by John Ferling
The congressmen returned the next morning and, after first tending to other business, once again took up the issue of independence. No one rose to speak. Nothing was left to be said. Noon was approaching on the morning of July 2 when Congress declared American independence. The vote was 12 to 0, with New York abstaining. Its delegates had not been authorized by the authorities at home to vote for the break with Great Britain, but the authorization came a few days later and New York cast its vote for independence later in July. Congress had voted unanimously for American independence.
Immediately following the vote on July 2, the congressmen became editors, poring over Jefferson’s composition. These unsparing editors made nearly forty changes to his draft. Their greatest change—and possibly the most telling deletion for the course of American history—was in striking Jefferson’s magnificent, if historically inaccurate, attack on the king for having imposed slavery on the colonies. The passage was struck at the behest of Georgia and South Carolina, and with its obliteration went Jefferson’s condemnation of slavery’s “assemblage of horrors” and his declaration that the British monarch had violated the “sacred [natural] rights” of blacks as well as whites.
Congress pruned what Jefferson had written by a third, deleting or combining some of the twenty-seven charges that Jefferson had brought against the monarch. Jefferson fumed at what he thought was the desecration of his craftsmanship, but aside from the sentences on slavery, Congress had done him a favor. His colleagues had taken a superb draft and made it better by shortening it. The draft that Congress edited was Jefferson’s document, and the Declaration of Independence that the American people, and the world, read and heard remained Jefferson’s. Congress and the committee charged with preparing the draft had recognized that Jefferson was uniquely capable of producing a resplendent and awe-inspiring Declaration of Independence, and he had done just that.52
Chapter 3
“Is my country the better for my having lived”
Making the American Revolution
Some colonists who wished to break ties with Great Britain longed for the new United States to replicate the social and political structure of the former mother country. Others, Jefferson among them, anticipated that independence would usher in sweeping reforms.
Following independence, Jefferson once again asked to be recalled to Williamsburg so that he might have a hand in drafting the state’s first constitution. In part, he wanted to leave Philadelphia because it was readily apparent that Congress could not lead the reformation of America. It had been created in 1774 to meet the threat posed by London, and now its role was to be the central manager of the war effort, including American diplomacy. Even if Congress had possessed the power to initiate reforms, it would not have done so. Reforms divide, and America required unity if it was to win the war.
This time, Williamsburg complied with his wishes, and Jefferson was back in Virginia by summer’s end, though too late to participate in drafting the state’s first constitution. During his first three years back at home, a time of blood-drenched battles and nearly unparalleled suffering by many American soldiers, the war was mostly a faraway event for Jefferson. He seldom mentioned it in his correspondence, and it would be a stretch to suggest that he directly assisted the new nation in its life-and-death struggle. In fact, a few days after reaching home, he declined Congress’s request that he join Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane on a mission to Paris to gain French assistance. Richard Henry Lee had written a letter imploring him to go, saying that the very survival of the United States hinged on bringing France into the war. Jefferson rebuffed his friend’s entreaty, pleading that his wife’s health was precarious. The state of Martha’s health is unknown, though Jefferson had evidently thought her well enough to leave her at home alone for four months that spring and summer. Jefferson said later that he neither wanted to be separated from his wife nor to “expose [her] to the dangers of the sea, and of capture by British ships”; he also subsequently acknowledged that he wished to remain in Virginia, “where much was to be done … in new modeling” the state socially and politically. Suspecting that his friend’s excuse about Martha’s health was spurious, Lee unambiguously told Jefferson that he should give up his “private enjoyments” at a time when so many were making enormous sacrifices.1
Although Jefferson relinquished little of his private life, he did not forsake all public responsibilities. He attended the meetings of the state legislature, spending up to eighteen weeks each year for the next three years in Williamsburg. The war proceeded without him, but Jefferson saw himself, and a few others of like mind, as the embodiment of the American Revolution. He was committed not just to change but also, in some instances, to such pervasive reforms that they could in truth be considered revolutionary. Furthermore, he hoped the reforms adopted by Virginia might serve as a model for all the new American states.2
For most, the conviction that Britain’s imperial policies were tyrannical was sufficient reason to commit to the colonial rebellion. Jefferson, however, was both intellectually curious and a disciple of the Enlightenment. He took it for granted that nothing should be taken for granted. Everything was fair game for questioning and rational reassessment, and he tried to understand the reasons for London’s behavior. His scrutiny led him to the conclusion that Great Britain groaned under a “vicious … Patrician order,” an “aristocracy of wealth” that was “of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society.” Over time, a “distinct set of families” had become “privileged by law.” These families perpetuated their elite status through wealth in land, but also through the patronage of monarchs who “habitually selected [the] counselors of State” from the ranks of the aristocracy. It was a tailor-made system through which the monarchy gained the backing of the nobility for advancing the “interests and will of the crown.” Unavoidably in this scheme of things, royalty and the aristocracy colluded first in abusing the people of England, then of Ireland. It was inevitable that someday they would similarly seek to victimize the colonists. That day had dawned, in Jefferson’s judgment, when the Stamp Act was passed.
These views ignited a rage that shone through in Jefferson’s writings about Anglo-American affairs, a deeper, more implacable anger than burned in the hearts of many of his fellow revolutionaries. His indignation was likely stoked as well by the belief that his years of study had made him the equal, and probably the superior, of most of the English elite, the metropolitan gentility that not only looked with condescension on colonial gentlemen but that also exploited commoners and sought to take advantage of Americans. Jefferson’s writings bristled toward a Parliament that wished to “arrogate over us.” He cataloged the King’s and the titled nobility’s long list of “treasonable crimes against their people.” He denounced the Crown’s repeated “unjustifiable exertion of power.” Britain’s elite, he charged, had “indulged themselves in every exorbitance which their avarice could dictate.” It was ordained that these “worthless ministerial dependants” would prey on the people for sustenance, and it was no less inescapable that, like vultures, they would seek through Parliament’s “unjust encroachment” on the rights of the people to plunder those in England and the American colonists.3
Jefferson was hardly the only American rebel to exhibit such fury. But he was set apart from most, both in seeing malign imperial policies as rooted in the social and political system of the mother country and in his conviction that Virginia had in some ways come to resemble Great Britain itself.4 A handful of “great families” dominated Virginia just as their counterparts monopolized power in the mother country. He knew that in such a society, men of “virtue and talent” who were not well-born might never reach their full potential. Nor would the “interests of society” be truly served so long as an aristocracy “founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents,” predominated and perpetuated itself through the “transmission of [its] property from generation to generation.” In the sweep of time, Virginia would mirror the decay
that blighted England.
Though part of what he referred to as Virginia’s “Pseudo-aristoi,” Jefferson fervently believed in providing greater opportunities for all men than could ever exist in an aristocratic society. He was drawn to an alternative to aristocratic rule, a system that could provide for the well-being and personal fulfillment of a far greater percentage of the citizenry.5 Jefferson was articulating his belief in republicanism. Historian Gordon S. Wood has called republicanism “a radical ideology, as radical for the eighteenth century as Marxism was to be for the nineteenth century.” It struck at the underpinnings of the old order. For centuries, political theorists had insisted that people were too corrupt and selfish to be left to their own devices; plunder and chaos would ensue. A monarchical society was preferable, they insisted, for through it the citizenry coalesced in allegiance to the king, acknowledging their dependency on a monarch who presumably governed for the greater good of all. Jefferson and his fellow republicans rejected such thinking. Jefferson believed that “dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” The monarchical system was a lie. It was “treason against the people … against mankind in general.” Like other republicans, Jefferson believed that a free citizenry could be responsible and patriotic. For republicans, as Wood put it, the American Revolution “promised nothing less than a massive reordering” of the lives of ordinary people, one that was grounded in “a fundamental shift in values and a change in the very character of American society.”6
Jefferson never sought to unravel the reasons behind his reform proclivities. One of his best biographers, Merrill Peterson, concluded that Jefferson probably “did not understand them himself.”7 Jefferson did say that his convictions stemmed from his “life of inquiry and reflection,” though he also insisted that his transforming journey had begun in college, where he “heard more good sense, more rational and philosophical conversations than in all my life.”8 But something made Jefferson receptive to the new ideas he heard from Professor Small and others, and to reconsidering old ways of thinking. His republicanism may have been nourished by his shock at recognizing that many of his dissolute and unproductive college classmates—most of whom were scions of aristocratic families—would someday be politically and socially powerful simply because of their birthright. It may have come from sitting with their ilk in the House of Burgesses, where he discovered soon enough that given the “bigoted intolerance” of most of his fellow assemblymen, nothing “liberal could expect success.”9 It is also possible that Jefferson may have sensed a contemptuous or patronizing tone among greater planters who interacted with his uneducated, parvenu father. He possibly felt that doors were shut to Peter Jefferson because he had not hailed from an elite and powerful family. Or, his republicanism may have come about in a circular manner. Critical thinking might have led him to comprehend the evil of slavery, which in turn might have led him to the conviction that republicanism offered the best hope for purging the land of that stain and, simultaneously, of improving the lot of humankind.
Jefferson had launched his reform efforts prior to independence. While trapped in Philadelphia, he had drafted a constitution and sent it to Williamsburg sometime in the spring of 1776. Much that he proposed was in step with the thoughts of others who were simultaneously contemplating constitutions for their states, but one suggestion was designed to lay “the axe to the root of Pseudo-aristocracy.”10 Believing that possession of land was the key not merely to individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness but also to the very survival of an American republic, Jefferson urged Virginia to take a step that had never previously been attempted by any American province. He suggested that Virginia give fifty acres to each free, landless man. This would immediately bestow suffrage rights on all adult, white males, and it also had the potential to launch a real social and political revolution. Most assemblymen considered such largess to be too radical. Besides, in a state where great fortunes could be made from speculating in land, and in which most of the land was owned by men of the social class that dominated the assembly, Jefferson’s proposition never stood a chance. But he did not give up. Once he arrived back in Virginia in the fall of 1776 and took a seat in the legislature, Jefferson worked with others to open the west. The assembly voted to make Kentucky a county. When the war was over, settlers could look forward to crossing the mountains to the bluegrass country, where cheap—if not free—land would be abundantly available.11
This was just the start. Five days after reentering the legislature, Jefferson took a potentially far-reaching step. He proposed that the state’s legal code be reviewed and “adopted to our republican form of government.” The legislature agreed and appointed him to the five-member Committee of Revisors to undertake the project. Two of the revisors, not being lawyers, rapidly dropped off the committee. The three remaining members—Jefferson, Wythe, and Edmund Pendleton—agreed to equally divide the work. They also concluded that it would be too “bold” to ask the legislature to “abrogate our whole system.” Furthermore, it would delay the completion of the work for an eternity. Nevertheless, the committee from the outset saw its role as one of “modifying” and “modernizing” Virginia’s laws. In January 1777 the three revisors “repaired to our respective homes,” as Jefferson said, and took up their task. Three years passed before their work was completed.12
Not everything recommended by the recodification committee was especially enlightened, including two areas for which Jefferson was responsible. His overhaul of the criminal code reduced a staggering number of capital crimes to just two; treason and murder. However, ignoring reforms that were already in place in some parts of Europe, he recommended a string of barbaric punishments for several crimes. So harsh was his criminal code that Jefferson himself subsequently called it “revolting” to “the modern mind.” It may have been that he was boxed in by others on the committee. He later hinted at having adhered to the wishes of his two colleagues who believed that macabre punishments would deter crimes.13 The Virginia legislature, which seldom distinguished itself as a beacon of enlightenment, was so appalled by the savagery of the proposed criminal code that it refused to enact it.14
Jefferson drafted the section on slaves and free blacks as well. Despite his resplendent and inspiring passages on liberty and equality in the Declaration of Independence, he was hardly forward-looking on matters of race. In fact, his outlook was all too conventional for the time. He admitted his abhorrence of the color black and said that he found Africans’ “wooly hair” and physiques to be repugnant. Accepting abundant racial stereotypes (he called them “Deep-rooted prejudices”), Jefferson believed that blacks were slow, lazy, oversexed, less capable than whites of reasoning, and on the whole an inferior race.15 With Jefferson taking the lead, the Committee of Revisors proposed making it illegal for slaves to be brought into Virginia, a step the House of Burgesses had unsuccessfully sought before the Revolution, but which the legislature approved in 1778.
Despite his racism, Jefferson wished to abolish slavery. He thought it an abomination for both races, and he believed its abolition would break the aristocracy’s stranglehold on Virginia. However, when members of the legislature who had drafted an emancipation bill asked him to include it in the revisal of the laws, Jefferson demurred, though he agreed to its submission as “an amendment … to be offered the legislature whenever the bill should be taken up.” Scholars have criticized Jefferson for refusing to incorporate the plan in the revised statutes, but he was a savvy politician who doubtless knew that the bill had no chance of passing during the war, and that to try and fail at this juncture likely would only make it more difficult to secure passage at a more favorable moment. Nevertheless, his consent to the amendment sheds light on Jefferson’s thinking with regard to ending slavery in Virginia.
The bill that he tacitly endorsed provided for the gradual end to slavery and for the removal from the state of those who were set free. It stipulated tha
t all children born to slaves following some predetermined date were to be gradually emancipated. The females were to live with their parents until age eighteen, the males until age twenty-one; during those years, they were to be trained at public expense in farming and other pursuits. Upon reaching adulthood, they were to become “free and independent,” though they were to be colonized at some undisclosed location outside the state, where they were to remain under Virginia’s protection until they were self-sustaining. A couple of years after this legislation was drafted, Jefferson defended the decision to require the freedmen to leave the state on the grounds that the two races could never live together in harmony. In addition, he hinted that the expulsion of emancipated blacks was necessary for warding off race-based politics that would inevitably splinter whites.16
The emancipation bill was never introduced. Years later, Jefferson said that “the public mind would not yet bear the proposition,” and there is little reason to doubt his assertion. However, in 1783, thinking that a state constitutional convention was about to be called, Jefferson privately prepared a draft constitution (which was published in the middle of that decade). The draft specified that Virginia was not “to permit the introduction of any more slaves to reside in this state, or the continuance of slavery beyond the generation which shall be living on the 31st day of December 1800; all persons born after that day being hereby declared free.” It said nothing of colonization of those who were freed. Jefferson’s constitutional thinking counted for nothing, as the proposed constitutional convention never met.17
