Enter, Stage Left
250 years ago this week, Thomas Jefferson made his debut as a revolutionary
This is an installment of “Sestercenntenial Moments,” marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its memory in our national life. For more on the background of the series, see here.
Reading about the American Revolution, which I do periodically as a student of the period, is like watching history unfold in slow motion. In part, that’s because communication moved a lot slower then than it does now—it took ships traveling the Atlantic weeks to carry news, and days to make what is now a two-hour trip between New York and Philadelphia (assuming you don’t convey news instantaneously by text or email). But it’s also because humans need time to absorb significant information. When I first drafted these words in early July 2024, it had been 11 days since President Joe Biden gave what is widely recognized to have been a disastrous performance at a presidential debate, and we still didn’t know what that was going to mean. Of course, time can also change what we understand what it means for something to be meaningful. Years from now, there will surely be those who say, “But was Biden’s performance really that disastrous?” Or: “The meaning of the debate was effectively irrelevant because the outcome had long since been determined by this other thing that few people were paying attention to at the time.” So it is that the past keeps changing.
One of the things you quickly realize when you try to understand what was happening in British North America this week 250 years ago is that politically-minded people—then, as now, a minority of the population—were still processing something that had happened eight months earlier: what we now know as the Boston Tea Party (a term that wasn’t used to describe it until a half-century later; at the time it was known as “the destruction of the tea”). On December 16, 1773, a group of radicals dressed up as Mohawk Indians committed a spectacular act of … vandalism? Justified protest? Misguided comedy? You could get takers for these or other reactions up and down the In Atlantic seaboard in the months that followed.
News of what happened in Boston reached London in early January. King George III issued the first of what came to be known as the Coercive or Intolerable (depending on which side you were on) in late January. The news reached Boston in early April. It drifted south, along with other new laws coercive laws (like replacing local officials with imperial ones) in May and June. Amid the range of reactions from New York to Charleston, there was substantial, if incomplete, consensus: whether or not what the “Mohawks” did was wrong, the British government’s response was an overreaction that did much more harm than good and posed a danger to sober Virginia no less than hot-headed Massachusetts.
But even if there was colonial unanimity on that point, the question remained what they should do about it. Return to the previously successful strategy of banning the import of British goods? Ratchet it up with an export ban, too? (Would there be enough political will to do either?) Pay back the cost of the tea while asking London for concessions in kind?
The strategy that the individual colonies, in communication with each other, finally settled on what was considered a moderate one: to call for a meeting we know now as the First Continental Congress to confer and make a series of resolutions (demands?) in an effort to resolve a now-decade-old conflict. Each colony came up with a process by which delegates would be named for this meeting—which was, strictly speaking, illegal—in Philadelphia that September. So that’s what July was about in 1774.
One of the people who would not be sent to that meeting from the great colony of Virginia was Thomas Jefferson. That’s because he wasn’t prominent enough. To be sure, Jefferson was a young man in a hurry, and on the rise. He was born into a middling planter family in 1743 but had distinguished himself as a student at the College of William and Mary, and made a living as a middling lawyer. But like the older George Washington—who did attend that First Continental Congress—Jefferson married well. He got richer still when his father-in-law died, leaving him enough money to give up his law practice (though Jefferson was legendarily bad at managing money). This allowed him to do what gentlemen of leisure had done for thousands of years: practice politics. That’s how he became a member of Virginia’s legislative House of Burgesses in 1769, and an up-and-commer by July of 1774.
But Thomas Jefferson was not exactly a typical politician. He was always more the egghead than the glad-handler, and did not like giving speeches. So during that last week of July, while the wheels for the Congress were being set in motion, Jefferson wrote some notes for what he thought Virginia’s delegates should say when they got there. It was written in haste, and not for publication. But Jefferson’s growing cadre of admirers arranged for it to be published, and so it was that A Summary View of the Rights of British America entered the fray as one of the more prominent discourses in the flood of social media that blanketed the colonies in these years. (Mass literacy and widespread gun ownership: That’s one way to make a revolution.)
There are two things that stand out about A Summary View, then and now. The first is the clarity with which it was written. The second, related point was how frank—even breathtakingly so—Jefferson was in staking out a radical position in the colonial dispute with Britain. While other writers of the period (notably John Adams) adopted legalistic, finely reasoned discourses on the questions of the day, Jefferson described the King of England as “no more than chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed with definite powers to assist in the great engine of government erected for their use.” The rights of the colonists were a matter of “the laws of nature, and not the gift of their chief magistrate.” These were not exactly new ideas—much of their logic derived from the writings of John Locke almost a century earlier—but Jefferson’s unapologetic assertiveness was striking in anticipating the similar tone of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense a year and a half later. (And why Jefferson would have more patience for Paine in the decades that followed than many of his contemporaries would.)
Then and later, there was a kind of Gordian knot quality to Jefferson. Rights did not have to be negotiated or explained: they were self-evident—and had been since the time of the Saxons, whose values and laws were never quite vanquished when William the Conqueror landed in England in 1066. A half-millennia later, the descendants of these free people landed in places like Massachusetts to get away from the “Normans” of London, and if there had been a relationship of convenience between those Saxons and Normans when dealing with Indians and the French, it had to be renegotiated if that relationship was to survive once the latter were out of the way. Then as later, Jefferson’s abstract reasoning was stronger than his sense of history. But part of what made him so exciting was the sense he conveyed that history could be rewritten. The seeds of the Declaration of Independence were clearly sown in A Summary View.
But they had not yet taken root. The Virginia delegates to the First Continental Congress ignored Jefferson’s advice, though they ended up taking a harder line than many (including colonial officials who had condoned the meeting) had hoped. But Jefferson was launched, and riding a wave that would make him a legend—and like all legends, something of a contradiction. We haven’t finished absorbing that.
And that’s the way it seems.