Prelude to Independence: Thomas Jefferson Declares British Acts Null and Void
“The British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.”
At all.
This was the bold conclusion Thomas Jefferson came to in his powerful pamphlet A Summary View of the Rights of British America.
Written nearly two years before the Declaration of Independence, the pamphlet foreshadowed ideas Jefferson would later develop further. He asserted several fundamental principles that underpin the American constitutional system, including the sovereignty of states within a broader union, and the view that usurpations of power are void.
Taxation and interference with the colonial economies were significant factors in the American Revolution, but it was fundamentally a constitutional crisis. The American colonists believed the British king and Parliament were violating their rights as Englishmen and the limits of power under the unwritten British constitution.
Jefferson wrote the pamphlet hoping to influence the Virginia delegation to the First Continental Congress, which met from September 5 to October 26, 1774, to take an aggressive stand against British actions. In it, he outlined colonial grievances, naming specific acts and actions taken by the British government, ultimately declaring them a “nullity” and “void.”
In many ways, A Summary View was a precursor to the Declaration of Independence. Many of the “unwarrantable encroachments and usurpations” Jefferson outlined reappear in the Declaration.
Jefferson laid out his argument in a very logical fashion, starting with the fact that the American colonists were “free inhabitants of the British dominions in Europe, and possessed a right which nature has given to all men.” He pointed out that the original settlers of North America set up societies “under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness.”
Jefferson was arguing that under the British Constitution, the colonists effectively had the right to local, self-government.
He went on to concede that “Parliament was pleased to lend them assistance against an enemy (France)” because the colonies had “become valuable to Great Britain for her commercial purposes,” but Jefferson insisted that “these states never supposed, that by calling in her aid, they thereby submitted themselves to her sovereignty.”
Jefferson then laid out the colonial understanding of their relationship with the mother country.
“That settlements having been thus effected in the wilds of America, the emigrants thought proper to adopt that system of laws under which they had hitherto lived in the mother country, and to continue their union with her by submitting themselves to the same common sovereign, who was thereby made the central link connecting the several parts of the empire.” [Emphasis added.]
He went on to insist that the colonies were “erected into distinct and independent governments.” As such, they retained most powers, while the mother country was limited to exercising only a few specific functions. This idea was carried over to the U.S. constitutional system with the states maintaining sovereignty with a general government delegated a few specific powers.
Having established the foundational principle that the colonies were essentially sovereign states attached to the British Empire only through the crown, Jefferson outlined some of the most prominent encroachments and usurpations that Parliament and the Crown had committed.
Many of the colonial grievances were economic. This stemmed from the fundamental economic system embraced by the British Empire – mercantilism, a system that used state power in an attempt to accumulate wealth for the nation and its favored businesses.
Because of its mercantilist policies, the British government began to view its colonies as little more than a source of natural resources and tax revenue.
Jefferson immediately attacked this notion, insisting “the exercise of a free trade with all parts of the world possessed by the American colonists, as of natural right” was “the object of unjust encroachment. [Emphasis added]
He also pointed out “no law of their own” abridged or took away that right. He referenced a treaty between the Commonwealth government of England under the authority of the English Parliament and Virginia stipulating that the colony would enjoy “free trade as the people of England do enjoy to all places and with all nations, according to the laws of that commonwealth.”
But “upon the restoration of his majesty King Charles the Second, their rights of free commerce fell once more a victim to arbitrary power.”
Jefferson referenced several acts, including the Destruction of Trees Act of 1663 that regulated the cutting down of trees. The act was intended to protect British shipbuilding resources. He also implicated the Trade Act of 1672 and the Navigation Act of 1673, part of a broader bundle of laws generally referred to as the Navigation Acts. Imposed between 1651 and 1696, these laws restricted colonial trade by generally requiring that goods imported to or exported from the colonies must be transported on British ships.
Jefferson said that under these acts, “the trade of the colonies was laid under such restrictions, as shew what hopes they might form from the justice of a British parliament, were its uncontrolled power admitted over these states.”
In other words, the actions of the Parliament were not only encroachments, but they were also prophetic. They were just a taste of how the British government would treat the colonies if they were ever allowed to build on the precedents of internal and local lawmaking.
“History has informed us that bodies of men, as well as individuals, are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny. A view of these acts of parliament for regulation, as it has been affectedly called, of the American trade, if all other evidence were removed out of the case, would undeniably evince the truth of this observation.”
Jefferson summarized the impact of these mercantilist regulations, noting that Parliament had indulged itself “in every exorbitance which their avarice could dictate, or our necessities extort.”
As a result, it “raised their commodities, called for in America, to the double and treble of what they sold for before such exclusive privileges were given them, and of what better commodities of the same kind would cost us elsewhere, and at the same time give us much less for what we carry thither than might be had at more convenient ports.”
Jefferson highlighted several other acts, including the Hat Act of 1732, under which “an American subject is forbidden to make a hat for himself of the fur which he has taken perhaps on his own soil.” He called this “an instance of despotism to which no parallel can be produced in the most arbitrary ages of British history.”
He also included the Iron Act of 1750, prohibiting the production of iron in the colonies. Under this law, Jefferson lamented the fact that “besides commission and insurance, we are to pay freight for it to Great Britain, and freight for it back again, for the purpose of supporting not men, but machines, in the island of Great Britain.”
Jefferson then boldly pronounced all of these acts to be a “nullity” and “void.”
“We do not point out to his majesty the injustice of these acts, with intent to rest on that principle the cause of their nullity; but to shew that experience confirms the propriety of those political principles which exempt us from the jurisdiction of the British parliament. The true ground on which we declare these acts void is, that the British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.” [Emphasis added]
Jefferson was pointing out that it wasn’t so much the negative impact of these acts that made them problematic. He was asserting a more fundamental principle. Whether “good” or “bad,” these acts were null and void simply because they crossed a line in the sand and usurped power that rightly belonged to the people of the colonies.
Jefferson went on to point out that “these exercises of usurped power” were not confined to the economic acts already listed but, “they have also intermeddled with the regulation of the internal affairs of the colonies.”
He also pointed out some of the better-known acts of Parliament, including the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, and the Declaratory Act, under which Parliament asserted the right to legislate for the colonies in “all cases whatsoever.”
Jefferson took particular umbrage to the New York Restraining Act, which dissolved the New York assembly, noting that “One free and independent legislature hereby takes upon itself to suspend the powers of another, free and independent as itself; thus exhibiting a phoenomenon unknown in nature, the creator and creature of its own power.”
He went on to highlight the Coercive Acts and what was functionally a military occupation of Boston.
Having provided a detailed list of grievances, Jefferson made a demand.
“That these are the acts of power, assumed by a body of men, foreign to our constitutions, and unacknowledged by our laws, against which we do, on behalf of the inhabitants of British America, enter this our solemn and determined protest; and we do earnestly entreat his majesty, as yet the only mediatory power between the several states of the British empire, to recommend to his parliament of Great Britain the total revocation of these acts, which, however nugatory they be, may yet prove the cause of further discontents and jealousies among us.”
While parliament’s unconstitutional – null and void – acts drew the lion’s share of Jefferson’s ire, he also took on the king’s “deviations from the line of duty.”
Jefferson saw the king going outside long-standing tradition and custom in his “wanton” exercise of power. Even where the king legitimately had authority to act under the system, Jefferson argued that he was applying it to the colonies in ways that people were never accustomed to.
“Your majesty, or your governors, have carried this power beyond every limit known, or provided for, by the laws.”
Jefferson asserted that “this is so shameful an abuse of a power trusted with his majesty for other purposes, as if not reformed, would call for some legal restrictions.”
Jefferson enumerated several actions by the Crown:
- Dissolving colonial legislatures and refusing to call them into session.
- Making civil government subject to the military
- Sending “large bodies of armed forces” to the colonies
- Asserting the “fictitious principle” that “all lands belong originally to the king.”
- Refusing to allow counties in Virginia to split without meeting certain requirements
Jefferson also pointed to the King rejecting “laws of the most salutary tendency.” He pointed out that “the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies.”
The colonies had attempted to “exclude all further importations from Africa,” but the King effectively vetoed those policies, “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.”
Jefferson concluded his list of grievances against the Crown with an emphatic smackdown of royal authority, boldly asserting that the colonists were laying their grievances before his majesty “with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
Jefferson also foreshadowed the American belief that government was the agent of the people – not its servant, writing, “Kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people.”
Jefferson concluded A Summary View by asserting that it wasn’t the colonies’ desire to separate from the mother country, but he insisted, “We are willing, on our part, to sacrifice every thing which reason can ask to the restoration of that tranquillity for which all must wish.”
A Summary View was a powerful condemnation of Britain’s usurpation of power and its violation of the colonists’ rights. It was also an early articulation of the foundational principles that would come to undergird the American constitutional system with the people of the several states sovereign over government.
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