THE SENTIMENT OF INDEPENDENCE, ITS GROWTH AND CONSUMMATION.
THE assertion needs no qualification that the thirteen colonies would not in the beginning have furnished delegates to a congress with the avowed purpose of seeking a separation from the mother country; and we may also affirm, that, with a possible forecast in the minds of some two or three members, such a result was not apprehended. If any deceptive methods—as was charged at the time—were engaged in turning a congress avowedly called to secure a redress of grievances into an agency for securing independence, they will appear in the sharp scrutiny with which we may now study the inner history of the subject. And if an explanation of the course of the Congress can be found, consistent with its perfect sincerity, we must then seek to trace the influences alike of the new light which came in upon the delegates, and of successive aggravating measures of the British government, in substituting independence as its object. Though it is certain that Samuel Adams, fretting under the hesitations of Congress, had proposed to an ardent sympathizer that the four New England colonies should act in that direction by themselves, his own clear judgment would have satisfied him that that step would have been futile unless the other colonies followed it. If there were but a single colony from which no response could be drawn, the consequences would have been obstructive. That different sections of the country should have furnished leaders so in accord as Samuel Adams, Richard H. Lee, and Gadsden was a most felicitous condition. A congress, then, composed of delegates from all the colonies was the indispensable and the only practicable method for working out the scheme of independence, and even such a congress must avoid basing its action on local grievances. The reserve which the delegates from Massachusetts found it politic to practise, in not obtruding their special grievances, was well decided upon from the first, and proved to be effective. That the circumstances required patience in such men as the Adamses is abundantly evident from the frankness with which they wrote outside of Congress of the temporizing and dilatoriness of what went on in it.