Thomas Jefferson: Enlightenment Statesman and American Founder

The most famous passage in the Declaration of Independence — “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” — was written by a thirty-three-year-old Virginia lawyer sitting in a rented room on the second floor of a brick house at the corner of Market and Seventh Streets in Philadelphia, in the early days of June 1776. He was not, at the time, a famous man. He had been in the Continental Congress for less than a year. He was on the five-man committee that had been charged with drafting the document, but the committee was a kind of dumping-ground for the work no one else wanted to do, and the only other member of the committee who would have preferred Jefferson do the drafting was John Adams, who was already in a position of sufficient prominence to be unsuitable. Jefferson, as the only southern member of the Virginia delegation who was not already occupied with a war, was a sensible choice. He did the work, mostly, in ten days.

The document he produced was not, of course, an act of original philosophy. The natural-rights tradition it draws on is, by his own admission in a letter to Henry Lee of 1825, an appeal to “the harmonising sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.” The originality of the Declaration is not in the philosophy. It is in the application — the particular use to which Jefferson put the Lockean natural-rights tradition in a particular historical moment, and the particular way in which he managed to make the natural-rights argument a usable political instrument for a republic that was, in 1776, in the act of being created.

The man who wrote it was, in other respects, more complicated and more troubling than the mythology allows.

The Life

Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, his father’s plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia. He was the third of ten children of Peter Jefferson, a planter and surveyor of modest attainments, and Jane Randolph, who came from one of the most prominent families in the colony. His father died in 1757, leaving him a substantial estate, including the plantation at Shadwell and, by the standards of the time, an unusually large number of enslaved people — about forty at the time of the elder Jefferson’s death, and ultimately, at the height of Jefferson’s own career, more than six hundred.

The single most important intellectual event of his life was his encounter, at the College of William and Mary, with a Scottish-born professor named William Small. Small was a student of the Edinburgh philosopher and a member of the small circle that the Scottish moralists had formed in the 1750s. He introduced Jefferson to the British empiricist tradition — to Locke, to Bacon, to Newton — and, more importantly, he introduced Jefferson to the social world of the small, well-connected, and intellectually serious group of Virginia gentry who would form the political class of the revolutionary generation. The other important figures in that circle were the young George Wythe, who would teach Jefferson law and become his most exacting teacher, and the older Peyton Randolph, the king’s attorney general, who would later preside over the first Continental Congress.

The decade between 1769, when Jefferson entered the House of Burgesses, and 1776, when he drafted the Declaration, was a long period of political apprenticeship. He was not, in the conventional sense, a great orator. He was a writer — the work for which the Burgesses would become famous was done in committee rooms, in correspondence, and in pamphlet form — and a tireless political organizer. The Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), a pamphlet he wrote for the Virginia Convention, established him, in the eyes of John Adams, as the best political writer in the colonies. The Declaration, two years later, was the work of a man who had learned his craft.

The years after the Declaration were, by his own account, more interesting. He served as minister to France from 1785 to 1789, the period of the convocation of the Estates-General, the storming of the Bastille, and the first, hopeful year of the Revolution. He was the first American minister accredited to the new French Republic. He served as Secretary of State under Washington from 1790 to 1793, in a cabinet that also included Alexander Hamilton and that produced, within three years, the political divisions of the next half-century. He was Vice President under John Adams from 1797 to 1801, in an administration that he spent most of his time attacking from the floor of the Senate.

The presidency, 1801–1809, was the period in which the political philosophy was, for the first time, applied to the specific problems of a continental republic. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which doubled the size of the United States in a single transaction, was, in Jefferson’s private correspondence, a deliberate violation of his own constitutional principles. The Lewis and Clark expedition was an act of the most aggressive natural-philosophical exploration of the century, organized by a man who, on the bench of the Supreme Court, would have found a way to declare it unconstitutional. The contradictions were, in some cases, productive. In other cases — most notoriously in the case of his relationship with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, and in his public defense of slavery in the Notes on the State of Virginia — they were not.

The Declaration

The Declaration of Independence is, in its philosophical structure, an essay in three movements. The first is a statement of natural-rights doctrine: human beings are equal in possession of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; these rights are unalienable; governments are instituted to secure them and derive their powers from the consent of the governed. The second is an indictment of the British Crown, a bill of particulars in twenty-seven charges, which Jefferson had the prudence to draft with the help of Adams and Franklin, and the unfortunate impulse to add a paragraph on the British slave trade that the Congress removed. The third is a declaration, in the strict sense, of independence.

The philosophy is, in the strict sense, Lockean. The rights are unalienable in Locke’s sense — they are not transferable, and no generation has the right to bind subsequent generations to a particular form of government. The argument about the dissolution of government is Locke’s, from the Second Treatise, and it is, in fact, the entire argument of the Second Treatise in seven paragraphs. The new wrinkle — the addition of “the pursuit of Happiness” to the Lockean triad of “life, liberty, and property” — is the most-quoted change and the least-understood. Jefferson’s private correspondence suggests that he made the change because he thought “the pursuit of Happiness” was a more accurate translation of the Stoic idea of eudaimonia that was, in his reading, the proper end of human life. The change has been the source of more constitutional commentary than almost any other sentence in American public discourse, and the interpretive debate — the question of whether the right is a right to pursue a particular kind of life, or a right to a particular kind of life — is still open.

The Declaration was a founding document of the modern human-rights tradition, and it is, as such, the most-quoted text in American politics. The scholarly debate about it has been, on the whole, the most productive in American intellectual history. The older view — most influentially argued by Carl Becker in The Declaration of Independence (1922) — was that the document was, in its philosophy, an essay in the natural-rights tradition, and that the natural-rights tradition was, in the strict sense, a piece of self-deception. The more recent view, in the work of the legal historian Jack Rakove, of the political theorist Michael Zuckert, and of the philosopher James Carey, has been that the natural-rights argument was, in fact, a usable political instrument and that the Declaration, properly read, is the founding document of a constitutional republic rather than a manifesto of metaphysical natural rights. The argument is well advanced, but it is not closed.

The Other Political Works

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted by Jefferson in 1777 and enacted by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786, is the most important American document of the Enlightenment tradition of religious liberty. The statute declared that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever,” and that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion.” The text is short — about a hundred words — and it is, in the judgment of this writer, the single most important sentence of American political philosophy before the Reconstruction Amendments. The text was the basis of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, and it is the most direct contribution of the Enlightenment tradition to the American constitutional order.

The Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) is the most thorough and most troubling of Jefferson’s major works. The book is, in part, a description of the geography, the natural history, the political institutions, and the social conditions of Virginia, and it is the best single source for the social history of the late colonial South. The book’s most famous passages — the argument that African Americans are physically and intellectually inferior to white Americans, the defense of the institution of slavery as a necessary evil that would, eventually, have to be abolished — are the basis of the long argument about Jefferson’s relationship to the institution of slavery. The argument is not, in the judgment of this writer, settled.

The Monticello library, of about 6,700 volumes, was sold to Congress in 1814 to replace the Library of Congress that the British had burned in the previous year. The catalogue of the library is, in effect, the catalogue of the working library of an American Enlightenment intellectual. It is heavily weighted in history, law, classical literature, and the natural sciences. The Bible is in it, but only in the original languages.

The Religious and Philosophical Views

Jefferson’s religious views were, in his private correspondence, considerably more radical than the views of any other American founder. He was, in the strict sense of the term, a deist — he believed in a God who had created the universe and who was accessible to human reason through the study of nature, and he rejected the supernatural claims of organized religion. He did not believe in the Trinity, in the divinity of Christ, in the miracles of the Bible, or in the authority of any particular church.

The most controversial of his religious works was the Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth — a small volume he compiled in his later years by cutting and pasting the relevant sections from the four Gospels with a razor and glue. The work, which was not published in his lifetime, presented Jesus as a great moral teacher, stripped of the supernatural claims that Jefferson found so objectionable. The “Jefferson Bible,” as it is now called, was, in the nineteenth century, the basis of a small religious movement that took Jefferson as a kind of unofficial patron saint. In the twentieth century, it became, in the hands of a small group of conservative Christians, an embarrassment.

A Judgement

The contradiction between Jefferson’s principles and his practice has been the subject of intense debate, and the debate is not, in the judgment of this writer, settled. The most thoughtful recent scholarship — Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello (2008), on the relationship between Jefferson and the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, and the work of the historians Christa Dierksheide, of Edward Gray, and of the political theorist Rogers Smith — has done a great deal to complicate the older hagiographical accounts. The fact of the slavery is, of course, not in dispute. The fact that Jefferson was one of the most important architects of the modern natural-rights tradition is also not in dispute. The fact that the two facts are related — that the natural-rights argument, in the eighteenth century, was an argument made by and for propertied white men, and that the appeal to universal rights was, in practice, a way of making the institution of slavery invisible — is, in the judgment of this writer, the most important thing about the Jeffersonian tradition.

The defenders of Jefferson — and there are serious defenders, most recently in the work of the political theorist Garrett Epps and of the historian John Boles — point out that Jefferson was, in his private correspondence, an opponent of slavery from his early twenties, that he included a clause against the slave trade in the original draft of the Declaration, that he proposed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery in 1784, and that he lived to see the beginning of the abolitionist movement. The critics — and the critical work has, in the last twenty years, become a small industry — point out that the antislavery clauses were consistently removed from the documents, that the constitutional amendment was defeated, and that the practical effect of Jefferson’s career was to perpetuate the institution of slavery for another half-century.

The best of the recent scholarship — the work of Gordon-Reed, of John Stauffer, of Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf in their joint biography Most Blessed of the Patriarchs (2016) — has tried to take both facts seriously. The verdict that comes out of this work is that the contradiction is, in fact, the central fact about Jefferson, and that the work of understanding him is the work of holding the two facts in mind at the same time.