Patriots (52 page)

Next, Jefferson made only slight revisions in seventy-five words that achieved what Samuel Adams and John Adams, the “Pennsylvania Farmer” and the
Boston Gazette
, Thomas Paine and
the writers of a thousand patriot essays had been groping toward:

“That, to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Jefferson passed to his indictment against George III, calling the king “his present majesty” and claiming that George was bent on establishing an absolute tyranny over America. As proof, Jefferson set down more than two dozen examples. For years America had been railing against Parliament, but Jefferson didn’t mention either House. Although Thomas Paine had attacked the monarchy, many Americans still felt an allegiance to the throne and to the man who occupied it. Jefferson would prove to the world that George was not a fit king. His attack would be specific and personal. He would write nothing to alarm the other crowned heads of Europe.

The first dozen charges retraced the complaints common to most of the colonies: George III had refused to approve essential laws; had convened provincial legislatures at inconvenient sites and then dissolved them; had obstructed the nationalizing of foreigners; had made judges dependent on the crown; had kept standing armies in the colonies without the consent of their legislatures.

Some accusations were better founded than others, but they touched on grievances from every region. Over the last fifteen years Massachusetts had not been the only colony to have its legislature moved. During the rebellious days of the Stamp Act, South Carolina’s assembly had been transferred from Charleston to Beaufort. Virginia, Massachusetts and South Carolina had all had their legislatures dissolved for refusing to rescind or ignore the Massachusetts circular letter. In 1771 North Carolina had passed a law exempting immigrants from all taxes for four years, but London had ruled that the measure might attract farmers from Scotland and damage agricultural production in Britain, and the act was disallowed.

In his next round of charges, Jefferson reminded the world of the cost to the colonies of quartering British troops, which long had been a sore point in New York. He denounced the act that
permitted British appointees charged with crimes in America to be taken to England for trial—“protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states.” Reviewing his first draft, Jefferson remembered the way the Quebec Act had undercut revolutionary zeal in Canada and inserted a reference attacking George III for abolishing the system of English laws in a neighboring province. Occasionally, the logic behind a charge was specious. “He is, at this time, transporting large Armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny,” Jefferson began one of his final accusations. But during the French and Indian War Americans had welcomed those same mercenaries as allies.

Jefferson’s last indictments were also open to debate, although it was undeniable that the king’s appointees had “excited domestic insurrection amongst us.” As Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunsmore had offered freedom to all slaves who would fight for Britain. And the king’s agents were recruiting Indians—Jefferson called them “merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” But George Washington and John Adams, along with other patriots, wanted to win the Indians to America’s cause.

Since his declaration had begun by proclaiming all men equal, Jefferson opened himself to charges of hypocrisy by raising the question of slavery. Now his last accusation against the king was also the strangest: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” He contrasted King George’s professed Christianity with his protection of a market where men could be bought and sold.

Jefferson himself was wholly the product of a slave society, and until he was nine years old blacks around him outnumbered whites by at least ten to one. As he drafted his statement,
one third of Virginia’s population of 400,000 were slaves. His father’s will had bequeathed slaves to him, and when his wife’s father died, some eighteen months after the wedding, Jefferson had inherited another 135 blacks. Included in that number was Elizabeth Hemings, whose mother had been African and whose father an English sea captain passing through Williamsburg. Jefferson’s
father-in-law had taken Elizabeth as his mistress after his wife died, and she bore him six children, all of them light-skinned. Virginians called them “bright mulattos.” One of Martha Jefferson’s unacknowledged half sisters was a girl called Sally, who promised to be as beautiful as her mother.

Jefferson’s first legislation when he entered the Burgesses had been aimed at making it easier to free individual slaves. A slaveowner in North Carolina and Georgia could simply release a slave. Virginia law required that a slave be set free only for “meritorious service.” Jefferson asked a relative, Richard Bland, to introduce a motion to give Virginians an unrestricted right to release their slaves, and Jefferson seconded the motion. But outrage swept through the House, Bland was denounced as an enemy of his county, and the bill was defeated.

Over the years, Jefferson had gone on deploring slavery and profiting from his slaves. He did not permit them to be whipped. But he advertised for a runaway he considered drunken and insolent and, after he got him back, sold him for a hundred pounds. Six years before he began drafting this declaration, Jefferson had argued as a lawyer for the freedom of a slave who claimed to have a white grandmother. In Virginia, with its gradations among mulattos, color counted less than the status of the mother. If she was free, her children were also free. Jefferson had argued then that under the law of nature all men were born free and that everyone came into the world with a right to his own person. The judge had interrupted his argument and held for the slave’s owner.

His years of conflict now broke out across the page as Jefferson tried to blame Britain’s king for what he considered an infamous practice among Americans. George III had “prostituted” his authority to keep alive the “execrable commerce” of slavery. Now the king was compounding this “assemblage of horrors” by inciting America’s slaves “to purchase that liberty of which he deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the
liberties
of the people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the
lives
of another.”

Nothing had weighed heavier on Jefferson’s conscience than being an accessory to the slave trade, and he hoped that the Congress would endorse his view of slavery. When John Adams read the draft, he objected privately to calling George III a tyrant, but
he didn’t protest because he assumed that the Congress would modify the phrase. Adams considered Jefferson’s denunciations of slavery among the best parts of the declaration. Benjamin Franklin also read the draft before it went to the Congress and made only slight changes. Thomas Jefferson then wrote out a fair copy, and it was laid before the Congress on June 28, 1776.

—

On the first of July, with Jefferson’s statement ready, delegates again took up Richard Henry Lee’s resolution that the American states declare themselves independent.

Members from each faction rose and repeated their familiar positions. Some had labored long over their imagery. A Scottish preacher, Dr. John Witherspoon of New Jersey, said that the country was not only ripe for independence but in danger of becoming rotten for lack of it. John Dickinson had prepared one last protest. He argued that independence should be held up until the states were confederated, until the boundaries of the new nation had been fixed, until a pact could be reached with France. When he finished, John Adams waited for someone less partisan and less personally repugnant to Dickinson to answer him. When no one did, Adams rose once more.

He started humbly. For once in his life, Adams said, he wished he were as eloquent as the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, because he was sure that none of them had ever faced a question of more importance to his country and to the world. Speaking without notes, Adams went through his usual arguments. Then new delegates arrived and asked to hear what they had missed. Adams was urged to begin over. He protested that he felt like an actor or a gladiator brought out to entertain an audience, but he reviewed his position still another time.

At last even the latecomers were satisfied. With the Congress sitting as the committee of the whole, a vote was called. Nine of the thirteen colonies endorsed independence, but with the understanding that the final vote should come on the next day, the second of July. Before the session adjourned, however, a dispatch from General Washington arrived, which reported that the British seemed prepared to attack the American positions in New York. That alarm swayed the voters John Adams had not reached. The next day, South Carolina swung behind the resolution, along with
Delaware’s delegates. John Dickinson and an ally stayed away from the hall so that Pennsylvania could also vote for independence. New York’s delegation had not received authority to vote, but, with one exception, her delegates favored Lee’s resolution.

On July 2, 1776, with no dissenting votes, the Congress at Philadelphia voted that the American colonies were henceforth free and independent states.

John Adams had never hesitated to remind his colleagues that their choice was momentous, perhaps the greatest decision that had ever faced mankind. The next evening he wrote home in triumph to Abigail Adams that the second day of July 1776 would “be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.” Adams knew how the day should be marked:
“It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

—

Once again, John Adams was a little ahead of his countrymen. There was still Thomas Jefferson’s declaration to approve. For three days, even before Lee’s resolution was adopted, Jefferson had been mortified as delegates from South Carolina and Georgia tried to expunge his lines about slavery and leave that charge against the king bland and color blind—“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” The Southern colonies were joined by Northern delegates, and Jefferson observed that although Northerners might not have many slaves, their merchants had profited from shipping them.

The Congress struck down another paragraph that held great sentiment for Jefferson. He had wanted to express something of the loss Americans felt as they turned their faces away from their homeland. Because their brethren in Britain, Jefferson had written, were indifferent to the agonies the Americans were suffering, “we must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, and in peace friends.” The Congress deleted the “love,” retained the threat and went on to cut out the rest of Jefferson’s wistful farewell:

“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!” Jefferson may have found the anguish of that ending too naked—or too Gallic—for in his final draft he had changed it to “our eternal separation.”

Each cut in his prose was a mutilation for Jefferson. Sitting nearby, Benjamin Franklin observed his distress. Franklin’s nature was at least as full-blooded as Jefferson’s, but he was more than twice Jefferson’s age. Over the years, he had imposed prudence and patience on himself and commended those virtues to readers of his popular
Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Now he offered what consolation he could. He told Jefferson that he made it a rule not to draft any paper that had to be reviewed by a public body. He had learned his lesson from this incident:

When Franklin was a journeyman printer, one of his companions was an aspiring hatter who had served his apprenticeship and was about to open his own shop. He wanted a splendid sign for it with a proper inscription, and he wrote out: “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money.” Below that he wanted a drawing of a hat. Before he had his sign painted, Thompson took his proposal to his friends for their suggestions.

The first man pointed out the redundancy of the word “Hatter,” since it would be followed by the words “makes hats.” Thompson struck it out.

Another friend said the word “makes” could be omitted since his customers wouldn’t care who actually made the hats; if they were any good, they would buy them. Thompson took that out, too.

A third friend said that since it was not customary to sell on credit, the words “for ready money” were useless. By now the proposed sign read, “John Thompson sells hats.”

“
Sells
hats?” said his next friend. “Nobody will expect you to give them away. What is the use of that word?” Thompson struck it out, and then he took out the “hats,” since there was already a hat painted on the board. So his inscription ended up “John Thompson,” with the drawing of a hat beneath it.

Franklin may have invented the story and very likely wasn’t telling it for the first time, but Jefferson remembered for the rest of his life the genial attempt to ease his irritation.