Independence

by John Ferling

  Jefferson had completed two terms of the Burgesses by the time he married and had shown promise that one day he would play a leading role in the assembly. His education and remarkable intellect were obvious attributes, and he literally stood out physically. At six feet two inches in height, he towered six inches or more above most assemblymen. Slender, with sinewy arms and legs, Jefferson had sandy-red hair and struck others as pleasant-looking, if not exactly handsome. But what many observers first noticed, aside from his height and exceptional intellect, was his poor posture and somewhat awkward manner. One onlooker commented on his lack of “external grace,” and another said that Jefferson reminded him “of a tall, large-boned farmer.”

  Jefferson’s greatest obstacle to success as a legislator stemmed from his reserved demeanor. Some of his more gregarious colleagues thought him cold and unfriendly, though Jefferson worked hard to be “considerate to all persons.” In time, most of his fellow assemblymen appear to have come to see him as kind, gentle, and affectionate. When Jefferson grew comfortable with an acquaintance, he relaxed and was more open, so that in time his associates found him to be a provocative and humorous conversationalist. But Jefferson could never overcome his innate shyness. He shrank from the backslapping and bonhomie that was second nature to the most successful legislators. Aware of his defects as a public speaker, he rarely joined in the floor debates in the legislature. He may have been self-conscious of his voice, described by a female observer as “femininely soft and gentle” and by numerous others as weak and barely audible. Whatever held him back, no one remembered Jefferson being a frequent participant in the give-and-take among the assemblymen. Nor did anyone recall ever hearing him deliver a rousing speech.22

  Jefferson appears to have remained a secondary figure in the Burgesses until the eve of the American Revolution. His shortcomings as a legislator had something to do with this, but the distractions in his private life were more responsible. He and Martha had two children prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, though only one, Patsy, lived beyond infancy. Jefferson was a doting father and loving husband, a man who found marriage to be as blissful as he had imagined it would be. He abandoned his legal career, hoping to spend more time at home with his family. Jefferson was so content that, had the Anglo-American crisis somehow been peacefully resolved, he might have been content to play only an insubstantial role as a legislator. Living at Monticello, raising his family, reading books, playing music, and from time to time writing an essay for publication might have been sufficient for his happiness.

  But Jefferson entered public life during a troubled time, taking his seat in the Burgesses during the Townshend Duties crisis. In 1772, his fifth year as a legislator, he joined with Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee in a campaign to link the colonies with committees of correspondence. It was the first sign that he aspired to play a greater role as a legislator. By the next year he chaired one of the six major committees in the assembly, an essential step on the road to becoming a leading assemblyman.23

  By then his views on Anglo-American relations had taken shape. Jefferson’s surviving papers from the early 1770s, though spare to be sure, suggest that above all he was concerned that the autonomy of the colonists was being “circumscribed within narrow limits” and that London was bent on compelling Americans “to direct all labors in subservience to her [Great Britain’s] interests.”24 He was doubtless thinking of the dangers threatened by parliamentary taxation, but as a large land holder, tobacco grower and exporter, and slave owner—his “family,” as he was wont to say, included some 175 slaves by 1774—Jefferson’s economic interests sometimes suffered in the face of imperial policies.

  Like Washington, Jefferson was distressed by London’s failure to open the lands west of the mountains that had been wrested from France in the Treaty of Paris. In addition, as was true of all tobacco planters, he was compelled by Parliament’s trade laws to export his crop solely to British markets. Tobacco prices suffered after 1750 and many planters attributed their woes to the lack of free markets. Virginia’s planters were convinced that, had they been able to trade in Europe and elsewhere, the value of their tobacco crops, and their earnings, would have increased. Jefferson did not address that issue directly, but he spoke heatedly of forces beyond the control of Virginia’s planters. He also alluded to royal officials who “might sweep away the whole of my little fortune.”25

  Faced with distressed markets, many planters additionally found themselves in possession of an oversupply of bondsmen. In 1772 the House of Burgesses voted unanimously to petition the Crown to disallow the Atlantic slave trade, a move aimed at producing shortages of slaves in Georgia and South Carolina, where rice—and slavery—flourished. If the imperial authorities consented, Virginia would be able to sell its excess slaves to the low-country South. But George III refused to play along. The Crown not only turned a deaf ear to Virginia’s petition; it also vetoed acts passed in 1767 and 1769 by the House of Burgesses that would have stopped slave imports into the Old Dominion. The king’s actions prompted one planter to exclaim that never before had Virginians felt such a “galling yoke of dependence.” Jefferson sensed that and something else as well. The king’s conduct, he thought, demonstrated with crystal clarity that the Crown preferred England’s slave merchants “to the lasting interests of the American states.”26

  Jefferson’s sense of how the policies of a faraway British government damaged his personal interests was filtered through his understanding of Enlightenment liberalism, the law, and the history of English government. From reading John Locke and English Whigs who had produced a remarkable abundance of radical tracts two or three generations earlier, Jefferson came to think of England as a decaying and corrupt land drifting toward tyranny. Already persuaded that England had been defiled for centuries by a feudal monarchical system, Jefferson by 1774 was convinced that not only did the mother country threaten to contaminate America but also that London schemed to reduce “a free and happy People to a Wretched & miserable state of slavery.”27 On the eve of the First Continental Congress, Jefferson said that he hoped the colonies could “establish union” with Great Britain “on a generous plan,” a remark that suggests that he already believed the traditional terms of the Anglo-American union to be obsolete.28

  Jefferson played an important role in Virginia’s radical activities in 1774. When Governor Dunmore prorogued the House of Burgesses in the spring, in retaliation for its resolutions denouncing the Coercive Acts, the legislators met defiantly in the Apollo Tavern—a few steps down dusty Duke of Gloucester Street from the capitol—and urged a national congress. It also agreed to meet again in August to select the delegates to the conclave, if the other colonies had by then consented to such a body. Jefferson might have been included in Virginia’s delegation to the First Congress, but while en route to the August assembly session, he fell ill with either a migraine or a cluster headache, which sent him to bed for several days. (Jefferson had suffered his first such agonizing headache eleven years earlier, when he learned of Rebecca Burwell’s engagement. Over the years the affliction recurred in moments of great tension and anxiety until his retirement from public life in 1809, after which he never again endured another debilitating headache.)29

  Earlier in the torrid summer of 1774, Jefferson had written a lengthy set of instructions—in reality, a learned essay—for the guidance of Virginia’s delegates. In all likelihood, he hoped that his composition would lead to his inclusion in Virginia’s delegation to Congress. The Virginia Convention spurned his ideas as too radical, but friends published what he had written as a pamphlet titled A Summary View of the Rights of British America.

  Much that Jefferson wrote had been said by others. But he went further than most pamphleteers in elaborating how the colonists had founded, maintained, and expanded their provinces without British help. Jefferson also advanced the unique argument that the Americans had chosen to be part of Great Britain through their voluntary consent. Nor had they ever
relinquished their rights as freeborn Englishmen. He wrote in a graceful, flowing manner, reminiscent of Dickinson’s in Letters from a Farmer, and with a refreshing brevity that few could equal. Although Jefferson missed the First Congress, his Summary View was widely read before war broke out, establishing his reputation as a literary craftsman. John Adams, for instance, called it “a very handsome public Paper” that gave Jefferson “the Character of a fine Writer.”30

  Virginia sent the same delegation back to Philadelphia for the Second Congress in May 1775, but Peyton Randolph returned home after only two weeks, preferring to preside over the provincial assembly rather than to serve as the president of Congress. Chosen by his fellow legislators as Randolph’s replacement, Jefferson hurried northward in June 1775 to take his seat. In mid-June he arrived in Philadelphia in an expensive carriage drawn by two horses and attended by two slaves.31

  Jefferson was no different as a congressman than he had been as a Virginia assemblyman. He rarely entered the floor debates—Adams later said that he never heard Jefferson “utter three Sentences together” in Congress—but he was less inhibited as a member of small committees, where his associates found him to be “frank, explicit, and decisive.”32 Nonetheless, his colleagues did not see much of him. Jefferson had been in Congress only six weeks when it recessed at the beginning of August 1775. After a month in Virginia, he returned to Philadelphia and served from early October until late December, when, like numerous other delegates, he asked for a leave to return home. He planned on remaining with Martha for about ninety days, more than twice the time spent at home that winter by most congressmen, but Jefferson’s absence was considerably longer than he had anticipated. Late in March he fell ill with another excruciating headache, brought on perhaps by his mother’s death on March 31 or by anxiety over his imminent departure. He did not leave Monticello for five more weeks, finally taking up his seat in Congress again in mid-May. On this occasion, he made the long trip from Albemarle County on horseback attended only by fourteen-year-old Robert Hemings, his personal servant, or body slave.33 Within three weeks of his return to Philadelphia, Jefferson sat down to compose the Declaration of Independence.34

  Jefferson had moved to a new residence when he returned to Philadelphia. Previously, he had lived on the east side of downtown, but he was bothered by the city’s “excessive heats” in the summer, finding Philadelphia far hotter and stickier than his remote hilltop in Virginia. He was now lodged on the second floor of the three-story, red brick home owned by Jacob Graff, a successful mason. The apartment was not only cooler but also, with a bedroom and parlor, larger.35

  Jefferson’s residence in Philadelphia when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Owned by Jacob Graff, and situated at Seventh and Market, Jefferson lodged here between May and August 1776. He drafted the Declaration of Independence in his two-room parlor on the second story. (Drawing from John T. Scharf and Thompson Westcott’s History of Philadelphia, 1884.)

  Jefferson likely began writing the draft of the Declaration on Wednesday or Thursday, June 12 or 13. Accustomed to rising early, he probably worked in the relative coolness of early morning. He may also have taken up his pen again in the evening, when the traffic beneath his windows faded and an occasional night breeze stirred. It is conceivable too that he skipped some sessions of Congress and worked through the day. Lee, with Wythe in tow, had left for home, but four other members of Virginia’s delegation were present, affording Jefferson the luxury of staying away if he chose to do so.

  Only two things are known for certain about Jefferson’s work on the draft: He wrote it while seated in a revolving Windsor chair with a small, folding writing desk placed across his lap, both of which had been custom-made for him by a Philadelphia cabinetmaker.36 And he delivered the draft quickly. Adams later recalled that only “a day or two” was required for Jefferson to complete the task.37 While Adams may not have meant for his comment to be taken literally, Jefferson was ordinarily a rapid writer.

  On a “Friday morn” Jefferson sent a copy of the draft to Franklin—he addressed it to “Doctr. Franklyn”—and asked that he “suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate.” By then, Jefferson had already shown Adams what he had written.38 Thus, in all probability Jefferson completed his draft within three to five days and gave it to Adams sometime between Monday, June 17, and Wednesday, June 19. Jefferson probably transmitted the draft document to Franklin on Friday, June 21.

  Years later Adams, consumed with jealousy at the laurels Jefferson had reaped as the author of the Declaration of Independence, carped that the document was “a juvenile declamation” that merely rehashed what others had said. There was “not an idea in it, but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before.” But Adams had forgotten that neither he nor his colleagues on the committee or in Congress wanted Jefferson to write something novel. It would have been ludicrous to have done so. Jefferson correctly understood, as he put it years later, that his task was to avoid “aiming at originality of principle or sentiment.” He was to prepare a draft that captured the “tone and spirit” of “the American mind” toward the mother country’s imperial policies and the king’s decision to make war on them. Along these same lines the document had to make clear why Congress, which had repeatedly insisted that it was not bent on independence, was indeed declaring independence. Within these parameters, Jefferson subsequently said, he merely sought to avoid copying “from any particular and previous writing.”39

  As the draft sprang from Jefferson’s pen, it became clear that the Declaration of Independence was to be more than simply a justification of revolution. It need not have been. The English Declaration of Rights, with which Jefferson and every educated colonist was familiar, began with “Whereas” and proceeded to list the charges against the king, James II. When Adams, a month earlier, had written the resolution directing the colonies to abandon their charters and create new, independent governments, he had begun: “Whereas his Britannic Majesty, in conjunction with the Lords and Commons of Great-Britain, has …,” followed by a compilation of the wrongdoings by Britain’s leaders during the past decade. That Jefferson’s draft did not follow those models may have been his unique contribution to the eventual Declaration of Independence. Or, it may have been the result of the instructions provided by the Committee of Five. For instance, in his private correspondence near the time the committee first met, Adams had fervently declared that an independent America must embrace “a more equal Liberty, than has prevail’d in other Parts of the Earth” and must repudiate hereditary rule by the “Dons, the Bashaws, the Grandees, the Patricians, the Sachems, the Nabobs, call them by what Name you please,” but in short, the “insolent Domination, in a few, a very few opulent, monopolizing Families.”40 He and others on the committee may have instructed Jefferson to go beyond merely amassing charges of British despotism and to delineate the meaning of the American Revolution.

  Jefferson’s draft included two segments that consciously sought to do more than merely justify the break with Great Britain. Jefferson penned a draft that enunciated in the broadest terms the principles upon which the new nation would stand and around which its citizenry could rally. After all, until recently, the colonists had considered themselves to be British, but those feelings had evaporated. Furthermore, the colonists identified first and foremost with their province and hardly, if at all, with the Continental Congress or the concept of an American Union. But the “united colonies” were about to become the “United States.” Jefferson’s draft, therefore, was meant not only to bring to a close America’s days as colonies of another nation, but to also announce the creation of the American nation.

  This was also meant to be a war document. The meaning it gave to the American Revolution should foster a willingness to fight for the new nation and the resplendent ideals for which it stood, while at the same time sustain morale on the home front throughout a lengthy war. However, this document was not to be directed s
olely at the American citizenry. Its audience included “mankind” in a “candid world,” and none more so than America’s friends in Great Britain who might someday play a useful role in the termination of hostilities and recognition of the United States. The draft referred to “our British brethren” who had long been remarkable for their “native justice & magnanimity,” and especially those among them who had been “our common kindred” in opposing the measures of Lord North’s ministry. As declaring independence at this juncture was due in large measure to the need for foreign assistance, the document was of course directed toward those nations in Europe that might trade or ally with America. (The minute that the Declaration was adopted and printed, the Committee of Secret Correspondence sent a copy to Silas Deane in Paris with instructions that he not only see to its publication in French newspapers but also “communicate the piece to the Court of France, and send copies of it to the other Courts of Europe.” Congress additionally ordered that the Declaration “be proclaimed … at the head of the army.”)41

  Very little in Jefferson’s draft was changed before the document was submitted to Congress. Adams appears to have made two alterations and Franklin five, all dealing with phraseology. For example, “his present majesty” was changed to “the present king of Great Britain.” Jefferson subsequently remarked that no changes were made by the Committee of Five, but it seems unlikely that Sherman and Livingston would not have suggested at least one or two alterations. Altogether, sixteen slight modifications were made to the original draft during the roughly ten days between Jefferson’s completion of his task and the document’s presentation to Congress.42 Some of the changes may have been made by Jefferson himself. Like any good author who is never satisfied with what he has written, Jefferson may have been unable to resist the temptation to tinker with his handiwork. Or, he may have been responding to oral suggestions that were made at the one or more committee meetings that were held, and some of these recommendations may have been made by Livingston or Sherman. But what is abundantly clear is that the document submitted to Congress was almost exclusively the work of Jefferson.