EIGHT
As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON, July 5, 1775
The present crisis is so full of danger and uncertainty that opinions here are various.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON, from Philadelphia, 1775
LODGING ON CHESTNUT between Third and Fourth streets in Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress was meeting at the Pennsylvania State House (later known as Independence Hall), Jefferson effortlessly entered the flow of things. He sent accounts of the military situation to Virginia. He looked over Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for “Articles of confederation and perpetual Union.” He recorded the “Financial and Military Estimates for Continental Defense.”
In a way, he had been preparing for this hour and for this work since he first stood in the lobby of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, listening, rapt, to Patrick Henry a decade before. There had been the glittering evenings in Fauquier’s Palace, full of music and ideas; the golden years in the Wythe house, immersed in law and history; the apprenticeship in politics under Peyton Randolph in the Raleigh Tavern, watching and learning. The Jefferson style—cultivate his elders, make himself pleasant to his contemporaries, and use his pen and his intellect to shape the debate—armed him well for the national arena. He was no longer in Williamsburg or Richmond, but he felt at home.
In Virginia, Jefferson had known everything and everyone. In sessions of the Congress in Philadelphia and in hours of walking the city, he encountered new ideas, new people, new forces.
Philadelphians, said the Anglican clergyman William Smith, were “a people, thrown together from various quarters of the world, differing in all things—language, manners, and sentiment.” Another clergyman, Jacob Duché, said, “The poorest laborer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiments in matters of religion and politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or the scholar.… For every man expects one day or another to be upon a footing with his wealthiest neighbor.”
In Philadelphia, Jefferson was caught up in a whirlwind of war and the rumors of war. John Adams of Massachusetts had proposed the appointment of George Washington of Virginia as commanding general for the Continental forces, a choice the Congress approved on Thursday, June 15, 1775. Two days later came the battle at Bunker Hill in Boston.
What Jefferson had heard Patrick Henry assert in the nave of St. John’s Church 250 miles south of Philadelphia in March was now fact. There was no peace.
Jefferson’s arrival in Philadelphia was an occasion of note among the delegates. Samuel Ward of Rhode Island recorded seeing “the famous Mr. Jefferson,” and said the Virginian “looks like a very sensible spirited fine fellow and by the pamphlet which he wrote last summer [the Summary View] he certainly is one.” Later in the year John Adams reported a fellow delegate’s view that “Jefferson is the greatest Rubber off of Dust that he has ever met with, that he has learned French, Italian, Spanish and wants to learn German.”
Adams and Jefferson could hardly have appeared less alike. Adams was eight years older and about five inches shorter, as thoroughgoing a New Englander as Jefferson was a Virginian. Adams had difficulty holding his tongue or his temper; Jefferson was a master of keeping his emotions in check. Yet the two men—and, in time, Abigail, Adams’s wonderful wife—were to forge one of the greatest and most complicated alliances in American history.
Born in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1735, John Adams was the son of a farmer and public servant. Like Peter Jefferson, John Adams, Sr., loomed large to his son. Young Adams was educated at Harvard, considered but decided against becoming a Congregational minister, and made his mark as a lawyer in Boston in the tumultuous years leading to the American Revolution.
From 1775 until the politics of the first Washington administration drove them apart, Adams and Jefferson worked together often and well, particularly in their years as fellow American diplomats in Europe. Their falling-out over the direction of the nation in the 1790s and the first decade or so of the nineteenth century was profound, for their disagreements were deep. Yet after both men retired they would revive the friendship they formed in these early Philadelphia days. “I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution,” their fellow Revolutionary Benjamin Rush wrote Adams in February 1812. “Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.”
Jefferson’s proximity to the action and his new connections to delegates from the northern colonies, particularly Adams, grew into an intense admiration for New England. To read of valor is one thing. To live among those who are following the news of bloodshed in their homes, who have a direct stake in the outcome, is to experience conflict at a more fundamental level. The ethos of war was all around him.
The day after Jefferson came to the city the Congress authorized an invasion of Canada—a dramatic move that helped fix Canada’s place firmly in Jefferson’s political and military imaginations. Since the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the British had occupied large sections of Canada, once known as New France. In the face of American invasion in 1775, Montreal surrendered but Quebec held out. The failure to conquer the whole territory effectively left it in British hands, and Canada became a haven for Loyalists. After the war, Canada was, in the American mind, a possible staging ground for a reassertion of British force and influence in the new United States.
Jefferson found an infectious courage in Philadelphia in 1775. “Nobody now entertains a doubt but that we are able to cope with the whole force of Great Britain, if we are but willing to exert ourselves,” he wrote in July. They were high hopes, but Jefferson was in a noble frame of mind, believing the Americans capable of vigor and virtue.
Jefferson and John Dickinson, the author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, consulted in these weeks at Dickinson’s Fair Hill estate outside Philadelphia on the Germantown Road. The result: a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, which was adopted by the Congress on Thursday, July 6, 1775.
The next day, Jefferson slipped away from the Congress and rode the ferry to the Woodlands, the botanist William Hamilton’s estate on the Schuylkill River. Hamilton and Jefferson shared a passion for landscape gardening. Walking the Woodlands on this summer’s day, Jefferson was likely imaginatively engaged by visions of creation, of bringing the natural world into harmony with the human. He also made a trip to the falls of the Schuylkill for an outing and dinner.
Such excursions offered welcome, if brief, respites from politics and from war. On Saturday, July 8, 1775, having made the case for armed resistance with Dickinson and Jefferson’s Declaration of Causes, the Congress extended its hand to the king, dispatching an “Olive Branch Petition” to London.
Nothing was to come of it.
Jefferson rarely spoke in large assemblies, preferring to make his mark in different ways. As accomplished a student of politics and of history as John Adams believed Jefferson benefited enormously from holding his tongue in debate. From all that Adams had read and all that he had experienced firsthand, he had learned, he said, “eloquence in public assemblies is not the surest road to fame and preferment, at least unless it be used with great caution, very rarely, and with great reserve.” Classing Jefferson with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, both of whom were also reluctant to speak at length in public, Adams said, “A public speaker who inserts himself, or is urged by others into the conduct of affairs, by daily exertions to justify his measures and answer the objections of opponents, makes himself too familiar with the public, and unavoidably makes himself enemies.”
To write public papers or to negotiate quietly, away from the floor of an assembly or even away from a largish committee, enabled a politician to exert his will with less risk of creating animosity. “Few persons can bear to be outdone in reasoning or declamation or wit, or sarcasm or repartee or satire, and all these things are very apt to grow out of public debate,” said Adams. “In this way in a course of years, a nation becomes full of a man’s enemies, or at least of such as have been galled in some controversy, and take a secret pleasure in assisting to humble and mortify him.”
Jefferson was reflective yet practical, confident yet realistic in the middle of the maelstrom of 1775. “The continuance and the extent of this conflict we consider as among the secrets of providence; but we also reflect on the propriety of being prepared for the worst events, and, so far as human foresight can provide, to be guarded against probable evils at least,” he said. Perhaps “a few gentlemen of genius and spirit” should be sent to train under General Washington to learn the “necessary art” of war.
So much was unknowable, but the political language of war had to celebrate what had been done and offer hope for darker moments. Jefferson was mastering this complex vocabulary. He knew, clearly, that Virginia faced a “deficiency” of military skill—a skill that “in these days of rapine can only be relied upon for public safety.” The use of “rapine” came from the lawyer in Jefferson. It was an ancient legal term for violent seizure of property, a rhetorical touch underscoring the view that anyone with property had a stake in the struggle.
After a visit to Robert Bell’s shop on Third Street to buy a copy of James Burgh’s book Political Disquisitions, Jefferson left Philadelphia for Virginia on Tuesday, August 1, 1775. He stopped along the road at Mrs. Clay’s inn at New Castle, Delaware, then continued onward to Chestertown, Annapolis, and Port Royal en route home to Monticello.
In the absence of any surviving letters between Jefferson and Patty we can only guess about the tone they used with each other when apart. Given Jefferson’s letters to his family and friends throughout his life, though, it is likely that he wrote to his wife in rather the way his contemporary Theodorick Bland, Jr., wrote his own wife. Bland was a Virginian, a physician, a politician, and a revolutionary. Writing his wife, also named Martha, from the front in New Jersey in 1777, he said: “For God’s sake, my dear, when you are writing, write of nothing but yourself, or at least exhaust that dear, ever dear subject, before you make a transition to another; tell me of your going to bed, of your rising, of the hour you breakfast, dine, sup, visit, tell me of anything, but leave me not in doubt about your health.… Fear not … yes, ‘you will again feel your husband’s lips flowing with love and affectionate warmth.’ Heaven never means to separate two who love so well, so soon; and if it does, with what transport shall we meet in heaven?”
With Patty, Jefferson had built the kind of marriage and life he wanted on the mountain. Music and dancing were essential. Jefferson never stopped humming, ordered an Aeolian harp, and paid £5 for a new violin. In memory he could hear his sister Jane’s voice, singing. And in the moment he could sit and listen to Patty play the pianoforte or the harpsichord.
“Mrs. Jefferson was small,” said the slave Isaac Granger Jefferson, and “pretty.” She was also busy, both bearing children and presiding over the plantation during her husband’s absences. Her account book tracks her daily work, including supervising the slaughter of ducks, turkeys, hogs, sheep, and lambs. She also managed the slaves in the house.
The “first” Monticello—Jefferson eventually tore down the house and started anew in the 1790s—was smaller than the second and final version, but it was still a grand place. “The house was built quite recently, in the latest Italian style,” a visitor wrote of the first Monticello. “There is a colonnade around the structure and the frieze is very charmingly decorated with all kinds of sculptures drawn from mythology.” He acquired a chessboard and pieces, a backgammon table, a refracting telescope, eight Venetian blinds, and Scotch carpet: He was always on the watch for lovely things—and always, always books. Even the first Monticello had, a visitor noted, “a copious and well-chosen library.”
The house itself—“an elegant building,” the visitor recalled—was only the most vivid expression of Jefferson’s wide-ranging mind. From books to languages to music to entertaining to art to architecture, he was constantly learning, experiencing, experimenting, tasting, living: At Shadwell and at the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg he had been taught that there was a vast world to engage and shape.
His architectural sense was informed by, among other works, James Gibbs’s Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture and an edition of The Architecture of A. Palladio. He mused on the painting scheme for his dining room, ordered a copy of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, and sent for a clothespress.
Jefferson had joined the Philosophical Society for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge, founded by Virginians (including his friend John Page) on the model of the American Philosophical Society, to which Jefferson was elected in 1780. In 1772, James McClurg, the future director of hospitals for Virginia during the Revolutionary War, published a book entitled Experiments upon the Human Bile. Jefferson bought a copy.
Following in the tradition of his kinsman John Randolph, the attorney general who lived in a beautiful house, Tazewell Hall, on a ninety-nine-acre estate on South England Street in Williamsburg, Jefferson was fascinated by gardening. Randolph, a Loyalist, owned perhaps the best violin in Virginia—Jefferson long envied it—and had written a book, A Treatise on Gardening by a Citizen of Virginia. The works of William Shenstone and of Thomas Whately also influenced Jefferson’s understanding of gardening and landscaping—an understanding centered on the idea of creating and controlling the illusion of wildness and of the natural.
In the summer of 1775, his Loyalist cousin John Randolph was on Jefferson’s mind for reasons other than gardening. Writing to Randolph that August, Jefferson opened pleasantly, expressing regret that Randolph was leaving America for England and reminding him of his enduring admiration for Randolph’s violin.
Then Jefferson moved to the real business of the letter: enlisting Randolph as an asset for the American cause. The British, Jefferson believed, were suffering from two fundamental misunderstandings of the American position. The first was that the discontent was concentrated within “a small faction” and was not shared by the broader population. Here Jefferson was shaping reality to suit his purposes. The American movement, while not limited to the elite, was still working its way through the social ranks.
The second matter on Jefferson’s mind was visceral. “They have taken it into their heads too that we are cowards and shall surrender at discretion to an armed force,” he said, adding, with a reserved pride, “The past and future operations of the war must confirm or undeceive them on that head.” In sum, Jefferson wanted Randolph to present the colonists as a broad, united, and brave force that deserved more respect from London.
Jefferson was thinking in plain political terms. If America were thought to be divided and cowardly, then the British would have no incentive to negotiate. Weakness in the New World would create contempt in the Old.
Jefferson drafted but deleted an interesting threat from the Randolph letter. If Britain were to come to dominate the seaboard colonies militarily, Jefferson mused, there was another option. Perhaps the hardiest of Virginians might move “beyond the mountains,” which suggested that Jefferson had been party to conversations about an extreme scenario in which the colonists devoted to the American cause might move to the interior of the continent.
It is an early example in Jefferson’s papers of his envisioning the West as a source of liberty and a theater for reinvention. The specificity of the suggestion in the crisis of 1775 shows that he was thinking hard about the practical implications of rebellion and was open to the most dire of contingencies should things go badly.
He did not want to leave Randolph with angry words. That would defeat the purpose of the letter, which was to use his departing kinsman as a conduit to influential people in London. In closing, Jefferson parted on a warm note: “My collection of classics and of books of parliamentary learning particularly is not so complete as I could wish. As you are going to the land of literature and of books you may be willing to dispose of some of yours here and replace them there in better editions. I should be willing to treat on this head with anybody you may think proper to empower for that purpose.”
The subtext: We may be political opponents, but we are men of culture who share a love of common things. It was a shrewd touch of Jefferson’s. The opening about the violin and the conclusion about the books made the intervening political assessments and assertions appear to be part of a natural conversation.
John Randolph read it as such. “Though we may politically differ in sentiments, yet I see no reason why privately we may not cherish the same esteem for each other which formerly I believe subsisted between us,” Randolph wrote Jefferson on August 31, 1775. “Should any coolness happen between us, I’ll take care not to be the first mover of it. We both of us seem to be steering opposite courses; the success of either lies in the womb of time.”
Jefferson’s letter served its purpose, finding its way from John Randolph to William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, the British secretary of state for the colonies. Jefferson had accomplished what he had set out to achieve: present his views to the imperial powers in London.
Jefferson spent much of September 1775 at Monticello with his family. The interlude was tragic: His daughter Jane, only a year and a half old, died. After her loss his letters home while he was away were marked by an obsessive concern for Patty and for little Patsy, now his only living child.
The demands of his sense of public obligation, however, were great. He left the mountain for the Congress in Philadelphia on Monday, September 25, 1775.
Boarding again on Chestnut Street, Jefferson returned to the work of the Congress, but his mind was on Patty and Monticello. He depended on his wife, confiding in her on political matters. He wrote to her, too, of military affairs. Yet for him there was nothing but silence from home in this Philadelphia autumn. She was ill.
By Tuesday, October 31, 1775, he was even more worried about Patty. “I have set apart nearly one day in every week since I came here to write letters,” he told his friend John Page. “Notwithstanding this I have never received the scrip of a pen from any mortal breathing.”
Eight days later he was more desperate. “I have never received the scrip of a pen from any mortal in Virginia since I left it, nor been able by any enquiries I could make to hear of my family,” he wrote a brother-in-law. “The suspense under which I am is too terrible to be endured. If anything has happened, for God’s sake let me know it.”
Jefferson’s anxiety about his personal world extended to the political one as well. There were reports of gathering British strength—cannons en route from the Tower of London, two thousand troops from Ireland, frigates bound for the middle colonies. One target: Virginia.
And more specifically, Virginia planters. The naval forces, Jefferson said, were coming “at the express and earnest intercessions of Lord Dunmore, and the plan is to lay waste all the plantations of our river sides.”
Little seemed cheering. On Sunday, October 22, 1775, an invitation for Jefferson to dine at Roxborough, the country house of the Philadelphia wine merchant Henry Hill, may have promised some shelter from the storms. It was a congenial company, headed by Peyton Randolph, whom Jefferson adored.
At Roxborough around four o’clock, Peyton Randolph suffered a stroke—Jefferson called it “apoplexy”—and lingered about five hours, dying at the Hills’ at nine o’clock that evening.
For Jefferson, the emblem of a whole world—a world Jefferson had known forever and which he aspired to lead—was dead at an hour of great danger. Peyton Randolph had dominated Virginia from the House of Burgesses to the Raleigh Tavern to St. John’s Church to the Pennsylvania State House. Jefferson always kept Randolph’s example in mind, admiring the blend of conviction and amiability that enabled the man Jefferson called “our most worthy Speaker” to survive and thrive in the arena.
Peyton Randolph was dead, Patty Jefferson was sick, and a daughter had died: Jefferson was beset from seemingly every side. Then, in the middle of the last week of October 1775, at Hampton, near Norfolk, Virginia, the British tried to land armed parties from British vessels. Dunmore was in command of Norfolk, which gave the British a strategic base in a critical point of access. To the north, colonial troops under Benedict Arnold and Richard Montgomery were undertaking expeditions against Canada. And in Virginia, the Virginia Convention, which was governing in the wake of Dunmore’s dissolution of the House of Burgesses, created a Committee of Safety, a civilian body to oversee the state’s military.
All that Jefferson loved was in peril. The eleven months preceding the Declaration of Independence were a contentious time in which nothing was certain in his family except Patty’s ill health and in politics except conflict with overwhelming British force.
In Philadelphia, Jefferson absorbed account after account, written by his most intimate friends, of the depredations of a superior military force against Virginia. “We care not for our towns, and the destruction of our houses would not cost us a sigh,” John Page wrote Jefferson, unconsciously echoing Jefferson’s remark to him five years earlier after the Shadwell fire. “I have long since given up mine as lost.”
Jefferson’s political colleagues in the Pennsylvania State House were suffering the same fears over events in their own states. The human element of Jefferson’s service in Philadelphia is sometimes minimized, with more attention paid to textual investigations of his resonant state papers. Yet the personal and the philosophical were intimately connected: The Jefferson of the summer of 1776 was shaped by the tensions and contests of 1775. What he read of the deteriorating relations with Dunmore and of the bloodshed and fears in Virginia steeled him for the war ahead.
November 7, 1775, is a forgotten date in the popular memory of the American Revolution, but the events of that autumn Tuesday in Virginia had much to do with those that culminated in the passage of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia the next year.
From his shipboard quarters at Norfolk, Dunmore declared martial law and directly challenged white Virginia, ordering that any slave or indentured servant who took up arms against the American Revolutionaries would be granted their freedom. Frightened white Virginians—and sympathetic whites in other colonies—suddenly saw their most fevered visions of slaves turning against masters threatening to become real. The announcement drove a number of those who had been previously lukewarm about independence into the Revolutionary camp.
Jefferson thought instantly of his family. If Dunmore succeeded in inspiring an army of slaves and indentured servants, then Monticello might not be safe. Jefferson made plans for Patty and his family to escape in the event of violence, plans that included his joining them in presumably safe territory. “I have written to Patty a proposition to keep yourselves at a distance from the alarms of Lord Dunmore,” he wrote a brother-in-law in November.
As Jefferson crafted emergency measures for his family, word of Dunmore’s strike swept up and down the eastern coast. In late November, John Page was both defiant and pleading. “For God’s sake endeavor to procure us arms and ammunitions,” Page wrote Jefferson from Virginia. Page feared the British—and he feared “an insurrection of the negroes.”
There was something else, too: the sense that the property of Virginia’s elites would fall into the hands of the British. “Some rascals, all foreigners, are already looking out for places and handsome seats,” Virginia statesman Robert Carter Nicholas wrote Jefferson in late 1775. “No country ever required greater exertions of wisdom than ours does at present,” Nicholas wrote Jefferson on November 25, 1775. “I fear no time is to be lost.”
As the session of the Congress drew to a close, Jefferson was named to a committee “to Ascertain Unfinished Business before Congress.” He found twenty-seven separate matters that required attention, from reports on currency and Indian affairs to the making of salt. A second Jefferson task: service on a panel charged with planning the powers of a proposed committee to govern during the congressional recess.
It was an instructive exercise, for it required Jefferson to analyze the role the Congress had been playing and discern which functions were essential. In a draft dated December 15, 1775, he listed nineteen duties he saw as crucial, ranging from supplying “the Continental forces by sea and land” to gathering “intelligence of the condition and designs of the enemy” to ensuring “the defense and preservation of forts and strong posts and to prevent the enemy from acquiring new holds.” The emphasis on practical military matters was consistent with what had chiefly occupied Jefferson for so long now.
With even his own family in possible danger, he wanted to make it clear that the Americans were ready to exact an eye for an eye. Responding to reports that the American officer Ethan Allen had been captured in the Canadian campaign and was to be “sent to Britain in irons, to be punished for pretended treasons,” Jefferson, in a draft declaration for Congress, said British prisoners would be held accountable for anything that happened to Allen. “We deplore the event which shall oblige us to shed blood for blood, and shall resort to retaliation but as the means of stopping the progress of butchery,” he said—but Americans would do what had to be done.
In the end, though the Congress deferred any decision to George Washington, the threatening draft shows that Jefferson saw the world as it was, not as he would have liked it to be.
Leaving Philadelphia on Thursday, December 28, 1775, he reached Monticello in the middle of January. It was a new year when he rode up the mountain.
There were outward signs of life as usual. He opened a cask of 1770 Madeira and began to think about taking his wife back with him to Philadelphia to be inoculated against smallpox. But the enveloping crisis could not be kept at bay. On Sunday, February 4, 1776, he received a new pamphlet entitled Common Sense. “The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind,” wrote Thomas Paine. Jefferson could not have agreed more.