American Sphinx (9 page)

Given this supercharged context, it is the beginning of all genuine wisdom to recognize that neither Jefferson nor any other of the participants foresaw the historical significance of what they were doing at the time. What’s more, within the context of Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, the writing of the Declaration of Independence did not seem nearly so important as other priorities, including the constitution-making of the states and the prospect of foreign alliances with France or Spain. The golden haze around the Declaration had not yet formed. The sense of history we bring to the subject did not exist for those making it.

One man, John Adams, has left a record that suggests he
was
conscious of being “present at the creation.” In May he wrote to his beloved Abigail in a prophetic mood: “When I consider the great Events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may have been instrumental in touching some Springs, and turning some small Wheels, which have had and will have such Effects, I feel an Awe upon my Mind, which is not easily described.” Two weeks later he announced to Abigail that he had begun to make copies of all his letters, a clear sign that he was sending them to posterity. But Adams was hardly typical. His neurotic sensitivity to his own place in history became legendary. And his remarks at the time referred to actions in the Continental Congress requiring the states to draft new constitutions, not to the drafting of the Declaration, which he considered a merely ornamental afterthought.
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Jefferson, for his part, remained focused on events back in Virginia. Throughout the weeks of late May and early June he devoted the bulk of his energies to producing three different drafts of a new constitution for his home state. Clearly influenced by the John Adams pamphlet
Thoughts on Government,
Jefferson emphasized the separation of powers, an independent judiciary and a bicameral legislature, with a weak executive (called the Administrator in order to signify his lack of governing power). Every political paper that Jefferson had written up to this point in his life had been a protest statement against some aspect of British policy. Therefore it is interesting to note that his initial effort at a positive and practical vision of government recommended a constitutional structure that adopted the general form of the old colonial governments, the exception being the diminution of executive authority, clearly a lesson rooted in the colonial resistance to gubernatorial claims of royal prerogative.
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Anyone on the lookout for more avowedly progressive features in Jefferson’s thinking could have found them. Although he required a property qualification for all voters, he also proposed a land distribution policy that would provide fifty acres for each resident. He quietly inserted a radical provision for complete religious freedom. And he urged that the new constitution be ratified by a special convention called exclusively for that purpose rather than by the sitting legislature, a democratic idea that John Adams had also proposed as a way of implementing the principle of popular sovereignty. All in all, Jefferson’s prescriptions for the new Virginian republic were an impressive blend of traditional forms and selective reforms. They establish the historically correct, if unorthodox, context for answering the proverbial question: What was Jefferson thinking about on the eve of his authorship of the Declaration of Independence? The answer is indisputable. He was not thinking, as some historians have claimed, about John Locke’s theory of natural rights or Scottish commonsense philosophy. He was thinking about Virginia’s new constitution.
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An aspect of his thinking proved directly relevant for the task he was about to assume. In his preamble to the first and third drafts of the Virginia constitution, he composed a bill of indictment against George III. One could see glimmerings of these charges against the British monarch in
Summary View,
then even more explicit accusations in
Causes and Necessities.
But the lengthy condemnation of the king in his draft constitution extended the list of crimes against colonial rights. It was in effect his penultimate draft for the list of grievances that became the longest section of the Declaration of Independence.

One of the grievances stands out, in part because it dealt with what soon proved to be the most controversial issue during the debate in Congress over the wording of the Declaration, in part because of the difference between what Jefferson wrote for the Virginia constitution in May and what he wrote for the Declaration in June. This is the passage in the Declaration in which Jefferson blamed George III for instigating and perpetuating the slave trade, thereby implying that slavery was an evil institution imposed on the colonists by a corrupt monarch. In the earlier draft for the Virginia constitution, however, he charged George III with “prompting our negroes to rise in arms against us; those very negroes who by an inhuman use of his negative he hath refused us permission to exclude by law.” Here one can see Jefferson juggling two incompatible formulations: One is to blame the king for slavery; the other is to blame him for emancipating the slaves (i.e., Lord Dunmore’s proclamation). It was symptomatic of a deep disjunction in his thinking about slavery that he never reconciled.
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Another one of the proverbial questions—how or why was Jefferson selected to draft the Declaration?—is also answerable with a recovery of the immediate context. The short answer is that he was the obvious choice on the basis of his past work in the Congress as a draftsman. That was his specialty. The longer answer emerges clearly from the situation that existed in the Congress in June 1776.

Virginia had taken the lead by instructing its delegates on May 15 to propose total and complete American independence from Great Britain. On June 7 Richard Henry Lee moved the resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States. . . .” A debate then ensued over when the vote on Lee’s resolution should occur. The Congress decided to delay a vote until July 1, in deference to delegations that were still divided (i.e., Pennsylvania) and to delegations that lacked clear instructions from their state legislatures (i.e., New York). In the meantime a committee could be working on a document that implemented the Lee resolution. A Virginian presence on the committee was essential, and Jefferson was the most appropriate Virginian, both because of his reputation as a writer and because Lee, the other possible choice, was the author of the resolution before the Congress and presumably would lead the debate in its behalf.
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The committee convened shortly after it was appointed on June 11. (Besides Adams and Jefferson, it included Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman.) The rest of the committee delegated the drafting to Adams and Jefferson. At this point one can reasonably ask why Adams did not write it himself. This was a question Adams raised with himself countless times over the ensuing years, as the significance of the Declaration grew in the popular imagination and Jefferson’s authorship became his major ticket into the American pantheon. In his autobiography Adams recalled that he delegated the task to Jefferson for several reasons, among them his sense that his own prominence as a leader of the radical faction in Congress for the past two years would subject the draft to greater scrutiny and criticism. But such latter-day recollections only tend to obscure the more elemental fact that no one at the time regarded the drafting of the Declaration as a major responsibility or honor. Adams, like Lee, would be needed to lead the debate on the floor. That was considered the crucial arena. Jefferson was asked to draft the Declaration of Independence, then, in great part because the other eligible authors had more important things to do.
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Context is absolutely crucial. For all intents and purposes, the decision to declare independence had already been made. Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense,
published in January, had swept through the colonies like a firestorm, destroying any final vestige of loyalty to the British crown. In May the Congress had charged each colony to draft new state constitutions, an explicit act of political independence that Adams always regarded as the decisive move. Most important, the war itself had been raging for more than a year. The bulk of the Congress’s time in fact was occupied with wartime planning and military decisions, as the British fleet was sighted off the coasts of New York and South Carolina and an American expeditionary force to Canada met with humiliating defeat. (One more debacle or major military blunder, and the American war for independence might have been over before the delegates in Philadelphia got around to declaring it started.) Nothing about the scene permitted much confidence or the opportunity to be contemplative. It did not seem to be a propitious moment for literary craftsmanship.

But whether they knew it or not—and there was no earthly way they could have known—the members of the Continental Congress had placed the ideal instrument in the perfect position at precisely the right moment. Throughout the remainder of his long career Jefferson never again experienced a challenge better suited to call forth his best creative energies. The work had to be done alone, isolated from the public debates. It needed to possess an elevated quality that linked American independence to grand and great forces that transcended the immediate political crisis and swept the imagination upward toward a purer and more principled world. Finally, it needed to paint the scene in bright, contrasting colors of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, “ought” and “is” without any of the intermediate hues or lingering doubts. It is difficult to imagine anyone in America better equipped, by disposition and experience, to perform the task as well.

Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in a matter of a few days—Adams later remembered it took him only “a day or two”—and then showed the draft to Adams and Franklin, later recalling that “they were the two members of whose judgments and amendments I wished most to have the benefit.” They suggested a few minor revisions (i.e., replacing “sacred & undeniable truths” with “self-evident truths”); then the committee placed the document before the Continental Congress on June 28. After Lee’s resolution was debated and passed (July 1–2), the Congress took up the wording of the Declaration; it made several major changes and excised about one-quarter of the text. During the debate Jefferson sat silently and sullenly, regarding each proposed revision as another defacement. Franklin sat next to him and tried to soothe his obvious pain with the story of a sign painter commissioned by a hatter, who kept requesting more concise language for his sign until nothing was left on the sign but a picture of a hat. On July 4 the Congress approved its revised version and the Declaration of Independence was sent to the printer for publication. Jefferson later recalled that it was signed by the members of Congress on that day, but that is almost surely not correct. The parchment copy was signed by most members on August 2.
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Most of the debate in the Congress and most of the revisions of Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration focused on the long bill of indictment against George III, the section that modern readers care about least. When Jefferson much later insisted that he was not striving for “originality of principle or sentiment” but was seeking only to provide an “expression of the American mind,” he was probably referring to this section, which was intended to sum up the past twelve years of colonial opposition to British policy in language designed to make the king responsible for all the trouble. Jefferson had been practicing this list of grievances for more than two years, first in
Summary View,
then in
Causes and Necessities
and then in his drafts of the Virginia constitution. “I expected you had . . . exhausted the Subject of Complaint against Geo. 3d. and was at a loss to discover what the Congress would do for one to their Declaration of Independence without copying,” wrote Edmund Pendleton when he first saw the official version, “but find that you have acquitted yourselves very well on that score.”
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As an elegant, if decidedly one-sided, version of recent Anglo-American history, this section of the Declaration has certainly stood the test of time, providing students of the American Revolution with a concise summary of the constitutional crisis from the colonists’ perspective at the propitious moment. As a reflection of Jefferson’s thinking, however, it is missing three distinctive and distinctively Jeffersonian perspectives on the conflict. When Jefferson wrote back to friends in Virginia, complaining that critics in the Congress had, as one friend put it, “mangled . . . the Manuscript,” these were the three major revisions he most regretted.
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First, as we noticed earlier, the Congress deleted the long passage blaming George III for waging “cruel war against human nature itself” by establishing slavery in North America; Jefferson also accused the king of blocking colonial efforts to end the slave trade, then “exciting those very people to rise in arms against us . . . by murdering the people on whom he has also obtruded them.” Several complicated and even tortured ideas are struggling for supremacy here. One can surmise that the members of Congress decided to delete it out of sheer bewilderment, since the passage mixes together an implicit moral condemnation of slavery with an explicit condemnation of the British monarch for both starting it and trying to end it.

In his own notes on the debate in Congress Jefferson claimed that the opposition was wholly political. Several southern delegations, especially those of South Carolina and Georgia, opposed any restraint on the importation of slaves, he reported, adding that their “Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.” Jefferson’s clear implication is that he was trying to take a principled stand against both slavery and the slave trade but that a majority of delegates were unprepared to go along with him.
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