The Word...
Philadelphia in July is brutal. The air sits heavy and wet over the cobblestones, thick with the smell of horses and baking river mud and whatever the summer has decided to do with a city of forty thousand people scorching and packed into a grid of narrow streets. The windows of the Pennsylvania State House have been open for weeks.
Inside, John Adams is sweating through his coat and he does not care.
He has been working in this building since before Lexington. He has been pushing toward this moment longer than anyone else in the room. On his mind are the words in Abigail's letter — I long to hear that you have declared an independency — which has been sitting where he can see it for weeks. He knows it by heart.
Today, someone is going to say the word out loud on the floor of Congress.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — June 7
Richard Henry Lee of Virginia rises.
He is tall and imposing, one of the fiercest advocates for independence in the colonies — and he has Virginia's May 15 instructions in his hand. The room goes quiet in the way rooms go quiet in response to a powerful presence.
Lee reads the resolution: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
Before Lee finishes, Adams is already on his feet to second it.
The debate erupts. The moderates push back — New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina aren't ready, their delegations don't have instructions, the timing is wrong, the timing has always been wrong. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina leads the opposition, pressing for delay. He is twenty-six years old, the youngest delegate in the room, and he pleads that some colonies need more time. Congress agrees to postpone the vote three weeks.
But the motion is on the floor. The word has been spoken. Independence...
Charleston Harbor, South Carolina — Early June
The British fleet has a target.
The same ships that sat blind off Cape Fear in April — the fleet that never received Glasgow's dispatches and waited on an empty shore for a Loyalist army that had already been destroyed at Moore's Creek — has regrouped, resupplied, and sailed south to Charleston. Nine warships under Commodore Sir Peter Parker. Nearly 270 cannons and 2,500 soldiers ready to land.
Standing in their way: Colonel William Moultrie, 435 men, and an unfinished fort on Sullivan's Island at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. The fort's walls are made of palmetto logs — soft, spongy wood packed with sand — and the British officers, studying it through their glasses, consider it no obstacle at all.
General Charles Lee, Washington's second in command, who had been sent south to organize the defense, agrees. He surveys the fort and calls it a slaughter pen. He orders Moultrie to abandon it.
Moultrie refuses and sends word to John Rutledge, President of South Carolina.
Rutledge's reply to Moultrie is immediate: General Lee wishes you to evacuate the fort. You will not, without an order from me. I would sooner cut off my hand than write one.
Moultrie stays. His men sleep at their guns, waiting and watching the sails on the horizon.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — June 11
Congress appoints a Committee of Five to draft a declaration — a document to have ready when the vote passes:
John Adams.
Benjamin Franklin.
Roger Sherman.
Robert Livingston.
Thomas Jefferson.
The committee turns to Jefferson with Adams insisting he should write it; Jefferson is from Virginia and is ten times the writer of any person in the room.
Jefferson goes to his rented rooms on Market Street, takes a seat at his portable writing desk, and begins. He has seventeen days.
Sullivan's Island, South Carolina — June 7–27
The waiting is its own kind of war.
Moultrie's men watch the British fleet from the walls of the fort, counting sails, doing the math. Thirty-one cannons against nearly 270. An unfinished fort against nine warships. General Lee sends message after message suggesting retreat. Moultrie sends each one back.
Rutledge writes from Charleston:
Do not make too free with your cannon. Cool and do mischief.
The powder stores are dangerously low. Moultrie orders his gunners to fire slowly, deliberately. Every round has to count because there are not enough of them.
The June heat on Sullivan's Island is another merciless enemy — ninety degrees and muggy on the platform, powder smoke hanging in the dead air, the reflecting sun off the water blinding.
The men inside wait. June passes one long, sweltering day at a time.
New York — Mid June
The intelligence report finally arrives.
Washington reads it once. Sets it down.
Howe's fleet has sailed from Halifax.
The question he left unfinished on the dock in New London — if it comes down to ships — is about to be answered. The bloody summer he predicted to his brother in May is on its way.
Sullivan's Island, South Carolina — June 28, Before Dawn
The British fleet weighs anchor in the early morning.
Nine warships move into position. Parker's flagship Bristol and one other take the closest berths, four hundred yards from the fort's walls, anchoring broadside. Three frigates are sent on a wider route to circle around behind the fort, flank its unprotected rear, and cut off any retreat.
By 11:30 in the morning, the guns open fire.
The sounds of explosions reaches Charleston a mile away. People climb onto rooftops to watch the smoke rise over Sullivan's Island.
Inside the fort, the British cannonballs slam into the palmetto walls — and stop. The soft wood absorbs the shot. The sand packed between the logs swallows what gets through. The dusty debris flies and the walls shake but they do not shatter. Moultrie's men are braced behind fortifications they thought would have crumbled in minutes... reinvigorated to find themselves still standing.
They start firing back.
Moultrie's gunners take their time. Four cannons at a time, slow and deliberate, every shot carefully aimed at the two closest British warships. The lead ship, Bristol, takes hit after hit — more than seventy before the day is done. Her decks run with blood. Every man on her quarterdeck is killed or wounded. Parker himself is hit, his breeches shot away.
The three frigates sent to flank the fort run aground on an uncharted sandbar. None of them reach their intended position. One cannot be re-floated. Her crew sets her on fire rather than let the Patriots take her. She burns through the afternoon while the battle rages.
By nine in the evening, the British cease fire. Parker pulls his battered fleet back out of range. The guns go quiet.
Moultrie's casualties: 12 killed. 25 wounded.
The Royal Navy's casualties: 64 dead. More than 140 wounded, and a frigate burning on a sandbar.
It is the first decisive defeat of the Royal Navy in the war, delivered from land by 435 men in an unfinished fort.
New York — Late June
Howe's fleet arrives at Sandy Hook.
Washington watches from Brooklyn Heights as the sails appear on the horizon. Then more sails. Then more. Over a hundred ships — warships, frigates, troop transports, supply ships, hospital vessels — carrying nine thousand British regulars and the first wave of Hessian mercenaries. The largest military force yet assembled in North America, and it is anchored off New York and aimed directly at everything the rebellion has spent six months becoming.
Urgent, he rides the lines past nightfall, stopping at each position, asking questions, making notes, giving orders. The harbor is still empty. Every hour it stays that way means one more defensive position can be fortified.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — July 1 & 2
On July 1, Congress reconvenes. The debate is fierce. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania rises to make the last great argument against. "The consequences involved in the motion now lying before you are of such magnitude that I tremble under the oppressive honor of sharing in its determination..." He warns that advocates of immediate independence want to "brave the storm in a skiff made of paper."
When Dickinson sits down, the room goes silent.
Rain streaks the windows. No one moves.
John Adams knows he is viewed as the most obnoxious man in the room — and that he is the only one who will answer. He rises without notes or preparation and makes his case one final time, thundering for everything he has been arguing in favor of for six months.
Thomas Jefferson would later write that Adams that day was "... our Colossus on the floor. Not graceful, not elegant, not always fluent in his public addresses, he yet came out with a power both of thought and of expression which moved us from our seats."
The exchange lasts most of the day.
On July 2, the vote is called.
Twelve colonies vote yes. New York abstains — their delegates are waiting on instructions from home that haven't arrived.
The Lee Resolution passes.
For the first time, the Continental Congress has voted to sever from Great Britain. Adams writes to Abigail that night: The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.
He is right about everything except the date.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — July 4
Congress takes up Jefferson's declaration. Two days of debate, edits, deletions. Jefferson sits in the hall and watches Congress cut his words and says nothing. Twenty-five percent of the draft is removed. What remains is the document.
Late in the morning of July 4, the final text is approved.
Jefferson's declaration is now the founding document of something that has never existed before. The word that no one could say in a timber courthouse in Halifax three months ago. The word that hung unspoken through every congressional debate. The word that Paine made people feel, and Adams made people believe, and North Carolina first put in writing, and Rhode Island acted on first, and Virginia forced to a vote — that word is now the first word of a new nation.
That evening, a committee carries the manuscript down the street to John Dunlap's print shop. His compositors set the type by candlelight. By morning, approximately 200 copies are rolled and ready to ride.
Two days later, the Pennsylvania Evening Post hits the streets.
The headline reads:
"This day the CONTINENTAL CONGRESS declared the
UNITED COLONIES FREE and INDEPENDENT STATES"
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