d severed
America from the Parliament of Great Britain. He admitted some sort of
dependence upon the crown, but his two main principles were these: (1)
that the soil of this country belonged to the people who had settled and
improved it, and that the crown had no right to sell or give it away; (2)
that the right of self-government was a right natural to every people, and
that Parliament, therefore, had no authority to make laws for America.
Jefferson was always about a century in advance of his time; and the
"Summary View" substantially anticipated what is now the acknowledged
relation of England to her colonies.

Jefferson was elected a member of the Continental Congress at its second
session; and he made a rapid journey to Philadelphia in a chaise, with two
led horses behind, reaching there the night before Washington set out for
Cambridge. The Congress was composed mainly of young men. Franklin, the
oldest member, was seventy-one, and a few others were past sixty.
Washington was forty-three; John Adams, forty; Patrick Henry, a year or
two younger; John Rutledge, thirty-six; his brother, twenty-six; John
Langdon and William Paca, thirty-five, John Jay, thirty; Thomas Stone,
thirty-two, and Jefferson, thirty-two.

Jefferson soon became intimate with John Adams, who in later years said of
him: "Though a silent member of Congress, he was so prompt, frank,
explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversation--not even Samuel
Adams was more so--that he soon seized upon my heart."

Jefferson, as we have seen, was not fitted to shine as an orator, still
less in debate. But as a writer he had that capacity for style which
comes, if it comes at all, as a gift of nature; which needs to be
supplemented, but which cannot be supplied, by practice and study. In some
of his early letters there are slight reminders of Dr. Johnson's manner,
and still more of Sterne's. Sterne indeed was one of his favorite authors.
However, these early traces of imitation were absorbed very quickly; and,
before he was thirty, Jefferson became master of a clear, smooth,
polished, picturesque, and individual style. To him, therefore, his
associates naturally turned when they needed such a proclamation to the
world as the Declaration of Independence; and that document is very
characteristic of its author. It was imagination that gave distinction to
Jefferson both as a man and as a writer. He never dashed off a letter
which did not contain some pla