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Show THE DAY THEY LAUNCHED THE PAPER SKIFF 4 His comment bears us out: "All this to be sure was but a flourish. " There was nothing to say but had been said time and again, but Adams, thus challenged, rose and gave, from knowledge and passionate conviction, the most brilliant speech of his life. Unfortunately it was not preserved, except in memory. But the "gentlemen from New Jersey" were satisfied and the speech no doubt undid much of the intellectual damage to independence inflicted by Dickinson. Thus ended nine hours of rocking debate "during which all the powers of the soul had been distended with the magnitude of the object," recalled Jefferson a decade later. Still, there might be last-minute switches. Haunting them since May was an editorial in the Philadelphia Gazette to the effect that independence was premature, untimely, ill-advised, and "to sever with England would be a leap in the dark. " If it failed the hangman, the gallows, death awaited these same embryo founding fathers. There was no worse time for this leap into the dark. Adams was uneasy. Another fearful one was Thomas McKeen. Early Sunday morning, by eight A. M., he had dispatched a rider to Dover, Delaware, to summon Caesar Rodney urgently to come in time for the vote. This rider pounded on Rodney's door eighteen hours later, at two A. M., Monday, July 1. Caesar Rodney, fifty-two, knew he should be in Philadelphia at that time, but excuses had been made for him that he was trying to rally support of patriots. The truth was that he was ill, in agony from a cancer in his face. "The oddest looking man I ever saw, " (even without the poultices |
