When the delegates from Virginia were sent to the first Continental Congress, Silas Deane noted that "the Virginia, and indeed all the Southern delegates appear like men of importance...they are sociable, sensible, and spirited men. Not a milksop among them."[29]
They were aristocrats wont to give orders and resentful of any interference; they were lords and almost supreme rulers on their plantations; they were owners of many slaves and they had been accustomed to call no man master; and Jefferson was one of them.
The change in the situation had come very abruptly. It is not the purpose of this book to present an elaborate discussion of the causes of the American Revolution, whether they were economic or political or philosophical, or whether they were of mixed motives, varying with each colony and in each colony with every man, did not impel the colonies to revolt against the mother country. I am aware of the present tendency to attribute most of the agitation preceding the revolution to purely economic causes; it must be remembered however, that, if the ulterior motives of the promoters of the American Revolution were selfish and interested, Jefferson was one of those who were moved by entirely different considerations, as were, as a matter of fact, most of the members of the First Continental Congress.
While life was still moving easily and happily in Virginia, where in 1772 the theatrical season had been particularly brilliant, things were coming to a head in New England. News of the Bill closing the Port of Boston on the first of June, 1774, reached the Virginia Assembly during the spring session; how it was received had better be told in the words of Jefferson. As so often happens in history at the decisive turn of events, the leadership was taken by a very small group of men who made up their minds at once, assumed responsibility and changed the course of the ship of state. So far no strong protest had been made by Virginia to the British Government. Dunmore was far from being tyrannical; the order imposing duties on many English products had been largely rescinded, except on tea, but it may not be sacrilegious to state that the Virginia gentry were more partial to French wines, Madeira and Nantes rum than to the English national beverage. If Virginia had not declared at that particular time her solidarity, if Jefferson and his friends had not taken the right steps and found the right words to "arouse the people from the lethargy into which they had fallen", even New England steadfastness and stanchness of heart would have been unequal to the task. It was on this occasion, rather than on the Fourth of July, 1776, that the fate of the British colonies of America was decided.
According to Jefferson's own statement, leadership in these subjects was no longer left to the old members of the Assembly, but Patrick Henry, R. H. Lee, F. L. Lee, three or four other members and he himself met in the library after agreeing that they must take "an unequivocal stand in the line with Massachusetts." They decided that the best means of calling the seriousness of the situation to the attention of the public was to appoint a day of general fasting and prayer, quite an unprecedented measure in Virginia; but they rummaged in old books "for revolutionary precedents and forms of the Puritans", and they finally "cooked up a resolution, somewhat modernizing their phrases, for appointing the 1st day of June on which the port-bill was to commence, for a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, to implore Heaven to avert from us the evils of civil war, to inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and to turn the hearts of the King and Parliament to moderation and justice."[30] Clearly the day of fasting and prayer did not appear to any of the members of the unofficial committee as springing from a profound religious sentiment, but they knew how strong over the people was the power of the Church, and how impossible it was to unite them except by giving a religious appearance to a purely political manifestation. These young Virginia lawyers knew their people and were not totally unacquainted with mass psychology; they knew how to play the game of practical politics, despite their high and disinterested ideal.
The next day Governor Dunmore pronounced the usual English remedy in such circumstances: the dissolution of the Assembly. Once more the members met in the Apollo room, and "they agreed to an association, and instructed the committee of correspondence to propose to the corresponding committees of the other colonies to appoint deputies to meet in Congress at such place annually as would be convenient, to direct, from time to time, the measures required by the general interest."
This passage in the "Autobiography" has led historians into a spirited controversy as to whether the proposal to form a Congress originated in Virginia or in Massachusetts, and whether such a plan had not been discussed in Boston as early as 1770. Whatever the case may be, the most important part of the resolution passed in the Raleigh Tavern was not the establishment of a coördinating organism; it was the declaration recorded by Jefferson, "that an attack on any one colony should be considered as an attack on the whole." This last part was not a simple administrative provision, it was more than a promise of a union; it was the constitution of a new society, since according to Kames as quoted by Jefferson in his "Commonplace Book" "mutual defence against a more powerful neighbor is in early times the chief, or sole motive for joining society."
The deputies went back home and, on the first of June, met the assemblies of the people "to perform ceremonies of the day and to address to them discourses suited to the occasion. The people met generally, with anxiety and alarm in their countenance, and the effect of the day, through the whole colony was like a shock of electricity, arousing every man and placing him erect and solid on his centre."[31]
As a result of the train of thought started by the meeting, the freeholders of Albemarle County adopted on June 26 a series of resolutions evidently written by Jefferson. Here for the first time Jefferson declared that:
The inhabitants of the several States of British America are subject to the laws which they adopted at their first settlement, and to such others as have been since made by their respective Legislatures, duly constituted and appointed with their own consent. That no other Legislature whatever can rightly exercise authority over them; and that these privileges they as the common rights of mankind, confirmed by the political constitutions they have respectively assumed, and also by several charters of compact from the Crown.