Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/642

614 JEFFERSON him, in a mortifying failure. In conformity with a usage brought from the mother country of selecting one of the younger mem bers to draft the reply to the governor s speech, this complimentary duty was devolved upon Jefferson. He confined himself too closely for the taste of the committee to the language of the resolutions which he was expected to amplify and glorify. His address was rejected, and the duty of preparing a substitute was confided to another member. This humiliation doubtless had some share in giving to his pen the parliamentary distinction usually won only by the tongue ; for he was no orator indeed, though one of the foremost members of several deliberative bodies in his time, he can fairly be said to have never made a speech. Jefferson s legislative duties were not destined to detain him long from his profession. The king having abandoned the policy of levying internal taxes, and directed instead that a duty upon certain leading articles of foreign commerce should be levied at the custom-houses in the colonies, in the spring of 1769 a mes senger arrived at Williamsburg, then the seat of government of Virginia, announcing to the House of Burgesses the firm resolve of Massachusetts to resist these duties by all constitutional means, and asking the concurrence and co-operation of Virginia. On the third day of the session of the House of Burgesses four resolutions were adopted with substantial unanimity, in harmony with those adopted by Massachusetts. The first declared against taxation without representation ; the second, that the colonies may concur and co-operate in seeking redress of grievances ; the third, that sending accused persons away from their country for trial is an inexpressible complexity of wrong ; the fourth, that they should send an address on these topics to the "father of all his people," beseeching his " royal interposition." On the following day, and without waiting for an official copy of these resolutions to reach him, Governor Botetourt dissolved the House of Burgesses. Thus in five days terminated, for the present, Jefferson s career as a legislator. But, though brief and crowned with no results to satisfy his ambition, history does not pronounce his first experience as a legislator inglorious, for it was illustrated by an effort, which was not the less honourable to him because it was unsuccessful, to ameliorate the condition of the African bondmen in Virginia. The law of those days forbade the manumission of a slave, except upon the condition that he was immediately sent out of the State. Jeffer son desired the repeal of this law. His efforts were not only un successful, but they developed such a state of feeling upon the subject as to bring into grand relief the courage which even at that early day ventured to propose such a measure. The day after the House of Burgesses dispersed, its members met at a public hall in the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, and, fol lowing the example of Massachusetts, resolved, with a near ap proach to unanimity (1) to be more saving and industrious; (2) never to buy any article taxed by parliament for revenue, except low qualities of paper which they could not dispense with, nor (3) to import any article from Britain or in British ships if they could help it, until the offensive Act was repealed; and (4) to save all their lambs for wool. Every man who signed the agreement was re-elected, and every man who refused lost his election. On February 1, 1770, while Jefferson and his mother were absent from home, his house was burned down. He had, however, already begun clearing the grounds and preparing for the erection of a new residence at Monticello, which occupied no inconsider able portion of his time and thoughts for the next two years, and which was destined to become, for more than half a century, the most distinguished seat of private hospitality in America. On the 1st of January 1772 he married Martha Skelton, a widowed daughter of a wealthy neighbour and associate at the bar of Williamsburg, of large fortune in lands and slaves. The lady was very handsome, childless, fond of music, twenty-three ; she proved to him a loving and devoted wife, and was the centre of a domestic circle the joys of which seemed only to be intensified and consecrated by the distractions of his public life. In the spring of 1773 Jefferson was appointed by the House of Burgesses a member of " a Committee of Correspondence and In quiry for the Dissemination of Intelligence between the Colonies." The appointment of this committee responded to the necessity then beginning to be felt by all the colonies of making common cause against the pretensions of the Crown, and looked to a convention in which their united purposes might find expression. The resolutions which gave birth to this committee provoked an immediate dis solution of the House, but its members were all re-elected. Soon after they had resumed their sittings in the following spring, news reached them of what is known in history as " The Boston Port Bill," by which the chief port of Massachusetts was to be closed to commerce on the 1st of June of that year (1774). The House of Burgesses thereupon set apart that day for fasting, humiliation, and prayer, thereby provoking from the governor another dissolu tion, May 20, 1774. This immediately led to the selection of delegates from the several counties to meet at Williamsburg in August, to consider the state of the colony, and to provide for an annual congress of the colonies. Jefferson was chosen a dele gate to the State Convention, but, owing to sudden indisposition which overtook him on his way, was unable to attend. His in fluence there, however, was not to be wanting, for much of the interval between the dissolution of the House and the meeting of the Convention was devoted to the consideration and pre paration of a series of instructions for the deputies who were to be sent to the General Congress, which was to meet at Philadelphia in September. In these instructions, which he had intended him self to propose, could he have been present, he maintained "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 connexion ; and that our emigration to this country gave no more rights over us than the emigration of the Danes and Saxons gave to the present authorities of the mother country over England." These instructions, though too radical then for the purpose for which they were designed, were laid upon the table of the delegates, road by many, and published in a pamphlet entitled A Summary View of the Rights of America, and extensively circulated. It ran through edition after edition in England, after receiving such modifications (attributed to the pen of Burke) as adapted it to the purposes of the Opposition ; and it procured for its author, to use his own language, "the honour of having his name inserted in a long list of proscriptions enrolled in a bill of attainder commenced in one of the two Houses of Parlia ment, but suppressed in embryo by the hasty course of events." This paper placed Jefferson among the leaders, if not at the head of the revolutionary movement in America events rapidly ripen ing in the public mind its novel and startling doctrines. The Declaration of Independence two years later, of which he asked that his tombstone should testify as the greatest achievement of his life, was but a perfected transcript of the Summary View. Jefferson was the leading spirit in the succeeding sessions of the Virginia Convention ; he was one of a committee of thirteen appointed to report a plan for arming Virginia ;. he was named a delegate to the General Congress, where he took his seat eight days after Colonel George Washington had been appointed by Congress commander-in-chief of the armies of the colonies ; and he was placed upon the committee to draw up a statement of the causes which had impelled the colonies to take up arms against the mother country, and upon another committee to report on Lord North s " conciliatory proposition." In the winter of 1775-6 disastrous news arrived from England. The king in opening parliament had denounced the colonists as rebels, and recommended decisive coercive measures against them ; and this was promptly followed by a law authorizing the confiscation of American vessels and cargoes, and those of all nations found trading in American ports, and the impressment of American crews into the British navy. This measure and the large vote by which it was passed instantly crystallized the colonies, and on the llth June 1776 Congress appointed Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston to prepare a Declaration of Independence. Jefferson at the request of his associates prepared a draft of the Declaration, which, after two or three verbal corrections by them, was taken up for consideration in the House on the 2d of July. In the debate on the Declaration Jefferson took no part, "think ing it a duty to be on that occasion a passive auditor of the opinions of others, more impartial judges than he could be of its merits and demerits." Two or three expressions had been used which gave offence to some members: the words "Scotch and other foreign auxiliaries " w r ere resented by some delegates of Scottish birth ; and the strictures on the king s repeated veto of colonial laws repealing the law which permitted the slave trade were disapproved by some of the southern delegates. On the evening of the 4th of July 1776 the Declaration was reported back from the committee of the whole House, and agreed to. Circumstances have given an historical importance to this document somewhat disproportioned to its merits as a statement of the grievances of the colonies ; for it seemed to be the weapon that dismembered a great empire, and that gave birth to a nation of unlimited possibilities ; it gave guarantees for the fame of its author which are possessed by no other production of an American pen ; for more than a century it has been read to assembled multi tudes in every considerable town in the United States on the anni versary of its adoption ; and its style and sentiments have been the model for every people which since that time has sought to assert for itself the right of self-government. Jefferson continued to participate actively in the efforls to organize the government of the confederation, and prepare it for the life and death struggle which was impending, until the 2d of September, when he resigned, to take his seat in the legislature of Virginia, to which he had been elected, and where he thought his services would be most needed. "When I left Congress in 76," he says in his autobiography, " it was in the persuasion that our whole code must be reviewed, adapted to our republican form of government, and, now that we had no negatives of councils, gover-