"To close the circle of our felicities": Caritas and Jefferson's first inaugural

Review of Politics

Volumn 66, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 181-205

  Holland, Matthew S ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 43249184209     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500037268     Document Type: Article

References (127)

1. As founding rector of the University of Virginia, an aging Thomas Jefferson insisted that students be "inculcated" in the Declaration of Independence which he designated the first of four "best guides" to the "distinctive principles" on which American government rests. See the "Minutes of the Board of Visitors," March 4, 1825 in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 479.
2. See Garrett Ward Sheldon's twenty-three page appendix on the historiography of Jefferson's political thought in The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 148-170
3. and articles by Peter Onuf, "The Scholars' Jefferson," William and Mary Quarterly 50, no.4 (1993): 671-699
4. and Lance Banning, "Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic," William and Mary Quarterly 43, no.1 (1986): 3-19.
5. Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), argues that Jefferson reflects classical republicanism as it gets reformulated in eigthteenth-century English-opposition thought.
6. Paul Rahe, in "Thomas Jefferson's Machiavellian Political Science," Review of Politics 57, no.3 (1995), stresses more of a renaissance republicanism in Jefferson's politics.
7. Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1978).
8. Wills's particular thesis-that Jefferson was influenced by Scottish moral sense thinkers to the virtual exclusion of John Locke-has been roundly refuted by Ronald Hamowy, "Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills's Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence," William and Mary Quarterly 36, no.4 (October 1979): 503-523.
9. For more effective treatments of how this school of thought may have influenced Jefferson, see Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);
10. Jean M. Yarbrough, American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998)
11. and Allen Jayne, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy and Theology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).
12. Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1984).
13. Michael P. Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 7.
14. Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, Lyman. H. Butterfield et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 1:423.
15. Jefferson prepared a document for the Declaration's drafting committee now referred to as Jefferson's "original Rough draught," a text Jefferson preferred over the final version as edited first by the drafting committee, then the full Continental Congress.
16. See Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books 1998), pp. 103-105.
17. Arthur M. Schesinger, "The Lost Meaning of the 'Pursuit of Happiness,' William and Mary Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1964): 325-28;
18. and Wills Inventing America p. 251.
19. For fuller treatment of this interpretation, see Zuckert, Natural Rights Republic, pp. 31-40;
20. Ronald Hamowy, "Declaration of Independence" in Encyclopedia of American Political History: Studies of the Principle Movements and Ideas, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York: Charles Schribner's Sons, 1984), pp. 457-58;
21. and Maier American Scripture p. 136.
22. Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1907), 15:124.
23. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. Crawford Brough Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), p. 46.
24. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York: H. Holt, 1948), p. 53;
25. John P. Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 37.
26. Adrienne Koch, "Power and Morals and the Founding Fathers," Review of Politics 15, no 4 (1953): 478.
27. Hamowy, "Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment," p. 519.
28. Also see Stephen E. Lucas, "Justifying America: The Declaration of Independence as a Rhetorical Document," in American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), p. 85.
29. Jean Yarbrough mounts the most plausible objection to this interpretation by showing that while Jefferson's own thoughts on happiness do not circumscribe the right to the pursuit of happiness, perhaps a larger "American" understanding of happiness does. Yet in the end, even she admits that "nothing in Declaration denies us the right to pursue happiness as we [today] understand it" (American Virtues, p. 14).
30. Similarly, Richard Matthews, who sees a strong, nonliberal, public happiness component embedded in Jefferson's larger political thought, also agrees that Jefferson's rhetoric in the Declaration decidedly makes use of a more vaguely understood "universal" sense of happiness to be defined in the "private realm" (Matthews, Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson, pp. 88-89).
31. Jefferson, Writings, p. 285.
32. Of the oft-quoted, and more traditionally religious passages, the opening "endowed by their Creator" line gets inserted by the Drafting Committee (Julian P. Boyd, The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of the Text as Shown in Facsimiles of Various Drafts by its Author, Thomas Jefferson [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945], p. 29)
33. and the closing appeal to the "supreme judge of the world" and acknowledgement of "a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence" were inserted by the Continental Congress in Ml (Boyd, Declaration of Independence, p. 34
34. George Mason, The Papers of George Mason, 1749-1778, vol.1, ed. Robert Allen Rutland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), p. 285.
35. Also see Maier, American Scripture, pp. 124-126, 268.
36. Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, January 1, 1802, in Jefferson, Writings, p. 510.
37. Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:525-558
38. See Eugene R. Sheridan's introduction to Jefferson's Extracts From the Gospels: "The Philosophy of Jesus " and "The Life and Morals of Jesus," ed. Dickinson W. Adams and Ruth W. Lester (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 5.
39. Letter to Joseph Delaplaine, December 25, 1816 in Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels, p. 382.
40. Sheridan, introduction in Jefferson's Extracts From the Gospels, p. 6.
41. Jefferson, Jefferson s Literary Commonplace Book, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 33.
42. Jefferson, Jefferson s Literary Commonplace Book 1989 Ibid., p. 42.
43. Jefferson, Jefferson s Literary Commonplace Book 1989 Ibid., pp. 24-25.
44. Jefferson, Jefferson s Literary Commonplace Book 1989 Ibid. p. 55.
45. Jefferson, Jefferson s Literary Commonplace Book 1989 Ibid. Ibid., p. 35.
46. Douglas L. Wilson, introduction to Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book, pp. 5-8.
47. Also see Adrienne Koch, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), pp. 2, 4.
48. Jefferson, Extracts from the Gospels, p. 388, emphasis added.
49. Jefferson, Extracts from the Gospels Ibid., p. 414, emphasis added.
50. Jefferson, Extracts from the Gospels Ibid., p. 348 (Letter to John Adams, August 22, 1813).
51. Wilson, introduction to Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book, pp. 16-17.
52. Also see Donald J. D'Elia, "Jefferson, Rush, and the Limits of Philosophical Friendship," in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117, no.5 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1973): 336-337
53. In his autobiography, The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: His "Travels Through Life " Together with His Commonplace Book for 1789-1813, ed. George W. Corner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948)
54. Rush notes that the accusation that Jefferson was "unfriendly to Christianity" when he drafted the Declaration "may be true. His notes contain some expressions which favor this opinion." But, it was Rush's sense that during their later Philadelphia conversations the "objects of [Jefferson's] benevolence were as extensive as those of his knowledge. He was not only the friend of his country, but of all nations and religions" (pp. 152, 151).
55. Letter of April 21, 1803, in Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels, p. 331.
56. Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels Ibid., p. 334.
57. Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels Ibid., p. 334.
58. "The Philosophy of Jesus," lost shortly after Jefferson's death, has been ingeniously reconstructed by Dickson Adams. See "The Reconstruction of 'The Philosophy of Jesus'" in Extracts from the Gospels, pp. 45-53.
59. Emphasizing how important this book was to Jefferson is the fact that late in retirement Jefferson redid it (titling it "The Life and Morals of Jesus"), feeling that the first one was "too hastily done" (Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels, pp. 37-2, 38, 369, 352).
60. (Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels Ibid., p. 365 (letter to Charles Thomson, January 9, 1816).
61. Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels Ibid., pp. 57-59.
62. Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels Ibid., p. 59.
63. The New Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, s. v. "agape."
64. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition designates "charity" as "Christian love: a word representing caritas of the Vulgate" and notes that it is often applied as "Man's love of God and his neighbor, commanded as the fulfilling of the law, Matt, xxii. 37, 39."
65. Also see Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953)
66. and Garth Hallet, Christian Neighbor-Love: An Assessment of Six Rival Versions (Washington, D. C: Georgetown University Press, 1989).
67. Clifford Orwin, "Machiavelli's Unchristian Charity," American Political Science Review 72, no.4 (1978): 1222-1223
68. This understanding of charity, not nearly as common today, was more prevalent in Jefferson's day. Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language opening definition indicates that charity is mostly used either "in a general sense" to mean "love, benevolence, good will," or "in a theological sense, [where] it includes supreme love to God, and universal good will to men."
69. In the First Epistle of John (4:10-21)-a book entirely excluded from Jefferson's New Testament-one reads, "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. ... We love him because he first loved us. ... And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also."
70. Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels, p. 355.
71. Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels Ibid., pp. 356-357
72. Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels Ibid., p. 357
73. Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels Ibid., p. 405 (letter of June 26, 1822).
74. Luebke, "The Origins of Thomas Jefferson's Anti-Clericalism," Church History 32, no.3 (1963): 344, 352.
75. Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels, p. 327 (letter to Joseph Priestly, April 9, 1803), 320 (letter to Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800).
76. Letter to Judge John Tyler, March 29, 1805, in Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson,U:69.
77. Jefferson's biographers-who typically devote just a few pages to the First Inaugural-are universally robust in their praise of this speech. Ellis considers it "an eloquent" expression of "panoramic wisdom," a "seminal statement in American history," and something that "can be read with profit on several levels" (Joseph E. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998], pp. 192).
78. Malone writes of its "enduring appeal" because of its "verbal felicity" and "timelessness" of thought (Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President- First Term [Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970], p. 17).
79. And Peterson recommends it as "an address to be studied and pondered in the cool reflection of the written word," for never was Jefferson's "happy faculty of condensing whole chapters into aphorisms more brilliantly displayed" (p. 655). Despite this, no detailed study of the speech by a political theorist or intellectual historian has previously been done.
80. Letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789 in Jefferson, Writings, p. 941.
81. Conventions of the day were such that Jefferson did very little campaigning, or campaign management (Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000], p. 210).
82. He does appear, though, to have at least tacitly supported James Callender in his vicious and often unfounded attacks on John Adams's fitness for the presidency (Ellis, American Spinx, pp. 218-19;
83. David McCullough, John Adams [New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001], pp. 536-537:
84. Also see John H. Aldrich and Ruth W. Grant, "The Antifederalists, the First Congress, and the First Parties," The Journal of Politics 55, no.2 [1993]: 295-326).
85. Also see Charles O. Lerche, Jr. "Jefferson and the Election of the 1800: A Case Study in the Political Smear," The William and Mary Quarterly 5, no.4 (1948): 468,469
86. Charles O. Lerche, Jr. "Jefferson and the Election of the 1800: A Case Study in the Political Smear," The William and Mary Quarterly 5, no.4 (1948) Ibid., p. 470 fh. 4, see all;
87. Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels, p. 10.
88. Luebke, Anti-Clericalism, pp. 344-347
89. Ellis, American Sphinx, p. 130.
90. This increasing conflict greatly influenced Rush's efforts to convince Jefferson of Christian charity's vital role in stabilizing the union, and Federalist accusations factored heavily in Jefferson's efforts to come more precisely to grips with what he really believed about Christianity (see D'Elia's "Jefferson, Rush and the Limits of Philosophical Friendship" and Sheridan's introduction to Jefferson's Extracts From the Gospels, especially pages pp. 12-17).
91. And the often acid and unjust quality of these accusations also helps explain that while Jefferson came to embrace warmly components of Christian morality, he never lost a deep antipathy toward zealously sectarian forms of Christianity. It was not just that he thought orthodox clerics were wrong intellectually, or theologically; many had personally and profoundly hurt him (Luebke, Anti-Clericalism, see all).
92. In a June 25, 1819 letter to Ezra Stile, Jefferson recognizes the discrepancy between the Christian morality he came to espouse and his hard feelings toward many in the clergy, confessing, I am sometimes more angry with [certain Christian ministers] than is authorized by the blessed charities [Jesus] preached" (Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels, p. 387).
93. Jefferson, Writings, p. 1089, emphasis added.
94. These and all subsequent references to Jefferson's First Inaugural are taken from "Jefferson's Inauguration Address, March 4, 1801" as found in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden, Modern Library ed. (New York: Random House, 1993), pp. 297-301.
95. Jefferson strikes a similar note in the middle of the speech when he refers to America as "a chosen country," and "the world's best hope" (biblical imagery Lincoln later picks up on).
96. Ellis, American Sphinx, p. 301.
97. Ellis, American Sphinx Ibid., p. 119.
98. As Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p. 57, explains, the famous Danbury Letter, where Jefferson introduces the "wall of separation" metaphor, was specifically written to explain why Jefferson would not continue such a tradition.
99. See also Driesbach, '"Sowing Useful Truths and Principles': The Danbury Baptists, Thomas Jefferson, and the 'Wall of Seperation,"' Journal of Church and State 39, no.3 (1997): 462-466
100. Even Jean Yarbrough, whose particularly thoughtful treatment of Jefferson comports with the argument of this paper, suggests that "Jefferson never systematically explores what he means by happiness in general or the pursuit of happiness in particular. Nearly all of his comments about happiness occur in private correspondence addressed to a wide variety of family, friends, acquaintances, and even strangers, in which the meaning of happiness is often casually treated" (American Virtues, pp. 14-15).
101. Malone, Jefferson the President-First Term, p. 18.
102. Ellis, American Sphinx, p. 182.
103. Besides working to retire the national debt (a welcome surprise to many Federalists), Jefferson allowed many Federalist officers to keep their government positions (ibid., pp. 194-99).
104. In detailing this, Ellis quotes a letter from Jefferson, who speaks of believing that by working to "conciliate the honest part of those who were called federalists, and do justice to those who have so long been excluded from it, I shall hope to be able to obliterate, or rather unite the names of federalists and republicans" (ibid., p. 198).
105. The letter's tone and lower-case spellings of the two parties further undermine Ellis's claim about the significance of the lower-case spellings of "republican" and "federalist" in the First Inaugural.
106. Ibid.,p. 183.
107. Ibid.,
108. Contrast this with the self-oriented and controlling tone of Andrew Jackson's First Inaugural where the phrase "I shall" is employed six times in a speech half as long (U.S. Congress, Senate, Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States: From George Washington 1789 to George Bush 1989, 101st Cong., 1st sess., 1989, S.101- 10,61-64).
109. In Webster's 1828 dictionary, "affection" prominently appears in the definitions of both "love" and "charity." Also, dreariness, or rather "dreary," is said to imply "both solitude and gloom," emphasizing in a second way that a lack of human happiness appears linked to a lack of human connection.
110. Emphasis added.
111. Emphasis added.
112. Felicity's first definition in Webster's 1828 Dictionary is "Happiness, or rather great happiness."
113. In an "Opinion on the French Treaties" to Washington (1793), Jefferson argued that "the law of self-preservation overrules the laws of obligations to others." See Jefferson, Writings, p. 423.
114. Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 212.
115. The other principles Jefferson recognizes are "support of state governments ... as the most competent administrators of domestic concerns," "preservation of the general government . . . as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad," "right of election by the people," "acquiescence in the decisions of the majority," "a well disciplined militia," "supremacy of the civil over the military authority," "economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burdened" (the third reference to keeping government collection and spending of monies at a minimum), "honest payment of our debts," "encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid," "diffusion of information," the "protection of habeus corpus," and "trial by juries." Combined with the "freedom of religion" and the "freedom of the press," these are what Jefferson believes "forms the bright constellation" that guided America through its "revolution," from English rule, and now must guide it through its "reformation" of Federalist rule.
116. The sole exception in this list of minimalist ideals is Jefferson's commitment to the "encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid." This highlights a heretofore underemphasized point. Jefferson's post-Priestly/Rush moral world was never exclusively liberal/rational-Christian. Always in the mix was a significant current of classical republican attention to the virtues found in laboring the land and enjoying the pastoral life. By privileging agriculture over commerce-yet not to the exclusion of the latter-Jefferson simultaneously honors his conviction that people should be free in the choice of their pursuits as he acknowledges that a nation of farmers was more likely to preserve the very freedoms and ideals of the Declaration than a nation of merchants. As Jefferson once wrote to John Jay in 1785, "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, & they are tied to their country, & wedded to its liberty & interests, by the most lasting bonds" (Jefferson, Writings, p. 818).
117. Jefferson Writings Ibid., p. 1110, emphasis added.
118. Writing well into his retirement, in an 1816 letter to Joseph C. Cabell, Jefferson says, "Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police, and administration of what concerns the State generally; the counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each ward direct the interests within itself {ibid., p. 1380).
119. In 1785, Jefferson led the effort to pass a bill updating a 1775 Virginia statute designed to render aid and give care to the "poor, lame, impotent, blind, and other inhabitants of the county as are not able to maintain themselves" (Jefferson, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, p. 420). The major difference between the policies of 1775 and 1785 is that, in keeping with Jefferson's desire for a stronger separation of Church and State, the care for the poor gets transferred from Anglican vestrymen to aldermen of the county.
120. Jefferson, Writings, pp. 1087-1088
121. Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels, p. 360, emphasis added.
122. The use here of "moral agents" is again a reminder that Jefferson's later concept of Christian love builds on an earlier "moral sense" understanding of love which Jefferson developed in college, prior to the Declaration (Yarbrough, American Virtues, pp. 17-18). This suggests that Jefferson saw "social love" and philosophical liberalism as compatible at the time of the Declaration, the difference being that later this social love took on more distinct Christian hues and political importance than Jefferson saw in 1776.
123. Many have pointed out that it is just this kind of love that ultimately heals the rift between Adams and Jefferson. Benjamin Rush, ceaseless in advocating the importance of Christian charity for American politics, patiently goads both men (at one point warning Adams that he and Jefferson will soon die and stand before a "Judge with whom the forgiveness and love of enemies is the condition of acceptance") toward a heartfelt reconciliation.
124. See Lyman H. Butterfield, "The Dream of Benjamin Rush: The Reconciliation of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson," The Yale Review 40, no 2 (1950): 297-319;
125. Lester J. Cappon, The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), pp. 284-86;
126. Ellis, Founding Brothers, pp. 206-248
127. Letter to Miles King, September 26, 1814 in Jefferson, Extracts From the Gospels, p. 360.