Our Forefathers Could Kick Your Fathers' Butts
By Phil McCombs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page F01
washingtonpost.com
On a recent balmy evening in the great rotunda of the National Archives, a white-haired scholar stood beside the Declaration of Independence. He was trembling with emotion. He was telling the story one more time -- only it was different, somehow.
For a magical hour, historian David McCullough managed to break through the tired old gloss, reach past the abstractions of dusty texts, and present the passionate beating heart of history -- the dust and sweat, the stunning providential fact that somehow at that time, in that place, were men and women of tremendous insight and fortitude who pulled off a violent revolution against the greatest imperial power since Rome.
"We still tend to see them, alas, as distant and unreal," McCullough said, "which, of course, is totally wrong. They were very real, they were very human. This document begins, let us not forget," -- he gestured at the parchment of the Declaration, protected under glass -- "with the lines 'When in the course of human events . . .'
"Human events. They were not gods, they were not marble idols, they were not superpeople. . . . They were flawed, they were imperfect, they were vulnerable, they were susceptible to the failings of human nature and the human spirit as any of us are."
On July 4, 1776, the day the Second Continental Congress finished editing and then voted to approve his draft of the Declaration in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson found time to shop for ladies' gloves and a thermometer he bought at John Sparhawk's London Bookshop for 3 pounds 15 shillings. The detail is in McCullough's new book, "John Adams."
"And they didn't know how it was going to come out," the historian continued in his Archives address, which was open to the public. "The hardest thing of all in writing history, [or] conveying history with great exhibits such as are in this magnificent National Archives, is to convey the idea that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. . . . It could have gone wrong. It could have gone off in any number of different directions."
The nation's founders, he said, were gutsy people of character "in the hands of fate. 'We cannot guarantee success,' John Adams wrote to [his wife] Abigail, 'but we can do something better. We can deserve it.' Think about that! How different that is from our own attitude -- that all that matters is success, that all we applaud is who is number one."
As Congress revised the Declaration in a spare, whitewashed room in the Pennsylvania State House, deleting many of his cherished phrases, Jefferson was silent. Benjamin Franklin leaned over and told him about the hatmaker who'd wanted a sign made with a picture of a hat and the words, "JOHN THOMPSON, HATTER, MAKES AND SELLS HATS FOR READY MONEY." Thoughtful friends deleted one word after another until only Thompson's name and the picture remained.
Yet it was Jefferson, ultimately, who had conceived and written the words that ring down through the ages:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
At the time, Jefferson was holding 200 human beings in bondage on his Virginia plantation. Of all the members of the Continental Congress, at least a third owned or had owned slaves. Franklin, who adamantly opposed slavery, had once owned two black house servants. John Hancock of Massachusetts, president of the Congress, had only recently freed the last of his slaves.
"That it was, at the least, inconsistent for slave owners to be espousing freedom and equality was not lost on Adams, any more than on others on both sides of the Atlantic," McCullough wrote in his book. "In London, Samuel Johnson, who had no sympathy for the American cause, had asked, 'How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?' "
But Adams -- the stouthearted "colossus of independence" (in Jefferson's phrase), who by force of personality and intellect had ramrodded Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independence through Congress July 2 -- was utterly opposed to slavery and had never owned another human being.
In her letters to her husband, Abigail Adams had "pondered whether the agonies of pestilence and war could be God's punishment for the sin of slavery," McCullough wrote. In his Archives speech, he said their common viewpoint on such matters was a foundation for "one of the great love stories in American history," as revealed in their touching letters during the long separations while he was away laboring for the country and she remained at home.
"We live, my dear soul," he wrote her, "in an age of trial. What will be the consequence, I know not."
"You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator," she wrote. "We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them."
He was far from inactive. It was Adams -- later George Washington's vice president and then the second president of the United States -- who arranged for Jefferson to write the Declaration, who earlier had nominated Washington to command the Continental Army after war broke out April 19, 1775, with the British assaults on Lexington and Concord, who "alone, of all those people in Philadelphia . . . predicted it would be a very long, very costly and very bloody war."
McCullough told his audience that when Adams's friend Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania, at 30 among the youngest of the signers (Franklin, 70, was the oldest), had mentioned Tom Paine's stirring phrase about "times that try men's souls," Adams, "to his great credit, responded . . . 'Let's never forget, these are the times that try women's souls, too.' "
In their farmhouse in Braintree, Mass., "Abigail Adams would have been up in the morning at 5 o'clock starting the fire in the fireplace, feeding the stock, feeding the chickens, waking up the hired girl, cooking the meals. Because the war was on in 1776, all schools were canceled. She would have to educate her children at home.
"She had to manage the farm. She had to make do financially in a time of rampant inflation and shortages of all kinds. The war was at her doorstep, troops were marching by in the street just outside the house, the dust would blow in the kitchen window. Soldiers would sleep on the kitchen floor at night. She was melting down pewter spoons in the fireplace to help make musket balls. The War of Independence was no abstraction in her life.
"By the end of the day, exhausted, she would probably have the children upstairs in bed by around, let's say, 10 o'clock, and then she would sit down and write letters to her distant husband in Philadelphia, which she referred to as 'that far country.' She'd never been more than 50 miles from home. Her husband, until he went to attend the First Continental Congress [in the summer of 1774], had never been out of New England."
Just two months after Lexington and Concord, on June 17, 1775, Abigail heard the thunder of the British bombardment at the Battle of Bunker Hill. John was again away in Congress, having two days earlier nominated Washington for commander. Abigail took "seven-year-old Johnny by the hand," McCullough wrote -- John Quincy Adams would become the sixth president of the United States -- "and hurried up the road to the top of nearby Penn's Hill.
"From a granite outcropping . . . they could see the smoke of battle rising beyond Boston, ten miles up the Bay. It was the first all-out battle of the war. 'How many have fallen we know not,' she wrote that night. 'The constant roar of the cannon is so distressing that we cannot eat, drink, or sleep.' "
British Gen. William Howe managed that day to break the siege of British positions in Boston by 15,000 Americans enraged by the slaughter at Lexington, but suffered disastrous casualties -- 271 dead and 783 wounded, to 140 Americans killed and 271 wounded.
The new Americans were rugged, resourceful folk.
"We see those 18th-century people too often as figures in a make-believe costume pageant," McCullough said, "with the men wearing lace at their cuffs and . . . satin pants, [and] the inclination is to think of them as soft, fops, even sissies -- but they were very tough."
The day they voted themselves independent -- July 2, 1776, some 15 months after Lexington -- more than 100 British warships had just been sighted off the coast of New York. The armada numbered 400 and soon landed 32,000 seasoned British troops and German mercenaries on Staten Island, a mere day and a half's march from Philadelphia.
The largest city in the Colonies at the time, Philadelphia had a population of only 30,000. (New York had 18,000, Boston perhaps 15,000.) In the Battle of Long Island, which followed in late August -- it was fought in Brooklyn -- Gen. Washington's inexperienced army of 19,000 was smashed, suffering 2,000 killed and wounded. Washington managed to withdraw his forces under cover of night, but was forced to abandon New York.
In eight years of command, Washington declined to take a salary but submitted an expense account for $160,074. Meticulously detailed in his own hand -- it was on exhibit near the Declaration, Constitution and Bill of Rights as McCullough spoke -- it includes expenses for himself and his headquarters for such items as blacksmiths, housekeepers and spies.
"It's a moving experience to be reminded of all that they faced, all that they had to overcome, all the odds that were against them," McCullough said, "and to be reminded emphatically . . . of what a small, small country it was."
In 1776, there were 2.5 million Americans stretched along the East Coast, a band of population only about 50 miles deep; some 500,000 of these were men, women and children held in bondage.
"When [Congress] gathered in Philadelphia to make this momentous Declaration," McCullough continued, "as John Adams said, about a third of the country were Tories, a third were timid and the rest were true-blue. He and those whose names figure on this great document" -- again, the historian gestured at the Declaration -- "were true-blue, believe me."
They were guilty of high treason against the British crown, punishable by death. As another Archives exhibit near the Declaration explained: "By July 4, 1776 the King had declared every rebel a traitor. There was a reward posted for the capture of certain prominent rebel leaders.
"While none of the [56] signers of the Declaration was actually tried for treason, 15 had their homes destroyed, four were taken captive and one spent the winter of 1776 in the woods pursued by British soldiers." By war's end, half the delegates to Congress "suffered direct, personal consequences for their support of American independence."
As the crucial vote on independence had approached, McCullough said, "many people wanted to postpone this great document. They felt it was better to wait. . . . There were rumors coming from England that they really did want to have a reconciliation with us, and Adams said, using a true farmer's analogy, 'Those rumors remind me of the way I get my horse when I hold out my hat and he thinks there's corn in it and he comes and finds it empty.' "
The opposition was led by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, "an ardent patriot, every bit of a patriot, who said then was not the time, nor should they necessarily even risk writing a Declaration of Independence, because as he said it would be like launching our fortunes 'in a skiff made of paper.' "
But on July 1, in the greatest speech of his life, Adams overwhelmed all opposition. Speaking for two hours behind closed doors, he was, Jefferson would recall, "not graceful nor elegant, nor remarkably fluent," but spoke "with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats."
No transcription was made, no notes kept.
A great storm had swept through Philadelphia as Adams spoke that day, striking with thunder, lightning and pelting rain. He kept on talking, "logical, positive, sensitive to the historic importance of the moment," McCullough speculated in his book, ". . . much in the spirit of lines he had written in a recent letter to a friend:
"'Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, measures in which the lives and liberties of millions, born and unborn are most essentially interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.'"
The next day, the vote was for independence.
"We can never, never know enough about them," McCullough said. "Their stories need repeating every generation.
"They were the real thing -- don't ever forget that." |
