One of these heads immediately arrests our attention. It is very handsome, and is set upon a fine, tall, gentlemanly figure,—both owned by one John Hancock from Boston, only thirty-nine years of age, of large wealth for those simple days honorably acquired by trade, of manners conspicuously high-bred, and with a soul that, like a lamp burning inside an alabaster vase, illuminates the beautiful characters which the highest culture has traced and wrought. Two years ago, when Boston was patiently biding the expected period of English justice, triumphing over a short-sighted selfishness, and was carrying, as best she might, meanwhile, the cruel burdens of the Boston Port Bill, and when General Gage was sent out to see that she did not cut the straps, shift the load, or escape its grievous weight, John Hancock,—who the evening before had rallied with soul-lifting eloquence his fellow-sufferers at Faneuil Hall to the unjustly imposed duty of throwing off the crushing load,—rode at the head of his Boston Cadets, to bear with restrained courtesy from the Long Wharf to the State House this hard plum from the royal enclosure,—a Gage that he was careful not to pluck, but to preserve until it was fully ripe. Among this group he sits on a raised seat, and acts as president.
A few gentlemen, more advanced in years than the rest, are sprinkled through the company. One, an old acquaintance of ours, the boy who in 1721 furnished through the “New England Courant” such strong food for even Boston, and afterwards set up an intellectual bakery at Philadelphia, now seventy years old, rests his massive benevolent figure in a chair made comfortable by his presence,—his broad mild face, so largely serene, framed in by flowing soft locks, and beaming with a placid composure, as if the ploughshare of hard work had not turned a furrow there. He looks as if he could forgive George III. for his narrow notions, wedged inextricably fast in his narrow brain, and even his sallow, bilious, meadow-bottomed, Hanoverian dulness, dripping in pestilent, unhealthy oozings through his slow liver into his slower understanding. Well does the serenely fronted old sage know all the importance and the character of the business in hand. His clear, philosophic mind has weighed in its calm well-adjusted balances the questions now to be decided. He has but lately escaped from England, where, as agent for the Colonies, he was watched and treated by the government with incised and rigorous dislike; yet, as a man and thinker, he was there welcomed by the best men and most advanced statesmen. With Pitt, Camden, Burke, Charles James Fox, and even Lord North, he met, and with calm, compact, sensible, logical eloquence discussed the nature of the principles, alike dangerous in England as in the Colonies, which the Ministry, in the name of the former, were seeking to fasten, as the shirt of Nessus, upon the latter. While on his ungracious mission, he had, also, encountered that ponderous, fact-clad, political Goliath, Samuel Johnson, who had lately stepped forth in front of the ministerial Philistines, and defied any one to prove that taxation of a people unrepresented was tyranny. In that encounter, the American, armed only with a simple Quaker sling, planted in the giant’s head a stone harder even than itself, and very uncomfortable therein. Few now were Franklin’s words; but each one weighed ten pounds, and though perhaps homely in shape and unrounded at the angles, when hurled out by an honest heart-force, they crashed resistlessly through all the fences and thickets of sophistry or learned show.
Having to manage those two difficult problems in the political economy which then crowded up for solution, namely, how to raise a revenue out of 2,800,000 poor colonists, which, in weight, should put it in equipoise with the heavy stacks of English pounds sterling; and how to make 7,754 soldiers, constituting, as Washington had that very morning reported from head-quarters, the entire colonial army, successfully oppose 28,000 English and 17,000 Hessian troops, this American Witenagemote had conscious need of all poor Richard’s solid, homespun sense and wise-headed prudence and resource. But the grand old man, who by virtuous kiting had obtained naturally lightning out of heaven by an easy discount, was equal to the task of drawing credit out of the well-soiled banks of his country. On a ring, circling his forefinger, and given him by an ardent friend, one may—by a near inspection, when the large head leans against his right hand—see carved that motto, which is his condensed biography,
“Eripuit cœlo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis.”
A little way off stands a tall, scholarly figure, carefully dressed in the gentlemanly costume of that time, a blue coat faced with yellow, a scarlet waistcoat paragraphing an elaborate shirt-frill, and black broadcloth tights, clasped at the knee, and, like his own round periods, closed by polished silver-tongued buckles. He is thirty-one years old. His brick-colored hair and sanguine complexion betoken his ardent temperament. His faultless dress and stainless linen betray a delicacy and refinement of culture and taste, in which he had few peers in his time on either side the Atlantic. This is Thomas Jefferson. Chairman of a committee to report on the question of the right of the Colonies to be hereafter independent of Great Britain, he holds in his womanly-shaped hands a large manuscript written in neat, careful characters.
Close to him stands the short, firm, square, condensed-looking figure of John Adams, coaxed into a well-ripened fulness. He is ten years older than Jefferson; destined to be his generous rival through an eventful life, and to die only a few hours after him, just fifty years from that time, and on the semi-centennial anniversary of that very day. There is a good-natured frankness in his round, generously blooded face, and full-veined forehead; great firmness in his well-pressed lips; and about his massive head a solid, intellectual strength that have already well earned for him the appellation of “the column of Congress.” A hot purpose shows in his pink-heightening complexion, flushing it with an auroral light which plays and flashes up to the very zenith of his head. Faults he has, like his rival, grievous and many; but among them is not that of being indifferent to his country or her freedom.
A little way off sits one of the most accomplished orators in all that gifted group; a genial companion you may see he is at a glance. He is a ripe scholar, educated in an English university, and yet warm with a loving nature that glows on his face and through his graceful discourse. Wielding a ready pen, whose vigorous strokes have already, in the Memorial of Congress to British America, cleft the unwilling hearts of Canadians, and, in The Address of Congress to the People of Great Britain, have imbedded forever in the English Constitution the principles of representation as the basis of taxation, Richard Henry Lee, from South Carolina, three years older than Adams, sits there in cultured ease and thoughtful dignity, a model legislator. In the preceding month of June he had moved a resolution, asserting the rights of the Colonies to be free, and to dissolve in brine the ligaments which wickedly tied them to the money-making law manufactory at home. This resolution, having of course been well debated when it came up for consideration three days ago,—for American Congresses were never deaf or dumb asylums,—had been adopted, and upon it a committee raised, whose report, drawn by Jefferson, and revised by Franklin and Adams, is to be read in to-day’s session.
A few feet away are Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, who, although only in his twenty-third summer, is laden with the sheaves of a rich harvest of oratorical fame; Charles Carroll of Maryland, who, annexing to the Declaration his address, so that he might not be passed by the state executioner for his treason, was spared by death to be the last of that memorable party on earth; Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who lived to fill acceptably every honorable office known to our system of government, except that of President; and Robert R. Livingston of New York, who survived the recordership of the city of New York, and became eminent, not only in many fields, but notably on the Hudson River, in connection with Robert Fulton’s efforts to subject water to steam,—not one of them, except Carroll, yet thirty-three years of age.
Leaning forward and near this last group stands the bulky figure of one who was for the first twenty-two years of his life a shoemaker; but who, disregarding the maxim of Horace “to stick to the last,” left the lapstone to attend to the understandings of his suffering countrymen. This, all know, is Roger Sherman of Connecticut, true to independence and well-grounded freedom—to the last.
Across the room stand talking together George Wythe of Virginia, sweet-tempered, frolicsome as a boy, yet resolute of purpose, able in debate, and capable of deep research; Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, born in England, an emigrant to Philadelphia in his thirteenth year, whose nature of sterling British oak, seasoned in the counting-house of Charles Willing, and whose solid aptitudes, hardened into financial wisdom, were now so much needed in the new political partnership of States; and Joseph Reed from the same State, whose sturdy, honest face seems to light up a large space all around him, and whose rebuke two years later to the commissioner of Lord North, who sought to bribe him, that “poor as he was, the king of Great Britain[Britain] was not rich enough to buy him,” raised American securities as high in Europe as the practical answers of some of his congressional successors to similar attempts on their financial virtue by North or South, East or West, have depressed them.