Shortly after Mr. Jefferson’s marriage, the preliminary movements of the Revolution began, and though he took an active part in them it was not without reluctance. Even after the battle of Bunker Hill, namely, in November, 1775, he wrote to a kinsman that there was not a man in the British Empire who more cordially loved a union with Great Britain than he did. John Jay said after the Revolution: “During the course of my life, and until the second petition of Congress in 1775, I never did hear any American of any class or description express a wish for the independence of the colonies.”

But these friendly feelings were first outraged and then extinguished by a long series of ill-considered and oppressive acts, covering, with some intermissions, a period of [pg 37]about twelve years. Of these the most noteworthy were the Stamp Act, which amounted to taxation without representation, and the impost on tea, which was coupled with a provision that the receipts should be applied to the salaries of officers of the crown, thus placing them beyond the control of the local assemblies. The crown officers were also authorized to grant salaries and pensions at their discretion; and a board of revenue commissioners for the whole country was established at Boston, and armed with despotic powers. These proceedings amounted to a deprivation of liberty, and they were aggravated by the king’s contemptuous rejection of the petitions addressed to him by the colonists. We know what followed,—the burning of the British war schooner, Gaspee, by leading citizens of Providence, and the famous tea-party in Boston harbor.

Meanwhile Virginia had not been inactive. In March, 1772, a few young men, members of the House of Burgesses, met at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg. They were Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee and his [pg 38]brother, Thomas Jefferson, and a few others. They drew up several resolutions, the most important of which called for the appointment of a standing committee and for an invitation to the other colonies to appoint like committees for mutual information and assistance in the struggle against the crown. A similar resolution had been adopted in Massachusetts two years before, but without any practical result. The Virginia resolution was passed the next day by the House of Burgesses, and it gave rise to those proceedings which ushered in the Revolution.

The first Continental Congress was to meet in Philadelphia, in September, 1774; and Jefferson, in anticipation, prepared a draft of instructions for the delegates who were to be elected by Virginia. Being taken ill himself, on his way to the convention, he sent forward a copy of these instructions. They were considered too drastic to be adopted by the convention; but some of the members caused them to be published under the title of “A Summary View of the Rights of America.” The pamphlet was extensively [pg 39]read in this country, and a copy which had been sent to London falling into the hands of Edmund Burke, he had it reprinted in England, where it ran through edition after edition. Jefferson’s name thus became known throughout the colonies and in England.

The “Summary View” is in reality a political essay. Its author wasted no time in discussing the specific legal and constitutional questions which had arisen between the colonies and the crown; but he went to the root of the matter, and with one or two generalizations as bold and original as if they had been made by Rousseau, he cut the Gordian knot, and severed America from the Parliament of Great Britain. He admitted some sort of dependence upon the crown, but his two main principles were these: (1) that the soil of this country belonged to the people who had settled and improved it, and that the crown had no right to sell or give it away; (2) that the right of self-government was a right natural to every people, and that Parliament, therefore, had no authority to [pg 40]make laws for America. Jefferson was always about a century in advance of his time; and the “Summary View” substantially anticipated what is now the acknowledged relation of England to her colonies.

Jefferson was elected a member of the Continental Congress at its second session; and he made a rapid journey to Philadelphia in a chaise, with two led horses behind, reaching there the night before Washington set out for Cambridge. The Congress was composed mainly of young men. Franklin, the oldest member, was seventy-one, and a few others were past sixty. Washington was forty-three; John Adams, forty; Patrick Henry, a year or two younger; John Rutledge, thirty-six; his brother, twenty-six; John Langdon and William Paca, thirty-five, John Jay, thirty; Thomas Stone, thirty-two, and Jefferson, thirty-two.

Jefferson soon became intimate with John Adams, who in later years said of him: “Though a silent member of Congress, he was so prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversation—not [pg 41]even Samuel Adams was more so—that he soon seized upon my heart.”

Jefferson, as we have seen, was not fitted to shine as an orator, still less in debate. But as a writer he had that capacity for style which comes, if it comes at all, as a gift of nature; which needs to be supplemented, but which cannot be supplied, by practice and study. In some of his early letters there are slight reminders of Dr. Johnson’s manner, and still more of Sterne’s. Sterne indeed was one of his favorite authors. However, these early traces of imitation were absorbed very quickly; and, before he was thirty, Jefferson became master of a clear, smooth, polished, picturesque, and individual style. To him, therefore, his associates naturally turned when they needed such a proclamation to the world as the Declaration of Independence; and that document is very characteristic of its author. It was imagination that gave distinction to Jefferson both as a man and as a writer. He never dashed off a letter which did not contain some play of fancy; and whether he was inventing a [pg 42]plough or forecasting the destinies of a great Democracy, imagination qualified the performance.

One of the most effective forms in which imagination displays itself in prose is by the use of a common word in such a manner and context that it conveys an uncommon meaning. There are many examples of this rhetorical art in Jefferson’s writings, but the most notable one occurs in the noble first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Upon this paragraph Mr. Parton eloquently observes: “The noblest utterance of the whole composition is the reason given for making the Declaration,—‘A decent [pg 43]respect for the opinions of mankind.’ This touches the heart. Among the best emotions that human nature knows is the veneration of man for man. This recognition of the public opinion of the world—the sum of human sense—as the final arbiter in all such controversies is the single phrase of the document which Jefferson alone, perhaps, of all the Congress, could have originated; and in point of merit it was worth all the rest.”

Franklin and John Adams, who were on the committee with Jefferson, made a few verbal changes in his draught of the Declaration, and it was then discussed and reviewed by Congress for three days. Congress made eighteen suppressions, six additions, and ten alterations; and it must be admitted that most of these were improvements. For example, Jefferson had framed a paragraph in which the king was severely censured for opposing certain measures looking to the suppression of the slave trade. This would have come with an ill grace from the Americans, since for a century New England had been enriching herself by that trade, and the southern colonies had subsisted upon the labor [pg 44]which it brought them. Congress wisely struck out the paragraph.

The Declaration of Independence was received with rapture throughout the country. Everywhere it was read aloud to the people who gathered to hear it, amid the booming of guns, the ringing of bells, and the display of fireworks. In Philadelphia, after the reading, the late king’s coat of arms was burned in Independence Square; in New York the leaden statue, in Bowling Green, of George III. was “laid prostrate in the dust,” and ordered to be run into bullets. Virginia had already stricken the king’s name from her prayer-book; and Rhode Island now forbade her people to pray for the king, as king, under a penalty of one hundred thousand pounds! The Declaration of Independence, both as a political and literary document, has stood the test of time. It has all the classic qualities of an oration by Demosthenes; and even that passage in it which has been criticised—that, namely, which pronounces all men to be created equal—is true in a sense, the truth of which it will take a century or two yet to develop.