Colin Bonwick. History Today. Volume 43. April 1993.
Thomas Jefferson believed he knew the value of his own work. He described himself on his tombstone as:
Author of the Declaration of American Independence [,] of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia, because by these, as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered.
Few admirers or critics have accepted this self-assessment, and few historians assign them the same relative importance. But all commentators from the eighteenth to the twentieth century acknowledge the centrality of Jefferson’s work to the new American republic.
Not that he was an uncontentious figure, for he had been in the thick of many political battles. It is unsurprising that George III snubbed him when he visited London in 1786, but what often causes surprise is the animosity he aroused among Americans. For many from his own day onwards he represented all that was worst and excessive in the Revolutionary era. He was guilty of being a democrat in an age when that term was frequently equated with mob rule. He was accused of atheism by society because he reduced Christ to no more than a moral teacher and dismantled the apparatus of establishment and denominational privilege in Virginia. He was accused of French (and therefore dangerously radical) principles for his sympathy towards the French Revolution, and he was accused of hypocrisy for spouting about liberty but owning slaves. The list of Jefferson’s alleged offences is almost infinite.
All this would be of only historical interest but for one thing. Americans needed to legitimate their actions and leant on the past to sustain their movement to the future. Once dead, Jefferson quickly became a symbolic figure and potent talisman. Not that people agreed on what he symbolised, for commonly both sides in a debate claimed his support. For the Jacksonians in the 1830s he became the progenitor of their democracy, individual enterprise and limited government, But their younger Whig opponents also used his authority while attacking ‘King’ Andrew Jackson. When they accused him of alleged executive tyranny they cited Jefferson as a model of disinterested republican service in the public interest and of deference to the rights of Congress. As North and South increasingly divided after his death, southerners sought his authority for their doctrines of state rights and nullification and found comfort in his agrarian philosophy; on the other side, abolitionists declared that slavery infringed the libertarianism so manifest in the Declaration of Independence. Nor was this the final use of the Jefferson aegis. In the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt, leader of the Democratic Party which claimed him as its founder, cited him as legitimising the New Deal’s massive expansion of government powers; in this Roosevelt strained credibility.
In the late twentieth century Jefferson’s popular reputation has ceased to be controversial. The rough edges have been smoothed and he is remembered as the benign and even anodyne founder of the nation, the apostle of liberty and, by extension, a citizen of the world. His statue stands in its Washington rotunda surrounded by extracts from his writings and a frieze on which is inscribed the words ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man’. The quotation gets to the core of his mind. It is also apposite since it sanctifies debate—and for historians Jefferson remains a controversial figure and a man who is exceptionally difficult to pin down.
It is easy to point to inconsistencies in Jefferson’s behaviour. He was a democratic theorist but an elitist landowner. He is portrayed as the advocate of the common man yet served as president of the American Philosophical Society; as an advocate of limited government and strict constitutional construction, yet as president he massively extended the national domain without clear authority. He insisted that freedom of the press was the best check on government integrity but was very sensitive to criticism and encouraged prosecution of critics for allegedly printing false and injurious facts. He proclaimed the natural rights of all men but owned many as slaves. Such paradoxes and inconsistencies expose him to severe criticism.
They can be attributed to three things. These include the range and subtlety of his mind, the extent and diversity of his career, and perhaps above all the possibilities and limitations of American politics during his lifetime. For it must be remembered that he was and remained an eighteenth-century gentleman who considered public service a duty.
The extent of Jefferson’s intellect can only be hinted at here. He was a very private man. He protested, no doubt sincerely, that his real concerns lay with his family, the cultivation of his estate, the construction of his house, Monticello, and his many intellectual interests. There was little that failed to arouse his curiosity and stimulate his mind, from history, political theory and law to the natural sciences, music and architecture, and his correspondence leapt from one to another in incredibly rich detail. He wrote only one pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, in 1774, and one book, Notes on Virginia, published eleven years later, and one has to examine his public papers and private correspondence to discover evidence with which to reconstruct his political system. He was a man of strong principles, yet his mind grew and developed over the years and his actions were shaped by the constraints under which he operated. But one thing unites all these intellectual threads and explains his preference for the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute and the University as the achievements he ranked most highly; all were connected to his devotion to the principle of free intellectual inquiry. For in his eyes man was a moral, a rational and a social being who was capable of improvement and for whom freedom of thought was as vital as the air he breathed.
But important though they were, the three works were insufficient to place him in the highest rank of founders of the republic; and in truth Jefferson’s self-evaluation was too modest. For he was an intellectual in politics and it is the extent of his public service that justifies his reputation. His language was often brilliant and vivid, and exposed him to the charge of being a naive idealist, yet a careful reading of his career demonstrates that this judgement was wrong. His belief in the possibility of long-term reformation was perhaps over-optimistic, but he told the Marquis de Lafayette, ‘We are not…to be translated from despotism to liberty, in a feather bed’. His hope for the future was tempered by recognition of the limitations of immediate circumstances. In the middle-term he was not the man to pursue impossible objectives such as the abolition of slavery, which he deplored. In the short-term he was acute and above all realistic: he grasped the way in which the United States would develop far more shrewdly than did any of his rivals.
What is most immediately striking about his political career is its length, diversity and centrality to the Revolution. It was unique in the United States and can be matched in Britain only by William Ewart Gladstone. He was long lived. Born on April 13th, 1743, he entered colonial politics in 1768, finally retired in 1809 as president, and did not die until July 4th, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He served in local, national and international politics, as a legislator, diplomat, secretary of state under President Washington, party leader and president; it was his service during the twenty years beginning with Washington’s inauguration in 1789 and ending with his retirement from the presidency in 1809 that raised Jefferson from the important to the preeminent.
The rift in Washington’s cabinet between himself and Alexander Hamilton, the secretary of treasury, is often interpreted as a conflict between the idealism of the one and the harsh realism of the other. Hamilton was sceptical about man-kind’s capacity for disinterested behaviour, argued that men were driven by self-interest, and insisted that political authority was linked to economic power. Moreover, the public welfare required that the wealthy should control government since they alone were fit to exercise political authority; the masses were not to be trusted. For his part, Jefferson insisted on the essential benevolence of human nature and the innate capacity of the common man to make sound moral judgements; he also advocated the expansion of a predominantly agrarian republic populated by independent farmers and administered by government possessed of limited powers. He was convinced that all men were entitled to equality of rights and protection of their interests; they were capable of voting though not qualified to hold office, which should remain in the hands of their sophisticated social superiors—hence the importance he attached to education for citizenship.
There is much to be said for Hamiltonian economics, yet with one exception, Jefferson read the situation more perceptively and proved himself the more successful politician. His major mistake was to insist that the Constitution should be strictly construed so as to grant only specifically enumerated powers to the federal government, as opposed to Hamilton’s broad construction doctrine which allowed the federal government implied powers with which to implement those that were specified. The Hamiltonian doctrine prevailed and permitted the federal government to develop and respond to changing circumstances. In this crucial respect Jefferson’s constitutionalism was dangerously rigid. Had Washington preferred his argument, national and governmental development would have been severely constrained at best and possibly damaged beyond repair.
In political economy the roles were reversed. Whereas conservative social theory was rigid to the point of self-destruction, Jefferson drew the only logical conclusion from the principle enunciated in many state constitutions as well as the Declaration of Independence: that legitimate authority derived solely from the people. His proto-democracy was flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances and therefore more in tune with the future. He was also correct to insist on the centrality of agriculture, for it remained the principal source of wealth and economic expansion through much of the nineteenth century, and continued to be important long after industrialisation and urbanisation began transforming the fabric of American society. Like Hamilton, he was a vigorous nationalist, but he appreciated that the bonds of union were still frail and liable to disintegrate if too great a weight was placed upon them. National government required decentralised and limited government, and in this he was at one with the formal distribution of political powers and ran with the grain of American society. Even after the Constitution was broadly constructed in conformity with Hamilton’s formula, the individual states retained many more domestic powers than the federal government; in particular the Constitutional Convention had been obliged to leave major issues such as the franchise, slavery and religious liberty to the states. Most of the authority deployed with transforming effect by positivist governments in Britain remained with the states, and it is not surprising that some of Jefferson’s greatest successes came during his service in the Virginia Legislature where he engaged in an extensive spring cleaning of laws inherited from the colonial era and drafted the Statute for Religious Freedom of which he was so proud. Similarly, his university was founded on state authority.
This understanding of the delicacy of the union and the limits of federal powers was accompanied by an expanding role as a national party Leader during the 1790s. What had started as reasoned criticism in cabinet turned into organised public opposition and the emergence of the Republican Party with parry machinery throughout the states and Jefferson as its leader. Like most contemporaries he remained uncomfortable with the concept of parties. Yet it was party organisation that provided an essential supplement to the formal machinery of union represented by the Constitution, and it was the shrewd organisation of the Republican Party which brought about his election to the presidency in what he later described as the Revolution of 1800. Jefferson’s shrewdness was further demonstrated by what followed. The defeated Federalists discovered they had nowhere to go, and their party slowly faded away. Jefferson remained embarrassed by the division and remarked in his Inaugural Address ‘We are all republicans—we are all federalists’, but he equated commitment to republican principles with support for the Republican Party and consolidated his authority by systematically appointing Republicans to as many offices as possible and using Hamilton’s political tactics to bind commercial interests to his new regime. It was not a witch hunt, but it was calculating politics.
As president from 1801 to 1809, he was also an efficient administrator who did not hesitate to use all the powers he considered inherent in the office. Opponents challenged his competence largely on the evidence of his unhappy wartime governorship of Virginia but they were mistaken. He had run the State Department, which handled domestic as well as foreign affairs, efficiently with a staff of only two chief clerks, two assistants and a part-time translator. As president he had scarcely more assistance, but appointed and retained able cabinet officials. He dispensed with Washington’s ceremonies but continued his administrative principles which allowed extensive consultation among the members of his official family while ensuring that final decision-making remained with him. Above all, and in keeping with his principles of limited government and separation of powers, he maintained careful relations with members of Congress, especially those whom he regarded as supporters, while deferring to what he considered to be their proper sphere of authority. By taking this stance he did no more than conform to the actual distribution of power during the early years of the national government. Similarly, he recognised that the government’s domestic powers were largely confined to encouraging grand strategic development. Hamilton had wanted to reduce the states to local municipalities but failed to explain how it could be done; Jefferson understood that respect for state authority was prudent politics as well as legal principle.
Even so, Jefferson acted with such vigour when he believed it necessary that critics accused him of repudiating the doctrine of limited government whenever it suited his purpose. He moved successfully against the Barbary pirates who preyed on American shipping in the Mediterranean. He ruthlessly pursued Aaron Burr and his associates for what he justifiably considered their treasonable activities in the south west, and above all in 1803 he agreed on doubtful constitutional authority to purchase the vast area known as Louisiana for a total cost of approximately 15 million dollars, rather than risk withdrawal of Napoleon’s offer to sell. This transformed the strategic environment of the north American continent, for he understood clearly that whoever controlled New Orleans also commanded the entire Mississippi basin. The land area of the United States virtually doubled at a stroke and created an opportunity for developing a new empire of farmers (at the expense of the original inhabitants); earlier he had anticipated the development of a chain of communities sharing broadly similar values but remaining politically separate from each other. After 1803 it became clear that the United States could become a single transcontinental nation.
Jefferson’s first term as president concluded with triumphant re-election. Foreign affairs dominated his second term and demonstrated the weakness of the United States in a world dominated by Britain and France, and the limits of federal authority when put to severe test without popular support. During his administration American trade had become ensnared in the bitter warfare between Britain and Napoleonic France. Both sides continually harassed American shipping, and Britain compounded the offence by claiming and exercising the right to impress alleged British subjects serving on American vessels. Diplomatic efforts failed to resolve the problem, and in 1807 Jefferson persuaded Congress to enact an Embargo Act. Its purpose was to coerce the belligerents to recognise American maritime rights by depriving them of American trade; its method was to prohibit American ships from leaving port and its consequence was extensive economic dislocation (particularly in New England), strong resistance and evasion and savage criticism. Shortly before leaving office Jefferson was obliged to secure its repeal. Whether it would have achieved its objective had it been successfully implemented is uncertain. What is clear is that in the absence of broad popular acceptance the federal government lacked the capacity to impose its will, especially if it exceeded what opponents considered to be its lawful authority. Thus Jefferson stood charged with repudiating his own principles, infringing the Constitution, attempting to massively extend the government’s power—and failing to protect American shipping. He had embarrassingly demonstrated the prudence of his own principle of limited government.
So how does his reputation stand? Part of the difficulty in evaluating his reputation lies in the fact that Jefferson was both a man of high principle and a pragmatic politician. Inescapably his convictions were constantly tested by the demands of political circumstance; the difficulty of reconciling the two imperatives to the satisfaction of critics was compounded by the length of his public service. The correct question to be asked is not ‘how frequently did he diverge from them’, but how close to them did he succeed in remaining? Thus his libertarian ideas were long term goals, but they could be implemented only within the framework of suitable conditions. He could encourage Congress to prohibit the importation of slaves at the earliest permissible opportunity, 1808, but he could not compel Virginia or any other state to abolish the peculiar institution itself, nor could the federal government do so on its own authority.
Jefferson was a subtle but strong and effective nationalist. During the quarter century after independence the United States was held together more by a strong psychological and cultural desire to be a single nation sharing common values than by geographical, economic or institutional imperatives. The bonding process could not be forced, for national identity and federal institutions were still at a formative stage that lacked the prescriptive authority of the British crown from which the United States had recently escaped. Jefferson recognised the country’s diversity and appreciated the legitimacy of local interests. Disintegration was the great danger if heavy burdens were imposed on fragile bonds; union would survive only if it conformed to the popular will. The two were totally linked; union and its liberty were one and indivisible. He encouraged and enabled them to grow.
It is easy to dismiss Thomas Jefferson of Monticello as ‘St Thomas of Cantingbury’. He was not a philosopher, but he set a complex ideological agenda for the future and sometimes fell short of his own principles. On occasion his faith was too simple. He recognised the need to divide the functions of government, but not the need to provide institutional protection for legitimate minority interests in an increasingly majoritarian society. His concept of liberty was essentially negative. It provided protection from infringement of rights rather than the positivist advancement of disadvantaged groups, but in that respect his views were in tune with the reigning ethos of nineteenth-century America. His egalitarianism was more a construct of the intellect than a passion of the heart, and he articulated democratic theory without being a modern democrat. Yet his success as a working politician legitimised that theory and enabled it to acquire prescriptive authority; in this he was a genuine revolutionary.