Madison and Jefferson (8 page)

For Jefferson the legal philosopher, British Americans had created for themselves a parallel country to their distant motherland. England’s offspring were, in effect, a new race of people—a new lineage, a new bloodline—possessing a real but somewhat thinned blood connection to their transatlantic kinsmen. In reasoning thus, Jefferson transformed the entire continent into a frontier nation formed by a righteous, independent, conquering
people—more than a century before the historian Frederick Jackson Turner espoused his famous “frontier thesis,” associating Americans’ distinctiveness in the world with their desire to conquer frontier.

Jefferson was not the only Virginian to glamorize the frontier for purposes of political argument. His ode to “adventurers” was matched by Madison’s evocation of the rifleman, an American original who left his permanent imprint on the land. Writing to his friend Bradford in July 1775, Madison sang the praises of the Virginia sharpshooter, reasoning that the “strength of this Colony will lie chiefly in the rifle-men of the Upland Counties, of whom we shall have great numbers.” Who were these heroes? “Brave hearty men,” said Madison, men who had rallied against Dunmore and would continue to make their mark on the land. They were known for their rustic appearance, wearing hunting shirts and carrying a tomahawk or scalping knife in their belts. They could repeatedly hit a handheld target at 250 yards. These men were hardly figments of Madison’s imagination: he had seen them up close while he drilled with the Orange County militia, honing his own shooting skills.
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We have already seen the name of one such frontiersman, the Maryland militia officer Michael Cresap, blamed for the deaths of Indian women and children; his reputed acts had led to the heartrending speech of the Mingo Logan. Incredibly, the same Michael Cresap was heralded in 1775 as a symbol of the rifleman’s virtues. Numerous newspapers recounted his exploits. This transformation from murderer to war hero occurred for reasons of patriotism: as news of the battles of Lexington and Concord reached the Ohio frontier, Cresap had organized his own company of riflemen. They attracted attention as they marched all the way to Massachusetts to join the Continental Army, staging shooting exhibitions, even war dances, en route. One paper reported that the riflemen were stripped “naked to the waist and painted like savages.” The traveling rifleman-adventurer was an early version of the “Wild West show.”
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At a time when the British ministry was prepared to use slaves and frontier Indians to carry out acts of violence, Cresap’s raw display of masculinity set the new American militiaman apart. Was he the answer to British arrogance? That was the idea. The proud rifleman who appealed to his fellow colonists’ pride could be made to symbolize the idea of liberty.

The frontier fighter had great resonance because Americans were otherwise being disparaged. Lord North had announced in Parliament that the mere presence of British redcoats would at once reduce the “cowardly sons of America” to an “unreserved submission.” A Pennsylvania paper reported
that the colonists had been described in England as “rank dunghill cowards.” He would never fire a shot in anger, yet Thomas Jefferson wrote to his Albemarle friend George Gilmer: “As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men.”
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Though they had yet to meet, Madison and Jefferson shared a high opinion of the heroic, arms-bearing Virginian. Around the time of independence, Jefferson was moved to incorporate such a figure into the design of Virginia’s state seal. On one side of the escutcheon, or heraldic shield, is the erect figure of a “Virginia rifle man of the present times completely accoutred”; on the other side of the shield stands a seventeenth-century adventurer, dressed in the Elizabethan style. Pierre Eugène Du Simitière, a Swiss illustrator living in Philadelphia, was engaged to produce the design. The penciled description is in Du Simitière’s hand, but it reads as if Jefferson had written it.

More than the Declaration of Independence was under consideration in Congress on July 4, 1776. That day Jefferson was appointed to another committee, teamed again with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. They were to devise a Great Seal for the new republic. It was probably Jefferson, thinking of his native state, who recommended the frontiersman for the national device, this time describing him as “an American soldier completely accoutred in his hunting shirt and trousers, with his tomahawk, powder horn, pouch, &c.” Once again Du Simitière was to be responsible for the design.

When Congress finally adopted the Great Seal of the United States ten years later, the American bald eagle was substituted for the soldier. The only part of the seal Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson conceived that remained in 1786 was the unifying motto in Latin:
E Pluribus Unum
or “Out of many, one.” By then the nation was at peace, and the winged predator understood to symbolize a burgeoning empire.
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Lord Dunmore was strenuously urging an invasion of Virginia in the spring of 1776, but his superiors were bent on a middle colonies strategy, eyeing New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. This did not alter to any great degree the Virginians’ campaign of readiness. The state’s Committee of Safety removed Patrick Henry, who had no military training or experience, from his role as commander in chief, while allowing him to retain the
rank of colonel. Hearing of his demotion, Henry did not think twice before resigning. He blamed Pendleton and never forgot the slight.

Down but not out, the radical retained his base of support. He had inspired younger members of the Virginia gentry with his stirring speeches, and he appealed to the rank and file as well. After the insult to their favorite, many of these raw recruits suddenly questioned whether they should continue in the militia. Even if Henry’s military credentials were questionable, the crisis in morale was real. Revolutionary Virginia needed him.
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None of this deterred Pendleton, who had a good sense of timing as well as judgment. When the Virginia Convention met for the third time, in May 1776, he capitalized on the prevailing mood and introduced a dramatic resolution calling for the Continental Congress to declare national independence. The vote in Williamsburg was unanimous, and though it was not an official statement of Virginia’s independence, it was just that—unambiguous—a de facto denunciation of any political dependency. Britain’s flag was pulled down from the top of the capitol, and the flag of Washington’s fledgling army rose in its place.
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At Pendleton’s direction, committees formed for the purpose of establishing a new Virginia government. Madison was assigned to the most significant one, where he was teamed with the state’s ablest and most outspoken: the brilliant, testy, and intensely private George Mason; the crusading, charismatic Patrick Henry; and a promising twenty-one-year-old, Edmund Randolph, the amiable son of the colony’s most prominent attorney, a Loyalist who had abandoned Virginia for England. Edmund was, no less significantly, nephew of the late Peyton Randolph, the only Virginian of Pendleton’s generation whose stature can be said to have exceeded his. In the decades to follow, Randolph would be virtually everywhere Madison and Jefferson were, always holding key posts in the heat of political battle alongside his better-remembered Virginia associates.

Complications have to be expected in the midst of a revolution. The gouty George Mason, a legal scholar who was never actually licensed to practice, lost his wife of twenty-three years in 1773 and was so devastated that he expected to depart public life. George Washington, his longtime Potomac neighbor, was among those routinely urging him to reconsider. The irrepressible Henry needed no such prodding. Edmund Randolph, full of impatient energy and eager to contribute to the cause, was intent on proving how far he stood from his father’s Tory principles. He had already done a brief stint in the Continental Army by the spring of 1776, functioning
as an aide at Washington’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, headquarters. To obtain that posting, he secured letters of recommendation from both Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. Madison and Randolph had much in common: as sons of the Virginia elite, they were expected to come forward and lead—in government, if not in the army.

All Williamsburg was astir on May 24, 1776, as the leading figures gathered. Pendleton wrote to Jefferson, in Philadelphia, about what was going on. “The Political Cooks are busy in preparing the dish,” he said, “and as Colo. Mason seems to have the Ascendancy in the great work, I have Sanguine hopes it will be framed to answer its end, Prosperity to the Community and Security to Individuals.” While Pendleton made no mention of the young delegate from Orange, James Madison, Jr., had already become a witness to history.
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The greatest weight rested on Pendleton’s shoulders, but Mason had his hands full and so did Madison. They were all “political cooks” at this moment, and the dish was the Virginia Declaration of Rights. With its exalted language, this impressive document became a guide for future declarations. Jefferson likely had a copy in his hands as he was laboring over his own better-remembered declaration. The tone—the very wording—is unmistakable:

A protracted debate broke out. The Tidewater planter Robert Carter Nicholas protested its all-inclusive language: that “all Men are born equally free and independant” could reasonably be interpreted as justification for the emancipation of Virginia’s slaves. Pendleton came up with compromise language, adding after “certain inherent natural Rights” the phrase “of which,
when they enter into a state of society
, they cannot, by any Compact deprive or divest their Posterity” (italics added). Those few words quieted
Nicholas and any others who needed to convince themselves that slaves, as property, had not entered into any compact or joined civil society. The original version was prepared on May 24, and the amended version presented and accepted on June 12.
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As the Virginia Declaration proceeds, it addresses qualities of life that are contained in the eighteenth-century meaning of “pursuit of happiness” and that include “Justice, Moderation, Temperance, Frugality,” and freedom of the press. Madison was perfectly happy with this language, but he wished it openly advocated the free exercise of religion.

Here, the young legislator made his first decisive attempt to recast republican society. Dissatisfied with the old, unadventurous language of religious
toleration
, Madison wanted something much stronger: “the full and free exercise of [religion], according to the dictates of conscience,” which no force could tamper with; religion could not be the basis for social privileges of any kind. Here was the influence of Princeton’s John Witherspoon on the rights of conscience.

Toleration was not the same as complete freedom. Toleration meant that the state had the power to grant or limit freedom of conscience. Pendleton and the majority did not wish the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, which Madison’s language would have implied; so the young reformer twice redrafted his amendment in order to forge a compromise, and
toleration
was replaced with “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.” It would take a whole decade for Madison and Jefferson, combined, to chip away at the establishment. Madison’s substitution in the Virginia Declaration of Rights was small but significant, a harbinger of things to come.
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In Congress, on July 1, Jefferson wrote to Will Fleming, who like John Page had been an intimate since their college days: “My country,” by which he meant Virginia, “will have my political creed in the form of a ‘Declaration &c’ which I was lately directed to draw.” He could not predict that a single paper in his handwriting would attain an iconic quality, and these few words are the only indication of the pride he felt at this historic moment.
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Jefferson was, by all accounts, itching to return to his “country,” where he knew important work needed to be done, work he expected to influence.
More than he wanted to occupy a seat in Congress, he wanted to claim principal authorship of the state constitution. Pendleton understood this and commiserated. Instead, Jefferson’s colleague Richard Henry Lee returned to Virginia first—called home, it was said, because his wife was ill. The real reason may have been the same as Jefferson’s: a desire to influence Virginia politics.

Lee had been as provocative in Philadelphia as Henry had been in their home state, proposing, well before any shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, that Congress organize and arm militias. On June 7, 1776, before leaving town, Lee (not Jefferson) introduced the fateful resolution calling for America’s national independence. It was owing to his absence (and, some have said, his contentiousness) that Jefferson was given the task of putting on paper the collective reasoning of Congress.
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Jefferson thoughtfully composed several drafts of the Declaration in mid-June, which he then passed to Benjamin Franklin and John Adams for review. On one of those days, he learned that Virginia had decided on the new slate of delegates to Congress. His own term would expire in a month, and two of his colleagues were being called home. Although Jefferson had been reelected to Congress, his name was near the bottom of the list of successful candidates. Thinking his popularity in Virginia was waning, he wrote to Will Fleming: “It is a painful situation to be 300. miles from one’s country, and thereby open to secret assassination without a possibility of self-defence.” As he learned of the vote count in Virginia, Jefferson felt he had to tell Fleming what his role was in declaring national independence. It was as if to say,
Don’t my fellow Virginians know how productive I’m being up here?