Jefferson was admitted to the bar in 1767, and, after a brief period practicing law, he was elected to the House of Burgesses in 1769. He was a relatively quiet member of that body, but in 1774, in the aftermath of the passage of the Coercive Acts, he drafted a lengthy address intended as a set of instructions to Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress. Jefferson’s draft wasn’t chosen, at least in part because some thought it too emphatic in its denial of British authority. But it was published as a pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. It not only buttressed the increasingly popular notion that the American colonial legislatures were independent of Parliament’s authority but also began to establish Jefferson’s reputation beyond Virginia as both an elegant stylist and a persuasive defender of America’s constitutional liberties. Indeed, Jefferson’s visibility following the publication of his Summary View, which was read by people all across America, may have been higher outside of Virginia than inside. In his home colony, he was seen as just another member of the House of Burgesses; but for those outside Virginia, his authorship of A Summary View of the Rights of British America spoke loudly of a keen intellect that might prove useful in the coming conflict with Great Britain.13
When Jefferson set off for Philadelphia, he traveled in an ornate phaeton, accompanied by two slaves—Jesse, who rode as postilion; Richard, a body servant who rode with him in the carriage; and Jupiter, Jefferson’s longtime personal servant and companion who traveled behind the phaeton with two extra horses. No doubt eager to display his own status as a Virginia gentryman, Jefferson outfitted his slaves in formal attire. His trip to Philadelphia took ten days—an unusually long time to cover the 325 miles from Williamsburg—the result, in part, of getting lost somewhere outside of Wilmington, Delaware, but also the consequence of his intellectual curiosity about the natural sights along the way. Upon arriving in Philadelphia on June 20, he took up lodgings in a room in a house on Chestnut Street belonging to one of Philadelphia’s premier cabinetmakers, Benjamin Randolph. He set up an account at City Tavern to take his dinner and late evening suppers there. Taking the place of Peyton Randolph and the now-departed George Washington, he most likely joined his fellow delegates Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Harrison and several others as a member of a “club” that dined together around a common table at the tavern. He was already personally known and generally admired by his fellow Virginia delegates, but, still, he knew that he was taking his place on a stage far larger and far more consequential than he ever could have imagined.14
“The Declaration on the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms”
The invitation to write a revised draft of the declaration to be read by General Washington to his troops would give Jefferson his first opportunity to appear on that larger stage. Jefferson probably began work on his draft immediately after he was added to the committee charged with writing it—sometime around June 26. In the meantime, John Dickinson headed a committee created in the aftermath of the May 26 vote to attempt one more approach to the king. They drafted a formal petition based on the four propositions Dickinson had so arduously put before the Congress in late May. And yet another committee, composed of Richard Henry Lee, Robert Livingston and Edmund Pendleton, wrote another Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain justifying America’s rejection of Lord North’s proposal and seeking to solicit the sympathy and aid of their “Friends, Countrymen, and Brethren” across the Atlantic. All of these political manifestos would come before the Congress toward the end of the first week in July, and all of them would generate a fair amount of criticism and controversy.15
First up was the declaration to be read by Washington to his troops. As soon as he was added to the committee charged with drafting the document, Jefferson set to work on the project, formally titled “The Declaration on the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms,” but more commonly referred to by the delegates as the “Declaration on Taking Arms.” He prepared at least two different drafts over a ten-day period, settling on a final version in the first week of July. Although much of the argument in Jefferson’s final draft was less emphatic in its denunciation of British violations of American rights than in his Summary View, at least some of the committee members found it too strident. In particular, New Jersey’s William Livingston, who remained in the camp of those committed to conciliation and was becoming extremely cranky in the bargain, thought that Jefferson’s draft “had the faults common to our Southern gentlemen.” He criticized it for lacking a “sense of dignity,” complaining that the radicals in the Congress, in whose number he now counted Jefferson, seemed to think that “a reiteration of tyranny, despotism, bloody &c [is] all that is needed to unite us at home and to convince the bribed voters of the North of the justice of our cause.” The sheer nastiness of Livingston’s comment suggests that, however much the delegates may have shared a common concern for the militiamen in Boston, there was still major disagreement—even acrimony—among them with respect to the most appropriate “next steps.” Livingston’s contention that Jefferson’s draft reflected a difference of style and opinion between North and South was in fact misleading, for there were no doubt many delegates from southern colonies—for example, Maryland, Delaware and South Carolina—who may also have had reservations about Jefferson’s draft, and in the North, there were significant differences of opinion between the New England delegates, on the one hand, and those from New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania on the other.16
John Dickinson also thought that Jefferson’s draft was “too strong,” but unlike Livingston, he played a constructive role in improving it. According to Jefferson’s later recollection, Dickinson, like Livingston, still retained the hope of reconciliation with the mother country and feared that the effectiveness of Jefferson’s draft might be weakened “by offensive statements.” When confronted by Dickinson’s criticisms, and because he continued to view the Pennsylvania congressman as “so honest a man, and so able a one,” Jefferson agreed to allow Dickinson to take his draft and “put it into a form he could approve.” When Dickinson took on that task, he did not confine himself to minor editing. In fact, he significantly rewrote it, leaving in place only four and a half paragraphs of a thirteen-paragraph document.17
A few of Dickinson’s changes to Jefferson’s draft were stylistic. He toned down some of the harshness of Jefferson’s language and emphasized that “We have not raised Armies with ambitious Designs of separating from Great-Britain, and establishing Independent States.” The more important changes were substantive—he included a recitation of the Congress’s previous efforts (many of them coming at his own instigation) at conciliation, and he softened Jefferson’s absolute denial of parliamentary authority, suggesting that the original charters issued to each of the colonies did not give the legislatures of those colonies the degree of autonomy from Parliament that Jefferson had claimed. Even with Dickinson’s changes, the finished product was decidedly muscular. Although “the farmer in Pennsylvania” continued to cherish the American allegiance to the king, he did not pull any punches when speaking of “Ministerial rapacity” or the “pernicious project” and “insidious maneuver” of the British Parliament. And, taking some phrases from Jefferson’s draft but reworking them into an even more stirring conclusion, Dickinson proclaimed:
Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. Our internal resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign assistance is undoubtedly attainable. We gratefully acknowledge, as signal Instances of the Divine Favour toward us, that his Providence would not permit us to be called into this severe Controversy, until we were grown up to our present strength, had been previously exercised in warlike operation, and possessed of the means of defending ourselves. With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the World, declare that . . . the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance, employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved t
o dye Free-men rather than live Slaves.18
The final version of the Declaration on Taking Arms was, as the eminent Jefferson scholar Julian Boyd concluded, the result of a true “collaboration on the part of the two men, however unwilling each was to accept the work of the other.” Whatever differences of opinion delegates may have had about the prospects of reconciliation, and whatever personal rivalries or clash of egos may have conditioned their behavior toward one another, the final draft of the Declaration on Taking Arms was unanimously and enthusiastically adopted by the Congress on July 6. Even John Adams, who by this time had developed a hearty dislike of Dickinson and who was beginning to complain that most of the Congress’s literary efforts were a waste of time, grudgingly acknowledged that it was a “spirited manifesto.”19
Somewhat anticlimactically, on July 8 the delegates approved a final draft of the Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain. Mindful that their earlier effort in this regard eight months before had failed to rally the British people to their cause, the drafting committee spent less time focusing on the fine points of America’s constitutional argument and more on a recitation of the atrocities committed by the British military in the subsequent months. It is likely that few in the Congress had much hope that the address would have much effect. John Adams caustically commented to James Warren, a distant kin of the recently killed Joseph Warren, that the address “will find many Admirers among the Ladies and fine Gentlemen; but it is not to my Taste. Prettynesses, Juvenilities, much less Puerilities, become not a great Assembly like this the Representative of the people.” He sarcastically predicted that all of the various petitions, declarations and addresses on which the Congress was spending so much time would result only in further “Bills of Attainder and other such like Expressions of Esteem and Kindness.” Adams anger and sarcasm were, typically, a bit over the top, but they were also reflections of the tensions continuing to build in the Congress—tensions between, at one extreme, many of the New Englanders and perhaps most of the Virginians and, at the other, the more conservative delegates from the mid-Atlantic colonies, with many other delegates still struggling with their feelings about how best to resolve what was looking more and more like an irreconcilable crisis.20
The Olive Branch Petition and John Adams’s Wrath
If John Adams was skeptical about the Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, he was downright indignant over the eventual passage and transmittal of yet another conciliatory petition to the king. The committee that had been working on that petition since early June presented its final draft to the Congress for its approval on July 5. The prestigious drafting committee—John Dickinson, Thomas Johnson, John Rutledge, John Jay and Benjamin Franklin—notably contained no New Englanders or Virginians. Dickinson and Jay had been outspoken about the need to go the extra mile to seek reconciliation, Rutledge had tended to waver back and forth between militancy and moderation and Franklin had been mostly silent; only Thomas Johnson of Maryland had been outspoken in his support of the New Englanders and the Virginians. Most importantly, it was primarily Dickinson—both because he was the most earnest champion of yet another petition to the king and because of his superior writing abilities—who shaped the final product.
The petition was, as its author intended it, extraordinarily pacific in tone, if not in its logic and substance. It was a “humble” petition from his “Majesty’s faithful Subjects.” It acknowledged that the union existing between “our Mother country” and the colonies had “produced benefits so remarkably important” to both sides that it had become “the wonder and envy of other Nations.” And although it castigated the “British ministry” for its “delusive pretences, fruitless terrors, and unavailing severities,” it differed from the petition sent by the First Continental Congress to the King in that it did not go into a lengthy recitation of American grievances. It closed by beseeching “your Majesty, that your royal authority and influence may be graciously interposed to procure us relief” from the afflictions from which the colonies had been suffering.21
According to John Adams’s later account, the debate over the final draft of the petition lasted two days and was filled with acrimony. Placing himself at center stage, he took credit for leading the opposition to Dickinson’s petition, an opposition, Adams claimed, that made Dickinson begin to “tremble for his Cause.” At one point in the debate, Adams left the Assembly Room and went out into the State House Yard. As Adams remembered it, Dickinson, observing his departure, “darted out after me. He broke out upon me in a most abrupt and extraordinary manner. In as violent a passion as he was capable of feeling, and with an Air, Countenance and Gestures as rough and haught as if I had been a School Boy and he the Master, he vociferated out: ‘What is the Reason, Mr. Adams, that you New England men oppose our Measures of Reconciliation?’” Adams claimed that Dickinson then threatened to lead other colonies in a move to “break off from you in New England” if that region’s members continued to oppose his petition to the king.
In Adams’s account, Dickinson, who had always been known for his cool, even cold, demeanor, was the hothead, his emotions out of control. By contrast, Adams, known by virtually every member of Congress to oscillate between emotional peaks and valleys of jubilation and despair, and whatever his mood, to wear his heart on his sleeve, presented himself as having dealt with Dickinson’s threats “cooly” and in a “very happy temper.” However cool or happy his temper may have been during that encounter, Adams admitted that his “Friendship and Acquaintance” with Dickinson ended at that moment. The two would never again exchange a word with one another except in the formal setting of the Congress. Adams concluded: “The more I reflected on Mr. Dickinson’s rude Lecture in the State House Yard, the more I was vexed with it, and the determination of Congress, in favour of the Petition, did not allay the irritation.”22
However vehemently John Adams and a few others—his cousin Sam, Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry—may have opposed what the delegates came to refer to as the Olive Branch Petition, even Adams was resigned to the fact that it was bound to be endorsed by virtually all of the members of the Congress. As Adams acknowledged in a letter to James Warren, “We must have a Petition to the King and a delicate Proposal of Negociation.” He could not resist adding: “This Negociation I dread like Death.” His greatest fear, he confided, was that the king and his ministers might agree to the petition but would then proceed to ignore it. His greatest hope, he confessed, was that the king and his ministers would reject it.23
Congress formally passed the petition sometime during the day on July 5. It was then written out and signed on July 8 “by the several members.” All of the delegates present that day signed it, including John Adams, although he must have done so with gritted teeth. Thomas Jefferson, for his part, was more polite. He was in the midst of developing a cordial and constructive relationship with Dickinson in the writing of the Declaration on Taking Arms, and though he probably held out little hope that Dickinson’s Olive Branch Petition would do much good, he merely commented that “Congress gave a signal proof of their indulgence to Mr. Dickinson, and of their great desire not to go too fast for any respectable part of our body, in permitting him to draw their . . . petition to the King according to his own ideas, and passing it with scarcely any amendment.” Jefferson’s more temperate view of both Dickinson and his petition was representative of the mainstream of opinion in the Congress at that moment. Though he and many other delegates were not optimistic about the prospect of it doing much good, they also believed that it could do little harm. And Jefferson, far more than John Adams, understood the need to continue to strive for consensus among the delegates.24
Consensus or no consensus, John Adams continued to fume, both about the petition itself—which he derided as a “measure of imbecility”—and about what he saw as Dickinson’s pernicious influence on the body. In a letter to James Warren on July 24 he railed against “A certain great Fortune and piddling Genius” whose high reputation was
wholly undeserved and who “has given a silly Cast to our whole Doings.” Instead of wasting its time on frivolous petitions and addresses, Adams wrote, the Congress should have “completely moddelled a Constitution,” creating a comprehensive legislative, executive and judicial structure to govern the “whole continent.” In other words, the Congress should have been taking purposeful steps towards independence.25
Alas, the letter never made it to James Warren. Intercepted by a British sympathizer as it was being carried to Boston, it was published in the Massachusetts Gazette, a paper widely suspected of Tory sympathies, with the aim of discrediting Adams by making public his disdain for one of the most respected men in all of America and of revealing his aggressive advocacy of independence. Upon reading Adams’s description of him, Dickinson was obviously not pleased but made no public mention of it other than to write in the margins of his copy of the newspaper reprinting Adams’s outburst: “Letter from John Adams of Massachusetts Bay in which he abuses me for opposing the violent measures of himself and others in Congress.” A more dispassionate observer of the contretemps, the firm patriot Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, noted that Adams was regarded with “nearly universal detestation” for his rude behavior toward Dickinson.26
Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor Page 31
