This is actually a moment where the movie falters a little.
-at a lot of other times it does a reasonable job showing that the anti-independence crowd weren't bad guys or cowards either.
In truth they weren't.
From the standpoint of that summer, American Independence was somewhere between a pipe-dream and a continent wide suicide mission.
You have to wonder if they realized they'd barely dipped their toe in the years of death and misery and destruction that were ahead of them (They had been at war a year, but there would be another seven.) if they would have gotten Independence passed.
You have to admire the guts of the patriots, every last one of them could have stayed home and led comfortable lives, instead of risking a traitor's death.
-but how wrong were the others calling for peace given what they knew about their odds of success?
"Support our troops: Bring them home!"
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Eric-62-2
8 years ago
The number and by extension the portrayal of John Dickinson is misleading and not true to the historical record. From a dramatic standpoint I understand this need to give Adams a clear antagonist who could be understood from a modern lens, which would mean making Dickinson and Independence opponents more like Tory defenders of British policy so I'm not too critical of it (I'd probably be more critical if this were not a musical where suspension of disbelief is always necessary to a degree).
But for the record, it needs to be understood that John Dickinson and Independence opponents were not defenders of British policy. Their concern was that Independence would mean the creation of not a unified nation but 13 separate republics eventually warring with each other over boundary disputes and control of land to the west. The one thing that had held all 13 colonies together for 150 years was their British identity and the sense that they were Englishmen living in America. Before the 1770s, the 13 Colonies always went their own separate ways with almost NO coordination among themselves.
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