Friday, May 23, 2014

A Summary View of the Rights of British North America, Part IV: Law and Precedent

I’d like to wrap up my reflection on Thomas Jefferson’s A Summary View by taking a moment to discuss what it was that Jefferson believed the British government was guilty of in its dealings with the Thirteen Colonies. While it’s true that the Declaration of Independence provides a lengthy list of grievances against Parliament and the Crown, there is little room left for the kind of detailed philosophical exposition that Jefferson frequently resorted to in his writings. Considering the nature of the document, more a press release than a treatise, this is understandable. A Summary View, however, represents Jefferson in a more contemplative and radical mode, and it’s worth examining which offences he chooses to draw attention to, and how he frames them within the broader relationship between the colonies and the Crown.

Thinking back once again to the Declaration of Independence, it’s clear that much of what Jefferson complains of in A Summary View made it into the final draft of that famous document. Among these are condemnations of George III’s callous use of his veto power, the frequent dissolution of the various colonial legislatures, a common and destructive interference in the day-to-day administration of the colonies themselves, and the repeated stationing of British troops within borders of the colonies without prior approval of the legislatures of the same. These are abuses which, as I explained in a previous post, violated what many colonists had come to perceive as their rights as citizens of the British crown. To that end I pointed to the Bill of Rights of 1689 as a formal expression of these rights, and something which I believe was on the minds of Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries in 1776. But it bears remembering that the Declaration does not mention the Bill of Rights explicitly, and speaks of the colonists rights in rather abstract terms. A Summary View, however, contains much more direct references to what Jefferson believed these rights to be, which were at once legal and moral, natural and prescribed.

As stated in the two previous posts, Jefferson believed that the relationship between the colonies of British North America and the British Crown was one of a shared monarchy, and shared legal and political traditions. He did not, therefore, consider the legislature of (for example) Virginia to be inherently inferior in authority to Parliament, but rather saw the two as equals under the executive authority of George III. This executive authority, however, was circumscribed by a body of laws, and by traditions of government that had their basis in the commonly understood concepts of justice and common sense. By the late 18th-century, the people of Britain had shown time and again that they were not inclined to tolerate a monarchy that claimed to wield absolute legal power. Accordingly, the British government had evolved in such a way as to hem in the power of the Crown and make it beholden to the rule of law. This form of constitutional monarchy became a much-celebrated aspect of the British political tradition, and Jefferson asserted at numerous points in in A Summary View that it applied to the colonies as much as it did Britain itself, and that it was George III’s frequent violations of this tradition that were at the root of the looming crisis in British America.

In paragraph fifteen, Jefferson states that it was an agreed-upon convention of the British constitution and those of many of the colonies (which he refers to here as “American states”) that the Crown possessed the power to refuse its assent to any law which had been approved by both branches of the legislature. He further adds that while for the better part of its history this veto power had been used sparingly by monarchs who were justly sensitive to the “impropriety of opposing their single opinion to the united wisdom of the two houses of parliament,” relatively recent events had given it a new purpose. As the British empire increased in size and complexity (as it had done over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries), Jefferson believed that the judicious use of the veto had become necessary in order to prevent the legislative acts of any one constituent state within the empire from infringing on the “rights and interest” of others. That being said, the frequent use of the veto power that had been employed against the acts of the colonial legislatures by the British monarch in the decades and years leading up to 1774 were accomplished for what Jefferson characterized as “the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all.” It was not the veto itself, which Jefferson acknowledged was a legal right possessed by the monarchy and which served an important administrative purpose, but rather the method of its employment and the justification behind its use. Thus it could be said that what Jefferson demanded was not a break with precedent but a greater respect for it, and for established legal forms.

He makes a similar argument in paragraphs eighteen and nineteen, this time in respect to the British monarch’s power to dissolve the legislature of his realm(s) at will. Though this power, he argues, had been utilized relatively frequently by British monarchs in the past, since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the passage of the Bill of Rights of 1689 it had fallen into disuse. Indeed, Jefferson points to a recent occasion when George III was called on to dissolve Parliament at the behest of the people, only to have his ministers openly declare that “his majesty possessed no such power by the constitution.” Jefferson meets this claim with skepticism, and argues that on occasions when a legislature has lost the confidence of its constituents, made itself the tool of foreign conspirators, and assumed powers not assigned it by law, dissolution is most definitely required. Accordingly he implies that the British Parliament had been guilty of all these sins in the recent past and resisted being dissolved, while the various colonial legislatures had not committed similar abuses and been dissolved on numerous occasions, concluding that George III and his ministers “have carried this power beyond every limit known, or provided for, by the laws.” Again, Jefferson seems to argue not for a radical restructuring of the relationship between the Crown and the colonies, but rather for greater legal consistency between the two in regard to the powers of Parliament and the monarchy.

Jefferson effectively concludes A Summary View with another argument that appears to call on the British monarchy for stricter adherence to the laws and precedents of the empire. Specifically, he claims that in order to enforce many of the measures which had resulted from the colonists’ resistance to Parliament’s assumption of authority over them, a large body of armed forces had been sent across the ocean and quartered among George III’s American subjects. These soldiers, Jefferson points out, were foreign to the colonies, were not called to service by any legal authority that the colonial governments possessed. And because George III had no legal right to inflict them upon British America, they were either liable to the laws of the colonies in which they found themselves (particularly those relating to riots or unlawful assemblies), or constituted an invading force. By comparison, Jefferson elaborates, the German mercenary troops called into service in Britain during the Seven Years War were not authorized by the sole authority of George II (grandfather of George III), but were called into service by an act of Parliament which also limited the terms and circumstances of their assignment. This, Jefferson stresses, is how a constitutional monarch should act: in accordance with the legal authority which he/she possesses within each of their various realms. The laws that limit Crown authority in Britain should have their equivalent in British America, as the rights of British citizens are equal to those of his majesty’s American subjects.

As to my purpose in bringing attention to these arguments in A Summary View, I reiterate a theme I pointed to in an earlier post: complexity. However much the American Revolution, its causes and significance have been retold, repackaged and regurgitated over these last few centuries, to the point that a politician or pundit can claim that the Revolution was simply a tax revolt and receive a chorus of appreciative nods in response, it was never so simple, particularly not to the revolutionaries themselves. In the entirety of A Summary View, Jefferson mentions taxes, taxation, or taxing only twice: once in paragraph thirteen when discussing the unjust legal fees associated with the Administration of Justice Act, and again in paragraph twenty-three when he states as a matter of course that the colonists’ property should only be taxed by their own authorities. Clearly he believed that there was more to discuss; more abuses, more responsibilities, more principles involved than the supposed burden of taxation.

It’s because of this aversion to simplicity that A Summary View, and its author, continues to be of interest. Jefferson was a complicated and often contradictory man, and accordingly many of his more radical arguments in A Summary View are balanced by a rather conciliatory and conservative conclusion. However it is that he came to advocate complete independence by 1776, in 1774 he was of the opinion that the relationship between the colonies and the Crown was worth preserving. Indeed, he claimed that it was the “fervent prayer of all British America” to “establish fraternal love and harmony through the whole empire.” In light of the grievances that stood in the way, his view seemed to be that British laws and British precedents were sound and that the fault lay with the monarch and his ministers’ inability to properly adhere to them. For someone considered among the most radical thinkers of his generation this might seem like a rather odd place to start. How did he arrive at that opinion? How did he make his case? How did he come to eventually promote independence? These are important questions, and their answers are not easily found.
        
Because the American Revolution was a complicated event and the revolutionaries were complicated people. And while I don’t mean to sound like an after-school special, I do earnestly believe that trying to understand them in all their complexity can be extremely helpful in coming to grips with the intricacies of our own time, the people in it, and the events we face every single day.

But don’t take my word for it: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Summary_View_of_the_Rights_of_British_America

Thursday, May 15, 2014

A Summary View of the Rights of British North America, Part III: Foundations, contd.

A quick recap before I pick up where I left off: Virginia and Massachusetts were founded by companies of investors and enjoyed varying levels of success before being reorganized as crown colonies; Pennsylvania and New York were founded as proprietary colonies, and Pennsylvania remained so while New York became a crown possession; New Jersey began as a proprietary colony, was split, and then recombined as a crown colony. So far only Pennsylvania began and ended its colonial period as an independent venture, and even then it partially owes its existence to a royal land grant.

            So far Jefferson’s argument isn’t looking so good.

   6 Province of Maryland: a proprietary colony formed via a land grant from Charles I to Cecil Calvert, Baron Baltimore in 1632, Maryland was intended by Calvert to be a haven for persecuted English Catholics. Subsequently the Calvert family was removed from power by a Protestant rebellion in 1688, succeeded by a series of royal governors, and then restored to their proprietary office in 1715 (where they remained until 1776). Similar to New Jersey in its rather turbulent history, Maryland doesn’t quite seem to fit Jefferson’s purported model of colonial autonomy either.

   7 Connecticut Colony: a merger of several smaller colonies, Connecticut actually began its existence as an outgrowth of Massachusetts (effectively make it a colony of a colony). In 1636 a group of Puritans who were dissatisfied with the growing Anglican dominance in the Bay Colony moved south and founded a settlement at Hartford on the Connecticut River. This settlement and its surrounding area was subsequently combined with the Saybrook Colony and the New Haven Colony and granted a royal charter in 1662. Essentially Massachusetts in microcosm, Connecticut seems to hew a bit closer to Jefferson’s vision of a colony that was founded on the exertions of private individuals, made to prosper through their hard work, and only later granted royal approval.

    8 Delaware Colony: beginning its life as a collection of Dutch and Swedish settlements founded in the 1640s and 1650s, the territory later known as Delaware passed into the hands of first the Calverts of Maryland in 1669 and then the Penns of Pennsylvania in the 1680s. William Penn subsequently attempted to assimilate the “Lower Counties of the Delaware” into his larger proprietary holdings, but was stymied by local resistance, granted the region its own assembly, and governed it as a de-facto autonomous colony. Because of its initially uncertain governance and ability to resist the centralizing efforts of authorities in Pennsylvania, Delaware could arguably be said to have been self-founded and self-governed for most of its early history (thus Jefferson’s description would not be entirely inaccurate).

   9 Province of Georgia: the youngest colony at the time of the American Revolution, Georgia was founded via royal charter in 1732 by General James Oglethorpe as a haven for debtors. For twenty years the colony was governed by a council of trustees, who among other things banned the sale of rum and the possession of slaves, and enjoyed annual subsidies from the British government. Indeed, because the colony was on the frontier of potentially hostile Indian territory, and because the crown believed that Georgia could serve as a buffer between Spanish Florida and the Carolinas, they were more inclined to lend direct financial and military aid than with other colonies. Unfortunately Parliament’s interest in Georgia waned by the 1750s and in 1752 the trustees, no longer able to effectively govern, allowed Georgia to be re-chartered as a crown colony. Because of its historically dependent relationship with the crown, Georgia seems the least self-sufficient and functionally independent of the Thirteen Colonies that Jefferson was presumably referring to in 1774.

  10 The Province of North/South Carolina: Though initially founded in 1629, it wasn’t until Charles II re-chartered the colony and granted it to a group of eight Lords Proprietors in 1663 that the Province of Carolina really came into being. After several decades of modest success the Proprietors were forced to grant separate governments for North and South Carolina in 1712 due to their increasing inability to act decisively in the face of a colonial rebellion and recurrent conflicts with local Natives. By 1729 seven of Proprietors had sold their shares to the crown, and North Carolina and South Carolina were re-chartered yet again as royal colonies. Another mix of autonomy and dependence, the Carolinas were settled under the auspices of the Lords Proprietors and enjoyed several decades of virtual independence from crown authority, though it was a royal grant that brought them into existence to begin with. I’d say that Jefferson was right in part on this score, though the reality was somewhat more complicated than he painted it in the 1770s.

   11 Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations: like Connecticut, Rhode Island was in many ways colony of Massachusetts; and like Delaware, it was formed out of a collection of smaller settlements that were able to resist being absorbed by Massachusetts and were granted a royal charter in 1663. Because these initial settlements were founded by religious dissenters like theologian and preacher Roger Williams and Puritan radical Anne Hutchinson, Rhode Island developed into a colony known for its dedication to religious freedom, progressive attitudes toward debt and capital punishment, and opposition to slavery. Again like Delaware and Connecticut, Rhode Island seems to conform to Jefferson’s vision of self-sufficiency more than most of its colonial brethren.

   12 Province of New Hampshire: initially settled via a series of land grants in the 1620s, New Hampshire effectively became a part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1641. In 1679 a charter was granted that restored the colony’s independence, which was again rescinded in 1686 and restored once more in 1691. Like several of its fellow New England colonies New Hampshire was settled by a combination of English transplants and religious and political exiles from Massachusetts, and though it was eventually made a crown colony it spent a good portion of its early existence being either loosely governed or possessing no formal government at all. Once more I would argue that Jefferson’s theory may apply, but only loosely.

Now I’ll bet you’re wondering what the point of all that was. Well, besides being an interesting exercise in and of itself, I hope that a few things have now become clear about how the various Thirteen Colonies were founded, and why Jefferson’s argument in A Summary View is significant in light of these facts.

To begin, Jefferson’s vision of the colonial founding, wherein industrious colonists worked their hands to the bone to carve out a slice of civilization in a hostile foreign environment only to have the fruits of their labours seized by greedy crown officials, doesn’t quite grasp how complicated the early history of many of the colonies where. Though some started out as joint-stock ventures or were founded as independent settlements of religious dissenters, others began as land grants to private individuals or members of the British aristocracy. Some required frequent royal assistance, like Georgia; others had to be taken under royal control after their independent governors failed to adequately administer them, like Virginia. Some even spent significant portions of their early history operating under little or no formal government, like Delaware, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. All told, no two colonies could be said to have followed the same path, and though most of them ended up being administered by the British crown, the ways by which they arrived at that conclusion were many and varied.

But more to the point, I think, is the fact that none of the colonies operated entirely outside of the apparatus of British government. Though Pennsylvania was the personal property of the Penn family, and Maryland of the Calverts, both came into being thanks to land grants made by the reigning monarch. Just so, Massachusetts and Virginia began as business enterprises that derived their legitimacy from royal charters, and even independently founded colonies like Connecticut and Rhode Island sought out royal approval in an effort to maintain their autonomy, not from the British government but from other colonies. Indeed, there was no colony among the Thirteen that didn’t eventually seek royal approval for their existence in some form or another. So in point of fact Jefferson’s blanket description of the colonies as self-founded and fully autonomous political entities is something of an oversimplification. Rather than viewing them as either independent entities or subsidiaries of the British government, it would perhaps be more accurate to characterize the relationship between the colonies and the Crown as a fluctuating network of autonomy and dependency, resistance and compliance.

But the point of this exercise wasn’t necessarily to prove that Jefferson was wrong, though what he seemed to believe was at least partially at variance with reality. No, the point is that Jefferson believed he was right, and that the colonies were, and had always been, functionally independent. In his mind, and the minds of others no doubt, the right of the colonies to refuse to comply with British legislation was derived from the nature of their foundation, indeed their very existence, as sovereign states. If Virginia, or Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania, were founded by free British citizens, and those citizens possessed certain natural rights, then the governments that they founded must also be free and retain similar rights. Unless at some point in their history the colonist voluntary gave up some of the privileges they enjoyed, and Jefferson certainly didn’t think that was the case, then there was no way to explain how the colonial governments could have become beholden to Parliament (a reality Jefferson refused to acknowledge). Within this particular historical arrangement, therefore, the American Revolution was less a violent rupture of an existing relationship than an acknowledgement of fact: the colonies were independent because they always had been.

In all I’d say there are two things particularly worth taking away from this exercise, and from this initial reading of A Summary View. The first is that the colonial foundings, and indeed the American Revolution itself, were complex events that have often been collapsed and simplified by how they are remembered. Jefferson seemed to see colonial history as a relatively straightforward progression of settlement, toil, personal sacrifice, and attempted British usurpation. Just so, people have tended to characterize the Revolution as just about taxes, or just about freedom. In both cases, real understanding can only be attempted once the true complexity of events is fully embraced. It is, I think, the essential difference between a myth and a fact: myths tell us who we think we are; facts tell us who we really are.

But there is still value to be found in myths. Jefferson believed in the myth of colonial autonomy, however much it may have ignored certain facts. It was of value to him, and to others, because it helped him to explain and to understand the world in which he was living, and the problems that he and his fellow colonists were preparing to confront. Attempting to understand how and why Jefferson came to believe in this myth is central to understanding how the colonists viewed themselves and their history, how they made certain decisions, and perhaps why they were ultimately driven to seek complete and formal independence from the most powerful empire in the history of the world. 

Friday, May 9, 2014

A Summary View of the Rights of British North America, Part II: Foundations

The content of A Summary View, deemed radical by many in 1774, did much to establish Jefferson’s reputation as an eloquent political writer and philosopher, and was likely responsible for his election to the Second Continental Congress in 1775, and his being chosen as the principle writer of the Declaration of Independence. Among other things it accomplished two basic tasks. First, it laid out Jefferson’s view of the political and social relationship between Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies. And second, it discussed the roots of the ongoing conflict between those two bodies. The latter had been tackled before, by individual writers and various colonial legislatures, and Jefferson’s views didn't diverge all that much from what had already been said. His conception of the colonies’ foundings and their place within the larger British Empire, however, was more than a little unconventional, and was likely what raised the ire of the more moderate delegates at Philadelphia in 1774.

Jefferson’s theory was fairly straightforward, if a bit unusual, and followed from a series of factual declarations. First he asserted in paragraph two that when his ancestors and those of his fellow colonists first arrived in America they did so as free inhabitants of the British Empire. Like all British subjects they were possessed of certain basic, natural rights, and by choosing to inhabit a land heretofore unsettled (by Europeans, anyway) and accordingly establishing new societies of their own design, these same rights were not rendered null and void. The Saxons of antiquity, a tribe of Germanic barbarians that settled in England beginning in the 5th century, did so in a similar manner to the earliest English colonists in America. The Saxons worked, and warred, and spilt their blood and sweat in attempting to take England for themselves, and consequently whatever gains they made were their property, and not those of whatever authorities existed in Saxony. Just so, Jefferson argued, the people of Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania owed whatever prosperity they enjoyed to their own hard work, their own toil and suffering, and not to British authorities whose financial assistance was minimal, recent, and self-interested.

Indeed, Jefferson continued, the then-recent Seven Years War that pitted Britain and France against each other yet again and saw battles rage across their respective North American colonies was conducted for Britain’s benefit. The colonists would have been pleased to trade with France or any of its colonies to their mutual satisfaction had Britain not felt threatened by this proposition and made war as a result. And though, Jefferson conceded, the financial assistance that Britain had granted the colonies had indeed been useful, it did not give Parliament the right to legislate for those colonies, any more than British aid to Portugal allowed them to regulate the laws of that sovereign kingdom. Rather, Jefferson believed, the colonies were tied to the British crown by choice. They had adopted models of government similar to that of Britain out of a sense of familiarity, and had chosen to acknowledge the British monarch as their own for similar reasons. Thus, the colonies that could be said to constitute British North America were not subsidiaries to Great Britain itself, but separate and equal political entities linked by a shared king. Jefferson followed this in paragraph four by definitively stating that whatever political divisions had been undertaken in British North America in the 17th century by the granting of land to favourites and followers of the monarch were fundamentally unjustified.

Simple enough, right? Virginia, Georgia, New Hampshire; these and their sister-colonies were established by the colonists themselves, and Britain’s assistance was mercurial at best. Thus, the colonies of British North America were independent political entities, with the right to make their own laws, collect their own taxes, and refuse to recognize any authority other than that of their legally accepted sovereign (who also happened to be the British monarch). As I said, this was a radical view in 1774, but did it have a basis in fact? Was Jefferson right, in spite of the more conservative views taken by many of his colleagues?

To answer that, I’d like to look at how each of the Thirteen Colonies was founded and test Jefferson’s hypothesis against the facts as they are now understood. Bear with me, if you would.

Deep breath.

   1) Province of Virginia: following failed attempts at colonization during the Elizabethan era, the London Company (a joint stock company) was granted a royal charter by James I in 1607 and authorized to settle along the coast of North America between the 34th and 41st parallels. The Company was required to pay all costs themselves, but in return reserved the right to all property and resources within their territory. The intention of the investors was to establish a permanent settlement, extract what resources they could in the way of minerals, timber or produce, and export and sell them in Britain at a profit (hopefully). After several disastrous years of famine, falling stock prices, lawsuits and conflicts with Natives, the Company had its charter revoked and Virginia became a crown colony in 1624. Though it was certainly intended to be an independent venture, and the early colonists did not receive aid from the British government, the colony’s inability to establish a firm footing, and its founders’ frequent financial missteps, ensured that little permanent success was achieved prior to the imposition of royal authority in the 1620s. Let’s say Jefferson was half-right in reference to his native land, but only just.

   2)Province of Massachusetts Bay: Massachusetts was formed of a merger of two earlier colonies: the Massachusetts Bay Colony (founded 1628), and the Plymouth Colony (founded 1620). Both were founded with the help of private investment, either through the London Company or one of its competitors. Colonists in these territories tended to be religious dissenters (non-Anglican Protestants) who borrowed money to obtain colonial charters and were actively fleeing persecution in Britain. In spite of hardships they managed to survive the harsh conditions in North America and developed into thriving centres of trade and agriculture. After several decades of virtual independence the colonies experienced a period of tumultuous relations with Britain from the 1660s through the 1680s, culminating in the merger and founding of the Province of Massachusetts Bay under royal authority in 1691. Because the colony/colonies enjoyed a lengthier period of independence from British governance than Virginia, and were generally less likely to have received aid due to their status as havens of religious dissent, I’d argue that Massachusetts fits more closely to Jefferson’s model (though it too was eventually reorganized under royal auspices).
           
  3) Province of New York: founded in 1614 by a chartered Dutch trading company as Nieuw-Nederlandt, it remained a private venture until captured by the English in 1664 during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Thereafter the territory was granted to the Duke of York, who never visited the region himself and governed it through a series of appointed officers and administrators as a proprietary colony (one that is essentially owned by a single individual and governed via a royal charter). In 1685 the Duke ascended the throne and became King James II, whereupon New York became a crown colony. Unless Jefferson considered the Dutch period to be within the scope of his evaluation, I don’t suppose New York could have ever been considered particularly autonomous (or at least not in the way he described).

   4)Province of Pennsylvania: a proprietary colony founded in 1681 by Quaker William Penn after King Charles II awarded him a 45,000 square mile grant in payment for debts the crown owed to William’s father, Pennsylvania remained in the hands of the Penn family until the Revolution. William Penn parcelled out land to a host of prospective settlers, helped establish a frame of government (which was considered very progressive at the time) and took pains to enforce religious freedom. The colony subsequently became one of the most successful and cosmopolitan European settlements in North America. More than most, I’d say Pennsylvania adheres to Jefferson’s vision of an independently founded and prosperous colony that owed little of its success to British assistance. That being said, without that initial land grant from Charles II it’s unlikely that Pennsylvania would have ever existed.

  5) Province of New Jersey: established in 1665 after the Duke of York granted territory between the Hudson and Delaware rivers in his colonial holdings to Sir George Cateret and Lord Berkeley of Stratton, New Jersey was administered as a proprietary colony, then split into East and West Jersey in 1674, and then recombined as a crown colony in 1702. A reasonably successful colony with a fitful history, New Jersey seems to fall somewhere between autonomy and dependence. Again I’d say that Jefferson is perhaps half-right.

With several more colonies to go, I think I’ll break off here and pick things up in the next post. So far, though, Jefferson’s argument is not necessarily being borne out by the evidence.    

Friday, May 2, 2014

A Summary View of the Rights of British North America, Part I: Context

Whiplash-inducing though it might be, I’d like to return to 1770s again for this next series of posts, and to the pen of one Thomas Jefferson, for a somewhat more in-depth discussion of the perceived grievances that helped to bring about the America Revolution. Specifically, I’d like to look at a pamphlet that Jefferson originally submitted to the First Continental Congress in 1774 entitled, A Summary View of the Rights of British North America. Intended by Jefferson to provide a brief overview of the historic relationship between the British government and the Thirteen Colonies and an outline of the abuses he believed said government had committed in the 1760s and 1770s, A Summary View shows Jefferson at his eloquent, radical best. Though it may not be as well-known as certain other contemporary documents, it’s representative of a series of similar pamphlets and declarations that were published in several of the colonies in the years leading up to the Revolution. In particular, it provides insight into how some of the colonists viewed their relationship with their supposed mother country, and how they defined their rights as (colonial) British citizens.

    I’ll note here that Jefferson will be a frequent subject of discussion going forward. This is not because I think he’s the most important Founding Father. Their various personal and professional disputes aside, I think it’s important to think of these men as working in tandem toward a common goal (however ill-defined it may be at times). But I do think he may be one of the most influential, if you consider the way that his words have been repeated and adapted over the almost two centuries since his death in 1826, and he was certainly among the founding generation’s most prolific writers. Few men did so much to create the essential vocabulary of the national and political consciousness of the United States, and few men had so many opinions about so many things. And at the same time few of the Founders cut as enigmatic and often contradictory a figure as Jefferson continues to do. He was a passionate man with deeply-held convictions who was as often wrong as he was right, and so, I think, quintessentially American. For these reasons, and because I simply have access to more of Jefferson’s writings than anyone else’s, he will figure into my reflections frequently from this point forward.       

   As I began to say about A Summary View, it was not the first document published in the Thirteen Colonies in the 1760s and 1770s that attempted to take stock of the ongoing dispute between the British government and those of the colonies themselves. Though I recall that I outlined said conflict briefly during my discussion of the Declaration of Independence, I think under the circumstances a bit more depth is required before I go on.

Essentially, the American Revolutionary era began in 1763 with the end of the Seven Years War (more commonly known in North America as the French and Indian War) and the victory of the British over their French rivals. Though successful, Britain had nearly doubled its national debt over the course of the conflict and was in earnest need of some new form of revenue to help defray similar expenses in the future. Since, in the minds of certain notables in the government of the day, the war had been primarily fought in North America for the benefit of the colonists, they should help to pay for their own defence. To that end, a series of laws were imposed on the colonies, first levelling taxes on sugar and regulating the issue of paper currency (the Sugar Act and Currency Act of 1764), then authorizing British soldiers to be housed by colonial residents at their own expense (the Quartering Act of 1765), and finally introducing taxes on many forms of paper goods, from legal documents to newspapers to playing cards (the Stamp Act of 1765). Though the taxes themselves were not particularly high, the majority of the colonists refused to accept them on the grounds that the British Parliament, in which no representatives of the colonies sat, had no right to impose taxes on colonial citizens. In addition the British troops that were garrisoned in the colonies, which the taxes were intended to pay for, were viewed by many as being in violation of their established right to be free of an excessive military establishment in times of peace.     

The colonists met these laws with varying forms of resistance, including public demonstrations, boycotts on British goods, declarations, pamphlets and petitions. These efforts ultimately culminated in the convening of the Stamp Act Congress in New York City in October, 1765, which included delegates from nine of the Thirteen Colonies. The assembled delegates eventually issued a Declaration of Rights and Grievances, which attempted to both assert the loyalty of the colonists to the British Crown and establish the rational for their continued protest of Britain’s efforts at colonial taxation. While it is debatable how successful this early congress was at influencing British policy (indeed, it’s likely Parliament responded more readily to the plaintive calls of British merchants whose livelihood was injured by the colonial boycotts), the Stamp Act was repealed in March, 1766. On the same day Parliament also passed the American Colonies Act (commonly known as the Declaratory Act), wherein it asserted its authority to pass binding laws for the colonies in the same way that it did for Britain proper.

The spirit of resistance on both sides of the Atlantic reared its head once more in 1767 with the passage of the Townshend Acts, which levied a series of taxes on essential goods like glass, paper, lead, and tea. These taxes led to further protests, which were exacerbated in March, 1770 by an outbreak of violence in Boston wherein garrisoned British troops fired into the unruly mob that had been harassing them. Eleven people were injured and five killed, and though the soldiers responsible were ultimately acquitted (thanks to the spirited defence of Boston lawyer John Adams), relations between Britain and its colonies entered a downward spiral in the years that followed. The breaking point seemed to arrive with the passage of the Tea Act in 1773. This act mandated the purchase of surplus East India Company tea by the American colonists in an effort to prop up the organization’s sagging fortunes. Because this tea was also subject to an import tax, many colonists believed that its purchase would have amounted to a tacit endorsement of Britain’s entire colonial taxation scheme. The resulting Boston Tea Party of December, 1773, during which protesters snuck aboard an East India Company ship in Boston Harbour and threw chests of tea overboard, called forth the wrath of Parliament in a form the colonists had yet to experience.

In an attempt to both reimburse the East India Company for their lost property and make it clear to their American cousins that further civil disobedience wasn't going to be tolerated, British lawmakers passed a series of statutes that exacted severe punishments on the colonies, and on Massachusetts in particular. These acts of Parliament, subsequently known as the Intolerable Acts, closed the port of Boston until the damaged property was repaid (the Boston Port Act), revoked the governing charter of the Massachusetts (the Massachusetts Government Act), reinforced the right of Parliament to authorize the housing of soldiers in citizens’ homes (an update to the Quartering Act), and ensured that any British official charged with a crime in one of the colonies would face trial in Britain only, with potential witnesses forced to travel at their own expense (the Administration of Justice Act, known colloquially as the “Murder Act”). Hoping to isolate the radicals in Massachusetts by making them the cause of shared misfortunes, the British government met with even stronger resistance than before. In fact, the sympathy that the Intolerable Acts generated for Massachusetts actually drew the colonies closer together than they had ever been before and led to the convening of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September, 1774. It was there that the assembled delegates (representing all of the Thirteen Colonies, save Georgia) agreed to a complete boycott of British goods until the hated Acts were repealed, and, perhaps more significantly, to come to the defence of Massachusetts in case of British military intervention.

I’ll leave the play-by-play there, I think. Hopefully you understand a bit more about the nature of the disagreement that led to the American Revolution, and if nothing else have a degree of background for what I'm going to talk about next. In that light, I’d also like to speak very briefly about Thomas Jefferson himself. After all, it was in 1774 that he first emerged onto the American stage.

Son of a planter and surveyor and recipient of a classical education, Jefferson’s background and early experiences were typical of the Virginia landholding class to which he belonged. At the College of William & Mary, which he attended from age 16 to 18, he studied mathematics, metaphysics, philosophy, Greek, and Latin. Upon graduation he served as a clerk under his mentor and former professor George Wythe, read the law, and was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767. In 1769 he stood for election to the Virginia House of Burgesses (the colonial legislature), where he served as a delegate until June, 1775.

So he was an intelligent young man, reasonably wealthy, and a reasonably successful lawyer. It was, all told, a pretty conventional life for a man of his social class; unremarkable, even. But the passage of the Intolerable Acts lit a fire in Jefferson, only 31 in 1774, and inspired him to pen a lengthy defence of colonial autonomy and a denunciation of the repeated abuses of the British government. This commentary, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, was written with the intention of being presented to the delegates at the Continental Congress for their approval. The subsequent debate found the assembled representatives favouring a more moderate approach, and A Summary View was later published in pamphlet form and widely distributed.