The mind of Thomas Jefferson

The Mind of Thomas Jefferson

Volumn , Issue , 2012, Pages

  Onuf, Peter S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

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References (99)

1. This essay was originally published, with Ari Helo, in William & Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 583-614.
2. Thomas Jefferson (hereafter TJ), Autobiography (Jan. 6-July 29, 1821), in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson Writings (New York, 1984), 3-101, quotations on 44.
3. The quotation is from TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, 1954), 138.
4. TJ elaborated his emancipation scheme most fully in a letter to Jared Sparks, Feb. 4, 1824, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1486-87.
5. For further discussion, see Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, VA, 2000), 147-88.
6. Recognition of the historicist dimension of early American political thought reveals striking historiographical differences within both the "republican" and Lockean "liberal" paradigms, complicating the conventional juxtaposition of the two schools. J. G. A. Pocock's analysis of Machiavellian republicanism as an early, nascent form of modern, historicist thinking remains suggestive. Successive "moments" in Pocock's conceptual history-classical, Machiavellian, and Rousseauean-can be seen as part of the complex historical pedigree of what he calls a modern "Western awareness of human historicity"
7. (J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition [Princeton, NJ, 1975], 551).
8. TJ to Lafayette, Feb. 14, 1815, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1361.
9. See Paul Finkelman's strong criticism of TJ in this respect, in "Jefferson and Slavery: 'Treason against the Hopes of the World,' " in Peter Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville, VA, 1993), 181-221.
10. For the accusation that TJ simply chose "political usefulness" over "active opposition to slavery," see John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Jefferson and Slavery (1977; Charlottesville, VA, 1991), 279.
11. I qualify this assertion in "Every Generation Is an 'Independant Nation': Colonization, Miscegenation, and the Fate of Jefferson's Children," in this volume.
12. TJ to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1501.
13. On TJ's authorship, see the brilliant discussion in Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA, 1993).
14. TJ, "original Rough draft" and Declaration of Independence as Adopted by Congress, July 4, 1776, in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 32 vols. to date (Princeton, NJ, 1950-), 1:423-28, quotation on 426, emphasis added.
15. The most persuasive critique along these lines can be found in Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997).
16. TJ to Edward Coles, Aug. 25, 1814, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1344, emphasis added.
17. TJ, "original Rough draft" and Declaration of Independence as Adopted by Congress, July 4, 1776, in Boyd et al., eds., Jefferson Papers, 1:426, emphasis added.
18. We are indebted here to Jan Ellen Lewis, "The Problem of Slavery in Southern Discourse," in David Thomas Konig, ed., Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic (Stanford, CA, 1995), 265-97.
19. TJ's "A Bill concerning Servants" thus provided that no further compact between master and servant was to be regarded as valid, because the servant had consented to such an exceptional compact (Boyd et al., eds., Jefferson Papers, 2: 473-75).
20. Locke, Second Treatise, in Laslett, ed., Two Treatises of Government, § 24:9-12, p. 285.
21. Locke explained here that selling oneself could mean only selling oneself "to Drudgery, not to Slavery."
22. Important works on Kames include William C. Lehmann, Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Study in National Character and in the History of Ideas (The Hague, 1971);
23. Arthur E. McGuinness, Henry Home, Lord Kames (New York, 1970);
24. Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (Oxford, 1972).
25. On Kames's legal thinking, see David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, UK, 1989).
26. One of the central themes of the Scottish common-sense school was, of course, to block routes to moral skepticism that Berkeley's and Hume's treatment of the general Lockean epistemology seemed to offer.
27. For a good introduction to the problematic issue of how to see Locke's moral thought as the link between the older school of natural law theorists and the Scottish Enlightenment, see also Knud Haakonssen's illuminating account of contemporary natural jurisprudence and its religious premises, in Haakonssen, ed., Thomas Reid, Practical Ethics: Being Lectures and Papers on Natural Religion, Self-Government, Natural Jurisprudence, and the Law of Nations (Princeton, NJ, 1990).
28. Lord Kames (Henry Home), Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (Edinburgh, 1751), 147.
29. E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols. (Charlottesville, VA, 1983), 2:11-12.
30. Garry Wills's contention (in Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence [Garden City, NY, 1978], 293-94) that this extract separates TJ's position from Locke's understanding of the state of war being continued between the master and his slave is misleading.
31. Wills's adherence to the notion of all-embracing benevolence as equivalent to the emotionally determined moral sense of man leads him to the erroneous conclusion that TJ rejected the Lockean understanding of the state of war.
32. The argument merely affirmed the validity of the Lockean notion of the state of war between the oppressor and the oppressed without any suggestion that human affections could alter the situation in moral terms.
33. In fact, TJ denied the Lockean right to retribution by the victor only insofar as it concerns individuals and not nations.
34. See TJ to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, in Dickinson W. Adams, ed., Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels: "The Philosophy of Jesus" and "The Life and Morals of Jesus" (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 358.
35. TJ's moral statements convey a moderate skepticism about all moral theories rather than any definite position among such moral sense theorists as Hutcheson, Kames, Reid, and Shaftesbury.
36. Modern philosophers still differ on how to interpret Hutcheson's moral sense doctrine. See, for example, P. J. E. Kail, "Hutcheson's Moral Sense: Skepticism, Realism, and Secondary Qualities," History of Philosophy Quarterly 18 (2001): 57-77, where Hutcheson's approach is analyzed as a kind of "non-realism" and contrasted with the old interpretations of Hutcheson's sentimentalism as well as with his alleged moral realism.
37. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London, 1739), bk. 3, pt. 2, § 1-24;
38. Kames, Essays, passim. Hutcheson, according to Kames, says "there is naturally an obligation upon all men to benevolence," a view that "falls far short of the whole idea of obligation."
39. For Kames, the term "obligation" covers, first and foremost, the necessary duties of justice without which no human society can survive. It is something we, indeed, occasionally neglect, but only against our instinctive orientation toward the moral good, so that conscious reflection is always involved when "a wrong" is done (see Kames, Essays, 57, 70).
40. Kames, Essays, 136, 111, 88-90.
41. Kames is not Hume, who erroneously (according to Kames) "endeavours to resolve the moral sense into pure sympathy" (Kames, Essays, 57).
42. Kames, Essays, 86, emphasis in original.
43. Kames, Essays, 85-86.
44. On the recurrent theme of corruption as related to both the Kamesian notion of civilization as well as to his esthetic theory, see McGuinness, Henry Home, Lord Kames, 120-39, quotation from Kames on 125.
45. Kames, Essays, 28.
46. Kames, Principles of Equity, 8.
47. TJ, The Rights of British America, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 111.
48. These themes are elaborated in Onuf, Jefferson's Empire, 147-88.
49. Because TJ thought that no "just war" could justify the institution, it followed that the only method to reestablish reciprocity was to abolish the institution.
50. Its liberalization would have made no difference in this respect.
51. James Oakes points out that it was well after the Civil War that the real disfranchisement of the African American took place: "Defining slavery not as a labor system, which had clearly been destroyed, but as one of 'race control,' which was now being restored, leading Southerners argued that the social order of their own age was largely continuous with its antebellum counterpart" (Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South [New York, 1990], 204).
52. See TJ to James Monroe, Nov. 24, 1801, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1098, for his confusing, ambiguous formulations about the relation between the colonization of Virginia slaves and slave rebellions, with such remarks as, that "acts deemed criminal by us" might be deemed "meritorious, perhaps" by the Haitian revolutionaries.
53. TJ to Samuel Kercheval, Sept. 5, 1816, in Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 vols. (Washington, DC, 1903-1904), 15:71-72.
54. Writing about political developments in France, TJ asserted that the "government she can bear, depends not on the state of science, however exalted, in a select band of enlightened men, but on the condition of the general mind" (TJ to Lafayette, May 14, 1817, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1407).
55. "Will not a lover of natural history," viewing "the gradations in all the races of animals . . . excuse" his preference for keeping "those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them" (TJ, Query 14 ["Laws"], in Peden, ed., Notes, 143).
56. With regard to women's political rights, the principle appears to have been the same; TJ stated that the "appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I" (TJ to Albert Gallatin, Jan. 13, 1807, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 12 vols. [New York, 1904-1905], 10:339).
57. TJ to Edmund Randolph, Aug. 18, 1799, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1068.
58. John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (Fredericksburg, VA, 1814), 394, 390.
59. For TJ's favorable commentary on this part of Taylor's work, see TJ to John Taylor, May 28, 1816, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1391-95.
60. TJ, Autobiography [1821], in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 44.
61. TJ, Query 18 ("Manners"), in Peden, ed., Notes, 163.
62. It is important to bear in mind that for most eighteenth-century moral philosophers "duty" denoted the virtues of man in his various roles as a family member, a statesman, or an individual under the moral law of nature. Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (London, 1985), illustrates the meaning of the functional notion of man in moral theory by noting that "it is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that 'man' ceases to be a functional concept" (58-59).
63. The various theories about the most extensive catalogue of Ciceronian "daily" duties must be kept separate from the highly complex question of the extent to which the obligatory notion of morality was elaborated in the various pre-Kantian moral doctrines with which TJ was familiar.
64. See the discussion in Karl Lehmann, Thomas Jefferson, American Humanist (1947; Charlottesville, VA, 1985), 122.
65. The quotation is in Douglas L. Wilson, ed., Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book (Princeton, NJ, 1989), 60n.
66. Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, iii, 1.
67. Even if TJ, as Michael P. Zuckert asserts, "never spoke of Hutcheson at all," "never once recommended Hutcheson's book to those who sought guidance on reading in politics and law," and "never owned Hutcheson's major work" (Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism [Princeton, NJ, 1994], 19)
68. this book was recommended by TJ to John Minor for studies in no lesser a field than that of ethics and natural religion (TJ to John Minor, Aug. 30, 1814, in Ford, ed., Works of Jefferson, 11:422n).
69. Dugald Stewart, The Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), vol. 1 of The Works of Dugald Stewart (Cambridge, UK, 1829), 284-89, quotation on 237.
70. TJ to Thomas Earle, Sept. 24, 1823, in Lipscomb and Bergh, eds., Writings of Jefferson, 15:471.
71. TJ to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, in Adams, ed., Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels, 357.
72. Jean M. Yarbrough's suggestion that TJ somehow misunderstood his own ethics arises partly from her failure to distinguish fully the notion of moral obligation from the widely accepted practical notion of duties as Ciceronian "offices."
73. By equating some more or less given notion of moral obligation with the commonplace, Pufendorf-inspired, catalogues of "duties we owe to others" and "to God" (and these, in turn, with the Jeffersonian moral virtues), Yarbrough ends up proclaiming that, "for Jefferson, all our obligations are meshed together into a seamless web of social utility" (American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People [Lawrence, KS, 1998], 153, 194-95, emphasis added).
74. No virtuous action, according to TJ, could be obligatory beyond the minimum contemporary standard of justice, whereas any virtuous act beyond this minimum could be genuinely beneficent to some people if not harmful to any others.
75. TJ to Robert R. Livingston, Sept. 9, 1801, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1091-95.
76. TJ to James Monroe, July 14, 1793, in Boyd et al., eds., Jefferson Papers, 26-503.
77. TJ to George Logan, May 11, 1805, in Ford, ed., Works of Jefferson, 10-141.
78. TJ to P. S. Dupont de Nemours, Jan. 18, 1802, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1101.
79. In any case, TJ thought the greatest moral teacher, the historical Jesus of Nazareth, had said all that needed to be said on the issue.
80. What Jesus had failed to do was to translate the principle of universal benevolence into a fully developed "system" of morality that would offer guidance in practical decision making (see TJ to Benjamin Rush, "Syllabus of an Estimate of the merit of the doctrines of Jesus," April 21, 1803, in Adams, ed., Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels, 333).
81. TJ to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787, in Boyd et al., eds., Jefferson Papers, 12:15.
82. On either a "savage" or a civilized man being "unbiassed by habits," see TJ, Report on Negotiation with Spain, March 18, 1792, in Ford, ed., Works of Jefferson, 6:425.
83. TJ to Jean Nicolas Démeunier, June 26, 1786 (Jefferson's answers to Démeunier's queries), in Boyd et al., eds., Jefferson Papers, 10:63, emphasis added.
84. TJ, Query 14 ("Laws"), in Peden, ed., Notes, 142.
85. On freedmen's customary thefts, see TJ to Edward Bancroft, Jan. 26, 1789, in Boyd et al., eds., Jefferson Papers, 14:492.
86. TJ to Jean Nicolas Démeunier, April 29, 1795, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1028.
87. We will forgo extensive quotation from this oft-quoted discussion. TJ, Query 14 ("Laws"), in Peden, ed., Notes, 143, quotation on 139.
88. TJ, Query 14 ("Laws"), in Peden, ed., Notes, 142;
89. Wills, Inventing America, 224-26.
90. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil (1725-1726;1964), § 4, 3:122 , in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1726).
91. This was the thrust of TJ's scheme for public education in Virginia: "By that part of our plan which prescribes the selection of the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated" (TJ, Query 14 ["Laws"], in Peden, ed., Notes, 148).
92. When emphasizing that individuals are genuinely different in their talents, TJ also held that it is possible that the "want or imperfection of the moral sense in some men" is just like the want of "the senses of sight and hearing in others" (TJ to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, in Adams, ed., Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels, 357).
93. TJ to Richard Price, July 11, 1788, in Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 2:9.
94. TJ, Query 18 ("Manners"), in Peden, ed., Notes, 162.
95. TJ to Joseph C. Cabell, Jan. 22, 1820, in Ford, ed., Works of Jefferson, 12:155;
96. TJ, quoted on the threat of descending to the level of the black man, in Miller, Wolf by the Ears, 257.
97. TJ, Query 19 ("Manufactures"), in Peden, ed., Notes, 165;
98. TJ to Joseph C. Cabell, Feb. 2, 1816, in Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, 1381.
99. TJ, Query 14 ("Laws"), in Peden, ed., Notes, 138.