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Although independence had been months, even years, in coming, the week's events seemed startling in their sudden finality. July 2 declared the fact of separation. In another two days, on July 4, the Congress endorsed an extraordinary document, a Declaration that stated the Colonies' numerous reasons for leaving the imperial embrace. That date and that document may eventually loom larger in the American mind than what happened on July 2, for the Declaration, written by Jefferson, endows the revolt with a philosophical foundation and justification.
All this week, however, Americans will be celebrating the fact of independence and not the reasons for it. After the public reading of the Declaration.Philadelphians sounded their church bells all day and night. Battalions marched to the State House yard. Muskets cracked a feu de joie. Early this week the news had traveled only as far as New York and Dover, Delaware; it will probably not reach Georgia before August. In Dover, the Committee of Safety presided over a ceremonial burning of a portrait of George III. Said the committee's president: "Thus we destroy even the shadow of that King who refused to reign over a free people." In small towns like Easton, Pennsylvania, crowds gathered at local courthouses and greeted a reading of the Declaration with three loud huzzas. John Adams wrote to Maryland's Samuel Chase: "You will see by this post that the river is passed and the bridge cut away."
So it was. But the Americans come to independence with divergent interests and reasons: the fishermen, shipbuilders and merchants of New England, the traders and small farmers of the Middle Colonies, the planters and farmers of the south. The newly united states stretch 1,300 miles from Massachusetts' rocky Maine coast to the sand hills of Georgia. Sometimes regional differences, suspicions and hostilities among the colonies have been stronger than the antagonisms between England and the new continent. The celebrated old drawing depicting the colonies as separate segments of a serpent's body is hardly an exaggeration.
Two weeks ago, South Carolina's Rutledge wrote privately of his dismay at the New Englanders' "overruling influence in council —their low cunning, and those levelling principles winch men without character and without fortune in general possess." Virginia's Carter Braxton worried similarly about the "democratical" tendencies of New Englanders. Some men in the north, meantime, scorn the southerners for their dependence on slave labor. In all sections, there persists a powerful streak of Toryism. In the Congress itself are men like Pennsylvania's John Dickinson, who, though not a Tory, held out for reconciliation with England, arguing that the break was unnecessary, or at least too sudden.