First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

by Thomas E. Ricks

Thomas Jefferson stepped on the national stage for the first time, at the age of thirty-one. As happened with Adams and his essay, Jefferson was able to offer a way of thinking about the changing politics of the colonies, to capture the changing mood of many and distill it into words. For Jefferson, this came in the form of his written advice to Virginia’s delegation heading to the Congress, which soon was issued as a pamphlet under the title A Summary View of the Rights of British America.19 It was an odd debut. As one modern analyst puts it, the essay is both tendentious and a mishmash. In essence it was an awkward rhetorical rehearsal for some of the subjects Jefferson would cover with greater clarity two years later in the Declaration of Independence, especially in cataloguing the abuses and usurpations of British officials against America.