American Scripture

The chapter opens with Thomas Jefferson’s arrival in Congress in May 1775. Congress had approved John Adams’s preface “calling for the suppression of all authority under the Crown” after approving the resolution that colonies without established governments must form new ones (47). Jefferson wanted to be in Williamsburg to take part in forming Virginia’s government; he did his best to participate from afar. Jefferson sent written contributions for Virginia’s new constitution, including a draft preamble in which he castigates the King’s misrule and concludes that his tyrannical acts release Virginia from its ties with Britain. This version of the preamble to Virginia’s constitution would be part of the first draft of Congress’s Declaration of Independence (48).

The style of Jefferson’s draft wasn’t original, for there were nearly 90 contemporary documents that shared similarities in rhetoric and syntax with Jefferson’s preamble—some documents even bore the title of “declaration,” while most of them were declarations in nature if not in name. Maier argues that those state and local government documents “offer the best opportunity to hear the voice of the people from the spring of 1776 that we are likely to get” (49). English tradition provided the framework for those American documents, including the Second Continental Congress’s Declaration of Independence.

1. In English Ways

Maier lists some of the types of official documents that American legislators used to communicate with the crown, noting that all of these began in British politics. An address was an official government document that respectfully communicated policy proposals, greetings, congratulations, sympathies, or expressions of gratitude, remorse, or encouragement. A petition was a specific kind of address; its purpose was to request something from its audience. An important petition type was the petition of right, which allowed English subjects to ask the King for a redress of wrongs and his acknowledgment of their rights, especially if the King was the one who violated those rights.

A declaration was a proclamation about important events, policy decisions, and/or grievances, that implicitly or explicitly demanded the support of its intended audience. American colonists were most familiar with the Declaration of Rights of 1689, which was itself the product of English tradition. Between 1327 and 1485, English subjects ended their monarchs’ reigns five times. A king could be deposed for incompetence, immorality, or violation of English law. The sixth time a regime change occurred in England, the House of Commons tried and convicted Charles I in 1649 for violating the people’s rights, sentencing him to death by beheading. The 1689 regime change proceeded differently because James II fled England, paving the way for William of Orange—the King’s son-in-law—to authorize a parliamentary election James had canceled. The new House of Commons and House of Lords created the Declaration of Rights, established William and Mary on the throne, and finally refashioned the Declaration into the Bill of Rights.

The opening of the Declaration of Rights of 1689 enumerated the reasons for James II vacating the throne and listed 13 “Rights and Liberties” the king had violated; it provided a model for American colonists in their formal demands for justice from George III and Parliament, which began as early as October 1765 in response to the Stamp Act. In 1774, the First Continental Congress adopted a “Bill of Rights,” which emulated the Declaration of Rights, but it didn’t include the establishment of a new regime (55). The situation changed by the spring of 1776, when Thomas Jefferson used the English Declaration to draft a constitution for Virginia. The draft’s preamble—which the Virginia Convention used—mirrored the opening of the 1689 Declaration of Rights; however, Jefferson changed references to the monarch’s authority: He implied that the King’s relationship with his subjects was contractual and rejected the inheritance of political power. A separate Virginia Declaration of Rights preceded the preamble and constitution; it bore similarities to the middle part of the English Declaration but with greater clarity (57).

If the English monarch is incompetent, unjust, or absent, then England requires a replacement. In the colonists’ case, Congress would become the replacement once the people agreed to consolidate a large share of power within that governing body. Leaders waited for the people’s conviction to ripen, though the more radical among the delegates believed the people were already ripe for such a change in government (58). A “complex political war” took place between April and July (58).

2. Mobilizing the People

The process of ascertaining each colony’s ripeness for Independence was fraught with practical and political complications. John Adams and his fellow delegates from Massachusetts wanted their colony to be the consensus-builder for the other colonies, and they imagined that a process of debate would convince the unripe people in other colonies to follow Massachusetts’s example. Reality proved otherwise. There was division within the assembly: the lower house, the House of Representatives, agreed to the plan, and the upper house, or Council, opposed any changes to the rules; the House alone issued the request for debate; not all the towns took up the debate immediately. The Massachusetts House of Representatives voted on July 3 to support Congress’s vote for Independence—the House didn’t know that Congress already adopted the resolution and was working on the Declaration.

Similarly contentious deliberations took place in other states as state legislatures weighed the question of whether to support Independence. The Rhode Island legislature didn’t extend the question to the towns for fear of giving the appearance of disunity (61). The legislature voted for Independence and approved extending to Rhode Island’s delegates the power to vote for it in Congress.

Virginia took the role of influencer, even though it wasn’t the first colony to empower its delegates—North Carolina did so one month before Virginia. North Carolina’s government delivered to Congress a declaration that instructed its delegates which way to vote on the same day Virginia’s instructions arrived. North Carolina, unlike Virginia, “did not order its delegates to propose Independence” but only to “concur with other members of Congress in declaring Independence” (63). On July 2, Congress adopted a motion, proposed by Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee, to declare Independence from Britain. Virginia shared its resolutions with other colonies and thus persuaded many of them to support Independence. The colonies’ allegiance to the King was central to the arguments for Independence: The King forfeited his right to rule over the lives of the colonists.

New Hampshire and Delaware followed suit, though Delaware was like Rhode Island in its use of indirect terms that formed an implicit adoption of Independence (64). New Jersey took radical steps to assert the colony’s Independence, not just by sending instructions to its delegates, though the instructions were equivocally expressed. New Jersey seemed torn in its hopes between Independence from and reconciliation with Great Britain—the colony’s government officials wanted to keep both options open.

Pennsylvania didn’t change attitudes easily because the colony’s assembly remained under the control of “a conservative elite” that maintained opposition to Independence with the aid of the colony’s conservative Congressional delegates, like John Dickinson. This attitude influenced the other middle colonies and some southern colonies, according to Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry. Pennsylvania voters didn’t change the politics of the assembly through a May 1 by-election; Independence became more popular within the following week when news arrived of King George hiring German soldiers, and then a British warship entered the Delaware River and engaged with Pennsylvania gunboats. Congress passed its May 10 resolution, which required colonies to form new governments, with the hope that a new Pennsylvania assembly would become more representative of public sentiment and thus advance the cause of Independence. A political battle ensued in Philadelphia between conservatives and radicals, between those who supported John Dickinson’s position and those who supported John Adams’s rhetoric. The latter faction won authority by the end of June with the forming of the Provincial Conference of Committees, a more representative form of government, despite the original assembly’s attempt at backtracking on its anti-Independence instructions to the Pennsylvania delegation on June 8.

Maryland’s Convention resolved on May 21 that it didn’t give the colony’s delegates permission to vote for Independence or for any measure that would separate Maryland from Britain’s rule. Maryland’s delegates, certain that the majority of Marylanders wanted Independence, wrote to the Maryland Convention on June 11 that Congress had delayed voting on the question so that delegates would have time to learn the will of their constituents; therefore, the delegates directed the Convention to assemble and to gather the opinion of the people. Maryland counties sent letters to their representatives in the Convention, demanding they inform the delegates that the people of Maryland want Independence. On June 28, a Maryland delegate, Samuel Chase, reported that pressure from the counties convinced the Convention to vote for Independence.

New York’s Provincial Congress was immune to public pressure on the Independence question. It received requests and county resolutions that indicated the people’s wish to separate from Britain, but it resolved to wait until the Second Continental Congress explicitly asked for New York’s vote on the issue. The New York Congress voiced its support for Independence on July 9, after the Continental Congress voted for the measure, but it wasn’t happy about the necessity for Independence.

Maier concludes by addressing a commonly held idea in American Revolution historiography about the political strategists responsible for building consensus among the people and for ending the rule of Pennsylvania’s conservative assembly. Historians have attributed those achievements to members of the Massachusetts delegation, particularly Samuel Adams, who was instrumental in the effort. Maier qualifies the attribution with evidence of John Adams’s contributions to Congress, both in writing and in speaking. She also observes that the Massachusetts delegates’ plan to make the colony an example for other colonies to follow wasn’t successful; Virginia was the leader among the colonies in the building of consensus. She states that, in the end, timing was more important to the ripening of public opinion than the identities of the people who promoted Independence.

3. Declaring Independence

This part of the chapter contains analyses of the various “declarations” that appeared between April and July of 1776; they were mostly group efforts issued by legislatures or conventions at the state level, and by towns and counties at the local level. A log of these documents appears in Appendix A, Pages 217-223. Maier begins this part with a summary and analysis of William Henry Drayton’s address to a jury on April 23, 1776. Drayton was the Chief Justice of South Carolina, and he was speaking to the jury (as well as everyone else in the courtroom) on an auspicious occasion: It was the first time a jury assembled following South Carolina’s adoption of a new constitution. The speech exemplifies the style, rhetoric, and ideas that the other “declarations” and Congress’s Declaration shared.

Drayton’s speech opens with a narrative history of South Carolina, beginning with 1719, when “Carolinians cast off their original proprietary government and called upon the English king to rule them directly” (70). He lists the colony’s grievances in a style similar to the list of charges against James II in the English Declaration of Rights, using the word “by” to introduce each grievance. Drayton argues that since the king in 1719 acknowledged the colonists’ legal right to revolt against their proprietary government, Carolinians in 1776 have the right to revolt against their current rulers, who have behaved like tyrants. He cites the Glorious Revolution as a precedent for South Carolina to follow; he quotes from an early draft of the Declaration of Rights to support his point and goes so far as to compare its charges against James II to the harms George III inflicted on the American colonies.

Citizens from all the colonies sent their instructions concerning Independence to Congressional delegations. The documents came from a range of groups with varying degrees of representative authority: some groups consisted of elected officials or a majority of residents in a given town or county; other groups didn’t claim to speak for the constituents in their localities. It was also often the case that documents’ instructions arose from drafts written by Congressional delegates (73). Some state instructions were brief and straightforward (e.g., Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland). Instructions from other states—North Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut, New Hampshire, the Pennsylvania Assembly, and Pennsylvania’s Conference of Committees—were similar in form and style to documents like the English Declaration of Rights, as were the “Declaration of the Delegates of Maryland” and the preambles to Virginia and New Jersey’s constitutions. Instructions from certain towns and counties were similarly formal, but most provincial groups’ instructions were informal in style. Some instructions described the debates or told stories that influenced communities’ conclusions, while others stated the conclusions only. Maier provides details about instructions from a handful of localities to emphasize how, despite differences in syntax and structure, the documents reflected the people’s investment in the cause of Independence.

Maier argues, “For all practical purposes, the contents of the various state and local resolutions on Independence are virtually identical” (74). One common topic in the documents is general respect for the authority of the Second Continental Congress; although the documents address delegates from specific colonies—or states, as they’re beginning to call them—they express their deference to the superiority of Congress, which must make the final decision for Independence on behalf of them all. Another common topic is the importance of American states maintaining unity and following Congress’s lead. In a very short time, the disparate colonies’ inhabitants, connected by their relationship with Great Britain and their recent struggles under British rule, developed a national identity based on affection for the union and its central government, Congress.

How state and local entities explain their “conversion to Independence” in the documents they sent to Congress bear structural and thematic similarities (76). Every document containing a conversion story, from New England to the Carolinas, describes the same pivotal events and draws similar conclusions from those events. The documents, for the most part, don’t describe the entire conflict between Britain and the colonies; they focus on the transgressions Britain perpetrated after 1775. There was no point in summarizing the origins of the conflict when Congress already enumerated colonists’ grievances in earlier documents.

Maier cites documents that included conversion passages, showing why colonists with very different political ideologies came to the same conclusion on Independence. State and local instructions to Congress generally referenced the same recent events and developments Judge Drayton described in his address to the jury, as a means of explaining the people’s conversion to Independence. The most important development they indicated was King George’s contemptuous treatment of the colonists: He rejected their petitions, in which they swore their loyalty to him, and he ordered an increase in hostilities—he wanted to beat his subjects into obedience, rather than negotiate with them for a peaceful resolution. Both local and state instructions described how the British brutally waged the King’s war, and how they worked to persuade Indigenous people and enslaved people to join their fight. Nearly all state and some local resolutions mentioned the Prohibitory Act, which King George signed in December 1775; Massachusetts resolutions focused mostly on the war, instead.

The most pivotal occurrence, according to almost every resolution, was the King’s hiring of German mercenaries. Independence became a necessity rather than a choice once colonists learned of the King’s intentions: By declaring Independence, they’d be free to solicit foreign aid as well.

Groups occasionally discussed other events in their resolutions, and those events revolved around the King. Reconciliation became impossible once colonists learned that King George signed the Prohibitory Act and that he’d rather persecute them than negotiate peace with them. The specific events these documents cited show the colonists formed their opinions of the war based on reports in newspapers, but although the King’s culpability was obvious in the reports, from April to early June state and local groups followed the English tradition of ascribing responsibility to the King and Parliament in their resolutions.

These tyrannies and betrayals threatening the colonists’ survival made Independence the inevitable conclusion to many localities’ resolutions. The documents justified the revolution with references to one or both of these principles: the principle of self-preservation, which resulted from a combination of religion and politics, the laws of nature and the laws of God; and the “Whig” principle—based on works by John Locke and other political writers—that government derives its authority form a contract with the people (87-88). The combination of driving principles varied depending on where and when the documents were drafted, but the overarching theme for almost every document was necessity.

Differences in principles and rhetoric aside, the declarations of state and local groups described Americans’ recent troubles and their need for Independence in the same way. There was consensus among colonists that the only path to true Independence was war, and the best hope they had of victory relied upon the aid of foreign alliances; therefore, the sooner Congress declared Independence, the sooner they could entreat other countries’ governments for military and financial support, giving their revolution a better chance of success.

4. Founding a Republic

The arguments in the various resolutions and instructions to Congress were not Thomas Paine’s arguments. Paine’s Common Sense wasn’t as influential as he and many others believed. It inspired debate, but so did news concerning the British government; colonists applied his language to justify independence, but their justifications weren’t the ones Paine described—they focused on the actions of King George and Parliament, which necessitated a declaration of independence. State and local groups argued for the moral, economic, or political benefits of Independence in their documents; the political benefit was particularly strong since it involved the forming of a government that relied on popular rule rather than heritage—a republic. Documents from groups in Massachusetts and South Carolina—one as early as December 1775, before Paine published Common Sense, in which he expounded on the need for a republican system of government—expressed their citizens’ enthusiasm for self-government and its advantages.

A collection of Massachusetts towns instructed their delegates to support Independence and “a revolution in government” in April 1776 (94). Their arguments reflected John Adams’s understanding that Independence and new government went hand-in-hand. The connection between Independence and a new government was apparent in Congress’s resolutions in May 1776, as well as in state instructions to Congressional delegates; however, states also claimed the right to maintain their own governments and laws, which would eventually lead to debates in the 19th century concerning how much power the central government should have over the states. The issue different states debated in the spring and summer of 1776 was how their new self-governing republics could represent the people fairly and transparently. Through the establishment of a new mode of government, as well as the adoption of Independence, “the people helped turn a colonial rebellion into a revolution” (95). The resolutions and instructions sent to Congress expressed the people’s consciousness of a cause that would motivate them more powerfully than simply separating from Britain, because with Independence came the opportunity to build a nation worth defending. Congress’s Declaration of Independence expressed similar ideas to inspire the people, but its approach differed from the others, and the circumstances of its creation were more complicated.