Chapter 14 THE UNKNOWN INDIVIDUAL

THE war for American independence was begun by an individual. He was asleep in his bed when someone pounded on his door and shouted out in the night: “The Redcoats are coming!”

But what could he do? He was only one man against the armed might of Britain. If he had been a king, a czar, or a potentate, he could have solved vast problems and done great things – he could have brought the powers of Europe together in harmony and made an everlasting peace and prosperity around the world.

But he was not a king, not a royal governor, not a rich man, not an important man. He was just one little man, unknown to anyone outside of his own neighborhood. So what could he do? Why should he take the initiative? Such things usually cleared up – they always had. So why not let nature take its course? This was no time to be foolhardy. He must keep calm, use his head, and consider the practical aspects. And there was his family to think of. What would become of them?

Most men felt that way. They knew they could do nothing, and they had better sense than to try. That night in Lexington, many of them stayed in bed. But the unknown individual chose between submission that looked like safety and rebellion that seemed utterly hopeless. Many respected citizens were against him; the teachers and the writers of books were against him. Men in high places – many widely-known men – stood stanchly with the King.

But the unknown individual had the courage of his convictions. He got up, put on his clothes, took his gun, and went out to meet the British troops. Not acting under orders, not being led nor wanting to be the leader, he stood on his own feet – a responsible, self-controlling person – and fired the shot heard ’round the world. The sound of that shot said that man is a free agent; that government is the servant rather than the master.

Ebenezer Fox

The records are scant. The unknown man had no biographer. He was just a plain, ordinary person who had learned from his own experience that each human being is self-controlling – responsible for his own acts and for his relations with others.

Ebenezer Fox was such a man, and he typifies thousands of Americans of his time. Ebenezer helped fight the War for Independence as an ordinary seaman under the pine-tree flag; and in the early 1800’s, he wrote down his “simple narrative” for his grandchildren because, he said, they liked to hear him tell it.¹²

He was born in the East Parish of Roxbury, Massachusetts in January, 1763. His father, a tailor, was a poor man with a large family; so Ebenezer at the age of seven was signed over to a farmer named Pelham. This was not unusual. In those days, most families expected a boy of seven to be self-supporting, either at home or as a servant to someone else. It sounds a bit shocking; but as Mrs. Lane points out, this same thinking still prevails in eastern Europe and western Asia. Even in the United States, as late as the 1860’s, the age of self-support was only nine.

Suffering many hardships and privations, Ebenezer frequently complained to his father, but the elder Fox paid no attention to his son’s grievances. He assumed that they arose merely from a spirit of discontent and would soon subside.

In the meantime, Ebenezer was hearing considerable talk about the tyranny of government and “Expressions of exasperated feeling against the government of Great Britain … from the mouths of all classes….”

He pondered over the things he heard and began to apply them to his own circumstances: “I thought that I was doing myself great injustice by remaining in bondage, when I ought to go free; and that the time was come, when I should liberate myself … and … do what was right in the sight of my own eyes.”

So, at the age of twelve, Ebenezer ran away from his master and got a job on a ship going to Santo Domingo. Returning with a contraband cargo of molasses and coffee, the ship was attacked by two British gunboats off Stonington, Connecticut. Young Ebenezer jumped overboard, stripped off his clothes in the water, swam to shore under fire from the British guns, and barely escaped drowning.

Thus he returned from his first voyage, penniless and stark naked – “without injury, but nearly exhausted from fatigue and fear, not a little augmented by the sound of the bullets that whistled around my head while in the water…. My appearance among them [the rest of the crew on shore] in a state of entire nakedness excited not a little mirth…. But after a few jests at my expense, the mate took off one of the two shirts, with which he had taken the precaution to provide himself before he left the vessel, and gave it to me.”

A little later, Ebenezer Fox volunteered to fight for independence. He was wounded, captured, and starved on the British “floating hell” in Long Island Sound; but he escaped and re-enlisted.

He became a gunner, which cost him the hearing in one ear, but he fought through to the end. When the war was over and the American ships had no further need for gunners, Ebenezer, along with other members of his crew, was left stranded in France and had to work his way home as best he could.

Back in those days, there were no veterans’ benefits. Ebenezer’s pay for five years of hard fighting consisted of his low wages, paid in the almost-worthless Continental currency, and his 30-dollar share of the prize money from a captured British ship.

Such men began and won the War for Independence. For ten years, they had been storming British forts. They came out of their homes and fought at Lexington. In June, they stood against wave after wave of British troops at the Battle of Bunker Hill; but it was not until the following February, when that historic hilltop was white with snow, that they had a leader.

America’s Godfather

His name was Thomas Paine. He was a workman, poor and growing old. He had spent most of his childhood helping his father, an English corset maker. But he had managed to get a few years’ schooling and had learned to read and write – a rare privilege for a working-class boy. He married a tobacconist’s daughter. They inherited her father’s tiny shop in Lewes, England. Paine’s wife died, and the little shop was sold for debt. He struggled along at various jobs until he was nearly forty; then friends lent him money to pay his passage to America.

Benjamin Franklin gave him a letter to a Philadelphia printer, who hired him at $5.00 a month to start a little publication called the Pennsylvania Magazine.

That was in the year 1775. The colonies were blockaded and could get no gunpowder. The new editor launched the first copy of the Pennsylvania Magazine with a recipe for homemade gunpowder. It was a sensational success, and Americans, mixing the ingredients in their kitchens, may have noticed the name of the editor – a name, then obscure, which was to resound down through history.

Thomas Paine had taken up writing at middle age; and, in contrast to the pompous style of the 18th century writers, he avoided quoting the classics and wrote in the simple language of the people. He saved his money and printed a little pamphlet covering his views on freedom. The pamphlet bore the title Common Sense. It came off the press early in 1776, and in all the history of printing, there has never been such a spontaneous sale. It was not copyrighted; there were no copyright laws, and anyway, Paine wanted no profit from his political writings. The first edition didn’t even bear his name. It was widely reprinted; and it has been estimated that, out of a population of 3,000,000 people, more than 300,000 bought copies. Translated into present-day terms, that would correspond to a sale of around 14,000,000 copies.

All who could read, read it. Others listened while it was read to them. It said to Americans: Do what is right in your own eyes. Cut loose from England. Set up a government of your own. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.”¹³

Shortly thereafter, Paine enlisted as a private in the defeated colonial army, which was falling back before the British advance – from Long Island to Manhattan, across Jersey, across the Delaware, across Pennsylvania. When Congress had taken to its heels and soldiers were deserting and cautious men were hastening to proclaim their loyalty to the King, Thomas Paine, by the light of a campfire, spread a scrap of paper on a drumhead and wrote:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; … Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; … What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: … it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”^13-a

His ringing words cut through the gloom of defeat. In every colony, courage rose to meet the challenge, and George Washington declared that Thomas Paine was worth more than an entire army. This plain-spoken man was the leader and the spirit of the new revolution. In America, England, and France, he was the greatest political influence of his century.

The Declaration

More than a year after Bunker Hill and six months after Paine’s Common Sense had raised all the unheard voices into one loud roar for independence, an extraordinary meeting was held in Philadelphia.

It seems that Thomas Jefferson had asked Paine to help draw up a statement reviewing the causes of the war and including a simple declaration of the principle for which the people were fighting. The tentative document was now ready, and representatives from each of the colonies had come to the meeting to consider its adoption.

These representatives were gentlemen of solid responsibility and high social position – including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Richard Henry Lee, Charles Carroll, Robert Morris, John Hancock, James Wilson, Roger Sherman, and George Walton. Such men had everything to gain by standing with the King. If they joined the rebels, they risked not only their own lives, but also the lives of their families. Under English law, their children and their children’s children would be attainted traitors.

Each man attending the meeting possessed a landed estate, a substantial business, a professional position – or all three. He need only do nothing. By keeping quiet, he might save his property, his superior class status, and his life. And he could easily justify his position on the premise that, while he might not wholly agree with the government’s policies, a good subject’s duty is to obey the laws and remain loyal to his king.

Some of them refused to sign, and each man who did sign knew what he risked when he wrote his signature under the words: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives….” He was prepared to lose his life when he signed a declaration of that ten-year-old war, its causes and its motives:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The Philadelphia group was undertaking not only to win the war, but to lay the groundwork for an entirely new kind of state. They were assuming leadership of the weak and losing side, and the problems were many. First of all, money would have to be raised, and the military effort would have to be better organized. Scattered mobs could never defeat Great Britain.

The prospects were not bright. The King’s troops were advancing down the Hudson River. His fleet was approaching New York. The leaders of the Revolution were faced with the armed might of the British Empire – with 13 disorganized and quarreling colonies at their backs.

Dissension

The different colonies had grown up as separate units. They were divided by religion, customs, economic interests, and commercial rivalries. If the war were to be won, they would have to be brought together in a unified objective. And winning the war would mean very little unless a political structure could be devised which would solve the kind of problems that had brought on the war.

Many prominent citizens – landholders, bankers, rich merchants, and speculators – were unmindful of the underlying causes of the Revolution; they were looking forward to the time when America would be set up as a monarchy, independent of Europe, but following the Old World pattern of a living authority. Others were clamoring for an out-and-out democracy, overlooking the fact that down through history all such attempts had led to tyranny and rebellion.

Each of the representatives at Philadelphia knew that men are free, and yet there was a wide difference of viewpoint as to what form of political structure would keep men free.

The Declaration had abolished government, but this was war. The revolutionary leaders must have authority to mobilize, arm, command, and feed the troops; and taxes would have to be collected to pay the bills. But any authority which they might exercise over any other man must be given to them by that man, so it was necessary to call for a general grant of authority from the people in the colonies.

Time and space would not permit all of them to meet in one place; they must meet in many places, and each group must send someone to represent all the individuals in that group.^*

From all the colonies, messengers on horseback went galloping through the woods to the secret meeting places to find out what was happening, to get instructions as to what should be done by the folks back home, and, above all, to make sure that no one tried to set up a central government which would infringe on their rights. Frequently, the King’s troops were at the meeting place ahead of the messengers; but amidst alarms, defeats, and retreats, most of the delegates managed to get together.

The State Constitutions

In their spare moments, some of the delegates would take quill in hand and write out substitutes for the royal charters under which their colonies had been operating.

The state constitution was an outgrowth of the royal charter. Each colony had had its own separate charter – based on the Old World belief that an authority controls the individual and that no person can do anything without its permission.

The state constitution would have to be just the reverse of the royal charter. It would have to define the uses of force that would and would not be granted to public officials. It was a matter of turning things upside down, and there was no precedent to serve as a guide.

Able men in every colony – consulting frequently with the representatives of other colonies – continued their efforts to develop state constitutions which would be in harmony with the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence.

Over and over again, the state constitutions were rewritten; over and over again, they were rejected by the people.

For six long years, the revolutionary leaders tried to evade the King’s troops, to hold the struggling army together, to get food and shoes and powder and bullets from stupid politicians and grafters, who stole the money and would have let the soldiers die. They negotiated loans from France and tried to get French help against the British. While they were doing all these things, they were also trying to persuade Americans to agree to the constitutions.

But the unknown Americans – the Ebenezer Foxes – were fighting authority, and each was determined to do what was right in his own eyes. They were resentful of anything that even resembled authority, and they did not intend to let a new power grow up as fast as they cut the old one down.

Grudgingly and most suspiciously, the colonies, one after another, did agree to their state constitutions – but not until strict prohibitions against the misuse of force had been clearly set forth in each constitution.

Dilemma

Then the people of the different states couldn’t make up their minds whether to unite or to become separate nations. If they were to unite in one strong government, what would happen to the freedom for which they were fighting? And there was strenuous argument between the large states and the small states as to how many votes each would be allowed in case they did join the Union.

They realized that their freedom would be endangered if they did not unite. Americans occupied only a small part of the New World. Most of the Western Hemisphere was still in the possession of Britain, France, and Spain.

The heterogeneous and scattered states, weakened under the strain of war, could hardly hope to survive unless united under some kind of centralized government strong enough to hold its own against the great powers of the world.

^* The idea was not new. For generations past, the colonists in their scattered and unprotected settlements had been getting together in times of danger, sending their representatives to get help – to bargain for it, if necessary – and to make formal agreements with other colonies. So they were used to the idea of delegating to one man their natural right of free speech and free contract. These early beginnings ultimately led to the invention of a new and unique device called the “convention of delegates.”