Madison and Jefferson (118 page)

38.
Virginia Gazette
, November 22, 1775, and April 13, 1776; Christopher Brown, “Empire Without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of Revolution,”
William and Mary Quarterly
56 (April 1999): 285–86.

39.
Journal entry of July 13, 1776, Robert Carter Papers, 1772–1793, Box 1, Folder 2, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.; Andrew Levy,
The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, The Founder Who Freed His Slaves
(New York, 2006). Yet when a British privateer landed a short distance from his plantation, thirty-two blacks were there to commit themselves to the British—much to Carter’s surprise. See Egerton,
Death or Liberty
, 71.

40.
See esp. Winthrop D. Jordan,
White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 276ff., quote at 279.

41.
Jack McLaughlin,
Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder
(New York, 1988), chaps. 1–3; Lucia Stanton,
Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello
(Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 17–18; Andrew Burstein,
The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist
(Charlottesville, Va., 1995), 12–23; John Wayles to TJ, October 20, 1772,
PTJ
, 1:95–96; “Deed from Jane Randolph Jefferson for the Conveyance of Slaves,” undated,
PTJ
, 27:675–76; Herbert E. Sloan,
Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt
(New York, 1995), 14–18. Sloan shows that had Wayles’s heirs kept his lands intact, their exposure to Wayles’s British creditors would have been minimal; in receiving his portion of the Wayles property, Jefferson attached his own lands to the liability he bore in meeting his late father-in-law’s debts. The Revolution did not change
this, and Jefferson spent the remainder of his life trying unsuccessfully to meet his obligations.

42.
Malone, 1:30–32; Brant, 1:66, 407; Kenneth Bailey, “George Mason, Westerner,”
William and Mary Quarterly
23 (October 1943): 409–17; Shaw Livermore,
Early American Land Companies: Their Influence on Corporate Development
(New York, 1939); Kenneth P. Bailey,
The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Westward Movement, 1748–1792
(Glendale, Calif., 1939); Thomas Perkins Abernethy,
Western Lands and the American Revolution
(New York, 1959); Harriette Simpson Arnow,
Seedtime on the Cumberland
(New York, 1960), 183, 228; Peter S. Onuf,
The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787
(Philadelphia, 1983), 75–82; Anthony F. C. Wallace,
Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans
(Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 28–37; Holton,
Forced Founders
, 9–12, 32–33; TJ to JM, November 11, 1784,
RL
, 2:350.

James Madison, Sr., had extensive dealings with land investors. One of his closest friends was Joseph Chew (ca. 1725–98), who moved out of Orange County and engaged in commercial dealings in various colonial cities. In 1750 Chew revealed to him that he wished to become a manager of the Ohio Company, the land venture begun in 1749 and backed by George Washington. The elder Madison also had dealings with William Lee, younger brother of Richard Henry Lee, who acted as one of the principal agents of the Mississippi Company; see JM to James Madison, Sr., October 9, 1771, and January 23, 1778, in
PJM
, 1:68–69, 222–23; and Joseph Chew to James Madison, Sr., September 6, 1749, and May 21, 1750, in Madison Family Papers, Library of Congress; Washington to Joseph Chew, September 25, 1774, in
Letters of Delegates to Congress
, 1:102. The Virginia gentry had to effect a balance between their own financial interests and the financial and the social aspirations of increasingly disgruntled tenant farmers. See Thomas J. Humphrey, “Conflicting Independence: Tenant Farmers and the American Revolution,”
Journal of the Early Republic
28 (Summer 2008): 159–82.

43.
Randolph C. Downes, “Dunmore’s War: An Interpretation,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
21 (December 1934): 311–12, 321–23, 326–27; Holton,
Forced Founders
, 33–34; Richard White,
The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lake Region, 1650–1815
(Cambridge, U.K., 1991); and Michael N. McConnell,
A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774
(Lincoln, Neb., 1992), 269–81.

44.
Wallace,
Jefferson and the Indians
, 1–5; John Bakeless,
Background to Glory: The Life of George Rogers Clark
(Lincoln, Neb., 1957), 25–28;
JMB
, 1:385–86.

45.
TJ to Frances Eppes, June 26, 1775; “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” June 26–July 6, 1775; TJ to John Page, August 5 and August 20, 1776, all in
PTJ
, 1:175, 217, 317, 485–86, 500.

46.
PTJ
, 1:123. Aptly, Jefferson’s notion followed the logic of the embattled Shawnees of 1770, who justified their retention of the land according to the “Antient Right of Conquest.” See Downes, “Dunmore’s War,” 316. To be clear, Jefferson’s “adventurers” were direct ancestors of the landed elite of his own time. He was not celebrating the yeomanry of Virginia so much as he was defending the rights of the Madisons, Pendletons, and like-minded others.

47.
A Summary View of the Rights of British America
, in
PTJ
, 1:121–23, 133; Peter S. Onuf,
Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood
(Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 21–23.

48.
JM to Bradford, June 19, 1775,
PJM
, 1:153; also see Rhys Isaac, “Dramatizing the Ideology of the Revolution: Popular Mobilization in Virginia, 1774 to 1776,”
William and Mary Quarterly
33 (July 1976): 380–82.

49.
Robert G. Parkinson, “From Indian Killer to Worthy Citizen: The Revolutionary Transformation of Michael Cresap,”
William and Mary Quarterly
63 (January 2006): 97–122; Robert McGinn and Larry Vaden, “Michael Cresap and the Cresap Rifles,”
West Virginia History
39 (1978): 341–47; also “Virginia Marksmanship: From Purdie’s
Virginia Gazette
, November 17, 1775,” in
William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine
20 (October 1911): 144–45.

50.
Jefferson’s published resolution on Lord North’s proposal, July 25, 1775, is in
PTJ
, 1:233; TJ to Gilmer, July 5, 1775; and see a similar repudiation of Americans’ alleged cowardice in TJ to John Randolph, August 25, 1775, ibid., 186, 241; for British statements, see “From London Evening Post. On Civil War in America,”
Pennsylvania Ledger
, November 18, 1775.

51.
Burstein,
Inner Jefferson
, 186; Burstein,
Sentimental Democracy
, 132–34;
PTJ
, 1:495–97, 510–11.

52.
Selby,
Revolution in Virginia
, 88–89; Mays,
Edmund Pendleton
, 1:241–42, 2:5–7; McDonnell,
Politics of War
, 181–83.

53.
Selby,
Revolution in Virginia
, 95–97;
Virginia Gazette
, May 17, 1776.

54.
Robert A. Rutland,
George Mason: Reluctant Statesman
(Baton Rouge, La., 1961), 23, 26–27, 38–40; Moncure Daniel Conway,
Omitted Chapters of History Disclosed in the Life and Papers of Edmund Randolph
(New York, 1888), 20–26; Pendleton to TJ, May 24, 1776,
PTJ
, 1:296.

55.
The Papers of George Mason
, ed. Robert A. Rutland (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970), 1:276–77; Brant, 1:238–41; Pauline Maier,
American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence
(New York, 1997), 126–27.

56.
Virginia Gazette
, June 1 and June 12, 1776; Selby,
Revolution in Virginia
, 106–8. The same argument would be made in the historic
Dred Scott
decision of 1857.

57.
Brant, 1:241–48; Ketcham, 72–73; Richard R. Beeman,
Patrick Henry: A Biography
(New York, 1974), 103; Daniel L. Dreisbach, “Church-State Debate in Virginia: From the Declaration of Rights to the Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom,” in Sheldon and Dreisbach, eds.,
Religion and Political Culture in Jefferson’s Virginia
, 135–41. Edmund Randolph in later years remembered Henry as the committee member who introduced the language on toleration; most scholars, however, believe Randolph’s memory flawed in this regard.

58.
TJ to Fleming, July 1, 1776,
PTJ
, 1:412–13.

59.
J. Kent McGaughy,
Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: A Portrait of an American Revolutionary
(Lanham, Md., 2004), chap. 5; for hints of Lee’s contentiousness, or divisiveness, which may or may not be exaggerated, see Randall,
Life of Thomas Jefferson
, 1:148–56.

60.
Fleming to TJ, June 22, 1776; TJ to Fleming, July 1, 1776; to Lee, July 23, 1776; to Page, July 30, 1776,
PTJ
, 1:406, 412–13, 477, 482–83; Malone, 1:240–41.

61.
On the larger similarities between Jefferson’s and Mason’s work, and their common sources, see Ronald Hatzenbuehler, “
I Tremble for My Country”: Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Gentry
(Gainesville, Fla., 2006), 39–43, 54–57.

62.
The several versions of the Declaration of Independence, notably Jefferson’s original draft and that adopted by Congress, are in
PTJ
, 1:315–19, 413–33.

63.
Quote from Katherine Sobba Green,
The Courtship Novel, 1740–1820: A Feminized Genre
(Lexington, Ky., 1991), 66.

64.
Sharon Block,
Rape and Sexual Power in Early America
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 230–31; Quentin Outram, “The Demographic Impact of Early Modern Warfare,”
Social Science History
26 (Summer 2002): 245–72, indicating that the English fear of mercenaries can be traced back to the Thirty Years War in Germany, 1618–48; Frank Whitson Fetter, “Who Were the Foreign Mercenaries of the Declaration of Independence?”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
104 (1980): 508–13; on the connection between rape and war, see also Nancy Isenberg, “Death and Satire: Dismembering the Body Politic,” in Isenberg and Burstein, eds.,
Mortal Remains: Death in Early America
(Philadelphia, 2003), 77–78. Joseph Warren’s momentous oration on the occasion of the second anniversary of the Boston Massacre, in 1772, evoked the same imagery, justifying “alarmed imaginations” over the prospect of “our children subject to the barbarous caprice of the raging soldiery,—our beauteous virgins exposed to all the insolence of unbridled passion,—our virtuous wives, endeared to us by every tender tie, falling a sacrifice to worse than brutal violence.” See Burstein,
Sentimental Democracy
, 68–69.

65.
John Dunn,
The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of “The Two Treatises of Government
” (Cambridge, U.K., 1969); Carole Pateman,
The Sexual Contract
(Stanford, Calif., 1988), 93; on Jewish divorce law, see Matthew Biberman, “Milton, Marriage, and a Woman’s Right to Divorce,”
Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900
39 (Winter 1999): 131–53. Carl L. Becker has written of America’s relationship to the king as a “thin gold thread of voluntary allegiance to a personal sovereign.” See Becker,
The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas
(New York, 1922), 130–34.

66.
Frank L. Dewey, “Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Divorce,”
William and Mary Quarterly
39 (January 1982): 216–17. Jefferson also recognized the voluntary nature of marriage when he wrote: “where both parties consent,” the covenant “must be dissoluble from the nature of things. On the primacy of Jefferson’s “tranquil permanent felicity,” see Andrew Burstein,
Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello
(New York, 2005).

67.
Dewey, “Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Divorce,” 218–19.

68.
For an account of the king’s speech, given in Parliament on October 28, 1775, but not reprinted in American newspapers until several months later, see the
Pennsylvania Packet
, January 13, 1776. The speech continued to be debated in the newspapers; see “Letter to Mr. Purdie,”
Virginia Gazette
, March 8, 1776. See also Rakove,
Beginnings of National Politics
, 80–81, 92, 95.

69.
Virginia Gazette
, February 23 and March 8, 1776; “Some
QUERIES
offered to the
FREEHOLDERS
and
PEOPLE
of
VIRGINIA
at large,”
Virginia Gazette
, April 19, 1776; Thomas Paine,
Common Sense
(Garden City, N.Y., 1973), 33. It is striking, too, that in one of Virginia’s petitions, the king was accused of assigning the colonies the woman’s role by “restraining her trade within the most narrow bounds,” draining her, through internal taxes, “of the little circulating cash she had,” all so that she would be bound “within her
little sphere …, contented with homespun.” Reconciliation might preserve an unequal union, but it would also make the colonists cowardly and effeminate dependents.

70.
On masculine English traits and manly public spirit, see Paul Langford,
Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850
(Oxford, U.K., 2000), 69, 96; and Lawrence E. Klein,
Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England
(Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 184–85; also “An American,”
Virginia Gazette
, January 1, 1776.

71.
“Some
QUERIES
offered to the
FREEHOLDERS …
,”
Virginia Gazette
, April 19, 1776; “Reasons for a Declaration of Independence of the
American
Colonies,”
Pennsylvania Packet
, as reprinted in
Virginia Gazette
, March 25, 1776; on Jefferson’s strategies in the Declaration for granting Congress its legitimacy as the king’s replacement, see Peter S. Onuf, “Thomas Jefferson, Federalist,” in
The Mind of Thomas Jefferson
(Charlottesville, Va., 2007), 89–90.