Jones figured that Madison’s idea of organizing black regiments stood little chance of helping the American cause and might just inspire the British to redouble their own efforts to coax southern slaves into serving the Crown. This, he said, would “bring on the Southern States probably inevitable ruin.” Gradual emancipation was “a great and desireable object,” Jones went on. But it would be a shame to lose a critical source of labor, all the while risking a “sudden revolution” if Madison’s well-meaning experiment were tried.61
In November 1780 the unsuccessful General Gates was replaced by a greater general, the Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene, who adopted aggressive tactics in the Carolinas and forced Cornwallis to rethink. But before General Greene could have much effect, the despised Benedict Arnold came ashore near Jamestown just after New Year’s Day 1781, marching on Richmond with fifteen hundred men and taking the capital without opposition. Jefferson could not have done much at this moment, though he can be faulted for not mobilizing the militia in time. Sending shock waves through the region, the faithless Arnold quickly left Richmond and returned to the coast. The capital of Virginia was so new, it had no significant public construction worth destroying.
In the midst of upheaval, there was at least one bright spot. At the time of the invasion, George Rogers Clark happened to be in Richmond to meet with Jefferson, and he dealt a punishing blow to one British contingent before being forced to get out of the way of Arnold’s superior numbers. A few days later, at the Battle of Cowpens, in South Carolina, Virginian Daniel Morgan orchestrated a resounding defeat of Tarleton’s cavalry, claiming more than one hundred British lives while taking more than seven hundred prisoners. It was the first impediment Tarleton’s raiders had faced.62
Cornwallis ranged over inhospitable country in North Carolina, far from his supply base, chasing after General Greene. In mid-April 1781 he announced that he was “quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventures” and brought his troops to Yorktown, on Virginia’s coast, from where, he predicted, “a successful battle may give us America.” The combination of impatience and overconfidence in a general tends to yield quotable lines such as these—in several months Cornwallis’s words would come back to haunt him.
Washington dispatched the youngest of his generals, the Marquis de Lafayette, to Maryland and Virginia. Jefferson notified the French volunteer that Virginians were as yet unprepared for a larger-scale war, blaming four years of a deceptive calm, while fighting raged hundreds of miles north and hundreds of miles south. Virginians had not acquired, he said, the “habits” of those who lived in the face of danger.
Jefferson himself continued to feel ill equipped to direct a war, and he wrote to Madison in March 1781 of his resolve to step down when his term expired at the beginning of June. Madison’s wooden and protracted reply is revealing in its lack of assertiveness: “Notwithstanding the personal advantages which you have a right to expect from an emancipation from your present labours, … I cannot forbear lamenting that the State is in the present crisis to lose the benefit of your administration. But as you seem to have made up your final determination in the matter and have I doubt not weighed well the reasons on which it is grounded I shall lament it in silence.” At this early stage in their association, Madison seems to have known that he could not change Jefferson’s mind, and so he politely gave the governor the benefit of all doubts.63
As spring arrived, Arnold’s forces were on the move again. Jefferson estimated the enemy at over four thousand strong, poised to come back in his direction from the Norfolk-Portsmouth area. Meanwhile the militia was short of lead. With mordant wit and understatement, Jefferson wrote to the Virginia delegation in Philadelphia of Arnold’s intent: “Should this Army from Portsmouth come forth and become active (as we have no reason to believe they came here to Sleep) our Affairs will assume a very disagreeable Aspect.” The loss of Chesapeake Bay as a commercial outlet was damaging to public and private shipping. The currency crisis had not relaxed either.64
As Arnold pushed inland, Jefferson relocated the state government from Richmond to Charlottesville, in the shadow of Monticello. The Governor’s Council was absent from the scene, and he was left to his own devices. He is supposed to have met at this time with Lafayette, who was awaiting reinforcements from Pennsylvania. Acknowledging his impotence, Jefferson regretted that Virginia could not contribute a sufficient number of men to make active resistance possible. “I sincerely and anxiously wish you may be enabled to prevent Lord Cornwallis from engaging you till you shall be sufficiently reinforced and be able to engage him on your own terms,” he told Lafayette. The foreigner who had fallen in love with America extemporized well, harassing the British and preventing them from penetrating deeper into Virginia and pushing north.
On May 28, 1781, a powerless Governor Jefferson appealed to Washington to lead the bulk of his army to Virginia. The reappearance of their long-absent native son would, he said, “restore full confidence of salvation.” To this he added with extreme pathos: “A few days will bring to me that period of relief which the Constitution has prepared for those oppressed with the labours of my office.” Two weeks later, when Jefferson was no longer governor, Richard Henry Lee would propose in no uncertain terms that Washington return to his state as a military dictator. Now a militia colonel who had seen some action himself, Lee appealed to Madison and the rest of the state’s delegation to lean on Washington: “Let Congress send him immediately to Virginia, and as the head of the Foederal Union let them possess the General with Dictatorial power until the General Assembly can be convened.” He expected Washington to retain this singular power for up to ten months and insisted that precedent for such action could be found in ancient as well as modern history. “There is no time to be lost,” Lee urged, “for the enemy are pushing their present advantages with infinite diligence and art.”65
Jefferson and the Virginia assemblymen with him in Charlottesville knew that the enemy was closing in. Pendleton had mistakenly conveyed intelligence to Madison that Tarleton had been killed in North Carolina, his legion “wholly cut to pieces.” But on Sunday, June 3, 1781, one day after Jefferson’s second term as governor came to an end without a successor having been chosen, an alarm was sounded. Captain Jack Jouett of the Virginia militia overheard the plans of several horsemen in Tarleton’s regiment. Familiar with local roads, he raced to Monticello in the predawn to alert Jefferson, then rode on to warn the exposed legislators in Charlottesville. After sending his family to safety, Jefferson remained on his little mountain long enough to gather up papers he did not want the enemy to capture. He then made a dash to nearby Carter’s Mountain, where he saw through his telescope that Charlottesville was crawling with British.
Tarleton’s men took seven state legislators prisoner in town. Those British soldiers who reached Monticello threatened the lives of Jefferson’s house servants as they stood guard over their master’s valuables. Fortunately for the now ex-governor, Tarleton gave orders to leave the estate intact. Cornwallis, who occupied Jefferson’s Goochland County property, Elk Hill, behaved less magnanimously, plundering at will. When he departed, nineteen of Jefferson’s slaves went with him. Four Monticello slaves took advantage of the invasion and ran away as well. Upward of eighty thousand slaves left their owners during the war years.66
Jefferson recorded an innocuous entry for June 4 in his account book: “British horse came to Monticello.” Rumors flew, and “intelligence” reached Philadelphia that exaggerated the impact of the assault on Charlottesville. Many read that Jefferson had been captured. We do not know whether or for how long Madison might have bought into this rumor, only that a month after the event he communicated with Philip Mazzei in Europe and noted that Jefferson had had a “very narrow escape.” He would not escape his critics, however, as stories of his management of the crisis began circulating.
Jefferson’s movements are actually easy to chart. After his brief reprieve on Carter’s Mountain, he rode on and met
up with Patty, their daughters, and twenty-two-year-old William Short. Short was one of Jefferson’s select law students, a protégé like James Monroe. This handsome, honor-bound young man would be at Jefferson’s side a great deal more than either Madison or Monroe during the 1780s, and at this fretful moment the family must have seen him as a godsend.
The Jefferson party traveled south together for two days, arriving at their Bedford County plantation, Poplar Forest, where the pursued politician cooled his heels. A fall from his horse kept Jefferson in Bedford longer than he might otherwise have planned to stay. The state legislature, which had assembled on the western side of the Blue Ridge, in Staunton, could not help but notice his absence.67
Jefferson felt he had performed his patriotic duty for two years as governor, and he wanted nothing more to do with management of the war. But before long he was compelled to answer for his conduct. On June 12 Thomas Nelson, Jr., an old friend of Jefferson’s and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, took over as governor; Assemblyman George Nicholas, a young representative with interests in Patrick Henry’s Hanover County as well as Jefferson’s Albemarle, moved that an inquiry be made into Jefferson’s actions. The clear imputation was that Jefferson had failed to do his duty in arranging for a proper defense of Richmond at the time of Arnold’s invasion. Everything had gone downhill from there.
In July, once the damage was already done to Jefferson’s reputation, Nicholas wrote to the accused that he had not intended personal insult. By autumn Nicholas would admit that he had overreacted. And at year’s end both houses of the Assembly voted unanimously to commend Jefferson for his service as governor, wording the resolution so as to praise him for his “ability, rectitude, and integrity.”68 Nevertheless, people believed what they wanted, and over the years the story would enlarge: Was it ineptness that Jefferson had displayed? Was it cowardice? Did he precipitously flee from Arnold, instead of remaining at his post and directing the militia? Did he do something weak in running from Tarleton’s men as they approached Monticello? The rap on Jefferson was that he cared too much for his own safety and too little for that of others.69
In this time of panic, someone besides the enemy had to be blamed for what befell Virginia, thus Jefferson was made the scapegoat. But no one person was at fault for the thinning of the ranks. Over the course of the war, neither Jefferson nor any of Virginia’s legislative leaders did anything to substantially change men’s attitudes about military service. Washington had stated unabashedly that the “lower class of people” should serve as Continentals; he did not realize that these tended to be the men with the least resolve. Few cared to fight outside their state, and the Virginians who were drafted into the Continental Army became disaffected quickly. They demanded and received higher bounties than Virginia militiamen, but despite receiving incentives for their service, many still ended up deserting. Resistance to conscription exposed tensions between the ruling gentry and nonslaveholding whites who felt they bore the greater burden in keeping the Revolution on track. The fault lines grew wider as the war progressed. Not inconsequentially, and without the intention of vindicating Jefferson, Pendleton told Madison on the eve of Tarleton’s entry into Charlottesville that the Pennsylvanians, instead of speeding their troops to Virginia, “were throwing out Insulting speeches that Virginia was too grand—let her be humbled by the Enemy, & such like.”70
The fact remains that protesting the burdens of his office and lacking real military knowledge, Jefferson lost stature by acquiescing to a second term. If he had been more aggressive in raising and deploying militia the story of his wartime governorship might have been different. Nor can we say whether his predecessor would have done any better. Patrick Henry was back with the legislature in Staunton, known to have encouraged, if not goaded, Assemblyman George Nicholas to go after Jefferson.
No matter what grudging respect for the Revolutionary orator Jefferson might have retained up to this point, he unmistakably regarded Henry as his chief antagonist now. Writing to the sympathetic Isaac Zane, whose iron manufactory was much in demand during the war, he held Henry accountable for the investigation into his conduct. The “trifling,” pitiable Nicholas, Jefferson said, was “below contempt,” “the tool worked by another hand.” Then, if the artisanal metaphor were not transparent enough, he left solid ground for his next, comparing the unnamed Henry to a whale, “discoverable enough by the turbulence of the water under which he moved.”71
Finding “neither accuser nor accusation” when he arrived in Richmond to defend himself that fall, Jefferson stayed on for two weeks and turned his attention to science and study. He ran into the trailblazing Daniel Boone and gave him a letter for George Rogers Clark, then in Louisville, Kentucky. Jefferson requested of Clark “teeth of the great animal whose remains are found on the Ohio.” He was in the process of writing Notes on Virginia and was eager to collect mammoth bones and other specimens from the West; his fellows in the American Philosophical Society awaited his findings.72
“The Hostile Machinations of Some of the States”
The future of the West was not merely a matter of science and exploration, of course. When the Assembly met in Staunton after Jefferson stepped down from the governorship, the state’s attorney general, Edmund Randolph, was newly elected to Congress. He joined Madison in Philadelphia in July, and the two bonded quickly. They lived together at the House-Trist establishment and, by day, weighed the touchy matter of Virginia’s western land cessions, a matter of unending concern to the planter class.
Poorly defined boundaries in vaguely worded royal charters had resulted in claims by Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York to some of the same territory. After more than a century and a half of jealously guarding its legal authority to land adjacent to the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes, Virginia now agreed in principle to give over to the United States the portion of its territory that encompasses modern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Maryland, possessing no territory beyond its current borders, most resented neighboring Virginia’s long reach. The Virginians had to satisfy Maryland if that state was to agree to the Articles of Confederation and define the wartime union as a constitutional authority and not merely a league of states.
Virginia’s offer of a land cession was framed in terms of a common fund to be administered by Congress. It would not allow its western land to be divided among existing states, expecting instead that new states would be formed from it. This had been Virginia’s position since 1780, when George Mason proposed using western land for the war effort—sales of public lands benefiting the national government.
From the perspective of Mason and others, the cession had to involve shared sacrifice. It had to void private land company acquisitions and questionable agreements with Indian tribes—all that continued to motivate the various non-Virginia claimants. Virginia would not permit private land companies to challenge its sovereignty in the West, nor should Congress even be able to consider these private claims. One such company, the Indiana, brought in a hired gun, the polemical Tom Paine, to argue against Virginia’s interest. The author of Common Sense had spoken to common purposes in 1776, but in this instance Paine’s prose served only to irritate the Virginians and increase their still-simmering suspicions about the motives of their sister states.
Virginia consented to an Ohio River boundary line, that is, to the westward extension of the Mason-Dixon Line, which officially divided Maryland and Pennsylvania. By this consent, Virginia gave away disputed portions of western Pennsylvania, at the same time stipulating that George Rogers Clark and his men receive from Congress the land bounties Virginia promised them. Crucially, Maryland dropped its objections to Virginia’s expansionism; with their long coastline, Marylanders were spooked by British maneuvers offshore in 1781, and were suddenly eager for friends. That is how the last holdout among the so-called landless states agreed to sign the Articles of Confederation. America had its first national constitution.73
But that agreement did
not end the contest over western lands. The congressional debates of 1781 marked but one phase in a protracted struggle by the small states to convince Virginia to adjust its sights in order to make for a less lopsided Union. As various members of Congress pressed Virginia to give up more of its rights to the “Western Country,” Madison wrote to Jefferson that the proceedings “clearly speak the hostile machinations of some of the States against our territorial claims.” George Mason warned Jefferson as well, using highly dramatic language when he portrayed the move in Congress as a conspiracy: “factious, illegal, & dangerous Schemes now in Contemplation in Congress, for dismembering the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
At the time when Madison asked for guidance on land cessions, he and Jefferson had had no direct correspondence for several months. The congressman warned the ex-governor that the rise in discord threatened to bring an end to the Union just as soon as the war ended. While insisting that their state should reserve the right to withdraw its agreement to any cession at all, he asked Jefferson to convey to fellow Virginians “the necessity of great temper and moderation.” Madison knew that any diplomacy he undertook would have to have full support in Richmond, and he still considered Jefferson’s influence strong there.74
Despite Madison’s historical reputation for reserve, he showed no reluctance to vocalize his strong pro-Virginia outlook in the face of skeptics. Along with his colleagues Edmund Randolph and Joseph Jones, the now thirty-year-old Madison had the presence of mind to strike a delicate balance between talking tough and urging patience. He saw a real possibility that the Confederation might dissolve right after it had begun, but he also thought it possible for Virginia to get what it wanted even as the central government gained new powers.75
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