 Press Room:
1776
Historical Note by the Authors
By
Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards
The first question we are asked
by those who have seen
—or read—1776 is invariably: “Is it true? Did it really
happen that way?”
The answer is: Yes.
Certainly a few changes have been made in order to
fulfill basic dramatic tenets. To quote a
European
dramatist friend of ours, “God writes lousy theater.”
In other
words, reality is seldom artistic, orderly, or
dramatically satisfying; life rarely provides
a sound second act, and its climaxes usually have not been adequately
prepared for. Therefore, in historical drama,
a number of small licenses are almost always
taken
with
strictest fact, and those in 1776 are enumerated in
this
addendum. But none of them, either separately or
in accumulation, has done anything to alter the
historical truth
of the characters, the times, or the events of American independence.
First, however,
let us list those elements of our play
that have been taken, unchanged and unadorned, from documented fact.
The weather in Philadelphia that late spring and early summer
of 1776 was unusually hot and humid, resulting
in a bumper crop of horseflies incubated in the stable
next door to
the State House (now Independence Hall).
John Adams was indeed' “obnoxious and disliked”
—the description is his own.
Benjamin Franklin, the oldest member of the Congress, suffered from gout in his later years and often
“drowsed” in public.
Thomas Jefferson, the junior member of the Virginia
delegation, was entrusted with the daily weather report.
Rhode Island's
Stephen Hopkins, known to his colleagues
as “Old Grape and Guts” because of his fondness for distilled refreshment,
always wore his round black, wide-brimmed Quaker's hat in the chamber.
Portly Samuel Chase, the gourmand from Maryland
(pronounced Mary-land in those times), was referred
to (behind his back, of course)
as “Bacon-Face.”
Connecticut's
Roger Sherman always sat apart from
his fellow
Congressmen, sipping coffee from a saucer-like bowl.
Caesar Rodney of Delaware, suffering from skin
cancer, never appeared in public without a
green scarf
wrapped around his face.
The dress of the Congressmen graduated from the
liberal greens, golds, brocades, and laces of
the conservative
Southerners, to the conservative browns, blacks,
mean cloth, and plain linen of the radical New Englanders.
The only two known employees of the Congress were
Charles Thomson, secretary, who kept no
minutes of
the debates (recording only those motions which were
passed),
and Andrew McNair, custodian and bell-ringer.
A motion concerning Congress's liability for a certain
Mr. Melchior Meng's dead mule was debated
and approved prior
to the motion on independence.
Ben Franklin's illegitimate son William was Royal
Governor of New Jersey until he was
arrested, in June
1776, and exiled to Connecticut.
The New York delegation abstained on many votes,
including the final vote on independence (that
tally being recorded by Mr. Thomson as twelve for, none against, and one
abstaining), though later the New
York Legislature (the members of which “speak
very
fast and very loud and nobody pays any attention to
anybody else, with the result that nothing
ever gets done”) approved the action after the fact,
George Washington's dispatches arrived on an
average of three a day, and almost all
of them were “gloomy”
to the point of despair.
The strength of the armed forces under Washington's
command
was as dismal as he reported. On May 12,
1776, for instance, the Duty Roster of the
Continental Army
listed:
Commissioned officers
589
Non-commissioned officers
722
Present & fit for duty
6,641
Sick but present
547
Sick but
absent
352
On furlough
66
On command [A.W.O.L.]
1,122
This was the total strength of
the American army.
Edward Rutledge
of South Carolina, the youngest member of
the Congress, was the leading proponent of
individual rights for
individual states.
The committee
to “manage” the Declaration of Independence
consisted of five Congressmen: Adams, Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert
Livingston (of New York—he wasn't
available to sign the Declaration, but
he obligingly sent his cousin, Philip,
to affix the powerful family name), and Jefferson. The fifth member
had originally been Richard Lee, the
offerer of the motion of independence, but he subsequently declined
in order to return to Virginia, where he
had been proposed for governor of
that “country” (as Virginians referred to their colony). None of the
five members of this committee wanted the
assignment of actually writing the
Declaration, and all of them
begged off for one personal reason
or another. But Jefferson, whom Adams accused of being the finest
writer in Congress, possessing “a happy talent for composition and a remarkable
felicity of expression,” was finally
persuaded. Later he recalled that
the purpose of the Declaration had been “to place before mankind the common
sense of the subject in terms so
plain and firm as to command their
assent.”
Jefferson was, besides being an author, lawyer,
farmer, architect, and statesman, a fine violinist. His wife, Martha, a
young, beautiful widow of twenty-four when
they married, was often praised for her
“uncommon
singing voice.” (She died ten years after their wedding,
a full
nineteen years before Jefferson inhabited the
White
House, and he never remarried. The Martha
Jefferson who is often listed as First Lady was
their daughter.)
Jefferson,
during those early years in Congress, was
not a loquacious man. Adams remembered
him as “the most silent man in
Congress… I never heard him utter three sentences together.”
Adams knew he would not receive his proper due
from posterity. He wrote that “the whole history of this
Revolution will be to lie, from beginning to
end.” And,
equally, he knew that Franklin was the stuff of which
national legends are built. They would certify that
“Franklin did this, Franklin did that, Franklin did some
other damned thing…Franklin smote the
ground and out sprang George
Washington, fully-grown and on his horse….Franklin then electrified
him with his miraculous lightning rod and
the three of them— Franklin,
Washington and the horse—conducted the
entire Revolution by
themselves.”
The seemingly endless list of Congressional committees (and their redundant titles) spoken by
Secretary Thomson at the beginning of Scene 5 are all taken from
his own
report as it appears in the “Journal of Congress.”
The Declaration of Independence was debated by the
Congress for three full days. It underwent
eighty-six separate changes (and withstood scores of others, including
an amendment calling for clear and sovereign “fishing rights”) and the
deletion of over four hundred
words, including a strong condemnation of that “peculiar
institution” slavery (accusing King George III of
waging
“cruel war against human nature itself, violating
its most sacred rights of life and liberty in
the persons
of a distant people who never offended him, carrying them into slavery in
another hemisphere…”) which
called for its abolition. This paragraph was
removed to
placate and appease the Southern colonies and to hold
them in the Union.
Jefferson, though a slaveholder himself,
declared that
“nothing is more certainly written in the Book of Fate than that this
people shall be free.” And further: “The
rights of human nature are deeply wounded by
this infamous
practice.”
The deadlock existing within the Delaware delegation was
finally and melodramatically broken by the arrival
of the
mortally ill Caesar Rodney, who, in great pain,
had ridden all night from Dover, a distance of
some
eighty
miles, arriving just in time to save the motion on
independence from being defeated. His
sacrifice was all
the more remarkable in view of the fact that by voting
for
the motion he was abandoning forever all hope of
receiving the competent medical treatment of
his illness
that was available in England; he had become a traitor
with a price on his head.
When the motion on independence had passed, John
Dickinson of Pennsylvania, the leader of the
anti-independence forces (desiring reconciliation with England),
refused to sign the Declaration, a document he
felt he could
not endorse. But, asserting a fidelity to
America, he left the Congress to enlist in the Continental Army as a
private—though he was entitled to a commission—and served courageously with
the Delaware Militia. Some years later he
was appointed to the Constitutional Convention, representing
Delaware, and returned to Philadelphia to contribute greatly to
the writing of that extraordinary
document, the United States Constitution.
All these historical facts appear in the play. But there
are, as
has been stated, many other instances where
changes were effected. In all cases, however,
we believe
they were the result of sound dramatic decisions which
were aesthetically, as well as historically, justified.
These changes
can be divided into five categories:
things altered, things surmised, things added, things deleted,
and things rearranged. Following are examples
of all five categories,
plus the reasons for the changes.
Things altered:
Of the two main alterations that were
made, one was in the interest of dramatic
construction, the
other for the purpose of preserving dramatic unity.
First, the Declaration, though reported back to Congress for amendments and revisions
prior to the vote on
independence on
July 2, was not actually debated and
approved until after that vote. However, had this schedule been preserved in the play, the audience's interest
in the debate would
already have been spent.
Second, the Declaration was not signed on July 4,
1776, the date it was proclaimed to the
citizenry of the
thirteen colonies. It was actually signed over a period
of several months, many of the signers having not been
present at the time of its ratification. The
greatest number signed on August 2, but one, Matthew Thornton of New
Hampshire, did not even enter Congress until November
4, and the name of Colonel Thomas McKean
of Delaware, probably the last to sign,
had not yet appeared on the document by the middle of January 1777.
It seems fairly obvious, however, that the
depiction of a July 4 signing,
like the famous Pine-Savage engraving
of this non-event, provides the occasion
with form and allows the proper
emotional punctuation to the entire
spectacle.
Things surmised:
Because Secretary Thomson did not
keep a proper record of the debates in Congress, and
because other chronicles are incomplete
in certain key areas, a small
number of educated suppositions had to
be made in order to complete the story.
These were based on consistencies of character, ends logically
connected to means, and the absence of other possible explanations.
It is unknown, for instance, whether Richard Henry
Lee was persuaded to go to the
Virginia House of Burgesses in order to secure a motion for independence
that could
be introduced in Congress, or if he volunteered on his own. Certainly Adams was getting
nowhere with his own efforts; he had, on twenty-three
separate
occasions, introduced the subject of independence to his fellows in Congress, and
each time it had
failed to be considered. It was also true that whenever
an
issue needed respectability, the influence of a Virginian was brought to bear. (Virginia was the
first
colony,
and its citizens were regarded as a sort of American aristocracy, an honor that was not
betrayed by
their leaders. The Virginian Washington was given command of the army,
and the Virginian Jefferson was given
the assignment of writing the Declaration.)
Certainly
Franklin
would have delighted in appealing to Lee's
vanity and deflating Adams' ego at one and the
same
time, as Scene 2 of the play suggests. But the actual
sequence of these events is unknown.
And when Lee returned from Virginia (in Scene 3)
a transcript of the debate in Congress on his motion for
independence was never recorded. But the positions of
individual Congressmen are known, and it was
possible to glean phrases, attitudes and
convictions from the many
letters, memoirs, and other papers that exist in abundance, in order
to reconstruct a likely facsimile of this debate, (Stick fights, such as the
one occurring between Adams and Dickinson
in this scene, were common during
Congressional debate, and though there is no report of this
particular one, the sight of the two
antagonists whacking away at each other certainly would
have surprised no one.)
Similarly, a record of the debate on the Declaration
was never kept. But in this case there was
even more to
go on. Jefferson himself, in his autobiography, provided two versions of
the document—as originally written and as finally approved. Who was
responsible for each individual change is not known, but in most instances
convincing
conclusions are not too hard to draw. McKean,
a proud Scot, surely would have objected to the
charge of “Scotch & foreign mercenaries
[sent] to invade and deluge us in
blood.” And John Witherspoon of New Jersey, a clergyman and the
Congressional chaplain, no doubt would
have supported the addition of the
phrase “with a firm Reliance on the Protection of
Divine Providence,” which had not been
present in Jefferson's original
draft. Also, Edward Rutledge must be
charged with leading the fight against
the condemnation of slavery, being the chief proponent of that practice in
Congress. And the exchange
between Jefferson and Dickinson, occurring in our version of this debate, includes
lines written by Jefferson on other occasions,
most notably: “The right to be free comes
from Nature.”
The conversion of James Wilson of Pennsylvania from
the “Nay”
to the “Yea” column at the last minute (in
Scene 7) is an event without any surviving
explanation. All that is definitely known
is that Wilson, a former law
student of Dickinson's and certainly under his influence
in Congress, as his previous voting record testifies, suddenly changed his position on independence
and, as a result, is generally credited
with casting the vote that decided
this issue. But why? A logical solution to this mystery was found
when we imagined one fear he might have
possessed that would have been
stronger than his fear of Dickinson's wrath—the fear
of going down in history as the man who
singlehandedly prevented American
independence. Such a position
would have been totally consistent with his well-known
penchant for caution.
The final logical conjecture we made concerned the
discrepancy between the appearance of
the word “inalienable”
in Jefferson's version of the Declaration and
its reappearance as “unalienable” in the
printed copy that is now in universal use. This could have been a
misprint, but it might, too, have been
the result of interference by
Adams (he had written it as “unalienable” in a copy of the
Declaration he had drafted in his own
hand), who believed that this seldom-used spelling was correct. There is no
doubt that the meddlesome “Massachusettensian,”
a Harvard graduate, was not above speaking to Mr. Dunlap, the printer.
It is also consistent with both men's behavior that
Adams and Jefferson should have disagreed on
this
matter,
as they did on most. They were to become bitter
enemies for much of their lives, only
to make up when
they had both survived to extreme old age. Both lived
long enough to be invited (by Adams' son, John Quincy, who was then
occupying the White House) to the fiftieth
anniversary celebration of the Declaration
of Independence. But on that very date,
July 4, 1826, exactly a
half-century later to the day, both of these
gigantic figures, Jefferson at
eighty-three, Adams at ninety-one—each believing and finding solace
in the thought that the other was
attending the jubilee—died. Surely this was one of the greatest coincidences
in all history and one which never
would be believed if included
in a play.
Things added:
The three
instances of elements that
were added to the story of American independence
were
created in the interest of satisfying the musical-comedy form. Again, it must be stressed that
none of
them interferes with historic truth in any way.
The first concerns Martha Jefferson's visit to Philadelphia in Scene 4. While it is true
that Jefferson missed
her to distraction, more than enough to effect an
unscheduled reunion, it is believed that he journeyed to
Virginia to see her. The license of
having her come to see him, at Adams' instigation, stemmed from our desire
to show something of the young Jefferson's personal
life without destroying the unity of
setting.
Second, in Scene 5 of the play, Adams, Franklin, and
Chase are shown leaving for New Brunswick, New
Jersey, for an inspection of the military. This particular
trip did
not actually take place, though a similar one
was made to New York after the vote on
independence,
during which Adams and Franklin had to share a single
bed in an
inn. Originally the New Jersey junket was
included in the play, represented by two
separate scenes
(one in an inn, showing the sleeping arrangements
mentioned, the other on the military training grounds,
showing inspection of “a ragtag collection of
provincial
militiamen and irregulars” who could do nothing right
until a flock of ducks flew by; the
men's hunger molded them into a
smoothly operating unit). These scenes were removed, however, during the
out-of-town tryout, in the
interests of the over-all length of the play and because they were
basically cinemagraphic in concept. Needless
to say, both should appear in the filmed
version of
7776.
And third, the account of General Washington's dusty young
courier, at the end of Scene 5, of a battle he had
witnessed, while an actual description of the village
green during and after the Battle of Lexington, is a
wholly constructed moment, designed to
illustrate the feelings and experiences of the Americans outside Congress,
who were deeply influenced by the decisions made
inside the Congress.
One further note: The tally board used throughout
the play to record each vote did not
exist in the actual
chamber in Philadelphia. It has been included in order to
clarify the positions of the thirteen colonies at any
given
moment, a device allowing the audience to follow
the parliamentary action without confusion.
Things deleted:
Certain elements that are historically
true have been left out of or removed
from the play for
one of three
separate reasons.
The first of
these was the embarrassment of riches;
there are just too many choice bits of information to
include in one, two, or even a dozen
plays. The fact that Franklin often entered the Congressional chamber in a
sedan chair carried by convicts,
for instance; or that, on several occasions, Indians in full regalia
would appear before the Congress,
petitioning for one thing or
another, and accompanied by their interpreter, a full-blooded Indian
who spoke with a flawless Oxford accent.
Then there was the advisability
of cutting down on
the number of Congressmen appearing in the play in the
interests
of preserving clarity and preventing overcrowding. There is, after all, a limit to
an audience's ability
to assimilate
(and keep separate) a large number of characters, as well as the physical limits of any given
stage production. For this reason several
of the lesser known (and least
contributory) Congressmen were
eliminated altogether, and in a few cases two or more
were combined into a single character. James Wilson, for example, contains
a few of the qualities of his fellow Pennsylvanian, John Morton. And John
Adams is, at
times, a composite of himself and his cousin Sam Adams, also of
Massachusetts.
But by far the most frustrating reason for deleting a
historical fact was that the audiences would never have
believed it. The best example of this is John Adams'
reply (it was actually Cousin Sam who said it) to
Franklin's willingness to drop the anti-slavery
clause
from the Declaration. “Mark me, Franklin,” he now
says in
Scene 7, “if we give in on this issue, posterity
will never forgive us.” But the complete line,
spoken in
July 1776, was “If we give in on this issue, there will be
trouble a hundred years hence;
posterity will never forgive us.” And audiences would never
forgive us. For
who could blame them for believing that the phrase was
the author's invention, stemming from the eternal wisdom
of hindsight? After all, the astonishing prediction
missed by only a few
years.
Things rearranged:
Some historical data have been
edited dramatically without altering their validity
or factuality.
The first example of this would
be the play's treatment
of Adams' relationship with his wife, Abigail. Two
separate
theatrical conventions have been employed; the
selection and conversion of sections
of their actual letters,
written to each
other during this period of their separation, into dialogue; and the placing of them in close physical
proximity though they remain, in reality, over three
hundred miles apart. The notion for this
last device sprang, oddly, from a line in one of these same letters:
Adams was complaining about their
continued separation and finally pleaded, “Oh, if I could only annihilate
time and space!” (The description
of scenes, at the beginning of
the play, defines these meetings by listing
the area of dramatic action as “certain
reaches of John Adams' mind.”)
The exchanges, spoken and sung,
between John and
Abigail
Adams are, as has been stated, the result of distributing, as dialogue,
sections and phrases from
various letters. The list of their children's diseases,
the
constant
requests for “saltpetre for gunpowder” (and
the counter-request for pins), the use
of the tender
salutation “Dearest friend,” the catalogue of Abigail's
faults, the news of the farm in
Braintree failing—even certain song lyrics transferred intact (“I live like
a nun in a cloister” and “Write to
me with sentimental effusion”)—all these were edited and rearranged in an attempt
to establish a dramatically satisfying relationship.
This same process was used to construct
George Washington's dispatches
from the field. Literally dozens
were selected, from which individual lines were borrowed
and then patched together in order to form the
five communiqués that now appear in the play. Therefore,
though the dispatches as now constructed were not written by the
Commander-in-Chief, each sentence within
them is either an actual quotation (“O how I
wish I had never seen the Continental
Army! I would have done better to retire to the back country and live
in a wigwam”) or paraphrase, or comes
from a firsthand report (the
final line of the last dispatch, “… but
dear God! what brave men I shall lose before this business ends!” was
spoken by Washington in the presence
of his adjutant, who later
reported it).
And finally, John Adams' extraordinary prophecy,
made on July 3, 1776, describing the way
Independence
Day would be celebrated by future generations of Americans
and written in a letter to his wife on that date,
has been paraphrased and adapted into lyric
form for the song “Is Anybody There?” sung by Adams in Scene
7. The original lines are:
I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding
generations as the great anniversary
festival. It ought to be
commemorated as
the day of deliverance by solemn acts of
devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with
pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells,
bonfires, and illumination, from one end
of this continent
to the other, from this time forward for evermore.
You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but 1 am
not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and
treasure that
it will cost us to maintain this Declaration and support
and defend these States. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the
rays of
ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is
more than worth all the means. And
that posterity will
triumph in that day's transaction, even although we should
rue it, which I trust God we shall not.
We have attempted, in the paragraphs above, to answer the question, “Is it true?” What we
cannot answer, however, is how such a question could possibly be asked
so
often by Americans. What they want to know is whether or not the story of
their political origin, the
telling of their national legend, is correct as
presented.
Don't they know? Haven't they ever heard it before?
And if not, why
not? As we say, it's a question we cannot
answer.
There are those who would claim that the schools
just don't teach it, and we would have trouble
disagreeing with them. The authors of 7776
are both products of the American
public-school system—one from the
West Coast, the other from the East. Both were better than average
students with a deeper than average curiosity
about American history. But neither of them was
given any more than a perfunctory review of the major
events, a roster of a few cardboard
characters, and a certain number of jingoistic conclusions.
But what of the arguments, the precedents, the compromises,
the personalities, the regional disputes, the perseverance, the
courage, the sacrifices, the expediencies?
What of the similarities between those times and these (states rights
versus federal rights; property rights
versus
human rights; privileged rights versus civil rights) and
the differences (if any)? What of the lessons
of the past applied to the problems of the
future, for what society can plan a
future without an intimate
knowledge of its own
past?
It is presumptuous of us to assume that 7776
will be able to fill even a portion of
this lamentable void (though doubtless no small portion of its
success is due to the “new” information it offers); the crime is that it
should even have to. The United States
owes its citizens, at the very least, an educational system that describes, defines, and explains our own existence.
1776.
Edwards, Peter Stone and Sherman. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. pp.158-172 |
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