Thomas Jefferson and Politics: “A game where principles are the stake” (original) (raw)
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"Rights and Slavery in Thomas Jefferson's Political Thought"
American Studies in Scandinavia 53:2, 2021
Jefferson is famous for his advocacy of equal rights of men, religious freedom, and democracy throughout the United States. He is equally (in)famous for his racist statements, for his little concern for women's rights, for his apparently unrealistic anti-slavery policies, and for his strongly anti-Federalist politics. This article will make clear that his political solution to the problem of slavery was not as far-fetched at the time as many scholars still tend to think it was. His fame as the high priest of minimal government also needs to be reconsidered given his hugely expensive, governmental solution to the problem of slavery. It is also important to grasp how very restricted a role Jefferson attributed to the federal government in putting his abolition plan into effect. The only aspect concerning the federal government in Jefferson's plan had to do with financing and sending slaves abroad after each state's individual decision of emancipation.
This talk explores the intensely personal paths which Jefferson and his contemporaries traveled in choosing sides in the American Revolution. For many British Americans, 1776 was an end, rather than a beginning, of individual revolutions that confirmed or converted their constitutional faith. Patriots and loyalists distilled ideas, experience, and circumstance into transformative personal decisions in intimate ways, yet a new American political culture demanded that those private political thoughts be made public through words, like the Declaration of Independence, or deeds, such as taking up arms against family and friends.
Virtuous Empire: The Jeffersonian Vision for America
2012
The Revolution Jefferson's primary contribution to the political thought of the Revolutionary period was his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. The line we all rem.ember from the Declaration is the section from the Preamble on "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." This line was clearly influenced by John Locke's principle of "Life, Liberty, and Property" in his Second Treatise on Government. One could take Jefferson's importation of Locke's ideas to mean that he was at heart a Lockean liberal, and that like Locke .:.... he was primarily concerned with economic liberty. Although this interpretation does not tell the whole story, it isn't without grounding given that Jefferson acknowledged he was an admirer of Locke. 4 According to Locke, all men possess certain natural rights that cannot be infringed. Above all, every man possesses a natural right to liberty, meaning that he is not subject to the will of others and owes obedience to no one but himself. However, in a state of nature men can use their liberty to harm others; especially by theft or destruction of another individual's property. This is not a state of affairs under which any rational man would want to live in because he would•be "subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary" wills of others. 5 Therefore, in order to be more secure in their property, individuals transfer their natural liberty over to a sovereign that may enforce laws protecting property rights. Locke says that "[t]he great and chief end therefore, of
Beyond the Schoolhouse Door: Educating the Political Animal in Jefferson's Little Republics
Democracy Education, 2015
Jefferson believed that citizenship must exhibit republican virtue. While education was necessary in a republican polity, it alone was insufficient in sustaining a revolutionary civic spirit. This paper examines Jefferson's expectations for citizen virtue, specifically related to militia and jury service in his 'little republics. ' Citizens required not only knowledge of history and republican principles, but also public spaces where they could personify what they learned. Jefferson often analogized the nation as a ship at sea, and while navigational instruments are necessary in charting an accurate course, i.e., republican theories, they become inconsequential without the decisive action required for their successful use. W riting to Samuel Kercheval (12 Jul. 1816) regarding his concern over calling a convention to reform Virginia's constitution, Jefferson affirmed his dissatisfaction with the constitution's structural provisions. After expounding on its inadequate design, he disparagingly asked, "Where then is our republicanism to be found" (Jefferson, 1984, p. 1397)? Reminding Kercheval of his earlier and similar disappointment with the nation's organic law, Jefferson (1984) commented, "The infancy of the subject at that moment, and our inexperience of self-government, occasioned gross departures in that draught from genuine republican canons" (p. 1396). His reflection revealed a sense of sustained ineffectuality giving rise to the sterile mechanics of constitutionalism and the administration of state altogether lacking in genuine republican substance. "In truth, " he demurred, "the abuses of monarchy had so much filled all the space of political contemplation, that we imagined everything republican which was not monarchy" (1984, p. 1396). Fear, pessimism, and misunderstanding, rather than a true appreciation of republican doctrine, Jefferson believed, explained the architectural deficiencies in and the diminution of republican principles from the constitutional scaffolding upon which the nation and the State of Virginia were to be governed. Events had proven what Jefferson earlier feared-namely, the potential aggrandizement of national power at the expense of local and state sovereignty. Jefferson's response to this pervasive setback lay in his reliance on abstract republican principles and the ancient democratic Saxon constitution, which he often drew upon as a means of evaluating existing political practices. He perpetuated this Saxon myth by emphasizing the importance of and necessity in developing citizen
Cambridge University Press, 2017, 2017
ABSTRACT This political biography of Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia," his only published book, challenges conventional wisdom by demonstrating its core political thought as well as the political aspirations behind its composition, publication and initial dissemination. Building upon a close reading of the book's contents, Jefferson's correspondence and the first comprehensive examination of both its composition and publication history, the authors argue that Jefferson intended his Notes to be read by a wide audience, especially in America, in order to help shape constitutional debates in the critical period of the 1780s. Jefferson, through his determined publication and distribution of his Notes even while serving as American ambassador in Paris, thus brought his own constitutional and political thought into the public sphere - and at times into conflict with the writings of John Adams and James Madison, stimulating a debate over the proper form of Republican constitutionalism that still reverberates in American political thought. CONTENTS Introduction Part I. Origins and Influences: 1. The Composition History of Jefferson's Notes 2. The Formal Structure of Jefferson's Notes Part II. Interpretation: 3. Reading the Notes, Part I - Nature 4. Reading the Notes, Part II - Cautious Philosophy 5. Reading the Notes, Part III - Peoples and Constitutions 6. Reading the Notes, part IV - Republican Reforms Part III. Publication and Reception: 7. The Publication History of Jefferson's Notes 8. Jefferson, Adams, and the View of Rebellion from Abroad 9. Jefferson, Madison, and Republican Constitutionalism Conclusion.
Developing Freedom: Thomas Jefferson, the State, and Human Capability
Studies in American Political Development, 2013
Thomas Jefferson is often invoked as an advocate of limited government and a defender of individual rights. This article argues that rights were Jefferson's starting place. Jefferson also believed that American citizens should have opportunities to develop the capabilities necessary to enjoy the full use of their rights. Rather than thinking about Jefferson as progovernment or antigovernment, this article concludes that we must understand the particular kind of government Jefferson desired, the ends he had in mind, and why and how those ends differed from his Federalist predecessors. A better understanding of Jefferson's statecraft not only offers a new perspective on the relationship between government and rights in Jefferson's thought but also how and why Jeffersonians in power used the state to promote individual freedom.
Thomas Jefferson and His Views on Equality
2000
The 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the rise of revisionism in the discipline of history, followed by the political and social upheavals in the 1960s, has reopened the question of how Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, justified owning the slaves while he drafted the famous phrase that "all men are created equal." The misunderstanding surrounding Jefferson's authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his views on equality comes from our present conception of equality as we read the document. This paper first examines what Jefferson meant by the phrase "all men are created equal," emphasizing that the document aimed not to achieve universal equality, but to achieve America's equal station to Britain. Jefferson's views on equality are then reviewed by examining Jefferson's opinions on slavery, both racial and non-racial. Throughout his life Jefferson hoped that slavery would be terminated in America. Yet, he also supported the plan of deporting African-Americans outside the United States. Mixture of two different races was the obstacle which kept Jefferson from envisioning a racially harmonious society. Because he abhorred miscegenation, Jefferson's alleged relationship to Sally Hemings, his slave girl, has drawn new interest in researching Jefferson's private and public writings on race and equality. The Jefferson-Hemings story needs to be reexamined as more than a tarnished political scandal. Racial mixture and fixed racial inequality were practiced, preserved, and repeated in his home, where the very
“My Ancient Faith”: Abraham Lincoln’s Response to the Jeffersonian Problem
Polity, 2022
In this paper I consider the "Jeffersonian problem": whether one generation has the right to bind future generations to an inherited constitutional order. Thomas Jefferson's challenge rests on fundamental democratic principles of equality and consent, and therefore-while there may be substantial pragmatic reasons to be wary of his argument-any response must also remain true to those moral ideals. I argue that through the crisis of slavery and the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was compelled to revisit the basis of the American political regime, and in doing so articulated a conception of democratic politics that answers Jefferson's challenge. He does so in two ways: first, Lincoln's political religion revives reverence for the ancestral in a democratic context; second, Lincoln's concept of rededication allows each generation to affirm that revered past while simultaneously manifesting its own sovereign power through novel applications of past principle. I conclude by arguing that the inclusion of generational obligations is essential to democratic politics and that Lincoln's approach provides the best means of doing so.