A letter from Washington, of the twenty-ninth of June, was then read, from which it appeared that Howe and fortyfive ships or more, laden with troops, had arrived at Sandy Hook, and that the whole fleet was expected in a day or two. "I am hopeful," wrote the general, "that I shall get some reenforcements before they are prepared to attack; be that as it may, I shall make the best disposition I can of our troops." Not all who were round him had firmness like his own; Reed, the new adjutant-general, quailed before the inequality of the British and American force, saying: "Had I known the true posture of affairs, no consideration would have tempted me to have taken an active part in this scene." No one knew better than the commander-in-chief the exceedingly discouraging aspect of military affairs; but his serene and unfaltering courage in this hour was a support to congress. His letter was referred to the board of war which they had recently established, and of which John Adams was the president.

On the second day of July there were present in congress probably forty-nine members. Rodney had arrived from Delaware, and, joining Mackean, secured that colony. Dickinson and Morris stayed away, which enabled Franklin, Wilson, and Morton of Pennsylvania, to outvote Willing and Humphreys. The South Carolina members, still uncertain if Charleston had not fallen, for the sake of unanimity, came round; so, though New York was still unable to vote, twelve colonies, with no dissenting one, resolved: "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."

At the end of this great day the mind of John Adams. heaved like the ocean after a storm. "The greatest question," he wrote, "was decided which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was nor will be decided among men. When I look back to 1761, and run through the series of political events, the chain of causes and effects, I am surprised at the suddenness as well as greatness of this revolution. Britain has been filled with folly, and America with wisdom. It is the will of heaven that the two

countries should be sundered forever; it may be the will of heaven that America shall suffer calamities still more wasting and distresses yet more dreadful. If this is to be the case, the furnace of affliction produces refinement in states as well as individuals; but I submit all my hopes and fears to an overruling Providence, in which, unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe.

"Had a declaration of independence been made seven months ago, we might before this hour have formed alliances with foreign states; we should have mastered Quebec, and been in possession of Canada; but, on the other hand, the delay has many great advantages attending it. The hopes of reconciliation which were fondly entertained by multitudes of the honest and well-meaning, though weak and mistaken, have been gradually and at last totally extinguished. Time has been given for the whole people maturely to consider the great question of independence, so that in every colony of the thirteen they have now adopted it as their own act.

"But the day is passed. The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America; to be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival, commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty, from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.

"You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration, and support and defend these states; yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of light and glory; that the end is worth all the means; that posterity will triumph in that day's transaction, even though we should rue it, which I trust in God we shall not."

The resolution of congress changed the old thirteen British colonies into free and independent states. It remained to set forth the reason for this act, and the principles which the new people would own as their guides. Of the committee appointed for that duty, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia had received the largest number of votes, and was in that manner singled out to draft the confession of faith of the rising empire. He owed this distinction to respect for the colony which he

represented, to the consummate ability of the state papers which he had already written, and to that general favor which follows merit, modesty, and a sweet disposition; but the quality which specially fitted him for the task was the sympathetic character of his nature, by which he was able with instinctive perception to read the soul of the nation, and, having collected its best thoughts and noblest feelings, to give them out in clear and bold words, mixed with so little of himself that his country, as it went along with him, found nothing but what it recognised as its own. Born to an independent fortune, he had from his youth been an indefatigable student. "The glow of one warm thought was worth more to him than money." Of a hopeful temperament and a tranquil, philosophic cast of mind, always temperate in his mode of life and decorous in his manners, he was a perfect master of his passions. He was of a delicate organization, and fond of elegance; his tastes were refined; laborious in his application to business or the pursuit of knowledge, music, the most spiritual of all pleasures of the senses, was his favorite recreation; and he took a neverfailing delight in the varied beauty of rural life, building himself a home in the loveliest region of his native state. He was a skilful horseman, and with elastic step would roam the mountains on foot. The range of his studies was very wide; he was not unfamiliar with the literature of Greece and Rome; had an aptitude for mathematics and mechanics, and loved especially the natural sciences; scorning nothing but metaphysics. British governors and officials had introduced into Williamsburg the prevalent free-thinking of Englishmen of that century, and Jefferson had grown up in its atmosphere; he was not only a hater of priestcraft and superstition and bigotry and intolerance, he was thought to be indifferent to religion; yet his instincts all inclined him to trace every fact to a general law, and to put faith in ideal truth; the world of the senses did not bound his aspirations, and he believed more than he himself was aware of. He was an idealist in his habits of thought and life, and he was kept so, in spite of circumstances, by the irresistible bent of his character. He had great power in mastering details as well as in searching for general principles. His profession was that of the law, in which he

was methodical, painstaking, and successful; at the same time he pursued it as a science, and was well read in the law of nature and of nations. Whatever he had to do, it was his custom to prepare himself for it carefully; and in public life, when others were at fault, they often found that he had already hewed out the way; so that in council men willingly gave him the lead, which he never appeared to claim, and was always able to undertake. But he rarely spoke in public, and was less fit to engage in the war of debate than calmly to sum up its conclusions. It was a beautiful trait in his character that he was free from envy; he is the constant and best witness to the greatness of John Adams as the advocate and defender of independence. A common object now riveted the two statesmen together. At that period Jefferson, by the general consent of Virginia, stood first among her civilians. Just thirty-three years old, married, and happy in his family, affluent, with a bright career before him, he was no rash innovator by his character or his position; if his convictions drove him to demand independence, it was only because he could no longer live with honor under the British "constitution, which he still acknowledged to be better than all that had preceded it." His enunciation of general principles was fearless, but he was no visionary devotee of abstract theories; the nursling of his country, the offspring of his time, he set about the work of a practical statesman, and the principles which he set forth grew so naturally out of previous law and the facts of the past that they struck deep root and have endured.

The Dutch manifesto of the twenty-sixth of June 1581, renounced Spanish sovereignty "according to the rights of nature." "Every man knows," it said, "that subjects are not created by God for princes, but princes for the sake of their subjects. If a prince endeavors to take from his subjects their old liberties, privileges, and customs, he must be considered not as a prince, but as a tyrant;" adding, "and another prince may of right be chosen in his place as the head."

From the fulness of his own mind, without consulting one single book, yet having in memory the example of the Swiss and the manifesto of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Jefferson drafted the declaration, in which, after citing the

primal principles of government, he presented the complaints of the United States against England in the three classes of the iniquitous use of the royal prerogative, the usurpation of legislative power over America by the king in parliament, and the measures for enforcing the acts of the British parliament. He submitted the paper separately to Franklin and to John Adams, accepted from each of them one or two verbal, unimportant corrections, and on the twenty-eighth of June reported it to congress, which, on the second of July, immediately after adopting the resolution of independence, entered upon its consideration. During the remainder of that day, and the next two, the language, the statements, and the principles of the paper were closely scanned.

ten:

In the indictment against George III., Jefferson had writ

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

These words expressed precisely what had happened in Virginia; she, as well as other colonies, had perseveringly attempted to repress the slave-trade; the king had perseveringly used his veto to protect it; the governor, clothed with the king's authority, had invited slaves to rise against their masters; but it could not be truly said that all the colonies had been always without blame in regard to the commerce, or that