province was chastised for the act of a few score men. The charter was revised in such a way as to throw almost despotic power into the hands of the royal governor; town meetings, those nurseries of independence, were forbidden, except for the annual election of officers; public buildings were designated as barracks for the King's troops; and the port of Boston was closed by British war-ships, except for "fuel or victual . . . for the necessary use and sustenance of the inhabitants of the said town," from June 1, 1774, until the tea should be paid for.

When the news of the punishment of Boston reached the Virginia Burgesses in their spring session of 1774, the same group of "bolder spirits" who had taken the lead from the older members in 1769, agreeing with Jefferson that they "must take an unequivocal stand in the line with Massachusetts,' voted a resolution to observe the 1st of June as a

day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, "to implore heaven to avert from us the evils of civil war, to inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and to turn the hearts of the King and Parliament to moderation and justice." The reply to such insolence could not be in doubt. "The governor dissolved us as usual," is Jefferson's laconic comment. And, as usual, again the members "retired to the Apollo," where they adopted resolutions boycotting British goods, declaring that an attack on one colony was an attack on all, and instructing their committee

of correspondence to sound the other colonies on the advisability of general annual congresses, the first to be held at Philadelphia in the following September. They further agreed that a convention should meet at Williamsburg on August 1 to appoint delegates to the Philadelphia Congress if the colonies reported favorably on the plan.

Albemarle County designated its newly elected burgesses, Jefferson and Walker, as delegates to the convention at Williamsburg. Their instructions, drawn up by Jefferson himself, contained resolutions asserting that the natural and legal rights of the colonists had been invaded by Parliament in frequent instances, and pledging the co-operation of the Virginians "with their fellow-subjects in every part of the Empire for the reëstablishment and guaranteeing such their constitutional rights, when, where, and by whomsoever invaded." These instructions, more radical than those of any other county,1 more defiant even than the Stamp Act resolutions of Patrick Henry, were only the text of a most remarkable

1 The resolutions of the Fairfax County meeting, for example, over which George Washington presided, acknowledged Parliament's power, "directed with wisdom and moderation," to regulate American trade and commerce. All the Virginia patriots, except George Wythe, says Jefferson in his Memoir, "stopped at the half-way house of John Dickinson, who admitted that England had a right to regulate our commerce, and to lay duties on it for the purpose of regulation, but not of raising revenue." Jefferson took the ground from the beginning that our connection with England was simply the personal union of the American and British parts of the Empire under the same sovereign.

document which Jefferson prepared in the summer of 1774, to serve as instructions for the delegates from Virginia to the general Continental Congress at Philadelphia.

Jefferson was taken ill on the way to Williamsburg and obliged to return to Monticello. But he sent on two copies of his paper, one to Patrick Henry, the other to Peyton Randolph, who he was sure would be chosen chairman of the convention. Randolph placed his copy on the table for the members' perusal. They thought it "too bold for the present state of things," and in its place drew up a briefer and milder set of instructions, in which they declared their “faith and true allegiance to His Majesty, King George the Third, our lawful and rightful sovereign," and their ardent wish for the return of the affection and commercial ties which formerly united both countries; protesting only against some specific abuses (notably Governor Gage's conduct in Massachusetts), without whose redress America could "neither be safe nor free nor happy."

The paper which Jefferson's colleagues generally thought "too bold for the present state of things," was nevertheless printed by some of the author's friends under the title, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. This celebrated pamphlet opens the list of American polemic and apologetic papers on the Revolution which Englishmen like Burke, Pitt, and Conway declared were unsur

passed in the literature of political argumentation. It was the boldest declaration of American rightsalmost a declaration of independence. It denied in toto the supremacy of Parliament over the colonies, asking by what right one hundred and sixty thousand electors in the island of Great Britain pretended to give laws to four million in the states (note the word!) of America. When the colonists left England, Jefferson maintained, they carried their liberties with them and escaped the control of their fellow Britons left behind as completely as their common ancestors who came over from Saxony escaped the rule of their German kinsfolk. Every act of Parliament touching the manufactures and trade of the Americans had been a usurpation and a wanton assault "upon the rights which God and the laws have given equally and independently to us all." The rapid succession of such acts during the reign of George III "pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.'

Jefferson reviews these acts: the revenue measures, the suspension of colonial legislatures, the punishment of Boston. He examines the conduct of George III: the vetoes on colonial laws, the arbitrary instructions to colonial governors, the exercise of feudal privileges over the soil, the landing of troops on our shores, the subordination of the civil

to the military power. He entreats the King, as "the only mediatory power between the several states of the British Empire," to recommend to Parliament the total revocation of its offensive acts, and himself to cease to sacrifice the rights of one part of the empire to the inordinate desires of another. The language of the address from beginning to end is that of freemen claiming their rights, not suppliants asking a boon. The customary bending of the knee and lavishing of obsequious adjectives are wanting. Instead, there is protest, remonstrance, defiance, warning, and even exhortation. The young lawyer of Albemarle County dares to sermonize the ruler of the British Empire: "Open your breast, sire, to liberal and expanded thought. Let not the name of George the Third be a blot on the page of history. The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail." Intolerable insolence!

With the publication of the Summary View in 1774, as the delegates of the colonies were gathering in Philadelphia, the period of Jefferson's apprenticeship comes to a close. The crisis in his country's life was a milestone in his own. He had reached his political majority. Up to now he had served on committees, drawn up resolutions, signed remonstrances with his colleagues at the Raleigh Tavern, returning to his law practice or to his farms at Mon