journing, the convention re-elected its seven delegates of 1774 to the new session of the Continental Congress, to be held in Philadelphia on May 10, adding the name of Thomas Jefferson to replace Peyton Randolph, in case the latter should be recalled to preside over the Virginia House of Burgesses.

Soon after the opening of the Congress, the King's governors in America received a conciliatory proposal from Lord North, to the effect that any colony agreeing to raise the sum assessed by Parliament and to leave the spending of the money to royal authority, should be free to levy the tax in its own way. Much as he hated and feared to call together the House of Burgesses, which he had twice summarily dissolved, and some of whose members (Randolph, Henry, Jefferson) he was even thinking of prosecuting for treason, Governor Dunmore was persuaded by his Council that there was no other way of getting Lord North's proposal before the colony or of preserving his own remnant of authority. Accordingly, the burgesses were convened the 1st of June, 1775, some of them coming down from the upper counties in hunting-shirts with their rifles slung across their shoulders. Governor Dunmore did not wait to hear their answer to Lord North's proposals. The wounding of two young men who had entered the magazine to secure arms, by springguns trained on the doors, raised such a storm

against the "murderous governor" in Williamsburg that Lord Dunmore thought it wise to slip away from his capital and take refuge on the deck of the war-ship (June 8). It was the end of the rule of George III's servants in Virginia.

The summons of the House of Burgesses recalled Peyton Randolph from the Congress at Philadelphia, leaving the vacancy which Jefferson had been chosen to fill. Randolph asked Jefferson to remain at Williamsburg, however, long enough to prepare the answer of the burgesses to Lord North. The paper which Jefferson drew up, and which was adopted on June 10, was a respectful but firm rejection of the terms offered. They only "changed the form of oppression without lightening its burdens." The colony could not agree to saddle itself with a perpetual tax, whose amount was to be determined by the British Parliament. Besides, Lord North left all the other grievances of the colonies unredressed: the laws against their trade, the interference with their legislatures, the reconstruction of their courts, the suppression of trial by jury, the introduction of standing armies. Finally, it was too late to appeal to the separate colonies with offers of conciliation. Virginia was committed to the common cause, and her delegates were sitting in the general Congress, before which his lordship's papers should be laid for common deliberation. "We consider ourselves as bound in honor, as well as interest, to share one

general fate with our sister colonies, and should hold ourselves base deserters of that union to which we have acceded, were we to agree on any measures distinct and separate from them." In other words, it was to Philadelphia and not to Westminster that the Americans now looked for their authority.

The day after his reply to Lord North was accepted by the burgesses, Jefferson set out by carriage for Philadelphia, taking a copy of the reply in his pocket.1 He could make only about twenty miles a day over the poor roads and across the slow ferries. There were eight unbridged rivers to cross in his journey of two hundred and fifty miles. He arrived on June 20, just in time to see George Washington set out for Cambridge to take command of the American army of sixteen thousand New England farmers. Although he was but thirty-two years of age the youngest man in Congress, with the exception of Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, and John Jay of New York-Jefferson was already known to the leading men of Philadelphia. "He brought with him," wrote John Adams, "a reputation for literary science and a happy talent of composition. Writings of his [the Summary View and the Reply to Lord North] were handed about, re

1 Jefferson says in his Memoir that he "conveyed to Congress the first notice they had of it." But here, as in many minor points in the Memoir, memory played the old man of seventy-seven false. New Jersey had laid the proposal of North before the Congress on May 20.

markable for their peculiar felicity of expression." Jefferson had no talent for public debate, but in consultation and committee work his opinion was "prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive," says John Adams in the same letter. He was a welcome accession to the radical cause in Congress, especially as he had the learning and the art to write a powerful apology for that cause. Our affairs were, as the writers of the time phrased it, "in a delicate posture." War had actually begun, yet we were still protesting our loyalty and sending our petitions to George III; united action was the only hope for our cause, and yet further measures of violence might drive the hesitating into the arms of England; and in England itself we had to convince the Tories of our candor and the Whigs of our courage.

It was not long before the masterly pen of Jefferson was called into requisition. News of the terrible slaughter of Bunker Hill reached Congress. Lexington and Concord might be explained away as skirmishes, but here was war in grim array, serried ranks of redcoats marching up the hill again and again to silence the murderous fire from the American ramparts. Congress hastened to appoint a committee to explain and justify the colonists' resort to arms, in a "declaration to be published by General Washington upon his arrival at the camp before Boston." John Rutledge's report was unsatisfactory to Congress, and John Dickinson and Thomas Jef

ferson were added to the committee. "I prepared a draft," says Jefferson in his Memoir, "of the Declaration committed to us. It was too strong for Mr. Dickinson. We therefore requested him to take the paper and put it into a form that he could approve. He did so, preparing an entire new statement, and preserving of the former only the last four paragraphs and half the preceding one. We approved and reported it to Congress, who accepted it."

Now the last four and a half paragraphs of this famous Declaration on the Colonists Taking up Arms are worth all the rest of the paper. They are nervous, forceful, and thoroughly radical. It is from them that the epigrammatic phrases are often quoted: "Our cause is just, our union is perfect," "resolved rather to die free than live slaves,” “we fight not for glory or conquest," "against violence actually offered we have taken up arms, we shall lay them down when hostilities cease on the part of the aggressor. It was these sentiments that were received with "thundering huzzas" by the soldiers encamped around Boston. They are sentiments we should expect from Jefferson, but not at all from the conservative John Dickinson. Yet, in spite of their Jeffersonian style, our documentary evidence seems to prove that they were written by Dickinson. The manuscript of Jefferson's rejected draft of the Declaration is among the original Jefferson papers in