Madison and Jefferson (4 page)

Although the hated Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, Parliament did not retreat. It passed the Declaratory Act, defending its power to impose laws on the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” New taxes followed, including one on tea, the Americans’ favorite drink. The drama enlarged in December 1773, as a band of protesters appeared at Boston Harbor dressed in “the Indian manner” and, in defiance of the tax on tea, boarded ships and dumped 342 chests into the deep. The Boston Tea Party has long stood as a symbol of American determination, but at the time even the most uncompromising Virginia patriots thought this form of resistance unwarranted. All awaited Parliament’s response. When it came, it was unexpectedly severe.

The Coercive Acts shut down Boston Harbor and curtailed Massachusetts self-government. The Quartering Act placed soldiers in Bostonians’ homes. The Quebec Act lowered the Canadian border to the Ohio River and threatened the western land interests of the colonies south of New England, including Virginia. The king, his ministers, and a majority in Parliament all believed that aggressive restrictions were needed to force the wayward Americans into submission, but the new acts only goaded the various colonies to cooperate more closely.
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The opposing sides in this face-off regarded each other as obstinate. In 1774 they grew increasingly adamant. For their part, proud Virginians refused to stand idly by as the Bostonians faced hardships. In May of that year the Virginia House of Burgesses called for a day of fasting and prayer as a show of support. Their royal governor, Lord Dunmore, countered by calling a halt to the session. Jefferson, a burgess, had a hand in the fasting resolution; he issued a plea for the colonies to be of “one Heart and one Mind” in answering “every injury to
American
rights.” It was in the same year that Jefferson, soft-spoken in person, proved himself a staunch critic on paper with
A Summary View of the Rights of British America
, printed in Williamsburg and subsequently reprinted in Philadelphia and London.

The House of Burgesses, through its Committee of Correspondence, remained in contact with the Massachusetts political organizers. Meeting in rump session at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, Jefferson and his peers took the decisive step of calling for a “general congress” of the beleaguered colonies. They called as well for a gathering of the best political minds in Virginia. Thus the same men who had previously sat in the House of Burgesses now represented Virginia at an extralegal convention—a shadow government bypassing royal authority. The Virginia Convention met for the first time in August 1774. A few weeks later, when the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, Virginians were given prominence. Peyton Randolph, Speaker of the House of Burgesses, was promptly elected the first president of Congress.
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Patriot sentiment disseminated through newspapers. The delegates to Congress were described in supernatural terms as “assembled gods” and “Oracles of our Country.” A Marylander claimed that Congress was not only the American equivalent of Parliament but excelled it “in honor, honesty, and public spirit.” James Madison, Jr., agreed, writing from his Orange County, Virginia, home to his Philadelphia friend William Bradford: “Proceedings of Congress are universally approved of in this Province & I am persuaded will be faithfully adhered to.” Virginia’s leaders accomplished much in a few short months. They created a viable opposition government in their colony and authorized their delegation in Philadelphia to voice “the united wisdom of North America” in the intercolonial congress.
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Yet the First Continental Congress was not particularly radical. It may have pronounced an embargo on British goods, but it also adopted a conciliatory posture toward King George III. Then over the winter of 1774–75, British forces stationed in Boston marched on towns where weapons and gunpowder were stored. In April 1775 the redcoats, or “lobsterbacks” as the
locals derisively called them, raided Lexington and Concord in a renewed attempt to capture stores of ammunition. The ensuing fight brought out thousands of villagers, who took deadly aim from inside their homes and behind trees, routing the redcoats. The provincials gained in confidence. If any doubt remained as to the colonies’ future, the Battle of Bunker Hill, in a sweltering June heat, let men and women up and down the coast know that a hot war had begun, one not likely to be confined to the Northeast.

A second Virginia Convention had been held in March 1775. Patrick Henry made an impassioned speech that was remembered but not recorded. Even before Lexington and Concord, he saw where the struggle was heading, and he appealed to Virginia’s leaders to remain committed to the cause of liberty at all costs. Whether he actually uttered the immortal “Give me liberty or give me death!” or his clever contemporaries edited their own memories in later years, William Wirt’s 1817 biography of Henry made history come alive with the attribution. The words, in fact, are less important than the perception they convey: Virginia, no less than Massachusetts, called the shots. Without Virginia’s commitment, colonial resistance would have been tepid, if not impossible.
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In August 1775 General Washington, a Virginian, was in command of American troops outside Boston. The town itself was occupied territory, with British forces poised to break out and march into the interior. On a smaller scale, Virginians were repelling advances from the last royal governor, who had sought refuge among a group of armed British vessels anchored offshore.

At this critical juncture Edmund Pendleton assumed leadership of the Committee of Safety, his rebellious colony’s department of defense. There was no more crucial piece of work than to coordinate resistance, and that was Pendleton’s job. When Peyton Randolph died suddenly at the age of fifty-four, Pendleton succeeded him as president of the all-important Virginia Convention, which would meet twice more to map out the future of a self-governing Virginia and weigh its role in the United Colonies.

Virginia had been Britain’s first commercial settlement in North America. By mid-1775 it was independent in all but name. Pendleton was, in this way, the state’s first executive and remained so through the murky period
preceding the legal establishment of a government. During the war years he would be a clearinghouse for political information and an essential sounding board for both Madison and Jefferson.

In early May 1776, in his role as president of the Virginia Convention, meeting again in Williamsburg, Pendleton received the thoughtful twenty-five-year-old James Madison, Jr. The new representative hailed from Orange, and Pendleton well knew that the family’s landholdings were the largest in that interior county. He may not yet have known Madison as well as he knew his influential father, Colonel James Madison, but he had certain expectations of this firstborn son of the Virginia gentry.

Madison had not been a real player in provincial politics until this moment. Since his return from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1771, he had been living 125 miles from the colonial capital, at the family estate of Montpelier. Jefferson had already established himself on a larger stage, with finely crafted writings protesting injustice—in particular, his hard-hitting
Summary View of the Rights of British America
, which contended that America was settled by free individuals at the cost of their own blood and their own fortunes. For most of the colonial era, according to Jefferson, they had avoided asking for even a shilling from the British treasury. Jefferson insisted on sizing up political events “with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people.”
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Despite his youth, Madison plunged immediately into Revolutionary politics. He was well versed on matters of natural rights and social contract theory. He believed that Great Britain was in the process of defaulting on an agreement based on economic fairness. Though we have no record to suggest a reaction from Madison to Jefferson’s
Summary View
, he too was steeped in the vocabulary of those pamphleteers who framed their appeals around such loaded words as
sovereignty, freedom, humanity
, and
happiness.
For several years now, American writers north and south had employed psychologically powerful metaphors to convince themselves that the parent country was betraying a union based on affectionate concern.
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Although life on his father’s plantation often felt isolating, Madison was more than just theoretically attached to the patriot cause. In 1776 he was as familiar with the political hub of America, Philadelphia, as Jefferson was, and his letters show an eagerness to stay abreast of news from the North. Jefferson was writing from Philadelphia with a minimum of self-censoring to John Page, his close companion from their days at the College of William and Mary and now, along with Pendleton, a member of Virginia’s Committee of Safety; Madison had the equivalent outlet in Princeton
classmate William Bradford, the son of a prominent Philadelphia printer.

The Bradford firm was the official printer to the Continental Congress, which first met a short time after Madison had concluded a visit to Philadelphia and sampled the political spirit there. He and Bradford exchanged animated, occasionally extravagant letters, each prompting the other with patriot logic. Bradford railed against the “corrupt, ambitious & determined” British ministry. Madison elaborated on “the Characteristics of a free people,” attested to the warm sentiments his fellow Virginians felt for Boston’s patriots, and praised “American ardor” in opposing the “secret enemies” of good and generous government. He saw little chance that the Crown would deliver justice and was opting for a continental defense against possible attack.
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What had shaped his mind? At Princeton, Madison was exposed to a wide variety of subjects, and though he never had any intention of becoming an attorney, he began the study of law in late 1773. His real intellectual passion lay with arguments in favor of religious and civil liberty. Here Reverend John Witherspoon, the president of Princeton, was his guide. A stout man with a Scottish accent as pronounced as his satirical bent, Witherspoon exposed Madison to the Scottish philosophes as well as the powerful Presbyterian critique of religious oppression. The Scots’ contribution to the Enlightenment was their particular emphasis on sympathy and sociability—how to nourish manners on a national scale and improve the human condition.

Revolutionary ideas were already in the air at Princeton during Witherspoon’s presidency, and he was subsequently elected to the Continental Congress. He would, in fact, be the only ordained minister to sign the Declaration of Independence. The great majority of those who took his classes became avid supporters of the patriot cause.

Passionate about liberty, Witherspoon believed that every human being had a natural inclination to behave morally in pursuit of temporal and eternal happiness alike. But he also believed in sin and human depravity: the moral sense was blunted whenever selfishness—an unjust authority, within or without—took over. Resistance to that authority through acts of virtue preserved liberty of conscience. In Witherspoon’s words, conscience set bounds to authority by saying: “Hitherto shalt thou go, but no further.”

Believing that liberty of conscience was uniquely a Protestant endowment, he reviled the Catholic Church. “Unjust authority is the very essence of popery,” he wrote. The Church of Rome was distant, hierarchical, and
oppressive, “making laws to bind the conscience” and punishing those who called its authority into question. Yet he held Protestants responsible for similar abuses, because all human institutions, religious and political, were prone to corruption, bias, and human error. The Church of England itself had an embarrassing history of persecuting Quakers, Presbyterians, and other dissenting sects on English soil.

As tensions built between America and England, Witherspoon saw in the British ministry a replication of these abuses. If the pope was fallible, then so were the British king, his council, and the members of Parliament. In short, London had become another Rome. Its distance from America had generated error, persecution, and the faulty claim that it could make laws “to bind us in all cases whatsoever.” In 1776, in one of his best-known published sermons (dedicated to John Hancock, who was then president of the Continental Congress), Witherspoon said that the central aim of American independence was to protect civil and religious liberties. His logic was formidable, and his robust language a strong stimulus for Madison.
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Writing to his friend Bradford early in 1774, Madison noted that while the recently engineered Boston Tea Party may have involved too much “boldness,” it was ultimately right because of the “
ministerialism
” of the royal governor. His choice of words was not accidental. Madison saw a direct connection between Britain’s ministers—the king’s chief political advisers—and the established church. Referring to the primacy of the Congregational Church in New England, he wrote: “If the Church of England had been the established and general Religion in all the Northern Colonies as it has been among us here [in Virginia], and uninterrupted tranquility had prevailed throughout the Continent, it is clear to me that slavery and subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated among us.”

A state of “tranquility” was nothing desirable—it meant surrender of the will. Madison was saying that the Bostonians’ love of liberty flourished in a dissenting religious environment, for Anglicans were without power there. If the Anglican Church had held sway in Massachusetts as it did in Virginia, a general passivity—“slavery and subjection”—would have sunk the colonies into a political grave. Virginia could learn from Boston’s example.

Madison possessed the fire of a young activist. Thinking of the contest between freedom and servitude, he was livid that religious persecution should continue in Virginia. In a county near Orange, a half dozen Baptists had been thrown into jail for publishing their beliefs. Madison expressed his disgust with “knavery among the Priesthood,” and the “Hell conceived
principle of persecution” that raged among the Anglican clergy. Though the House of Burgesses was then considering petitions on behalf of dissenters, he doubted much would change. The self-interested clergy were “numerous and powerful” due to their connection to the “Bishops and the Crown”; they would do all they could to retain control.