The FUND for AMERICAN STUDIES
TEACHING FREEDOM
a series of speeches and lectures honoring the virtues of a free and democratic society
Vexing the Ghost of Thomas Jefferson
By Daniel Hannan
British journalist and European Parliament member Daniel Hannan
delivered the following remarks to TFAS supporters and alumni attending
the 46th Anniversary Annual Conference in Charlottesville, Va. Following
an afternoon visit to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Hannan spoke to
conference attendees of his admiration for Jeffersonian principles and
what he calls a shared inheritance.
Daniel Hannan is a writer and
blogger, and has been a conservative
Member of European Parliament for
South East England since 1999.
He is secretary-general of the
Alliance of European Conservatives
and Reformists, the league of antifederalist Centre-Right parties in
Europe. He attended Marlborough
and Oriel College, Oxford where he
studied modern history.
He speaks French and Spanish and
loves Europe, but believes the EU
is making its constituent nations
poorer, less democratic and less
free.
Hannan has written eight books,
including “The New Road to
Serfdom,” which was a New
York Times best seller. His most
recent publication is “A Doomed
Marriage: Britain and the EU.” He is
currently writing a book about the
Anglosphere.
His blog at www.hannan.co.uk
typically attracts 200,000 hits a
week from 80,000 unique users.
Hannan rose to international acclaim in 2009 when he delivered a speech
in the European Parliament criticizing Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s
response to the global financial crisis. The speech titled, “The devalued
Prime Minister of a devalued Government,” has close to 3 million views
on YouTube.
No man is an island the poet tells us,
and as no man, so no generation exists
sundered from its past for its posterity. A
nation is much more than an aggregation
of individuals who happen to live under the
same jurisdiction.
Over dinner last night, TFAS President
Roger Ream made a remark that was of
the kind that often goes in one ear and out
the other. He said, “It’s the duty of every
generation to prepare the next one for
leadership.” It’s one of those things that
because we’ve heard it before, because it’s
true to the point of almost being a truism,
we don’t stop and think about what it
means.
Ponder what’s behind Roger’s sentiment.
What is a nation? Americans are not a
random set of individuals who happen to be
born to another random set of individuals.
You are inheritors of a unique and sublime
tradition, and with that heritage comes
the duty to keep fast the freedoms that you
inherited from your parents and pass them
on intact to your children.
What is that American heritage? This is
after all The Fund for American Studies,
not the Armenian or Angolan or Albanian
studies. Well, it was the creation of
some far sighted and patriotic men in
Philadelphia who saw ancient roots for it,
roots that stretched deep into the soggy,
cold earth of medieval England.
They traced them. Jefferson traced the
roots of American liberty back a very long
way, back through the glorious revolution,
back even before the great charter to the
folk right of Anglo-Saxon freedoms that
had existed medievally. If you were looking
intently in Jefferson’s book room today
behind his bedroom, you will have seen
some of the histories that told the same
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minded to endure the degradations of
the others. Possessing a chosen country
with room enough for our descendants
to the thousandth and thousandth
generation. Entertaining a sense of
our equal right to the use of our own
faculties, to the acquisition of our own
industry to honor, and confidence from
our fellow citizens resulting not from
birth but from our actions and their
sense of them.”
“
Hannan takes questions and meets with TFAS supporters after delivering his remarks.
Americans are not a random set of individuals
who happen to be born to another random set of
individuals. You are inheritors of a unique and
sublime tradition, and with that heritage comes
the duty to keep fast the freedoms
that you inherited from your parents and pass
them on intact to your children.”
story of how a free people in England
had lost their liberties at the time of the
Norman conquest.
He saw himself very much as not a
revolutionary but a conservative in the
sense that he wanted to restore the
rights he believed he had been born with
as a freeborn Englishman. Or rather,
he was using the word revolution in its
literal sense, to mean a complete turn
of the wheel, a turning upright of that
which had been set on its head.
Thomas Jefferson distilled those ideas
in the old courthouse in Philadelphia
to that purest and most potent form.
What is your birthright as Americans?
Well, look, we’ve heard an awful lot of
the third president’s words tonight. I
could fill the whole speech, actually.
He’s one of those figures whose words
apply with uncanny aptness to our
present discontents and our precise
circumstances.
But I’m going to give you one longish
quote. Bear with me. This is from his
first inauguration address in 1801.
But again, as with Roger’s eloquent
summary of what it is that TFAS does,
think about what he’s saying. This is
how he describes America’s dream and
America’s task.
“Kindly separated by nature and a wide
ocean from the exterminating havoc
of one quarter of the globe. Too high-
“Enlightened by a benign religion,
professed indeed and practiced
in various forms, yet all of them
inculcating honesty, truth, temperance,
gratitude, and the love of man.
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, what more
is necessary to make us a happy and
prosperous people? Still one thing
more, fellow citizens. A wise and frugal
government which shall restrain
men from injuring one another, shall
leave them otherwise free to regulate
their own pursuits of industry and
improvement, and shall not take
from the mouth of labor the bread it
has earned. This is the sum of good
government.”
If only every one of your successors in
the White House had kept faith with
those principles. If only they had had
the modesty to recognize that they were
passing through institutions bigger than
they were.
Here’s a little paradox. This idea of one
generation holding in trust freedoms
for the next, is one which your third
president had very little time for. You
won’t find a bigger Jeffersonian than
this one on either side of the Atlantic,
but he wasn’t perfect.
Man has fallen. Perfection is not for
this life, and Thomas Jefferson had
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his flaws. There was one thing that
he was wrong about, and that was the
French Revolution and the ideology
that it inspired. And he particularly
believed that there was no obligation
laid on one generation by the hand of its
predecessors.
In a letter to Madison at the time, he
talked about it. He said, “It is selfevident to me that this generation
holds the earth in usufruct that one
generation has the right to do as it
pleases.” That sentiment horrified his
contemporary, perhaps the greatest of
all conservative philosophers, Edmond
Burke. Burke famously put forward the
idea that there is a partnership between
the generations. There is a partnership
between the dead, the living and those
yet to come.
Jeffersonian vision. It’s human nature
to take things for granted. I often find
talking to American friends that people
don’t appreciate how unusual the
defining characteristics and attributes
of American democracy are - from term
limits and balanced budget amendments
through to the direct election of
everyone from the school board to
the sheriff, the dispersal of power,
state’s rights, ballot and referendum
mechanisms.
In a letter he wrote in 1800 to Gideon
Granger of Connecticut, “Our country
is too large to have all its affairs directed
by a single government. Public servants
at such a distance and from under the
eye of their constituents must be invited
to corruption, plunder and waste.”
Your Constitution
didn’t only serve its
purpose in the sense
of keeping you free
and prosperous, it also
drove your fathers
to carry the promise
of freedom to other
continents. That’s our
shared inheritance.”
I said before that Jefferson was not
perfect. His actions didn’t always match
his words. I suppose that’s another way
of saying he was a human being. He
occasionally comported himself in a
rancorous and fractional way. He was
unsupportive, to put it neutrally, first to
George Washington and then to Adams.
“
I’m delighted that in this regard, at
least The Fund for American Studies is
Burkean rather than Jeffersonian. It’s an
extraordinary thing that you get to pass
on. It’s a unique, sublime privilege that
you’ve had from the past. It’s a lot more
fun than being The Fund for Albanian or
Armenian Studies.
This is something that has enlightened
the world. And what’s the basis of it?
How did it work out? Well, if I had to
try and draw together the threads of
Jeffersonian thought into the main
political principles on which basis the
republic developed, I would say there are
three.
First, that the individual should be as
free as possible from state coercion.
Second, that decisions makers
wherever possible should be elected and
accountable. Third, that power should
be dispersed, that decisions should be
taken as closely as possible to the people
that they affect.
Now, when it’s stated like that, it sounds
almost banal. It sounds obvious, but
all of the unique features of American
democracy have their origin in that
All of these are, if you like, the
phenotype of the original Jeffersonian
genotype. His was the DNA. That’s the
working up all of them have in common,
the desire to elevate the citizen over the
state rather than the other way around.
We know there is a whole wealth of
evidence from political scientists and
economists that when government is
dispersed and democratized and local, it
becomes more efficient.
There is less duplication. There is less
to waste. You have happier and more
engaged citizens. We have a wealth
of knowledge from the 20th century
that teaches us that. Thomas Jefferson
intuited what we now see inherently. He
felt it in his bones.
An incredibly good description of the
European Union, and by the way, what
an incredibly good description of the
direction in which your present leaders
seem bent on taking you.
So, there was a mismatch between
these sublime ideals and the way he
sometimes behaved in office. Let’s be
honest about that. Now, I’m guessing I
don’t completely understand your party
system, but I’m guessing that it’s for
that reason that the Democrats have
always claimed him as one of theirs.
Nonetheless, to see the uniqueness of
his achievement, compare your system
to virtually anyone else’s, even in the
Western democracies. Compare the
Constitution here, both in the way it was
adumbrated and the way in which it’s
worked since, with the constitution that
was recently adopted in the European
Union.
You might think that I’m making a
ridiculous and bizarre comparison.
How can I possibly compare that tawdry
process on the other side of the Atlantic
to what happened in Philadelphia. You
know what, it’s not I who am making
this comparison. It was first made by the
author of the European Constitution.
It was a former French president called
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
1706 New Hampshire Avenue, NW / Washington, DC 20009
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In the passing decades, I have seen bit by bit my
country lose its freedom ... And I used to say,
‘At least there is one place where the traditional
concept of English liberty is secure.’ So, you can
imagine how I feel now when I stand before you,
and I see you repeating all the mistakes that have
been made elsewhere.”
In the year 2001, when the
constitutional convention met at
Laeken, he said, “This is our
Philadelphia moment,” and he went on
to liken himself to Thomas Jefferson.
of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms,
guarantees our right to strike action,
affordable housing and free healthcare.
You can, I think, intuit where I’m going
with this, what the difference is.
Well, where does one begin with that?
Actually, here’s a place to begin –
Jefferson wasn’t there at the time that
the Constitution was being drawn
up. He was ambassador to Paris.
But we can extrapolate a good deal
from a comparison between the two
experiments.
How about this as the real difference?
Your Constitution was ratified by
separately convened bodies in each of
the thirteen members. I think to be
exactly precise about this, it came into
effect when eleven had ratified it.
Rhode Island and North Carolina
came into line a little bit later.
Your Constitution with all of its
amendments is 7,200 words long. The
European Constitution is 78,000 words
long. Yours concerns itself with the big
broad-brush issues, the relationship
between state and federal authorities.
The European Constitution was
repeatedly rejected in referendums in
country after country. By 53 percent of
French voters, by 54 percent of Irish
voters, by 62 percent of Dutch voters,
and was then imposed anyway. So,
don’t take for granted the extraordinary
political inheritance that began with the
inhabitants of this famous house. It’s up
to all of you to keep it secure.
The European Constitution, now
renamed the Lisbon Treaty, busies
itself with every imaginable detail of
government policy; the rights of asylum
seekers, the status of disabled people,
space policy. Such is the presumption
of one generation that they assume to
lay down with constitutional force these
things for all time.
The Declaration of Independence,
Thomas Jefferson’s greatest
achievement, promised life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness. The European
Union’s equivalent, called the Charter
Jefferson observed in a letter, “It cannot
be to our interests that all Europe
should be under a single monarchy.”
Barack Obama knows better. He’s
strongly in favor of all Europe being
under a single monarchy and keeps on
nagging my country to join it. But I’m
going to come back to that.
Why am I here? Some of you might be
thinking this is a bit funny, having an
TFAS Board of Regent member, Ambassador
Julia Chang Bloch, listens to Hannan’s
remarks.
elected representative from the United
Kingdom coming and hymning the
praises of the author of the Declaration
of Independence.
Well, I’m not sure that things were quite
that simple. Go back to his writings
and his speeches. Thomas Jefferson saw
himself very strongly as part of an old
English Whig tradition. He called it in
one letter, “The tradition of the Whigs
before the revolution,” meaning before
the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
One of the loveliest and most wistful
lines in the first draft of the Declaration
of Independence, Jefferson was made to
take it out by his colleagues, but it’s a
beautiful line. He said, “We might have
been a great and free people together.”
He was standing up for an ancient
tradition of people being bigger than
their bosses. This sublime, almost
miraculous common law idea that the
state doesn’t get to set the rules, that
the law was somehow already there,
luminously, before the government was
ever dreamed of, binding the king just as
surely as it bound his meanest subject.
To say that now sounds almost banal,
but that it should sound banal is tribute
to the achievement of Jefferson and the
other revolutionaries that they took this
idea and they made it into the nation
that we see around us.
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No English speaker can be indifferent
to the fortunes of this republic. We’re
too closely bound together. We’ve been
through too much down the ages.
Your Constitution didn’t only serve its
purpose in the sense of keeping you
free and prosperous, it also drove your
fathers to carry the promise of freedom
to other continents. That’s our shared
inheritance.
sake. What would have Thomas Jefferson
made of calling your official a czar? Even
in his worst nightmares, he would have
never thought of such an authoritarian
title.
supervision. When we see a country now
largely run by executive decree
with parliamentary supervision
sidelined. You can imagine how that
makes me feel.
When we see the most important feature
of the revolution, the thing that they
had grown up fighting against and
were determined to prevent, which is
the executive outgrowing legislative
I was talking on the bus on the way over
to Art Kalotkin, who was telling me that
he’d had a cousin who was so pleased to
be here that he’d called his child Paul
Revere. The Paul Revere story is telling.
In the three great ideological conflicts
of the 20th century, in the First
and Second World Wars, and in the
Cold War, how many countries were
consistently on the right side? How
many were solidly for the side that
wanted to elevate the citizen over the
government rather than the other way
around?
It’s a pretty short list, but it includes all
the main English-speaking democracies.
What happened at the time of the
revolution is that a tradition that was
our joint inheritance was elevated here
even as it was being lost in the country
where it was first adumbrated.
In the passing decades, I have seen bit
by bit my country lose its freedom.
We’ve lost our sovereignty to Brussels.
We’ve lost our independence as
people. We’ve seen power shift from
elected representatives to the standing
bureaucracy of the state. We’ve seen
government grow. We’ve seen taxes and
spending grow to a degree that would
have prompted revolutions on both sides
of the Atlantic at the time of the unrest.
And I used to say, “At least there is one
place where the traditional concept of
English liberty is secure.” So, you can
imagine how I feel now when I stand
before you, and I see you repeating
all the mistakes that have been made
elsewhere.
When I see power here shifting from the
fifty states to the federal government,
shifting from the elected representative
to the unelected, to the czar for heaven’s
Following these remarks, Hannan continued his conversation with TFAS alumni and supporters
while attending day three of the 46th Anniversary Annual Conference at James Madison’s Montpelier. Hannan wrote a 4th of July commentary on his participation in the TFAS conference. To
read his piece visit, www.TFAS.org/46th/Hannan.
Top: Hannan enjoys a tour of Madison’s home with TFAS alumni (l.-r.) Betsy Bryant (IBGA 05), Cecily Hastings (ICPES 05), Courtney Rohrbach (IPVS 05) and Lindsey Parke (IBGA 05).
Bottom: Conference attendees Eugenia Hawrylko, her husband Raymond Aab and President
Roger Ream speak with Hannan while walking the grounds of Montpelier.
1706 New Hampshire Avenue, NW / Washington, DC 20009
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Who can tell me what Paul Revere was
shouting on his famous ride through
Eastern Massachusetts? The British are
coming, right? Who can tell me what’s
wrong with that story?
You only have to think about this for
a couple of seconds, right? The entire
population of Massachusetts was British.
It would have been an extraordinary
thing to shout, “The British are
coming.” What he actually said was,
“The regulars are out,” or according to
one quote, “The red coats are out.”
But the point is, at that stage, this was
a civil war within a single polity. I am
very happy, as most people on both sides
of the Atlantic were at the time, that
it was the democratic rather than the
monarchical cause that prevailed. The
consequences in all parts of the Englishspeaking world were extremely happy for
all of us.
His name was Joseph Warren. He was a
doctor in Massachusetts, and he said to
his countrymen, “You are to decide the
question upon which rests the happiness
and freedom of millions yet unborn. Act
worthy of yourselves.”
Let me close by quoting somebody
other than Thomas Jefferson. In 1775,
Jefferson was returning to Monticello
after the Virginia Congress to prepare
for his role with the Virginia militia.
At the time that was happening, the
man who had sent Paul Revere on his
famous ride said something, which bears
repeating.
My friends, you are the inheritors of
a sublime tradition. Act worthy of
yourselves. Honor the vision of your
founders. Venerate the shade of Thomas
Jefferson and what he stood for. Never
be afraid to speak to and for the soul of
this nation of which by good fortune and
God’s grace you are privileged to be part.
Teaching Freedom is a series of remarks published by The Fund for American Studies, a nonprofit
educational organization in Washington, D.C. The speakers featured in each issue delivered their remarks
at a TFAS institute or conference or serve as faculty members of an institute.
The speakers who participate in the educational programs contribute greatly to the purpose and mission
of TFAS programs. The speeches are published in an effort to share the words and lessons of the speakers
with friends, alumni, supporters and others who are unable to attend the events. To read past issues of
Teaching Freedom, visit: www.TFAS.org/TeachingFreedom.
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