuel Adams's only way of fighting back. He also resurrected Franklin's proposal to write an American constitution, a step that had been tabled six months earlier, as it was seen as tantamount to a declaration of independence.