Independence (45 page)

The lucid wording of the statements published by the committees of safety early in 1776 made clear that a new frame of mind was taking shape in America. Increasing numbers of colonists saw themselves as Americans, saw America as their country, and believed that America should be governed solely by Americans. In astonishingly short order, the belief had taken hold that Great Britain was a foreign land that groaned under a “wicked system” that drove those who held office to seek “the destruction of
American
liberty.”
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On America's farms and at its workbenches, in villages along the coastal plain and throughout the rolling, wooded backcountry, people were discovering that their interests all too often differed from the interests of those who governed the British Empire. Moreover, they were coming to find that they could get along fine, perhaps better, when they were removed from British jurisdiction. Age-old loyalties to the mother country were vanishing—in many places had already disappeared—like snow under a warm sun. With the new way of thinking came a growing tolerance, even fervor, for the idea of American independence. The gathering transformation in the thinking of Americans appears to have outpaced that of many who sat in Congress. Public opinion polls were not taken in those days, but it is difficult not to believe that a considerably smaller percentage of reconciliationists lived in America by the spring of 1776 than sat in the Continental Congress.

Nothing in the Americans' worldview changed more drastically, or rapidly, than their opinion of the monarchy. Even into the 1770s, George III's coronation and his birthdays were celebrated throughout America with balls, games, “Gun-firing,” and repeated toasts at elaborate dinners. The monarch was lauded in sermons, pamphlets, almanacs, and widely sold biographies. The royal likeness and the king's arms adorned mass-produced china, ceramics, and glassware, and George III's portrait hung in government buildings and many shops. Throughout the eighteenth century, Great Britain's kings had been not just revered but also loved by Americans, who thought of them as benevolent figures who presided over the relationship between the colonies and the mother country. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphian who later signed the Declaration of Independence, said that, as a youngster, he had believed that kings were “as essential to political order as the Sun is to the order of our Solar System.”
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This veneration of monarchy eroded badly after the enactment of the Intolerable Acts. In their wake, some southern Anglican clergy who prayed for the king were forced from their pulpits and fled into exile, and here and there throughout the colonies mobs set on those who openly defended the king or accepted a royal appointment. When Timothy Ruggles, who nine years earlier had been the president of the Stamp Act Congress, was named by royal authorities to the Massachusetts council under the provisions of the Intolerable Acts, a mob descended on his Worcester County estate, damaging his home, disfiguring his horse, and killing his livestock.
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The onset of hostilities and the king's repeated refusal to hear Congress's petitions further dampened emotional support for the monarch, and Thomas Paine's visceral and nearly unanswerable assault on royal rule in
Common Sense
drove a stake through the heart of homage to monarchy. It “put the torch to combustibles,” said Edmund Randolph, a Virginia activist, who clearly thought that Paine had voiced sentiments that already existed.
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The colonists had long been accustomed to political and social systems modeled on those of England, but there had always been significant differences. North of the Potomac, America was devoid of aristocratic hierarchies, and it was less deferential and more egalitarian. Furthermore, colonists everywhere had for years believed that the real authority in their province was—or at least should be—the assembly, a body chosen in elections in which some two thirds or more of all adult white males were qualified to vote. And from Patrick Henry's Virginia Resolves until the First Continental Congress, it was the assemblies that had largely led the protest against British policies. Invisibly but inexorably, the sense coagulated in the colonies that America's resistance to the ministry's supposed conspiracy against liberty was nothing less than that of a struggle by a republican people through its elected representatives against a corrupt mother country dominated by an ossified aristocracy and mostly dissolute commoners. Republican America, untainted by England's luxury, extravagance, and servility, gradually came to be seen as the embodiment of virtue and purity. Such thinking added a deeply moral dimension to the American protest. For some, that meant that independence was imperative to ensure that America would not be poisoned by Britain's corruption. For others who shared Paine's conviction about starting the world anew—those who, perhaps, were the most idealistic, ideological, ambitious, and opportunistic—it meant that the belief in American independence and a republican revolution were inextricably linked. For these colonists, American independence was merely the beginning of the American Revolution. Independence was to be followed by an expunging of privileges for the few and by the institutionalization of equal opportunities.
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Vivid testimony to the alterations in the colonists' outlook welled up across the land in the spring of 1776. With breathtaking suddenness, numerous localities adopted their own declarations in favor of severing ties with Great Britain. Often following a step behind public opinion, the revolutionary governments in several colonies rewrote their instructions to their congressional delegations authorizing them, if they saw fit, to declare American independence.

Stunningly, South Carolina, whose delegates had largely and intransigently remained part of the reconciliation faction in Congress, was the first colony to act. The previous fall Congress had freed New Hampshire and South Carolina to scrap their governments under royal charters and, if necessary, to create new ones. The Yankees acted quickly, but South Carolina's provincial congress did not finally act until mid-February 1776. Its decision to write its own constitution triggered a firestorm. Powerful elements in the colony resisted, claiming with considerable justification that doing so was tantamount to declaring independence. But others, notably Christopher Gadsden, who had sat in Congress since its inception, not only urged a new constitution but also demanded that it specify that South Carolina was free of all British ties. Inspired by
Common Sense
, Gadsden, who had just returned to Charleston from Philadelphia, spoke publicly in favor of “the absolute independence of America.” His assertion startled and alarmed many in the same fashion as would an unexpected “explosion of thunder,” according to a fellow rebel in South Carolina's capital.
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Gadsden's remarkable stance was thought by most to be untimely, not to mention shockingly audacious, and it went unheeded. The foes of a new constitution prevailed until the third week of March, when news of the American Prohibitory Act finally reached Charleston. It hit with the impact of a bombshell. Within two days of learning that London was bent on sweeping South Carolina's trade from the high seas, the provincial congress instructed its congressional delegation to act with the majority to secure the “defence, security, interest, or welfare” of both South Carolina and “America in general.” The word “independence” did not appear in the instructions, but a sixth sense was not required to know that the colony's congressmen were being told that, if need be, they should vote to sever all ties with Great Britain. Three days after taking this step, the provincial congress adopted a new constitution. The word “independence” was not in its text either. Like its predecessor in New Hampshire, South Carolina's new fundamental charter was to exist until the Anglo-American differences were resolved, whether by reconciliation or independence.
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What did this mean? Was South Carolina still part of the British Empire? On April 23, after living with the ambiguity for a month, William Henry Drayton, the chief justice of the province, handed down a ruling that provided clarification. Calling the upheaval against Great Britain “the late revolution”—as if the American Revolution was already complete—Justice Drayton wrote that South Carolina was “independent of Royal authority.” He grounded his judgment on the precedent set by Parliament when it forced James II from the throne during the Glorious Revolution nearly a century earlier. Parliament had acted because the king had broken his contract with his subjects by having failed to protect “their lives, liberties, and properties.” George III, Drayton reasoned, had similarly “broke the original contract” between ruler and ruled “by not affording due protection to his [American] subjects.”
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In a stupendous act of judicial activism, Justice Drayton had ruled that South Carolina was independent.

The news that South Carolina had adopted a new constitution led John Adams to exclaim that this was convincing evidence that America was “advancing by slow but sure steps to [a] mighty Revolution.” If what South Carolina had done spawned similar acts in the three other southern colonies, he went on, their “Example … will Spread through all the rest of the Colonies like Electric Fire.”
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Unbeknownst to Adams, that fire was already spreading. North Carolina's provincial congress had just instructed its congressional delegation “to concur with the delegates of the other Colonies in declaring Independency, and forming foreign alliances.” It was the first time that a provincial body had authorized a break with the mother country by actually using the word “independence.”
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Before the end of April every member of Congress knew what North Carolina had done, and it led Samuel Adams to rejoice that the “Ideas of Independence spread far and wide.” It would not be long, he thought, before Congress acted. Members of the Virginia delegation had already told him that the provincial authorities in Williamsburg would shortly dispense with the old instructions that had “tied the Hands of their Delegates” on the matter of declaring independence. Adams was confident that similar moves would be made in the coming weeks in nearly every colony. Only New York and Pennsylvania troubled him, but he did not believe that Congress could do anything, or needed to do anything, to spur them toward independence. It was “Events which excite” people to take bold and surprising steps, he said, and at every twist and turn since the Tea Act, events had “produce[d] wonderful Effects.” Samuel Adams was confident that the next pivotal event would be either the return of British armed forces or a great battle. Thereafter, all—or nearly all—of the provinces would be ready for “a Declaration of Independency.”
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Samuel Adams had expected that Virginia would be the next to act, but Rhode Island moved more quickly. On May 4 its assembly decreed that officials in the province should no longer take an oath of allegiance to the king. Like Justice Drayton, the Yankees reasoned that George III had broken his compact by “departing from the … character of a good king.” Rather than having defended his subjects, he was “endeavoring to destroy the good people” of Rhode Island. That same day, the assembly instructed its two delegates in Congress to act in concert with the other colonies. It did not mention independence by name, but like South Carolina, Rhode Island was telling its congressmen to vote for the final break with Great Britain if that was what the majority in Congress thought was in the best interests of the American people.
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On May 15, eleven days after Rhode Island took that step, the Virginia Convention finally acted. Some had wanted the colony to declare independence, but after wrangling for more than a week, it settled on instructing its delegates in Philadelphia to recommend that Congress declare independence. The instructions previously adopted in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Rhode Island had been passive in that they emphasized concurrence with the majority opinion in Congress. Virginia's congressional delegation in contrast was instructed “to propose” that Congress “declare the United Colonies free and independent States, absolved from all allegiance to, or dependence upon the Crown or Parliament of Great Britain.” That same day, moreover, the Virginia Convention resolved to prepare a Declaration of Rights and a constitution for the citizenry of what it expected would soon be the independent state of Virginia.
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In the wake of South Carolina's move toward independence, three grand juries in that colony adopted statements in favor of a final break with the mother country. But localities did not always wait on action by the provincial assembly. Four Virginia counties had adopted ringing declarations of independence prior to the action taken by the Convention, and each appropriated ideas laid out by Paine, especially his critiques of monarchical rule.
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The local committees of safety were swept by the fervor that gripped Americans everywhere in early 1776, but they may additionally have been nudged a bit by Virginia's congressmen, some of whom wrote home during the spring advising that support on the home front was imperative. For instance, Francis Lightfoot Lee—Richard Henry's brother, who had entered Congress the previous autumn—informed a powerful local figure in the Old Dominion that France and Spain had refused to supply badly needed military equipment until the colonies declared independence. America was being driven by “hard necessity … to extremity,” he expounded. Either it would have to choose “absolute submission [to Great Britain] or foreign assistance.” If Congress opted for the latter, it would have to declare independence. Lee asked his correspondent: “Which will be your choice?” In a second letter Lee said that America's alternatives were “slavery or separation.” Would it not be prudent, he continued, to prepare Virginians for Congress's “inevitable” decision? Lee wrote a third time, and in that missive he was even more direct. Congress would not declare independence, he explained, until it knew that its constituents wanted America to be set free of Great Britain.
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