• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2550 0

native colony. He had not been selected to attend the first Continental Congress and should not have been at the second. He was called only as a late replacement for Peyton Randolph, who had been summoned home to Virginia. Jefferson’s reputation rested almost entirely on his Summary View of the Rights of British America written two years earlier. A rather aggressive and youthfully impudent essay advising the British on how they ought to conduct themselves in their principal overseas possession, it had gained him some attention as a writer. To his fellow Virginia delegates he was known as a dilettante (a word that did not yet have any pejorative overtones; taken from the Italian dilettare, it simply described one who found pleasure in the richness of human possibility) and admired for the breadth of his reading in an age when that truly meant something. (He was adept at seven languages.)

By no means, however, did he have what we might call a national standing. Nor did he display any evidence of desiring one. He showed a distinct lack of keenness to get to Philadelphia, dawdling en route to shop for books and to buy a horse, and once there he said almost nothing. ‘During the whole time I sat with him I never heard him utter three sentences together,’ John Adams later marvelled. Moreover, he went home to Virginia in December 1775, in the midst of debates, and did not return for nearly five months. Had he been able, he would gladly have abandoned the Congress altogether, leaving the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to someone else in order to take part in drawing up a new constitution for Virginia, a matter much closer to his heart.27

None the less, because he showed a ‘peculiar felicity for expression’, in John Adams’s words, he was one of five men chosen to draft the Declaration of Independence – John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston were the others – and this Committee of Five in turn selected him to come up with a working draft. The purpose, as Jefferson saw it, was ‘not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent’.28

But of course the Declaration of Independence is much more than that. As Garry Wills has written, it stands as ‘perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great Iiterature’.29 Consider the opening sentence:

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.

In a single sentence, in clear, simple language that anyone can understand, Jefferson has not only encapsulated the philosophy of what is to follow, but set in motion a cadence that gradually becomes hypnotic. You can read the preamble to the Declaration of Independence for its rhythms alone. As Stephen E. Lucas notes, it captures in just 202 words ‘what it took John Locke thousands of words to explain in his Second Treatise of Government. In its ability to compress complex ideas into a brief, clear statement, the preamble is a paradigm of eighteenth century prose style.30

What is less well known is that the words are not entirely Jefferson’s. George Mason’s recently published draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights provided what might most charitably be called liberal inspiration. Consider perhaps the most famous line in the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Compare that with Mason’s Virginia Declaration:

All men are