The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [132]
By the time terms and appointments were settled in May 1776, events had made them obsolete. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, calling boldly for independence, had electrified the colonists, convinced thousands of the necessity of rebellion and brought them with their muskets to the recruiting centers. George Washington had been named Commander-in-Chief; Fort Ticonderoga had yielded to Ethan Allen’s company of 83 men; General William Howe, prompted by the Americans’ remarkable hauling of cannon from Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights, had been forced to evacuate Boston; British forces in full combat were gaining in the south and in Canada. In June the Continental Congress heard a resolution offered by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia that the United Colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” On 2 July the formal Declaration of Independence was voted without dissent, with revisions added in a second vote on 4 July.
In September, after Howe’s victory in the battle of Long Island, his brother the Admiral arranged in his alternate capacity as peace commissioner a conference with Franklin and John Adams representing the Continental Congress, but as he had no authority to negotiate unless the colonies resumed allegiance and revoked the Declaration of Independence, the meeting was fruitless. So passed on both sides the attempt to forestall and then reverse the rupture.
Opponents of the war were vocal from the beginning although outnumbered by the war’s supporters. Following Amherst’s example, others in the Army and Navy refused to serve against the Americans. Admiral Augustus Keppel, who had fought throughout the Seven Years’ War, declared himself out of this one. The Earl of Effingham resigned his Army commission, unwilling to bear arms in what “is not so clear a cause.” Chatham’s oldest son, John, serving with a regiment in Canada, resigned and came home, while another officer who remained with the Army in America expressed the opinion that because “This is an unpopular war, men of ability do not choose to risk their reputations by taking an active part in it.” This freedom of action found its justifier in General Conway, who declared in Parliament that although a soldier owed unquestioning obedience in foreign war, in case of domestic conflict he must satisfy himself that the cause is just, and he personally “could never draw his sword” in the present conflict.
Animating these sentiments was the belief that the Americans were fighting for the liberties of England. Interdependent, both would either be “buried in one grave,” said the opposition speaker, Lord John Cavendish, or endure forever. London’s four members in Parliament and all its sheriffs and aldermen remained steadfast partisans of the colonies. Motions were made in both the Commons and the Lords opposing the hiring of foreign mercenaries without prior approval by Parliament. The Duke of Richmond moved in December 1776 for a settlement based on concessions to America, whose resistance he termed “perfectly justifiable in every political and moral sense.” A public subscription was raised for the widows and orphans and parents of Americans “inhumanly murdered by the King’s troops at or near Lexington and Concord.”
Recognizing the contradiction of self-interest in the American war, a political cartoon of 1776 pictured the British lion asleep while ministers were busily engaged in slaughtering the goose that lays the golden egg. Observers like Walpole saw the contradiction