By Stephen Smoot
The Shinnston News & Harrison County Journal has named Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin as Citizens of the Month, a recognition sponsored by Dorsey Funeral Home in Shinnston – locally owned and operated.
In the Year of Our Lord 1776, war had gripped parts of British North America for about a year. During that time, the Continental Congress had evolved. What started off as a body seeking moderation of Parliamentary policies towards the 13 colonies had evolved into a government of sorts. As its focus on military and foreign affairs deepened, so did the understanding that they would have to seek their independence.
Yet they had not collectively declared independence as a body, even through localities had started to do so.
Thomas Jefferson, in his early 30s at the time, had earned recognition as a bright young man but not a decision-maker on the level of many others involved. The Continental Congress appointed him to the Declaration writing committee in early June. He joined Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania, John Adams from Massachusetts, Robert Livingston from New York, and Roger Sherman from Connecticut.
The Committee of Five, as it was called, represented the different sections faithfully, although none but Jefferson saw this as of much impact. Declarations sent to London from various localities and individuals simply expressed the intent to sever ties and there it ended.
Adams pressed Jefferson to take the lead in writing up the draft, despite the man from Massachusetts being an oft-published writer on politics, law, and government. Jefferson recalled that it was “pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught.”
The second president recalled in an 1822 letter that he explained to Jefferson why he should take on the task. “Reason 1st. You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason 2nd. I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular . . . Reason 3rd. You can write ten times better than I can.”
Adams brought one of the greatest legal and philosophic minds in history to the work. His impatient and abrasive brilliance failed to charm almost anyone outside of his wife Abigail and King George III when Adams was appointed there as Minister to Great britain from the United States. Many remembered his greatest triumph as a defense attorney, successfully defending the British soldiers implicated in the Boston Massacre.
Appealing to justice and evidence, Adams convinced a jury of Boston citizens to find the soldiers, who received the white-hot hatred of that city’s residents since the incident, not guilty of almost every charge save the 1770s equivalent of reckless discharge of a gun.
Jefferson came to the task one of the most well-read of those at the Continental Congress and bearing one of the most fertile minds. He read deeply of the philosopher Epicurus. That classical Greek mind focused on individual happiness as a vital aim of life. One achieves happiness through avoidance of mental disturbance and physical pain, mostly by staying away from stressors in either field. Epicurean philosophy, when properly applied, leads to Stoicism instead of hedonism since excesses in anything can certainly lead to mental stress and physical pain.
Therein lies the source of “pursuit of happiness,” which was drawn from George Mason’s first section of The Virginia Declaration of Rights. Mason wrote that no government can “deprive or divest their posterity . . . the enjoyment of life or liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing happiness and safety.” Jefferson simplified it into pursuit of happiness, philosophically seeing those aims as the same.
Although Jefferson expressed his hatred of Plato and called some of his works libels on Socrates, he also seemed unconsciously drawn to the idea of refashioning the material world to meet the ideas of the mind. One sees this most dramatically in the American landscape created by the Northwest Ordinance, one of Jefferson’s finest and least appreciated achievements.
In the process of writing the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson saw something more than a political “Dear John” letter. He saw a means to convey a philosophy justifying why the colonies should, and could, break from their rightful sovereign, the monarch of Great Britain.
The Declaration of Independence transformed into a clarion call to humanity for governments to respect the rights of free people and peoples. Every Declaration listed grievances against the Crown. Jefferson’s underscored why those grievances represented violations of natural rights.
Every Founding Father, and most Americans today, understand that the rights of each individual come from God (or Nature, if one prefers.) Government’s role lies in respecting and protecting natural rights, not in violating or even establishing them. This ideal is foreign to most cultures and an occasional barrier to those seeking to understand the United States and her people.\
Jefferson presented his work proudly to the Committee of Five. Since all on the committee save Jefferson had roles on every important one, little time existed to review the document, so the experienced pens of the journalist Franklin and the lawyer Adams started carving up the work, especially that of Adams.
Like some advanced graduate students at the same age proudly presenting a thesis or dissertation, Jefferson was emotionally wounded by the sheer number of edits put to the document.
Franklin sought to cool Jefferson’s temper. The diplomat and most respected colonial figure in Britain in better days came to the realization that independence was necessary before most. While serving as Postmaster for the colonies, he opened personal letters from the Royal Governor of Massachusetts that revealed the chief executive’s intense frustrations in office and his growing hatred of the American people.
He published the letters under a pseudonym, as illegal then as now. His goal lay in showing British and American antagonists that they should fault the colonial governors as hateful and incompetent and work together instead. Authorities in London called Franklin to a public hearing that started as an inquiry into his conduct and ended with a long stream of insults directed at the figure before them, but also America in general. Friends helped him escape arrest by putting him on a ship bound for Philadelphia where he quietly stewed against Britain. Later in 1783, Adams seized control of negotiations to end the War of Independence because Franklin saw no issue with placing the new United States under French tutelage.
The grand man of the Continental Congress put his skills at diplomacy to work, quietly whispering to the disconsolate Jefferson, making him smile with jokes about Adams shortness and corpulence. Many of the edits adjusted style and details, but did not touch the depth of the philosophical arguments.
Yet Jefferson left the Continental Congress and put himself in the service of the Commonwealth of Virginia, rejecting all calls to return, even pleas from George Washington.
The Declaration itself has served as inspiration to peoples around the globe and has been enshrined into United States Constitutional case law via a number of United States Supreme Court decisions.
Franklin would join Washington as the two great paternal figures who quietly guided the shaping of the Constitution. Both Jefferson and Adams at this point served abroad as diplomats and had no direct influence on the proceedings. Going forward through the decades, the men had a literal love-hate relationship.
The heated politics of the 1790s pulled the men into hostile interparty feuding. Later in life, however, the two men bonded over their revolutionary past and also in the ways that old men like to complain about “kids these days.” Their letters serve as some of the best statements on law, government, and philosophy ever composed, with neither intending the world to keep reading them centuries later.
Exactly 200 years before the United States celebrates 250 years of independence, John Adams died quietly at his Massachusetts home. With one of his last breaths, he whispered “Thomas Jefferson still survives.”
But he was wrong. The third president passed in Virginia not long before the second, both of them moving on to heaven, already becoming legends in their own lives and examples for centuries to come.