ng them beyond the control of the local assemblies. The
crown officers were also authorized to grant salaries and pensions at
their discretion; and a board of revenue commissioners for the whole
country was established at Boston, and armed with despotic powers. These
proceedings amounted to a deprivation of liberty, and they were aggravated
by the king's contemptuous rejection of the petitions addressed to him by
the colonists. We know what followed,--the burning of the British war
schooner, Gaspee, by leading citizens of Providence, and the famous
tea-party in Boston harbor.

Meanwhile Virginia had not been inactive. In March, 1772, a few young men,
members of the House of Burgesses, met at the Raleigh Tavern in
Williamsburg. They were Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee and his brother,
Thomas Jefferson, and a few others. They drew up several resolutions, the
most important of which called for the appointment of a standing committee
and for an invitation to the other colonies to appoint like committees for
mutual information and assistance in the struggle against the crown. A
similar resolution had been adopted in Massachusetts two years before, but
without any practical result. The Virginia resolution was passed the next
day by the House of Burgesses, and it gave rise to those proceedings which
ushered in the Revolution.

The first Continental Congress was to meet in Philadelphia, in September,
1774; and Jefferson, in anticipation, prepared a draft of instructions for
the delegates who were to be elected by Virginia. Being taken ill himself,
on his way to the convention, he sent forward a copy of these
instructions. They were considered too drastic to be adopted by the
convention; but some of the members caused them to be published under the
title of "A Summary View of the Rights of America." The pamphlet was
extensively read in this country, and a copy which had been sent to London
falling into the hands of Edmund Burke, he had it reprinted in England,
where it ran through edition after edition. Jefferson's name thus became
known throughout the colonies and in England.

The "Summary View" is in reality a political essay. Its author wasted no
time in discussing the specific legal and constitutional questions which
had arisen between the colonies and the crown; but he went to the root of
the matter, and with one or two generalizations as bold and original as if
they had been made by Rousseau, he cut the Gordian knot, an