oncord and just before Bunker Hill.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were members of it. But they spoke no
word for independence. Instead, Jefferson drafted a declaration, which
Congress adopted, to the effect that the Colonies had "not raised armies
with designs of separating from Great Britain and establishing
independent states"; and in other addresses which the same Congress
adopted after the battle of Bunker Hill it was explicitly stated that
the Colonists were loyal to the British Crown, that they wished for
lasting union with Great Britain, and that they had taken up arms not to
find liberty outside of the British Empire but to vindicate and defend
liberty within that Empire. After the adjournment of that Congress in
August, 1775, less than a year before the Declaration of Independence,
so representative a man and so ardent a patriot as John Jay publicly
denounced the imputation that the Congress had "aimed at independence"
as "ungenerous and groundless," and as marked with "malice and falsity."
Not until the spring of 1776 was there any significant turning toward
independence as the inevitable resort.

If I have thus dwelt at length upon well-known facts which pertain to
the history of the United States rather than to that of Cuba, it is in
order to remind American readers, on the strength of a precedent which
they, at any rate, must regard with the highest respect, how reasonable
it was for Cubans even as late as in 1897 and 1898 to cling to a policy
and a hope substantially identical with those which were cherished by
the foremost representative American patriots in 1774 and 1775. We can
see now, they themselves can see now, that they were in error and that
their hopes were vain. But they were no more in error than were the
immortal American Autonomists of the beginning of the American
Revolution.

Similarly it was necessary that Cuba should not only be entirely
separated from Spain but also should be made independent, and not be
annexed to the United States. On that point, too, many good men were in
error. As we shall see, the first important Cuban
revolutionist--although not himself a native Cuban--had in view not
independence but annexation to the United States, and so did many
another sterling patriot after him. Probably the general feeling was
that the one thing supremely essential was to be sundered from Spain,
and since annexation to the United States seemed to promise the
effecting of that most prompt