Equal Ground

It must have been hard on Benjamin Franklin when the Provincial Congress asked his son, William, to step down as Royal Governor of New Jersey. But William supported the English king, and the revolutionaries weren’t going to stand for that. The truth is the war of Independence divided this country in much the same way the Civil War would a hundred years later. Old Ben was 78 years old before he patched thing up with his son, and theirs was one of the happier endings.

You’ve probably heard how hard this war was for the British soldiers, how they were so far from home, in a hostile land, but the fact is a third of all colonists were loyal to the King and could be counted on for support. Another third of the citizens here considered themselves neutral. Some were from religious groups, like the Society of Friends, but the idea of taking up arms was in total contrast to their beliefs. And that left only a third of the colonists to support the revolution. Now factor in the population of that day, only about two million and then subtract all the women and children and it becomes plain that any revolutionary army would have to be pretty small. And the idea that this group challenged the entire British Empire and won its independence, well that’s sometimes hard to believe.
But a fact is a fact, right? And the revolutionary army fought that war and won, so the question of America’s independence was over and done with. Well, the British probably didn’t see things quite that way. It was the King, after all, who had owned the colonies, not the British people themselves, and what he lost in the War of Independence was access to a fortune in natural resources. England itself was overpopulated, its own resources stretched to the limit, it would be a long time before America would be free from the threat of British domination. The revolutionaries had, in fact, questioned the very idea that the king served under a divine right granted him by God. Thomas Paine, the author of the famous “Common Sense” pamphlet called the idea of kingship, “The most prosperous invention the devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry.” It was a slur the King of England probably wouldn’t forget so easily.

At the signing of the treaty of Paris, England’s acknowledgment of America had been downright patronizing. After the war, British troops still remained at seven posts throughout America. They still dominated the new country by controlling its economic markets, and for 15 years they refused to send a Minister or Ambassador to the United States. When American officials were forced to deal with the British they expected to be treated with condescension and contempt, and that was on a good day.

Hostilities were so bad that when Thomas Jefferson took office as President in 1801 he knew it was just a matter of time before America’s army would have to fight the British again. He was right, of course, and America would be back at war with England only three years after the end of his second term.

But Jefferson was one of the original writers of the Declaration of Independence and what he thought about the rights of Americans had been made pretty plain. He decided early on in his career that his countrymen would no longer bow to the British or any other foreign power.

So on July 4, 1801, Jefferson made a radical gesture that changed the course of American politics. It’s a Little Known Fact that instead of bowing in greeting to diplomats, a gesture Jefferson interpreted as a sign of subservience, he tried a new tactic at one of his first White House receptions. He reached out, took the hand of the person he greeted, and shook it. And America’s leaders have met the rest of the world as equals ever since.