Friends of Liberty

In July 1782, Benjamin Franklin received word in Paris that Lord Shelburne had become Prime Minister of Great Britain. Franklin had known Shelburne for more than two decades — through London friendship, through eight years of war, through letters maintained across the full length of the conflict. He trusted him more than almost any other British politician. The endgame had arrived. What followed was one of the most consequential negotiations in the history of both nations — a preliminary peace treaty that recognized American independence completely, doubled the size of the new nation, and secured terms more generous than anyone had expected. Shelburne’s critics called it weakness. History has called it wisdom. He was forced from office before the final treaty was signed and never held significant power again. This is the final episode of our series.

In 1780, a former Continental Army colonel arrived in Benjamin West’s London studio with a mission he had been forming for years: paint the Revolution’s faces before the people who made it were gone. The British arrested him almost immediately — retaliation for the execution of Major John André — and held him for seven months before Edmund Burke secured his release. John Trumbull spent the next six decades doing exactly what he had come to London to begin. He sat with Jefferson in Paris. He sat with Adams in Massachusetts. He painted forty-seven of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration from life. Four of his paintings hang today in the rotunda of the United States Capitol. Without him, we would not know what the Revolution looked like.

Two men signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. One was John Hancock — his signature famously large, famously bold, the one everyone knows. The other was Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress, whose name appears beside Hancock’s with equal legal authority and almost no historical recognition. Thomson served as Secretary for fifteen continuous years — longer than almost any general, any diplomat, any delegate — keeping the official records, maintaining institutional memory, and managing the administrative machinery that kept the Revolutionary government functioning through war, financial collapse, and political upheaval. He also helped design the Great Seal of the United States. When it was over, he burned his private memoirs. He could not tell the truth, he said, without giving great offense.

On June 17th, 1775, Joseph Warren died at Bunker Hill — the most prominent American to fall in the war’s early months, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, the man who had sent Paul Revere on his midnight ride. The Provincial Congress needed a new president immediately. The revolution was two months old, the Continental Army was still forming, and the provisional government of Massachusetts had no legal standing and no model to follow. The man they chose was James Warren of Plymouth — a farmer, a merchant, a careful administrator who had spent years building the organizational machinery of colonial resistance. He kept it running when it mattered most. No monument anywhere bears his name. The revolution he helped organize moved on without him, as revolutions do.

In 1763, an English woman published the first volume of a radical history of England arguing that liberty and tyranny had been at war across the centuries — and that the people had both the right and the duty to resist when kings overstepped. Thomas Jefferson preferred her history to any other. John Adams corresponded with her for decades. Mary Wollstonecraft acknowledged her as a direct intellectual influence on the founding document of modern feminism. Catharine Macaulay championed American rights from London for fifteen years, maintained active correspondence with the Revolution’s leading figures on both sides of the Atlantic, and in 1784 sailed to America to see what her arguments had helped build. George Washington welcomed her to Mount Vernon for ten days. History forgot she existed.

On March 22nd, 1775, Edmund Burke rose in the House of Commons and delivered one of the most remarkable speeches in the history of democratic governance — three hours of precisely reasoned argument that the British government’s American policies were unjust, unconstitutional, and destined for catastrophe. Parliament listened politely and voted him down. Within weeks, shots rang out at Lexington and Concord. Within years, every consequence Burke had described in careful detail had come to pass — the hardening of colonial resistance, the intervention of France, the unraveling of empire. His speeches were printed as pamphlets and circulated widely in America, where colonial leaders read them and knew that powerful voices in Parliament understood their cause. He was right about everything. It never mattered at all.

On May 1st, 1777, an eighteen-year-old free Black man from Northampton, Massachusetts, enlisted in the Continental Army for the duration of the war. He was not seeking freedom through military service — he was already free. He served seventy-four months in total, through Saratoga, Valley Forge, and Yorktown, longer than the vast majority of soldiers whose names appear in the history books. He served as orderly to the Polish engineer Tadeusz Kościuszko, and the two men became genuine friends across every boundary the era placed between them. After the war he returned to Stockbridge, farmed carefully, and became the largest Black landowner in town. He died in 1848 at the age of eighty-nine — one of the last living men who remembered what the Revolution had actually cost.

Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on October 19th, 1781. Ten months later, on August 19th, 1782, seventy-seven Kentucky frontiersmen were killed or captured in fifteen minutes on the bank of the Licking River. The British garrison at Detroit was still supplying raids on Kentucky settlements. The peace negotiations were underway in Paris. Nobody on the frontier had been told the war was over — and nobody with a rifle and a grudge had any particular reason to act as though it were. Daniel Boone was present at Blue Licks. He warned the commanders that the tracks looked too obvious. He asked them to wait for reinforcements. They voted to advance. Among the dead Boone found afterward was his son Israel.

William Pitt won North America for Britain. He directed the Seven Years’ War from a desk in London, drove the French from Canada and the Ohio Valley, and built the largest empire the world had seen. The Americans named Pittsburgh in his honor. Then Parliament began taxing the colonies, and Pitt spent the next decade warning his colleagues — in speech after speech, with mounting urgency and increasing despair — that coercion would fail and the consequences would be catastrophic. France would enter the war. The empire would fracture. Every warning proved accurate. Every warning was ignored. On April 7th, 1778, he entered the House of Lords for the last time, visibly dying, still trying to prevent the inevitable. He collapsed mid-sentence and never recovered.

On the eve of the 250th anniversary of American independence, this episode belongs to none of the famous names. It belongs to a fifteen-year-old boy from Connecticut who read about the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776 and decided he was going to war. Joseph Plumb Martin served seven years in the Continental Army — Valley Forge, Yorktown, everything in between. He came home with almost nothing. In 1818 his pension application required a statement of assets to prove financial need; his list was a catalog of poverty. In 1830 he published the only full memoir of the Revolution written from the perspective of a common soldier. The generals made the decisions. Men like Martin did the fighting. Without them, none of the rest of it was possible.