Thomas Jefferson Wrote the Argument Two Years Early. He Also Wrote One That Nobody Ever Came Back For.
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In the summer of 1774 a thirty-one-year-old Virginia lawyer set out for Williamsburg carrying a set of resolutions he meant to propose.
He never arrived. Dysentery stopped him on the road. He sent two copies ahead, one to Patrick Henry and one to Peyton Randolph, who he knew would take the chair of the convention.
Henry’s copy vanished. Thomas Jefferson told the story two ways in later life.
In one account he said he never learned whether Henry disapproved of the ground taken or was simply too lazy to read it, and settled the matter by calling Henry the laziest man in reading he ever knew.
In the other he supposed Henry had thought it too bold as a first measure, which is exactly what the majority of the members thought.
Peyton Randolph laid the second copy on the table. It was read, admired, and set aside.
Talks of revolution were in the air, and the convention wanted instructions its delegates could carry to Philadelphia. This went considerably further than the delegates were prepared to go. It was, in Jefferson’s recollection of their judgment, too bold for the present state of things. They adopted tamer instructions instead, assuring the world that Virginia sincerely approved of a constitutional connection with Great Britain.
The convention did not print the paper. Some of its members printed it anyway.
That detail is usually lost, and it matters.
The publication was a private act by a faction, paid for by subscription — George Washington put in three shillings ninepence for what he called Mr Jefferson’s Bill of Rights — and Clementina Rind issued it in Williamsburg with a preface by self-appointed “Editors” claiming it would show the world the moderation of the late convention.
It went out anonymously, credited on the title page to a native and member of the House of Burgesses. The men who declined to adopt the argument did not bury it. Some of them bought it a printing press.
Reprints followed inside the year: Philadelphia, two London editions from Kearsly, and a Norfolk printing recorded by Evans of which no copy has ever been located. Jefferson believed the London text had been taken up by the parliamentary opposition and, as he put it, interpolated a little by Mr. Burke to make it answer opposition purposes. That claim is weaker than it sounds, and Jefferson said so himself in the next sentence: he had it from Parson Hurt, who happened to be in London at the time. It was hearsay, written down decades after the fact. What the London printings demonstrably carry is an added preface signed Tribunus, generally attributed to Arthur Lee, the Virginian then living in England. One side of that dispute is a printed document. The other is a remembered report.
The anonymity did not hold. Peyton Randolph later told Jefferson that the pamphlet had earned him a place on a list of proscriptions in a bill of attainder prepared in Parliament. A paper a provincial convention had declined to adopt was being reprinted, quarreled over, and prosecuted on two continents within twelve months.
What made it too bold
The colonial argument of 1774 was, for the most part, a lawyer’s argument about limits. Parliament had gone too far. Parliament had taxed without representation. Parliament had exceeded its proper authority. Fix the excess and the quarrel ends.
Jefferson refused the premise. Parliament, he wrote, was a body of men foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws — not an authority that had overstepped, but no authority in America at all. The colonies were joined to Britain solely through a common king. He put the imbalance in plain numbers: can any one reason be assigned why 160,000 electors in the island of Great Britain should give law to four millions in the states of America, every individual of whom is equal to every individual of them in virtue, in understanding, and in bodily strength?
He grounded the whole of it in the rights of a free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature and not as the gift of their chief magistrate. Everything else in the pamphlet follows from that clause. If rights come from nature, the king is not their source, and a man who is not their source cannot be their arbiter. Jefferson stated the consequence in a line no one else in that convention would have signed: kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.
He was equally direct with George III. The address to the king dispensed with the customary posture of supplication and told him plainly that he was the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed with definite powers.
Then came the sentence that sets the pamphlet’s temperature: Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art.
And he drew a distinction that outlasted every individual grievance. Single acts of tyranny, he wrote, may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.
Think about that. Jefferson is using the word figuratively, of Virginians, and he will use it literally a few paragraphs later.
The structure of that sentence is the structure of an indictment, and it is the structure Congress adopted in 1776. Pauline Maier established the connection more precisely than any general impression of resemblance: every grievance against George III in A Summary View reappears among the repeated injuries and usurpations of Jefferson’s draft Declaration, in the same order.
The objection, which is a good one
Before drawing any lesson from a rejected paper, the obvious objection deserves an answer.
Rejected proposals are usually rejected for cause. For every set of resolutions that looks prophetic in hindsight there are a hundred that were impractical, badly reasoned, or flatly wrong, and whose authors also went home convinced the room lacked nerve.
We remember this one because Jefferson later became Jefferson. Read backward, almost any rejected document written by a man who becomes famous takes on the appearance of prophecy. Early is a comfortable word, and it is frequently the defeated writer’s word for wrong.
So, the claim requires a test, and the test has to be capable of failing. A rejected argument has earned the word early only when later events confirm its reasoning and later actors demonstrably take it up. Boldness by itself establishes nothing. Applied honestly, that standard vindicates part of what Jefferson wrote in 1774 and convicts another part of it, and the second half of the verdict is the more instructive.
What actually changed
In a later recollection Jefferson wrote that tamer sentiments were preferred, and, he believed, wisely preferred; the leap he proposed being too long, as yet, for the mass of our citizens.
Consider what that admission costs a proud man. He was not claiming vindication for the whole of his 1774 proposal, and he was right to withhold the claim. The pamphlet argued for remaining inside the empire under a shared crown, and stated plainly that it was neither the wish nor the interest of the colonies to separate from her.
Two years later he was writing the document that severed the connection. Events had run past his own proposal as thoroughly as they had run past the convention’s caution.
What survived was the reasoning underneath: rights from nature rather than from the crown, a king answerable as chief magistrate, and a pattern of oppression establishing design rather than accident.
Those premises were available in finished form when the Congress needed them, and the reason they became usable is that between the summer of 1774 and the summer of 1776 the situation supplied what argument alone could not. Lexington and Concord. Bunker Hill. The king’s proclamation declaring the colonies in rebellion. The Prohibitory Act. Dunmore’s offer of freedom to enslaved men who would take up arms for the crown. Paine’s Common Sense in January of 1776.
The room had not lacked courage in 1774.
It had lacked events.
Jefferson understood that in retrospect and said so.
The argument nobody came back for
The same pamphlet contains a second argument, and its history is the reason the test above has to be able to fail.
Among the grievances Jefferson laid at the king’s feet in 1774 was the crown’s obstruction of colonial efforts to restrain the importation of enslaved Africans.
His words were these: the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state; but previous to the infranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. The royal veto, he charged, had preferred the immediate advantages of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states.
Corsairs. Pirates, not merchants. And a small textual accident attaches to the word. Jefferson’s manuscript reads British corsairs; the first printed edition set it as African; and he went into his own copy and put British back. He was not sharpening the charge, he was restoring it against someone else’s substitution, moving the blame off the sellers and back onto the ships and the crown that licensed them. Those corrections never reached print in his lifetime.
Read the grievance as written and it is more than an objection to the trade. It names enfranchisement as the object and treats ending importation as the step that has to come first. That is the fuller principle, stated in 1774, on the record.
What he escalated, and what he did not invent
The premise underneath the grievance was not fabricated, and that is what makes it worth examining.
Virginia had been taxing slave imports since 1759 and raised the duty to fifteen percent in 1769. London had disallowed the colony’s measures, most recently in 1772. In that year the House of Burgesses addressed the king directly, calling the trade one of great inhumanity, warning that under its present encouragement it endangered the very existence of his American dominions, and asking him to lift the restraints that kept Virginia’s governors from checking it. The Address adds that some of his Majesty’s subjects in Great Britain may reap emoluments from the traffic, but that the interest of a few should be disregarded.
Jefferson’s line about the interest of a few British corsairs is that sentence, escalated.
Now read what the Address actually asks for. Its stated grounds are security, settlement, and the fear of a population growing beyond the colony’s capacity to control it, with inhumanity entered once, in passing. And it asks only that importation be checked.
It says nothing about abolishing slavery.
That is the distance Jefferson traveled on his own. He did not invent Virginia’s position; he escalated it — from a petition about imports grounded largely in self-preservation to the claim that the abolition of domestic slavery was the great object of desire in those colonies. The escalation was his, which means the principle was his, and so was the responsibility for it.
He made the charge again, and Congress cut it out
He made it two years later at far greater force. In his draft of the Declaration of Independence he charged George III with waging cruel war against human nature itself, with captivating and carrying a distant people into slavery in another hemisphere, and with prostituting his negative to suppress every legislative attempt to restrain that execrable commerce.
He set two words in capitals, in consecutive sentences: the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain, and the market where MEN should be bought and sold. At 168 words it was the longest grievance in the document, and he placed it last, where the closing blow goes.
Congress struck the passage and put nothing in its place. There was no softened substitute and no compromise language; the charge simply came out. The debates were not recorded. Decades later Jefferson blamed South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and added that northern delegates felt a little tender on the subject as well, their people having been pretty considerable carriers of enslaved people for others.
The argument was laid on the table twice, in the two most consequential papers of his early career, and struck out both times.
The writing continues. The acting stops.
He did keep writing it, and the honest version of this story turns on that fact rather than around it.
In 1784 he drafted the territorial ordinance that would have barred slavery from the western territories after 1800. It failed by a single vote, with a New Jersey delegate lying sick in his chambers. In the Notes on the State of Virginia, drafted in the early 1780s, he wrote the lines most often quoted from him on the subject — that he trembled for his country when he reflected that God is just — and sketched a plan of emancipation that depended on removing the freed people out of the state.
He noted that an amendment containing it had been prepared, to be offered to the legislature.
It was never offered.
Every attempt that might have cost him something falls before 1785. After that there are laments, private letters, and arithmetic.
In 1814 Edward Coles, a young Virginian who had inherited enslaved people and meant to free them, wrote asking Jefferson to lend his name to the cause. Jefferson declined and advised him to stay in Virginia and wait for a better season. Coles freed them anyway, took them to Illinois, gave them land, and was later elected governor of the state.
By 1820 Jefferson was writing that the country had the wolf by the ears. That same year he explained to his son-in-law John Wayles Eppes that a woman who brings a child every two years is more profitable than the best man of the farm, because what she produces is an addition to the capital while his labors disappear in mere consumption. He had been running that calculation for a long time; a letter to Washington in 1792 works the annual increase of the people he enslaved as a return on capital.
He enslaved more than six hundred people across his life, about a hundred and thirty at Monticello at any given time. He freed two in his lifetime, five in his will, and let two more, Beverly and Harriet Hemings, leave unpursued in 1822 — Harriet with fifty dollars and a seat on a stagecoach. Every one of them belonged to the Hemings family.
When he died insolvent on the Fourth of July, 1826, roughly a hundred and thirty human beings were sold in the dispersal that followed, and families were separated in the process.
An honest reading of the founding has to hold both of these facts at once, because both are in the same hand. Jefferson stated the case against the trade, and past it, more forcefully than almost anyone of his generation — twice, in state papers, in front of men who could have acted. He then spent fifty-two years demonstrating that clear articulation and moral action are separable.
That is a more disturbing conclusion than hypocrisy, and a more useful one, because hypocrisy makes the problem a defect in one man’s character and this is not that.
The lesson, with its limits
Two arguments, written by the same hand in the same decade, both bold, both struck down by rooms that found them premature.
One of them was early. The other was left on the table.
The difference between them is not the quality of the writing or the nerve of the writer. The difference is that men came back for the first, and no one with the power to act came back for the second — including, after 1784, the man who wrote it.
That is the honest shape of the lesson. A fully stated argument, put in writing with its foundations exposed, stays available after the room declines it. It can be read, argued with, and picked up when circumstances change. Washington’s three shillings ninepence is the whole mechanism in miniature: the argument lost the vote, and someone in the room paid to keep it in print. That is a real advantage, and worth the trouble of writing carefully. It is also not a guarantee. The writer does not control which of the two outcomes he gets, and writing the thing down is not the same as carrying it.
Most of us have been in a room where the tamer sentiment carried.
Sometimes the tamer sentiment was right, as Jefferson conceded it was in 1774. The paper that gets laid down and set aside is sometimes the thing everyone reaches for when the situation turns. Sometimes it is just a paper on a table, and the man who wrote it walks past it for the rest of his life.
Jefferson’s argument about the trade sat there for ninety-one years.
It took a war and at least 620,000 dead, by the conservative count, to finish it.
Thomas Jefferson was not the man who finished it.
The man who finished it was Abraham Lincoln.
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A note on sources. Jefferson left two differing accounts of the 1774 episode. His 1821 Autobiography supplies the dysentery, the remark about Henry’s reading habits, “too bold for the present state of things,” the bill of attainder, and the Burke claim with its attribution to Parson Hurt. A separate recollection printed in Ford’s Works of Thomas Jefferson, Federal Edition, vol. 2, supplies the “tamer sentiments” passage and the supposition that Henry thought the paper too bold; the manuscript behind Ford’s text has not been identified. The two are quoted here as distinct recollections rather than blended. Pamphlet text follows the manuscript in Boyd’s Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, with printed-edition variants noted where they bear on meaning. The 1772 Address of the House of Burgesses to the King is quoted from the published transcription. Declaration draft language follows the Library of Congress text of the original Rough draught.
About the Author
Charles Cranston Jett is an author and civic educator based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served aboard nuclear submarines during the Cold War. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live at Water Tower Residences, where they co-host the Chicago Salons.