Americanism Redux

August 6, Your Today, 250 years ago, in 1776

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(hearing music) “…Memories may be beautiful and yet what’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget; so it’s the laughter we will remember, whenever we remember, the way we were…” (hearing more music)

These are the poignant lyrics of a touching song from 1973.

The things remembered are often not the way things were.

So it is this week, 250 years ago, and the way the Declaration’s most important part was added on.

This is Part Three and you’re in Americanism Redux.

* * * * * * *

Today, August 6, 1776, the impression of Americans everywhere is that the Declaration has two parts to it. The first part is philosophical, rhetorical, and a blend of social and political theory. It’s humanity. The second part lists grievances, the specific instances that, taken together, totaled up to the need for separation from British rule and independence on the world stage. It’s more about a people.

Part One and Part Two. That’s what you read in the newspapers or heard read to you by a town crier or designated speaker.

And then at the very end you see or hear the name John Hancock, President, and Charles Thomson, Clerk.

Oh, there’s a sweeping title of impersonality at the top: “Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled”.

But there’s not another name or signature on the damn thing. Two Parts make the Declaration. Where are the signatures?

* * * * * * *

For most people, there’s a good chance they’ll have a smattering knowledge of this Declaration-enacting group.

A dozen or so folks on a “Committee of Safety” in each colony/state will know. They’ve been writing and sending instructions to their colony/state’s delegates. Their families will also know, at least those old enough to understand.

Beyond that, a circle of others, tightly connected to government and public affairs, will know who their delegates are, but certainly few outside their area. They vote, read, go to meetings, and so on. They talk about the stuff in their homes, workplaces, worship places, and street corners.

Let’s be honest. The likely truth is, essentially, that as of August 6 you’re likely find perhaps one in five people who can tell the names of a half-dozen delegates in Philadelphia. Non-delegate Tom Paine, oh they’ll know him, because of his pamphlet “Common Sense”. And yes, John Hancock is well-known too, with newspapers including his name in their printing of the Declaration. To most readers, apparently Hancock’s some sort of wizard in Philadelphia. And perhaps a couple of other delegates’ names. But a knowledge of the full or majority membership of the Continental Congress?

Forgettaboutit.

* * * * * * *

(one likelihood)

Why no other names besides President Hancock and Clerk Thomson?

Treason is the reason.

Signing or putting an individual name on the public Declaration is an enormous risk. If the war suddenly turns dark, or if enemy soldiers, supporters, infiltrators, and sympathizers carry out a kidnapping plan, that’s it. If you’re a delegate, you’re finished, done, dead. Death-sentenced with torturing, maiming, and public execution (and remember, Washington had overseen the hanging of a Loyalist conspirator in New York City just a couple weeks ago). There is a real and genuine feeling of terror over the risk and probabilities. A lot of the Continental Congress delegates know the names of victims—martyrs—from their knowledge of recent English history and ancient classical history. It’s part of the memories in their heads, the way things were which could very easily be that way again.

British authorities had tried and failed sixteen months ago with Hancock and Sam Adams. Who’s to say they can’t succeed now, especially with a large Redcoat military force due to invade New York City any day?

Yeah, let’s keep the individual names a secret and off the document. Treason is the reason, and terror terrifies.

* * * * * * *

Two weeks ago, on July 19, a brief mention was made of potential signatures during a session in the meeting room of Pennsylvania State House. Delegates of the Continental Congress agreed that the handful of paper copies of the Declaration should be “engrossed”, followed by each signing from each member. The engrossing job went to Timothy Matlack, assistant to Clerk Charles Thomson, also on July 19. No more was said, or at least no more was written down as having been said.

* * * * * * *

“Engrossing” is a legal term known well to those delegates in the Continental Congress educated as lawyers. It means “to make official”, that the writing now in front of you is finished and officially understood to be the legally existent and recognizable document; deeds, wills,, and contracts fall into the engrossing category. Matlack’s charge to do the engrossing came with an additional feature: put it on parchment, the thickest type of paper used. That will enhance the engrossed document’s durability. It will, if you will, live longer. They’re doubling up—engrossing on a lasting material. It’s built to last for as long as the Union lives.

Who knows? A drinking game might have ensued down at the “Man Full of Trouble”, a working-class tavern about ten minutes’ walk from the State House: which lasts longer, the Union or the paper it’s written on? Matlack’s taking bets.

* * * * * * *

(Matlack)

250 years ago this week, on August 2, Matlack and Thomson bring in the finished engrossed 1,337-word production of the document. Matlack’s handwriting is magnificent, a quill doing a brush’s work. This is the arrival of a clean, crisply-new, and artistically-rendered Declaration, the first of its kind as an icon on Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street and the Planet Earth.

They lay the stiff surface on a wooden table, alongside a few paper Declaration copies a fortnight old.

Most of the delegates are in the meeting room. A handful aren’t. Those there now start to act singly or in small groups in approaching the table. Once tableside, it’s up to each one of them to decide how long they want to dart their eyes back-and-forth in reviewing and comparing the gleaming parchment next to the ordinary-looking copies. Maybe a section, sentence, or word gets special attention to ensure a perfect match between new and old. Or a fleeting admiration of a particular spot. Or nothing extra at all. Whatever it is, the delegate’s time and posture hint at the relationship between parchment and pen-holder.

The room combines standing up, walking, waiting, examining, signing, and returning.

One of the newest members, Benjamin Rush, notices that a hushed silence and solemnity in the space.

No one makes an official record of the moments. Everyone etches the scene in memory.

Again, why nothing formally written-down? Remember the rhyme: if notes fall in the wrong hands and fate goes the hard way, treason is the reason, and they’re genuinely terrified by the thought of it. So, the agreement holds: no one knows who signed when or what they did in the instant.

* * * * * * *

By this week 250 years ago, this sort of silence-is-survival decision is now part of the culture of the Continental Congress and this room. They’ve kept individual names out of the kept record in every key moment of voting. Same goes for the names of colonies as well. That way, if the official journals are stolen or seized, there’s one less piece of evidence in the treason-trial that results in their execution. Delegates in the room work with this knowledge about their culture as a group.

* * * * * * *

A decision in the room in this first week of August has the earliest signatures spreading out across the bottom section of the long parchment. There’s purpose to it. Name-placement mimics seating arrangements in the room—by colony/state clusters with a regional tilt. Softly, the signatures also express the act of uniting a Union from constituent pieces.

Thus, one by one, signatures begin appearing in iron-gall ink. Closeness of the names creates emptiness between the groupings; shapes form without lines. It’s the development of the Declaration’s final section, Part Three, at the bottom of the parchment, below the last words “we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” Having started the day with Parts One and Two, the sleek work of civic art welcomes the youngest of the bunch, Part Three, with no edits, no debates, no arguments. Everything else on the parchment had required writers, editors, and finally, adopters. Every individual name expresses the heart and mind and soul of the signer. Lives are written down in one of the most powerful moments of accountability not recorded.

Matlack did the engrossing. The Signers did the enlivening.

* * * * * * *

A legitimate question from today, 250 years ago: When will the names be released to the public and listed openly on printed copies?

Answer: keep quiet—silence is policy and secrecy is fact. Until something changes, the names will be locked down and locked away.

Those in the know will know. For anyone else, it’s their best guess. Until further notice.

Move on. Silence is survival.

* * * * * * *

A single child grown into a married father of five provides another revealing look into the meeting room.

The married man with multiple children is a Signer himself, Abraham Clark, 50-years old and a delegate from New Jersey. Clark confesses that he’s fearful of disunion, that the current crisis will fail to unite the delegates in Union. He’s directly implying that the Declaration now receiving signatures has not worked to unify. Clark’s fears run so deep he’d stood and told the rest of the delegates that if the Union can’t hold, they’ll need to begin asking for pardons from the British. Those pardons, everyone knows, are the only thing standing between themselves and death. Clark admits in private today, 250 years ago: “Perhaps our Congress will be Exalted on a high Gallows.” From his vantage point in Philadelphia, Abraham Clark concludes to a friend, “It is impossible to foresee the state of affairs with you next fall.”

Or whether Clark will be hanging at the end of a rope.

* * * * * * *

The pressure toward disunity has intensified during the time the ink dried on Part Three. All week, including today, August 6, the circle spins faster and faster as the Union shakes and quivers.

Preside/nt John Hancock of the Continental Congress has to write to General George Washington and explain that, no, the Congress hasn’t disrespected him in the use of power. Hancock explains that General Horatio Gates has received, temporarily, a greater amount of power than Washington in order to deal with the dangerous mess of the Union’s war in the north.

That dangerous mess continues to roar out in its effects—delegates, officers, commentators, hangers-on, and people in the know are all discussing it and blaming a scapegoat chosen by their particular side. It’s the verge of political parties, hungry and bare-teethed, in the making.

Inside the Continental Congress, no one is optimistic about the Articles of Confederation that seek to organize the Union into a stand-up government that the world can see. How will voting procedures in Congress be defined? How will taxes be defined? And like the dialogue with George Washington, where will power be found and wielded?

Three reactions sprout in the heat: first, we need a daily prayer; second, maybe, says Roger Sherman of Connecticut, there’s a new way to think of how power is allocated within the new government; and third, say several delegates, we need to think about human labor in a fractional relationship between free and enslaved forms.

Within the walls of blueish-gray that mark this meeting room of Pennsylvania State House, an invisible tracker of time opens the flow of another meeting, in 1787, where delegates debate these topics eleven years into the future.

* * * * * * *

As the sun drops on August 6, 1776, there is one complete form of the Declaration of Independence will all three parts intact.

Also

(a different III)

In Madrid, Spain the monarch Charles III has made his announcement.

A Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata will be created (in modern Uruguay). Its purpose is to strengthen the basis for war, trade, and overall influence against Portugal, Spain’s key rival in South America. Charles III has also chosen Pedro Antonion de Cevallos to fill the post of Viceroy.

The announcement begins a major drive by the Spanish imperial government to take permanent control of a large swath of the South American continent. The clash between these Spanish and Portugese empires seems to be reaching a defining stage.

Cevallos is ready to again take command of a large military force that he’ll be leading across the Atlantic. He’s been in this conflict for the past twenty years, a global struggle between the two Great Powers of southern Europe. He’s a proven leader and revered in Spain.

Now cold, now hot, now here, now there, the competition between Spain and Portugal, the actions of Madrid and Lisbon, affect people across the western hemisphere. They are not idle as this latest wave heads west.

For You Now

The way we were…

It’s my hope that you have a better sense of the way we were as Part Three of the Declaration of Independence emerges in the real-time of early August, 1776.

Why isn’t it better known? Why is it mostly ignored or overlooked?

In providing a thought about these questions, I suggest you keep your own life and awareness in mind. Why forget things?

The song says we prefer to forget the unhappy. So it is with Part Three. They wanted it forgotten, or at least unknown, in their current moment. There’s a real chance the ultimate unhappiness of forcible death could occur. This tells you something important: they didn’t know how things would turn out. Tragedy as much as triumph might result.

Also, we should realize that other things blotted out Part Three. George Washington is one example. His presence is a sun-like figure from that era; everything else is shadow. The Constitution is another example. We tend to understand its adoption as the conclusive achievement of the American Revolution. And by its nature, Part Three isn’t a grand, concentrated act with a tight, sealed-up end. It’s so much cleaner to say the document is done and now we’re on to the rest of life. In those perspectives, Part Three of the Declaration gets left behind.

It’s also hard to tell and understand a story that has fifty-six threads to it (the final number of signers). We like sticking with one or two threads.

By knowing Part Three, you learn the decision is made by individuals with their own stories. You learn too that accountability is one person and one name and one life at a time, not a wave of hands held up by a faceless group. You learn as well that the greatest things often depend on forgotten moments and stretches where the best you do is the best there was to be done.

Part Three comes today, in its own time and in its own way.

Suggestion

Take a moment to consider: what’s the best thing you’ve done that usually isn’t remembered? And what is it for the American nation?

(Your River)