MayerBlog: The Web Log of
|
|
|
Thomas Jefferson, Man versus Myth
Today, April 13, 2006, marks the 263rd anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, America’s most famous – and most misunderstood – Founding Father. Whether it’s because of his authorship of the Declaration of Independence or because of his place in the pantheon of American leaders memorialized on the Mall in Washington, D.C., Jefferson has become – for better or for worse – an icon symbolizing America as well as its founders. In recent years it’s also become fashionable (for no better reason than simple iconoclasm) for people of all political persuasions – left-liberal, conservative, and libertarian – to bash Jefferson, who’s been denounced, variously, as “anti-capitalist,” “atheist,” “democrat,” “Jacobin,” “racist,” and “utopian idealist,” among other things. Here, as a serious scholar of Jefferson and his ideas for the past 30 years, I’d like to help set the record straight – to separate Jefferson the man (and his real historical record) from the myths about him. I’ll address two myths in particular: the notion that Jefferson should be thought of as “the father of American democracy,” and the claim that Jefferson fathered some or all of the children of his slave Sally Hemings. I’ll also address some of the other claims made about Jefferson (including those epithets listed above), separating historical fact from fiction, and conclude by discussing the real Thomas Jefferson, both his positive attributes that ought to make him a hero to all Americans (indeed to all persons who hold Enlightenment values) and those negative attributes that were real flaws, or weaknesses, in his character. I’ll conclude by pointing out that Jefferson, though truly great, was also all-too-human.
The “Father of American Democracy” Myth
Jefferson has been long regarded as the “father of American democracy.” During the celebration of his 250th birthday in 1993, he was officially proclaimed “the architect of democracy” (a play on words that coupled his famous association with democracy and his achievements as an architect). The first writer to explicitly associate Jefferson with democracy may have been Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic book, Democracy in America, where Tocqueville referred to Jefferson as “the most powerful advocate democracy has ever had.” Jefferson himself would have been surprised – perhaps even appalled – by this association with democracy because he would have strenuously denied it, and with good reason. Jefferson never explicitly identified his political philosophy with democracy. Rather, he identified with the republican form of government and called his own politics – and the political party that he founded in the 1790s – “republican.” Like virtually all the Founders, Jefferson regarded democracy as a bad form of government. Under the classical “mixed constitution” model of government to which most English-speaking thinkers adhered in the 18th century (a model that could be traced back to ancient political thought, specifically to Aristotle’s Politics), democracy was one of three “pure” forms of government (the other two were monarchy and aristocracy) which, by themselves, would degenerate into either despotism or disorder. (Monarchy would degenerate into tyranny by “the one,” a dictator – as in the ancient Roman empire; aristocracy would degenerate into tyranny by “the few,” the aristocrats or oligarchs, as in the ancient Roman republic; and democracy would degenerate into tyranny by “the many,” majority tyranny or mob rule, or else into anarchy.) An ideal constitution, it was believed, would combine elements of each of the three pure forms into a “mixed” model of government, as Englishmen in the 18th century saw their constitution (with all three forms of government represented by the King, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, joined together in King and Parliament). Jefferson’s mature political thought eventually rejected the English “mixed constitution” model and instead embraced republican government, which he defined as, essentially, representative government. The "essence of a republic," as Jefferson understood it, was "action by the citizens in person, in affairs within their reach and competence, and in all others by representatives, chosen immediately, and removable by themselves." Governments were "more or less republican in proportion as this principle enters more or less into their composition." Like other American founders, he would have denied that the American system of government was a “democracy”; rather, he insisted, it was a “republic,” as he thus defined it. He and his good friend James Madison, who were co-leaders of the opposition political party of the 1790s (the first true national opposition political party in U.S. history) called their party “Republican” because they believed they stood for preserving the republican system of American government against their opponents, the Hamiltonian Federalists, whom they accused of trying to introduce monarchical or aristocratic principles into the American system and thus of trying to un-do the American Revolution. (For more on how the terms democracy and republic were used in early American politics, see my previous entry “A Republic, Not a Democracy,” June 6, 2005.) Many people today – including historians, political scientists, and even Jefferson scholars – misunderstand Jefferson’s commitment to republicanism and particularly his advocacy of “self-government,” confusing it with democracy. But democracy is government by the majority of the people; republican government is government by the representatives of the people; and limited, constitutional, republican government – the American system – is government by the people’s representatives whose power is limited by various constraints imposed by the constitution. “Self-government,” as Jefferson understood it, meant, literally, individuals governing themselves, without the interference of government. Early in his presidency Jefferson wrote, “Our people in a body are wise, because they are under the unrestrained and unperverted operation of their own understandings.” He viewed the United States as the leading model to the world for “the interesting experiment of self‑government”; that it was the nation’s destiny to show the world “what is the degree of freedom and self‑government in which a society may venture to leave it's individual members.” To “leave” them to do what? To be free – to govern themselves. Jefferson had much confidence in the ability of individuals to govern themselves – in other words, in their ability to be free of government control. He did not, however, have much confidence at all in the ability of individuals to govern others; like the English radical Whig philosophers who so influenced his political thought, he fundamentally distrusted men who held political power. Perhaps the most important statement of Jefferson’s distrust of power can be found in his Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, where he wrote, “Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power: . . . our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go. . . . In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” The “chains of the Constitution” to which he referred were the various structural devices – federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, and ultimately, the ability of the people to amend the Constitution – the devices that its framers put in the document to help check the abuse of political power. As I show in my book, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, 1994, paperback ed., 1995), Jefferson’s philosophy of government emphasized the need for citizens to be constantly vigilant – to be ever on their guard against government and all uses of political power – because power was inherently threatening to individual freedom. My study of Jefferson’s constitutional thought highlights what was most important about his philosophy of government: his commitment to liberty and his distrust of government. Believing that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground,” Jefferson stressed the importance of written constitutions, scrupulously adhered to, as well as popular participation and vigilance over government, to keep its power from being abused. Jefferson’s political philosophy differed profoundly from that of modern-day advocates of democracy, who seek to use politics to “empower the people” – to allow the majority in society to use the coercive power of government to limit the freedoms of individuals, in the name of some amorphous concept called the “public interest.” Although Jefferson himself never uttered the famous maxim often attributed to him – “That government is best which governs least” – the sentiment behind the maxim is perfectly consistent with his political philosophy. And although Jefferson frequently defended the democratic principle of majority rule – his Republican party was, after all, far more populist (in the literal sense of the term) than its opposition, the rather elitist and paternalistic Federalist party of the 1790s – it is significant that Jefferson always coupled majority rule with the protection of minority rights. In his First Inaugural Address of March 4, 1801, for example, he urged all Americans to keep in mind “this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” Jefferson’s well-known advocacy of religious freedom aptly illustrates this concern with the rights of minorities – for, after all, the most important minority of all is the lone individual. Jefferson regarded freedom of religion as a natural right because he understood that, in his own conscience, every individual is free. Accordingly, he authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom because he championed the right of every person to hold (or not to hold) religious beliefs, free of governmental interference. Justifying the Statute in his book (the only truly book-length work he ever wrote), Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson explained: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” If one applies consistently Jefferson’s test for the legitimacy of government, the result would be not democratic government but rather limited government – indeed, the same kind of limited government (government limited to the basic function of protecting individuals from harming one another) that modern-day libertarians advocate. Rather than being considered an “architect of democracy,” Jefferson ought to be remembered as a champion of individual rights – and especially of the essential natural right, liberty, the right to be free – and of the limited, constitutional, and republican system of government that best safeguarded that essential right.
The Sally Hemings Myth
For over 200 years – ever since it was first raised in print by the notorious hatchet journalist James Callender in a Richmond, Virginia newspaper in 1802 – the allegation that Thomas Jefferson fathered the children of his slave Sally Hemings has been a popular American myth. Although many people today erroneously believe that the Jefferson-Hemings paternity claim is historical fact, the persistence of that belief is merely evidence of the power of the myth and of the various social forces that have helped sustain it throughout American history. Personal and political enmity, partisan conflict, and the slavery controversy helped fuel “the Sally story” in the early 19th century. Today, the story is kept alive because other forces, equally political, in American culture and in the history profession have created an atmosphere in which it has become difficult to separate myth from fact. As a member of a blue-ribbon Scholars Commission which spent the better part of a year, from summer 2000 until April 2001, reinvestigating the Jefferson-Hemings matter, I have learned that the supposed “evidence” supporting the paternity claim truly is quite weak. Proponents of the Jefferson paternity thesis rely largely on three pieces of documentary evidence: the 1802 Callender article; an 1805 letter published in a Boston, Massachusetts newspaper and attributed to one “Thomas Turner,” of Virginia; and an 1873 article in a Pike County, Ohio newspaper allegedly reporting an interview with Madison Hemings, the second-youngest son of Sally Hemings. Modern retellings of the story – including Fawn Brodie’s controversial Jefferson biography as well as the oral tradition claimed by some Hemings descendants – themselves appear to have been based on one or more of these three sources. The only other important “new evidence” cited by proponents of the Jefferson-Hemings thesis have been the results of a 1998 DNA study and a study of the birth patterns of Hemings’ children conducted in 1999 by a staff member of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello) and published in William & Mary Quarterly in January 2000. The Scholars Commission reviewed thoroughly not only these pieces of evidence but also all other relevant evidence, many pieces of which pointed to some other male relatives of Thomas Jefferson – his nephews, Peter and Samuel Carr, and/or his brother, Randolph Jefferson, or perhaps one or more of Randolph’s sons – as the likely father, or fathers, of Sally Hemings’ children. The thirteen scholars who signed the Commission’s final report concluded unanimously that the Jefferson-Hemings paternity claim was “by no means proven”; and all but one of us found the claim unpersuasive, with our views ranging from serious skepticism about the charge to a conviction that it is almost certainly false. We also found that neither the DNA study nor the statistical study printed in William & Mary Quarterly pointed to Jefferson, as opposed to his brother Randolph or perhaps one of Randolph’s sons, as the father of Hemings’ children. My own conclusion was that the paternity claim was not at all plausible and that the Jefferson-Hemings story is, quite literally, a myth. In my concurring report for the Scholars Commission, “The Thomas Jefferson – Sally Hemings Myth and the Politicization of American History,” I discussed the story in its broader context, what I describe as the “politicization of American history,” and concluded that the persistence of the myth today can be explained as a result of the influence of several phenomena -- “political correctness,” radical multiculturalism, and postmodernism – which, unfortunately, have helped undermine traditional standards for objectivity in historical scholarship. As I noted in the conclusion to my report, “[Many people] for various reasons, passionately want to believe that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’ children. These include some of the descendants of two of Sally Hemings’ children who passionately want their families’ oral traditions – and for many of them and their supporters, their places in American history – somehow validated by widespread acceptance of the Jefferson paternity thesis as historical fact. But it is not the role of historians to make people feel good about themselves or their family stories; `feel-good’ history is not good history. It is, rather, the role of historians to explain the past as best they can, by following objective methodology and the evidence.”
In my individual report, I critically analyzed the two works that are chiefly responsible for keeping alive the Jefferson-Hemings paternity thesis: the report of an ad hoc research committee created by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (Monticello), released in 2000; and the book written by law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, first published in 1997. As I detail in my report, both works fail to follow the standards of good historical scholarship; rather, they exemplify what some historians denounce as “lawyer’s history”: for they are written rather like lawyers’ briefs, selectively marshalling historical evidence in order to reach the authors’ preconceived conclusion that Jefferson did father Hemings’ children. Both the Monticello committee and Professor Gordon-Reed have political agendas that biased their work. The Monticello committee was chaired by a woman who also headed Monticello’s oral history project, which gathered the so-called “oral history” of the Hemings descendents, hardly credible evidence supporting the paternity thesis (especially given the fact that many of the Hemings descendants actually changed their “oral history” story – which originally had suggested paternity by Jefferson’s brother, Randolph – in order to fit with the paternity claim advanced by Fawn Brodie’s “intimate” biography of Jefferson, a 1974 book that no credible Jefferson scholar takes seriously). Professor Gordon-Reed wrote her book in order to vindicate Madison Hemings, Sally Hemings’ son whose treatment by historians skeptical of the paternity thesis she sees as “a metaphor for the condition of blacks in American society." Yet the case made by Professor Gordon-Reed on behalf of the paternity thesis is based on very slim evidence: essentially she demands that everyone accept as historical truth Madison Hemings’ unsubstantiated (and quite suspect) claims, made in a partisan Republican newspaper in 1873, a half-century after the deaths of both Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Anyone who does not accept his account unquestioningly, Gordon-Reed denounces as racist. Her book is not history; it’s propaganda – an example of “politically correct”/radical multiculturalist intimidation which, unfortunately, works with many scholars and authors who buy into her racist assumptions. The Scholars Commission report, which remains the most comprehensive (and the most objective) investigation into the Hemings paternity claim, will be published in book form later this year, under the title The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission, by Carolina Academic Press. The book will include not only the Commission’s general report but individual reports by individual members, including my own report and the individual report by our chairman, Robert F. Turner, a University of Virginia professor who has written an expanded version of his separate report which truly is the most thorough investigation of the question thus far written by any scholar. (Among other accomplishments, Professor Turner’s report thoroughly discredits the Madison Hemings account, exposing the many good reasons why it ought to be regarded as unreliable historical evidence.) Two other interesting books published in recent years have also called into question the paternity thesis and exposed the historical origins of the Hemings myth. Rebecca and James McMurry, in their book Anatomy of a Scandal: Thomas Jefferson and the Sally Story (2002), uncover the true origins of the Sally Hemings story. As I noted in my foreword to the book, “They reveal, for the first time in print, the full chronology of the story – tracing it back to the scandalmongers with whom it originated, men whose enmity toward Jefferson (and his father-in-law, John Wayles) was both personal and political. It is a fascinating story that needs to be told, and this book tells it ably.” More recently, Cynthia Burton, in her book Jefferson Vindicated (2005), thoroughly reviews the “fallacies, omissions, and contradictions” in the Hemings genealogical search. These include misrepresentations about the 1998 DNA study and its findings – misrepresentations on which, sadly, most of the authors of new Jefferson biographies published in recent years have relied, when they naively accept as established truth the Sally Hemings myth.
The Real Thomas Jefferson
There are many reasons why Americans should regard Jefferson as not only the most interesting and important of their nation’s Founding Fathers but also a real hero. His heroism is not lessened when we consider that, like all other human beings, Jefferson was influenced by his times and by the circumstances of his life. The real Jefferson – not the icon represented by the statue in the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. or by his portraits (both old and new) found on the nickel coin – was a man with some real limitations. Indeed, perhaps it can be said that his heroism arose from his ability to transcend some of these limitations: the aristocratic Virginian who nevertheless identified with the aspirations of the “common man”; the slaveholder who nevertheless wrote in the Declaration of Independence the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal,” endowed equally with the same natural rights. My own admiration for Jefferson is not diminished by my realization of his real weaknesses or limitations. As I see it, they fall into three categories. First – Jefferson’s greatest personal weakness, in my opinion – was his failure to oppose slavery. He was always ambivalent about the institution of slavery (as ably discussed in John C. Miller’s The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (1977), a classic work that is still the best study of the subject). Early in his political career, he made noble efforts to end slavery: he denounced the institution in both his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) and his draft of the Declaration of Independence (a passage that was deleted by Congress); his draft constitutions for Virginia provided for gradual emancipation, and he successfully fought to prohibit the importation of new slaves into both Virginia and the United States; and his proposal to ban slavery from the western territory north and west of the Ohio River was embodied in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Yet, later in life, Jefferson abandoned his early efforts opposing slavery and, when given the opportunity to voice support for the growing anti-slavery clause, he declined to do so. (He was too old for the fight, he claimed; it would be like “bidding old Priam to buckle [on] the armour of Hector,” he wrote to Edward Coles in August 1814.) A lifelong slaveowner, he did not follow the example of other prominent Virginia gentry (most famously, George Washington) of freeing his slaves in his will: the sad truth was that Jefferson, who died deeply in debt, could not afford to do so. (Nor could he do so under Virginia law, which provided that slaves so emancipated could be seized by the deceased’s creditors in satisfaction of his debts.) Jefferson was ambivalent at best – and hypocritical at worst – about slavery because, sadly, he could not transcend the racist views he shared with fellow white Virginians of his time. Slavery existed because white Americans regarded black persons as inferior, intellectually – a “suspicion” that Jefferson voiced in an infamous passage in his Notes on Virginia. To his credit, later in life, after he met the black mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Bannecker and was confronted with other evidence of intellectual achievements by black persons, Jefferson retracted his earlier view. But, unfortunately, he remained quite race-conscious, to the end of his days: that was why he was alarmed (as if awakened “by a fire-bell in the night,” he wrote at the time of the Missouri crisis in 1820) about the prospect of a racial civil war; that’s also why I believe a sexual relationship with a slave – even a light-skinned mulatto, as Sally Hemings was rumored to have been – would have been unthinkable for Jefferson. (Indeed, I think that among the strongest reaons to reject the Hemings paternity thesis is the absence of any evidence Jefferson even noticed Sally Hemings or regarded her as anything but one of his domestic slaves. As the Scholars Commission report shows, the notion that Jefferson gave “special” treatment to Sally and her children – like the erroneous claim that he freed her and all her children in his will – too is nothing but a myth.) Second – Jefferson’s greatest philosophical weakness – was his failure to fully form a moral philosophy, or ethics. Although Jefferson’s political philosophy was well articulated, his moral philosophy was virtually nonexistent. He followed some Scottish Enlightenment philosophers (Francis Hutcheson, among others) in believing in the existence of a “moral sense,” in other words, an innate morality – which is to say that he did not even believe in a moral philosophy, in the strict sense of the term. He called himself a “Christian,” not because of his religious convictions (as discussed below, they were decidedly unorthodox) but because he naively regarded Jesus’s moral teachings as “the most sublime morality that has ever fallen from the lips of man.” Jefferson’s failure to develop a moral philosophy that was truly revolutionary – that is, one that abandoned the primitive altruism of Christian ethics and instead based morality on objective truths about human nature – meant that the political revolution he and his fellow Patriots began with the American Revolution was incomplete. Enlightenment values thus were only imperfectly realized in American institutions, making possible the undoing of the principles of 1776 with the rise of the 20th-century paternalistic state and the altruistic ethics on which it was implicitly based. Finally, Jefferson had many character flaws which not only have made him difficult to understand (not only for his contemporaries but for modern scholars, too), but which also reinforced some of the negative caricatures his critics have made of him. He had an unfortunate tendency to resort to hyperbole, especially in his private letters, which were frequently published, even during his lifetime. Consider, for example, his overly-enthusiastic comments in support of the French Revolution, at least in its early stages. He wrote his protégé, William Short, in January 1793 that he would “rather . . . have seen half the earth desolated” than to see the Revolution fail. “Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it is now.” Or consider his blithe reaction to the 1787 Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts, about which he proclaimed “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Such comments furnished ammunition for Jefferson’s critics, both then and now, to denounce him as a “Jacobin” or “anarchist,” as noted below. He was rather thin-skinned, overly sensitive to criticism – which is a rather remarkable, and unfortunate, trait in a man who spent fifty years in the public eye. Notwithstanding his remarkable record of public service – member of the Virginia legislature, member of the Second Continental Congress, Governor of Virginia, U.S. ambassador to France, first Secretary of State of the United States, second Vice President of the United States, third President of the United States – Jefferson was always ambivalent about politics, torn between ambition and a desire to promote the cause of liberty, on the one hand, and his own aversion to controversy and to criticism, on the other. His silence about the Sally Hemings allegations – no doubt to protect the honor of his brother and/or his nephews, and to cover up the embarrassing truth of miscegenation at Monticello – also helped to keep the story alive and to make the myth possible if not plausible. And Jefferson was guilty of being too optimistic – some may say, with good reason, “too naïve” – in his confidence in the ability of ordinary people, “common men,” to govern themselves without resorting to the temptation of governing others. Perhaps the major reason why Jefferson is so identified – erroneously so, as I argue above – with democracy is that, unlike his good friend and collaborator, James Madison, Jefferson failed to fully appreciate all the dangers of majority tyranny. The problem that Tocqueville so eloquently described in Democracy in America – for which he coined the phrase “tyranny of the majority” – was one of which Jefferson was barely aware. In this, as in a few other aspects of political philosophy, Jefferson was less realistic, less pragmatic, than his friend Madison. Thus, while Madison argued persuasively for the need to keep constitutions sacred by tinkering with them as minimally as possible, Jefferson (in his enthusiasm for the proposition that “the earth belongs to the living”) argued for each generation (every twenty years, according to his reckoning) to rewrite all the laws and adopt new constitutions. Jefferson failed to anticipate today’s “common man” – the stereotypical “average Joe” who is deplorably apathetic about, and ignorant of, public-policy issues, let alone constitutional principles.
Notwithstanding these genuine flaws, however, Jefferson does not deserve most of the epithets that his critics (both in his own time and today) have hurled at him. Some are based on legitimate criticisms (tied in with the points I’ve made above), but most are also myths.
n “Atheist” Jefferson’s unorthodox religious views prompted his Federalist political opponents frequently to denounce him as an “atheist.” For example, during the presidential campaign of 1796, supporters of Jefferson’s Federalist opponent, John Adams, denounced Jefferson as “an atheist, anarchist, demagogue, coward, mountebank, trickster, and Francomaniac,” and predicted “If Jefferson is elected, we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.” From the standpoint of New England Congregationalists, who formed a core constituency of the Federalist party in the northeast, Jefferson did seem an atheist. He certainly did not adhere to traditional, or orthodox, Christian theological beliefs; he was a deist, who viewed god as merely the creator of nature, not a supernatural force that intervened in human affairs. As noted above, he admired Jesus’s ethics – and only in that sense called himself “Christian” – but he denied the claims of Jesus’s divinity, along with many other basic Christian theological beliefs, as the invention of “Platonists.” (In this, Jefferson’s views were remarkably in accord with those of John Adams, who also was more an Enlightenment deist than a traditional Christian, as the lively correspondence of the two men in their retirement years demonstrates.) In part because Jefferson lacked traditionally Christian theistic beliefs, he championed religious freedom – and, no doubt, for this reason, too, exposed himself to criticism by those who would use the coercive power of government to impose their faith on others. Jefferson’s authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom – and the role he and his colleague Madison played in fighting against the establishment of the Episcopal Church in Revolutionary Virginia – gave him a well-deserved reputation as champion not only of religious liberty generally but also of dissenting sects. For that reason, he received a letter of congratulations upon his election as president from a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut; and it was Jefferson’s reply to the Danbury Baptists that declared his famous interpretation of the First Amendment religion clause as “building a wall of separation between Church and State.” He took the First Amendment guarantee more seriously than any other U.S. president, refusing even to issue presidential proclamations declaring days of prayer or thanksgiving because they were religious practices over which the government had no authority.
n “Anti-capitalist” Other erroneous views that many scholars have of Jefferson are that he did not value property rights and that he held an “agrarian” view of economics that was hostile to capitalism. Neither of these claims are true; they’re based on selective reading, or misreading, of some of Jefferson’s writings. With regard to property rights, many scholars point to the omission of property from the trinity of natural rights Jefferson identified in the Declaration of Independence: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” As I explain in my Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, however, there are good reasons why Jefferson substituted the phrase pursuit of happiness for property. First, he followed 18th-century natural rights philosophy in understanding property rights as “adventitious” (that is, based on a mixture of natural rights with rights created under positive, or man-made, law) and not purely natural. Second, Jefferson was following his general style of writing, which used an economy of words. As similar statements found in state constitutions drafted in 1776 make clear, all Americans understood property rights as part of either the natural right to liberty or the right to pursue happiness. (Consider, for example, George Mason’s declaration of rights in the 1776 Virginia Constitution, which identified the basic natural rights as “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Mason’s declaration also identified these rights as those “which, when [men] enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity” – which Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence summed up in the one word, inalienable.) Jefferson clearly regarded the basic right to acquire and possess property as a natural right. As he wrote in 1816, the right to property was founded “in our natural wants, in the means by which we are endowed to satisfy those wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the equal rights” of others. Indeed, he also argued that extra taxation of the wealthy would transgress natural right: “To take from one, because it is thought that his industry and that of his fathers, has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry or skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.” These statements of Jefferson’s mature theory of political economy trump the earlier comments he made, while minister to France in the 1780s, which seemed to support inheritance taxes and which also regarded farmers as the most “virtuous” members of society. Those scholars today who think of Jefferson as holding an anti-capitalist (or pre-industrial) agrarian philosophy invariably quote only these letters from the 1780s, ignoring Jefferson’s statements later in life – especially after the War of 1812, when Jefferson abandoned his notion that the United States should remain primarily an agricultural nation and instead embraced manufacturing and industry as worthwhile endeavors for Americans. Indeed, any account of Jefferson’s mature thinking on matters of economics must take into account his enthusiastic agreement with the writings of the French anti-mercantilist philosopher Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, whose Treatise on Political Economy went even further than Adam Smith’s more famous book The Wealth of Nations in advocating free-market capitalism. De Tracy made clear that the productive value of the trader or manufacturer is equal to that of the farmer. He also defended the right of industrious persons to seek profits as “rewards for their talents,” and viewed commerce generally as the “fabric” of society. Jefferson was so enthusiastic about this treatise that he undertook the task of translating it into English, so that it could be used as the basic economics text in American universities. As historian Joyce Appleby has shown in her splendid little book, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (1984), it was Jefferson’s Republican party that truly supported a free market economy – in contrast to Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist party, which was wedded to traditionally paternalistic European notions of order and authority in political economy (as in other aspects of politics). Largely because of the modern Republican Party’s identification with Hamilton rather than its true founder, Jefferson (a complex story ably told in the book written by my mentor, Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1962), far too many scholars today naively associate Hamilton with capitalism and Jefferson with agrarianism, when it was Jefferson who truly supported free-market capitalism.
n “Hypocrite” Throughout American history, Jefferson has been charged with hypocrisy – sometimes with good reason, but other times because of further misunderstandings about his real views, especially his philosophy of government. As I’ve discussed above, Jefferson’s ambivalence with regard to the institution of slavery does understandably expose him to the charge of hypocrisy. Notwithstanding a long record of opposition to slavery, Jefferson himself remain a slave owner to the end of his life and, during his retirement years, he declined the opportunity to take a public stance in support of the antislavery cause. Jefferson’s actions can be explained in terms of both the context of his times and the circumstances of his life, but these explanations do not excuse the inconsistency between his philosophical principles and his actions, with regard to slavery. Far less justifiable is the claim – made today by scholars of all political persuasions, whether left-liberal, conservative, or libertarian – that Jefferson as president was a “hypocrite” because he exercised the powers of the presidency in ways that betrayed his limited-government views of the 1790s. Many scholars today see this as evidence of the inherent tendency of power to corrupt those who wield it, even someone like Jefferson. John Adams’s great-grandson, Henry Adams, made the charge in his History of Jefferson’s presidency, where he accused Jefferson of exercising near-monarchical powers as president and thus betraying the “states’ rights” philosophy that he earlier had held. The problem with this charge, as I discuss in my Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, is that it fundamentally misunderstands Jefferson’s federalism: he was not a knee-jerk advocate of “states’ rights,” but rather an advocate of the division of powers between the federal government and the states, giving each full authority to act within its legitimate sphere. With regard to those powers that the Constitution assigns to the national government – powers appropriate to the national government and denied to the states under the Constitution, such as the power to make treaties or to regulate foreign commerce – Jefferson could and did, consistent with his political views of the 1790s, take a broad view. Thus, as I explain in my book, the most commonly-cited example of Jefferson’s “hypocrisy” as president – the famous Louisiana Purchase of 1803 – was not at all inconsistent with Jefferson’s view of federalism, for the Purchase was done pursuant to the treaty power and thus raised no valid Tenth Amendment concerns. (Ironically, it was Jefferson himself who opened himself to the charge of hypocrisy by raising constitutional concerns; he sought an amendment to the Constitution to make explicit the national government’s power to acquire new territory, in order to set a precedent against broad interpretation of federal powers under the Constitution. In other words, he sought to use the opportunity presented by the Louisiana Purchase to “set an example” in support of his strict interpretation of federal powers.) Less justifiable, perhaps, were some of the other actions Jefferson took as president – for example, his support of rigorous enforcement powers during the Embargo, or his support of federal appropriations for the Lewis & Clark expedition or the National Road – but these actions, along with his support of the establishment of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, can be explained in terms of his federalism views, as I explain in “"Necessary and Proper: West Point and Jefferson's Constitutionalism," in a chapter in the book published in celebration of West Point’s bicentennial, Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy (Robert M.S. McDonald ed., Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2004).
n “Jacobin” As I noted above, both in his own time and today Jefferson has been criticized for his support of the French Revolution. In its early stages, when he served in France as U.S. ambassador in 1789-90 and was a close friend to the Marquis de Lafayette and other moderates, Jefferson was optimistic that the French were following in the Americans’ footsteps. He retained that optimism, despite abundant evidence to the contrary as the French Revolution became increasingly violent (leading to the infamous Reign of Terror in 1793), largely because Jefferson’s friendship with moderates like Lafayette had blinded him to the truly dangerous and radical roots of the French Revolution in the collectivist ideas of philosophers like Rousseau (of whom Jefferson was ignorant). So, in the 1790s, when the war between Great Britain and France divided Federalists and their Jeffersonian Republican opponents on American foreign policy (with the Federalists generally favoring Britain while the Republicans generally favored France), Federalists charged Jefferson and his fellow Republicans of being “Jacobins,” likening them to one of the most radical factions in the French Revolution, Robespierre and his fellow members of the infamous Jacobin Club. Jefferson, of course, was no Robespierre; neither was he a Jacobin, in any sense. At most, he was guilty of naivete, in failing to understand how radically different the roots of the French Revolution were from those of the American Revolution. (By the time Napoleon had risen to power and established his French Empire, Jefferson of course realized that the revolution in France had indeed taken a radically different direction, not toward liberty but instead toward another form of tyranny.) Nevertheless, his propensity to resort to unguarded hyperbole in his private correspondence – as I’ve noted above – further has exposed him to charges of anarchism or Jacobinism, by modern scholars. For example, the left-wing Irish litterateur Conor Cruise O’Brien, in his recent book The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, dramatically asserted, “The twentieth-century statesman whom the Thomas Jefferson of January 1793 would have admired most is Pol Pot,” head of the totalitarian Communist government in Cambodia that killed nearly half of his country’s eight million people. What was O’Brien’s basis for making this outrageous charge? He cited Jefferson’s “Adam and Eve” letter to William Short in January 1793, in which Jefferson had written (as noted above) he would “rather . . . have seen half the earth desolated” than see the Revolution fail. O’Brien reads this letter, along with the “tree of liberty” letter written by Jefferson in reaction to Shays’ Rebellion, as evidence of Jefferson’s radicalism; he echoed the conservative British statesman Edmund Burke in accusing Jefferson of being “intoxicated with `the wild gas’ of liberty.” Conservative American historian Forrest McDonald, reviewing The Long Affair for National Review, maintained that O’Brien was “right on target” – not a surprising statement from a historian who has made no secret of being an admirer of Hamilton and a critic of Jefferson. Yet O’Brien’s absurd charge exemplifies the unfortunate tendency of modern scholars, whether on the political “left” or “right,” to caricature Jefferson in order to advance their own agendas.
n “Racist” As more fully discussed above, Jefferson shared the racial views held generally by white Virginians (and slave owners) of his time – views that today would be considered racist. To call Jefferson “racist” because of those views, however, is to commit the error of “presentism”: of reading modern standards or mores into the past, and of unfairly judging people in the past by those modern standards. Even some admirers of Jefferson today are guilty of this error. Many of the people who would like to believe the Sally Hemings myth is historical truth have an idealistic notion that Jefferson and Sally Hemings had, in effect, a “common law marriage” at Monticello. Not only does this notion defy credibility – given the difficulty of keeping such a relationship secret in the “fishbowl” atmosphere at Monticello, which was more like a hotel than a private home (as the Scholars Commission report discusses) – but it’s also unfair to Jefferson, to envision him as a 21st century man with “multiculturalist” sensitivities. He wasn’t such a man. Although in many respects he was a man whose philosophic views were ahead of his time, he was a human being whose knowledge and beliefs, his values and his tastes, were influenced by the circumstances of the 18th- and early 19th-century world in which he lived.
n “Secessionist” As Merrill Peterson shows in his book The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, Republican Party operatives in the period after the Civil War sought to associate Jefferson with the Democratic Party (even though the Republican Party, too, owes its origin to one wing of Jefferson’s Republican Party – which explains both the party’s name and Abraham Lincoln’s statements that all his political principles flowed from Jefferson); late 19th-century Republicans also sought to associate both Jefferson and the Democratic Party with the views of the defeated Southern Confederates. Some modern defenders of the “lost cause” of the Confederacy also see Jefferson as the inspiration for Southern secessionists, either because of his alleged “states’ rights” views or because of the “right of revolution” found in the Declaration of Independence. There is a link between Jefferson and Southern secessionists: Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 not only asserted a state legislature’s right to declare federal laws unconstitutional but also further claimed the right of a state to “nullify” unconstitutional federal laws, on the theory that the Constitution was, essentially, a “compact” among the states and that each state, as a “party” to that compact, might judge whether it had been breached. Neither Jefferson nor James Madison, author of the similar (though more moderate) Virginia Resolutions (which omitted the nullification claim), ever intended the 1798 resolutions to justify state secession; indeed, both Jefferson and Madison sought to help prevent the secession of Republican-majority states that shared their alarm at the Federalists’ attempt to silence the opposition party through the Alien and Sedition Acts (the subject of the Resolutions). Despite his ready identification with Virginia as his “country,” Jefferson was in many respects a nationalist. His views and Abraham Lincoln’s are far more in accord than many modern scholars realize. As for the notion that the “right of revolution” found in the Declaration of Independence justified the secession of the Confederate states, it should be noted that Jefferson qualified that right of revolution – the right of the people, who retain sovereign power, to re-establish government when it becomes “destructive of the ends” for which it was created – with the corollary principle that that right ought to be exercised, not for “light and transcient causes,” but only when a “long train of abuses” shows a deliberate conspiracy to tyrannize the people. Lincoln’s election as president in 1860 – the event that triggered the secession of the Southern states that comprised the Confederate States of America during the Civil War – did not meet this requirement; indeed, Lincoln’s election was based on the view widely held in the North that the U.S. government had come under control of the Southern “slave power” (a view that was understandable, given such developments as the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in the Dred Scott case.) Modern scholars who conclude otherwise misunderstand both the Civil War and the American Revolution.
And finally,
n “Utopian idealist” As I’ve noted, Jefferson indeed was sometimes naïve, or overly optimistic, in his view of human nature – for example, in his assumption that all individuals are basically good (that they share the innate “moral sense”), or in contrast with Madison, his lack of concern about the problem of majority tyranny. So, to a point, this allegation rings true. Yet Jefferson did understand one important fact about human nature that many modern so-called “realists” ignore: political power does corrupt. Jefferson might have been guilty of having too much confidence in the ability of individuals to govern themselves, but he was quite realistic in his lack of confidence in the ability of people to govern others. As he famously observed in his First Inaugural Address in 1801, “Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.” History has answered it; Jefferson was right.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday, April 13, 2006 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
|