to devote himself to it, without the interruption of political objects, he acquired very considerable reputation, and there still exists a monument of his early labour and useful talents, in a volume of Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Supreme Courts of Virginia, which he compiled and digested, amid the engagements of active professional occupation.

But he came into life at a period, when those who possessed the confidence of their fellow citizens, and the energy and talents requisite for public life, were not long permitted to remain in a private station, and pursue their ordinary affairs; he was soon called to embark in a career of more extensive usefulness, and to aim at higher objects-ingenium illustre altioribus studiis juvenis admodum dedit, quo firmior adversus fortuita rempublicam capesseret. We find him accordingly, as early as the year 1769, a distinguished member of the legislature of Virginia, associated with men, whose names have come down to us, as the earliest and most determined champions of our rights. Ever since the year 1763, a spirit of opposition to the British government, had been gradually arising in the province, and this spirit was more and more increased, by the arbitrary measures of the mother country, which seemed to be the mere offsprings of rashness and folly. The attachment to England was considerable in all the colonies, but in Virginia it was more than usually strong; many of the principal families of the state, were connected with it by the strongest ties of consanguinity; the young men of promise, were sent thither to complete their education in its colleges; and

by many, and those not the least patriotic, it was fondly looked to as their home. To sever this connexion, one would suppose to be a work of no ordinary facility; yet such was the rash course pursued by the British ministry, that a very brief period was sufficient to dissolve in every breast, that glowed with national feeling, the ties which had been formed by blood, by time and by policy; a very short experience was enough to convince every mind, conversant with the political history of the world, and able to weigh, amid the tumult of the times, the probable chances of successful resistance, with the miseries of submission or defeat, that there was no hazard too great to be encountered, for the establishment of institutions, which would secure the country from a repetition of insults that could only end in the most abject slavery. It will not be doubted, that Mr. Jefferson was among the first to perceive the only course that could be adopted; his own expressive language portrays at once the sufferings of the country, and the necessity of resistance.

"The colonies were taxed internally and externally; their essential interests sacrificed to individuals in Great Britain; their legislatures suspended; charters annulled; trials by juries taken away; their persons subjected to transportation across the Atlantic, and to trial before foreign judicatories; their supplications for redress thought beneath answer; themselves published as cowards in the councils of their mother country and courts of Europe; armed troops sent amongst them to enforce submission to these violences; and actual hostilities commenced against them. No alternative was presented

but resistance, or unconditional submission.

Between

these there could be no hesitation. They closed in the appeal to arms."

On the first of January, 1772, Mr. Jefferson married the daughter of Mr. Wayles, an eminent lawyer of Virginia; an alliance by which he at once gained an accession of strength and credit; and secured in the intervals of public business (which indeed were few) the domestic happiness he was so well fitted to partake and to enjoy. Its duration however was but short; in little more than ten years, death deprived him of his wife, and left him the sole guardian of two infant daughters, to whose education he devoted himself with a constancy and zeal, which might in some degree compensate for the want of a mother's care and instruction.

On the 12th March, 1773, Mr. Jefferson was appointed a member of the first committee of correspondence, established by the colonial legislatures; one of the most important acts of the revolution, and which paved the way for that union of action and sentiment, from which arose the first effective resistance, and on which depended the successful conduct and final triumph of the cause. The year 1774, found Mr. Jefferson still an active member of the legislature of Virginia. The passage of the Boston Port Act, and the bills which immediately followed it, had filled up the measure of insult and oppression. The private property of all was to be sacrificed for the public conduct of a few; the faith of charters was unhesitatingly violated; and personal liberty and life itself were destroyed, without resort to the common

forms of justice, and without redress. At this crisis Mr. Jefferson found time, amid the arduous and incessant labours of his public life, to write and publish his "Summary View of the Rights of British America."

This pamphlet he addressed to the king, as the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws and circumscribed with definitive power, to assist in working the great machine of government, erected for their use, and consequently subject to their superintendence. He reminded him, that our ancestors had been British freemen, that they had acquired their settlements here, at their own expense and blood; that it was for themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone, they had a right to hold. That they had indeed thought proper to adopt the same system of laws, under which they had hitherto lived, and to unite themselves under a common sovereign; but that no act of theirs had ever given a title to that authority, which the British parliament would now arrogate. That the crown had unjustly commenced its encroachments, by distributing the settlements among its favourites, and the followers of its fortunes; that it then proceeded to abridge the free trade, which they possessed as of natural right, with all parts of the world; and that afterwards offices were established of little use, but to accommodate the ministers and favourites of the crown. That during the present reign, the violations of our rights had increased in rapid and bold succession; they were no longer single acts of tyranny, that might be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, pursued

so unalterably through every change of ministers, as to prove too plainly a deliberate and systematical plan, of reducing us to slavery. He next proceeds, in a style of the boldest invective, to point out the several acts by which their plan had been enforced, and enters against them a solemn and determined protest. He then considers the conduct of the king, as holding the executive powers of the laws of these states, and points out, without restraint, his deviation from the line of duty; he asserts, that by the unjust exercise of his negative power, he had rejected laws of the most salutary tendency; that he had defeated the repeated attempts of the colonies to stop the slave trade and abolish slavery; 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. That inattentive to the necessities of his people, he had neglected for years, the laws which were sent for his inspection. And that assuming a power, for advising the exercise of which, the English judges in a former reign had suffered death as traitors to their country, he had dissolved the representative assemblies and refused to call others. That to enforce these, and other arbitrary measures, he had from time to time sent over large bodies of armed men, not made up of the people here, nor raised by the authority of their laws. That to render these proceedings still more criminal, instead of subjecting the military to the civil powers, he had expressly made the latter subordinate to the former. That these grievances were thus laid be

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