Jefferson and Hamilton (8 page)

But more than theory composed Jefferson’s thinking. While he was appreciative of his British birthright, he was also a Virginian, and proud of it. His family had lived in the province for about three-quarters of a century, and throughout his life Jefferson spoke of his homeland as “my country, Virginia.” During the century and a half between the arrival of the English colonists at Jamestown and Jefferson’s coming of age, each generation of Virginians had pushed westward, fighting the Indians, taking their lands, opening new frontiers. The Virginians, as Jefferson knew, had done it with little help from the mother country. Prior to the wars in the 1740s and 1750s, he said with scant exaggeration, “No shilling was ever issued from the public treasures of his majesty or his ancestors for [Virginia’s] assistance.”
¹⁰
He believed that Virginians, and Virginians alone, had made Virginia. But Virginians had done much for Great Britain. In the 1740s, the colony had contributed hundreds of men to an Anglo-American army that fought the Spanish in the Caribbean and South America. In the Seven Years’ War, thousands served in the Virginia Regiment, fighting and dying in frontier warfare against the French and Indians.

It was indisputable as well that Virginia was a troubled colony by the 1760s, and some of its troubles arose from its colonial status. The cost of waging the Seven Years’ War had left Virginia, like the parent country, saddled with steep war debts. Had it been permitted to issue its own currency, Virginia might easily have retired its debt. However, imperial authorities, who sought to protect British creditors, prohibited such a practice. Compounding matters, tobacco prices had been declining since the early 1760s, threatening some planters with ruin. Virginians might have realized higher prices had they been able to operate in a free market economy, but Britain’s mercantilist system compelled them to send their tobacco to British markets. Virginia’s planters were driven to borrow from British creditors. Debts piled up. As Jefferson himself later remarked, these “debts had become hereditary from father to son, for many generations, so that the planters were a species of
property, annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.”
¹¹
Virginia’s planters had tried to save themselves by petitioning the Crown to end the African slave trade within the British Empire. That expedient not only would have driven up the price of slaves, but also would have allowed Virginia’s planters to escape their debts by selling their surplus slaves to rice-producing South Carolina and Georgia. But the king had turned a deaf ear to their entreaties, prompting one planter to exclaim that never before had Virginians felt such a “galling yoke of dependence.” What Jefferson concluded from the king’s conduct was that when the interests of English businessmen and financiers collided with what the colonists saw as their well-being, the Crown always sided with those in the metropolis against “the lasting interests of the American states.”
¹²

Something else stirred Jefferson. He thought slavery degraded and corrupted both blacks and whites, retarded Virginia’s economy, and concentrated wealth and power, resulting in an oligarchy of great planters. While his views were still in gestation, he was moving toward the notion of a broader diffusion of power within Virginia. His thinking was strikingly radical. He envisaged change in the colonies’ relationship with the mother country as well as fundamental change within Virginia, most of which was impossible without fundamental changes in the framework of the British Empire.
¹³

John Adams once remarked, “Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775 … before a drop of blood was drawn.” He was doubtless thinking of his own transformation, but he could as easily have been referring to Thomas Jefferson.
¹⁴
By 1774, Jefferson had come to favor not only greater American autonomy, he feared for the safety of “those rights which god and the laws have given equally and independently to all.”
¹⁵
To his way of thinking, London’s policies were all the more outrageous in light of everything the colonists had done to help expand Britain’s empire.

The Coercive Acts made it clear that London had drawn a line in the sand. If the colonists failed to submit to Parliament’s unlimited authority, it would mean war. Jefferson was defiant. He believed that “no other Legislature” save the House of Burgesses “may rightfully exercise authority over” the inhabitants of Virginia. Any attempt by Parliament to do so would violate the “privileges they [Virginians] hold as the common rights of mankind” to be governed by representatives of their own choosing.
¹⁶

In the crisis brought on by the Coercive Acts, the colonists thought it essential to present a united American front and to determine their response collectively. They opted to meet in a national congress in Philadelphia in September 1774 to settle on a course of action. Jefferson fell ill en route to the August meeting of the Virginia assembly that was to select the members of its
delegation to the congress. One scholar labeled it “a typical act of avoidance” on the part of Jefferson.
¹⁷
But it is more likely that he was felled by another stress-induced malady—one brought on not from fear of having to attend the Continental Congress but from anxiety that he would not be chosen as one of the province’s congressmen.

Indeed, Jefferson so badly wished to attend the Congress that he drafted a set of instructions for Virginia’s delegation, in the hope of improving his chances of being chosen. His composition was a lengthy treatise on imperial constitutional matters and the transgressions of both Parliament and the king. It was filled with daring assertions, which demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that by the summer of 1774, some nine months before the outbreak of war, Jefferson was far more radical than most Americans. He couched what he wrote as a legal treatise that showed the way toward reconciliation, but the tenor of his composition suggests that he had already reached a point in his thinking where he saw American independence as preferable to any likely imperial relationship. Jefferson did not advocate independence—to have done so would have been impolitic—but his argument constituted a bridge between the common threads of radical thought prior to the Coercive Acts and the unrestrained radicalism of Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense
that lay eighteen months down the road.

Since the beginning of imperial troubles, colonial protestors had maintained that Parliament had no right to tax the colonists. Henry had said so in his flaming speech in 1765, the House of Burgesses had taken that position in its resolutions attacking the Stamp Act, and nearly every colony had followed suit. In
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
, the most popular pamphlet on imperial troubles published in America before 1776, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania had taken a similar line. But while Dickinson had disputed Parliament’s right to tax the colonists, he argued that it must have the right to regulate American trade for “the common good of all.”
¹⁸
Acknowledging Parliament’s right to control colonial commerce was popular in the merchant-dominated northern colonies, but Jefferson had taken a different stance. He urged Virginia’s delegates to Congress to declare that every piece of American legislation passed by Parliament was “void.” Parliament, he said, “has no right to exercise authority over us.”

More than a few American insurgents would have agreed with Jefferson, but to this point, none had charged that the monarch was complicit in Britain’s allegedly iniquitous designs on America. Jefferson not only eschewed the customarily servile language the colonists used when writing of the monarch, but he also fumed at the king’s having strayed beyond his legitimate executive role to cooperate with Parliament in its “many unwarrantable incroachments
and usurpations,” especially its “wanton exercise of … power” in sending troops to the colonies in peacetime and in negating colonial legislation. He excoriated George III for having responded indifferently to the colonists’ petitions for redress and for his heedlessness of American interests, including his refusal to permit the colonists to migrate across the Appalachians. The monarch’s behavior, Jefferson wrote, threatened to stake out his reputation as “a blot in the page of history.”

In what remained of his instructions, Jefferson proceeded from the radical to the bizarre. In a labyrinthine and utterly fictitious version of English history and law—one that historian Joseph Ellis characterized as “cartoonlike”—he denied the Crown’s authority to dispose of land and even maintained that those who had migrated from England to America had left the jurisdiction of the mother country.
¹⁹
He sounded like a man who was desperate to stake a claim to be included in Virginia’s delegation.

Jefferson’s attempt failed. For one thing, nearly everything he had written was too extreme for his colleagues. Jefferson subsequently said that he had taken “our true ground,” but Virginia’s assemblymen understood that his views were far in advance of those of most Americans in 1774. Solidarity with the northern colonies was imperative. Only a united stand might make the imperial government back down short of war, and only a union of all the colonies could successfully implement a national boycott of British trade or effectively wage war, if it came to that. Jefferson was not chosen for still another reason. The assembly selected a star-studded seven-member delegation to send to Philadelphia. It included Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and George Washington, together with other worthies, including the Speaker of the House and a former attorney general. Jefferson had simply not done enough by this juncture to be thought the equal of the luminaries who were chosen. The delegates were instructed to agree to an embargo of British trade and to warn London that its enforcement of the tax on tea and the Coercive Acts would invite American reprisals.
²⁰

Nevertheless, Jefferson’s impassioned scribbling was not wasted. Without his knowledge, friends in the assembly published his essay as a pamphlet, giving it a less-than-catchy title:
A Summary View of the Rights of British America
. It did not appear until near the end of the year, but in politics, timing is often everything. It was Jefferson’s good fortune that by the time his treatise began to be widely read, in the spring of 1775, war with Great Britain had begun, making a wide swath of the public receptive to his condemnation of Parliament and the king. That his literary skills were a cut above the norm also attracted attention. Articulate Americans familiar with the scores of pamphlets already published on the imperial troubles were accustomed to
turgid, legalistic jargon. Jefferson’s writing was muscular, crisp, and lucid. For example, in discussing the limits of Britain’s authority over the colonies, John Adams, in a pamphlet that appeared nearly simultaneously, wrote: “This
statum Walliae
, as well as the whole case and history of that principality, is well worthy of the attention and study of Americans…. ‘
Nos itaque
,’ says King Ed. I.” That was followed by an eighty-nine-word paragraph entirely in Latin. Here is how Jefferson said the same thing: “Can any one reason be assigned why 160,000 electors in the island of Great Britain should give law to four millions in the states of America, every individual of whom is equal to every individual of them in virtue, in understanding, and in bodily strength?”
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Jefferson added: “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions … pursued unalterably thro’ every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” And: “The god who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”
²²
A Summary View
brought Jefferson a deserved reputation as a superior writer and thinker. It also led his most radical brethren in the northern colonies to see him as a soul mate.

Alexander Hamilton published his thoughts on the imperial crisis at nearly the same moment that Jefferson’s
Summary View
appeared. Hamilton’s knowledge of the Anglo-American dispute must have been limited before he took up residence in Manhattan, but he was a fast learner. He was also a keenly ambitious young man who had come to North America to make his mark, and when imperial tensions grew in 1774, Hamilton had to see opportunities for his ascension. There can be no doubt that he also understood that he and his world stood on the brink of a great historic moment.

Hamilton seized it. He hurriedly defended the Boston Tea Party in a short essay for a New York newspaper. After word of the Coercive Acts reached America the following spring, Hamilton, still a collegian, spoke at a mass meeting near the King’s College campus. He advocated a national congress and a boycott of British trade. In November 1774 the colonists learned that the Continental Congress had defied Parliament’s claim of unlimited authority. In fact, it had agreed to boycott British trade, demanded the repeal of all objectionable parliamentary legislation, and urged each colony to ready its militia for the possibility of war. As its aggressive actions appeared to make war inevitable, a number of the most conservative colonists wrote pamphlets denouncing Congress. Likely recalling the benefits he had derived from his essay on the Caribbean hurricane two years earlier, Hamilton answered one
of the Tory pamphleteers, Samuel Seabury, an Anglican clergyman who had written under the pseudonym “A. W. Farmer.” Hamilton’s plangent rejoinder,
A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress
, appeared on December 15, 1774. Seabury answered with another pamphlet, prompting Hamilton, who had just celebrated his twentieth birthday, to dash off an eighty-page retort titled
The Farmer Refuted
. It was published in late February 1775.