THE claim of Chalmers that the passion for independence had latently existed from the very foundation of the New England colonies[694] had been early denied by Dummer in his _Defence of the N. E. Charters_. John Adams[695] had been outspoken in his advocacy of independence for more than a year before R. H. Lee introduced his resolution into Congress. He had avowed it in letters, which the British intercepted in July, 1775, and printed in a Boston newspaper. If Josiah Quincy, Jr. (_Memoirs_, 250, 341), can be believed, he found Franklin in London in 1774 holding ideas "extended on the broad scale of total emancipation" (Sparks's _Franklin_, i. 379). The resolves of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, in May, 1775, were strongly indicative. John Jay traced the beginning of an outspoken desire to the rejection by the king of the petition of the Congress of 1775 (_N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg._, July, 1776). In the autumn of that year it is certain that the passion for independence animated the army round Boston (Frothingham's _Siege of Boston_, 263), and in December James Bowdoin was confident that the dispute must end in independence (_Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, xii. 228). There was very far from any general adhesion to the belief in its inevitableness at all times during 1775. Washington was not conscious of the wish (Sparks, i. 131, ii. 401; Smyth, ii. 457). Gov. Franklin was expressing to Dartmouth the prevalence of a detestation of such views (_Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, xiv 342). The English historians have dwelt on this (Mahon, vi. 92, 94; Lecky, iii. 414, 447, iv. 41).[696]
[Illustration: AUTOGRAPHS OF THE MECKLENBURG COMMITTEE, MAY 31, 1775.