Considered radical and even unthinkable one year ago, the subject can no longer be ignored.
So far, the war against Britain has been waged in the hope that King George will rescind his punitive actions against the colonists. As of this moment, the Americans are still considered British subjects, despite their rebel status. Many would be happy to remain that way.
A vote for independence changes everything. Any form of colonial allegiance to Britain will cease. No longer will the struggle be about respect—from this day forward, it will be a quest for freedom.
In the mind of George III, this choice has already been made. “The die is now cast,” he told British prime minister Lord North when the rebellion first flared. “The colonists must either submit or triumph.”
But, to many colonists, it is not that simple. There have been British colonies in America for almost two hundred years.1 Americans have a deep emotional bond to Britain that reflects this long history—and in many cases, their own ancestry. To sever that tie would be to turn their backs on the century upon century of English tradition that forms the essence of who the colonists are as a people. Thomas Jefferson himself, whose mother was born in London, traces his ancestry “back in to the early mists of Scottish and English history.”
Thomas Jefferson
The truth is that no one knows what will happen once independence is declared. The colonies have no idea how to govern or tax themselves. Like petulant children, they don’t know where they are going or how they will get there—all they know is that they can no longer tolerate British oppression.
Thus, the great divide. Only seven colonies currently favor independence. New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina are either completely loyal to the Crown or wavering about whether to break with England.
If it is to be seriously pursued, all thirteen must vote for independence. Any division among the colonies will undermine the rebellion.
The path is clear: all thirteen colonies must now consider themselves states.
As Thomas Jefferson watches from his chair, Richard Henry Lee rises to his feet. His left hand is wrapped in a black silk handkerchief, to conceal the absence of four fingers lost in a hunting accident. The words he is about to state are a poorly kept secret, having been drafted for him at the pro-independence Virginia Convention in Williamsburg three weeks ago. He will read them word for word.
Lee is a powerful man, a forty-four-year-old planter and legislator from one of Virginia’s most esteemed families. Descended from generations of Lees in the British Midlands, he feels a strong connection with England. But since arriving in America one century ago, the Lees have established an even greater connection with their new homeland.2
Richard Henry Lee clears his throat. The room grows silent. Thomas Jefferson leans in, the better to hear.
“Resolved,” Lee begins, “that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; that they are absolved from their allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”
* * *
John Adams immediately seconds Lee’s motion. The Assembly Room explodes into angry debate. Thomas Jefferson holds his tongue, allowing windy orators such as Adams and Lee to make the arguments for independence. The great windows on two sides of the room are closed, despite the rising June temperature. This is not an issue for passersby on the gravel walkways outside to overhear.
If he wanted, Jefferson could stand and join the fight. He is an avid reader, devoting himself to absorbing the literature circulating throughout the colonies about the pros and cons of independence—in particular, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published just a few months ago.3 If Jefferson desired to make a statement in favor of independence, he would have a great deal to add to the discussion.
But the Virginian says nothing. Still, throughout the debate, he takes meticulous notes, filling page after page in neat script, recording every idea put forth.
Like Benjamin Franklin, who is absent from the Congress due to an attack of gout that makes it difficult for him to walk, Jefferson has an extremely active mind. His thoughts can flit from politics to the weather to global exploration in an instant. He is a creature of habit who begins each day by rising before the sun, no matter how late he has gone to bed the night before. Breakfast is coffee, fresh bread, and ham. But he does not eat until he soaks his feet in cold water, convinced this is good for his health.
Jefferson then records the morning temperature and wind speed in an ivory-colored notebook he keeps with him at all times. He also records the afternoon temperature at precisely four o’clock each day. Even now, as he sits amid the great cacophony of the independence debate, Jefferson’s pockets are filled with implements to satisfy his curiosity: notebook, thermometer, pencil, compass, and even a pocket-size globe. In spring, Jefferson makes note of the date on which particular flowers bloom. Once autumn comes, he will record the migratory patterns of birds.4
By then, Jefferson hopes to return home to his five-thousand-acre plantation, Monticello. His absence is felt quite keenly now, thanks to a series of tragedies, beginning with the drowning death of his sister Elizabeth two years ago. That was followed by the loss of his seventeen-month-old daughter Jane, who was named for his mother.
Then, just nine weeks ago, Jefferson’s mother, Jane Jefferson, suffered a stroke and passed away within the hour. Though born into privilege, she had lived a hard life, giving birth to ten children and burying her husband when she was just thirty-seven. Jefferson’s father had been a force of nature, an oversize man who surveyed and settled western Virginia, then rose to the rank of colonel in the state militia and served in the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s legislative body. As a young boy, Thomas Jefferson spent many an evening in Peter Jefferson’s study, listening intently as his father taught him about the classics, literature, voyages of discovery, and surveying. Their close relationship inspired a lifelong fascination with learning for young Thomas, who was just fourteen when his father died. Peter Jefferson’s will dictated that Thomas not come into his inheritance until he was twenty-one, and his relationship with his mother deteriorated in those seven years.
Jefferson resented her deeply, believing her to be an angry, violent, domineering woman. Part of the problem was that Jane Jefferson was so fixated on running the family plantation after her husband’s death that she sent her son away to boarding school during the week. Young Thomas took that as rejection.
Throughout his life, he very rarely mentioned his mother, but at one point he observed, “Anger and violence and rage deform the female figure. A turbulent woman disgraces the delicacy of her sex.”
When it came time to choose a wife, then, Jefferson purposely selected a spouse who manifested the opposite behavior. The auburn-haired Martha is a petite beauty known for her gentle nature and her compassion—traits Jane Randolph Jefferson’s son did not often see his mother display.
And yet, her sudden death shattered Thomas.
He was incapacitated for a full month, racked by blinding migraine headaches that left him unable to leave Monticello. These “paroxysms of the most excruciating pain” began “every day at sunrise and never left me until sunset.”
Jefferson’s grief abated when he arrived in Philadelphia, but now other worries confront him. His relationship with Martha is intense and loving, full of wine and music. Friends and colleagues allude knowingly to the frequency of their connubial pleasure, with many a joke about Jefferson’s absences from Congress attributed to his passion for Martha.
She is frail, though, suffering from undiagnosed diabetes. The Jefferson family physician, Dr. George Gilmer, is forced to visit Monticello far too often. Shortly before Jefferson departs for Philadelphia, Martha learns that she is once again pregnant—a condition that has taken a hard toll on her in the past. The weight gain of pregnancy and the high blood sugar brought on by diabetes inc
reases her chance of miscarriage.
Now twenty-seven, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson was married at the age of eighteen and widowed by the time she was twenty. Her first husband, Bathurst Skelton, knew Thomas Jefferson during their time together at the College of William and Mary. He died after a brief illness, leaving Martha to raise their infant son alone. John, as the child was known, died three years later, while she and Thomas Jefferson were courting. Six months later, on New Year’s Day 1772, Martha married Thomas. She became pregnant almost immediately.
Martha Jefferson (or Patty, as her husband has nicknamed her) has pale blue eyes, impeccable manners, an easy laugh, and lily-white skin that she protects from the sun by never venturing outside without a bonnet or scarf. She and Thomas are fond of playing music together, her soprano harmonizing with his tenor as she plays the harpsichord and he the violin. Martha was once the more romantic of the two, but during their time together, his oft-cynical intellectual nature has softened into a deep and abiding passion for life.
Martha and Thomas are third cousins. More unusual is that she is the half sister to six Monticello slaves, thanks to her late father’s dalliances with domestic servant Betty Hemings. The youngest of these is Sally, who will later become an infamous figure in Jefferson’s life, and is now just two years old.5
Precisely thirty-eight weeks and four days after the Jeffersons’ wedding date, their daughter Martha came into the world. She was nicknamed Patsy, to distinguish her from her mother. There is no cure for or protection from diseases such as whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever, and mumps, so of the six children born to Thomas and Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, only this daughter and Mary Jefferson, who will be born in 1778, live to adulthood. The other four babies will all die of childhood illnesses before the age of two. The Jeffersons’ only son will live just seventeen days.
Given how easily illness and infection can take a life, and how much tragedy he and Martha have known in their young lives, Thomas Jefferson is understandably nervous about his wife’s current pregnancy while he works in Philadelphia. She writes him at least once a week, but if that reassuring letter does not arrive on schedule, Jefferson is overcome by anxiety.
As he sits in this increasingly stuffy room, Jefferson has much on his mind. But the best way to avoid morose thoughts is to remain busy.
The congressional debate over independence spills over from Friday to Saturday, through the Sunday recess, and finally into Monday, June 10. All the while, the tall Virginian remains silent, taking page after page of notes. Finally, when it is clear that the delegates need to step back and let the idea breathe, the Congress agrees to take a three-week break from the issue. On July 1, they will revisit the topic of independence once again.
Jefferson is pleased with the decision. “It appearing from the course of these debates that the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland were not matured for falling from the parent stem, but that they were fast advancing to that state, it was most prudent to wait awhile for them, and to postpone the final decision to the first of July,” he observes.
Jefferson’s time as a spectator now comes to an end. On June 11, he is asked to articulate Lee’s resolution in a written document. If the Congress votes for independence on July 1, this “declaration,” as the British refer to public pronouncements of this nature, will explain the decision to the world. John Adams recommends that Jefferson write it.
“What can be your reasons?” a shocked Jefferson asks.
“Reason first,” Adams responds. “You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I do.”
“Well,” Jefferson responds in acceptance, “if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.”
Thus, as Martha Jefferson remains home alone, soon to lose their unborn child to miscarriage, Thomas Jefferson stays in Philadelphia. He sequesters himself in the second-floor rooms of a new brick house on Seventh and Market Streets. His favorite slave, Jupiter, has just gotten married and requested that he be allowed to remain behind at Monticello. Instead, the man who will shave, dress, and serve Jefferson’s meals each day is Robert Hemings, the light-skinned fourteen-year-old offspring of Jefferson’s father-in-law and slave Betty Hemings.
Thomas Jefferson spends the last two weeks of June 1776 putting quill to paper in the stuffy upstairs parlor of his rented lodgings. He sits at a small wooden table draped in a white cloth as he writes. A fireplace is to his left. A grandfather clock across the room chimes the hours.
Atop the table rests Jefferson’s portable mahogany desk. He is right-handed, and thus keeps an inkwell and a set of extra quills to that side of the hinged writing surface. The same task awaits him each morning: to craft a convincing moral and ethical argument in favor of separating from England.
Racked by personal tragedy, and accompanied only by a slave boy, Thomas Jefferson carefully assembles the 1,337 words that will go down in history.
The “Declaration of Independence” is born.6
5
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
JUNE 24, 1776
8:55 A.M.
Benjamin Franklin is suffering.
Limping slightly, the aging diplomat accepts the well wishes of his fellow delegates as he takes his seat at a table reserved for the Pennsylvania delegation. Franklin has been away from Congress for two weeks, dealing with his latest attack of gout, but he has managed to stay busy during the absence. This past weekend, he pored over Thomas Jefferson’s latest draft of the Declaration of Independence, offering comments and suggesting a line or two that might be clarified. Franklin, along with John Adams, has suggested changes throughout the writing process. If all goes well, the plan is to present the declaration to Congress formally this coming Friday.1
Perhaps then, the “Doctor” can truly get some rest. Though he is fitter than his corpulent appearance might indicate, Franklin is seventy years old, and the past few months have been a time of mental and physical hardship unlike any he has known.
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706, the tenth son of an English-born soap maker and his second wife. By age ten, he was put to work helping his father boil soap, cut candlewicks, and fill dipping molds with animal fat.
“I disliked the trade,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography, “and had a strong inclination for the sea, but my father declared against it. However, living near the water, I was much in and about it, learnt early to swim well, and to manage boats—and when in a boat or canoe with other boys, I was commonly allowed to govern, especially in any case of difficulty. Upon other occasions I was generally a leader among the boys, and sometimes led them into scrapes.”
Josiah Franklin, fearful that his headstrong son would indeed run away to sea, noticed Benjamin’s love for reading and apprenticed him to his older brother James, a printer recently returned from London with his own press.
A formal legal contract was required before the relationship could take place. Benjamin Franklin signed the terms of his indenture at the age of eleven, formally binding him to work for his brother until the age of twenty-one. He would not be paid a wage until the final year of his apprenticeship. If he tried to escape, he would be arrested, and even jailed.
This servitude led to the first great relational divide of Benjamin Franklin’s life.
Soon after Ben’s arrival, James founded the first independent newspaper in the colonies, the New England Courant. Young Benjamin begged his brother for the chance to publish an article of his own in the paper. Time and again, James refused. So, posing as the widow “Silence Dogood,” the teenage Benjamin slipped articles penned in her name under James’s door once every two weeks. Not only did the Courant run the “letters,” but the observations of Silence Dogood became enormously popular. The widow’s true identity became the subject of intense curiosity. Men even wrote to the
Courant proposing marriage to Widow Dogood.
After fourteen Silence Dogood letters, Benjamin confessed to his brother that he was the author. James Franklin had long been annoyed and jealous of his younger brother’s charisma and fondness for independent thinking. So, rather than applaud Benjamin’s resourcefulness, he beat him.
“My brother was passionate, and had often beaten me, which I took extremely amiss; and, thinking my apprenticeship very tedious, I was continually wishing for some opportunity of shortening it,” Franklin would later write.
Despite that, Benjamin remained loyal, running the Courant on his own when James was arrested that same year for printing articles deemed offensive to Boston’s religious community. But once again, instead of thanking his brother for keeping the business up and running, and printing articles in James’s defense, James continued to punish his younger brother with a beating.
Fed up, Franklin escaped.
“I sold some of my books to raise a little money,” Franklin would later write of the voyage by ship that took him from Boston, “and as we had a fair wind, in three days I found myself in New York, near three hundred miles from home, a boy of but seventeen … with very little money in my pocket.”
Escape brought independence, but Franklin never forgot the beatings that made him run. Writing of James, he would later note, “I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life.”
Franklin would write those prophetic words in 1757, at the age of fifty-one, almost twenty years before King George and Parliament bullied America into war.
* * *
Overcoming the beatings of the brutal James Franklin, young Benjamin found the inspiration to live a life of independence, unrestricted by the standard expectations that so often prove the downfall of lesser men.
In 1730, at the age of twenty-four, Benjamin Franklin became a master printer in his own right. In that same year, now living in Philadelphia, he entered into a common-law marriage with the plain and industrious Deborah Read. And whether coincidence or not, this arrangement allowed him to evade formal indictment for the crimes of “bastardy” and “fornication”—which carried a fine of ten pounds and, in some cases, a public whipping.
Killing England Page 6