From The President - Fall/Winter 2026

After the Declaration

John Trumbull’s iconic painting Declaration of Independence makes it all look so serene. The signers sit in orderly rows, every hair in place, every head the same height, even their cutaway coats in a matching muted palette. The Committee of Five presents its draft as if creating, with the stroke of a pen and the swearing of lives, the we who hold these self-evident truths. In painting his epic canvas, which he completed in 1818, Trumbull traveled back in time, to a primal scene he never witnessed. The date was June 28, 1776. The rest, the painting seems to say, is history.

John Adams worried that the story of the country’s birth would be written that way, too. “The History of our Revolution will be one continued Lye from one End to the other,” he fretted in a letter to Benjamin Rush in 1790. “The Essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical Rod Smote the Earth and out Sprung General Washington.” The heroes take the stage; the camera pans over the map; the pages of the calendar flip; and voilà, the peace is signed: Declaration to nation in a snap.

But of course, the country’s birth pangs only began in June 1776. Reading the several dozen letters Thomas Jefferson wrote between the beginning of that momentous July and the end of the year reminds us of the contingency and even the improbability of American success. On July 15, he told his friend Francis Eppes that General William Howe had arrived in New York with “two or three vessels,” a kind of scouting party, perhaps “a prelude to the passage of their whole fleet, and seems to indicate an intention of landing above New York.” Reports from Canada were dire, with half of the American forces “down with the smallpox.”

It got worse. “The ill successes in Canada had depressed the minds of many,” Jefferson wrote later that month. To the south, Howe’s forces massed quickly. “Forty odd ships arrived the other day, and others at other times,” Jefferson wrote on August 5. “It is questionable whether our recruits come in so speedily as his.” They could not. On August 20, he tallied American men and materiel, and noted, “We have been in hourly expectation of the great decision at New York but it has not yet happened.”

A week later, the great decision came: British forces overwhelmed the Continentals in the Battle of Brooklyn. Washington eked out a strategic retreat, but an estimated 2,000 of his men were killed, wounded, or captured. By September, the British controlled Manhattan and were pushing into Westchester and New Jersey. Losses kept mounting: White Plains, Fort Washington, Fort Lee. Casualties multiplied. Retreat followed retreat.

Reading the news from still-serene Monticello, Jefferson worried about the battlefield losses, and the smallpox, and whether Native nations would join the British cause.

But all the while, Jefferson kept working: drafting a lengthy report on the value of gold and silver coinage, even as the worth of the Continental paper dollar plummeted. Mapping philosophical arguments and writing resolutions to end Virginia’s support for the Church of England. Creating a series of bills to restructure the courts of his beloved commonwealth, so that justice might be more fairly administered. Helping Virginia’s House of Delegates to understand the history of the commonwealth’s contested boundaries.

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine famously wrote in the first issue of The American Crisis, published on December 19, a week before Washington’s struggling remnant pulled off the war’s first miraculous upset, in Trenton. Paine warned that the “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.”

Jefferson, no battlefield hero, manifested his strenuous patriotism in the patient, steady work of self government. Like so many Americans then and since, he knew, as Paine noted, that “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”

The Declaration lit the spark. Fulfilling its promise — the theme of this issue and of much of Monticello’s programming in 2027 — had barely begun as 1776 drew to a close. It remains our highest calling today.

Monticello Magazine, Fall/Winter 2026