America 250: Franklin, the Adamses and Hamilton in 1776

What the 250th anniversary marks

On 2 July 1776 the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted that the thirteen colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States”. On 4 July it approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence, and that is the date printed on it. Most delegates signed the engrossed copy on 2 August 1776, and some signed later still.

The 250th anniversary, the semiquincentennial, fell on 4 July 2026. Congress set up the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, known as America250, in 2016 to organise it. The anniversary does not stop with one day. The next dates are the 250th anniversaries of the Battle of Trenton (26 December 2026), the Battle of Princeton (3 January 2027), the surrender at Saratoga (17 October 2027), the French alliance (6 February 2028) and Yorktown (19 October 2031). The war formally ended with the Treaty of Paris on 3 September 1783, so the cycle runs to 2033.

The four founders in 1776, at a glance

George Washington, commanding the Continental Army, and Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the first draft of the Declaration, were the other central figures of the year. This page follows the four whose letters and papers give a view from Congress, from home, from abroad and from the army.

Benjamin Franklin in 1776: editor, envoy and the oldest signer

Franklin had come home from London in May 1775, after a decade representing colonial assemblies there, and was elected to Congress the next day. In spring 1776, at 70, he travelled to Montreal with Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll to win Canada to the American side. The mission failed, and the journey nearly broke his health.

In June he was named to the Committee of Five with John Adams, Jefferson, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston. Jefferson wrote the draft; Adams and Franklin made changes. Tradition credits Franklin with turning “sacred and undeniable” truths into “self-evident” ones. The handwriting on the rough draft suggests it, but scholars disagree on whose hand made the change. Franklin was the oldest signer.

In September Congress chose him as a commissioner to France. He sailed in late October with two grandsons and reached Paris in December 1776. His work there produced the treaties of alliance and commerce of February 1778, which brought French money, troops and ships into the war.

One famous line needs a warning. “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately” is often said to be Franklin's quip at the signing, but no record from 1776 contains it; it first appears in print decades later. Treat it as legend. Franklin's own words from the eve of the war are sharper. In July 1775 he wrote, and kept, a letter to his old London friend William Strahan, a member of Parliament: “You and I were long Friends: You are now my Enemy, and I am, Yours, B Franklin.”

He was also, in 1776, a man who had owned enslaved people. He turned against slavery late in life and in 1790, as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, signed a petition asking Congress to end the slave trade. Both facts belong in any honest account.

John Adams in 1776: the voice of independence in Congress

Adams was the leading advocate of independence in Congress. In April 1776 he published Thoughts on Government, a short pamphlet advising the colonies to set up governments with two legislative houses, an independent executive and independent judges. In May he pushed through the resolution, with his preamble dated 15 May, that told the colonies to form new governments under the authority of the people: independence in all but name. On 1 July, when John Dickinson argued that a declaration was premature, Adams answered him in a long speech that, by several delegates' accounts, carried the room. No text of it survives.

That summer he chaired the Board of War and drafted the Plan of Treaties, the model for agreements with foreign powers that Franklin took to France. In September he, Franklin and Edward Rutledge met the British admiral Lord Howe on Staten Island and refused his offer of peace without independence.

On 3 July he wrote two letters to Abigail. One reports the vote; the other predicts how it would be remembered, though he expected the date to be the second, not the fourth:

He went on to say it should be celebrated “with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other”. The same letter is worth reading in full; it is a clear explanation of why Congress waited as long as it did.

Abigail Adams in 1776: the home front and the new code of laws

With John in Philadelphia, Abigail Adams ran the farm at Braintree, managed money and tenants, taught four children and reported the war around Boston, which the British army left in March 1776. On 31 March she wrote the letter that asked Congress to “Remember the Ladies” in its new laws and not to put “unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands”. John's joking reply of 14 April and what followed are covered in our article on Remember the Ladies.

In July she took the children into Boston to be inoculated against smallpox, a risky but proven method in the 1770s. There, on 18 July, she joined the crowd in King Street to hear the Declaration read from the balcony of the State House:

In August she pressed John on girls' schooling, asking what could be said of daughters, “who every day experience the want of it” (letter of 14 August 1776). Two years earlier, in a letter of 22 September 1774, she had written that it seemed wrong to fight for liberty while depriving others of theirs, a point about slavery that the Declaration's signers did not settle.

Alexander Hamilton in 1776: an artillery captain in a losing campaign

Hamilton, born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, had arrived in New York in 1772 and was a student at King's College (now Columbia). He had already written two pamphlets defending Congress against a loyalist critic. In the second, The Farmer Refuted (February 1775), he wrote that the rights of mankind “are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself”.

In March 1776 the New York Provincial Congress made him captain of a new artillery company. He drilled it hard and spent his own money on equipment. In the summer and autumn the British drove the Continental Army out of New York: Long Island in August, the loss of Manhattan in September, White Plains in October. Hamilton's guns covered parts of the retreat across New Jersey, and his company took part in the attack on Trenton on 26 December 1776 and the fight at Princeton on 3 January 1777. In March 1777 he joined Washington's staff as an aide-de-camp, the post that started his political rise.

Recent research has also documented that Hamilton took part in buying and hiring out enslaved people for his family, though he backed plans in 1779 to free enslaved men who fought. Students should meet the record as it is.

Classroom ideas for the semiquincentennial

• Four letters, one year: give groups the Adams letters of 31 March, 14 April, 3 July and 21 July 1776 (all free from the Massachusetts Historical Society). Each group summarises one and the class builds a timeline of 1776 from them.
• Reenact 1 July 1776: half the class prepares Dickinson's case for waiting, half Adams's case for declaring now, using Adams's 3 July letter as evidence of his reasoning.
• Test a quote: ask students to find the earliest printed source for “hang together or hang separately”. Our guide on checking whether a quote is real shows the method.
• Read the preamble: annotate the second paragraph of the Declaration, then ask who was left out of “all men”, using Abigail's letters and Franklin's later petition.
• Interview a founder: students write questions for one of the four in December 1776 and practise them by voice with AI recreations of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Abigail Adams or Alexander Hamilton on Yuga. They are built from the founders' writings but are not the people themselves and can make mistakes, so final work should cite the letters, not the app.
• Look ahead: fifteen years later, in 1791, Hamilton and Jefferson argued over whether the Constitution allowed a national bank. Have students read Hamilton's opinion on the bank and list which of his 1775 ideas about rights and government still show.

Our question lists for Franklin, John Adams, Abigail Adams and Hamilton go further, and Hamilton vs Adams explains why the two later became bitter enemies.