Robert M. S.McDonald, ed. Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. 256 pp. Cloth $40.00 (original) (raw)

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

"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.