Independence (57 page)

Chase was prescient. Sullivan hurried to Canada thirsting for action and glory. “I now think only of a glorious Death or a Victory,” he announced. Even though he acknowledged that it was “a serious truth” that the army was “extremely weak,” Sullivan ordered an advance to Three Rivers, where, with about one third of his Continentals, he attacked a British force that was three times larger. Predictably, his men were not only mauled; they were also cut off from the remainder of their comrades. They escaped only because the British failed to follow up their advantage. The rebels’ good fortune sprang from Carleton’s adherence to antiquated orders from London directing that he merely clear the St. Lawrence of the rebel invaders. Sullivan, who had already begun to think of how to explain his blunder to Congress—“Ill Success never happen’d by my Rashness Imprudence or Cowardice,” was his ultimate and unpersuasive defense—finally decided toward the end of May to do what the congressional commissioners had recommended thirty days earlier: He retreated to Isle-aux-Noix. But even there calamity dogged this miserable army. Smallpox, dysentery, and malaria struck the men encamped on the swampy, mosquito-infested island. A dozen or more men died daily; some three hundred perished within two weeks. “Death reigns triumphant,” an army physician announced, and Sullivan remarked that his soldiers were “Dropping off Like the Israelites before the Destroying Angel.”
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About two weeks before Sullivan’s misguided attack on Three Rivers, Richard Henry Lee had learned that Virginia wished its delegation to ask Congress to declare independence. At that juncture, Lee remained optimistic that something could be salvaged from the Canadian adventure. Though the commissioners “seem to be on the fright,” Lee had said, he still believed that the American army might make a valiant defensive stand that would prevent the enemy from reaching the “Upper Country,” by which he meant New York’s northern border. If the Continentals could pull that off, Lee reasoned, the Indians would remain neutral and the long and bitter Canadian campaign would “answer every good purpose.”
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Lee was one of the few in Congress who still harbored hope for success in Canada. Thomas Stone of Maryland, who read the same dispatches, thought the American army would retreat out of Canada and that “a most bloody & distructive war” was in the offing on the New York and New England frontier. Another delegate foresaw “hard rubs” in the Northern Department. By early June, Lee had changed his tune. News arrived that another five thousand reinforcements from London were crossing the Atlantic, headed for Quebec. This ended all hope for success in Canada. “[O]ur Affairs in that Quarter wear a melancholy Aspect,” the president of Congress notified each colony.
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Many in Congress were beginning to fear that the disasters in Canada might only be a small foretaste of wartime woes to come. Howe was expected to strike around New York City during the summer and it now appeared certain that another British army would simultaneously invade upper New York. All knew that Washington’s army would face a “violent struggle” when the redcoats and their German allies landed near Manhattan with what one congressman called a “dreadfull Armament.” Not a few feared that Sullivan’s army, which was “in a very bad way,” would be unable to hold the line on the frontier. Worry spread that the British might in time seize control of the Hudson River.
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As the first week of June sped past, the feeling gathered impetus that America might not be able to stand alone in the coming military trials. The realities of the war were forcing a stark choice. Either Congress must accept London’s untrammeled sovereignty or it must break with Great Britain completely. Proclaiming American independence offered the only hope of securing foreign assistance. Foreign aid alone would enable America to wage what now seemed certain to be a long struggle against Great Britain’s formidable military. To wage war unilaterally would lead to ruin, as the recurring debacles in Canada demonstrated. A majority in Congress was now convinced that the colonists were “certainly unequal to a Contest with [Great Britain] and her Allies.” For most congressmen, submission to London’s arbitrary rule was unthinkable, which made declaring independence unavoidable. “It is not choice then, but necessity that calls for Independence,” wrote Richard Henry Lee on June 2. One day later, John Adams wrote to Patrick Henry in Williamsburg: “The Importance of an immediate Application to the French Court is clear.” It was equally clear that Adams believed independence was a foregone conclusion and that he had begun to think of life in the independent United States. “The Decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled,” he told Henry, that “a more equal Liberty, than has prevail’d in other Parts of the Earth, must be established in America.”
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With a vote on independence almost certainly near at hand, more than one reconciliationist in Congress must have wrestled with a decision that he had hoped never to have to make: to support or to resist the final break with the mother country. No delegate had been a more resolute advocate of reconciliation than Robert Robert Livingston of New York. He hailed from a family of New York bluebloods that had been a dominant force in the colony’s politics for nearly a century. The first New York Livingston—also named Robert—had emigrated from Scotland in 1673 and accumulated a fortune from land and the fur trade. Thereafter, Dutchess County sent one or more members of each generation of the Livingston family to the New York assembly. Over the years, assorted Livingstons held a wide array of important offices. Congressman Livingston’s father (named Robert Robert Livingston to distinguish him from numerous other Robert Livingstons in the extended family) was the grandson of the clan’s founder. Like many others in the dynasty, he too held lofty offices, serving as an admiralty court judge as well as a justice on the New York Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, the Robert Robert Livingston who sat in the Continental Congress, was destined for a political career.

Born in 1746, Robert R. Livingston graduated from King’s College in 1765, married the daughter of a land baron, and inherited from Judge Livingston thousands of acres, more than 350 tenants, and mills, stores, and iron forges. Clermont, his mansion, was so palatial that it dwarfed the homes of most other rich Americans; measuring 104 feet by 91 feet, it had roughly as much square footage as the Pennsylvania State House. Young Livingston was admitted to the bar in 1770 and soon formed a legal partnership with John Jay, a friend from college days. Livingston held one Crown office, recorder of the city of New York, a position that London took from him in 1775 because of his activism in the colonial protest. Five days after the war began, Livingston, who had no legislative experience, was added to New York’s congressional delegation. Only twenty-nine years old at the time, he was one of the youngest men to serve in Congress during the American Revolution.

Livingston came to Philadelphia in 1775 with a view of the imperial crisis that was similar to Dickinson’s, as well as his father’s. Judge Livingston had exhorted his son to oppose London’s colonial policies but had also counseled that New York should “not desire … [to] be wholly independent of the mother country” because of the “benefits we receive of protection.” The elder Livingston had attended the Stamp Act Congress in 1765 and supported America’s opposition to that parliamentary tax. After Lexington and Concord, Judge Livingston advised his son to use the Continental Congress as a vehicle for “lay[ing] hold of Lord North’s overtures, to open a negotiation” leading to reconciliation. Congressman Livingston did just that. He steadfastly supported policies that he believed might resolve the “unnatural Quarrel” between the mother country and her colonies. Thus, he had no objection to America’s armed resistance, for, like Dickinson, he thought it would compel North to make a settlement “on the solid Basis of mutual Justice and constitutional Liberty.”
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John Adams once speculated that extraordinarily wealthy men such as Livingston were unswerving reconciliationists because deep down they feared that the British military would confiscate their property.
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Livingston’s own remarks suggest that, like Galloway, he was more apprehensive of radical American revolutionaries. Livingston feared that a break with Great Britain would be accompanied by sweeping political changes and social unrest. In the aftermath of independence, American society would lack that “influence that is derived from respect to old families wealth age etc.”
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Livingston’s concerns notwithstanding, he was often out of step with Dickinson. From the outset, Livingston knew that he would support independence if that was what a majority in Congress desired. Within a week of the beginning of hostilities, he declared: “I am resolved to stand or fall with my country. My property is here[.] I cannot remove it & I will not hold [it] at the will of others.” When Bonvouloir was in Philadelphia, Livingston was warm for pursuing commercial ties with France. During the tempestuous debates on trade in the fall of 1775, Livingston openly broke with Dickinson. He advocated the exportation of tobacco to Europe and urged that shipments of assorted northern commodities to the British West Indies be permitted. Such commerce, he argued, would raise revenue for the purchase of arms and munitions. He also claimed that the northern colonies’ trade in the Caribbean was essential in order to alleviate the plight of farmers and laborers. The income of farmers had declined by two thirds, he contended, while some three hundred thousand workers had been idled in the year since the Association was first adopted. Unless the northern provinces could conduct this trade, Livingston asserted, there was a danger that morale would collapse and northern men, who made up the lion’s share of the Continental army’s soldiery, would no longer volunteer. But while he called for trade in northern produce, Livingston opposed the exportation of some southern staples. Planters could get by because they lived on self-sufficient plantations, he said, adding tactlessly, though forthrightly, that their “Blacks go naked till 14” anyway.
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Livingston was never a leader in Congress, and he was almost certainly less influential within New York’s delegation than either Jay or James Duane. But he was respected by his colleagues in each major faction and frequently was chosen for important committee assignments. Among other things, Congress had put him on one panel charged with writing a letter to the people of London, another that was to draft an address to the inhabitants of Great Britain, and on the committee that met with General Washington when he came to Philadelphia in May 1776. Livingston’s most important assignment came in November 1775, when he served with Robert Treat Paine and New Hampshire’s John Langdon on what Congress called the Committee to the Northward. With Montgomery and Arnold advancing on Quebec, the three congressmen were to travel to Fort Ticonderoga to meet with General Schuyler and, if need be, to proceed into Canada and rendezvous with General Montgomery, Livingston’s brother-in-law.

The congressmen faced a grueling two-week journey. It began with an overland ride to New York City. Thereafter, the men sailed up the Hudson River to Albany, after which they spent days on horseback first negotiating “very rutted” roads, then coping with primitive thoroughfares that had turned to a fetid ooze following heavy autumn rains, and finally making a long ride across “hard frozen” terrain laden with “considerable snow & Ice.” None of the three were accustomed to roughing it. What is more, although they were traveling to the far north in November and December, Livingston and his comrades shortsightedly had “brought but one blanket with us.” Sleeping several nights on “hemlock beds,” they built roaring fires and somehow managed to survive temperatures that plummeted well below freezing. In the course of their mission the congressmen examined Fort Constitution and recommended improvements—which clearly had not been made when Franklin and his companions dropped in five months later—recommended repairs to Fort Ticonderoga, and took steps to secure additional troops and supplies for Montgomery. They eschewed a journey into Canada, in part because none of the three spoke French. On the final leg of the trek, the congressmen stopped in Albany to confer with one hundred Iroquois sachems and warriors and beseech them to remain neutral.
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Livingston was not eager to return to Congress. He missed his family and believed that his health had suffered from his heavy workload and sluggish lifestyle as a congressman. He had long before moaned that he was “sick of politicks,” and now he said that he dreaded returning to that “hot room” in Philadelphia. He reached home around Christmas and tarried there for nearly seventy-five days, not rejoining his fellow New York delegates in Congress until mid-March.
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Much had occurred during Livingston’s long absence from Philadelphia, including the publication of
Common Sense
and word of the American Prohibitory Act. When Livingston returned to Congress, he knew the day was not far off when he would probably have to make a decision on independence. While he continued to support the “Glorious struggle [to be] emancipated from the tyranny of an inhuman prince,” Livingston still opposed independence. His actions during the spring of 1776 were those of a man who sought to delay the decision on independence in the hope that it would never have to be made. Indeed, Livingston spoke in private of pursuing a strategy of “well-timed delays.” That, in fact, was the strategy not only of Livingston but also of the entire New York delegation and a string of provincial congresses back home. The plan of action, or inaction, was grounded on twin convictions. Livingston and his New York comrades not only believed that a large number of MPs opposed Lord North’s American policies and were “prepared to give up the right of [Parliament’s] taxation” of America, but they also were convinced that the opposition faction in Parliament would swell if the British suffered setbacks during the coming campaign of 1776. Therefore, if the decision on independence could be staved off, military realities by late in 1776 might make both sides more willing to consent to terms of reconciliation. In February, Livingston summed up his outlook: “I wish to join hands with a nation which I have been accustomed to respect.”
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