Delegates must have been primed to resume discussion of the proposed resolution for independence on Monday morning, although by this point the positions – but not the outcome — must have been well established and well known.

I haven’t read through Letters of the Delegates to Congress in a while. Unlike either the journals or Jefferson’s notes, they are much more scattered and piecemeal. For June 7-9, there are official letters from John Hancock to the colonies (about lead) and to General Washington, and Elbridge Gerry to his brother, and then to Jospeh Trumbull. Neither says anything about the resolution. A letter from the New York delegates to their convention does hint at “the question of independence being agitated” and some modification of their instructions. Robert Treat Paine addresses the manufacture of cannons.

But editor Smith didn’t confine himself strictly to “letters.” One fascinating piece that can’t nailed down perfectly is “John Dickinson’s Notes for a Speech in Congress,” which, based on context, seems to be part of his stated opposition to independence at this time. Dickinson is a complicated and problematic figure, and perhaps it is fairest to say of him that he sometimes thought in terms of unforeseen implications. For instance, would Pennsylvania’s independence somehow obligate it to a trade neutrality – and if so, how would that work in the present conflict and in the future? Additionally, Dickinson doubted that Congress really had popular support for independence, rather than reconciliation. But in the end, it appears that Dickinson was especially drawn toward “policy” – the practical ends.

There are two extensive letters by John Adams – June 9 to Samuel Cooper, then another to William Cushing. But how often did Adams not write an extensive letter. Adams hints, but not very openly, to the debate going on in Congress, except to say, “We are in the very midst of a Revolution, the most compleat, uexpected, and remarkable of any in the History of Nations.”

The tug of war between Dickinson and Adams encapsulates in one way pretty much everything about the spectrum of American Revolution views.

But the most explicit, and maybe even dramatic, letter is that of Edward Rutledge (South Carolina) to John Jay on “Saturday Evg 10 o’clock”: “The Congress sat till 7 o’clock this Evening in Consequence of a Motion of R.H. Lee’s resolving ourselves free & independent States.” Rutledge himself was on the Dickinson wavelength. Most tellingly, though, he asserted that when debate was “renewed on Monday” that he would “move to that it should be postponed for 3 weeks or a Month” – and that is exactly what happened. The journals are not terribly helpful, but it appears that after attending to other pressing business the committee of the whole took “farther consideration,” which – after who knows what speeches were given – resulted in being “postponed to Monday the first day of July next; and in the mean while, that no time be lost, in case the Congress agree thereto, that a committee be appointed to prepare a declaration to the effect of the first resolution.”

In short, we haven’t quite yet arrived at the nucleus of the Declaration proper yet we are very, very close – and more importantly, Thomson then copied into the journal for the first time the exact words – the exact wording – they had been debating and would continue again in three weeks, “which is in these words, ‘That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and Independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown; and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be totally dissolved.”

With that, we have arrived at the nucleus of American Independence. They are worth our pondering slowly and carefully over the next several weeks.

Countdown to Semiquincentennial: Number 4, June 10
By Michael G. Ditmore