Madison, schooled at Princeton where he was one of only a handful of Virginians, identified as easily with his northern peers as with his southern. Yet he evidenced no greater discomfort with slavery than Jefferson did. The “junior” James Madison was a dutiful son whose long-lived father bore chief responsibility for the Montpelier plantation. Madison acquiesced to the slavery system his father administered. His letters home show that he had no interest in questioning the man who sent him funds and provided him every opportunity for personal and intellectual growth.
Jefferson, on the other hand, came into his full patrimony with the death of his mother in the spring of 1776. His father, Peter, had died in 1757, when Thomas was only fourteen. Sometime afterward he spied the nearby mountaintop and resolved that he would design a classical villa and place it there. He began to level the ground in 1768 or 1769 and moved there permanently in 1770, the same year that he began courting the young widow Martha (Patty) Wayles Skelton. As war approached, Jefferson continued to direct his slaves to bake bricks on the site and build his splendid Monticello. His father had left him at least 7,500 acres and perhaps fifty slaves; in 1773, upon the death of his father-in-law, John Wayles, a ready participant in the transatlantic slave trade, Jefferson inherited 135 more slaves and, with them, crippling debts to English bankers. It was infinitely harder for Jefferson than for Madison to separate his fortunes from land worked by slaves.41
“Adventurers”
To understand what Madison and Jefferson represented, we need to better understand who they represented. The circle they moved in contained a good number of privileged and determined men, planters and lawyers steeped in Enlightenment doctrine. We see them today in contradictory roles: self-controlled letter writers with strength of will who, as heavy borrowers, remained prisoners of a slave economy.
As noted, the sprawling Virginia economy centered on the production of tobacco. Because that crop destroyed soil, the lure of western lands—rich and fertile Indian lands—was irresistible. Nearly all the leaders of Revolutionary Virginia were invested in one or more western land companies. Peyton Randolph, first president of the Continental Congress, was among the earliest. George Washington and his neighbor George Mason were principal backers of the Ohio Company, which laid claim to 200,000 acres. Richard Henry Lee lobbied the British ministry for a grant of comparable size to promote his Mississippi Company. Both Jefferson and Patrick Henry lent their names to a petition directed to the Governor’s Council in 1769, requesting 45,000 acres along the Ohio River.
The speculators from the verdant hills and fertile valleys of Virginia’s river-fed Piedmont section deserve our special consideration. Longtime Jefferson family friend and Albemarle neighbor Dr. Thomas Walker was the lead player in the Loyal Land Company over two decades leading to the Revolution. The Loyal Company had an interest in nearly a million acres, primarily in what would become Kentucky. James Madison, Sr., known as Colonel Madison, was a part of this enterprise, and so was Thomas Jefferson’s father, who traveled almost as widely as Dr. Walker and whose pioneering map of Virginia hangs at Monticello today. When Peter Jefferson died, his shares in the Loyal Company were divided among his eight surviving children, and Walker was named the guardian of his son. In the late 1760s, Edmund Pendleton became an outspoken advocate for the Loyal Company, when he contested the claims of a rival company in Pennsylvania and lobbied the British government for titles to this desirable territory.
Here was a direct link between the fathers of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. In one respect, then, the “glue” that held their interests together was Edmund Pendleton. And until he became their enemy, Lord Dunmore was another eager participant in the Loyal Company investment plan. Powerful Virginians were all somehow connected. So it stands to reason that Pendleton’s eagerness to declare Virginia independent in May 1776, and to instruct its delegates in the Continental Congress to vote for national independence, was related to the landed gentry’s urge for western land. If more evidence is needed of the planters’ expansionist ambitions, note that 1776 Virginia’s claim to the territory of Kentucky was finally recognized.42
These tensions existed because the Proclamation of 1763, issued by the British Parliament, expressly prohibited western migration. London did not wish to be saddled with costly Indian wars merely to support the colonists’ desire to spread out. True, American speculators were frustrated by the Proclamation line, but legal restrictions actually did nothing to dissuade all species of squatters from moving into Indian Territory.
Their appetite for land and their hatred for Indians made war inevitable. In 1774, using Indian attacks as an excuse for a full-scale invasion, Lord Dunmore waged war against the Shawnee people of the Ohio Valley. The defeated Indians ceded their land, and Virginians secured through conquest what had been denied through treaties. It was the last action Dunmore authorized (ignoring London’s opposition) before giving up on cooperation with the colonists.
Not every Virginian turned a blind eye. As James Madison, Jr., read of these events, he expressed the uncommon view that a war against the Indians had been provoked by Dunmore and others out of self-interest. He did not, however, relate his own father’s involvement in western speculation to the seizure of Indian land. Writing to Bradford, Madison conventionally blamed the “unhappy condition of our Frontiers” on the “cruelty of the savages,” before acknowledging that the Indians had been provoked and their “mischiefs … grossly magnified & misrepresented” to rationalize expansion.43
Though by our standards he displayed little empathy toward Indians, Madison did send Bradford what he called a “specimen of Indian Eloquence and mistaken valour.” It was “The Speech of Logan a Shawanese Chief, to Lord Dunmore.” Logan was an Ohio Valley Mingo with extremely friendly ties to white settlers—he had taken a white man’s name in tribute to a Pennsylvania friend. He accused a Maryland militiaman named Michael Cresap of having murdered the women and children in his family. In his speech, Logan admitted to performing acts of bloodshed to avenge his loved ones’ deaths. The speech evoked an image, already familiar to white readers, of the honorable Indian warrior, careless of his own fate, seeking a just retribution and nothing more. “There runs not a drop of my blood in the Veins of any human creature,” the Mingo explained, posing and answering a single question: “Who is there to mourn for Logan? No one.”44
Bradford was so taken by Logan’s sublime speech that he saw to its publication in his father’s newspaper. Jefferson would read the same lamentation in the Virginia Gazette and never forgot it. Yet Madison conveyed a mixed message when he offered only faint praise for Logan’s “mistaken valour.”
Madison did not elaborate on the Indian problem to the extent that Jefferson did. Like many of the delegates in Congress, Jefferson believed that the British in Canada would be able to “excite” more tribes to ally with them against the rebellious Americans. His words to John Page reveal a deep anger as well as anxiety: “Nothing will reduce those [Indian] wretches so soon as pushing war into the heart of their country. But I would not stop there. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them remained on this side of the Misisippi.” He could scarcely see any point in trying to sway Indians to abandon their alliance with the British, for they could only be, he said, “a useless, expensive, ungovernable ally.”
This was why the Quebec Act, passed by Parliament in 1774, did more than simply thwart the interests of land speculators. It declared that the border separating Virginia’s claims from Canada was to be drawn at the Ohio River. Since the early seventeenth century, based on their original charter, Virginians had held that there was, in effect, no legal barrier to their land claims to the west—the province extended as far west as their imaginations could encompass and their surveyors could range. And so, seen together, Dunmore’s willingness to turn slaves against their masters and Parliament’s decision to redraw borders led Virginians to see an exponential threat: they were not safe anywhere. The British could easily and unexpectedly
send armed parties of Indians across frontiers, while continuing to appeal to the Virginia-born underclass, white and black. From the perspective of the Virginia gentry, 1776 was the culmination of years of intimidation.45
Jefferson, like Madison, had little use for real Indians. He was pleased, however, to romanticize the North American continent in ways that suited the ambitions of the upwardly mobile Virginians of his generation. Those who inhabited the lands of Virginia, exclusive of Indians, were, for Jefferson, the descendants of hardy English adventurers. They were the heroes of a fantasy frontier, justifying Anglo-American claims to autonomy, to self-determination. In A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson advertised himself as a discoverer of historical meanings.
As a strategic document, the Summary View was a forerunner to the Declaration of Independence, a kind of “test” to determine how his patriot colleagues, as well as the king and Parliament, might react to an assertive picture of American power, Virginia-led. Here, as in his Declaration, Jefferson’s argument was dazzlingly drawn, celebrating “the lives, the labors and the fortunes of individual adventurers,” who provided a rationale for the right of conquest. Indians commuted from place to place and used the land in the manner of primitive tribes. Lacking the skill of enterprising white adventurers, they could be supplanted for the sake of productivity and progress.46
Jefferson relied on a straightforward logic. Early British settlers freely migrated to America, exercising their natural right to explore for “new habitations.” Without any help from the British government, “America was conquered, and her settlements made, and firmly established, at the expense of individuals.” Emphatically he added: “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have the right to hold.” He criticized the British government for discouraging westward settlement, and he rejected what he called the “fictitious principle that all lands belong originally to the king.” America was blood-soaked soil, a conquered land, whose conquerors retained the incontrovertible right of ownership. That right superseded their former ties to Britain.47
For Jefferson the legal philosopher, British Americans had created for themselves a parallel country to their distant motherland. England’s offspring were, in effect, a new race of people—a new lineage, a new bloodline—possessing a real but somewhat thinned blood connection to their transatlantic kinsmen. In reasoning thus, Jefferson transformed the entire continent into a frontier nation formed by a righteous, independent, conquering people—more than a century before the historian Frederick Jackson Turner espoused his famous “frontier thesis,” associating Americans’ distinctiveness in the world with their desire to conquer frontier.
Jefferson was not the only Virginian to glamorize the frontier for purposes of political argument. His ode to “adventurers” was matched by Madison’s evocation of the rifleman, an American original who left his permanent imprint on the land. Writing to his friend Bradford in July 1775, Madison sang the praises of the Virginia sharpshooter, reasoning that the “strength of this Colony will lie chiefly in the rifle-men of the Upland Counties, of whom we shall have great numbers.” Who were these heroes? “Brave hearty men,” said Madison, men who had rallied against Dunmore and would continue to make their mark on the land. They were known for their rustic appearance, wearing hunting shirts and carrying a tomahawk or scalping knife in their belts. They could repeatedly hit a handheld target at 250 yards. These men were hardly figments of Madison’s imagination: he had seen them up close while he drilled with the Orange County militia, honing his own shooting skills.48
We have already seen the name of one such frontiersman, the Maryland militia officer Michael Cresap, blamed for the deaths of Indian women and children; his reputed acts had led to the heartrending speech of the Mingo Logan. Incredibly, the same Michael Cresap was heralded in 1775 as a symbol of the rifleman’s virtues. Numerous newspapers recounted his exploits. This transformation from murderer to war hero occurred for reasons of patriotism: as news of the battles of Lexington and Concord reached the Ohio frontier, Cresap had organized his own company of riflemen. They attracted attention as they marched all the way to Massachusetts to join the Continental Army, staging shooting exhibitions, even war dances, en route. One paper reported that the riflemen were stripped “naked to the waist and painted like savages.” The traveling rifleman-adventurer was an early version of the “Wild West show.”49
At a time when the British ministry was prepared to use slaves and frontier Indians to carry out acts of violence, Cresap’s raw display of masculinity set the new American militiaman apart. Was he the answer to British arrogance? That was the idea. The proud rifleman who appealed to his fellow colonists’ pride could be made to symbolize the idea of liberty.
The frontier fighter had great resonance because Americans were otherwise being disparaged. Lord North had announced in Parliament that the mere presence of British redcoats would at once reduce the “cowardly sons of America” to an “unreserved submission.” A Pennsylvania paper reported that the colonists had been described in England as “rank dunghill cowards.” He would never fire a shot in anger, yet Thomas Jefferson wrote to his Albemarle friend George Gilmer: “As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men.”50
Though they had yet to meet, Madison and Jefferson shared a high opinion of the heroic, arms-bearing Virginian. Around the time of independence, Jefferson was moved to incorporate such a figure into the design of Virginia’s state seal. On one side of the escutcheon, or heraldic shield, is the erect figure of a “Virginia rifle man of the present times completely accoutred”; on the other side of the shield stands a seventeenth-century adventurer, dressed in the Elizabethan style. Pierre Eugène Du Simitière, a Swiss illustrator living in Philadelphia, was engaged to produce the design. The penciled description is in Du Simitière’s hand, but it reads as if Jefferson had written it.
More than the Declaration of Independence was under consideration in Congress on July 4, 1776. That day Jefferson was appointed to another committee, teamed again with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. They were to devise a Great Seal for the new republic. It was probably Jefferson, thinking of his native state, who recommended the frontiersman for the national device, this time describing him as “an American soldier completely accoutred in his hunting shirt and trousers, with his tomahawk, powder horn, pouch, &c.” Once again Du Simitière was to be responsible for the design.
When Congress finally adopted the Great Seal of the United States ten years later, the American bald eagle was substituted for the soldier. The only part of the seal Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson conceived that remained in 1786 was the unifying motto in Latin: E Pluribus Unum or “Out of many, one.” By then the nation was at peace, and the winged predator understood to symbolize a burgeoning empire.51
“A Declaration of Rights”
Lord Dunmore was strenuously urging an invasion of Virginia in the spring of 1776, but his superiors were bent on a middle colonies strategy, eyeing New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. This did not alter to any great degree the Virginians’ campaign of readiness. The state’s Committee of Safety removed Patrick Henry, who had no military training or experience, from his role as commander in chief, while allowing him to retain the rank of colonel. Hearing of his demotion, Henry did not think twice before resigning. He blamed Pendleton and never forgot the slight.
Down but not out, the radical retained his base of support. He had inspired younger members of the Virginia gentry with his stirring speeches, and he appealed to the rank and file as well. After the insult to their favorite, many of these raw recruits suddenly questioned whether they should continue in the militia. Even if Henry’s military credentials were questionable, the crisis in morale was real. Revolutionary Virginia needed him.52
None of this deterred Pendleton, who had a good sense of timing as well as judgment. When the Virginia Convention met for the third time, in May 1776, he
capitalized on the prevailing mood and introduced a dramatic resolution calling for the Continental Congress to declare national independence. The vote in Williamsburg was unanimous, and though it was not an official statement of Virginia’s independence, it was just that—unambiguous—a de facto denunciation of any political dependency. Britain’s flag was pulled down from the top of the capitol, and the flag of Washington’s fledgling army rose in its place.53
At Pendleton’s direction, committees formed for the purpose of establishing a new Virginia government. Madison was assigned to the most significant one, where he was teamed with the state’s ablest and most outspoken: the brilliant, testy, and intensely private George Mason; the crusading, charismatic Patrick Henry; and a promising twenty-one-year-old, Edmund Randolph, the amiable son of the colony’s most prominent attorney, a Loyalist who had abandoned Virginia for England. Edmund was, no less significantly, nephew of the late Peyton Randolph, the only Virginian of Pendleton’s generation whose stature can be said to have exceeded his. In the decades to follow, Randolph would be virtually everywhere Madison and Jefferson were, always holding key posts in the heat of political battle alongside his better-remembered Virginia associates.
Complications have to be expected in the midst of a revolution. The gouty George Mason, a legal scholar who was never actually licensed to practice, lost his wife of twenty-three years in 1773 and was so devastated that he expected to depart public life. George Washington, his longtime Potomac neighbor, was among those routinely urging him to reconsider. The irrepressible Henry needed no such prodding. Edmund Randolph, full of impatient energy and eager to contribute to the cause, was intent on proving how far he stood from his father’s Tory principles. He had already done a brief stint in the Continental Army by the spring of 1776, functioning as an aide at Washington’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, headquarters. To obtain that posting, he secured letters of recommendation from both Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. Madison and Randolph had much in common: as sons of the Virginia elite, they were expected to come forward and lead—in government, if not in the army.
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