men were filled with similar anxieties. The letter, already quoted, from the new adjutant-general, Joseph Reed, describing the military situation, was not laid before the Congress indeed, but one from General Washington, giving essentially the same facts, was read at the opening of that day's session. In spite of this mournful beginning, and notwithstanding the arguments of Mr. Dickinson, the purpose of the majority in the legislative body was clear and strong; and the pressure from their constituencies was yet stronger. Nearly every colony had already taken separate action towards independence, and on that first day of July the Continental Congress adopted, in committee, the first resolution offered by the Virginia delegates. There were nine colonies in the affirmative, Pennsylvania and South Carolina voting in the negative, the latter unanimously, Delaware being divided, and New York not voting, the delegates from that colony favoring the measure, but having as yet no instructions.

When the resolutions came up for final action in convention the next day, the state of things had changed. Dickinson and Morris, of Pennsylvania, had absented themselves and left an affirmative majority in the delegation; Cæsar Rodney had returned from an absence and brought Delaware into line; and South Carolina, though still disapproving the resolutions, joined in the vote for the sake of unanimity, as had been half promised by Edward Rutledge the day before. Thus twelve colonies united in the momentous action; and New York, though not voting, yet endorsed it through a State convention within a week. The best outburst of contemporary feeling over the great event is to be found in a letter by John

Adams to his wife, dated July 3, 1776. He writes as follows:

"Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was nor will be decided among men. . . . When I look back to 1761, . . . and recollect the series of political events, the chain of causes and effects, I am surprised at the suddenness as well as greatness of this revolution. Britain has been filled with folly and America with wisdom. . . . It is the will of Heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever. It may be the will of Heaven that America shall suffer calamities still more wasting and distresses yet more dreadful. . . . But I submit all my hopes and fears to an overruling Providence, in which, unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe.

"The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty, . . . from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward for evermore.

"You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration and support and defend these States. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory; I can see that the end is worth all the means. And that posterity will triumph in that day's transaction, even though we should rue it, which I trust to God we shall not."

John Adams was mistaken in one prediction. It is the Fourth of July, not the Second, which has been accepted by Americans as "the most memorable epocha." This is one of the many illustrations of the fact that words as well as deeds are needful, since a great act may seem incomplete until it has been put into a fitting form of words. It was the vote of July

2d that changed the thirteen colonies into independent States; the Declaration of Independence only promulgated the fact and assigned its reasons. Had this great proclamation turned out to be a confused or ill-written document, it would never have eclipsed in fame the original Resolution, which certainly had no such weak side. But this danger was well averted, for the Declaration was to be drawn up by Jefferson, unsurpassed in his time for power of expression. He accordingly framed it; Franklin and Adams suggested a few verbal amendments; Sherman and Livingston had none to offer; and the document stood ready to be reported to the Congress.

Some of those who visit Philadelphia may feel an interest in knowing that the "title-deed of our liberties," as Webster called it, was written in “a new brick house out in the fields"-a house standing at the southwest corner of Market and Seventh streets, less than a quarter of a mile from Independence Square. Jefferson had there rented a parlor and bedroom, ready furnished, on the second floor, for thirty-five shillings a week; and he wrote the Declaration in this parlor, upon a little writing-desk, three inches high, which still exists. In that modest room we may fancy Franklin and Adams listening critically, Sherman and Livingston approvingly, to what was for them simply the report of a committee. Jefferson had written it, we are told, without the aid of a single book; he was merely putting into more systematic form a series of points long familiar; and Parton may be right in the opinion that the writer was not conscious of any very strenuous exercise of his faculties, or of any very eminent service done.

Nothing is so difficult as to transport ourselves to

the actual mood of mind in which great historic acts were performed, or in which their actors habitually dwelt. Thus, on the seventh day of that July, John Adams wrote to his wife a description of the condition of our army, so thrilling and harrowing that it was, as he says, enough to fill one with horror. We fancy him spending that day in sackcloth and ashes; but there follows on the same page another letter, written to the same wife on the same day-a long letter devoted solely to a discourse on the varieties of English style, in which he urges upon her a careful reading of Rollin's "Belles-lettres" and the Epistles of Pliny the Younger. Yet any one who has ever taken part in difficult or dangerous actions can understand the immense relief derived from that halfhour's relapse into "the still air of delightful studies." And it is probable that Jefferson and his companions, even while discussing the title-deed of our liberties, may have let their talk stray over a hundred collateral themes as remote from the immediate task as were Pliny and Rollin.

During three days-the second, third, and fourth of July-the Declaration was debated in the Congress. The most vivid historic glimpse of that debate is in Franklin's consolatory anecdote, told to Jefferson, touching John Thompson, the hatter. The amendments adopted by Congress have always been accounted as improvements, because tending in the direction of conciseness and simplicity, though the loss of that stern condemnation of the slave-trade"a piratical warfare against human nature itself". has always been regretted. The amended document was finally adopted, like the Virginia resolution, by the vote of twelve colonies, New York still abstaining.

If Thomas McKean's reminiscences at eighty can be trusted, it cost another effort to secure this strong vote, and Cæsar Rodney had again to be sent for to secure the Delaware delegation. McKean says, in a letter written in 1814 to John Adams, "I sent an express for Cæsar Rodney to Dover, in the county of Kent, in Delaware, at my private expense, whom I met at the State-house door on the 4th of July, in his boots; he resided eighty miles from the city, and just arrived as Congress met." Jefferson has, however, thrown much doubt over these octogenarian recollections by McKean, and thinks that he confounded the different votes. There is little doubt that this hurried night ride by Rodney was in preparation for the Second of July, not the Fourth, and that the vote on the Fourth went quietly through.

But the Declaration, being adopted, was next to be signed; and here again we come upon an equally great contradiction in testimony. This same Thomas McKean wrote in 1814 to ex-President Adams, speaking of the Declaration of Independence, "No man signed it on that day”—namely, July 4, 1776. Jefferson, on the other hand, writing some years later, thought that Mr. McKean's memory had deceived him, Jefferson himself asserting, from his early notes, that "the Declaration was reported by the Committee, agreed to by the House, and signed by every member present except Mr. Dickinson." But Jefferson, who was also an octogenarian, seems to have forgotten the subsequent signing of the Declaration on parchment, until it was recalled to his memory, as he states, a few years later. If there was a previous signing of a written document, the manuscript itself has long since disappeared, and the accepted historic opinion