Independence by John Ferling Read Free Book Online Page A

players, important members of the Continental Congress as well as British ministers and their principal adversaries in Parliament. Public officials in that day were not unlike today’s officials. Some who held positions of authority were high-minded and sought what they thought was best for the nation. Some were visionaries. Some were inspired by deeply held philosophical convictions. Some were vengeful. Some acted on behalf of narrow provincial interests or sought to protect the entrenched elite. Some were motivated by the hope of enhancing their careers or reputations. Some sought economic gain. Many were driven by a combination of these motives. And no one had a crystal ball. No one could say unequivocally what the long-term results would be if the choice he advocated was adopted.
    On the American side, the members of Congress remained deeply divided over the best course to pursue all the way down to July 1776. Some congressmen desperately sought to avoid war and revolution, some held intransigently to the hope of reconciliation, some reluctantly accepted independence, and some surreptitiously yearned for independence years before it was declared. This is the story of able and ambitious politicians—including America’s Founders—scrambling to land on their feet; of members of Congress walking a political tightrope between the conflicting interests of New England, the mid-Atlantic colonies, and the South; of men who were daring and men who were timid; of men who were tied to the past and men who dreamed of what might be a glorious future.
    Britain’s ministers and those in Parliament who opposed them simultaneously groped for the means of saving Great Britain’s North American empire. It is a spellbinding tale of a great modern nation blundering into a disaster as its leaders become trapped by their earliest decisions, making them captives in a descent toward tragedy. How the hard and unbending British leaders steered their nation toward an epic disaster provides lessons for politicians in any time period. Britain’s rulers coped with the welter of interests in a great modern state. At the same time, they sought to avoid the appearance of weakness. Their story, it seems now, is that of shortsighted leaders on a straightforward path to catastrophe.
    Above all, this is a story that could have ended differently. A declaration of American independence, at least in 1776, might never have occurred. There were ways that the imperial crisis might have been resolved, and this book tells the story of the options and alternatives that existed.
    But mostly it is a human story. Some forty years after 1776, Thomas Jefferson tried to set the record straight. He was troubled that subsequent generations had come to credit the Founding Fathers with “a wisdom more than human” and to view their achievements with “sanctimonious reverence.” 1 With regard to independence, Jefferson knew that the story of what had transpired between the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was far more complex. He knew that the struggle to break America’s colonial shackles had been a very human story filled with shards of weakness, opportunism, accidents, deceit, fortuity, enmity, decisions wise and misguided, exemplary leadership, and ultimately heroic boldness.
    John Adams would have agreed with Jefferson. He, too, knew how difficult the struggle had been to bring Congress to declare independence, and not long after the battle had been won, he declared: “Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the [Revolutionary] Generation, to preserve your Freedom.” 2
    The leaders on both sides were ordinary mortals who happened to be confronted with extraordinary challenges. This is the story of their response to the uncommon challenges they faced. It is not a story filled with heroes and villains so much as it a history of human beings of assorted virtues, beliefs,