Rebels with a Cause
“And for the support of this Declaration, … we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
The Declaration of Independence was both a consequence and a cause of the American Revolution. As an “expression of the American mind,” it was an effect with its own deep, underlying causes—the culmination of a long line of thinking and acting by many people over the course of many years. The Declaration, John Adams wrote to a family friend, “compleats a Revolution, which will make as good a Figure in the History of Mankind, as any that has preceeded it.”1 The text itself was the product of a thinking mind that attempted to express in written words the moral and political ideas, principles, and convictions of several million people as they had developed over the preceding decade.
The Declaration was also a cause with many effects. Its articulation of certain moral and political principles made a real difference in the lives of ordinary people. It motivated individuals to act in certain ways. It inspired and even obligated Americans to act in defense of its principles (and not just in 1776): it impelled them to resist the decisions and actions of the British king and his Parliament, to declare their independence from the mother country, to join George Washington’s Continental Army, to fight a war of national liberation, and to construct new constitutions and governments. According to William Whipple, a signer of the Declaration from New Hampshire: “This Declaration has had a glorious effect—has made these colonies alive.”2
To revolutionary Americans, the words used in the Declaration of Independence held real and important meaning. The Declaration’s ideas were more than simply descriptive or illustrative rationalizations; they had a profound moral meaning that served as a causal force in motivating American revolutionaries to take certain actions. Ascertaining the moral values and principles that moved eighteenth-century Anglo-American provincials to act—what they were reacting against and what they were acting for—is the first task of any history of the Revolution. Historians must recreate and understand their problems, challenges, alternatives, modes of reasoning, values, motives, and judgments as they understood them. Then, and only then, can we determine why they thought and acted as they did.
The writing, signing, and public readings of the Declaration were themselves discrete acts that altered the course of human events. The Declaration brought a decade-long struggle to a single point, but it was more than just a symbol or an expression of the American mind. A mere 1,337 words transformed the subjects of a British king into republican citizens of an independent nation. The Declaration’s principles served as the moral foundation for the creation of new republican governments. More immediately, it also inspired tens of thousands of Americans to fight and thousands to die on behalf of its principles. Moreover, by signing their names to the Declaration and thereby renouncing their allegiance to George III, the representatives to the Continental Congress were committing treason and thereby signing their own death warrants. From the British perspective, the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of American treason.
The United States became a different place after July 4, 1776.
The Declaration of Independence was both a consequence of thought and action and a cause of new thought and action. Its first sentence says that it is necessary for “one People” to do two things, one negative and one positive: they must end their constitutional relationship with Great Britain, and they must also assume the power and authority to create new governments, with the power to “levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” In its concluding paragraph, the Declaration sums up what it is doing (as both fact and moral imperative) by announcing that America’s “United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES.” The publication of the Declaration of Independence is the necessary first step in achieving both goals. Thus the Declaration unites theory and practice.
The most interesting word in the opening sentence of the Declaration is one that readers typically glide over without a second thought. The key word is the adjective necessary. Consider the meaning of the word in the context of the sentence in which it appears: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, … they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” In the second paragraph, the Declaration also says that it is not only the “right” but the “duty” of the American people to “throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” But why necessary, why a duty? Why in the course of events from 1765 to 1776 did it become “necessary”—even a duty—for the American colonists to dissolve their political connection to king and mother country and to build a new nation? Was separation really necessary?
In reality, there was none of the legendary tyranny in Britain’s American colonies that stained the annals of history. Could the Americans of 1776 genuinely say they were an oppressed people? Surely not! For some, the stamp tax was a pittance not worth the pottage. In fact, it might be truer to say that, despite their political disagreements with George III and his government, the American people were freer and wealthier than any other people in history. The Americans felt none of the crushing weight imposed on the peoples of Europe by the canon and feudal laws. Certainly from the perspective of British officialdom, the Americans’ response to parliamentary legislation was incomprehensible.
The Declaration’s strange use of the word “necessary” raises even more philosophic questions. Why is separation said to be necessary rather than chosen or optional? Would it not be truer to say that the colonists had in front of them a whole range of options? In the wake of the Declaration, according to Thomas Paine, “all was choice.”3 But if so, how could their choice be necessary? Scientific laws of nature are necessary, but how does necessity work in a moral-political context? What will happen if the colonists do not separate? Why was it necessary to risk unspeakable suffering and even death itself? Imagine how the meaning of the Declaration would have changed if Jefferson had written not “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary … ” but instead “optional,” “possible,” “expedient,” “preferable,” or even “prudent”?
These kinds of questions help bridge the artificial chasms that historians sometimes create between ideas and events, words and deeds, intentions and actions, rhetoric and reality—which is to say, causes and effects. Such questions challenge us to see the origin of the American Revolution and the motives that led American revolutionaries to act in a new light. They permit us to dissolve the false dichotomy between the revolutionaries’ consciously chosen ideals and their consciously chosen actions.
Consider, for instance, how and why Jefferson and the signers used some of the rhetorically powerful language that we see in the text. When they invoked the inflammatory language of “despotism” and “tyranny” or “equality” and “liberty,” were they deploying manipulative propaganda, or did those words and ideas reflect reality and certain moral imperatives? By tracing the “history of the present King of Great Britain” through an objective examination of his “repeated injuries and usurpations” and by submitting “facts to a candid world,” were the Americans not judging and acting according to a moral standard that they publicly announced?
The Declaration’s first sentence goes on to say that the Americans are now declaring the “causes which impel them to the separation.” But how is it that they are being impelled, and by what force? And what are the precise “causes” that “impel” separation and independence? In order to explain those causes, Jefferson demonstrated two things in the Declaration: first, the unjust actions taken by king and Parliament (i.e., the twenty-seven charges leveled against the king) in the years between 1764 and 1776, and, second, the moral and political principles against which the actions of king and Parliament were to be judged (i.e., the laws of nature and certain self-evident truths). The colonists’ moral principles and the king’s actions are presented dialectically. They are in conflict with one another, and one is judged against the other. Taken together, they are the causes that impel the Americans to the separation.
Readers of the Declaration are still left with a deeper question: why should these particular causes lead to war? No one was forcing the Americans to sever their ties with George III and go to war against the world’s most lethal military force. For many Americans, independence was a difficult, if not a tragic, choice. In the two years leading up to independence, the colonists debated in the Continental Congress whether to separate or not. In 1774, the First Continental Congress reaffirmed the colonists’ loyalty to the British Crown, and as late as July 5, 1775, the Second Continental Congress adopted John Dickinson’s “Olive Branch Petition,” which declared the colonists’ genuine hope for reconciliation with their king and mother country. So the Americans did have the choice to not sever their ties with Britain and to seek reconciliation. Many political moderates and certainly the Loyalists took that position.4 Even staunch Whigs such as Landon Carter and John Dickinson balked at the prospect of forever renouncing allegiance to their king and to a nation and constitution they had long venerated. To repeat our primary question: Why was separation said to be necessary?
THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY
The American mind was forged in the 1760s and 1770s under the pressure of events provoked by the imperial crisis and as a result of the provincials’ confrontation with certain philosophic ideas. As John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine knew very well, the American Revolution was primarily an intellectual and a moral revolution—it represented, as Adams noted, a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people.”5 It was a revolution that advanced new moral values and virtues, new manners and mores, and a new way to think about moral character and moral action. From this fundamental change in the Americans’ moral values followed all of the subsequent social, political, and economic changes that would come to define a new way of life in America.6
This moral revolution is best seen by trying to understand why American revolutionaries thought it was necessary to dissolve a longstanding constitutional, political, and cultural relationship with Great Britain, and then by examining how they did it. Quite possibly the most intriguing element of the revolutionaries’ moral reasoning and action was their view that it was necessary—absolutely necessary—that they dedicate their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to separating from Great Britain and then to founding a nation de novo.
Our entry point for examining why this was so is a phrase the Americans of the 1760s and 1770s used often: the “spirit of liberty.” The revolutionaries’ dedication to the spirit of liberty as a cardinal virtue is a powerful theme that defines the American response to the issues of the imperial crisis.
To modern historians, the notion of a spirit of liberty might seem like little more than flowery rhetoric. To eighteenth-century Americans, however, it meant something specific and essential. The word “spirit” as used in the phrase signifies both an idea and action. As Levi Hart put it, the spirit of liberty means to “assert and maintain the cause of liberty.” The phrase “spirit of liberty” united theory and practice for American revolutionaries; it implied an action in defense of a principle; it was characterized by certain virtues in the defense of liberty. In the words of an anonymous writer published in the Boston Gazette, “We know our rights, liberties, and privileges, and likewise men are determined to sacrifice all things else for their preservation.”7 The spirit of American liberty is a sentiment, a mindset, a disposition, a virtue. As a sentiment, it loves freedom and hates slavery. As a mindset, it is watchful, suspicious, and skeptical. As a disposition, it is active, jealous, restless, resolute, protective, and, most of all, vigilant. And as a virtue, it is defined by integrity, fortitude, perseverance, courage, and patriotism. The spirit of liberty, then, is a sense of life defined by independence in the fullest sense of the term.
The spirit of liberty almost seems to have been bred into the Americans’ political subconscious. The first seventeenth-century settlers in the New World, wrote the historian Samuel Williams in 1794, were virtually forgotten by their kings and left alone without supervision. Without ruling structures from above, the result was predictable: the American settlers established and developed a “spirit of freedom” unique to them. And with time, “nature” established “a system of freedom in America,” which British imperial officials “could neither comprehend or discern.”8 The spirit of American liberty developed slowly in the colonies, over the course of a century and a half, through barely detectable, piecemeal adaptations of thought to experience and experience to thought. As a result, colonial Americans developed certain habits and social conventions that grew out of and were compatible with the broad freedom that was unique to their culture.
They also developed what would come to be a new moral logic, with its own unique idiom, dialect, and vocabulary of thought. In 1774, in the wake of the Coercive Acts, Richard Wells called on his fellow provincials to “inject a little of the spiritus Americani” into their battle with British imperial officials. For himself, he hoped to purge “every narrow sentiment” from his “soul” so that the “pure unadulterated spirit of liberty” would give “vigor” to “[his] understanding.” Likewise, Jonas Clark went so far as to suggest that the depredations of the British Parliament and army had rekindled the Americans’ original moral spiritedness and been “the means of preserving and transmitting that glorious spirit of liberty.” The American spirit of liberty was virtually synonymous with the moral constitutions of the colonists, and it provided the Americans with a worldview through which they interpreted and responded to the cascade of events between 1764 and 1776. No theme ran as broadly or deeply through American culture in the 1760s and 1770s. American Patriots like Virginia clergyman John Hurt were constantly reminding themselves and their fellow citizens that it was incumbent on all of them “to cherish and cultivate” the tree of liberty. They must, said Hurt, “fence it in and trench it round against the beasts of the field and insects of earth”; they must revere and conform all their actions to the “majesty of liberty.”9
The spirit of liberty as a cause also had certain identifiable effects. According to Phillips Payson in his 1778 election-day sermon, “it is obvious to observe that a spirit of liberty should in general prevail among a people,” and where it does “their minds should be possessed with a sense of its worth and nature.” In those places where “the spirit of liberty is found in its genuine vigor it produces its genuine effects; urging to the greatest vigilance and exertions, it will surmount great difficulties; [so] that it is no easy matter to deceive or conquer a people determined to be free.”10
The spirit of American liberty served as a kind of moral and psychological tripwire that was first triggered by the passage of the Stamp Act and kept active with the passage of every piece of British legislation aimed at the Americans in the decade leading up to 1776. During these years, American Whigs developed objective standards by which to measure the justice and injustice of British legislation. These standards, when combined with the provincials’ spirit of liberty, provided the Americans with an early-warning system that alerted them day or night to the abuse or growth of arbitrary power.
By the early 1760s, this emerging moral awareness was taking root in the political consciousness of most Anglo-Americans. At the highest level of abstraction, the American Revolution, wrote Samuel Williams, “explained the business of the world, and served to confirm what nature and society had before produced.” Thus their contest with Great Britain was not to create freedom de novo, but to restore and maintain a sense of lost freedoms. In 1774, the Americans reminded their king through the Continental Congress that they were “born the heirs of freedom.” The American spirit of liberty meant discovering and resisting the forces of despotism before such forces could sink roots in the New World. The spirit of liberty was, according to Reverend John Tucker, the “animating soul of a free state.”11
An excellent example of this kind of spiritedness can be seen in an essay published in the Massachusetts Spy in 1771. There the pseudonymous “Massachusettensis” warned his fellow countrymen about the advance of creeping power, “which is impossible to guard against” because it “appears in a variety of shapes.” Encroaching power, he continued, corrupts a free society first “under the colour of law, and then it is christened with the name of lawful authority.” Thus it is absolutely imperative for a free people who want to stay free to be on guard against and to watch for the first sign of power’s appearance. “In order to do this,” however, “the laws and rules of the constitution should be well examined,” Massachusettensis told his fellow Bostonians, “and if we see an exercise of power not warranted by those laws and rules, it becomes our duty to remonstrate against it, and if this be ineffectual, to oppose it.” Two years later, Simeon Howard, in a sermon preached to the Boston artillery company, reminded the soldiers that in every free state it was the right and responsibility of every subject to watch the quest for power by their rulers. It was “necessary,” he said, that the people preserve their freedom from unreasonable restraints by government officials so that they might retain “a spirit of liberty” and a capacity to defend themselves.12
It was common for colonial Americans to view power as restless and sleepless, which meant they must be ever alert to its machinations. The colonists frequently invoked the famous Latin dictum obsta principiis (to nip in the bud, or to resist the beginnings), which they attributed to Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. “Watch and oppose ought therefore,” Josiah Quincy declared, “to be the motto” of the Americans if not the rest of mankind. In his 1781 election sermon to Governor Hancock and the Massachusetts legislature, Jonas Clark declared “Obsta Principiis … a good maxim” for all friends of liberty.13 And in a series of essays written for the Massachusetts Spy in 1771 and 1772, the pseudonymous “Centinel” frequently if not obsessively cited Machiavelli’s warning. “It is the declaration of a great man,” he wrote in reference to the Florentine, that “a nation should often recur to its first principles.” It is critically important, he warned, for the people to be vigilant against the “first motions” of power’s relentless march. They must “keep the most watchful active eye on the times.” Centinel pounded away at his neighbors week after week, reminding them over and over again “if there was a period of American history, that required vigilance, and a careful inspection of the time,” now is that time. In fact, “we live in a day,” he wrote, “when we must suspect every thing.” To satisfy the point, he nagged and browbeat his fellow Bostonians time and again with the rallying cry, obsta principiis, which, he repeated as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, “should frequently be inculcated on a people.”14
The keepers of America’s vestal flame recognized that political power is an omnipresent force in all societies, which is why the liberty-loving temper of the people must be kindled, nurtured, and kept constantly on the alert. No infringement of their rights should be seen as too small to protest or resist. One day in 1774, an unknown man writing under the pseudonym “A Freeman” stopped by the Pennsylvania assembly, then in session, and left with the members a short, untitled essay in which he declared the “passion of Liberty” must be “implanted in every breast” and “awakened.” The time had come, he continued, with an obvious reference to Machiavelli, to “nip this pernicious weed in the bud, before it has taken too deep root.” It was built into the Americans’ language and grammar of liberty that tyranny always begins with some seemingly small and insignificant violation of rights that goes unnoticed at first but that sets a precedent for further violations. The lust for power frequently works its way stealthily until it is too late to stop it. This is why a free people must be in a state of constant readiness to identify the unlawful or unjust use of power and to resist it. According to Samuel Adams (writing as “Vindex”), a true patriot should “keep the attention of his fellow citizens awake to their grievances” and in a constant state of agitation “till the causes of their just complains are removed.”15
Rekindling and stoking the spirit of American liberty became a central theme repeated over and over again in the writings of leading American Patriots. Consider now two of the deepest explorations—the writings of John Adams and John Dickinson—of what that spirit was and how it was carried out in practice, particularly as it arose in response to the Stamp and Townshend Acts.
The first American essay to really examine the nature and meaning of the spirit of liberty during the 1760s was John Adams’s “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” published in 1765. The ultimate purpose of the “Dissertation” was twofold: to identify the nature of the despotism inherent in the Stamp Act, and to inspire the Americans to defend their liberty. Adams’s goal was to define and rekindle what he called the American “spirit of liberty,” which for him was a certain kind of virtue that he characterized in his “Governor Winthrop to Governor Bradford” essays as “a jealous, a watchful spirit.” The maxim that he chose to define the spirit of liberty was “obsta principiis.” A free people ought to be jealous of their rights and liberties, and they must be ready to resist encroachment on them at the earliest signs of malevolence on the part of rulers. This is why he warned his fellow Patriots in 1767 to be wary of “these early advances, these first approaches of arbitrary power, which are the most dangerous of all, and if not prevented, but suffered to steal into precedents, will leave no hope of a remedy without recourse to nature, violence, and war.”16
In notes that he wrote in his Diary in 1772 for an oration at Braintree, Adams summed up the spirit of American liberty during the Revolutionary era:
But this is an unalterable Truth, that the People can never be enslaved but by their own Tameness, Pusillanimity, Sloth or Corruption…. The Preservation of Liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral Character of the People…. Liberty, under every conceivable Form of Government is always in Danger…. The Love of Power, is insatiable and uncontrollable…. There is Danger from all Men. The only Maxim of a free Government, ought to be to trust no Man living, with Power to endanger public Liberty. Let Us guard against these dangers, let us be firm and stable, … but as daring and intrepid as Heroes…. Liberty depends upon an exact Balance, a nice Counterpoise of all the Powers of the state.
Adams understood that the long-term preservation of liberty required both a certain kind of political constitution sustained by a certain kind of moral constitution, that is, the moral vigilance of the people. He regarded the latter as more fundamental than the former. In the summer of 1775, he told Abigail that a “Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored.” Once liberty is lost, he continued, it “is lost forever,” which is precisely why those who love freedom must be vigilant in its defense. To that end, Adams appealed in his Novanglus letters to a “latent spark” in human nature, which is the “love of liberty.” Connected to this “latent spark” was an additional aspect of human nature that felt “a resentment of injury and indignation against wrong. A love of truth, and a veneration for virtue.” Ultimately, Adams argued in February 1775, “Liberty can no more exist without virtue and independence, than the body can live and move without a soul. When these are gone … if you look for liberty, you will grope in vain.”17
The spirit of liberty is wrought into the constitution of human nature, but even so it is a spirit that must be continuously nourished and kept alive. And when this spirit of liberty is combined with certain moral and political principles—such as equality, natural rights, consent, popular sovereignty, the social contract, and rule of law—the architectonic principle that results is what Adams called the “revolution-principle.” By 1775, the time had come for the Americans to invoke such revolution-principles, which were, he argued, “the principles of nature and eternal reason.” He was therefore distressed to learn that some residents of Massachusetts could hold such principles to be “noble, and true” on one hand, but, on the other hand, considered the “application of them to particular cases” as somehow “wild and utopian.” For Adams and fellow revolutionaries, moral principles should provide rational guidance to practice. The practically right action should result from the rationally true principle. There should be no dichotomy between theory and practice. American revolutionaries could not accept the idea that politics was a sphere sovereign unto itself without the need of guidance from rational thought or practical philosophy. The unification of theory and practice was central to Adams’s self-understanding and moral constitution. He simply could not apprehend or appreciate a moral psychology that assumed that certain principles could be accepted as “in general true” but nevertheless “not applicable to particular cases.” Adams wrote, “I thought their being true in general was because they were applicable to most particular cases.”18
It was the provincials’ unbending moral character, their dedication in practice to their moral and political ideals, that British imperial officials were never able to comprehend. Hence British imperial officials could never understand why for the Americans independence had become a moral necessity.
Adams’s invocation of “revolution-principles” was remarkable for its somber, rational, and levelheaded appeal to facts, precedents, and historical conditions. If revolutions are not to be undertaken for light and transient reasons and must be pursued with caution, moderation, and prudence, then there must be rationally defensible principles and observable conditions that justify such a momentous step. For Adams, the boundary line between resistance and revolution was the nature of the existing political constitution. He always sought constitutional solutions to constitutional problems, but when that was no longer possible, then a “recourse to higher powers not written” was justified.19 The colonists were now moved to open rebellion and independence under the sanctifying authority of these “higher powers.” In other words, in the course of recent events it had become “necessary” for the Americans to declare their independence.
In 1767, John Dickinson penned his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which many historians regard as one of the most influential pamphlets of the Revolutionary period. Dickinson’s Letters present a powerful analysis of the ways in which unchecked power asphyxiates liberty. They also provide the best analysis of the American spirit of liberty written at the time.
Dickinson knew that the various acts of the British government should not be “regarded according to the simple force of each, but as parts of a system of oppression.” His primary concern in the Letters was to sound the alarm against the Townshend Acts, particularly the New York Suspending Act and the Townshend duties. The Americans, he warned, must be vigilant and exert “THE MOST WATCHFUL ATTENTION” against Parliament’s subtle designs; they must prevent a creeping form of slavery under the guise of legalities, otherwise “A NEW SERVITUDE MAY BE SLIPPED UPON US, UNDER THE SANCTION OF USUAL AND RESPECTABLE TERMS.” He goes on to warn against those “artful rulers” who attempt to “extend their power beyond its just limits” by subtly manipulating language and legal technicalities. And with every passing generation the noose is tightened just a little bit more. Every usurpation, whether large or small, eventually requires additional usurpations to keep all prior usurpations in force: “A free people therefore can never be too quick in observing, nor too firm in opposing the beginnings of alteration either in form or reality, respecting institutions formed for their security. The first kind of alteration leads to the last: Yet, on the other hand, nothing is more certain, than that the forms of liberty may be retained, when their substance is gone.” Thus it is absolutely necessary, Dickinson argued, that the people should always be on guard to protect their liberty as they protect their property. He encouraged them to “watch,” “observe facts,” “search into causes,” and “investigate designs,” and of course he insisted that they assert their “right of JUDGING from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness.” He implored his fellow Americans to be ever vigilant. Quoting from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Dickinson reminded his readers that “SLAVERY IS EVER PRECEDED BY SLEEP.”20
Invoking ideas and rhetoric similar to Adams’s, Dickinson equated the American spirit of liberty with jealousy, watchfulness, and vigilance. “A PERPETUAL jealousy, respecting liberty,” he told the American people, “is absolutely, requisite in all free states.” They must keep up the “utmost vigilance,” and they must be “watchful of their liberty.” He went on to remind his fellow colonists of Machiavelli’s famous chapter in Discourses on Livy, which “prove[s] that a state, to be long lived, must be frequently corrected, and reduced to its first principles.” The lesson of all history proves “that every free state should incessantly watch, and instantly take alarm on any addition being made to the power exercised over them.”21
Dickinson attacked the Townshend duties precisely because they were so comparatively small. It would be a “fatal error,” he warned, to disregard and therefore to acquiesce in these new duties because of their trifling amount. In fact, the “smallness” of the duties is a trap. No matter how inconsequential the tax, no matter how reasonably and equitably applied, the colonists should regard the act with “abhorrence.” He suggested that the Townshend duties were intentionally designed to be small so that the Americans would not notice or object and a precedent could therefore be established. He went on to posit that the British were testing the moral disposition of the colonists. The Townshend Act “is a bird sent out over the waters, to discover, whether the waves, that lately agitated this part of the world with such violence [Dickinson is here referring to the colonists’ reaction to the Stamp Act], are yet subsided. If this adventurer gets footing here, we shall quickly find it to be of the kind described by the poet—‘Infelix vates’ [“A direful foreteller of future calamities,” from Virgil’s Aeneid].” He then raised the very real possibility that the goal of the British imperial officials in setting such a small tax was to establish a “PRECEDENT, the force of which shall be established, by the tacit submission of the colonies.” Once the precedent is established, “the parliament will levy upon us such sums of money as they choose to take, without any other LIMITATION, than their PLEASURE.”Thus it is imperative that the colonists resist every attempt to tax them without their consent regardless of the size.22
The Townshend Act “is founded,” according to Dickinson, “on the destruction” of the colonists’ “constitutional security.” If members of Parliament “have a right to levy a tax of one penny upon us,” Dickinson noted, then “they have a right to levy a million upon us.” What this means, of course, is that the possession and control of American property depended not on the will of the colonists and their rights but on the pleasure of Parliament. Dickinson supported his contention by invoking the authority of Locke: “‘There is nothing which’ we can call our own; or, to use the words of Mr. Locke--‘WHAT PROPERTY HAVE WE IN THAT, WHICH ANOTHER MAY, BY RIGHT, TAKE, WHEN HE PLEASES, TO HIMSELF?’” The Townshend duties are clearly a tax, Dickinson concluded, and “Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves or our representatives. We are therefore—SLAVES.” The logic of Dickinson’s moral reasoning was simple, compelling, motivating, and explanatory. It’s what made the American revolutionary mind unique. This idea of preserving natural liberty in its pristine form and so resisting even one small precedent against it had come close to the center of the American consciousness. This idea is precisely why the colonists viewed the rather trifling stamp tax and Townshend duties so ominously: they viewed each as the entering wedge of a broader campaign to deprive them of rights and liberties. Years later, James Madison borrowed Dickinson’s moral logic and reconfirmed the spirit of American liberty in no uncertain terms: “Remember that precedents once established are so much positive power; and that the nation which reposes on the pillow of political confidence, will sooner or later end its political existence in a deadly lethargy.”23
Third-party British observers of American affairs such as Edmund Burke also took note of, and attributed causal force to, American revolutionaries’ notion of a “spirit of liberty.” In his 1775 speech on conciliation with the colonies, Edmund Burke was moved to explain that the single most important factor in understanding the Americans’ resistance to British legislation was their “Temper and Character.” By studying the moral character of the colonists, Burke thought he had located the deepest source of their behavior over the course of the previous decade. In the American temperament and moral character, he wrote,
a love of Freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of Liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth.
The Americans’ spirit of liberty, according to Burke, provided the primary causal explanation of why they reacted to the Stamp, Declaratory, Townshend, Tea, and Coercive Acts in such a determined and principled way. It rendered the colonists “acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources.” By contrast, the people of other countries, he noted, “judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance.” These American provincials did not succumb to the same kind of moral lethargy so common to most people throughout history. They would have none of that. Instead, they anticipated the “evil,” and they judged “of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle.” They saw and augured “misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.”24
Burke’s warning was not heeded. Like modern historians, his colleagues never understood the principles, temperament, and character of the American revolutionaries, which meant they never understood their deepest motives. They had no way to know that the revolution’s trigger was embedded in the spirit of American liberty. British officials therefore could never understand why it was necessary for the Americans to dissolve the political bands that had connected them to Britain for over 150 years.
IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
Though the Declaration of Independence was a foreign policy statement inspired by certain philosophical principles drawn largely from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, it was also something more. It was a call to action. As Thomas Paine put it in The American Crisis, during some of the darkest days of the war, “those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.” The Declaration was both the last step of a process to defend the old-style English liberty and the first step in a process to support the new-style American liberty. Moral principles require moral action, and as John Hurt said of the American colonists in a sermon to Virginia troops, “there never was a country” with “stronger motives to unite in active zeal than this, nor was there ever a time required it more than the present.”25 Samuel Adams repeated many times in the months leading up to July 4, 1776, that the time had come: it was now or never, and he chose now.
American revolutionaries permitted no dichotomy between words and deeds. The Declaration’s signers knew that they were committing treason and that war would soon follow. And in order to support their commonly shared principles in the face of war, they mutually pledged to each other, on behalf of the American people, their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. This meant they must now fight to defend their freedom, and they must create a new constitution and establish a government with the power to levy war and contract diplomatic alliances.
But the Declaration meant war not just for the fifty-six men who signed it. Tens of thousands of ordinary men and boys were, in effect, pledging to fight against the greatest military power in the world. Some would die, some would be maimed, some would be captured, imprisoned, and tortured, and virtually all would suffer from exhaustion, starvation, and exposure. And not just soldiers would suffer deprivations, but their families and communities would undergo great hardships as well.
Jefferson’s words were therefore intended, in part, to inspire and motivate men to act in the context of the time. Initially, the great alternatives confronting the Americans on July 4, 1776, were, as one member of the Continental Congress wrote to another, “perfect freedom, or Absolute Slavery,” and to choose freedom of course meant war. They had been left “no other alternative,” said Jonas Clark, but the “SWORD or SLAVERY.” Six months later, however, the options facing General George Washington and his troops were even more ominous. As Washington put it on Christmas Day, 1776, just before the Battle of Trenton, the choice to separate from Great Britain could now be reduced to an even more fundamental alternative: “Victory or Death.”26
After the Second Continental Congress unanimously approved the Declaration of Independence on the fourth of July, the document was printed and distributed throughout the United States. It was imperative that all Americans be told as quickly as possible that they were now an independent nation and that this new country would have to defend itself on the battlefield. The responsibility for printing and distributing the Declaration fell to John Hancock, who on July 6 commissioned a Philadelphia publisher to print over five hundred copies. In his letter to the states, Hancock spoke of the general purpose and hoped-for consequences of the Declaration: “The important Consequences … from this Declaration of Independence, considered as the Ground & Foundation of Government will naturally suggest the Propriety of proclaiming it in such a Manner, that the People may be universally informed of it.”27
Fast riders were then instructed to deliver copies throughout the former colonies. Once received in cities, towns, and villages, the Declaration was read publicly to large civilian audiences in state after state, in public meetings up and down the Atlantic seaboard and from the coast to the Appalachian Mountains. The Declaration’s effect on the spirit of the American people was electrifying. Parades, celebrations, fireworks, thirteen-gun salutes, and toasts typically accompanied each public reading. In the days and weeks after it was signed, distributed, and read around the country there was an outpouring of support for the document.28 Its four self-evident truths served as a polestar for the members of Congress, the people at large, and, most importantly, for Washington’s troops.29
On July 9, Joseph Barton of Delaware wrote to a correspondent that the Declaration “gives a great turn to the minds of our people declaring our independence.” It provided the Americans, he continued, with a moral standard on which “to depend.” Until the publication of the Declaration, he was torn, he said, between his fealty to the king and his desire to defend his country. For now, though, his “heart and hand shall move together.” As for his neighbors, they had been sitting on the fence “until we declared a free State,” but now they are “ready to spend their lives and fortunes in defense of our country.” With the signing of the Declaration of Independence, wrote Joseph Elmer, a future member of the Continental Congress and the United States Senate, “a new era in politics has commenced.” The future happiness or misery of the American people, he continued, depends “entirely upon ourselves.” Ten days later, Tristram Dalton, a former Harvard classmate of John Adams’s, wrote to congratulate Elbridge Gerry, one of the Declaration’s signers:
I wish you joy on the late full Declaration—an event so ardently desired by your good self and the people you particularly represent. We are no longer to be amused with delusive prospects. The die is cast. All is at stake. The way is made plain. No one can now doubt on which side it is his duty to act. We have everything to hope from the goodness of our cause…. We have put on the harness, and I trust it will not be put off until we see our land a land of security and freedom—the wonder of the other hemisphere—the asylum of all who pant for deliverance from bondage.
The exuberance generated by the Declaration around the country was contagious. Benjamin Rush, a last-minute delegate to the Continental Congress and thus a signer of the document, told Charles Lee, “The Declaration of Independence has produced a new aera in this part of America.” It inspired the Pennsylvania militia, he wrote, to “be actuated with a spirit more than Roman” and because of it the “spirit of liberty reigns triumphant in Pennsylvania.”30
The Declaration of Independence played a particularly important role in motivating George Washington’s volunteer army. On July 6, two days after the Declaration was approved by Congress, Washington received a copy from John Hancock, whose accompanying letter urged the general to share it with his troops: “that our Affairs may take a more favourable Turn, the Congress have judged it necessary to dissolve the Connection between Great Britain and the American Colonies, and to declare them free & independent States; as you will perceive by the enclosed Declaration, which I am directed to transmit to you, and to request you will have it proclaimed at the Head of the Army in the Way, you shall think most proper.” By Hancock’s account, the Declaration was to be the banner that would lead Washington and his troops into battle.31
Three days later, on July 9, 1776, as the sun was setting over New York City, the commander in chief of the Continental Army ordered all the fighting brigades in the city to convene in lower Manhattan to hear one of the first-ever public readings of the Declaration of Independence. Before they began the fight to save New York City, the soldiers were told that General Washington “hopes this important Event will serve as a fresh incentive to every officer, and soldier, to act with Fidelity and Courage, as knowing that now the peace and safety of his Country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms: And that he is now in the service of a State, possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit, and advance him to the highest Honors of a free Country.”32 The Declaration’s words inspired and galvanized Americans to fight, and possibly to die, in the name of defending their homes and their most deeply held moral principles.
The Declaration was, as Jefferson would later say, an expression of the American mind—of the Americans’ deepest moral and political aspirations. It gave voice to what few of them were capable of expressing in speech or print. On July 18, 1776, James Thacher recorded in his military diary what the Declaration meant to his fellow soldiers:
When we reflect on the deranged condition of our army, the great deficiency of our resources, and the little prospect of foreign assistance, and at the same time contemplate the prodigious powers and resources of our enemy, we may view this measure of Congress as a prodigy. The history of the world cannot furnish an instance of fortitude and heroic magnanimity parallel to that displayed by the members, whose signatures are affixed to the Declaration of American Independence. Their venerated names will ornament the brightest pages of American history, and be transmitted to the latest generations.
What Jefferson did, as Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, put it in a 1783 sermon to the Connecticut General Assembly, was to “[pour] the soul of the continent into the monumental act of independence.”33
The Declaration inspired and motivated not only those Americans who supported the “glorious cause” but also those sitting on the fence. On July 15, Samuel Adams wrote to Richard Henry Lee in Virginia that “our Declaration of Independency has given Vigor to the Spirits of the People.” It inspired many moderates, he continued, to change their minds and support independence and the “American cause.” The next day, Adams wrote to his fellow Bostonian, James Warren, telling him “our Declaration of Independence has already been attended with good Effects.” On August 1, summing up the meaning and influence of the Declaration to his colleagues in the Continental Congress, Adams said: “You are now the guardians of your own liberties…. The hearts of your soldiers beat high with the spirit of freedom; they are animated with the justice of their cause.” In the words of David Ramsay, one of the first historians of the Revolution, the Declaration motivated the American people to “bear up under the calamities of war,” and to endure “the evils they suffered, only as the thorn that ever accompanies the rose.”34
By energizing the spirit of the people, the Declaration also served to inspire men to join Washington’s army. Sometime after the signing of the document, an unknown farmer in Pennsylvania gave a speech to a meeting of his neighbors in Philadelphia County to explain why he was signing up: “I am an American,” he declared, “and am determined to be free.” In fact, he had been “born free” and was not about to forfeit his birthright “for a mess of pottage” as Esau did in the Book of Genesis (25:29–34). This unknown but eloquent farmer went on to explain what the inescapable logic of his principles meant in practice: “We have no alternative left us, but to fight or die. If there be a medium, it is slavery; and ever cursed be the man who will submit to it! I will not.” He added bluntly: “I, therefore, conceive myself as having taken up arms in defence of innocence, justice, truth, honesty, honour, liberty, property, and life; and in opposition to guilt, injustice, falsehood, dishonesty, ignominy, slavery, poverty, and death.” Indeed, “I will part with my life sooner than with my liberty; for I prefer an honourable death to the miserable and despicable existence of slavery.” He concluded: “Blest be the spirit of American liberty, wisdom, and valour.”35 This is a stunning example of actions taken on the motivation of clear principles.
Ideas have consequences, and the Declaration’s ideas fired men up to fight and die for liberty in the years after 1776. Those who supported the Declaration viewed going to war as a moral and existential necessity. Compromise, slavery, or defeat were not options. American revolutionaries acted consistently in the name of a morally absolute principle. “The truth is,” Samuel Adams wrote in 1771 as a premonition of what was to come, “all might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought.”36
No man lived and exuded that spirit of liberty more than America’s commander in chief, George Washington. More than any other revolutionary, he was the embodiment of Aristotle’s vision of the magnanimous man—a man whose greatness of soul stood above all others and was fired by an animating love of liberty. His towering figure left most men—including many other truly great men—in awe. The example of his moral character did even more than his military tactics to inspire his troops. “I hope we shall be taught to copy his example,” said Nathanael Greene, who himself became a sterling commander of the Continental Army, “and to prefer the love of liberty in this time of public danger to all the soft pleasures of domestic life and support ourselves with manly fortitude amidst all the dangers and hardships that attend a state of war.”37 Americans high and low, rich and poor, young and old understood the necessity to defend their country and their moral principles. And that is precisely what they did.
In the year after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, General Washington’s army moved from Massachusetts to New York, and then to New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Before and after every battle, Washington spoke to his troops in order to fortify and renew their fighting spirit of liberty. In the late summer of 1776, now in New York City and preparing for several battles in defense of Manhattan, he once again addressed his troops: “The Enemy have now landed on Long Island, and the hour is fast approaching, on which the Honor and Success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding Country depend. Remember officers and Soldiers, that you are Freemen, fighting for the blessings of Liberty—that slavery will be your portion, and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men.”38 But words only go so far. They must be translated into action, and few men are truly ready for the brutality and horror that comes with actual fighting. Still, they fought.
After taking lower Manhattan, British forces pushed forward to the north end of the island on their way to New Jersey. The British goal was to take Fort Washington, which was the rebels’ last redoubt on the lower Hudson. On November 15, William Howe, the commander in chief of British forces in America, sent one of his officers to deliver a message to Robert Magaw, the American commander at Fort Washington. Howe’s message left no room for misunderstanding: surrender the fort or face total destruction. Magaw’s reply to Howe’s aide-de-camp summed up perfectly the spirit of American liberty:
If I rightly understand the purport of your message from Gen: Howe … “this post is to be immediately surrendered or the garrison put to the sword[“]—I rather think it a mistake than a settled resolution in General Howe to act a part so unworthy [of] himself and the British nation—But give me leave to assure his excellency that actuated by the most glorious cause that mankind ever fought in, I am determined to defend this post to the very last extremity.39
“Give me liberty, or give me death,” “Live free or die,” “We hold these truths to be self-evident”: these were more than highfalutin slogans to the Americans. They had genuine meaning for America’s fighting men. Ideas and principles provided the motivation for action—sometimes life-or-death action. On November 16, 1776, some 8,000 British soldiers attacked Fort Washington. In the battle, 53 Americans were killed, 96 were wounded, and just over 2,800 were taken prisoner, most interned on British ships where hundreds would die of starvation, disease, or exposure.
After the loss of Fort Washington and New York City, General Washington and his army were on the run. Washington’s increasingly ragtag soldiers were first driven to New Jersey; then, in early December 1776, with the British chasing close behind, the Americans commandeered every skiff, boat, and raft they could round up and escaped across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. A brutal early winter had set in. Washington’s citizen-soldiers were cold and miserable, and some were sick and starving. The American painter and inventor, Charles Willson Peale, watched the American landing from the Pennsylvania shore. Peale immediately made his way to the soldiers’ camp and was left shaken by what he saw. Several soldiers were barely clothed. One soldier “was in an Old dirty Blanket Jacket, his beard long, and his face so full of Sores that he could not clean it.” The man was so badly “disfigured” that Peale failed to recognize at first that he was looking into the eyes of his own brother, James. During the American soldiers’ winter of despair, Major General William Heath from Massachusetts reported seeing troops from another regiment “so destitute of shoes that the blood left on the frozen ground, in many places, marked the route they had taken.”40
In the winter of 1776, Thomas Paine, the author of the world’s first bestseller, Common Sense, volunteered to serve as a civilian aide on General Nathanael Greene’s staff. What he saw that winter was more than he could bear. Paine was so moved by the depredations suffered by the American troops and by their undaunted bravery that he wrote a series of essays in their honor. Two days before Christmas 1776, illuminated by the light of the campfire, he wrote the first essay in what would come to be known as The American Crisis. The essay begins with these immortal words: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”41
Ironically, the Declaration of Independence not only invokes the “Laws of Nature,” but it is itself an instance of that very law—the law of self-preservation. The Declaration’s moral law commands those who support its underlying principles to act in a certain way—to separate from Great Britain and to establish new governments. The Declaration’s moral law of nature can be presented in the form of the if-given-then principle described in chapter 2: If the Americans want to live in a free and just society, given the arbitrary and unjust laws passed by Parliament and supported by George III, then they must declare their independence. Moral necessity demands of the colonists that they act in a certain way (i.e., with vigilance, integrity, and courage) given their chosen values (e.g., justice and freedom). Failure to do so means a concession to tyranny and will result in oppression, their likely enslavement, or worse. As Judge Drayton put it in his charge to the Charleston grand jury in October 1776, three months after the writing of the Declaration of Independence, freedom was the birthright of the American people by the “law of nature.” The former colonists were therefore “authorized” by that same law to exert “the inherent powers of society” to resist “the edicts which told them they had no property” and that they were bound to obey Parliament’s laws against their consent “in all cases whatsoever.”42
The Declaration of Independence announced to the world that the Americans could not and would not renounce their most deeply held convictions. It also said that the Americans must act on their chosen values. They were impelled by moral necessity, according to the Declaration, to “alter their former Systems of Government.” American revolutionaries permitted themselves no breach between their principles and their practice. Given their devotion to those principles, they saw no alternative.
Thomas Paine described the moral situation in which the American people found themselves in the months just before and after the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “All was choice, and every man reasoned for himself.” The rationally necessary choice was to act in defense of their liberty and property. “It was in this situation of affairs, equally calculated to confound or to inspire,” Paine continued, “that the gentleman, the merchant, the farmer, the tradesman and the laborer mutually turned from all the conveniences of home, to perform the duties of private soldiers, and undergo the severities of a winter campaign.”43
The words John Adams wrote to a friend during some of the darkest days of the Revolutionary War serve as a kind of motto capturing who Adams and his fellow revolutionaries were as men and as patriots: “Fiat Justitia ruat Coelum” (let justice be done though the heavens should fall). In the powerful words of the Continental Congress’s Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, published in 1775, the Americans had been
reduced to the alternative of chusing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritated ministers, or resistance by force.—The latter is our choice—We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery…. we will in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perserverance, employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with our [one] mind resolved to dye Free-men rather than live slaves.44
Having made their case against despotism and for freedom, it should be clear now why, for the Americans, revolution was necessary, why they would not compromise, why it was their duty to act, and why they were impelled to dissolve the political bands that had connected them to Great Britain. Based on their commitment to certain principles, they had no other option. They had to act because of who and what they were, because of the choices they had already made, because of the values they held, because of the moral law they chose to live by, because of the kind of society they chose to live in, and because George III and the British Parliament threatened to rob them of all that. Henry Knox, in the spring of 1776, put the matter this way:
The future happiness or misery of a great proportion of the human race is at stake—and if we make the wrong choice, ourselves and our prosperity must be wretched. Wrong choice! There can be but one choice consistent with the character of a people possessing the least degree of reason. And that is to separate—to separate from that people who from a total dissolution of virtue among them must be our enemies—an event which I de[v]outly pray may soon take place; and let it be as soon as may be!45
The Declaration of Independence required action, the kind of action that leads in the short term to hardship, penury, and possibly even death, but in the long term to the blessings of a free society.
The Declaration also tells us a good deal about the men who signed it and led the Revolution. They declared to the world their right to self-government, and they backed it up with their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They demonstrated to the world that ideas and action can and must be unified. The Declaration and the war for independence that followed represent a heroic integration of thought and deed. The virtue of integrity was the linchpin that united theory and practice in the revolutionaries’ moral universe. They held their moral principles as absolutes, and they attempted to practice them without compromise or contradiction. They chose to act in ways they thought right and just, regardless of the immediate consequences, precisely because they understood the value of acting in their long-term self-interest.
America’s founding revolutionaries were thus rebels with a cause. Despite the many vicissitudes and challenges thrown at them by fortuna, they met their problems head-on and remained loyal to their principles. They attempted to lead an integrated moral life. If integrity is the principle of being principled, then the revolutionary generation of 1776 embodied that virtue in spades. As Joseph Reed, who became one of Washington’s aides, put it to his wife, Esther, “My honor, duty, and every other tie held sacred among men, call upon me to proceed with firmness and resolution.”46
At every stage of the Revolutionary crisis, the Americans held in focus their principles, the ways in which those principles were being violated, and the means by which they should protest and then fight to defend them. They refused to sanction British actions. They did not evade, rationalize, turn the other cheek, or shirk their commitment or responsibility to their highest values. Instead, they responded to the repeated violations of their rights and liberties by organizing boycotts and protesting and resisting usurpations, by writing letters, petitions, and remonstrances, by liberating boxes of tea, and eventually by going to war.
This uncompromising spirit of liberty can be seen in the attitude of John Adams, one of the earliest, most principled, and most articulate advocates for independence. In 1775, he saw what few others did. Writing in June from the Continental Congress, then meeting in Philadelphia, Adams told Moses Gill, “I am myself as fond of Reconciliation … as any Man … [but] the Cancer is too deeply rooted, and too far spread to be cured by any thing short of cutting it out entire.” Adams rejected the position of the conciliationists and the pragmatists. “The Middle Way is none at all,” he wrote to General Horatio Gates. “If we finally fail in this great and glorious Contest, it will be by bewildering ourselves in groping for this middle Way.” For Adams, there was no turning back. In his letter to Gill, he also noted, “Powder and Artillery are the most efficacious, Sure, and infallibly conciliatory Measures We can adopt.” The time had come to invoke what he called, in the Novanglus letters, “revolution-principles.”47
At the fateful moment on August 2, when fifty-six men formally signed their declaration of independence, they heroically assumed full responsibility for the war that was sure to come. And when Patrick Henry the year before proclaimed, “Give me liberty, or give me death,” it was no idle pledge. In February 1776, word arrived that Parliament had declared that all Americans who did not submit unconditionally to the principle of parliamentary sovereignty would be deemed traitors. Adams and the other members of Congress knew that the punishment for treason was death by hanging. To make matters worse, it was reported that the British navy was headed to America with a cargo of German mercenaries—the dreaded Hessians. Imagine having to tell your wife, as Adams did, that in “Case of real Danger … fly to the Woods with our children.”48 Several months later, when forty-five ships of the British armada had actually dropped anchor off the coast of Manhattan, General Henry Knox, along with hundreds of other New Yorkers, was forced to evacuate his wife, Lucy, and their infant daughter. The British bombardment and invasion of the city would begin any day. On July 11, 1776, seven days after the Americans declared their independence, Knox wrote to Lucy, telling her “the great being who watches the hearts of the children of men, knows I value you above every blessing, and for that reason I wish you to be at such a distance from the horrid scenes of war.” As if to remind himself, he told her, “We’re fighting for our country, for posterity perhaps. On the success of this campaign the happiness or misery of millions may depend.”49
The moral universe inhabited by American revolutionaries might seem like a foreign place to twenty-first-century Americans, but we forget its moral lessons at our peril.
On July 3, 1776—the day after he had delivered one of the greatest speeches in American history, a speech that moved the Continental Congress to vote for independence and for which he was later called the “Atlas of Independence”—John Adams summed up the meaning of their declaration in language that captures perfectly the Americans’ sense of life:
You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not.—I am well aware of the Toil, and Blood, and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.—Yet through all the Gloom, I can see the Rays of lavishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction.50
Despite the vicissitudes that befell them—the hardships of war, the blood and toil, the starvation, the imprisonment and torture, the destruction of home and property, the loss of family and loved ones, and, for some, death itself—the American revolutionaries refused to compromise, or to surrender their lives, liberty, property, and sacred honor. Their revolution is surely one of history’s greatest monuments to human virtue. It is ours to remember and celebrate.