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Four and a half years had passed since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, reluctantly serving as governor of Virginia, struggled to lead a state in crisis. The economy was a disaster, men rioted against military service and the only thing protecting the coast from British invaders was what Jefferson called “our miserable navy.”
In the final hours of 1780, a messenger on horseback raced to the recently created capital of Richmond and found Jefferson strolling in the garden of the governor’s house. A fleet of 27 ships was seen entering the Capes of Virginia. Unsure if the vessels were British, Jefferson hesitated to disturb the militia. Two days passed until forces were alerted.
By then it was too late. The traitor Benedict Arnold — whom Jefferson investigated during his time in Philadelphia and had once called “a fine sailor” — was now making his way up the James River. Arnold’s mission was to invade Virginia, scatter the legislature and perhaps capture Jefferson.
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Some militia assembled on their own and performed heroically, but there was no stopping such a large force. What Jefferson needed most were men willing to fight, but many Virginians were more concerned about remaining at home to protect their property. To fulfill Virginia’s quota of volunteers for the Continental Army, Jefferson had backed a measure that gave volunteers 10,000 Continental dollars, 300 acres of land and “a healthy sound negro, between the ages of ten and thirty years.”
Jefferson’s close friend and fellow Virginian, James Madison, himself an enslaver, realized the contradiction of making enslaved people pawns in the battle for freedom. Instead, he said, they could be used to bolster the revolutionary cause, adding wryly that it would “certainly be more consonant to the principles of liberty which ought never be lost sight of in a contest for liberty.”
A Virginia militia leader backed a similar idea to bolster the state’s deficient force, saying Black soldiers would be “equal to any.” But Jefferson had no interest in liberating Black people no matter how dire things seemed.
A horse-drawn carriage is seen at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia on July 15. Thomas Jefferson was a resident of Williamsburg in different periods of his life. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Arnold moved steadily up the James River, stopping to ransack the estate of Benjamin Harrison, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and heading closer to Richmond. Jefferson — warned that Arnold was less than 30 miles away — took his wife and three daughters to safety and then rode by horseback to check on the militia’s whereabouts. A local force of 300, called out too late and scattered across the landscape, could not stop the British assemblage of three times that number.
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