[Thomas Jefferson’s] first hero was his fellow-Virginian Patrick Henry, who seemed to be everything Jefferson was not: a firebrand, a man of extremes, a rabble-rouser, and an unreflective man of action … Jefferson was 17 when he met him and he was present in 1765 when Henry acquired instant fame for his flamboyant denunciation of the Stamp Act. Jefferson admired him no doubt for possessing the one gift he himself lacked — the power to rouse men’s emotions by the spoken word.
Jefferson had a more important quality, however: the power to analyze a historical situation in depth, to propose a course of conduct, and present it in such a way as to shape the minds of a deliberative assembly … It was Jefferson, in 1774, who encapsulated the entire debate in one brilliant treatise — Summary View of the Rights of British America…Jefferson relied heavily on Chapter Five of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, which set out the virtues of a meritocracy, in which men rise by virtue, talent, and industry. Locke argued that the acquisition of weath, even on a large scale, was neither unjust nor morally wrong, provided it was fairly acquired. So, he said, society is necessarily stratified, but by merit, not by birth. This doctrine of industry as opposed to idleness as the determining factor in a just society militated strongly against kings, against governments of nobles and their placemen, in favor of representative republicanism.
Jefferson’s achievement, in his tract, was to graft onto Locke’s meritocratic structures two themes which became the dominant leitmotifs of the Revolutionary struggle. The first was the primacy of individual rights: “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” Equally important was the placing of these rights within the context of Jefferson’s deep and in a sense more fundamental commitment to popular sovereignty. “From the nature of things, every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation.”
It was Jefferson’s linking of popular sovereignty with liberty, both rooted in a divine plan, and further legitimized by ancient practice and the English tradition, which gave the American colonists such a strong, clear, and plausible conceptual basis for their action. Neither the British government nor the American loyalists produced arguments which had a fraction of this power. They could appeal to the law as it stood, and duty as they saw it, but that was all. Just as the rebels won the media battle (in America) from the start, so they rapidly won the ideological battle too.
— Paul Johnson, A History of the American People
This quote goes out to my mother, who loves Thomas Jefferson.
