All Williamsburg was astir on May 24, 1776, as the leading figures gathered. Pendleton wrote to Jefferson, in Philadelphia, about what was going on. “The Political Cooks are busy in preparing the dish,” he said, “and as Colo. Mason seems to have the Ascendancy in the great work, I have Sanguine hopes it will be framed to answer its end, Prosperity to the Community and Security to Individuals.” While Pendleton made no mention of the young delegate from Orange, James Madison, Jr., had already become a witness to history.54
The greatest weight rested on Pendleton’s shoulders, but Mason had his hands full and so did Madison. They were all “political cooks” at this moment, and the dish was the Virginia Declaration of Rights. With its exalted language, this impressive document became a guide for future declarations. Jefferson likely had a copy in his hands as he was laboring over his own better-remembered declaration. The tone—the very wording—is unmistakable:
A Declaration of Rights, made by the Representatives of the good people of Virginia, assembled in full Convention; and recommended to Posterity as the Basis and Foundation of Government.
That all Men are born equally free and independant, and have certain inherent natural Rights, of which they can not by any Compact, deprive or divest their Posterity; among which are the Enjoyment of Life and Liberty, with the Means of acquiring and possessing Property, and pursueing and obtaining Happiness and Safety.55
A protracted debate broke out. The Tidewater planter Robert Carter Nicholas protested its all-inclusive language: that “all Men are born equally free and independant” could reasonably be interpreted as justification for the emancipation of Virginia’s slaves. Pendleton came up with compromise language, adding after “certain inherent natural Rights” the phrase “of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any Compact deprive or divest their Posterity” (italics added). Those few words quieted Nicholas and any others who needed to convince themselves that slaves, as property, had not entered into any compact or joined civil society. The original version was prepared on May 24, and the amended version presented and accepted on June 12.56
As the Virginia Declaration proceeds, it addresses qualities of life that are contained in the eighteenth-century meaning of “pursuit of happiness” and that include “Justice, Moderation, Temperance, Frugality,” and freedom of the press. Madison was perfectly happy with this language, but he wished it openly advocated the free exercise of religion.
Here, the young legislator made his first decisive attempt to recast republican society. Dissatisfied with the old, unadventurous language of religious toleration, Madison wanted something much stronger: “the full and free exercise of [religion], according to the dictates of conscience,” which no force could tamper with; religion could not be the basis for social privileges of any kind. Here was the influence of Princeton’s John Witherspoon on the rights of conscience.
Toleration was not the same as complete freedom. Toleration meant that the state had the power to grant or limit freedom of conscience. Pendleton and the majority did not wish the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, which Madison’s language would have implied; so the young reformer twice redrafted his amendment in order to forge a compromise, and toleration was replaced with “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.” It would take a whole decade for Madison and Jefferson, combined, to chip away at the establishment. Madison’s substitution in the Virginia Declaration of Rights was small but significant, a harbinger of things to come.57
“We Must Endeavor to Forget Our Former Love”
In Congress, on July 1, Jefferson wrote to Will Fleming, who like John Page had been an intimate since their college days: “My country,” by which he meant Virginia, “will have my political creed in the form of a ‘Declaration &c’ which I was lately directed to draw.” He could not predict that a single paper in his handwriting would attain an iconic quality, and these few words are the only indication of the pride he felt at this historic moment.58
Jefferson was, by all accounts, itching to return to his “country,” where he knew important work needed to be done, work he expected to influence. More than he wanted to occupy a seat in Congress, he wanted to claim principal authorship of the state constitution. Pendleton understood this and commiserated. Instead, Jefferson’s colleague Richard Henry Lee returned to Virginia first—called home, it was said, because his wife was ill. The real reason may have been the same as Jefferson’s: a desire to influence Virginia politics.
Lee had been as provocative in Philadelphia as Henry had been in their home state, proposing, well before any shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, that Congress organize and arm militias. On June 7, 1776, before leaving town, Lee (not Jefferson) introduced the fateful resolution calling for America’s national independence. It was owing to his absence (and, some have said, his contentiousness) that Jefferson was given the task of putting on paper the collective reasoning of Congress.59
Jefferson thoughtfully composed several drafts of the Declaration in mid-June, which he then passed to Benjamin Franklin and John Adams for review. On one of those days, he learned that Virginia had decided on the new slate of delegates to Congress. His own term would expire in a month, and two of his colleagues were being called home. Although Jefferson had been reelected to Congress, his name was near the bottom of the list of successful candidates. Thinking his popularity in Virginia was waning, he wrote to Will Fleming: “It is a painful situation to be 300. miles from one’s country, and thereby open to secret assassination without a possibility of self-defence.” As he learned of the vote count in Virginia, Jefferson felt he had to tell Fleming what his role was in declaring national independence. It was as if to say, Don’t my fellow Virginians know how productive I’m being up here?
As it turned out, Jefferson’s concern was unwarranted. His narrow reelection to Congress was strictly a response to his protest to Pendleton that he needed to be with his sickly wife, Patty. This was the rationale Lee had used. But Jefferson was not making excuses: tormented letters to Lee and to John Page, and Patty Jefferson’s subsequent medical history, are ample evidence that Jefferson was not scheming to return to Williamsburg. What his correspondence does show, though, is strong concern for his reputation as a statesman and a pronounced suspicion that secret enemies were out to defeat him, or “assassinate” his character.60
Hidden angst and sensitivity to personal honor induced Jefferson to take sharp aim at Great Britain in his highly polemical Declaration of Independence. As he and his colleagues had to build a common case on a series of justifications, Jefferson appealed to the “candid world” whose attention—and financial and military support—the Continental Congress wished to attract. The “candid world” encompassed Britain’s colonial competitors France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic, plus potential benefactors Prussia and Russia. America wanted to be counted “among the Powers of the earth,” to quote from the preamble.
Jefferson of Virginia was doing more than cribbing from Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, of course, just as he was expressing more than the collective reasoning of Congress.61 The animated tone of his Declaration meant that it could be read theatrically. Governments are not changed for “light and transient causes,” he says, then segues to a more sentimental form of persuasion by making pain personal and justice nonnegotiable: “All experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable … But when a long train of abuses and usurpations … evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism …” Even the sound of his “long train” of words is seductive.
Jefferson knew when to raise the pitch for effect. First, he indicted King George III for having “refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” The ensuing verbs increased the severity of the king’s alleged crimes: “He has dissolved”; “He has combined with others”; “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns”; “He h
as constrained our fellow citizens.” “He has”—and here Jefferson associated the tyrant king’s official appointments with a predatory, wasting disease—“sent hither swarms of new officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” Jefferson’s voice varied subtly across the page: determined, reproachful, confrontational, and at all times principled.
The author of the Declaration did not always get his way. Congress edited out what was possibly Jefferson’s most theatrical line of all, his protest of the king’s “unfeeling” act in sending mercenary armies to invade America: “These facts,” wrote Jefferson most vividly, “have given the last stab to agonizing affection.” What could be more unbearable, more unspeakable, than for those who profess to love their fellow countrymen to hire foreigners to commit wanton acts of violence against them? Jefferson presents his conclusion almost as though it had come to him as an epiphany: “Manly spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren.” And then his resolve: “We must endeavor to forget our former love for them.” It is, indeed, great theater.62
But Patrick Henry could provide theater; Jefferson had to do more. And so he carefully constructed a legal brief, justifying the causes for separation. Both British royalists and American patriots habitually referred to the king as a father figure, but Jefferson consciously avoided this metaphor. The text of the Declaration mentions the “present king of Great Britain” once, the “Christian king of Great Britain” once, elsewhere dismissing him as a mere “prince” or “chief magistrate.” By stripping the king of his royal aura, Jefferson enumerated his crimes as though the “He” that is the subject of the list of crimes was an unexceptional individual, an ordinary political official. If Jefferson did not ritually “kill” the king in his prose, he certainly demoted him. This flawed official, having committed “injuries and usurpations,” warranted public censure and justified an act of permanent separation by his colonies.
Jefferson’s organizing metaphor was not paternal and filial but marital. His choice of words suggested the breakup of a husband and wife, not a father and child. In the opening paragraph, he announced that a disconnection was occurring between two equal parties: “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another.” Echoing language usually applied by jurists and philosophers to regulate (and minimize) divorce, Jefferson asserted that governments (like marriage) should not be changed for “light & transient causes.” When he described the “patient sufferance of the colonies,” he was invoking the image of the long-suffering wife, so often described in the literature of his generation as one “born to suffer and obey.”63
As Jefferson’s argument progressed, allusions to the king as a bad husband became clearer. One passage describing the king’s character called him a prince “unfit to be the ruler,” who, in the “short compass of twelve years,” dominated in a union (read: a twelve-year marriage) marked by cruelty and misadventure. In “future ages,” few would believe the “hardiness of one man adventured”—that is, how one man could have been so greedy and rapacious as to commit the “long train of abuses” to which Americans have reacted with understandable outrage. The abusive husband George III was a reckless, and therefore unfit, head of the British household; as an unresponsive spouse, he answered “repeated petitions” with “repeated injuries.”
Jefferson wished to make the king’s crimes personally felt, so the marriage analogy made perfect sense. The legal bonds that America needed to sever were the bonds of affection, evoked in the Declaration’s highly emotive line: “we must endeavor to forget our former love.” The marital union collapsed, Jefferson concluded, when the king dispatched to America “disturbers of our harmony”—the military equivalent of a home wrecker—heartless soldiers and “foreign mercenaries” who “invade and destroy us.” In 1776 the word mercenary stood for acts of rape and pillage committed by the “unfeeling.” It was the large number of Hessians hired by the British government to fight in America that provoked this strong reaction.
In line with the stereotype of the cold-blooded mercenary, newspapers that year were to report with pathos the story of a Pennsylvania farmer who surprised a Hessian officer in the act of raping his daughter; he killed the mercenary “in an agony of rage and resentment,” only to be killed in turn by a comrade of the offending officer. In labeling the king’s appendages “unfeeling,” Jefferson was accusing George III of condoning rape and violating the most sacred trust of marriage and family honor.64
Influenced by John Locke’s concept of the social contract, Jefferson naturally understood that marriage was the first social compact formed in the state of nature, the act that created civil society. Marriage was a voluntary agreement based on consent, whereas absolute monarchy predicated its rule on a combination of descent and brute power. In “constituting … government,” Jefferson wrote, the American colonies had, sometime past, “adopted one common king.” Having done so voluntarily, they could therefore discard the monarchy voluntarily too. Having “abdicated government” in America, “declaring us out of his allegiance & protection,” the king could be divorced, just as a husband who ceased caring for his wife could. Here Jefferson drew on one of the Jewish justifications of divorce, the act of repudiation, in which the husband ends the marriage by putting his wife outside his house.65
As a practicing attorney, Jefferson was well versed in the arguments for and against divorce. In 1772 he prepared a detailed series of notes for a client who intended to divorce his wife, notes that bear a marked resemblance to Jefferson’s world-famous manifesto of 1776. Jotting down his thoughts in two columns, he listed reasons in favor of divorce on one side, and reasons opposed to divorce on the other. His first entry in favor cites the Scottish philosopher David Hume: “Cruel to continue by violence a union made at first by mutual love, but now dissolved by hatred.” It is a perfect rendering of his logic in the Declaration. His additional notes in defense of the divorce principle include “Liberty of affection” as a “natural right” and “happiness” as the reason why marriage exists at all. This might help explain, as many over the years have wondered, why Jefferson revised Locke’s triad, “life, liberty, and property,” by substituting “happiness” for “property.” Happiness conjured feelings of “tranquil permanent felicity,” another of Jefferson’s fine-sounding phrases, which was as integral to his deeply sentimental view of marriage as to his idyllic mountaintop home.66
In listing the arguments against divorce, he observed that “frivolous quarrels” must be avoided—this accords with his reference in the Declaration to “light and transient causes.” He quoted the eighteenth-century French political philosopher Montesquieu in contending that it was “cruel to confine divorce or repudiation to the husband” without granting the wife the same power. Divorce thus “restores to women their natural right of equality.” This is what is conveyed in the opening lines of the Declaration, as America, depicted in Revolution-era cartoons as a passive female, dissolved its “political bands” by necessity, in order to “assume among the powers of the earth a separate & equal station.” It was the law of nature and of nature’s god.67
Reconciliation, like separation, had marital overtones. Politicized people were painfully aware of what it meant when the king repudiated his colonies in an October 1775 speech before Parliament, openly rejecting the colonists’ professions of loyalty and affection. He considered these assurances as mere subterfuge. Even so, in the early months of 1776, rumors circulated that the king’s ministers were coming up with a plan of reconciliation, and moderate members of the Continental Congress clung to the hope that commissioners would be sent to negotiate favorable terms of reunion.68
In March 1776 a particularly lurid piece in the Virginia Gazette argued passionately against the possibility of “reconciliation and reunion with your butchers.” The writer was echoing Thomas Paine’s wildly popular pamphlet Common Sense, just published in January. Paine had declared that the only feelings American hearts should harbor
toward the British were those of pride and contempt. Whoever could “shake the hands” of “murderers” was no longer worthy of “the name of husband, father, friend, or love,” possessing instead the “heart of a coward and the spirit of the sycophant.”69
Language gives enormous clues to one’s emotional state; it is true for communities as well as individuals. In the Revolutionary lexicon, “manly spirit” (which in the Declaration commanded Americans “to renounce forever” their “unfeeling brethren”) went hand in hand with honorable behavior, a code first defined by face-to-face gentlemanly contact. Yet on New Year’s Day 1776 the Virginia Gazette made clear that Great Britain had abandoned the key components of honor: courage, candor, and generosity. Enlisting understood social inferiors (slaves, Indians, and Canadian Catholics) to fight in America was, according to the newspaper, a “base and inhuman stratagem.” William Bradford had early protested Britain’s “so slavish a way of Conquering,” and Jefferson’s Declaration weighed in here too: the king’s deadly accomplices were savages and mercenaries. By the standards of civilized behavior, George III had unmanned himself. In Jefferson’s words, he had turned a “deaf” ear and waged a “cruel” war.70
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