The Road to Monticello

by Hayes, Kevin J. ;

  He had one more thing to say to Randolph, but it did not fit in this impassioned letter. He put it in a postscript:

  P. S. My collection of classics and of books of parliamentary learning particularly is not so complete as I could wish. As you are going to the land of literature and of books you may be willing to dispose of some of yours here and replace them there in better editions. I should be willing to treat on this head with any body you may think proper to empower for that purpose.

  This postscript shows Jefferson taking advantage of his friend’s departure in order to augment his own library, but his motives were not entirely selfish. His comments reveal what Jefferson really regretted about the split between America and Great Britain. Wanting more “books of parliamentary learning,” Jefferson recognized America’s ultimate debt to English law. Regardless of their current differences, there was no denying that the laws and government of the colonies were based on English law and government and would remain so, even after independence.

  Jefferson sincerely regretted that by splitting with England he would be parting with a place whose literary heritage meant so much to America. The violation of their rights at the hands of King and Parliament required the colonists to stand and fight, but in so doing they were taking sides against a place that, in terms of cultural influence, had meant the world to them. Sadly, Jefferson realized that he was making war against the Land of Literature and of Books.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Declaration of Independence

  The third week of September 1775, Samuel Ward wrote George Washington an anxious letter from Philadelphia, asking him if he knew where Jefferson was. The Continental Congress had reconvened the preceding week, but Jefferson, who was emerging as one of its hardest working and distinguished delegates, had yet to show. Though Ward did not realize it, personal reasons were keeping Jefferson home beyond the date Congress was scheduled to reconvene: he had to bury his second daughter, Jane Randolph Jefferson. Born the first week of April the year before, the baby had received her name from both her grandmother and her aunt. Jane, Thomas’s favorite sister, had died as a young woman; her namesake had not lived to see her second birthday. The child’s bereaved father lingered at Monticello until the last week of September. Once he left home, he made excellent time and reached Philadelphia before the month’s end.

  Whatever grief he brought with him dissipated amidst the rigorous Congressional committee work he undertook upon his arrival. But the specter of death followed Jefferson to Philadelphia: before another month was out, Peyton Randolph died in an apoplectic fit, as a stroke was called back then. Randolph’s sudden illness occurred during a dinner party at the country house of Philadelphia wine merchant Henry Hill. Within five hours yet “without a groan,” Randolph passed away.1

  His obesity made Randolph prone to such illness, yet his death still came as a shock. He was only in his mid-fifties. Francis Lightfoot Lee, the Virginia delegate elected to replace Richard Bland, became quite disturbed upon learning of Randolph’s death the next morning. “I am so concern’d,” he wrote, “that I cant think of politicks.” Richard Henry Lee reported the news to General Washington, concluding, “Thus has American liberty lost a powerful Advocate, and human nature a sincere friend.”2 Jefferson took his death hard, too. Randolph had been a friend and mentor since the death of his father. Still, Jefferson would not let his grief impede the weighty tasks Congress faced that year.

  Writing to England to inform John Randolph of his brother’s death, Jefferson situated the sad news within an impassioned defense of American liberty. He spoke bluntly:

  Believe me Dear Sir there is not in the British empire a man who more cordially loves a Union with Gr. Britain than I do. But by the god that made me I will cease to exist before I yeild to a connection on such terms as the British parliament propose and in this I think I speak the sentiments of America. We want neither inducement nor power to declare and assert a separation. It is will alone which is wanting and that is growing apace under the fostering hand of our king. One bloody campaign will probably decide everlastingly our future course; I am sorry to find a bloody campaign is decided on.3

  Perhaps Peyton Randolph’s death that year was inevitable, but other American and British deaths could be prevented if the king would only acknowledge the inequity of his American policy. The chance of such an acknowledgment, Jefferson realized, was now almost impossibly remote.

  The Continental Congress remained in session until mid-December, but Jefferson, who faced many administrative responsibilities, lingered in Philadelphia until the year’s end before returning to Monticello. Here, a few months into the new year, death would claim the oldest but last surviving Jane Jefferson. Thomas’s mother was only in her mid-fifties, too. The cause of her death is uncertain, but, like Randolph, she apparently died of apoplexy, passing away less than an hour after its onset.

  It is difficult to say how much the unexpected deaths of these loved ones affected Jefferson or influenced the composition of the Declaration of Independence. People faced death frequently in the eighteenth century. At a time of high infant mortality and low life expectancy, few could go long without having to cope with the death of a loved one. If Jefferson’s experience differed from that of his contemporaries, it was because his belief system differed: though most of his friends and neighbors could take comfort in their belief in an afterlife, Jefferson’s religious skepticism deprived him of the solace such beliefs offered. Whatever paradise the future might hold would come through man’s doing. Suffice it to say that the presence of death in Jefferson’s life during the mid-1770s lent a personal sense of urgency to the cause of freedom.

  In times of grief, Jefferson’s books gave him great comfort. Those who have studied the intellectual background of the Declaration of Independence have catalogued in great detail the influence of important legal and political thinkers on the development of the thought processes that led to Jefferson’s composition of the Declaration.4 It is important to understand that grief prompted him to turn to works beyond legal theory and political philosophy. When Jefferson was in mourning, Locke, Kames, and Burlamaqui gave way to Sherlock, Young, and Os-sian. The influence of poets, devotional writers, and other belletrists on the Declaration cannot be ignored.

  Jefferson’s surviving correspondence offers little insight regarding these personal tragedies, so it is difficult to discern precisely how this series of deaths affected him. His reticence in personal matters suggests a capacity to compartmentalize the private and public aspects of his life. Other documentary evidence confirms Jefferson’s capacity to separate his intellect from his emotions, but he could never completely disassociate the two. Anyone who applies profound learning to speak with passionate intensity in the cause of freedom and country must let emotion and intellect run together, at least part of the time.

  While Jefferson was spending the rest of the winter at Monticello, a new pamphlet appeared in Philadelphia, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Thomas Nelson, Jr., who remained in Philadelphia after Jefferson had left, sent him a copy of Paine’s rousing manifesto as soon as it was published. Many thousands of copies circulated throughout colonial America in the late winter and early spring of 1776. Contemporary testimony verifies the work’s wide-ranging influence. John Penn, a delegate from North Carolina on his way to Philadelphia for the spring session of the Continental Congress, wrote that throughout his journey he heard nothing praised “but Common Sense and Independence. That was the cry throughout Virginia.”5

  Jefferson recognized Paine’s influence and appreciated his literary style, but he downplayed the impact of Common Sense on Virginia readers. Recalling the work in Notes on the State of Virginia, he contradicted what John Penn said. Jefferson observed that though “copies of the pamphlet itself had got into a few hands” in the early months of 1776, the idea of American independence “had not been opened to the mass of the people in April, much less can it be said that they had made up their minds in its favor.”6 The a
ccount of Common Sense in Notes on the State of Virginia reflects less the reality of the situation and more Jefferson’s rhetorical purpose. He wanted to depict Virginians as people who made up their minds independently. Despite what Jefferson may have said in Notes on the State of Virginia, Common Sense shaped people’s minds throughout Virginia and the other colonies. In a way no one before him had done, Paine took the current American political ideas and put them in a form colonists could read, appreciate, and understand.

  Though he deliberately minimized the influence of Paine’s work on the thinking of Virginians when he retold the events of 1776 in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson did have a keen understanding of local sentiment around the time Common Sense appeared. That spring he devoted much effort surveying the opinions of his countrymen to get their thoughts on American independence. He told one correspondent that he “took great pains to enquire into the sentiments of the people on that head. In the upper counties I think I may safely say nine out of ten are for it.”7 In terms of American political history, Jefferson was among the first to survey public opinion and generate data from it.

  Late that spring Jefferson, now thirty-three, returned to Philadelphia to resume his role as delegate to Congress. Soon after arriving, he wrote John Page, “I have been so long out of the political world that I am almost a new man in it.” A new man: the phrase anticipates the famous definition of an American that Jefferson’s friend and correspondent, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, would make in Letters from an American Farmer: “The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions.”8 Jefferson’s use of the phrase to describe himself on the eve of independence shows how in tune he was with the popular sentiments. Approaching the birth of a new nation, he, too, had become a new man and, therefore, was a fit representative to speak for it.

  Upon his return to Philadelphia, Jefferson decided to take new lodgings. He vacated the home of cabinetmaker Benjamin Randolph and found a home several blocks outside the city center. Anticipating another hot summer in Philadelphia, he wanted to escape the city congestion. Explaining his decision, he wrote, “I think, as the excessive heats of the city are coming on fast, to endeavor to get lodgings in the skirts of the town where I may have the benefit of a freely circulating air.”9 His new lodgings, the middle floor of a three-story brick house at the corner of Seventh and Market Streets, consisted of a furnished parlor and bedroom.

  Using a portable, custom-made writing desk of his own design, Jefferson habitually wrote in the parlor. Benjamin Randolph had built the writing desk according to Jefferson’s specifications. “Plain, neat, convenient, and, taking no more room on the writing table than a moderate 4to. volume,” as Jefferson described it, the desk was good for any kind of writing.10 This house and this desk would become famous for the Revolutionary document Jefferson would draft here this hot Philadelphia summer.

  The Declaration of Independence is Jefferson’s best known piece of writing, but he wrote much else in the summer of 1776. Clearly recognizing the significance of the Congressional debates leading to the Declaration, he kept meticulous notes of the events that transpired. In fact, his “Notes of Proceedings in the Continental Congress” forms the most thorough account of the proceedings known. Jefferson’s notes are even more detailed than John Adams’s diary.

  The first Friday in June, Richard Henry Lee, voicing instructions from the Virginia Convention, moved to declare that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”11 The motion absolved Americans from allegiance to the British crown, severed any and all political connections between the American states and Great Britain, provided measures for obtaining assistance from foreign powers, and proposed a confederation uniting the states.

  When debate on this motion began the following Monday, those against it argued that it was too rash. Delegates from the middle colonies hesitated to break with Great Britain completely. Foreseeing a time when they might be willing to do so, they argued that unless and until all the American colonies could come together as a whole, the fight for independence would be doomed.

  Led by John Adams and the Virginians, those in favor of independence attempted to persuade the reluctant delegates from the other colonies by arguing that officially declaring independence would confirm a preexisting fact. The outbreak of hostilities on the part of the British the previous year had effectively cut the last remaining ties with the colonies. The American people deserved independence, and they looked to the Continental Congress to lead the way. Adams and others effectively refuted the arguments of reluctant Congressional delegates but did not completely convince everyone.

  The decision was forestalled until the beginning of July. Should Congress declare independence at that time, it would want to proceed as quickly as possible. To that end, it would be convenient to have a written instrument in place. Congress appointed a committee to draft this document. Besides Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson, the Committee of Five, as it has become known, also included Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman. The committee assigned Jefferson to draft the formal document declaring independence from Great Britain. He proudly accepted the task.

  As Jefferson understood it, his purpose in drafting the Declaration was not to advance new ideas but to codify the main ideas toward liberty and freedom his fellow Americans had already accepted. The Declaration was intended as a purposeful political document, not as an original philosophical or legal treatise on the ideas of natural law and natural rights. Recalling his composition of the Declaration after the lapse of several decades, Jefferson wrote, “Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”12

  In another late reminiscence, Jefferson elaborated the relationship between his extensive reading and the composition of the Declaration: “Whether I had gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only that I turned to neither book or pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether, and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”13 The comment rings true. Though parts of the Declaration echo passages in such works as John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government, Jefferson had already read and synthesized these and many similar works before he sat down in the second-floor parlor of his Philadelphia apartment to write the Declaration.

  Many know the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence by heart:

  When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.14

  This paragraph makes no mention of either North America or Great Britain. Rather, it speaks in general terms and situates its purpose within the history of mankind. The phrase “political bands,” though somewhat unusual, was not unheard of. Evidence indicates that the phrase was part of the contemporary American parlance. Dr. James MacClurg, one of Jefferson’s Virginia friends, for example, used the phrase to refer to the artificial ties that joined men together by “prospect of advantage, or compelled by force.”15

  Jefferson’s words posit a cyclical view of history. Laws established for the common good become meaningless when common law diverges from natural law, at which time legal ties must be severed in order to reassert natural law. The process of breaking these political b
ands is so natural and necessary that their severing need not even be announced. What makes an announcement necessary is the idea of civility. As Jefferson had learned reading such works as Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, the principles of civility required that the dissolution of political ties be properly communicated to the world.

  Following this opening paragraph comes the most memorable sentence Jefferson ever wrote and, arguably, the finest articulation of the idea of natural rights ever written. It took much hard work to get the paragraph just right.16 In his rough draft, he wrote:

  We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…

  Though he had minimized the use of conjoined pairs of words when commonplacing legal theory, Jefferson now made use of the structure for rhetorical effect. The conjoined pairs slow the pace of the sentence and let him build his argument gradually. When he returned to revise the passage, he realized he had overdone the word pairs. He subsequently eliminated the first two pairs. He changed the phrase, “equal and independent” to “equal.” That revision was simple enough. Revising the first pair was more difficult.

  His original phrase, “sacred and undeniable,” accomplished much. Besides contributing to the document’s deliberate pace, the phrase suggested that the truths he was about to enumerate were sanctioned by God. Out of character for Jefferson, the use of the word “sacred” may have been intended to placate more religious members of the Continental Congress. Actually, the word adds ambiguity to the sentence: “sacred” also had a secular connotation, as his use of it elsewhere reveals. Refuting Benjamin Rush’s suggestion that some American place names ought to be changed, Jefferson said that “a name when given should be deemed a sacred property.”17 His use of the word “sacred” here simply means unalterable; it has no religious connotation. Jefferson use of the word this early in his draft of the Declaration of Independence anticipates his reuse of it in the last sentence of the Declaration, in which the delegates to the Continental Congress, representing the United States as a whole, pledge their “sacred honour.” Here again the word “sacred” means unalterable, yet it also implies a religious connotation. Its repetition in the final sentence effectively ties together the introduction and conclusion.