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After the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson would write that he was inspired by what he called a “trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced.” He hung portraits of these leading British thinkers of the Enlightenment in his parlor: John Locke, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.
They would help form Jefferson’s views on natural rights, scientific reasoning and much else that would be reflected in the Declaration of Independence. In an era that encouraged people to no longer blindly follow orthodoxy, Jefferson would adopt the credo of another Englishman, philosopher Lord Bolingbroke, who wrote, “No hypothesis ought to be maintained if a single phenomenon stands in direct opposition to it.”
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All of that was on Jefferson’s mind as he traveled from Monticello to Philadelphia in spring 1776. The momentum for the revolution seemed unstoppable. But it still needed a legal rationale, based on grievances grounded in the law, and it was this that Jefferson would be called upon to deliver. He was uniquely suited to the task by his years of training in the law, science and philosophy, and applying this to the Declaration would become one of his claims to genius.
But other factors also were pulling at him and the other founders. As Jefferson guided his horse along muddy, sandy and stump-riddled roads, fording creeks and ferrying across rivers, he looked upon a landscape of both grinding poverty and unimaginable prosperity. A new country, he believed, must look west, beyond the Appalachian mountain chain that was like a wall running up much of British America.
Within Virginia’s borders, the 10 percent of those who were considered “gentry,” which included Jefferson, owned half the land. Most Virginians struggled on smaller tracts at a time when tobacco prices were plunging — dropping 40 percent from 1772 to 1773 alone — and trade was restricted to British middlemen. For many Southerners, the early 1770s were a desperate and recessionary time that helped spark their revolution.
A reproduction of a shop where enslaved people would have worked is seen at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation in Charlottesville, on Aug. 5. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Jefferson and many others were united in their belief that London’s policies were holding them back. And they believed one source of redress was taking land west of the mountains, much of which Britain had promised to protect for the Native Americans who lived there.
Jefferson had traveled through parts of Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountain range during his years as a lawyer and knew the fast-growing western reach of the colonies better than most people of his era. But he never crossed land west of the Appalachian chain, which he said “perhaps” were the tallest in North America. As he headed to Philadelphia, the lure of what lay beyond these mountains was one of the most important matters occupying his mind — a fascination that would continue throughout his life, as he sent the Lewis and Clark expedition to reach the Pacific Ocean and doubled the nation’s size in the Louisiana Purchase.
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