SIX
Things seem to be hurrying to an alarming crisis, and demand the speedy, united councils of all those who have a regard for the common cause.
—Letter of the Virginia House of Burgesses, May 31, 1774
IT WAS A BIZARRE SEASON at Monticello. In the early afternoon hours of Monday, February 21, 1774, the first recorded earthquake in the history of Virginia struck with strength in Albemarle County. In the furor, Elizabeth Jefferson, Thomas’s reputedly mentally disabled sister, disappeared from Shadwell. She was found, dead, three days later, after apparently drowning in the Rivanna.
In the middle of the first week of May, a springtime snowstorm left the Blue Ridge covered in white. The next day brought a terrible frost that killed “almost everything,” Jefferson said: leaves, vines, wheat, rye, corn, and a good deal of tobacco. “This frost was general and equally destructive through the whole country and the neighboring colonies,” Jefferson wrote in his garden book. Only half of Monticello’s fruit survived.
Yet there was also joy on Jefferson’s mountain: Patty Jefferson gave birth to a second daughter on Sunday, April 3, 1774. Called Jane Jefferson, the baby bore the name of both Jefferson’s mother and of his late sister. It was Patty Jefferson’s second delivery in nineteen months. She had been pregnant for all but about nine or so months of her twenty-seven-month-old marriage. Even among the elite, childbirth was dangerous and could be fatal to both mother and infant. Jefferson was to learn this well: All but two of the six children born to Patty and Thomas Jefferson were fated to die in infancy or childhood.
Self-evidently an ardent lover, Jefferson also proved an attentive husband and father. His memorandum book notes the purchase of “breast pipes,” glass devices that facilitated the breastfeeding of infants.
Political duty, however, always called. The House of Burgesses was set to meet in Williamsburg in the spring of 1774. There was much to discuss. And Jefferson had to be there.
Leaving his wife and his two infant daughters—the newborn Jane and the toddler Patsy—Jefferson reached Williamsburg on the eve of confrontation with Britain.
These had been—and would continue to be—years of crisis. Beginning in his first session as a member of the House of Burgesses in May 1769, Jefferson had served in the midst of conflicts with Britain of varying degrees of severity. A pattern took hold. The British Parliament imposed new taxes to raise revenue from British America. Colonists in their sundry capitals (Boston, Annapolis, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and so on) resisted to a greater or lesser degree depending on the moment. The royal governments in the New World and the establishment in Britain grew yet more impatient with what they saw as a continent populated by the recalcitrant, the unreasonable, and the ungrateful.
From the time of the Townshend Acts to the Boston Tea Party (a protest over duties on tea), London attempted to exert control. The American colonists fought back by various means. There were nonimportation agreements in the colonies to keep British goods off the American market. There were objections to the possible arrest of Americans who would then be tried in England. There were committees of correspondence to establish communication among the colonies.
In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson sensed a sort of tragic stasis. Independence was a possibility, but not a certain one. As late as May 1772, for example, George Wythe was still committed to the maintenance of at least the appearance of the status quo. Writing to London, he ordered a “robe, such as is worn by the clerk of the House of Commons, but better than the one I had before … which indeed was scandalous.” Even allowing for irony in his manner of expression, Wythe clearly did not yet envision a new world of republican simplicity.
A remark of Jefferson’s father-in-law’s illuminated the ethos of the time for many of the colonists. Writing in Williamsburg in October 1772, John Wayles had reported: “Our sale of slaves goes on slowly so ’tis uncertain when we shall be down, but I suppose before the Rebel party leaves town.” The “Rebel party” was still only a movement to be alluded to in passing.
To protest was one thing, to rebel quite another. There were Virginians of Jefferson’s class who chose to remain loyal to London rather than take the path of revolution. His cousin John Randolph of Tazewell Hall was to become known as John Randolph “The Tory” for his allegiance to the Crown—an allegiance that led him to return to England as revolutionary sentiment grew. Overall, about a fifth of white American colonists in these years, or 20 percent, sided with England.
Still, a notation in Jefferson’s memorandum book suggests his own musings were growing more expansive. “Non solum nobis, sed patriae”: “Not for ourselves only, but for our country.”
For the elite, revolution was the shrewdest economic choice. London had already stymied landownership in the West, restricting those with capital (or those capable of borrowing capital) from acquiring coveted acres. Virginia’s public finances were a mess; there was no way for the colony to honor the paper money issued during the Seven Years’ War, which alienated most of the holders of the paper. And there was the inescapably personal issue of the money that planters owed creditors in Britain. In Jefferson’s words, such debts were now “hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.” Virginians owed at least £2.3 million to British merchants, nearly half the total owed by all the American colonies. In May 1774, Jefferson and Patrick Henry had proposed suspending payments of such debts.
Only weeks earlier Jefferson had made a personal financial decision with perilous consequences. When John Wayles died in 1773, he left an estate worth £30,000, but one that was also heavily indebted, with £11,000 owed to his largest creditor, Farell and Jones in Bristol. In January 1774, Jefferson and Wayles’s two other sons-in-law decided to break up the jointly held estate among themselves, with a fateful result: Jefferson’s liability for his portion of the Wayles debt now extended to his personal property.
The decision to revolt was not solely economic, but it was surely informed by concerns over money. In Virginia the impetus to rebel came from the propertied elements of society; the middle and lower classes were slower to follow the lead of men such as Jefferson. It was a rich man’s revolution, and Jefferson was a rich man. It was a philosophical revolution, and Jefferson was a philosophical man.
The intersection of economic and ideological forces created a climate in which well-off, educated Virginians saw a clearer, more compelling, and more attractive future if they could successfully separate themselves from London.
In Jefferson’s political imagination, any move that could be interpreted as an encroachment on liberty was interpreted in just that way. Taxes, the presence of British troops, trade regulations, the disposition of western lands, and relations with Indian tribes, among other matters, were all seen as grasps for power by London, power that Jefferson and others believed rightly belonged to them (or at least to them within a constitution in which they played a much larger role). Absolutism was always just a step away; subjugation an imminent possibility. The Americans were not wrong to think this way, for the history they knew—and the politics they were experiencing—tended to favor the Crown and its adherents rather than the people as more broadly defined.
As a Virginian and a burgess, Jefferson had an acute sense of the tightening of royal authority. Before 1729, no royal governor in Virginia had suspended an act of the colonial legislature. In the ensuing thirty-five years, until 1764, governors intervened fewer than sixty times, or less than twice a year. Then, in the nine years between 1764 and 1773, there were seventy-five such suspensions—a steady, and infuriating, rate of increase that the most powerful Virginians, those in the House of Burgesses, felt directly and ever more often.
On Thursday, May 19, 1774, Virginia newspapers announced the Boston Port Act. Enacted by Parliament, the law closed the city’s port until restitution was made for the losses incurred by the East India Company in the Boston Tea Party the previous December.
The legislation closing Boston’s port in retaliation for the protesters’ dumping the taxed tea into Boston Harbor infuriated Jefferson’s circle. (It was one of what became known as the Intolerable Acts of 1774.) Jefferson said he was among the burgesses who agreed “we must boldly take an unequivocal stand in the line with Massachusetts.”
Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and four or five other members joined Jefferson in the capitol’s Council Chamber, home to a library of parliamentary and legislative precedents that included documents edited by John Rushworth, an antimonarchical historian who had fought in the English Civil War. “We were under [the] conviction of the necessity of arousing our people from the lethargy into which they had fallen as to passing events,” Jefferson recalled, “and thought that the appointment of a day of general fasting and prayer would be most likely to call up and alarm their attention.”
The Day of Fasting and Prayer resolution of Tuesday, May 24, 1774, was one in a series of lessons in the politics of revolution that, from the unseasonably frosty May of 1774 through June and July of 1776, offered Jefferson opportunities to manage and marshal the American mind. He had learned the art of pragmatism during the Stamp Act debates, watching more experienced lawmakers find ways to exert their will against that of Patrick Henry. Now Jefferson turned his attention from the chambers of Williamsburg to the broad countryside, from the mechanics of legislation to the leadership of a mass movement. Jefferson’s role in the adoption and promotion of the Day of Fasting and Prayer resolution illustrated his growing understanding of the importance of engaging the emotions of one’s followers.
For Jefferson, the decision to base a revolutionary appeal on religious grounds was expedient, reflecting more an understanding of politics than a belief that the Lord God of Hosts was about to intervene in British America. Though not a conventional Christian, Jefferson appreciated the power of spiritual appeals. To frame an anti-British argument in the language of faith took the rhetorical fight to the enemy in a way that was difficult to combat. Jefferson and his colleagues could argue that they were only humbling themselves before the Lord, calling on a largely religious populace to fast and pray, not to resist authority.
The wording itself came after Jefferson and his comrades “rummaged” through Rushworth’s collection of “revolutionary precedents and forms of the Puritans of that day.” In Jefferson’s telling, his group “cooked up a resolution” on Monday, May 23, 1774. It asked Virginians to pray for deliverance from “the evils of civil war.”
The House of Burgesses, meanwhile, considered joining a full boycott of all British goods and supporting calls for a Continental Congress. Reading the messages from the North and feeling the anxiety in the city, the colonial leadership in Williamsburg was aware of the stakes. A reckoning could not be far off.
Monticello’s cherries had ripened in the interval between Jefferson’s departure for Williamsburg in May and his return to Albemarle County in June. He was home to do business. In a letter to their constituents, he and John Walker announced the Day of Fasting and Prayer, a reaction, they wrote, to “the dangers impending over British America from the hostile invasion of a sister colony.” Their language was martial and grave; echoing the burgesses’ resolution, he and Walker argued there was a threat of “civil war.”
To execute this strategy Jefferson turned to his friend the Reverend Charles Clay, the clergyman who had buried Jefferson’s sister Elizabeth after she drowned earlier in the year. Clay was to preach the sermon in the parish of St. Anne’s in “the new church” on the Hardware River. The location itself was chosen to make the greatest impression, for it was the “place … thought the most centrical to the parishioners in general.”
Services were held on different days in different counties. The St. Anne’s ceremony fell on Saturday, July 23, 1774. Jefferson was struck by the human element of the experience, writing; “The people met generally, with anxiety and alarm in their countenances, and the effect of the day[s] through the whole colony was like a shock of electricity, arousing every man and placing him erect and solidly on his center.”
Three days later, the freeholders of Albemarle gathered at the courthouse in Charlottesville to elect Jefferson and Walker to the special August meeting in Williamsburg. The voters also adopted the Resolutions of the Freeholders of Albemarle County that denounced the Boston Port Act. Composed by Jefferson, the resolutions spoke of “the common rights of mankind,” promising “we will ever be ready to join with our fellow subjects … in exerting all those rightful powers which God has given us, for the re-establishing and guaranteeing such their constitutional rights when, where, and by whomsoever invaded.” They called for an immediate ban on British imports and set a more distant date—October 1, 1775, fifteen months away—for an end to exports unless American grievances were redressed.
At Monticello, working fast, enjoying fresh cucumbers and lettuce, Jefferson hurried to compose instructions to the delegates who were to attend the larger national Continental Congress, scheduled for September 5, 1774, in Philadelphia.
Entitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson’s midsummer work was his first substantial state paper. With these pages—the instructions ran roughly 6,700 words—he invested the American cause with universal themes, linking the claims of the New World with the Whig story of the march of liberty in the Old.
He was writing, he said, to remind George III
that our ancestors, before their emigration to America, were the free inhabitants of the British dominions in Europe, and possessed a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them.… That their Saxon ancestors had, under this universal law, in like manner left their native wilds and woods in the North of Europe, had possessed themselves of the island of Britain, then less charged with inhabitants, and had established there that system of laws which has so long been the glory and protection of that country.
He concluded with a passage on the nature of politics and governing.
Let those flatter, who fear; it is not an American art. To give praise which is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature.… Open your breast, sire, to liberal and expanded thought. Let not the name of George the third be a blot in the page of history.… The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail. No longer persevere in sacrificing the rights of one part of the empire to the inordinate desires of another; but deal out to all equal and impartial right.… This is the important post in which fortune has placed you, holding the balance of a great, if a well poised empire.
And a claim of ultimate, if conditional, loyalty: “It is neither our wish nor our interest to separate from” Great Britain. Yet the demands were great. “Still less let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own. The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”
The author intended to carry the draft to Williamsburg himself. On the road, however, Jefferson was stricken with dysentery. Incapacitated, he sent his enslaved personal servant Jupiter to Williamsburg with two copies of the document: one for Peyton Randolph and the other for Patrick Henry. His words now on their way into the hands of other men, he returned to Monticello.
Thanks to Jupiter, Jefferson’s paper reached Williamsburg; and thanks to Clementina Rind, the widow of William Rind, the printer with offices on North England Street, the piece was published, winning audiences in the rest of the colonies and in London.
The assembled burgesses applauded when the Summary View was read aloud at Peyton Randolph’s house. To widen its reach, Mrs. Rind used her hand-pulled press to publish the Summary View from the newspaper’s offices in the Ludwell-Paradise House in Williamsburg. In a preface, the printer wrote: “Without the knowledge of the author, we have ventured to communicate his sentiments to the public; who have certainly a right to know what the best and wisest of their members have thought on a subject in which they are so deeply interested.” Either she or another editor chose a motto from Cicero to affix to the opening of the pamphlet: “It is the indispensable duty of the supreme magistrate to consider himself as acting for the whole community, and obliged to support its dignity, and assign to the people, with justice, their various rights, as he would be faithful to the great trust reposed in him.”
On Saturday, August 6, 1774, George Washington paid 3s 9d for several copies of what he called “Mr. Jefferson’s Bill of Rights.” Thomas Walker, one of Jefferson’s guardians from Peter Jefferson’s will, loaned his to William Preston, a burgess and colonel of the militia, urging him to read “the enclosed piece” and trusting that “your care of it I can depend on as I have no other copy.”
The Summary View framed the issue starkly—too starkly for some at that hour. However far the mind might range in the direction of independence and war, thinking about the intellectual justifications for revolution and taking up arms were very different things. “Tamer sentiments were preferred, and I believe, wisely preferred; the leap I proposed being too long as yet for the mass of our citizens.” In the Virginia of the time, there was, he said, an “inequality of pace” among the people, and “prudence” was “required to keep front and rear together.”
With the Summary View Jefferson moved toward the front ranks of the cause, taking an advanced position. There were even rumors that Jefferson had been added to a bill of attainder in London, which would have declared him guilty, presumably of treason—a capital offense.
In the Day of Fasting and Prayer resolution, the Albemarle resolves, and the Summary View, Jefferson had appealed to his audience’s sense of justice, which one would expect in the litigation of grievances, but also to its sense of destiny. In his rhetoric he deployed both the particular and the universal. He simultaneously made the most specific of allegations of British wrongdoing (some of which were obscure even to contemporary readers and listeners) and sketched out a vision of history in which the struggles of the hour were indelible chapters in the long story of freedom. In so doing Jefferson mastered the art of rhetorical political leadership by appearing at once concerned about the needs of his people and attentive to their innate need to be part of a larger drama that imbues daily life with mythic stakes.
The work of his conscious life had been the accumulation of knowledge, the broadening of his mind, and the formation of ideas about liberty, law, and how one ought to live. Under William Small, under George Wythe, alongside Dabney Carr and John Page, Jefferson had come to believe that reason, not hereditary right, should govern human affairs. Tyranny was tyranny, whether practiced by kings or priests.
He knew, too, that he was risking everything—and everything of his young family’s. In his commonplace book he had copied down these lines from Pope’s translation of Homer:
Death is the worst; a Fate which all must try;
And, for our Country, ’tis a Bliss to die,
The gallant Man tho’ slain in Fight he be,
Yet leaves his Nation safe, his children free,
Entails a debt on all the grateful State;
His own brave Friends shall glory in his Fate;
His wife live Honour’d, all his Race succeed;
And late Posterity enjoy the Deed.
America was still twenty-three months from declaring independence when Thomas Jefferson gave the Atlantic world the Summary View. His celebrity grew as his pamphlet circulated. John Adams thought it “a very handsome public paper” that demonstrated “a happy talent for composition.”
Because of the play of his mind and the formation of his convictions, Jefferson was something of a prophet in the summer and fall of 1774, a figure who, from a mountaintop, looked deep into the nature of things and told his countrymen what he had seen. The Summary View was an act of courage driven by conviction offered to a people in search of a creed.
As 1774 drew to a close, Jefferson—at thirty-one years old, a husband, father, lawyer, planter, legislator, and thinker—had moved to a new, higher rank of political skill. The Summary View and his other pieces demonstrated a capacity to reflect and advance the sentiments of his public simultaneously, giving his audience both a vision of the future and a concrete sense that he knew how to bring the distant closer to hand, and dreams closer to reality.