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 a humane mind 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 dis

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. amendments adopted by Congress have always been accounted as improvements, because tending in the direction of con

ciseness 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 abstain- | ing. 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 Statehouse 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 together. 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 hopeless 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 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 is that both these venerable witnesses were mistaken; that the original Declaration was signed only by the President and Secretary, John Hancock and Charles Thomson; and that the general signing of the parchment copy

It is probable,

took place on August 2d.* at least, that fifty-four of the fifty-six names were appended on that day; and that it was afterward signed by Thornton, of New Hampshire, who was not then a member, and by McKean, who was then temporarily absent.

Jefferson used to relate," with much merriment," says Parton, that the final signing of the Declaration was hastened by a very trivial circumstance. Near the hall was a large stable, whence the flies issued in legions. Gentlemen were in those days peculiarly sensitive to such discomforts by reason of silk stockings; and when this annoyance, superadded to the summer heat of Philadelphia, had become intolerable, they hastened to bring the business to a conclusion. This may equally well refer, however, to the original vote; flies are flies, whether in July or August.

American tradition has clung to the phrases assigned to the different participants in this scene: John Hancock's commentary on his own bold handwriting, "There, John Bull may read my name without spectacles;" Franklin's, "We must hang together, or else, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately;" and the heavy Harrison's remark to the slender Elbridge Gerry, that, in that event, Gerry would be kicking in the air long after his own fate would be settled. These things may or may not have been said; but it gives a more human interest to the event, when we know that they were even attributed. What we long to know is, that the great acts of history were done by men like ourselves, and not by dignified machines.

Even those who look with the greatest pride and hope upon the present and future of this nation, must admit that the Continental Congress contained in 1776 a remarkably large proportion of able and eminent men. The three most eminent delegations, naturally, were from what were then the three leading States-Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Virginia contributed Thomas Jefferson, who framed the Delaration; Richard Henry Lee, whose resolutions preceded it; Francis Lightfoot Lee, his brother; Wythe and Braxton, who had stood by Patrick Henry in the old House of Burgesses; Nelson, who had first proposed organizing the Colonial militia of Virginia, and who later, as a general in

Bancroft, ix., 59; Frothingham, "Rise of the Republic," 545.

the field, bombarded his own house at Yorktown, and Harrison, afterward the father of a President. Massachusetts sent Hancock, the President of the Congress; Samuel Adams, who shared with Hancock the

GARDEN-HOUSE, OWNED BY DR. ENOCH EDWARDS, WHERE
JEFFERSON AND OTHERS CELEBRATED THE PASSAGE
OF THE DECLARATION.

honor of being excepted from a royal pardon; John Adams, "our Colossus on the floor;" Elbridge Gerry, afterward Commissioner to France and Vice-President of the United States, and Robert Treat Paine, who had acted as public prosecutor after the Boston massacre. Pennsylvania contributed Dr. Franklin, "the Genius of the Day and the patron of American Liberty;" Robert Morris, "the financier of the Revolution," by whose sole credit the Continental army was sustained in its closing campaign, and who was afterward a prisoner for debt; Morton, who had been a member of the "Stamp Act Congress;" Ross, the mediator between the Colonists and the Indians; Dr. Rush, renowned for science and for humanity; Clymer, soldier, student, writer, and prison reformer; the Irish-born Taylor and Smith, and the Scotch Wilson.

Yet the other Colonies were represented by delegations hardly less eminent. New York sent Livingston, of "Livingston's Manor," the correspondent of Edmund Burke, and one of the framers of the "Address to the People of Great Britain" in the first Continental Congress; Lewis, the Welsh merchant, to whom the British Government had given five thousand acres of land for his services in the French and Indian war; Floyd, who, during the greater part of the Revolution, was an exile from his home,

leaving it in the hands of the British; and Morris, afterward succeeded in Congress by his more famous brother, Gouverneur. New Jersey sent Hopkinson, lawyer, wit, and poet-the author of "The Battle of the Kegs;" Dr. Witherspoon, the Scotch clergyman, President of Princeton College; Stockton, a patriot, and the ancestor of patriots; Clarke, known as "The Poor Man's Counselor," though not a lawyer, and "honest John Hart." New Hampshire had chosen Dr. Bartlett, the first to sign the parchment roll; Dr. Thornton, who succeeded Governor Wentworth, and became acting-Governor of New Hampshire; and Whipple, who rose from a cabin-boy to be a general, commanding with Stark at Bennington, and under Gates at Saratoga. Connecticut sent Roger Sherman, shoemaker, lawyer, and judge, who had studied. while working at his bench, and had become a profound lawyer on borrowed law-books; Huntington, afterward President of Congress, and Wolcott, who defended the Connecticut coast against Tryon, and, later, made peace with the Six Nations. Rhode Island sent Hopkins, who had introduced a bill into the Rhode Island Assembly to abolish slave importation, and had at the same time emancipated his own slaves; and Ellery, whose house was burned by the British army as soon as it took possession of the island.

Delaware had elected Rodney, who rode eighty miles, as already stated, to be present at the vote for independence; Reed, who had roused his colony to contribute for the sufferers by the Boston Port Bill, and McKean, the only man who served in Congress through the whole Revolutionary War. The South Carolina delegates, forming at first the only delegation which had united in opposing independence, were equally united in finally approving and practically sustaining it, Middleton losing his fortune in the cause, Hayward being scarred for life by a gunshot wound, and both, with Rutledge, being imprisoned for a year at St. Augustine by the British; while young Thomas Lynch, who had come from the London Temple to espouse his country's cause, escaped the dangers of war only to be lost at sea at thirty. These were all natives of the colony from which they came; but North Carolina and Georgia were honorably represented by what we should now call "carpet-baggers." North Carolina sent Hooper, a Massachusetts man, who had studied law under James Otis; Hewes, the