Independence (51 page)

When asked in the spring by a constituent whether a declaration of independence was imminent, a Virginian responded that “it is probable” Congress “will wait till the people brings it before them.”
²³
By April the delegates knew that a sea change in popular opinion was occurring.

In the first months of war a colonist who had dared to publicly urge independence could have found himself in a world of trouble with American authorities. In the autumn of 1775, for instance, Thomas Anderson of Hanover County, Virginia, was forced by the local committee of safety to publicly recant his statement “declaring that this Country was in a state of rebellion, and aimed at a state of independence, more than opposition to parliamentary taxation.” Nearly simultaneously the Chester County, Pennsylvania, Committee of Safety—chaired by Anthony Wayne, who shortly was to become a general officer in the Continental army—was appalled when the local militia battalion trumpeted that its men had taken up arms “to overturn the Constitution, by declaring an independency.” The committee condemned “an idea so pernicious in its nature” and compelled the officers to recant and publicly swear that they and their men soldiered to secure “a happy and speedy reconciliation” with Great Britain.
²⁴

Wars often reshape thinking, and this one was part of a rebellion that had been refashioning thought since 1765. By early 1776 the Anglo-American conflict, little more than nine months old, was causing the colonists to see both their mother country and themselves in a different light. Dunmore’s proclamation, the razing of Falmouth, and battlefields steeped in blood had hardened feelings toward the mother country. Even the most conservative congressmen found their loyalty to Great Britain shaken to the core by knowledge that “the sword of ministerial vengeance … has been drawn,” causing “innocent blood [to have] been shed,” as New York’s James Duane exclaimed.
²⁵
Whatever love had once existed for the parent state vanished entirely when a son, father, or brother died fighting against British soldiers. A New Hampshire farmer who lost a son in the Canadian campaign wrote in his diary that his child had died “defending the just Rights of America” against the “wicked Tyranical Brute (nea worse than Brute) of Great Britain.”
²⁶
Some towns experienced a staggering death toll during 1775. On the first day of the war, four men from Lynn, five from Needham, six from Cambridge, seven from Danvers, ten from Lexington, and a dozen from Menotomy (now Arlington) had perished.
²⁷
That was only the beginning. Others from those villages, and dozens of additional towns, fell in action or from camp diseases in the ensuing months. Enmity toward Great Britain rose in step with the increasing casualty rate, until by the spring of 1776 Franklin spoke of “a rooted Hatred” for England throughout America.
²⁸

Concurrently, the idea gathered force that the inhabitants of America were Americans, not British. Many colonists were third- or fourth-generation Americans. In addition, Americanism was nourished by the training received by thousands of soldiers who had to be readied for fighting British regulars. General Washington, for instance, frequently sent messages to his troops telling them that this was not a war to resolve the problems of Massachusetts or New England. All Americans, he said, were confronted by “a diabolical Ministry” bent on “Inslav[ing] this great Continent.” The “great Cause we are engaged in” is one of protecting “Life, Liberty, & Property” from the ravages of “a brutal, savage enemy,” a foe that threatened “every thing we hold dear,” that had laid “our towns … in ashes” and driven “innocent Women & Children … from their peaceful habitations.”
²⁹

In the three years since the tea ships had set sail for colonial ports during the warm summer of 1773, America had become a far different place. The offices of the king’s chief executives, solicitors, and customs officials had been shuttered and the officials who had once occupied them were only a dim memory from a rapidly receding past. In nearly every colony, sovereign authority was wielded by a revolutionary assembly, often called the “provincial congress” or “provincial convention.” Many who sat in these bodies were new to such lofty power, having been thrust by the rebellion, and especially the war, into their elevated position. A notch lower, in the counties and towns, committees of safety—sometimes called the committee of inspection or observation—enforced the boycott of trade with the mother country instituted by the First Congress, managed the war effort, and maintained security on the home front. Many, perhaps most, who sat on these committees had never before occupied a civil office. Nor would they have much hope of ever wielding power again if royal authority was reestablished.
³⁰

While the overwhelming majority of colonists supported the war, those whose behavior violated the laws of Congress or was judged harmful to the conduct of the war faced the possibility of harsh treatment from the committees of safety. Men who refused to sign an oath to abide by the Continental Association, and especially those caught violating the non-importation, non-exportation, and non-consumption laws, might be placed under surveillance or have their names published as “enemies of the country,” a clarion call for patriots to cruelly ostracize them.
³¹
Incidents of open infidelity were relatively uncommon, although in January 1776 some four hundred inhabitants of Queens County, New York, were made to publicly apologize for having failed to establish a committee to enforce the Association.
³²
Those caught selling goods to the British army suffered harsher punishments. Some were briefly jailed, after which they were compelled to pay the costs incurred in their confinement.
³³
One Edward Parry was exiled from his coastal Massachusetts village and ordered to “be immediately sent to some inland Town, which shall be more than seventy miles distant from the seaports in this Colony.”
³⁴
Maryland’s rebel assembly removed from local office a violator of the Association.
³⁵
When the local committees could not get their hands on Tory authors of newspaper essays or pamphlets, they did the next best thing: They publicly burned the offending tract. Freehold, New Jersey’s committee even condemned one pamphlet to “a suit of tar and turkey-buzzard’s feathers.”
³⁶

Many men also got into trouble because of things they said. Citizens were jailed or fined for disloyal pronouncements. Some were made to recant utterances such as “the English would be an overmatch for the
Americans
” or “damn … the honourable Continental Congress.” Men were punished for having publicly defended “British taxation,” “scandalously aspersed the characters” of American leaders, engaged as “a retailer of falsehoods,” denounced the “rascally Rebels,” spoke “injuriously of the distressed people of … Boston,” and maintained they would rather “be under a tyrannical King as a tyrannical Commonwealth.” Action was taken against those who through their “wicked and mischievous striving [had attempted] to bring destruction and ruin on … [this] bleeding country.”
³⁷
Those who recanted often had to pledge to henceforth “conduct myself as a true friend to
America
,” acknowledge “being too backward … with regard to the liberties of my country,” vow to hereafter “sacrifice my interest and venture my life in the defence of my Country,” or “beg forgiveness of God, and all friends to
American
liberty.”
³⁸
During the first months of 1776 there were fewer and fewer openly unpatriotic acts that cried out for punishment. What is more, punitive actions against those who openly called for American independence appear to have ceased altogether.

The lucid wording of the statements published by the committees of safety early in 1776 made clear that a new frame of mind was taking shape in America. Increasing numbers of colonists saw themselves as Americans, saw America as their country, and believed that America should be governed solely by Americans. In astonishingly short order, the belief had taken hold that Great Britain was a foreign land that groaned under a “wicked system” that drove those who held office to seek “the destruction of
American
liberty.”
³⁹
On America’s farms and at its workbenches, in villages along the coastal plain and throughout the rolling, wooded backcountry, people were discovering that their interests all too often differed from the interests of those who governed the British Empire. Moreover, they were coming to find that they could get along fine, perhaps better, when they were removed from British jurisdiction. Age-old loyalties to the mother country were vanishing—in many places had already disappeared—like snow under a warm sun. With the new way of thinking came a growing tolerance, even fervor, for the idea of American independence. The gathering transformation in the thinking of Americans appears to have outpaced that of many who sat in Congress. Public opinion polls were not taken in those days, but it is difficult not to believe that a considerably smaller percentage of reconciliationists lived in America by the spring of 1776 than sat in the Continental Congress.

Nothing in the Americans’ worldview changed more drastically, or rapidly, than their opinion of the monarchy. Even into the 1770s, George III’s coronation and his birthdays were celebrated throughout America with balls, games, “Gun-firing,” and repeated toasts at elaborate dinners. The monarch was lauded in sermons, pamphlets, almanacs, and widely sold biographies. The royal likeness and the king’s arms adorned mass-produced china, ceramics, and glassware, and George III’s portrait hung in government buildings and many shops. Throughout the eighteenth century, Great Britain’s kings had been not just revered but also loved by Americans, who thought of them as benevolent figures who presided over the relationship between the colonies and the mother country. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphian who later signed the Declaration of Independence, said that, as a youngster, he had believed that kings were “as essential to political order as the Sun is to the order of our Solar System.”
⁴⁰

This veneration of monarchy eroded badly after the enactment of the Intolerable Acts. In their wake, some southern Anglican clergy who prayed for the king were forced from their pulpits and fled into exile, and here and there throughout the colonies mobs set on those who openly defended the king or accepted a royal appointment. When Timothy Ruggles, who nine years earlier had been the president of the Stamp Act Congress, was named by royal authorities to the Massachusetts council under the provisions of the Intolerable Acts, a mob descended on his Worcester County estate, damaging his home, disfiguring his horse, and killing his livestock.
⁴¹
The onset of hostilities and the king’s repeated refusal to hear Congress’s petitions further dampened emotional support for the monarch, and Thomas Paine’s visceral and nearly unanswerable assault on royal rule in
Common Sense
drove a stake through the heart of homage to monarchy. It “put the torch to combustibles,” said Edmund Randolph, a Virginia activist, who clearly thought that Paine had voiced sentiments that already existed.
⁴²

The colonists had long been accustomed to political and social systems modeled on those of England, but there had always been significant differences. North of the Potomac, America was devoid of aristocratic hierarchies, and it was less deferential and more egalitarian. Furthermore, colonists everywhere had for years believed that the real authority in their province was—or at least should be—the assembly, a body chosen in elections in which some two thirds or more of all adult white males were qualified to vote. And from Patrick Henry’s Virginia Resolves until the First Continental Congress, it was the assemblies that had largely led the protest against British policies. Invisibly but inexorably, the sense coagulated in the colonies that America’s resistance to the ministry’s supposed conspiracy against liberty was nothing less than that of a struggle by a republican people through its elected representatives against a corrupt mother country dominated by an ossified aristocracy and mostly dissolute commoners. Republican America, untainted by England’s luxury, extravagance, and servility, gradually came to be seen as the embodiment of virtue and purity. Such thinking added a deeply moral dimension to the American protest. For some, that meant that independence was imperative to ensure that America would not be poisoned by Britain’s corruption. For others who shared Paine’s conviction about starting the world anew—those who, perhaps, were the most idealistic, ideological, ambitious, and opportunistic—it meant that the belief in American independence and a republican revolution were inextricably linked. For these colonists, American independence was merely the beginning of the American Revolution. Independence was to be followed by an expunging of privileges for the few and by the institutionalization of equal opportunities.
⁴³