Thomas Jefferson: Word and Deed

On July 9, 1776, as the “largest, most powerful force ever sent forth from Britain or any nation,” was gathering in New York waters, General George Washington ordered his soldiers to march onto the commons.¹ At 6 p.m., a declaration approved by the Continental Congress five days earlier was read aloud. It began:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.²

The troops listened in rapture, giving “their most hearty assent, the expressions and behavior both of officers and men testifying their warmest approbation of it.”³ Washington hoped this Declaration of Independence would “serve as a fresh incentive to every officer, and soldier, to act with Fidelity and Courage, as knowing that now the peace and safety of his Country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms.”⁴

These farmers and merchants turned militiamen had banded together for a redress of grievances concerning their rights as British subjects. But they were British subjects no more. Now they would fight, not for proper representation in parliament, but for recognition of their inalienable rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The principal author of these words, Thomas Jefferson, said they were “intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”⁵

Historian David McCullough details what then followed:

The formal readings concluded, a great mob of cheering, shouting soldiers and townspeople stormed down Broadway to Bowling Green, where, with ropes and bars, they pulled down the gilded lead statue of George III on his colossal horse. In their fury the crowd hacked off the sovereign’s head, severed the nose, clipped the laurels that wreathed the head, and mounted what remained of the head on a spike outside a tavern. Much of the lead from the rest of the statue would later be, as reported, melted down for bullets “to assimilate with the brains of our infatuated adversaries.”⁶

Though vastly outnumbered by a better trained and better equipped British military, Washington’s Continental Army now held more firmly than ever a weapon that would win the war: righteous, moral fervor. Such was the power of Thomas Jefferson’s words.

Jefferson is one of America’s most revered and most reviled founders. He is loved for authoring the Declaration of Independence, writing trenchantly against slavery, erecting a wall of separation between church and state, founding the University of Virginia, and more than doubling the size of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase. He is loathed for violating principles he espoused (including some in the Declaration), owning slaves (more than six hundred in his lifetime), supporting the French Revolution, instituting an embargo on foreign trade, and appeasing Barbary pirates.

Whereas some say that Jefferson was a man of reason and “the pen of the revolution,” others say he was a walking contradiction who wrote powerful words but didn’t practice his alleged principles. Should Jefferson be placed on a pedestal? Should statues of the man be torn down, like those of George III? How should this founder be remembered?

‘Fix Reason Firmly in Her Seat’

Whatever his flaws and inconsistencies, Jefferson was a man of deep thought who spoke highly of reason and principle, and sought to anchor his ideas in reality.

Jefferson held that the world is essentially a good place, hospitable to human life, and knowable to the human mind. As he wrote to John Adams, “I think with you that it is a good world on the whole, that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us.”⁷ Man is equipped to deal with the world, said Jefferson, because our senses “evidence realities; and there are enough of these for all the purposes of life.” He argued, “A single sense may indeed be sometimes deceived, but rarely: and never all our senses together, with their faculty of reasoning.”⁸

Reason, according to Jefferson, is the key to human ingenuity and flourishing. It can “advance the knowledge and well-being of mankind . . . indefinitely, and to a term which no one could fix or foresee.”⁹ Jefferson wrote that “A mind always employed is always happy,” and that those who failed to apply their rational faculties are “wretched.”¹⁰

Jefferson held that the development of moral character requires effort and practice. He counseled his nephew, “Encourage all your virtuous dispositions, and exercise them whenever an opportunity arises; being assured that they will gain strength by exercise, as a limb of the body does, and that exercise will make them habitual.”¹¹ Virtue, according to Jefferson, is practical, and to think otherwise is to err with consequences. “Nothing is so mistaken as the supposition, that a person is to extricate himself from a difficulty . . . by an injustice. This increases the difficulties ten fold.”¹² In regard to governance, he counseled a friend, “Only lay down true principles, and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendancy of the people.”¹³

Given the link in Jefferson’s thought between productivity and happiness, it is not surprising that he filled his life with engaging, practical work. He labored, sometimes studying sixteen hours a day, to become a first-rate legal scholar. In service to this end, he learned to read Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian.¹⁴ He read profusely and “spared no pains, opportunity or expence,” in building America’s largest private library of more than six thousand volumes.¹⁵ In addition to his public papers and a book (Notes on the State of Virginia), Jefferson wrote more than eighteen thousand letters.¹⁶ He was a self-taught violinist, horticulturalist, and architect, who designed and built his home, the magnificent, domed Monticello, replete with inventions and innovations that delight visitors to this day.¹⁷

Though nominally Christian, Jefferson insisted that reason take primacy over faith, counseling a nephew to “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”¹⁸

Jefferson battled state sponsorship of religion, in part because he realized that it throttled the individual’s ability to think for himself about morality. He repudiated “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers” who “have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible.” He condemned laws that forbade people to contradict the clergy, observing that such laws disarmed men of their “natural weapons, free argument and debate.”¹⁹ Jefferson sought to dethrone religious authority, to free the individual mind, and to make morality intelligible:

Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies. We should all then, like the quakers, live without an order of priests, moralise for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe; for I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.²⁰

Jefferson’s greatest achievement in this regard—the legal shield that would protect “impious” men from religious dictates—was the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. This statute officially ended all state support for religion in Virginia and decriminalized dissent. As Jefferson explained, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”²¹

This statute and the reasoning behind it shaped James Madison’s thinking on the subject, gave rise to the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and thus became a cornerstone of freedom for the entire nation. Jefferson later characterized the First Amendment as “a wall of separation between church and state,” a phrase that has been cited repeatedly in Supreme Court decisions.²²

Words such as those in the Declaration of Independence and Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom do not come to a man from out of the blue. Jefferson was able to think and write as profoundly and deeply as he did because he exerted extreme effort; studied political theory, history, and philosophy; and engaged in countless conversations and debates over many years. His long-term commitment to understanding human nature and how the world works made him capable of rising to these intellectual feats.

‘Mr. Jefferson Thought for Us All’

Between the years 1762 and 1767, Jefferson studied law against a background of proliferating British controls over the colonies. During these years of study—in which he devoured political pamphlets and treatises on government by John Locke, Montesquieu, and the like—eight acts were passed, each of which asserted Parliament’s authority over the colonies.²³ In 1765, these controls extended to the passage of the Stamp Act, the first law with the explicit purpose not of regulating commerce between lands, but of taxing colonists to raise revenue for the crown. Though still a student at the time, Jefferson “stood at the door of communication between the house and the lobby” in the Virginia House of Burgesses, rapt by the “torrents of sublime eloquence” issued by Patrick Henry against this unjust law.²⁴

In 1769, at the age of twenty-six, Jefferson was elected a representative in the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he joined the effort to secure the rights of Virginians and ultimately other colonists. But the House was disbanded time and again by the governor of Virginia—a British proxy.²⁵ So Jefferson and other young burgesses began meeting at a tavern where they would not be inhibited by the governor. They sent letters to the representatives of other colonies proposing committees of correspondence in order “to produce a unity of action.”²⁶ In December 1773, a group of Bostonians known as the Sons of Liberty protested the British Tea Act (a new tax) by boarding a British merchant ship and dumping more than three hundred chests of tea into the harbor (The Boston Tea Party). In retribution, Britain closed the port of Boston and ordered it to remain closed until the tea was paid for. The Virginian burgesses organized a day of prayer and fasting to show solidarity with the people of Massachusetts. This event was so rousing that it struck the Virginia colonists—who had fallen into a state of lethargy—”like a shock of electricity.” Soon after, the colonists elected delegates to what would be the first Continental Congress.²⁷

Jefferson proposed instructions, in effect talking points, for the members of this new Congress. Therein, he took aim at the British Parliament, which dictatorially constrained colonial exports while securing a monopoly for British imports. The case Jefferson made in his Summary View of the Rights of British America was shorn of any servile language “which would persuade his majesty that we are asking favors, not rights.”²⁸ Jefferson named a principle at the root of American discontent, writing: “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”²⁹

Though his critique proved too radical for official congressional endorsement in 1774, it would affect the political climate in other ways. Without Jefferson’s knowledge, the essay was published as a pamphlet.³⁰ In a preface, the editor wrote:

The sources of our present unhappy differences are traced with such faithful accuracy, and the opinions entertained by every free American expressed with such a manly firmness, that it must be pleasing to the present, and may be useful to future ages. . . . Without the knowledge of the author, we have ventured to communicate his sentiments to the public; who have certainly a right to know what the best and wisest of their members have thought on a subject in which they are so deeply interested.³¹

Summary View caught the attention of George Washington, who approvingly called it “Mr. Jefferson’s Bill of Rights.”³² John Adams later reflected that Jefferson “had been chosen a delegate [to Congress] in Virginia in consequence of a very handsome public paper which he had written for the House of Burgesses.”³³

Although Washington, Adams, and others greatly appreciated Jefferson’s Summary View, the pamphlet was not so well received on the other side of the Atlantic. Indeed, reports indicated that Parliament now wanted Jefferson for treason.³⁴ As the forces of revolution gathered, Summary View shone a spotlight on Jefferson as a leader among leaders.

According to John Adams, when Congress appointed a subcommittee to draft a declaration of independence, he approached Jefferson with a three-point argument as to why he (Jefferson) should write it:

“Reason first You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third You can write ten times better than I can.”

“Well,” said Jefferson, “if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.”³⁵

Jefferson was, without doubt, one of the most important contributors to the moral and intellectual case for the American Revolution. And his fellow revolutionaries knew it. As Benjamin Rush wrote years later to Adams, “I consider you and him, as the North and South poles of the American Revolution.—Some talked, some wrote—and some fought to promote & establish it, but you, and Mr Jefferson thought for us all.”³⁶

‘I Would Have Seen Half the Earth Desolated’

As vital as Jefferson’s ideas were to the founding of the United States and the success of the American Revolution, his understanding of rights and the requirements of liberty seemed to evaporate when it came to the French Revolution (1789–1799).

Jefferson happened to be in France when the Revolution began, and he regarded the upheaval as a positive development. If Frenchmen were endowed with the same unalienable rights as Americans, he reasoned, then a government violating these rights was committing the same crime that the British crown had committed against the colonists. The French had helped the colonists in righting that wrong. Shouldn’t Americans help the French to right this one?

Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat who had been instrumental in helping America defeat Britain, sought Jefferson’s assistance in drafting a declaration of rights. Jefferson obliged and suddenly had his hand in another revolution.

But the French Revolution was fundamentally different from the American. The American revolutionaries consistently sought one thing: to establish a country based on the principle of individual rights. Although the French Revolution began with a similar goal, it deteriorated and then reversed course, becoming what Jefferson would later call “a tremendous obstacle to the future attempts at liberty.”³⁷ Indeed, as would become clear, some of the French revolutionaries sought not to establish a land of liberty but to destroy every last vestige of the Ancien Régime and to kill everyone who supported it in any way.

The rationally limited nature of the Americans’ aims can be seen in their words and deeds before and during the American Revolutionary War. For instance, although Jefferson threatened rebellion in his 1774 Summary View, he also emphasized, “It is neither our wish, nor our interest, to separate from [Britain]. We are willing, on our part, to sacrifice every thing which reason can ask to the restoration of that tranquility for which all must wish.”³⁸ He and the other founders saw that Britain was violating the rights of Americans, and they sought a rational, orderly, and preferably peaceful resolution. Even in declaring independence, the American founders proceeded in an orderly, purposeful way, maintaining respect for the intellect. In commencing the revolution, Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”³⁹

In April 1775, when Britain initiated war in Lexington and Concord, the Americans retaliated to defend themselves and to secure independence—not to kill everyone with any ties to Britain. During the war, instances of excessive brutality against Loyalists and British prisoners were scant relative to the bloodlust that would be unleashed in the French Revolution.

In 1789, the first wave of French revolutionaries advocated a government of law to protect “the natural rights of every man.” Jefferson passionately agreed with this aim and helped to draft the seminal document of the revolution, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which stated in part:

Political liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not injure another. The exercise of the natural rights of every man, has no other limits than those which are necessary to secure to every other man the free exercise of the same rights; and these limits are determinable only by the law.⁴⁰

Jefferson’s impetus for helping to draft this document can be seen in a 1788 letter to John Jay, in which he said “it is to be feared that an impatience to rectify every thing at once, which prevails in some minds, may terrify the court, and lead them to appeal to force, and to depend on that alone.”⁴¹ This proved prescient.

As the revolution devolved into an unprincipled massacre, however, Jefferson continued to support it. He seemed to believe that the violence was justifiable given the stated aims of the Revolution. In January 1793, he wrote that although “the arm of the people,” an unrestrained force “blind to a certain degree,” might not be a sufficient tool for securing liberty, it was a “necessary” tool.

Jefferson did not know the extent of the horrors to come. He did, however, acknowledge at least as early as January 1793 that French revolutionaries were killing innocent people—and he still gave the Revolution full-throated, nearly unconditional support.

In the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as any body, and shall deplore some of them to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree. A few of their cordial friends met at their hands the fate of enemies. But time and truth will rescue and embalm their memories, while their posterity will be enjoying that very liberty for which they would never have hesitated to offer up their lives. The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.⁴²

Only nineteen days after this letter was written, the French monarch, King Louis XVI—whom Jefferson later called “an honest and moderate man”—was executed.⁴³ Perhaps Jefferson’s optimism that the French Revolution would somehow follow the example of the American clouded his view of the kind and degree of violence involved. In any event, this revolution no longer was intended to secure “the natural rights of every man.” The atrocities that ensued were horrific beyond measure.

As Christopher Hibbert explains in The Days of the French Revolution, the revolutionaries executed almost three thousand people in Paris and about fourteen thousand in the provinces. The people of France “lived in constant fear of death and went to bed dreading the sound of a knock on the door in the middle of the night when most arrests took place.” The revolutionaries told their followers and henchmen, “You have no more grounds for restraint against the enemies of the new order . . . liberty must prevail at any price.” They “regarded all dissidents as criminals,” and said, “You must punish not merely traitors but the indifferent as well.” Some “advised that the Law of Suspects should be interpreted so that all the well-to-do came within its scope: questions should be asked in every village about the means of the principal farmer; if he were rich he should be guillotined without further ado.” ⁴⁴

But it was not only the rich, or even mainly the rich, who suffered. The poor were executed with the well-to-do, women with men, the young with the old, some accused of “starving the people,” others of “depraving public morals,” one witness for “not giving his testimony properly.” . . .⁴⁵

Jean Baptiste Henry, aged eighteen, journeyman tailor, convicted of having sawed down a tree of liberty, executed . . . Stephen Thomas Ogie Baulny, aged forty-six, convicted of having entrusted his son, aged fourteen, to a garde du corps in order that he might emigrate, condemned to death and executed the same day . . . Henriette Françoise de Marboeuf, aged fifty-five, widow of the ci-devant Marquis de Marboeuf, convicted of having hoped for the arrival of the Austrians and Prussians and of keeping provisions for them, condemned to death and executed the same day . . . François Bertrand, aged thirty-seven, publican at Leure in the department of the Côte-d’Or, convicted of having furnished to the defenders of the country sour wine injurious to health, condemned to death at Paris and executed the same day. . . .⁴⁶

[T]wo thousand were towed out in barges into the middle of the Loire and drowned, some of them stripped naked and bound together in couples. The river became so choked with these barges that ships weighing anchor brought them up filled with the dead. . . .⁴⁷

A woman was charged with the heinous crime of having wept at the execution of her husband. She was consequently condemned to sit several hours under the suspended blade which shed upon her, drop by drop, the blood of the deceased whose corpse was above her on the scaffold before she was released by death from her agony.⁴⁸

Although the full extent and details of the savagery involved in the French Revolution were not immediately available to people in the United States, many of these details were revealed to the general public years before Jefferson ceased supporting the Revolution. In September 1792, Abigail Adams Smith wrote from London to her mother, Abigail Adams, in Braintree, Massachusetts:

The accounts from Paris are shocking to every humane mind, and too dreadful to relate. . . . One would suppose, that the English newspapers exaggerate in their accounts; but I fear they do not, for I saw, on Sunday last, a lady who was in Paris on the 10th of August, and she heard and saw scenes as shocking as are related by any of them; they seem to have refined upon the cruelties of the savages. ⁴⁹

And Jefferson, then secretary of state, had easy access to firsthand information from William Short, the American charge d’affairs in France whom Jefferson had groomed and referred to as his “adoptive son.”⁵⁰ A month before Abigail Adams Smith relayed her account, Short had written to Jefferson:

My late letters and those which you will no doubt have recieved [sic] from Paris have prepared you for hearing of the arrestation, massacre or flight of all those who should be considered as the friends and supporters of the late constitution in France with a monarch at its head. The mob and demagogues of Paris had carried their fury in this line, as far as it could go. ⁵¹

What did Jefferson know and when did he know it? The timeline shows that even after he knew the Revolution involved the massacre of innocent people, he continued to support it.

Over time, Jefferson’s support for the Revolution diminished, until finally, in 1795, he admitted: “What a tremendous obstacle to the future attempts at liberty will be the atrocities of Robespierre!”⁵² In an 1815 letter to Lafayette, he reflected that “in the end, the limited monarchy they had secured was exchanged for the unprincipled and bloody tyranny of Robespierre, and the equally unprincipled and maniac tyranny of Bonaparte.”⁵³

How could a man who understood the principle of rights and the responsibility of revolutionaries to uphold it continue supporting a revolution after it devolved into such unspeakable savagery? This remains a conundrum.

‘These People Are to Be Free’

Even less explicable than Jefferson’s position on the French Revolution are his mixed words and deeds on the matter of slavery.

Though a slave owner himself, Jefferson often referred to the practice as “a moral reproach,” and he fought many legal and ideological battles against slavery. For instance, in 1770 he worked pro bono on behalf of an enslaved mulatto man, arguing that “under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.”⁵⁴ Shortly after being elected a Virginia burgess, Jefferson seconded a bill that would allow slaveholders to legally free their slaves. For an indication of how radical this was at the time, consider that Colonel Richard Bland, who sponsored the bill, was “one of the oldest, ablest, & most respected members.” Yet, for advocating the bill, “he was denounced as an enemy of his country, & was treated with the grossest indecorum.”⁵⁵ When fellow Virginians were finally convinced to approve the bill, the King’s Council, the British-appointed lieutenant governor, and the king himself vetoed it.⁵⁶

Jefferson blamed Britain for the slave trade during the revolutionary years. In his Summary View, he charged that though the colonies desired to ban the importation of slaves, “our repeated attempts to effect this . . . have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative.” Jefferson also blamed Britain for infecting the colonies with the practice “in their infant state.”⁵⁷ He amplified this message in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, charging that in his support for the slave trade, King George III “has waged cruel war against human nature itself.”⁵⁸ But many of Jefferson’s contemporaries in the Continental Congress disagreed either with his evaluation of slavery, or his charge that Britain was to blame for it, or both. So they struck his passages on slavery from the Declaration.

Jefferson made some progress against slavery in 1778, when his bill outlawing the importation of slaves passed in Virginia, making it one of the first states in the world to criminalize the international slave trade. He sought an amendment granting “freedom of all born after a certain day,” but he “found that the public mind would not yet bear the proposition.” To this delay he cautioned, “the day is not distant when [the public] must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”⁵⁹

Although Jefferson advocated emancipation, he also held that the practice of slavery had caused such antipathy between blacks and whites “that the two races, equally free” could not all of a sudden live peacefully together. He thought that freed slaves would be alienated from society and unable to support themselves.⁶⁰ Consequently, he held that emancipation alone would likely lead to chaos and bloodshed.⁶¹ Thus, he proposed tying emancipation to expatriation, such that freed blacks would be deported.⁶² But achieving widespread acceptance even of this idea, Jefferson thought, would take years of gradual enlightenment. He told a young neighbor, “I had always hoped that the younger generation . . . would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it.” He counseled him to “become the missionary of this doctrine . . . insinuate & inculcate it softly but steadily, through the medium of writing and conversation; associate others in your labors, and when the phalanx is formed, bring on and press the proposition perseveringly until its accomplishment.”⁶³

In the meantime, Jefferson sought at least to stem the growth of this immoral institution. In 1784, he proposed a law to ban slavery in all new or incoming states; it failed to pass by one vote but inspired a 1787 law that fulfilled this aim west of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio River.⁶⁴ Finally, in 1807, as president, Jefferson signed a law banning America’s international slave trade, making it the first country in the world to do so. (Credit, however, goes to Britain for passing a similar law later that same month and being the first to implement it.)⁶⁵

Though he fought against slavery in the foregoing respects, Jefferson, like many men of the time, held certain prejudices against blacks. In the 1780s, Jefferson expressed “The opinion, that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination.” But he admitted such an opinion “must be hazarded with great diffidence. . . . I advance it therefore as a suspicion only.”⁶⁶ Jefferson’s opinions and suspicions extended to some overtly racist comments, which were not merely asserted but also published. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), he wrote:

Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. . . . They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. . . . They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. . . . It appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.⁶⁷

These statements are reprehensible—especially coming from a man who prided himself on being rational and scientific.

In 1791, when a black freeman, Benjamin Banneker, sent Jefferson a copy of his almanac, which demonstrated knowledge of spherical trigonometry, Jefferson wrote:

No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence.⁶⁸

He later wrote, “My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation.”⁶⁹

But whereas Jefferson seemingly acknowledged the possibility that he was wrong about the inferiority of blacks, he apparently never recognized the fact that he was. In 1814 he wrote, “Their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”⁷⁰

Jefferson’s contradictions extended into the sphere of rights as well. For instance, regarding blacks and rights Jefferson wrote, “whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”⁷¹ He made such declarations and railed against slavery in various ways, yet he continued to own, buy, and sell slaves throughout his life. And although Jefferson may have practiced more restraint than many of his slaveholding contemporaries, the horror of slavery was as real at Monticello as it was everywhere else.

Consider Jefferson’s treatment of a runaway slave named James Hubbard. When Hubbard first ran away and was recaptured, Jefferson refrained from punishing him for the “offense.” Indeed, after this first offense, Jefferson permitted Hubbard to make an unaccompanied, ninety-mile journey to a second Jefferson-family home to visit his relatives for Christmas. When Hubbard later “stole” from Jefferson—a capital offense at the time—Jefferson again refrained from retribution. Hubbard apologized profusely and appeared so remorseful that Jefferson said, “Ah . . . we can’t punish him. He has suffered enough already.” But after Hubbard escaped yet again, the vile nature of the master-slave relationship reared its head. As Jefferson explained, “I had him severely flogged in the presence of his old companions, and committed to jail.”⁷² (Jefferson may also have had sex and fathered children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, but the evidence is inconclusive and contested by many scholars.)⁷³

What is more, Jefferson not only maintained slaves; he also advocated the practice to others. Writing to the benefactor of a friend who had fallen on hard times, Jefferson said:

Should the favor of his relations be directed towards him in future, . . . I think I may pledge myself that it shall be every farthing of it laid out in lands and negroes, which besides a present support bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per cent in this country by the increase in their value.⁷⁴

As Jefferson owned more than six hundred slaves throughout his life, one can only assume that he reaped much “silent profit.” His failure to formally free more than a few slaves is often blamed on the fact that he inherited massive debts, had great financial difficulties, and thus was not in a position to free “property” that was effectively “owned” by those to whom he was in debt. But this argument has little merit given the fact that Jefferson continuously lived far beyond his means, building and rebuilding a mansion, buying fine wines, collecting art, and generally living the high life.

Jefferson was a thorough contradiction on the issue of slavery. Even so, much of his thinking, arguing, and political activism—particularly his statement in the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal”—ultimately helped to abolish slavery. Although justice demands that we recognize Jefferson’s own “moral reproach” on the issue of slavery, justice also demands that we recognize his part in ending this age-old atrocity. In 1859, less than two years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln did just that, writing:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.⁷⁵

‘A Boundless Field of Power’

Although Jefferson was cautious about granting excessive power to the federal government, he also saw the need for such a government in regard to both domestic and foreign policy. His main concern on this count was that federal powers remain checked by a constitution.

In 1783, as a member of Congress under the Articles of Confederation, Jefferson was frustrated by the divisiveness of the states and by the fact that “the Confederation had made no provision for a visible head of the government during vacations of Congress.” He later reflected that a head of government “was necessary to superintend the executive business” and thus recognized the “wisdom and practicability” of the American Constitution, which provided “a plurality of Counsellors, but a single Arbiter for ultimate decision.”⁷⁶

In 1788, after studying a draft of the Constitution, he wrote to James Madison, “It is a good canvas, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from North to South, which calls for a bill of rights.”⁷⁷ Jefferson recommended that nine states ratify the Constitution as drafted, and that the remaining four hold out until a bill of rights with “express declarations ensuring freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of the person under the uninterrupted protection of the Habeas corpus, & trial by jury in civil as well as in criminal cases,” was appended.⁷⁸ He also disapproved that the draft lacked presidential term limits and thus enabled a man to be reelected in perpetuity.⁷⁹

Jefferson held that the Constitution was a contract between the people and their government, and he was concerned to minimize the possibility that the contract would be interpreted in such a way as to give the government more power than intended. Correspondingly, he sought strictly to uphold the Constitution to its letter, especially against any efforts to grant additional power to the federal government.

For instance, when Alexander Hamilton proposed that the government create a bank in 1790, Jefferson looked to the Constitution for authorization and found none. Although a federal bank would be helpful to the government in managing its finances and paying its debts, Jefferson held that a “convenience” was not a justification. He argued that if any facility toward performing an enumerated power could be used as a justification for assuming a new one, there would be no power “which ingenuity may not torture into a convenience.”⁸⁰ He pointed out that the general welfare clause empowered the government only to lay taxes, “not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare.”⁸¹ To interpret providing for the general welfare as its own distinct power, wrote Jefferson,

Would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the U.S. and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they pleased.⁸²

Jefferson feared that the foundation of the limited, rights-protecting government would crack if the bank were instituted without an amendment to the Constitution. He warned that “to take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.”⁸³

Jefferson was constantly involved in political quarrels. But his distress over the growth of power in the U.S. government was one of his greatest concerns, and it swelled tremendously while he was vice president to John Adams.

In 1798, after a group of French ministers attempted to extort payments from American diplomats, Adams thought it necessary to curb civil liberties and thus signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. The first of these Acts allowed the president to deport any resident alien he considered dangerous. The second prohibited anyone to “write, print, utter or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, . . . with intent to defame . . . or to bring them . . . into contempt or disrepute, or to excite against them . . . the hatred of the good people of the United States.”⁸⁴

Jefferson considered these laws “an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the constitution.”⁸⁵ Through an intermediary, he proposed the Kentucky Resolutions, which opened with a clause specifying “That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government . . . and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”⁸⁶

Incensed by what he regarded as increasingly obvious breaches of the Constitution, Jefferson sought to end these usurpations. He ran for and won the presidential election of 1800.

‘Alas! Jefferson Is Not Destined!’

Jefferson’s presidency was fraught with difficulties that would put his principles to the test. Three in particular stand out.

The first began within a month of his being sworn in and would continue into his second term as president. Since the birth of the nation, pirates of the Barbary states had been preying on American ships in the Mediterranean, attacking them, taking the vessels, imprisoning sailors, and demanding ransom.⁸⁷ Whereas other countries paid the pirates “tribute” to secure safe passage, Jefferson had argued years earlier that “The motives pleading for war rather than tribute are numerous and honourable, those opposing them are mean and shortsighted.”⁸⁸ Congress, along with Presidents Washington and Adams, had held that a war with the Barbary pirates would be too costly, chiefly because America did not even have a navy until Adams established one toward the end of his presidency. So prior to Jefferson’s term as president, America had paid tribute.

In 1801, less than three weeks into his presidency, Jefferson gave orders to ready a naval squadron to defend U.S. shippers in the Mediterranean.⁸⁹ By the time the squadron arrived, Tripoli had already declared war on the United States for late tribute payments. The United States fought and won this first battle, bolstering Jefferson’s belief that the fleet, though small, could effectively dissuade the Barbary pirates from further aggression.

In 1803, the USS Philadelphia was captured by Tripoli after her crew grounded the ship on a reef while on patrol. Tripoli demanded $1,000 ransom for each of the ship’s 307 crewmen, making the total far higher than any previous demand. Making matters worse, the United States had reason to believe Tripoli would sell the Philadelphia, still fully intact, to another pirate state and American enemy, Algiers. This exchange would buoy Tripoli with cash and Algiers with another instrument of war. The U.S. Navy, thinking any mission to rescue the heavily guarded ship would fail, instead attacked and destroyed the Philadelphia before the stout, thirty-six-gun frigate could be turned against American sailors.

Meanwhile, Captain Richard Morris, who was put in command of U.S. forces in the Mediterranean in 1802, spent almost the entire year of 1803 in the port of Gibraltar, more than a thousand miles away from Tripoli, leading to his dismissal for “inactive and dilatory conduct.”⁹⁰

In 1804, under new leadership, the U.S. Navy launched a series of maneuvers against Tripoli, including an effort to obliterate a large portion of the Tripolitan force in one fell swoop by turning a captured ship into a “floating volcano” and sailing it into the enemy fleet.⁹¹ The extremely dangerous feat required that the ship, filled with explosives, be sailed relatively close to the enemy before being lit and abandoned by the crew. Unfortunately, the entire crew was killed when the ship was fired upon and destroyed before getting into range.

With calamities mounting, Jefferson became anxious for an end to the war. In 1805, William Eaton, a former army captain, led a group of eight marines and five hundred mercenaries on a five-hundred-mile trek across the desert. Their daring and unexpected land assault on the Tripolitan capital of Derna finally gave America the upper hand. But instead of continuing the war and pressing Tripoli for unconditional surrender, Jefferson allowed U.S. negotiators to pry American prisoners from the pasha’s still defiant fists with a $60,000 payment—feigning honor by calling it “ransom” rather than “tribute.” Thus, after years of opposing “shortsighted” negotiations with pirates, Jefferson negotiated with them, which indeed proved shortsighted.

The result was a resurgence of piracy against American ships that led to the second Barbary War. In 1816, with Madison as commander in chief, the war was prosecuted by the principles Jefferson had advocated but failed to practice, leading to a decisive and lasting American victory.

A second difficulty for Jefferson’s presidency arose upon hearing that Spain would retrocede its Louisiana territory in North America to France, which included the commercial hub of New Orleans. About this Jefferson wrote:

There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural & habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from it’s [sic] fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants. France placing herself in that door assumes to us the attitude of defiance.⁹²

Concurring about the “manifest and great danger to the nation,” one commentator wrote in the New York Evening Post:

This event threatens the early dismemberment of a large portion of our country . . . and remotely the independence of the whole union. . . . How is the evil to be averted? The strict right to resort at once to WAR, if it should be deemed expedient cannot be doubted. . . . There is not the most remote probability that the ambitious and aggrandizing views of Bonaparte will commute the territory for money. . . . If the President would adopt this course [of war] he might yet retrieve his character; induce the best part of the community to look favorably on his political career, exalt himself in the eyes of Europe, save the country, and secure a permanent fame. But for this, alas! Jefferson is not destined!⁹³

The commentator was Jefferson’s longtime adversary, Alexander Hamilton, who must have been as shocked as Jefferson to learn that Bonaparte was willing to sell, not only New Orleans, but the whole Louisiana Territory, “giving us,” as Jefferson put it, “the sole dominion of the Mississippi.”⁹⁴

Jefferson had every inducement before him to purchase the territory, but he was stymied by his own strict reading of the Constitution, and for the same reasons that he had argued against a federal bank. “The general government has no powers but such as the constitution has given it;” he wrote, “and it has not given it a power of holding foreign territory, & still less of incorporating it into the Union. An amendment of the constitution seems necessary for this.”⁹⁵

Yet, James Monroe—who at the time was in France and involved in the negotiations—wrote “that if we give the least opening they will declare the treaty void.”⁹⁶ Though Jefferson stuck to his interpretation of the Constitution, he nevertheless chose to violate it, reasoning that “we must ratify & pay our money, as we have treated, for a thing beyond the constitution, and rely on the nation to sanction an act done for it’s great good, without it’s previous authority.”⁹⁷ Jefferson retroactively drafted an amendment, but his cabinet argued that it was unnecessary, and Congress disregarded it.⁹⁸

In the end, Jefferson compromised his strict interpretation in order to double the size of the country while avoiding conflict and setting a precedent for acquiring land without war.

A third great difficulty for Jefferson’s presidency arose when both France and England began attacking American ships and impressing American sailors. In 1807, the British attack on the USS Chesapeake ignited public support for military measures. As the attorney general wrote regarding the event, it “has excited the spirit of 76 and the whole country is literally up in arms.”⁹⁹ But instead of war, Jefferson wanted to show Britain “that there are peaceable means of repressing injustice, by making it the interest of the aggressor to do what is just.”¹⁰⁰

He first attempted diplomacy by sending Monroe to England to renegotiate on impressment, a practice the Jay Treaty of 1795 failed to end. When this attempt also failed, Jefferson called for commercial rather than armed retaliation.

Later in 1807, Jefferson signed the Embargo Act, a measure intended to punish Britain and France by forbidding U.S. exports to either nation or their colonies. Because import duties from Britain and France made up more than 50 percent of the government’s revenue, Congress wanted British and French imports to continue flowing to America. Thus, the Act prohibited only exports from America to Britain and France. This had a devastating effect on American merchants, on businesses that relied on them, and thus on Americans in general. As honest men became smugglers in order to survive, Jefferson signed additional laws that exacerbated the injury by punishing violators of the embargo with either forfeiture of their ships or a fine of double the value of both the ship and its cargo.¹⁰¹ As one might expect, exports plummeted, Americans suffered, and the aggressor nations were left unscathed.

The embargo was repealed in Jefferson’s final days as president. But untold damage had already been done.

‘Thomas Jefferson Survives’

After two terms as president, Jefferson turned back to a mission that his federal duties had superseded. Jefferson knew firsthand the connection between education and liberty. He thought his own life’s work was possible chiefly because of the company he had kept in his youth with men of the mind, in the glow of their enlightenment ideals. Jefferson could have spent his life drearily, as many Virginia planters did, caring only for “his glass, his lass, his game of cards.”¹⁰² Instead, he filled his life with intellectual pursuits, which were fostered initially by three great thinkers. The first was professor William Small, a man of the Scottish Enlightenment. Small introduced Jefferson to Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Francis Fauquier, as well as the widely respected lawyer George Wythe, who would become Jefferson’s law professor and a fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence. While Jefferson was still a student, the four would gather to discuss the latest in science, politics, law, and art. Jefferson reflected some sixty years later that “to the habitual conversations on these occasions I owed much instruction.” Jefferson received a top-notch education in enlightenment ideas from men who were putting them to practical use in the affairs of the day, and in his own view, this “probably fixed the destinies of my life.”¹⁰³

Jefferson was “Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, & that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree.”¹⁰⁴ After retiring from the presidency, he would labor for the rest of his life creating a fount of enlightenment from which the future stewards of freedom might drink.

Within a year of retiring, Jefferson wrote a friend that he’d been spending his time, “& by no means the least pleasing,” directing “the studies of such young men as ask it.” He explained that they

Have the use of my library & counsel, & make a part of my society. In advising the course of their reading, I endeavor to keep their attention fixed on the main objects of all science, the freedom & happiness of man. So that coming to bear a share in the councils and government of their country, they will keep ever in view the sole objects of all legitimate government.¹⁰⁵

But Jefferson had bigger plans than mentoring the ambitious youths of his hometown. As early as 1779, he had dreamed up an entire system of education for all of Virginia.¹⁰⁶ In 1800, Jefferson had written to the learned gentleman and educator Joseph Priestley for assistance with his intention to create a “University on a plan so broad & liberal & modern, as to be worth patronising [sic] with the public support, and be a temptation to the youth of other states to come, and drink of the cup of knowledge & fraternize with us.”¹⁰⁷

Jefferson spent years of planning and campaigning for his vision of a university but garnered little support. Finally, in 1817, with the help of then-president James Monroe and prior president James Madison, Jefferson established a regional school. It would be another two years before Virginia Governor Wilson Cary Nicholas wrote to Jefferson that “Your college is made the University of Virginia. I call it your, as you are its real founder, its commencement can only be ascribed to you. To your exertions & influence its being adopted can only be attributed.”¹⁰⁸ This was not an overstatement. Jefferson had not only created the university’s purpose, curriculum, bylaws, and plans for faculty—he had also drawn the plans of the buildings themselves and began their construction in 1817, assuming the role of the university’s architect in both body and soul.¹⁰⁹

Jefferson was thrilled that his vision was now being implemented but worried that he would die before his work was through. He wrote to John Adams that though his age was beginning to wear on him, “I am fortunately mounted on a Hobby, . . . This is the establishment of an University, . . . But the tardiness with which such works proceed may render it doubtful I shall live to see it go into action.”¹¹⁰

At last, on March 7, 1825, the University of Virginia opened its doors to some thirty students. Twenty-five years earlier, while still president, Jefferson had expressed that “I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.”¹¹¹ Now he wrote a friend, “I am closing the last scenes of life by fostering and fashioning an establishment for the instruction of those who are to come after us. I hope it’s [sic] influence on their virtue, freedom, fame and happiness will be salutary and permanent.”¹¹²

On July 2, 1826—just over a year after the university debuted—Jefferson lapsed into a state of semiconsciousness from which he would never fully recover. Yet, he was as deliberate in dying as he was in living. When he periodically awoke, he asked whether it was yet the fourth of July. And he held on, until it was.

On the afternoon of July 4, fifty years to the day after his Declaration of Independence illuminated the world with the principle of liberty, Jefferson died at his home, Monticello. In one of history’s great coincidences, Jefferson’s friend and fellow revolutionary, John Adams, died that same day, but not before mustering the strength to say, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”¹¹³

The record by which Jefferson survives, today and for eternity, is by no means unblemished. He was a morally mixed man in both word and deed. Nonetheless, it is indisputable that his virtues eclipsed his vices. Jefferson was an intellectual giant whose key ideas lit up the world and still guide us today. Were it not for him, our world would be less bright, less free.

This is how Thomas Jefferson should be remembered.

About Jon Hersey

Jon Hersey is the associate editor of The Objective Standard. His work focuses on intellectual history, specifically, the ideas on which freedom and flourishing depend. He has published in-depth articles on John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Stark, William Wilberforce, Rosa Parks, and more.

View all articles by Jon Hersey →