Read Online Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham - Free Book Online Page B

accomplish once the bell rang the burgesses into session: rescind the Fifth Resolution, undoing Henry’s victory and regaining command of the field.
    Jefferson was therefore witness to a bid to overturn the previous day’s result. An hour or so later, the House took up the matter and reversed itself from the day before. Henry’s departure had given his foes an opportunity they did not fail to exploit. Though the records of the House are silent about the Stamp Act on May 31, Governor Francis Fauquier wrote the Board of Trade that after “a small alteration in the House”—presumably Henry’s departure—“there was an attempt to strike all the Resolutions off the Journals. The 5th which was thought the most offensive was accordingly struck off.”
    The lesson for Jefferson, the man who would come to be seen as the great democrat, tribune of liberty, and scourge of elite authority? Never give up the political fight and never shy away from using any and all means to carry the day. Only six weeks after his twenty-second birthday, Jefferson had been given a tutorial in the intricacies of power. On Thursday he had been thunderstruck by Homeric oratory evoking the glories of liberty and asserting that to give Parliament any control over Virginia or her sister colonies would do nothing less than “destroy AMERICAN FREEDOM .”
    Then on Friday, he watched the prior day’s defeated faction become today’s victors through resilience and opportunism. Unwilling to give up, Henry’s foes were vigilant and resourceful, seeing their chance in his departure and taking steps to find precedent to give their course of action the color of authority. Important, too, was mastery of the means (in this case, the legislative process) to give oneself the ability to achieve the desired end. In later years, whenever Jefferson was able to seize unexpected political moments and turn them to his advantage, he appreciated the role of tactical skill. He had seen it all demonstrated late in a Williamsburg May.
    Fauquier saw, too, that things were changing. On the following Tuesday, June 4, 1765, he hosted the annual birth-night ball in honor of George III, usually a spectacular occasion in Williamsburg. Not this year. “I went there in expectation of seeing a great deal of company,” wrote the anonymous French traveler, “but was disappointed for there was not above a dozen of people. I came away before supper.”
    A s the Stamp Act debates unfolded, Jefferson’s own first significant public act, the memory of which he cherished, was an elaborate attempt to bend the natural world to his purposes. To do so he used his mind and the arts of quiet persuasion.
    The Rivanna was not navigable for boats carrying crops from Albemarle farmers to market. Climbing into a canoe, Jefferson set out to learn whether anything could be done.
    Paddling along the river his friend Margaret Bayard Smith once described as “wild and romantic,” Jefferson discovered that the removal of rocks below Milton Falls could transform the Rivanna into a vital route for his and his neighbors’ crops. Jefferson raised private money to undertake the project, successfully making the case to individual investors. In October 1765, the colonial assembly praised Jefferson’s “laudable and useful” work, and authorized the “clearing the great falls of [the] James River, the river Chickahominy and the north branch of [the] James River.”
    Jefferson was thrilled. He was working in the tradition of his father, bringing order to the wilderness and—no small thing—being recognized and honored for it.
    F or Jefferson, the eleven years between the Stamp Act battle in Williamsburg and the Rivanna work in 1765 and the formal Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776 was a time of steady maturation—intellectually, politically, and emotionally. Like many Americans, he was an