Madison and Jefferson (9 page)

As it turned out, Jefferson’s concern was unwarranted. His narrow reelection to Congress was strictly a response to his protest to Pendleton that he needed to be with his sickly wife, Patty. This was the rationale Lee had used. But Jefferson was not making excuses: tormented letters to Lee and to John Page, and Patty Jefferson’s subsequent medical history, are ample evidence that Jefferson was not scheming to return to Williamsburg. What his correspondence does show, though, is strong concern for his reputation as a statesman and a pronounced suspicion that secret enemies were out to defeat him, or “assassinate” his character.
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Hidden angst and sensitivity to personal honor induced Jefferson to take sharp aim at Great Britain in his highly polemical Declaration of Independence. As he and his colleagues had to build a common case on a series of justifications, Jefferson appealed to the “candid world” whose
attention—and financial and military support—the Continental Congress wished to attract. The “candid world” encompassed Britain’s colonial competitors France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic, plus potential benefactors Prussia and Russia. America wanted to be counted “among the Powers of the earth,” to quote from the preamble.

Jefferson of Virginia was doing more than cribbing from Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, of course, just as he was expressing more than the collective reasoning of Congress.
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The animated tone of his Declaration meant that it could be read theatrically. Governments are not changed for “light and transient causes,” he says, then segues to a more sentimental form of persuasion by making pain personal and justice nonnegotiable: “All experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable … But when a long train of abuses and usurpations … evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism …” Even the sound of his “long train” of words is seductive.

Jefferson knew when to raise the pitch for effect. First, he indicted King George III for having “refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” The ensuing verbs increased the severity of the king’s alleged crimes: “He has dissolved”; “He has combined with others”; “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns”; “He has constrained our fellow citizens.” “He has”—and here Jefferson associated the tyrant king’s official appointments with a predatory, wasting disease—“sent hither swarms of new officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” Jefferson’s voice varied subtly across the page: determined, reproachful, confrontational, and at all times principled.

The author of the Declaration did not always get his way. Congress edited out what was possibly Jefferson’s most theatrical line of all, his protest of the king’s “unfeeling” act in sending mercenary armies to invade America: “These facts,” wrote Jefferson most vividly, “have given the last stab to agonizing affection.” What could be more unbearable, more unspeakable, than for those who profess to love their fellow countrymen to hire foreigners to commit wanton acts of violence against them? Jefferson presents his conclusion almost as though it had come to him as an epiphany: “Manly spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren.” And then his resolve: “We must endeavor to forget our former love for them.” It is, indeed, great theater.
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But Patrick Henry could provide theater; Jefferson had to do more. And so he carefully constructed a legal brief, justifying the causes for separation. Both British royalists and American patriots habitually referred to the
king as a father figure, but Jefferson consciously avoided this metaphor. The text of the Declaration mentions the “present king of Great Britain” once, the “
Christian
king of Great Britain” once, elsewhere dismissing him as a mere “prince” or “chief magistrate.” By stripping the king of his royal aura, Jefferson enumerated his crimes as though the “He” that is the subject of the list of crimes was an unexceptional individual, an ordinary political official. If Jefferson did not ritually “kill” the king in his prose, he certainly demoted him. This flawed official, having committed “injuries and usurpations,” warranted public censure and justified an act of permanent separation by his colonies.

Jefferson’s organizing metaphor was not paternal and filial but marital. His choice of words suggested the breakup of a husband and wife, not a father and child. In the opening paragraph, he announced that a disconnection was occurring between two equal parties: “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another.” Echoing language usually applied by jurists and philosophers to regulate (and minimize) divorce, Jefferson asserted that governments (like marriage) should not be changed for “light & transient causes.” When he described the “patient sufferance of the colonies,” he was invoking the image of the long-suffering wife, so often described in the literature of his generation as one “born to suffer and obey.”
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As Jefferson’s argument progressed, allusions to the king as a bad husband became clearer. One passage describing the king’s character called him a prince “unfit to be the ruler,” who, in the “short compass of twelve years,” dominated in a union (read: a twelve-year marriage) marked by cruelty and misadventure. In “future ages,” few would believe the “hardiness of one man adventured”—that is, how one man could have been so greedy and rapacious as to commit the “long train of abuses” to which Americans have reacted with understandable outrage. The abusive husband George III was a reckless, and therefore unfit, head of the British household; as an unresponsive spouse, he answered “repeated petitions” with “repeated injuries.”

Jefferson wished to make the king’s crimes personally felt, so the marriage analogy made perfect sense. The legal bonds that America needed to sever were the bonds of affection, evoked in the Declaration’s highly emotive line: “we must endeavor to forget our former love.” The marital union collapsed, Jefferson concluded, when the king dispatched to America “disturbers of our harmony”—the military equivalent of a home wrecker—heartless soldiers and “foreign mercenaries” who “invade and destroy us.” In 1776 the word
mercenary
stood for acts of rape and pillage committed by
the “unfeeling.” It was the large number of Hessians hired by the British government to fight in America that provoked this strong reaction.

In line with the stereotype of the cold-blooded mercenary, newspapers that year were to report with pathos the story of a Pennsylvania farmer who surprised a Hessian officer in the act of raping his daughter; he killed the mercenary “in an agony of rage and resentment,” only to be killed in turn by a comrade of the offending officer. In labeling the king’s appendages “unfeeling,” Jefferson was accusing George III of condoning rape and violating the most sacred trust of marriage and family honor.
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Influenced by John Locke’s concept of the social contract, Jefferson naturally understood that marriage was the first social compact formed in the state of nature, the act that created civil society. Marriage was a voluntary agreement based on consent, whereas absolute monarchy predicated its rule on a combination of descent and brute power. In “constituting … government,” Jefferson wrote, the American colonies had, sometime past, “adopted one common king.” Having done so voluntarily, they could therefore discard the monarchy voluntarily too. Having “abdicated government” in America, “declaring us out of his allegiance & protection,” the king could be divorced, just as a husband who ceased caring for his wife could. Here Jefferson drew on one of the Jewish justifications of divorce, the act of repudiation, in which the husband ends the marriage by putting his wife outside his house.
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As a practicing attorney, Jefferson was well versed in the arguments for and against divorce. In 1772 he prepared a detailed series of notes for a client who intended to divorce his wife, notes that bear a marked resemblance to Jefferson’s world-famous manifesto of 1776. Jotting down his thoughts in two columns, he listed reasons in favor of divorce on one side, and reasons opposed to divorce on the other. His first entry in favor cites the Scottish philosopher David Hume: “Cruel to continue by violence a union made at first by mutual love, but now dissolved by hatred.” It is a perfect rendering of his logic in the Declaration. His additional notes in defense of the divorce principle include “Liberty of affection” as a “natural right” and “happiness” as the reason why marriage exists at all. This might help explain, as many over the years have wondered, why Jefferson revised Locke’s triad, “life, liberty, and property,” by substituting “happiness” for “property.” Happiness conjured feelings of “tranquil permanent felicity,” another of Jefferson’s fine-sounding phrases, which was as integral to his deeply sentimental view of marriage as to his idyllic mountaintop home.
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In listing the arguments against divorce, he observed that “frivolous
quarrels” must be avoided—this accords with his reference in the Declaration to “light and transient causes.” He quoted the eighteenth-century French political philosopher Montesquieu in contending that it was “cruel to confine divorce or repudiation to the husband” without granting the wife the same power. Divorce thus “restores to women their natural right of equality.” This is what is conveyed in the opening lines of the Declaration, as America, depicted in Revolution-era cartoons as a passive female, dissolved its “political bands” by necessity, in order to “assume among the powers of the earth a separate & equal station.” It was the law of nature and of nature’s god.
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Reconciliation, like separation, had marital overtones. Politicized people were painfully aware of what it meant when the king repudiated his colonies in an October 1775 speech before Parliament, openly rejecting the colonists’ professions of loyalty and affection. He considered these assurances as mere subterfuge. Even so, in the early months of 1776, rumors circulated that the king’s ministers were coming up with a plan of reconciliation, and moderate members of the Continental Congress clung to the hope that commissioners would be sent to negotiate favorable terms of reunion.
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In March 1776 a particularly lurid piece in the
Virginia Gazette
argued passionately against the possibility of “reconciliation and reunion with your butchers.” The writer was echoing Thomas Paine’s wildly popular pamphlet
Common Sense
, just published in January. Paine had declared that the only feelings American hearts should harbor toward the British were those of pride and contempt. Whoever could “shake the hands” of “murderers” was no longer worthy of “the name of husband, father, friend, or love,” possessing instead the “heart of a coward and the spirit of the sycophant.”
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Language gives enormous clues to one’s emotional state; it is true for communities as well as individuals. In the Revolutionary lexicon, “manly spirit” (which in the Declaration commanded Americans “to renounce forever” their “unfeeling brethren”) went hand in hand with honorable behavior, a code first defined by face-to-face gentlemanly contact. Yet on New Year’s Day 1776 the
Virginia Gazette
made clear that Great Britain had abandoned the key components of honor: courage, candor, and generosity. Enlisting understood social inferiors (slaves, Indians, and Canadian Catholics) to fight in America was, according to the newspaper, a “base and inhuman stratagem.” William Bradford had early protested Britain’s “so slavish a way of Conquering,” and Jefferson’s Declaration weighed in here too: the king’s
deadly accomplices were savages and mercenaries. By the standards of civilized behavior, George III had unmanned himself. In Jefferson’s words, he had turned a “deaf” ear and waged a “cruel” war.
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In divorcing their king, Americans had to replace their shadow state governments with legitimate assemblies and new state constitutions. They could now proceed to make alliances with other nations on equal terms. As the stand-in for a king who had abandoned his people, the Continental Congress symbolized a new voluntary covenant, which meant that
the Declaration of Independence was simultaneously a public disavowal and a new exchange of vows. When the signatories of the Declaration agreed to “pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” they brought a formal end to the “unfeeling” union by declaring an oath to a new, “feeling” one.
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Virginia was on Jefferson’s mind as much as the “united States of America” when he composed the Declaration of Independence.
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The most outstanding proof is his awkward-sounding section on slavery. In describing the slave trade as “piratical warfare” engineered by George III, he was quoting from a letter Pendleton had written to him seven months earlier concerning Dunmore’s so-called slave scheme. More to the point, in damning George III for the insidious crime of perpetuating the slave trade (asking how “the Christian king of Great Britain” could have “determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold”), Jefferson was principally condemning Lord Dunmore. The king stood as proxy for Virginia’s last royal governor, who continued to represent the most immediate threat to Virginia’s political integrity.

According to Jefferson’s rendering of the slave trade, the British kidnapped men from Africa and brought them to America; at this late date they had opted to recruit them for their own convenient, ad hoc use. “He”—the king, Jefferson writes, but he means Dunmore—“is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which
he
has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom
he
also obtruded them [“obtrude” meant “to insert by force”]: thus paying off former crimes committed against the
liberties
of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the
lives
of another.” This was to turn justice on its head.

The Declaration of Independence had to have unanimous support to be effective, and the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia refused to accept any antislavery language in its text. Thus, Congress took Jefferson’s carefully wrought protest against an “execrable commerce” in slaves and deleted it in its entirety.