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Article: Founders Chic: Live From Philadelphia: They cut political deals and stabbed each other in the back on the way to inventing freedom. Why Jefferson, Adams and their brethren are suddenly hot again.(Society)
- Article from:
- Newsweek
- Article date:
- July 9, 2001
- Author:
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Good thing the founders didn't rely on pollsters. At the time of the Revolution, the American colonists, John Adams recalled, were "about one third Tories"--loyal to the British crown--"and [one] third timid, and one third true blue." Adams was true blue. "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I am with my country from this day on," he told a friend in 1774. "You may depend on it."
By the summer of '76, as Adams cajoled his fellow delegates to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to declare independence from Great Britain, perishing was a distinct possibility. On the night of July 2, as the delegates were casting their first votes, word reached ...