On this day 250 years ago Thomas Jefferson is sick at home in Monticello and unable to travel to Williamsburg to attend the Virginia Convention. However, Jefferson had completed his pamphlet on A Summary View of the Rights of British America and dispatched a servant to ride to Williamsburg to deliver a copy to Peyton Randolph and another copy to Clementina Rind for printing and distribution to the other delegates to the Virginia Convention who were scheduled to meet in Williamsburg beginning August 1.
A Summary View would create Jefferson’s reputation across all the Colonies and in Britain as one of the leading thinkers and writers of the Patriots. In A Summary View Jefferson laid out an explanation for why “the British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.” He also previewed the ideas he would restate and summarize in the Declaration of Independence two years later. But several stirring passages would not make it into the Declaration including his assertion of a natural right of immigration to America:
our ancestors, before their emigration to America … possessed a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness.
and his condemnation of slavery:
The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative: Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.
Sources: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffsumm.asp; https://virginiahistory.org/learn/thomas-jeffersons-1774-summary-view-rights-british-america; Trend & Tradition, (Spring ed. 2024) (Williamsburg)
Also on this day 250 years ago, the people of Deerfield, Massachusetts erected a Liberty Pole.
https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=230729
On This Day In The Revolution 