Jefferson and Hamilton (19 page)

Soon thereafter Jefferson signaled a willingness to serve as Virginia’s governor. It was not solely the exhortations of others that induced him to abandon Monticello. Jefferson understood the dangers brought on by Britain’s war in the South, and he knew that if the redcoats succeeded in the Lower South, they would one day come after Virginia. Besides, he believed—as Lee had put it to him—that if “we can baffle the Southern invasion,” the “game will be presently up with our enemies.”
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Jefferson appreciated that this was a dangerous time to be Virginia’s governor, but it was an opportune moment as well for an ambitious and idealistic individual. If the American victory was finally won on his watch, there would be laurels to be worn. What is more, a bloc in the assembly that favored domestic reform was supportive of Jefferson’s candidacy. Much might be achieved if he led the state government.
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To be sure, Jefferson found the prospect of serving as governor to be unsettling. He worried about his abilities to handle the responsibilities of the office, especially as he had never served in an executive capacity. For that matter, Jefferson, who a year earlier had been overwhelmingly defeated in a contest to become Speaker of the House.
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Yet, while acknowledging that a “private retirement” at Monticello was “almost irresistible,” Jefferson said it “would be wrong to decline” to serve as governor.
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On June 1, 1779, Virginia’s legislature elected Jefferson as governor, choosing him on the second ballot over two other candidates, both close acquaintances. One was John Page, perhaps his oldest, dearest friend. The other was Thomas Nelson of Yorktown, who had served in Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence, and in 1779 was the ranking officer in the state’s militia.

The governor of Virginia, like most chief executives during the Revolutionary era, had little power. He existed mostly to administer legislative enactments, which he could not veto. When the governor did have to make a decision, he had to do so in collaboration with the eight-member Council of State. However, the governor could request emergency authority, and Jefferson’s predecessor, Patrick Henry, had done just that when the British invaded
nearby Pennsylvania in 1777. Jefferson, who believed in small, unobtrusive governments, had criticized the assembly for acceding to Henry’s wishes, and throughout his two years in office he steadfastly refused to request additional powers. Jefferson did have one power that he was free to use: taking up his remarkable pen. Yet, while he had previously wielded it to shape the thinking of his countrymen,—most spectacularly in the Declaration of Independence—as governor, Jefferson surprisingly never sought to rally or mold public opinion with a stirring executive address.

Jefferson was unhappy as governor. Within a month of taking office he was wistfully looking toward the day when his one-year term would end. It was bad enough holding an office that he did not relish, but Jefferson also knew when he became governor that morale was waning. As his old friend Fleming told him, the “bulk of the people … seem[ed] to have lost sight of the great object for which we had recourse to arms.”
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The war was four years old. The hope of imminent victory following the French alliance had faded. America had not won a significant victory in two years. Washington’s army had not fought a major engagement since Monmouth, and it had not campaigned in the real sense of the term in two years.

Whatever Jefferson felt, he took his obligations seriously. In twenty-four months on the job, he returned home only twice from Williamsburg and then Richmond—which became Virginia’s capital in the course of his tenure—and both visits were quite short. He coped with tons of paperwork, conferred regularly with legislators, and met almost daily with the Council of State. Almost every item of business with which he dealt was war-related. In fact, Jefferson took office in the midst of the greatest wartime crisis that Virginia had faced since the first winter of the war, when the last royal governor, aided by loyalists and runaway slaves, had waged a brief campaign against the rebels.

Three weeks before Jefferson’s election, a British raiding force of more than 35 vessels and 1,800 men under Sir George Collier struck near Portsmouth. Meeting with only minimal resistance, the British sailed up the Elizabeth River to Gosport, home to one of the state’s largest shipyards. Collier’s men captured or destroyed at least 130 vessels and six million pounds of tobacco; laid waste to warehouses and naval supplies, including tons of seasoned wood for shipbuilding; seized large quantities of the militia’s supplies; liberated up to 1,500 slaves; and plundered numerous plantations, allegedly stripping rings and jewelry from frightened women. Reeling from the magnitude of the destruction, Jefferson embarked on his new job by boldly telling the authorities in Philadelphia that Congress had forsaken Virginia. Despite the existence of a Continental navy, it had never helped the state, which had suffered from a crippling blockade imposed by only a handful of British vessels.
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The British did not return to Virginia for seventeen months, though Jefferson had a scare just before Christmas of 1779. Washington notified him that a huge British armada thought to contain upwards of eight thousand redcoats had sailed south from Manhattan. “Their destination [is]
reported
to be for Chesapaek bay,” the commander warned. Cautioning that the enemy might invade Virginia, Washington exhorted Jefferson to “take any precautions which may appear to you necessary.”
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Washington’s warning was a false alarm. The British fleet was sailing instead for South Carolina. Virginia was fortunate. Jefferson had rushed supplies to the counties on the Chesapeake, and along the York and James Rivers that led to Williamsburg, but he had not mustered the militia. He had the authority to act but shrank from mobilization, knowing it would be costly and give “disgust” should the enemy never arrive. Besides, Jefferson gambled on a hunch: “I cannot say that I expect them,” he remarked. On this occasion, he was correct.
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After Collier’s damaging raid, Jefferson asked the state Board of War to prepare a plan of defense. In the months that followed, much of his time was consumed with establishing armories, finding weapons and powder, erecting coastal batteries, and building a network of sentinels and express riders in the hope that the state would never again be caught unaware and defenseless.
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In addition, Virginia was to provide eleven of eighty battalions for the Continental army, about the same number as required of the two other largest states, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Jefferson worked tirelessly to find recruits. Virginia fell back on its age-old inducements of cash and land bounties for enlistees, and Jefferson threw his weight behind a tax increase that fell heaviest on the wealthiest. Eventually, Virginia resorted to conscription and finally, in desperation, to the proffer of a healthy male slave between the ages of ten and thirty for each man who volunteered. Still, about one-third fewer men were raised under Jefferson than by Patrick Henry. Few blamed Jefferson. Most, including Henry, attributed it to war weariness and the abundant sacrifices already made by the citizenry.
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Jefferson also devoted considerable time to Virginia’s war in the west. A year before he became governor, the state had sent an army of 350 men under George Rogers Clark into what now is Indiana and Illinois. As the British were arming tribes in that region, Clark had been tasked with forcing the Indians to make peace. Not coincidentally, if Clark succeeded, Virginia’s claim to the region—which originated in the colony’s charter, granted by the Crown early in the seventeenth century—would be solidified.

By the time Jefferson took office, Clark had scored sensational victories in the Illinois country. He had captured Henry Hamilton, Britain’s lieutenant
governor of Detroit, thought to be the mastermind behind organizing and arming the Indians, and thousands of bushels of corn had been destroyed, a step Jefferson characterized as Clark’s “happiest stroke.” Believing that Clark had pacified the frontier at least temporarily, Jefferson urged a thrust against Fort Detroit, the heart of British power in the Northwest.
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Despite Virginia’s financial problems, and the possible risk the state might face from the dispersal of its limited soldiery, Jefferson acted with a bold assertiveness that he seldom displayed in dealing with threats in the east. Several factors drove him. Possession of the west in the postwar period was crucial to his dream of cheap land and widespread property ownership, which he in turn believed was crucial for the success of republicanism. Furthermore, taking Detroit before the spring would free up to eight hundred militiamen from the western counties alone, men whose service would be useful if the British ever again raided coastal Virginia. A native of a frontier county himself, Jefferson also sympathized with those in western Virginia who faced the spread of “destruction and dismay.” The Indians, he said, were given to “savage irruptions” characterized by “cruel murders and devastations” visited on innocent civilians. In the end, the campaign against Detroit never materialized, in large measure because of opposition by the western militia, which had no appetite for campaigning so far from home. Jefferson let it pass. Just as he had been reluctant to hazard the displeasure of militiamen in the scare raised by the sailing of the British armada, he had no wish to provoke their anger over a crusade against faraway Detroit.
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Jefferson had acted responsibly, and with great vigor, in coping with the threats faced by Virginia. But the danger did not diminish. As the winter of 1780 faded, the British invasion of South Carolina began. From this point forward, the peril that Virginia faced grew greater, and the problems facing Governor Jefferson grew exponentially.

At first, few understood the significance of Britain’s southern strategy when it was unfurled in 1778. Even Washington initially shrugged off the enemy’s success in taking Savannah. He thought Britain’s campaign in the South was no more than a sideshow, one that would have little bearing on the war. Six months later, around the time that Jefferson became governor, Washington at last comprehended that London planned the reconquest of Georgia and South Carolina, with more to follow. But so long as a British army occupied New York City, he refused to deploy any of his army to the Lower South. However, Congress acted. It ordered Continentals from the Upper South to augment the army of General Benjamin Lincoln, commander of American forces in the Southern Department. Moreover, once the British flotilla sailed from New York in December 1779—and Washington learned its destination
was South Carolina, not the Chesapeake Bay—he exhorted Jefferson to send all the help he could spare to Lincoln. There “never was greater occasion for the states to exert themselves,” Washington declared.
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Jefferson was in a bind. As Virginia had already been the target of one devastating naval raid, he could not ignore the possibility of another attack at any moment. Certain that he would receive little help from Congress, Jefferson believed that some men, and some supplies, had to be kept in Virginia for its defense. The legislature authorized the dispatch of upwards of 2,000 men to South Carolina, but Jefferson never considered giving up that many troops. Ultimately, he ordered some 400 men and some supplies to Charleston.
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Logistical problems slowed the operation, perhaps fortunately. About the time the Virginians marched into South Carolina, the British imposed an ironclad siege on Charleston. Lincoln’s army was trapped and no further reinforcements could enter the city. In May 1780 Charleston fell. The United States lost 5,500 killed and captured, but the men that Jefferson had sent south were not among them.

The news of the disaster at Charleston hit Jefferson with the impact of a body blow. With no Continentals remaining in the Lower South, at least for the time being, he feared the British army might waste no time before marching northward into Virginia. Nor was that his only concern. Shortly before learning of the debacle at Charleston, Jefferson received word from a friend in Paris that France would likely drop out of the war unless the allies soon scored a decisive victory.
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Never had America’s fortunes, or those of Virginia, looked so bleak. Given the magnitude of the crisis, Jefferson unhappily agreed to stand for a second term. The legislature reelected him in June 1780.

Jefferson worked furiously throughout that summer of 1780. Without exaggeration, he remarked that the “duties of the office I hold [are] so excessive.”
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He prepared for the defense of Virginia, but he did even more for the new Continental army in the Southern Department that was taking shape in North Carolina under the command of General Horatio Gates. Jefferson knew that if Gates stopped the British advance, Virginia might be spared further fighting. In a flurry of activity, Jefferson oversaw the outfitting of state infantry and cavalry units that were headed southward, renewed his recruiting efforts, sought “military furniture” for some “utterly unfurnished” regular battalions, and organized “a line of expresses” from Richmond to as near Charleston as possible. He calculated that his “speedy line of communication” would give him ample warning should the British army in South Carolina, now under the command of General Charles Cornwallis, plan an invasion of Virginia. In addition, he rounded up axes, tomahawks, wagons, horses, powder, flints, and cannonballs for Gates’s army, and sent him two thousand
Virginia militiamen. Jefferson acknowledged that “we have not Arms” for Virginia’s militia, but he advised Gates that Congress was sending three thousand muskets.
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