The Remaining Questions

The letters were put into his hands on his arrival in town, by the servant who opened the door in Chestnut Street, in a bundle tied with tape, before he had got his coat off; and John Dickinson stood in his own hall with his hat still on and the bundle in his hand, too tired to sit down, and looked at the hand on the uppermost one and knew it for Charles Thomson’s.

He had been away three weeks and two days. He had gone down to Kent on the last Tuesday of September, ill, in the coach, with Polly beside him holding his hand as though he might fall out of it; and he had lain in the two rooms at Poplar Hall for most of October with a fever that came and went, and a cough, and a weakness in the legs that the doctor at Dover said was nothing and that he had not been able to walk off. He was not well now. He had come up anyway, because a man who has spent four years saying that a thing ought to be done does not stay in bed in Kent while it is being done without him, and because the Lower Counties had had nobody in the Congress since Mr Van Dyke went home, and somebody had to sit in their place when the thing was read.

It had not been read yet. Thomson’s note said so, in four lines, as Thomson said everything: that there was no word from Boston; that the General had left West Point on the eighth and was expected there by the sixteenth; that the city was quiet now; and that Mr Wilson had come home.

Dickinson read it twice, standing in the hall. Then Polly came in behind him from the coach, and took the letters out of his hand, and his hat off his head, and sent him up to bed, and he went.

---

He had drafted the heads himself.

He thought about that in bed, in the dark, with the street going quiet under the window and Polly asleep beside him; as he had thought about it every night in Kent, in the fever, when the thoughts went round and round and would not lie down. He had drafted them in the last week of September, in this house, at the table by the window, with a cough on him and a candle, in four nights; and they had been adopted on the Tuesday, almost as he wrote them, and he had gone home to Kent the same afternoon in the coach, too ill to stay and watch them go.

The General’s letter had come on the twentieth, by express from West Point, with Sir Henry Clinton’s inside it. Thomson had read them both to the Congress in the morning, in his dry clear voice, in the room in the State House where Dickinson had made his speech in seventy-six, and nobody had said anything at all for some time after he had finished. Sir Henry had the honour to acquaint His Excellency that he had received His Majesty’s commands to propose a cessation of arms. Commissioners would follow. Sir Henry would submit that Boston was the place. And the General, in his own hand, in the plain words he always used, wrote that he had answered Sir Henry that he could enter into no engagement of that kind without the authority of the Congress, and awaited its instructions; and at the end of his letter there was a paragraph that Thomson read more slowly than the rest, and then read again, because the room had asked him to.

The General begged leave to add one thing. If the Congress should be pleased to authorise a cessation of arms, he would ask to be permitted, on the day it was signed, to resign into the hands of the Congress the commission with which it had honoured him in the year 1775; in order that it might be seen by all the world that the peace was the act of the civil power of these colonies, and not of their army.

Dickinson had sat with his hands on the table and listened to that read twice, and thought that it was the best thing anybody had done in the whole of the war, and that it had been done by the one man in America who need not have done it. He had thought too, being honest, that the General was going to be right on the day, which was a thing Dickinson had never managed in his life. He had always been right four years early. It was not the same.

---

There had been two days of it then, in the committee of the whole, with the windows open, because it was still warm.

It had been easier than he had expected. The men who had wanted independence were fewer in the room than they had been in seventy-six, and tired, and some of them were not in the room at all: Mr Lee had been at home in Virginia since May, and Mr Samuel Adams had gone home to Boston, and Mr McKean was in his court. Those who were left said what they had to say. Mr Gerry said it, and said it well, and said, at the end of an hour, that if there was to be a Parliament under the Crown it had better be a Parliament with the fisheries in it, or Massachusetts would want to know why; and sat down, and that was the last of independence. Nobody moved it. There was nothing to move it against. The King’s own general had written to ask for a cessation, and the King’s own ministers were sending commissioners to treat upon every point in dispute, Sir Henry wrote, not excepting a legislature in America under the Crown; and a man could not very well stand up and demand to be let go by a King who had just offered to let him alone.

So the Congress resolved to authorise the General, and accepted his resignation for the day of the signing, and deputed Mr Hancock, who had signed the General’s commission in seventy-five and was at Boston, to receive it in the Congress’s name; and named General Greene, who was in the southward, to command what should remain of the army; and named a committee to draw the heads the General was to agree with Sir Henry, and put Dickinson at the head of it, with Mr Gouverneur Morris of New York and Mr Marchant of Rhode Island. Nobody said why. Nobody needed to. He had been drafting the same paper, in one form or another, for five years.

He had drafted it in four nights. It had not been hard. It had been, if anything, the easiest paper he had ever written, because it was only the Grievances with the anger taken out, and he had written most of the Grievances, and taken the anger out of a great many papers in his time. That there should be a Parliament of America, under the Crown, seated in America and competent in all the internal affairs of the colonies. That no tax, duty or imposition should be laid upon the colonies but by that Parliament; the Parliament of Great Britain renouncing the claim. That the trade of the colonies should be free, with all nations. That the lands westward of the mountains should be open to settlement, and to the government of the colonies, the Proclamation of 1763 notwithstanding. That there should be a general amnesty, and no man prosecuted, on either side, for anything done in the late troubles, whether for rebellion or for loyalty. And that the Crown should retain the powers of peace and war, of treaties with foreign princes, and of the common defence.

He had read them over on the fourth night, by the candle, and been satisfied, and been aware that he was satisfied, which with him was always the moment to begin again.

---

The trouble had come over the sixth head, as he had known it would. He had known it since July of seventy-six.

There were people in the King’s lines. There were thousands of them, at New York and at Savannah and on the islands and wherever the King’s army had been, men and women and children who had walked away from farms in the Jerseys and the Lower Counties and Virginia and the Carolinas, where they had belonged to somebody, and gone to the King’s soldiers, without any promise, because the King’s soldiers were there. Every man in the room knew it. Some of them had lost people that way. And every man in the room knew that the King’s commissioners, when they came, would have the King’s army behind them, and the King’s army would have those people in its camps; and that sooner or later, at some table, somebody was going to have to say what became of them, and of the trade that had brought their fathers, and of the thing itself.

Mr Morris had said it first, in the committee, in his loud easy young man’s voice, with his feet on a chair. Mr Morris was twenty-seven and owned a great deal of New York and was afraid of nobody. He said that the commissioners would ask, and that it would be better to have it in the heads, named, so that the Congress could say it had been reserved, than to be asked and have nothing to say. Dickinson had agreed with him. Mr Marchant had looked out of the window.

So Dickinson had drafted it, a clause at the end of the sixth head, in the plainest words he could find: that the case of the negroes who had come within the King’s lines, and the trade in slaves, and the condition of slavery in the colonies, be expressly reserved to the commissioners. He had looked at it for a long time on the paper. He had thought of the thirty-seven people at Poplar Hall, whom he had set free on condition of their serving him until 1798, and of the sum he had done about it; and of the morning in July of seventy-six when the charge against the slave trade had been struck out of the Grievances in a quarter of an hour, without a division, as a courtesy, and he had sat in his place and said nothing. He had left the clause in.

It lasted a day.

The gentlemen from South Carolina said that if it stood, they would go home. They said it civilly. They said that they had not come to Philadelphia to have the property of their constituents made a subject of negotiation with the King of England, or with anybody; and that if the word was written down in the heads, it would be read in London as an invitation, and in Charleston as a betrayal, and the Carolinas would be lost to the settlement before it was made. Georgia said the same, for what was left of Georgia that the King’s army did not hold. Some of the northern men, whose towns had built the ships, were interested in the windows again. Mr Gerry said that if this was to be named, the fisheries ought to be named too; and the gentlemen from South Carolina said that they would be very glad to name the fisheries, if Mr Gerry would leave out the other; and Mr Gerry, after a moment, said nothing more.

Dickinson stood up and spoke. He had promised himself in July of seventy-six that he would, the next time, and he did. He said that a word left out of a paper was not a thing left out of the world. He said that the commissioners would ask whether the clause was there or not, and that if it was not there they would ask the more pointedly, and the Congress would have nothing to answer but its silence; and that leaving the word out would be taken in the end for exactly what it was, which was an endeavour to hide a thing the Congress was ashamed of. He said it for about ten minutes, as well as he had ever said anything, with the cough on him. He did not persuade anybody. He watched himself not persuading anybody, as he had watched it in seventy-six, and went on to the end, and sat down.

The President asked the committee whether it could not find some form of words.

And he had found one. That was the thing he lay awake with, in the dark, in Chestnut Street, with Polly asleep. It was his trade to find a form of words that men who disagreed could sign, and he was very good at it, and he had found it in an evening, at the table by the window downstairs, with the cough and the candle. He had struck out the clause. He had written instead, at the end of the sixth head, after the powers the Crown should retain: and that all other questions between the two countries, not provided for in these heads, be reserved for the treaty.

All other questions. The fisheries were in it, and Mr Gerry was satisfied. The western boundaries were in it, and the debts, and the loyalists’ estates. And the people in the King’s lines were in it, and the trade, and the thing itself, and nobody had had to write the word; and the gentlemen from South Carolina had read it and nodded, and Mr Morris had read it and looked at Dickinson for a long moment and said nothing, and the heads had been adopted on the Tuesday with the sixth head as he had written it the second time.

He had seen, as he wrote it, what it was. It was a door left unlocked. He had written one of those before, in seventy-five, and been proud of it. He was not sure that he would be proud of this one, and he did not know how long it would be before anybody came to try the handle.

---

He went to see James Wilson on the Friday.

The house was at the corner of Third and Walnut, a big brick house with a good door, and the door was new; the old one had been broken in with a sledge. There were holes in the brickwork round the upper windows, and in the frames, and a pane of glass in one of the third-storey windows had been replaced with a board. A man was painting the new door. He looked at Dickinson as Dickinson went up the steps, and went on painting.

Wilson received him in the parlour, standing. He had read law with Dickinson thirteen years ago, a raw young Scotsman with a Scots voice he had never lost and a mind like a good knife, and he had been at the bar since sixty-seven, and was the best lawyer in Philadelphia now, and the most hated; and he still called Dickinson sir, and Dickinson had never been able to stop him.

He told it plainly, as a lawyer tells a thing, in order. On the Monday, the fourth, the militia of the city had met at a tavern on the commons, Burns’s, a great many of them, with drink, to do something about the prices, and about the Tories. Somebody had told them that the Congress had resolved on a general amnesty, which was true, and that every Tory who had gone off with the King’s army would be coming back now with a pardon in his pocket to take up his property, which was very likely true as well; and they had decided that they would do justice themselves, before the commissioners could get to it. They had begun by taking up four or five men they said were Tories and marching them about the town behind a drum. Then somebody had said that the lawyer Wilson had defended the Tories in the courts, and had got them off, and would get the rest off, and they had come to Third and Walnut.

There had been thirty or so gentlemen in the house by then, who had heard what was coming. General Mifflin was one. Mr Robert Morris had been sent for. They had some arms. Captain Campbell, a one-armed officer of the invalids who had come in to help, had leaned out of a window on the third floor and shaken his pistol at the crowd and fired it, and been shot dead where he stood. Mifflin had tried to speak to them from a window below and been shot at, and fired both his pistols into them. Then they had brought up a sledge, and broken the door, and come into the hall, and the gentlemen had fired down the stairs into them; and a colonel from Lancaster had been bayoneted on the stairs; and then the President of the Council had come galloping into Walnut Street with the City Light Horse behind him, in his own clothes, with a pistol in his hand, as though he had just got out of bed, and the crowd had broken and run, and it was over.

“Six dead,” said Wilson. “Four of theirs, and Campbell, and a black boy who was in the street and had nothing to do with any of it. And I do not know how many hurt. I was in the house. I did not count.” He looked at the window with the board in it. “I was at Mr Morris’s place in the country for a fortnight afterwards. I came back at night, on the nineteenth. I did not see why I should come back by day.”

Dickinson said that he was very sorry, and found that he meant it more than he could say.

“They shot at my house,” said Wilson, “because the Congress had resolved to pardon the men I had defended. That is the whole of it. They were not going to wait for a commissioner. They were going to have their justice before the peace took it away from them.” He turned from the window, and looked at Dickinson with his clever Scots face, quite without malice. “You were right, sir. You were right in seventy-five, and you were right in seventy-six, and the King has come round to you at last, and the Congress with him. I hope it is a comfort.”

“It is not,” said Dickinson.

“No,” said Wilson. “I did not suppose it would be.”

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The express came in from Boston on the Monday night, the twenty-fifth, very late; and on the Tuesday morning at ten the Congress was in its room in the State House, every man of it who was in Philadelphia, and some who had been ill, with the windows shut against the cold now, and the fire lit, and the President in the chair; and Charles Thomson stood up beside the President’s table with the papers in his hand, and read them.

He read the General’s letter first. It was short. It was dated at Boston on the evening of the nineteenth, and it said that the General had the honour to inform the Congress that he had that day signed, with Sir Henry Clinton, at the State House in that town, articles for a cessation of arms between the forces of the United Colonies and those of His Majesty, of which he enclosed a copy; that the cessation had taken effect at noon; that he had that evening, in the presence of the Council of the Massachusetts Bay and of a great part of the town, resigned his commission into the hands of Mr Hancock, whom the Congress had deputed to receive it, and was now a private gentleman; and that he begged leave to recommend to the favour of the Congress the officers of his family, and the army.

The room was very quiet when Thomson put that letter down. Dickinson looked at the floor.

Then Thomson read the articles.

The articles ended hostilities at noon on the signing day. The King’s troops would withdraw to agreed coastal posts and Canada pending a treaty. Prisoners would be exchanged; those in New York’s ships must be released within a month. Neither army surrendered its colours. Then Thomson reached the fifth article and read the six heads. Dickinson heard his own sentences, returned from Boston with Washington’s and Clinton’s signatures below them.

A Parliament of America, under the Crown. No tax but by that Parliament. Free trade. The west opened. A general amnesty. The Crown retaining the powers of peace and war, of treaties, and of the common defence; and all other questions between the two countries, not provided for in these heads, reserved for the treaty.

Sir Henry had altered nothing but the order of two words. Dickinson noticed that. He noticed too, because he was a lawyer, the last article, which somebody at Boston, he supposed one of the General’s young men, had put in at the end: that if there should be any doubtful expressions in the articles, they were to be interpreted according to the common meaning and acceptation of the words. He very nearly laughed at that. He thought that it was the only article in the paper that nobody would ever be able to keep.

---

He wrote to Rodney while the Congress debated what to do next, as men wrote letters in the Congress, on his knee, with the noise going on round him.

I write this in Congress. This instant we have received the articles signed at Boston, and heard them read, and I am at present the whole of the Lower Counties, and have voted for a thanksgiving. He looked at that. He crossed out for a thanksgiving, because it sounded as though he meant something by it, and wrote with the majority, which was true and meant nothing. The General has resigned. You will have heard. The commissioners are to be named within the week, and I believe I know whom they will name.

He expected Franklin, Adams and Jay. Not himself. He had known that since summer. Adams had called him a piddling genius in a letter the whole continent had read, and the commissioners would have to sit for years at a table with men who had been wrong, and forgive them; and a man who had been right too early was not known for that.

He wrote, at the end of the letter, that he hoped Rodney’s health was better than his own. Then he signed it, and sanded it, and sat with it on his knee until the Congress adjourned to ten o’clock the next day.

---

In the afternoon he had the coach brought round, and he and Polly drove out to Fairhill.

It was two miles. The road went out through the Northern Liberties past the brickyards and the rope walks, and then between fields, with the trees along it gone yellow and the leaves coming down in the wind; and he sat with his hands on his stick and watched them come down, and Polly sat beside him and did not ask him why he wanted to go, because she knew, and because she had a Friend’s way of letting a thing stand once it was there.

The house had burned on the twenty-second of November in seventy-seven, two months after Galloway wrote to him that it would of course be secure. A party of the King’s troops had come out from the city with orders to clear the ground in front of the lines, and had burned seventeen houses along the road that day, and Fairhill was one; and an officer had told General Howe afterwards, people said, that he had burned that damned rebel Dickinson’s house, and been pleased with himself. Dickinson did not know whether that was true. He had not been there. He had been in Kent, in two rooms, and the news had come to him in a letter from a neighbour, and he had read it at the table in the two rooms and folded it and put it away, and told Polly, whose father’s house it had been, and whose grandfather’s.

He had not been out to look at it since. He did not know why he was looking now, except that it was the day, and that he could not think where else to go.

The walls were standing, most of them. The roof was gone, and the floors, and the windows were holes in the brick with the sky behind them; and the chimney stacks stood up out of it at each end, black, like the chimneys of the burned towns in the Seneca country that the newspapers had been full of all September. The garden had gone to weeds and the box had grown up. But the orchard was there, beyond the house, going down the slope towards the creek, the old trees with their leaves turning, as it had been there outside the window of the room where he had written the Farmer’s letters, and the petition, and the sentence about being let alone.

He left Polly in the coach and walked up through the weeds to the house, slowly, with the stick, and stood in what had been the doorway of the room, and looked across it at the hole in the wall where the window had been, where the desk had stood.

He did the sum. He had always done the sum.

The Parliament was in the first head, nearly as he had wanted it since the Farmer’s letters. His own words were there. He had said in seventy-five that the King would hear them if they asked him properly, and the King had heard them, four years late.

And it had cost him his name with half the country, and his seat in the Congress, and his battalion, and his place in the Assembly, all in one year; and two years in two rooms in Kent; and this house, which had been his wife’s family’s for sixty years; and his health, this autumn, which he did not think he would altogether get back. That was his own account, and he could bear it. He had borne it.

It had cost four years. He could not count the rest. He did not know how many men had died in the four years, on both sides, of shot and fever and the cold, and in the ships at New York; nobody knew, and it would be a great many thousands when they did. He thought of the one-armed captain shaking his pistol out of Wilson’s window, three weeks ago, half a mile from his own house, killed by men of his own country for defending a lawyer, on account of a pardon that Dickinson had written into the fifth head. He thought of the black boy in the street, who had had nothing to do with any of it, and whose name Wilson did not know.

And he thought of the sixth head, and of the words he had written at the end of it, the second time. All other questions. He had been right about the Parliament, and he had bought it, at the last, with the same silence he had sat through in seventy-six; except that in seventy-six he had only sat through it, and this time he had written it down, in his own hand, very well, so that nobody would have to.

He would free the people at Poplar Hall, he thought, standing in the doorway; without the condition, all of them, as soon as it could be done. He knew as he thought it that it was the sentence he had always used, and that it had always been true, and that he had always found a reason to put the day off. He knew only that he had said it again, to himself, in a burned house, and that it did not feel any different from the other times.

The wind came through the window hole and moved the weeds on the floor where the desk had stood. Below the house, in the orchard, the leaves were coming down.