Made In America - Bill Bryson [32]
John Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer, hastily ran off an apparently unknown number of copies. (Until recently only twenty-four were thought to have survived – two in private hands and the rest lodged with institutions. But in 1992 a shopper at a flea market in Philadelphia found a copy folded into the back of a picture frame, apparently as padding. It was estimated to be worth up to $3 million.) Dunlap’s version was dated 4 July and it was this, evidently, that persuaded the nation to make that the day of revelry. The next year, at any rate, the great event was being celebrated on the fourth, and so it has stayed ever since. It was celebrated ‘with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other’, in John Adams’s words. The first anniversary saw the entrance of a new word into the language: fireworks. Fireworks themselves weren’t new, but previously they had been called rockets.
America wasn’t yet a nation, but more a loose confederation of thirteen independent sovereignties – what the Articles of Confederation would later call ‘a firm league of friendship’. True nationhood would have to wait a further twelve perilous, unstable years for the adoption of the Constitution. Before we turn to that uneasy period, however, let us pause for a moment to consider the fate of poor Tom Paine, the man who set the whole process of revolution in motion.
Despite the huge success of Common Sense, the publication brought him no official position. By the end of 1776, he was a common foot soldier. After the war, Paine travelled to France, where he performed a similar catalytic role in the revolution there with his pamphlet The Rights of Man before falling foul of the erratic Robespierre, who had him clapped into prison for daring to suggest a merciful exile for King Louis XVI (on the grounds that Louis had supported the American rebels). Unappreciated in France and a pariah in his own country, he returned to America and sank almost at once into dereliction and obscurity.
Not long before he died, an old friend found Paine in a tavern in New Rochelle, New York, unconscious, dressed in tatters, and bearing ‘the most disagreeable smell possible’. The friend hauled him to a tub of hot, soapy water and scrubbed him from head to foot three times before the odour was pacified. His nails had not been cut for years. Soon afterwards, this great man, who had once dined with the likes of Washington, Jay and Jefferson, who had been a central figure in the two great revolutions of the modern age, died broken and forgotten. William Cobbett, the essayist, stole his bones and took them back to England with him, but likewise died before he could find a suitable resting-place for them. And so the remains of one of the great polemicists of his or any other age were unceremoniously carted off by a rag-and-bone merchant and vanished for ever.
4
Making a Nation
It began with a dispute between oyster fishermen.
In 1632 Charles I placed the border between Virginia and Maryland not in the middle of the Potomac River, as was normal practice, but instead gave his chum Lord Baltimore the whole of the river up to the Virginia bank, to the dismay and frustration of Virginia fishermen who were thus deprived of their right to gather the river’s delicious and lucrative bivalves. Over time, the dispute spread to Pennsylvania and Delaware, led to occasional skirmishes known collectively and somewhat grandly as the Oyster War, and eventually resulted in the calling of a gathering to try to sort out this and other matters involving trade and intrastate affairs.
Thus