III.

Theoretician of Independence

During his 20s, Jefferson read voraciously in Enlightenment philosophy, 17th-century English history, political theory, and law. Drawing on this learning, he drafted in 1774 a Summary View of the Rights of British America as instructions for Virginia's delegates to the First Continental Congress, which met to consider the colonies' grievances against Great Britain. Virginia leaders instead adopted a more legalistic set of instructions, and Summary View was published anonymously as a pamphlet. As Jefferson's authorship became widely known, however, he moved suddenly into the front rank of American political theorists.

In the pamphlet, Jefferson argued that the original settlers of the colonies came as individuals rather than as agents of the British government. The colonial governments they formed therefore embodied the natural right of expatriates from one country to select the terms of their subjection to a new ruler. Colonial legislatures and the British Parliament, he asserted, shared power, and both were responsible for protecting the “liberties and rights” of the people.

The Declaration of Independence, drafted principally by Jefferson in late June 1776 for the Second Continental Congress, drew the implications of this historical view to their logical conclusion, proclaiming that the “tyrannical” acts of the British government gave the colonists the right to “dissolve the political bands” that had connected them with the mother country.