The Common Faith

The first thing he saw in Philadelphia was a man reading the pamphlet aloud.

He was standing on a mounting block at the corner of Second Street in a leather apron, with twenty or so people round him in the cold, and he was reading from a thin book in a grey paper cover in the voice of a man who has read a thing before and means to read it again. Adams rode past at a walk, with Gerry beside him and the light going, and heard quite distinctly: “…the blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ‘Tis time to part!”

The crowd made a noise. It was not the noise he would have expected. It was the noise of people who have heard a good thing well said, and enjoyed it, and have no intention whatever of doing anything about it.

He had bought it in New York and read it by a bad candle, with his boots on. By the last page he was standing. Everything he had said for a year, said better and with a rudeness he had never permitted himself in print: society a blessing, government a necessary evil, a continent governed by an island, the royal brute of Britain. Written by an Englishman. Fine impudence. Half New York thought the Englishman was John Adams.

By daylight the plan of government in the second half looked so democratical, so lacking any check, that it would bring every evil work. He put the book in his saddlebag. The first half was magnificent. The second would have to be dealt with. Let them get a country first.

That had been in New York. In New York nobody had yet told him the date on which it was published.

---

Sam was waiting for him at Mrs Yard’s, in the parlour with his feet to the fire and the palsy in his hands a little worse than in the autumn; and he got up when John came in, and embraced him, which he did not ordinarily do, and Adams understood from that how bad it was.

“You have heard,” Sam said.

“I have heard.”

He had heard in the first week of January, in the Council chamber at Watertown, when a rider came over from Cambridge with a printed sheet that the regulars had sent out of Boston under a flag, as a courtesy, because they thought it would do them good. It was the King’s Speech of the twenty-sixth of October, entire. He had read it standing, with the Council round him reading it over his shoulders, and he had known by the second paragraph.

A petition has been laid before me, signed by many of my subjects in America, each of them in his own name… I have received it, as coming from my subjects.

One of the older Council members said, very gently, “Well, he has read it.” Three men laughed, the way men laugh at a funeral, and Adams walked to the window and looked at the snow on the meeting-house green and thought: there it is. The whole of it. He has not conceded one thing. He has received a piece of paper. And it will be enough.

Then the letters had come from Philadelphia, Sam’s among them, about the House of Lords.

“Sixty-one to forty,” Sam said now, as though John might not have had the figure. “On Richmond’s motion. That the petition affords ground of conciliation. It came in a letter from Penn the same week as the Speech, and the same week as that.” He nodded at the saddlebag, which John had not put down. “The Speech on the Monday, the pamphlet on the Wednesday, Penn on the Friday, and by the Saturday it was over. Not the pamphlet. The pamphlet is doing very well. Bell has sold every copy he could print and quarrelled with the author over the profits, and there are three printers at it now and a German edition coming. I have been congratulated on writing it four times this week, by men who will vote against every word of it.”

“I was told in New York that I wrote it.”

“You did not write it. I did not write it. A staymaker from Thetford wrote it, who has been fourteen months in the country and owes money in every street of it, and it is the best thing either of us will ever read.” Sam sat down again, slowly. “And it came out the same week the King said he had received the petition, John, and the people who read it agreed with every line, and then they went home and told their wives that it would not be necessary now.”

“Is he in town? Paine?”

“He is in town. He drinks in a house in Second Street and owes the landlord, and he would be very glad to meet you, because he thinks you are on his side.”

“I am on his side.”

“Yes,” said Sam. “That is what I meant.”

He had denied authorship to four people in New York. Each time he liked the mistake more than he should. A staymaker had beaten him to the pamphlet he had wanted to write for a year. Worse, the man had published it a week too late.

---

He could not sleep, and did not try. He sat up in his room with a candle and the pamphlet, and went through it a third time, and found that he did not need to; he had most of it by heart already; and he put it down and sat with his hands on his knees and thought about the guns at Framingham.

They had seen them on the second day out from Braintree, he and Gerry. Colonel Buckminster had given them dinner, and afterwards walked them out behind the tavern into the snow, where a train of sledges stood in a field with the oxen unyoked and steaming, and on the sledges, under tarpaulins, the artillery of Ticonderoga. Colonel Knox had brought it down three hundred miles of winter, over the mountains and across the frozen rivers, to Cambridge, for the General. Adams had walked along the line of it and counted, because he could not help counting: nine eighteen-pounders, ten twelves, six sixes, four nines, the mortars and the howitzers. He had stood in the snow with his hand flat on the cold barrel of an eighteen-pounder that had been the King’s, and thought that it was the most persuasive thing he had seen since the war began.

Fifty-nine guns going to Cambridge to be pointed at the King’s army. And in Watertown, in the same week, a printed sheet in which the King said, in his own voice, that he had received a petition as coming from his subjects. Both of these were true at once, and the country had decided, by Saturday, which of them to believe.

He turned to the clause the moderates passed over. Whenever my subjects in America shall return to that obedience which is due to the laws, I shall be ready to hear their grievances. Return first; be heard afterwards. He could point it out again tomorrow. They would answer with the sentence about receiving the petition.

He had said for months that the ministry’s best weapon was not its army. It was its ability, at any moment it chose, to offer terms, and leave every man who had argued for independence standing in a dry bed looking foolish. And the ministry had not even had to offer terms. It had only had to receive a piece of paper.

---

The State House in the morning was exactly as he had left it in December, which was the worst of it.

The same room, the same green baize, the same chairs, the same smell of wet wool and ink and the stable yard. Mr Hancock in the chair, very fine. Mr Thomson at his table with the Journal. The members coming in out of the cold and stamping and shaking hands; and every one of them who shook his hand, it seemed to Adams, did it with a little extra warmth, the warmth men show at a funeral to the brother of the deceased.

Nobody said anything to him about the pamphlet in the chamber. Out of it, in the yard and the passages and the room behind where the members took their chocolate, he heard it quoted eleven times before noon, and admired, and laughed over, and he heard the Speech quoted rather more, and the Lords’ resolution more than either; and on the Pennsylvania side of the room he heard, twice, in a tone of quiet satisfaction, the sentence Mr Penn had spoken at the bar of the House of Lords.

I believe that the colonies acquiesce in the words of the Declaratory Law.

The Pennsylvanians were the heart of it, as they had been since the summer. Their Assembly had instructed them in November, in words Mr Dickinson had drafted and everybody knew he had drafted, to dissent from and utterly reject any proposition that might lead to a separation from the mother country, and the instructions had been a burden to them in December and were a banner to them now. Mr Wilson carried a copy of the Lords’ resolution in his pocket-book. Mr Morris, who had never in his life said a word against anything that was good for trade, was saying in the yard that the Congress ought to send the House of Lords its thanks. Nobody laughed at him. That was the thing Adams could not get used to. In December they would have laughed.

Sam had copied Penn’s answer for him in January. All cases whatsoever, except taxation: that was what the messenger had accepted for them. A man who admitted he had not read the Act. And he begged their pardon afterwards, in a letter. Adams had brought the copy with him.

Adams wanted him disavowed. He had wanted it since Watertown, and he wanted it more now that he had heard the sentence in Mr Wilson’s mouth, said slowly, with relish, as a man reads out a clause in a will that leaves him the house. He said so to Sam at dinner, and to Gerry, and to Mr Chase of Maryland, who was the most violent man in the Congress on most subjects and on this one, it turned out, was not.

“Move it, then,” Chase said, cutting his beef. “Move that the Congress disavows Mr Penn. I shall vote with you. So will your cousin. So will perhaps five others.” He chewed. “And then Mr Dickinson will move the previous question, and it will be put, and lost, and it will be in Thomson’s Journal for ever that on such a day the Congress of the United Colonies was asked to say that it does not acquiesce in the Declaratory Act, and declined. At present Mr Penn’s opinion is Mr Penn’s. You are proposing to make it ours.”

Sam said the same thing in fewer words. Gerry, who was new and did not yet know how anything was done, said it in more. Adams saw it as soon as Chase had said it, and saw that it was right, and hated it, and did not move anything. There were twenty men in that room who had wanted all winter to be given a reason, and the King had given them one, in his own voice, and the Congress’s own messenger had signed it. Not this winter. Perhaps not in this war.

---

He met Dickinson in Chestnut Street at four o’clock, coming out of the State House yard as he went in.

It was nearly the same place. The same gate. Adams thought of the last time, and the hat that had stayed on Dickinson’s head, and the man walking past him with his eyes in front of him in the sight of the delegates of four colonies, who had told everybody; and he felt his own hat begin to come off, as it had then, out of a habit older than either of them, and could not stop it.

Dickinson stopped.

He was thinner than in the summer, and he looked ill, and tired, and older than he was; and he took his hat off, and held it, and bowed. Not deeply. Precisely. The bow of a man who has decided in advance exactly how far he will bend, and bends exactly that far, and not an inch further, so that nobody watching can mistake it either for triumph or for apology.

“Mr Adams,” he said. “You are come back.”

“I am come back.”

“I hope Mrs Adams is well. And the children.”

“Very well, I thank you.” And then, because he could not help it, because he had never in his life been able to leave a thing where it lay: “You have had a good winter, Mr Dickinson.”

Dickinson considered that, with his hat in his hand, for longer than the remark deserved.

“I have had a winter,” he said. “The King has read a paper. That is all that has happened, sir. You will find that a great many people in this town have decided it is a great deal more than that, and I am not going to tell them they are wrong, and I would take it kindly if you did not either. Not yet.” He put his hat on. “Good day to you.”

Dickinson went on up Chestnut Street. Adams stood at the gate with his own hat in his hand, and found that he would have given a good deal, at that moment, to have been cut again. A cut you could answer. This was a man who had won, and knew he had won, and was too intelligent and too sad to enjoy it, and had stopped in the street to be courteous to the man he had beaten; and there was no answer to that in any language Adams had.

---

He wrote to Abigail that night, at the table in his room at Mrs Yard’s, with the pamphlet beside the inkstand.

He wrote about the journey, and the guns at Framingham, and the cold, and New York, which was full of soldiers and rumours and very expensive. He wrote that he was well, which was true, and that he missed her, which was true and did not need saying and he said it anyway. He asked after the children, one by one, and wrote that Johnny was to keep at his French, because the language of the next war would be French whatever happened in this one, and then looked at that sentence and let it stand.

Then he wrote that he had sent her from New York a pamphlet intituled Common Sense, and he wrote the sentence he had composed on the road between New York and Trenton, with the horse going and the frozen fields going by, and had been rather proud of:

written in Vindication of Doctrines which there is Reason to expect that the further Encroachments of Tyranny and Depredations of Oppression, will soon make the common Faith:

And there he stopped, with the pen lifted, because the rest of the sentence, the part he had been proudest of, was a warning: unless the cunning ministry, by proposing negotiations and terms of reconciliation, should divert the present current from its channel. He had composed it in the saddle as a prophecy. He sat looking at the colon, and understood that it was not a prophecy. It was a report. It had happened in Watertown, in the first week of January, while he was still on the Council and the pamphlet was still at the printer’s; and the ministry had not even had to propose anything.

He listened to the watchman in Second Street, and to somebody across the way reading to a tavern that had stopped listening. Then he put a full stop after Faith, where none belonged, and wrote to his wife about the price of hay.