Jefferson’s fight for liberty was also a fight for land - Washington …

After the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson would write that he was inspired by what he called a “trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced.” He hung portraits of these leading British thinkers of the Enlightenment in his parlor: John Locke, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.

They would help form Jefferson’s views on natural rights, scientific reasoning and much else that would be reflected in the Declaration of Independence. In an era that encouraged people to no longer blindly follow orthodoxy, Jefferson would adopt the credo of another Englishman, philosopher Lord Bolingbroke, who wrote, “No hypothesis ought to be maintained if a single phenomenon stands in direct opposition to it.”

All of that was on Jefferson’s mind as he traveled from Monticello to Philadelphia in spring 1776. The momentum for the revolution seemed unstoppable. But it still needed a legal rationale, based on grievances grounded in the law, and it was this that Jefferson would be called upon to deliver. He was uniquely suited to the task by his years of training in the law, science and philosophy, and applying this to the Declaration would become one of his claims to genius.

But other factors also were pulling at him and the other founders. As Jefferson guided his horse along muddy, sandy and stump-riddled roads, fording creeks and ferrying across rivers, he looked upon a landscape of both grinding poverty and unimaginable prosperity. A new country, he believed, must look west, beyond the Appalachian mountain chain that was like a wall running up much of British America.

Within Virginia’s borders, the 10 percent of those who were considered “gentry,” which included Jefferson, owned half the land. Most Virginians struggled on smaller tracts at a time when tobacco prices were plunging — dropping 40 percent from 1772 to 1773 alone — and trade was restricted to British middlemen. For many Southerners, the early 1770s were a desperate and recessionary time that helped spark their revolution.

Jefferson and many others were united in their belief that London’s policies were holding them back. And they believed one source of redress was taking land west of the mountains, much of which Britain had promised to protect for the Native Americans who lived there.

Jefferson had traveled through parts of Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountain range during his years as a lawyer and knew the fast-growing western reach of the colonies better than most people of his era. But he never crossed land west of the Appalachian chain, which he said “perhaps” were the tallest in North America. As he headed to Philadelphia, the lure of what lay beyond these mountains was one of the most important matters occupying his mind — a fascination that would continue throughout his life, as he sent the Lewis and Clark expedition to reach the Pacific Ocean and doubled the nation’s size in the Louisiana Purchase.

Like many of the founders, Jefferson had filed claims for land — which in his case could have netted 17,000 acres. But access to much of the western lands was blocked by London, and for this and much else that alarmed him, Jefferson was convinced that the colonists were treated unfairly — unequally — by the British government.

King George III and his government could not fathom a rebellion.

Britain had the most prosperous economy, the greatest empire, the largest navy and, seemingly, the wherewithal to stamp out a revolution among a heretofore relatively disparate band on colonies across the Atlantic. Yet time and again, London miscalculated. For all its wealth, it had exhausted many resources in the North American colonies, such as fighting the French and Indian War in the west.

In the wake of that war, in which Britain won western land from the French, London imposed the Proclamation of 1763, which established a de facto border of the colonies on the western side of the Alleghenies.

While some colonists violated the Proclamation Line, it prevented speculators such as Jefferson, George Washington and many other future leaders of the revolution from owning and then selling lands at what they anticipated would be for enormous profit. Many colonists, especially veterans who were due a grant for their service, expected the British victory to result in a land boom.

Instead, the British restricted settlement in hopes of mollifying Native Americans who, London learned, were creating an unprecedented tribal confederacy that could lead to another costly war. Nor did King George III want to pay for the defense of colonists who sought to settle in land that the British had said they would protect for Indians. The British hoped that by restricting the colonies between the Appalachians and the Atlantic Ocean, they would be easier to control from afar.

The anger across many colonies over this policy would become one of the major causes of a revolution, uniting commoners who wanted to settle on the fertile Ohio territory and the gentry who sought to profit from their claims.

Time and again, colonists tried to get around the proclamation, and the future founders filed more titles for western land. But the restrictions multiplied. Parliament then passed the Quebec Act of 1774, which sought to prevent settlement beyond a certain point of the Ohio River by ceding that land to the province of Quebec. The act also granted power to Catholics in that province to collect tithes and establish bishops — moves that outraged many Protestants, who dominated the colonies.

Effectively, Parliament had taken control of vast lands claimed by Virginia and other colonies, which Indian tribes also called their own and which several of the founders believed they had controlled. At the same time, the monarchy said that it owned the right to sell all un-deeded western land under its control for the benefit of the crown. This shocked Jefferson and others — and British investors — who believed the monarchy had ceded its right to such land long ago; they now were in competition for land with the king of England.

George III “has no right to grant lands of himself,” Jefferson wrote.

Jefferson not only expected to turn the colonies into independent states by ending British restrictions against settlement, but he also envisioned more states on the western side of the Appalachians — all of which meant seizing land from Native American and British control.

As Jefferson put it later, if the Native Americans refused to assimilate and cede their land, “the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal” farther west. “The same world will scarcely do for them and us.”

After the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, the delegates of the Continental Congress in 1775 had drafted the “Olive Branch Petition,” which they sent to King George III in hopes of peacefully retaining the bond between Britain and “your still faithful Colonists.” But the monarch refused to accept the petition, which convinced the colonists that he approved the parliamentary actions to which Jefferson and others had objected. Instead, the king on Aug. 23, 1775, issued a proclamation declaring the colonies in a state of “open and avowed rebellion.”

The king’s action played into Jefferson’s hands. A year earlier, in his “Summary View of the Rights of British America,” he had urged the king to rein in Parliament and treat the colonists equal with citizens in Britain. The king had formally rejected that idea, and more conservative colonists who had recoiled at Jefferson’s rhetoric now embraced it, which had helped solidify support for the battle of Norfolk and the unification of colonists against Britain.

So too did anger at the Church of England. As Jefferson perceived more than many others, the church’s prominence was an issue of great importance to many poor White people, especially in rural areas, who were forced to support a church to which they did not belong.

The Anglican Church, later known as the Episcopal Church in America, had been created in the 16th century after the pope refused to annul King Henry VIII’s first marriage. While colonies had varying religious foundations, Anglicanism was so dominant in Virginia that children were required to be baptized in the faith, although residents could practice other religions.

Those who did not follow this faith in Virginia were called “dissenters,” who could in extreme cases be imprisoned, with their children taken away and other harsh penalties. Moreover, Virginians were required to pay fees to support Anglican ministers regardless of whether they followed that faith. Jefferson, who was raised as an Anglican but became skeptical of church leaders, later wrote that this amounted to “religious slavery.”

Jefferson lived among many Baptists and Presbyterians who objected to being labeled dissenters and especially to being taxed to support the Anglicans — the largest fee that many paid at the time, much more significant than fees on property or imports.

The Anglican Church’s power was as much of a threat to many colonists as the taxing authority of Parliament and local legislatures. A “great awakening” of enlightenment swept the colonies, centering on the concept that all worshipers were equal before God and had freedom to follow their beliefs.

Jefferson described himself as believing in the moral teachings of Jesus but not the supernatural events portrayed in the Bible. In his desire to protect the rights of people of any faith, Jefferson later famously wrote to a Baptist church official that there should be a “wall of separation” between church and state.

By the time of the revolution, Jefferson calculated that two-thirds of Virginians considered themselves “dissenters” and thus subject to penalty. If the dissenters were to gain the right to practice their religion without supporting the Church of England and without penalty, independence from Britain would have to be won. It was yet another force impelling Jefferson toward Philadelphia.

Jefferson kept careful account of his journey, noting his stops in places such as Culpeper, Virginia, and Frederick, Maryland, where he paid a barber in “Maryland currency,” and then took a ferry across the Potomac River into Pennsylvania, where he stayed in York.

While having dinner at a local tavern, Jefferson could look west to a lesser-known scene of the revolution. A decade earlier, White colonists who had settled in the west, or believed they had the right to do so, did not buy into the British plan for peace with Native American tribes. These colonists saw an alliance between London and tribes as meddling in what they viewed as their destiny to occupy western lands occupied by Native Americans. Jefferson would champion that colonist cause, much to the dismay of the original Americans.

In a campaign known as the Allegheny Uprising, the settlers smeared their faces with dark paint in the Native style, which led them to be known as the “Black Boys,” and attacked a British caravan of goods and ammunition that was being sent as a goodwill gesture to tribes in western Pennsylvania. They also murdered Native Americans, viewing their acts as patriotic as anti-tax rallies elsewhere — both of which confounded British authorities. The conflict raged for months, far less known than the uprisings in Massachusetts or elsewhere. As historian Patrick Spero has written in his book “Frontier Rebels,” these settlers “wanted to be free of Indians as much as they wanted to be free of their imperial overlords,” even if their story “clouds the heroic narratives of colonial rebels fighting to overthrow a tyrannical imperial regime.”

All of these issues — taxes, tariffs, trade, western land, religious freedom, slavery, Indian wars on the frontier, not to mention the threat of hanging for treason — would consume Jefferson as he took a ferry across the Susquehanna River to join his fellow revolutionaries in the Continental Congress.