Well, sweltering reader, the summer heat that we longed for in the deadness of the frozen winter has finally arrived….big time! On the first day of July I referred to the fact that, on average, July is the hottest month in the northern hemisphere. Yesterday it was at least 112 in this part of the high desert of Southern California. And we sometimes see 118, maybe as much as 120, in July. Air conditioning gobbles up the electricity at an alarming rate.
By all historical accounts, it was also hot and uncomfortable in the “hotbed” of rebellion in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the summer of 1776. As the new Continental Congress met again, it was over a year since the initial “shot heard ’round the world” as colonists and redcoats faced off in Lexington and Concord (Massachusetts, for the benefit of any ill-prepared and ignorant candidates wishing to become President of the United States that they know precious little about), April 19, 1775.
A lot of meeting and talking, scheming and “plotting,” organizing and arming, had occurred during the intervening months (and before, since the first Continental Congress had met as early as 1774). In 1775, one of the most influential and hardest-working members of the Congress, John Adams, the lawyer from Boston, had nominated George Washington to be the Commander-in-Chief of a Continental Army. So much had already been put in place that it should have come as no surprise that in May of 1776 Adams introduced a resolution to the Congress that called for independence from Britain. June 7, 1776, the also greatly influential Ricard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed independence at the Second Continental Congress. It was decided that a formal declaration had to be drafted.
Speaking of the great John Adams, second President of these United States, I always think of him when the calendar reaches today, July 3. Everything had been finalized, the Declaration of Independence so skillfully written by Thomas Jefferson and the suggestions of others, “the deed done,” by July 3, 1776, that Adams is recorded as proclaiming that in future generations of Americans, July 3rd would be remembered and honored as the Great Day of beginning the nation. But since the formal statement and its list of grievances against England was adopted by vote of the Congress on July 4, 1776, you and I have to wait an extra day for Independence Day festivities and fireworks (with the exception of our distant neighbors, who seem to have such a supply that it takes days before and after the 4th to shoot them all off).
The United States of America seems so necessary and inevitable from the vantage point of July 3, 2011, that I think most Americans of today have no idea how shaky and far-from-certain the whole founding and fighting process really was back there in hot, sticky Philadelphia the summer of 1776. Upon his signing of the Declaration, probably the most respected of all of the “founders,” Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, is said to have quipped, “We must all hang together, gentlemen….or we most assuredly will hang separately.”
Indeed, it was a bold, highly risky, tenuous-to-the-extreme, project the Congress representatives were undertaking. Great Britain was riding high. They had just defeated France “for the possession of” the North American continent (ironically, with George Washington’s help as a young militia officer). Their navy was the best in the world. Their army was undoubtedly the most powerful. Their economy was fattened in large part by their far-flung colonial possessions and trade around the globe….which, of course, was the overwhelming motivation for this “fool’s errand” of creating an independent American nation. The wealthy landowners and merchants of the American colonies wanted to keep their prosperity for themselves….not send it off to London in the form of taxes and fees.
The great national myth and inspiring ideals that we celebrate once again this July 3rd and 4th of 2011 is based in large part, of course, on the cause of Freedom, of inevitable rebellion against tyranny and oppression. The founders went on record as “hanging together” and taking a stand for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness….and that all men are created equal – no royalty or nobility or “lording it over” another.
With a considerable number of slave owners – Thomas Jefferson and George Washington among them – they didn’t really mean all men, of course….at least it was an issue that was left unresolved. Despite Sarah Palin’s passionate contention that founders like John Quincy Adams labored unrelentingly for the elimination of slavery….they didn’t….which is why the Civil War had to be fought only 85 years after the Declaration. And despite my admiration that he so richly deserves for my namesake (both of us having “Quincy” for a middle name….an old family name for me – also middle name for my father)….John Quincy Adams was not one of the founders. He became 6th President of the United States (1825-1829), but was only 9 years old (born 1767) at the time of the Declaration.
Setting aside the inadequate educations of Presidential and “patriotic” wannabes like Bachmann and Palin – if only they knew the basics of American history as well as immigrants they so stridently want to bar from the welcoming arms of the Statue of Liberty – not only was the whole founding process pretty shaky and highly dangerous…. especially Tenuous was the fighting business. England was not going to give up their hard-won possessions with a mere shrug and “good luck with nation-building.”
More of the American myth was the “Tea Party” and “Minuteman” righteous rebellion in which “embattled farmers” with their muskets and pitchforks rallied to fight and defeat the invading redcoats and their despicable mercenaries from Europe. Well, there certainly were some of those….although roughly a third of the American colonists considered themselves to be “loyalists” to the crown and all that was English (okay, maybe not the taxes part). Roughly another third really didn’t have the luxury of “getting involved,” whatever their feelings on independence or loyalty. If they were embattled farmers, especially out in the hinterlands and the frontier that wasn’t so far inland, their battle was largely one of survival, of hacking out a means of staying alive in the wilderness, and fending off raids and war parties from the Native Americans whose lands and hunting territories they were attempting to farm.
Out of the rough third that did support the project undertaken by the Continental Congress in 1776, the early, “high-minded,” middle-class musket and pitchfork farmers were no longer around very much by then. Concord and harassing the retreating redcoats back in April of 1775 had been kind of neat….but they did have farms and families to take care of, you know. The Continental Army left behind for Washington to command and inspire war mostly poor, landless, lowly laborers, and unmarried. The average age was in their early 20’s; and they weren’t there for the most part in the sacred cause of liberty or any other abstract ideal….they had been offered pay and a chance to own land that Congress would grant to them on the frontier (imagine that, revolution by our own kind of “mercenaries”).
As Professor James Kirby Martin, University of Houston, wrote in a recent book, they “were folks who didn’t have another alternative” if they ever wanted anything in their lives. George Washington’s inevitably motley militias of course lost battle after battle, were pushed out of Long Island, all the way across New Jersey, and from a high of maybe 31,000 troops in that hot summer of 1776….by year’s end they had dwindled to about 3,000. Pay and the promise of land wasn’t of much solace to 21-year-old’s who had to worry about being shot in the back as they ran in retreat. Since many had enlisted with six-month contracts, when those expired many went back to their dismal, but less deadly, poverty and trying to survive without musket balls whizzing past their ears.
Realizing the goals of Philadelphia on July 3-4, 1776, was one of history’s genuine “long shots;” and one wonders if today’s Las Vegas odds-makers would have even taken the bet. Things would get a lot hotter for the founders, Washington’s lamentable excuse for an army, and the dwindling, “maybe less than a third,” colonists who backed the play for independence. And today we take it all so for-granted….and those who would lead us at the top don’t even know how it all happened back then. How can you head up what you don’t even know?
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