49. Robert G. Parkinson, “From Indian Killer to Worthy Citizen: The Revolutionary Transformation of Michael Cresap,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (January 2006): 97–122; Robert McGinn and Larry Vaden, “Michael Cresap and the Cresap Rifles,” West Virginia History 39 (1978): 341–47; also “Virginia Marksmanship: From Purdie’s Virginia Gazette, November 17, 1775,” in William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine 20 (October 1911): 144–45.
50. Jefferson’s published resolution on Lord North’s proposal, July 25, 1775, is in PTJ, 1:233; TJ to Gilmer, July 5, 1775; and see a similar repudiation of Americans’ alleged cowardice in TJ to John Randolph, August 25, 1775, ibid., 186, 241; for British statements, see “From London Evening Post. On Civil War in America,” Pennsylvania Ledger, November 18, 1775.
51. Burstein, Inner Jefferson, 186; Burstein, Sentimental Democracy, 132–34; PTJ, 1:495–97, 510–11.
52. Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 88–89; Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1:241–42, 2:5–7; McDonnell, Politics of War, 181–83.
53. Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 95–97; Virginia Gazette, May 17, 1776.
54. Robert A. Rutland, George Mason: Reluctant Statesman (Baton Rouge, La., 1961), 23, 26–27, 38–40; Moncure Daniel Conway, Omitted Chapters of History Disclosed in the Life and Papers of Edmund Randolph (New York, 1888), 20–26; Pendleton to TJ, May 24, 1776, PTJ, 1:296.
55. The Papers of George Mason, ed. Robert A. Rutland (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970), 1:276–77; Brant, 1:238–41; Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997), 126–27.
56. Virginia Gazette, June 1 and June 12, 1776; Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 106–8. The same argument would be made in the historic Dred Scott decision of 1857.
57. Brant, 1:241–48; Ketcham, 72–73; Richard R. Beeman, Patrick Henry: A Biography (New York, 1974), 103; Daniel L. Dreisbach, “Church-State Debate in Virginia: From the Declaration of Rights to the Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom,” in Sheldon and Dreisbach, eds., Religion and Political Culture in Jefferson’s Virginia, 135–41. Edmund Randolph in later years remembered Henry as the committee member who introduced the language on toleration; most scholars, however, believe Randolph’s memory flawed in this regard.
58. TJ to Fleming, July 1, 1776, PTJ, 1:412–13.
59. J. Kent McGaughy, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: A Portrait of an American Revolutionary (Lanham, Md., 2004), chap. 5; for hints of Lee’s contentiousness, or divisiveness, which may or may not be exaggerated, see Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson, 1:148–56.
60. Fleming to TJ, June 22, 1776; TJ to Fleming, July 1, 1776; to Lee, July 23, 1776; to Page, July 30, 1776, PTJ, 1:406, 412–13, 477, 482–83; Malone, 1:240–41.
61. On the larger similarities between Jefferson’s and Mason’s work, and their common sources, see Ronald Hatzenbuehler, “I Tremble for My Country”: Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Gentry (Gainesville, Fla., 2006), 39–43, 54–57.
62. The several versions of the Declaration of Independence, notably Jefferson’s original draft and that adopted by Congress, are in PTJ, 1:315–19, 413–33.
63. Quote from Katherine Sobba Green, The Courtship Novel, 1740–1820: A Feminized Genre (Lexington, Ky., 1991), 66.
64. Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 230–31; Quentin Outram, “The Demographic Impact of Early Modern Warfare,” Social Science History 26 (Summer 2002): 245–72, indicating that the English fear of mercenaries can be traced back to the Thirty Years War in Germany, 1618–48; Frank Whitson Fetter, “Who Were the Foreign Mercenaries of the Declaration of Independence?” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 104 (1980): 508–13; on the connection between rape and war, see also Nancy Isenberg, “Death and Satire: Dismembering the Body Politic,” in Isenberg and Burstein, eds., Mortal Remains: Death in Early America (Philadelphia, 2003), 77–78. Joseph Warren’s momentous oration on the occasion of the second anniversary of the Boston Massacre, in 1772, evoked the same imagery, justifying “alarmed imaginations” over the prospect of “our children subject to the barbarous caprice of the raging soldiery,—our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion,—our virtuous wives, endeared to us by every tender tie, falling a sacrifice to worse than brutal violence.” See Burstein, Sentimental Democracy, 68–69.
65. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of “The Two Treatises of Government” (Cambridge, U.K., 1969); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 93; on Jewish divorce law, see Matthew Biberman, “Milton, Marriage, and a Woman’s Right to Divorce,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 39 (Winter 1999): 131–53. Carl L. Becker has written of America’s relationship to the king as a “thin gold thread of voluntary allegiance to a personal sovereign.” See Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York, 1922), 130–34.
66. Frank L. Dewey, “Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Divorce,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (January 1982): 216–17. Jefferson also recognized the voluntary nature of marriage when he wrote: “where both parties consent,” the covenant “must be dissoluble from the nature of things. On the primacy of Jefferson’s “tranquil permanent felicity,” see Andrew Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello (New York, 2005).
67. Dewey, “Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Divorce,” 218–19.
68. For an account of the king’s speech, given in Parliament on October 28, 1775, but not reprinted in American newspapers until several months later, see the Pennsylvania Packet, January 13, 1776. The speech continued to be debated in the newspapers; see “Letter to Mr. Purdie,” Virginia Gazette, March 8, 1776. See also Rakove, Beginnings of National Politics, 80–81, 92, 95.
69. Virginia Gazette, February 23 and March 8, 1776; “Some QUERIES offered to the FREEHOLDERS and PEOPLE of VIRGINIA at large,” Virginia Gazette, April 19, 1776; Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), 33. It is striking, too, that in one of Virginia’s petitions, the king was accused of assigning the colonies the woman’s role by “restraining her trade within the most narrow bounds,” draining her, through internal taxes, “of the little circulating cash she had,” all so that she would be bound “within her little sphere …, contented with homespun.” Reconciliation might preserve an unequal union, but it would also make the colonists cowardly and effeminate dependents.
70. On masculine English traits and manly public spirit, see Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850 (Oxford, U.K., 2000), 69, 96; and Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 184–85; also “An American,” Virginia Gazette, January 1, 1776.
71. “Some QUERIES offered to the FREEHOLDERS …,” Virginia Gazette, April 19, 1776; “Reasons for a Declaration of Independence of the American Colonies,” Pennsylvania Packet, as reprinted in Virginia Gazette, March 25, 1776; on Jefferson’s strategies in the Declaration for granting Congress its legitimacy as the king’s replacement, see Peter S. Onuf, “Thomas Jefferson, Federalist,” in The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, Va., 2007), 89–90.
72. Note that in lowercasing “united,” the parchment copy signed by the members of Congress denoted the primacy of the states over the nation at their moment of joining together. PTJ, 1:432. Compare Jefferson’s “Original Rough Draft,” which capitalizes “United,” ibid., 1:427.
73. Pendleton to TJ, November 16, 1775, PTJ, 1:261. For an incisive discussion, see Sidney Kaplan, “The ‘Domestic Insurrections’ of the Declaration of Independence,” Journal of Negro History 61 (July 1976): 243–55. Charles A. Miller shows that Jefferson fell short of calling chattel slavery a violation of natural law, in Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore, 1988), chap. 3. Carl Becker diminishes the power of Jefferson’s so-called philippic against slavery in the Declaration, writing: �
�It is indeed vehement; but it is not moving.” Becker, Declaration of Independence, 220.
We should be careful not to generalize too much on this subject. For instance, some northern figures associated with an antislavery mentality were in fact much slower to become active critics than history imagines. Benjamin Franklin assumed black inferiority and is shown by the historian David Waldstreicher to have been extremely cautious, even ambivalent, in addressing the slavery issue. Franklin did not register disagreement with the slavery passage in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence that overdramatized both London’s complicity in the colonial slave trade and Americans’ desire to put an end to it. He had made the same argument himself four years earlier, in response to the Somerset case. “To free slaves,” as Waldstreicher reminds us, “would infringe on the property rights of Britons—and thus effectively enslave the slaveholders.” See Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004), quote at 180.
74. PTJ, 1:426–27.
75. See, for instance, the Newport [R.I.] Mercury, July 22, 1776.
76. Pennsylvania Packet, June 24, 1776, reprinted in the New-York Journal, July 4, 1776.
77. New-York Journal, July 11, 1776; Virginia Gazette, July 27 and August 10, 1776.
78. Freeman’s Journal, July 6, 1776.
79. Michal J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville, Va., 1998); Dunn, Dominion of Memories; Haztenbuehler, “I Tremble for My Country.”
80. Pauline Maier contends that Congress’s editing distinctly improved Jefferson’s text. See Maier, American Scripture, chap. 3.
81. Pendleton to TJ, August 10, 1776, PTJ, 1:488–89.
82. David A. McCants, Patrick Henry, Orator (New York, 1990), chap. 1; Becker, Declaration of Independence, 218.
CHAPTER TWO
On the Defensive, 1776–1781
1. Charles Crowe, “The Reverend James Madison in Williamsburg and London, 1768–1771,” West Virginia History 25 (1964): 270–78; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 203–5; Malone, 1:42. As a young lawyer, Jefferson traveled to Augusta County and had extensive dealings with Reverend Madison’s father and brother (both named John). See numerous entries in JMB for the years 1767–69.
2. Brant, 1:251–71; Pendleton to TJ, August 10, 1776, PTJ, 1:489.
3. Henry S. Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1858), 1:62–63; JMB, 1:424–26; Malone, 1:245–46.
4. Pendleton to TJ, August 10, 1776, PTJ, 1:489.
5. In this context, Peter Gay has written that Hume’s view of politics was “realistic in its awareness of conflict, hard-headed in its call for order, but at the same time, liberal in its insistence on a domain of freedom, and above all, flexible in its very generality.” He effectively sums up Madisonian political theory with these words. See Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York, 1969), 460–61.
6. Jefferson’s “Autobiography,” TJP-LC.
7. Holly Brewer, “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: ‘Ancient Feudal Restraints’ and Revolutionary Reform,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (April 1997): 313.
8. Ibid., 311, 315–18, 338.
9. On Jefferson’s failed attempt to circumvent entail, see ibid., 327–28; Carter Braxton to Landon Carter, December 19, 1776, cited in John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783 (Williamsburg, Va., 1988), 140; Malone, 1:252ff.
10. On this subject, see esp. 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). In 1782 Madison willingly became involved in helping Pendleton’s nephew recover an escaped slave and appears not to have been averse to promoting a fugitive slave law. Pendleton to JM, September 9, 1782; JM to Pendleton, September 24, 1782, PJM, 5:109–10, 157–58.
11. It is uncertain precisely how much original thought belongs to Jefferson in Bill no. 51, “A Bill concerning Slaves,” prepared (but not introduced into the Assembly) prior to June 1779. See PTJ, 2:470–73. Virginia’s General Assembly may have voted to end the state’s participation in the international slave trade in 1778, but it continued to permit slave owners from outside the state to settle there without having to free their slaves. The Continental Congress had voted to stop the slave trade in 1774 (mainly to harm British merchants), but it may be that the states did not consider this vote as binding after 1776, and several, individually, passed more decisive legislation to this effect. Virginia was the first to do so.
Jefferson’s role in the process is not entirely clear. In June 1777 a bill was prepared in the Assembly for the purpose of ending the importation of slaves into Virginia. “Hereafter,” it read, all persons “imported into this Commonwealth” would be “absolutely exempted” from bondage. Jefferson may or may not have been involved in its drafting—documentation is lacking—though he believed, when he was in his seventies, that he had been a principal in this legislation. The important points to make are, first, that he was associated with a push to curtail the slave trade from at least the time of his draft of the Declaration of Independence; and second, that his colleagues were well aware of his discomfort with slave trafficking. He took pride in his opposition, whether or not he misremembered his authorship of this particular bill. PTJ, 2:22–24; Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 158–61; John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York, 1977), 20–21.
12. On the neurophysiological attributes inherent in Jefferson’s political medicine, and its particular vocabulary, see Andrew Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello (New York, 2005); and for further contextualization, see Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009).
13. Jefferson was not alone in his thoughts on education. At the very time the new state constitution was being drafted, one interested citizen sent an urgent appeal to the Virginia Assembly. “Academicus” wrote for the Virginia Gazette that “learning alone” stood to ensure the stability of the new state government. Relying on England for education was no longer possible and would perhaps even be detrimental—the writer expressed suspicion of those who “drank deep of the fountain of corruption.” See “To the Honorable Convention of Virginia,” Virginia Gazette, May 31, 1776.
14. Brant, 1:296–300; Malone, 1:274–77; Randall, Life of Thomas Jefferson, 1:203–5.
15. JMB, 1:70, 428–29. That same month Jefferson was repaid by Reverend Madison for a sum of cash he had loaned. The notation Jefferson made with respect to the purchase of books reads “Recd. of James Madison”; for the return of cash lent, “Recd. of Rev. Madison.” The notations were made only days apart. The distinction suggests that the first transaction was indeed made with James Madison, Jr.
16. James M. Elson, comp., Patrick Henry in His Speeches and Writings and in the Words of His Contemporaries (Lynchburg, Va., 2007), 91.
17. John J. Reardon, Edmund Randolph: A Biography (New York, 1974), 35–37.
18. Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 124–27; John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (Knoxville, Tenn., 1988), chap. 7 and 199–200; Patrick Henry in His Speeches and Writings, comp. Elson, 92; Stephen to TJ, [ca. 20] December 1776, PTJ, 1:659; Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley, Calif., 1988), 64, 250n30. General Stephen was drummed out of the service a year later, and blamed for the American defeat at Germantown; Washington was glad to be rid of him. See John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York, 2009), 136–37.
19. Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 131; Brant, 1:211, 323–26; Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008), 247, 257, 265–76. Aware of the difficulty in recruitment, meaningful numbers of slaves expressed a willingness to join the army, which legislators refused to allow; however, free blacks we
re enlisted, a practice sanctioned in Virginia but in no other southern state and many slaves pretended to be free and were aided by recruiters, who received ten dollars for each “free” person they brought into service. As of mid-1777, white indentured servants and apprentices could legally leave their masters without consent in order to serve in the military. Ibid., 261, 337–38.
20. David C. Hendrickson, “The First Union: Nationalism versus Internationalism in the American Revolution,” in Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Empire and Nation: The Revolution in the Atlantic World (Baltimore, 2005), 48–50; John Adams to Henry Knox, September 29, 1776, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, ed. Paul L. Smith (Washington, D.C., 1976–2000), 5:260.
21. “Resolutions Urging Recruitment and Conferring Emergency Powers on the Governor and Council,” December 21, 1776, Papers of George Mason, ed. Robert A. Rutland (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970), 1:325–27; TJ to Adams, May 16, 1777, PTJ, 2:19.
22. PJM, 1:192–93; Mark W. Brewin, Celebrating Democracy: The Mass-Mediated Ritual of Election Day (New York, 2008), chap. 2.
23. PJM, 1:214–15; Brant, 1:316.
24. PTJ, 2:119, 122–24, 139–47. Characterization of Wythe is from TJ to Ralph Izard, July 17, 1788, PTJ, 13:372.
25. On the debates, see esp. Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774–1781 (Madison, Wisc., 1940).
26. JM to JM, Sr., January 23, 1778, PJM, 1:222–23; Malone, 1:284–85; Brant, 1:292–93.
27. “Session of Virginia Council of State, April 7, 1778,” PJM, 1:236–37. Henry was forced to admit his personal ineffectiveness in a letter to Congress: “no Efforts of the Executive have been sufficient,” he wrote.
28. JM to Bradford, March 23, 1778; “Election to Virginia House of Delegates Voided,” May 27, 1778, PJM, 1:235, 242–43; Brant, 1:337–38.
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