Parliament had no right whatsoever to exercise authority over the colonies

From American Sphinx; The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph J. Ellis.  Page 34.  

The reference was to a pamphlet that Jefferson had somewhat inadvertently published the previous year. In July 1774 he had taken it upon himself to draft a set of instructions for the first Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress. In a typical act of avoidance he had come up sick for the debate in the Virginia Convention, but friends had arranged for the publication of his draft by a press in Williamsburg. From there printers and newspaper editors throughout the colonies had picked up the pamphlet under the title of A Summary View of the Rights of British America. The audience at whom Jefferson had actually aimed his instructions, the Virginia legislators, chose not to follow them, preferring to recommend that its delegates adopt a moderate posture toward Great Britain. What Jefferson had recommended, and what became the basis of his political reputation outside Virginia, was decidedly more radical. Indeed, if the arguments of Summary View were to be believed, they put him in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement in America.

The style of Summary View was simple and emphatic, with a dramatic flair that previewed certain passages in the Declaration of Independence (e.g., “Single acts of “tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably thro’ every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery”). What most readers noticed, however, and Jefferson later claimed was his chief contribution, was the constitutional argument that Parliament had no right whatsoever to exercise authority over the colonies. While this position had been implicit in the colonial protest literature ever since the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, the clarity of the colonial case had fallen afoul of several complicating distinctions. Granted, Parliament had no right to tax the colonists without their consent, but did it not have the power to regulate trade? Well, yes, it did, but not when the intent of the trade regulation was to raise revenue. But, then, how was intent to be gauged? And what about Parliament’s other legislative actions, like quartering troops in colonial cities and closing Boston’s port? These nagging questions made for a somewhat convoluted constitutional problem. Could Parliament do some of these things but not others? If so, how did one decide which was which? The core appeal of Summary View was that Jefferson cut through the tangle with one sharp thrust: “[T]he British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.”