A Summary View of the Rights of British America by Thomas Jefferson

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A Summary View of the Rights of British America by Thomas Jefferson

Daily Essay 2013, Joerg W. Knipprath 2. The Constitution, 3. The Amendments, 4. The Classics that Inspired the Constitution, 13. Guest Constitutional Scholar Essayists, 17. Topics, A Summary View of the Rights of British America by Thomas Jefferson, Boston Tea Party, Constitutional Amendment III, Constitutional Amendment III, Constitutional Amendment V, Constitutional Amendment V, Constitutional Amendment VI, Constitutional Amendment VI, Declaration of Independence, Joerg W. Knipprath

Guest Essayist: Professor Joerg Knipprath, Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress, after months of preparation and weeks of political wrangling, announced that it had adopted an independence declaration. That document was written by Thomas Jefferson and substantially revised (“mangled,” according to Jefferson) by the Congress. Due to his other obligations, Jefferson had little time to spend on this task. Fortunately, he had composed his Summary View of the Rights of British America just two years earlier, from which he could draw much of the substance of the new document.

The Summary View resonates quite differently from the petitions, remonstrances, and declarations of a decade earlier. Read more

March 6, 2013/0 Comments/by Janine Turner and Cathy Gillespie

A Summary View of the Rights of British America by Thomas Jefferson – Reprinted from The U.S. Constitution, A Reader, Published by Hillsdale College

A Summary View of the Rights of British America by Thomas Jefferson, Classics that Inspired the Constitution, Daily Reading 2013, The Original Documents 4. The Classics that Inspired the Constitution, A Summary View of the Rights of British America by Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson began his public career in 1769 in the Virginia House of Burgesses, the colonial legislature. British implementation of the Coercive Acts of 1774 (also known as the Intolerable Acts)–passed in response to the Boston Tea Party–prompted the “Summary View,” Jefferson’s first publication. Written for Virginians who were choosing delegates to the First Continental Congress, it laid the groundwork for later appeals by a “free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature.”

July 1774

Resolved, that it be an instruction to the said deputies when assembled in General Congress with the deputies from the other states of British America to propose to the said Congress that an humble and dutiful address be presented to his majesty begging leave to lay before him as chief magistrate of the British empire the united complaints of his majesty’s subjects Read more

March 6, 2013/0 Comments/by Janine Turner and Cathy Gillespie