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Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers
A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) and became his fi rst major political work. In the midst of this political activity, Jefferson suffered two major tragedies. One was the fi re on February 1, 1770, that burned much of Shadwell, where he was living with his mother and sisters. The most distressing part of the fi re for Jefferson was the destruction of his already extensive library and his “painstakingly amassed collection of legal notes and papers” (Bernstein 10). The other was the sudden death of his boyhood friend, brotherin-law, and fellow politician Dabney Carr in May 1773. Amid these tragedies and his political work, on January 1, 1772, Jefferson and the woman he had been courting, a young recent widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, were married. As the tensions between the American colonies and the British were rising, the call for independence from Britain became greater, and the Second Continental Congress, of which Jefferson was a member, began to focus its attention on independence. Although he was not originally part of the declaration committee, Jefferson replaced Richard Henry Lee. John Adams, along with the general favor of the entire committee, persuaded Jefferson to draft the “declaration.” Though we like to believe the myth that the Declaration of Independence was solely Jefferson’s own, and it chiefly was, the Congress made several changes, each of which Jefferson took as a personal affront. Jefferson left the Congress in the fall of that same year (1776) to serve once again in Virginia’s lower legislative house, renamed the House of Delegates. He started immediately on law reform. His fi rst projects were the issues of entail and primogeniture—he believed that men should be able to leave their properties and money after their death to whomever they wanted. At the time, Virginia did not allow this. Jefferson’s “most sweeping law reform, the one central to his vision of a just society and closest to his heart” was his “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” which emphasized his belief in the separation between church and state and “declared that the government has no right to dictate what anyone could believe in matters of
religion” (Bernstein 42). Many of Jefferson’s other bills, however, did not receive acclaim or support. Jefferson was elected as Virginia’s second governor on June 1, 1779. The Revolutionary War infi ltrated nearly every political issue and was Virginia’s dominant problem. During his second term as governor, Charlottesville and Monticello were seized briefly by Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton of the British army. When Jefferson left the capitol before Tarleton’s seizure of it and joined his family in Poplar Forest, he left Virginia without a governor for 10 days. Since the election was postponed, he was still acting governor though he assumed he was acting as a private citizen when he left two days after when his term would have ended (Bernstein 46). Jefferson was accused of cowardice and an investigation was supposed to follow. However, when the inquiry was to begin, George Nicholas, who proposed the resolution to begin Jefferson’s investigation, did not appear. No one else was interested in pursuing the charges. Jefferson retired from public service and would do what he would do every time he left office: swear he would never return to government. By the time Jefferson retired from politics in what would become a string of retirements, he had already left his legal career. In this retirement, he began work on Notes on the State of Virginia. Originally Notes began as a response to a questionnaire sent out in 1780 by a French diplomat, François Barbé-Marbois. Later this manuscript would be revised to help refute Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon’s claims that America was naturally degenerative. The fi nished, authorized edition was published in 1787, the fi rst publication bearing Jefferson’s name on the title page. It was also during this retirement that Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson died on September 6, 1782, after giving birth to their sixth child, Lucy. Three of their children preceded her in death. Lucy would die approximately two years later while Jefferson and his oldest daughter, Martha, were in France. Some speculate that it was because of his wife’s death that he returned to politics to assuage his grief. In late 1782, he accepted his appointment