This classic of English historical literature represents the first great collected edition of English state papers. Beginning to assemble his huge set of documents during the time of Oliver Cromwell, Rushworth had a pragmatic purpose in mind. He designed the work to counteract the misinformation that was being propagated by contemporary pamphleteers. Rushworth intended the Historical Collections to preserve many state papers from being destroyed and thus to prevent subsequent lies from being taken as truth. His work, which ultimately amounted to eight folio volumes, would not be completed until after his death. Jefferson, who had a copy of it in his personal library, would consult it numerous times in the coming years as he searched for seventeenth-century documents pertinent to the history of Virginia. Rushworth set an example for Jefferson’s own aggressive efforts to collect and preserve important historical documents.
Explaining how he and his committee drafted the resolution, Jefferson recalled, “We thought Oliver Cromwell would be a good guide in such a case. So we looked into Rushworth, and drew up our Resolutions after the most pious and praiseworthy examples.”6 Using some appropriate “revolutionary precedents and forms of the Puritans” as a basis, they drafted a resolution of their own.7 Shrewdly, they chose Robert Carter Nicholas, an especially devout House member, to move the resolution. Jefferson’s personal reluctance to present a bill calling for a day of prayer suggests that his religious skepticism was already well developed—and well known. Had he moved the resolution, others might have recognized it for what it was, a political ploy rather than a sincere expression of religious devotion.
With Nicholas’s help, the bill passed unanimously—to Jefferson’s great relief. Had there been any debate, he believed, it would not have passed. Upon its passage, the House ordered the following proclamation to be printed:
This House being deeply impressed with Apprehension of the great Dangers to be derived to British America, from the hostile Invasion of the City of Boston, in our Sister Colony of Massachusetts Bay, whose Commerce and Harbour are on the 1st Day of June next to be stopped by an armed Force, deem it highly necessary that the said first Day of June be set apart by the Members of this House as a Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer, devoutly to implore the divine Interposition for averting the heavy Calamity, which threatens Destruction to our civil Rights, and the Evils of civil War; to give us one Heart and one Mind firmly to oppose, by all just and proper Means, every Injury to American Rights, and that the Minds of his Majesty and his Parliament may be inspired from above with Wisdom, Moderation, and Justice, to remove from the loyal People of America all Cause of Danger from a continued Pursuit of Measures pregnant with their Ruin.8
It did not take long for a copy of this proclamation to reach Governor Dunmore’s hands. Shortly after it appeared in print, he called the burgesses to the Council chamber. As he wafted a paper before them, there was little doubt what he had in his hand or on his mind.
“I have in my hand a Paper,” he told them, “published by order of your House, conceived in such Terms as reflect highly upon his Majesty and the Parliament of Great Britain; which makes it necessary for me to dissolve you, and you are dissolved accordingly.”
Undaunted, the burgesses left the capitol, made their way down the Duke of Gloucester Street, and unofficially reconvened at the Apollo, where they agreed to another association. They instructed the Virginia Committee of Correspondence to write to the correspondence committees from the other colonies to propose that each choose representatives to meet in a general congress to discuss matters pertinent to the interests of all, the gathering that would become the First Continental Congress. Subscribers to this Virginia association reinforced their colony’s solidarity with the others by declaring that an attack on any one colony should be considered an attack on the whole. The association further recommended that each county in Virginia elect representatives to convene in Williamsburg that August to consider the state of the colony and to choose delegates to the Continental Congress, assuming the other American colonies agreed to it.
On Wednesday, June 1, the day of prayer and fasting was observed throughout Virginia. Local clergymen delivered sermons on the occasion, and citizens were quite moved. Jefferson spent the day in and around The Forest. It did not really matter where in Virginia he was; he could have felt this fast day’s effects anywhere in the colony. He long remembered how his fellow Virginians interpreted the event: “The people met generally, with anxiety and alarm in their countenances, and the effect of the day thro’ the whole colony was like a shock of electricity, arousing every man and placing him erect and solidly on his centre.”9 The event profoundly affected Jefferson and reinforced his devotion to the cause of liberty. The behavior of his fellow Virginians this day bolstered his decision to pen the harshest denunciation of the crown that he or, for that matter, any colonist had yet written, a work that appeared in pamphlet form as A Summary View of the Rights of British America.
Recalling A Summary View in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson situated it within a list of revolutionary polemics beginning with Richard Bland’s 1766 work, An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, which had impressed many Virginia readers by both its erudition and its ideas. Philip Mazzei, for one, read Bland’s Inquiry with great interest and found it “very well thought out.” Jefferson called Bland’s work “the first pamphlet on the nature of the connection with Gr. Britain, which had any pretension to accuracy of view on that subject.”10
Though appreciative, Jefferson was not uncritical of Bland, who “would set out on sound principles, pursue them logically till he found them leading to the precipice which we had to leap, start back alarmed, then resume his ground, go over it in another direction, be led again by the correctness of his reasoning to the same place, and again back about, and try other processes to reconcile right and wrong, but finally left his reader and himself bewildered between the steady index of the compass in their hand, and the phantasm to which it seemed to point.”11
In A Summary View, to continue the metaphor, Jefferson led his readers to the precipice and then took them over the edge. He later described the pamphlet as “the first publication which carried the claim of our rights their whole length.”12 A Summary View did not contain any startling new ideas, nor did it contain anything that was not already in the minds or on the lips of his fellow patriots.13 Its literary qualities gave A Summary View its impact. Its daring form, its clarity, its vivid figurative language—these aspects made A Summary View a powerful statement of colonial rights.
Proud of A Summary View after it appeared in print, Jefferson had not necessarily intended it for publication. Rather, he designed it as a set of instructions for those delegates chosen to represent colonial Virginia at the Continental Congress. He later asserted that he wrote it hastily, but its meticulous construction, moving rhetoric, and clever use of imagery and example belie this assertion. Jefferson was neither the first nor the last author to feign nonchalance as he recalled a published work. In terms of its use of imagery, A Summary View contains a series of linked motifs that reinforce the argument and make the British injustice palpable. Jefferson’s imagery has a cumulative effect. One image builds on another as readers gradually feel the weight of his argument.
In terms of form, the work begins like any legislative resolution. Resolving that Congress prepare an address to King George III, A Summary View loses the feel of a resolution as it assumes the quality of an address. During his first term in the House of Burgesses, Jefferson was criticized because an address to the governor he had written followed too closely the wording of the resolution on which it was based. With A Summary View, he embedded an address within the resolution. In its published form, A Summary View sounds as if it is directly addressed to the king, and it was read as such. One contemporary British reader characterized it as “an expostulation with his majesty.” Emphasizing its similarity to a spoken performance, one modern American reader has characterized it as a dramatic monologue.14
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While appearing to speak with King George III directly, A Summary View drops the submissive language traditionally used to address the crown. Jefferson forthrightly justified his choice of words in the opening paragraph. He explained that the address to the king would be “penned in the language of truth, and divested of those expressions of servility which would persuade his majesty that we are asking favors and not rights.”15 This emphasis on plain speech had been a part of colonial American discourse since the early seventeenth century, when such diverse figures as Captain John Smith and William Bradford stressed the importance of speaking plainly in their writings. Never before had any colonist deigned to address the king so bluntly.
The idea of natural rights provides the theoretical basis for A Summary View. All men, Jefferson asserted, have the natural right to emigrate where they will. Furthermore, emigrants are not obliged to remain under the sovereign laws of those places they leave. A Summary View became the most renowned articulation of this idea, but the point Jefferson was making had been made before by others. In An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, Bland had also asserted the natural right of emigration. For precedent, Jefferson cited the ancient Saxons who left Europe for England. Settling in the British Isles, they felt no compunction to retain the laws of the lands they left behind and instead established a fundamental system of laws unique to Britain. Similarly, those who left England for America were under no compunction to follow English law in the New World. Earlier American colonists had accepted English law merely as a matter of convenience.
Warming up to his argument, Jefferson denied the crown any responsibility for helping to establish the colonies. Instead, he emphasized that the American settlers alone were responsible for successfully planting the British colonies in North America: “Their own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for their settlement, their own fortunes expended in making that settlement effectual. For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Self-sufficiency has long been recognized as an important aspect of the American national character. As Jefferson’s words clarify, self-sufficiency had become a part of the American character well before nationhood. The American colonists invested their bodies and blood in their struggle. They had earned their rights “at the hazard of their lives and loss of their fortunes.”16
Jefferson’s words echo the promotion literature that had been encouraging people to immigrate to America throughout the colonial period. They are especially reminiscent of words Captain John Smith wrote in A Description of New England and reiterated in The Generall Historie of Virginia. Encouraging Englishmen to immigrate to the New World, Smith had asked the rhetorical question: “Who can desire more content that hath small meanes, or but onely his merit to advance his fortunes, then to tread and plant that ground he hath purchased by the hazard of his life?”17 Whereas Smith was writing in anticipation, beckoning people to immigrate, Jefferson was writing in retrospect, showing how the early colonists had answered Smith’s call and risen to the challenge.
The early settlers established the American colonies by and for themselves, but it was not long before the crown claimed the colonies for its own and began apportioning America as a means of currying political favor. The land that was originally designated by the name Virginia was “parted out and distributed among the favorites and followers of their fortunes.” A Summary View uses the image of the body or, more precisely, the mutilated body to make the point: “No exercise of such a power of dividing and dismembering a country has ever occurred in his majesty’s realm of England.”18
This imagery of dismemberment also had precedents in early American literature. William Byrd II prefaced his History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina with a brief history of Virginia, which depicts the history of North America as a series of dismemberments. Byrd personified Virginia and conveyed the pain it experienced as it had one limb after another lopped off. Emphasizing how the early colonists put themselves in physical danger and then using a figurative comparison linking the land with the body, Jefferson gave colonial America an organic quality and inextricably linked the land with the people who live on it.
Addressing specific issues, Jefferson chose examples that reinforced the association between colony and colonist, land and body. Barred by Parliament from shipping goods anywhere save Great Britain, the colonists had been led into some absurd restrictions. To illustrate their absurdity, he cited an Act effectively forbidding an American subject from making “a hat for himself of the fur which he has taken perhaps on his own soil.”19 The example of the hat distinguishes the colonists from the king: to the American colonists, the crown had come to symbolize Great Britain’s tyrannical power over them; Jefferson represented the colonists themselves by more humble garb, a homemade hat.
The example also reinforces the link between land and body. A product of the land, the hat covers the body and protects it from the elements. In other words, the British legislation effectively deprived colonists of the protection the land offered them. It also denied them their characteristic self-sufficiency. Influencing matters as personal as articles of clothing, the legislation represented a serious incursion of government into the realm of personal freedom.
A further example gives weight to Jefferson’s argument, both literally and figuratively. Though colonial America produced significant quantities of iron, British law prevented Americans from manufacturing anything from the iron they produced. In A Summary View, Jefferson observed that “the iron which we make we are forbidden to manufacture; and, heavy as that article is, and necessary in every branch of husbandry, besides commission and insurance, we are to pay freight for it to Great Britain, and freight for it back again, for the purpose of supporting, not men, but machines, in the island of Great Britain.”20
By using iron as a metaphor, Jefferson was able to use a representation of weightiness to give thrust to his argument. Juxtaposing Britain and America, his words establish other binary oppositions: agrarian and industrial,man and machine. From the viewpoint Jefferson espoused, iron is useful for husbandry in America. Iron ore is taken from the land but only to be turned into implements that contribute to the land’s improvement. In Britain, on the other hand, American iron simply becomes a part of the industrial machinery. Were they to acquiesce to British demands, Americans would become nothing more than cogs in the imperial British machine.
Figurative uses of the machine were common to eighteenth-century sociopolitical discourse, but metaphors of the time typically compared the workings of an efficient government to those of a well-oiled machine. Elsewhere in A Summary View Jefferson used the machine in this sense as he mentioned how the crown should “assist in working the great machine of government.”21 Here he associated Great Britain with industrial machinery and thus contrasted agrarian America with industrial Britain, American men with British machines. Establishing a dichotomy between man and machine, Jefferson anticipated a figurative opposition that would not become prevalent in the literary discourse until the rise of Romanticism during the early nineteenth century.
Closing his discussion of trade restrictions, he distanced himself from the examples he had been using to support his argument. After all, the problem with Britain was not a matter of specific complaints about individual statutes. Rather, it was a matter of rights: “The true ground on which we declare these acts void is that the British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.”22 Regardless of the practicality or impracticality of the statutes they passed, British lawmakers simply had no right to impose jurisdiction on the American colonists.
The systematic nature of these acts of tyranny on the part of the British had effectively reduced the colonists to a state of slavery. Supporting the point, Jefferson enumerated four Acts passed in consecutive years of the reign of King George III. Listed in series, these Acts verify the systematic nature of British repression and establish a pattern of repetition anticipating J
efferson’s next metaphor. After naming the Acts, he characterized them as part of “the connected chain of parliamentary usurpation.”23
The slavery and chain metaphors connect this series of oppressive Acts with Jefferson’s earlier examples and consequently reinforce the motifs of body and iron by associating the two. The crown’s efforts to control the physical actions of the colonists and to control the iron and other materials they produce come together in the image of a slave manacled in iron bands. Though the American colonists had complained about the repressive legislation on multiple occasions, neither the crown nor parliament had answered the colonial complaints. Taking a superior stance, Jefferson refused to repeat their numerous, analogous complaints, a refusal that takes on the aura of a slave casting off his chains.
Slavery metaphors had already entered the Revolutionary discourse. The association to which Jefferson and the other Virginia burgesses had affixed their names the previous month, for instance, had accused the British government of “reducing the inhabitants of British America to slavery, by subjecting them to the payment of taxes, imposed without the consent of the people or their representatives.”24 Though a commonplace of current political writing, the slave metaphor still put Jefferson on shaky rhetorical ground. A slaveowner himself who spoke for a land of slaveowners, he knew that he could not cast the American colonists in the role of slaves to a British master without some qualification. He preempted possible criticism in this regard by arguing that the crown was responsible for perpetuating slavery, not the colonists. The Americans had been trying to abolish the practice of slavery for years, he asserted, but the crown continued to condone and perpetuate the slave trade. Though not entirely convincing, the assertion is necessary to sustain the argument.
Mentioning the Boston Tea Party, Jefferson did not justify the actions of the rebellious Bostonians, but he did attempt to explain it. He suggested that an “exasperated people, who feel that they possess power, are not easily restrained within limits strictly regular.”25 This forward-thinking explanation identifies the psychological basis motivating the Bostonians’ behavior. The British administrators, however, could not or would not understand the subtle psychological reasons underlying the Boston protest. Instead, they meted out punishment quickly and forcefully. After describing the British retribution, Jefferson concluded, “This is administering justice with a heavy hand indeed!”
The Road to Monticello Page 21