by John Ferling
Nevertheless, Jefferson’s impassioned scribbling was not wasted. Without his knowledge, friends in the assembly published his essay as a pamphlet, giving it a less-than-catchy title: A Summary View of the Rights of British America. It did not appear until near the end of the year, but in politics, timing is often everything. It was Jefferson’s good fortune that by the time his treatise began to be widely read, in the spring of 1775, war with Great Britain had begun, making a wide swath of the public receptive to his condemnation of Parliament and the king. That his literary skills were a cut above the norm also attracted attention. Articulate Americans familiar with the scores of pamphlets already published on the imperial troubles were accustomed to turgid, legalistic jargon. Jefferson’s writing was muscular, crisp, and lucid. For example, in discussing the limits of Britain’s authority over the colonies, John Adams, in a pamphlet that appeared nearly simultaneously, wrote: “This statum Walliae, as well as the whole case and history of that principality, is well worthy of the attention and study of Americans…. ‘Nos itaque,’ says King Ed. I.” That was followed by an eighty-nine-word paragraph entirely in Latin. Here is how Jefferson said the same thing: “Can any one reason be assigned why 160,000 electors in the island of Great Britain should give law to four millions in the states of America, every individual of whom is equal to every individual of them in virtue, in understanding, and in bodily strength?”21
Jefferson added: “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions … pursued unalterably thro’ every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” And: “The god who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”22 A Summary View brought Jefferson a deserved reputation as a superior writer and thinker. It also led his most radical brethren in the northern colonies to see him as a soul mate.
Alexander Hamilton published his thoughts on the imperial crisis at nearly the same moment that Jefferson’s Summary View appeared. Hamilton’s knowledge of the Anglo-American dispute must have been limited before he took up residence in Manhattan, but he was a fast learner. He was also a keenly ambitious young man who had come to North America to make his mark, and when imperial tensions grew in 1774, Hamilton had to see opportunities for his ascension. There can be no doubt that he also understood that he and his world stood on the brink of a great historic moment.
Hamilton seized it. He hurriedly defended the Boston Tea Party in a short essay for a New York newspaper. After word of the Coercive Acts reached America the following spring, Hamilton, still a collegian, spoke at a mass meeting near the King’s College campus. He advocated a national congress and a boycott of British trade. In November 1774 the colonists learned that the Continental Congress had defied Parliament’s claim of unlimited authority. In fact, it had agreed to boycott British trade, demanded the repeal of all objectionable parliamentary legislation, and urged each colony to ready its militia for the possibility of war. As its aggressive actions appeared to make war inevitable, a number of the most conservative colonists wrote pamphlets denouncing Congress. Likely recalling the benefits he had derived from his essay on the Caribbean hurricane two years earlier, Hamilton answered one of the Tory pamphleteers, Samuel Seabury, an Anglican clergyman who had written under the pseudonym “A. W. Farmer.” Hamilton’s plangent rejoinder, A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, appeared on December 15, 1774. Seabury answered with another pamphlet, prompting Hamilton, who had just celebrated his twentieth birthday, to dash off an eighty-page retort titled The Farmer Refuted. It was published in late February 1775.
While Jefferson’s essay had an air of the meditative and philosophical about it, Hamilton’s tracts had a slash-and-burn quality. Hamilton was young and seeking recognition, as well as writing to rebut a specific Tory assault on Congress. But those factors hardly mattered. Hamilton’s style never changed significantly over the years. There was a no-holds-barred tone to nearly every pamphlet and essay that he penned. In these two endeavors, Hamilton characterized the foes of Congress as “Bad men” with “mad imaginations” who engaged in “sophistry” as they tried to “dupe” and “dazzle” the American public. The “Farmer” only pretended to have America’s interests at heart, Hamilton charged, while in fact, those who defended Parliament and the ministry bore a “violent antipathy … to the natural rights of mankind.” The reality was, he said, “We are threatened with absolute slavery.”
Despite Hamilton’s hostile tone, his argument was more temperate than Jefferson’s. He recognized Parliament’s right to regulate American commerce and conceded that the colonists’ “dependence … on the King” was “just and rational.” His “favourite wish,” he said, was that the colonies and mother country might be reconciled.
Hamilton’s compositions were redundant and overly long. His initial pamphlet was more than twice the length of A Summary View, and his two tracts combined were tenfold longer than Jefferson’s succinct essay. Furthermore, Hamilton said nothing about the imperial crisis that was new or original, or very daring. Unlike Jefferson, he was careful to remain within the general parameters of what American protestors had been saying for the past ten years about parliamentary powers and the rights of the colonists. Hamilton was hoping to make a name for himself in New York, one of the most conservative colonies. So conservative was the province, in fact, that its assembly initially refused to ratify the actions taken by the First Continental Congress or elect delegates to the Second Congress, scheduled to meet in May 1775.23 Viewed from that perspective, it was bold of Hamilton to write the pamphlets. And considering that he had not yet completed college, Hamilton’s achievement was little short of amazing.
Moreover, while his constitutional arguments offered nothing new, he had served up something novel in the literature of the American insurgency. He may have been the first in print to maintain that Britain could not win a war with the colonists. Hamilton not only predicted that France and Spain would assist America, but he also envisioned that by using Fabian tactics America could prevent a British victory. The colonists could “evade a pitched battle” and instead “harass and exhaust the [British] soldiery” until the enemy’s rate of attrition finally led it to make peace.24
War broke out six weeks after the appearance of The Farmer Refuted. The ministry of Frederick Lord North responded to the actions of Congress by ordering the use of force to suppress the colonial rebellion. Fighting began on April 19, 1775, when British regulars carried out a mission to destroy a rebel arsenal in Concord, Massachusetts. As word of the bloodletting spread, a war spirit seized America. Volunteer militia units sprouted like weeds in colony after colony. Hamilton and several fellow students joined one in Manhattan that was called the Corsicans. The proud young soldiers wore brown leather caps bearing the inscription “Liberty or Death” and skin-tight green jackets emblazoned with the words “God and Our Right.” Hamilton pulsated with martial fervor, but in May, when an angry mob descended on the campus bent on roughing up the Tory-inclined president of King’s College, the young student-warrior risked life and limb to address the crowd, delaying its advance until his benefactor could escape to safety.
By late June the Second Continental Congress had created an armed force, the Continental army, and appointed George Washington to be its commander. A second great battle had also been fought, this time on the grassy slopes and scarred peak of Bunker Hill, just outside Boston. Nearly one thousand British regulars were casualties in the engagement. Hamilton had been busy too. Having put aside his studies, he attacked new parliamentary legislation in two short essays for the New-York Gazetteer.25 Late in the summer, he faced danger for the first time in the war. Together with more than a dozen collegiate militiamen, Hamilton came under fire from a Royal Navy warship as he and his comrades helped move cannon from the exposed Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan. The college boys fired back ineffectually with their heavy a
rtillery.
As the leaves turned in the fall, Hamilton resumed his studies, though he did not ignore the war and colonial rebellion. Before attending class, he took part in the daily military drill, always conducted in the chilly, faint light of sunrise, on the spacious grounds of St. Paul’s Church. His regimen was demanding—much as Jefferson’s had been when he was the same age. Hamilton was soldiering, studying, and wielding his pen on behalf of the insurgency. Writing under the pseudonym “Monitor,” he ground out fourteen essays in fourteen weeks for the New-York Journal. He added little to what he had said in his responses to the “Farmer,” and in fact, portions of these essays were culled intact from his previous pamphlets.
Hamilton focused on the depredations of Parliament and, unlike Jefferson, said little about the behavior of the Crown. Furthermore, whereas Jefferson saw British actions as stemming from deep-rooted maladies within the British system, Hamilton saw a conspiracy at work. A “few artful men behind the curtain” in London had gained traction. Through “bribery and corruption” these miscreants had pushed the implementation of the new colonial policies. Their object had been to “enrich themselves by the plunder and spoils of their dependent colonies.” If this cabal succeeded, he warned, the colonies someday would be governed by “needy courtiers” who relied on standing armies to maintain their rule. With regard to Parliament, however, Hamilton had made one giant step. Twelve months earlier he, like those in the First Congress, had acquiesced in Parliament’s regulation of American trade. Now Hamilton contended that “All Parliamentary power over them [the colonists] has been mere usurpation.” He was keeping step with Congress, which during the first week of December repudiated all ties to Parliament.26
What Hamilton had written before the war had meshed with the sentiments of most Americans. But hostilities had a jarring impact that made much in the “Monitor” series seem dated. Indeed, “Monitor’s” ideas seemed antiquated next to Jefferson’s in A Summary View, which had been penned some eighteen months earlier. With considerable justification, Jefferson once claimed that his prewar pamphlet was “the first publication which carried the claim of our rights their whole length”—that is, to the very doorstep of independence.27 Hamilton had not gone nearly that far, and when Thomas Paine’s Common Sense hit the streets early in 1776, in the midst of the “Monitor’s” run, the young New Yorker’s views seemed especially archaic.
Paine, a skilled artisan who had recently emigrated from England to Philadelphia, demystified government, which the citizenry had been taught to believe was so complex that it must be left to the educated and social elite. No good reason existed, Paine declared, why the people should not share in the governing process. He additionally demythologized monarchical rule, showing that it was a system that elevated incompetents and rogues to the throne, where they spent their time making wars and giving away titles to well-placed sycophants. For many colonists—perhaps for most—Paine drove a spike through the heart of the yearning for reconciliation. Why, he asked, should the colonists bequeath sovereignty to a “second hand government” three thousand miles away? The imperial government ruled on behalf of England’s social and economic elite, giving the interests of the colonists only secondary consideration. He insisted that imperial commercial laws were harmful to colonial prosperity. Furthermore, colonial ties made it certain that Americans would forever be dragged into England’s plundering wars. In contrast, American independence offered the promise of peace, prosperity, freedom, and happiness. Depicting the desperate war that was unfolding as a decisive historic event, Paine promised that victory and independence held the promise of the birthday of a new age of liberty for humankind.28
Hamilton had said next to nothing of American independence. Nor had he written a word about revolutionary change. Only in the wake of Common Sense did his gaze turn toward the British monarchy. “Monitor” suddenly mentioned the “black catalogue of royal iniquities” that dotted the historical landscape, a sad chronicle of “ambition and avarice … pride, caprice and cruelty.” If George III was part of the “mischiefs” afflicting America, he “must be a despot.” Yet, Hamilton never charged the British monarch with culpability in the alleged plot to oppress the colonists, and after one essay—the twelfth in the series—he said nothing more about royal authority. His closest approach to the topic of independence came in two oblique statements. The war, he said, had brought the imperial crisis to the “last extremity.” He also said that in the past the colonists had submitted to London’s hegemony “for conveniency sake,” implying that Americans must be given greater autonomy, or else. But the overall tone of the series was that America was waging war to reconcile with Great Britain and its monarch, a happy and fortuitous event that would take place once the “Ministry [was] driven from the post they have occupied.”29
Writing such a large number of essays in such a brief time was an impressive feat, all the more so as the author celebrated his twenty-first birthday in the course of his contribution. Nevertheless, circumstances—not to mention the American outlook—were rapidly changing, and Hamilton’s outlook did not always keep pace. His continued insistence that America owed affection and obedience to the king was in line with the thinking of the most conservative colonists, but to a steadily increasing number of his readers it must have seemed misplaced and obsolete.
If Hamilton’s ideas were slow to change, his life was transforming. Hard on the heels of his last “Monitor” essay, King’s College, which was seen by many as a Tory haven, was seized by patriot forces and turned into a military hospital. At about the same time, in mid-March, Hamilton left his militia unit to enter the Continental army. He had been offered a position as an aide to Lord Stirling, a brigadier general, but Hamilton wanted no part of a desk job. He wanted action, acclaim, glory, and rapid advancement, and to achieve that he set about reading books on gunnery and received some instruction from a former “British bombardier” who lived in Manhattan. Ultimately, through the influence of well-placed New Yorkers, including John Jay and Alexander McDougall (a longtime Sons of Liberty activist who had married well and prospered), Hamilton accepted a commission as a captain and became the commander of an artillery company raised by the revolutionary government of New York. His decision to soldier was hardly surprising as, ever since he was a boy, he had longed for a war to make his name. At last, he had his war and he was committed to the cause. He was prepared, he said, to “seal with my blood the sentiments defended by my pen.”30 Passionate young Captain Hamilton was ready to serve, and to shine and win laurels.
While Hamilton donned a uniform, Jefferson worked in the House of Burgesses to get Virginia’s militia mobilized, as Congress had requested.31 He also drafted the legislature’s response to a so-called peace plan offered by the British prime minister. Lord North’s Conciliatory Proposal was a sham, and Jefferson treated it as such. Mindful that many legislators prayed for the empire’s salvation, he tempered his composition, seeking to keep it in sync with the declarations of the Continental Congress. But Jefferson did assert that Virginia wished “a free trade with all the world,” which was tantamount to demanding an end to Great Britain’s century-old imperial trade regulations.32
When Jefferson learned in May 1775 of the bloody fighting in Massachusetts, he privately remarked that the advent of war “has cut off our last hopes of reconciliation,” a more radical view than Hamilton would articulate in his New-York Journal essays nine months later.33 One only had to read between the lines of A Summary View to see that Jefferson was ready for American independence in 1774, and his trenchant view was confirmed once Great Britain resorted to force.
Three weeks after war erupted, the Second Continental Congress convened. A couple of weeks later the Virginia assembly added Jefferson, now in his sixth year in the House of Burgesses, to the colony’s delegation in Congress. Most who served in Congress were unknown to their colleagues when they arrived in Philadelphia. There were exceptions, of course, including Washington, Franklin, Dickinson, an
d Samuel Adams. Jefferson was now another whose reputation preceded him.
His arrival on June 20, 1775, was a bit conspicuous. He clattered along Philadelphia’s cobbled streets in a handsome phaeton, accompanied by two slaves dressed in livery, four horses, and a guide he had hired in Wilmington. A Rhode Island congressman immediately wrote home that “the famous Mr. Jefferson” had entered Congress. Jefferson’s fame, such as it was, was due to A Summary View, which had probably been read by most delegates. John Adams had perused it and called it a “very handsome public Paper” penned by “a fine Writer.” Later, he recollected that Jefferson entered Congress with a “reputation for literature” and “a happy talent of composition.”34
In 1775, Jefferson was thirty-two and in many ways a striking figure. He wore fashionable clothing, though he could not be said to be clothes-conscious. In an age when the median height of full-grown American males was five feet seven, Jefferson stood six feet two. He had reddish hair, a somewhat ruddy complexion, and hazel eyes. Many remarked on his “mild and pleasing countenance.” No one described him as handsome, but none thought him unattractive. Jefferson was slender, strong and sinewy, and he tended to stand ramrod straight. One of his slaves later described him as a “strait-bodied man … a straight-up man,” and a longtime overseer at Monticello once characterized his posture as “straight as a gun barrel.” However, he slouched badly when seated, causing some to think him ungainly and awkward. He never outgrew his boyish shyness, and with strangers he was anything but outgoing. Numerous new acquaintances thought him “reserved even to coldness,” “serious, nay even cold,” or “cool and reserved,” but those who got to know Jefferson variously described him as gentle, polite, thoughtful, kind, humble, gracious, good-humored, and cheerful. He possessed “all the qualities which can arouse esteem and affection,” said one observer. Nearly everyone who left a description of Jefferson was struck by his incredible intellect, and not a few thought him the most engaging conversationalist they had ever met. He was widely regarded as orderly, diligent, and industrious; John Adams thought him “prompt, frank, explicit and decisive.” Many colleagues were surprised by his reluctance to join in the congressional debates. Adams served with him in Philadelphia for a year and “never heard him utter three sentences together” on the floor of Congress. Jefferson was like Washington and Franklin in that regard, but he was singular in other ways. Adams subsequently recalled that no congressman, not even Samuel Adams, he pointedly said, was more “prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive” than Jefferson.35
