Much more difficult to achieve were tactics and strategies for applying economic coercion. While the delegates agreed non-importation should be instituted, they could not easily agree upon what English and European goods should be excluded as luxuries. All did agree that no slaves should be imported. Here the convention went beyond a mere desire to place economic pressure on British slave traders; their objective was to halt the trade altogether. The major stumbling block to action was non-exportation of tobacco and non-collection of debts. While most exponents of non-exportation and non-collection wanted to break the business links to Britain and to hasten resolution of the constitutional impasse, there were some Virginians who undoubtedly believed that these measures would bring them relief from their creditors. The majority of the delegates, however, including many of the radicals and those most deeply in debt, held it was improper to refuse to send to England tobacco promised to merchants and creditors. Such a tactic was a violation of private contract and personal honor. Radical Thomson Mason put it succinctly, "Common honesty requires that you pay your debts."
Eventually a series of compromises was worked out. All importations from Britain and the West Indies would cease on November 1, 1774; all slave importations would cease the same day; no tea would be drunk; and colonists would wear American-manufactured clothes and support American industries. If these measures did not bring relief and redress of grievances, all exports would cease on August 10, 1775. To assure compliance and enforcement of these agreements 107 delegates signed the Virginia Association binding themselves together in common action. The convention elected and instructed Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, Washington, Henry, Bland, Harrison, and Pendleton "to represent this Colony in general Congress". They then departed to establish committees and associations in every county and town in Virginia. Determination to aid Massachusetts and a conviction that if one colony suffered, all suffered, permeated the convention resolutions. John Adams confided in his diary on August 23, "... saw the Virginia Paper. The Spirit of the People is prodigious. Their Resolutions are really grand."
Two publications issued during the summer of 1774 confirm the degree to which Virginians were moving away from Britain toward an autonomous commonwealth status with the king the only link binding the colonies to the mother country. The first was a series of letters published in the Virginia Gazette (Rind) during June and July signed by a "British American", who later identified himself as Thomson Mason, the outspoken brother of George Mason. The second were notes and resolutions by Thomas Jefferson, later published and distributed widely throughout the colonies under the title, A Summary View of the Rights of British America.[29 ]
Thomson Mason's letters, often ignored in favor of Jefferson's Summary View, are especially intriguing because they start with a favorite Virginia assumption—The British constitution was "the wisest system of legislation that ever did, or perhaps ever will, exist". It provided a balance in government between the crown, the nobility, and the commons, or as Mason suggests, it blended the three forms of government, "monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (each) possessed of their distinct powers, checked, tempered, and improved each other.... The honour of the monarchy tempered the Impetuousity of democracy, the moderation of aristocracy checked the ardent aspiring honour of monarchy, and the virtue of democracy restrained the one, impelled the other, and invigorated both. In short, no constitution ever bid so fair for perpetual duration as that of England, and none ever half so well deserved it, since political liberty was its sole aim, and the general good of mankind the principal object of its attention."
What went wrong according to Mason, was not that a hapless king ascended the throne, but a corrupt aristocracy had perverted parliament and parliamentary powers to its own end. Therefore, the colonies owed no obedience to the laws of parliament at all; in fact, to no law passed by that body since 1607. The people of Virginia should be prepared to defend themselves and ready to "unsheath the sword" to show the English aristocracy they were determined to protect the "few Rights which still remain" and to regain "the many privileges you have already lost." With great courage Mason signed his name to the last letter, in which he undoubtedly had written treasonous remarks. It is a measure of the times that no Virginian rose to shout "Treason!" in 1774.
Jefferson's more famous Summary View moved to nearly the same conclusion with perhaps even more emotion and rhetoric. Intended to arouse the convention, from which he was absent, the Summary View is one of Jefferson's few impassioned pleas, written with fervor in what Dumas Malone, his distinguished biographer, calls "the white heat of indignation against the coercive acts."[30 ] Filled with errors he would undoubtedly have corrected if he had not fallen sick, Jefferson directed himself toward moral and philosophical arguments. The essential question was "What was the political relation between us and England?". The answer was a voluntary compact entered into between the king and his people when they voluntarily left England for America, a compact which they had never renounced, but which parliament had broken and the king had not protected. He denied the authority of parliament even to make laws for trade and navigation and asserted England was now attempting to take for its own benefits the fruits of a society wrested from the wilderness by the American colonists. These colonists, having arrived without assistance, voluntarily formed a government based on their own natural rights and were entitled to defend those rights and that government against the repeated incursions of parliament. Then Jefferson touched upon a very telling point in understanding the radical shift of the colonists in their allegiance from 1763 to 1775. He noted that while parliament had passed laws previously which had threatened liberty, these transgressions had been few and far between. More recently, however,
Scarcely have our minds been able to emerge from the astonishment into which one stroke of parliamentary thunder had involved us, before another more heavy, and more alarming, is fallen on us. Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguishable (an identifiable point in time) period, and pursued, unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan for reducing us to slavery.
To Jefferson in 1774 the source of this conspiracy to reduce the colonies to slavery was parliament; by 1776 he would identify the king as being involved as well.
Too rash, and too radical, for the August convention or even for the Continental Congress in October 1774, the Summary View would earn for Jefferson an intercolonial reputation as a brilliant writer and a foremost patriot. It was this reputation which resulted in his appointment to the committee in June 1776 which drew up a declaration of independence.