As long as we all agree that it was ideas, radical ideas, that set us free from the tyranny of monarchs – that the loftiest language is meaningless without these ideas, which gives language force and meaning – then we Americans have some unfinished housekeeping with Mr. John Locke, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson. Among others.
But first…a quick reprise of the fascinating backstage maneuvering at the Continental Congress in 1776, by all accounts a congress of revolutionaries (for the most part) who risked their necks by showing up. Now long forgotten is that chief among them was none other than (arguably) the brightest guy in the room, the 43 year-old Richard Henry Lee, a tall and garrulous aristocratic lawmaking firebrand from tidewater Virginia. Lee, as a patriot advocating a clean if violent break from the English crown, was peerless among his southern contemporaries and fearless as a leader and an orator.
And therein lay the rub that would eventually rob him of his much deserved glory. His southern compatriots often compared him (pejoratively, to be sure) with the reckless radicals in the north. No matter, Lee, who had been elected as president of the Continental Congress, had formed a powerful intellectual alliance with the farmer from Massachusetts, the estimable John Adams. It was Adams who persuaded Richard Henry to deliver a speech and offer a motion, on June 7, 1776, calling for a complete break with England. Rather than decide the matter that day, the Congress passed a resolution to have a declaration of independence drawn up for consideration.
Under normal circumstances, the honor of that task would have fallen to Lee, but his southern compatriots bristled at this idea and threatened to walk away from the proceedings altogether. Northerners, fearful of what they might mean to the cause, hastily replaced Lee on the committee with Benjamin Harrison and his ally, Carter Braxton. No fate could have been more cruel to R.H. Lee, for Carter Braxton was the chief solicitor for the Lee family’s oldest rivals in the state, the King Carter family of the tidewater region. As Paul Nagel wrote of this contretemps, “The ghosts of King Carter and John Robinson whispered not only in Williamsburg, but they had followed R.H. Lee to Philadelphia.”
One crisis avoided, another quickly loomed. Benjamin Harrison was an arch-conservative, and there was no way the northern faction was going to entrust so momentous a task as the Declaration of Independence to Harrison. After some backroom cajoling, it was decided that the quiet lawyer Thomas Jefferson should get the nod.
Regardless of who wrote it, the ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence came from an Englishman, not an American. A century earlier, the great empiricist of the Enlightenment, John Locke, laid the foundation for the ideas that energized the American revolution, including government existing by the consent of the governed and the notion that the object of good government was to promote life, liberty, and property.
These formed the ‘inalienable rights’ of free men.
Jefferson was later confronted by a fellow co-founder, who accused him of nothing less than plagiarism of Locke. Jefferson was careful not to confess to anything that damning, but he did admit that there were no new ideas in the declaration – those all came from Mr. Locke. What he had done, he said was put those ideas into American words.
All of which prompted Gore Vidal to write, in his inimitable fashion (in Inventing a Nation): “Later that most famous summer of 1776, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, making literature of (James) Mason’s somewhat desultory laundry list, consisting of John Locke’s garments.”
Many years later, John Adams would comment that the Lee family of Virginia had given more of her sons to the cause of liberty than any other American family, and that sadly, Richard Henry Lee’s proper reward for his role in bringing about the American Revolution would have to come in the next world.
Related Articles |
