This Day in Revolutionary War History (Moderates, Radicals Unite to Present Case for Fighting)

July 6, 1775—Nearly one year before the Second Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, it took the first step at airing the grievances of the 13 colonies over British depredations.

Two delegates who locked horns in the debate leading to independence, Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson, took turns in creating Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, which sought to assure the public—and, in far-off Great Britain, King George III—that their problems were not with the monarch but with his ministers imposing coercive measures on the colonies.

Years later, John Adams recalled that during the American Revolution, one-third of the colonists supported the cause, one-third were opposed, and one-third were neutral. If anything, non-supporters of independence were still in the ascendant one year earlier, but events were assuming a momentum that many feared could not be controlled.

This latter group is not as celebrated as the radicals, who won the vote for independence in the Second Continental Congress and, in the end, the war itself. They come off especially badly in the musical 1776.

But the moderates’ stance was not without merit, and they marshaled compelling arguments for the colonists’ rights before the Declaration of Independence and contributed to the republic afterward.

The most prominent moderate delegates from two large middle colonies, including New York’s John Jay, who became the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court; Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, among the keenest legal minds of the revolutionary and Federalist periods; and Robert Morris, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant who earned the nickname “Financier of the Revolution” through his crucial infusion of money when the Continental Army was at its most desperate.

But the leader of the group in the debates already convulsing the Second Continental Congress was Dickinson, a wealthy lawyer who, by refusing to sign the Declaration of Independence—even though he promptly joined the Continental Army as a private—immediately forfeited much of the credit he deserved for mobilizing American opinion against British policies in his pamphlet Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1768).

In devastating critiques of the Stamp and Townshend Acts, Dickinson crafted one of the first known strategies for nonviolent protest in American history, preferring to call on economic pressure and appeals to the Mother Country’s longstanding care of its faraway offspring (“where is maternal affection”?: he wondered) to bring Britain’s ministers around.

Unlike fellow Pennsylvania delegate Joseph Galloway, who wanted the colonists to be brought more tightly under the British umbrella, Dickinson preferred that the colonists be allowed to administer something more akin to home rule.

Yet his reluctance to accept the inevitability of independence might have resulted from internal divisions within his own extended clan. His in-laws included not just independence firebrands but also loyalists and others whose allegiance could be swayed to and fro—an example in microcosm of the split that Adams saw in the nation at large.

On a committee that the Continental Congress designated to respond to Britain, Dickinson found himself working with a Virginia delegate less inclined to speak up but every bit his equal as a penman: Thomas Jefferson, whose Summary View of the Rights of British America attracted wide notice within his colony and among the other politicians gathered that year in Philadelphia.

The case that the panel would present had assumed greater importance with the outbreak of hostilities at the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Dickinson read the first draft by Jefferson—and blanched over its fierce statements.

Jefferson read Dickinson’s revisions, nodded—and mostly accepted only his minor suggestions.

Dickinson reviewed Jefferson’s “fair copy,” made a few other suggestions—and, after some more changes, Congress had in its hands a document that slammed the “Legislature of Great-Britain” for being “stimulated by an inordinate Passion for a Power.” (To track the intense revision process behind Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, see this "Editorial Note" on the "Founders Online" Website.)

At the same time, it pledged to readers that, while committed to defending their lands and freedoms, “we mean not to dissolve that Union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored.”

What a difference a year would make. King George III’s high-handed refusal even to consider the “Olive Branch Petition” adopted that same weekend in Philadelphia undermined the warnings of Dickinson, its primary proponent, that the colonies were incurring enormous risks by fighting Britain without a powerful ally or an effective central government.

In the end, the defiance of the Continental Congress brought on the violence and the assault on privilege that concerned Dickinson. But the cause won out and even a conservative reformer like Dickinson accommodated the new order by serving in the governments of Pennsylvania and Delaware. At his death in 1808, Jefferson hailed his onetime "moderate" opponent in the Continental Congress:

"Among the first advocates for the rights of his country when assailed by Great Britain, he continued to the last the orthodox advocate of the true principles of our new government, and his name will be consecrated in history as one of the great worthies of the revolution.”