9. See “Extract of a Letter from Boston,” in Virginia Gazette, October 27, 1774; A Letter from a Virginian, to the Members of the Congress (New York, 1774), cited in Rakove, Beginnings of National Politics, 38; “Extract of a Letter from Maryland, Sept. 28,” in Pennsylvania Ledger, February 2, 1775; JM to William Bradford, November 26, 1774, PJM, 1:129; “The Convention of 1774: Instructions to the Deputies Elected to Attend the General Congress, 6 August,” in Scribner et al., eds., Revolutionary Virginia, 1:237.
10. William Wirt, The Life of Patrick Henry (Hartford, Conn., 1832 [1817]), sec. 4.
11. “A Summary View,” in PTJ, 1:121–35.
12. See especially Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007), 116ff.; Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (New York, 1982), chap. 5.
13. JM to Bradford, April 1, July 1, and August 23, 1774; Bradford to JM, August 1, 1774, PJM, 1:112, 115, 118, 121.
14. Jeffrey H. Morrison, John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic (Notre Dame, Ind., 2005); John Witherspoon, “The Charge of Sedition and Faction against Good Men …” (1758); sermon dedicated to Hancock, The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men (1776), both in The Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1800), 1:319–44, 2:407–36, quotes at 332–33, 427–28; David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1750–1800 (Westport, Conn., 1985), 69–70; Ashbel Green, The Life of the Revd. John Witherspoon, ed. Henry Littleton Savage (Princeton, N.J., 1973), 146–47, 258; Ketcham, 41–44; Mary-Elaine Swanson, “James Madison and the Presbyterian Idea of Man and Government,” in Garrett Ward Sheldon and Daniel L. Dreisbach, eds., Religion and Political Culture in Jefferson’s Virginia (Lanham, Md., 2000), 119–31; Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York, 2007), 10–11.
15. JM to Bradford, January 24 and April 1, 1774, PJM, 1:106, 112–13; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 278–82.
16. JM to Bradford, January 20 and July 28, 1775, PJM, 1:135, 161–62; Ketcham, 64–67; Brant, 1:106–11, 116–17; “Orange County Committee,” from Virginia Gazette, April 15, 1775, in Scribner et al., eds., Revolutionary Virginia, 2:377–78, 386, 389.
17. JM to Bradford, November 9, 1772, PJM, 1:75; Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 1998), 104; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), 24–27.
18. PTJ, 1:246; PJM, 1:163.
19. TJ to Wirt, August 4, 1805, and April 12, 1812; Wirt to TJ, September 16, 1805, TJP-LC; Frank L. Dewey, “Thomas Jefferson and a Williamsburg Scandal: The Case of Blair v. Blair,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89 (1981): 44–63, quote at 57. Jefferson (who was not in Philadelphia when Henry was) nevertheless informed Wirt that as a member of the First Continental Congress, Henry made a good first impression: “While general grievances were the topics, he was in his element & captivated all by his bold & splendid eloquence. But as soon as they came to specific matters, to sober reasoning and solid argumentation he had the good sense to perceive that his declamation however excellent in it’s proper place, had no weight at all in such an assembly as that, of cool-headed, reflecting, judicious men.” It was essential to Jefferson that the world know what Henry was not. “He squeezed exorbitant fees,” Jefferson persisted, claiming that Henry shamelessly sought personal fame and giant wealth: “Mr. Henry’s ravenous avarice, the only passion paramount.” Wirt admitted his dilemma, Jefferson’s disparagement having apparently been confirmed by some others—though only Jefferson, it appears, was fixated on Henry’s supposedly indecent love of money. “Conflicting narratives are so equal in number and character,” Wirt told Jefferson, “that I find it impossible to say directly where the truth lies.”
Though he ended up writing a biography that Henry’s descendants adored, Wirt confirmed Jefferson’s assessment of Henry’s lack of diligence. Unbiased former colleagues attested to Henry’s own admission, in later years, of an “early neglect of literature” and the “indolence of his character.” Attempting to rescue his subject, Wirt rationalized: “The people seemed to have admired him the more for his want of discipline.” This was how early American biography was slanted. Oratorical genius was meant to range, not to be confined to paper; or as Wirt put it, to “revel in all the wildness and boldness of nature.” Wirt, Life of Patrick Henry, esp. 25–26, 125–33.
20. Scribner et al., eds., Revolutionary Virginia, 1:227–28. Each of the more than one hundred members of the convention voted for seven individuals; because a nominee had to receive two-thirds of the convention’s votes to be selected for Philadelphia, two ballots had to be taken before seven names were found. In the two ballots, Peyton Randolph received 104 and 107 votes, respectively (virtually everyone included him in the top seven); Lee received 100 and 102; Washington 98 and 104; Henry 89 and 104; Richard Bland 79 and 90; Benjamin Harrison 66 and 94; and Pendleton 62 and 100. Jefferson received 51 on the first ballot and merely 18 on the second.
21. JM to Bradford, August 23, 1774, PJM, 1:121; Diary of Silas Deane, September 10–19, 1774, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, ed. Paul L. Smith (Washington, D.C., 1976–2000), 1:61; Elma Josephine Hege, “Benjamin Harrison and the American Revolution,” master’s thesis, University of Virginia, August 1939; Henry S. Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1858), 1:155. Jefferson was impressed with Richard Bland as a source of knowledge on constitutions, “a great antiquarian, and possessed of many valuable public papers.” TJ to Ebenezer Hazard, April 30, 1775, PTJ, 1:164. However, Ralph Ketcham speculates that the two men Madison wished replaced were Bland and Randolph, for being “timid,” or insufficiently aggressive. Ketcham, 61. On Washington, see John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York, 2009), 75–79.
22. Pinkney’s Virginia Gazette, June 1, 1775, cited in Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 152; Providence Journal, December 23, 1775; JM to Bradford, June 19, 1775, PJM, 1:153. The phrase a “devil more damned in evil,” from Macbeth, is attributed to John Page; see Scribner et al., eds., Revolutionary Virginia, 4:21; Virginia Gazette (Purdie), May 31, 1776.
23. “Report of the Causes of the Late Disturbances,” in Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1773–1776, ed. John Pendleton Kennedy (Richmond, 1905), 237; Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 3.
24. JM to William Bradford, May 9, 1775; “Address to Captain Patrick Henry and the Gentlemen Independents of Hanover,” Virginia Gazette, May 19, 1775, PJM, 1:144–47.
25. Pendleton to Joseph Chew, June 15, 1775, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1:486; TJ to Small, May 7, 1775, in PTJ, 1:166–67.
26. JM to Bradford, May 9 and June 19, 1775, PJM, 1:145, 151–52; Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 50. The charges against Bland were found to be baseless.
27. JM to Bradford, November 26, 1774; Bradford to JM, January 4, 1775, PJM, 1:129–32; Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York, 2009), 60–61. Egerton also notes that in South Carolina in 1775, a slave was executed for preaching that King George III had “set the Negroes Free,” while their white masters were ignoring the decree.
28. JM to Bradford, June 19, 1775, PJM, 1:153; Douglas B. Chambers, Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia (Jackson, Miss., 2005), 5–7. Ambrose Madison may in fact have died of natural causes—the point is that his slaves were blamed, and the sinister art of poisoning (brought to Virginia from West Africa) immediately suspected.
29. Donald J. Gara, “Loyal Subjects of the Crown: The Queen’s Own Loyal Virginia Regiment and Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, 1775–76,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 83 (2005): 30–4
2; John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore, 2003), 194–97; Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 50, 67; Washington to Joseph Reed, February 26–March 9, 1776, PGW-RW, 3:374. In his 1789 account South Carolina patriot David Ramsay wrote of the “headstrong passions” of Lord Dunmore during this period, and the general British view that an “easy conquest” of the American rebels would come as a result of the massive numbers of slaves and servants who seemed likely to join with His Majesty’s forces. See Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, ed. Lester H. Cohen (Indianapolis, 1990), 1:232–33. On the badge “Liberty to Slaves,” see New-York Gazette, December 18, 1775.
30. TJ to Page, October 31, 1775; Robert Carter Nicholas to TJ and the Virginia Delegates, November 25, 1775; Pendleton to TJ, November 16, 1775, PTJ, 1:251, 260–61, 266–67. The falsity of Pendleton’s claim as to Dunmore’s intent to sell the escaped slaves is borne out in Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston, 2006).
31. In 1778 General Washington instructed his kinsman Lund Washington, who oversaw production at Mount Vernon, to “Barter for other Land” in Virginia by selling slaves. The only property he would not have Lund sell were “Breeding Mares and Stock of other Kinds.” Read unsympathetically, it appears that Washington’s human breeders were expendable to him, but his livestock was not. By war’s end, there would be some five thousand African-American Continentals under his command. It was all done quietly and gradually. GW to Joseph Reed, December 15, 1775; to Lund Washington, August 15, 1778, PGW-RW, 2:553, 16:315; Egerton, Death or Liberty, 74–75. The most compelling recent analysis of Virginians of all ranks amid the crisis fomented by Dunmore’s decisions is Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007), chaps. 1–4.
32. Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 26–32; Holton, Forced Founders, 92–96; “Indenture,” September 1774, in PJM, 1:123–24; Susan Dunn, Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia (New York, 2007), chaps. 1 and 2; Brant, 1:49.
33. Henry to Robert Pleasants, January 18, 1773, in James M. Elson, comp., Patrick Henry in His Speeches and Writings and in the Words of His Contemporaries (Lynchburg, Va., 2007), 66–68.
34. George Van Cleve, “Somerset’s Case and Its Antecedents in Imperial Perspective,” Law and History Review 24 (Fall 2006): 601–46; Jerome Nadelhaft, “The Somerset Case and Slavery: Myth, Reality, and Repercussions,” Journal of Negro History 51 (July 1966): 196–97; New-York Journal, August 27, 1772.
35. Benjamin Franklin to Anthony Benezet, August 22, 1772, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 19:269; “Extract of a Letter from Phillis, a Negro girl of Mr. Wheatley’s of this Town, to the Rev. Samson Occom,” Boston Evening-Post, March 21, 1774; Peter Dorsey, “To ‘Corroborate Our Own Claims’: Public Positioning and the Slavery Metaphor in Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly 55 (September 2003): 354, 366. The author of another article, signed “A Son of Africa,” echoed the Somerset ruling, claiming that Americans could not enslave Africans without contradicting the British constitution, the laws of Great Britain and God. Only custom supported slavery, as there was no positive law in the Kingdom of Great Britain or the province of Massachusetts that upheld slavery. Massachusetts Spy, February 10, 1774.
36. “Number VI: A Few Political Reflections,” Pennsylvania Packet, August 8, 1774; Dorsey, “To ‘Corroborate Our Own Claims,’ ” 369; Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge, La., 2006), 23–24.
37. Virginia Gazette, November 25, 1775, March 22, 1776, July 20, 1776, and October 4, 1776; New-York Gazette, December 4, 1775; see also issue of December 8 for a satirical poem, “A Proclamation Declaration,” mockingly attributed to Dunmore. It reads in part: “Ye convicts, servants and ye debtors, / Ye sentenc’d felons, break your fetters, / And slaves of rebels hither come / And march with me at beat of drum.” These caricatures tell only half the story. Dunmore was confident that colonial resistance would fail, because the Virginia planter elite had so little concern for both white and black underclass. “Slaves and the lower class of people,” he wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth, would discover before long that they had been “duped by the richer sort” into doing their bidding. His letter found its way back to the Virginia Gazette and fed Virginians’ fearful expectations. Dunmore was not merely inciting rebellion, they now heard, but planned to grant free blacks and white servants the much-coveted rights of Britons if they turned on the patriot crowd. See “Extract of a letter from the Earl of Dunmore to the Earl of Dartmouth, dated Williamsburg, December 24, 1774; laid before the House of Commons, February 15, by Lord North,” Virginia Gazette, April 29, 1775.
38. Virginia Gazette, November 22, 1775, and April 13, 1776; Christopher Brown, “Empire Without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 56 (April 1999): 285–86.
39. Journal entry of July 13, 1776, Robert Carter Papers, 1772–1793, Box 1, Folder 2, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.; Andrew Levy, The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, The Founder Who Freed His Slaves (New York, 2006). Yet when a British privateer landed a short distance from his plantation, thirty-two blacks were there to commit themselves to the British—much to Carter’s surprise. See Egerton, Death or Liberty, 71.
40. See esp. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 276ff., quote at 279.
41. Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York, 1988), chaps. 1–3; Lucia Stanton, Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 17–18; Andrew Burstein, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville, Va., 1995), 12–23; John Wayles to TJ, October 20, 1772, PTJ, 1:95–96; “Deed from Jane Randolph Jefferson for the Conveyance of Slaves,” undated, PTJ, 27:675–76; Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York, 1995), 14–18. Sloan shows that had Wayles’s heirs kept his lands intact, their exposure to Wayles’s British creditors would have been minimal; in receiving his portion of the Wayles property, Jefferson attached his own lands to the liability he bore in meeting his late father-in-law’s debts. The Revolution did not change this, and Jefferson spent the remainder of his life trying unsuccessfully to meet his obligations.
42. Malone, 1:30–32; Brant, 1:66, 407; Kenneth Bailey, “George Mason, Westerner,” William and Mary Quarterly 23 (October 1943): 409–17; Shaw Livermore, Early American Land Companies: Their Influence on Corporate Development (New York, 1939); Kenneth P. Bailey, The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Westward Movement, 1748–1792 (Glendale, Calif., 1939); Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (New York, 1959); Harriette Simpson Arnow, Seedtime on the Cumberland (New York, 1960), 183, 228; Peter S. Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787 (Philadelphia, 1983), 75–82; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 28–37; Holton, Forced Founders, 9–12, 32–33; TJ to JM, November 11, 1784, RL, 2:350.
James Madison, Sr., had extensive dealings with land investors. One of his closest friends was Joseph Chew (ca. 1725–98), who moved out of Orange County and engaged in commercial dealings in various colonial cities. In 1750 Chew revealed to him that he wished to become a manager of the Ohio Company, the land venture begun in 1749 and backed by George Washington. The elder Madison also had dealings with William Lee, younger brother of Richard Henry Lee, who acted as one of the principal agents of the Mississippi Company; see JM to James Madison, Sr., October 9, 1771, and January 23, 1778, in PJM, 1:68–69, 222–23; and Joseph Chew to James Madison, Sr., September 6, 1749, and May 21, 1750, in Madison Family Papers, Li
brary of Congress; Washington to Joseph Chew, September 25, 1774, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1:102. The Virginia gentry had to effect a balance between their own financial interests and the financial and the social aspirations of increasingly disgruntled tenant farmers. See Thomas J. Humphrey, “Conflicting Independence: Tenant Farmers and the American Revolution,” Journal of the Early Republic 28 (Summer 2008): 159–82.
43. Randolph C. Downes, “Dunmore’s War: An Interpretation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 21 (December 1934): 311–12, 321–23, 326–27; Holton, Forced Founders, 33–34; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lake Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, U.K., 1991); and Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln, Neb., 1992), 269–81.
44. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 1–5; John Bakeless, Background to Glory: The Life of George Rogers Clark (Lincoln, Neb., 1957), 25–28; JMB, 1:385–86.
45. TJ to Frances Eppes, June 26, 1775; “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” June 26–July 6, 1775; TJ to John Page, August 5 and August 20, 1776, all in PTJ, 1:175, 217, 317, 485–86, 500.
46. PTJ, 1:123. Aptly, Jefferson’s notion followed the logic of the embattled Shawnees of 1770, who justified their retention of the land according to the “Antient Right of Conquest.” See Downes, “Dunmore’s War,” 316. To be clear, Jefferson’s “adventurers” were direct ancestors of the landed elite of his own time. He was not celebrating the yeomanry of Virginia so much as he was defending the rights of the Madisons, Pendletons, and like-minded others.
47. A Summary View of the Rights of British America, in PTJ, 1:121–23, 133; Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 21–23.
48. JM to Bradford, June 19, 1775, PJM, 1:153; also see Rhys Isaac, “Dramatizing the Ideology of the Revolution: Popular Mobilization in Virginia, 1774 to 1776,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (July 1976): 380–82.
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