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The Enigmas of Thomas
Jefferson…
J. Bradford DeLong
U.C. Berkeley
, WCEG, and
NBER
http://bradford-delong.com
::
brad.delong@gmail.com
:: @delong
2017-01-30
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s_Jefferson
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jefferson.html
6727 words
1
Every time I start thinking about Thomas Jefferson
,
I get
distracted by the family psychodrama—and by the plight of
the Hemings family—and by the fact that TJ named one of
his sons by Sally Hemings, born at the start of Jefferson
’
s
second term as president,
“
Madison
”
.
I wonder what Jemmy Madison thought of that, and
whether Jefferson told him personally that he had done
so
…
I. Jeffersonian Roads Taken and Not
Taken
1
A. Thomas Jefferson’s Education
Whether Thomas Jefferson's vision of the future of America
was coherent was unclear then and remains unclear now.
Jefferson, like most of his founding-father contemporaries,
was steeped in one version of classical history: Roman
history as a morality play. Jefferson and many, many of his
revolutionary peers assumed that yeoman farmers—
Cincinnati
—were the only possible social class that could
maintain a free republic. They all believed that Rome was a
great, free Republic because of its fi ercely-independent
farmers who nevertheless loved their city and would—like
2
1
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/11/the-jeffersonian-vision.html
Cincinnatus—drop their ploughs and instantly take up their
swords to defend (and conquer), and then return to their
ploughs after the war was over.
The history that he and his peers had been taught was that
the two centuries around the start of the Christian era saw
the transformation of Rome from a virtuous farmer's
republic into an unequal, commercial, corrupt, imperial city
of plutocrats and proletarians. The wealth of conquest
corrupted the Republic, so their teachers taught them,
transforming Italy into a land of plutocrats, moneylenders,
slaves, and driving the former self-suffi cient yeomen off
their land into the city. There they subsisted on bread and
circuses and became proletarians—the Roman mob which
was such easy prey to demagogues. Thus the virtuous city
of Rome degenerated into the unequal, commercial,
corrupt, imperial city of proletarians and plutocrats over
which demagogues and then demagogues fought.
The Emperor Augustus stabilized the situation at the price
of the Romans' liberty, but only for a while. Afterwards the
best that could be hoped for was the benevolent rule of a
wise autocratic emperor. And after a run of fi ve—Nerva,
Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—
Rome's luck ran out.
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B. Jefferson’s Vision and Revolution
Jefferson and his followers saw the transformation of
London into an unequal, commercial, corrupt, imperial city
as a similar threat to British liberty. Indeed, what they saw
as the threat of the spread of imperial corruption from
London across the Atlantic was one of the reasons that they
made the American Revolution.
Republican virtue was to be found only in the countryside,
where people worked hard and wrested their living from
the soil. But Jefferson did not set his hand to the plough.
And his family’s plantations were arenas of vice and
domination to a degree that far surpass the corrupt London
of George III Hanover. Jefferson did, however, free those of
his slaves who were descended from himself.
Making this historical morality play very real indeed to
Jefferson
’
s generation was their fi rm belief that eighteenth-
century Britain was repeating Roman history. Eighteenth-
century Londoners saw their civilization as in an
“
Augustan
Age
”
—and the rebel American colonists saw that as no
good thing.
That is why they rebelled.
Rebel colonial grievances up to 1775 were not because the
tyranny of London was then so burdensome—stamp taxes,
tea imports, arbitrary royal governors, continental-system
4
trade restrictions, and even the closing of Boston's port
were not intolerable, but the precedent that Americans were
not citizens but subjects was intolerable in the context of
what they saw as Britain's steps along the road of imperial
destiny.
C. Jefferson’s Road Not Taken
And
,
after the Revolution was won, one of Jefferson's
highest priorities was to keep the cycle of urban-imperial
corruption and subsequent loss of liberty from happening
again by making sure that Philadelphia and New York did
not become Rome.
After all, in
the eyes of Jefferson and
company, Republican virtue was to be found only in the
countryside, where people worked hard and wrested their
living from the soil.
W
hile imperial Britain’s rule was a bad thing in Jefferson
’
s
view, the agrarian economy that imperial Britain’s
mercantilist policies had gardened its North American
colonies into was a good thing because it kept Americans
close to the soil, and hence virtuous.
The Jeffersonian current in American politics was indeed
strong. A generation after Jefferson, the president was
Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson
’
s enemies were:
Amerindians, bankers, corrupt government contractors, and
anyone who favored literacy or property tests that kept the
5
vote from the (white, male) rural adults with their hunting
rifles whom Jackson as president believed had come down
the Mississippi at the end of 1814 and so enabled him to
win the Battle of New Orleans. A Jefferson-Jackson United
States would have been rural, Anglo-Saxon, Southern and
Border-Southern, and not a technological-leader but rather
a technological-follower nation.
What would have been the long-term consequences if
America had not taken the Hamiltonian turn? What would
the world in 1900 have looked like if the United States had
focused on specializing in its comparative advantage of
resource-intensive products and bought most of its
manufactures from Britain and Europe?
Ah! Counterfactuals!
II.
Thomas Jefferson and Dumas
Malone
2
Does Thomas Jefferson deserve a biographer like Dumas
Malone? Does anyone deserve a biographer like Dumas
Malone?
6
2
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/
000054.html
From Dumas Malone (1962),
Jefferson and the Ordeal of
Liberty
(New York: Little, Brown), pp. 45 ff.:
Early in the year, Jefferson, writing a private letter to
William Short [TJ to Short, Jan 3, 1793; Ford, VI,
153-7], now at The Hague, in the paternal tone which
he had not yet laid aside, chided his former secretary
for the
“
extreme warmth
”
with which the latter had
censured the proceedings of the Jacobins
[Robespierre and company] in recent letters.
He did this at the injunction of the President
[Washington], he said, expressing the fear that if
Short
’
s criticisms became known they would injure
him at home as well as abroad, since they would not
be relished by his countrymen. This private letter
contains as fervid comments as Jefferson ever made
on the French Revolution, and it has been widely
quoted by later writers for just that reason.
Jefferson's proneness to express himself more
vehemently in private letters and memoranda than in
public papers and offi cial pronouncements does not
make him unique among human beings. Other
responsible offi cers besides him have let themselves
go in private while weighing their public words,
though the reverse has often been the case with
campaign orators—of whom he was never one.
Whether the measured judgments of a responsible
statesman or the unrestrained private language of the
same man should be regarded as the better index of
his true sentiments is perhaps an unanswerable
question, and both must be taken into account by
ano
d
yne seeking to arrive at truth. A statesman must
be judged at last by his public policies and offi cial
acts, which represent the results of his sober
deliberation, but private language affords an
7
important clue to the state of his own mind and
emotions. The contrast was unusually sharp in the
case of Jefferson, who imposed extraordinary
restraint on himself as a public man....
To hostile interpreters this apparent contradiction has
lent color to the charge of duplicity... [but] his friends
could not have been unaware of his proneness to
exaggeration when blowing off steam in private; and
the persons most aware of it should have been his
young friends [like Short].... No saying can be fully
understood out of its specifi c setting, and some of the
most vivid of Jefferson's were pedagogical in
purpose.... This letter to Short is a case in point. The
essential and abiding truth embedded in it is that all
human progress is costly, especially progress toward
liberty and democracy; butr much of its imagery is
such as poets would use—not mathematicians or
coldly calculating statesmen
.
Jefferson's defense of the Jacobins... need not detain
us.... [H]is information... could not be up to date... To
him the Jacobins were merely the republican element
in the old party of the Patriots, and the Feuillants...
the monarchical. His friend Lafayette had belonged
to the latter group, and he himself had been far from
unsympathetic
…
.
But in the year 1793... he was convinced that the
“
expunging
”
of the King had become an absolute
necessity
…
.
[
…
]
Short needed comfort, however, more than logic. The
personal cost of the revolution was mounting, and the
human toll was being taken among the very people
whom he and Jefferson had valued most during the
latter's stay in France. Lafayette... in custody, and the
8
liberal-minded Duc de la Rouchefoucauld... snatched
from his carriage and killed before the eyes of his old
mother and young wife... [this] affected Short the
most... embitter[ed] him.
Jefferson... was well aware of the general trend when
he sought to bring philosophy to bear on these fearful
developments.
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 anybody, 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.... 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 the 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
…
In the last two sentences Jefferson indulged in
hyperbole.... [T]he record of Jefferson's reasoned and
disciplined life gives every ground to suppose that he
himself would have recoiled from [their literal
application].... He would certainly have said no such
thing in public, and he could hardly have been
expected to anticipate that private words of his would
be quoted to schoolboys in later generations, seized
upon by political partisans, or exploited by reckless
demagogues.
9
In writing to one he regarded as a son he let his
poetic imagery run away with him.... [H]e was saying
that despotism had been overthrown in France...
would eventually be overcome everywhere... in the
light of this vast triumph for... human liberty the
losses must be regarded as slight. He afterwards had
to revise the casualty lists upward, but he was
prepared for that... the abiding signifi cance of his
re
fl
ections lies in his frank recognition that the cost
of liberty may be and frequently is exceedingly
high...
p. 12: The
“
coalition
”
with Hamilton, which the
President [Washington] suggested in February,
Jefferson objected to chiefly on domestic grounds....
[H]e renewed his allegations about improper
influences on the legislative branch of the
government.
“
My wish was to see both houses of
Congress cleansed of all persons interested in the
bank or public stocks,
”
he said;
“
and that, a pure
legislature being given us, I should always be ready
to acquiesce under their determinations, even if
contrary to my own opinions, for that I subscribe to
the principle that the will of the majority honestly
expressed should give law.
”
Also, he confi rmed the
fears of his Chief about discontent among
Southerners, attributing this to the sacrifi ce of of their
judgment and interests to those of the North, by
means of a
“
corrupt squadron
”
in Congress under the
command of the Secretary of the Treasury
…
Thomas Jefferson was a great man and a small man. We
know the great man well. Biographers like Dumas Malone
however, try hard to keep us from knowing the small man
at all
: the one who was too approving of the Jacobins and
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