Book One: The Olive Branch Part One: The Petition Characters
Chapter Three
The Piddling Genius
John Dickinson. Philadelphia, in the Province of Pennsylvania. Saturday, 8 July 1775.
The acceptance of the Olive Branch is the decisive antecedent. The King could have refused to receive the petition and proclaimed the colonies in rebellion, foreclosing reconciliation. The Crown accepted it instead, on the advice of the Colonial Secretary, Lord Dartmouth, declining to proclaim a rebellion and leaving a settlement possible.
He had written it four times, and the fourth time he had taken out everything he liked.
The sentences that pleased him had been the first to go. He had learned that at Fairhill, writing the Farmer’s letters: an argument must survive in the hands of a man determined to find fault with it. The sword drawn and the scabbard broken had gone in the second draft. He still missed it.
Four fair sides remained. His Majesty’s faithful subjects declared their attachment to his person, family and government, explained that they had been driven to arms, and prayed for reconciliation. They requested a means of accommodation. They conceded none. Parliament’s authority went unmentioned; one sentence on that would have lost half the signatures.
The Congress had agreed to it on Wednesday, which was the fifth, after the sort of day he had come to expect: two hours of general approval, an hour of amendment, and a quarter of an hour in which the whole business nearly went over because Mr Gadsden wanted a word changed and would not be told why the word was there.
The word was humble. Mr Gadsden of South Carolina, who had been a firebrand since before there was anything to set fire to, said that he would not describe himself as humble to any man living, and that if the Congress meant to crawl it should at least do so on its own account and not on his. There was a noise of agreement from three benches, mostly New England, and Mr Dickinson stood up and said that the word was not a description of the Congress but a form of address, that it appeared in every petition laid before every English sovereign since the reign of Edward the Third, and that its absence would be noticed in London by men who noticed nothing else.
“Then let them notice,” said Gadsden.
“They will notice,” said Dickinson, “and they will say that the Americans have sent us a paper that does not know how a paper is written, and they will say it with relief, because it will save them reading the rest of it. Sir, we are asking for our rights in a language chosen by the people we are asking. That is not crawling. That is knowing where the door is.”
The word stayed in. It stayed in by eight colonies to four with one divided, which was a better majority than he had expected and a worse one than he had let himself hope for, and he sat down knowing that half the men who had voted with him had done it out of impatience to get to dinner.
They signed on the Saturday.
The room in the State House was as hot as it had been every day that summer. The windows were shut against the flies from the stable yard and the noise from Chestnut Street, and the delegates sat in their coats because they were gentlemen and because Mr Hancock in the chair would have thought it strange if they had not. The flies got in regardless. There was a smell of ink and warm wool and the tallow of the candles nobody had needed since six in the morning.
They came up to the table by colonies, north to south, and put their names to it.
He watched them come. Mr Hancock first, who wrote large and took his time. The New Englanders after him, who had voted for the paper because they could count and because they knew that Pennsylvania and New York and the Jerseys would not go a step further until it had been tried, and who signed it the way a man signs a receipt for goods he did not order. Mr Samuel Adams signed without looking at it. Mr John Adams signed, and Dickinson watched him do it, and saw him put the pen down and look for a moment at what he had written, as a man looks at something he has been made to do.
Then Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and New York, where Mr Jay signed, who had written the first draft of the thing back in June and had handed it over without a murmur when the committee decided it wanted another hand on it.
Then his own colony, and he went up with the rest of the Pennsylvania delegation and signed under Mr Franklin, whose signature was the smallest on the sheet.
Then the Delaware counties, and Maryland, and the Virginians, and Mr Harrison, who filled a great deal of chair and wrote a small tidy name. Mr Rutledge and Mr Middleton for South Carolina. And Mr Gadsden, humble and all, who gave Dickinson a look as he came back down the room that was not quite friendly and not quite otherwise.
Forty-six names in the end, or thereabouts. He did not count them until afterwards.
The sand went on the last signature and Mr Hancock said something about the hour, and that was the whole ceremony. There was no speech. Nobody said that this was the last petition, or the last chance, or any of the things that would be said about it afterwards by men who had not been in the room. They put their hats on and went out into the yard to find it still hot.
Outside, in the yard, Mr Adams was waiting for him. Not for him, particularly. He was talking to Mr Rutledge with his hat in his hand, and he stopped when Dickinson came out, and the two of them exchanged the civilities of men who dislike each other in a small profession.
“Well, sir,” said Adams. “Your paper is gone.”
“It is signed. It goes on Tuesday.”
“And when it is answered?”
“Then we shall know something we do not know now,” said Dickinson, “which is more than we have got out of any other week’s work this summer.”
Adams laughed at that, genuinely, because he was not a man who could hold a grudge through a good answer, and then spoiled it. “It will be answered with regiments, sir. You know it will. There is not a man in that room who does not know it.”
“There are twenty in that room who do not know it, Mr Adams, and they are the reason you have an army in Cambridge instead of a militia in Massachusetts.” He heard his own voice go thin and did not like it. He was tired, and the heat had given him the headache he got now three days in five, and he had been on his feet since five. “You want the middle colonies. You cannot have them by telling them they are fools. You may have them by letting them be proved wrong in their own time and at their own expense, and that is what this is.”
“That,” said Adams, “is a very expensive way to prove a thing.”
“It is the only way anything is ever proved to a free people.”
They parted civilly. Walking down Chestnut Street in the late sun with his hat off, Dickinson thought that he had come out of it rather well, and then thought that he always came out of it rather well, and that he had now been coming out of it rather well for eleven years, and was not sure what he had to show.
The other paper was worse, and nobody would remember it.
Two days before the petition, Congress had adopted a declaration setting out the causes and necessity of taking up arms, and it had been given first to Mr Jefferson of Virginia, who was twenty and something and wrote the best English in the building. What Jefferson brought back was magnificent. It was also, in four places, a declaration of war, and in one place an accusation against the King personally, and it could not be sent out over the names of men who were at that moment petitioning the same King as his faithful subjects.
So the committee had given it to Dickinson to mend, and he had mended it, and Jefferson had sat through the reading of the amended draft with his face perfectly still.
He was a curious young man, Jefferson. He said almost nothing in Congress, which in that assembly was a form of eccentricity, and he wrote as though the sentences arrived finished. Dickinson had gone over to him afterwards, in the yard, because he had been the young man once whose paper was mended by an older one and remembered exactly how it felt.
“I have used a great deal of it,” he said.
“You have used what would go through,” said Jefferson, pleasantly enough, “and mended what would not,” and then, after a moment: “I should be obliged to know which was which, sir, when you have leisure. I mean it as a question and not as a complaint.”
“The parts I struck are the parts that were true,” said Dickinson. “That is generally the difficulty.”
Jefferson thought about that longer than most men would have, and did not smile, and said that he saw. They parted on decent terms and never afterwards spoke of it, and Dickinson was aware for the rest of his life that the younger man had forgiven him for it publicly and never once in private.
He had kept a great deal of it. He had kept the best of it. He had kept the sentence about being resolved to die freemen rather than live slaves, which was worth ten of anything Dickinson had ever written, and he had put in at the end that the colonies did not mean to dissolve the union which had so long and so happily subsisted between them and Great Britain, and had not raised armies with the ambition of separating from her.
Both sentences were now in the same document, over the same signatures, and would go out to the world together: we will die before we submit, and we do not wish to leave you. Mr Adams thought this ridiculous. Mr Jefferson thought it a mutilation and was too well bred to say so, which was worse. Dickinson thought it was the exact truth of where the continent stood in July 1775, and that the two sentences were not a contradiction but a position.
The petition went on the Tuesday, by the Mary and Elizabeth out of Philadelphia, carried by Mr Richard Penn, who was a proprietor’s grandson and an amiable man and would be listened to at least as far as the anteroom. Arthur Lee was to join him in London. Three copies were sent by different vessels, because the summer was full of weather and privateers and because Dickinson did not intend to lose four months to a sinking.
He went home to Fairhill for two days after it sailed, which was the longest he had been out of the city since April. The orchard was heavy. His wife asked him whether the paper would answer, and he said that he did not know, and she said that he had not slept properly since May, and he said that this was also true, and they left it there. Polly Dickinson had a Friend’s way of letting a thing stand once it had been said, and he had married her partly for it.
He was not a Friend himself. He had been raised among them and had never joined, and now he was a man who drilled with a battalion in the mornings and wrote petitions for peace in the afternoons, which the Quakers of the Meeting found scandalous in one direction and the Congress found scandalous in the other. He had stopped explaining it. The explanation was simple enough and nobody wanted it: that a man may believe his cause just and still believe that a war for it is a catastrophe, and may fight in it and still write to prevent it, and that the two beliefs live together in most men who have ever had to make a decision of any size.
August was the letter.
It came out on a Thursday, in the Boston paper the Tories printed under the guns, and from there into every paper in the colonies within a fortnight, because nothing travels like a gentleman’s private correspondence.
Mr Adams had written two letters in July, one to his wife and one to Mr James Warren of Plymouth, and had given them to a young man to carry to Massachusetts, and the young man had been taken on the road, and the letters had gone to the Admiral instead. The one to Warren was about the Congress. It said that a certain great fortune and piddling genius, whose fame had been trumpeted so loudly, had given a silly cast to the whole doings.
There was no name in it. There did not need to be. There was exactly one man in the Congress who was a great fortune, and one whose fame had been trumpeted, and the Tory printer helpfully supplied the identification in a note, in case any reader in the thirteen colonies had failed to arrive at it unassisted.
He read it at his own table in Chestnut Street with the paper folded back, twice, and then a third time, and found that the phrase he could not get past was not piddling genius, which was only rude, but silly cast. A cast is what a man gives a thing when he turns it in his hands. Adams meant that the whole work of the Congress had been bent out of its proper shape by one member’s vanity, and that the member was him, and he had thought it and written it down in July while signing the paper he was writing about.
The letter to Mrs Adams was printed too. It was affectionate, and rather charming, and it made the other one worse, because a man who writes like that to his wife is not a man who says things he does not mean.
The Congress was in the street when it met him.
He came out of the State House yard on the Friday into Chestnut Street with Mr Charles Thomson, and Adams was coming the other way with his hat already lifting, and Dickinson looked at him and walked past.
Thomson walked beside him without speaking. Dickinson had not rehearsed it. He had seen Adams’s face and gone past with his hat on, at forty-two, cutting a man in the street before the delegates of four colonies. His ears burned all the way up Chestnut.
What he could not tell anybody, and what he turned over that night at the window in Chestnut Street with the shutters back and the street going quiet, was that Adams was probably right about the King and certainly wrong about the reason.
Dickinson did not think his petition would be granted. He had never thought it. He thought there was perhaps one chance in five that it would be received at all, and if it were received, perhaps one in three that anything would come of it, which multiplied out to something he did not care to put a figure on.
But the paper was not written for the King. It was written for the man in Lancaster County with two hundred acres and four sons who had voted Whig every year of his life and would not go to war against his own sovereign until he was satisfied that everything short of war had been honestly tried. There were tens of thousands of that man between the Hudson and the Chesapeake, and Mr Adams could not see him, because Massachusetts had already had its town burned and its people shot at and had done its deciding in April.
The middle colonies had not. They would decide when they decided, and they would decide once, and if the Congress asked them for a war before they were ready the answer would be no, and the answer would be final, and there would be no continent and no army and no anything, and Massachusetts would be left alone with the regulars and the winter.
The petition was the proof. Nothing else could be. You cannot tell a careful man that a thing has been tried; you have to try it in front of him, and let him watch, and let him count the months while the answer does not come. Every week the King did not answer was a week of the argument being made for him, by the King, for nothing, in the only language the careful man believed.
He wrote none of that down. He wrote, instead, to his wife at Fairhill, a short letter about the heat and the orchard and the likelihood of his being home by the month’s end, and at the bottom, because she would have seen the papers and would not ask:
Thou wilt have read what is said of me. It is not just, and it is not altogether unjust, and I find I mind the second part more. I have done what I am able to do. If it answers, no one will remember who wrote it; if it fails, no one will forget. I am content with the bargain, or shall be by Michaelmas.