In 1776, Josiah Bartlett really could’ve used a good cell phone plan.
Stuck in sweltering Philadelphia as July crawled ever closer on the calendar, the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy’s namesake Founding Father was getting nervous.
New Hampshire’s lead delegate to the Continental Congress, Bartlett was a passionate patriot. His first year as a representative in the colonial assembly was 1765, the year of the Stamp Act.
The next year, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act, which shockingly asserted that the “colonies and plantations in America have been, are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon the imperial crown and parliament of Great Britain; and that the King’s majesty” had “and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.”
Got that, Americans? Self-government would never be an option.
A subject of a crowned warlord is all the colonists “are and of right ought to be.” (Remember those words.)
Bartlett grew more radical as the government imposed ever tighter controls on the colonists, particularly those in Boston. In 1774, his home in Kingston mysteriously burned down. It was widely believed to have been torched by Tories.
Appointed to the Continental Congress that year, he declined, needing to rebuild his home. But in 1775, the Provincial Congress chose him again. This time he made the long journey on horseback to Philadelphia.
By then, he was impatient for independence. But some colonists were not so eager. Even after Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, the Siege of Boston and the American invasion of Quebec—all on New Hampshire’s doorstep—some Granite Staters remained loyal to the crown.
On Jan. 13, 1776, Bartlett wrote to John Langdon, concerned that Portsmouth “is very much afraid of the idea conveyed by the frightful word Independence.”
But there was hope, he wrote, for the argument in favor of independence had just caught fire. In Philadelphia “this week a pamphlet on that subject was printed” and “greedily bought up and read by all ranks of people.”
That pamphlet was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Bartlett sent Langdon a copy with instructions to “lend round to the people; perhaps on consideration there may not appear anything so terrible in that thought as they might at first apprehend, if Britain should force us to break off all connections with her.”
In April, North Carolina instructed its delegates to vote for independence. Virginia followed in May. The resolution for independence was not introduced in Congress until June 7, but some states weren’t waiting. Revolution was in the air.
Congress scheduled the independence vote for July 1. As the day crept closer, Bartlett’s letters filled with increasingly desperate requests for instructions on how to vote.
On June 6th, he wrote to Nathaniel Folsom that the New Hampshire delegates “think it their duty to act agreeable to the minds of their constituents and in an affair of that magnitude desire the explicit directions of the legislature of the colony and that it may be forwarded to us as soon as possible.”
There was a very real possibility that Congress would hold the vote on independence before New Hampshire’s instructions arrived.
Bartlett’s correspondence shows that it took roughly two weeks for letters to travel between New Hampshire and Philadelphia. Every day that passed without word from the Committee of Correspondence, Bartlett grew more anxious.
On June 14, Connecticut’s assembly voted for independence. The next day, New Hampshire followed. But Bartlett didn’t know.
He knew only that he would be the first delegate called to vote when the time came. Votes were conducted by delegation, and in geographical order. New Hampshire went first.
It would be a humiliation of historic proportions if the vote came and he had to announce that famously cantankerous New Hampshire had to abstain. (This fate befell New York.)
When July 1 arrived, the delegations from South Carolina, Delaware, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania were still arguing. The vote was postponed a day.
On July 2, the question was called:
“Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and, of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connexion between them, and the state of Great Britain, is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”
Note the language pulled directly from the Declaratory Act of 1766. The colonies “are, and, of right ought to be, Free and Independent States.”
A deliberate poke in the king’s eye.
The first colony was called.
How does New Hampshire vote on the resolution?
New Hampshire votes…
“Aye.”
A week later, on July 9, Bartlett wrote to Meshech Weare, head of New Hampshire’s Committee of Correspondence, that Weare’s letter conveying the instructions to vote for independence “came very seasonably to hand.”
It had arrived just in time.
Why did Josiah Bartlett and William Whipple, patriots deeply committed to independence, worry about instructions from home? Here was an opportunity to make history. Couldn’t they vote for independence and sell it to the people afterward?
On smaller questions, delegates had to use their own judgment. No one wrote home for instructions on how much flour to order for the troops. But on independence, Bartlett refused to substitute his own judgment for that of the people.
He was happy to persuade. He sent a copy of Common Sense to try to convince Granite Staters to support the break with Britain. But ultimately, the decision was not his to make, he believed.
The war for independence was a war for self-government. It was a war to destroy the chains that bound subjects to a “superior” class of nobility entitled to make decisions on the rabble’s behalf.
Bartlett and William Whipple believed that they served the free people of New Hampshire. In the new republic they wished to create, the people weren’t bound by their leaders. The leaders were bound by the people.
So Bartlett and Whipple waited to be told what to do by the common people their own government dismissed a decade earlier as worthy only of permanent subservience.
This complete inversion of the political order is what they risked their lives to achieve.
Their success in turning the world upside down is the greatest political achievement in human history.
