In divorcing their king, Americans had to replace their shadow state governments with legitimate assemblies and new state constitutions. They could now proceed to make alliances with other nations on equal terms. As the stand-in for a king who had abandoned his people, the Continental Congress symbolized a new voluntary covenant, which meant that the Declaration of Independence was simultaneously a public disavowal and a new exchange of vows. When the signatories of the Declaration agreed to “pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” they brought a formal end to the “unfeeling” union by declaring an oath to a new, “feeling” one.71
“Consanguinity”
Virginia was on Jefferson’s mind as much as the “united States of America” when he composed the Declaration of Independence.72 The most outstanding proof is his awkward-sounding section on slavery. In describing the slave trade as “piratical warfare” engineered by George III, he was quoting from a letter Pendleton had written to him seven months earlier concerning Dunmore’s so-called slave scheme. More to the point, in damning George III for the insidious crime of perpetuating the slave trade (asking how “the Christian king of Great Britain” could have “determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold”), Jefferson was principally condemning Lord Dunmore. The king stood as proxy for Virginia’s last royal governor, who continued to represent the most immediate threat to Virginia’s political integrity.
According to Jefferson’s rendering of the slave trade, the British kidnapped men from Africa and brought them to America; at this late date they had opted to recruit them for their own convenient, ad hoc use. “He”—the king, Jefferson writes, but he means Dunmore—“is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them [“obtrude” meant “to insert by force”]: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.” This was to turn justice on its head.
The Declaration of Independence had to have unanimous support to be effective, and the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia refused to accept any antislavery language in its text. Thus, Congress took Jefferson’s carefully wrought protest against an “execrable commerce” in slaves and deleted it in its entirety.
To be clear, it was not owing to moral outrage, but for purely economic reasons that Virginians had been calling for an end to the slave trade since the 1750s. Jefferson’s Declaration referred to slavery as a “cruel war against human nature,” an assault on “a distant people who never offended.” This was tragedy, but even at this stage, the Virginia slave owner stopped short of calling for emancipation for the enslaved, whose value as property stood to increase with the abolition of the international slave trade. Owners of property who joined the Revolutionary cause had their rights and interests upheld; despite the Somerset ruling, unfree human beings, as property, had no claim to the pursuit of happiness. Therefore Jefferson was using the occasion of his writing the Declaration merely to absolve his “country” of Virginia of complicity in the promotion of slavery.73
Race mattered in another crucial way: It was an integral part of the mid-eighteenth-century view of nationhood. Dunmore had sparked a race war, and Hessian mercenaries had further cut the cords of an imagined racial kinship that bound Great Britain to her colonies. Transatlantic blood ties, diluted over time, reminded the Revolutionaries of a “consanguinity” that had, in some very significant way, been abandoned. Consanguinity united a people and preserved social harmony. Its loss was catastrophic. Near the end of the text of the final Declaration, just before it voted to “acquiesce in the necessity [of] separation,” Congress claimed that America’s “British brethren” were “deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.” Because of the dissolution of blood ties, England was now a foreign country.
Jefferson had taken Congress in this direction. He simply could not let go of the theory of bloodlines that he had previously incorporated into the steadfast Summary View. Repeating his perspective on the history of settlement, he reinserted in his original rough draft of the Declaration the structure of America’s unique genealogy: “We have reminded [the British] of the circumstances of our emigration & settlement, … that these were effected at the expense of our own blood & treasure, unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain.” Land was marked by the investment of blood.74
It all fit with the Virginians’ grand vision of a frontier cleared of Indians. The British had deliberately left white settlers vulnerable to “the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes & conditions of existence,” according to Jefferson’s draft. In this instance, members of the Continental Congress retained Jefferson’s language, word for word, proving that they were as sensitive to Virginia’s grievance about its land companies’ access to western ground as they were responsive to the Deep South’s unholy desire to protect the institution of slavery. There was Indian blood yet to spill, because land hunger entailed a certain amount of violence. But Virginians were used to that.
In more than trivial ways, then, the rest of America was following Virginia’s lead when, on July 4, 1776, the people of the former British colonies united.
“Virginia Alone Stands Up”
In the summer of 1776 it was called variously “the Declaration of Independency,” “the Declaration for Independency,” “Declaration of Independence of the United Colonies,” and “the Congress’s Declaration of the Independence of the United States of America”—sometimes several variants were used in a single newspaper article.75 All such wordings, however, were accompanied by some form of mass congratulation, to wit: The Declaration “was everywhere received with the utmost Demonstrations of Joy.” Yet as Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress, observed in the Pennsylvania Packet (by invocation of a biblical metaphor) one week before Congress acted: “Should an immediate declaration of Independence take place, we shall only have crossed the Red Sea of our difficulties—A wilderness will still be before us.”76
Had a new era truly dawned? When word of the Declaration reached Manhattan, which was under impending threat of a British invasion, the New-York Journal termed its appearance “a grand Aera in the history of the American states” and “an event which will doubtless be celebrated through a long succession of future ages.” In Williamsburg, the Declaration was printed in the newspaper on July 20 and “proclaimed” in public five days later; the news was received in Richmond with “universal shouts of joy,” as a thousand citizens gathered for an evening celebration at which toasts were drunk—“the whole conducted with the utmost decorum,” the editor found it necessary to add.77
While Massachusetts bore the brunt of the initial British onslaught, and New York would next suffer, Virginia’s preeminent place in the Revolution seemed secure. As yet unaware of what had just taken place in Philadelphia, a writer in the Freeman’s Journal of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, spoke to the colonies at large on July 6: “Brothers, The grand, the alarming, tho’ necessary crisis, is at length arrived, for a publick declaration of independency … Virginia alone stands up, & gives the great example, with positive orders to their delegates to vote for independency at all events.” This New Englander was awed by Virginia’s longtime role in the union of states: “She has ever been the foremost in our publick measures, and the wisdom of her councils acknowledged by all parties.” Would union preserve such memories? Would the exigencies of war remove jealousies, or ultimately sharpen them?78
The Virginia gentry was composed of men of power and influence who relished union but prized their own culture above all else. As a distinctive group of people, they cared about marriage and bloodlines and legitimacy, carrying names from one generation to the next and recording their genealogies as they amassed fortunes in land. They moralized generally, paying close attention to the drin
king and gambling habits that could and did squander inheritances, ruin marriages, and sink reputations. With Dunmore’s challenge in the foreground of their thoughts, it is no accident that both the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence repeat the phrase “safety and security” in the context of pursuing happiness.79
Not knowing what his Declaration would soon come to mean, or how he would personally benefit from his association with it, Thomas Jefferson sought state honors more than national position. Though his mind was highly regarded by his colleagues and his writing seriously valued, that was all the public posturing he wished to do. James Madison, Jr., was more comfortable speaking up in a deliberative body, and he too was seeing his long political career begin momentously. These two Virginians maintained their independent connections to Edmund Pendleton, Patrick Henry, Edmund Randolph, and other prominent Virginians. But they were not yet interacting with each other directly.
“Your Original Declaration of Independance”
Jefferson possessed a contagious quality of mind. He knew how to write for effect. When Congress met in general session, he scarcely spoke, but he studied the temper of his colleagues and calibrated the wit of those who were on the receiving end of his letters. His economy of words and their sonorous appeal was impressive. From the Declaration alone we can see how he drew attention to himself.
But he was not prepared for either editors or critics. It is hard to say whether the intercession of his congressional colleagues made the Declaration of Independence a stronger or a weaker document.80 Jefferson certainly had an opinion. Writing to Will Fleming, he distinguished what he had written from what Congress adopted. He let Edmund Pendleton know too, giving the most important of the Virginians his original draft so that it might be placed beside the final form and compared. “I am also obliged by your Original Declaration of Independance,” Pendleton cooed. “Your brethren have … altered it much for the worse.” He was telling Jefferson just what Jefferson wanted to hear.81
Theirs was a typographical culture, one that reveled in great oratory but venerated the written and published word. The blank page was the medium most congenial to Jefferson’s talent; but Patrick Henry was the spark that lit the fire that was the Revolution in Virginia. It was his stirring speeches that caused jaws to drop. It was he who played Pied Piper to the common men of the colony, as they marched on the royal governor’s mansion. Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” echoed in 1775. A call to sacrifice was something Thomas Jefferson could never quite pull off. Historian Carl L. Becker argued mischievously many years ago that one could hardly picture Jefferson uttering the seven conspicuous words Henry did; instead, it would have been: “Manly spirit bids us choose to die freemen rather than to live as slaves.” Credible, but not inspirational. On July 6, 1776, Patrick Henry became Virginia’s first elected governor. When Jefferson succeeded him three years later, and Virginia came under direct attack by British forces, it was inevitable that the two would be compared.82
Was Jefferson’s prose evidence of genius? Was Patrick Henry’s forensic skill evidence of genius? We know that they became rivals, and that Jefferson, who belittled Henry’s intellect, resented his pretensions. He would eventually find Madison siding with him in wishing Henry dead. But before we arrive at that toxic moment, a question no one has asked before needs to be spoken: As future-directed politicians, were they both more fascinating than they were perceptive? Jefferson was bewilderingly beautiful on the page; Henry was bewilderingly beautiful before the bar. But bewilderment remains. Both of them were carried away by language.
Another question: Why did Jefferson need Madison to temper his effusions? Though no less radical in the substance of his political doctrine, Madison already comes across in 1776 as unmysterious. In time, he would acquire a reputation for being nonconfrontational. Some might assume that his story lacks the controversial quality of Jefferson’s. But that too remains to be seen.
CHAPTER TWO
On the Defensive
1776–1781
We hear from Virginia, that on Monday the 4th inst, at 12 o’clock, M. a detachment from Earl Cornwallis’s army, consisting of 300 cavalry, and 100 infantry, entered Charlottesville, in Albemarle county. They had been detached by his Lordship, for the express purpose of seizing the members of the General Assembly of Virginia … His Excellency Gov. Jefferson, and two other gentlemen (members of the Legislature) it is feared were taken.
—PENNSYLVANIA PACKET, JUNE 19, 1781
Governor Jefferson had a very narrow escape.
—JAMES MADISON TO PHILIP MAZZEI, JULY 7, 1781
AS A “JUNIOR,” JAMES MADISON HAD TO LIVE UP TO THE REPUTATION of his well-connected father. But during the American Revolution another James Madison was better known than either the one we nowadays remember as the “Father of the Constitution” or his father. Indeed, before he met James Madison, Jr., Thomas Jefferson had befriended this other Madison and helped to advance his career.
The Reverend James Madison of Augusta County was born in 1749, two years before his Orange County namesake. He was the future U.S. president’s second cousin. Growing up in frontier Virginia, to the west of Jefferson’s Albemarle, he crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains in the mid-1760s to study with Jefferson’s early teacher, the Reverend James Maury. In 1768 he enrolled at the College of William and Mary, attaching himself to Jefferson’s law professor, the famously gentle and generous George Wythe. Graduating in 1771, and aided by the strong recommendation of his friend Jefferson, he became, within two years, a professor of natural philosophy and mathematics at the college.
The new professor came into his position with righteous purposes, establishing the Williamsburg Society for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge with the support of Wythe, John Page, and other like-minded men. Though a critic of British policies before the Revolution, he nonetheless set sail for England in 1775, to “enlist under the Banners” of the Anglican Church, as he put it in a letter home. He recrossed the Atlantic the following year, just as Jefferson was contemplating his Declaration in Philadelphia, returning to Virginia by way of New York. As it happened, Madison docked in Manhattan in late July, when the British were preparing to come ashore with a force of ten thousand men. If doubt existed as to Reverend Madison’s political identity, he quashed it by spying on the British headquarters in advance of the Battle of Long Island, conveying the intelligence directly to General Washington. Thereafter the American Anglican resumed his professorial duties in Williamsburg. In 1777, at the age of twenty-eight, he was named president of the College of William and Mary, a position he would retain until his death in 1812, at a grave moment in his cousin’s presidency.1
As a man of Enlightenment science and an Anglican clergyman at the same time, Reverend Madison represented a unique combination of the old and new worlds in Virginia. He was an educator, and education was at the heart of Jefferson’s Revolutionary vision of reform for the Old Dominion; but so was disestablishment of the Church of England. Jefferson did not want the church to continue in charge of the College of William and Mary, but he did want his friend Reverend Madison to manage its curriculum. He evidently believed this Madison to be a man of science first, whose mind was open, and who was not a tool of the church.
The James Madison who is our primary concern understood the pecking order. In the late spring and summer of 1776, as his cousin rose in the estimation of Virginia’s patriot elite, he continued to occupy a secondary role in Revolutionary politics. Yet he was privy to all serious discussions concerning Virginia’s future within the new union of states. He remained in Williamsburg from May through July, when the Virginia Convention went into recess. He returned in the fall, because in establishing a government, the convention men became automatically the first members of the new House of Delegates.
Though Edmund Pendleton was the arranger of most political activities, the leading light in Williamsburg at this time was George Mason, the self-sufficient scholar-aristocrat who, like J
efferson, tended to confine his activism to the printed page. Mason had taken the lead in drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights in May and now oversaw production of the state’s constitution in June. Passed just days before the Declaration of Independence was approved by Congress, Virginia’s constitution established a bicameral legislature composed of the House of Delegates (the real lawmakers), whose members were to be popularly elected for single-year terms, and a Senate, whose members were also popularly elected, but for a four-year term. The Senate did not introduce bills, but only put its stamp on those the House of Delegates initiated.
The governor, lacking veto power, was a weak executive by modern standards, voted into office by the Assembly and responsive to a revolving, eight-man council, his official advisers. A strong governor would have stirred fears of executive tyranny in these times. Patrick Henry fought unsuccessfully for the governor’s veto right, once he realized that he was likely to be elected governor.
Madison witnessed a fair bit of disputation over how to create constitutional government at the state level. His concern in 1776 was the same as it would be in Philadelphia in 1787: how to build political institutions without making them susceptible to corruption. It was hard to say whether Virginia even had a popular government in 1776. In later years, looking back at the Revolutionary era, Madison tended to emphasize the Virginia constitution’s flaws over its laws. Early in their collaboration, he and Jefferson would find common cause in urging improvements to that constitution, only to find that their colleagues did not care to tamper with it. Civil and criminal codes, yes, but not the state constitution.
“Unnatural Distinctions”
Jefferson was noticeably frustrated over the summer months. He hoped to make his mark on the Virginia constitution, but mail between Philadelphia and Williamsburg traveled too slowly for his opinion to count. His proposed plan of government arrived only after debate had ceased. An innocuous preamble was all that the convention adopted that reflected his language.
Madison and Jefferson Page 8