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4. Resistance to Tyranny
s was predicted by Mr. Jefferson and his confederates, the establishment of Corresponding Committees resulted in the convocation of a general Congress, which event followed the ensuing year. The intermediate steps to that result require a summary notice to show the connection of the prophecy with its fulfilment.
The resistance to the revenue impositions had been conducted with such inflexibility and general concert as to have checked the regular current of importation into the Colonies and occasioned a prodigious surcharge of the dutied commodities in England. Immense quantities of tea in particular had accumulated in the warehouses of the East India Company -- a monopoly which was much favored by the government and had an extensive influence over it. This company having obtained permission to transport their tea free of the usual export duty from Great Britain to America on condition that upon its introduction there, the duty of three pence per pound should be paid, immediately dispatched enormous shipments to Boston and other American ports. On the arrival of the tea in Boston, the patriots were thrown into a frenzy of indignation and alarm. They saw and felt that the crisis now approached which was to decide the great question, whether they would submit to taxation without representation or brave the consequences of some decisive movement which might be adequate to relieve them from the emergency. If the tea were permitted to be landed, it would be sold, the duties paid, and all they had gained be lost. They resolved, therefore, that it should not be landed, and the resolution was no sooner formed than executed by the destruction of the entire cargo.
The intelligence of this spirited stroke in vindication of popular rights so exasperated the British ministry that they resorted to a measure which fixed the irrevocable sentence of dismemberment upon the British empire. This was the famous Boston Port Bill, by which the harbor of that great city was closed against the importation of any goods, wares or merchandise whatsoever, from and after the first day of June, 1774.
When the rumor of the impending calamity reached Boston, a meeting of the inhabitants was called, the act was denounced as cruel and flagitious, and they made their appeal to God and the world. Numerous copies of the act were printed and dispersed over the colonies, and to make a deeper impression on the multitude, the copies were printed on mourning paper, bordered with black lines. They were cried through the country as "barbarous, cruel, sanguinary, and inhuman murder." (Botta, vol. I, p. 120)
The Legislature of Virginia was in session when the news of this interdict was received in May, 1774. Mr. Jefferson was still a member, and his sympathies for the north rose to a point before unequaled. Perceiving the advantages to be derived from the popular excitement which he foresaw would be created, he as quickly devised the means for using it with effect for the benefit of the common cause. Fearful to trust the cause at this propitious moment to the tardy pace of the old members, he again rallied the little council of chiefs with whom he had confederated on the former occasion, and concerted a private meeting the same evening at the council chamber of the library "to consult on the proper measures to be taken." Punctual at the hour they met, and mutually ripe in sentiment, unanimously agreed that they "must boldly take an unequivocal stand in the line with Massachusetts." They were also impressed with the necessity of arousing the people from the apathy into which they had fallen as to passing events, and for this purpose, Mr. Jefferson proposed the appointment of a day of general fasting and prayer throughout the colony, "as most likely to call up and alarm their attention." The proposition met enthusiastic acceptance with his colleagues, and he was requested to prepare the necessary instrument to be presented to the House.
"No example," says Mr. Jefferson, "of such a solemnity had existed since the days of our distress in the war of '55, since which a new generation had grown up. With the help, therefore, of Rushworth, whom we rummaged over for the revolutionary precedents and form of the Puritans of that day preserved by him, we cooked up a resolution, somewhat modernizing their phrases, for appointing the first day of June, on which the Port Bill was to commence, for a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, to implore Heaven to avert from us the evils of civil war, to inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and to turn the hearts of the King and Parliament to moderation and justice." (Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:9) The draft was approved by the consulting members; but before they separated, another important figure was necessary to be arranged; and the manner in which it was done showed the wisdom and sagacity of the conclave. "To give greater emphasis to our proposition," continues Mr. Jefferson, "we agreed to wait the next morning on Mr. Nicholas, whose grave and religious character was more in unison with the tone of our resolution, and to solicit him to move it." They accordingly went to Mr. Nicholas the next morning. He moved it the same day -- May 24th -- and it passed without opposition.
The instrument was drawn up much like the olden New England proclamations, with great solemnity of phraseology, directing the members "preceded by the Speaker and mace" to assemble on the appointed day, "devoutly to implore the Divine interposition for averting the heavy calamity which threatens destruction to our civil rights, and the evils of civil war; to give us one heart and one mind, firmly to oppose by all just and proper means, every injury to American rights; and that the minds of His Majesty and Parliament may be inspired from above with wisdom, moderation, and justice to remove from the loyal people of America all cause of alarm from a continued pursuit of measures pregnant with their ruin."
This solemn example of Virginia was the signal for a general movement among the colonies. The same religious observance was ordered to be kept on the same day in all the principal towns, and the first day of June was a day of mourning throughout the continent. Business was suspended, the bells sounded a funeral knell, the pulpits reverberated with inflammatory discourses, and every engine of popular terror was put in use.
In Virginia, the heavens were shrouded with gloom. The ministers of religion, arrayed in their long black robes, headed processions of the people and alarmed them from the pulpit with terrific appeals to their passions. Popular orators pronounced their inflammatory harangues. The committees of vigilance circulated the infection through every village, and all cooperated with prodigious effect in promoting the general conflagration. "The people," says Mr. Jefferson, "met generally, with anxiety and alarm in their countenances, and the effect of the day through the whole colony was like a shock of electricity, arousing every man and placing him erect and solidly on his center." (ME 1:11)
he most important transaction of this eventful session remains to be considered. The chain of causes were now bringing about the grand result so confidently predicted by Mr. Jefferson. It would hardly seem credible now that a resolution for the appointment of a religious ceremony, conceived in such terms of mingled devotion and loyalty as was that of the House of Burgesses, should have provoked the hostile interposition of the Executive power; but so it was. The order of the House for a general fast had no sooner fallen under the eye of Lord Dunmore than he made his appearance before them with the following speech: "Mr. Speaker and gentlemen of the House of Burgesses: I have in my hand a paper published by order of your House, conceived in such terms as reflect highly upon His Majesty and the parliament of Great Britain, which makes it necessary to dissolve you, and you are dissolved accordingly."
But the powers of the government had become completely paralyzed in that contumacious colony, and its Executive decrees were regarded as idle ceremonies. The whole body of the members repaired in a mass to the Apollo. They immediately organized themselves into an independent Convention, agreed to an association more solemnly than ever against the calamitous revenue system, declared that an attack on any one colony to compel submission to arbitrary taxes should be considered as an attack on all British America, and instructed their Committee of Correspondence to propose to the corresponding committees of the other colonies the expediency of appointing Deputies to meet in Congress annually, at such place as should be convenient, to direct from time to time the measures required by the general interest.
That no time might be lost in carrying their recommendation of a Congress into effect, they did not leave their seats without first having arranged the preliminary meeting for the choice of their own deputies. They passed a resolution soliciting the people of the several counties to elect representatives to meet at Williamsburg the 1st of August ensuing to take into further consideration the state of the colony, and particularly to appoint delegates to the General Congress, should that measure be acceded to by the Corresponding Committees of the other colonies. The meeting then dissolved, and the members were universally greeted with the applause of their countrymen.
From this period -- 1774 -- the royal government might be considered at an end in Virginia. The self-constituted convention, which was erected upon the ruins of the regal Legislature, immediately succeeded by a bold usurpation to all its functions and took the reins of the government into their own hands.
Agreeably to their instructions, the Committee of Correspondence lost no time in proposing to the committees of the other provinces the expediency of uniting in the plan of a general congress. They met the day after the adjournment of the convention, Mr. Jefferson in the chair, prepared letters according to their instructions and dispatched them by messengers express to their several destinations. The proposition was unanimously embraced by Massachusetts first, whose Legislature was in session when it was received, and by all the other provinces in quick succession as their respective Legislatures or conventions assembled. Delegates were universally chosen -- no province sending less than two nor more than seven. Philadelphia was designated as the place, and the 5th of September ensuing as the time of the meeting.
Agreeably to the further recommendation of the meeting at the Apollo, the people of the several counties of Virginia elected delegates to the preliminary convention at Williamsburg. Mr. Jefferson was chosen to represent the county in which he resided. On the first of August. '74, this formidable body, being the first democratic convention of Virginia, assembled at Williamsburg and was organized for business.
Mr. Jefferson, before leaving home, had prepared a code of instructions to the delegates who should be chosen to Congress, which he meant to propose for adoption at the meeting. Speaking of these instructions, the author says, "they were drawn in haste, with a number of blanks, with some uncertainties and inaccuracies of historical facts which I neglected at the moment, knowing they could be readily corrected at the meeting." (ME 1:183)
It is generally admitted that this production ranks second only to the Declaration of Independence, of which it was indeed the genuine precursor for boldness and originality of sentiment and felicity of composition. He set out for Williamsburg some days before that appointed for the meeting of the Convention, but was arrested on his journey by sickness which prevented his attendance in person. His spirit, however, was there; and so anxious was he to discharge in some way the duties of his appointment that he forwarded by express duplicate copies of his draught, one under cover to Patrick Henry, the other to Peyton Randolph. His own account of the reception of his draught is too interesting to be omitted.
"Whether Mr. Henry disapproved the ground taken or was too lazy to read it -- for he was the laziest man in reading I ever knew -- I never learned: but he communicated it to nobody. He probably thought it too bold as a first measure, as the majority of the members did. On the other copy being laid upon the table of the Convention by Peyton Randolph as the proposition of a member who was prevented from attendance by sickness on the road, tamer sentiments were preferred and, I believe, wisely preferred; the leap I proposed being too long as yet for the mass of our citizens. The distance between these and the instructions actually adopted is of some curiosity, however, as it shows the inequality of pace with which we moved and the prudence required to keep front and rear together." (Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:12)
The paper was read, nevertheless, with great avidity by the members; and although they considered it "a leap too long" for the existing state of things, they were so impressed with its expositions of the rights and wrongs of the Colonies that they caused it to be published in a pamphlet form under the title of "A Summary View of the Rights of British America." A copy of the work having found its way to England, it was taken up by the Whigs in Parliament, interpolated in some places by the celebrated Burke to adapt it to opposition purpose there, and in that form ran rapidly through several editions. Such doctrines as were advanced in this pamphlet had never before been heard in England, nor even ventured in America; and they drew upon the author the hottest vials of ministerial wrath. The name of Jefferson was forthwith enrolled in a Bill of Attainder for treason in company with those of about twenty other American citizens who were considered the principal "agitators" in the Colonies. The Attainder, however, although actually commenced in Parliament, never came to maturity, but "was suppressed in embryo by the hasty step of events which warned them to be a little cautious."
This esteemed paper is highly valuable as containing the first disclosure in a clear and authentic form of the state of Mr. Jefferson's mind on the subject of those great questions which were the bases of the American Revolution, and as exhibiting in the discussions which it gave rise to, and in the circumstances attending its rejection by the Convention, the "inequality of pace" with which the leaders in the American councils traveled onward to the same result. It will not be thought invidious in a later day to compare the birth and trace the relative progress of their opinion on those truths, the practical application of which, in a rational and peaceable way, has already regenerated the political condition of half the world.
It appears that in the most essential principles involved in the emancipation of the American Colonies from Great Britain -- those principles which settled the question upon its right basis and determined the final issue -- Mr. Jefferson was for a long time ahead of his contemporaries. The great point at which the other leaders of that hazardous enterprise, with a single exception (Mr. Wythe), halted as the utmost extremity of colonial right, he only called the "half-way house." A brief memorandum which he himself has left of that period explains the ground which he occupied and the precise distance between him and his compatriots. Speaking of his draft of instructions, he says--
"In this I took the ground that from the beginning I had thought the only one orthodox or tenable, which was, that the relation between Great Britain and these Colonies was exactly the same as that of England and Scotland after the accession of James and until the union; and the same as her present relations with Hanover, having the same executive chief but no other necessary political connection; and that our emigration from England to this country gave her no more rights over us than the emigrations of the Danes and Saxons gave to the present authorities of the mother country over England. In this doctrine, however, I had never been able to get any one to agree with me but Mr. Wythe. He concurred in it from the first dawn of the question -- What was the political relation between us and England? Our other patriots, Randolph, the Lees, Nicholas, Pendleton, stopped at the half-way house of John Dickinson, who admitted that England had a right to regulate our commerce and to lay duties on it for the purposes of regulation, but not for raising revenue. But for this ground there was no foundation in compact, in any acknowledged principles of colonization, nor in reason -- expatriation being a natural right, and acted on as such by all nations in all ages." (Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:11)
Again, in a letter to John Saunderson in 1820, he says:
"On the first dawn of [the Revolution], instead of higgling on half-way principles as others did who feared to follow their reason, he [Wythe] took his stand on the solid ground, that the only link of political union between us and Great Britain was the identity of our Executive; that that nation and its Parliament had no more authority over us than we had over them; and that we were coordinate nations with Great Britain and Hanover." (Emphasis added. ME 1:167)
This point is further illustrated in the Bill of Attainder before mentioned. After reciting a list of proscriptions, among which were Hancock and the Adamses as notorious leaders of the opposition in Massachusetts, Patrick Henry as the same in Virginia, Peyton Randolph as President of the General Congress in Philadelphia, the Bill adds "and Thomas Jefferson, as author of a proposition to the Convention of Virginia for an address to the King in which was maintained, that there was in right, no link of union between England and the Colonies, but that of the same King; and that neither the Parliament, nor any other functionary of that government, had any more right to exercise authority over the Colonies, than over the electorate of Hanover; yet expressing, in conclusion, an acquiescence in reasonable restrictions of commerce for the benefit of Great Britain, a conviction of the mutual advantages of union, and a disavowal of the wish for separation." (Girardin's History of Virginia, Appendix, No. 12, note.)
It appears, therefore, that the final and only tenable ground of answer to the great question which formed the hinge of the American Revolution, the right of taxation without representation, originated with Mr. Jefferson. Following out the right of expatriation into all its consequences, he advanced at once to the necessary conclusion that there was no political connection whatever between the Parliament of Great Britain and the Colonies; and consequently, that it had no right to tax them in any case -- not even for the regulation of commerce. The other patriots, either not admitting the right of expatriation or, what is most likely, not having pursued it to its legitimate results, conceded the authority of Parliament over the Colonies for the purposes of commercial regulation, though not of raising revenue. But this was going no farther than did Burke, Chatham, Wilkes, Fox, and the opposition members generally of the House of Commons; and it is not improbable that, had the question been restrained to that issue, it would have terminated in mutual reconciliation upon that basis. But happily it was not so restrained, and quite a different conclusion was the result. It is not small evidence of originality that one of the youngest of the American counselors, and a youth compared to most of them, should have been the first to plant himself upon the farthest verge of colonial right, short of absolute independence.
Upon a critical examination of this paper [note], it will appear that the author's mind had already attained those fundamental discoveries in Political Science which have since received such an astonishing exemplification before the world. It is a more learned and elaborate production than the Declaration of Independence, to which it is inferior as a literary performance, but in power and sublimity of conception, scarcely exceeded by the "Declaratory Charter of our rights and of the rights of man."
The author begins with the vindication of the first principle of all political truth, the sovereignty of the people, as a right which they derive from God, and not from His Majesty, who, he affirms, "is no more than the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws and invested with definite powers to assist in working the great machine of government erected for their use and consequently subject to their superintendence." He next proceeds to vindicate the right of expatriation, showing that the barbarian nations in the North of Europe from whom the inhabitants of Great Britain descended would have as good right to usurp jurisdiction over them as they over us; and from this right, the basis of every other, he deduces the broad principle that the American States were coordinate nations with Great Britain herself, having a common executive head but no other link of political union. The doctors of nullification would here find a triumphant justification of their theory, should it be made to appear that the States possess the same relation to the federal that they then did to the mother government! He refutes with becoming satire the fictitious principle of the common law that all lands belong mediately or immediately to the Crown, and says, "it is high time to declare that His Majesty has no right to grant lands of himself." Finally, he recommends His Majesty to "open his breast to liberal and expanded thought," adding "that the great principles of right and wrong are legible to every reader," and that "the whole art of government consists in the art of being honest." (Emphasis added.)
In conformity to this ground, the word "States" is for the first time substituted for that of "Colonies." This will not be thought a small circumstance when it is known that in the debates upon the Declaration of Independence even, the term "States" was made a topic of repeated cavil, and in several instances expunged. The Convention at Williamsburg were not prepared to sanction the principles contained in these "instructions." Tamer sentiments were substituted; the congressional delegates [note] were appointed to the number of seven, and resolutions were adopted in which they pledged themselves to make common cause with the people of Boston in every extremity. They broke off all commercial connection with the mother country until the grievances of which they complained should be redressed, and empowered their chairman, Peyton Randolph, or in case of his death, Robert C. Nicholas, on any future occasion that might in his opinion require it, to convene the several delegates of the colony at such time and place as he might judge proper. This last resolve was more important than all the others, as it showed their determination to keep the government in their own hands to the exclusion of the parent authorities, and was a virtual assumption of independence in Virginia.
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