OLD STATE HOUSE IN BOSTON
A crowd listening to the reading of the Declaration of Independence.
And they framed the Declaration of Independence! They framed it; but Thomas Jefferson wrote it. He was bent on proving that the Revolution was right. And, having taken an unpaid brief for his country, he found twenty-seven good reasons for independence, even at the cost of a bloody revolution. Those reasons are not the Declaration: the real pith of that splendidly written document is the brief statement of “self evident truths”; among them “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Some of the states made much longer and fuller statements of the same kind; but this is the bedrock of popular government in America. Time cannot tarnish, use cannot diminish, age cannot weaken, this splendid thought that God Almighty sends His children into the world with equal political rights; that every human being has an interest in that mutual understanding with other human beings called society and government.
SAMUEL ADAMS
From the painting by the early American artist, J. S. Copley.
SOCIAL AND COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION
When Rip Van Winkle came back home he found a new set of neighbors who scoffed at good King George. The Americans lived in a changed world. In the South most of the political leaders who were not Englishmen took the patriots’ side,—the Randolphs, and the Peytons, and the Carrolls, and the Rutledges, and the Pinckneys, and the Haynes,—and when the war was over the wheel had revolved under them, but left them still at the top. In the North there was a greater change,—Sam Adams, the untitled leader of the Boston town meeting, became leader of Massachusetts; John Hancock, the merchant accused of smuggling, was governor; John Adams, the struggling lawyer, was minister to England. Where were the rich and fashionable people who lived in the fine colonial mansions and drank too much Madeira? Hundreds of them gone, exiled, driven forth, farming in the eastern townships of Canada, waiting in the antechambers of the great in London.
PARSON CLARK’S HOUSE, LEXINGTON