Fire and Knowledge

[Note: All page citations are from John Adams by David McCullough]

Most people associate the fourth of July with fireworks and firecrackers and grilling.  Most know it is called “Independence Day.” Most think the Declaration of Independence was signed on that day.  It wasn’t.

Did you know that the key date resulting in independence with Britain was not July 4, 1776 but rather Wednesday, May 15, 1776?  On that day

the preamble was approved.  When an exasperated James Duane [who was against the preamble] told Adams it seemed “a machine for the fabrication of independence,” Adams replied that he thought it “independence itself.”  [Adams] was elated.  Congress, he wrote, had that day “passed the most important resolution that was ever taken in America.”

Others agreed.  Even “the cool considerate man thinks it amounts to a declaration of independence,” wrote Caesar Rodney enthusiastically. (p. 109)

A little less than a month after, on Monday, June 10, Congress was scheduled to have an official vote regarding the independence of America.

Rutledge… succeeded in having the final vote delayed for twenty days, until July 1, to allow delegates from the middle colonies time to send for new instructions [on how to vote].  Nonetheless, it was agreed that no time be lost in preparing a declaration of independence.  A committee was appointed, the Committee of Five, as it became known, consisting of [Thomas] Jefferson, [John] Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Benjamin Franklin… (pp. 118-9)

It was decided that Thomas Jefferson would draft the declaration.

[Jefferson] had none of his books with him, nor needed any, he later claimed.  It was not his objective to be original, he would explain, only “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject”…. He borrowed readily from his own previous writing, particularly from a recent draft for a new Virginia constitution, but also from a declaration of rights for Virginia….

But then [George] Mason, [James] Wilson, and John Adams, no less than Jefferson, were, as they all appreciated, drawing on long familiarity with the seminal works of the English and Scottish writings John Locke, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Henry St. John Bolingbroke, or such English poets as Defoe[:]

When kings the sword of justice first lay down,
They are no kings, though they possess the crown.
Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,
The good of subjects is the end of kings.

Or, for that matter, Cicero.  (“The people’s good is the highest law.”) (pp. 120-21)

Congress met for the fateful final decision on Monday, July 1, 1776.

Richard Henry Lee’s prior motion calling for independence was again read aloud; the Congress resolved itself into a committee of the whole and “resumed consideration.”  Immediately, Dickinson, gaunt and deathly pale, stood to be heard.  With marked earnestness, he marshaled all past argument against “premature” separation from Britain…. To proceed now with a declaration of independence, he said, would be “to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper”….

[John Adams rose to speak.]  He wished now as never in his life, Adams began, that he had the gifts of the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, for he was certain none of them ever had before him a question of greater importance….

No transcription was made, no notes were kept.  There would be only Adams’s own recollections, plus those of several others who would remember more the force of Adams himself than any particular thing he said.  That this was the most powerful and important speech held in Congress since it first convened, and the greatest speech of Adam’s life, there is no question.

To Jefferson, Adams was “not graceful nor elegant, nor remarkably fluent,” but he spoke “with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.”  Recalling the moment long afterward, Adams would say he had been carried out of himself, “‘carried out in the spirit,’ as enthusiastic preachers sometimes express themselves.”  To Richard Stockton, one of the delegates from New Jersey, Adams was “the Atlas” of the hour, “the man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independency…. He it was who sustained the debate, and by the force of his reasoning demonstrated not only the justice, but the expediency of the measure.” (pp. 126-127)

The debate lasted nine long hours.

At one point, according to Adams, Hewes of North Carolina, who had long opposed separation from Britain, “started suddenly upright, and lifting up both his hands to Heaven, as if he had been in a trance, cried out, ‘It is done! and I will abide by it.’” (p. 128)

But when a preliminary vote was taken some of the colonies unexpectantly held back.  Some delegates were divided and some were missing.  The final vote would be postponed until the next day.  “To compound the tension that night, word reached Philadelphia of the sighting off New York of a hundred British ships, the first arrivals of a fleet that would number over four hundred” (p. 129).

The next day on July 2, Congress met again.  Ceasar Rodney, a missing delegate from Delaware, “had [almost unimaginably] ridden eighty miles through the night, changing horses several times, to be there in time to cast his vote” (p. 129).  Two of the opposing delegates for Pennsylvania did not show up so that the Pennsylvania vote would be swung towards independence.

New York continued to abstain, but South Carolina, as hinted by Edward Rutledge, joined the majority to make the decision unanimous in the sense that no colony stood opposed…

So, it was done, the break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence.  If not all thirteen clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and with the other silent, the effect was the same.

It was John Adams, more than anyone, who had made it happen. Further, he seems to have understood more clearly than any what a momentous day it was and in the privacy of two long letters to [his wife] Abigail, he poured out his feelings as did no one else:

The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America.  I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.  It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.  It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more….

That the hand of God was involved in the birth of the new nation he had no doubt.  “It is the will of heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever.”  If the people now were to have “unbounded power,” and as the people were quite as capable of corruption as “the great,” and thus high risks were involved, he would submit all his hopes and fears to an overruling providence, “in which unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe.” (pp. 128-9)

Yet things were still not completed.  The Declaration had to be edited and a final vote be taken.  It all went very smoothly—the votes were the same as on July 2.

Congress ordered that the document be authenticated and printed.  But it would be another month before the engrossed copy was signed by the delegates.  For now, only the President, John Hancock, and the Secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, fixed their signatures.

With the passage of the Declaration of Independence thus completed, and having thereby renounced allegiance to the King and proclaimed the birth of a new United States of America, the Congress proceeded directly to other business.  Indeed, to all appearances, nothing happened in Congress on July 4, 1776.  Adams, who had responded with such depth of feeling to the events of July 2, recorded not a word of July 4.  Of Jefferson’s day, it is known only that he took time off to shop for ladies’ gloves and a new thermometer…

But by the following morning, the fifth, printer John Dunlap had broadside editions available and the delegates were busy sending copies to friends.  On July 6, the Pennsylvania Evening Post carried the full text on its first page.

The great day of celebration came Monday, July 8, at noon in the State House Yard, when the Declaration was read aloud before an exuberant crowd… Bells rang though the day and into the night.  There were bonfires at street corners.  Houses were illuminated with candles in their windows.  In the Supreme Court Room at the State House, as planned, a half dozen Philadelphians chosen for the honor took the King’s Arms down from the wall and carried it off to be thrown on top of a huge fire and consumed in an instant, the blaze lighting the scene for blocks around…. As in Philadelphia, drums rolled, bonfires burned, prayers were said, and toasts raised in town after town, North and South.  When the news finally reached Savannah, Georgia, in August, it set off a day-long celebration during which the Declaration was read four times in four different public places and the largest crowed in the history of the province gathered for a mock burial of King George III….

The actual signing of the document would not take place until Friday, August 2, after a fair copy had been elegantly engrossed on a single, giant sheet of parchment… Nothing was reported of the historic event.  To judge by what was in the newspapers and the correspondence of the delegates, the signing never took place.

In years later, Jefferson would entertain guests at Monticello with descriptions of black flies that so tormented the delegates, biting through their silk hose, that they had hurried the signing along as swiftly as possible.  But at the time Jefferson wrote nothing of the occasion, nor did John Adams.  In old age, trying to reconstruct events of that crowded summer, both men would stubbornly and incorrectly insist that the signing took place July 4….

The fact that a signed document now existed, as well as the names of the signatories, was kept a secret for the time being, as all were acutely aware that by taking up the pen and writing their names, they had committed treason, a point of considerably greater immediacy now, with the British army so near at hand….

The most encouraging results of the decision for independence was its almost immediate effect on “spirit,” within Congress and among the people, but also among the rank-and-file militia….

Even those in Congress who had been so ardently opposed, now, by word or deed, committed themselves to the “Glorious Revolution.” Robert Morris continued in his duties without pause, working as strenuously as anyone.  “I think an individual that declines the service of his country because its councils are not comfortable to his ideas makes him a bad subject,” he wrote, still unable to see himself as other than a “subject.”  John Dickinson, though ill and exhausted from the strain of the past weeks, departed at the head of the first troops to march out of the city to join in the defense of New Jersey, a scene that made a deep impression on many, including John Adams.  “Mr. Dickinson’s alacrity and spirit,” he told Abigail, “certainly becomes his character and sets a fine example.” (pp. 136-9)

So for this Independence Day, I encourage everyone to remember our heritage, read our documents, and serve this country even if its decisions are not your decisions.  It is one amazing country.

Suggestions for Independence Day readings:

• The Declaration of Independence [free online]
• The Constitution of the United States [free online]
• The Articles of Confederation [free online]
• The Judiciary Act [free online]
• The Bill of Rights [free online]
• John Adams by David McCullough
• 1776 by David McCullough
• The Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History, Ed. By Michael Kammen