A COALITION STRATEGY
How a Congress at war adopted the Olive Branch Petition
By the first week of July 1775 the Second Continental Congress had taken over an army outside Boston, appointed a Virginian to command it, issued paper money to pay for it, and authorised an invasion of Canada. It had been doing this since the middle of May. On 5 July it adopted, without a recorded dissent, the Olive Branch Petition, asking the King to restore harmony.
This is usually presented as confusion, or as hypocrisy, or as the last twitch of a doomed moderation. It was none of those. It was a deliberate strategy, and the two documents were designed to work together.
Congress contained men who wanted independence and men who would have accepted almost any settlement short of it, and both groups needed the same thing: the middle colonies. Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland had not authorised their delegates to break with Britain and in several cases had explicitly forbidden it. Nothing could be done over their objection. So the radicals conceded the petition, and the moderates conceded the army. Adams described the arrangement years later as measures of imbecility swallowed to keep the union together, which is not a compliment but is an accurate description of a coalition.
There was also a calculation about audiences. A petition that the King refused would prove to every doubter in America, and to every foreign court, that the colonies had exhausted the peaceful alternatives. If it succeeded, the quarrel was over. If it failed, it removed the last argument of the men who said the quarrel could still be settled. Either outcome was useful, and the second was more useful than the first.
ONE AUTHOR, TWO TONES
Dickinson shapes the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms
John Dickinson was the principal author of the Olive Branch Petition and the man who rewrote the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. Jefferson had produced the first draft of the Declaration and Dickinson thought it too harsh; the committee gave it to Dickinson, who softened the opening and the close and kept a good deal of Jefferson's substance. Jefferson's account of the Olive Branch Petition, written decades afterwards, is unusually generous and worth quoting because it explains the whole episode:
Congress gave a signal proof of their indulgence to Mr. Dickinson, and of their great desire not to go too fast for any respectable part of our body, in permitting him to draw their second petition to the King according to his own ideas, and passing it with scarcely any amendment. Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography
Not to go too fast for any respectable part of our body. That is the sentence that makes July 1775 intelligible. The Olive Branch Petition was the price of unanimity, and Congress paid it knowingly.
Adams disagrees—in writing, to the wrong person
John Adams thought the Olive Branch Petition absurd and said so in a private letter to James Warren on 24 July, describing Dickinson, without naming him, as a certain great fortune and piddling genius whose fame had been trumpeted so loudly, and complaining that he had given a silly cast to the whole proceedings. In the same packet he wrote that the Congress should long since have raised a navy and arrested every Crown officer in America.
The courier was taken by the British, and the letters were printed in Boston in the middle of August. They did three things at once. They humiliated Adams. They ended his relationship with Dickinson, who thereafter passed him in the street without speaking. And they told the ministry, in Adams's own hand, that the Congress which had just petitioned for peace contained men who regarded the petition as a farce, which cannot have improved the document's reception.
THE CROWN CLOSES THE DOOR
The King answers the Olive Branch Petition before he reads it
Richard Penn, grandson of the founder of Pennsylvania and a former lieutenant-governor of the colony, carried the Olive Branch Petition to London and arrived on 14 August. A copy reached Lord Dartmouth on the 26th. Penn and Arthur Lee delivered the document itself on 1 September, and were told the next day that no answer would be given to it.
By then the question had already been settled. On 23 August, a week before the Olive Branch Petition was handed over, George III issued a Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition, declaring that the colonies were in open and avowed rebellion and requiring all officers and subjects to suppress it and to disclose anyone in traitorous correspondence with the rebels.
The King did not read the Olive Branch Petition and refuse it. He never read it at all. He had received the news of Bunker Hill, he had read the London papers on the American war, and he had made up his mind on the general question before the specific document arrived. On 26 October he told Parliament that the rebellion was manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire, which was not yet true when he said it, and announced that foreign troops would be hired.
THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION
What the refusal changed
News of the Proclamation of Rebellion reached America through the autumn, and the fact that the Olive Branch Petition had been rejected unread reached Congress in November. The effect was not that anybody changed their mind about the King's character. It was that the moderates lost their argument.
The whole reconciliation case rested on a single premise: that George III was a well-disposed monarch misled by a wicked ministry, and that if he could once be reached directly he would intervene. Every colonial protest since 1765 had been built on it. The Olive Branch Petition was the purest expression of it, and it was a test. The King had been reached directly, by a body that had unanimously professed its loyalty, through a messenger of impeccable respectability, and the answer was a proclamation of rebellion issued before the document was handed over.
Then in December came the Prohibitory Act, which declared American ships and cargoes forfeit to the Crown and put the colonies outside the King's protection. Washington called it the Act of Independency, and remarked that Parliament had done what Congress had not yet dared to do.
On 10 January 1776 Thomas Paine published a pamphlet arguing that the office of king was itself the problem, that the distinction between a good monarch and bad ministers was a fiction, and that reconciliation was a dream. Six months earlier that argument had been unpublishable. The King had spent the intervening autumn making it.
Unity came before clarity
Congress could not yet agree on independence, but it could agree to defend colonial rights, maintain an army, and preserve a final path to reconciliation. The two papers kept delegates with different end goals inside one coalition.
The King redefined the conflict
George III’s proclamation described the colonies as being in open rebellion and required British subjects to help suppress it. The appeal to a protective monarch now collided with the monarch’s own public language.
Protection and allegiance separated
The Prohibitory Act removed the colonies from the Crown’s protection, banned trade, and exposed American ships to seizure. For colonists who linked allegiance to protection, Parliament had weakened the legal and emotional case for remaining subjects.
A new argument found an audience
Common Sense did not create the failures of 1775. It gave plain language to the conclusion those failures made easier to hear: the problem might be monarchy and dependence, not merely bad ministers.
WHY THIS STOP MATTERS
Fighting did not yet mean independence
The July papers preserved a meaningful distinction between resisting by force and declaring a permanent separation. That distinction allowed colonies with different instructions and different levels of commitment to act together. The Crown’s response did not instantly turn every colonist into an independence supporter, but it made reconciliation harder to defend and narrowed the political middle.
The next stop asks how Thomas Paine attacked the assumptions still holding that middle together: loyalty to a “good king,” fear of separation, and the belief that reconciliation remained possible.
Trace the sequence through the National Archives account of the Olive Branch Petition ↗, the Library of Congress 1775 timeline ↗, and the Library of Congress account of organizing the war ↗.
Source notes, qualifications, and interpretive choices
- The dates of the Petition vary between sources. Congress agreed the text on 5 July and the engrossed copy was compared and signed on 8 July, which is why some accounts give one date and some the other. The Journals record the signing under 8 July.
- “Without a recorded dissent” describes formal adoption, not private agreement. The National Archives notes that support for the Petition was not universal; delegates accepted it to preserve unity even as some privately opposed it.
- Washington's appointment is dated 15 June, when Congress resolved on him; his commission is dated the 19th, and some accounts use that.
- The division of authorship of the Declaration between Jefferson and Dickinson rests largely on Jefferson's recollection written many years later, and historians have never fully agreed on which passages belong to whom.
- The Petition's arrival in London is given here from the note in the Journals: Penn arrived 14 August, Dartmouth received a copy on 26 August, and the document was delivered on 1 September. Other accounts give 21 or 22 August for its arrival.
- Adams's letter is quoted in modernised spelling. The phrase about a piddling genius does not name Dickinson, but everyone in Philadelphia knew who was meant, including Dickinson.
- Spelling and capitalisation in the quoted documents follow the printed texts, which differ in small ways from the manuscripts and from each other.
The Petition to the King and the Declaration setting forth the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms are quoted from the Journals of the Continental Congress as published by the Avalon Project at Yale Law School. Jefferson's remark is from his Autobiography.