Ch. 2.3. Jefferson’s Charges Against the King, Group I: Eight Charges from his Summary View
(Continued from Mayer, pp. 111-15; supplemented from Yirush, pp. 248-52.)
But what of the other eight of this first group of charges – that is, those that Jefferson took from his Virginia preamble? It remains possible –as several historians have proven–to rummage through colonial history in search of events that could give substance to Jefferson’s charges, some of which are so buried in the remote history of colonies other than his own that Jefferson probably never heard of them.
The question remains what Jefferson meant when he said, for example, that the King had “refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good” (charge 1), or neglected to give his consent to “laws of immediate & pressing importance” (charge 2), or attempted to retard American population growth by discouraging immigration (charge 7). Luckily, Jefferson left important clues to the meaning of his opening charges against the King in a still earlier document of his composition, a set of draft instructions for Virginia’s delegates to the First Continental Congress that he wrote in 1774.
Jefferson had not been asked to draft those instructions –he had a way of producing documents in the hope they might be adopted, which in this case did not happen. His friends nonetheless published his text as A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774). This was one of the first sustained pieces of American political writing that subjected the King’s conduct to direct and pointed criticism. Jefferson not only raised all of the first eight charges against the King that he would later include in his draft preamble to the Virginia constitution, but discussed them in the same order they appeared in that document.
The criticisms of the King in A Summary View were founded upon a theory of empire that was becoming ever more widely shared among Americans in 1774, and an understanding of early American history that remained controversial since it conveniently overlooked considerable conflicting evidence. The first colonists of British North America, Jefferson insisted, settled the country at their own expense and despite the charters and patents for which they applied before leaving England were free of British authority.
Jefferson went on to explain that after a time the settlers decided to adopt the legal system of their mother country and to establish a continuing union with it by submitting themselves to “the same common sovereign.” But while the King thereby became “the central link connecting the several parts of the empire,” the colonists remained outside the jurisdiction of Parliament.
Given this view of the empire, Jefferson argued that Parliament’s attempts to legislate for the colonies were a violation of “those rights which God and the laws have given equally and independently to all.” This oppression had a long history, beginning with Cromwell’s attempts to restrict the trade of Virginia in the 1650s, a policy that Charles II continued after the Restoration of 1660. Jefferson objected to the Navigation Acts because they violated the “natural right” that the colonists “possessed” to “exercise of a free trade with all parts of the world.”
But the ill effects of these trade regulations paled in comparison to Parliament’s repeated attempts, beginning with the Sugar and Stamp Acts, to tax and legislate for the colonies without their consent. Jefferson singled out Parliament’s suspension of the New York legislature for failing to comply with the Quartering Act as a particularly egregious example of parliamentary tyranny, and he condemned the Coercive Acts on the same grounds. Given that he viewed the empire as an association of equal states under one common sovereign, Jefferson called for the king, as “the only mediatory power between the several states of the British empire, to recommend to his parliament of Great Britain the total revocation of these acts.”
Jefferson was not, however, calling for Parliament’s authority to be replaced by an equally unbounded subordination to the Crown. Indeed, he decried the role that prerogative power had played in the empire. He charged the Stuart monarchs with taking land that “had been acquired by the lives, labors, and the fortunes of individual adventurers,” and distributing it among their “favorites,” who then “erected” it “into distinct and independent governments.” Jefferson also lamented that, even after the overthrow of the Stuarts in 1688, royal governors in America had continued to prorogue and dissolve the colonial assemblies (charges 5-6).
Some of Jefferson’s most vehement criticism focused on the way the Crown had rendered the settlers’ property rights insecure by imposing on British North America the kind of feudal tenures that had been introduced by the Normans into England. However, Jefferson contended that “America was not conquered by William the Norman, nor its lands surrendered to him, or any of his successors,” and thus “possessions” in the colonies were “undoubtedly of the allodial nature.” For Jefferson, the existence of such allodial (i.e., unencumbered) property rights meant that “each individual of the society may appropriate to himself such lands as he finds vacant, and occupancy will give him title.”
This clear implication of this stance was that any attempt by the Crown to preserve Native American rights by limiting western settlement was an illegitimate exercise of the prerogative (charge 3). In Jefferson’s view, individual settlers (or the governments to which they delegated their authority) had the sole right to appropriate and distribute land in America.
The Summary View provides, therefore helpful context for the first section’s remaining eight accusations against the king. “For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all,” Jefferson asserted in A Summary View, “his majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency” (charge 1). He gave one example: the King had blocked the efforts of colonial legislatures to discourage the slave trade by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition.” Royal governors had vetoed acts to tax slave imports (which was not the same as ending slavery) in Virginia and several other colonies, including New Jersey and Massachusetts.
A Summary View went on to criticize the King for having “permitted our laws to lie neglected in England for years,” and condemned instructions to royal governors that allowed them to “pass no law of any moment” unless it had a suspending clause “so that, however immediate may be the call for legislative interposition, the law cannot be executed till it has twice crossed the Atlantic, by which time the evil may have spent it’s whole force” (charge 2).
Without providing more detail, Jefferson went on to attack at some length “a late instruction to his majesty’s governor of… Virginia, by which he is forbidden to assent to any law for the division of a county, unless the new county will consent to have no representative in the assembly.” That provided a basis for the third charge against the King in the Virginia preamble and, later, fortified by similar controversies over the extension of representation New York, New Jersey, and New Hampshire, in the Declaration of Independence.
Two long paragraphs in A Summary View covered the next two charges (charges 5 and 6), that the King had dissolved representative bodies, as the Virginia preamble put it “repeatedly & continually” for opposing invasions of their rights, and had refused to call others “for a long space of time,” but, again, Jefferson gave no concrete examples from the colonial past.
As noted above, Jefferson argued that, because “America was not conquered by William the Norman,” its land titles remained free of the feudal duties. Although the Crown had continued to grant lands in the colonies, when it charged only small sums this had not caused problems. But the King, he said, had lately increased the terms of purchase and the fees to which lands were subject, “by which means the acquisition of lands being rendered difficult, the population of our country is likely to be checked.”
That became the charge in the Virginia preamble that the King was “endeavoring to prevent the population of our country and for that purpose… raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands” as well as by “obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners,” and, in the Declaration of Independence, “refusing to pass [laws] to encourage [foreigners’] migrations hither” (charge 7).
Finally, A Summary View charged that “his majesty has from time to time sent among us large bodies of armed forces, not made up of the people here, nor raised by the authority of our laws.” The King’s grandfather, George II, had asked Parliament’s permission before bringing Hanoverian troops into England, and George III was similarly bound, Jefferson argued, to get the permission of colonial legislatures before sending troops into their territories (charge 11).
“To render these proceedings still more criminal against our laws,” he continued, “instead of subjecting the military to the civil power, his majesty has expressly made the civil subordinate to the military” (charge 12). Again, he did not state when or where or how that was done.
The fact that in 1774 Jefferson had raised eight of the first twelve charges against the King that subsequently appeared in the Declaration of Independence is itself a sign of how different the Declaration was from state and local resolutions on Independence. In 1774, the colonists had not yet been converted to Independence: indeed, Jefferson’s Summary View was an overtly loyal document that urged George III to redress the colonists’ grievances, remove fears of “future encroachment” on American freedom, and “establish fraternal love and harmony through the whole empire.”
Clearly, then, the grievances in the Declaration were not meant to identify, as did the state and local declarations, precisely which events had reconciled Americans to separate nationhood. The grievances in the Declaration served a different purpose – not to explain the Americans’ change of heart but to justify revolution by proving that George III was a tyrant.
Jefferson’s failure to cite concrete examples to support the Declaration’s charges did not mean they lacked historical foundation. The King had, for example, approved a suspension of the New York and Massachusetts assemblies for opposing Acts of Parliament (charges 5-6); British troops were sent to Boston in 1768 and again in 1774 (charge 11), when the Crown established military government there (charge 12).
To have cited chapter and verse for charge after charge in the preamble and the Declaration would have been tedious in the extreme. In fact, from a literary point of view, Jefferson’s decision to cite his charges in general terms, as they had been stated in the English Declaration of Rights, was probably wise. Even his inclusion of grievances that sometimes pertained to a single colony in die Declaration of Independence is defensible: that all Americans felt aggrieved by the oppression of any among them testified to a sense of fellowship that confirmed their identity as a people.
Many of the charges in this opening section of the Declaration had, however, played a relatively inconspicuous part in the imperial controversy, which is why the Declaration left observers, then and now, scrambling to figure out what it was talking about. But almost all of the allegations Hutchinson singled out for comment and described as “grossly misrepresented,” or founded on events “so trivial and insignificant… as to have been presently forgot,” came from the first group of charges against the King. Those that followed referred to far more familiar and widely contested events of the revolutionary era.