A Decided Character

He woke with the window open, and lay for a moment working out whose fault that was.

It was Dr Franklin’s. Everything in that room was Dr Franklin’s fault, beginning with the room. The taverns of New Brunswick had been full of officers and soldiers, straggling and loitering on every road from Philadelphia in a manner that gave Adams, at least, a very poor opinion of the discipline of the army, and the best the landlord could do for two members of the Congress at ten at night was one bed, in a chamber hardly larger than the bed, with no chimney and one small window. The window had been open. Adams, who was an invalid and had a horror of the night air, had shut it.

Oh! Franklin had said, from the bed. Don’t shut the window. We shall be suffocated.

Adams had said that he was afraid of the evening air. And Franklin, who was seventy years old and had been carried from Philadelphia in a chaise while Adams and Rutledge rode, and ought by rights to have been asleep before his head was down, had sat up in his nightcap with every appearance of delight and said that the air within the chamber would soon be worse than the air without, and indeed was worse already, and that Adams should open the window and come to bed and be convinced. I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds.

He had opened it. He had got into bed. He had said that he had read the Doctor’s letters on the subject and thought the theory a paradox, but would run the risk of a cold to hear it defended; and Franklin had begun, with the air of a man who has been waiting a long while for exactly this, on the matter thrown off by the lungs and the skin, and the consumption of the air in a closed room, and the fallacy of supposing that anybody ever took cold from cold; and Adams had gone to sleep somewhere in the middle of it, and so, he suspected, had Franklin.

He had not taken cold. He lay and looked at the grey square of the window and found that this annoyed him more than taking cold would have done.

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They rode on to Perth Amboy in the morning, Rutledge and Adams on their horses and Franklin in his chaise between them, through a country full of soldiers who did not look like an army.

When Sullivan arrived on parole with Howe’s invitation, Adams called him a decoy duck. Howe could have nothing to offer that the King had not offered in his Speech. Adams argued the point at length, was outvoted, and then, because the Congress had a sense of humour that it showed at the worst moments, was put on the committee.

So he was going. He was going, with a Pennsylvania philosopher who believed in fresh air and a South Carolina lawyer of twenty-six who had led his colony against independence in July, to ask a British admiral what he could do for them; and he knew the answer, and he was going to hear it anyway, and carry it back, because that was what the Congress had decided, and he had spent his life telling other people that a decision of the proper body bound the men who had argued against it.

Abigail had written to him from Boston about the reading. She had told him about the bells, and the guns of the forts, and the young man who had shouted for the King’s arms to come down and been ignored; and she had told him, at the end, in a line by itself, that she had not said God save the King. He had read that line in the State House yard and laughed out loud, and a member from Maryland had looked at him. He had not been able to explain it to the member from Maryland. He did not think he could have explained it to anybody but her.

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Lord Howe’s barge was waiting for them at the water at Amboy, with its crew sitting at their oars, and a British officer standing on the landing in a very good coat, who bowed, and explained that he had the honour to remain behind on the Jersey side as a hostage for their safe return.

Adams looked at him, and then at Franklin.

“It would be childish,” he said, “to depend upon such a pledge.”

Franklin’s mouth moved slightly. Rutledge looked at the officer, who had gone rather pink. And Adams said that if his lordship had been good enough to send a surety, the surety had better come with them, so as to be on the same side of the water as the men he was security for, which was where a surety belonged; and his colleagues agreed with him, Rutledge with real pleasure, and the officer, after a moment, bowed again, and got back into the barge.

It was a good barge. The men rowed it as if they had been born in it. The water was flat and bright, and on the far side Staten Island came up green and low, with a house on the shore above the landing, and soldiers drawn up on the grass below the house in two long lines, and a man standing alone at the water’s edge waiting for them, in a blue coat, with his hat in his hand.

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Lord Howe met them at the landing himself. He was a tall dark man of about fifty with a heavy face and a sailor’s way of standing, as if the ground might move, and when he saw the officer come ashore with them he looked at him, and then at Adams, and smiled, and said that the gentlemen did him very great honour, and that he took the return of his officer as the highest compliment they could have paid him. Adams believed he meant it. That was the first difficulty with Lord Howe, and it was there from the first minute: he meant everything he said.

They went up from the water to the house between the two lines of soldiers. They were Hessians, grenadiers, enormous men in tall brass caps, and as the committee came between them they went through some evolution with their muskets and bayonets, stamping and wheeling and presenting, looking as fierce as ten furies, which Adams supposed was military etiquette and which he regarded, he hoped, with the indifference it deserved. Franklin walked through it as if it were a hedge. Rutledge, who was young, looked at the bayonets.

The house had been used as a barracks by the guards, and was as dirty as a stable. But his lordship had had one large room swept and made ready for them, and had spread the floor with a carpet of moss and green sprigs cut from the bushes and shrubs round about, so that the whole room smelled of the woods; and he had made it, Adams thought, looking round at it with real surprise, not only wholesome but romantically elegant. There was a table laid. There was good claret, and good bread, and cold ham, and tongues, and mutton. His lordship’s secretary, Mr Strachey, sat at a side table with his papers.

They ate first. It would have been uncivil to do otherwise, and Lord Howe was not a man to whom one wished to be uncivil. He talked, while they ate, of Franklin’s chess. Franklin had played at chess in London two winters ago with his lordship’s sister, in her house, in the evenings when the talk of reconciliation had gone as far as it could, and they spoke of her, and of the games, with an affection that Adams had not expected and did not entirely know what to do with. Then the cloth was drawn, and his lordship sat back in his chair and looked at the three of them, and began.

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He said that he could not treat with them as a committee of the Congress.

He said it at once, and plainly, and with evident regret. His powers did not allow him to acknowledge the Congress as a body, which had no existence in the constitution. But his powers did enable him to confer and consult with any private gentlemen of influence in the colonies on the means of restoring peace, and he was glad of this opportunity of conferring with them on that subject, if they would consider themselves for the present in that character: as private gentlemen, and as what he did not doubt they were, the King’s subjects.

Adams answered somewhat quickly.

“Your Lordship may consider me in what light you please,” he said, “and indeed I should be willing to consider myself, for a few moments, in any character which would be agreeable to your Lordship, except that of a private gentleman.”

There was a silence in the room of moss.

The Congress had chosen him. That was why he sat at this table. A private gentleman could speak for himself; neither he nor the admiral had crossed the water to do that. He heard how sharply the answer had come out, and waited.

Lord Howe turned, not to Adams, but to Franklin and Rutledge, and said, with great gravity, “Mr Adams is a decided character.”

Franklin looked at his claret. Rutledge looked at Adams. Howe let it pass and went on. Adams wished the phrase had been said angrily. The solemnity made it harder to place.

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The conference lasted three hours, and Lord Howe did most of the talking, and all of it was honest.

He spoke of his family’s love for America. He spoke of his elder brother, killed at Ticonderoga in the last war, to whom the Province of the Massachusetts Bay had raised a monument in Westminster Abbey, and he said that he esteemed that honour to his family above all things in this world, and Adams, who had been a young man in Braintree when the vote was taken, felt it go home in spite of himself. His lordship said that such was his gratitude and his affection to the country on that account that he felt for America as for a brother, and that if America should fall, he should feel and lament it like the loss of a brother.

Franklin bowed, with a cool and easy air and a collected countenance.

“My Lord,” he said, “we will do our utmost endeavours to save your Lordship that mortification.”

Lord Howe looked at him for a moment as if he had been hit. Then he said only that he supposed the gentlemen would endeavour to give his country employment in Europe; and none of the three of them said a word or gave a look from which he could draw any inference, and he went on.

He went on to his powers, and they were exactly what Adams had said in the Congress they would be.

His commission, with his brother the General, was to restore the King’s peace in America. He was empowered to hear the grievances of the colonies, and to receive them, and to lay them before the King and his ministers with every disposition in the world to see them redressed; he said this with feeling, and Adams believed that too. He was empowered to grant the King’s pardon to all who returned to their duty, without exception, the King being desirous of overlooking the past. And he was empowered to declare any colony at the King’s peace, once it had laid down its arms and returned to obedience to the laws, so that its trade might go on and its people be at rest.

“And the Grievances, my lord,” said Rutledge. “The paper of the fourth of July. Your lordship has read it.”

“I have read it, sir. Several times. It is a very able paper.”

“It asks for a Parliament of our own. For the colonies to be taxed by their own representatives and by no one else. For the late Acts to be repealed.” Rutledge was leaning forward in his chair. He was very young, and he had stood up in the State House two months ago and voted against independence with his whole delegation behind him, because he had believed that this afternoon was possible; and Adams, watching him, understood that he was watching a man find out. “Has your lordship any power to promise us any of those things?”

Lord Howe was quiet for a moment.

“I have no power to promise you anything that is not in the gift of the King,” he said. “And the constitution of the empire is not in the gift of the King. It is in the gift of the King in Parliament, which is a thing I cannot bind and would not attempt to. I can hear you. I can carry what you say to London with every recommendation I am able to give it, and I would do so gladly. I cannot promise you an American Parliament, sir. Nobody in this room can, and nobody in London could promise it to me.”

“Then you can promise to hear us,” said Franklin, “once we have stopped asking.”

His lordship coloured. “Once you have returned to the King’s peace, Doctor. That is all the condition there is. Lay down your arms, and I am authorised to say that your grievances will be heard with every attention. The King has said as much from the throne.”

“The King said whenever,” said Adams.

Lord Howe looked at him.

“Your lordship will forgive me. I have read the Speech a great many times. Whenever my subjects in America shall return to that obedience which is due to the laws, I shall be ready to hear their grievances. Whenever. We are asked to give up the only thing that makes anybody listen to us, on the promise that we shall then be listened to. And when we have been listened to, my lord, and Parliament has heard us out, and said no, as it has said no for ten years, we shall have nothing left to say it with.”

“You do not trust the King.”

“We trust the King,” said Adams, “rightly governing. I believe that is the phrase.”

For another hour they returned to the same conditions. Howe could promise no Parliament. The committee could promise no disarmament. Strachey recorded each repetition. Adams watched the secretary turn a page, though nothing new had been said to put on it.

At the end of the three hours Lord Howe stood up, and they stood up with him.

“Then I am sorry, gentlemen,” he said, “that you have had the trouble of coming so far to so little purpose.”

“Not so little, my lord,” said Franklin. “We know now exactly how far apart we are. That is worth an afternoon.”

His lordship smiled at that, a little, and said that he supposed it was.

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He walked down with them to the water himself, between the Hessians, who did not perform this time, and stood on the landing while they got into the barge, the officer with them; and as they pushed off he lifted his hat, and held it lifted until they were some way out.

Nobody spoke for a while. The men pulled. The sun was low now and the water had gone the colour of brass, and the Jersey shore came up ahead, and behind them the house on Staten Island got small, and the two lines of soldiers on the grass below it became two lines of red and blue dots, and then could not be told from the grass.

Rutledge was the first to speak. He said, to nobody in particular, looking back at the island, that he had voted against independence in July because he had believed the King would hear them.

“He will hear us,” said Franklin. “He has said so. He will hear us very attentively, after we have given up.”

Rutledge did not answer. Adams, watching him, felt sorry for him, and then was surprised to find that he did not feel sorry for himself. He had come expecting nothing and he had been given nothing, and there was a kind of relief in that, as there was in any account that came out exactly as one had calculated it. It was Rutledge who had come expecting something.

He thought about being called a decided character, and decided not to think about it.

When they landed at Amboy the officer got out first and stood on the landing, and bowed to them all, and Adams found that he was smiling at him, and that the officer was smiling back. Then they mounted, and Franklin was handed into his chaise, and they rode back the way they had come, through the country full of soldiers who did not look like an army, towards Philadelphia and the Congress and the report they would have to make, which would be very short, because there was so little in it and all of it was true.

That night, at the inn, there were rooms enough for everybody. Adams lay in his own bed with the window shut and found, after an hour, that he could not sleep for the closeness of the air, and got up in the dark and opened it, and was very glad that Franklin was in another room and would never know.