“All Honor to Jefferson”
Professor Jean Yarbrough, Speaker
Second Annual Jefferson Lecture, July 17, 2014
The distinguished historian Merrill Peterson once observed that Jefferson is a mirror in
which each age finds reflected its most pressing concerns. Before turning to the present age, I
thought it might be useful to review how Jefferson looked to Americans at roughly 50-year
intervals.
Half a century after Jefferson left the White House, the country was deeply divided over
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the extension of slavery to the territories. In that
crisis, Abraham Lincoln returned again and again to the principles Jefferson had set forth in the
Declaration: the equal rights of all men and women to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
and, following from this initial equality, the belief that legitimate government can only rest on
the consent of the governed. For Lincoln, these principles were “the definitions and axioms of a
free society” (1859), “the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” It was, he thought, a bitter
irony that the political party Jefferson had founded no longer stood for these ideals. Indeed, in
certain quarters Democrats now dismissed the first two paragraphs of the Declaration as
“glittering generalities,” if not “self-evident lies.” Yet for Lincoln, Jefferson’s glory lay precisely
in the opening lines of the Declaration: “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete
pressure of a struggle for independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and
capacity to introduce a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men
and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke
and a stumbling block to the harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”
Fast-forward another 50 years, or 100 years after Jefferson left office. A Republican,
Theodore Roosevelt, whose view of Jefferson was decidedly hostile, now occupied the White
House. “I think the worship of Jefferson a discredit to my country.” “The more I study
Jefferson,” TR wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge in 1907, “the more profoundly I distrust him and his
influence, taken as a whole.” Roosevelt’s principal complaint lay in Jefferson’s handling of
foreign affairs, especially during the Embargo Act. “Without the prudence to avoid war, or the
foresight to prepare for it, the Administration drifted helplessly into a conflict in which only the
navy prepared by the Federalists twelve years before, and weakened rather than strengthened
during the intervening time, saved us from complete and shameful defeat.” Although TR was
willing to grant that, like Lincoln, Jefferson was a man of the people, he thought that Jefferson
had too cramped a view of government to be of use in the new industrial age. In contrast to
Lincoln, whom TR considered a progressive avant la letter, Jefferson “led the people wrong, and
followed them when they went wrong,” and so betrayed the insults of the nation.
If anything, Herbert Croly, TR’s friend and fellow Progressive, was even more critical. In
the Promise of American Life, published in 1909, exactly 100 years after Jefferson stepped down
from the presidency, Croly insisted, first, that Jefferson’s faith in the people promoted an
extreme individualism and a naïve faith that the public good could be attained without a vigorous
and efficient national government. What was needed was intelligent direction, led by a battalion
of impartial experts, not the rudderless “drift” that ensued when individuals were left to pursue
their own private and selfish interests.
Second, Croly charged that the central idea enshrined in the Declaration, that of equal
rights, was a fraud. It wrongly assumed that all individuals started from the same point, much as
they do in a marathon, but in fact, the existence of private property meant that in later
generations some began life far ahead of where others did, making it all but impossible for those
in the back to catch up. Standing alone, the principles of equality and liberty could never be
reconciled. It was a marriage that gave birth to “unnatural children”: if equality prevailed, then
mediocrity resulted. This, Croly charged, was the Jeffersonian position. (Apparently, he was
unfamiliar with Jefferson’s efforts to promote a natural aristocracy.) If, on the other hand, liberty
reigned supreme, oligarchy triumphed. The only way the two principles could be reconciled was
if both were subordinated to the larger principle of brotherhood. What exactly this meant Croly
did not say, though it certainly tilted in the direction of socialism. But Croly attempted to
reassure his readers that he did not mean international socialism. What he had in mind was a
decidedly more national socialism, one that would replace the old selfish individualism with a
more lofty individuality. For good reason, he was certain that refracting liberty and equality
through the prism of brotherhood would radically alter both the Jeffersonian and the Hamiltonian
sides of the equation, though he thought it would do more harm to the Jeffersonian side, a
development he welcomed.
1909 was also the year in which John Dewey published his brief essay marking the 50th
anniversary of the publication of the Origin of the Species and exploring the consequences of
evolution for philosophy. For Dewey, this meant 3 things:
1. Because the species were not fixed, it made no sense to talk of a permanent human
nature.
2. Because chance determined evolution, it made no sense to talk of divine purpose or
providence.
3. Because nature was understood as the struggle for survival, it could not serve as the
source of moral law or natural rights
Dewey did not mention the Declaration or Jefferson in his tribute to Darwin, but thirty years
later, in a vastly altered political climate, he cast a more friendly eye on Jefferson than TR or
Croly. In Freedom and Culture, written in 1939, Dewey discerned a number of ways in which
Jefferson’s thought could be adapted to the truths of evolutionary biology:
1. Although evolution had rendered the notion of natural rights obsolete, these rights
could be salvaged if they were seen rather as moral ideals, “not located in the clouds
but backed by something deep and indestructible in the needs and demands of
humankind.” Presumably, these demands were more capacious than the catalog of
rights Jefferson had in mind.
2. Because Jefferson had omitted property from his trilogy of rights, Dewey concluded
that he meant to make the “most complete break with Locke.” “It is,” he thought,
“sheer perversion to hold that there is anything in Jeffersonian democracy that forbids
political action to bring about equalization of economic conditions…” Dewey, after
all, was a social democrat.
While taking note of Jefferson’s belief that the rights of man were unchangeable, even as he
rejected the grounds for this permanence, he applauded Jefferson’s insistence that “laws and
institutions must …keep pace with the times.” Above all, this meant that Americans must
abandon their “idolatry of the Constitution” and embrace the spirit of pragmatic experimentation.
In this way, did the author of the Declaration of Independence and the opponent of
energetic government become in the middle decades of the 20th century the godfather of the New
Deal? It is no small irony that the Jefferson Memorial, inscribed with the immortal words of the
Declaration, was begun in 1939 and completed in 1943 to honor the third President just at the
moment that his political philosophy of limited government, dedicated to protecting the equal
rights of the individual, had been rendered largely obsolete by FDR’s New Deal.
For the past one hundred years, the task of the progressives in both parties, and of their
liberal heirs, has been precisely to supplant the principle of equal rights that lies at the heart of
the Declaration and to erect an administrative state that runs alongside the constitutionally
mandated branches of government. The real work of governing would be increasingly transferred
to these bureaucratic agencies, which are neither accountable to the people nor restrained by
checks and balances. Liberated from these constitutional shackles, the supposedly impartial
experts who staff these agencies would help their fellow citizens progress to a higher stage of
moral and political development, if not exactly Croly’s ideal of brotherhood, then at least some
notion of SOCIAL justice more in keeping with the times.
As Dewey hoped, progressive education would play a central role in this transformation.
Social studies would replace history, insuring that students were no longer familiar with the work
of the Founders, and so, more willing to move beyond them. Thus, it comes as no surprise that
the NC teachers association has recently proposed beginning the junior year survey of American
history in 1877, omitting the Founding and the Civil War altogether.
So, when we look into the mirror today, what is the image of Jefferson that we see? If by
“we,” we mean the professional historians, the news is not good. For more than a decade,
historians have been fascinated by questions involving race and sex. Sometimes Jefferson has
been denounced as a racist, who should be expelled from the pantheon of the Founders; other
times, he has been found wanting for his retrograde views on women. But for the most part,
historians have eagerly advanced the narrative that Jefferson fathered at least one child, and
probably more, with his slave, Sally Hemings. Although the evidence is far from conclusive—
there were approximately 25 male Jeffersons who carried the distinctive Y chromosome—some
of the most distinguished historians of the day have lent their considerable energies to this
project. Occasionally, some lonely historian will complain that this single-minded focus on
Jefferson’s (imagined) sex life has blotted out all other, dare I say, more serious inquiries, but the
narrative so engaged the imagination of the age that it refuses to die. In this saga, Jefferson’s
ideas are largely beside the point.
But it is also a distressing fact that Jefferson’s ideas have also not much captured the
imagination of our recent political leaders. And yet in resisting the steady march of
progressivism, Jefferson can be enormously useful. Let me now suggest how:
First is the reaffirmation of individual rights. In the last part of Democracy in America,
Alexis de Tocqueville warned that the rise of a paternalistic bureaucracy would be all too
inclined to sacrifice the rights of the individual to what it perceived to be the greater good of the
community. Tocqueville understood just how much this impetus for the common good was
rooted in democratic envy, and he warned that as conditions became more equal, every
remaining inequality would grate and gall. It is only by recognizing and defending the rights of
the individual that this tendency toward “depraved equality” can be turned back. That the rights
proclaimed in the Declaration were rooted in man’s permanent and unchanging nature gave them
a particular solidity. However much society might change, whatever progress we might make as
a nation or civilization, human nature remains basically the same. Because our rights are rooted
in our unchanging nature, they cannot be expanded indefinitely, but must take into account the
limits that nature establishes. It is not natural rights that are (as Dewey mocked) “located in the
clouds,” but the progressive construction of moral ideals that knows no limits.
Moreover, in contrast to Darwin, human nature cannot be reduced to a struggle for
survival. The Jeffersonian, and by extension, the Founders’ understanding of nature does honor
to humanity. As Jefferson understood, human nature may be self-interested, but it is also
endowed with a moral sense that yearns for justice and (within limits) benevolence.
Finally, on this question of rights, although Jefferson did decline to include property
among the inalienable rights enumerated in the Declaration, his understanding of property was,
pace Dewey, essentially Lockean. As long as private property was used to promote industry and
increase productivity (and not, as in France, owned by the king for seasonal hunting while
peasants starved), the rights of property, and to unequal amounts of property, should be
protected. Jefferson could not have made this clearer when he wrote:
“To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired
too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and
skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—the guarantee to every one of his
industry and fruits acquired by it.” (Prospectus on Political Economy, enclosed to Joseph
Milligan, Apr. 6, 1816)
This, in a nutshell, was also Jefferson’s reply to Croly: although people did not start out
in the same place—the whole metaphor of the race is mistaken, there is not one starting line, or
one finish line—each should have the opportunity to advance as far as his talents and luck would
take him. It was fruitless to compare oneself to others; the real comparison was where one began
and where one finished.
Second is Jefferson’s insistence on limited and accountable government. For Jefferson,
the whole point of government is “to secure these rights,” and when it has done so, it should
stand aside. It is not the role of government to provide for our every need, which quickly turns
into our wants, or to redistribute wealth in the name of social justice. As President, Jefferson
reduced the scope of the federal government, dismissing patronage appointments and in the
process, was able to retire the national debt. Yes, it is true that he approved a tax code, in which
ordinary citizens never saw a tax collector, and the bulk of the taxes were paid by the wealthy,
but there were no income taxes, and the taxes he was referring to were largely customs duties on
imported items, many of them luxuries.
For Jefferson, the key to limited government lay in the proper distribution of political
powers both within the national government and between the federal government and the states.
In contrast to Progressives like TR and Croly, and their liberal heirs, all of whom opposed the
separation of powers and federalism precisely because they serve as brakes on the consolidation
and expansion of national power, Jefferson insisted on dividing and sub-dividing political power
distributing to each government, right down to the townships and wards, responsibility for those
matters within their competence and interest. For Jefferson, the great enemy of liberty was “the
generalizing and centralizing of all cares and powers in one body,” far removed from the
watchful eyes of the people.
The opposite side of Jefferson’s insistence on limited government was his confidence in
the capacity of the people to govern themselves. But to do so wisely, they must be educated. In
his view, the best way to ward off “degeneracy” in the body politic was “to illuminate, as far as it
is practicable, the minds of the people.” What he had in mind was a distinctly political education
that would instruct the people in their “rights, interests and duties as men and citizens.” To this
end, the curriculum would be heavily weighted in favor of history, especially the histories of
Greece, Rome, England, and America. If the boys and girls of Virginia would study the ways in
which other nations had risen to greatness, and perhaps more importantly, by what errors and
vices they had declined, they would be better able to preserve their republican institutions.
Still, it was not enough for citizens to be educated in their rights; they also had to be able
to act on them. More than any other Founder, Jefferson was convinced that republican
government also depended on fostering a certain kind of spiritedness in the people. He approved
of periodic rebellions, and looked for ways to keep the spirit of the revolution alive in future
generations. So impressed was he by the energy that the New England townships mustered to
oppose his Embargo Act that he sought ways to amend the Virginia state constitution to establish
them there. Jefferson’s great contribution to republican theory was to recognize the modern
representative republic must ultimately be bottomed on the participation of an educated and
civic-minded people. If, indeed, our republic is to resist the steady expansion of government
power, the effort must come from the bottom up. For this insight alone, we can echo John
Adams’ last words, “Jefferson still survives.”