Joseph J. Ellis

by American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

  Specific factual extravagances are less important to note than Jefferson’s overall narrative scheme. The colonists are innocent bystanders being acted on by an aggressive British government. The political conflict invariably takes the form of a moral dichotomy that leaves no room for shaded meanings or ambivalent loyalties. The bitterness and confusion of the present are contrasted with the “once upon a time” version of the past. And most effectively, the real revolutionaries are not American colonists but British officials, who are just as unmitigatedly corrupt as the colonists are virtuous.

  The rhetorical excess of Causes and Necessities merits additional meditation, in part because it was a preview of coming attractions in the Declaration and in part because its message was conveyed in coded language familiar to Jefferson and his contemporaries but strange to our modern ears and sensibilities. The key feature was the apparent extremism of the contrast between American virtue and British corruption, which itself depended upon an implicit presumption that sinister forces were conspiring in London’s faraway corridors of power to deprive unsuspecting colonists of their liberties. Like the Saxon myth, this way of thinking and talking about politics had deep roots in the Whig tradition in England, dating back to the Puritan dissenters during the English Civil War in the 1640s. The chief eighteenth-century proponents of this dissenting tradition, who called themselves Real Whigs or the Country Party, were Englishmen: Henry St. John Bolingbroke, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (writing under the pseudonym of Cato) and James Burgh. They had created a language, and indeed an ideology, of opposition to the arbitrary and abusive exercise of power by the British ministry, often described as the Court Party, distinctive for its neurotic suspicion of government’s motives and its stark moral contrasts between popular virtue and official corruption.

  Jefferson’s library contained copies of the major writings of Bolingbroke, “Cato” and Burgh, and he along with his colleagues in the Continental Congress were well versed in the arguments and the idiom of English Whiggery. What strikes our modern ears as hyperbolic and melodramatic both in its tone and its posture toward political authority—virtually any expression of governmental power is stigmatized—was in fact part of a venerable Whig tradition of opposition. It was an acceptable and familiar style of political argumentation that had proved extremely useful in the previous decade of protest against British taxation. It had enormous polemic potential in simplifying the bewildering constitutional complexities facing both the colonists and the British ministry. Even its quasi-paranoid attitude toward the motives of decision-makers in London and Whitehall enjoyed at least the appearance of cool reason during the spring of 1776, as George III and his ministers seemed bent on behaving like villains in the Whig script.

  What deserves special attention, however, is that Jefferson’s embrace of the Whig rhetoric and the Whig story line was utterly sincere. His draft of Causes and Necessities, then his subsequent draft of the Declaration, were not undertaken as self-conscious polemics or exaggerated pieces of propaganda. What he wrote actually reflected his understanding of the forces swirling through Anglo-America. What some delegates in the Congress regarded as a conveniently useful distortion that would help mobilize colonial opinion in the direction that destiny required, Jefferson regarded as an accurate characterization of the essential elements of the political situation. Whether or not he had acquired the primal categories of his political thinking from the Whig historians and Country Party theorists, by the spring of 1776 he had thoroughly absorbed their style and substance into his own personality, where they only served to buttress his extreme aversion to explicit expressions of authority and his instinctive tendency to think in terms of moralistic dichotomies. Jefferson was, then, a quintessential Whig, but the Whig values were so appealing because they blended so nicely with his own quintessentially Jeffersonian character.

  He also showed himself extremely sensitive to any criticism of his prose. This led to Jefferson’s first political battle in the Continental Congress, when John Dickinson questioned the tone and wording of several sections of the Jefferson draft of Causes and Necessities. Dickinson was a delegate from Pennsylvania and the acknowledged leader of the moderate faction in the Congress. He had been put on the committee to draft Causes and Necessities in order to assure bipartisan support for the document. Jefferson’s late-in-life recollection of Dickinson’s objections therefore sounded quite plausible: “I prepared a Draught of the Declaration committed to us. It was too strong for Mr. Dickinson. He still retained the hope of reconciliation with the mother country, and was unwilling it should be lessened by offensive statements.”

  After much editorial detective work in the twentieth century, however, Jefferson’s wholly plausible recollection has been discredited. Dickinson’s suggested revisions did not represent a watering down of Jefferson’s message. In fact Dickinson inserted the strongest and most quotable words in the entire document: “Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. Our internal resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign assistance is attainable.” Jefferson’s objections were essentially stylistic and temperamental. Dickinson’s revisions injected a more matter-of-fact tone that offset Jefferson’s dramatic dichotomies. Mostly, however, Jefferson could not abide any tampering with his verbal creations. He had worked out his arrangement of words in isolation. In the give-and-take of the drafting committee, he regarded all critical suggestions as unwelcome and misguided corruptions. The purity of his prose, like the purity of the colonial cause, did not permit compromise.35

  The Continental Congress resolved the impasse by approving a final draft that included most of Dickinson’s changes. Despite the revisions, it retained Jeffersonian intonations that, a year later in slightly altered form, were to echo through the ages: “So to Slight Justice and the Opinion of Mankind, we esteem ourselves bound by Obligations of Respect to the Rest of the World, to make known the Justice of our Cause.” His composition of Causes and Necessities, like Summary View, proved a dress rehearsal for the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.36

  By the end of the summer of 1775, then, the pattern was set. Jefferson played no role in the public debates, but he was appointed to several committees and often charged with the responsibility of drafting the reports. He was asked, for instance, to draft the Resolutions of Congress on Lord North’s Proposal, a spirited rejection of the English government’s halfhearted offer of compromise. He was asked to draft the Declaration on the British Treatment of Ethan Allen, a protest against trying Allen for treason. Despite his public silence, as well as his reticence during committee debates and his thin-skinned attitude toward criticisms of his literary craftsmanship, the leadership of the radical faction in the Congress counted him as a staunch and valuable ally. More than fifty years later John Adams remembered Jefferson as “a silent member in Congress,” but “so prompt, frank, explicit and decisive… that he soon won my heart.” Though only eight years older than Jefferson, Adams claimed that he initially regarded him as a son.37

  The gravitational pull of Monticello remained a constant seduction. Indeed, if there were a fundamental rule of emotional physics for Jefferson, it was an attraction for isolation and an aversion to the public arena: He hated the debates in Congress; could barely tolerate the bickerings on committees; preferred to read and work alone in his quarters, but longed to escape the “cockpit of revolution” altogether and retire to his mountaintop. In December 1775 he did just that. Throughout the winter and spring, while the governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, declared martial law and infuriated the Tidewater leadership by inviting all slaves to join him as free men in war against the planter class, and while the political tempo in Philadelphia quickened, especially after the publication of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, Jefferson remained secluded at Monticello. He focused his attention on Martha, who was ill, probably because of a difficult pregnancy. And he indulged his private cravings. He stocked his cellar with Madeira (vintage 1770), his private park with domesticated deer, his stable with
a new line of thoroughbred foals and his soul with a much needed dose of serenity.38

  He planned, albeit reluctantly, to return to Philadelphia in April but was struck by a “mysterious malady” that left him incapacitated for more than a month. The ailment turned out to be a migraine headache, the first recorded occurrence of what proved a lifelong affliction that flared up whenever he felt unduly pressured. The immediate sources of the pressure he felt in the spring of 1776 were probably twofold: First, his public duties in the Continental Congress were at odds with his private preferences to remain at home; second, his mother had died on the last day of March. His estrangement from her in all likelihood prompted complicated feelings of guilt and relief. In any event his only mention of the event was characteristically cold and curt. “The death of my mother you have probably not heard of,” he wrote to William Randolph: “This happened on the last day of March after an illness of not more than an hour. We suppose it to have been apoplectic. Be pleased to tender my affectionate wishes to Mrs. Randolph and my unknown cousins… .” Save for a brief mention in his autobiography, it was the last time Jefferson acknowledged her existence.39

  He arrived back in Philadelphia on May 14. Not only did he lack any inkling of the historic events that were about to transpire—he confessed that he was completely out of touch with the evolving situation in Congress—but he even tried to persuade friends in Virginia to have him recalled. The Virginia legislature was meeting in convention at Williamsburg to draft a state constitution, and Jefferson, like a good many other delegates in Philadelphia, presumed that the most crucial political business was now occurring at the state rather than national level. The act of drafting new state constitutions, he noted, “is the whole object of the present controversy.” He meant that the establishment of state governments was the most discernible way to declare American independence, indicating as it did the assumption of political responsibility for the management of American domestic affairs. (John Adams agreed with this perspective and, leaving nothing to chance, had spent the spring designing model constitutions for several states.) Peyton Randolph, Edmund Pendleton and Patrick Henry all had opted to remain back home in the Old Dominion, either to oversee the drafting of Virginia’s constitution or to take the field against Dunmore’s ragtag army of former slaves and loyalists. George Washington was in the field organizing the Continental Army. Philadelphia, or so it seemed, had become a mere sideshow.40

  But Philadelphia was where duty demanded that Jefferson place himself. Anticipating the imminent arrival of a hot and humid summer, he decided to shift his lodgings to the outskirts of the city in order to “have the benefits of a freely circulating air.” On May 23 he moved his Windsor chair and writing desk into new quarters on the second floor of a three-story brick house at the corner of Market and Seventh streets. The chair, the desk and the entire dwelling were about to become sacred relics of what history was to record as America’s most miraculous moment.41

  TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

  DURING THE NEXT six weeks, from mid-May to early July 1776, Jefferson wrote the words that made him famous and that, over the course of the next two centuries, associated him with the most visionary version of the American dream. As a result, this historical ground has been trampled over by hordes of historians, and the air surrounding it is perpetually full of an incandescent mixture of incense and smoke. His authorship of the Declaration of Independence is regarded as one of those few quasi-religious episodes in American history, that moment when, at least according to the most romantic explanations, a solitary Jefferson was allowed a glimpse of the eternal truths and then offered the literary inspiration to inscribe them on the American soul.

  Given this supercharged context, it is the beginning of all genuine wisdom to recognize that neither Jefferson nor any other of the participants foresaw the historical significance of what they were doing at the time. What’s more, within the context of Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, the writing of the Declaration of Independence did not seem nearly so important as other priorities, including the constitution-making of the states and the prospect of foreign alliances with France or Spain. The golden haze around the Declaration had not yet formed. The sense of history we bring to the subject did not exist for those making it.

  One man, John Adams, has left a record that suggests he was conscious of being “present at the creation.” In May he wrote to his beloved Abigail in a prophetic mood: “When I consider the great Events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may have been instrumental in touching some Springs, and turning some small Wheels, which have had and will have such Effects, I feel an Awe upon my Mind, which is not easily described.” Two weeks later he announced to Abigail that he had begun to make copies of all his letters, a clear sign that he was sending them to posterity. But Adams was hardly typical. His neurotic sensitivity to his own place in history became legendary. And his remarks at the time referred to actions in the Continental Congress requiring the states to draft new constitutions, not to the drafting of the Declaration, which he considered a merely ornamental afterthought.42

  Jefferson, for his part, remained focused on events back in Virginia. Throughout the weeks of late May and early June he devoted the bulk of his energies to producing three different drafts of a new constitution for his home state. Clearly influenced by the John Adams pamphlet Thoughts on Government, Jefferson emphasized the separation of powers, an independent judiciary and a bicameral legislature, with a weak executive (called the Administrator in order to signify his lack of governing power). Every political paper that Jefferson had written up to this point in his life had been a protest statement against some aspect of British policy. Therefore it is interesting to note that his initial effort at a positive and practical vision of government recommended a constitutional structure that adopted the general form of the old colonial governments, the exception being the diminution of executive authority, clearly a lesson rooted in the colonial resistance to gubernatorial claims of royal prerogative.43

  Anyone on the lookout for more avowedly progressive features in Jefferson’s thinking could have found them. Although he required a property qualification for all voters, he also proposed a land distribution policy that would provide fifty acres for each resident. He quietly inserted a radical provision for complete religious freedom. And he urged that the new constitution be ratified by a special convention called exclusively for that purpose rather than by the sitting legislature, a democratic idea that John Adams had also proposed as a way of implementing the principle of popular sovereignty. All in all, Jefferson’s prescriptions for the new Virginian republic were an impressive blend of traditional forms and selective reforms. They establish the historically correct, if unorthodox, context for answering the proverbial question: What was Jefferson thinking about on the eve of his authorship of the Declaration of Independence? The answer is indisputable. He was not thinking, as some historians have claimed, about John Locke’s theory of natural rights or Scottish commonsense philosophy. He was thinking about Virginia’s new constitution.44

  An aspect of his thinking proved directly relevant for the task he was about to assume. In his preamble to the first and third drafts of the Virginia constitution, he composed a bill of indictment against George III. One could see glimmerings of these charges against the British monarch in Summary View, then even more explicit accusations in Causes and Necessities. But the lengthy condemnation of the king in his draft constitution extended the list of crimes against colonial rights. It was in effect his penultimate draft for the list of grievances that became the longest section of the Declaration of Independence.

  One of the grievances stands out, in part because it dealt with what soon proved to be the most controversial issue during the debate in Congress over the wording of the Declaration, in part because of the difference between what Jefferson wrote for the Virginia constitution in May and what he wrote for the Declaration in June. This is the passage in the Declaration
in which Jefferson blamed George III for instigating and perpetuating the slave trade, thereby implying that slavery was an evil institution imposed on the colonists by a corrupt monarch. In the earlier draft for the Virginia constitution, however, he charged George III with “prompting our negroes to rise in arms against us; those very negroes who by an inhuman use of his negative he hath refused us permission to exclude by law.” Here one can see Jefferson juggling two incompatible formulations: One is to blame the king for slavery; the other is to blame him for emancipating the slaves (i.e., Lord Dunmore’s proclamation). It was symptomatic of a deep disjunction in his thinking about slavery that he never reconciled.45

  Another one of the proverbial questions—how or why was Jefferson selected to draft the Declaration?—is also answerable with a recovery of the immediate context. The short answer is that he was the obvious choice on the basis of his past work in the Congress as a draftsman. That was his specialty. The longer answer emerges clearly from the situation that existed in the Congress in June 1776.

  Virginia had taken the lead by instructing its delegates on May 15 to propose total and complete American independence from Great Britain. On June 7 Richard Henry Lee moved the resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States… .” A debate then ensued over when the vote on Lee’s resolution should occur. The Congress decided to delay a vote until July 1, in deference to delegations that were still divided (i.e., Pennsylvania) and to delegations that lacked clear instructions from their state legislatures (i.e., New York). In the meantime a committee could be working on a document that implemented the Lee resolution. A Virginian presence on the committee was essential, and Jefferson was the most appropriate Virginian, both because of his reputation as a writer and because Lee, the other possible choice, was the author of the resolution before the Congress and presumably would lead the debate in its behalf.46