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exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between
church and state.”
Jefferson’s “wall of separation” has, perhaps, become a
more familiar phrase than the actual language of the First
Amendment. Various Supreme Court decisions have cited
his words. In the 1947 case of Everson v. Board of Education,
a New Jersey citizen objected to his town reimbursing parents for money they spent busing their children to Catholic
parochial schools. Jefferson’s wall, proclaimed Supreme
Court Justice Hugo Black, “must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.” There
have nonetheless been many breaches, as Americans continue to debate such issues as whether prayers should be
allowed in a school or whether the Ten Commandments
can be displayed at a courthouse. Even the Everson decision, despite Black’s sweeping statement, upheld the town’s
program on the grounds that it was designed to protect the
students’ safety.
Jefferson’s commitment to the separation of church and
state was literally set in stone. In 1826, when he reviewed his
achievements and suggested what should go on his tombstone, Jefferson decided it ought to include his authorship
of only two works: the Declaration of Independence and
the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
“I like a little rebellion now and then”
What really alarmed Jefferson’s opponents were not his
comments on religion but on rebellion. For Jefferson, the
end of the Revolution did not signal the end of rebellion.
In 1787, Daniel Shays led several hundred men, incensed
by high taxes and debts, in an attack on the federal arsenal
in Springfield, Massachusetts. The attackers were repulsed,
but many took it as a warning about the weakness of the
From Chapter 11 “Thomas Jefferson”
We Hold These Truths . . . and Other Words That Made America
by Paul Aron
© 2008 by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
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federal government. The Articles of Confederation,
adopted in 1777, made Congress almost entirely dependent
on the states for money and troops. Many, not just in Massachusetts, resolved to fix the problem at the Constitutional
Convention later in 1777.
For Jefferson, there was no problem to fix. “I hope they
pardoned them,” he wrote Abigail Adams in February about
Shays and his followers. “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it were
to be always kept alive.”
“I like a little rebellion now and then,” he added. “It is
like a storm in the atmosphere.”
A few months later he expressed similar sentiments to
Adams’s son-in-law, William Stephens Smith. “What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?” he asked. “The tree
of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the
blood of patriots and tyrants.”
In 1789, when Paris was the scene of a far bigger rebellion than Shays’s, Jefferson was there. The violence of the
French Revolution did not change Jefferson’s mind about
the value of rebellion. In September, he philosophized, in
a letter to Madison, about whether any generation has a
right to bind another. “I set out on this ground, which I
suppose to be self evident,” he wrote, using language that
could not but conjure up that of the Declaration, “that the
earth belongs . . . to the living.” Every law, even every constitution, would expire with the generation that created
them. Jefferson even went so far as to define a generation
as nineteen years.
Such comments were not just radical but downright
anarchist. They seemed to confirm his opponents’ worst
fears. In reality, of course, Jefferson was not an anarchist. In
1787 he supported the Constitution, albeit with some reservations, and when he became president in 1801, he certainly
From Chapter 11 “Thomas Jefferson”
We Hold These Truths . . . and Other Words That Made America
by Paul Aron
© 2008 by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
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did not dismantle the federal government. He did not
demand that a new constitution and an entirely new set of
laws be created every nineteen years. Still, these words do
provide a window into Jefferson’s thinking. Philosophically
if not practically, he was deeply libertarian; he did not like
government of any sort, and he wished for a world where
none would exist.
From Chapter 11 “Thomas Jefferson”
We Hold These Truths . . . and Other Words That Made America
by Paul Aron
© 2008 by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
“a government without newspapers or
newspapers without a government”
Jefferson’s libertarian principles did not always mesh
with political realities. In principle, Jefferson believed in a
strong press.
“Were it left for me to decide whether we should have
a government without newspapers or newspapers without
a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the
latter,” he wrote Edward Carrington in 1787. Or this, to
William Green Munford in 1799: “To preserve the freedom
of the human mind . . . and freedom of the press, every
spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom.”
Yet Jefferson also came to see himself as the victim of
an abusive press. The press of the period was highly partisan and did not hesitate to attack the private lives of public
figures. The Federalist press went after Jefferson with a
vengeance. “It is well known,” the Richmond Recorder wrote
in 1802, “that the man, whom it delighteth the people to
honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. . . . The
name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to
bear a striking, if sable resemblance to those of the president himself.”
The charge that Jefferson had a slave mistress was
picked up by other papers across the country. A Philadel-