Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (65 page)

A
CALLER
AT
M
ONTICEL
LO
VTM,
8.

“
COPIOUS
AND
WE
LL
-
CHOSEN
”
IbID.

“A
S
ALL
V
IR
GINIANS
”
IbiD., 9.

C
ARR
DIED
O
F
A
“
BILIOUS
FEVER
”
MB,
I, 340.

SKETCHING
OUT
HIS
PLANS
TDLTJ,
47.

J
OHN
W
AY
LES
DIED
MB,
I, 329.

TO
MOVE
E
L
IZABETH
H
EMINGS
Gordon-Reed,
Hemingses of MonticellO,
92.

T
H
E
H
EMINGS
FAMILY
See, for instance, ibid.; Lucia Stanton,
Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello
(Charlottesville, Va., 2000); and TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/hemings-family (accessed 2012).

SIX
·
LIKE A SHOCK OF ELECTRICITY

“
T
HE
A
MERICANS
HAV
E
MADE
A
DISCOVERY
”
“Speech on Townshend Duties, 19 April 1769,”
The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke,
II, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford, 1980), 231. See also Virginia History, Government, and Geography Service,
Road to Independence: Virginia 1763–1783
(Memphis, Tenn., 2010), 33.

“
T
HINGS
SEEM
TO
BE
HURRYING
”
PTJ,
I, 111.

THE
EARLY
AFTERNOON
HOURS
Ibid., 104. Writing from Williamsburg, John Blair told Jefferson that there had been “a very moderate trembling of the earth [in Williamsburg], so moderate that not many perceived it, but Dr. Gilmer informs me it was a pretty smart shock with you.” (IBID.)

REPUTEDLY
MEN
TALLY
DISABLED
SISTE
R
Brodie,
Thomas Jefferson,
48, 71.

A
SPRINGTIME
SN
OWSTORM
GB,
55.

KILLED
“
ALM
OST
EVERYTHING
”
IBId.

“T
HIS
FROST
WAS
GENERAL
”
IBID.

A
SECOND
DAUGHTER
ON
S
UNDAY
MB,
I, 372.

S
HE
H
AD
BEEN
PREGNANT
For accounts of the toll of childbirth on women in these years, see Catherine M. Scholten, “ ‘On the Importance of the Obstetrick Art': Changing Customs of Childbirth in America, 1760 to 1825,”
William and Mary Quarterly,
3d ser., 34, no. 3 (July 1977): 426–45, and
Childbearing in American Society: 1650–1850
(New York, 1985), 42–49; Mary Beth Norton,
Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1996), 71–84; Judith Walzer Leavitt,
Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750 to 1950
(New York, 1986), 36–63; Marie Jenkins Schwartz,
Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South
(Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 143–86.

THE
PURCHA
SE
OF
“
BREAST
PIPES
”
Scharff,
Women Jefferson Loved,
93. See also
MB,
I, 373.

THE
T
OWNSHEND
A
CTS
Morgan,
Birth of the Republic,
34–35.

THE
B
O
STON
T
EA
P
ARTY
Middlekauff,
Glorious Cause,
231–37.

NONI
MPORTATION
AGREEMENT
S
PTJ,
I, 27–31, is one eXAMpLE.

THE
POSSIBLE
ARR
EST
OF
A
MERICANS
Middlekauff,
Glorious Cause,
219–20. In 1772, New England radicals had burned a British ship on customs duty, the HMS
Gaspee,
after it had run aground in Narragansett Bay. When no one was arrested in the case, London announced a special investigation and said that anyone apprehended in the matter would be tried in England. For the colonists the decree was infuriating and terrifying. Here was a grave imperial threat. (IBID.)

COMMITTEES
OF
CORRESPONDENC
E
Ibid., 221.

HE
ORDERED
A
“
ROBE
”
Imogene E. Brown,
American Aristides,
86.

“O
UR
SALE
OF
SLAV
ES
GOES
”
PTJ,
I, 96.

TO
REBEL
Q
UITE
ANOTHER
Isaac Samuel Harrell,
Loyalism in Virginia: Chapters in the Economic History of the Revolution
(Durham, N.C., 1926), 1. It was not a clear-cut call. “Despite the events of the preceding decade, in 1773 loyalism was the logical state of mind in Virginia; loyalism called for the maintenance of the long established social, religious, and political order,” wrote Harrell. “In religion, in social customs, in personal contact, Virginia, of all the colonies in North America, was most closely akin to the mother country.” (Ibid.) In terms of Virginia's predominant position, Harrell believed the March 1773 session, which was prorogued, to be “the beginning of the end” of royal rule. (Ibid., 30–31.)

Middlekauff,
Glorious Cause,
30–52, offers an intriguing account of the roots of revolution. “Why these Americans engaged in revolution had much to do with the sort of people they were.” (Ibid., 31.) Middlekauff argued that the combination of the Protestant emphasis on the centrality of the individual and the Whig sense of history created the climate for revolution. (Ibid., 30–52.)

For Jefferson, whether it was Crown or Parliament, the consistent theme was usurpation. Even Loyalists were willing to acknowledge London bore some blame; their point was that the constitution could, with effort, be brought back into balance. For example, in June and July 1774, in William Rind's
Virginia Gazette,
Thomson Mason, brother of George, argued that the English constitution was “the wisest system of legislation that ever did, or perhaps ever will, exist.” To Mason, the “monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy [each] possessed of their distinct powers, checked, tempered, and improved each other.… The honor of the monarchy tempered the impetuosity of democracy, the moderation of aristocracy checked the ardent aspiring honor of monarchy, and the virtue of democracy restrained the one, impelled the other, and invigorated both.” (Virginia History, Government, and Geography Service,
Road to Independence,
37.) The problem, Mason said, was that the aristocracy had knocked the system off balance by usurping power through Parliament.

Looking back from the perspective of 1926, Charles M. Andrews also argued that the central motivation came from rivalries between the colonial assemblies and Parliament:

Primarily, the American Revolution was a political and constitutional movement and only secondarily one that was either financial, commercial, or social. At bottom the fundamental issue was the political independence of the colonies, and in the last analysis the conflict lay between the British Parliament and the colonial assemblies, each of which was probably more sensitive, self-conscious, and self-important than was the voting population that it represented. For many years these assemblies had fought the prerogative successfully and would have continued to do so, eventually reducing it to a minimum, as the later self-governing dominions have done; but in the end it was Parliament, whose powers they disputed, that became the great antagonist. (Andrews, “American Revolution,” 230.)

Reflecting on the American Revolution from the perspective of 1790, William Smith, Jr., the New York–born chief justice of Canada, wrote Lord Dorchester:

The truth is that the country had outgrown its government, and wanted the true remedy for more than half a century before the rupture commenced.… To expect wisdom and moderation from near a score of petty Parliaments, consisting in effect of only one of the three necessary branches of a Parliament, must, after the light brought by experience, appear to have been a very extravagant expectation.… An American Assembly, quiet in the weakness of their infancy, could not but discover in their elevation to prosperity, that themselves were the substance, and the governor and Board of Council were shadows in their political frame. All America was thus, at the very outset of the plantations, abandoned to democracy. And it belonged to the Administrations of the days of our fathers to have found the cure, in the erection of a Power upon the continent itself, to control all its own little republics, and create a Partner in the Legislation of the Empire, capable of consulting their own safety and the common welfare. (Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas,
A History of Canada, 1763–1812
[Oxford, 1909], 256.)

Proposals for reconciliation were considered but none really seemed practicable. The most prominent was that of Joseph Galloway. (Middlekauff,
Glorious Cause,
257–58.) And there was John Randolph's, described and reprinted in Mary Beth Norton, “John Randolph's ‘Plan of Accommodations,' ”
William and Mary Quarterly,
3d ser., 28, no. 1 (January 1971): 103–20.

H
IS
COUSIN
J
OHN
R
ANDOLPH
Samuel Willard Crompton, “Randolph, John,” February 2000, American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/01/01–00767.html (accessed 2011). In London, Mary Beth Norton wrote, John Randolph was “one of the most active and respected refugees, playing a major role in each of the three organizations formed by the American exiles. In 1779 he was selected to present to George III a petition on the American war signed by 105 loyalists; a few months later he led a group of loyalists who offered their services to the king in the event of a French invasion of Great Britain; and in 1783 he was named chairman of the committee established by Virginia refugees to review the property claims they intended to submit to the British government.” (Norton, “John Randolph's ‘Plan of Accommodations,' ” 104.) For more on Loyalists and the Revolution, see Wilbur H. Siebert, “The Dispersion of the American Tories” in Wright,
Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution,
249–58; Harrell,
Loyalism in Virginia
; Richard Archer,
As If an Enemy's Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution
(New York, 2010); Thomas B. Allen,
Tories: Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War
(New York, 2010); and Paul H. Smith, “The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organization and Numerical Strength,”
William and Mary Quarterly,
3d ser., 25, no. 2 (April 1968): 259–77.

ABOUT
A
FIF
TH
OF
WHITE
A
MERICAN
COLONISTS
Gordon S. Wood,
American Revolution
, 113. The usual figure for the number of Loyalists in America during the Revolution is a third, but recent scholarship based on militia recruitment puts the estimate at closer to a fifth. Sixty to eighty thousand Loyalists left America during the war. (Ibid.) I am indebted to Wood for insights on this pOInT.

“N
ON
SOL
UM
NOBIS
”
MB,
I, 37.

F
OR
THE
EL
ITE
,
REVOLUTION
WAS
Michael A. McDonnell,
The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007), 1–15, delineates the tensions that divided Virginians by class before and during the war. “The way patriot leaders organized for war and reacted to the demands of those they expected to fight it depicts a conservative, anxious, sometimes fearful group clinging to traditional notions of hierarchy, deference, and public virtue in an attempt to maintain its privileged position within an increasingly challenged and challenging social and political culture,” McDonnell wrote. (Ibid., 6.)