The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (73 page)

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lished himself as a leader in western Virginia. Though his wife brought him no property, his marriage surely helped his rise. The Randolphs were a great family, and an alliance with them set a man off from ordinary planters.

Peter Jefferson wanted his son educated and sent him to a nearby parson for instruction in Latin and Greek. Thomas Jefferson's love of the classics was born in these years. He continued his studies at William and Mary College between 1760 and 1762 and then prepared for the bar with George Wythe, a distinguished attorney in Williamsburg and a fine classicist himself. Jefferson may have met Wythe through William Small, a professor of natural philosophy at the college. Small saw something in Jefferson and made him his friend as well as his student. Jefferson could not have found better instructors and friends in Williamsburg. Both Small and Wythe were lively cultivated men; both set standards for the young Jefferson and, though he needed no encouragement to study, these mentors undoubtedly led him to make demands upon himself.

Jefferson was a serious student but not entirely a solemn young man. Wythe put him to reading
Coke Upon Littleton
, the first of four parts of Edward Coke's
Institutes of the Lawes of England
. Jefferson soon read all four parts but not without an occasional protest. To his friend John Page he confessed "I do wish the Devil had old Cooke [ Coke], for I am sure I never was so tired of an old dull scoundrel in my life." He was nineteen when he wrote these words. He tired of Coke and yearned for the society of his friends -- "Remember me affectionately," he told Page, "to all the young ladies of my acquaintance." A young Virginia gentleman commonly enjoyed a wide acquaintance, and Jefferson's list was long. It included one Alice Corbin from whom he planned "to win a pair of garters." His letters at this time reveal an attractive young man full of enthusiasm for his "Belinda," as he called Rebecca Burwell, and full too of his dreams of dances and young women, and of uncertainty about his future.

Whatever Jefferson dreamed, he must have believed that his future rested in the practice of law and the raising of tobacco. He began to do both with more than the usual responsibilities of a young man. His father had died when Jefferson was fourteen, and when he reached twenty-one he assumed the responsibility of looking after his mother and his younger sister Elizabeth. He was equal to the task. He managed the family's property carefully, and he began raising tobacco about the time he was admitted to the bar. The financial accounts he kept in

these early years of manhood reveal a meticulous man much given to recording every detail of his expenditures. If, when traveling on legal business, he had his clothes washed and paid a shilling to the washerwoman, that fact made its way into his records. If he had his horse shod, that too was recorded.

Jefferson apparently impressed his neighbors in more important ways, and in 1769 they elected him to the House of Burgesses from Albemarle County. Three years later on January 1, 1772, he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a young widow. Although Jefferson wrote little about his wife and seems not to have spoken much about her even to his friends, the marriage was one of great love on both sides.

Up to the outbreak of war in 1775, Jefferson's life resembled that of many Virginia planters. Still, in 1776, thirty-three years of age, he was an extraordinary man. His difference did not simply lie in the range of his interests and his already formidable learning. To be sure, he seems to have been interested in everything around him and in almost everything that could be learned from books. He had studied architecture, music, classical literature, politics, law, history, and science. But what really set him apart from others was not his learning, or his interests, it was the quality of his mind. He was not a systematic thinker or a theoretician. Nor was he really interested in the formal problems of philosophy -- he despised Plato. But if he had little taste for abstractions, his thought was often speculative. He asked probing questions about everything that he studied, and he sought empirical answers. He had more than a lawyer's desire for evidence; he had the bent and the appetite of a scientist. But more than most men of his time, surely more than most men of any time, he had imagination. The Revolution quickened it and almost immediately drew from him a vision of the opportunities that lay before free men in America.

By June 28 all the colonies except New York had authorized their delegates to approve independence. Pennsylvania had been especially reluctant, but popular groups there, armed by the Adams preamble of May 15, met in mobs and conventions and sent the sluggish assembly into oblivion. Thus when debate resumed in Congress on July 1, there was a large majority for independence. The vote that day found Pennsylvania's delegation joining South Carolina's in opposition, however; and Delaware's only two members present divided. New York's delegates explained that they favored independence but could not vote for it because they were bound by old instructions. The next day, July 2, with a third member on hand from Delaware, its delegation joined the major-

ity, as did South Carolina's and Pennsylvania's. Only New York remained uncommitted to independence until the approval of its convention was laid before Congress on July 15. Before that day, on July 4, the Declaration of Independence was approved after Congress made several revisions.
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Soldiers standing in regimental formations listened to their officers read the declaration on July 9, and in the days that followed civilians heard it read or read it themselves in the newspapers. Although both soldiers and civilians responded with cheers and celebrations, there is no way of knowing what pleased them most about the declaration. It seems likely that they were moved most by the Congress declaring them independent of Britain. That they were independent had seemed obvious to many for at least a year. Now they had to prove it, with their lives if need be.

What Americans thought and felt about the declaration's "truths" which are presented as "self evident" -- that all men "are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights," among them "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" -- is not clear. There was no immediate discussion in public of these claims; nor was there of the contention that all men were "created equal." Thomas Jefferson wrote these words and though at the time, and since, no great originality was attributed to them and to the substance of the declaration, the declaration may in fact have possessed more originality than anyone suspected.

The declaration is usually understood as a restatement of the contract theory of John Locke, holding that those governing America from Britain broke the fundamental understanding defining their relationship with the Americans. The British ruler violated the contract repeatedly and finally drove the Americans to declare their independence but only after they were denied redress. The contention of the declaration is, as Americans had argued over the previous twelve years, that they were defending their rights and that they took the final step, declaring their independence, only after all other measures failed.
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The document Congress approved on July 4 places most of the blame for the crisis on king and Parliament. Jefferson's original draft indicted an additional oppressor -- "our British brethren," the people of Britain

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themselves. According to Jefferson, the British people, like their king and "their legislature,"

have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity, and when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of their laws, of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have by their free election re-established them in power. At this very time too they are permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but Scotch and foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us. These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren. We must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends. We might have been a free and a great people together; but a communication of grandeur and of freedom it seems is below their dignity. Be it so, since they will have it. The road to glory and happiness is open to us too. We will climb it in a separate state, and acquiesce in the necessity which pronounces our everlasting Adieu!
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Congress removed most of these denunciations of the British people and kept the king as the focus of rejection. It did, however, retain a reference to the British people as "our common kindred" and in keeping Jefferson's description of them as "deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity" included them among the oppressors of America. In the opening of the declaration, as approved by Congress, the American people are described as dissolving the "political bands" which held them to another. Whether Congress intended to explain the decision to separate as something more than an act by which a people rejected a prince who had violated the fundamental contract, it included the British people by retaining these phrases from Jefferson's original draft.

Contrary to the long-standing judgments of historians, for many reasons the Jeffersonian draft is a much more powerful statement than the one finally approved by Congress. A rejection of one people by another once joined together by "love" is a great and moving event. It is made more affecting by the recognition that soldiers of "our common blood" had been dispatched across the ocean to kill Americans. As the Jeffersonian version puts it, the Americans declared their independence only after "the last stab to agonizing affection." There is in these lines a sense of betrayal, a sense that the Americans had been abandoned by their own kind, by their own blood, by brethren who had lost their

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capacity to honor justice and ties of affection, who had indeed become unfeeling brethren."

Congress understood the American people better than Thomas Jefferson did and therefore deleted these passionate denunciations. By 1776 most Americans had long since stopped loving their British brethren if indeed they had ever felt such profound affection. Immigration had diluted the ties of "blood," and the provincialism that marked American life outside the cities, and perhaps within as well, fostered rather more restricted circles of feeling. The British connection was important, and the colonies had in the eighteenth century testified to their commitment to it in their trade, in their admiration and imitation of British constitutional arrangements, in their support of the mother country in wars with France, among other ways; but in all these cases self-interest and tradition prompted their action, not a deep feeling of affection. Thus the version of the declaration Congress adopted on July 4, 1776, substituted traditional contract theory for Jefferson's passionate evocation. The process leading to independence that the congressional declaration describes is hardly devoid of feeling, though the feeling is not of love betrayed but of anger aroused by a tyrannical oppressor, a destroyer of rights who had broken the fundamental law.

The congressional declaration is therefore a safer document and a less imaginative one than Jefferson's. For Jefferson did not simply denounce one people: he claimed that a second -- the American people were fully formed, a people capable of "grandeur and freedom." He had stated his conviction in 1774 that the American people had been free from the time of the founding of the colonies in the seventeenth century. By leaving Britain they had separated themselves from the home country and had chosen to retain only a political connection through formal allegiance to the king. The most important tie -- of affection had leagued them with the British brethren, and now it had been destroyed by the support these brethren gave the tyrant.
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