by John Ferling
Anglo-American relations were quiet during Hamilton’s first year or so in the English colonies. The strains and turbulence of the mid-1760s seemed a distant memory. Though reared on a Danish island in the Caribbean, Hamilton had worked for a firm owned by New Yorkers and had dealt with British clients scattered through the West Indies, so he likely had some sense of the issues that had divided the colonies and London. However, when he sailed for the mainland colonies in 1772, Hamilton could not have known that he was coming to a land that was about to be swept by a great revolution. As Hamilton neared the end of his first year in college, his world, like that of Thomas Jefferson, was about to change forever.
The American Revolution
Chapter 2
“The Galling Yoke of Dependence”
Becoming Rebels
Newly married and a father, Jefferson was happy at last. At age twenty he had wondered if there was “any such thing as happiness in the world.”1 As he neared age thirty, Jefferson knew there was. He had found contentment through his family. Jefferson had given up his legal practice. He had grown contemptuous of lawyers, calling them a “disagreeable crowd” that, like “parasites” feasted off the misery of others. However, it was the additional wealth that accrued from marriage that enabled him to live on a grand scale without practicing law.2 He anticipated tranquility and prosperity as a planter, and he doubtless looked toward a long career in the House of Burgesses, probably hoping that in time his intellect and pen would elevate him to a leadership role. Jefferson may have thought of writing for publication, perhaps doing as Franklin had done en route to becoming the best-known American of the era. Perhaps he too could now and then dash off a newspaper essay or write a pamphlet on a scientific matter, social criticism, or imperial policy. The last thing he expected, or wanted, was long absences from Monticello.
America’s growing conflict with Great Britain intruded on Jefferson’s bliss. Around the time of Jefferson’s birth, the prime minister and his cabinet in London had quietly contemplated tightening control over the colonies. Britain’s rulers feared that generations of distracted supervision and paltry enforcement of the imperial commercial laws might lead the American provinces to drift steadily toward independence. Nearly twenty years of warfare with Spain and France, including the Seven Years’ War, which began in the colonies in 1754, thwarted Great Britain’s plans to institute new colonial policies. But in 1763 hostilities ended in a magnificent British victory. In the Treaty of Paris, Great Britain acquired all of North America east of the Mississippi River, including Canada and Florida. With a long period of peace seemingly at hand, the way was clear for London to institute change. Wishing to put in place governments in the newly won territories, regulate trade with the Indians, and resolve conflicting land claims, the Crown first promulgated the Proclamation of 1763, a decree that forbade the flow of population across the Appalachians until further notice. To keep peace on the frontier, and as leverage for inducing the Indians to relinquish their lands, London left an army of several thousand troops in America. It was the first time Great Britain had deployed a sizable force in America in peacetime. However, faced with a staggering war debt and the simultaneous cost of maintaining the army in America, London needed money. Officials glimpsed two new sources of revenue. One was through a stricter regulation of colonial commerce. The other was by levying taxes on the colonists.3
Jefferson was twenty-one and studying with Wythe when the Stamp Act, the first direct tax that Parliament had ever imposed on the colonists, went into effect in 1765. Jefferson followed events closely. Wythe wrote the first draft of the House of Burgesses’ denunciation of parliamentary taxation, asserting that it was unconstitutional. In the spring, Jefferson stood with the other spectators in the lobby outside the assembly chamber and listened as Patrick Henry delivered an impassioned speech assailing the tax. Thereafter, Jefferson not only said that Henry’s oration was the best speech he had ever heard—years later, he acknowledged the enormous “impression [it] made on me”—but he also insisted that Henry’s daring conduct in 1765 had launched the colonial insurgency against the parent state.4
Jefferson, however, did not rush into the ranks of agitators. Henry had hardly finished his celebrated speech before Jefferson returned home, embarking on two years of intense additional study. During those years, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in the face of American protests, though it simultaneously declared its authority to legislate for America “in all cases whatsoever.” In 1767, the year that Jefferson launched his legal practice, Parliament exercised the authority it claimed. It enacted the Townshend Duties, taxes on the sales of lead, tea, glass, paper, and paint in the colonies. A new wave of American resistance flared. Essays denouncing the taxes flowed from colonial presses. Several northern provinces joined in an economic boycott of British trade to force their repeal. Virginia was ready to join the embargo movement by the time the House of Burgesses assembled in May 1769, the first session in which the newly elected Jefferson served. The assembly convened and Jefferson took his seat. The royal governor, Baron de Botetourt, rode from the Governor’s Palace in a handsome carriage drawn by six white horses to open the session with a brief speech. Though a newcomer, Jefferson was asked to draft the assembly’s response. He did so, but his colleagues rejected his composition—possibly because its tone was not sufficiently obsequious. The legislature instead adopted a statement that declared its “firm Attachment to his Majesty’s sacred Person and Government,” although the burgesses unanimously agreed to embargo British imports until Parliament rescinded the taxes.5
The American boycotts worked. In the spring of 1770, about the time that Jefferson began to court Martha Wayles Skelton, Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except for its tax on tea. An air of calm settled over imperial relations, leading some to conclude that the Anglo-American tempest had ended. But the Townshend duties provoked a sea change in the thinking of even more Americans, as this second attempt to tax the colonists revealed an unmistakable pattern in London’s intentions. John Adams, in Massachusetts, thought the Stamp Act had caused the “People, even to the lowest Ranks … [to] become more attentive to their Liberties, more inquisitive about them, more determined to defend them.”6 Some colonists were beginning to believe that a “profoundly secret, dark, and deep” plot existed among royal officials to quash the rights of the colonists.7
In 1770, though, no colonist imagined that the American Revolution lay on the horizon, least of all Jefferson, whose focus remained on getting his life and career on track. When he remarked in his memoirs that “our countrymen seemed to fall into a state of insensibility to our situation” during the early 1770s, it may have been a subliminal reference to his own conduct.8
To the surprise of most, however, imperial troubles resurfaced late in 1773. Urban protests against the lingering tax on tea culminated in December in the Boston Tea Party, an organized strike in the night on ships in Boston’s harbor laden with dutied tea. Before sunrise, some ninety thousand pounds of East India Company tea had been destroyed. Imperial authorities responded with a heavy hand. In the spring, Parliament enacted the Coercive Acts, draconian measures levied solely against Massachusetts. The legislation fined the colony, shut the port of Boston until compensation was made for the destroyed tea, and made major changes to the provincial government in the Bay Colony. It was a last-ditch effort to break the back of the American insurgency by peaceful means. The colonists learned of these measures, which they called the Intolerable Acts, in May 1774.
Jefferson had by then pulled together his thoughts on the limits of British authority. He had been influenced by both Henry’s stirring speech and Wythe’s thinking on imperial constitutional matters. He had read deeply in the law, political theory, English history, the human condition, and the natural rights of humankind. He was also conversant with the remarkable abundance of radical tracts produced by English dissidents who styled themselves “Real Whigs,” an appellation they chose in order to emphasize t
heir attachment to the ideas of earlier English republicans. Since the late seventeenth century, these writers had produced a pugnacious literature that blended descriptions of corruption and decay in England with warnings of threats to liberty. The rot in England purportedly stemmed from the excessive powers and diabolical designs of a strong executive—the monarchy—which corrupted legislators through patronage and pensions. But England’s degeneration had also allegedly occurred because its modern financial system had produced unimaginable riches for the few and deepening poverty for the many, widening the gap between rich and poor, and cursing the land with a malignant tyranny that ate away at the liberties once enjoyed by Englishmen.9
But more than theory composed Jefferson’s thinking. While he was appreciative of his British birthright, he was also a Virginian, and proud of it. His family had lived in the province for about three-quarters of a century, and throughout his life Jefferson spoke of his homeland as “my country, Virginia.” During the century and a half between the arrival of the English colonists at Jamestown and Jefferson’s coming of age, each generation of Virginians had pushed westward, fighting the Indians, taking their lands, opening new frontiers. The Virginians, as Jefferson knew, had done it with little help from the mother country. Prior to the wars in the 1740s and 1750s, he said with scant exaggeration, “No shilling was ever issued from the public treasures of his majesty or his ancestors for [Virginia’s] assistance.”10 He believed that Virginians, and Virginians alone, had made Virginia. But Virginians had done much for Great Britain. In the 1740s, the colony had contributed hundreds of men to an Anglo-American army that fought the Spanish in the Caribbean and South America. In the Seven Years’ War, thousands served in the Virginia Regiment, fighting and dying in frontier warfare against the French and Indians.
It was indisputable as well that Virginia was a troubled colony by the 1760s, and some of its troubles arose from its colonial status. The cost of waging the Seven Years’ War had left Virginia, like the parent country, saddled with steep war debts. Had it been permitted to issue its own currency, Virginia might easily have retired its debt. However, imperial authorities, who sought to protect British creditors, prohibited such a practice. Compounding matters, tobacco prices had been declining since the early 1760s, threatening some planters with ruin. Virginians might have realized higher prices had they been able to operate in a free market economy, but Britain’s mercantilist system compelled them to send their tobacco to British markets. Virginia’s planters were driven to borrow from British creditors. Debts piled up. As Jefferson himself later remarked, these “debts had become hereditary from father to son, for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property, annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.”11 Virginia’s planters had tried to save themselves by petitioning the Crown to end the African slave trade within the British Empire. That expedient not only would have driven up the price of slaves, but also would have allowed Virginia’s planters to escape their debts by selling their surplus slaves to rice-producing South Carolina and Georgia. But the king had turned a deaf ear to their entreaties, prompting one planter to exclaim that never before had Virginians felt such a “galling yoke of dependence.” What Jefferson concluded from the king’s conduct was that when the interests of English businessmen and financiers collided with what the colonists saw as their well-being, the Crown always sided with those in the metropolis against “the lasting interests of the American states.”12
Something else stirred Jefferson. He thought slavery degraded and corrupted both blacks and whites, retarded Virginia’s economy, and concentrated wealth and power, resulting in an oligarchy of great planters. While his views were still in gestation, he was moving toward the notion of a broader diffusion of power within Virginia. His thinking was strikingly radical. He envisaged change in the colonies’ relationship with the mother country as well as fundamental change within Virginia, most of which was impossible without fundamental changes in the framework of the British Empire.13
John Adams once remarked, “Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775 … before a drop of blood was drawn.” He was doubtless thinking of his own transformation, but he could as easily have been referring to Thomas Jefferson.14 By 1774, Jefferson had come to favor not only greater American autonomy, he feared for the safety of “those rights which god and the laws have given equally and independently to all.”15 To his way of thinking, London’s policies were all the more outrageous in light of everything the colonists had done to help expand Britain’s empire.
The Coercive Acts made it clear that London had drawn a line in the sand. If the colonists failed to submit to Parliament’s unlimited authority, it would mean war. Jefferson was defiant. He believed that “no other Legislature” save the House of Burgesses “may rightfully exercise authority over” the inhabitants of Virginia. Any attempt by Parliament to do so would violate the “privileges they [Virginians] hold as the common rights of mankind” to be governed by representatives of their own choosing.16
In the crisis brought on by the Coercive Acts, the colonists thought it essential to present a united American front and to determine their response collectively. They opted to meet in a national congress in Philadelphia in September 1774 to settle on a course of action. Jefferson fell ill en route to the August meeting of the Virginia assembly that was to select the members of its delegation to the congress. One scholar labeled it “a typical act of avoidance” on the part of Jefferson.17 But it is more likely that he was felled by another stress-induced malady—one brought on not from fear of having to attend the Continental Congress but from anxiety that he would not be chosen as one of the province’s congressmen.
Indeed, Jefferson so badly wished to attend the Congress that he drafted a set of instructions for Virginia’s delegation, in the hope of improving his chances of being chosen. His composition was a lengthy treatise on imperial constitutional matters and the transgressions of both Parliament and the king. It was filled with daring assertions, which demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that by the summer of 1774, some nine months before the outbreak of war, Jefferson was far more radical than most Americans. He couched what he wrote as a legal treatise that showed the way toward reconciliation, but the tenor of his composition suggests that he had already reached a point in his thinking where he saw American independence as preferable to any likely imperial relationship. Jefferson did not advocate independence—to have done so would have been impolitic—but his argument constituted a bridge between the common threads of radical thought prior to the Coercive Acts and the unrestrained radicalism of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense that lay eighteen months down the road.
Since the beginning of imperial troubles, colonial protestors had maintained that Parliament had no right to tax the colonists. Henry had said so in his flaming speech in 1765, the House of Burgesses had taken that position in its resolutions attacking the Stamp Act, and nearly every colony had followed suit. In Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, the most popular pamphlet on imperial troubles published in America before 1776, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania had taken a similar line. But while Dickinson had disputed Parliament’s right to tax the colonists, he argued that it must have the right to regulate American trade for “the common good of all.”18 Acknowledging Parliament’s right to control colonial commerce was popular in the merchant-dominated northern colonies, but Jefferson had taken a different stance. He urged Virginia’s delegates to Congress to declare that every piece of American legislation passed by Parliament was “void.” Parliament, he said, “has no right to exercise authority over us.”
More than a few American insurgents would have agreed with Jefferson, but to this point, none had charged that the monarch was complicit in Britain’s allegedly iniquitous designs on America. Jefferson not only eschewed the customarily servile language the colonists used when writing of the monarch, but he also fumed at the king’s having strayed beyond his legitimate executive role t
o cooperate with Parliament in its “many unwarrantable incroachments and usurpations,” especially its “wanton exercise of … power” in sending troops to the colonies in peacetime and in negating colonial legislation. He excoriated George III for having responded indifferently to the colonists’ petitions for redress and for his heedlessness of American interests, including his refusal to permit the colonists to migrate across the Appalachians. The monarch’s behavior, Jefferson wrote, threatened to stake out his reputation as “a blot in the page of history.”
In what remained of his instructions, Jefferson proceeded from the radical to the bizarre. In a labyrinthine and utterly fictitious version of English history and law—one that historian Joseph Ellis characterized as “cartoonlike”—he denied the Crown’s authority to dispose of land and even maintained that those who had migrated from England to America had left the jurisdiction of the mother country.19 He sounded like a man who was desperate to stake a claim to be included in Virginia’s delegation.
Jefferson’s attempt failed. For one thing, nearly everything he had written was too extreme for his colleagues. Jefferson subsequently said that he had taken “our true ground,” but Virginia’s assemblymen understood that his views were far in advance of those of most Americans in 1774. Solidarity with the northern colonies was imperative. Only a united stand might make the imperial government back down short of war, and only a union of all the colonies could successfully implement a national boycott of British trade or effectively wage war, if it came to that. Jefferson was not chosen for still another reason. The assembly selected a star-studded seven-member delegation to send to Philadelphia. It included Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and George Washington, together with other worthies, including the Speaker of the House and a former attorney general. Jefferson had simply not done enough by this juncture to be thought the equal of the luminaries who were chosen. The delegates were instructed to agree to an embargo of British trade and to warn London that its enforcement of the tax on tea and the Coercive Acts would invite American reprisals.20
