In September 1774, fifty-six delegates (the representatives each colony sent) from twelve colonies gathered in a Philadelphia carpenters' guildhall to do something that had never been done before, and not one of them came to break with Britain. They came to get the Intolerable Acts repealed (Chapter 4): to make the king and his ministers back down, restore Boston's port, and leave the colonists in peace as the loyal British subjects they still believed themselves to be. The boldest thing this first congress would do was organize a boycott. Its formal petition called the colonists George III's "most loyal subjects." If you had stood in that hall and proposed independence, the room would have looked at you as if you had lost your mind.

Twenty-two months later, in that same city, a different congress voted that the colonies were "free and independent states," absolved of all allegiance to the British crown. The men in the room had not changed their natures. The world around them had. The distance between those two votes is the chapter, and the thing that closed it was not a few radicals talking everyone into it. Step by step, the British government itself kept removing every other option until independence was the only door left unlocked.

The First Continental Congress convened on 5 September 1774 at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, a brick guild house barely twenty years old, lent to the delegates by the city's master builders, and sat until 26 October. Fifty-six delegates came from twelve colonies. Only Georgia stayed home, its royal governor still firmly in control and the colony wanting British troops to help against raids on its frontier. The delegates elected Peyton Randolph of Virginia their president and made Charles Thomson of Philadelphia, who was not even a delegate, their secretary.

The roster reads, in hindsight, like a list of men a country would later name things after: George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia; the cousins John Adams and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts; John Jay of New York; John Dickinson and Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania. They did not all want the same thing, and that disagreement is the most important fact about the Congress. In the opening debates, Patrick Henry reached for the grand version of it. As John Adams recorded it in his notes, Henry declared that the old colonial labels had dissolved: "I am not a Virginian, but an American." It was a thrilling line, and in 1774 mostly aspiration. The men in the room thought of themselves first as Virginians and Pennsylvanians and New Englanders, with different economies, different churches, and a long habit of distrusting one another.

What pulled them toward the radical edge was a packet of resolutions carried down from Massachusetts. The towns of Suffolk County, which included Boston, had met at Milton on 9 September and adopted resolves (formal statements voted by a body, carrying its authority) drafted largely by Dr. Joseph Warren, a Boston physician and patriot organizer. The Suffolk Resolves declared the Intolerable Acts unconstitutional and owed no obedience, urged a boycott of British goods, and told the militia to prepare. Paul Revere, the Boston silversmith and express rider, carried them to Philadelphia, and on 17 September the Congress voted to endorse them. For a body that had been in session less than two weeks, endorsing a document that called the king's laws void and told men to drill was a long step.

But the Congress contained its own counterweight, and his name was Joseph Galloway. A conservative Pennsylvania lawyer, Galloway thought the whole quarrel could be settled inside the empire rather than against it, and on 28 September he proposed a plan to do exactly that. The Galloway Plan of Union would have created a Grand Council of the colonies, a kind of American parliament whose members the colonial assemblies would choose, working alongside a president-general appointed by the crown; the American body and the British Parliament would share authority over American affairs, each able to veto the other. It was a genuine constitutional compromise, an attempt to give the colonies a real voice in the empire without leaving it.

And the Congress did not laugh Galloway's plan out of the room. It came within a single colony's vote of adopting it. A motion to set the plan aside carried by a narrow margin, six colonies to five (the count rests on Galloway's own later account, so treat it softly), and only weeks afterward, on 22 October, was the plan rejected outright and struck from the official journal entirely. In the autumn of 1774, half of the Continental Congress wanted a permanent constitutional union with Britain. Independence was not on the table. The argument was over how to stay.

What the Congress did agree on was milder than independence and, in the long run, more consequential than anyone in the hall guessed. On 14 October it issued a Declaration and Resolves, a statement of rights: the colonists were entitled to life, liberty, and property, to the rights of Englishmen, and to be taxed only by their own assemblies. It granted that Parliament could regulate external trade "from the necessity of the case," but denied any right to tax or legislate for the colonies internally. This was the language of aggrieved Britons asking for their due, not of a new nation.

Then, on 20 October, the Congress created the Continental Association, the quiet revolution of the session. On its face the Association was just a boycott with a schedule: no British or Irish goods imported after 1 December 1774, no consuming them after 1 March 1775, and, if the Intolerable Acts were not repealed, no exports to Britain, Ireland, or the West Indies after 10 September 1775 (the export ban delayed a year so planters could sell one more crop). One clause even pledged the signers to import no more enslaved people after December and to quit the slave trade altogether, a boycott measure rather than an act of conscience, but a clause worth noticing. The teeth were in Article 11. Every county, city, and town was to elect a committee to watch the trade, publish the names of violators in the newspapers as "enemies of American liberty," and enforce the boycott. A name printed in the gazette was a sentence: neighbors stopped buying from the man and stopped selling to him until he recanted or was ruined.

Thousands of these local committees sprang up across the colonies, and that is the thing that mattered. Ordinary colonists, elected by their neighbors, began administering a continental policy that no royal official had authorized and no royal court could stop. They inspected ledgers, shamed merchants, and ran the boycott town by town. Nobody called it a government. It functioned as one. The Congress dissolved on 26 October, agreeing to reconvene the following May if their grievances were not redressed, and went home. Behind it, in every colony, an embryonic shadow government had quietly come to life.

In Massachusetts that shadow government did not stay embryonic for long. The colony's royal governor was now General Thomas Gage, the commander of the British army in North America, installed under the Intolerable Acts to bring the province to heel. Outside Boston, he was failing before the winter was over.

The warning came early. On 1 September 1774, Gage quietly sent about 250 regulars to remove the provincial gunpowder from a magazine at Charlestown. The operation was bloodless and finished by noon, but rumor inflated it into a massacre, and within a day thousands of militiamen were converging on Cambridge before the truth caught up and they stood down. This was the Powder Alarm, and it taught both sides the same lesson from opposite directions. The colonists learned they could put thousands of armed men in the field on a day's rumor. Gage learned he could trust nothing past the Boston town line.

When Gage canceled the colonial legislature's session, the elected representatives simply met anyway, first at Salem and then Concord, and reorganized themselves as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress with John Hancock, the wealthy Boston merchant, as president. It was an illegal body by royal lights, and the towns obeyed it as if it were the lawful government, because to them it was. It created a Committee of Safety with the power to call out the militia, and a Committee of Supplies that began stockpiling arms, powder, and food, much of it at Concord. To keep the militia ready for the next alarm, the Provincial Congress directed the regiments to hold roughly a quarter to a third of their men prepared to muster at a minute's warning. These were the minute companies, the minutemen.

By the start of 1775, the situation was plain even if nobody said it aloud. Royal government functioned inside Boston, under the protection of Gage's regiments, and essentially nowhere else in the province. Gage spent the cold months probing for the colonists' stockpiled arms, and a powder-and-cannon expedition toward Salem in February ended in a tense standoff with no blood shed. The countryside had slipped out of his hands. What remained was the question of when, not whether, the friction would finally produce a shot.

It produced one on 19 April 1775, at Lexington and Concord. British regulars and Massachusetts militia killed one another, the king's army fell back into Boston, and within hours the New England militia had it under siege. That is the whole of the event for this chapter. The fighting belongs to another telling. What matters here is what the news did, and the news moved faster and changed more than the muskets.

The Massachusetts Committee of Safety sent fast courier riders galloping south within hours, carrying a copied letter, the "Lexington Alarm," that was forwarded from town to town down the seaboard. It reached New York in days, Philadelphia in under a week, and the whole coast from Maine to Georgia in roughly twenty days. The news even reached London first in the patriots' own version: a fast Salem schooner carried the Massachusetts account across the Atlantic ahead of Gage's official dispatch, so that when word arrived in London on 28 May, the first story the British government heard about Lexington was the American one.

The effect of that news was to collapse the middle ground. Militias mobilized in every colony, royal governors began losing their grip, and several would eventually flee to warships in their harbors. The question colonists argued over changed from "how do we win back our rights?" to "how do we fight a war we never voted for?" And yet, crucially, most of them still framed the fighting exactly as they always had: as loyal subjects defending themselves against a ministry's army, not as a nation fighting for independence. They were shooting at the king's soldiers and still petitioning the king. That contradiction was about to get sharper.

It got sharper on 17 June 1775, at Bunker Hill. The British took the hill overlooking Boston, but at a cost of roughly a thousand casualties, an appalling share of them officers. General Henry Clinton, surveying the price, called it "a dear bought victory." Dr. Joseph Warren, the author of the Suffolk Resolves, was killed in the redoubt. Again the event is a single beat; the politics are the point. In Britain the casualty lists did not soften opinion. They hardened it. The cost of one New England hilltop convinced the king and his ministers that they were no longer dealing with wayward subjects to be coaxed back but with enemies to be beaten. Gage's recall went out within days of his report arriving, and the appetite for compromise died in London at the precise moment a peace offering from the colonies was crossing the ocean toward it.

That peace offering came from the Second Continental Congress, which had convened on 10 May 1775 in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, three weeks after Lexington. The room had some new faces. Benjamin Franklin was back from a long stint in London. John Hancock arrived from Massachusetts and became president on 24 May when Randolph was recalled to Virginia. From late June, a tall, quiet Virginian named Thomas Jefferson took his seat. The Congress adopted the New England army besieging Boston as a Continental Army and gave its command to George Washington, whose war begins elsewhere.

The Second Congress is best understood by a single, almost unbelievable fact: in the first week of July 1775, it adopted two documents that point in opposite directions, and it meant both of them.

The first was the Olive Branch Petition, adopted on 5 July and drafted chiefly by John Dickinson, the Pennsylvania lawyer who led the moderates. It is worth being clear about Dickinson, because the easy story makes men like him into cowards, and he was nothing of the kind. He professed the colonies' deep attachment to George III, laid the blame for the conflict squarely on the king's ministers, and begged the king himself to open a path back to reconciliation. Many delegates thought the petition useless. They signed it anyway, to keep the moderates and the wavering middle colonies inside the cause. The very next day, on 6 July, the same Congress adopted the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, a document justifying the war it was now fighting. Americans, it said, would die free rather than live enslaved. And in nearly the same breath it explicitly disavowed independence, denying any "ambitious design of separating from Great-Britain, and establishing independent states." The irony runs deep, because the Declaration of Causes was drafted by Jefferson and then heavily revised by Dickinson, so the same moderate hand shaped both the plea for peace and the justification for war. Picture Dickinson at his desk that week, sharpening the language of a war declaration in one stack of papers and the language of unbending loyalty in the other, believing every word of both. Loyal subjects, fighting the king's army, swearing they did not want to leave the empire: that was the Congress in July 1775, holding both directions at once.

The petition's fate settled the matter, though it would take months for everyone to admit it. A petition was the formal legal channel a subject still had to his king, the constitutional thread that said we are inside your protection and you owe us a hearing, which is exactly why what happened next stung. Richard Penn, a grandson of Pennsylvania's founder, and Arthur Lee carried the Olive Branch Petition to London and presented it to the colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, on 1 September 1775. They were told that because the king had not received it on his throne, no answer would be given. He would not read it at all. And there was a worse fact in the timing: the king had already proclaimed the colonies in open rebellion nine days before the petition was even delivered. The olive branch had been answered before it arrived.

Every move the colonists made toward independence was matched, and often preceded, by a move from London that made reconciliation harder. It was not the radicals who kept removing the middle ground. It was the king's own government, acting on the advice of his ministers and with the votes of his Parliament, which is to say the whole machinery of British rule turning against the colonies at once.

On 23 August 1775, George III issued a Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition, declaring the American colonies in "open and avowed rebellion" and commanding loyal subjects and officers to put it down and to report anyone carrying on "traitorous correspondence" with the rebels. It had been drafted before the Olive Branch Petition even reached the government. In effect, the proclamation was the king's answer to a petition he refused to read.

Then, on 26 October 1775, George III opened Parliament with a speech that said the quiet part out loud. The rebellion, he declared, was "manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent Empire," the work of a "desperate conspiracy" whose professions of loyalty were insincere, "meant only to amuse." He announced enlarged forces and "friendly offers of foreign assistance," the opening that would soon bring German troops into the fight against British subjects: soldiers rented from German princes, the largest contingent supplied by the ruler of Hesse-Cassel, which is why the colonists would call them all Hessians. The irony is exact. In October 1775 the king was accusing the Americans of fighting for independence while they were still officially denying it in writing. He called it before they did, and by treating them as a nation already, he helped make them one.

The last bolt slid home on 22 December 1775, when the Prohibitory Act received royal assent. Parliament outlawed all trade with the thirteen colonies, blockaded their ports, and declared American ships and cargoes lawful prize "as if open enemies," with captured crews liable to be forced into service. Britain had formally placed the colonies outside its protection. When the text reached America early in 1776, John Adams read it for exactly what it was. The act, he wrote, "throws thirteen colonies out of the royal protection, levels all distinctions, and makes us independent in Spight of all our supplications and Entreaties." He even joked that Parliament had done the colonists' work for them, passing what amounted to an act of independence so that the formal break could come "from the British Parliament rather than the American Congress." Add the sight of American towns in flames, the Royal Navy having burned Falmouth in Maine in October and Norfolk in Virginia on New Year's Day 1776, and the word "protection" began to sound like a bad joke. London kept proving the radicals' case for them.

Into that opening walked the unlikeliest persuader in the story. On 30 November 1774, Thomas Paine came ashore at Philadelphia carrying almost nothing but an introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in London. He was thirty-seven and, by every measure his world used, a failure: born in Thetford, England, the son of a staymaker (a maker of the whalebone stays that stiffened women's corsets), he had been a sailor, a schoolteacher, a shopkeeper, and twice a dismissed excise officer (a tax collector), and he arrived bankrupt, his first wife dead and his second marriage dissolved. Within months he was editing a magazine, and within a year he would write the pamphlet that changed the argument.

On 10 January 1776, in Philadelphia, the printer Robert Bell ran off a pamphlet (a short, cheap, unbound booklet, the era's mass-market op-ed) that carried no author's name, signed only "Written by an Englishman." Paine had wanted to call it "Plain Truth"; his friend Benjamin Rush suggested a better title. They called it Common Sense.

Every patriot pamphlet before it had attacked Parliament's policies while professing loyalty to the king. Paine did something nobody in the colonial argument had quite done: he attacked monarchy itself. He argued that hereditary kingship was absurd on its face and unsupported by Scripture, walking his readers through the Old Testament in the plain cadence of a dissenting sermon, because the Bible was the one book his entire audience had read. He demystified the English crown's origins, describing William the Conqueror as "a French bastard landing with an armed banditti." He stripped George III of his dignity, calling him not the father of his people but "the Royal Brute of Britain." And he made separation feel less like treason than like common sense, the title doing its work. The relationship between an island and a continent was simply backward: "Small islands not capable of protecting themselves," he wrote, "are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island."

The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. — Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

He told his readers their fight belonged to the whole world, not just to them. He told them reconciliation was finished, in the voice of nature itself: "The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ''TIS TIME TO PART.'" And in place of a king he offered a republic, where "a government of our own is our natural right" and, in a phrase that turned the whole order upside down, "in America THE LAW IS KING." In an appendix added in February he handed the colonists a sense of their own scale no one had given them before: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

The style was the weapon. Paine wrote in short, declarative, un-Latined sentences, citing Scripture and ship-rigging instead of John Locke and legal precedent. Contemporaries felt the difference at once. George Washington wrote that the "sound Doctrine, and unanswerable reasoning" of Common Sense would "not leave numbers at a loss to decide upon the Propriety of a Separation," and a few months later reported that it was "working a powerful change" in the minds of many men in Virginia.

How many copies it sold is a question worth getting right, because the legend has run wild. The old textbook figure of half a million is inflated and abandoned; Paine himself claimed over a hundred thousand in three months, and modern scholars suspect far fewer, perhaps seventy-five thousand or less in the first year. But the honest version needs no inflated number. Common Sense went through some twenty-five printings in a single year, in more than a dozen towns, and was read aloud in taverns and army camps when an ordinary pamphlet sold one or two thousand copies in its whole life. By any measure of its own day, it was the bestselling thing that had ever been printed in America. Paine took no profit from it; he gave his author's share to the cause.

It did not convert everyone, and the most telling holdout was a man who already wanted independence. John Adams admired the assault on monarchy but recoiled from Paine's plan for governing the new republic, a single all-powerful assembly with nothing to check it, and wrote his own pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, partly to answer it. That is the measure of how radical Common Sense was: it was too radical even for the radicals.

After Common Sense, the persuading was finished mostly by bad news. The text of the Prohibitory Act arrived in February and March. Then came confirmation that the crown had hired thousands of German mercenaries, news firming up through the spring. For many colonists who had clung to reconciliation, hired foreign soldiers turned loose on British subjects was the last straw, and the colonies began, one after another, to instruct their delegates.

The pressure ran upward as much as down. In town meetings, county committees, and the new provincial congresses, ordinary people were passing their own resolutions and sending them to the men they had elected, telling their delegations in Philadelphia which way to vote. North Carolina went first. On 12 April 1776, its provincial congress at Halifax (the colony's own extralegal assembly, meeting because royal government had collapsed), eighty-three delegates voting unanimously, empowered its delegates in Philadelphia to "concur with the delegates of the other Colonies in declaring Independency." Note the careful word: concur, not propose. North Carolina would join such a vote, but it would not lead. Virginia went further. On 15 May the Virginia Convention at Williamsburg instructed its delegation to propose independence outright, and set about writing its own constitution. That instruction is why the motion, when it came, came from a Virginian.

Congress itself took a half-step in the same direction the same week. On 10 May it resolved that any colony whose government was inadequate should form a new one "sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs," which sounded innocent enough. The bite was in a preamble (the introductory "whereas" statement that gives the reasons for what follows) that John Adams wrote and the Congress passed on 15 May, while Dickinson happened to be absent. Because the king had rejected reconciliation and was hiring foreign troops, it declared, "the exercise of every kind of authority under the said crown should be totally suppressed." Royal authority, suppressed by the reasoning bolted onto a modest resolution. Adams knew what he had done. "This Day," he wrote to James Warren, "the Congress has passed the most important Resolution, that ever was taken in America." Through May and June the instructions kept coming, pushing delegation after delegation toward independence, while the Pennsylvania and Maryland delegations remained barred from voting for it into late June.

Then, on 7 June 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia rose in Congress and moved the resolution his colony had told him to make, and John Adams seconded it. "Resolved," it ran, "That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." The unthinkable was now a motion on the floor. But the middle colonies still could not vote for it, so on 10 June the Congress postponed the decision three weeks, to the first of July, to let those delegations get fresh instructions from home. And it did one thing more, so that no time would be lost if the vote carried: it appointed a committee to draft a declaration in the meantime.

The committee, appointed on 11 June, had five members: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert R. Livingston of New York. They gave the actual writing to Jefferson, thirty-three years old and known for a graceful pen. (Adams, telling the story decades later, remembered urging Jefferson to take the job with the line "You can write ten times better than I can," though Jefferson disputed the details of that memory.)

Jefferson drafted the document in the rented second-floor parlor of a young bricklayer's new house at Seventh and Market Streets, writing on a portable lap desk of his own design. For most of June he sat alone in that hired room, building the case sentence by sentence while a war went on around him. Franklin and Adams made light edits; the committee reported the draft on 28 June. What Jefferson produced has three parts. It opens with a theory of government, the famous creed that "all men are created equal," endowed by their Creator with "certain unalienable Rights," among them "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," to secure which governments are instituted, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," and which the people may alter or abolish when they turn destructive. Then comes the indictment: twenty-seven grievances, every one aimed at the king. "He has refused... He has dissolved... He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns." And then the conclusion, folding in Lee's resolution almost word for word: these colonies "are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States," their signers pledging "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

The relentless focus on the king can mislead. The historical George III was a constitutional monarch backing the policies of his ministers and his Parliament, not a lone tyrant inventing a crisis, and historians largely clear him of personally engineering it (though after Lexington he was genuinely the hardliner). The Declaration's parade of royal villainy was a deliberate legal strategy, not a biography. By 1776 the colonists denied that Parliament had ever held authority over them at all, so there was no point indicting it; the king was the last constitutional thread that still tied them to Britain, and the document's whole job was to cut it.

When Congress took up the draft from 2 to 4 July, it cut roughly a quarter of Jefferson's words, tightening as it went. The longest single deletion was Jefferson's furious 168-word attack on the African slave trade, which blamed the king for waging "cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him," carrying them "into slavery in another hemisphere," an "execrable commerce." Jefferson himself recorded why it died: it was struck "in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it," and because, he added, "our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."

The contradiction has to be named, and named flatly. The man who wrote that all men are created equal enslaved more than six hundred people across his lifetime. The Congress that proclaimed unalienable rights to liberty cut the one passage condemning the slave trade in order to keep the slave-trading colonies, north and south, inside the new nation. And the cut passage was itself a piece of evasion, blaming the king for an institution the colonists profited from and chose to keep. The nation declared itself free in a document edited to protect slavery. That reckoning has its own chapter later. Here it is enough to say it plainly and not look away.

The votes themselves are a story the holiday gets wrong. On 1 July the Congress first took up the question in a committee of the whole, the looser, relaxed-rules format it used for debating before any count was put on the record. In that preliminary tally, nine colonies stood for independence. Pennsylvania and South Carolina were against; Delaware's two present delegates split one and one; and New York abstained, its delegates bound by year-old instructions that forbade a yes. An abstention is not a no: New York's men declined to vote either way, which meant no colony was yet recorded against independence in the vote that would matter. Overnight, Caesar Rodney of Delaware, a delegate who had been away on business, rode some seventy or eighty miles through a thunderstorm to reach Philadelphia in time, arriving on 2 July still in his boots and spurs, and broke his colony's tie for independence. South Carolina swung over for the sake of a unanimous front. And in Pennsylvania, Dickinson and Robert Morris, who could not bring themselves to vote yes, deliberately stayed away so as not to be counted, letting their delegation carry three to two in favor. (Note the two kinds of silence: New York was present and abstaining, on the record; Dickinson simply absented himself.) So on 2 July 1776 the Continental Congress voted for independence, twelve colonies to none, with New York abstaining. Legally, that was the moment. That was Independence Day.

John Adams thought so. Writing to his wife Abigail on 3 July, he predicted that "the Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America," and that "It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more." He was right about everything except the date. The country would celebrate two days off, on 4 July, the day Congress finished editing and adopted the text of the Declaration (adopted meaning voted to approve the wording, which is a separate act from signing it) and ordered it printed. Adams was clear-eyed about the cost of what he was celebrating, too: "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."

The rest happened quickly. On the night of 4 July, the Philadelphia printer John Dunlap ran off roughly two hundred broadside copies (a broadside being a large single sheet printed on one side, made to be posted and read in public), the first printing of the Declaration, and these went by express to the states and the army. New York's convention finally assented on 9 July, and because New York had only abstained rather than voted no, that late yes left no colony on record against, letting Congress have the document engrossed (copied in formal script onto parchment as the official record) on 19 July as "the unanimous declaration of the thirteen united states of America." That parchment was signed mostly on 2 August, not on the Fourth, with a few members signing later still, one as late as November, fifty-six signers in all. So the famous date marks the approval of the words, not the day the names went on. (The familiar Franklin line about how the signers "must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately" is a charming legend that was not attached to him until decades later, but the gallows mood behind it was real: treason carried death, and every man who signed knew it.)

The Declaration was read aloud first on 8 July, by Colonel John Nixon, a Philadelphia militia officer, in the State House yard in Philadelphia, to ringing bells and cheers. The next day it was read to Washington's army in New York, and that evening the city gave the Revolution one of its most vivid images. Soldiers and townspeople streamed down to Bowling Green, where a gilded lead statue of George III on horseback had stood since 1770, threw ropes over the king and his mount, and hauled the whole thing crashing off its pedestal. They knocked the head loose, broke the figure apart, and carted the pieces away. Most of the lead was hauled to Litchfield, Connecticut, and melted into musket balls, the recorded tally running to better than forty-two thousand cartridges. The king of England, cast into ammunition to be fired at the king's own army.

And so the thing that had been unthinkable in a Philadelphia guildhall in the autumn of 1774 was, by the high summer of 1776, official. Thirteen colonies now called themselves states, at war with their king, with a creed on parchment they would spend centuries arguing about. But declaring independence settled almost nothing on the ground. A vote in Philadelphia did not make a single farmer in the Carolina backcountry or a single merchant on the Hudson choose a side. The Declaration announced a nation; it did not produce one. What it produced, in every town and along every road, was the harder and more intimate question of who you were now: a question to be answered not by Congress but by neighbors, looking hard at one another across fences and pews and deciding, one by one, whose side they were on.