CHAPTER III.

THE SENTIMENT OF INDEPENDENCE, ITS GROWTH AND CONSUMMATION.

BY GEORGE E. ELLIS, D. D., LL. D.,

_President Mass. Hist. Society._

THE assertion needs no qualification that the thirteen colonies would not in the beginning have furnished delegates to a congress with the avowed purpose of seeking a separation from the mother country; and we may also affirm, that, with a possible forecast in the minds of some two or three members, such a result was not apprehended. If any deceptive methods—as was charged at the time—were engaged in turning a congress avowedly called to secure a redress of grievances into an agency for securing independence, they will appear in the sharp scrutiny with which we may now study the inner history of the subject. And if an explanation of the course of the Congress can be found, consistent with its perfect sincerity, we must then seek to trace the influences alike of the new light which came in upon the delegates, and of successive aggravating measures of the British government, in substituting independence as its object. Though it is certain that Samuel Adams, fretting under the hesitations of Congress, had proposed to an ardent sympathizer that the four New England colonies should act in that direction by themselves, his own clear judgment would have satisfied him that that step would have been futile unless the other colonies followed it. If there were but a single colony from which no response could be drawn, the consequences would have been obstructive. That different sections of the country should have furnished leaders so in accord as Samuel Adams, Richard H. Lee, and Gadsden was a most felicitous condition. A congress, then, composed of delegates from all the colonies was the indispensable and the only practicable method for working out the scheme of independence, and even such a congress must avoid basing its action on local grievances. The reserve which the delegates from Massachusetts found it politic to practise, in not obtruding their special grievances, was well decided upon from the first, and proved to be effective. That the circumstances required patience in such men as the Adamses is abundantly evident from the frankness with which they wrote outside of Congress of the temporizing and dilatoriness of what went on in it.

There is no general assertion which comes nearer to the truth on this subject than that, from the first colonization of America by the English, the spirit of independence was latent here, and was in a steady process of natural development. George Chalmers, with the opportunities of a clerk of the Board of Trade, made an inquisitive private study of State Papers, and reached the full conviction that the colonists from the start, not only quietly assumed, but really aimed at an independence. He quotes abundant warnings, and charges the successive crown officials here and at home with culpable negligence in not acting on these warnings when they might have done so.[661] The pages of Chalmers confirm and illustrate the fact that the colonists lived in the enjoyment of a more real autonomy, and a do-as-you-please enfranchisement, than was shared by home subjects. There went with this a sort of assumption, a bold conceit, a sturdy truculency, which could be easily trained into defiance.[662]

Large allowance also must be made on account of the fact that the colonies had mastered their most critical perils wholly from their own resources. English benevolence in private individuals had generously fostered some enterprises of learning and charity here. But government had left the exiles to fight their own battles against the savages and the earliest French enemies. Far back in colonial times Governor Winthrop records that, in some emergent strait of the exiles, a suggestion was made of turning to England for help. The suggestion was shrewdly put aside, lest, having asked such aid, they might incur obligations.

It was of course admitted that the colonists had come under some form of obligation to the home government during the exhausting campaigns of the French and Indian wars. A question, however, soon came under debate, as to what that obligation involved. Great Britain assumed that it justified a demand upon the colonists for revenue. The colonists roused themselves to repudiate any obligation to be enforced by the payment of a tax imposed by a Parliament in which they had no representation. It was just here that the latent spirit of independence led the colonists to examine to the root their relations of allegiance, and, on the other hand, their natural rights. The General Court of Massachusetts, in 1768, had admitted "that his Majesty's high court of Parliament is the supreme legislative power over the whole empire." It took less than ten years to bring it about that Massachusetts either had not understood what it said,—at least, had not meant to say exactly that,—or had come to think differently about it.

In the Bill of Rights coming from the first Congress the committee say: "In the course of their inquiry they find many infringements and violations of rights, which they pass over for the present." These previous impositions and disabilities came in, however, afterwards for their full share of rhetoric and argument. As we trace the method in which the controversy with government matured, we mark these stages of it. Objection and forcible resistance found their first occasion when, at the close of the French war, government devised the policy of the Stamp Act. The colonists came to distinguish this as creating an _internal_ tax, in contrast to the previous _external_ taxes, through the laws regulating commerce, to which heretofore they had not objected. Vindicating their resistance to the new internal tax, they came to find similar grievances in the former external taxes. So they were teaching themselves first to define and then to assert independence.

We have become accustomed to associate with the term Congress the idea of a legally constituted organic body, with defined powers authoritatively assigned to it, the exercise of which is binding on its constituents. Our Continental congresses were of quite another sort, and had no authority save what might be granted to the wisdom and practicability of the measures they advised. Most certain it is that only a very small minority of the people of the colonies were concerned in calling the early congresses. As certain, also, is it that a very large preponderance of the people of all classes were then strongly opposed to any violent measures, to sundering ties of allegiance, or to seeking anything beyond a peaceful redress of grievances. On the whole, while it must be admitted that Congress was generally in advance of its constituency, it knew how to temporize and to give intervals of pause in steadily working on to its ultimate declaration. "Natural leaders" always start forth in such a cause, and they learn their skill by practice.

When it became evident that, instead of any healing of the breach, the whole activity of the Congress tended to widen it, a regret was expressed in some quarters that, by the connivance and consent of the royal governors, and through the regular legislative processes, a more legal and conservative character had not been secured to this meeting of delegates,—as if dangerous plotting might thereby have been averted. But the patriot leaders of the movement were too well advised to look for any such official coöperation. The very life of their scheme depended upon its wholly popular conception. Nor could the consent of governors and formal assemblies have been won to it. The whole method of the steady strengthening of the spirit of alienation from Great Britain was a working of popular feeling in channels different from those of ordinary official direction and oversight.

It was but fair to assume that the objects of the first Congress would be defined by the instructions furnished by those who sent or commissioned its members. The delegates from New Hampshire were bid "to consult and adopt such measures as may have the most likely tendency to extricate the colonies from their present difficulties, to secure and perpetuate their rights, liberties, and privileges, and to restore that peace, harmony, and mutual confidence which once happily subsisted between the parent country and her colonies." Massachusetts bade her delegates "deliberate and determine upon wise and proper measures, to be by them recommended to all the colonies, for the recovery and establishment of their just rights and liberties, civil and religious,[663] and the restoration of union and harmony between Great Britain and the colonies, most ardently desired by all good men." Rhode Island's charter governor empowered the delegates "to join in consulting upon proper measures to obtain a repeal of the several acts of the British Parliament, &c., and upon proper measures to establish the rights and liberties of the colonies upon a just and solid foundation." Connecticut authorized its delegates "to consult and advise on proper measures for advancing the best good of the colonies." The delegates from New York were trusted without any particular instructions, having merely a general commission "to attend the Congress at Philadelphia." So, also, New Jersey appointed its delegates "to represent the colony of New Jersey in the said General Congress." Pennsylvania sent a committee from its own Assembly in behalf of the province "to consult upon the present unhappy state of the colonies, and to form and adopt a plan for the purposes of obtaining redress of American grievances, ascertaining American rights upon the most solid and constitutional principles, and for establishing that union and harmony between Great Britain and the colonies which is indispensably necessary to the welfare and happiness of both." The deputies from the three Lower Counties were "to consult and determine upon all such prudent and lawful measures as may be judged most expedient for the colonies immediately and unitedly to adopt, in order to obtain relief for an oppressed people, and the redress of our general grievances."

It will be observed that the instructions from these eight colonies are moderate and pacific in terms, without menace, or a looking to any other results than harmony. Something a little more emphatic appears in what follows. The Maryland delegates were to use all efforts in their power in the Congress "to effect one general plan of conduct operating on the commercial relations of the colonies with the mother country." Virginia bade her delegates "consider of the most proper and effectual manner of so operating on the commercial connection of the colonies with the mother country as to procure redress for the much-injured province of the Massachusetts Bay; to secure British America from the ravage and ruin of arbitrary taxes; and speedily to procure the return of that harmony and union so beneficial to the whole nation, and no ardently desired by all British America." The delegates of South Carolina are instructed "to concert, agree to, and effectually prosecute such legal measures as shall be most likely to obtain a repeal of the said acts and a redress of those grievances." The deputies of North Carolina were authorized "to deliberate upon the present state of British America, and to take such measures as they may deem prudent to effect the purpose of describing with certainty the rights of Americans, repairing the breach made in those rights, and for guarding them for the future from any such violations done under the sanction of public authority."

Now it is true that one may read as between the lines of these instructions intimations of reserved purposes, and possibly menaces that something more will be required if what is suggested in them fail of effect; but as they stand, their tone is not hostile or menacing. They limit the terms and measure of what they exact. Several very pregnant suggestions present themselves. Men of a large variety of opinions and purposes might take part in a congress so constituted. If the measures proposed had been restricted, so to speak, to the programme, there might have been substantial accord among the delegates, and no one could have been startled and offended with what they soon regarded as rebellious manifestations in the Congress.

The case of Joseph Galloway, at first esteemed a most resolute patriot, and then committing himself to extreme loyalty, presents us an example. He was a lawyer of great abilities, a gentleman of wealth and of high social position. He had made many strong protests against the oppressive measures of government. He was a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly eighteen years, and twelve years its speaker. He says[664] that when he was chosen as a delegate to the first Congress he positively refused to serve unless he was allowed to draw his own "instructions." He was permitted to do so, and he himself signed them as speaker. They contain this injunction: "You are strictly charged to avoid everything indecent and disrespectful to the mother state." Chosen a delegate to the second Congress, he positively declined to serve, though importuned to do so by Dr. Franklin. The instructions given to the eight associates named with him for this second Congress contained the stringent words, "We strictly enjoin you that you, in behalf of this colony, dissent from and utterly reject any propositions, should such be made, that may cause or lead to a separation from the mother country, or a change of the form of government." The removal of this restriction on June 14, 1776, enabled a majority of the delegates to give the vote of the province for independence.

No man in this first Congress marked a stronger contrast to Galloway than Samuel Adams, the "man of the people." Compared with what Joseph Reed called "the fine fellows from Virginia", Adams was not what is conventionally called a gentleman; but while John Hancock brought from Massachusetts money and ambition, his colleague carried the hardier brains of the two. The odious epithet of "demagogue" attached to Adams, not because of any beguiling arts, but from his plain simplicity of garb, preferred associates, manners, and mode of life. In his cheap and homely attire, dispensing with any other mode of influence than that of an honest heart and a vigorous mind, he had made himself the familiar companion of the mechanics, artificers, and craftsmen of North Boston, the shipbuilders, joiners, and calkers,—the rough, honest, and thrifty democracy,—with whom, sitting on a spar or loitering in a workshop, he would spend long and instructive hours. He was puritanically religious and rigidly observant of solemnities, prayed in his family, and asked a blessing at each meal of his simple fare. He neglected his own business to devote himself to public interests. Of his own poverty he was neither ashamed nor proud. It would not have been seemly for him to have presented himself to the courtly gentry of the Congress as he appeared in the streets of Boston. It would doubtless have confirmed the prejudice which many entertained of him as an ill-bred mass-leader. For deep and wide learning in legal, political, and economical science, added to his college culture, and for debating powers, he was the peer of any of his associates. If he had been left to himself in his straits he would have gone on his high errand clad as he was; but before he was to go his friends had done the best they could for him. The tailor, the hatter, bootmaker, and haberdasher, appearing at his house from anonymous friends, had furnished him a complete outfit, not, however, of the full sumptuousness of Hancock's. As for the rest, Adams was well prepared in bodily presence to meet for the first time his warm friend in correspondence, Richard Henry Lee. No truly lineal citizen of the old Puritan colony will ever be ashamed of this characteristic representative of its traditions and its people at the first Congress,—this prophet of independence.

The fact, without any fulness of detail, is assured to us that there was much of discordance and dissension in this Congress of 1774. Probably there was scarcely a single proposition or speaker that did not find an antagonist. Certainly it appeared that Congress was not ready to break from the mother realm. Results, however, were reached of a sort to prompt just such further measures from the British government as to insure some livelier work in its next session. The most decisively contumacious act of the Congress was the adoption and approval of the resolves passed by the daring Suffolk County (Massachusetts) meeting, which most clearly endorsed rebellion, and took steps in initiating it.[665] It is to be remembered, moreover, that in this first Congress, Washington, whose frank sincerity stands unimpeached, denied that the colonies wished for, or could safely, separately or together, set up for independence. Before Congress again met in May, the first blood had been shed at Lexington and Concord; and Massachusetts, as the first colony to set up as a consequence its own autonomy, sought and received the ratification of its conduct by Congress, after it had assembled.

The instructions to the delegates still held them to seeking a redress of grievances and the restoration of harmony, as "desired by all good men", and in pursuit of this object a second letter or petition to the king, which John Adams calls "Dickinson's letter", was prepared and adopted by Congress. It was respectful, earnest, tender in its professions and appeals. It besought the king himself to interpose between his much-abused and long-enduring subjects and the oppressive measures of his ministers, as if he himself was misled and imposed upon by them. The bearing which this most remarkable letter has upon the charge of insincerity and hypocrisy in the action of Congress is apparent. It is enough to say here that Richard Penn, the messenger who bore the letter, was not permitted to see the king, whose only recognition of it was a violently toned proclamation for suppressing rebellion and sedition among his American subjects. Startling was the effect on the Congress of this royal declaration of an unrelenting purpose, which arrived on November 1st, coupled with the intelligence of a large reinforcement of the British army and navy, and with the purposed employment of seventeen thousand German mercenaries. The same day brought an account of the burning of Falmouth, now Portland, by Captain Mowat, reasonably exciting an alarm in all the settlements on the seaboard. What might be lacking in the final resolution of some of the leading members of Congress to come to the issue was well supplied by these last measures of government, which could work only in the direction of an implacable rupture. Still it is a matter of fact, now attested by full evidence, that the majority of Congress, either held by their lingering hope of some scheme of conciliation, or even doubtful if their constituents would reinforce their own resolution now, would not entertain a motion for independence.[666] A recess of the Congress from August 5th to September 5th gave to some of the members an opportunity to try the pulse of their constituents. The king in his speech, October 26, 1775, reiterated his stern purposes. It is noticeable that in the comments made upon it by speakers in the opposition, the avowals of members in the Congress were confidently quoted as repelling the charge that they were aiming for independence; but General Conway said significantly, "They will undoubtedly prefer independence to slavery."

The delegates of the thirteen colonies—Georgia being now represented—met in Philadelphia, May 12, 1776, having now the whole bearings of the struggle fully before them. The members had found their way to the assurance that their professed loyalty to the constitution of the realm consisted with, and might even require, a defiance of its monarch. There were those who still held back. We note that personal alienations declared themselves between members, starting from differences of opinion or strength of resolve, as they faced the final question. Perhaps it is well that oblivion has been allowed to settle over the attitudes and words of some of the actors of the time, whether in or out of Congress. Gadsden, Lee, the Adamses, and Patrick Henry were ready and eager for the boldest venture, supported by Chase of Maryland, Ward of Rhode Island, Wolcott and Sherman of Connecticut, and at last by Wyeth of Virginia. Wilson of Pennsylvania held back. So did the strongly patriotic Dickinson, restrained by Quaker influence. He was yet to be reassured, and his ballot was to be the decisive one. Massachusetts should have been a unit; but Samuel Adams and Hancock were alienated, and Paine and Cushing were not yet full-strung, but the last-named was soon superseded by Gerry, who was in entire sympathy with the Adamses. Congress recommended the colonies whose governors had deserted their posts to set up governments of their own, if only for a temporary purpose, till constitutional rule should be reëstablished. Then, after an emphatic but calm restatement of grievances, and the failure of all efforts to secure a redress, Congress engaged with the question whether all the colonies might not be forced to set up such a government of their own. The dastardly conduct of Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, in following his own flight for refuge on board a frigate with a proclamation to stir an insurrection among the slaves, might well have left it to R. H. Lee, by direct instruction from his constituents, early in May, to announce that on an appointed day he should move for a declaration of independence. He did so on Thursday, the 7th of June. His motions were for such a declaration, with a complete dissolution of all political connection between the colonies and Great Britain; for the forming of foreign alliances, and a plan of confederation. John Adams seconded the motions. They were discussed on Saturday in a committee of the whole. On Monday, after a long debate, Rutledge moved a postponement of the question for three weeks. Up to this point Jefferson says that New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and South Carolina were not ready for the decision, and thought it prudent to wait, though fast stiffening for the issue.

On June 10th Congress resolved that the consideration of Mr. Lee's first proposed resolution—that declaring independence—be postponed to the 1st of July; but that no time should be lost in the interval, it appointed, on June 11th, a committee to prepare such a declaration. This committee was Jefferson, John Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston.[667] This postponement was in deference to the unreadiness of the delegates of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina to take the decisive step. Some unnamed member had procured the passage of a vote that on whichever side the majority should turn, the decision should be pronounced unanimous, for or against the resolutions. The vote of each colony was to count for one, whatever the number of its delegates, the majority in each delegation pronouncing for its colony. The debate was sharp and intensely earnest. The vote of Pennsylvania was divided. Those of the six colonies just named being in opposition, there was no decision. Two of the halting Pennsylvania delegates being induced to absent themselves on the next day, fifty delegates being present, the resolutions prevailed by a majority of one province.[668] They had been bitterly opposed by Livingston of New York, Dickinson and Wilson of Pennsylvania, and Rutledge of South Carolina. Argument, persuasion, and appeal were diligently pressed to draw the hesitating to acquiescence. Meanwhile several of the colonies were anticipating the action of Congress in taking their stand for independence: North Carolina, in April, 1776, and also Massachusetts, at the same date; Virginia, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New Jersey followed; and New York, as we shall see, soon came into line.

The proposed measures of Congress, associated with the leading one of independence, were most sagaciously devised for dignifying the primary resolve and elevating the action which should sustain it above the character of a mere rebellion. Those measures assumed the rights and responsibilities of nationality. The issuing of letters of marque and reprisal, the making free of all the ports for commerce with all the world except Great Britain, and the inviting of foreign alliances, were exercises of the prerogatives of sovereignty, and were the reasons assigned by France for regarding the United States as a nation at war with another nation. On July 12th Congress appointed a committee of one delegate from each colony charged with reporting a plan of confederation, and another committee of five to propose a plan for foreign alliances.

The Declaration marked a crisis alike in the forum and for the people. It was read to Washington's army, and drew wild plaudits from officers and from the ranks. As rapidly as panting couriers could disperse it over the country it was formally received with parade and observance, and read in town and village. It gave life and inspiration for every successive measure to turn a purpose into an accomplished fact.[669]

Many of our writers, in tracing the working of the various opinions which aided in fostering the spirit of independence, have found reason to ascribe much influence to strong religious animosities, especially to hostility to the state religion of England. It might perhaps be difficult to trace sharply and directly through all the colonies any lines of division of this character attributable to such an agency, as distinct and positive as those which manifested themselves in secular affairs, but there can be no question that sectarian influences had an important part in the animosities of the time. It would have been but natural that in this matter the line between the loyal and the disloyal should have been drawn between the English Church and the dissenters, who were the vast majority of the colonists; but this rule was by no means without many marked exceptions. All the Episcopal ministers officiating in the colonies had received ordination in England. Their oath bound them to loyalty. Most of them, too, in the northern provinces, were pensioners of an English missionary society. The test applied to them when the spirit of rebellion was strengthening was whether they would read or omit in their services the prayers for the king. It stood little for them to plead in their defence their oath and their dependence on a foreign fund. Such a plea was a poor one, as being strictly personal and selfish, born of a love of ease and of a cringing spirit. Some of them left their pulpits, and maintained a discreet silence. Those who insisted upon fulfilling all the pledges and duties of their office were in many cases roughly handled. It is to be considered, however, that so far as sectarianism in religion would alienate the colonies from Great Britain, it could not have been a prime agent in the case, for then it would have alienated them from each other, to which result it did not avail. The Tory refugee Judge Jones uses the terms Presbyterians and Episcopalians as almost synonymous with the terms rebels and loyalists. But this was by no means true.[670] The leading patriot John Jay, with many others from his province, was an Episcopalian. The Episcopalians of Virginia, of Maryland, and of the Carolinas were as stiffly opposed to the importation here of English prelates as were the Congregationalists of New England. The Tory Galloway[671] traced our rebellious spirit to the same source as that of the English civil war, viz., to Puritanism. He wrote: "The disaffection is confined to two sets of dissenters, while the people of the Established Church, the Methodists, Lutherans, German Calvinists, Quakers, Moravians, etc., are warmly attached to the British government." Galloway exceeded the strict truth in that statement.

The numbers, position, and experiences of Episcopal ministers in the provinces at the period of the war have been recently presented in an elaborate and well-authenticated monograph on the subject.[672] From this it appears that there were at the time not far from two hundred and fifty clergymen, all of foreign ordination. The lack of Episcopal supervision brought with it laxity of discipline. At the southward the church gathered into it the wealthy, the officials of the government and of the army and navy, professional men, and merchants. But their clergy, instead of being, like their few brethren at the North, stipendiaries of a foreign society, largely derived their support from those to whom they ministered, and so, though being under the oath of allegiance, were more free to share the patriotic sentiments of the laity, and they did so. Clergy and laity in the Southern provinces seem, many of them, to have been as strongly opposed, for temporary or other reasons, to the introduction of a foreign prelacy as were those at the North. Several of the Episcopal clergy in the Middle and Southern provinces proved themselves most ardent patriots, not only in discourse but by taking chaplaincies in the Continental armies, and even serving in the ranks and as officers in command. The trial test for deciding their position was in the religious services required of them on the days appointed by Congress for thanksgiving or fasting. Their choice was not a free one between a full or a mutilated service of prayer. The severest sufferers of this class were among the Episcopal ministers of New York and Connecticut, who resolved to stand for loyalty. Some, however, trimmed to time and necessity; others were patriots. Provoost, afterwards the first Bishop of New York, espoused the side of the people.[673]

It was in New England that the "Puritanism" of which Galloway wrote had the prevailing influence; and a very energetic and effective influence it was, working with other agencies in making the English civil government all the more odious because of the lordly prelates, who ruled not only in church, but in state. The inherited and traditionary spirit of New England had kept alive the memory of the ecclesiastical tyranny which had developed Puritanism in Old England, and of the trials and sacrifices by which deliverance had been secured. Those very New England colonies in which the rebellious spirit was most vigorous had been in but recent years, by help alike of sympathizers and opponents, conservatives of the old ways and reformers with the new, working their own way of relief from their theocratic basis of government, and securing freedom for themselves in belief and worship, with progress in the severance of church and state. They could not patiently contemplate the establishment of prelacy among them. Two occasions, operating as warnings, had freshened the old Puritan spirit of New England just previous to the opening of civil contention. One was the project, which had been zealously pressed, of sending English bishops into the colonies, whose functions the popular mind refused to distinguish between those which they exercised as lords, both spiritual and temporal, in England and those of ordination and confirmation, etc., which was all that was required of them as "superior clergy" here. An animated pamphlet controversy had been waging on this subject a decade before the outbreak of hostilities, in which appeared as a champion on one side the bold and able minister Jonathan Mayhew of Boston, and on the other, Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury.[674] No English prelate ever had functions or presence on our territory. The other reason, for a revival of the hostility here against the Established Church, was found in the coming hither into the old Congregational parishes, and the maintenance here by an English missionary society, of a number of Episcopal ministers. It was charged—not, however, justly—that the benevolent founders of that society had endowed it solely for the support of missionaries to neglected and forlorn persons,—fishermen and others in the colonies,—whereas it was used to promote division and disaffection in places well provided with a ministry. This charge was overstrained, for no missionary was sent to any place where there were not those, few or many, who were actual members of the English Church, or who stood out against the doctrine and discipline of Congregationalism. None the less did hostility to the English Church help largely to stimulate the spirit of rebellion.[675]

The first provincial congress of Massachusetts, assembled in 1774, knew very well the grounds of their reliance when by resolution they sent an address to each and all of the ministers in the province, reminding them of the valued aid and sympathy which their common ancestors in the years of former trials had found in their religious guides, and earnestly appealing for their help and strong efforts among their people in resistance of the tyranny of the mother country. The New England ministers were not slow in responding to—indeed, they had in many cases anticipated—this appeal of their civil leaders. They had a marvellous skill for discerning the vital relations between politics and religion, while they had a strong repugnance to what was conveyed by the terms "church and state." With very few exceptions,—such, however, there were, in rare cases, of pastors in years and of timid spirits,—the ministers were foremost in inspiriting patriotism and in meeting all the emergencies of the times.[676]

The only organized and official measures taken by any one of the religious denominations in sympathy with the American Revolution was that of the Presbyterians, who had freed themselves from dependence on a civil establishment. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians on the frontiers of Virginia and North Carolina had stoutly vindicated their religious rights against the Established Church in Virginia, and were among the foremost in asserting their independence of the mother country. With the sturdiest resolution they had successfully triumphed over the Episcopal party in New York and thwarted government influence in its behalf. John Witherspoon, the only clergyman in the Congress of 1776, gave by delegated authority the vote of the Presbyterians for independence.[677]

And now the question may well be asked, Where rests the chief responsibility for bringing to this result the protracted controversy between the mother realm and her colonies? The Declaration of Independence was yet to be made good by a severe struggle on the part of the colonies, and to be accepted by the other party in the issue. It is rarely, if indeed the case has any historical parallel, when so large a measure of the responsibility for bringing about a signal revolution in the great affairs of a nation can, as in this instance, be directly charged upon an individual, and that was his majesty George III.[678] The facts of the case with their full evidence stand now clearly certified. That Declaration, with the event which it signified, might have come in other ways. Agencies and events were working to it. But that it came when it did, and as it did, he at whose heavy cost it came was largely the conspicuous agent and cause of it. That this is so, let the following tracing of the stages of the developments attest. And by the charge here alleged is meant that the king was mainly instrumental in bringing about the result, not merely by an official or representative responsibility, nor by prerogative, but by the prompting of personal feeling and private decision. It is also to be admitted that the king may have been guided by the purest motives and the loftiest sense of duty to preserve in any way the jewels of his crown and the integrity of his empire. But none the less it was his will and resolve that decided the issue.

As we have seen, the effect of every measure of the British government brought to bear upon the colonies was directly the opposite of what had been intended. Threats and penalties exasperated, but did not intimidate. Seeming concessions and retractions did not conciliate. Contempt and defiance called out corresponding and reciprocal feelings. There was a strict parallelism between the ministerial inventions for securing the mastery and the patriot ingenuity and earnestness for nullifying them. The few incidental accompaniments of popular violence and mobs were so familiar to the people of England at home as to count for little. They were to be regretted and condemned, but they were fully offset by the indiscriminate and vengeful punishments which government visited upon them.

We are to remember that the king, if not the originator and adviser of all these measures, gave them his cordial approval. More and more, as the quarrel ripened, his personal will and resolve asserted themselves, even autocratically. When the catastrophe finally came, his prime minister frankly confessed, that by the king's urgency, and in compliance with his own view of the claims of loyalty, he had been acting against his own clear judgment of what was wise and right, if not against his conscience.[679] Who, then, so much as the king, as sole arbiter, by his own personal decision, substituted arms for debate? The colonies, no longer the aggressive party, were put on the defensive. Still, even after this dropping of the royal gage of battle, the Assembly of Pennsylvania, with its residuum of Quakerism, required of its members the old oath of allegiance to George III., and Dickinson reported to it strongly loyal instructions for its delegates. Is it strange that Franklin refused to take his seat in that body? Two years later,—March 17, 1778,—the king writes to Lord North: "No consideration in life shall make me stoop to opposition. Whilst any ten men in the kingdom will stand by me, I will not give myself up into bondage. I will rather risk my crown than do what I think personally disgraceful. It is impossible that the nation should not stand by me. If they will not, they shall have another king, for I will never put my hand to what will make me miserable to the last hour of my life."[680] And again, when the end was at hand, the king, writing to Lord North, March 7, 1780, says: "I can never suppose this country so lost to all ideas of self-importance as to be willing to grant American independence. If that word be ever universally adopted, I shall despair of this country being preserved from a state of inferiority. I hope never to see that day, for, however I am treated, I must love this country."[681]

Recalling the fact that in all previous remonstrances[682] and petitions, without a single exception, whether coming from a convention, an assembly, or a congress, the ministry and Parliament were made to bear the burden of all complaints and reproaches, we note with emphasis that in the Declaration of Independence, for the first time, "the present king of Great Britain" is charged as the offender. Its scathing invectives in its short sentences begin with "He." His tools and supporters are all lost sight of, passed unmentioned. This substitution of the monarch himself as chargeable, through his own persistency, with the whole burden heretofore laid at the door of his advisers indicates the necessity which Congress felt of seeming to sever their plain constitutional allegiance to the monarch, and of ignoring all dependence on his ministers or Parliament, whose supremacy over the colonies they had always denied. Hence the tone and wording of all the previous utterances of Congress, deferential and even fulsome as they now seem, in sparing the king, for the first time, in the Declaration, are changed to give the necessary legal emphasis of the capital letter in _He_. Indeed, the law and the man were essentially as one, for the candid monarch told John Adams, on his subsequent appearance as the minister of the United States, that he was the last person in his realm to consent to the independence of the colonies. The utter hopelessness of the measures of government was obvious to the wiser statesmen of Britain and to those whose observation was guided by simple common sense.[683]

A matter of sharp and reproachful criticism—which has not wholly disappeared from more recent pages of history and comment—was found in what certainly had the seeming of insincerity and duplicity in the earnest professions of loyalty made by leading patriots while the spirit of absolute independence, latent and but thinly veiled, was instigating measures of defiance, and even of open hostility. The patriots, it was boldly charged, had practised a mean hypocrisy. The shock of the disclosure was at the time sudden and severe. Joseph Galloway, though perhaps the most hostile and vengeful, was by no means the least able or the most estranged and disappointed of a class of very prominent men, who avowed that they had been alienated from the patriot cause by the exposed duplicity of its wiliest leaders. They had joined heart and hand in council and measures with those who professed to be seeking only a redress of grievances, with an unqualified loyalty as British subjects to the king and the constitution, and in a disavowal of any idea of independence.

On the other side of the water, the Declaration, as "throwing off the mask of hypocrisy" by the patriots, was a very painful shock to many who had been most friendly and earnest champions of the cause of the colonists. The members of the opposition in Parliament and in high places were taunted by the supporters of government for all their pleading in behalf of rebels. And when, besides the bold avowal of independence, the added measures of a suspension of all commerce with Great Britain, and of an alliance of the patriots with the hereditary enemy of their mother country, came to the knowledge of those who had been our friends, the consternation which it caused them was but natural. Manufacturers and merchants, against whose interests so heavy a blow had been dealt, and all Englishmen who scorned the French, our new ally, might with reason rank themselves as now our enemies. Of course, the ministry and the abetters of the most offensive measures of government availed themselves of the evidence now offered of what they had maintained was the ultimate purpose of the disaffected colonists, hypocritically concealed, and they confidently looked for a well-nigh unanimous approval and support of the vengeful hostilities at once entered upon. It was affirmed that the British officers and soldiers here, who had before been but half-hearted and lukewarm in fulfilling their errand, now became as earnest and impassioned in war measures as if they were fighting Indians, Frenchmen, or Spaniards. Such were really the effects wrought on both sides of the water, not merely by the bold avowal of independence, but by what was viewed as the exposure of a subtle and hypocritical concealment of the purpose of it under beguiling professions of loyalty.

What is there to be said, either by way of explanation or of justification, of the course ascribed to the patriots? It is well to admit freely that there was much said, if not done, that had the seeming of duplicity and insincerity, of secrecy of design and of sinuous dealing. And after yielding all that can be charged of this, we may insist that, in reality, it was nothing beyond the seeming. Neither disguise, nor duplicity, nor hypocrisy, nor artful or cunning intrigue, in any shape or degree, was availed of by the patriots. The result to which they were led was from the first natural and inevitable, and it was reached by bold and honest stages, in thinking out and making sure of their way. The facts are all clearly revealed to us in their course of development. The maturing of opinion, till what had been repelled as a calamity was accepted as a necessity, is traceable through the changing events of a few heavily burdened years, if not even of months and days, to say nothing of the symptoms of it which a keen perception may discover during the career of four generations of Englishmen on this continent. Its own natural stages of growth were reached just at the time that it was attempted to bring it under check by artificial restraint of the home government. That government compelled the colonists to ask themselves the two questions: first, if they were anything less than Englishmen; and further, if their natural rights were any less than those of men. There has been much discussion as to when and by whom the idea of American independence was first entertained. It would be very difficult to assign that conception to a date or to an individual. All that was natural and spontaneous in the situation of the colonists would be suggestive of it; all that was artificial, like the tokens of a foreign oversight in matters of government, would be exceptional or strange to it. Husbandmen, mechanics, and fishermen would not be likely to trouble themselves with the ways in which their relations as British subjects interfered with their free range in life. Larger and deeper thinkers, like Samuel Adams, would feel their way down to comprehensive root questions, sure at last to reach the fundamentals of the whole matter,—as, What has the British ministry and Parliament to do with us? It required nine years to mature the puzzling of a peasant over the question of a trifling tax into the conclusion of a republican patriot statesman. Every stage of this process is traceable in abounding public and private papers, with its advances and arrests, its pauses and its quickenings, its misgivings and assurances, in all classes of persons, and in its dimmest and its fullest phases. We have seen how it was working its way in the honest secrecy of a few breasts in the first Congress, even when repelled as a dreaded fatality. Samuel Adams is generally, and with sufficient evidence, credited as having been the first of the leading spirits of the revolt to have reached—at first in private confidence, steadily strengthening into the frankest and boldest avowal—the conviction that the issue opened between the colonies and the mother country logically, necessarily, and inevitably must result in a complete severance of the tie between them. Even at that stage of his earliest insight into the superficial aspect of the controversy, when he is quoted as if hypocritically saying one thing while he intended another, it will be observed that his strong professions of loyalty are qualified by parenthetical suggestions of a possible alternative. Thus, in the Address which he wrote for the Massachusetts Assembly, in 1768, to the Lords of the Treasury, his explicit professions of loyalty for his constituents close with the caveat that this loyalty will conform itself to acquiescence so far as "consists with the fundamental rules of the Constitution."[684] Of course, as the oppressive measures of government exasperated the patriots, they were not only led on to discern the full alternative before them, but were unreserved in their expressions of a willingness to meet it, at whatever cost. Still, however, what seemed like hesitation in the boldest was simply a waiting for the slow and timid to summon resolution for decisive action. Of the single measures in Congress preceding the Declaration of Independence, the most farcical and the most likely to be regarded as hypocritical was the second petition to the king, which his majesty spurned. His ministers had to compare with its adulatory insincerities some intercepted letters of John Adams, written nearly at the same time, stinging with defiance and treason. But John Adams well described this petition to the king as "Dickinson's Letter." Dickinson himself is the most conspicuous and true-hearted of the class of men who to the last shrunk from the severance of the tie to the mother country. Yet he was to be the one whose casting vote, by a substitute, was to ratify the great Declaration. There may have been weakness in his urgency that that petition should proffer a final hope of amity, but it was the prompting of thorough manliness and honesty. As we have seen, it was the royal scorn of that petition, backed by a wilful personal espousal of responsibility, which made the king the real prompter of the Declaration of Independence.[685]

Leaving out of view all obligations of the colonies to the mother country, there was still quite another class of very reasonable apprehensions which had a vast influence over the halting minds. What would be the relations of the severed and possibly contentious colonies to each other, with all their separate interests, rivalries, and jealousies? Might not anarchy and civil war make them rue the day when, in rejecting the tempered severity of the rule of a lawful monarch, they had forfeited the privilege of having an arbiter and a common friend?

Nor was this the only dread. The Indians were still a formidable foe on the frontiers. So far as they were held in check, it was largely by English arms and influence. Without anticipating the cruel and disgraceful complication of the trouble which was to come, and the aggravations of civil war, by the enlistment of these savages by England as her allies against her former subjects, it was enough for timid colonists looking into the future to realize the power of mischief which lurked with these wild men in the woods. Every further advance of the colonists beyond the boundaries already secured would provoke new hostilities, and remind the pioneers of the value to them of English armaments and reinforcements. And yet once more, those were by no means bugbear alarms which foreboded for the colonists, left to themselves, outrages from French and Spanish intrigue, ambition, and greed of territory. France and Spain had losses and insults to avenge against England, and might seek for reprisals on the undefended colonists. It needs only an intimation, without detail, of the apprehensions which either reason or imagination might conjure from this foreboding, to show how powerfully it might operate with prudent men in suspending their decision between rebellion and loyalty. All these considerations, taken separately and together, whether as resulting in slow and timid maturing of sentiment and of profession in Congress, or as influencing the judgment of patriot leaders, or as guiding the vacillating course of individuals and multitudes, may have given a seeming show of insincerity and duplicity to words contrasted with subsequent deeds. But a clear apprehension of all the alternatives which were then to be balanced will satisfy us that there was little room for hypocrisy to fill.

Some show of reason for charging upon the patriots duplicity and lack of downright frankness was found in their professions of a steadfast, but still a qualified, loyalty. If there was not at first some confusion or vagueness in their own ideas on this point, they certainly set themselves open to such a misunderstanding by the ministry as to leave it in doubt whether they knew their own minds or candidly declared them. The controversy, from its beginning till its close, was constantly alleged to start from this discriminating standard of loyalty: the colonists repudiated the exercise of authority over them by Parliament and the ministry, and yet avowed themselves faithful and loyal subjects of the king. The king could govern and act only through Parliament. How could they repudiate the authority of Parliament and respect that of the king? What was to be the basis, scope, and mode of exercise of his authority? They certainly could not have in view the exercise of an autocracy over them, the restoration of the old royal prerogative which a previous glorious revolution had shattered. The king could exercise his authority in the colonial assemblies only through governors, and those governors had been rendered powerless here. Even the sage and philosophic Franklin found himself perplexed on this point. Writing from London to his son in New Jersey, March 13, 1768, he says: "I know not what the Boston people mean; what is the subordination they acknowledge in their Assembly to Parliament, while they deny its power to make laws for them?"[686] Galloway pertinently asked of the first Congress, "if they had any other union of the two countries more constitutional in view, why did they not petition for it?" "The Congress, while they professed themselves subjects, spoke in the language of allies, and were openly acting the part of enemies."[687] How are we to reconcile two statements made by Pitt in the same speech, in January, 1776: "This kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the colonies." "At the same time, on every real point of legislation, I believe the authority of Parliament to be fixed as the Polar Star." Without any attempt to conceive or fashion a definition of their ideal, the good common sense of the patriots at last worked out the conclusion that their emancipation from the Parliament involved a dispensing with the king.[688]

There was no disguising the fact, however, that, with independence declared, there was no such unanimity of purpose among all the members of Congress, still less among their many-minded and vaguely-defined constituency. It was inevitable, therefore, that both a degree of arbitrariness towards halting and censorious objectors, and of harsh severity towards open resistants, should henceforward characterize the measures approved by the patriot leaders. There was a sagacious moderation and prudence in the measures taken by Congress to conciliate and reassure the half-hearted and the hesitating. For the final stand had been taken that nothing short of an achieved independence should be accepted as the issue.

The prime movers in the patriot cause continued to be the main workers for it, and gradually reinforced themselves by new and effective aiders. Astute and able men, well read in history and by no means without knowledge of international law and the methods of diplomacy, surveyed the field before them, provided for contingencies, and found full scope for their wits and wisdom. When we consider the distractions of the times, the overthrow of all previous authority, the presence and threats of anarchy, the lack of unanimity, and the number and virulence of discordant interests, and, above all, that Congress had only advisory, hardly instructive, powers, even with the most willing portion of its constituents, we can easily pardon excesses and errors, and heartily yield our admiration to the noble qualities and virtues of those who proved their claim to leadership. When we read the original papers and the full biographies of these men, we are impressed by the balance and force of their judgment, their power of expressing reasons and convictions, their calm self-mastery, and the fervor of their purposes.

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.

THE source to which naturally we should first apply ourselves for the fullest information on the development of the purpose of independence would be the _Journals of Congress_. But our disappointment would be complete. The same reasons which enjoined on the members secrecy as to the proceedings seem to have deprived the record even of some things that were done and of almost every utterance in debate. We have to look to other sources, the most scattered and fragmentary, to learn the names even of the principal leaders in the debates, and from beginning to end we have not the report, scarcely a summary, of a single speech. Our reasonable inference from such hints is that some ten, or at most fifteen, members were the master-spirits in securing the adoption of measures, while they were opposed by some as earnest as themselves, but not as numerous. But whatever may have been written in the original _Journals_ was subjected to a cautious selection when they were printed by a committee. It is only from Jefferson himself, for instance, that we learn (Randall's _Jefferson_, i. 15) how, somewhat to his chagrin, "the rhetoric" of his draft of the Declaration was toned down. Especially do the _Journals_, as printed, suppress all evidences of strong dissension, of which we have abundant hints in fragments from John and Sam. Adams, Franklin, Dickinson, Galloway, Jefferson, Jay, and Livingston. But the _Journals_ do spread before us at length sundry admirable papers, drawn by able and judicious committees.[689]

The reader must turn to the notes appended to chapter i. of the present volume for an examination of some of the leading pamphlets occasioned by the Congresses of 1774 and 1775, and for an examination of their opposing views, with more or less warning of the inevitable issue of independence.

One may easily trace in the writings of Franklin, extending through the years preceding the Revolution, and through all the phases of the struggle, seeming inconsistencies in the expression of his opinions and judgment. But these are readily explicable by changes in time and circumstance. We must pause, however, upon the strong statement made by Lecky in the following sentence: "It may be safely asserted that if Franklin had been able to guide American opinion, it would never have ended in revolution."[690]

Opportune in the date of its publication, as well as of mighty cogency in its tone and substance, was that vigorous work by Thomas Paine, a pamphlet bearing the title "Common Sense." If we take merely the average between the superlatively exalted tributes paid to his work as the one supremely effective agency for bringing vast numbers of the people of the colonies to front the issue of independence, and the most moderate judgments which have estimated its real merit, we should leave to be assigned to it the credit of being the most inspiriting of all the utterances and publications of the time for popular effect. The opportuneness of the appearance of this remarkable essay consisted in the fact that it came into the hands of multitudes, greedy to read it, a few months before the burning question of independency was to be settled. The papers issued by Congress might well answer the needs of the most intelligent classes of the people, in reconciling them to the new phase of the struggle. But there were large numbers of persons who needed the help of some short and easy argument, homely in style and quotable between plain neighbors. And this eighteen-penny pamphlet met that necessity. It appeared anonymously. John Adams says it was ascribed to his pen. Paine had been in confidential intercourse with Franklin, and the sagacious judgment of that philosopher doubtless suggested the form and substance of some of its contents, and may have kept out of it some things less apt or wise. Washington, Franklin, and John Adams welcomed it as a vigorous agency for persuading masses of simple and honest men that their rights must now be taken into their own hands for vindication. The character of the writer alienated from him the regard of those who could and who would willingly have advanced his interests, and made him to multitudes an object of horror and contempt. Though his pamphlet bore the title of "Common Sense", Gouverneur Morris says that that was a quality which Paine himself wholly lacked. Posterity, however, may well accord to him as a writer the high consideration given to him by his contemporaries, of having happily met by his pen a crisis and a pause in the state of the popular mind. Franklin wrote that "the pamphlet had prodigious effects."[691]

Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ was published in the same year. Wise men have often affirmed that if it had appeared a generation earlier, and if the doctrines and principles which it advocated had passed into the minds of statesmen and economists, peaceful rather than warlike measures would have disposed of the controversy. It required the lapse of twoscore years to convince English statesmen and economists of the practical wisdom of the leading principles advanced by this college professor. He maintained the general viciousness and folly of the English colonial administration; that while even the restricted commercial monopoly was more generous than the colonial rule of any other governments, the prohibition of manufactures was mischievous and oppressive. He agreed with Dean Tucker, that a peaceful separation of the colonies would benefit rather than harm the mother country. Yet, under existing circumstances, such a separation was impracticable, because neither the government nor the people of the realm would seriously entertain the proposition.[692]

One of the best expositions of the views held by some of the Tory writers, that the seeds of independency were sown with the early settlements and nurtured through their history, is given in a tract by Galloway,[693] which was published in London in 1780, as _Historical and Political Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Rebellion. In which the Causes of that Rebellion are pointed out, and the Policy and Necessity of offering to the Americans a System of Government founded in the Principles of the British Constitution, are clearly demonstrated. By the Author of Letters to a Nobleman on the Conduct of the American War_. He pleads that the rebellion has been encouraged by the assertion "of the injustice and oppression of the present reign by a plan formed by the administration for enslaving the colonies", and asserts that the mother country had fostered the infancy and weakness of the colonies, had espoused their quarrels, and, at an enormous cost of debt, had defended them. "The colonies are very rich and prosperous, with more than a quarter of the population of Great Britain, and should share its burdens. The rebellion did not spring from a dread of being enslaved." The writer then ably and justly traces its origin to the principles of the Puritan exiles, from whose passion for religious freedom has grown that for civil independence. He attributes much influence helpful to rebellion to the organization among the Presbyterians at Philadelphia, in 1764, which united by correspondence with the Congregationalists of New England. The other sects were generally averse to measures of violent opposition to authority. The measures of government are vindicated, and all trouble is traced to a faction in New England, sympathized with and led on by a similar faction at home. The "Circular Letter", bringing the colonies into accord, wrought the mischief. Two sharply divided parties at once were formed, or proved to exist: the one defining and standing for the right of the colonies with a redress of grievances, on the basis of a solid constitutional union with the mother country, and opposed to sedition and all acts of violence; the other resolved by all means, even though covert and fraudulent, to throw off allegiance, appeal to arms, run the venture of anarchy, and assert, and if possible attain, independence. The latter party, acting with some temporary reserve and caution, opposed all peaceable propositions, and covertly worked for their own ends. They used most effectively a system of expresses between Philadelphia and the other towns, Sam. Adams being the artful and diligent fomenter of all this mischief. By his guile, Congress was brought to approve the Resolves of the Mass. Suffolk Conference, which declared "that no obedience is due to acts of Parliament affecting Boston", and provided for an organization of the provincial militia against government. He proceeded to argue that "the American faction", as in the fourth resolve of their Bill of Rights, explicitly declare their colonial independence. This was followed by an address to his majesty,—not calling it a petition,—and which the writer proceeded to analyze with much acuteness, as being vague and evasive in its professions, and suggestive of conditions which would prove satisfactory. Finally, "the mask was thrown off", and the casting vote of the "timid and variable Mr. Dickinson" carried the Declaration of Independence. "Samuel Adams, the great director of their councils, and the most cautious, artful, and reserved man among them, did not hesitate, as soon as the vote of independence had passed, to declare in all companies that he had labored upwards of twenty years to accomplish the measure." Mr. Galloway closes with sharp strictures upon the bewildered and vacillating policy which the government has heretofore pursued, and pleads for a firm and generous "constitutional union" between the realm and the colonies. The growth of the spirit of independence necessarily makes a part of all general histories of the war, which are characterized in another place.

EDITORIAL NOTES.

THE claim of Chalmers that the passion for independence had latently existed from the very foundation of the New England colonies[694] had been early denied by Dummer in his _Defence of the N. E. Charters_. John Adams[695] had been outspoken in his advocacy of independence for more than a year before R. H. Lee introduced his resolution into Congress. He had avowed it in letters, which the British intercepted in July, 1775, and printed in a Boston newspaper. If Josiah Quincy, Jr. (_Memoirs_, 250, 341), can be believed, he found Franklin in London in 1774 holding ideas "extended on the broad scale of total emancipation" (Sparks's _Franklin_, i. 379). The resolves of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, in May, 1775, were strongly indicative. John Jay traced the beginning of an outspoken desire to the rejection by the king of the petition of the Congress of 1775 (_N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg._, July, 1776). In the autumn of that year it is certain that the passion for independence animated the army round Boston (Frothingham's _Siege of Boston_, 263), and in December James Bowdoin was confident that the dispute must end in independence (_Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, xii. 228). There was very far from any general adhesion to the belief in its inevitableness at all times during 1775. Washington was not conscious of the wish (Sparks, i. 131, ii. 401; Smyth, ii. 457). Gov. Franklin was expressing to Dartmouth the prevalence of a detestation of such views (_Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, xiv 342). The English historians have dwelt on this (Mahon, vi. 92, 94; Lecky, iii. 414, 447, iv. 41).[696]

Early in 1776 the passion for independence gathered head. In March, Edmund Quincy thought the feeling was universal in the Northern colonies (_N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg._, 1859, p. 232). Francis Dana, just home from England, was saying that he was satisfied no reconciliation was possible (Sparks, _Corresp. of the Rev._, i. 177). The probability of independence was recognized in the instructions which Congress gave to Silas Deane in March, on his sailing for Europe. In April came the violent measure in Congress of abolishing the British custom laws. The press was beginning to give the warning note,[697] but not without an occasional counter statement, as when the _N. Y. Gazette_ (April 8, 1776) asserted that Congress had never lisped a desire for republicanism or independence. Sam Adams was urgent (Wells, ii. 397). John Adams was writing to Winthrop, of Cambridge, to restrain him from urging Massachusetts to break precipitately the union of the colonies (_Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll._, xliv. 298), and he was counselling Joseph Ward to be patient, for it "required time to bring the colonies all of one mind; but", he adds, "time will do it" (_Scribner's Mag._, xi. 572).

May was the decisive month, and events marched rapidly. On the 1st, Massachusetts set up a committee to conduct the government of the province in the name of the people.[698] On the 4th the last Colonial Assembly of Rhode Island renounced its allegiance (_Newport Hist. Mag._, Jan., 1884, p. 131). A letter of Gen. Lee to Patrick Henry, on May 7th, has raised a doubt of Henry's steadfastness (Force, 5th ser.,