INDEPENDENCE: The Birth of a New America

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At 6 o'clock last Tuesday morning in Philadelphia, Virginia Delegate Thomas Jefferson looked out at the gray sky and then noted that his thermometer registered 70°. Soon afterward, there came a crack of lightning and a sudden deluge. By 9 o'clock, the city was awash. Nearly 50 delegates to the Second Continental Congress slowly filled the ground-floor meeting room of the State House on Walnut Street. They conversed quietly but kept a watchful eye on everyone who came through the door. The room steamed. The only consolation in keeping the windows closed against rain was that they also excluded the horseflies from a nearby stable.

The day before, a preliminary vote on Virginian Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independence showed nine of the colonies in favor, two (South Carolina and Pennsylvania) opposed, New York abstaining and Delaware deadlocked. To decide such momentous business—cutting much of a continent and its 2.5 million inhabitants free from the British Empire—the Congress hoped for virtual unanimity. Anything less might poison the enterprise with disunity. Hence the delegates' anxiety on the morning of July 2.

A rumor passed through the hall that Pennsylvania would come over. South Carolina's Edward Rutledge entered smiling—ins colony, too, would vote for independence. New York's men still awaited instructions from home, but they would not dissent. That left only Delaware stalemated—one delegate in favor, one opposed, and one back home on business. Bostonian John Hancock, President of the Congress, rapped his gavel. Secretary Charles Thomson began rereading the resolution aloud prior to a vote.

Then over the cobblestones outside came a rattle of horse's hoofs. Soaking wet and mud-splattered, his face gray with fatigue, Delaware's third delegate, Farmer Caesar Rodney, had ridden all night from Dover after an express rider informed him of his colony's stalemate. He wore a green silk handkerchief, now nearly black with road dirt, to cover the lower part of his face, which is afflicted by a cancer. "The thunder and rain delayed me," Rodney said matter-of-factly as he entered the hall.

There, without dissent, the disparate colonies of America at last took the step that severed their 169-year-old political ties with the mother country, proclaiming that they "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states." Independence—the process as painful and bloody as birth—represents a unique historic experiment, a visionary gamble that a various people can literally will themselves into a separate political being on a new continent. Boston's John Adams is already predicting exultantly: "The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America."