The Committee on the Declaration made its report on the first of July, and the great discussion began.1 The draft was written by Thomas Jefferson some time between the eleventh and twenty-eighth of June. It was completed on the twenty-eighth, which fell on Friday, and was presented to Congress on the morning of that day.2 To the curious it affords an instance of the distinction of Friday in American history. On Friday, Columbus sailed out of the harbor of Palos, in search of a new route to the Indies, and on Friday he caught sight of the low coral reefs of Watling's Island. On Friday, Richard Henry Lee made his motion for American independence, and the Declaration was completed on Friday and started on its passage through Congress. Jefferson, then thirty-three years of age, like Washington, Henry, Marshall and Madison, came from a family of the middle class in Virginia. He was related to the Randolphs by marriage, but the proud old families of the Dominion looked upon him as a leveler and an upstart, and never sympathized with his democratic ideas. At the time that he wrote the Declaration he was lodging, as he records in a letter written nearly fifty years afterwards, in the house of one Graff, a young bricklayer, situated on the south side of Market street, Philadelphia, "probably between Seventh and Eighth streets," and he thought it was a corner house. Research Printed and sold by Isaac Collins, MDCCLXXVI. Trenton; Reprinted by order. Joseph Justice, Printer, 1831; 100 pages. Proceedings of the Convention of the Province of Maryland, held at the city of Annapolis on Wednesday, the 14th of August, 1776 (till Monday, November 11, 1776, inclusive), 209-378. In Proceedings of the Conventions of Maryland cited above. 1 For the Debates on the Declaration, see Jefferson's Works, Vol. I, 12, et seq.; also the Madison Papers (Gilpin), Vol. I, 9-39. See also the Journal of Congress, II, 226, et seq. 2 Journal, II, 225. THE CHOICE OF JEFFERSON. 151 has proved his recollection true, and posterity has placed a bronze tablet on the north wall of the National Bank which has been erected on the spot where the Graff house stood. In that house Jefferson rented the second floor, consisting of a parlor and bedroom, and "in that parlor," says he, "I wrote habitually, and in it wrote this paper particularly.' The choice of Jefferson to write the draft was not accidental, for the course of events led to his selection with the precision of fate. At the time that he wrote the Declaration, the idea of independence was scarcely six months old. The history of American political affairs up to this time affords ample illustration of the evolution of the idea. The American fathers were not political conspirators, for they thought out the state, invited an open discussion of its theory and administration, and, obedient to the habit of the Anglo-Saxon race, they adhered to parliamentary forms, and reduced their thoughts in an orderly manner to written instruments. The Declaration could not have been made by any other people; yet its ideas were generic with the race. Could they have been known to Raleigh and Gilbert, who stood on the threshold of political fame, the first colony in the new world might not have failed, and the feeble settlement at Jamestown would not have been encumbered with the Stuart charters of 1606 and 1609. It was in 1611 that Virginia received a charter, among whose provisions was one which proved the entering wedge of American liberty and independence, and it was 1 The tablet should have been placed further to the east, as it now marks the location of the party wall between the Graff house and its neighbor on the west. See, The House in which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, by Thomas Donaldson; Avil Printing Company, Philadelphia, 1898. 2 See note, p. 138, ante. 152 PRECEDENTS FOR THE DECLARATION. repeated literally in the charters of the later colonies. Englishmen in America might establish local governments with a general assembly empowered to make laws "not contrary to the laws of England," or, as would now be said, not inconsistent with the English constitution. By the authority of this provision, the assemblies made the laws from 1619 to 1776, and it was under it that the principles of local government were recognized and the evolution of a political system went on. It was under this system that our ancestors in the colonies learned to govern themselves. William Penn, one of the first American democrats, briefly expressed the principles of the declaration a hundred years before Jefferson elaborated it. "We place the power in the people," wrote Penn to the inhabitants of New Jersey, and in his frame of government for Pennsylvania in 1682, he declared that the purpose of all government was "to support power in reference with people, and to secure the people from abuse of power by their free and just obedience to a government, created and administered by themselves:"2 which is as wise an epitome of sound popular government, given in the seventeenth century, as was Jefferson's declaration of the equality of man in the eighteenth; or Lincoln's famous definition of the free state,-"government of the people, by the people and for the people," in the nineteenth. Capital is not fond of revolutions and they are usually re-enforced by young, landless and adventure-loving men. 1 Penn et al. to Richard Hartshorne, London, 6th month, 26th, 1676, Smith's History of New Jersey, 81. 2 Penn's proprietary frame of government is printed in The Proceedings Relative to Calling the Conventions of 1776 and 1790; the Minutes of the Convention that formed the Present Constitution of Pennsylvania, together with the charter to William Penn; the Constitutions of 1776 and 1790, and a view of the Proceedings of the Convention of 1776 and the Council of Censors, Harrisburg, 1825, p. 19. PRECEDENTS FOR THE DECLARATION. 153 It was not to the rich that Jefferson turned as the chief material for a State. Colonial life was striped with social distinctions. Between the rich and poor, the well born and the plain born, the colonial official and the leather-clad colonial laborer, there was a great gulf fixed. Jefferson had faith in the masses. He saw them in America without a leader, unorganized, in peril of intoxication with the new wine of liberty and possible destroyers of their inestimable political heritage. But under skillful management, not too obvious, though none the less controlling, he believed them capable of becoming the chief political power in the state. No adequate explanation of Jefferson's influence on American institutions will neglect this dominating political doctrine of his life. He looked upon the people as a multitude without a political shepherd, likely to go astray amidst the wastes of anarchy, or to fall into the pit of monarchy. With scrip and staff and an astute political policy, he became their shepherd, and his disciples now possess the land. It was his unique privilege and fame to write the first confession of faith for popular government. The paper he wrote, unaided by book or clerk,1 in the plain parlor of the bricklayer's house, is to-day undoubtedly more familiar to the civilized world than is any other political document ever penned. It has long been the most influential state paper in America, and for the reason that it teaches the first principle of our democracy:-the natural equality of men in the state. Yet, its ideas did not originate with Jefferson, and some of them had been in public service for years. On the twenty-ninth of Jan 1 For Jefferson's claim of ignorance of the Mecklenburg resolutions, see Randolph's Jefferson, Vol. I, Chapter v; Vol. III, App. No. 2. John Adams's claims to the authorship of the Declaration are discussed in Randall. 154 PRECEDENTS FOR THE DECLARATION. uary, 1579, the seven Dutch provinces in conference at Utrecht issued a declaration which was in the nature of a league.1 It was essentially a religious compact, but it as completely lacked the notion of popular sovereignty, -which was the characteristic of Jefferson's work,-as the Declaration of Independence lacks the religious element, which is the characteristic of the Dutch act. Grotius, nearly a century and a half before Jefferson, in his introduction to "Dutch Jurisprudence" paraphrased the Dutch maxim that "through birth all men are equal." He published his jurisprudence one hundred and seventeen years before Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws;" and Jefferson, there is reason to presume, was as familiar with Grotius as he is known to have been familiar with Montesquieu. The whole course of economics and political events in America has emphasized the principle of human equality, and the dicta of Grotius and Montesquieu were the more welcome in America as authoritative declarations of the truth of the favorite political doctrine of the eighteenth century, the natural rights of men. But Jefferson advanced the doctrine at a critical time in the evolution of democracy, and advanced it so far and so skillfully, that in the popular mind he is held to be its author. He made it the corner-stone of American government. Parliamentary strictures on trade and industry had been calling forth remonstrances from assemblies for nearly twenty years, and when the stamp act passed, these remonstrances began to take on an unusual character, and in 1776 they were raised to the dignity of the defense of principle. Jefferson, while yet a student at law with Chancellor 1 Bor, xiii, 26-30. For an account of the Union see Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic. (Ed. 1861) III, 411-417. |