Today’s selection– from John Hancock by Willard Sterne Randall. As the American colonies moved toward declaring independence from Britain in the summer of 1776, bold acts of leadership and defiance—both political and military—began to define the revolution’s early course.
“John Hancock is primarily remembered for his large, flamboyant signature on the Declaration of Independence. According to a story that originated years later, he said that he signed his name large and clear so that King George III could read it without his spectacles. Contrary to legend, there was no ceremonial signing on July 4, 1776. After Congress approved the text on July 4, Hancock signed the approved copy as president of Congress before sending it to the printer John Dunlap, who produced the first published version to be widely distributed as a broadside. Hancock was the only delegate whose name appeared on it. His iconic signature appears on a sheet of parchment carefully printed two weeks later and signed by Hancock and all the delegates present on August 2, although the location of this version was originally kept a secret. (Now this document is on display at the National Archives.)
“Until a second broadside with all the signers’ names listed was issued six months later, Hancock was the only delegate whose name was publicly attached to the treasonous document as it was disseminated to governors, troop commanders and newspapers that took it to England and the capitals of Europe. His signing alone, affixing his name to the document that would become his death warrant if he were captured by the British, can be described only as heroic. After signing the Declaration on July 4, President Hancock ordered it read aloud to a crowd in the Pennsylvania State House yard as dispatch riders hurried printed copies throughout the new states. In New York City, General Washington welcomed its rhetoric as a badly needed tonic for his troops.
“Since driving the British out of Boston at cannon point three months earlier, Washington had been amassing Connecticut and New York militia in anticipation of an imminent counterattack. A British armada.composed of a hundred fifty troop transports and thirty men-of-war had dropped anchor in New York harbor; thirty-two thousand Regulars, including nine thousand German mercenaries, had ditched their tents on Staten Island.
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| In John Trumbull’s painting The Declaration of Independence, Hancock, as presiding officer, is seated on the right as the drafting committee presents their work. |
“By the time the Declaration arrived on July 9, Washington’s inexperienced militia faced the largest fleet and biggest army Great Britain had ever sent from its shores. Washington had the document read aloud to his troops and then ordered them back to their billets. Some joined the mob surging through the streets and breaking the windows of prominent Loyalists. Reaching Bowling Green at the tip of Manhattan, they vaulted the fence surrounding the equestrian statue of King George III. The largest statue in America, it had been dedicated only six years earlier to celebrate the British victory over France. Looping ropes around the horse and its royal rider, they pulled the fifteen-foot statue to the ground. One man sawed off the king’s head; the rest was carted off to Litch field, Connecticut, where women converted it into 42,088 bullets.
“On August 27, after being outmaneuvered and soundly defeated at the Battle of Brooklyn, Washington managed to evacuate most of his army under cover of a storm. His troops were rowed to Man hattan Island by fishermen from Gloucester, Massachusetts. Re treating first north, then across New Jersey, and surviving a series of rearguard actions, Washington led his army, made up of twenty percent of the force he had assembled in New York, across the Del aware River. On Christmas Day 1776, he counterattacked, surprising a groggy garrison of German mercenaries in Trenton. Ten days later, he routed the British at Princeton. As a steady drumbeat of Washington’s dispatches reached President Hancock to be read aloud to Congress, delegates found little time to debate a new form of government.
“Months earlier, on the day that Congress created the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence, they also created a second panel made up of a delegate from each colony and chaired by John Dickinson to prepare a written constitution for a confederation of states. When Benjamin Franklin had returned to America a year earlier, he proposed a government similar to his 1754 Albany Plan of Union, but Congress never debated it.
“One week after Congress promulgated the Declaration, the Dickinson committee presented a draft Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union to the full Congress. But it would take fully five years and two defeats in Congress before the nation’s first constitution was finally ratified. No state or combination of speculative investors was willing to relinquish its claim to a bonanza in western lands. All that could be settled immediately was a name for the new entity: the United States of America. A fourth draft of the Articles, not debated until November 1777, would finally be presented for congressional approval and submission to the states for ratification.”
| author: Willard Sterne Randall | |
| title: John Hancock: First to Sign, First to Invest in America’s Independence |
