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Letters from Jefferson to John Norvell (11 June 1807), to William Duane (12 August 1810), to Horatio G. Spafford (17 March 1814), to [George Washington Lewis] (25 October 1825); selections.
Thomas Jefferson
In the 1760s and 1770s a young Thomas Jefferson purchased, read, commonplaced, re-purchased, re-read, and otherwise absorbed Hume’s History of England. He even recommended to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., Peter Carr, and Robert Skipworth, that they read Hume’s History too. But from 1807 until his death in 1826, Jefferson’s recorded comments on Hume were negative ones. Reprinted below are illustrative selections from four of Jefferson’s letters. Here, Jefferson shows his preference for John Baxter’s A new and impartial history of England; from the most early period of genuine historical evidence, to the end of the present year; written on a plan entirely new, agreeable to the true principles of liberty and the British constitution (London, 1796). For Jefferson’s differences from Hume on the topic of history, see Craig Walton, “Hume and Jefferson on the Uses of History,” in Donald W. Livingston and James T. King, eds., Hume: A Re-evaluation (New York, 1979), pp. 389–403.
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Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell (11 June 1807):
. . .
History in general only informs us what bad government is. But as we have employed some of the best materials of the British constitution in the construction of our own government, a knolege of British history becomes useful to the American politician. There is however no general history of that country which can be recommmended. The elegant one of Hume seems intended to disguise & discredit the good principles of the government, and is so plausible & pleasing in it’s style & manner, as to instil it’s errors & heresies insensibly into the minds of unwary readers. Baxter has performed a good operation on it. He has taken the text of Hume as his ground work, abridging it by the omission of some details of little interest, and wherever he has found him endeavoring to mislead, by either the suppression of a truth or by giving it a false coloring, he has changed the text to what it should be, so that we may properly call it Hume’s history republicanised. He has moreover continued the history (but indifferently) from where Hume left it, to the year 1800.
The work is not popular in England, because it is republican: & but a few copies have every reached America. It is a single 4to. volume. Adding to this Ludlow’s Memoirs, Mrs. M’Cauley’s & Belknap’s histories, a sufficient view will be presented of the free principles of the English constitution.
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Thomas Jefferson to William Duane (12 August 1810):
. . .
I have been long intending to write to you as one of the associated company for printing useful works.
Our laws, language, religion, politics, & manners are so deeply laid in English foundations, that we shall never cease to consider their history as a part of ours and to study ours in that as it’s origin. Every one knows that judicious matter & charms of stile have rendered Hume’s history the manual of every student. I remember well the enthusiasm with which I devoured it when young, and the length of time, the research & reflection which were necessary to eradicate the poison it had instilled into my mind. It was unfortunate that he first took up the history of the Stuarts, became their apologist and advocated all their enormities. To support his work, when done, he went back to the Tudors, and so selected and arranged the materials of their history as to present their arbitrary acts only, as the genuine samples of the constitutional power of the crown, and, still writing backwards, he then reverted to the early history, and wrote the Saxon & Norman periods with the same perverted view. Altho’ all this is known, he still continues to be put into the hands of all our young people, and to infect them with the poison of his own principles of government. It is this book which has undermined the free principles of the English government, has persuaded readers of all classes that these were usurpations on the legitimate and salutary rights of the crown, and has spread universal toryism over the land. And the book will still continue to be read here as well as there. Baxter, one of Horne Tooke’s associates in persecution, has hit on the only remedy the evil admits. He has taken Hume’s work, corrected in the text his misrepresentations, supplied the truths which he suppressed, and yet has given the mass of the work in Hume’s own words. And it is wonderful how little interpolation has been necessary to make it a sound history, and to justify what should have been it’s title, to wit, ‘Hume’s history of England abridged and rendered faithful to fact and principle.’ I cannot say that his amendments are either in matter or manner in the fine style of Hume. Yet they are often unperceived, and occupy so little of the whole work as not to depreciate it. Unfortunately he has abridged Hume, by leaving out all the less important details. It is thus reduced to about one half it’s original size. He has also continued the history, but very summarily, to 1801. The whole work is of 834 quarto pages, printed close, of which the continuation occupies 283. I have read but little of this part. As far as I can judge from that little, it is a mere chronicle, offering nothing profound. This work is so unpopular, so distasteful to the present Tory palates & principles of England that I believe it has never reached a 2nd edition. I have often inquired for it in our book shops, but never could find a copy in them, and I think it possible the one I imported may be the only one in America. Can we not have it reprinted here? It would be about 4 volumes 8vo.
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Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford (17 March 1814):
. . .
In truth Blackstone and Hume have made tories of all England, and are making tories of those young Americans whose native feelings of independence do not place them above the wily sophistries of a Hume or a Blackstone. These two books, but especially the former, have done more towards the suppression of the liberties of man, than all the millions of men in arms of Bonaparte and the millions of human lives with the sacrifice of which he will stand loaded before the judgment seat of his maker. I fear nothing for our liberty from the assaults of force; but I have seen and felt much, and fear more from English books, English prejudices, English manners, and the apes, the dupes, and designs, among our professional crafts. When I look around me for security against these seductions, I find it in the wide spread of our Agricultural citizens, in their unsophisticated minds, their independence and their power if called on to crush the Humists of our cities, and to maintain the principles which severed us from England.
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Thomas Jefferson to [George Washington Lewis] (25 October 1825):
Dear Sir,
I do not know whether the Professors to whom ancient and modern history are assigned in the University have yet decided on the course of historical reading which they will recommend to their schools. If they have, I wish this letter to be considered as not written, as their course, the result of mature consideration, will be preferable to any thing I could recommend. Under this uncertainty, and the rather as you are of neither of these schools, I may hazard some general ideas, to be corrected by what they may recommend hereafter.
In all cases I prefer original authors to compilers. For a course of ancient history, therefore, of Greece and Rome especially, I should advise the usual suite of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Diodorus, Livy, Cæsar, Suetonius, Tacitus and Dion, in their originals, if understood, and in translations if not. For it’s continuation to the final destruction of the empire we must then be content with Gibbons, a compiler, and with Segur, for a judicious recapitulation of the whole. After this general course, there are a number of particular histories, filling up the chasms, which may be read at leisure in the progress of life. Such is Arrian, Q. Curtius, Polybius, Sallust, Plutarch, Dionysius, Halicarnassus, Micasi, &c. The ancient universal history should be on our shelves as a book of general reference, the most learned, and most faithful perhaps that ever was written. It’s style is very plain, but perspicuous.
In modern history, there are but two nations with whose course it is interesting to us to be intimately acquainted, to wit: France and England. For the former Millot’s general history of France may be sufficient to the period when 1 Davila commences. He should be followed by Perefixe, Sully, Voltaire’s Louis XIV and XV, la Cretelle’s XVIIIme siècle, Marmontel’s Regence, Foulongion’s French revolution, and Madame de Staël’s, making up by a succession of particular history, the general one which they want.
Of England there is as yet no general history so faithful as Rapin’s. He may be followed by Ludlow, Fox, Belsham, Hume and Brodie. Hume’s, were it faithful, would be the finest piece of history which has ever been written by man. It’s unfortunate bias may be partly ascribed to the accident of his having written backwards. His maiden work was the history of the Stuarts. It was a first essay to try his strength before the public. And whether as a Scotchman, he had really a partiality for that family, or thought that the lower their degradation the more fame he should acquire by raising them up to some favor, the object of his work was an apology for them. He spared nothing, therefore, to wash them white, and to palliate their misgovernment. For this purpose he suppressed truths, advanced falsehoods, forged authorities, and falsified records. All this is proved on him unanswerably by Brodie. But so bewitching was his style and manner, that his readers were unwilling to doubt anything, swallowed every thing, and all England became Tories by the magic of his art. His pen revolutionised the public sentiment of that country more completely than the standing armies could ever have done, which were so much dreaded and deprecated by the patriots of that day.
Having succeeded so eminently in the acquisition of fortune and fame by this work, he undertook the history of the two preceding dynasties, the Plantagenets and Tudors. It was all important in this 2nd work to maintain the thesis of his 1st, that ‘it was the people who incroached on the sovereign, not the sovereign who usurped on the rights of the people.’ And again, chapt 53rd, ‘the grievances under which the English labored [to wit: whipping, pillorying, cropping, imprisoning, fining, &c.,] when considered in themselves, without regard to the constitution, scarcely deserve the name. Nor were they either burthensome on the people’s properties, or any wise shocking to the natural humanity of mankind.’ During the constant wars, civil and foreign, which prevailed while these two families occupied the throne, it was not difficult to find abundant instances of practices the most despotic, as are wont to occur in times of violence. To make this 2rd epoch support the 3rd, therefore required little garbling of authorities. And it then remained, by a 3rd work, to make of the whole a compleat history of England, on the principles on which he had advocated that of the Stuarts. This would comprehend the Saxon and Norman conquests, the former exhibiting the genuine form and political principles of the people constituting the nation, and founded in the rights of man, the latter build on conquest and physical force, not at all affecting moral rights, nor even assented to by the free will of the vanquished. The battle of Hastings indeed was lost but the natural rights of the nation were not staked on the event of a single battle. Their will to recover the Saxon constitution continued unabated, and was at the bottom of all the unsuccessful insurrections which succeeded in subsequent times. The victors and vanquished continued in a state of living hostility, and the nation may still say after losing the battle of Hastings,
‘What tho’ the field is lost?
All is not lost, the unconquerable will
And study of revenge, immortal hate
And courage never to submit or yield.’
The government of a nation may be usurped by the forcible intrusion of an individual into the throne. But to conquer its will, so as to rest the right on that, the only legitimate basis, requires long acquiescence and cessation of all opposition. The whig historians of England therefore have always gone back to the Saxon period for the true principles of their constitution, while the tories and Hume, their Coryphæus, date it from the Norman conquest, and hence conclude that the continual claim by the nation of the good old Saxon laws, and the struggles to recover them, were ‘encroachments of the people on the crown, and not usurpations of the crown on the people.’ Hume, with Brodie, should be the last histories of England to be read. If first read, Hume makes an English tory, from whence it is an easy step to American toryism. But there is a History, by Baxter, in which, abridging somewhat by leaving out some entire incidents as less interesting now than when Hume wrote, he has given the rest in the identical words of Hume, except that when he comes to a fact falsified, he state it truly, and when to a suppression of truth, he supplies it, never otherwise changing a word. It is in fact an editic expurgation of Hume. Those who shrink from the volume of Rapin, may read this first, and from this lay a first foundation in basis of truth.