Young John Adams: The Second Continental Congress

by CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN

1

IN the State House yard the Philadelphia Associators drilled their new-formed battalions, the bucktails on their cockaded hats standing up bravely in the early May breeze. Twenty blocks away in the Factory yard, the Quaker Blues went through the manual of arms as smartly as any veterans, aware they had been read out of Meeting for what they did. And in John Cadwalader’s garden the Silk Stocking Company drilled, determined to outdo the Blues. Their light green uniforms were crossed over the breast with white leather belts; they wore green jockey caps, and on their cartouche boxes the word LIBERTY stood out large.

Crowds gathered in the late afternoons to watch them. Often enough, John Adams was among the crowd. He was touched and cheered by the martial spirit that everywhere prevailed. “Uniforms and Regimentals are thick as Bees,” he wrote home. “Oh, that I were a soldier! I will be. I am reading military books. Everybody must, and will, and shall be a soldier.”

Coming through New York, John had seen thousands of troops at drill — a sight especially heartening because that large province last winter had rejected the First Continental Congress and refused to send delegates to the Second. They had even prepared humble petitions to King and Parliament, inscribed on paper bearing the significant watermark Liberty and Prudence. But Lexington had changed their minds; they had elected a dozen delegates for Philadelphia. John hoped all twelve would not be as conciliatory as Duane and Jay. Tidings of Lexington had traveled amazingly fast. Kentucky should have it soon, and Savannah. Surely, the news would bring Georgia into the union! Congress sat in the State House now, two blocks up Chestnut Street from Carpenters’ Hall. The Pennsylvania Assembly had lent their room on the ground floor at the east end, a large, beautiful, white-paneled chamber, lined on two sides with windows. A handsome glass-prisrned chandelier hung in the center. At the far end were twin fireplaces; the President’s table faced the room. The place had an air auspicious, inspiring.

Forty-eight delegates answered to the roll call. (There would eventually be sixty-five.) Virginia had her old delegation. Thomas Jefferson was to come later, as alternate for Peyton Randolph, should the latter be called back to Virginia, John saw few new faces, Hancock of course was with the Massachusetts delegation now, Pennsylvania had added a distinguished young Scottish-born constitutional scholar, James Wilson. But among newcomers the most celebrated by far was Dr. Franklin, just landed from England. It was wonderful to see him, his chair at the end of the row pulled out a little from the rest, tranquil and composed in his brown Quaker suit, the gray hair falling almost to his shoulders. Here was a man who knew the riddle of ministerial Britain at first hand, who had met Lord North face to face, a man wise in the ways of courts and empires.

The first morning, Colonel Washington created a sensation by appearing in his uniform of the Virginia militia—blue and buff coat with rich gold epaulets, a small elegant sword at his side and a black cockade in his hat. Some, jealous of his wealth and social position, said sourly that the Virginian had found a pretty way to advertise his military ambitions. After all, Colonel Dickinson sat in Congress sans regimentals; so did Major Mifflin. But the New England men declared it a glorious idea. And how skillful, how natural to the man, this tacit yet open reminder that the business of the Congress might well be not negotiation but war!

It was a reminder, John discovered very soon, that was most bumingly necessary. The New England men had come to Philadelphia with a program definite, immediate, practical: First, to put the continent in a state of strong defense. Second, to institute a people’s government in every colony, entirely independent of royal governors, Parliament, and Britain. They had expected to put it through without delay.

Now they found they could not even mention the word independence, let alone the words American Army. In spite of Lexington, the Middle and Southern colonies were not ready to accept a state of war for the whole continent. They had every sympathy with Massachusetts and said so with tears in their eyes. They approved the drilling, the battalions, the martial spirit out-of-doors. But they approved it, John discovered, conditionally, only should negotiation fail.

Sitting in the wide, white-paneled chamber, discouragement swept over John. At the expense of three precious days, Congress prepared an elaborate memorial for London, proving that Britain, not America, had fired the first shot at Lexington. What was to be gained, John thought disgustedly, by proving who fired first ? In Congress last summer a Pennsylvania member had suggested bluntly that Massachusetts be left to conduct by herself what quarrels she chose. Was it possible Congress might repeat this proposal? “Don’t let New England start a war,”Dr. Franklin had written from London, “without the approval of the Continental Congress. If they do, they may have to fight a war alone.”

John recalled it now with foreboding. Yet a display of anger, contempt, impatience, would persuade of nothing, and might lose much. Even in letters home, John told himself he must be careful, hint rather than say what he felt. “America,” he wrote to Abigail, “is a great unwieldy body. Its progress must be slow. It is like a large fleet sailing under convoy. The fastest sailors must wait for the dullest and slowest.”

2

AFTER the Lexington depositions, Congress turned its attention to the Continental Association. No more goods must be shipped to Georgia, East and West Florida, Quebec. Local merchants sent pleas and claims to the floor. All were solemnly entered in the Minutes — as if, John thought, shifting irritably in his seal, as if there were no redcoats at Boston.

The city of New York looked for a large detachment of British troops to land any day. Congress resolved that no resistance should be offered. The redcoats were to be received peacefully by the citizens, even given barrack room! Five men of Boston, who had seen their own town resist British troops since the year ’68, sat silent, staring at their shoes.

Here and again, it was true, something happened to lift the gloom of these first days. There was a knock at the door one morning and a traveler entered, his face and clothes streaked with dust. It was a Dr. Hall, from the Parish of St. John’s, Georgia. The Parish — a whole county — had sent him as delegate, he told Congress a trifle breathlessly. He had ridden nearly eight hundred miles. Of course he couldn’t expect to vote, he added hastily, seeing that the rest of Georgia had not joined the union. But could he sit here, that his constituents might know they were part of the union? John all but wept as the Doctor walked to the seat assigned, limping a little from six consecutive weeks on horseback.

On the 18th of May, Congress heard that Fort Ticonderoga had been captured from the British. Ticonderoga, commanding the approach to the St. Lawrence River, was as important strategically as any point in America. Yet to Congress the affair caused more embarrassment than triumph. Badly as America needed the powder and arms taken by Ethan Allen, to advertise his victory would be to acknowledge before the world that the colonies had definitely taken the offensive against England, nullifying all the careful depositions and proofs about Lexington.

Toward the last of May, something happened to push John altogether beyond his powers of selfcontrol. The Dickinson-Duane faction moved that “an humble and dutiful petition” be dispatched to His Majesty, including a plain statement that the colonies desired immediate negotiation and “accommodation of the unhappy disputes,” and that they were ready to “enter into measures” to achieve it.

It was too much. John sprang to his feet and lashed out. His voice, rapid, loud, penetrated to every corner. This was an act of imbecility! Were they to sit composing humble addresses, with the earth still loose over fifty New England graves, and Britain’s ships of war coming ever nearer? Had not Congress wasted time enough with humble petitions that were never read, eloquent addresses that were spurned and spat upon? Let this Congress give over petitioning and memorializing, and get to the business of defending the continent! Two precious weeks had already been wasted. Before they even breathed the word negotiation, certain matters should be tended to on this side of the water.

John raised a hand, ticked off his program on his fingers: Let Congress recommend to each colony that it institute an independent popular government. Let the troops at Cambridge be recognized as a Continental army with a commander-in-chief over all, and let Congress assume the entire burden of its subsistence and armament. England should be told of these plans, frankly and fully—and told also that if she continued this war, the colonies would seek help and foreign alliance where they could. John leaned forward, grasped the chair in front of him. “Yes,” he repeated, “alliance with France, with the ancient enemy, if need be! With Spain, Holland, with any European power that cares to listen. Then and then only, Congress may enter into negotiation with Britain and her ministers. Then only we may indulge this talk of harmony, accommodation, loyalty, allegiance, love.”

Spitting the last five words as if they were poison and would choke him, John sat down. Sullivan of New I lampshire rose immediately, continuing where John left off. His voice was rough, angry. John had scarcely got his breath when he was told a man wished to see him, outside the building in the State House yardJohn made his way across the room. As he stepped to the pathway, the door banged behind him and a voice spoke his name, loud, peremptory. Dickinson had followed him out; he was in a violent passion.

“Give me the reason,” he shouted, “why you New Englandmen oppose our every measure of reconciliation! Sullivan is in there now, haranguing against my petition to the King. Look ye, Adams! If you don’t fall in with our plans, I and my friends will break off from New England, carry this Congress and this country in our own way.”

John looked coolly back at Dickinson. His own speech had cleared his brain, and though he was still angry, he felt confident, exhilarated. Beyond the open window, Sullivan’s voice could be heard, droning on. Out here the midday sun blazed. Sweat poured from Dickinson’s face; his lips were white and his fingers twitched at his sides.

“You are wasting your time, Mr. Dickinson,” John said. “I am not to he threatened. In the name of unity, I can make sacrifices as well as you. You and your friends have seen me make them. Let the Congress judge between us. If they vote against me, I will submit. And if they vote against you, let you do the same.”

Dickinson opened his mouth to speak. John turned on his heel and left him.

3

BUT if John had won the encounter without doors, Dickinson won it within. Congress voted Ay to the humble petition. Resolved unanimously, Charles Thomson wrote in the Minutes. At the last, John submitted. He had to submit. Unity at all costs must be preserved — and even a dutiful petition need not stop America from fighting a war. But John thought much about Dickinson and his seeming change of front. This was a man who had done more than any of them, back in the year ‘68, to wake the colonies to the reality of their position. Yet here he was, begging, bargaining, petitioning, praying, negotiating. John determined to light him with all the strength and all the skill he possessed. Things were in the open now, the parties and factions defined. John and his supporters faced, John said, “not only the parly in favor of a petition to the King, and the party who were jealous of independence, but a third party —a Southern party which was against a Northern, with a jealousy against a New England army under the command of a New England general.”

The quickest way to proceed would he to name a commander-in-chief from some colony south of Connecticut. The minute a Southern general was adopted, the army automatically ceased to be a New England organization and became a Continental one. From a military standpoint the move was urgent, vitally necessary. On the way down from Braintree, John had visited headquarters at Cambridge, had seen at first hand how dangerous was the confusion. Already since April, four thousand volunteers had got discouraged and gone home. Sixteen thousand remained, sprawled in lines thirty miles long from Cambridge to Roxbury, subsisting precariously on gifts from the surrounding farms, living in tents, cabins, sailcloth shelters, brush-thatched huts of turf or stone. To encourage enlistment, any man that brought in forty-nine volunteers got a captain’s commission. John himself had seen one of these “captains” — a wizened little shoemaker from Weymouth — order a private from his company to fetch a pail of water for the mess. “Fetch it yourself, Keptin,” the man had replied without rancor. “I got the last pail.”

Artemas Ward of Shrewsbury commanded these motley thousands. He was a Harvard graduate, well known for his services in the French war, and very popular. But he was nearing fifty, suffered from the bladder stone, and had no experience in dealing with such vast numbers of men. John Hancock was New England’s candidate to succeed him. Hancock had seen no service in the field; besides which he was frequently crippled with gout. But as Colonel of the Boston Cadets he had long cut a fine figure on the parade ground, escorting governors, officiating at civic celebrations. There was litlle doubt he expected the position, or at least the refusal of it. Hancock moreover had come into special prominence lately by reason of having been named President of Congress pro tern, when Peyton Randolph was called home to Virginia.

John had no slightest intention of nominating Hancock. George Washington was his man. Not only did John admire Washington personally, but unless a Southerner commanded the troops, there would be few enlistments south of Connecticut. Canvassing the delegates, John found little serious support for Hancock; it was Artcmas Ward who was Washington’s most formidable rival. Yet John felt sure he could persuade his countrymen that local pride should give way to urgent necessity. Colonel Washington, moreover, could afford the job financially, having a large independent fortune. This would count heavily with the Middle and Southern delegates, men like Dickinson, Duane, the Rutledges, who considered an independent fortune the first step to prestige. Washington had more military experience than any other man in America — except of course, the much talked of Colonel Charles Lee, a retired half-pay British officer who lived on his estates in Virginia and advertised himself as more American than the Americans.

Many said Charles Lee would make a better leader than Washington, and in truth his military record was impressive. He had served in the British army since he was twelve, had fought in Portugal and Poland as well as with Braddock on the Ohio. At Tieonderoga in ’58 he had lost two fingers. Somewhere along in this bright career, Lee had married the daughter of a Seneca chief, He was a genius at getting on with Indians; they called him Boiling Water because he was never still. Over six feet tall, he was hawk-nosed, cadaverous, very slovenly in his dress, and carried a shining though somewhat mysterious reputation as a literary man. Humor had it he was Junius, author of the notorious London letters to the King. The whole world seemed to know about Charles Lee, and about the pack of hound dogs that accompanied him everywhere. Above all men, it was said, he could whip an undisciplined army into shape.

But Lee was British-born. This alone, John told himself, must in the end tell decisively against him. The army would not fight under a British-born commander-in-chief. As second-in-command, however, Lee could be extremely useful.

John worked hard. By the middle of June, he decided the moment was ripe. On a dull, muggy morning, he walked alone to Congress, determined to nominate Washington before the noon bell sounded from the tower. As soon as the members were seated, John rose and spoke briefly for the establishment of a Continental army, outlining the present dangers, chief of which was that the forces at Cambridge might dissolve entirely. What was to prevent the British from profiting by this delay, marching out of Boston and “spreading desolation as far as they could go”? For commander-in-chief of a Grand American Army he would like, John finished, to suggest “a gentleman whose skill as an officer, whose independent fortune, great talents and universal character would command the respect of America and unite the full exertions of the Colonics better than any other person alive.“

All the time John was speaking, Hancock wore a look of pleased, even radiant expectancy. Facing the room in his chair behind the President’s table, he was plainly visible to everyone, including John, who stood near the front. No one loved glory more than Hancock; he had the vanity of a child, open and vulnerable. John saw his face and hastened on, raising his voice a little: “ A gentleman from Virginia, who is among us here, and well known to all.”

Hancock shrank as at a blow. (“I never,” John wrote later, “remarked a more sudden and striking change of countenance. Mortification and resentment were expressed as forcibly as his face could exhibit them.”) Washington, who was on the south side of the room, left his seat at the word Virginia and slipped quietly out the door before his name was pronounced.

John finished and sat down. Sam Adams rose at once to second the motion, Hancock’s face grew hard and dark with anger; he made no attempt to hide his feelings. Since the year ’65, Sam Adams’s open palm had received the Hancock money — thousands of pounds poured out for the use of the liberty party. Was this to be his reward? Hancock’s eyes swept the room. Sherman of Connecticut, then Cushing of Boston, rose. The army around Cambridge, they argued, would not fight under a Southern commander. There had been trouble enough already over the local election of New England officers. Many a regiment had broken up entirely because of these local jealousies.

Colonel Washington was indeed a splendid soldier and patriot, someone else interposed. But he could speak no French, an accomplishment that might prove indispensable should this war continue, and foreign alliances, foreign legions, be sought.

The debate went on. Most of the talk, John noted with relief, came from a very small group. Three quarters, perhaps seven eighths, of the room sat silent. They were the Washington men. John had worked hard enough by now to know it, and know they were merely waiting for the vote. Late in the afternoon, Congress rose without taking the count. That evening the brace of Adamses were very busy, and next morning when Johnson of Maryland put the motion a second time, Congress voted unanimously for Washington.

A week later, on Friday, June 23rd, John got on his horse and, with most of Congress, escorted General Washington and his military entourage out of town on the journey northward. They had not ridden twenty miles from Philadelphia when the little cavalcade was stopped by a very dusty courier post ing down from Donnecticut. Gage had at tacked the Provincial.entrenchments. There had been a bailie on the hills above Boston — Breeds Hill, Bunker’s Hill; . . . Charlestown was burned by the enemy. Out of two thousand British, a thousand had been lost, and four hundred Americans. . . . The militia were driven from their position.

4

AFTER Bunker Hill, Congress seemed to bestir itself, jolted into more decisive action. Articles of War were adopted for the army, a hospital service organized, with doctors, nurses, and such medicines as could be found. Congress scoured the country for gunpowder and for saltpeter to make it, niter, sulphur, for brass fieldpieces, and above all for muskets that would shoot. A General Post Office was set up to facilitate communications. Loans of money were arranged to buy army supplies; two millions of paper dollars were ordered printed and put in circulation. A department of Indian Affairs was organized; a skillful and most necessary appeal composed, praying the powerful Six Nations to remain neutral in this war.

Yet even now, in all that Congress did, it proceeded conditionally, John noted. Always conditionally, on the assumption, the hope, the prayer, that Britain would capitulate, make peace, forgive, return to the old free system of government. Early in July, Dickinson’s Petition to the King went off to London, carried by Richard Penn and signed, of course, by every member of Congress. John wrote his name below Sam’s and, thoroughly disgusted, threw down his pen. The Address to the People of Great Britain which went in the same ship affected him as strongly. The times were too desperate, the situation too serious, for such polite and fruitless trafficking. “Prettynesses,” John wrote in disgust, “juvenilities—and much less, Puerilities, became not a great assembly like this, the Representatives of a great People.”

There was one member of Congress, a new member, who occupied himself with neither prettinesses nor puerilities. Late in June, Thomas Jefferson had arrived from Virginia. John was immediately drawn to him, (“He soon seized upon my heart,” John said.) Jefferson at thirty-two was tall, thin, sandyhaired, with a fair complexion — in no way celebrated unless it was for his trick of writing fluent English. The Virginia delegates had boasted about it. Jefferson was not a speechmaker like Patrick Henry or Richard Henry Lee. His eloquence lay all on paper. He could translate into warm and even burning words the most abstract ideas concerning government, liberty, freedom. Jefferson was a natural scholar, his friends reported further, deeply read in history and natural science— “the greatest rubber-off-of-dust,” Duane told John, that he had ever met, with a knowledge of French, Italian, and Spanish, and the ambition to learn German. What particularly attracted John, these first weeks, was Jefferson’s quick, decisive way in committee. “He was prompt,” John said; “frank, explicit as Samuel Adams himself.”

Not long after Jefferson’s arrival, he was pul on a committee to draft a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking up Arms, a document designed chiefly for the troops at Cambridge. Jefferson was asked to write it. He proceeded very carefully, making several drafts, striking out phrases that seemed verbose or slipshod. But the committee disapproved. (“It was too strong for Mr. Dickinson,”Jefferson said later.) Dickinson went over it, and though he strengthened rather than toned it down, Congress accepted his version. ”Our cause is just,“ a final paragraph ran, “our union is perfect. We fight not for glory or for conquest. In our own native land, in defence of the freedom that is our birthright, we have taken up arms. We shall lay them down when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, and all danger of their being renewed shall be removed, and not before.”

Yet the Declaration on Taking Arms, spirited though it might be, was balanced on the other side by the humble petition. John could not forget it. “In exchange for these Petitions, Declarations and Addresses,” he wrote home, “I suppose we shall receive Bills of Attainder and other such like Expressions of Esteem and Kindness.”

“Does every member of Congress feel for us?” Abigail had written after Bunker Hill. “Can they realize what we suffer?”

“No!” John answered. “They don’t! They can’t. A ship is dearer to some of them than a city, and a few barrels of flour than a thousand men’s lives — other men’s lives, I mean.”

5

THE British burned Falmouth in October of 1775, shelling it from the sea, a pointed answer to Dickinson’s humble Petition to the King. One hundred and fifty buildings, churches, houses were leveled to the ground. The news shocked the enlire country. Here was no midnight raid by naked, painted savages. The British had done this. America’s own brothers had done it. Captain Mowett, commander of the ship Canceaux that had led the shelling, showed papers ordering him to destroy all towns from Boston to Halifax, and announced that Portsmouth would be next.

“Death and desolation mark their footsteps,” General Nathanael Greene wrote to the newspapers from Washington’s headquarters outside of Boston. “Fight or be slaves is the American motto now.” This was civil war with a vengeance.

Yet there were men in the patriot party who showed little sympathy for Falmouth. One of them was John’s old friend, Major Hawley of Northampton. By whose fault was it, Hawley demanded, that Falmouth had been a “defenseless victim”? The town had refused to arm, had taken no measures to blockade the harbor. Would its citizens believe, at last, that Britain was an enemy not a friend, or must Boston be burned to prove it, and Philadelphia? Let Falmouth and her sister towns cease to mourn and whimper! Let them abandon their mistaken “loyalty” and enter this contest with their whole heart and strength, taking pride in the rightness of the cause. This was not the first civil war of history. The Scriptures themselves bore witness: “And the children of Israel wept before the Lord and asked counsel, saying, Shall I go up to battle against the children of Benjamin my brother? And the Lord said, Go up against him.”

Go up against thy brother. America was not yet ready for such counsel. America was still two-thirds Tory and four-fifths totally indifferent to the war. Thirteen colonies as yet had no conception of themselves as a nation, though they had begun cautiously to talk of a confederacy, and newspapers used the phrase United American Colonies. Even the patriots still regarded the war as an affair wholly sectional. Each colony felt justified in taking what individual stand it chose. New Jersey threatened a separate peace treaty with Britain, Massachusetts a separate declaration of independence. Congress found it necessary to pass a resolution “that it will be very dangerous to the liberties and welfare of America, if any Colony should separately petition the King or either house of Parliament.“

The Middle colonies seemed more concerned over internal squabbles than over the war with Britain, putting their hope in the King of England, nursing the kind illusion that it was the British ministry and not George III who burned their towns and murdered their brothers. In spite of Lexington, Bunker Hill, Falmouth, in spite even of Hessian mercenaries coming to kill them, Americans still believed that kings were half divine. George Rex ruled by godly sanction. Every warrant bore his name, every office was conferred under the power of his royal seal and signature. To deny him, dethrone him, would be not only dangerous but impious.

Led by Dickinson, the “conciliation men” had no slightest intention of knuckling under to Britain, no intention of renouncing the fight for a free representative government in America. They still hoped, by threat or persuasion, to gain a free government not separate from the British Empire but within it. Their position had not changed since August, 1774, when Congress first met to protest the Boston Port Bill. The trouble was, Britain had not reacted according to their prophecies or their plans. The commercial blockade had failed to force Britain’s hand, the use of arms had failed to force it. Parliament and King were no nearer yielding than they had been when Peyton Randolph called the first meeting to order in Carpenters’ Hall.

The radical party in Congress, the “violent men,” the “independence men,” were led now by the two Adamses, Gadsden of South Carolina, the two Lees and George Wythe of Virginia. Washington of course was with the army; Patrick Henry had stayed in Virginia as Colonel of the militia. Jefferson, called home by illness in his family, would not return until May of ’76. Their party differed from the Dickinson-Duane-Wilson faction only in having abandoned all hope of reconciliation. This was not to say they did not still desire it in their hearts. Every one of them, except perhaps Sam Adams, would have rejoiced to see America remain — on her own terms — within the British Empire. But they were realistic, knew that separation was now inevitable — and recognized further that, Britain would destroy the colonies altogether rather than yield.

To this last, the conciliatory party remained blind, preferring to deceive themselves and their followers with visions of an olive branch extended across the seas. Peace commissioners were coming from London in the spring or summer, said Dickinson, Rutledge, Duane. They had positive news of it, positive promises. What folly, then, and what wickedness, to scream separation from England! The independence men would be guilty of plunging their country in endless, tragic civil war, compared with which t he few skirmishes already fought would be nothing. A wise delay of a few months might save the situation.

John Adams said openly and contemptuously that he did not believe a word of this commissioner talk. “A bubble,” he called it. “As arrant an illusion as ever was hatched in the brain of an enthusiast, a politician or a maniac.”

For the conciliation men, John Adams had become, by January of 1776, an adversary more dangerous even than his cousin Samuel. Sam at least was opposed to a large standing army; Sam recognized and valued local attachments, local sentiments. One had the feeling that the Grand Incendiary was a Massachusetts man first, an American second. But John Adams put a Continental army and a Continental confederated government over and beyond all else.

There was about this Braintree Adams something maddeningly obdurate. He seemed not to care how many enemies he made, and he was sure of himself and his convictions! When he rose he spoke arrogantly, let his voice ring out with royal impatience, thumped his hickory walking stick against the floor to make his points tell. He had a way of drawing in his lips, sucking loudly against his teeth, raising his thick powerful chest as if to gather the force of a tremendous bellows and then letting fly, repeating himself inexorably, like a bell that clangs and clangs and will not be denied. “Nothing can save us but discipline in the army, governments in every colony and a confederation of t he whole. . . . Discipline in the army! (thump with the hickory cane). A written constitution in every state! (thump again). A union and a confederation of thirteen states, independent of Parliament, of Minister and of King!“

(To be concluded)