Patriots (50 page)

Paine had taken one other step to bring independence nearer, one that he did not announce. He had signed over the copyright of
Common Sense
to the Congress. At two shillings each, it went through edition after edition, until half a million copies had been sold. Penniless when he arrived from England, Thomas Paine had donated a fortune to the American cause.

—

For nearly a decade, North Carolina had been more contentious in the patriot cause than its neighbors, and its colonists had paid the price. At Alamance Creek in 1771, Governor William Tryon’s troops had routed a group of farmers called the
Regulators, who were protesting corruption among King George’s appointees. Tryon ordered seven of the leaders executed. But a later British force was defeated by Carolina patriots in a battle at Moore’s Creek, and, while the Continental Congress was still debating, the people of Mecklenburg, North Carolina, passed a resolution in May 1775 that severed their ties with England. On April 12, 1776, all of North Carolina declared itself completely independent.

Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina left Philadelphia to prod his colony’s provincial congress at Charleston and arrived brandishing the first copy of
Common Sense
that the members had seen. They were thunderstruck at first by Gadsden’s demand for independence, but when news reached them that Parliament had voted late in December 1775 to seize any American ships on the high seas, popular sentiment began to turn.

Before Thomas Jefferson returned to Philadelphia, he canvassed his neighbors and concluded that nine tenths of the people favored independence. On May 15, 1776, Virginians in Williamsburg
instructed their delegates to present to the Continental Congress a resolution that the thirteen colonies be declared free and independent states. At the same time, John Adams had persuaded the Congress to recommend that each state form its own new government. Adams considered the action almost as good as a formal statement of independence. John Dickinson and his allies still thought that final step was hasty, and six colonies instructed their delegates to vote against separation. The same gallows humor that had once swept across Massachusetts had reached Pennsylvania, and as they debated separation the delegates joked morbidly about the consequences. Benjamin Harrison, who was six feet four inches and obese, boasted to slender Elbridge Gerry that when they were hanged his weight would guarantee him a shorter agony.

The debate seemed to be reaching its climax when a new disappointment arose for the delegates committed to independence. They had hoped that the Canadians would agree to become their fourteenth state, but word came in April that Benedict Arnold had given up his attempt to blockade Quebec and that American troops were retreating. Congress hadn’t been able to supply its Canadian expedition with provisions, money or medicine, and smallpox had ravaged its ranks. “Defeated most ignominiously,” John Adams wrote to James Warren in Massachusetts. “Where shall we lay the blame?” Benjamin Franklin had been a member of a commission to inspect the Canadian effort, and his group returned with a report of alarming mismanagement. John Hancock complained to George Washington that America’s Northern troops had been ruined by a lack of discipline, and the colonies were desperately unprepared for any new British offensive.

But the Congress wasn’t daunted. It authorized Washington to try to raise more militia—six thousand to send as reinforcements to Canada, thirteen thousand to station in New York, another ten thousand to keep in reserve. And on June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee took the floor to offer the resolution many delegates had been dreading. Lee was one of Samuel Adams’ closest allies and had been criticized for representing Massachusetts more diligently than Virginia. That was why Adams could tell friends the evening before the speech that Lee’s resolution would decide the most important question America had ever faced.

At forty-four, Richard Henry Lee was tall and lean, red-haired like Thomas Jefferson but with an aquiline nose and a profile described as Roman. He came from one of Virginia’s most prominent families and in 1764 had applied for the job of stamp master but had quickly felt ashamed of that moment of greed and entered the ranks of the patriots. Lee felt a dislike for Virginia’s slave economy, and long before independence became an issue he had reminded the House of Burgesses that Africans were their fellow creatures. They were “
created as ourselves,” Lee said, “and equally entitled to liberty and freedom by the great law of nature.”

Richard Lee had blown off the fingers of one hand in a hunting accident, and whenever he rose to speak he would wrap the mutilated hand in a handkerchief. Before Patrick Henry arrived in the Burgesses, Lee had been its leading speaker, the sort of orator who moved himself deeply as he spoke. Now in Philadelphia he launched his three-part resolution with what he considered its least important point:

“That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

Lee went on to more vital matters: America should form foreign alliances, and the Congress should prepare a plan of confederation for the colonies. The Congress delayed debate on Lee’s resolution until the following morning. Then, acting as a committee of the whole, the members began to debate whether or not America should declare herself free.

Even the conservatives did not complain about Lee’s other two suggestions. Sending official delegates to France and drawing up a confederacy seemed sensible. But why declare independence before the colonies were sure they could achieve it? Why warn Britain of America’s intentions? Wouldn’t the colonies look ridiculous asking Europe’s heads of state to support a union that didn’t exist? Edward Rutledge of South Carolina—at twenty-seven, one of the youngest delegates—joined with John Dickinson to press those points. He hoped to postpone the discussion for three weeks, or for months if he could manage it.

By the following Monday, June 10, Rutledge seemed to have
prevailed. The Congress voted to postpone any decision until the first day of July. But Richard Lee’s faction had a trick left to play. They won approval for appointing committees that would spend the next three weeks preparing drafts on each point of Lee’s resolution. That way no more time would be lost if the Congress agreed to his recommendations. The next day, June 11, the Congress named those committees, drawing on the different talents of its members and balancing each committee politically.

Samuel Adams was appointed to the committee to prepare the draft of confederation, but he was not one of the five chosen to draw up a declaration of independence to be held in reserve. Two of the choices, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, were almost inevitable. John Adams regretted that he had been talking too much these days; true respect, he concluded, went to men who were more aloof. But that was only Adams scourging himself. His passionate logic had, in fact, made him influential and widely trusted, and his fellow delegates named him both to the committee on the declaration and to the committee to draw up treaty plans for France. Nor would Congress pass over the talents of Franklin, its most celebrated author. Robert Livingston of New York had enough votes to join the committee, even though he had argued against Lee’s resolutions. Roger Sherman of Connecticut was also chosen.

The fifth member won his place through compromise: some Northern delegates continued to believe that naming a Virginian to America’s most visible positions was good strategy. Richard Henry Lee was not electable because he was considered too radical even within his own delegation. And Benjamin Harrison was too conservative for Lee’s supporters, however much he might joke about being hanged. Both factions could agree, however, on Virginia’s newest delegate. When Thomas Jefferson arrived at the Congress the year before, he had been preceded by a reputation in both literature and science. Many members had read his pamphlet
A Summary View of the Rights of British America.
Even those who thought his account of the Boston Tea Party sounded as though Samuel Adams had dictated it agreed that Jefferson wrote well. He seemed to shrink from public speaking, but in private his sentiments were everything the Adamses could hope for. John Adams lobbied for him to join the committee and was so
persuasive that when the votes were counted Jefferson had received more than anyone else.

Jefferson was a modest man of thirty-two; John Adams was past forty. When the time came for one person to draw up a preliminary draft, Jefferson was ready to defer to his elders. He had just rejoined the Congress after an extended absence, but he remembered John Adams’ need for respect. Seeking him out, Jefferson suggested that Adams be the one to draw up the declaration.

Adams was in a playful and self-deprecating mood when Jefferson offered him the assignment. “I will not,” he said. Adams agreed with Richard Henry Lee that the declaration was only a formality and less important than the drafts to consolidate the colonies and enlist allies.

“You should do it,” Jefferson said.

“Oh, no!”

“Why will you not?” Jefferson persisted. “You ought to do it.”

“I will not.”

“Why?”

“Reasons enough.”

Jefferson indulged this antic mood. “What can be your reasons?”

John Adams began to tick them off: “Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.”

“Well,” Jefferson said, “if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.”

—

Thomas Jefferson’s father had married well, possibly too well. Peter Jefferson became deeply enmeshed with his wife’s family, the prosperous and prominent Randolphs of Virginia, and one cousin, William Randolph, was closer to him than a brother. William could afford to be generous to the rising young planter and once deeded Jefferson two hundred acres of undeveloped land. As payment, he asked for one bowl of arrack punch. William Randolph’s wife died young, and when Randolph began to suspect that he was also dying he added a codicil to his will requesting
that his loving friend move down to the Randolph plantation and remain there until Randolph’s son was grown. Peter Jefferson–large, strong, scrupulous—mourned his friend by honoring his wish. Taking no pay, he moved his family from their modest home, Shadwell, to Tuckahoe, the imposing Randolph estate, where one story of the main house was set aside for visitors. That was why Thomas Jefferson’s earliest memory, at two years old, was of being carried on a pillow by a slave as the Jeffersons moved downriver to Tuckahoe.

What his mother had thought of the move Thomas Jefferson never recorded. Her family may have felt that marrying Peter Jefferson had brought Jane Randolph down in the world; she may have agreed with them. As he grew up, the boy came to appreciate his father and admire him. Thomas himself would be tall, but never so burly or strong as Peter Jefferson. But whatever his parents told him about the move, Thomas was surrounded by reminders that he was being raised on the Randolph estate.

In 1752, when Thomas was nine years old, his parents returned to the plainer life of Shadwell, and five years later Peter Jefferson died. He left behind eight children, Thomas the oldest son. Jane Randolph Jefferson inherited the Shadwell house and its farmland, most of the slaves and all of the horses. When Thomas reached twenty-one he was to have his choice of lands on the Rivanna or Fluvanna River, along with a share of livestock and half the slaves. In the meantime, each child was left a personal servant. Peter Jefferson’s own mulatto, Sawney, was considered the most valuable slave of the household staff, and he went to Thomas, along with books, mathematical instruments and a cherry-wood desk.

In later life, Thomas congratulated himself for having turned out as well as he had. He was only fourteen when he lost his father, and his mother had never been a source of guidance. His younger brother Randolph was slow-witted, and there was no strong bond between Thomas and his older sisters. Life in Virginia abounded with temptations for drinking and gambling, and if the colony’s clergy couldn’t resist them, why should a lusty young man? With his father gone, Thomas escaped the gentility at home by seeking out the neighborhood’s rougher men and boys although he knew they were cardsharpers and wastrels for whom a fox hunt was life’s highest aspiration. Even while they fed his rebellious side, he
was being carried through adolescence by an inherent fastidiousness and an ardent love of books. He said later that if forced to choose between his father’s estate and his classical education, he would always pick the education.

Thomas learned to ride and swim well, but it was through his mind that he intended to lift himself above the friends sunk in sport and pleasure. He had begun to judge his contemporaries and his elders harshly. Patrick Henry struck him as somewhat coarse and shallow, and when Thomas reached William and Mary, at the age of seventeen, he found his classmates even more disappointing. Low standards of admission had “filled the college with children,” he complained, which made classes disagreeable, even degrading, to a properly prepared student like himself.

Instead of mixing with boys his own age, Thomas moved gratefully into a circle of cultured older men. Dr. William Small, a Scotsman who taught mathematics and philosophy, introduced Thomas to George Wythe, a distinguished lawyer, and to the colony’s lieutenant governor, Francis Fauquier. That quartet, united by a love of music, often dined at the Governor’s Palace. Fauquier had arrived in Virginia two years before Jefferson entered William and Mary. According to rumor, he had been given the post after an influential lord in London had won his entire inheritance at the gaming tables, felt sorry for him and helped him to a royal appointment in America. The story, true or not, may have contributed to Jefferson’s lifelong dislike of cards; when he set up his own house, he did not allow them.