The largest donor of the 2024 presidential campaign, by far, is Timothy Mellon, the reclusive billionaire and heir to the Mellon banking fortune. Mellon was already the largest donor after donating $25 million each to the Super PACs supporting the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump (MAGA Inc.) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (American Values 2024). Then, Mellon donated another $50 million to MAGA Inc. on May 31, the day after Trump was convicted of committing 34 felonies. 

Mellon’s $75 million contribution to MAGA Inc. represents almost half of the group’s total fundraising. Mellon has also donated millions more to other conservative causes this cycle. 

Despite his political spending, little is known about Mellon. The most detailed account of Mellon’s views comes from his self-published 2015 autobiography. “This book was not ghost-written: every single word is my own,” Mellon said in a press release announcing its publication. People who wanted to purchase the book were required to make a $9 donation to Hillsdale College, a private Christian institution that aggressively promotes right-wing ideology or another conservative group. 

According to a 2020 article published in the Washington Post, Mellon writes that Black people have become “even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations” after social safety net programs were expanded in the 1960s and 1970s. Mellon writes that they are now “slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam.” 

Mellon also derided programs intended to lift people out of poverty as “Slavery Redux.” Mellon claimed that in exchange for “delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cell phones, WIC payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on.” According to Mellon, who inherited his fortune, “[t]he largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass.”

Mellon also blasted universities for offering college students the opportunity to learn about the history of Black people, women, and the LGBTQ community. “Black Studies, Women’s Studies, LGBT Studies, they have all cluttered Higher Education with a mishmash of meaningless tripe designed to brainwash gullible young adults into going along with the Dependency Syndrome,” Mellon wrote.

In response to scrutiny of the book, Mellon stood firm. “I said everything I wanted to say,” Mellon told Bloomberg. “I don’t have any regrets.”

But now, Mellon is trying to rewrite history. The website Mellon used to sell the book, timsstory.com, has been taken offline. The book doesn’t appear to be available to purchase anywhere. Instead, later this month, Mellon is publishing a new autobiography with the same title. This time, the cover includes a gushing blurb from Kennedy. 

Mellon’s new book is being published by Skyhorse Publishing, which is run by Tony Lyons. He also serves as the co-chair of American Values 2024, Kennedy’s Super PAC. Skyhorse Publishing has published Kennedy’s books about vaccine conspiracy theories and the works of other conspiracy theorists, including Alex Jones. According to the promotional material, Mellon’s new book reveals “a life not merely lived on inherited wealth but on conviction, leadership, and the audacity to defy convention.”

Mellon’s connection to Project 2025

In addition to his donations to Super PACs supporting the campaigns of Trump and Kennedy, Mellon donated $4 million to Sentinel Action Fund, a Super PAC created by Heritage Action, a subsidiary of the Heritage Foundation. (Contributions directly to Heritage Action or the Heritage Foundation are not disclosed.)

The Heritage Foundation is the leading organization behind Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump administration. 

Project 2025 is a 920-page document that lays out a radically different future for the United States. The document details a “Christian nationalist vision of the United States, one in which married heterosexuality is the only valid form of sexual expression and identity; all pregnancies would be carried to term, even if that requires coercion or death; and transgender and gender-nonconforming people do not exist.”

In addition to the detailed policy guide, the Heritage Foundation is vetting thousands of “conservative warriors” who can come to Washington, D.C., to implement the plan. 

Why is Mellon supporting Kennedy?

Mellon’s $25 million donation to Kennedy’s Super PAC is keeping his cash-strapped campaign afloat. But why is Mellon supporting Kennedy? 

In 2023, before Kennedy dropped out of the Democratic primary, Mellon expressed his support for Kennedy in a statement released by the super PAC. “The fact that Kennedy gets so much bipartisan support tells me two things: that he’s the one candidate who can unite the country and root out corruption and that he’s the one Democrat who can win in the general election.” Mellon “has also been a ‘supporter’” of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine non-profit Children’s Health Defense, Mark Gorton, co-founder of the American Values super PAC, told NOTUS. 

Mellon, however, also has a history of supporting candidates that he thinks will damage the Democratic Party. 

In 2018, for example, Mellon donated $2,700 to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). In an interview with Bloomberg, Mellon explained the donation was because “he thought that, if elected, her outspokenness would cause headaches for Democrats.” Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign tried to refund the donation, but Mellon said he would “neither cash nor deposit the check but rather, frame it.” The Wall Street Journal reported that Mellon also donated $5,800 to Senator Joe Manchin (I-WV) in 2021 and 2022 and $2,900 to Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) in 2022, two politicians who have a history of obstructing Democratic policy priorities.

Mellon’s other massive donation

In 2021, Mellon donated $53 million to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) fundraising campaign to build a border wall. According to the Texas Tribune, Mellon’s donation “contributed nearly 98% of the fund’s total donations.” 

In June 2021, Abbott announced a plan to build a state-funded wall on the Mexico border. Abbott “expected people to both donate their own money and volunteer their land for the barrier.” The plan is part of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which seeks to subvert federal immigration policy. In addition to the barriers, some of which are topped with razor wire, Texas has authorized “Texas National Guard soldiers and state troopers to arrest” undocumented migrants. This has created safety concerns and “essentially criminalizes seeking asylum,” which migrants have the right to pursue under federal law. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that “people familiar with [Mellon’s] thinking” said that “[o]ne of the main issues driving Mellon’s giving is immigration.” In 2010, Mellon gave $1.5 million “to help the state of Arizona defend a controversial law that required police to determine the immigration status of people suspected of living in the U.S. illegally, which critics said could lead to racial profiling.” 

On today’s Front Page from The Free Press: why Gavin Newsom won’t save the Dems; a neurologist diagnoses Biden; the overwrought cooking at the heart of ‘The Bear’; and much more. 

But first, here’s Nellie Bowles, introducing today’s lead stories from Joe Nocera and Timur Kuran. 

When the legacy media encounters an inconvenient fact—Biden’s age, say, or Hunter’s laptop, or the lab leak, or the complexity of puberty blockers, or the riots of the summer of 2020—it likes to take some time to process the problem. 

Reporters need to discuss the issue over dinner, wring their hands about what to do, get yelled at for possible thought crimes by a righteously angry intern, mull some more, get yelled at again by another intern. To have more drinks, more meetings.

There’s no rush to tell the American public about anything inconvenient. It’s important to be careful. To keep that information private for a year, maybe two years. Maybe three. 

But at a certain point—once a critical mass of outside, independent voices who don’t follow the same set of rules and who don’t covet what the reporters covet—say the inconvenient thing, finally and with a collective sigh, the mainstream press can tightly hold hands, take a step together, and recite in unison: Biden is in mental decline. 

If the spectacle of watching every legacy publication suddenly stand together and say just that gave you vertigo, it’s understandable. Did they all just happen to notice our aging president at once? Of course not.

Every White House reporter, every fancy magazine profiler, they knew exactly what was going on with Joe Biden. They just didn’t think you, the reader, were ready to know. Also, did we mention the risk of getting yelled at by an intern? That’s hard. 

The Biden era has to be one of the least covered White Houses in modern history. Read the mainstream press, and you’d think Trump had been president these last four years. 

The strangest part is how obvious it all is. Our president is 81. Is it really that hard to believe that someone who is 81 would suffer cognitive decline and show it? This is what happens to a lot of people in their 80s. It’s mortality. But acknowledging and reporting on mortality—when it doesn’t suit your political ends—is apparently too much to ask. 

Today we bring two important pieces about this phenomenon, one by Joe Nocera and one by Timur Kuran. They help explain how it is that the mainstream media could pretend Biden’s aging mind was either a nonfactor or a crazy thing to worry about. Until suddenly—boom—it was a simple fact. A truth universally acknowledged. 

As an aside, this is in part why The Free Press is necessary. If there’s a conspiracy of silence around a topic, that’s what we want to puncture. We’re not driven by which side gains or loses from our publishing the truth. We side with the truth, convenient or inconvenient, popular or unpopular. And we’re grateful to you for supporting that mission. —NB 

Read Joe Nocera on how the mainstream media consistently gave us one narrative, when the opposite was true. 

Read Timur Kuran to find out why smart people follow the herd. 

And become a paid subscriber to The Free Press today: 

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More post-debate polls have now landed, and—contrary to the claims of the Biden campaign—they show that the president has lost ground. The day before the debate, Trump had a 1.6 point lead over Joe Biden in the Real Clear Politics polling average. By Tuesday afternoon, that gap had widened to 2.4 points. (Real Clear Politics)

Are things any better in the battleground states? Not according to post-debate internal Democratic polling leaked to Puck. It shows a bloodbath in the states that matter, with the president dropping by about 2 points in “core” battlegrounds. Biden is losing by 10 points in Georgia and Arizona, and is leading by only a tiny margin in places like Virginia, Maine, and New Mexico, once seen as safely Democratic. The survey also shows the president polling behind Kamala Harris. (Puck) 

Hunter Biden has started showing up to meetings with his father and senior aides. That’s the big change we know of in Biden’s workplace since the debate, bringing in someone who would likely fail a background check for this kind of role were he not the president’s son. No wonder, as Axios reports, everyone inside the White House is “freaking the fuck out.” (NBC)

The Anti-Defamation League is pressing state attorneys general to investigate the tax-exempt status of two anti-Israel groups linked to protests in support of Hamas since October 7. These organizations claim to be in the business of “current affairs education.” The ADL’s ten-page letter to New York Attorney General Letitia James lays out a grim picture of antisemitic speech, ties to terrorist organizations, and suspicious accounting. (Washington Examiner) 

Suspected Chinese spy bases in Cuba are getting much more extensive, according to satellite images. The surveillance technology there could be used to spy on U.S. citizens. And yet some still wonder if we are in a new Cold War. (Wall Street Journal)

French parties have stepped up their cooperation to limit the number of seats Marine Le Pen’s National Rally wins in the second round of parliamentary elections on Sunday. More than 200 candidates have announced they are stepping aside to avoid a split in the anti-RN vote. (Reuters) 

Ahead of Britain’s election on Thursday, Nigel Farage’s populist Reform party is outperforming the governing Conservatives among young voters. It’s part of a broader trend, also visible in France, of under-30s abandoning the center and breaking left and right. An anonymous British Zoomer explains why. (Matt Goodwin)

Why are there so few conservative professors? And can anything be done about it? Steve Teles dives deeply to unravel the tangle of factors that made higher ed so hostile to conservatives. (Chronicle of Higher Education) 

Everyone loves a good rant, and today’s screed comes from Freddie deBoer, who has fallen out of love with today’s NBA. “I just hate watching the modern NBA, where teams have made the correct tactical decision to just launch and launch and launch three-pointers and in so doing made the project frequently unwatchable.” (Freddie deBoer) 

 Those crazy kids known as Gen Z have found an unlikely anthem in Billy Joel’s “Vienna.” They say it captures their ennui. Not so ambitious for juveniles! (The Guardian) 

It’s only two months old, but you guys are already getting hooked on the Free Press Book Club, where each month one of our writers recommends a new book they love and pairs it with a classic work from the past. Last month, our host was veteran Free Presser Peter Savodnik, who picked two books about yuppies—and his essay, published on Saturday, generated a lively debate in the comments about whether this slice of American society really explains all our problems.

So, given how enthusiastic you’ve all been about the book club, we wanted to let you know that in July, it’s going to be hosted by one of our newest staff writers, River Page, who’s already made his pick. Rest assured, it’s epic—a deep dive into the dark heart of an American subculture that is too often overlooked. “I couldn’t put the book down,” River says. “People will love it.”

All will be revealed at the end of the month. But if you really can’t wait to find out what River’s recommendation is, you might be interested to know that we have 15 copies of it sitting in the Free Press office right now. And we want to send them to subscribers who love a good story as much as we do. We’re looking for people who still make time to sit down and read a book cover to cover—and then share their thoughts on it. If that sounds like you, please write to us at books@thefp.com and tell us why you want early access to this month’s book club. You’ll hear from us if a book is coming your way. Don’t forget to include a postal address! 

We’ll also be hosting a real-life book club, in a part of America that The Free Press has never ventured to before. Stay tuned for more details. And in the meantime, happy reading! 

→ Biden has Parkinsonism, a neurologist tells The Free Press: On yesterday’s Front Page, Emily Yoffe called for the president to address questions about his fitness for office by undergoing a medical assessment conducted by a group of independent doctors and making the findings public. Biden’s team doesn’t appear to have any appetite for further medical scrutiny. Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said a cognitive test was “not warranted in this case.” 

But whether the White House likes it or not, medical experts are observing Biden closely and coming to their own conclusions. One of them, an emeritus professor of neurology at a top medical school, wrote to Emily to say he thinks the president has Parkinsonism. He did not want to be named, for fear of making himself a target. Here’s his full note: 

Dear Ms. Yoffe,

I read your piece in The Free Press on President Biden’s obvious neurologic illness.

Neurologists frequently make diagnoses by observation. In fact, most movement disorder diagnoses are made by direct observation or description by patients and families. Mr. Biden has Parkinsonism, an umbrella term that refers to neurologic conditions that cause slowed movements, rigidity, and tremors. By observation, he has a masked face, reduced blinking, stiff and slow gait, hunched posture, low volume voice, imbalance, freezing, mild cognitive disturbance, and difficulty turning. I have seen one video of tremor. All these diagnose Parkinsonism. He would need further investigation by experts to determine which specific disease within the broad term he has, such as idiopathic Parkinson’s disease or another specific disease.

While there is no cure for the many conditions comprising Parkinsonism, there are effective treatments for many of the symptoms. By failing to get a diagnosis, the president is denying himself such treatments, and so worsens his own situation.

The long history in the U.S. of so many “covering” for the president going back to Woodrow Wilson should now be broken.

→ The trouble with Gavin: The quick-witted, smooth-talking governor of California would be an obvious pick for Biden’s replacement—in some ways. Gavin Newsom has been Biden’s surrogate throughout the campaign, and he’s good at it, always appearing vigorous and alive, seeming to genuinely enjoy sparring with Republicans. He’s charming; he’s dashing; he’s funny. And he runs the most important state in the union, California, the world’s fifth-largest economy. You can complain about its politics all you want (I do, I have, I will in the following paragraphs), but the numbers don’t lie: the state is a world power unto itself. Plus, there is his age. At a spry 56, Newsom looks like a teenager next to our gerontocracy. Our Gavin Newsom is only 56 years old. Sure, that’s about ten years older than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama when they began their terms, but that’s not what matters. To our eyes now, adjusted for Trump and Biden, a 56-year-old president is basically a teen mom—shocking, wild, vibrant. 

You know what else is going in Gavin Newsom’s favor? His ex-wife is Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, which is funny, strange, and definitely falls in the pro column. Plus, he’s managed to wrangle the rest of California’s political class of corrupt communists without ever seeming too corrupt or too communist himself. He’s done some vaguely moderate things. I do believe Gavin Newsom believes in the free market, and that’s a big deal for an elected Californian in the year 2024. 

But Gavin Newsom would probably fail as a Biden replacement. Because he does, I’ve heard, have weaknesses. What are they? 

Well, there’s the homelessness situation. California’s cities are overrun with tent encampments. Root causes: lack of cheap housing thanks to “environmentalists” and neighborhood heritage types who block anything that’s not a single-family home, preferably with a chicken run out back. Also: empathetic-seeming but insane drug policies that all but pay people to do more fentanyl. 

There’s the high-speed rail. This one’s a boondoggle has so far cost $18 billion across 15 years, with no train in sight, though the project randomly announces a few feet of track has been laid in a desert every couple years. The top railroad operator in France was supposed to help build it before abandoning the state to build one in a region that was “less politically dysfunctional” (that region: North Africa). 

There’s the fact that California’s required ethnic studies courses are pretty antisemitic. There’s the fact that Newsom was eating indoors with all his friends at the French Laundry during the pandemic when everyone else was banned from indoor dining. I mean, don’t even get me started on Gavin’s lockdown policies. 

As for the top issue on many voters’ minds: he’s not exactly an Abolish ICE guy, but he’s not particularly strong on the border. You’ve heard of sanctuary cities, but Newsom wants the whole state to be “a sanctuary to all who seek it.” Which is a lovely notion but. . . the entire world would like to move to California for a little Santa Monica sanctuary. 

Personally, I like Gavin. (Stop throwing things at me, I am who I am!) But he’s too vulnerable on too many hot-button national topics right now, and I think the DNC knows that. —Nellie Bowles

→ Panic attack on a plate: I am a restaurant critic, and in 2018, I ate at what had just been named the best restaurant in the world. Osteria Francescana, in Modena, is run by the famous chef Massimo Bottura, and to dine there feels like eating his internal life. His memory of a childhood holiday in Normandy was lamb, kelp, and cider; his description of autumn in Northern Italy was mushrooms, chestnuts, and truffles. It was not unpleasant, but it was odd, with an intensity I just don’t want from food. 

I kept eating because the meal would cost the newspaper I was writing for a fortune, and it would be rude not to, but my digestive system was a victim and a pawn. The dish I liked best was the lasagna. It was a tiny moment of sanity—too tiny. A portion for ants.

But that is the tasting menu restaurant for you: an invitation to a chef’s inner life. It isn’t about you and the food you love: it’s about them and their desire to impress and remake the world on tiny plates. That is what I think when I watch The Bear, which has just reemerged for its third season.

It follows Carmen Berzatto—a highly trained chef, played by Jeremy Allen White, who has returned home to Chicago to turn his recently dead brother’s sandwich shop into a restaurant worthy of a Michelin star. People loved the sandwiches: they queued around the block for them. They only admire Carm’s would-be Michelin-starred food. There’s a difference and I think it’s this: the first satiates the diner. The second satiates the chef. 

In flashbacks, we see that Carm got his start at a restaurant in New York City. Its kitchen is like an operating theater. I think it’s based on either Per Se or Eleven Madison Park, tasting menu palaces that Michelin stars fall on like snow. The former is run by Thomas Keller, who has a cameo in this season of The Bear. Working in this restaurant, Carm is tortured by the head chef. In Season 3 they meet again, and he tells Carm he needed to be tortured to be great. 

What becomes of this torture? I have reviewed both restaurants. Per Se, I hated. I thought it pretentious and loveless, a glossy cave above Columbus Circle, preening with self-love, serving quite repulsive food. Sitting before Keller’s plates, I thought: What does this food, so tiny and overwrought, have to do with me? Why am I eating a panic attack that isn’t my own? When I got back to the hotel, I threw up.

Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park was better: that is, I didn’t feel actively hated there. It was just weird. The duck with lavender flying from its ass was good, but unnecessary. I don’t know what Humm’s variations of turnip were trying to do. Perhaps Humm was trying to save the turnip—but why elevate it above all root vegetables?

Food can do anything—Massimo Bottura told me that—and I want chefs to do less with it. I love these guys, I admire them, I pity them. But for all I have eaten, the meal I loved best was red snapper, pulled from the Caribbean Sea, and cooked in a shack only half rebuilt after a hurricane. It had a simplicity and an honesty to it. That is, it was happy to be itself. —Tanya Gold 

Brian writes: In honor (or should that be honour?) of your British editor, I recommend Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. There are no new recordings (that I know of), but two excellent snippets are on YouTube, one from Sideshow Bob and one from Star Trek’s Picard, Data, and Worf. And if you want the whole thing, then you can’t go wrong with the Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Houston’s cast recording. (Houston and Victorian comic opera—who knew?) 

Faith recommends another speech by Frederick Douglass: Follow “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” with Douglass’s “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion.” Delivered in Himrod’s, New York, on July 4, 1862, it demonstrates Douglass’s love and admiration for this country and his conviction that it belonged to all, regardless of race. What a shame these two speeches are never read in tandem. Worse, the latter has been all but forgotten. I guess it doesn’t fit the narrative.

Send your recommendations to thefrontpage@thefp.com. 

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman. 

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On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress passed a “Resolution for Independence” declaring “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.”

Also known as the “Lee Resolution,” after Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee, who had proposed it, the resolution was the final break between the king and the thirteen colonies on the North American continent that would later become the United States of America. 

The path to independence had been neither obvious nor easy. 

In 1763, at the end of what was known in the colonies as the French and Indian War, there was little indication that the colonies were about to start their own nation. The war had brought an economic boom to the colonies, and with the French giving up control of land to the west, Euro-American colonists were giddy at the prospect of moving across the Appalachian Mountains. Impressed that the king had been willing to expend such effort to protect the colonies, they were proud of their identity as members of the British empire.

That enthusiasm soon waned. 

To guard against another expensive war between colonists and Indigenous Americans, the king’s ministers and Parliament prohibited colonists from crossing the Appalachians. Then, to replenish the treasury after the last war, they passed a number of revenue laws. In 1765 they enacted the Stamp Act, which placed a tax on printed material in the colonies, everything from legal documents and newspapers to playing cards. 

The Stamp Act shocked colonists, who saw in it a central political struggle that had been going on in England for more than a century: could the king be checked by the people? Colonists were not directly represented in Parliament and believed they were losing their fundamental liberty as Englishmen to have a say in their government. They responded to the Stamp Act with widespread protests. 

In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act but linked that repeal to the Declaratory Act, which claimed for Parliament “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” This act echoed the 1719 Irish Declaratory Act, which asserted that Ireland was subordinate to the British king and Parliament. It also imposed new taxes.

As soon as news of the Declaratory Act and the new taxes reached Boston in 1767, the 

Massachusetts legislature circulated a letter to the other colonies standing firm on the right to equality in the British empire. Local groups boycotted taxed goods and broke into warehouses whose owners they thought were breaking the boycott. In 1768, British officials sent troops to Boston to restore order. 

Events began to move faster and faster. In March 1770, British soldiers in Boston shot into a crowd of men and boys harassing them, killing five and wounding six others. Tensions calmed when Parliament in 1772 removed all but one of the new taxes—the tax on tea—but then, in May 1773, it tried to bail out the failing East India Company by giving it a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. The result would be cheaper tea in the colonies, convincing people to buy it and thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose the tax.

Ships carrying the East India tea sailed for the colonies in fall 1773, but mass protests convinced the ships headed to every city but Boston to return to England. In Boston the royal governor was determined to land the cargo. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded the Dartmouth, tied to a wharf in Boston Harbor, and tossed the tea overboard. Parliament promptly closed the port of Boston, strangling its economy.

In fall 1774, worried colonial delegates met as the First Continental Congress in Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia to figure out how to stand together against tyranny. In Massachusetts a provincial congress stockpiled weapons and supplies in Concord and called for towns to create companies of men who could be ready to fight on a minute’s notice.

British officials were determined to end the rebellion once and for all. They ordered General Thomas Gage to arrest Boston leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were rumored to be in Lexington, and to seize the supplies in Concord. On the night of April 18, 1775, the soldiers set out. The next morning, on the Lexington town green, the British regulars found several dozen minutemen waiting for them. The locals began to disperse when ordered to, but then a shot cracked through the darkness. The regulars opened fire. Eight locals were killed, another dozen wounded. 

The regulars marched on to Concord, where they found that most of the supplies had been removed. Then, when they turned to march back to Boston, they found their retreat cut off by minutemen firing from behind boulders, trees, and farmhouses. Seventy-three regular soldiers were killed, another 174 were wounded, and 26 were missing. There were 96 colonial casualties: 49 killed, 41 wounded, and 5 missing.

Before disbanding the year before, the First Continental Congress had agreed to meet again if circumstances seemed to require it. After the events at Lexington and Concord, the delegates regrouped in Philadelphia in late spring 1775, down the street from Carpenters’ Hall in the Pennsylvania State House, a building that we now know as Independence Hall.

The Second Continental Congress agreed to pull the military units around Boston into a Continental Army and put George Washington of Virginia in charge of it. But delegates also wrote directly to the king, emphasizing that they were “your Majesty’s faithful subjects.” They blamed the trouble between him and the colonies on “many of your Majesty’s Ministers,” who had “dealt out” “delusive presences, fruitless terrors, and unavailing severities” and forced the colonists to arm themselves in self-defense. They begged the king to use his power to restore harmony with the colonies. By the time the Olive Branch Petition made it to England in fall 1775, the king had already declared the colonies to be in rebellion.

In January 1776 a 47-page pamphlet, published in Philadelphia by newly-arrived immigrant Thomas Paine, provided the spark that inspired his new countrymen to make the leap from blaming the king’s ministers for their troubles to blaming the king himself. “In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine wrote. 

Paine rejected the idea that any man could be born to rule others, and he ridiculed the idea that an island should try to govern a continent. “Where…is the King of America?” Paine asked in Common Sense. “I’ll tell you Friend…so far as we approve of monarchy…in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.

“A government of our own is our natural right: And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance. If we omit it now, some [dictator] may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.”

“We have it in our power,” Paine wrote, “to begin the world over again.” 

As Common Sense swept the colonies, people echoed Paine’s call for American independence. By April 1776, states were writing their own declarations of independence, and a Virginia convention asked the Second Continental Congress to consider declaring “the United Colonies free and independent States, absolved from all allegiance to, or dependence upon, the Crown or Parliament of Great Britain.” On June 7, Lee put the resolution forward. Four days later, the Congress appointed a committee to draft such a declaration.  

Congress left time for reluctant delegates to come around to the resolution, so it was not until July 2 that the measure passed. “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America,” Massachusetts delegate John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3. While we celebrate the signing of the final form of the declaration two days later, the adoption of the Lee Resolution marked the delegates’ ultimate conviction that a nation should rest not on the arbitrary rule of a single man and his hand-picked advisors, but on the rule of law.

—

Notes:

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/contcong_07-08-75.asp

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2012).

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/147/147-h/147-h.htm

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/lee-resolution

https://www.nps.gov/inde/learn/historyculture/resources-declaration-secondcontinentalcongress.htm

https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17760703jasecond&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fdate%2Fall_1776.php

https://www.nps.gov/mima/learn/historyculture/april-19-1775.htm

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