jefferson's first declaration of independence: a summary view of the rights of british america...

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Jefferson's First Declaration ofIndependence: A Summary View ofthe Rights of British America RevisitedStephen Howard BrownePublished online: 12 Dec 2010.

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Quarterly Journal of SpeechVol. 89, No. 3, August 2003, pp. 235–252

Jefferson’s First Declaration of Independence:A Summary View of the Rights of British America Revisited

Stephen Howard Browne

This essay examines Jefferson’s Summary View of the Rights of British America as evidence of his craft

as a storyteller. Specifically, I argue that Jefferson deploys a series of narrative renderings, the rhetorical effect of which

is to eliminate the possibility of any genuine reconciliation with the English government. On the basis of this

interpretation I conclude that the Summary View represents Jefferson’s first declaration of independence. Key

words: Thomas Jefferson, narrative, American independence

LATE in the spring of 1774 a small group of Virginians gathered themselves in thelibrary of the Burgesses council chamber. There Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry,

Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, and several others undertook to “cook up,” inJefferson’s words, a “Resolution Designating a Day of Fasting and Prayer.” Anxious lestthe senior leadership fail to assert itself in light of the recent Boston Port Act and othercoercive measures, the young reformers conspired to seize the initiative, convinced,Jefferson later recalled, “of the necessity of arousing our people from the lethargy intowhich they had fallen as to passing events,” and “that the appointment of a day ofgeneral fasting and prayer would be most likely to call up and alarm their attention.”Lacking experience in such matters, they pulled from the shelf John Rushworth’sHistorical Collections, a massive compendium of seventeenth-century political tracts andcommentary. The result was a brief but pointed appeal to “divine Interposition foraverting the heavy Calamity, which threatens Destruction to our civil Rights, and theEvils of civil War; to give us one Heart and one Mind firmly to oppose, by all just andproper Means, every Injury to American Rights, and that the Minds of his Majesty andParliament may be inspired from above with Wisdom, Moderation, and Justice, toremove from the loyal People of America all Cause of Danger from a continued Pursuitof Measures pregnant with their Ruin.”1

Ensuing events soon crowded out this relatively minor episode in Jefferson’s earlypolitical career, but it remains telling on several counts. Note the stunning array ofrhetorical talent assembled: Patrick Henry, who, George Mason observed, was “by farthe most powerful speaker I ever heard. Every word he says not only engages butcommands the attention; and your passions are no longer your own when he addressesthem.” Richard Henry Lee was to move before the Continental Congress “That theseUnited Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that theyare absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connectionbetween them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”Here, too, was George Mason, a tireless reformer whose draft of the Virginia Decla-ration of Rights was to fund so much of Jefferson’s most famous effort. Finally, Jeffersonwho, although no orator, was fast laying claim to possessing the sharpest pen of themall. Note, too, the urgent need to go public and stage a ritual act of collective protest.Finally, there is the turn to Rushworth’s volume, to history, as if from its boundlessdetail may be found coherence, authority, form—those resources which might giveassurance to a contingent present and unknown future.2

The publication several months later of Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British

Copyright 2003, National Communication AssociationDOI:10:80/0033563032000125331

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QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 2003

America provides ample evidence of his craft and the sensibility giving that craft shapeand effect. The text may thus be read as a site of symbolic action, the chief characteristicof which is its subtle imbrication of historical myth and political critique; these in turnare so fused as to constitute a rationale for independence. There is every reason, then,to attend closely to its words, its imagery, appeals, and prose rhythms. By doing so weglimpse an aspect of Jefferson and his craft seldom acknowledged: for all the emphasisplaced on his theoretical contributions to republicanism, constitutionalism, and naturalrights, Jefferson was an accomplished teller of stories. So prominent a trait is this in theSummary View, I hope to demonstrate, that one makes sense of the text’s arguments onlyif that is taken into account. Accordingly, I suggest in the following that the pamphletmay be read as it tells a series of stories—of the myth of Saxon freedom; of theAmerican migration; of Parliamentary corruption; and of violations by the Crown.Together, these narratives plot a sustained conflict between freedom and tyranny, therhetorical function of which is to leave the colonies with no choice but to embrace theformer by resisting the latter.The Summary View thus has much to tell us about the specific rendering of Jefferson’s

vision at the time of its appearance and about the play of his imagination generally.Specifically, I propose in the following analysis to treat the Summary View as a unifiedstatement on the history and prospects of colonial freedom, the rhetorical function ofwhich is to remove from the path of American progress those two forces—Crown andParliament—which had conspired to obstruct colonial destiny. This statement in turn isorganized and given effect through four narratives—stories about the origin, develop-ment, and prospects of the American colonies. Together, these stories cohere into acompelling rationale for severing, once and for all, the ties that heretofore bound onepeople with another.

Saxon Mythology and the Quest for a Rational Past

So entrenched is our sense of Jefferson as the exemplar of American Enlightenmentthought that it remains difficult to grasp his relationship to the past. It was, to say theleast, a complicated relationship, shaped on the one hand by his resolute faith in thepromise of reason to liberate humans from the shackles of history, on the other by animagination deeply impressed with the drama of ages past. The philosopher of natureand natural law looked to seize the liberating energies of reason, thus to harness it tothe ends of enlightened government and the full realization of human potential. Indeed,writes Merrill Peterson, Jefferson’s “whole tendency was to combat the chaos ofexperience and submit it to the dictates of reason which, of course, he identified withthe laws of nature.” Jefferson accordingly was “an authentic spokesman of this hope ofthe Enlightenment, this vindication of human nature against the past, which seemed tobe the peculiar mission of America.” At the same time, Jefferson could seldom resist theappeals of history and was enthralled with the bounty it offered up as a resource forscientific speculation, education, and political argument. Thus, H. Trevor Colbournfinds in the Summary View “the first graphic illustration of the political use Jefferson madeof his careful reading of the past, and specifically the past of his English forefathers.”3

There is no genuine need to insist on one or the other of these orientations; Jeffersonwas nothing if not intellectually opportunistic, and few were as agile in selecting fromthe storehouse of learning whatever best suited the rhetorical purpose. But some

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QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH BROWNE

advantage may be found in approaching a reading of the Summary View by turning toJefferson himself and asking after his own sense of the past. Perhaps the most tellingsuch illustration comes in a letter written three years before his draft of instructions.Here he responds to a request from his future brother-in-law Robert Skipworth for acatalogue of books. History, Jefferson explains, was to be considered a “moral exercise,”its lessons “too infrequent if confined to real life.” Including within its scope the fictitiousas well the factual, he reasons, the “field of imagination is thus laid open to our use andlessons may be formed to illustrate and carry home to the heart every moral rule of life.”In short, the past mattered to Jefferson. It mattered not as it matters to the antiquarian,nor as it does to the modern academic historian. The past mattered because it could beput to moral purpose. He was less concerned with its intrinsic interest or accuraterecording than its inventive possibilities. History was an available means of persuasion,a well-spring from which the rhetorical craft might draw in the quest for a better future.4

Such an understanding of Jefferson’s orientation to the past, in any case, will helpmake sense of the motives, composition, and implications of the Summary View. Nowhereis it more in evidence that in the first of the author’s four key narratives; these make upthe infrastructure of the text. Jefferson’s invocation of a Saxon myth to ground hisargument is neither lengthy nor deep, but it provides the underpinnings of his case,authorizes his more provocative claims, and lends to his argument the unmistakabledrama of rights won, lost, and demanded again. In order to gain some perspective onthe story Jefferson has to tell, I need briefly to consider the history of that story.Ten years before the Summary View, the unsteady but brilliant Boston lawyer James

Otis directed his formidable intentions against the impending Stamp Act. The Rights ofthe British Colonies, Asserted and Proved, as his pamphlet was titled, protested vehementlyagainst Parliament’s intrusion upon colonial rights, rights which Otis argued were theirsnot only by natural law but enshrined by a history dating to a Saxon golden age. There,in the misty recesses of the British past, Otis espied a people bred to freedom, fiercelyjealous of their rights, and who secured to their heirs the full and inseparable blessingsof liberty. Indeed, Otis wrote of his Saxon forbears, “Liberty was understood, and morefully enjoyed by our ancestors, before the coming in of the first Norman Tyrants thanever after; ‘till it was found necessary, for the salvation of the kingdom, to combat thearbitrary and wicked proceedings of the Stuarts.”5

In appealing to this mythic image of the Saxons Otis was recycling a story known toall literate colonists. Its basic plot looked something like this: centuries before theNorman conquest, a population of Saxons from northern Germany had been invited tosettle among the Britannic peoples. These Saxons, although primitive in some ways,were known to have carried with them a long tradition of liberty, representativegovernment, and a deep commitment to the retention of political rights generally. Thesevirtues in turn established the foundations of English common law which, among otherprovisions, recognized the rights of freemen to own land, to choose their electors, andto enjoy free trade. All this was as it should be, until the invasion forces of Williaminaugurated an extended period of feudal government. Only when the Stuarts had beendisposed of once and for all and the Glorious Revolution secured could the venerableSaxon tenets of liberty once again be recalled.When Jefferson felt called upon to invoke the Saxon myth, he could do so confident

that his readers would find therein a powerful source of collective pride in such origins.Indeed, writes Michael Kammen, “by the time of the Seven Years’ War a consistentand well-developed view of colonial origins had been in common use for decades,” a

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central component of which was the Saxon myth. Jefferson knew that the myth hadbeen circulating for a good deal of the preceding century, put to use especially inpolemics against the royal prerogative and Parliamentary corruption. Critics of themonarchy were especially drawn to the Saxon manner of electing their king: NathanielBacon, writing during the volatile years of the mid-seventeenth century, stressed in hisHistorical Discourse that the king’s title “rested upon the good opinion of the free-men,”and was thereby “no other than a primum mobile set in regular motion, by lawsestablished by the whole body of the kingdom.” All in all, Bacon concluded, it was “abeautiful composure, mutually dependent in every part from the Crown to the clown,the Magistrates being all Choice men, the King the choicest of chosen: election beingthe birth of esteem, and that of merit, this bred love and mutual trust, which made themas corner-stones, pointed forward to break the wave of danger.” Near century’s end,Henry Care’s English Liberties glowingly recounted how “Our ancestors, the Saxons, hadwith a most equal poise and temperament, very wisely contrived their government, andmade excellent provisions for their liberty, and to preserve the people from oppression.”By the mid-eighteenth century the Saxon past had become an object of effusive praise;and rightly so, thought Bolingbroke and others, for there could be found “a people ofspirit and of sense; who knew the ends of government, and obliged their governours toproduce those ends.” His Remarks on the History of England celebrated the Saxon insistenceon claiming rights as freeborn subjects; together, Bolingbroke wrote, “these principles ofthe Saxon Commonwealth were therefore very democratical; and these principlesprevailed through all subsequent changes.”6

Jefferson’s familiarity with and attraction to the Saxon myth is evident. Among thedaunting list of titles urged upon young Mr. Skipworth are works by Bolingbroke,Blackstone, Tacitus, Hume, and Robertson, each of which treats the story to greater orlesser degree. Of those volumes lost in the burning of his Shadwell library in 1770, weknow of Kames’s Historical Tracts, Dalrymple’s Essay on Feudal Property, Hales’s History ofthe Common Law, and William Petyt’s Jus Parliamentum, all concerned in part with Saxonlegacies. We know, too, that Jefferson’s interest was not limited to youthful fascinations;he later took up the study of the Saxon language and sought in old age to feature it inthe curriculum of his fledgling University of Virginia. Above all Jefferson looked to theSaxon past as a warrant for throwing off the yoke of feudalism and restoring to his newcountry the blessings of an ancient system of common law. “Has not every restitutionof the antient Saxon laws had happy effects?” he asked rhetorically of EdmundPendleton in August of 1776. “Is it not better now that we return at once into thathappy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the witof man, as it stood before the 8th century?” The Summary View was conceived, designed,and delivered precisely in order to answer that question to maximum effect.7

As Jefferson envisioned it, the Saxon past gave to natural right the force of historicalexample. He thus introduces the first of two appeals to that past by reminding the king“that our ancestors, before their emigration to America, were the free inhabitants of theBritish dominions in Europe, and possessed a right, which nature has given to all men,of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them, of goingin quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws andregulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness.” Althoughsuch a right was not recognized in British law, it was by the time of Jefferson’s writinga commonplace in colonial rhetoric, most conspicuously in the formulation of his fellowVirginian Richard Bland. In his Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (1766), Bland

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had similarly insisted that “when Subjects are deprived of their civil Rights, or aredissatisfied with the Place they hold in the Community, they have a natural Right toquit the Society of which they are Members, and to retire into another Country. Nowwhen Men exercise this Right,” Bland reasoned, “and withdraw themselves from theirCountry, they recover their natural Freedom and Independence.” Whatever the legal ortheoretical status of this right, Jefferson found the source of its rhetorical power in thehistorical precedent set by the Saxons. He accordingly observes that the colonists’“Saxon ancestors had under this universal law, in like manner, left their native wilds andwoods in the North of Europe, and possessed themselves of the island of Britain thenless charged with inhabitants, and had established there that system of laws which hasso long been the glory and protection of that country.” In the event, Jefferson argues,the country which the Saxons had left exercised no lingering claim on their loyalties orfreedoms. Likewise, “it is thought that no circumstance has occurred to distinguishmaterially the British from the Saxon emigration.”8

Jefferson’s appeal to the Saxon past is brief and not altogether original; in context,however, it contains an explosive and daring set of implications. At a minimum, itrealigns the very terms of colonial identification; in Ferguson’s words, “Jefferson’sdescription of the right of emigration under natural law leaves Americans closer in spiritto their Saxon ancestors than to their contemporaries in England.”9 Pushed to its logicalends, the passage implies that English law has no more claim on the colonists than thatof their European forebears had on the departed Saxons. The law of emigration—“which nature has given to all men”—thus trumps any and all laws binding colony tomother country. Coming as it does early in the text, moreover, this appeal to Saxonorigins leverages the ensuing arguments by eliminating the cornerstone of Englishimperial policy. Thus weakened, the edifice of colonial administration totters through-out the text until, finally, it collapses into itself, leaving among its ruins the foundationsof a new and greater political order.The second sustained deployment of the Saxon myth occurs in the context of

Jefferson’s critique of Crown policy toward the granting of lands. He was sensitized tothe issue when, as a practising lawyer, he routinely entered into complex legal battlesover the sale and purchase of Virginia properties. George III had upped the stakessignificantly by reasserting royal claim to the ownership and distribution of coloniallands. At issue, ultimately, was the question whether Americans were bound by thefeudal principle that all such lands belonged to the Crown. This was a position firmlyentrenched in English common law, and as Jefferson knew very well from his ownreading of Blackstone, it was basic to the very meaning and function of the realm. “Thegrand and fundamental maxim of all feudal tenure is this,” Blackstone declared, “thatall lands were originally granted out of the sovereign, and are therefore holden, eithermediately or immediately, of the crown.” Needless to say, the resolution of the issue oneway or the other carried with it enormous consequences, not least among them the verygrowth and survival of the colonial experiment. By pricing out would-be landownersthrough exorbitant rates of sale and quitrent, the Crown, argued Jefferson, waseffectively checking American expansion. Did the king have such a right? Were all landsheld mediately or immediately of the Crown?10

In order to answer the question in the negative, Jefferson must for a second timeresort to the myth of Saxon origins. On this occasion, however, he confronts aformidable assumption to the contrary. Indeed, denying it may represent somethingvery close to treason. The story he now tells is designed to circumvent the claim to royal

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ownership by leapfrogging the feudal basis of that claim, recalling a time before itsintroduction with the invasion of William of Normandy in 1066. Jefferson had givenconsiderable thought to the matter, as is clear from his reflections in the pages of hiscommonplace book. Drawing upon William Somner’s A Treatise of Gavelkind, Jeffersonnoted, “The Saxons were settled here so early as 600, whereas feuds did not attain theirfull vigor even on the continental parts of Europe till two centuries after this. Williamseems not to have introduced the feodal tenures by his mere arbitrary will, norimmediately after the conquest; but they were gradually established by the Normanbarons and others in such forfeited lands as they received from the gift of theconqueror.” By Jefferson’s lights, then, the ancient constitution preceded feudal law and,therefore, took precedence over it. Here is where such reasoning takes him in theSummary View:

The introduction of the Feudal tenures into the kingdom of England, though antient, is well

enough understood to set this matter in a proper light. In the earlier ages of the Saxon

settlement feudal holdings were certainly altogether unknown, and very few, if any, had been

introduced at the time of the Norman conquest. Our Saxon ancestors held their lands, as

they did their personal property, in absolute dominion, disencumbered with any superior,

answering nearly to the nature of those possessions which the Feudalists term Allodial.11

After the conquest, feudalism crept into the administration of English lands, as muchunder threat and coercion as through voluntary concession. Still, Jefferson argues,considerable lands remained allodial as under the Saxon dispensation, and the kingnever held literally all such grants; indeed, they represented but “exceptions out of theSaxon laws of possession, under which all lands were held in absolute right.” How thento explain the history of the colonies, whose inhabitants seemed perfectly happy tonegotiate grants of land with the Crown? Was not the process of their establishmentand development essentially feudal? Indeed it was, Jefferson writes, but the colonistshad been hoodwinked into believing the “fictitious principle that all lands belongoriginally to the king,” and, being laborers rather than lawyers, were willing to operateaccording to this fiction as long as the Crown asked for relatively modest sums. Recentaggressions on the part of the Crown, however, exposed the fiction for what it wasand demanded that the truth be stated clearly and now. “It is time,” Jeffersonannounces,

for us to lay this matter before his majesty, and to declare that he has no right to grant lands

of himself. From the nature and purpose of civil institutions, all the lands within the limits

which any particular society has circumscribed around itself, are assumed by that society, and

subject to their allotment only. This may be done as by themselves assembled collectively,

or by their legislature to whom they may have delegated sovereign authority: and, if they are

allotted in neither of these ways, each individual of the society may appropriate to himself

such lands as he finds vacant, and occupancy will give him title.

Aside from the sheer nerve required to make such a declaration, the passage is notablefor several reasons. First, I concur with Ferguson’s impression regarding the space theauthor places between colonist and mother country. Jefferson here draws a circlearound the colonies, assigns the ownership of land to that society alone, assigns itsovereign powers, and protects the exercise of those powers from what amounts to analien and hostile nation. Blackstone had been compelled to qualify his explanation ofentitlement through occupancy by stressing that “at least as regards land, the first

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discoverer and occupant acquires no title to himself, but to the nation to which hebelongs or under whose flag he sails.” Jefferson takes Blackstone’s point and reappliesit to the current situation, in which title to colonial lands is transferred to the coloniststhemselves.12

The confidence with which such views are expressed is a product of the myth onwhich it relies; it is not just that George III has no right to colonial entitlement—no kingdoes and no king ever did. Grounding American destiny in the origins of Saxon rule,the author not only subverts the particular issue of land allotment and ownership, butso delimits the reach of royal authority that it can no longer retain its grasp on colonialgovernment. Hence, the rhetorical function of the Saxon myth: it simultaneouslyre-authorizes a set of historical claims even as it de-activates another; it recalls from thepast an originary tale of rights earned and assumed, and in the process literally displacesthe false sovereignty of English imperial rule.

“Blood Bought Treasure”: Colonial Immigration and the Myth of AmericanEntitlement

As readily available as was the myth of Saxon inheritance, one story proved evenmore ready at hand for colonists adamantly insisting on rights to self-government.Drawing from a well-funded tradition of Puritan mythology, patriots from Massachu-setts Bay to Williamsburg routinely invoked variations on the story of America’s errandinto the wilderness, a composite narrative of daring, courage, and entitlement thatremains intact and familiar even now as sanctioning a collective political and socialidentity. Michael Kammen characterizes the general thrust of the emigration narrativethis way: for the colonists, he writes, it was a matter of genuine interpretive debate; itconfirmed the grounds of dissent and bolstered their convictions; encouraged them toraise objections early in the movement toward independence; frustrated the opposition;and “constituted a major line of consistency and continuity in revolutionary politicalthought.”13

At the heart of this story was—and is—a deeply resonant appeal to treasuresrightfully earned, to a land occupied, cultivated, and made bountiful, there to bepossessed and thus transformed from a “howling wilderness” into an “asylum for allmankind.” Versions of the story range from Samuel Danforth’s appeal for spiritualrenewal to Mario Cuomo’s vision of two Americas, but the message remains essentiallythe same: that possession sanctions ownership, and ownership complemented by thetwin virtues of labor and freedom not only secures title but represents a model for theworld itself. Evident in such ritualized performances as the jeremiad, Stamp Actsermons, Boston Massacre Orations, and July 4 celebrations, the story took on enor-mous cultural power in the eighteenth century. This occurred, notes Sacvan Bercovitch,for reasons readily evident:

The ritual of errand enforces an identity that is at once transitional and representative; it

identifies the community’s “true fathers” not by their English background but by their exodus

from Europe to the American strand; it establishes a mode of consensus by calling and

enterprise rather than by (say) national tradition or genealogical patterns; and it implies a form

of community without geographical boundaries, since the wilderness is by definition un-

bounded, the terra profane “out there” yet to be conquered, step by inevitable step, by the

advancing armies of Christ.14

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By the time of the imperial crisis, the myth had taken on a secular cast no doubtunintended by its originators, but it would prove equally powerful as a means toarticulate colonial aspirations. Indeed, its appeal was most conspicuous precisely atthose moments when American identity was thought most endangered. Before, during,and after the Stamp Act crisis, for example, protest writings recurrently invoked thestory of blood-bought sacrifice so frequently that it became a kind of rhetoricalcommonplace through which a collective sense of betrayal could be given maximumexpression. James Otis reasoned that charter liberties had been granted to the ancestors“in consideration of their sufferings and merit, discovering and settling America. Ourfore-fathers were soon worn away in the toils of hard labor on their little plantations,and in war with the Savages. They thought,” Otis pointedly concluded, “they wereearning a sure inheritance for their prosperity.”15

In this image of a beleaguered but resolute people fending off native forces humanand not, colonists availed themselves of a colorful and morally compelling vision of theirown sanctified past. Key to that image was the belief that it had been they alone whobore the brunt of that sacrifice, who had voluntarily and without complaint assumedthe dangers and expense without assistance from the “mother country.” The colonies,insisted Stephen Hopkins, were planted “not at the expense of the Crown or kingdomof England, but at the expense of the planters themselves; and were not only planted,but also defended against the savages, and other enemies, in long and cruel wars, whichcontinued for an hundred years, almost without intermission, solely at their owncharge.” If in the years since the colonies remained straightened, there could be nosurprise in that, Jonathan Mayhew declared, “as most of them were originally settledat the sole and great expense of the adventures; the expense of their money, their toil,their blood.”16

Such appeals to hardship and sacrifice were no doubt emotionally satisfying to leadersbent on rallying colonial sentiment. At the same time, however, the myth of America’sfounding and progress was anchored in a theory of ownership that carried a messageof equal force. Not only had colonists occupied American soil and nurtured it tofruition, the more general claim was that in doing so, they came to possess special titleto that soil, and with such title they possessed special rights as well. If they sought anexplicit statement with which to warrant that claim, they needed to look no fartherthan to the always accommodating John Locke. His famous treatment of property inthe Second Treatise laid out the principle in the clearest possible language:

God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded man also to labor,

and the penury of his Condition required it of him. God and his Reason commanded him

to subdue the Earth, i.e., improve it for the benefit of Life, and therein lay out something

upon it that was his own, his labor. He that in Obedience to this Command of God, subdued,

tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his Property, which

another had no Title to, nor could without injury take from him.

Labor, Locke explains, gives value to property, and in the state of nature at least givesa right of property. Now to the extent that America was upon its plantation thought tobe very much in a state of nature, its cultivation gave it value and bestowed upon its newinhabitants rights of property “which another had no Title to, nor could without injurytake from him.”17

The implications of such reasoning for imperial rule were profound. For all theassurances of loyalty to the kingdom, the seemingly obsequious petitions and professions

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of horror at the thought of independence, there lurks under the radical discourse of

pre-war leaders a persistent logic of self-sovereignty that Locke’s passage underwrites. It

surfaces in John Allen’s “Beauties of Liberty,” wherein the author declares that “the

king of England has no more right, according to the laws of God and nature, to claim

the lands of America, that he has the lands of France—America … is the blood-bought

treasure of their forefathers; and they have the same essential right to their native laws,

as they have to the air they breathe in.” It appears again in Richard Bland’s argument

that, “upon the Law of Nature,” the colonists “have a Right to a civil independent

Establishment of their own, and that Great Britain has no Right to interfere it.” From

this it follows that, “If a Man invades my Property, he becomes an Aggressor, and puts

himself into a State of War with me: I have a Right to oppose this Invader.” It is also

in the Boston Gazette: “If the Crown and people of England had at that time [the first

plantations] no right, property or claim to that part of the earth which they [colonists]

had fixed upon to settle and inhabit, it follows, that in the supposed state of nature,

neither the Crown nor people of England had any lawful and equitable authority or

controul over them than the inhabitants of the moon.”18

The moon, France, the colonies: none subject by right of God or nature to the

proprietary claims of England. It is important to remind ourselves that in truth most

colonists were reluctant, at least publicly, to avow any desire for total independence

until very late in the day; at the same time, there can be no gainsaying the evidence that

many were awakening to a logic deeply embedded in the myth of America’s plantation:

that by virtue of their arrival, risk, and right to ownership, the “American strand” was

theirs to rule and theirs alone. Bland was coming to the full implication of this story in

1766, but could scarcely bear the thought; as Jefferson recalled years later, the elder

statesman and scholar then had to “set out with a set of sound principles, pursue them

logically till he found them leading to the precipice which he had to leap, start back

alarmed, then resume his ground, go over it in another direction, be led by the

correctness of his reasoning to the same place and again back about and try other

processes to reconcile right and wrong.” 19 It was left to Jefferson in the summer of 1774

to pick up that line of reasoning again and, far from backing away, to leap over the

precipice upon which the colonies were so precariously perched.

Jefferson’s relationship to the matter of emigration, like that of Franklin, was at once

complex and ambivalent. He worried about its potential for disruption: the very

achievement of American nationhood, he warned in the Notes, meant that the asylum

for mankind might well be overrun with new peoples, and so render its government “a

heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.” Such abstract and statistical musings as

can be found in the Notes, however, contrast sharply with his pre-revolutionary

sentiments about the legacy of the British American plantations, of which he was very

much a product and beneficiary. More than ancestral pride was at stake: British

imperial policy respecting emigration featured greatly in the context of colonial resist-

ance. Thus, in two separate indictments found in the Declaration of Independence,

emigration policy is isolated as cause for longstanding grievance. In the seventh candidly

submitted “fact,” Jefferson declares that the king “has endeavored to prevent the

population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws of naturalization of

foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the

conditions of new appropriations of lands.” A later passage, for the most part eliminated

by Congress, is even more evocative of these themes:

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We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here, no one

of which could warrant so strange a pretension: that these were effected at the expense of

our own blood and treasure, unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain: that

in constituting indeed our several forms of government, we had adopted one common king,

thereby laying a foundation for perpetual league and amity with them: but that submission

to their parliament was no part of our constitution, nor ever in idea, if history may be

credited.20

As with virtually all principles in the Declaration, those expressed here were common

coin, tokens of a colonial culture increasing in value even as tensions mounted toward

their climax. The Summary View is notable in part because it contains the most elaborate

statement of Jefferson’s particular appropriation of the emigration theme; specifically,

it provides an illuminating example of how that theme wove itself into a comprehensive

rationale for colonial independence. In turning to the text proper, I note first that the

story builds directly upon the Saxon myth examined above—indeed, it may be read

as a logical extension of the originary tale. Recall that Jefferson had argued that the

colonists were no more bound in principle by their ancestors than the peoples settling

in ancient England were bound by their Saxon forebears. The American “adventurers,”

as Otis, Hopkins, Bland, and others insisted, had purchased their right to sovereignty

by their occupation and development of putatively unclaimed lands. Jefferson’s distinc-

tive rendition of this position was to give it force, and to coax from it a narrative in

which Americans might readily find themselves. “Their own blood was spilt in acquiring

lands for their settlement,” Jefferson writes, “their own fortunes expended in making

that settlement effectual. For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered,

and for themselves they have right to hold.” The signature cadence of the language

is unmistakably Jeffersonian, the word choice refracted into several similar construc-

tions: the colonists held “undisturbed the rights thus acquired at the hazard of their

lives and loss of their fortunes,” occupied a country “acquired by the lives, the labors

and the fortunes of individual adventurers.” Such usage is not, as most historians claim,

mere rhetorical flourish but a mode of formulating past experience to optimal effect;

it is the syntactic recuperation of a history now revealed as ordered, purposeful, and

deeply resonant of current aspirations. It is, as Jefferson confided to Skipworth, “history

as a moral exercise,” stylized to be sure but no less compelling for that.21

Jefferson’s appeal to the myth of American emigration further allows him to clarify

the conditions under which colonial rule was to be properly conducted. He thus

elaborates the point by stressing that the colonists were left to fend for themselves for

much of their history until, having become a source of potential wealth to the realm,

they at length received support in the battle against France for imperial domain. Such

assistance, although welcome, no more bound the colonists to English sovereignty than

any other country similarly endowed, say Portugal, who could not be expected thereby

to submit herself to British sovereignty. Why then should the colonies? “We do not

mean however to underrate those aids,” Jefferson avers, “but we would shew that they

cannot give a title to that authority which the British parliament would arrogate over

us.” The case is sharpened by a claim that will figure significantly in the Summary View

as a whole—the colonists, Jefferson argues, not only left voluntarily, at their own

expense and sacrifice, but also chose of their own will to retain a certain relationship

with royal authority:

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settlements having been thus effected in the wilds of America, the emigrants thought proper

to adopt that system of laws under which they had hitherto lived in the mother country, and

to continue their union with her by submitting themselves to the same sovereign, who was

thereby made the central link connecting the several parts of the empire thus newly multi-

plied.22

The implication here is pivotal: if the colonists left of their own accord, as they werefree to do by natural right; if they established from a state of nature a duly constitutedpolitical society, as Lockean theory claimed they had every natural right to do; andif they chose to “adopt that system of laws under which they had hitherto lived in themother country,” as Jefferson claimed, then what power, precisely, could legitimatelyforce them to retain a relationship freely entered into but now thought destructive ofthe new polity? The insinuation cannot be missed: as soon as these adventurers pulledup anchor, they had then left behind any binding authority not of their own making.True, Jefferson acknowledges, the emigrants had become used to thinking and speakingin terms of their English ancestors, had accepted in the main English legal and politicalconventions. But the key term here is choice, and by stressing it in so basic a way inthe text, Jefferson gives to the emigration narrative its provision for free human agency.In short, a relationship established by choice could be disestablished by choice, whichis precisely what Jefferson aimed to effect.Taken together, the myth of Saxon origins and the emigration narrative constitute

the positive case against imperial rule. Rhetorically, each works to relocate the sourceand authority of legitimate power; in the former, by antedating feudal rule; in the latter,by uncoupling merely convenient arrangements so as to reestablish polity underdifferent geographical and political conditions. Either way, the standard argumentsissued from the mother country are rendered at best tendentious, possessing neitherthe force of historical, natural, or positive law. On this basis Jefferson turns to thenegative case against imperial authority. Here again he will appeal to prominent andpowerful narratives to dismantle England’s professed claims to imperial rule. Putgenerally, the second half of the Summary View implicitly—but unmistakably—suggeststhat even if England could lay claim to some rightful authority over the colonies, shehad so abrogated her responsibilities as to have lost any claim on the loyalty of thecolonists. Jefferson first targets Parliament by inscribing its actions within a prevailingconspiracy narrative.

Fixed Intentions and Connected Chains: The Conspiracy Against ColonialLiberties

From the Stamp Act crisis until well after the outbreak of armed rebellion, BritishAmericans widely held that Parliament was bent on a systematic plan to dispossess thecolonies of their natural and chartered rights. Radical spokesmen so frequently beat thisdrum of conspiratorial design that by 1774 it had taken on the force of a truism, andfew proponents of resistance could resist its rhetorical appeal. In broadsides, speeches,pamphlets, and official resolutions, the message was pounded relentlessly into thecollective mind of colonial America: “A series of occurrences, many recent events,” asthe Boston Town Meeting of 1770 declared, “afford great reason to believe that adeep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed,for the extinction of all civil liberty.” As its chief historian has demonstrated, theconspiracy narrative took on something of a life of its own, so powerful was its

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explanatory force: within its peculiar logic, Parliamentary motives could be discerned asself-evident, and protests to the contrary counted only as evidence of further duplicity.“It was this,” Bernard Bailyn concludes, “the overwhelming evidence, as they sought it,that they were faced with conspirators against liberty determined at all costs to gain endswhich their words dissembled—that was signaled to the colonists after 1763, and it wasthis above all else that in the end propelled them into Revolution.”23

The genius of the conspiracy myth is that it works so efficiently to explain theotherwise inexplicable, and it was made to explain a great deal, for what else to makeof the manifold incursions on colonial rights? The Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, theBoston Massacre, standing armies, the “Intolerable Acts,” the Quebec Acts, the BostonPort Act—these and more all seemed irrefutable evidence not of mere incompetence orarbitrary missteps, but the playing out of a fully-conceived scheme for reassertingimperial authority at the cost of colonial liberties. As British measures mounted throughthe years so, too, did the realization that British Americans were facing a unified, onlypartially-hidden enemy bent on their ruin. In the aggregate, John Dickinson com-plained, these depredations gave proof that “a plan had been deliberately framed andpertinaciously adhered to, unchanged even by frequent changes of ministers, uncheckedby any intervening gleam of humanity, to sacrifice to a passion for arbitrary dominionthe universal property, liberty, safety, honor, happiness, and prosperity of us unoffend-ing yet devoted Americans.”24

As a rhetorical resource, the appeal to conspiracy not only locates and assigns motive,it gives to heretofore hidden intentions evident structure, direction, and valuation. Toname a set of phenomena a conspiracy is to accord them a relationship, howeverputative, and to organize events into a coherent and psychologically compellingnarrative. That such a narrative was very much alive, available, and compelling by thetime of Jefferson’s Summary View is evident from the many resolves issued from Virginia’scounties in the summer of 1774. Virtually every one of them evinces a deep convictionthat Parliament was acting from fixed design. Parliament’s behavior, they announced,was evidence of:

their fixed determination to deprive the colonies of their constitutional and just rights and

liberties (Culpeper County)

a despotic exertion of unconstitutional power, calculated to enslave a free and loyal people

(Dunmore County)

a premeditated design and System, formed and pursued by the British Ministry, to Introduce

an arbitrary Government into his Majesty’s American Dominions (Fairfax County)

the fixed intention of parliament to deprive America of her constitutional rights and liberties

(Gloucester County)

the fixed intention of the said Ministry to reduce the Colonies to a State of Slavery (Prince

George County)25

As the Virginia county resolutions were published in Williamsburg’s Virginia Gazetteduring the period of Jefferson’s drafting of the Summary View, there can be little surprisein finding him invoking similar language. We are more familiar with the passage earlyin the Declaration in which the author notes that, “when a long train of abuses andusurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them underabsolute despotism,” it is then Americans’ right and duty “to throw off such govern-ment, and to provide new guards for their future security.” As observed above, and

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as scholars of the Declaration have firmly demonstrated, Jefferson was here appealingto a longstanding and deeply held commonplace about the thrust of ministerial policy,but it was not the first time Jefferson did so: strikingly similar phrasing is found in theSummary View, where he at once invokes the general narrative and applies it to thespecific purposes of the text.At six relatively lengthy paragraphs, Jefferson’s critique of Parliament represents the

most detailed and extensive phase of the Summary View. Taking as his main themes thehistory of colonial land dealings, commerce, and government of internal affairs,Jefferson begins his story with the reign of the Stuarts and proceeds from there.

The trade of the colonies was laid under such restrictions as shew what hopes they might

form from the justice of a British parliament were its uncontrouled power admitted over these

states. History has informed us that bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible of

the spirit of tyranny.

As evidence of such a tyranny, Jefferson assembles chronologically a litany of traderestrictions beginning with hat making, to iron production, to land credit, to the sale oflucrative postal offices. Without needing to enumerate them all here, it is enough to notethe general rhetorical effect of Jefferson’s story of power assumed, rights violated, andlegitimate government subverted. Taking the long view, he casts his eyes over the wholepattern of events and is forced to state explicitly the source, direction, and meaning ofimperial policy:

thus we have hastened thro’ the reigns which preceded his majesty’s during which the violation

of our rights were less alarming, because repeated at more distance intervals, than that rapid

and bold succession of injuries which is likely to distinguish the present from all other periods

of American history. Scarcely have our minds been able to emerge from the astonishment

into which one stroke of parliamentary thunder has involved us, before another more heavy

and alarming is fallen on us. Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion

of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably

thro’ every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing

us to slavery.26

What Bailyn aptly describes as the “logic of rebellion,” the evidence of which featuresso prominently in the Declaration of Independence, here exposes Parliament’s inten-tions for what they really were, undisguised by ministerial intrigue and imperialmachinations. A plan has been too plainly proved to be anything other than aself-evident proof of Parliament’s malignity, thus, its incapacity to exercise any rightfulauthority over the colonies whatsoever.

“The Conduct of His Majesty”: Jefferson Arraigns the King

“The king,” wrote William Blackstone, “can do no wrong.” Among other implica-tions, this meant that “whatever is exceptional in the conduct of public affairs, is not tobe imputed to the king, nor is he answerable for it to his people; for this doctrine wouldtotally destroy that constitutional independence of the crown, which is necessary for thebalance of power in our free and active, and therefore compounded, constitution.” 27

The venerable jurist was not rendering an interpretation but restating a principle at theheart of British common law. If cause for complaint was to be found, then it was to beimputed to others—king’s counsel, ministry, Parliament—never, in any case, to the

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person of the king. Bearing this truism in mind goes some way toward explaining boththe career of colonial dissent and the daring of Jefferson’s final pages in the SummaryView. For the past decade, opposition to imperial policy had been directed almostexclusively to Parliament, colonial governors, or to the pernicious influence of the king’sadvisors, notably Lord Bute. This is not to say that the Crown’s reach went unchal-lenged in colonial affairs, but the overwhelming volume of protest rhetoric implicitlyhonored the settled assumption that the king could do no wrong. We cannot sufficientlyappreciate the radical implications of the Summary View unless as we keep in mind thisprinciple and the language of dissent it sanctioned. Over and against the tradition ofdeflecting opposition to other sources, Jefferson takes the battle to the king himself, andit is here that the rhetorical force of his argument reaches its consummation.That Jefferson’s arraignment of George III comes as it does, when it does, is hardly

incidental: indeed, the entire balance of the text is devoted to setting up the challengeto optimal effect. Viewed from this perspective, the preceding narratives collaborate indistinctive but closely interdependent ways to propel Jefferson into the final stages of hisargument. Thus, the appeal to Saxon origins establishes an antecedent source of rightsand sovereignty; the emigration narrative transfers those rights and that sovereignty tothe American strand; and the conspiracy story highlights the legal and moral failure ofParliament to make good on its claims to imperial rule. As a result, the king is isolatedas a target, positioned to bear the full brunt of colonial discontent. By this meansJefferson eliminates the king’s plausible options: he may persist in the current vein andthus violate the implicit contract exchanging protection for allegiance; or he mayintervene in Parliament’s ruinous course and thus admit to failure of legitimate rule. Inthe end, all that remains is independence, a choice the colonies, and the colonies alone,can make. The textual dynamics that conduce to this conclusion built from thenarratives toward a full-fledged critique of the king, now exposed as operating fromuntenable assumptions about the source and authority of his own power. Rhetorically,this process is evident at the level of proposition and of tone, of argument and style, sofused as to seal the case once and for all.Critics and historians of the Summary View have noticed its “bare knuckle feeling,” as

Brodie put it, where, in the words of Ellis, “the tone toward George III ranges betweenthe disrespectful and the accusatory.” So pronounced is this quality, indeed, so differentis it from the interminable stream of obsequious petitions that predate its composition,that it cannot be ignored as a constitutive feature of its overall effect. In general,Jefferson’s arraignment proceeds along four lines of complaint: that the king has failedto exercise his power to “prevent the passage of laws by any one legislature of theempire which might bear injuriously on the rights and interests of another”; or to invokehis rightful power to dissolve a Parliament having become “obnoxious” and having “lostthe confidence of their constituents.” Failing these expectations, the king is argued tohave compounded his errors by superseding his prerogative by manipulating terms ofland ownership and disposition and by raising standing armies when he had no right todo so. 28 Those seeking historical and legal support for Jefferson’s case might easily lookto Blackstone and other common law authorities; indeed, the complaints were by 1774latent in colonial opposition in one form or another. The radical tendency of the case,however, is owing to the unabashed indictment of the king’s person and, specifically, thetone with which that person is addressed. It is the manner in which the grievances wereposed that gives them their rhetorical force and distinction, not simply their enumer-ation.

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“Tone” is confessedly an elusive term, lacking the more precise definitions applied tomost other rhetorical characteristics of style. It hints at a certain trait of audibility, asif a given passage can be heard on a recognizable register of expression. Thus, it is notimplausible to regard King’s “I Have a Dream” oration as possessing a certain tonality,a distinctive and clearly identifiable mode of address that owes much to the speaker’soral style, rhythm, and affect. Taking literally its original meaning in the Greek “tostretch,” tone also denotes a kind of linguistic inflection or coloration that distinguishesa particular statement from the norm. Thus, we say of Lincoln’s second inauguraladdress that it evinces an unmistakable tone inasmuch as we set it off from all other suchritual efforts. Presumably something like this sense of tone was the basis for John Adams’reflection that Jefferson possessed upon arrival at the second Continental Congress “thereputation of a masterly pen … in consequence of a very handsome public paper whichhe had written for the House of Burgesses, which had given him the character of a finewriter.”29

If such a sense of tone may be ascribed to Jefferson’s critique of the king, it is thatof an author who believes himself to have his opponent cornered—hence the“arrogance” of which Brodie writes. Neither impudent nor violent, Jefferson’s mode ofaddress is distinctively accusatory, emboldened by confidence born of being in the right;there is in the text no room for concession, ambiguity, or false humility. By way ofcontrast, it may be helpful to recall the ordinary run of language devoted to most Crownsolicitations. At the very time Jefferson was composing the Summary View, the VirginiaGazette printed the following Petition to His Majesty from his loyal subjects:

They, therefore, prostrating themselves at the foot of your throne, most humbly implore your

fatherly goodness and protection of this and all their sister colonies in their enjoyment of their

ancient and inestimable right of being governed by such laws only, respecting their internal

Polity, and taxation, as are derived from their own consent.

The contrast with Jefferson’s opening salvo against the king’s policies could not be moreconspicuous: “we next proceed to consider the conduct of his majesty, as holding theexecutive powers of the laws in these states, and mark out his deviations from the lineof duty.” Needless to say, there is nothing in the ensuing series of indictments remotelysuggestive of prostration at the foot of the throne or humble entreaties for fatherlygoodness.30

In each of the four areas in which the king is alleged to have revealed his contemptfor the colonies, Jefferson stakes his position just short of outright treason. Noting thatthe king has refused to exercise the negative against Parliament but appears all toowilling to impose it on the colonies, Jefferson writes:

This will not excuse the wanton exercise of this power which we have seen his majesty practice

on the laws of the American legislatures. For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no

conceivable reason at all, his majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency … . so

shameful an abuse of a power trusted with his majesty for other purposes, as if not reformed

would call for some legal restrictions.

Punctuating the several lengthy passages making up the indictment, Jefferson recur-rently uses language heretofore restricted to private exchanges, if at all. The king isbelieved not to have “bestowed a single thought on the situation” of the colonistsseeking redress; he has carried his “power beyond every limit known or provided by thelaws.” As to the policy of Crown disposition of colonial lands: “It is time therefore to

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lay this matter before his majesty, and to declare that he has no right to grant lands ofhimself.” Similarly, Jefferson announces, “his majesty has no right to land a singlearmed man on our shores.” On making military administration superior to civilgovernment: “But can his majesty thus put down all law under his feet? Can he erecta power superior to that which erected himself? He has done it indeed by force; but lethim remember that force cannot give right.”31

By the time the Summary View reaches its final paragraph, such pronouncements haveaggregated to the point where nothing short of a conviction of guilt seems possible. Notwishing to leave it at that, however, Jefferson seizes on the momentum to deliver in thetext’s peroration a brief lecture on the nature of colonial virtue, the place of royalty inrightful government, and to deliver a thinly veiled warning to his majesty. It is a stanceassumed by virtue of the argument thus far, freed from what Jefferson declares are thefictional conventions of English history and law; from it, the voice of the citizen and notthe subject is heard in unmistakable tones, at once self-assured and plaintive, as if fromone who knows what the future holds even if others do not. Here is no cringing petitionbut grievances “laid before his majesty with that freedom of language and sentimentwhich becomes a free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature,and not as the gift of their chief magistrate … Let those flatter,” Jefferson writes, “whofear; it is not an American art.” Now, toward the end, George III is confronted with theheart of the matter: “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.” In viewof this long train of indictments and the boldness with which they are delivered, readerscould only have taken the final, ritualized profession of loyalty as ironic. “It is neitherour wish nor our interest to separate from her,” Jefferson writes of England’s prove-nance, but the lingering message cannot be missed: “The god who gave us life, gave usliberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”32

Conclusion

Jefferson conceived of his text as a “draft of instructions” to Virginia colleagues in theContinental Congress. At this point in the analysis, it is worth asking just what thosedelegates were being instructed in. The final phase of the Summary View suggests theanswer: the Virginians, and by extension all those assembled in Philadelphia, were beingshown what should be said and how a colonist ought to sound—what kind of stanceought to be taken toward England and toward themselves, what kind of language andcomportment should be expected of Americans at this juncture in the crisis of identitythat soon was to erupt into armed combat. The rhetorical labor of the text in generalis to provide what might be understood as the collective psychology necessary forassuming such a position. At a minimum, Jefferson seems to have grasped, it requireda closely orchestrated process in which space is first cleared for the reassertion ofcolonial identity—thus, the appeals to Saxon origins and the great migration—and thenfor the removal of those powers seeking to usurp what had been shown to be rightfullyAmerican—thus, the conspiracy myth and the consummating critique of Crownauthority. Together, these narrative and critical functions fix the king in an untenableposition and, consequently, deliver to the colonists the image of a government whosefuture could not include their own.The extent to which his fellow Americans were prepared to accept Jefferson’s offer

remains a reasonable question; if nothing else, it warns us against equating the author’s

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sentiments too readily with those for whom it was written. A quarter of a century afterits publication, Jefferson himself admitted, “It was thought too strong for the times.”Modern observers are inclined to agree that Jefferson was writing ahead of his time. Inthe view of Merrill Peterson, Jefferson “was advancing the contest to the next stage, notknowing where, once this act was played out, he would go next.” Joseph Ellis similarlyconcludes that “if the arguments of Summary View were to be believed, they put him inthe vanguard of the revolutionary movement in America.” But whereas both dis-tinguished historians tend to discount the foresightedness or probity of Jefferson’sargument, I hope to have suggested an alternative perspective. The immediate andlasting impression conveyed by the Summary View is of a rhetorical imagination ferventlyat work to instill in its readership the reasoned confidence to accept the inevitable. Thatits author saw fit to avail himself of the resources of myth is evidence of the range anddepth of that imagination. Jefferson possessed, among his other acknowledged gifts, thepower to tell stories, and to make those stories the basis for pointed political dispute.This much, in any case, is the rhetorical legacy of the Summary View, Jefferson’s firstdeclaration of independence.33

Notes

Stephen Howard Browne is Professor of Rhetorical Studies, Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, The Pennsylvania StateUniversity. He wishes to thank the staff of the manuscripts division at the Library of Congress, Robert Iltis, the editor, and reviewers.The essay is dedicated to Thomas W. Benson.

1 Thomas Jefferson, “Resolution of the House of Burgesses Designating a Day of Fasting and Prayer,” in ThePapers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 105. For accountsof the episode, see Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970),70; and Robert L. Scribner, ed., Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence (Charlottesville, VA: University Pressof Virginia, 1973), 93–4.

2 George Mason to Martin Cockburn, May 26, 1774, in The Papers of George Mason, ed. Robert A. Rutland(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 190; Worthington C. Ford, ed., Journals of theContinental Congress, 1774–1789 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1904–37) 507. News of the closing ofBoston’s port, as noted, galvanized Virginian reformers upon its arrival. The Day of Fasting and Prayer workedaccording to plan, although Governor Dunsmore quickly dissolved the House of Burgesses—to no one’s surprise.The Burgesses promptly met at Williamsburg’s Apollo tavern and resolved that all the colonies be contacted tomeet in general assembly. In the meantime, each county in the colony was to send elected deputies to meet inWilliamsburg on August 1, there to assess the state of things and appoint delegates to what we now know as thefirst Continental Congress. Jefferson was duly elected as representative from Albermarle county and set aboutcomposing a Draft of Instructions to the Virginia Delegates in the Continental Congress, completed in July and meant for theireyes alone. Jefferson was stricken ill on the road to Williamsburg and failed to attend the meeting, but he managedto get copies to Patrick Henry, who seems not to have paid it much attention, and to Peyton Randolph who, aschair of the convention, circulated the draft to other delegates. As Jefferson later put it, the text was “generallyread by the members, approved by many, but thought too bold for the present state of things.” Nonetheless it wasprinted in pamphlet form as A Summary View of the Rights of British America, and so entered the volatile world ofcolonial protest. See Thomas Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (NewYork: Library of America, 1984), 8, 1121.

3 Peterson, New Nation, 30–31; H. Trevor Colbourn, “Thomas Jefferson’s Use of the Past,” William and MaryQuarterly 15 (1958): 66.

4 Thomas Jefferson to Robert Skipworth, August 3, 1771, in Peterson, Writings, 742; for a comprehensivetreatment of the revolutionists’ relationship to history, see H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig Historyand the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1965).Among works in rhetorical studies dealing with the strategic and symbolic management of history, see Ronald C.Carpenter, History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press,1995); Kathleen Turner, ed., Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of AlabamaPress, 1998); see, in addition, Colin Gordon, “Crafting a Usable Past: Consensus, Ideology, and Historians of theAmerican Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 46 (1989): 671–95; J. V. Matthews, “ ‘Whig History’: TheNew England Whigs and a Usable Past,” New England Quarterly 51 (1978): 193–208; and Warren I. Susman,“History and the American Intellectual: The Uses of a Usable Past,” American Quarterly 16 (1964): 243–63.

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5 James Otis, “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved,” Tracts of the American Revolution,1763–1776, ed. Merrill Jensen (Indianapolis, ID: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 21.

6 Michael Kammen, “The Meaning of Colonization in American Revolutionary Thought,” Journal of the Historyof Ideas 31 (1970): 341; Nathaniel Bacon, An Historical Discourse of the Uniformity of the Government of England (London,1651), 47, 53; Henry Care, English Liberties: Or, the Free-Born Subject’s Inheritance (London, 1680), 7; Henry St. John,Viscount Bolingbroke, Remarks of the History of England (London, 1750), 51, 53.

7 For a survey of Jefferson’s library, see Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, 158–84; Thomas Jefferson to EdmondPendleton, August 13, 1776, in Peterson, Writings, 752.

8 Jefferson, Summary View, 121; all further citations are to this edition. Richard Bland, “Inquiry into the Rightsof the British Colonies,” in Jensen, Tracts, 116; Jefferson, Summary, 121–22.

9 Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997),107.

10 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1859), II: 52.11 Thomas Jefferson, Commonplace Book, ed. Gilbert Chinard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 191;

Jefferson, Summary View, 132.12 Jefferson, Summary View, 133; Blackstone, Commentaries, II, 5 nt. 2.13 Kammen, Colonization, 338.14 Sacvan Bercovitch, Rites of Ascent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge,

1993), 86; Samuel Danforth, “A Brief Recognition of New-England’s Errand into the Wilderness,” Three Centuriesof American Rhetorical Discourse, ed. Ronald F. Reid (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1988), 37–53; MarioCuomo, “Keynote Address,” American Rhetoric from Roosevelt to Reagan, ed. Halford Ross Ryan (ProspectHeights, IL: Waveland Press, 1987), 269–277.

15 Otis, “Rights,” 23–4.16 Stephen Hopkins, “The Rights of Colonies Examined,” in Tracts, 58; Jonathon Mayhew, “The Snare Broken,”

in Political Sermons of the Founding Era, 1730–1805, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1991), 240.17 John Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966),

309.18 John Allen, “An Oration Upon the Beauties of Liberty,” in Political Sermons, 310; Bland, “Inquiry,” in Tracts,

121; Boston Gazette, 17 March 1766, 1.19 Quoted in Peterson, New Nation, 72.20 Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in Writings, 211; Jefferson, “A Declaration by the

Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled,” in Writings, 20, 22.21 Jefferson, Summary View, 122, 123; Jefferson to Skipworth, Peterson, Writings, 742.22 Jefferson, Summary View, 122–2323 Quoted in Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1967), 94; Bailyn, 95; see also Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceitin the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982): 401–41.

24 Quoted in Bailyn, Origins, 120.25 Scribner, Revolutionary Virginia, 119, 123, 129, 137, 152.26 Jefferson, Summary View, 124, 125.27 Blackstone, Commentaries, 243–44.28 Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), 114; Joseph J. Ellis,

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 35; Jefferson, Summary View, 131.29 Quoted in Boyd, Papers, 676; for documentation on the reception and publication history of the Summary View,

see Boyd, Papers, 669–76.30 Virginia Gazette, 15 July 1774; Jefferson, Summary View, 129.31 Jefferson, Summary View, 129–30; 133; 13432 Jefferson, Summary View, 134, 134.33 Peterson, New Nation, 77; Ellis, American Sphinx, 34.

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jefferson's first declaration of independence: a summary view of the rights of british america...

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