Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (10 page)

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.

I
n 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.

SEVEN

THERE IS NO PEACE

Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.

—K
ING
G
EORGE
III, on the American colonies

A
T
M
ONTICELLO
THE
PEACH
TREES
were blossoming. It was early March 1775, and Jefferson was preparing to leave for Richmond to attend the Virginia Convention, a meeting of revolutionary leaders to be held at St. John's, a hilltop wooden Anglican church. The building was the largest structure in Richmond, and every bit of space was needed: Organizers expected one hundred or so delegates to make their way to St. John's through the springtime mud. The president of the convention sat behind the communion rail. Delegates filled the pews, and eager spectators took up the remaining seating. The overflow from the daily crowds stood outside the open windows in the walled churchyard, listening.

The work of the convention was intense, Jefferson's range of tasks wide. Virginia's revolutionary leaders had to make decisions about military preparations, taxes, and trade—formulating policy in the expectation of war while British officials in the colony were themselves taking a stronger stand against Jefferson and his colleagues.

John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, the tough-minded, Scottish-born royal governor who had succeeded Botetourt, had forbidden Virginians to import arms and powder from Britain. London had also ordered the seizure of any munitions that arrived in America, stipulating that the royal representatives were to prevent elections to the Second Continental Congress. Neither side showed any inclination to back down.

At St. John's, Jefferson threw himself into whatever came his way. He was hardheaded, not theoretical. He believed the hour called for action, not rhetoric.

On March 23, 1775—a springtime Thursday warm enough for the windows of the church to be left open—Patrick Henry called on Virginia to move its militia “into a posture of defense.” Standing in pew 47 in the eastern aisle of the nave of the church, Henry spoke brilliantly. “Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace—but there is no peace,” Henry said. “The war is actually begun!” In a transporting climax, Henry cried: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me—give me liberty, or give me death!”

To Jefferson, Henry was essentially a magician. “His eloquence was peculiar; if indeed it should be called eloquence, for it was impressive and sublime beyond what can be imagined,” Jefferson later said. “Although it was difficult, when he had spoken, to tell what he had said, yet while he was speaking, it always seemed directly to the point.”

Afterward it fell to a committee that included Jefferson to work out the actual plans for colonial defense. The committee resolved:

That each troop of horse consist of thirty exclusive of officers: that every horseman be provided with a good horse, bridle, saddle with pistols and holsters, a carbine or other short firelock with a bucket, a cutting sword or tomahawk, one pound of gunpowder and four pound of ball at the least, and use the utmost diligence in training and accustoming his horse to stand the discharge of firearms, and in making himself acquainted with the military exercise for cavalry.

There were possible fissures within the colonies. New York had reportedly voted against electing representatives to the Second Continental Congress scheduled for May. Did that decision, Jefferson asked, mean New York had “deserted the Union”?

Weapons, militiamen, unity: In Richmond, Jefferson was at work in the cause of defense. Away from his committee duties and the action on the floor, he tried to enjoy himself in Richmond, drinking at Mrs. Younghusband's tavern, dining at Gunn's rival establishment, and buying book muslin for his library from Mrs. Ogilvie. The next political act, however, was already scheduled. On Monday, March 27, 1775, Jefferson was elected as a deputy to the Second Continental Congress.

The first Congress had been called in the wake of the Boston Port Act and the other so-called Coercive Acts. Gathering from September to October 1774—shortly after Jefferson wrote the
Summary View,
then fell ill—the Congress had issued a list of grievances against the British government, called for a continued boycott of British goods (as well as enforcement of that boycott), and agreed to meet again if necessary.

And necessary it was. The threat of war seemed to grow in the autumn of 1774. In New England, British troops took control of powder magazines and cannons to secure them from colonial militias and asked London for more troops in expectation that bloodshed was at hand. London's response to this request, and to the First Continental Congress, was to offer the British military commander in North America, General Thomas Gage, a clear instruction: “Force,” the government advised Gage, “should be repelled by force.”

There was to be no negotiation. There was to be war. The Second Continental Congress was therefore to take on an even more daunting task than the first: the management of an aspiring nation undertaking an armed revolution.

I
n Richmond, Jefferson's committee's resolution on preparing the militia noted that a failure to prepare militarily would leave Virginia in “evident danger … in case of invasion or insurrection.” Both possibilities—invasion from without or insurrection from within—felt more likely after the third week of April 1775.

In Massachusetts, British troops and American colonists clashed at Lexington and Concord on Wednesday, April 19, 1775. By the end of the day, after gunfire along a shifting sixteen-mile front, there were 273 British and 95 American casualties. The exact sequence of the battle is unclear, but the meaning of the bloodshed was unmistakable. As Jefferson wrote after hearing the reports, any “last hopes of reconciliation” were now gone. “A frenzy of revenge,” he added, “seems to have seized all ranks of people.”

The painter John Singleton Copley wrote his half brother: “The flame of civil war is now broke out in America, and I have not the least doubt it will rage with a violence equal to what it has ever done in any other country at any time.”

I
n Virginia, elite whites were contending with slave violence both rumored and real and with the seizure, by Lord Dunmore, of the supplies of gunpowder at Williamsburg. In the middle of April in Chesterfield County, not far from Albemarle, whites were “alarmed for an insurrection of the slaves.” In Northumberland County two slaves set fire to a militia officer's house “with a parcel of straw fixed to the end of a pole.” Dunmore decided that the enemy of his enemy was his friend—that the slaves whom the whites often feared were Britain's natural allies in Virginia.

As Thursday, April 20, 1775, became Friday, April 21, royal marines removed fifteen half barrels of gunpowder from the public magazine at Williamsburg to the HMS
Magdalene,
effectively disarming the Virginians. A furious crowd of colonists gathered outside the Governor's Palace, ready for anything.

At the Palace, Dunmore announced that he was simply securing the powder in the event of a slave insurrection, but the royal governor barely concealed his fury and contempt, later calling the crowd “one of the highest insults, that could be offered to the authority of his majesty's government.” Dunmore was especially angry about the presence of militia in Williamsburg, noting that the colonists were treating with him “under the muskets of their independent company which they left only at a little distance from my house.” Two days later Dunmore arrested two of the company's leaders. It was then that he truly struck.

On Saturday, April 22, 1775, Dunmore announced that “by the living God” he would “declare freedom to the slaves, and reduce the city of Williamsburg to ashes” should there be further “injury or insult” to the royal establishment.

Reaction was swift and predictable. From Pennsylvania, a colonist wrote a friend overseas: “Hell itself could not have vomited anything more black than his design of emancipating our slaves.” Colonists with slaveholding sympathies either began or accelerated their preparations for war, Jefferson among them.

J
efferson was obsessed with politics of the continental crisis. In a Sunday, May 7, 1775, letter to his old teacher William Small in England, Jefferson interrupted himself at one point to say: “But for God's sake where am I got to? Forever absorbed in the distresses of my country I cannot for three sentences keep clear of its political struggles.”

Yet he could not help himself. “Within this week,” he wrote to Small, “we have received the unhappy news of an action of considerable magnitude between the king's troops and our brethren of Boston.” The fact that blood was shed under such circumstances, Jefferson said, seemed to doom prospects for a peaceful resolution. (Small died in Birmingham, England, before Jefferson's letter reached him.)

Dunmore's seizure of the gunpowder and his statements about the slaves inflamed matters in Jefferson's immediate world. In Albemarle County, the militia declared they wanted “to demand satisfaction of Dunmore for the powder, and his threatening to fix his standard and call over the Negroes.”

To Jefferson, Dunmore was the particular manifestation of a universal truth. The British were unbending, apparently uninterested in even affecting an air of respect toward the Americans. The bolder the Americans grew, the surlier the British seemed. Ever sensitive to slights and conscious of the alchemy of human relationships in which respect, rivalry, affection, and deference were bound together in varying and changing proportions, Jefferson was able to detect such shifts in the political realm as well as in his personal one.

He offered an astute analysis of the British approach: “A little knowledge of human nature and attention to its ordinary workings might have foreseen that the spirits of the people here were in a state in which they were more likely to be provoked than frightened by haughty deportment.”

J
efferson's political education continued during a spirited session when the House of Burgesses met in Williamsburg in June 1775. While the House considered conciliatory proposals from London, three Virginia colonists trying to break into the powder magazine were wounded by a shotgun rigged to fire if the magazine were tampered with. Dunmore felt the situation so precarious—and his security so tenuous—that he and his family left Williamsburg, seeking refuge aboard the HMS
Fowey
.

Around Saturday, June 10, 1775, Jefferson replied to London's conciliatory proposal on behalf of Virginia. Despite the passions of the hour—a fleeing royal governor, skirmishes over gunpowder, and the fear of slave rebellion—Jefferson took a measured tone, saying that the Virginians had “examined it minutely; we viewed it in every point of light in which we were able to place it; and with pain and disappointment we must ultimately declare it only changes the form of oppression, without lightening its burthen.”

Others in Virginia were not so certain. As Jefferson recalled it, Robert Carter Nicholas and James Mercer, a lawyer from Stafford County, were more open to talk of reconciliation with London than was either Jefferson or, more important, Peyton Randolph, who believed Virginia should take a stronger revolutionary stance.

In a sign of his standing with Peyton Randolph, Jefferson was asked to draft the House's response, for Randolph “feared that Mr. Nicholas, whose mind was not yet up to the mark of the times, would undertake the answer.” With Jefferson's text as the starting point, Randolph was able to exert a greater level of control than if Nicholas had been the initial author.

It was still a contentious argument. Even after the Boston Tea Party, even after Lexington and Concord, even after Dunmore and the Gunpowder Affair and the talk of arming slaves, a permanent separation from Great Britain was a matter of intense debate for Jefferson and his contemporaries.

Divided opinion was a recurring fact of life for Jefferson in these years of political formation. He came of age amid conflict, not certitude. To him statecraft was always a struggle between passionately held points of view. Smooth marches of like minds to glorious conclusions may have been the stuff of his dreams, but reality was far different—and it was reality that concerned him most.

Randolph shepherded Jefferson's draft through the assembly. There were, Jefferson said, “long and doubtful scruples from Mr. Nicholas and James Mercer, and a dash of cold water on it here and there, enfeebling it somewhat,” but it finally passed. For Jefferson and Randolph the key point was unity among the colonies.

Such unity was on Jefferson's mind, for he was to take his place on the national stage at last. He left Williamsburg for the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on Sunday, June 11, 1775. A larger world beckoned.