Independence (52 page)

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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Lee must have been happy with the declaration on independence adopted on April 23 by the sixteen members of the Charlotte County, Virginia, Committee of Safety. It began with the assertion that the government of Great Britain had pursued a “despotick plan … these twelve years past, to enslave
America.
” The king, Lord North, and Parliament, it continued, “have turned a deaf ear to the repeated petitions and remonstrances of this and our sister Colonies.” Instead, those rulers had sought “to enforce their arbitrary mandates by fire and sword,” including “encouraging … our savage neighbours [Indians], and our more savage domesticks [slaves], to spill the blood of our wives and children.” It concluded: As “nothing is intended for us but the most abject slavery” and as “all hopes of a reconciliation … [are] now at an end,” it wished the Continental Congress to “immediately cast off the
British
yoke, and to enter into a commercial alliance with any nation or nations friendly to our cause.”
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Congressmen may have been pleading for direction from home, but through the winter and spring of 1776 they were aware that calls for independence—formerly a taboo topic—filled newspapers across the land. Once
Common Sense
was greeted with unbridled exuberance, pleas for independence were commonplace. Most of the scribblers in the press argued that wartime realities made a declaration of independence essential. Between their bravado-filled lines, many proponents of independence acknowledged that America would need considerable assistance from France and Spain if it was to win a protracted war, and foreign aid would require that Congress sever all ties with Great Britain. Several writers hinted, though few said it explicitly, that it was essential for Congress to declare independence in the near future. Some wanted it done before the peace commissioners arrived, anxious that Lord North’s game of divide and conquer might succeed. Others, believing that Versailles was favorably disposed, wanted to act while French help was still possible. Still others, concerned about damage to morale that might accompany military setbacks, urged that independence be declared prior to the onset of the campaign in the summer of 1776. An anonymous New York writer touched all bases in April when he posed the following question to Congress: “Should the American Colonies neglect the present critical moment of asserting and securing their freedom, is it not probable that a few months will put it out of their power of doing it forever?”
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Some essayists sought to convince their readers that reconciliation on favorable terms was no longer possible. One, who called himself a “strenuous advocate for independency,” maintained that “Blood once shed puts a final period to all other accommodations.” Thomas Paine, writing as “The Forester,” took a similar position. Reconciliation, he wrote, was a “false light.” All hope of being reunited with Great Britain “ ’Tis gone! ’tis past! The grave hath parted us, and death, in the persons of the slain, hath cut the thread between
Britain
and
America
.” American submission was the only condition on which the colonies could be reunited with the mother country, said many writers. One observed that “If we reject … Submission and Dependence, we must of consequence be Independent.”
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Many writers attempted to demonstrate the positive aspects of independence, and especially to equate independence with liberty. “The day in which the Colonies declare their independence, will be a jubilee” to all “heroes who have offered themselves as sacrifices upon the altar of liberty,” Paine declared. Another essayist tried to show that “dependency is slavery,” whereas independence would enable Americans to secure their “safety, honour, and … interest” on their own terms. Some argued, as had Paine in
Common Sense
, that an independent America wresting liberty from the grasp of tyrants would be a beacon to others around the world. “The lovers of liberty abroad have their eyes turned toward us,” one New Yorker wrote, while another asserted that like “the waves of the sea,” the example of American independence would have a breathtakingly wide impact.
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Some saw a glorious future for an independent America. With independence would come “peace, plenty, and liberty,” said a Maryland polemicist. In March the author of “Plain Hints” equated colonial America to a tree that was surrounded by impediments and could not grow to its full potential. Free the tree, he said, and it “might soon become the largest tree in the forest.” That same month “An American” insisted that an independent America would be on the road to “eminence and glory.”
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