Independence (19 page)

L
ORD
D
ARTMOUTH,
G
EORGE
W
ASHINGTON,
H
OSTILITIES

SOME DELEGATES LEFT PHILADELPHIA EARLY,
but Colonel Washington and Richard Henry Lee stayed to the end, finally setting off for home on a dismally foggy morning on the day following adjournment. Every inch of Washington’s carriage was packed. An inveterate consumer, he had spent more than one hundred pounds—roughly what a skilled tradesman would earn in four years—on shopping sprees during his eight weeks in the city. He had purchased silk stockings and ribbed hose, a toothbrush, a razor strop, shoes, shoe polish, gloves, pamphlets, bed linen, and a nutcracker, and for Martha he had bought gloves, a pocketbook, a nightgown, and snuff. For his house, Washington acquired a bell, twenty yards of fabric, and twenty-six yards of ribbon. He was taking home wool and cotton to be spun by his female slaves. He had also bought shoes and boots for his body servant, Billy Lee. The extra weight on the carriage did not slow the travelers. They reached Mount Vernon toward the end of their fourth day on the road.
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Neither Washington nor Richard Henry Lee believed that war was imminent. Lee thought the ship that crossed the Atlantic with the news of the boycott would return with word that North’s government had backed down. Based on what he heard from correspondents in England during the fall and winter, Washington felt that “the Ministry would willingly change their ground” rather than risk using force that would “be inadequate to the end designed.” He certainly acted as if there would be no war. Soon after returning to Mount Vernon, he purchased land and indentured servants and sent a team of hired hands, servants, and slaves to develop property that he owned in what now is West Virginia. He even skipped the autumn meeting of the Virginia legislature in order to tend to his business affairs. Yet while he hoped for peace, Washington provided money and time to help get the nascent Fairfax Independent Company, a contingent of fifty-six aspiring soldiers, onto the drill field. He rode to Alexandria on several occasions to observe their musters and act as something of a consultant to its inexperienced young officers, who were attired in buff and blue uniforms that he had designed for the unit. What is more, Washington did his part to get the Continental Association up and running in Fairfax County.
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Life, with all its anxieties and uncertainties, its hopes and sorrows, went on that fall and winter for all the congressmen. Confident that Congress’s unyielding stand would “save us … an effusion of blood,” John Dickinson made improvements to Fairhill, his country estate, six miles outside Philadelphia. If he was wrong and war came, Dickinson confidently expected that history would exonerate the colonists. Future generations, he said, would understand that the blame for “wrecking the whole Empire” was due to the misguided policies of North’s government. Not every congressman was so sure of that. North Carolina’s William Hooper thought the great imperial crisis had in part been brought on by the “intemperate folly of … Deluded Men” from Boston. James Duane said that he and his fellow New Yorkers were in a “Pitch of Anxiety” over whether “our Friends in Boston [would] precipitate an Attack on the King’s Troops.” Patrick Henry spent the winter grieving. His wife, Sarah, who was mentally ill, died shortly after he returned from Philadelphia, possibly a suicide. Samuel Adams negotiated with Iroquois representatives over the winter, hoping to persuade the Native Americans to remain neutral in the event of war. Every colonist was apprehensive over how North’s ministry would respond to what Congress had done. The “Times … are … as bad as they can be,” John Adams lamented. “I doubt whether War, Carnage and Havock would make us more unhappy than this cruel state of Suspense we suffer.”
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Nor was it only the congressmen who waited expectantly through that long winter, wondering whether war would follow the latest American defiance of the mother country. Several provinces prepared for war. Like the men in Alexandria who were trained by Colonel Washington, militiamen and volunteers in nearly half the American colonies were drilling on lonely, muddy fields, trying to learn quickly how to be soldiers. Even while the Continental Congress was meeting, the rebel government in Massachusetts directed each town to organize its militia—which in many instances had been dormant since fighting ended in the French and Indian War, fifteen years earlier—and train the men at least three times each week. If some men had no musket, local officials were ordered to “take effectual care, without delay, to provide the same.” The Lexington, Massachusetts, militia company drilled only two days each week, but for four hours each time, and when winter’s cold was unbearable, the men were put through their paces inside a barn. Before the end of February the British army’s intelligence network informed General Gage that thousands of Yankees were under arms and would rally “to oppose the troops” should the commander order his regulars to “attempt to penetrate into the Country.”
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The first person in London to learn what Congress had done was the Earl of Dartmouth, the American secretary. Born in 1730 as William Legge, Dartmouth had entered the cabinet three years earlier, and because he was responsible for the North American colonies, he found himself at the center of the storm. Dartmouth had joined the government with relatively little experience in public office, but he had the closest possible ties to Lord North. When Dartmouth was only six years old, his widowed mother had married North’s father. Dartmouth was two years older than his new half-brother, and the youngsters grew close. Raised together, they were side by side at Oxford and later shared a thirty-month grand tour of Europe. Dartmouth was twenty-four when he returned home. He married soon thereafter, became a patron of the arts, was devoted to Evangelicalism, and acquired a deserved reputation for philanthropy. Among other things, he contributed to the endowment of the Indian Charity School in Hanover, New Hampshire, an institution that slowly evolved into today’s Dartmouth College.

Dartmouth took his family’s seat in the House of Lords in 1754, the same year that North was first elected to the House of Commons. North’s ascent in politics was more rapid. He entered a ministry five years after becoming an MP; Dartmouth sat in Parliament for eleven years before he was named to the Board of Trade by the Marquis of Rockingham. Dartmouth immediately played a pivotal role in the repeal of the Stamp Act, a step that won him a reputation as a friend of America, including a unanimous vote of gratitude by the Massachusetts assembly for his “noble” efforts on behalf of the colonists.

After the Rockingham ministry collapsed in 1766, Dartmouth held no political office for six years, though he was an active player among the Rockinghamites who worried over both what they saw as the monarchy’s attempt to increase its power and the disaster that would befall Britain’s merchants should war with America occur. Though they never devised a coherent American policy, Rockingham’s faction steadfastly opposed the government’s colonial policies from 1766 onward, even sharing with many Americans the belief that all English were threatened by the possibility of monarchical tyranny.
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In 1772, when Hillsborough was forced out, North turned to his stepbrother, offering Dartmouth the post of American secretary. The prime minister hoped that Dartmouth’s appointment would be seen in America as a signal of a new ministerial course. Dartmouth, who was forty-two years old at the time, was gray and balding, with soft features and kind eyes that bespoke the warmhearted temperament for which he was noted. Although he knew that he would be out of step with most members of the cabinet, Dartmouth accepted North’s tender, delighted by his half-brother’s “friendship and good will.” He took office confident that he could “heal the Breach” between the colonies and the parent state, differences that he told himself were “rather in the head than in the heart.” Dartmouth’s appointment won the applause of wary colonists, including Franklin, who remarked that the ascension of the new American secretary “gives me room to hope … to obtain more in favour of the Colonies … than I could for some time past.”
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Like North, Dartmouth played for time, hoping that, in the long run, reason would prevail and the American problem would go away. He sometimes acted in an unorthodox manner to smooth out differences. A year after taking office, Dartmouth made the unprecedented step of writing directly to Speaker Cushing in Massachusetts, bypassing the royal governor. Telling Cushing that he believed Parliament was sovereign, Dartmouth astoundingly confided that he also thought that its “right [of sovereignty] … should be suspended and lie dormant” until some imperial emergency—another war, perhaps—rendered its “exercise … obvious.”
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Given enough time, Dartmouth might have had some success, although even in a ministry headed by his close kin, he stood virtually alone. When the East India Company’s troubles surfaced in 1773, Dartmouth foresaw the dangers posed by the Tea Act and fought a lonely battle against it. “He is a truly good Man,” Franklin said of Dartmouth at the time, but he “does not seem to have Strength equal to his Wishes.” Franklin also believed, probably accurately, that to survive politically, Dartmouth was compelled on many occasions to display a “
Firmness
” toward the colonies that he secretly abhorred.
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Some Americans had seen Dartmouth as their only hope when the ministry debated its response to the Boston Tea Party. It was widely believed that he would press the cabinet to demand nothing more than compensation for the East India Company. Some hoped that he would push the notion that the “Idea of Taxation might be waived” as the best hope for assuring that the “Dispute might Subside.”
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But few thought Dartmouth could succeed. Some suspected his limitations, seeing him as weak-kneed, with “no will or judgment of his own” and a proclivity to shrink from battle. Others thought more highly of him, but doubted that he could “singly … stem the torrent.” Many hoped that if Dartmouth saw that he could not prevail, he would resign rather than “dip his hands in blood.” It would be a courageous gesture that might inspire the foes of coercion and possibly stay the hand of those who were crying that the colonists must be severely punished.
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In the early-1774 cabinet battle over how to respond to the Boston Tea Party, North provided Dartmouth with every opportunity to present his case for leniency. The American secretary, in turn, seized the chance to defend the colonists from what he called the “madness of the people” for revenge. Dartmouth first fought to limit Boston’s punishment to the arrest and prosecution of those responsible for the destruction of the tea. When such a mild response was greeted with scorn, Dartmouth urged that coercion be accompanied by a repeal of the Tea Act, but even North refused to back his kin in rescinding the tax on tea. In the end, Dartmouth stood alone. The best he had been able to do was to secure the cabinet’s authorization for the royal governor in Massachusetts to act with leniency toward colonial offenders. Dartmouth did not resign when the ministry embraced the Coercive Acts.
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Dartmouth had been most troubled by the Massachusetts Government Act, sensing that the government had gone too far when it changed the colony’s charter. As the summer of 1774 approached, Dartmouth’s only hope had been that the other colonies would not unite behind the Bay Colony. However, in midsummer he had learned of the colonists’ plans for a continental congress, and thereafter he feared the worst. Others had as well. With war beginning to look ever more likely, Lord North had advised the monarch to dissolve Parliament and call elections. George III complied and, as expected, the autumn elections returned a huge majority for the government. Not only did the Rockinghamites lose a dozen seats, but also North reported to the king in November that three of every five members of the House of Commons would unwaveringly support his government and many more would fall in line behind most of his measures. If war came, the government would enter it backed by a huge majority.
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Although Congress had met in secret, some of what it was doing reached Dartmouth during the fall. Galloway disclosed to friends the details of his Plan of Union, and one of them, probably Benjamin Franklin’s son, William, passed along the information to Dartmouth; Joseph Reed, the Philadelphia lawyer, knew from other sources some things that were happening behind closed doors at the State House, and he was secretly corresponding with the American secretary. However, while Dartmouth gathered scraps of information, news from Philadelphia had always been sketchy, and rumors were plentiful in London. One bit of tattle had Congress looking to Benjamin Franklin, who was still in London, for guidance. According to other hearsay, Congress would do nothing more than petition the king’s help.
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The first definitive word had reached London in October. It was Congress’s published approval of the Suffolk County Resolves. With that, Dartmouth knew that all was lost. “They have declared war on us,” he moaned.
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