Randolph, who had so largely guided the deliberations of the
first Continental Congress, was at the last moment prevented by
ill-health from attending the second. His place in the Virginian
Delegation was taken by Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was not yet thirty when he took his seat in the Continental
Congress, but he was already a notable figure in his native State. He
belonged by birth to the slave-holding gentry of the South, though not
to the richest and most exclusive section of that class. Physically he
was long limbed and loose jointed, but muscular, with a strong ugly face
and red hair. He was adept at the physical exercises which the
Southerners cultivated most assiduously, a bold and tireless rider who
could spend days in the saddle without fatigue, and a crack shot even
among Virginians. In pursuit of the arts and especially of music he was
equally eager, and his restless intelligence was keenly intrigued by the
new wonders that physical science was beginning to reveal to men;
mocking allusions to his interest in the habits of horned frogs will be
found in American pasquinades of two generations. He had sat in the
Virginian House of Burgesses and had taken a prominent part in the
resistance of that body to the royal demands. As a speaker, however, he
was never highly successful, and a just knowledge of his own
limitations, combined perhaps with a temperamental dislike, generally
led him to rely on his pen rather than his tongue in public debate. For
as a writer he had a command of a pure, lucid and noble English
unequalled in his generation and equalled by Corbett alone.

But for history the most important thing about the man is his creed. It
was the creed of a man in the forefront of his age, an age when French
thinkers were busy drawing from the heritage of Latin civilizations
those fundamental principles of old Rome which custom and the
corruptions of time had overgrown. The gospel of the new age had already
been written: it had brought to the just mind of Jefferson a conviction
which he was to communicate to all his countrymen, and through them to
the new nation which the sword was creating. The Declaration of
Independence is the foundation stone of the American Republic, and the
Declaration of Independence in its essential part is but an incomparable
translation and compression of the _Contrat Social_. The aid which
France brought to America did not begin when a French fleet sailed into
Chesapeake Bay.