Jefferson and Hamilton (11 page)

The Declaration of Independence was widely disseminated as a print document, but many listened as it was read aloud. General Washington had it read to his troops, Abigail Adams heard it read from the balcony of the Massachusetts State House, a member of Pennsylvania’s Committee of Safety read it to a large throng gathered on the lawn of Independence Hall, and around the country on village commons and the steps of county courthouses, leather-lunged local officials read the document to raptly attentive audiences.
⁴⁶
Those who listened discovered a magical quality to Jefferson’s handiwork, for he was a penman with a genius for the cadence of the written word, a writer conversant with music who had a feel for what one scholar has called the “rhythmical pauses … comparable to musical bars.”
⁴⁷
Nor was that all. Historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg have demonstrated that the Declaration lent itself to being “read theatrically.” Listeners were made to feel the pain, disappointment, reproach, and anger that lay at the heart of Jefferson’s “seductive” creation.
⁴⁸

Jefferson may have written a document to give birth to the new nation, but first the war had to be won if the United States was to survive. With that in mind, Jefferson consciously produced a war document. This may have been one reason that he substituted “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for the more conventional trilogy of “life, liberty, and property.” By the summer of 1776 it was apparent that America faced a long struggle to secure independence, and it was equally evident that, in a protracted war, many propertyless Americans would be asked to bear arms. They, too, had to be given a reason for serving. Furthermore, most in Congress understood that victory in a prolonged war would likely hinge on foreign help. Jefferson announced American independence to a “candid world,” carefully adding that the new American nation possessed “the full power to … contract alliances, establish commerce, & do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.”

Jefferson submitted the document to Congress on Friday, June 28. On Monday, Congress took up the question of independence. John Adams anticipated the “greatest debate of all,” and he was not disappointed.
⁴⁹
John Dickinson was on his feet first to speak against independence, and despite the oppressive heat in Congress’s closed chamber on a ninety-degree afternoon, his address lasted for nearly two hours. He warned that if the war was lost, the colonists would face the fury of British retribution. To prevent losing the war, he added, the colonists would need French help. But independence procured in that fashion would be a sham, for the autocratic, Roman Catholic French would become America’s new masters following the victory. In all likelihood, he continued, the war could not be won even with French assistance. In fact, it was likely that no one could win the war. In that event, Europe’s superpowers might break the stalemate by imposing peace, and by partitioning America among themselves. Dickinson wanted to continue waging war for reconciliation—not independence—and promised Congress that in a year or two Great Britain would have to make the concessions that the First Congress had sought. Americans would be left secure and prosperous, and free, within the Britain Empire. He closed by remarking that the “Book of Fate” portended a “dreadful” future for an independent America.
⁵⁰

John Adams was the first to respond to Dickinson. At some point in Adams’s lengthy rejoinder, distant thunder could be heard. It came steadily closer, resounding through every nook and cranny of the State House, and soon boomed as if field artillery was being fired in the nearby street. The fleecy white clouds of morning had long since darkened, then turned a deep black. In the midst of Adams’s address, the sky opened. Large drops splattered on the tall windows in Congress’s chamber, and in only a moment a lashing rain slanted against the glass. The room darkened. The temperature plummeted. Candles were lit. Through it all, Adams continued to speak, arguing that the war could not be won—could not even be carried on much longer—without foreign assistance, and that no European nation would aid America so long as its objective was reconciliation within the mother country. Independence must be declared.
⁵¹

It was late afternoon when Adams sat down. But other speakers followed. It appeared that every congressman wanted to say something. Each recognized that this was a historic day, and each wanted to be a part of history, to possibly say something that would be remembered by posterity. None succeeded in saying anything memorable. In fact, only Dickinson’s speech—and merely the notes for his talk—has survived from that long day of speech making. It is not known whether Jefferson spoke, though it is probable that
he did. The speeches continued until night gathered over Philadelphia. At that point, the delegates, who had not eaten since breakfast, adjourned.

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