Independence (49 page)

While the battle raged in the cabinet and Parliament, North and Dartmouth threatened to resign, hoping their ploy would prompt ministers and MPs alike to grant the Howe brothers the freedom to conduct negotiations. As had been the case when Howe threatened to resign, this tempest was resolved by the intervention of the king. After persuading North to stay on, the monarch directed his prime minister to obtain, and follow, the advice of William Murray, Lord Mansfield, the lord chief justice. Mansfield agreed with Germain, who clearly had a majority of Parliament on his side. It was not what North had hoped for, but he and Dartmouth complied. Howe did not. He threatened for a second time to resign. Adding that his brother would probably refuse to serve as well, Lord Howe said that he was “disqualified” from serving in a capacity in which he was to offer the Americans the choice of surrender or the continuation of British military operations. Lord Howe proposed instead that he and his brother be authorized to declare an armistice should the Americans consent “to offer a contribution in lieu of taxation, lay down their arms, [and] restore the civil government” that had existed in each colony before the imperial troubles began. Howe envisaged this as only a first step. He also asked for the authority to open talks on the colonists’ additional grievances once the armistice took effect.

Germain vociferously objected. He demanded that the Americans formally assent to Parliament’s sovereignty before any further steps be taken. Once again, Lord Mansfield was called on to resolve the dispute. After a joint visit by North and Germain, the lord chief justice proposed the slightest compromise: The commissioners were not to demand the colonists’ acquiescence in the Declaratory Act but were to wait to see what concessions the Americans offered. Only if the colonists voluntarily accepted the unlimited authority of Parliament, said Mansfield, should the envoys proceed. Having won again, Germain promptly consented. Howe, probably hoping to save face, did not accept Mansfield’s terms, and during a span of six weeks he and Germain haggled, mostly over negligible points. Ultimately, Howe accepted instructions that in substance hardly differed from those that Germain had first drafted four months earlier.
³⁵
At last, on May 3—some 125 days after Wilson and Dickinson sought to lay the foundation for talks with the commissioners—the king formally named the Howe brothers as his peace commissioners and vested them with their instructions. The commissioners were forbidden to negotiate with Congress or any colony still under a rebel government. Once the legitimate colonial assemblies agreed to adhere to the laws of Parliament and consented to make restitution to the Loyalists for the property losses they had suffered, and after all American armed forces had laid down their arms and all fortifications had been dismantled or surrendered, the Howe brothers were authorized to issue pardons, suspend the Coercive Acts and the American Prohibitory Act, and listen to the colonists’ additional grievances.
³⁶

Lord Howe and his brother were so-called peace commissioners, raising in the public mind in England, and among some wishful-thinking reconciliationists in Congress, the presumption that they were being sent to America to engage in sincere diplomacy to resolve the colonists’ grievances. North would have liked for them to do that, but the vast majority in his cabinet and in Parliament never had the slightest intention of sending envoys for such purposes. From start to finish, the whole point of dispatching the commissioners was to secure the colonists’ servility to the imperial government, an outcome that nearly all in the British government believed could be achieved through economic coercion and the triumph of British arms on American battlefields.

No one in the mother country understood better than Edmund Burke what was occurring, and why, and what almost certainly would be its outcome. He appeared to think that the Tory mentality—that is, the cast of mind of the most politically conservative of his countrymen—habitually fixated on resolving matters through the use of force. People of such persuasion “always flourish in the decay, and perhaps by the decay of the Glory of their Country,” he lamented. As Howe sailed away on his mission of futility, Burke added, “we are a people who have just lost an Empire.”
³⁷

As early as mid-March the members of Congress knew from London press reports that one or more peace commissioners were to be sent. Only the most gullible, or desperate, believed this step would satisfactorily resolve Anglo-American differences. Grasping at straws, North Carolina’s William Hooper chose to think that the commissioners would be empowered to present Congress with “proffers [that] will be liberal.” Drawing on the most optimistic puffery in English newspapers, he took as gospel that the “haughty monarch” had accorded his envoys the authority to negotiate “without limitations,” and even “to part with us” rather “than hold us upon … an ignominious condition.”
³⁸

Few in Congress were so sanguine. As the months piled up following the king’s mention of peace commissioners, some delegates even suspected the monarch’s emissaries would never come. Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut called them the “Phanptom … Commissioners.” If they did materialize, he added, it was an “idle Whim” to imagine that they would do more than offer pardons.
³⁹
John Adams thought only the deluded could expect substantive negotiations, and he predicted that a commissioner empowered to truly conciliate was “a Messiah that will never come.”
⁴⁰
Samuel Adams was certain that George III would concede nothing to his American subjects. He is “more unrelenting and malignant than was [the] Pharaoh towards the Israelites in Egypt.” But something good might come of it, Adams believed. Once and for all, “the doubting and … timid” colonists would see that London had nothing to offer America but the sword, and when at last they understood that truth, all their hopes “of reconciliation must vanish.”
⁴¹

CHAPTER 10

“T
HE
F
ATAL
S
TAB
”

A
BIGAIL
A
DAMS AND THE
R
EALITIES OF THE
S
TRUGGLE FOR
I
NDEPENDENCE

FOR FEAR OF SHATTERING
wartime unity, the word “independence” had seldom been uttered in Congress in 1775. Times had changed by the spring of 1776. The delegates were daily “disputing … about independency,” one congressman remarked. Some deputies were certain that the severance of all ties with Great Britain was not far away. Elbridge Gerry had been in Philadelphia barely a month before he pronounced that the day when America will “give Law to herself … will soon take place.” John Adams and others believed that wartime exigencies dictated that independence must be declared before long. As colonists, “We have hitherto conducted half a War,” Adams said, but independence would enable Americans to trade with foreign nations, and that was essential for waging war more forcefully. Others thought the combination of British policies and hostilities had rapidly eroded the mood for reconciliation. The war, according to Richard Henry Lee, had made Americans aware of the “British crimes” of killing its colonists and seeking the “barbarous spoliation” of its colonies. Lee added that all but Tories and the most intransigent reconciliationists realized that one might as well “expect to wash an Ethiopian white, as to remove the taint of despotism from the British court.”
¹

When John Adams returned to Philadelphia on February 8 from his winter furlough at home, he arrived with a list of measures that he planned to advocate at the appropriate times. They included issuance of an American currency; a ban on the exportation of gold and silver; a national tax to finance the war; congressional subsidies for flax, hemp, cotton, and wool; commercial treaties with France, Spain, Holland, and Denmark; a “
Declaration of Independency
”; a constitution for the new American nation; and alliances with France and Spain.
²

As the winter of 1776 faded, Congress appeared to be swept by the sense that it was treading water, awaiting events that would push it to do what by then almost certainly a majority of delegates were ready to do: set America free of Great Britain. Those who favored independence did not have long to wait. In a span of roughly seventy-five days beginning in late February, a series of occurrences and circumstances pushed Congress to the brink of declaring independence.

The first pivotal moment came on the next-to-last day of February. Freshly arrived newspapers from London brought word of the American Prohibitory Act. Listening as some of the newspaper accounts were read on the floor of Congress, the delegates learned that since New Year’s Day American ships sailing off the coasts of England, Scotland, and Ireland had been subject to capture. As of March 1, less than forty-eight hours away, all colonial vessels bound for or departing from American ports were “to be seized & confiscated” by the Royal Navy.
³
New England had been under a blockade since the outset of the war, but henceforth the commerce of every colony was to be interdicted. “Firmness in the strongest terms” was London’s intractable answer to Congress’s petition for conciliation, said one delegate, who also believed that Parliament’s latest step “shew[s] that the Colonies are of but very little consequence to Britain.”
⁴

It may seem odd that word of London’s having resorted to all-out war—economic as well as military—could so inflame the colonists. After all, a state of hostilities had existed for ten months, and the colonists had long since boycotted all trade with the mother country. Yet the news of the American Prohibitory Act was a savage blow to most Americans. In some measure this was because of their long and ardent affection for Great Britain. Throughout the eighteenth century the belief had been deep-seated in America that the mother country was the most benevolent, nurturing, and enlightened of all nations. But now, atop the realization that London was sending a huge army and a large fleet to crush the rebellion, the colonists had received the disquieting tidings that the British government was prepared to deprive colonial civilians of essential goods. For some, this confirmed the newfound wisdom that the English in reality “know so little of our feelings or character.” For others, it heightened the malevolent image of the parent state that had taken root during the past two years. Wishing to leave nothing to chance, Congress had its president, John Hancock, notify the colonies of the “Strain of Rapine and Violence” that drove the British government.
⁵

The timing of the American Prohibitory Act was important as well. For one thing, news of the legislation arrived at the same moment that word spread through the colonies of recently intercepted letters from Germain to Governor Eden of Maryland. The letters revealed not only that Maryland’s chief executive had been transmitting sensitive military information to London but also that the ministry envisaged an invasion that year of the Carolinas and possibly Virginia. The purloined letters were sent to General Charles Lee, commander of the Continental army in the Southern Department, who passed them on to Richard Henry Lee in Congress. Like their northern brethren, southern colonists now knew that their trade was to be blocked and that their provinces faced an imminent assault by British military forces.
⁶
News of the blockage of trade also hit many colonists with singular intensity because they had expected the arrival of peace commissioners, not an escalation of punitive measures. Conjoined with what one congressman called Lord North’s “declaration of war” came word—happily divulged by Franklin, who had gotten the information from friends in London—that Parliament had adjourned at Christmas 1775 without having confirmed any peace commissioners. Moreover, Parliament had no plans to reconvene until late January. London seemed to be in no hurry to parley with the colonists.
⁷

Every member of Congress understood that Britain’s all-encompassing war on the colonists’ trade meant that America must establish commercial ties outside the British Empire. To protect its economy, America would have to act as if it was independent, whether or not it had formally proclaimed itself a sovereign nation. Once again, the harsh realities of war were moving Congress a step closer to actually declaring independence. “It cannot surely after all this be imagind that we consider ourselves or mean to be considered by others in any State but that of Independence,” said Samuel Adams. Other delegates saw things in a similar light. The American Prohibitory Act “will cause a final separation,” New Hampshire’s William Whipple predicted. Joseph Hewes, a delegate from North Carolina who had yearned to be reunited with the mother country, saw that there no longer was any “prospect of a reconciliation.” Despairing, Hewes said that “nothing is left now but to fight it out.” Some delegates, he reported home, already “urge strongly for Independency and eternal separation.” Others, he said, wished “to wait a little longer” until the voice of the people was heard or conversations with the peace commissioners took place, though not a few were so outraged that they hoped Congress would refuse to receive the peace commissioners if and when they arrived.
⁸