nd training a democrat, he
naturally espoused the cause of his countrymen. The peculiar condition
of the colonies furnished the opportunity to Jefferson's wonderful
faculty for writing. The orator could not be heard by all the people of
the colonies; but the products of the pen could be carried to the most
secluded hamlet. And truly in Jefferson's hands the pen was "mightier
than the sword."

The first year after opening his law office, at the age of twenty-five,
he was elected a member of the House of Burgesses from Albemarle, his
native county, and on taking his seat the following May, the controversy
between the royal governor and the assembly at once began. Jefferson
prepared the resolutions in reply to the executive speech; and on the
third day of the session the passage of other resolutions, in the form
of a bill of rights, caused the governor to dissolve the assembly.
Jefferson was again elected to the House of Burgesses, and in 1774, was
elected a delegate to the State convention.

On account of illness he failed to reach the convention, but he prepared
and forwarded to its president a draft of instructions which he hoped
would be adopted for the guidance of those to be sent by the body as
delegates to the General Congress of the colonies. For this paper,
afterward published as "A Summary View of the Rights of British
America," the name of Jefferson was inserted in a bill of attainder
brought into the English Parliament.

After a short detention in the House of Burgesses, in which he drafted
the reply of Virginia to the "conciliatory proposition" of Lord North,
he proceeded to Philadelphia as a delegate to the General Congress, in
which he took his seat on June 21, 1775.

When Jefferson entered the Congress, conditions existing between the
mother country and the colonies had already reached the point of open
rebellion. It is true that the taxes had all been repealed except the
import tax on tea, but the repeals had been invariably accompanied with
the assertion of an unlimited right to tax without the consent of the
colonies. English troops had been quartered in Boston, and English
war-ships occupied its harbor. The right of deportation to, and trial
in, England for offences committed in America, was still claimed by both
king and Parliament. The battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill had now
been fought, and Washington had already been commissioned as
commander-in-chief of the colonial armies.

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