John Adams, Part 2: The Colossus of Independence

Charles Thomson

Last time John told us about defending Captain Preston and eight British soldiers after the Boston Massacre of 1770, when no other prominent lawyer would touch the case. He told the jury that facts are stubborn things. We also heard about the letters he wrote to Abigail in Braintree, his closest confidante through years of separation. John, how's the old man feeling?

John Adams

Ninety years old and still more opinions than teeth, Charles. And I'll say it again, defending those soldiers was no act of sainthood. It was law. The law doesn't ask whether a man is popular. If it did, I'd have been hanged long ago. But you didn't invite me back to talk about my virtues. You want July of 1776, when I was at my most insufferable and, I will admit, my most useful.

Charles Thomson

I was sitting at my desk in that room on July first, so I'll hold you to the facts. Start with the room itself.

John Adams

The first floor of the Pennsylvania State House. About forty feet by forty, packed with delegates, in the worst of the Philadelphia summer. And the tall windows were shut.

Charles Thomson

They were. I can add to that. We kept them closed for two reasons. One was secrecy, because Loyalists would have loved to eavesdrop. The other was the horseflies swarming up from the stables next door. So you had heat, flies, and the most dangerous question in the world.

John Adams

Heat, flies, and John Dickinson. Now, I want to be fair to Dickinson, because history has made him a coward, and he was nothing of the kind. He was a Pennsylvania lawyer, the principal author of the Olive Branch Petition the year before, a man of conscience. He believed independence at that moment was a disaster. And he made the best case for waiting I ever heard. He spoke first, and he was eloquent.

Charles Thomson

What was his argument? Give it to us as he'd have given it.

John Adams

Two points, and they were not foolish ones. First, we had no binding alliance with France. Second, we had no formal confederation among ourselves. We were thirteen colonies that had never agreed on a constitution. So he said, in effect, that declaring independence now was like sailing into an ocean storm in a little boat made of paper. A lovely image. It was also frightening, because it was partly true.

Charles Thomson

And as he finished, the weather answered him.

John Adams

Exactly as if the heavens had been rehearsed! Dark sky, thunder shaking the building, lightning, rain coming down in sheets. You could not have staged it better. And then silence. Nobody stood. Nobody wanted to follow that speech. I looked around and thought, somebody must answer him. And I will confess, I wished for the tongue of Demosthenes or Cicero. I had none of that. I had only the facts and a very strong opinion.

Charles Thomson

You had no notes.

John Adams

None. I got up and spoke extemporaneously, and I kept going for hours. My argument was that independence was already a fact. The King's Prohibitory Act had put us outside his protection. His ships and troops were making war on us. We weren't deciding whether to leave the empire. We were deciding whether to say out loud what had already happened. A skiff of paper? I told them the boat was already in the storm, and the only question was whether it would fly its own flag.

Charles Thomson

I should say for the listeners that no transcript of that speech survives. I recorded the motions and the votes, because that was my duty. So what we know of your speech comes from those who heard it.

John Adams

Which, as a vain man, I regret daily. But here's the part nobody remembers. In the middle of all this, the door opens and in walk three men from New Jersey, drenched to the bone from riding through that storm. Richard Stockton, Francis Hopkinson, and the Reverend John Witherspoon. They had missed everything, and they asked, politely, if we might go through it again.

Charles Thomson

I remember your face.

John Adams

I felt like an actor called back for an encore, or a gladiator told that the crowd wanted another round. I was spent. But Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, who was no friend of mine on this question, leaned over and urged me to do it. His reasoning was that only Adams had the facts at his command. Now that's a compliment I would have framed, if it hadn't come from a man who disagreed with me. So I rose and gave it again, shorter and hotter. And it worked. Stockton came over, and the New Jersey delegation with him.

Charles Thomson

Now the mechanics, because people imagine a hundred men raising their hands. That isn't how we voted.

John Adams

No. Each colony cast one vote, and it was decided by the majority of that colony's delegates. A colony with five delegates and a colony with two each counted as one. So you couldn't win by charming a room. You had to win thirteen separate arguments inside thirteen separate delegations.

Charles Thomson

On the first of July, we voted in Committee of the Whole. I'll give the count. Nine colonies in favor: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. Pennsylvania and South Carolina against. Delaware tied, one to one, with Thomas McKean for and George Read against. And New York abstained, because its delegates had no fresh authority from home.

John Adams

Nine of thirteen. Which was a majority, and which was useless. A split declaration would have told Britain and France that we couldn't agree on our own existence. It was Rutledge again, to his credit, who proposed putting off the final vote until the next morning, so South Carolina could think it over.

Charles Thomson

And that night, McKean sent a rider to Dover for Caesar Rodney.

John Adams

I love this man. Rodney had asthma and a cancer in his face, and he wore a green silk veil over it. He rode eighty miles through the night, through that same storm, and walked into the State House on July second still in his boots and spurs. Delaware's two votes became two to one for independence. I couldn't have written a better entrance, and God knows I've tried to write them for myself.

Charles Thomson

Pennsylvania turned too, and that deserves credit. Dickinson and Robert Morris stayed out of the chamber on the second. They didn't vote against their conscience, and they didn't block the others.

John Adams

Honorable, in its way. With them gone, Franklin, James Wilson, and John Morton voted yes, against Thomas Willing and Charles Humphreys, so Pennsylvania went three to two. Rutledge brought South Carolina around for the sake of unity. And when you counted it up, it was twelve colonies for the Lee Resolution, which said these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States. Twelve for, none against. New York abstained, and its provincial congress approved a week later, on July ninth.

Charles Thomson

I wrote it down, John. I was the only man in the room who wasn't allowed to cheer. Later, Stockton called you the Atlas of American Independence, for carrying it on your shoulders. And Jefferson, who hardly spoke in open debate, said you were the pillar of the cause, our colossus on the floor.

John Adams

Let it be recorded that I am blushing. Jefferson even said I wasn't graceful or elegant, or what you'd call fluent. I'll accept that. But he said that now and then I came out with such a power of thought that it moved men right out of their seats. For a Virginian to say that of a Massachusetts man, in writing, I have forgiven him for several other things.

Charles Thomson

Speaking of rivals who became colleagues, Franklin voted yes that day. And that autumn, you shared a bed with him.

John Adams

Oh, you've been waiting to ask. September, 1776. Congress sent Franklin, Rutledge and me to Staten Island to parley with Lord Howe. We stopped at an inn in New Brunswick, and the taverns were so full of straggling soldiers that there was one bed for Franklin and me. In a room barely bigger than the bed. No chimney. One small window.

Charles Thomson

And you shut it.

John Adams

I was sickly and I feared the night air. So I closed it. Franklin said, don't shut that window, we'll be suffocated. And then he explained. Cold air does not give you a cold. Foul air does, the air you breathe over and over in a shut room. The body spoils a gallon of air a minute, he said, and two of us would use up the whole chamber in an hour or two. I got up, opened the window, and climbed into bed, because I was curious. And he lectured me on respiration and perspiration until I fell asleep. I believe the last thing I heard was Franklin, himself half asleep, still explaining.

Charles Thomson

Did you ever win the argument?

John Adams

Never to my satisfaction. I asked him whether a man heated from exercise might catch cold from a sudden draft, and he never gave me a straight answer. And I've heard his own physician thought he died, years later, from a violent cold caught sitting for hours at an open window. I'm not saying a word. I'm only repeating what I heard.

Charles Thomson

One more thing about that July. You wrote Abigail the day after the vote.

John Adams

I wrote that the second of July would be the most memorable day in American history. That future generations would celebrate it with parades, shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other. And what do they do? They pick the fourth! The fourth was the day we adopted the committee's edited text and sent it to Dunlap, the printer. The second was when we actually voted to be free. I'm a little cross about it, Charles, I admit it. Printers even changed the dates on my letters over the years, so I'd look like I'd predicted the Fourth. I didn't. I predicted the Second.

Charles Thomson

The Fourth is the day my name appeared in print with John Hancock's, so I can't complain too loudly.

John Adams

You wouldn't. You're a modest man, and an annoying one.

Charles Thomson

Next time, in the finale of this series: John Adams goes alone to Holland and persuades the Dutch to recognize America and lend millions of guilders. Then the presidency, with the Quasi War against France and the hawks in his own party pushing him to fight. And his long friendship, rivalry and reconciliation with Thomas Jefferson. John, thank you.

John Adams

My pleasure. Bring more coffee. And leave the window open, since I've learned my lesson.