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Sadly, modern Americans seem to have done a better job preserving what Thomas Jefferson has left us in bricks and mortar than we have preserving his ideas. Tourists visiting Charlottesville, Virginia, can witness firsthand the ongoing efforts to preserve Jefferson's home at Monticello as well as his splendid little "Academical Village, " the Lawn, which is still a vital center of student life at the University of Virginia. Further down the road, near Lynchburg, Virginia, preservationists have begun restoring Poplar Forest, Jefferson's retreat home. Scholars have been less successful in keeping alive his philosophy, particularly his ideas about government -- despite the copious record he left in his writings. Ken Burns's recent PBS documentary, Thomas Jefferson, is a case in point. It features a parade of scholars who simultaneously declare their own inability to understand Jefferson, and mislead others with interpretations of his life and thought that are as questionable as they are contradictory.
Burns informs the viewer, for example, that Jefferson's life was full of contradictions: the "man of the people" with the tastes of an aristocrat, the natural rights philosopher who owned slaves, the "lifelong champion of small government who more than doubled the size of the United States, " and so on. Most of these alleged contradictions really aren't as antithetical as they appear, for they are based on faulty assumptions or misunderstandings of principles. Joseph Ellis, for example, reasserts the bromide -- common among modern "liberal" academics -- that the ideals of equality and the pursuit of happiness, as expressed in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, are unattainable or contradictory. But there's nothing contradictory about equality of rights and each individual's pursuit of happiness, if the concept of rights is properly understood. Herbert Spencer's law of equal freedom, the radical Whigs' concept of "natural liberty, " and Jefferson's concept of "natural society" all accounted for how the two can work together. The fact that many of today's intellectuals simply don't get it reveals much more about them than it does about Jefferson.
Misinterpretations of Jefferson's political thinking seem pandemic these days. The 1993 celebrations of the 250 th anniversary of Jefferson's birth, for example, typically championed his reputation as "father of American democracy. " Chief Justice William Rehnquist, speaking at the University of Virginia, echoed the views of many Jefferson scholars that "the permanence of Jefferson resided not in his specific theories or acts of government, but in his democratic faith. " While it is certainly true that Jefferson was a leading proponent of representative democracy -- in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville called Jefferson "the most powerful advocate democracy has ever sent forth" -- his devotion to democracy was neither absolute nor unqualified. Indeed, Tocqueville thought it significant that Jefferson once warned James Madison that "the tyranny of the legislature" was "the danger most to be feared" in American government. To Jefferson, democracy and its associated principles -- majority rule, equal rights, direct representation of the people in government -- were valuable, not as ends in themselves, but as essential means to a greater end, the maximization of individual freedom in civil society. Liberty was Jefferson's highest value; he dedicated his life to what he once called "the holy cause of freedom. " 1 What repeatedly drew Jefferson away from his tranquil domestic life at Monticello and back into the political fray was precisely that "holy cause of freedom, " to which he felt duty-bound whenever he saw liberty threatened by a powerful central government -- whether it was the British government under King George III or the United States government under Federalist administrations. His passion for this cause was reflected in the language that he used in his political writings.
Jefferson, the zealous defender of religious freedom, tended to use words such as holy, orthodox, or catholic when discussing political, not religious, principles; he reserved words such as heretic or apostate to denounce politicians whom he regarded as the enemies of liberty. He summed up his life's work in a letter written relatively early in his public career, in 1790, soon after his return to the United States following his ambassadorship to France. "[T]he ground of liberty is to be gained by inches... [W]e must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time, and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good. " 2 Jefferson's philosophy of government, accordingly, stressed the perpetual need to limit government's powers. As he once wrote, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. " 3 The notion that government inevitably threatened liberty was part of the radical Whig tradition in which Jefferson's early intellectual life had been steeped. Like John Locke, Algernon Sidney, and other English radical Whig political philosophers, Jefferson understood, paradoxically, that it was government, which was created to "secure" individual rights, that posed the greatest danger to those rights through the abuse of its legitimate powers. Hence Jefferson, like other "Whigs" of his time -- and like the classical liberals of the nineteenth century -- was profoundly distrustful of concentrated political power and intensely devoted to the ideals of limited government and the rule of law.
To Jefferson, the significance of the American Revolution was the opportunity it gave Americans to create a republican form of government -- that is, a government not only founded in theory upon the consent of the governed, but one that was continually responsible to the will of the people -- "the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind, " he maintained. He understood the American constitutions, state and federal, to implement in practice the theory of government he so eloquently presented in his original draft of the Declaration of Indepen-dence, where he stated the "self-evident" truths that all men are created "equal & independent, " that from that equal creation they derive "rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty & the pursuit of happiness, " and that "to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. " The creation of republican governments alone, however, was not sufficient to guard against abuses of power. Jefferson also understood the value of devices such as written constitutions, the division and separation of powers, and the people's power to amend constitutions. The fundamental principle of his constitutionalism was most cogently expressed in his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions (1798), where he wrote: [C]onfidence is everywhere the parent of despotism -- 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... 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. Zealously guarding liberty, Jefferson was suspicious of the use of governmental power.
He feared that without the rule of a higher law, the achievement of the American Revolution would be lost. The governments in Europe "have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. " If the people of America once become "inattentive to the public affairs, " he warned, "you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual excep-tions. " 4 Like Thomas Paine, who in Common Sense had distinguished government and society, Jefferson understood that the realm of politics was quite limited; outside it, individuals should be free to fashion their lives as they saw fit, through voluntary social relationships. The "essence of a republic, " he wrote, was a system in which individuals "reserve to themselves personally the exercise of all rightful powers to which they are competent, " delegating others to their "representatives, chosen immediately, and removable by themselves. " He believed this "proximate choice and power of removal" was "the best security which experience has sanctioned for ensuring an honest conduct in the functionaries of society" -- in other words, for preventing those in power from becoming "wolves. " The Declaration of Independence listed three natural, or "inalienable, " rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Elsewhere in his writings Jefferson referred to others: expatriation, religious freedom, freedom of trade, and the right to hold property.
All these rights might be understood as particular manifestations of one basic natural right, liberty, which Jefferson regarded as sacrosanct as life itself: as he wrote in his 1774 essay, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, "The god who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them. " Jefferson regarded as a basic principle of good government the guarantee to all of the enjoyment of these rights. In 1816, discussing the "rightful limits" of legislators' power, he maintained that "their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us": "No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umbrage of an impartial third. " He added that "when the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right. " 5 Two years later, in a report which he prepared as chairman of the Commissioners for the Univer-sity of Virginia, Jefferson included in his syllabus of the basic principles of government "a sound spirit of legislation, which, banishing all arbitrary and unnecessary restraint on individual action, shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal rights of others. " Fundamental to Jefferson's political philosophy, then, was the idea that no government could legitimately transgress natural rights. In order for law to be binding, it must not only proceed from the will of properly authorized legislators, but it must also be "reasonable, that is, not violative of first principles, natural rights, and the dictates of the sense of justice. " In the final paragraph of his Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, for example, Jefferson added a declaration that the rights therein asserted were "the natural rights of mankind, " and that although the legislature which enacted the Bill had no constitutional power to restrain subsequent legislatures, any future act repealing it or narrowing its operation would be "an infringement of natural right. " The institution of slavery was so troubling to Jefferson, throughout his life, because he realized that it violated the natural rights of an entire race of people. That Jefferson owned slaves himself, knowing all too well the evils of the institution that he so frankly described in his Notes on the State of Virginia, was the greatest flaw of his private life; the philosopher of the American Revolution, the greatest liberating event in the history of the world, personally participated in what John Hope Franklin calls in Burns's film "a transgression against mankind. " And that Jefferson abandoned his early zeal for emancipation (his praiseworthy efforts to abolish slavery in Virginia, which culminated in his writing the Northwest Ordinance prohibition on slavery), and instead acquiesced in the continued existence of slavery -- as well as its spread to other territories in the West -- unmistakably was the greatest flaw of his public life. Like so many others, Burns distracts us from the real tragedy of Jefferson's position on slavery by focusing on the myth that Jefferson fathered children by his slave, Sally Hemings. The claim is based on an oral tradition kept alive among Hemings' descendents -- dubious evidence, not only because it is self-serving and unreliable, but also because of its use as political propaganda, first by Jefferson's Federalist enemies and later in the nineteenth century by antislavery Whig and Republican politicians who sought to discredit Jefferson and the antebellum Democratic party. (Today the story is still kept alive to push others' political agendas. ) Virtually all reputable Jefferson scholars agree that there is no contemporary evidence of any sexual relationship whatsoever between Jefferson and Hemings, but few are willing to dismiss the allegation as a myth, for fear of being called racist.
So, like the historians interviewed in Burns's film, "politically correct" white scholars hedge a bit, saying "we don't know" the truth. If we set aside the Hemings family's tradition as the myth that it is, it appears most likely that Sally Hemings' children were fathered by either Peter or Samuel Carr, Jefferson's nephews and wards, raised by him at Monticello as if they were the natural sons that he never had. His nephew's abuse of a young slave girl on Jefferson's mountain was no less scandalous to Jefferson and his family than if he himself had perpetrated the abuse -- which explains, in part, why Jefferson's only response to the allegations was silence. But it speaks volumes about the extent to which slavery not only debased the slave but also corrupted the morals of the master, as Jefferson himself had observed in Notes on the State of Virginia: "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the [one] part, and degrading submission on the other. " That this "rottenness" had set in within his own family, and that Jefferson had been powerless to prevent it and even unwilling to acknowledge it, is the real story that remains untold. Another myth about Jefferson that Burns perpetuates is his supposed agrarianism. Jefferson's vision of America's future, on this view, was of an "agrarian paradise" -- implying that Jefferson's small-government philosophy was appropriate only for the pre-industrial America of the early nineteenth century, a convenient rationalization that apologists for the modern regulatory-welfare state have been asserting since Woodrow Wilson's "New Freedom" speech in 1913.
In the 1780 s, when Jefferson wrote his much-quoted statements about farmers being the most "virtuous" citizens, he was essentially agrarian in outlook. But after the War of 1812, Jefferson realized that America needed also to be a manufacturing nation, and his political economy matured into a full acceptance of market capitalism. In the 1810 s Jefferson experienced an awakening when he read the Treatise on Political Economy by the French anti-mercantilist philosopher Antoine Louis Claude Des tutt de Tracy, who, among other things, regarded the productive value of the trader or manufacturer as equal to that of the farmer; defended the rights 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 Tracy's treatise that he personally undertook the task of translating it into English, so that it could be used as the basic economics text in American universities. But this profound evolution in Jefferson's ideas about political economy is utterly ignored in Burns's documentary, as it generally is in high-school and college textbooks. To Jefferson, religion was a matter of conscience, a private matter that ought not concern government.
For that reason, he joined his friend and collaborator, James Madison, in calling both for the free exercise of religious beliefs and for a strict avoidance of government "establishment" of religion. "The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction, " his original text declared. As he explained the purpose of the Virginia Statute in Notes on the State of Virginia, "Our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them, " noting that "the rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit" because men are answerable for them to God only. "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. " When Jefferson wrote to Madison late in 1787, expressing his great disappointment that the new federal Constitution included no explicit guarantee of rights, the first such right that he listed was freedom of religion. He surely had in mind the kind of broad statement of "natural right" expressed in his Virginia Statute, which provided that "no man shall be compelled to frequent or support" any religion, nor any "suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief, " and that "all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capabilities. " Although the language finally adopted by Congress in proposing what would become part of the First Amendment -- stating that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" -- was far less explicit than the language of the Virginia statute, Jefferson interpreted it to be just as comprehensive a guarantee. In other words, he understood the First Amendment freedom of religion clause, like the Virginia statute, to leave the formation of religious opinions solely to "the reason of man. " As president, Jefferson faithfully adhered to this principle and to his broad view of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
He departed from the precedent set by his predecessors, Washington and Adams, by refusing to recommend or designate any day for national prayer, fasting, or thanksgiving. As he explained his policy, in a letter made public early in his presidency, he noted that since Congress was prohibited by the First Amendment from acts respecting religion, and the president was authorized only to execute its acts, he had refrained from prescribing "even occasional performances of devotion. " In famous words, he declared that the First Amendment mandated a "wall of separation between Church and State. " 6 Collaborating again with James Madison in 1798, Jefferson opposed as unconstitutional the Sedition Act, which had made it a criminal offense to make any "false, scandalous, and malicious" statement against either President John Adams or the Federalist-controlled Congress. If Jefferson was -- as some critics have charged, both in his time and today -- less than fully libertarian in his defense of freedom of the press in the years that followed his election in 1800, it was because he was deeply troubled by what he perceived as the "licentiousness" of the press of his time. During his presidency he expressed concern that his Federalist opponents were "pushing its [the press's] licentiousness and its lying to such a degree of prostitution as to deprive it of all credit. " This was, he had noted, "a dangerous state of things" because "even the least informed of the people have learnt that nothing in a newspaper is to be believed. " To another correspondent he bemoaned the fact that "nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. " 7 Despite his belief in the efficacy of state laws against false and defamatory publications, it is important to note that, as president, Jefferson consistently followed a "hands-off" policy, as required by the First Amendment. In his Second Inaugural Address, he explained his administration's policy as an "experiment" that had been "fairly and fully made" to determine "whether freedom of discussion, unaided by power, is not sufficient for the propagation and protection of truth. " The press, "confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint, " he maintained. "The public judgment will correct false reasonings and opinions, on a full hearing of all parties; and no other definite line can be drawn between the inestimable liberty of the press, and its demoralizing licentiousness.
If there be still improprieties which this rule would not restrain, its supplement must be sought in the censorship of public opinion. " The Second Inaugural, then, did more than reiterate Jefferson's steadfast denial of federal authority over freedom of the press: it revealed that, when pressed to draw a line between "the inestimable liberty" and the "demoralizing licentiousness" of the press, Jefferson came down on the libertarian side. He would leave to the marketplace of ideas, and ultimately to "the censorship of public opinion, " the restraint of falsehoods. Jefferson took very seriously the "chains of the Constitution. " These included not only the enumeration of powers in the main text of the Constitution and the specific limitations on powers found in the Bill of Rights, but also two other devices to keep powers restrained by dividing them: federalism, which divided powers between the states and federal government; and the separation of powers, which divided federal powers among the three branches, legislative, executive, and judicial. Federalism was, to Jefferson, the "true theory of our constitution"; and in a classic statement, made shortly before he was elected president, he described it thus: The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign nations. Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization and a very unexpensive one -- a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants. 8 In Jefferson's view, the whole field of government in the United States was divided into two departments, "domestic" and "foreign, " each department having "distinct directories, coordinate and equally independent and supreme, in its own sphere of action. " To the state governments were reserved "all legislation and administration, in affairs which concern their citizens only"; to the federal government was given "whatever concerns foreign's, or the citizens of the other states. " The "foreign, " or federal, sphere, moreover, was strictly limited to the few functions enumerated in the Constitution. Nothing better illustrates Jefferson's strict interpretation of federal powers under the Constitution than his 1791 opinion on the constitutionality of a bill to establish the Bank of the United States.
Jefferson considered the Tenth Amendment, which provided that "all powers not delegated to the U. S. by the Constitution, not prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people, " to be "the foundation of the Constitution. " It reiterated the general principle of federal powers expressed by the language of Article I: that the legislative powers of the federal government, vested in the Congress of the United States, were limited to those "herein granted" in the Constitution. "To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. " The rest of Jefferson's opinion shows what he regarded those "boundaries drawn about the powers of Congress" to be: they were expressed in Article I, the enumerations of Congressional power, construed (as Jefferson would later put it) "according to the plain and ordinary meaning of its language, to the common intendment of the time and those who framed it. " 9 "The incorporation of a bank, and other powers assumed by this bill, have not... been delegated to the U. S.
by the Constitution, " Jefferson concluded, arguing that they were neither "among the powers specially enumerated" nor "within either of the general phrases" of Article I, the "general welfare" and "necessary and proper" clauses. He understood the "general welfare" clause to be a statement of the purpose for which the specific power of laying taxes was to be exercised, not a grant to Congress of "a distinct and independent power to do any act they please, which might be for the good of the Union. " To interpret it as the latter, Jefferson observed, "would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless" as it would, in effect, "reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, " of empowering Congress to do whatever it pleased. Similarly, he took quite literally the word "necessary" in the "necessary and proper" clause. The Constitution, he argued, restrained Congress "to the necessary means, that is to say, to those means without which the grant of the power would be nugatory"; otherwise, the "necessary and proper" clause also "would swallow up all the delegated powers, and reduce the whole to one phrase. " Jefferson's opinion on the constitutionality of the bank bill thus presented a theory of strict interpretation of the Constitution. To say that Jeff...
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