![]() The delegations of the two most populous colonies were thus united in supporting independence by the early spring of 1776. ![]() In March, by which time Gerry had arrived in Philadelphia to take his seat, the Virginia delegation had shifted into the radical camp with the defection of Benjamin Harrison from the conservative to the independence faction and the return to Philadelphia of Richard Henry Lee. ![]() On 20 December 1775 the Massachusetts Provincial Congress replaced Thomas Cushing, a conservative, with Elbridge Gerry, a radical and follower of Samuel Adams, as a delegate to the Continental Congress, thus securing for the pro-independence forces a majority in the Massachusetts delegation. While these formal resolutions were enacted by the Continental Congress, events were quickly moving toward the colonies formal separation from Great Britain. Even the Declaration of the Causes and Necessities of Taking Up Arms, written by Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson and endorsed by Congress on the day following adoption of the Olive Branch Petition, rejected independence while asserting that the colonists would not be enslaved even at the cost of their lives. Yet, despite these measures, the Second Continental Congress, on 5 July 1775, adopted John Dickinsons Olive Branch Petition which expressed the colonists earnest hope for reconciliation with the motherland and which called upon the King to work toward the reestablishment of peace. Two weeks later, upon learning that several other colonies had ratified the Continental Association, the Restraining Act was extended to Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. In February 1775 the British Parliament declared that the colony of Massachusetts was in a state of rebellion and in the following month King George III endorsed the New England Restraining Act, forbidding the New England colonies from trading with any nation except Britain and prohibiting them from fishing in the North Atlantic. This ∼ontinental Association was met not with offers of conciliation, as many had hoped, but with a policy directed at punishing the colonies for their insubordination. Meanwhile the colonies bound themselves to implement a ban on all imports from Great Britain, to discontinue the slave trade, and to embargo all exports to Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies. Indeed, a second Congress was to convene in May 1775 only if the colonies continued to find themselves burdened by the oppressive legislation to which they so strenuously objected. The First Continental Congress, which had met in Philadelphia during September and October of 1774, had repeatedly reaffirmed the colonies underlying loyalties to the British Crown once their grievances had been redressed. It is fair to say that when hostilities broke out between the British and Americans at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 few if any colonists supported independence from Great Britain. Despite its timelessness, however, the Declaration, especially its listing of the grievances against the Crown, are best read against the backdrop of late eighteenth-century North American history. Although written for a specific historical purpose, it nevertheless enunciates a political philosophy that transcends the particularities of time and place and offers a general theory of rights and of the legitimacy of resistance against established authority. The Declaration of Independence is almost certainly the most powerful piece of political rhetoric ever penned.
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