America breaks free: "this nation," declared Benjamin Franklin, "was established in spite of [any number of] obstacles, with an expedition, energy, wisdom, and success which the whole history of human affairs has not, hitherto, given an example."

We also learned that the army was entirely without surgeons. We had daily intimations of plots hatching and insurrections intended for expelling us on the first news of the arrival of a British army. We were in a critical and most irksome situation, pestered hourly with demands great and small that we could not answer, in a place where our cause had the majority of enemies, the garrison weak, and a greater [demand] would, without money, increase our difficulties. Forwarding provisions was the absolute necessity, or the army must starve, plunder, or surrender.

On the 10th of May, five ships of war arrived from Quebec, with an enemy of less than a thousand. Our forces were so dispersed that no more than two hundred could be collected at headquarters. In this situation a retreat was inevitable and made in the utmost confusion with the loss of our cannon on the batteries, provisions, five hundred stand of small arms, and a batteau load of powder.

Two days later I took leave of the other two commissioners to return home, having grown daily more feeble, with symptoms of the gout. I was afflicted with a succession of boils, sometimes two or three together, each when heal'd left round about it spots of scurff, which obstinately continu'd. I could hardly have got along but for Mr. Carroll's friendly assistance and tender care of me. It was with the utmost difficulty I got a conveyance, the country being all afraid to be known to assist us with carriages, but I arrived in New York sale on the evening of May 26.

We were obliged to quit Canada, being too much of a bold thing to block up Quebec a whole winter with an army much inferior in numbers to the garrison, and our troops sent too late to support them, or having had the smallpox, being much disabled by that distemper. I arrived home in Philadelphia, recovering from a severe fit of the gout, which kept me from Congress and company for a month, so I knew little of what had passed there.

It is the natural right of men to quit the state. In June, I was asked to assist in the preparing of a Declaration of Independence for a final separation from Great Britain. It had always been my opinion that it is the natural fight of men to quit the society, state, or country in which they were born, and either join with another or form a new one as they may think proper. The Saxons thought they had this fight when they quitted Germany and established themselves in England. I wrote a draft of a resolution to Congress along these lines in late 1775, viz.:

Whereas, whenever kings, instead of protecting the lives and property of their subjects, as is their bounded duty, do endeavour to perpetrate the destruction of either, they thereby cease to be kings, become tyrants, and dissolve all ties of allegiance between themselves and their people; we hereby further solemnly declare, that whenever it shall appear clearly to us, that the King's troops and ships now in America, or hereafter to be brought there, do, by his Majesty's orders, destroy any town or the inhabitants of any town or place in America, or that the savages have been by the same orders hired to assassinate our poor out-settlers and their families, we will from that time renounce all allegiance to Great Britain, so long as that kingdom shall submit to him, or any of his descendants, as its sovereign.