1 Cold Wind, Warm Election May 1, 1776 Voters kept arriving on Philadelphia''s western outskirts. At the block of Chestnut Street between Fifth and Sixth streets, outside the door to the Pennsylvania State House, the men kicked up dust, a growing crowd of tricornered hats and winter-beaten coats. Soon they were trading insults and threats. It was Mayday of 1776, bright but cold, with a wind blowing from the Delaware River, and the polls had been open since ten in the morning for what one, a visitor, predicted would be "the warmest election that ever was held in this city." The voters were choosing a new Pennsylvania government. The vote was expected to be close, the day tense and possibly even violent. The State House itself, assertively symmetrical in high Georgian style, spoke only of grace and stability. Cupolas adorned the bell tower, which drew gazes up and heads back as it pierced the sky.
Big mechanical clocks celebrated Pennsylvania''s leadership in science and technology. Words from Leviticus proclaimed liberty. In a light-suffused chamber on the ground floor one of the oldest deliberative bodies on the continent-one of the best respected in the English-speaking world-the Pennsylvania assembly, made laws. But grace and stability hadn''t been evident lately. The assemblymen had moved upstairs to a committee room. They were lending their regular room to the Continental Congress, a body of delegates representing the various American colonial governments. The body had gathered in Philadelphia in 1774 as the First Continental Congress to mount a formal, intercolonial resistance to trade and police policies of England. Colonial governments objected to those policies for violating liberties that Americans believed they were guaranteed by English law.
Yet many colonists, in and out of government, objected to the colonies'' joining in opposition. Some deemed colonial resistance outright sedition. Delegates to the First Congress had fought bitterly over how far and how assertively to protest and resist. Things had grown dire since then. Delegates to the Second Congress, which convened in Philadelphia in the spring of 1775, were now responsible for operating a poor excuse for a military force, optimistically called the Continental Army, which had actually gone to war against the British Army. The shooting had started in April 1775, when British regiments occupying Boston, Massachusetts, where American resistance had been especially confrontational, marched in formation out of town and into the nearby countryside. At Lexington and Concord, country militias confronted those ranks of crack redcoats and the soldiers were sent running back to Boston, harried by guerilla musketmen. With the British troops shocked and humiliated by defeat, militias from elsewhere in New England, and then from the other colonies, hastened to Massachusetts to aid what became a colonial siege, keeping the British occupiers stuck in Boston.
In Philadelphia, the Second Continental Congress gave firm support to Massachusetts by forming the Continental Army. The delegates sent George Washington, a Virginia militia colonel with few qualifications other than charisma and an impressive physique, up to Massachusetts to command the army and manage the siege. Then, late in March, word had come to Philadelphia that the redcoats had burned their own forts and broken their own cannon, and had sailed their ships out of Boston Harbor. Things hadn''t been entirely quiet since then. British ships had shelled and threatened coastal towns. Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, now operating from a British warship, offered slaves freedom if they''d rise up against their plantation masters. An American expedition to Quebec was in the process of failing. Only a few miles downriver from Philadelphia, two British men-of-war were tacking up and down the bay, patrolling the Delaware''s mouth to stop the city''s trade.
But there had been no invasion. Now that pause was over. The biggest armada in English history was forming, row on row of masts and sails mustering in the harbor at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and transport ships from England, sighted on the high seas, carrying thousands of soldiers, best disciplined in the world, expert at shaking curtains of lead from ranked muskets. Then they would charge, a thicket of blades, to slice bashed-up opponents into piles of gore. British retribution had been a year in the planning. It wouldn''t be mild. So the voters outside the Pennsylvania State House this cold Mayday had reason to be frightened and testy and ready to push and shove. The question they had to decide today, under pressures they could never have imagined before, was a terrible one: Reconciliation with England? Or American independence? Reconciliation had long been the watchword.
The war against England was defensive: that was the position of the Continental Congress and the colonial governments it represented, as well as a fervent belief of many Americans, even patriots. Taking up arms had been justified, after years of Parliament''s abuse, by British troops'' outright military aggression in Massachusetts. The war was supposed to make England see reason and bring Parliament to terms that would restore American liberties. Many colonists, including outspoken American resisters, referred to England as "home" and considered themselves loyal inhabitants of a glorious nation and great empire. They sought nothing more from the war than a quick conclusion and a just reconciliation with the mother country. But some Americans had a different desire, and it was shocking: American independence. The idea had hardly been spoken aloud until recently. Its boldest adherents were from Massachusetts, which had always taken extreme positions against England; certain well-connected Virginians supported independence, too.
In every colonial government and in the Continental Congress, the "reconciliationists" opposed the "independents" with force. Reconciliationists condemned declaring independence as a mad, doomed scheme of Massachusetts extremists. No colony had been more committed to achieving reconciliation with England than Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania made its opposition to independence decisive. Already called the keystone, rich and big, the Congress''s host, it was the most influential of the colonies. Philadelphia''s port on the Delaware dominated American trade, and the city was considered the second most important and elegant in the empire. A geographical position between New England and the South made Pennsylvania not only economically powerful but also militarily strategic, capable of fatally dividing Massachusetts from Virginia. And Pennsylvania held political sway over Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, and New York, which formed a solid middle-colony bloc for reconciliation.
Those colonies instructed their delegates in the Congress to pursue peace with England and to vote against any measure that might so much as hint at an American declaration of independence. Thanks to Pennsylvania''s leadership, no effort in the Congress to push for independence could succeed. But all that might change today. The Pennsylvania assembly was scheduled to begin its new session on May 20 in the temporary committee room upstairs. This election was for new Pennsylvania assemblymen, and a ticket of assembly candidates had announced their support for American independence. If those independence candidates could win a majority in the Pennsylvania assembly, the colony would reverse its policy for reconciliation almost overnight. The assembly would vote to change instructions to Pennsylvania''s delegates in the Congress. So great was Pennsylvania''s influence that an independence assembly elected here today could swing the whole Congress toward declaring independence and making the war a revolutionary one.
Hence the ugly mood. American independence or reconciliation with England? In an election that might determine Americans'' fate, there was no middle ground. The Continental Congress had taken an unaccustomed weekday recess, giving over the ground floor of the State House to receiving and recording Philadelphians'' ballots. Up and down the coast, people on both sides of the question awaited the results with fear and hope. As Pennsylvania went today, so must go the country, and the country was so passionately divided, and the contest in Pennsylvania so close, that nobody could confidently predict the outcome. Samuel Adams of Boston was not to be seen at the polls that Mayday. He''d done more than he hoped anyone would ever know to push the Pennsylvania election toward American independence. He made it his business to be anywhere but at the center of what he inspired.
He roomed with his second cousin John Adams near the Delaware River''s loud docks. He''d arrived in the spring of 1775, shortly after the shooting war had broken out at Lexington and Concord, entering Philadelphia in dour triumph. Muffled churchbells tolled to show the colonies'' support for his suffering Massachusetts. Most visitors were overwhelmed by the size, stink, and hustle of the busiest port in America and second-most-sophisticated city in the empire. Some marveled at the broad avenues on a rational grid. Not Samuel Adams. He found little to remark on and nothing to admire or approve in Philadelphia, in the province of Pennsylvania itself, or in the middle colonies as a whole. He''d been called out of his New England country, and out of Boston''s narrow alleys and turning streets, by a duty to make things like today''s election go a certain way.
Where he saw frippery and pusillanimity, a saving change must come. Of what was called middling height (fairly short) and middling buil.