INSURRECTION!
Episode Two, in which Congress Debates
Mr. Jefferson’s Draft
“Liberty for Whom?”
“Player Character” sheet in this packet, Copyright Eric Oakley 2014
PLAYER CHARACTER
SAMUEL ADAMS
MASSACHUSETTS BAY
Born:
Birthplace:
Residence:
Family:
Religion:
Occupation:
Offices:
Affiliations:
Ally:
September 27, 1722
Marblehead, Massachusetts Bay
Marblehead, Massachusetts Bay
Elizabeth Wells (Wife)
John Adams (Cousin)
Abigail Adams (Cousin-in-Law)
Congregationalist
Maltster
Massachusetts General Court
Harvard College
Sons of Liberty
John Hancock (Massachusetts Bay)
ADAMS’S ATTRIBUTES
WEALTH
LANDHOLDINGS
REPUTATION
BUSINESS CONNECTIONS
FOREIGN STANDING
IMPERIAL CONNECTIONS
Debtor, Poor Business Sense
Activist, Egalitarian, “Demagogue”
Molasses Merchants, Brewers
ADAMS’S PHILOSOPHIES
REPUBLICAN
LIBERTARIAN
SEPARATIST
POPULIST
COUNTRY
LEVELLER
PASSIVE
SOCIETY
PACIFIST
SECULAR
MONARCHIST
AUTHORITARIAN
LOYALIST
ELITIST
TOWN
CAPITALIST
AGGRESSIVE
RACE
MILITANT
SPIRITUAL
SPECIAL ABILITY  “RADICAL”
MAY BE USED ONCE PER GAME DAY
At any time, Adams may INCITE a random event. Adams rolls the location and nature of this
event on the INSURRECTION CHART. The benefits and costs of this event are rolled on the
same chart by a delegate representing the Colony in which the action occurs.
THE DUNMORE PROCLAMATION
John, Earl of Dunmore, Governor General of Virginia
December 1775.
DECEMBER 1775.
By His Excellency the Right Honorable JOHN Earl of DUNMORE, His Majesty's Lieutenant and
Governor General of the Colony and Dominion of Virginia, and Vice Admiral of the same.
A PROCLAMATION.
AS I have ever entertained Hopes, that an Accommodation might have taken Place between Great-Britain
and this Colony, without being compelled by my Duty to this most disagreeable but now absolutely
necessary Step, rendered so by a Body of armed Men unlawfully assembled, firing on His Majesty's
Tenders, and the formation of an Army, and that Army now on their March to attack His Majesty's
Troops and destroy the well disposed Subjects of this Colony. To defeat such reasonable Purposes, and
that all such Traitors, and their Abettors, may be brought to Justice, and that the Peace, and good Order of
this Colony may be again restored, which the ordinary Course of the Civil Law is unable to effect; I have
thought fit to issue this my Proclamation, hereby declaring, that until the aforesaid good Purposes can be
obtained, I do in Virtue of the Power and Authority to ME given, by His Majesty,
determine to execute Martial Law, and cause the same to be executed throughout this Colony
and to the [effect] that Peace and good Order may the sooner be restored, I do require every Person
capable of bearing Arms, to resort to His Majesty's STANDARD, or be looked upon as Traitors to His
Majesty's Crown and Government, and thereby become liable to the Penalty the Law inflicts upon such
Offences; such as forfeiture of Life, confiscation of Lands, &c. &c.
And I do hereby further declare all indented Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free
that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His Majesty's Troops as soon as may be, for the more
speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty, to His Majesty's Crown and Dignity.
GIVEN under my Hand on board the Ship WILLIAM, off Norfolk, the 7th Day of November, in the
SIXTEENTH Year of His Majesty's Reign.
DUNMORE.
(GOD save the KING.)
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, ORIGINAL DRAFT
Thomas Jefferson
July 1776.
[Preamble] When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that
subordination in which they have hitherto remained, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the
equal and independent station to which the laws of nature and of nature's god entitle them, a decent
respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the
change.
We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and independent; that
from that equal creation they derive in rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation
of life, and liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted
among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of
government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and
to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing it's powers in such
form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
[ … Evidence against King George III…]
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the
persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another
hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the
opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to
keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing
every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce and that this assemblage of
horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms
among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon
whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people,
with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
[Conclusion] We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress,
assembled do , in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these states, reject and renounce
the allegiance and subjection to the kinds of Great Britain and all others who may hereafter claim by,
through, or under them; we utterly dissolve and break off all political connection which may have
heretofore subsisted between us and the people or parliament of Great Britain; and finally we do assert
and declare these colonies to be free and independent states, and that as free and independent states they
shall hereafter have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to
do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this
declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
excerpt from
THE UNKNOWN AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Gary B. Nash
On July 13, 1776, when she received a firsthand account from her husband that the Continental
Congress had issued the Declaration of Independence, Abigail Adams had just been inoculated against
smallpox, along with the four young Adams children. For days people had been making their way into
Boston-at least thirty alone from the small town of Braintree where the Adams family lived-to undergo
inoculation. The British had evacuated the city four months before, in March 1776, but they left behind a
more insidious enemy that took no prisoners and refused to spare even noncombatants. Smallpox had
raced through Boston and the surrounding countryside throughout the previous year. Desperate to ward
off the dreaded killer, about five thousand people underwent inoculation in Boston in the summer of 1776.
As she nursed her children and struggled against the harsh regimen involved in the inoculation
procedure, Abigail read John's prediction that “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. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports,
guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward
forever more.” Many did just what Adams recommended—celebrate and solemnize. In one of the most
telling celebrations of all, a milling crowd of New York City citizens roped the marble-mounted
equestrian statue of George III, topping it on Bowling Green, and fell upon the leaden monarch.
Mutilating the face, cutting off the head, and displaying the royal visage atop a flagpole, they left the rest
of the torso on the ground. It would end up in Litchfield, Connecticut, where women and children turned
it into about 42,000 musket balls—hunks of “melted majesty,” as one wit put it—to be fired at the king’s
redcoated troops.
When Abigail read the declaration, she was overjoyed. But one deletion from an earlier draft
bothered her. “I cannot but feel sorry that some of the most manly sentiments in the declaration are
expunged from the printed copy,” she wrote John. “Perhaps wise reasons induced it.” Apparently,
Abigail was referring to the complaint Jefferson drafted about the slave trade, which he asserted was
entirely the work of “the Christian king of Great Britain.” The king, Jefferson charged, “has waged cruel
war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a
distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere,
or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” Moreover, the king vetoed every effort of the
American colonies to stop “the execrable commerce.”
It is no surprise that delegates to the Continental Congress stripped out this language because it was
patently false and because Georgia and South Carolina insisted on continuing their importation of
Africans, even if the other colonies had prohibited it or made it prohibitively expensive with stiff import
duties. John Adams, second only to Jefferson on the drafting committee, liked this antislavery language,
but it did not survive the scrutiny of the full Congress, which also rubbed out Jefferson’s charge that the
king “is exciting those very people [enslaved Africans] to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that
liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom her also obtruded them; thus
paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them
to commit against the lives of another.” In place of this emotional language, Congress inserted a brief
phrase in the midst of a charge that the king was rousing “the merciless Indian savages.” The king, the
revised and adopted declaration charged, “excited domestic insurrections amongst us,” an ambiguous turn
of phrase that could have referred to the North Carolina Regulators and New York land rioters—white
colonists all—as well as slaves answering Lord Dunmore’s call. Congress had certainly erased some
“manly sentiments” that Abigail Adams wished had remained. This was the most important deletion
made to Jefferson’s draft.
Why would Jefferson make such preposterous charges against the king? He owned nearly one
hundred slaves himself, was making no attempt to free them, understood that planters like himself had
clamored for slaves for many generations, and had never objected that English kings had “obtruded”
Africans upon them. He also knew that American slave traders were as avid to participate in the trade as
the British merchants whose interests, Jefferson charged, the king was trying to protect. To suggest that
Americans were unwilling partners in the slave trade and were really not complicit in the institution of
chattel bondage was, on its face, outrageously dishonest. Roger Wilkins, calling this section of
Jefferson’s draft a “bloated roar of rage,” suggests that this was “beyond mere hypocrisy.” Rather, it was
“the product of the irreconcilable tension between earned guilt and the aspiration to honor,” resulting in a
“gusher of overheated rhetoric, [a] jumble of charges disconnected from reality.” Mostly cleansed of the
most preposterous charges against George III, the revised declaration was rushed before the congressional
delegates on July 2. Though they unanimously affirmed on that day that “these United Colonies are, and
of right, ought to be, free and independent states,” they took several days more to amend the draft, to be
finally endorsed on July 4. The Declaration of Independence released a torrent of festering emotions and
allowed the great task at hand to move forward. For many people in North America, the stirring words of
Thomas Paine, in his revision of Common Sense published in late February 1776, now rang true: “We
have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened
since the days of Noah until now. The birth-day of a new world is at hand.” But what would the new
world look like? The answers to that were various, depending on one's condition and shaped by one’s
hopes for the future. People of all stripes began to step forward with different agendas for a born-again
America. Necessarily, these agendas would have to be pursued in the midst of an armed conflict of the
greatest intensity and duration that the inhabitants of the American colonies had ever known.
“We hold this truth to be self-evident, that God created all men equal, and is one of the most
prominent features in the Declaration of Independence and in that glorious fabric of collected wisdom,
our noble constitution. This idea embraces the Indian and the European, the Savage and the Saint, the
Peruvian and the Laplander, the white man and the African.” So spoke Philadelphia's prosperous black
sailmaker, James Forten, thirty-seven years after the declaration first received printer’s ink. Was Forten
mistaken that white Americans of the revolutionary generation subscribed to the notion that unalienable
rights were universal, not limited just to white European males? Many historians believe that men such as
Forten were wrong, that the founders really meant all white men are created equal, that only they were
entitled to the fabled “unalienable rights.” Conventional wisdom has it that white revolutionary leaders
believed Africans—even those who were free—were not endowed with fully human attributes and
therefore were not considered to be among “all men” claimed in the declaration to have been created
equal.
To be sure, many white Americans did not intend to include African Americans and others (such as
women) under the canopy guaranteeing unalienable rights and equality as a birthright. But many did.
Forten did not misremember the days of his early service in the Revolution; nor did he invent the climate
of opinion in his hometown of Philadelphia. Hardly any writer who attacked slavery in the 1760s and
1770S imagined that Africans were not part of the human race. James Otis made this explicit in his
Rights of the British Colonists in 1764, and a decade later the Massachusetts General Court debated a bill
premised on this principle. Abigail Adams expressed the same view in 1774, insisting that black
Americans had “as good a right to freedom as we have.” In the same year, Tom Paine insisted that “the
slave, who is the proper owner of his freedom, has a right to reclaim it.” Samuel Hopkins, writing in
1776 from Newport, Rhode Island, the center of New England slave trading, made it his business to keep
the matter squarely before the Second Continental Congress. The enslaved Africans, he exhorted,
“behold the sons of liberty oppressing and tyrannizing over many thousands of poor blacks who have as
good a claim to liberty as themselves, [and] they are shocked with the glaring inconsistence.” Hopkins
warned that if the leaders of the nation struggling for independence did not erase this "national sin,” the
American people would never survive God’s wrath. Almost simultaneously, the New York legislature
stated that slavery was “utterly inconsistent with the avowed principles in which this and other states have
carried on their struggle for liberty.”
In southern as well as northern colonies important leaders acknowledged the universality of rights
proclaimed by the declaration. As early as 1767, Virginia’s Arthur Lee stated baldly that “Freedom is
unquestionably the birthright of all mankind, of Africans as well as Europeans.” Two years later,
Jefferson argued before Virginia’s highest court, in a case involving a mulatto consigned to thirty years of
labor, that “under the law of nature, all men are born free, everyone comes into the world with a right to
his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.” Nearly all Virginia
leaders admitted as much as they began drafting a constitution for the state in 1776. George Mason’s
draft, in the very first article of the Declaration of Rights, stated “that all men are born equally free and
independent, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or
divest their posterity; among which are, the enjoyment of life and liberty.” Objections immediately arose
for fear that the first clause would “have the effect of abolishing” slavery or might be “the forerunner of ...
civil convulsion.” The language had to be manipulated “[so] as not to involve the necessity of
emancipating the slaves.”
Edmund Pendleton, a shrewd lawyer and expert wordsmith, rescued the Virginia leaders from the
problem of making the essential claim of natural inborn rights while not giving slaves an opening. The
accepted revision averred that “All men are by nature equally free and independent,” but acquired rights
only “when they enter into a state of society.” The last clause solved the problem because it could be said
that slaves were not in a state of society. Such sophistry would do for the moment, though many
Virginians were already on record saying that Africans were part of humanity and therefore as possessed
of natural rights as Europeans, Asians, or anyone else. Though Jefferson would use many of the key
words in the natural-rights proposition in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, he knew
better than to slip in the weaselly clause about “when they enter into a state of society.”
Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: the Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create
America (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 207-211.