Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  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 listene
rs) 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.

  —KING GEORGE III, on the American colonies

  AT MONTICELLO 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.

  In 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.”

  In 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.