Of Right Ought to Be

The King’s ministers had made the Congress the best offer they would ever make it, and it reached York by way of the enemy’s printer, in a parcel from General Washington’s camp, folded small.

Mr Thomson read it to them in the courthouse after dinner. There were twenty-three members in the room, which was a good attendance for York, and the windows were open on the square for the first time that spring, so that the sound of the market came in, and a smell of manure and apple blossom, and a German voice somewhere below crying cheeses; and Mr Thomson stood at his table under the window in his plain coat and read the papers through from beginning to end in his flat Irish voice, as he read everything, the price of shoes and the death of generals, without any expression whatever.

The first bill renounced revenue taxes, keeping only trade duties whose proceeds would go to the colony paying them. The second allowed commissioners to treat with the Congress, suspend Acts since the tenth of February, 1763, grant pardons, restore governments and consider colonial seats at Westminster. Washington wrote that the drafts were being distributed through every channel the enemy had.

When Mr Thomson had finished, nobody said anything for a while. A cart went by in the square.

Adams followed the clauses with his hands on his stick.

They had asked for much less in seventy-four. Now the Congress could be treated with as the Congress. Pardons for everybody, himself included. He resented the pardon more than was useful. He looked round to see whether anyone would mention it.

No American Parliament. Seats at Westminster, yes; a place among hundreds who had never crossed the ocean. The promise that they would not tax America rested on the same authority that claimed the right to do it. Nothing prevented the next Parliament changing its mind.

And it had come too late. It had come in a parcel from a camp where men were still eating fire cake, in the same spring as a rumour from France that every member in the room had heard and none would mention. Adams looked along the tables at the men who had beaten him in seventy-six, and saw that they knew it too.

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The papers went to a committee the same afternoon: Mr Gouverneur Morris of New York, and Mr Drayton of South Carolina, and Mr Dana of Massachusetts. They reported on the Wednesday, and the Congress adopted the report unanimously, and Adams voted for every word of it, and so did every man who had voted against him two years before. He found that interesting.

The report said that the bills were meant to divide the people and to make them slack in their preparations for the campaign. It said that any man or body of men who should presume to make any separate or partial convention or agreement with commissioners under the Crown of Great Britain ought to be considered and treated as open and avowed enemies of these United Colonies. And it said that the Congress could not with propriety hold any conference or treaty with any commissioners on the part of Great Britain unless they should, as a preliminary to it, withdraw their fleets and armies.

That was the whole of it. Mr Morris had drafted it, very well, with a good deal of wit at the expense of Lord North that Adams would have been glad to have written himself; and it went out to the printers and was in every newspaper from New Hampshire to Georgia within the month.

The refusal was unanimous. Adams wanted no treaty; Morris wanted one without an enemy army in Philadelphia. The Jerseys and Maryland had instructions, and South Carolina would not be seen to want anything. London would receive one resolution and suppose the Americans of one mind. Adams thought it very likely the last time they would be.

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He had been home for the winter.

He had gone in November, six weeks after the Congress came to York, and ridden the four hundred miles to Braintree in the sleet, and spent December and January and February at home with his wife and his children and his law books, and his farm under the snow, and had been happier than he had any right to be, with the army at Valley Forge. He had argued causes in the courts. He had heard Johnny, who was ten now, construe his Latin at the kitchen table, and listened to Nabby read, and parted Charles and Tommy when they fought. He had sat up with Abigail after the children were in bed, in front of the fire, and talked about the war until she told him to stop, and then about other things. The General Court had chosen him again for the new year, and in March, when the roads began to open, he had kissed them all and ridden south.

York was a town of Germans, a few hundred houses of brick and stone and logs along two crossing streets, with the courthouse in the middle of the square where they crossed, and the market round it, and the Codorus Creek at the bottom of the town, and the Susquehanna, which was a mile wide and very comforting, between it and the King’s army. The Germans were civil. They let rooms to the members at prices that showed they had heard of Philadelphia, and went to their own churches, and spoke their own language in the street, and looked at the Congress, Adams thought, rather as they looked at the weather: as a thing that had come, and would go, and was not their business. He envied them sometimes.

There were never more than thirty members in the room and often fewer than twenty. Mr Hancock had gone home in the autumn. Mr Samuel Adams had gone home. New Hampshire had nobody there at all, that spring, and the North Carolina gentlemen went home at the end of April, and the Congress of the United Colonies, which had been fifty men in the State House in Philadelphia in the summer of seventy-six, with the whole continent watching, was a score of tired men in a country courthouse who knew each other’s arguments by heart and could finish each other’s sentences, and sometimes did.

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Mr Simeon Deane came in on the second of May, a Saturday, in the afternoon, from France.

He had landed at Falmouth in Casco Bay three weeks before from a French frigate, and ridden from there, by Boston, with his dispatches in a bag strapped under his coat, and he was the colour of a man who had been in the saddle for three weeks, and he would not give the bag to anybody but the President. The Congress had adjourned until Monday. Mr Laurens sent round the town for the members, and they came in from their dinners and their lodgings, wiping their mouths, and by candlelight in the courthouse, with the doors shut and the square outside full of people who had seen the horse come in, Mr Thomson broke the seals.

It was from Paris, from the commissioners, and the first letter was the Doctor’s, and Adams would have known it for Franklin’s if it had come without a name.

It said what the King of France would do. It set it down in order, plainly, without one ornament, in the words of the French minister, as nearly as the Doctor could give them: a treaty of amity and commerce, and with it an alliance; the King’s arms and his fleets and his treasure engaged until the thing was done; no advantage to be taken of their present situation; and the King’s own candour, that he did not pretend to act wholly for their sakes, since the power of England would be diminished by the separation, and that was manifestly the interest of France. And then the condition, which the minister had said was no condition but the nature of the thing. A king could sign a treaty only with a sovereign. Let the Congress declare the colonies free and independent States, and empower its commissioners to sign for them, and the King would sign with them the same day.

The treaties themselves were in the bag, in a fair copy, drawn and agreed at Versailles article by article in the winter, and not signed. There was a space at the foot of each for the names.

Adams heard it read, and looked at the candles, and found that his eyes had gone hot and that he could not see the candles very well.

He had wanted it for three years. He had asked for it in the State House in seventy-six without a note, and lost it by one man’s ride through the rain, and now the King of France, of all the kings in the world, had sent it to him by a man on a horse, with a place left for his signature.

Franklin stated no opinion. He reported the offer and its condition as plainly as the price of tobacco. Adams knew how the Doctor had voted at Pennsylvania’s table, and that he had lost there four to three. He thought the old man was telling them something by saying nothing, and he thought he knew what it was. You have been asked this before.

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He moved it himself on the Monday. He had decided in the night that he would, and that nobody else should be let do it.

He rose at the Massachusetts table when the President called for business, and moved, in the same words Mr Lee had moved two years ago and he had carried for him in Mr Lee’s absence, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; and further, that the commissioners of the Congress at the court of France be empowered to sign the treaties of amity and commerce and of alliance now before the Congress, in the name of the said States.

Mr Richard Henry Lee seconded it. He had come in from Virginia on the Friday, the day before Mr Deane, thin and grave, with his hand wrapped in its black silk where he had lost his fingers to a fowling piece years ago; and he got to his feet at the Virginia table and said that he had moved this motion once before, and had been in Virginia when it was put, and had regretted it every day since, and that he was glad to have lived to second it in his own person. Then he sat down, and looked at Adams, and Adams looked back at him, and neither of them said what they were both thinking, which was that they had counted, and it was not enough.

They debated it for three days.

He spoke for an hour and a half. London’s promise could be repealed by the next Parliament; a power of their own could not. Without French ships the King’s army would hold New York, Philadelphia, Newport and the sea. “The men at Valley Forge,” he said, “have starved all winter for a cause this Congress will not name.” In seventy-six they had said no foreign power offered aid. Now one did. He stopped and waited for Morris.

Mr Gouverneur Morris answered him on the Tuesday.

Morris was twenty-six, tall and handsome and very sure of himself, a New York gentleman of a great family whose mother still lived at Morrisania inside the King’s lines and whose half-brother had been an officer in the King’s army for twenty years. He had a gift Adams had always envied and never trusted: he could make a room laugh just when Adams needed it serious. He congratulated Massachusetts on its finest speech for the King of France. The Doctor’s letter showed His Most Christian Majesty acting candidly for France’s interest. Morris believed him. Would the Congress consider what it was exchanging?

“We are offered,” he said, “a King who will not give us a Parliament. We are invited to prefer to him a King who has never given his own people one.”

There was a little laughter. Adams did not laugh.

London’s bills were rightly refused while troops held their capital. But the ministry had come three-quarters of the way; why burn the boats? An alliance bound them to make no separate peace. Morris asked whether the farmers of Pennsylvania and the Jerseys had agreed to fight for French sugar islands, for revenge in the Channel or India, until France was satisfied. Then he turned to Gérard’s last assurance.

“The Doctor tells us,” he said, “that if we decline, His Majesty will consider his own interests, which are not very different from ours. I believe the Doctor. I believe His Majesty will go to war with England this summer whether we sign his paper or not, because it is his interest to go to war with England this summer, and he has been waiting three years for a reason. Let him go. We shall have his war without his treaty. We shall have the French fleet in the Channel and the King’s ministers at our door with their hats in their hands, and we shall still be free to take from London, when London is ready to give it, the one thing we have asked for. I would not bind my country to a king’s quarrel for ever in order to get what that king will give us for nothing.”

Adams was on his feet before Morris had sat down.

“The gentleman,” he said, “would take a man’s sword and refuse him his hand, and expect him to go on lending the sword.”

“I would take it as long as it was offered, sir,” said Morris. “As His Majesty takes our trade.”

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On the Wednesday Mr Laurens put the question, and Mr Thomson called the colonies.

Adams had counted it on the Sunday night, at the table in his room, and again on the Monday, and again that morning, and he did not need to count it now, and counted it anyway, with his lips moving, at the table, as the names came.

New Hampshire. No member present. Thomson wrote it down.

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

New York. Mr Morris rose. New York, which had begged to be excused in seventy-six because its delegates had no instructions, had instructions now, and Mr Morris gave its answer in a clear voice, and it was no.

The Jerseys: no.

Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania delegates were new men, put in by the radicals who had turned Mr Dickinson out, men who had been for independence when it was dangerous. But Pennsylvania had had both armies in it all winter, and it had been a long winter; and they looked at each other across their table, and were divided, two and two, and Pennsylvania gave no voice. Adams heard it and felt something go in his chest, quite small, like a thread breaking. He had not been sure of Pennsylvania. He had hoped.

The Lower Counties on Delaware. Mr McKean stood up alone. He had said aye in seventy-six, loudly, before anybody asked him; and he stood now with a paper in his hand, which was the instruction of the Assembly of the Lower Counties, and read from it in a flat voice that the delegates were to consent to no measure that would shut the door against an accommodation with Great Britain on the terms of the Fourth of July; and then he folded the paper, and said, “No,” and sat down, and did not look at anybody.

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

Four colonies for. Six against. Pennsylvania divided. Two not in the room.

Mr Thomson added it up, which took him no time at all, and gave it to the chair; and Mr Laurens, who had voted against it himself with South Carolina, and had been as courteous to Adams through the three days as a man can be to another man he is about to beat, declared in a quiet voice that the motion was lost.

It was wider than in seventy-six. Adams had known it would be. In seventy-six they had lost on a tie, by one man’s ride through the rain, and had been able to tell each other for two years that it had been an accident of the weather. Nobody would be able to say that now.

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The rest took the afternoon. The Congress resolved, by a great majority, that it had the highest sense of His Most Christian Majesty’s magnanimity and goodness; that it could not, consistently with the declared sense of the people of the Colonies and its own resolution of the Fourth of July, 1776, accept treaties founded on a declaration it had not made; that it relied with confidence on the continuance of His Majesty’s friendship; and that the commissioners at Paris be instructed to convey all this to the Comte de Vergennes, in such terms as might best preserve that friendship, and the supplies. A committee of three was named to draft the letter. None of them had voted with him. Adams did not ask to be put on it, and was not.

He walked out with Mr Lee at six, into the square, where the market had gone and the boys were playing at something in the long light by the courthouse steps.

“I was not here the last time,” Lee said, after a while. “I have told myself for two years that it might have made a difference.”

“It made a difference of one man,” said Adams. “Virginia was aye without you, and was aye today.”

They stood for a moment and watched the boys. Then Lee put out his maimed hand in its black silk, and Adams took it, and they went their ways.

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He wrote to Abigail that night and told her the numbers. He had moved it himself, he wrote, and Mr Morris had made a very good speech and he had made a better one, and had lost; he believed he was the only man in America who had lost the same vote twice and been fool enough to move it himself the second time, and supposed he should have it cut on his stone. The French fleet would very likely be on the coast by the summer whatever the Congress did, and she was not to be frightened by it, since it would be fighting on their side without having been asked. He began to write that he did not know what the Congress would do now, and struck it out, because he did. It would wait for London to come the last quarter of the way, and London would come, and they would have their Parliament and their King, and he would be expected to be glad. He folded the letter.

He sealed it, and sat for a while with the candle.

Then, because he could not sleep and could not read anything he had brought, he went to his trunk and found, at the bottom of it, under his shirts, a little pamphlet of his own: the thing he had written two springs ago for the gentlemen of the Congress who had asked him how a people might make itself a government, and which Dunlap had printed with a title and without his name. Thoughts on Government. He had written it for thirteen governments. He sat down with it at the table and began to read it, to pass the time, and found that it was better than he remembered, and that very nearly all of it would do as well for one.

At two in the morning he discovered that he had begun to write in the margin, and put down the pen as if it were hot, and went to bed, and lay a long time with the window open, listening to the frogs down on the Codorus, who did not care in the least who governed them.