Madison and Jefferson Read Online Free PDF Page B

biography of Henry made history come alive with the attribution. The words, in fact, are less important than the perception they convey: Virginia, no less than Massachusetts, called the shots. Without Virginia’s commitment, colonial resistance would have been tepid, if not impossible. 10
“American Ardor”
    In August 1775 General Washington, a Virginian, was in command of American troops outside Boston. The town itself was occupied territory, with British forces poised to break out and march into the interior. On a smaller scale, Virginians were repelling advances from the last royal governor, who had sought refuge among a group of armed British vessels anchored offshore.
    At this critical juncture Edmund Pendleton assumed leadership of the Committee of Safety, his rebellious colony’s department of defense. There was no more crucial piece of work than to coordinate resistance, and that was Pendleton’s job. When Peyton Randolph died suddenly at the age of fifty-four, Pendleton succeeded him as president of the all-important Virginia Convention, which would meet twice more to map out the future of a self-governing Virginia and weigh its role in the United Colonies.
    Virginia had been Britain’s first commercial settlement in North America. By mid-1775 it was independent in all but name. Pendleton was, in this way, the state’s first executive and remained so through the murky periodpreceding the legal establishment of a government. During the war years he would be a clearinghouse for political information and an essential sounding board for both Madison and Jefferson.
    In early May 1776, in his role as president of the Virginia Convention, meeting again in Williamsburg, Pendleton received the thoughtful twenty-five-year-old James Madison, Jr. The new representative hailed from Orange, and Pendleton well knew that the family’s landholdings were the largest in that interior county. He may not yet have known Madison as well as he knew his influential father, Colonel James Madison, but he had certain expectations of this firstborn son of the Virginia gentry.
    Madison had not been a real player in provincial politics until this moment. Since his return from the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1771, he had been living 125 miles from the colonial capital, at the family estate of Montpelier. Jefferson had already established himself on a larger stage, with finely crafted writings protesting injustice—in particular, his hard-hitting
Summary View of the Rights of British America
, which contended that America was settled by free individuals at the cost of their own blood and their own fortunes. For most of the colonial era, according to Jefferson, they had avoided asking for even a shilling from the British treasury. Jefferson insisted on sizing up political events “with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people.” 11
    Despite his youth, Madison plunged immediately into Revolutionary politics. He was well versed on matters of natural rights and social contract theory. He believed that Great Britain was in the process of defaulting on an agreement based on economic fairness. Though we have no record to suggest a reaction from Madison to Jefferson’s
Summary View
, he too was steeped in the vocabulary of those pamphleteers who framed their appeals around such loaded words as
sovereignty, freedom, humanity
, and
happiness.
For several years now, American writers north and south had employed psychologically powerful metaphors to convince themselves that the parent country was betraying a union based on affectionate concern. 12
    Although life on his father’s plantation often felt isolating, Madison was more than just theoretically attached to the patriot cause. In 1776 he was as familiar with the political hub of America, Philadelphia, as Jefferson was, and his letters show an eagerness to stay abreast of news from the North. Jefferson was writing from Philadelphia with a minimum of