Light and Liberty

Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge

Robert M. S. McDonald, Robert M. S. McDonald

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780813932378
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Historia económica

Although Thomas Jefferson's status as a champion of education is widely known, the essays in Light and Liberty make clear that his efforts to enlighten fellow citizens reflected not only a love of learning but also a love of freedom. Using as a starting point Jefferson's conviction that knowledge is the basis of republican self-government, the contributors examine his educational projects not as disparate attempts to advance knowledge for its own sake but instead as a result of his unyielding, almost obsessive desire to bolster Americans' republican virtues and values.

Whether by establishing schools or through broader, extra-institutional efforts to disseminate knowledge, Jefferson's endeavors embraced his vision for a dynamic and meritocratic America. He aimed not only to provide Americans with the ability to govern themselves and participate in the government of others but also to influence Americans to remake their society in accordance with his own principles.

Written in clear and accessible prose, Light and Liberty reveals the startling diversity of Jefferson's attempts to rid citizens of the ignorance and vice that, in the view of Jefferson and many contemporaries, had corroded and corrupted once-great civilizations. Never wavering from his faith that "knowledge is power, " Jefferson embraced an expansive understanding of education as the foundation for a republic of free and responsible individuals who understood their rights and stood ready to defend them.

“The Yeomanry of the United States Are Not the Canaille of Paris”

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Thomas Jefferson, American Exceptionalism, and the “Spirit” of Democracy

BRIAN STEELE

THE SOURCE OF MUCH OF OUR PRESENT AMBIVALENCE ABOUT JEFFERSON is rooted in the awkward tension between our sense that he was not inclusive enough to qualify as what most of us today would be willing to call a “democrat,” on the one hand, and, on the other, that he was, nevertheless, too naïve about the ability of ordinary white men to make wise decisions in a deliberative democracy to offer us anything useful in the way of a political theory. There are so many compelling and well-understood reasons to challenge Jefferson’s long-standing association in the American imagination with our more expansive concept of “democracy” that it seems gratuitous to revisit them here. Jefferson’s complicity with slavery, his mostly unchecked racism, his hostility to women’s participation in high politics, and his embrace of a more traditional conception of elite leadership than any later American politics would allow all provide a number of asterisks next to Jefferson’s name in the record book of our democracy.¹

Yet Jefferson’s name belongs in that book, and not just for the usually agreed-upon reasons: that his “magical” words belie his lifestyle and provide a rhetorical touchstone toward which all movements to make American democracy more inclusive have nodded.² What ultimately makes Jefferson a “democrat” in his day—and ours—is his willingness to trust the political and moral instincts of the American public, and, by theoretical extension, the democratic element in any properly constituted political community—however unfortunately circumscribed by race and gender—in a way that few political theorists before or since have done. By the late eighteenth century, government had long been considered “too important a matter to be entrusted to the people.”³ Yet Jefferson shared little of the distrust of the “democracy” that had long characterized political theory and statesmanship.⁴ As he told William Johnson in 1823—and he never seemed to tire of repeating it—the main difference between him (and his party) and the Federalists was his willingness to trust the judgment of ordinary citizens. “The cherishment of the people,” he wrote, “was our principle, the fear and distrust of them, that of the other party.”⁵ As John Adams once told him, and as generations of Americans have confirmed, the “foundation” of Jefferson’s “Unbounded Popularity” was his “steady defence of democratical Principles.”⁶

Adams meant Jefferson no compliment. Throughout their justly fabled correspondence, Adams suggested—and some historians have echoed him—that Jefferson was naïve and idealistic, at best, and blessedly ignorant or utopian, at worst. But Adams misunderstood Jefferson. Jefferson’s embrace of the people may have inspired the world—and he hoped it would.⁷ But, as in multiple other areas, Jefferson’s commitment to universal enlightenment principles in this instance coexisted with a belief that only the American people were ready for self-government. In other words, there was, he believed, a sociological foundation for his optimism about Americans and not merely an idealistic one. “Popular taste,” as Joyce Appleby has so nicely put it, may have been “the final arbiter for Jefferson,” but the taste he valued was one that demanded a certain cultivation—a cultivation that he believed only Americans had experienced.⁸ It was not just any popular taste that Jefferson considered authoritative, then, but one alert, deeply informed, and shaped by an unhindered moral sense; and one that reached certain enlightened conclusions. What is perhaps most striking about Jefferson’s democratic instincts is how intimately linked they were with a faith in the peculiar ability of a particular people—the American people—to arrive at truth and govern themselves. What distinguished Jefferson and the Republicans, he insisted, was their belief “that men, enjoying in ease and security the full fruits of their own industry, enlisted by all their interests on the side of law and order, habituated to think for themselves, and to follow their reason as their guide, would be more easily and safely governed, than with minds nourished in error, and vitiated and debased, as in Europe, by ignorance, indigence and oppression.”⁹ This late statement is consistent with what Jefferson suggested throughout his lifelong correspondence and public career: only Americans seemed to be a public sufficiently enlightened to trust. In short, this is yet another case in which Jefferson’s nationalism speaks a universal or cosmopolitan language, which, in turn, has long misdirected our attention to the universal claims rather than to the nationalist assumptions on which such claims rested.

Jefferson is long remembered as a champion of international democracy, and his faith in the God-given capacity of human beings to live in society and govern themselves is undeniable.¹⁰ To be sure, Jefferson saw the American Revolution as an example to the rest of the world, and hoped that the “ball of liberty” would continue to “roll ‘round the globe.” But democracy was not as easy as all that.¹¹ Liberty would come only to “the enlightened part” of the globe, for “light & liberty,” Jefferson told Tench Coxe, “go together.”¹² The corollary of this point is that without “light” there can be no “liberty.” In other words, it is impossible to speak meaningfully of liberty in the absence of capacity for enjoying it. (For a fuller exploration of this theme, see Johann Neem’s essay in this collection.) As Jefferson noted in 1805, “the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty,” but those people “are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree.” Even American liberty would be “a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.”¹³

Fortunately, Jefferson believed, the American people were sufficiently enlightened to preserve their own liberty. America remained, Jefferson told the citizens of Washington, D.C., in 1809, “the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self government.”¹⁴ Other nations would “be lighted up” only when and “if” they “shall ever become susceptible to its benign influence.” Self-government was the human ideal, but its spread was limited to the capacity of various national communities to handle it. American democracy did not come ready-made for export.

So Jefferson’s assertions about America’s capacity for self-government partook of and contributed to a larger discourse about American identity and exceptionalism.¹⁵ Jefferson’s optimism about democracy was rooted in his sense that the American people possessed an exceptional “spirit” that would both resist tyranny and preserve law and order, as well as a “public opinion” that could be trusted to give energy and direction to government. Jefferson was such an enthusiastic democrat, in other words, largely because he was an American nationalist.

Much has been made of Jefferson’s support of the French Revolution. But Jefferson’s enthusiasm for that event was late and short-lived.¹⁶ Prior to 1789, he repeatedly insisted that the French were not ready for self-government; they would do best to settle for a benevolent constitutional monarchy until they were exercised in the habits of self-government. And the convulsions that ended in Terror and, eventually, military dictatorship only served to confirm his initial warnings and to disappoint deeply the enthusiasm he did experience after 1789.¹⁷ As for the Spanish American republics, which Jefferson welcomed in theory, he never once imagined that they would end in anything other than military despotisms. The problem in France and Spanish America, as Jefferson explained again and again, was that the people there simply did not yet have the capacity for self-government. This was not a judgment about any natural inferiority. There was nothing inherent in the people that disqualified them for democracy. The opposite is true. Culture, unique historical circumstances, environmental characteristics, but especially, multiple generations of despotic government and the power of the Catholic Church over the minds of the people, had taken human beings created by God for freedom and self-government and rendered them incapable of running their own affairs. It was sad, but true. Spanish Americans would gain independence from Spain, and Jefferson wished them well, but he was under no illusions about the possibility for self-government once Spain had fled the hemisphere. “History,” he told Baron von Humboldt, “furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.” In Spanish America, in other words, an elite class of priests and aristocrats had for so long held a monopoly over social, cultural, and financial capital, that the people had been rendered incapable of engaging in democratic politics.

As a result, the Spanish American republics “must end in military despotisms,” Jefferson believed. “The different castes of their inhabitants, their mutual hatreds and jealousies, their profound ignorance and bigotry,” he feared, “will be played off by cunning leaders, and each be made the instrument of enslaving the others.”¹⁸ Since the people of Latin America had been “habituated from their infancy to passive submission of body and mind to their kings and priests,” their lethargy and submissive spirit rendered them unqualified “to think and provide for themselves.” This naturally made them “instruments … in the hands of” despots.¹⁹ The South Americans certainly had the same right to self-government that all people possessed by nature, and all Americans should cheer on their effort. “But the question is not what we wish,” Jefferson insisted, “but what is practicable.”²⁰ The real trouble would not be throwing off external tyranny. For the people of Spanish America, the most “dangerous enemy is within their own breasts.”²¹ The “ignorance & bigotry of the mass” led Jefferson to “doubt their capacity to understand and to support a free government.”²² On the contrary, such “ignorance and superstition” would “chain their minds and bodies under religious and military despotism.” He worried that “the degrading ignorance into which their priests and kings have sunk them, has disqualified them from the maintenance or even knowledge of their rights.” A move straight from such despotism to self-government was unthinkable. Much better, Jefferson argued again and again, for these people to “obtain freedom by degrees only; because that would by degrees bring on light and information, and qualify them to take charge of themselves understandingly.”²³ So, “as their sincere friend and brother,” he urged not revolution and republicanism but “an accommodation with the mother country … until they shall be sufficiently trained by education and habits of freedom to walk safely by themselves.” Only then, Jefferson said, would they be prepared “for complete independence.”²⁴

This was exactly the advice Jefferson had offered the French reformers with whom he was associated in the 1780s. The French people wanted liberty, but they lacked the light necessary to maintaining it, so the best for which they could hope was a constitutional monarchy. As he told Madison in 1788, “the misfortune” of the French people was “that they are not yet ripe for receiving the blessings to which they are entitled. I doubt, for instance, whether the body of the nation, if they could be consulted, would accept of a Habeas corpus law, if offered them by the king. If the Etats generaux, when they assemble, do not aim at too much, they may begin a good constit...