Jefferson and the Virginians

Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire

Peter Onuf

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780807169896
• eBook ISBN: 9780807170557
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In Jefferson and the Virginians, renowned scholar Peter S. Onuf examines the ways in which Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Virginians—George Washington, James Madison, and Patrick Henry—both conceptualized their home state from a political and cultural perspective, and understood its position in the new American union. The conversations Onuf reconstructs offer glimpses into the struggle to define Virginia—and America—within the context of the upheaval of the Revolutionary War. Onuf also demonstrates why Jefferson's identity as a Virginian obscures more than it illuminates about his ideology and career.Onuf contends that Jefferson and his interlocutors sought to define Virginia's character as a self-constituted commonwealth and to determine the state's place in the American union during an era of constitutional change and political polarization. Thus, the outcome of the American Revolution led to ongoing controversies over the identity of Virginians and Americans as a "people" or "peoples"; over Virginia's boundaries and jurisdiction within the union; and over the system of government in Virginia and for the states collectively. Each debate required a balanced consideration of corporate identity and collective interests, which inevitably raised broader questions about the character of the Articles of Confederation and the newly formed federal union. Onuf's well-researched study reveals how this indeterminacy demanded definition and, likewise, how the need for definition prompted further controversy.

1

“Strongest Government on Earth”

THE RISE AND FALL OF JEFFERSON’S EMPIRE

Thomas Jefferson called the United States “the strongest government on earth” in his Inaugural Address as the third president of the United States on March 4, 1801. He delivered his address in “so low a tone that few” who crowded into the Senate Chamber “heard it,” according to witness Margaret Bayard Smith. A notoriously poor public speaker, Jefferson spoke much more effectively to his fellow Americans through the cool medium of print. Within three weeks his text had been published in newspapers and special editions across the country, bridging the distances that separated Americans from their new capital city of Washington and bringing Jefferson closer to the people. The self-effacing Democratic-Republican was no demagogue: he did not speak to the people from a position of commanding authority, but instead spoke for them. Whether read silently or read aloud in homes, coffeehouses, or other local settings, Jefferson’s words and the sentiments that animated them were given voice and brought to life by ordinary citizens. Americans were their own sovereigns, the ultimate source of the authority Jefferson was now prepared to exercise in their name.¹

Jefferson undoubtedly would have preferred to be a more effective public speaker. The arts of persuasion were prized in an era when political leaders sought to shape public opinion and articulate the people’s will; Jefferson envied the inspiring rhetoric that enabled Patrick Henry to mobilize popular support for the Revolution.² Yet it was also true that people like Jefferson—the elite patriot leaders and self-styled lawgivers who articulated the new regime’s fundamental principles, drafted new constitutions, and assumed the deference of their humble neighbors—feared the anarchy and disorder that demagogic appeals to the people might unleash. Jefferson’s solution to this problem was to refashion the role of the republican leader. By putting the right words into the mouths of the sovereign people, their humble servant could take his orders from them. Jefferson was following the script he had written for the former sovereign, in his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774): Americans knew “that kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people,” he had then told George III.³ Now, he assured his new employers, “I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choices it is in your power to make.”

Jefferson defined himself against the king who had betrayed his people; he also defined himself against his illustrious predecessor George Washington. “Without pretensions to that high confidence you reposed in our first and greatest revolutionary character, whose pre-eminent services had entitled him to the first place in his country’s love, and destined for him the fairest page in the volume of faithful history,” Jefferson asked for “so much confidence only as may give firmness and effect to the legal administration of your affairs.” Washington was the “father of his country,” and his dutiful children had submitted to his superior authority in the Revolution.⁴ But Jefferson was only the temporary trustee of the people’s business, “relying then on the patronage of your good will.” The new president concluded by calling on “that infinite power, which rules the destinies of the universe” to “lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.”

Jefferson later called his election to the presidency the “Revolution of 1800.”⁵ In the party struggles of the 1790s, he liked to think, the “Spirit of 1776” had been rekindled as the people came to their senses and reasserted their independence. Jefferson’s Inaugural Address thus was a testimonial to the people’s power. If his voice did not rise above the din of the excited crowd, the meaning of the moment was nonetheless clear. This was “one of the most interesting scenes,” wrote Margaret Bayard Smith, that “a free people can ever witness,” for they saw themselves—in all their majesty—ascending to power. In his address Jefferson self-consciously invoked and reaffirmed the people’s Declaration of Independence. Neither document aimed at “originality of principle or sentiment.” The “object” of the Declaration, as he told Henry Lee shortly before his death, was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.” The Inaugural Address was also “intended to be an expression of the American mind,” to remind his countrymen of the shared principles that bound them together and made them a single great people.⁶ On neither occasion did Jefferson seek to rise above the people. To the contrary, he called on his countrymen to transcend their differences, to recognize one another as patriotic Americans, and so rise above themselves.

Bitterly opposed partisans had good reason to be skeptical. Jefferson’s inauguration was preceded by rancorous partisan divisions that called the very existence of an American “people” into question. For many observers, the French Revolution seemed to change everything, at home and abroad. Pitting “aristocratic” defenders of the old regime against “democratic” insurgents, the European conflagration threatened to spread across the Atlantic in a great struggle to determine the future of the civilized world, if not its very survival.⁷ The specter of disunion and war became all too frighteningly visible in the presidential succession crisis immediately preceding Jefferson’s inauguration. His rhetorical challenge was to distinguish American from European politics and convince his listeners and readers that they had been fighting over means, not ends.

“It was not wonderful,” Jefferson explained, that the “the throes and convulsions” of the French Revolution “should reach even this distant and peaceful shore.” Yet, however much Jefferson and his followers might sympathize with the democratic revolution in Europe, they recognized—or should recognize—that it was not their struggle: Americans had already won their independence. And when Jefferson evoked the European scene—the “agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty”—he implicitly endorsed the prudential concerns of Federalists, who “felt and feared” being sucked into the vortex of the Old World’s war.⁸ Jefferson assured his fellow Americans that they were an exceptional people. In the heat of partisan conflict, they might forget who they were and what bound them to one another. But as Americans stood on the precipice and contemplated the prospect of disunion and war, they came to their senses and reaffirmed their national identity. “The animation of discus[s] ions and of exertions” over how to maintain the new nation’s independence and steer clear of European entanglements might lead foreign observers—and even some Americans—to conclude that American partisans were proxies and pawns of European belligerents. “But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,” Jefferson assured his countrymen. “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle,” he famously intoned. “We are all republicans: we are all federalists.”

The distinction between diversity of “opinion” and shared “principle” reflected Jefferson’s understanding of how individuals rose to the exalted status of self-governing republican citizens. They did so by recognizing and affirming their collective identity as a free people: if republicans made the republic, the republic made republicans. Individuals escaped the state of nature when they simultaneously became conscious of their own rights and recognized those rights in others. They could then see that “all men are created equal”; this recognition was in turn the threshold of enlightened sociability and more perfect forms of union. Fearful conservatives rejected this republican logic. People needed to be governed: their natural state was anarchy, a war of all against all that could only be restrained by the imposition of a divinely sanctioned hierarchical order. Jefferson reversed this conventional formulation. The American Revolution demonstrated the civic capacity of ordinary folk mobilized in defense of their liberties. By remembering the Revolution, Americans would reinvigorate their union and reaffirm their American identity.

No good American could possibly “wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form,” and if a deviant few should deny their American identity by doing so, “let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.” For Jefferson, it was axiomatic that all Americans should uphold the principle of union, for this was what defined them as American: union enabled patriots to triumph in the Revolution and so establish republican governments that secured their equal rights. Union also made the American government the “strongest . . . on earth. I believe it the only one, where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.” The power of the union thus derived from the Revolutionary republican commitment to equal rights. The choice was clear to Jefferson. “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 form of kings, to govern him?” It was only through self-government—and consensual union—that natural rights could be recognized and enforced. By uniting “with one heart and one mind,” citizens collectively could mobilize the irresistible power of a great nation.

I. UNDER GOD

As the new century dawned, the great challenge Americans faced was to reaffirm their identity as Americans, not to preserve a federal constitution that had nearly collapsed in the recent presidential succession crisis. If a united people constituted the foundation of a durable republic, the constitution was merely its superstructure. And there was nothing sacred about a document that failed to express the will of the people and so sustain their union.⁹ By the same logic, the proper alignment of foundation and superstructure—the people and a government they recognized as their own—made the United States the “strongest government on earth.”

The union that Jefferson celebrated in his Inaugural Address barely survived the party conflicts of the 1790s and was only restored by the renewed patriotic commitments of the American people. He looked back to 1776 in order to promote progress toward a more perfect union that would redeem the Revolution’s promise. This was not the union his friend James Madison and his fellow founders had constructed at the Philadelphia Convention in the summer of 1787.¹⁰ The federal constitution was an elaborate mechanism designed to contain the diverse and often conflicting interests of Britain’s rebellious colonies. It was certainly “more perfect” than the loose and ineffectual alliance established under the Articles of Confederation, and the Confederation was itself an improvement over the ad hoc, extraconstitutional congresses that had presided over the Revolutionary war effort. But Jefferson was less interested in contracts negotiated by lawyer-statesmen to secure the interests of their respective states than in renewing and perfecting the “spirit” or “character” of the American people.

In a letter to his friend Joseph Priestley shortly after his inauguration, Jefferson juxtaposed the weakness of the federal constitution to the power of the people, united “with one heart and one mind.” Had the constitutional impasse not been resolved, Jefferson wrote, “the federal government would have been in the situation of a clock or watch run down.” Yet the result would not have been anarchy, disorder, or disunion. Instead, a convention “would have been on the ground in 8 weeks” and proceeded to repair “the constitution where it was defective & wound it up again.” The “mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over” the land during the succession crisis would have guaranteed the convention’s success. Recurring to “self-preservation,” the first law of nature, the people would assume the role of clockmaker God, giving life to the broken constitutional mechanism. The constitutional clock could only keep accurate time if it were regularly “repaired”—amended, interpreted, and perhaps even replaced—to accord with the enlightened will of the people. “The order & good sense displayed in this recovery from delusion, and in the momentous crisis which lately arose,” Jefferson concluded, “really bespeak a strength of character in our nation which augurs well for the duration of our republic, & I am much better satisfied now of it’s stability, than I was before it was tried.”¹¹

“Nature’s God” was clearly present both in Jefferson’s clock metaphor and in his reference to the constitutional crisis as “the storm . . . now subsiding.” The emergence of a self-governing people was something “new under the sun.” Surely God intended men to stand in his light, recognizing their common humanity and ordering their affairs in accord with nature’s laws. Jefferson accused his Federalist foes of attempting to keep the people in the dark, proscribing “all advances of science” as dangerous “innovations.” These “barbarians” were enemies of progress who sought to turn back the clock: “we were to look backwards not forwards for improvement,” to a benighted age “when ignorance put every thing into the hands of power & priestcraft.” But the people had recovered from their “delusion,” or what in the darkest days of the great party conflict he had called a “reign of witches.”¹² An enlightened people could see more clearly—into the future and across the vast spaces of the continent.

When he addressed the American people at his inauguration, Jefferson evoked a progressive and expansive union that would enable his countrymen to overcome their differences. This “rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land,” was “advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.”¹³ Americans possessed a “chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” Contemplating the future, Jefferson imagined the nation as a succession of generations, a “happy and a prosperous” family of families. He invited his fellow Americans to keep the “transcendent objects” of the Revolution in view as the electoral storm subsided and the “hopes of this beloved country” were renewed.

The union Americans created depended on the recognition of equal rights that flowed from their love of God. With “a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry,” we earn the “honor and confidence from our fellow citizens” by “our actions and their sense of them”—not by the accidents of birth in an unequal, hierarchical society. Jefferson was not conjuring up an atomistic, libertarian fantasy of self-sovereignty. He instead envisioned a communion of equals, “enlightened by a benign religion, professed indeed and practised in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude and the love of man.” Americans worshiped the same God in different ways, all “acknowledging and adoring an overruling providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here, and his greater happiness hereafter.” “With all these blessings,” he asked, “what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?” The greatest blessing of all was their capacity to recognize one another as a people, to come together in “the pursuit of happiness” and thus fulfill the design of the “supreme, intelligent being” who created the world.¹⁴

Jefferson’s religious language should not be dismissed as rhetorical cover for less exalted, secular purposes. His personal spiritual quest, undertaken in increasing earnest over the remaining years of his life, was to better understand God’s design for mankind.¹⁵ As a student of Lord Kames and other exponents of natural religion, Jefferson saw what he called “science”—or natural philosophy—as the pathway to greater enlightenment.¹⁶ Self-appointed or state-supported religious authorities stood in the way of that quest, pretending to privileged access to the mysterious mind of God. Deploying their interpretative monopoly for self-interested purposes, “priests” set themselves and their state sponsors up as God-like intermediaries between lowly, “fallen” subjects and a deity who defied description. Jefferson thus accused conventional Christians of being man-worshiping atheists who refused to recognize the hand—and mind—of God in the laws of nature.

Conventional Christianity’s original sin was the deification of Jesus in the Trinitarian conception of the Godhead. By subjecting Christians to the mystification and irrationality of a “revealed” religion that remained concealed for most of mankind, the Trinitarian heresy set the pattern for all the crimes that marred Christianity’s bloody history. By deifying Jesus the man, the priestly caste obscured, distorted, and subverted his message. Enlightened by his own critical reading of the Gospels, Jefferson proclaimed himself a true, or “primitive,” Christian who adhered to Jesus’s original, uncorrupted teachings.¹⁷ “Jesus embraced, with charity & philanthropy, our neighbors, our countrymen, &...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Strongest Government on Earth”: The Rise and Fall of Jefferson’s Empire
• 2. Democracy: Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry
• 3. Constitutions: Thomas Jefferson and James Madison
• 4. Empire: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington
• Notes
• Index