Thomas Jefferson

America’s Founding Idealist

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) is America’s Founding Idealist. The values of this country—liberty and equality, freedom and individualism, republicanism and democracy all sprang from his mind and pen. From the moment he burst onto the national scene in 1774 with A Summary View of the Rights of British America, to his providential death on the 50th anniversary of his Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826, he embodied America’s highest goals and aspirations.

James Parton summed up: “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.” Today, at the Jefferson Memorial in the capitol of the nation he helped to found, we admire his towering figure and read his inspiring words. Jefferson’s challenge is as alive and relevant today as it was more than two hundred years ago, when he first summoned his fellow citizens to their revolutionary destiny.

Yet Jefferson’s life and public policies are shot through with contradictions and even paradoxes. Jefferson the politician does not always measure up to Jefferson the ideologue. In his private life he lived out the dilemmas that vex his country still. But when old John Adams, also on his deathbed on July 4, 1826, croaked that “Jefferson still survives,” he was absolutely right. He defined forever the rightful place of the Sage of Monticello in the hearts and minds of his countrymen. For as long as America struggles to live up to its creed—the values and ideals he cherished—the United States of America will be Jefferson’s country.

Thomas Jefferson wrote his own epitaph, and it can be seen today on his gravestone in the family cemetery at Monticello:

THOMAS JEFFERSON
Author of the Declaration of American Independence,
Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom,
And Father of the University of Virginia.

Nothing of his political or diplomatic career, as delegate, governor, minister, secretary, vice-president, president. Nothing as scientist, architect, naturalist, linguist, or philosopher-statesman. Nothing of the West—of Louisiana or Lewis and Clark. Jefferson’s epitaph is the grossest understatement in American history. He chose to accentuate items at the beginning and end of his long public career. Since he did not fill the gap, we must.

Early Years

Thomas Jefferson was born on 13 April 1743 at his father Peter’s plantation, Shadwell, in Albemarle County, Virginia, on the western edge of settlement. His mother, Jane, was a Randolph, one of the top half-dozen aristocratic families in colonial Virginia. The elder Jefferson, who died when Thomas was fourteen, was a prominent local officeholder. Jefferson had all the proper credentials for upward mobility in the Virginia plantocracy. Something of a prodigy, he studied Latin and Greek before entering, in 1760, the College of William and Mary.

Two years at Williamsburg, then propounding the tenets of Scottish Enlightenment humanitarianism, opened him to politics, science, and society. Always a bookworm, he studied law (to make a living) and political theory (to argue against Britain). Both subjects served him well in the Virginia House of Burgesses (1769-1775), where his Summary View anticipated the Declaration of Independence by blaming the King for America’s problems. His colleagues in the second Continental Congress (1775-1776) recognized his literary talents; although a committee of five undertook the Declaration, the first draft, with its stirring revolutionary rhetoric, was his.

In the Virginia House of Delegates (1776-1779) Jefferson sought quite successfully to reduce his revolutionary ideology to practice. His bills abolished primogeniture and entail, the traditional English legal supports of landed aristocracy. He helped revise the colonial code of laws. His defense of religious freedom, of liberty of conscience without state regulation, alone elevates him to the highest pantheon of American libertarianism.

Jefferson’s brief tenure as Governor of Virginia (1779-1781) marked the nadir of his public career. His state was unprepared for war, and he was unwilling to stretch its constitution with strong executive leadership. When British Colonel Banastre Tarleton raided Charlottesville, where Jefferson had summoned the legislature, he and it fled ignominiously into the hills. He then resigned his office before his successor was properly chosen. Even his supporters used the term “abdication.” The Virginia Assembly later investigated and vindicated his conduct, but his opponents never let him forget it.

Jefferson recovered from this obloquy, and from the death of his wife Martha, by responding to a French questionnaire seeking information about the American states. His material appeared in English in 1787 as Notes on the State of Virginia, a brilliant combination of statistical analysis and philosophical inquiry. It remains the starting point for any investigation of Jeffersonian ideology.

Statesman

During a brief stint in the Confederation Congress (1783-1784),^[3]The United States governed itself under the Second Continental Congress (1775-1781), the Articles of Confederation (1781-1789), and, since 1789, the Constitution. National government in the 1780s … Continue reading Jefferson immersed himself in committee work, producing among other reports, a plan for the western territories which ultimately became the famed Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This latter document prohibited slavery in the territories of the Old Northwest, and repudiated colonialism by planning for eventual statehood. Thirty-five of the fifty United States have successfully negotiated the Jeffersonian process from acquisition to full membership in the American union.

The Congress then sent Jefferson to France, where he soon replaced Benjamin Franklin as American Minister (1784-1789). Jefferson loved the French—their wine, women, and culture—yet professed that Europe strengthened his Americanness. Somewhat to the right of French revolutionary thinkers, he came to appreciate the strength of conservative institutions like monarchy and hereditary aristocracy, and he understood, even if he did not encourage, the violence necessary to overthrow them. Despite the excesses of the French Revolution, Jefferson knew that the counter-revolution was worse. He always hated kingship, nobilities, artificial privileges, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.

The Virginian returned to America in late 1789 and soon accepted appointment as the first Secretary of State under the Constitution. His tenure (1790-1793) was marked by deteriorating relations with Great Britain and with Britain’s chief American supporter, Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson entered the lists against Hamilton with an argument against the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States. He lost, but his forebodings of a “boundless field of power” proved accurate. He came to believe that Hamilton and his fellow Federalists were closet monarchists, and he led the agrarian opposition to Hamilton’s market republicanism. The two men and their philosophies have ever since represented opposite polarities on the American political spectrum.

After three years of pleasant but debt-burdened retirement at Monticello, Jefferson became Vice President of the United States (1797-1801) under his old friend and revolutionary compatriot, John Adams. The electoral system designed by the Framers had yielded a Federalist in the first office and a Democratic-Republican in the second. Jefferson watched helplessly as the Adams administration whipped up a war crisis with France, but it was Federalist domestic policy that gave Jefferson an opening. In response to the Alien and Sedition laws^[4]Four measures passed by the Federalist Congress in 1798 to curb domestic opposition: 1) the Alien Enemies Act empowered the President to detain citizens of a nation at war with the U.S. It is still … Continue reading he wrote the Kentucky Resolution (1798),^[5]By way of opposition to the Alien and Sedition laws, Republican legislatures in Virginia and Kentucky passed resolutions arguing that these measures were unconstitutional, since they gave the … Continue reading which, by advancing the compact theory of the Constitution and the doctrine of nullification seriously undermined the long-term strength of the Union.

Jefferson’s authorship, (and Madison’s, of the Virginia Resolution) were top secret until revealed in 1824. When Adams proved unable to negotiate peace with France in time to influence the election of 1800, he lost the presidency to Jefferson.

The electoral college now produced a tie vote for the highest office. Both Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr were chosen President in 1801. (Before the 12th amendment, added in 1804, each elector cast two votes for president. The tie reflected the discipline and cohesion of Jefferson’s Republican party.) Because Burr would not forthrightly refuse the office of vice president, and because the Federalists thought they might have a chance to deny Jefferson, the House of Representatives cast thirty-six ballots before selecting the Republican. Jefferson never forgave Burr.

Louisiana Purchase

Jefferson’s two-term administration (1801-1809) is noted for strong presidential and party leadership, fiscal economy in a government of ostensibly-limited powers, a knock-down battle with the Federalist judiciary, and a growing crisis with Britain and France, culminating in the Embargo of 1807.^[6]Rather than declare war against France and Britain, Jefferson’s Embargo cut off their trade. No American ship could carry goods abroad, and no foreign ship could leave the United States loaded. … Continue reading A brilliant combination of foreign and domestic policy enabled the President to pull off the most momentous single achievement in all of American history–the acquisition of Louisiana in 1803.

France had claimed the vast Louisiana Territory ever since the explorations of LaSalle and Marquette in the 17th century.^[7]Father Jacques Marquette floated down the Mississippi river to its juncture with the Arkansas River in 1673, and claimed the Missouri drainage for France. In 1682 another French explorer, Sieur … Continue reading The exigencies of the Seven Years War turned the area over to Spain in 1762. But in 1800 France re-acquired Louisiana in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso.^[8]In the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Spain ceded Louisiana to France in return for the Kingdom of Etruria at Florence. In Spanish eyes, she traded a colonial liability for an Italian kingdom. When Jefferson learned the details, sometime in 1802, he realized that not a weak Spain but a strong France controlled America’s thousand-mile western border. Jefferson never feared Spain; its North American holdings were, he figured, ripe for the taking. But France threatened the “right of deposit” at New Orleans—the right of American farmers to float their goods down the Mississippi River and unload them in the city. “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy,” he told Robert Livingston, the U.S. Minister to France. “It is New Orleans.” He offered to buy the city, or part of it, or another location suitable for commerce. Napoleon, who had intended Louisiana as a vast new world granary, now had European priorities. He offered all of Louisiana to the United States.^[9]See Pierce Mullin, The Louisiana Purchase.

This real estate tender left the President in a theoretical pickle. The Constitution did not specifically permit the purchase of foreign territory. Jefferson had already staked out the grounds of strict construction in the bank debate of 1790.^[10]“Strict construction” refers to the view that the U.S. Constitution does not permit any governmental action not specifically allowed in the document. The opposite view, broad … Continue reading Now he admitted privately that acquisition without amendment would make “blank paper” of the founding document. But the opportunity, the timing, and the price were too good to pass up. Jefferson bought Louisiana by treaty. The transaction revealed him as a pragmatic politician, unencumbered by ideological purity. The Louisiana Purchase–828,000 square miles for $15 million–was Jeffersonian statesmanship at its finest. It also fueled his triumphant re-election.

Battered by diplomatic reversals in his second term, Jefferson gladly handed his office to his protege, James Madison, in 1809, and retired to Monticello. There, for the rest of his days, he practiced scientific agriculture, kept up a voluminous correspondence, and designed, both physically and academically, the University of Virginia. This man’s Memorial stands in Washington, D.C., but if you seek his monuments, look around: Louisiana, “Mr. Jefferson’s University,” the United States of America.

Philosopher

It is impossible to sum up briefly the life, achievements, and philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. He is a towering Enlightenment figure who spent his life, it seems, investigating and writing about everything. A short biography runs six volumes; his published works, when completed, will fill a hundred. A few themes, however, deserve explication.

Jefferson’s timelessness, his everlasting memorial, rests on his unceasing advocacy of a natural rights philosophy of liberty and equality, of democracy, individual freedom, and limited government by consent of the governed. He first set forth these “self evident” truths in his Declaration of American Independence: “all men are created equal” and endowed with “certain inalienable rights & among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These beliefs are the consistent theme of Jefferson’s life; what he wanted to be remembered for; what he wanted inscribed on his tombstone. In his First Inaugural Address he called these natural rights “the creed of our political faith.” He hated the artificial barriers of the past monarchy, aristocracy, “monkish ignorance and superstition.” In the last letter of his life (June 24, 1826) he expounded “the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” These are American values, even today.

Jefferson’s universal truths are, of course, contradictory and philosophically incompatible. Liberty implies individual freedom, including the freedom to be different; equality implies sameness, or uniformity. Liberty has historically been an aristocratic value: equality a democratic goal. A government guaranteeing universal rights and resting on the consent of the people poses a problem: What if the people agree to deny these rights to themselves? American political and public discourse is a constant balancing act between Jeffersonian extremes. Thus partisans of all stripes can and do invoke Thomas Jefferson to support various and nefarious schemes of both left and right. Jefferson is indeed our universal philosopher.

Radical

Thomas Jefferson always and ever enjoys a reputation as an authentic American radical, even revolutionary. Federalists feared, honestly feared him, and gruesomely predicted dwellings in flames, female chastity violated, and churches destroyed. Fisher Ames^[11]Fisher Ames (1758–1808) was a Federalist Congressman in the 1790s, an orator, and publicist, who favored a republic but feared democracy. scented “the loathsome steam of human victims offered in sacrifice to the God of Reason.” In truth, Jefferson deplored the excesses of the French Revolution; he never set out to destroy religion, the laws, the society, the calendar.

But his sentiments frighten people yet. They cite his advocacy of tiny ward/republics as the basic units of political life, or they quote his most incendiary observations:

The earth belongs, in usufruct,^[12]A legal term defining use but not ownership or destruction of property. to the living.

I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

To attain all this, however, rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over; yet the object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation.

Two points here. First, Jefferson was habitually given to hyperbole and exaggeration. In the Declaration of Independence he accused poor George III of “works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages.” Rather than see the French Revolution fail he opined, “I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve, left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it now is.” The world’s population at the time was roughly nine hundred million, and there were, at best, fifty countries. Would Jefferson kill off 899,999,900 people?

Second, all these wild expressions of death and anarchy are contained in private letters–to James Madison, John Adams, and others. They were not intended for public consumption. They are known to us, now, but not to Jefferson’s contemporaries. Who among us would wish their private, most intimate thoughts elevated into a public philosophy? The private Jefferson could be explosive; publicly, he was most often a practical, moderate, empirical statesman.

American Paradoxes

Every generation rewrites history in light of its current concerns, and contemporary American historiography is obsessed with the status of women, blacks, Indians, and other groups heretofore treated as marginal, oppressed outsiders. Since Thomas Jefferson is the bellwether for every change, every nuance in American society from his time to ours, his opinions on these subjects have naturally been solicited.

And in fine, Jefferson is not weathering modern historical revisionism very well. He was, in modern terms, a chauvinist. He encouraged his daughters to improve themselves in music and domestic tasks so they could be more pleasing to their husbands. Women were outside political society: “The tender breasts of young ladies were not formed for political convulsions.” “Appointing women to office is a proposition for which the public is not prepared—nor am I.” In all this, Jefferson was a man of his time, and of his place.

Jefferson believed Native Americans were equal to Europeans—and, in values such as virtue and courage, even better. He advocated intermarriage. His “benevolent” or “paternalistic” policies of assimilation sought to transform Indian people into farmers, artisans, and Christians.

Yet his Declaration described Indians as merciless savages, and his policies amounted to cultural genocide. Quieting title to Indian lands led inexorably to removal and, later, reservations. Jefferson’s lofty ideals yielded willingly in this case, to political pressure and public opinion.

Thomas Jefferson personified an early America paradox—he was simultaneously anti-slavery and anti-Negro. His Notes on Virginia condemned slavery as a boisterous passion conducive to aristocracy. Yet he believed blacks inferior to whites in the endowments of body and mind; his observations of differences make painful reading today. But the Scottish Enlightenment taught him that true happiness is found in the heart, where all men are indeed created equal, and since slavery is a power relationship, rebellion and murder were justified.

Miscegenation was abhorrent to Jefferson; he could not imagine a biracial society. “When freed,” he said of the black slave, “he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.” The implacable conundrum of racial slavery gnawed at Jefferson for his entire life. “Indeed,” he lamented, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

Did the man who believed that miscegenation stained the blood of the master sire six children by his slave, Sally Hemings? The story has circulated since 1802, and recent DNA findings have narrowed the odds considerably. Jefferson’s odyssey continues.

Virginian

Thomas Jefferson imbibed a political philosophy derived from 18th-century England. Known variously as Oppositionist, Real Whig, or Commonwealth thought, the precepts arose from the “country” opposition to Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole’s “court” administration. Country thinkers considered themselves independent, virtuous, landed members of the gentry, immune to bribery, influence, and other forms of ministerial corruption. In reality they were nostalgic, out-of-touch opponents of the realities of war, debt, capitalism, and governmental growth in England’s Augustan Age.

Country principles made sense in Virginia and the tobacco South. Landed gentlemen made a virtue of resistance to high finance, debt and its attendant obligations, the active exercise of governmental power, taxes, standing armies,^[13]A “standing army” is a permanent tax-supported military establishment. banks, and luxuries. These principles fit nicely into the attack against Parliament in the 1760s, and against Hamiltonian Federalism in the 1790s. They are the bases of plain republicanism, of Jeffersonian democracy, of much of American political ideology even today. Thomas Jefferson survives.

Militarist

Jefferson’s reputation as an ideological pacifist is also unwarranted. True, the English oppositionist writers he admired abhorred standing armies as detrimental to liberty and unduly expensive. He viscerally opposed the military establishment created by John Adams in 1798 because he thought, like Alexander Hamilton, that it might be employed against not France but Virginia. A citizen army, the militia, was his first line of defense. As president he severely underfunded both the army and navy, relying on economic extortion, or commercial coercion, to put pressure on England and France.

But Jefferson was no conscientious objector. He realized that war, not merely his Declaration, had achieved American independence. In his first inaugural address he praised “a well-disciplined militia–our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war-till regulars may relieve them [italics added].” He established the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He sent the U.S. Marines into Tripoli to chastise the Barbary pirates. When war with England came in 1812 he supported it–and the armies and taxes necessary to sustain it.

The Expedition Jefferson sent west under Meriwether lewis was necessarily military in nature. A captain, a lieutenant, three sergeants and twenty-three privates made the point. The United States was entering dangerous international waters: French troops might occupy Louisiana, the British might mobilize, the Spanish might interfere (four Spanish armies set out from Santa Fe to intercept Lewis and Clark). Indians might be hostile. And army personnel came cheap–they were readily available at forts and posts in the west, and could be disciplined if necessary. Thomas Jefferson was their Commander in Chief.

Agrarian

Thomas Jefferson was a philosopher of agrarianism. Notes on Virginia remains the bible of his ideal fee-simple republic. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God,” he wrote famously, “whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” Many rural Americans still believe this nonsense; their association leaders still spout it. It gets worse: “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.” Jefferson believed in a nation of small farmers, owning enough land to guarantee economic self-sufficiency and personal independence. Independence, political and personal, was the hallmark of republicanism, for “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”

Jefferson hated cities. Except for a few artisans, who owned their own tools and thus were personally independent and virtuous, “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” It’s why he disliked Federalists: “They all live in cities.”

The necessity for land to sustain Jefferson’s agrarian republic built in contradictions that not even the master fully understood. First, the small farmers of Jefferson’s South were not virtuous yeomen who industriously tilled their fields by day and read Homer at night in the original Greek. In the backcountry they were lazy, sensuous, ignorant, illiterate, violent, poverty-stricken trouble-makers.

Second, most “farmers” in Jefferson’s universe were not small landholders raising the necessities of life but large plantation owners using slave labor to grow tobacco for sale on the world market. They were at the mercy of supply and demand and commodity prices and the very money-lenders that Jefferson despised. Moreover, their rapacious planting patterns cleared forests, drained nutrients from the soil, exposed the ravaged land to fierce erosion, and yielded progressively lower profit margins. Always the impetus was to move on–to Kentucky, to Tennessee, to the Mississippi Territory. But the Creeks lived there, and the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees. Commercial agriculture in Jefferson’s America led inexorably to Indian removal.

Third, Jeffersonian agrarianism was imperialistic. Jefferson opposed urban manufacturing: “While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff . . . for the general operations of manufacture, let our workshops remain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles.” America would buy its manufactured goods from Europe, paying for them by selling surplus agricultural commodities. But a growing population and a consumer ethos meant more imports, more surpluses, and therefore more land. In his First Inaugural Jefferson praised his “chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” It was not enough.

His purchase of Louisiana added millions of acres to the national domain. It was not enough. His successors grabbed California, the southwest, and Oregon. By then a market revolution offered increasing numbers of Americans like Abraham Lincoln occupational choices other than dirt-farming. “Manifest Destiny” was a conscious attempt by Jefferson’s political descendants to prolong the agrarian present and deny the industrial future.

Finally, new lands for farmers meant new lands for slaves. Jefferson’s “Empire for Liberty” risked an “Empire for Slavery.” Every sectional quarrel between the Revolution and the Civil War originated over the question of slavery in the territories. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854^[14]With the Kansas–Nebraska Act, in order to formally organize the lands west of Missouri for territorial status and eventual statehood, the U.S. Congress explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise, … Continue reading opened land that Jefferson had bought to possible slavery expansion, the Jeffersonian conundrum had come full circle.

Jefferson Still Survives

Thomas Jefferson survives. He gave us our ideals, and it is in the nature of an ideal that it can never be perfectly realized, but must be constantly sought and approximated. The great historian C. Vann Woodward wrote that “It fell to the lot of one Southerner to define America.” The struggle of the United States to achieve Jefferson’s ideals defines American history. And no life is perfect, seamless. The contradictions and pitfalls of Jefferson’s life also define America. He embodied the best and the worst of us; the highs and the lows. We live with him still.