Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

For the elite, revolution was the shrewdest economic choice.22 London had already stymied landownership in the West, restricting those with capital (or those capable of borrowing capital) from acquiring coveted acres. Virginia’s public finances were a mess; there was no way for the colony to honor the paper money issued during the Seven Years’ War, which alienated most of the holders of the paper.23 And there was the inescapably personal issue of the money that planters owed creditors in Britain.24 In Jefferson’s words, such debts were now “hereditary

from father to son for many generations, so that the planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London.”25 Virginians owed at least £2.3 million to British merchants, nearly half the total owed by all the American colonies.26,27 In May 1774, Jefferson and Patrick Henry had proposed suspending payments of such debts.28

In Virginia the impetus to rebel came from the propertied elements of society; the middle and lower classes were slower to follow the lead of men such as Jefferson. It was a rich man’s revolution, and Jefferson was a rich man. It was a philosophical revolution, and Jefferson was a philosophical man.

Taxes, the presence of British troops, trade regulations, the disposition of western lands, and relations with Indian tribes, among other matters, were all seen as grasps for power by London, power that Jefferson and others believed rightly belonged to them (or at least to them within a constitution in which they