America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation by Joshua Kendall Read Free Book Online

one novelist whom this man of facts adored. Sterne’s signature work repeatedly attacked conventional authority, and thus appealed to the adolescent rebel that would forever remain a core part of Jefferson.
      
    After his admission to the bar in early 1767, Jefferson quickly built a thriving legal practice. Though he missed the nonstop reading, he didn’t mind the mundane tasks of writing briefs and filing motions; after all, for Jefferson, drudgery always held a certain appeal. He kept close track of all the relevant numbers in his copious fee and case books; the former features an eighteen-page alphabetized index of all his debtors and the latter lists all 939 cases that he handled between February 1, 1767, and November 9, 1774, when political unrest shut down the courts. By then, the husband with the growing family was already channeling most of his energy into a promising legislative career that had begun with his taking a seat in the House of Burgesses in May 1769. As he entered government, he felt it necessary to step up his reading of political philosophy. By the end of 1769, he was devouring a host of tomes by such heavyweights as England’s John Locke and France’s Montesquieu. While Jefferson could have become an accomplished lawyer and a legislator without the decade of systematic study—Patrick Henry, whom he called “the laziest man in reading I ever knew,” did not attend college and devoted just six weeks to the study of law—his self-designed professional training would be instrumental in helping him shake up the reigning political order in both America and the world.
    He got his first chance to wield his fiery pen for the cause of freedom in June 1774, when Parliament responded to the Boston Tea Party by closing the Port of Boston. Standing in solidarity with the residents of Massachusetts, the delegates to the Virginia assembly planned a meeting for early August to choose representatives to the new Continental Congress, slated to begin in September. Jefferson soon completed a twenty-three-page pamphlet of grievances, which he intended to show to his fellow legislators. While his body did not reach the capital—en route to Williamsburg, he came down with dysentery—his words did; and they caused quite a stir when published anonymously later that year in the Virginia Gazette and other papers across America as “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.” “If it had any merit,” a modest Jefferson would write a generation later of his first publication, “it was that of our taking our true ground, and that which was afterwards assumed and maintained.” Jefferson had issued the most powerful challenge to date of British rule, one which got the colonists to think about their plight in an entirely new way.
    In an attempt to stop Parliament from passing any more unjust laws, Jefferson marshaled a series of brilliant and original theoretical arguments. This was not philosophy for philosophy’s sake, but philosophy as a means to achieve specific political ends. According to Jefferson, just like the Saxons who had emigrated to Britain a millennium earlier, the residents of America were free agents unbeholden to the mother country; but they had been too busy earning a living to be aware of the rights to which they were entitled. “Our ancestors…who migrated hither,” noted the conscientious student of history and law, “were farmers, not lawyers. The fictitious principle that all lands belong originally to the king, they were early persuaded to believe real.” And not only, stressed Jefferson, was America not a feudal state, but “British parliament [had] no right to exercise authority over us.” That bold assertion was based on the doctrine of natural right, which he had read in Locke and elsewhere. Though Jefferson’s position was radical for the time, he did not yet seek to displace King George III as America’s “chief magistrate.” He envisioned that America might become