A Skiff Made of Paper

He had counted it so often that he no longer needed to, and he counted it again anyway, at the window in Chestnut Street at four in the morning, with the speech on the table behind him and the street still dark.

Six for. New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Connecticut, the four New England governments, which had been for it since the spring before and would be for it at the Last Judgement. Virginia, whose convention had instructed its delegates in May to propose it, so that the motion on the table was a Virginian’s. North Carolina, which had instructed its delegates in April, before anybody.

Five against. Pennsylvania, by four votes to three in its own delegation, his among the four. The Jerseys, whose provincial congress had sat at Burlington in June with the King’s Speech and the Lords’ resolution in front of it, and had sent its delegates instructions to do nothing that would shut the door. Maryland, whose convention had sat at Annapolis on the twenty-eighth and declined to change the instructions it gave in May, so that Mr Chase, who had ridden home to change them, had ridden back without. South Carolina, where young Mr Edward Rutledge led a delegation that had come to Philadelphia to stay in the empire on better terms, not to leave it. And Georgia, whose instructions came from Savannah, which was a long way from Philadelphia and a short way from the Creeks.

New York would not vote. Its delegates had no instructions, and had written to their convention for some, and the convention would not sit until the ninth.

That left the Lower Counties on Delaware, and the Lower Counties were divided. Mr McKean was for it. Mr Read was against it. And Mr Rodney, who would have settled it, was away in Sussex with the militia, where fifteen hundred of his neighbours had taken up arms for the King at the end of June, and was not expected back.

A colony divided did not vote. Six for, five against, and the motion carried.

He had known it for a week, since the news came from Annapolis, and he had come to this window every morning since and done the sum again, as though it might come out differently in a better light. It did not. He was going to stand up in a few hours and make the best speech of his life against a thing that would be done whatever he said, and he was going to lose it by the one colony in America where he had grown up.

He went back to the table and read the speech over once more.

---

He had written out only the beginning. The rest was notes, five close pages of them, because he did not trust himself to read a long speech to men who were not listening, and because he had found over the years that a thing he had written out entire came out of his mouth sounding written. But the beginning he had written out, and rewritten, and he knew it by heart.

He had kept the sentence about the skiff though it pleased him, which was usually cause to strike a sentence. The votes were counted, and the men who cast them carried their instructions in their pockets. He was not trying to persuade anybody this time. He was trying to be remembered correctly.

The room was full by ten and hot by eleven, with the windows shut against the flies from the stable yard, and the Congress went into a committee of the whole, as it did for the great questions, so that Mr Hancock came down from the chair and Mr Harrison of Virginia filled it. The secretary read the motion. That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States. Mr Lee who had moved it was not there to hear it read; he had gone home to Virginia in June to make a government, and had left it to the Adamses to carry. Mr Harrison looked down the room, and Dickinson stood up.

“Sir,” he said. “The consequences involved in the motion now lying before you are of such magnitude that I tremble under the oppressive honour of sharing in its determination.”

He saw John Adams, across the room, settle back very slightly in his chair, like a man at a play he has seen before.

He made the arguments he had made all spring, in order, plainly, because they were true. That foreign help would not be got by declaring anything, but by what the army did in the field, which was the only evidence of union and vigour that France or Spain would respect. That France and Spain had not been asked, and might as well be offended as pleased by a people who began their empire in so high a style on the point of being invaded. That the colonies had not yet agreed among themselves on a single article of a confederation, and that he knew it better than any man in the room, because he sat on the committee that was trying to draw one, and some of them there totally despaired of any reasonable terms. That the first campaign would very likely decide the war, and that the first campaign had not been fought. That to declare now would commit the country to an alternative where to go back would be infamy and to go on might be destruction.

Then he made the argument he had not been able to make in the spring, because in the spring it had not been true.

“The King has received our petition,” he said. “I do not say he has answered it. He has not answered it. I do not say he has changed his mind about this war; I have seen no sign that he has. But he has received it, which he need not have done, and he has said from his throne that he will hear our grievances, which he need not have said, and the House of Lords has resolved against his own ministers that our petition is a ground of conciliation. His commissioners are on the sea. Sir, we have asked to be heard. It appears that we are to be. And there is a paper on this table, drawn by a committee of this Congress, that tells them in words they cannot misread what it is we want. I ask the gentlemen to send it before they burn the house they are asking to be let live in.”

Nobody moved. It was very hot.

“To declare our independence now,” he said, “unprepared as we are, confiding in our fortune more boldly than Caesar himself, would be to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.”

He sat down. There was no sound in the room for a moment, and then a little general shifting, as there always was, and Mr Harrison looked down the room for the next man, and found John Adams already on his feet.

---

Adams spoke without a note, for something over an hour, and it was the best speech Dickinson had ever heard him make.

Adams said that the colonies had been independent in fact since Lexington, that no foreign power would treat with subjects, and that the King’s courtesy had cost the King nothing and the Congress proposed to pay for it with everything. He did not answer Dickinson; he went round him. Last he said that the gentleman from Pennsylvania had spoken of a skiff made of paper, and that the paper on the table was a very fine paper, and might float no better. Dickinson looked down at his own notes. He had no answer there to that.

Adams was not speaking to the room. He was speaking to the year after next.

When Adams sat down it was past four, and Mr Rutledge rose and moved that the committee rise, and that the question on Mr Lee’s motion be put to the Congress together with the question on the paper on the table, when the committee had gone through it, since the one was the alternative to the other and the country should be told both answers on the same day. The New England men looked at each other. Then Samuel Adams nodded, very slightly, and they let it go without a division. Dickinson understood. They had counted too, and they had six to five, and they could afford to be generous about the day.

In the yard afterwards he stood with George Read under the trees.

“McKean has sent an express to Caesar,” Read said.

“To Sussex?”

“To Dover first. They will find him wherever he is.”

“Then it is seven,” said Dickinson.

Read did not answer at once. He was a quiet, heavy, careful man, a lawyer of New Castle, who had never in Dickinson’s hearing said a thing he could not prove. He looked across the yard to where McKean was talking to the Adamses with his hat on the back of his head.

“Caesar has had a hard fortnight in Sussex,” he said. “He wrote to me on Friday.” And then, when Dickinson looked at him: “I do not know what he will do, John. I do not think he knows.”

---

They went through the paper on the Tuesday and the Wednesday, line by line, in committee.

It was a strange thing to sit through. The paper was Mr Jefferson’s, mostly, all but the end, and the end was Dickinson’s, and both of them sat in the room and listened to the Congress take it apart. Mr Jefferson said nothing at all, for two days. He sat very upright, a tall young man with a reddish head, and watched his sentences go, one after another, with a face that showed nothing; and the nothing was so complete that it was itself a kind of speech, and Dickinson found that he was sorry for him, and did not know how to say so to a man he hardly knew. Mr Franklin, beside him, told him a story about a hatter, which seemed to help.

We ask not to be let go, but to be let alone. He had written it at Fairhill, on the back of a letter about drains. The New England men objected as he expected. The sentence stood.

On the Wednesday the committee came to the passage on the slave trade.

It was the longest charge in the paper and the angriest, and it laid the trade at the King’s door: that he had kept open a market where men were bought and sold, and vetoed every law the colonies had passed to close it. Mr Rutledge said that South Carolina would not put its name to it, and Georgia said so after him. Some of the northern men, whose towns had built the ships and fitted them out, were suddenly interested in the windows. The thing was struck out in a quarter of an hour, without a division, as a courtesy to the colonies whose votes the paper needed, and the committee went on to the next charge.

Dickinson said nothing, and knew exactly why. At Poplar Hall he owned men, women and children, as his father had. His wife’s people had told him for twenty years what the struck passage said, and he had always meant to deal with it, as a man means to settle a debt. Now a paper he had helped write had the chance to say it for him, and he let it pass. He did not pretend that he did not know what his silence was worth.

On the Tuesday the news had come that Howe’s fleet was at Sandy Hook, a hundred and thirty sail, and on the Wednesday that the regulars were landing on Staten Island without a shot fired. The Associators were ordered to the Jerseys. Dickinson was a colonel of them. He went from the State House to the drill ground and back, and his men did what they were told, and he noticed that some of them had stopped looking at him when they did it.

---

On the night of the third a storm came up out of the south-west at about eleven, and he lay awake in Chestnut Street and listened to it.

It was a great storm, the kind the summer brought every year or two, the thunder right over the roofs and the rain coming down the street like a river, and the lightning showing him the ceiling of his room in white flashes, every crack in it. He lay and listened and thought about the road from Dover, eighty miles of it, through Smyrna and Christiana Bridge and Chester, all of it clay. He thought about a man with asthma and a cancer in his face riding it in the dark, in this, because McKean had sent for him. He did not know whether Rodney was on the road. He thought he was. Caesar Rodney had been sent for a great many times in his life, by one thing and another, and had never been known not to come.

He thought: if he does not come, I lose by one. If he comes, I lose by two. And he thought of Read under the trees, saying that he did not think Caesar knew, and he lay in the dark and listened to the rain and did not let himself think anything else.

---

Rodney came into the State House yard a little after nine on the Thursday morning, on a horse that could barely stand, with mud to his thighs and his boots still on and his spurs on his boots, and the green silk scarf he wore over the ruined side of his face soaked black with rain.

McKean was at the door before he was off the horse. Dickinson, at the other end of the yard, watched McKean take his hand in both of his own and say something, laughing, and watched Rodney let him, and say very little back. Then Rodney went in, walking stiffly, like a man who has been eighteen hours in the saddle, and sat down in his place without taking his boots off, and closed his eyes.

The Congress sat. Mr Hancock took the chair. The committee reported. And Mr Hancock put the question on Mr Lee’s motion, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, and asked the secretary to call the colonies.

Charles Thomson called them as he always did, from north to south, in his dry clear voice, and wrote each answer down before he called the next.

New Hampshire: aye. Massachusetts Bay: aye. Rhode Island: aye. Connecticut: aye.

New York. Mr Livingston rose and said that the delegates of New York, having no instructions, begged to be excused, and sat. Thomson wrote it down.

New Jersey: no. Pennsylvania: no. He gave Pennsylvania’s answer himself, four to three, in a voice he was pleased to find steady.

The Lower Counties on Delaware.

The three of them stood up at their table, as a divided delegation did when it was polled in the open. McKean said aye, loudly, before anyone had asked him. Read said no. And Rodney, with his eyes open now, and the scarf dark across his face, stood a moment longer than he needed to, and looked not at McKean and not at Read but down the room at nothing in particular, and said no.

Nobody spoke. Thomson wrote it down. McKean sat down very slowly, like an old man.

Maryland: no. Virginia: aye. North Carolina: aye. South Carolina: no. Georgia: no.

Thomson added it up, which took him no time at all, and stood, and gave it to the chair. Six colonies for the question, six against, New York not voting.

Mr Hancock looked at the paper for a moment longer than he needed to. Then he said, in his clear unhappy voice, that the question was not carried.

Dickinson did not look at the Adamses. He did not look at anybody. He looked at the window at the end of the room, where the light was coming in grey and clean after the rain, and found that his hands were quite still on the table in front of him, and that he did not feel anything at all.

---

They adopted the Grievances that afternoon.

No colony voted against the Grievances. New York again begged to be excused. Hancock signed the fair copy and Thomson attested it. A clerk carried it to Dunlap’s and was told to wait for the proofs.

Dickinson found Rodney afterwards in the yard, sitting on the mounting block in the shade with his eyes shut and his hat over his knee.

“You will want to know why,” Rodney said, without opening them.

“I would not presume to ask.”

“Then I’ll tell you, and you’ll stop looking at me like that.” He opened his eyes. “I have spent a fortnight in Sussex keeping fifteen hundred men who love the King from being hanged by fifteen hundred men who do not, and they are the same families, John, the same farms, the same meeting house. I told them all the Congress was not going to do anything foolish. I told them the King had received the petition. It was the only thing that got them home.” He shut his eyes again. “If we declared today they would be out again by August, both lots, and I should have a war in my own county. I came to vote for it. I meant to. I sat on that horse all night meaning to. And somewhere about Chester it came to me that I could not go back to Lewes with it.”

“McKean will not forgive you.”

“McKean will forgive me in a month. The country is another thing.” Rodney put his hat on and stood up, carefully. “Don’t thank me. I didn’t do it for you.”

Adams went past them at the gate without stopping. He raised his hat to them both, very properly, and went on into Chestnut Street with his hands behind his back.

---

He walked home late, the long way, by Market Street.

Dunlap’s press was working behind the open shop. Sheets hung on lines like washing, all headed In Congress, July 4, 1776. By morning the express riders would have them. Dickinson stopped in the street to look at them, and stayed some time.

Everything they had ever sent the King had been paper, and the King had answered it with regiments every time but one. That was what he had been saying since the spring. He knew only that this was not a skiff, whatever Adams said, because it was going the other way, into the storm, towards the one man it was written to.

A boy came out of the shop with an armful of sheets and nearly ran into him, and said “Beg pardon, Colonel,” and then looked at him properly, and knew him, and said nothing else at all. Dickinson stood aside to let him pass, and went home.