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

self-governing just as Scotland had been in the seventeenth century. And he appealed to the king for protection from parliamentary abuses. “No longer persevere,” he implored, “in sacrificing the rights of one part of the empire to the inordinate desires of another.”
    Jefferson would move on to attacking the king in the Declaration. By June 1776, he had already acquired a reputation among his colleagues as a writer with a “peculiar felicity for expression,” as John Adams would later put it; thus, he received the most votes when the Continental Congress appointed a committee of five to draft a document to explain the rationale for independence. Jefferson proposed that the older, Harvard-educated Adams, who had come in second in the balloting, take a first crack at it. Though he was one of the few Founders in Jefferson’s league in the book collection and consumption department, Adams still felt compelled to demur, conceding, “You can write ten times better than I can.” In contrast to “A Summary View,” the Declaration would contain no new ideas. In the intervening two years, a general consensus had emerged among American Whigs that the doctrines of natural law and natural right applied to their dispute with England. “Not to find out new principles,” Jefferson would write of his purpose nearly a half century later, “or new arguments, never before thought of…but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject.…It was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.” By crafting one of the most revered state papers ever written, which Abraham Lincoln would call that “immortal emblem of man’s humanity,” Jefferson would succeed in doing far more than that; he would also inspire oppressed groups from around the world for centuries to come.
    The Declaration would bear Jefferson’s stamp not in its content, but in its style and its passion. As the historian Carl Becker observed nearly a century ago, its text is a “model of clear, concise and simple statement.” These were the prose skills that Jefferson had honed during his long years of apprenticeship in Williamsburg. The voracious reader was also a compulsive note taker, who prided himself on his ability to “seek out the pith” when summarizing legal cases in his commonplace book. “The most valuable of all talents,” he once wrote, “is that of never using two words where one will do.” In the storied Preamble, he squeezed in all the major arguments of Locke’s Second Treatise on Government in just two hundred words. The urgency behind his plea also had roots in his own experience. For the thirty-three-year-old, who had still lived in his mother’s home just a half dozen years earlier, personal independence had been a long time in coming. For Jefferson, the British monarch represented one more authority figure who stood in his way. And characteristically, the bulk of his achievement number one—more than half of its nearly 1,400 words—took the form of a list, which Samuel Adams later described as George III’s “catalogue of crimes.” In detailing the king’s twenty-seven abuses in its central section, often forgotten today, Jefferson was plagiarizing from himself; the preamble of his draft of the Virginia Constitution, which he had completed that spring, was a close cousin. In the Declaration, he couldn’t help but personalize the conflict, calling the king “a tyrant…unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” This epithet made others squirm. “I thought the expression too passionate,” John Adams would later write, “and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document.” Jefferson wouldn’t budge on his assessment, however. In his memoir, he would refer to the English monarch, whom he met in London in 1786, as a “mulish being.”
    That summer, America’s declaration of independence, rather than Thomas