Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

by Richard R. Beeman

  Thomson would continue teaching for the next decade, while at the same time dabbling in local politics. He became particularly interested in what he considered to be the Pennsylvania proprietary government’s inhumane policy toward the colony’s Indians and in 1759 wrote a lengthy, anonymous pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Alienation of the Delaware and Shawnee Indians from the British Interest. Although the pamphlet did not endear him to Pennsylvania’s proprietary officials, it did win him praise among many of the Quakers in the Pennsylvania Assembly. By 1760, recognizing that a career as a teacher was unlikely to lead him to either wealth or fame, he left his teaching post and began a career as a merchant and, a bit later, as a distiller of rum. Combining an interest in the pursuit of profit with an active engagement in politics, Thomson joined those in Philadelphia who urged firm resistance to British policies every step of the way between the enactment of the Stamp Act in 1765 and the passage of the Coercive Acts in 1774. Working behind the scenes, he had been one of the most active organizers of resistance to the Stamp Act in Philadelphia, and allying himself with John Dickinson, he had been a key organizer of the non-importation agreement in Philadelphia in response to the Townshend Duties.

  By 1774, on the eve of Thomson’s election as secretary to the Continental Congress, his climb to political prominence had reached a height sufficient to prompt John Adams to label him “the Sam Adams of Philadelphia—the Life of the Cause of Liberty.” Some of his more conservative enemies in Pennsylvania described him in less flattering terms as “one of the most violent of the Sons of Liberty (so-called) in America,” but as men like Joseph Galloway were beginning to realize, many of the members of the Continental Congress, a body that they had hoped would put the brakes on the radical resistance movement in America, were far more sympathetic to the likes of the Adamses and Charles Thomson than they had anticipated.10

  Thomson would serve as secretary of the Congress from its opening day on September 5, 1774, until its expiration and supplanting by the First Federal Congress in 1789. Because of the longevity of his service recording, or at least being responsible for recording, all of the business of the Congress, he was in a unique position to observe every important event that occurred in America’s first continental legislative body. Alas, he proved to be a less-than-conscientious record keeper, and historians are still puzzling over the precise order of some of the business conducted in the Congress. Even worse, at least from the standpoint of the twenty-first-century historian eager to learn more about the inner workings of the Congress, late in his life Thomson took an even more willful step. He had apparently amassed a large collection of “secret historical memoirs” relating to the Revolution, but when asked if he would write a history of the Revolution, he emphatically declined, claiming that his history would “contradict all the histories of the great events of the Revolution,” thereby casting doubt on the virtue and wisdom of those involved in the struggle. It would be better, he asserted, to allow subsequent generations of Americans to live with their myths: “Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men. Perhaps they may adopt the qualities that have been ascribed to them, and thus good may be done.” He would prefer, he said, to let America’s revolutionary heroes “go down with éclat to Posterity, whose Laurels would be tarnished if I were to write.” Nor did he merely refrain from writing that history; he made sure that others would not use his papers to do the same. Beginning in 1815, he proceeded to burn every scrap of information that he had respecting the course of events of the American Revolution! A coup for mythmaking, but a disaster for history.11

  Instructing the Delegates

  After approving Thomson’s appointment as secretary, there were certainly many in the New York and Pennsylvania delegations who must have felt some uneasiness about the direction in which the Congress was moving. They may have felt some relief when the Congress turned to more routine business—that of the reading of the credentials and instructions from each of the colonial legislatures to their delegates. However routine that procedural business may have been, the instructions from the colonial legislatures provide us with a striking reminder that the First Continental Congress, far from being conceived by the colonial legislatures as a revolutionary body, was instead one called not just to protest the policies of the British Parliament but also to seek reconciliation with their mother country. The instructions from the colonial legislatures, even in the more radical Virginia and Massachusetts, were strikingly similar. While all of them referred to the need for a redress of American grievances, they also were in accord in desiring the restoration of “that peace, harmony, & mutual confidence which once happily subsisted between the parent country and her Colonies.” When we look back on the steady deterioration in the relationship between the Congress and royal officials in London during the twenty-two months that would follow, we might find it tempting to regard these expressions of affection and felicity as insincere boilerplate, but in fact, the overwhelming number of delegates to the Congress did come to Philadelphia with a deep affection for their mother country and were genuinely desirous of finding a path toward reconciliation.12

  The instructions to the delegation from the Massachusetts General Court, adopted on June 17 and most likely drafted by Sam Adams, were surprisingly mild, joining in the common refrain, expressing the General Court’s hope for a “restoration of union & harmony between Great Britain and the Colonies, most ardently desired by all good men.” Sam Adams may have had far more ambivalence about the desirability of a “restoration of union & harmony” than most of his fellow delegates, but, ever the shrewd tactician, he realized that moderation, not militance, would likely win Boston and Massachusetts more friends among the delegates attending the Congress.13

  A few legislatures were more pointed in their criticisms of British policies. The Delaware legislature offered a catalogue of specific British actions that had precipitated the crisis. Its instructions condemned the acts of Parliament that had closed the ports of Boston and essentially imposed a military government on the residents of Massachusetts Bay. In addition, they called particular attention to British trade policies designed to restrain American manufacturing by making the colonies a captive market for goods made in England. Such policies, the Delaware legislators believed, were meant to take away “the property of the Colonists without their participation or consent.”14

  The Virginia Convention, which had begun to meet in defiance of the order of the Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, after he had dissolved the colony’s legitimate legislature, the House of Burgesses, was the least restrained in its rhetoric. Some of the impassioned language of its instructions was no doubt crafted by men like Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry, who were eager to support Boston at all costs. But we must now mention a young and still relatively obscure member of the Convention from Albemarle County. Thomas Jefferson, thirty-one in 1774, had been elected to his first term in the House of Burgesses five years before. By the time the Virginia Convention opened its proceedings in July of 1774, Jefferson had gained considerable respect among his fellow delegates for his intellect and literary skills, but was not yet considered one of the most prominent leaders of that body. Nevertheless, he took it upon himself to draft a set of resolutions defending American rights and defining the limits of Parliament’s power over the colonies, a draft he hoped would be endorsed by the Virginia Convention and would then serve as the colony’s official position in the upcoming general Congress. Much to his disappointment, on July 11, he was stricken by dysentery on his way to the Convention and had to turn back home to recover. Jefferson’s friend and fellow Albemarle County representative John Walker carried a copy of his resolutions to Williamsburg for him, presenting them to Speaker Peyton Randolph, but Jefferson was no doubt frustrated that he did not have a chance to be present to speak on behalf of his literary production.

  Jefferson’s resolutions are particularly notable in light of the famous document that he would present to the Continental C
ongress in July of 1776. They condemned the “many unwarrantable encroachments and usurpation, attempted to be made by the legislature of one part of the empire, upon those rights which God and the laws have given equally and independently to all.” The young Albemarle County lawyer had no use for humble expressions of affection and devotion to King George III, instead asserting that “his majesty will think we have reason to expect when he reflects that he is no more than the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed with definite powers, to assist in working the great machine of government erected for their use, and consequently subject to their superintendance.” In a lengthy exegesis—too lengthy given the traditional form of such instructions—in support of his challenge to the king’s authority, Jefferson embarked on a careful historical analysis of the “origin and first settlement of these countries,” concluding that a long “chain of parliamentary usurpation” was responsible for the mistaken notion that Parliament had any authority at all over the American colonies. He then proceeded, in a manner again similar to his construction of the Declaration of Independence, to provide a catalogue of grievances against the king, whom Jefferson blamed for disallowing “wholesome” laws, dissolving provincial legislatures, the presence of a standing army on American soil and the replacement of civil with military government in Massachusetts. Jefferson’s draft concluded with an expression of hope that “fraternal love and harmony” would be restored between Great Britain and its colonies, but it made it clear that that outcome depended on a redress of the colonists’ grievances and a recognition that “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.” Jefferson’s reputation as a defender of American liberties was nowhere near as prominent as that of Patrick Henry or Richard Henry Lee, who had been elected to the Continental Congress at least in part because of their fiery speech-making. But Jefferson’s literary efforts, still in their infancy, would ultimately prove more important and earn for him a prominence far greater than anything that his more oratorically skilled colleagues would ever achieve.15

  The members of the Virginia Convention, when they considered Jefferson’s proposed resolutions, were not prepared for such a bold assertion of American rights, nor for such a bold denial of the rights of the king and Parliament. In Jefferson’s recollection, the leap was “too long, as yet, for the mass of our citizens.” But Jefferson’s literary efforts were not in vain. Just a week later some of his friends arranged to publish his ideas in pamphlet form under the title of A Summary View of the Rights of British America. The pamphlet would circulate widely throughout the colonies and help to establish Jefferson’s reputation as an unusually careful and eloquent defender of America’s constitutional liberties. Indeed, Jefferson’s Summary View would play an important role in his ultimate selection by the Congress as the principal draftsman of the Declaration of Independence.16

  The final version of Virginia’s instructions, adopted on August 1, 1774, was much more concise than Jefferson’s lengthy treatise, consisting of just one paragraph. It was slightly more belligerent than the instructions from some of the other colonies, referring to the “rage and ruin of arbitrary taxes,” but it too concluded by expressing a desire to move as “speedily as possible to procure the return of that harmony and Union, so beneficial to the whole Empire, and so ardently desired by all British America.”17

  The Son of Thunder

  By September 6, the mist and rain of the previous day had given way to warm sunshine as the delegates turned to their first important piece of procedural business—the establishment of rules for voting within the Congress. That discussion would produce the first overt signs of discord among the colonies. The cause of the discord, however, had little to do with the delegates’ attitudes toward their attachment to the mother country and everything to do with their calculation of the self-interests of the colonies they were representing.

  The man who provoked that discord had become a force to contend with in his home colony of Virginia, and over the course of his career would become legendary as the “son of thunder” because of the extraordinary power of his oratory. But in 1774 he was still relatively little known in other parts of America. Although later in his career he would dress more elegantly, favoring a dramatic, scarlet cloak, Patrick Henry appeared before the Congress wearing a plain, unpowdered wig and dressed in a simple gray suit of country clothing, more nearly resembling—in the recollection of Charles Thomson—a Presbyterian minister “used to haranguing the people.” And harangue he did. Though Henry would take his place in history as a passionate defender of the provincial interests of his home state of Virginia and a vocal opponent of any interference from outside authority—whether that authority be imposed by the British government of George III or the government of the United States after the adoption of the federal Constitution—on that day in 1774, he rose in Carpenters’ Hall and declared: “Government is dissolved. . . . We are in a state of nature. . . . The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American!”18

  Patrick Henry possessed a genial, outgoing personality that would make him the hero of the ordinary farmers who made up most of the population of the central and western sections of Virginia. And his oratorical gifts, whether unleashed in the courtroom before a jury as he pleaded a case in his role as one of the colony’s most successful lawyers or on the stump in a local election campaign or on the floor of the Virginia House of Burgesses, would become legendary. But at thirty-eight years of age at the time of the meeting of the Continental Congress, he had taken a while to get his career launched.

  Patrick Henry’s father, John Henry, had immigrated to Virginia from Scotland in 1727 and through hard work and a timely marriage had risen to a position of modest prominence within the social and political circles of the still-expanding region of the Virginia Piedmont, the area of the colony that ran westward from the town of Richmond to the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sometime in 1733 or 1734, John Henry married Sarah Winston, the daughter of a prominent Virginia Piedmont family, who had recently been left a widow by the death of her wealthy and politically prominent husband, John Syme. With his newly acquired combination of social connections and wealth, John Henry moved quickly into the lower levels of the gentry of the Virginia Piedmont, gaining appointment as a justice of the Hanover County Court, achieving the rank of major in the county militia and, through his connections in local politics, adding to his wife’s inherited landholdings by gaining patents for several thousand acres of western lands. While by no means possessing the wealth or social standing of members of the First Families of Virginia—the Lees, Randolphs, Byrds, Carters or Harrisons—John Henry was in a position to offer his two offspring a solid start in life.

  The eldest child, Patrick, was born in 1736, shortly after the marriage between John Henry and Sarah Winston Syme. Patrick’s early years hardly foretold a life of achievement. An indifferent student, he apparently abandoned all attempts at formal schooling by the time he was ten, and when, at the age of eighteen he married Sarah Shelton, the daughter of another moderately prominent Piedmont family, it was not at all clear how the young couple would support themselves. The Shelton family had given the newlyweds 300 acres, a modest farmhouse and six slaves as a wedding present, but the farmhouse burned to the ground three years after their marriage. Henry was apparently able to sell a few of his slaves and purchase enough goods to start a country store, but that venture failed within a year. Between 1757 and 1760 Henry and his wife lived at the inn and tavern operated by the Shelton family, with Henry earning his keep by tending bar and entertaining the guests by playing the fiddle.19

  At that point, after successive failures as a farmer and merchant, and with distinctly unimpressive educational attainments, Patrick Henry made what must have seemed to many an incomprehensible decision: he began legal studies with an eye to becoming a lawyer. His legal education, even by the lax standards of the western regions of Virginia,
was exceptionally skimpy. Depending on whose testimony one chooses to believe, Henry spent somewhere between six weeks (Thomas Jefferson’s somewhat uncharitable estimate) and nine months preparing for his bar examination. Henry presented himself for his examination before a quartet of the most distinguished lawyers in the colony: Robert Carter Nicholas, a long-time member of the House of Burgesses and soon-to-be treasurer of the colony; John Randolph, Virginia’s attorney general; Peyton Randolph, trained at London’s Middle Temple and soon to become Speaker of the House of Burgesses; and George Wythe, widely considered to be the most learned lawyer in the colony. Henry’s performance before his examiners was by all accounts dismal. John and Peyton Randolph signed Henry’s certification to practice law with the greatest reluctance, and, “upon repeated importunity and promises of future reading,” Nicholas finally agreed to sign the aspiring lawyer’s license as well. All three men, though appalled by Henry’s lack of legal knowledge, nevertheless were impressed by his “natural genius,” persuading themselves that though he was nearly wholly unprepared to practice law at that moment, he would, in the course of time, “soon qualify himself.” George Wythe, the one true legal scholar among the four, simply could not bring himself to concur. He “absolutely refused” to sign Henry’s license, but made no attempt to overturn the judgment of his three co-examiners. And, as later events would confirm, the observation of the two Randolphs and Nicholas about Henry’s natural genius—his quick wit and charming personality—would prove right on the mark. Although he was relatively poorly educated and, at that moment, poorly disciplined, the force of Henry’s personality, combined with the passion of his public performance, would enable him to develop into one of the most successful lawyers in all of Virginia.