3
Introduction
This chapter looks to Jefferson as a possible source and illustration of the abiding confusion in the West about the meaning of democracy.1 Like Jefferson, many democratic leaders are torn between a desire for direct popular rule and another, competing desire for the proper will of the people to be expressed. Jefferson is torn between a reverence for the common people and the belief that his own republican vision is the only valid one for the American republic.2 This typical bifurcation of the popular will between its actual, historically manifest desires and an ideal interpretation of it is first outlined in Rousseau’s Social Contract and is a hallmark of democratism.3 While outwardly the people’s champion, Jefferson nevertheless expresses a clear preference for an “enlightened” democracy that has many of the features of the democratist ideology.
It is time for a reassessment of this American framer and his understanding of democracy, which has greatly influenced not only American national identity but arguably the self-understanding of other democratic nations that have turned to Jefferson as a source of inspiration. This chapter tries to elucidate the paradoxical nature of democratism by focusing especially on the symbiotic relationship between Romanticism and Enlightenment rationalism in the thought of Jefferson. The first part of this chapter examines the tension between Jefferson’s agrarianism and his progressive faith in scientific rationality with a view to illustrating this same dynamic within the logic of democratism. The second part of the chapter examines Jefferson’s desire to expand the “empire of liberty” through the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson’s motives for territorial expansion and his policies toward Native Americans reveal practically some of the more sinister implications of his paradoxical understanding of democracy. An outspoken advocate of states’ rights and federalism, Jefferson nonetheless sought territorial expansion and the removal of native peoples from the land, moves that concentrated greater power in the national government and trampled the rights of indigenous peoples. The concrete examples from Jefferson’s presidency illustrate his commitment to a type of democracy that he does not always spell out. A look at his actions deepens our understanding of his theory. As with other thinkers examined in this book, Jefferson’s use of benevolent-sounding abstract language tends to mask practical realities that undermine those very goals.
The idea that Jefferson is a contributor to a widespread ideology of democracy will no doubt alarm many. There are many sides to Jefferson and many different interpretations of this American framer. Because Jefferson never wrote political treatises, his political philosophy must be discerned through his letters—of which there are many thousands—his inaugural addresses, his Notes on the State of Virginia, and various other writings, including of course the Declaration of Independence. The fact that there are such a vast number of interpretations of Jefferson that are at odds with one another suggests that his thought is not always consistent. A writer and thinker as prolific and active as Jefferson is sure to hold different views at different times, some in competition. No person is simply one thing, and Jefferson least of all. One scholar observes, “Given the absence of a magnum opus by Jefferson and given the presence of thousands of his public and private letters, all scholarly efforts to present an integrative understanding of his political ideas are forced to employ an eclectic method,” and finding “selective evidence” to support one’s preconceived perspective on Jefferson is not difficult.4 While that may be true to some extent, there is widespread evidence within Jefferson’s corpus of a long-held commitment to what this book identifies as the ideology of democratism. This chapter approaches the study of Jefferson from multiple angles—examining his agrarianism, Enlightenment philosophy, religious belief, and statecraft—to demonstrate the presence of an essential unity in his thought and practice. When viewed in the light of democratism, Jefferson’s philosophy appears less contradictory or eclectic and instead, like Rousseau’s philosophy, guided by a unifying principle.
Jeffersonian Agrarianism and Faith in the Common Man
Jefferson’s faith in the common people and his emphasis on equality has caused his love of republicanism to morph in the public mind into a love of democracy, and for good reason. Jefferson’s definition of republicanism as “government by its citizens in mass, acting directly and personally, according to rules established by the majority,” is akin to what we consider direct democracy, and that is the interpretation of republicanism to which he tenaciously adhered.5 While he did not believe that direct democracy was possible beyond the small New England township, he did believe that the government ought to be as accountable and responsive to the people as possible. Jefferson historically has been associated with “Jeffersonian democracy” precisely for his seeming democratic instincts, evidenced in complaints, for example, that “our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected” and that “the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and their interests require.”6 Jefferson often commends the people’s “good sense” and juxtaposes the corrupt populace of Old Europe with the “independent, the happy, and therefore orderly citizens of the United States.”7 At times he was fanatical in his faith in the people. In 1787 he said that should he be proven wrong that men cannot be trusted to self-govern, he would “conclude, either that there is no god, or that he is a malevolent being.”8 But Jefferson especially admired the agrarian lot of colonial America. If God had a chosen people, Jefferson famously opined, it would be “those who labour in the earth.”9
Agrarians, according to Jefferson, are self-sufficient, dependent not “on the casualties and caprice of customers,” as are merchants and tradesmen, professionals he openly disdains as harmful to the republic.10 Jefferson finds simple virtue in the nature of agrarian labor and imagines that economic independence correlates with political independence. “Cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independent citizens,” Jefferson writes to John Jay in 1785.11 The yeoman farmer is for Jefferson the prime example of one who thinks for himself because he works for himself. Urban life, conversely, is inherently corrupting; these “sinks of voluntary misery” are full of transience and populated with those who would rather turn a profit than turn the soil.12 Merchants “have no country,” Jefferson decries. “The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”13 He insists that such city-dwellers cannot well exhibit the democratic virtues of liberty and equality.
Although certainly not alone in his fondness for the agrarian life, Jefferson differed from founders such as Adams and Washington, who, while also prone to agrarian encomia, do not look to this way of life as an exclusive source of democratic virtues.14 Adams’s and Hamilton’s understanding of human nature as essentially divided between good and evil inclinations meant that they could not believe that even so wholesome an endeavor as husbandry could perpetuate virtue and freedom in the republic indefinitely. For Jefferson, the agrarian way of life to a great extent creates the material conditions that promote virtue and sustain democracy. Virtue is not, he asserts, difficult for most people provided they are nurtured by husbandry and rural life. “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural,” he writes to Madison in 1787.15 Framers such as Adams and Hamilton, while sympathetic to this view, believed that the Constitution must mitigate the effects of vice and faction, which they believed were permanent threats to liberty. The various constitutional checks and balances—checks which Jefferson believed unduly constrain the people’s will—were in part designed to do this.
It is no coincidence that many have favorably compared Jefferson to John Locke and for this reason seen a significant influence of the latter on the American framing.16 Jefferson’s Lockean understanding of the role of productive labor, evident in his agrarian sentiments, greatly influenced his philosophy of democracy. Like Locke, Jefferson believes that one of the central purposes of government is to protect life, liberty, and property and that this is the core principle the various state constitutions “all cherish as vitally essential.”17 Jefferson often emphasizes the importance to democracy of men “enjoying in ease and security the full fruits of their own industry.”18 In his first inaugural address, he praises our “equal right . . . to the acquisitions of our industry” in America.19 Like Locke, Jefferson finds in the apparently inherently egalitarian nature of productive labor evidence of equality as a natural right. The proper end of government, therefore, is the protection of our person and property, he reasons.20 This is the social contract model of government, which holds that man “procure[s] a state of society” through “the exercise of [his] faculties.” Society emerges through rational consent, this philosophy holds, and it is logical that persons would consent to leave the state of nature only if the new society can guarantee to protect the rights that existed in the pre-civil state. This new social state, Jefferson says, becomes one of man’s “acquisitions,” and one that “he has a right to regulate and control.”21
Jefferson’s vision of agrarianism seems to have been heavily colored by his understanding of government as a social contract and his belief that human beings are born free, equal, and rational. The productive nature of agrarian labor and the material self-sufficiency it provides the farmer suggest to Jefferson an attendant social and historical deracination, more in line with the sentiments of a dreamy idealist like Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur than the actual yeomanry. Crèvecoeur believed that the American farmer represented a “new man”: he has left behind “all his ancient prejudices and manners” and received “new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced.”22 Jefferson’s notorious disdain for traditional modes of life, especially those he associated with the “Old World,” would support this notion. Those who cling to traditional beliefs are irrational, Jefferson says, easily held captives of “mystery & charlatanerie.”23 The lessons of those “ages of the darkest ignorance” are of little political value for Jefferson. Americans would do well to distance themselves as much as possible from the ways of their European forefathers. No political experiment could be “so stupid . . . so destructive of every end for which honest men enter into government” as those of our ancestors, Jefferson says in a letter to François D’Ivernois.24
Jefferson praises the pious husbandman who looks “up to heaven,” and extols the virtues of steady industry, suggesting that he recognizes the agrarian way of life to be essentially a traditional one.25 Yet he is very critical of traditional religion and systems of belief, even denouncing certain state constitutions as “poisoned by priest-craft.”26 Jefferson seems to ignore the traditional element of agrarianism and the deeply religious nature of most Americans, especially rural Americans. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the vast majority of the population attended church, and religious belief was on the rise.27 How to square Jefferson’s seeming unqualified belief in the virtue and capacity for self-rule of the American people with his condemnation of traditional believers, the people whom he accuses “of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms, & fabrications”?28 Many such people were the actual farmers at the time. Jefferson’s praise for the rootedness of agrarian life suggests that on one level he understands this conservative view.29 However, his belief that the American experiment proves there is indeed something “new under the sun” demonstrates that he sees in the American farmer a symbol or abstract representation of what he takes to be a “new man,” an idea at odds with the continuity and traditional mode of existence that actual agrarians valued. It would probably have come as a great surprise to these farmers to know that they were looked upon as representing something entirely new rather than being an extension of a long line of farmers practicing more or less the same trade as their fathers and forefathers.30
Jefferson’s idealized agrarianism was in part guided by his belief in America’s providential role in history. Ernest Lee Tuveson, in his examination of what he sees as a millenarian tradition in American thinking, argues that Jefferson has a place among those who view America as “chosen.”31 According to Tuveson, the pastoral life is for Jefferson the apex of human moral achievement. If Jefferson views America as exceptional, it is because Americans largely belong to the class of agrarians. America is not a chosen nation but, as Jefferson says of the agrarians, a “chosen people.” They are chosen because of their pastoral, innocent way of life, which Jefferson equates with an innocence belonging to the New World, which has made a decisive break from the corrupt Old World. Jefferson viewed agrarians as a stand-in for Americans in general; most Americans were farmers, after all. Disparaging those who make their living through commerce just as he condemns those who seem to him to sympathize with monarchy or orthodox religion, Jefferson imagines that America’s essence is simple, moral, agrarian, and republican, and enlightened insofar as America is an entirely new nation, built not on tradition but on principles. Those who deviate from the American philosophy, as he understands it, belong in spirit to the Old World.
Jefferson, like Rousseau, intermingles nostalgia for an imagined Eden with the belief that human will and rationality can forge a new pastoral paradise. Jefferson’s dreamy vision of a simple and virtuous rural existence recalls Rousseau’s vision of natural man, who is “subject to few passions and self-sufficient.”32 Jefferson believes, with Rousseau, that human beings are naturally good, autonomous creatures who thrive without the accumulations of culture and tradition, commerce and consumerism. Cities, for Jefferson, represent the opposite of pastoral eudaimonia. “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government,” Jefferson complains, “as sores do to the strength of the human body.”33 Tuveson observes that Jefferson’s belief that the agrarians represent the chosen people of God “echoes Rousseau’s belief that ‘dependance,’ which ‘begets subservience and venality,’ is the ‘natural progress and consequence of the arts.’ ”34 Jefferson’s paeans to the simple ways of the Native Americans reflects this Rousseauean naturalism.
Thus, it is perhaps not as paradoxical as it might at first seem that Jefferson should hold a romantic understanding of human nature and society and also an Enlightenment faith in progress through scientific rationality. Jefferson’s romantic side, like Rousseau’s, feeds into his Enlightenment beliefs, resulting in a political philosophy that expects “progress” toward a simpler way of life reflected in an imaginary past. Irving Babbitt sheds light on this apparent paradox. Both the Rousseauist and the Baconian, Babbitt says, reject the normativity of established practice and look toward some “far-off divine event”: “Rousseau himself put his golden age in the past, but nothing is easier than to be a Rousseauist, and at the same time, like the Baconian, put one’s golden age in the future.”35 Faith in an imagined future in which differences will be reconciled and the people will come together in a spirit of fraternity unites the romantic and the Enlightenment rationalist. “The differences between Baconian and Rousseauist, and they are numerous, are, compared with this underlying similarity in the quality of their ‘vision,’ unimportant,” Babbitt says.36
Jefferson’s commitment to agrarianism seems to have been more rhetorical and symbolic than substantive. It played a decisive role in his romantic-Enlightenment vision of a brand-new existence for America. The farmer, for Jefferson, is representative of a pure and simple nation. It was largely irrelevant to his enchanted vision that the yeomanry were traditionally religious and held the types of beliefs that he derided in his letters and private conversations. Jefferson abstracted from their roles as free farm-holders metaphysical traits of freedom and equality, equating these farmers with the nation he viewed as entirely new. For Jefferson, the American yeomanry did not represent a continuation of the age-old practice of farming, obviously predating the American “experiment,” but a tabula rasa, simple and pure but needing to be gently enlightened in order to appreciate Jefferson’s particular democratic vision.37
Jefferson’s Philosophy of Education
Jefferson’s paradoxical view of the agrarians is also evident in his belief that, for all of their simple virtue, they are still in need of education and reform of a particular kind. His understanding of reason orients his beliefs about the type of education that he believed could benefit his countrymen. Jefferson was adamant that reason must overcome superstition and that those subjects that emphasize reasoning and scientific inquiry ought to replace traditional disciplines such as theology and moral philosophy. Ethics “may be as well acquired in the closet as from Living lecturers,” Jefferson said, and of moral philosophy, “I think it lost time to attend lectures in this branch.”38 Even subjects like religion can be evaluated and judged as true or not by appeal to one’s reason alone. In a letter to Peter Carr in which Jefferson discusses which subjects are worthy of study, he advises Carr to “shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.”39 For Jefferson, a real education means discovering for oneself what is reasonable and logical and what ought to be dismissed as mere superstition.
“Education & free discussion,” Jefferson insists, can serve as the antidotes for “bigotry,” “ignorance,” and “Jesuitism”—the type of thinking he deplores.40 With general enlightenment, “tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”41 Virginians in particular, Jefferson believes, are prone to old ways of thinking and would greatly benefit from “a general seminary of the sciences meant for the use of the state.”42 This would entail a system of primary schools and a university in Virginia “where might be taught, in it’s [sic] highest degree, every branch of science useful in our time & country: and it would rescue us from the tax of toryism, fanaticism, & indifferentism to their own State.”43 Jefferson often proclaims the value of skepticism and the ability to discover for oneself the truth, but at the same time he believes that objective reasoning will naturally lead to his view of things. He fully expects that when reason is engaged, others will naturally be led to the same conclusions as he about politics. When the people are not so inclined, Jefferson admits that he feels he has a duty to “[sow] useful truths and principles among the people, which might germinate and become rooted among their political tenets.”44
There is a part of Jefferson that, with Diderot, Voltaire, and other Enlightenment thinkers, “deplored the general taste” of the masses and distrusted their ability to rule.45 Education, for Jefferson, can help to guide the thinking of Americans toward the beliefs that he holds to be true. He is careful to reserve his criticism for his political enemies and anonymous demagogues, but he nonetheless reveals an inclination to change the views of those people he otherwise lauds. One scholar argues that for Jefferson, education was “as critical to the long-term revolutionary effort of remaking society as muskets and manifestos were to the short-term effort of securing independence.”46 With other democratists, Jefferson believes that education, including the informal education of the people through their political leaders, ought to cultivate the kind of thinking that will lead the nation toward what he takes to be a genuine expression of republicanism. For example, he inaugurated government support of the sciences, dedicating himself, as one historian remarked, “to the application of science as the most certain means of national advancement and human happiness in the new republic.”47 While Jefferson ultimately hopes to improve the lot of agrarians through improvements in technique and machinery, it is unlikely that the yeomanry would have shared his desire for modernization and scientific advancement, especially through the vehicle of the state.
At the same time as he would wish to see scientific advancement, Jefferson demonstrates a wariness of established convention. In his letter to Carr, Jefferson famously writes, “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.” Jefferson’s penchant for rationalism and scientific thinking is motivated by his progressive belief that a scientific mode of thinking will contribute to a better future marked by general enlightenment. However, he also imagines a rustic past in which stultifying norms and conventions have not perverted humanity’s natural good sense. In this respect, he puts himself squarely in the tradition of Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences” and Émile, which convey the idea that traditional academic disciplines and courses of study are detrimental to genuine knowledge. This idea is reflected in Rousseau’s statement that, “I am perfectly sure that my heart loves only that which is good. All the evil I ever did in my life was the result of reflection; and the little good I have been able to do was the result of impulse.”48 Jefferson sees the plowman as wiser than the professor because, like Rousseau, he believes that those who have not been tainted by artificial conventions can simply follow their hearts and natural reasoning abilities. There is, again, a strong affinity between romantic and Enlightenment thinking. For Jefferson, as for Rousseau, the purpose of education is to help purify humanity.
Jefferson’s twin romantic and Enlightenment proclivities explain why, for example, although remembered by some as “above all a farmer,” he should at the same time hail Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke as “the three greatest men the world had ever produced.”49 His paradoxical view combines a preference for abstract reasoning with reverence for “natural man.” Ultimately, however, Jefferson’s desire to see a certain type of intelligence in power betrays his belief that the simple agrarian folk he admires must adopt or at least assent to more progressive, enlightened beliefs.
The “ward system” is Jefferson’s plan to administer universal public education alongside direct democracy. What he considers “the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man” was to divide counties into individual wards “5 or 6 miles square.”50 This apparent blueprint for decentralized democratic government, in which each member of the ward would have an “equal voice in the direction of its concerns,” adds to Jefferson’s reputation as America’s arch-democrat.51 However, there is another interpretation of this scheme. As an abstract proposal for a more pure democracy that Jefferson expects will be adopted universally, it fits well within democratist thinking. Hannah Arendt, in fact, likens this scheme to other rationally conceived revolutionary power-to-the-people programs: “Both Jefferson’s plan and the French sociétés révolutionaires anticipated with an utmost weird precision those councils, soviets, and, Räte, which were to make their appearance in every genuine revolution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”52 Intended to radically decentralize power and give full control of government to the people, these councils quickly became apparatuses of those at the top, as evidenced, for example, in Napoleon’s takeover of the eighty-three departments created in 1790, which had been intended to decentralize power and provide local democracy throughout France. Napoleon co-opted administration, ensuring that his unified vision was enacted rather than the diverse intentions of local officials. The Russian soviets suffered a similar fate after the 1917 Revolution.
Although perhaps meant to provide direct democracy, revolutionary schemes premised on the Baconian belief that we “must begin anew from the very foundations” stem from the idea that society as historically constituted is inadequate and must be remade according to a better, more rational vision.53 Such abstract planning is generally incompatible with decentralization, local control, and pluralism. Jefferson’s belief that his scheme would be universally recognized for its superiority over the old way betrays not only the disconnect between the idealist planner and concrete reality but also the expectation that the new plan will be universally attractive. It reveals a conceit common to democratist thinking.
Jefferson’s belief that the ward meetings “would at any time produce the genuine sense of the people on any required point, and would enable the state to act in mass” is not only highly idealistic but is also ultimately subordinated to his competing belief that democracy ought to take on the particular characteristics he believes appropriate. His micromanagement of a boy’s boarding school in Virginia that was to be a preparatory school for his University of Virginia is telling of the level of control that Jefferson wished to exert over the minds of his countrymen. He believed, with Rousseau, that even the minutest details must be carefully managed by the visionary.54 On its face, the ward system appears to be an instance of decentralization and direct democracy, but as a plan to reorganize society in accordance with a supposedly superior vision—Jefferson’s vision—it betrays a desire for control and standardization ultimately incompatible with genuine democracy, which would hardly be democratic if it did not take into account existing conditions and practices.
Jefferson’s imaginings about what might have been had his proposals been implemented reveals the dreamy, idealistic side of his political imagination. The ward system, he says, “would have restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind”; it “would have raised the mass of the people to the high ground of moral respectability”; it “would have compleated the great object of qualifying them to select the veritable aristoi.”55 Jefferson imagines that with some changes to the tax law, for example, “the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of the country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone.”56 His philosophy of democracy relies heavily on the subjunctive, on what might have been, had the plan been implemented. Although he presents it as a tantalizingly simple task, such as changing the tax code, reforming existing institutions is not sufficient. Wholesale change is required. In the case of Jefferson’s education schema, the entire program needed to be adopted for it to have the intended effect. “Jefferson avowed,” Mark Holowchak writes, “that his reforms must be taken in toto, for Jeffersonian republicanism bespoke a systemic approach of education, and there was no system in place in Jefferson’s day.”57 A uniform system would help to streamline thinking, presumably away from ideas about republicanism, religion, and politics that competed with Jefferson’s own ideas.
Jefferson’s hand in the creation of the University of Virginia reveals some of the practical consequences of his idealism. He had imagined an institution of higher learning where, according to Alan Taylor, “students would learn his notions of republicanism, rejecting the Federalism of northern schools and George Washington.”58 He hoped that scholarships would enable poor but deserving students to attend in addition to the wealthy. Yet the expensive buildings that Jefferson demanded, to the chagrin of the Virginia legislators, took all of the available money, leaving nothing for financial aid for students. The University of Virginia became the most expensive university in the nation, charging the highest tuition.59 Jefferson’s hopes of reforming and enlightening the most promising of his countrymen were dashed as the university took on much the same character as the college that he had tried in vain to reform, the College of William and Mary. The student body was composed mostly of the sons of wealthy, southern plantation owners. Unruly and “without shame,” as one observer of the day lamented, the student body greatly disappointed Jefferson.60 “The article of discipline is the most difficult in American education,” Jefferson wrote in 1822. “Premature ideas of independence, too little repressed by parents, beget a spirit of insubordination, which is the great obstacle to science with us, and a principal cause of its decay since the revolution. I look to it with dismay in our institution, as a breaker ahead which I am far from being confident we shall be able to weather.”61 It is “jarring to read Jefferson write of ‘premature independence’ by the young and of postrevolutionary decay,” Taylor observes, “for we associate him with confidence in people and progress.” But, Taylor adds, “Jefferson was never entirely comfortable with people as they were.”62
Because Jefferson views his countrymen through a romantic lens, he is often unable to accept them as they are. Eager to improve their thinking, he tried to establish a university that could accommodate these poor, rural folk, but his romantic thinking hampered his own efforts. Jefferson despairs that his university will have the intended effect and that future generations will accomplish what his could not, from emancipation of slaves to the realization of true republicanism.63 He takes comfort in his advanced age sparing him “the pain of witnessing [the] consequences” of a dissipated and entitled youth taking up residence in the quarters he once envisioned housing future great leaders.64 Because of his unrealistic expectations of the university—Palladian perfection, a disciplined and eager youth ready to abolish slavery—Jefferson’s vision resulted in a university that was built at tremendous cost and unable even to offer scholarships to poor whites. The dissonance between vision and reality resulted not in falling short of the ideal but in a worse outcome than had Jefferson calibrated his vision to the constraints of reality.
Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty”
Jefferson’s belief in an “empire of liberty” prefigures ideas that would become major impetuses behind the democratist foreign policy.65 The Louisiana Purchase, his repeated attempts to acquire the Floridas, and his treatment of Native Americans illustrate his belief in the historical inevitability of democracy and also the paradox of trying to achieve democracy through force. Jefferson views democracy providentially, stating in his last public letter, “All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”66 He connects his desire to expand the country with a philosophy that puts America at the vanguard of democratic history. In this same letter, Jefferson says of the Declaration of Independence that it is “an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world.”67 For Jefferson, expanding the United States represents the natural course of events, an idea that would become popularly known as “manifest destiny.” Acquisition of the Louisiana territory is “inevitable from the course of things,” he believes.68 Peter Onuf reads in the Louisiana Purchase the fulfillment of Jefferson’s promises in his first inaugural address, which imagines a “transcendent” destiny for America. According to Onuf, the Louisiana conquest “was subordinated to a triumphalist narrative of liberation that focused on the ‘natural,’ irresistible extension of agricultural settlement and the progress of civilization.”69 Jefferson’s desire to acquire the Floridas, a pursuit that became, according to Henry Adams, his “overmastering passion,” similarly illustrates Jefferson’s expansionist tendencies.70 The Floridas, like Louisiana, were America’s natural right and destiny. “We shall certainly obtain the Floridas, and all in good time,” Jefferson writes in 1803. “In the meanwhile, without waiting for permission, we shall enter into the exercise of the natural right we have always insisted on with Spain, to wit, that of a nation holding the upper part of streams, having a right of innocent passage through them to the ocean.”71
Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana (an offer he could hardly refuse, to be sure) represents not a repudiation of his philosophy in the name of political expediency but an illustration of his democratist philosophy. His justifications for his actions reveal the way in which democratists are inclined to interpret what would otherwise appear to be classic instances of territorial expansion—a desire of statesmen throughout the ages. However, conquest is not viewed by the democratist as merely that; it is couched within a larger narrative about natural rights and spreading freedom. This idea will be explored in greater detail in the chapter that examines the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy. Jefferson’s “appetite for expansion,” as Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson characterize his desire to acquire Louisiana and the Floridas, reveals the side of democratism that desires to spread its way of life.72 This illustrates one part of the democratist paradox: wishing to spread democracy while avoiding the appearance of imperialism. Historian Walter McDougall suggests that the “[c]onstitutionally dubious” Louisiana Purchase “had ominous implications for the expansion of slavery and dispossession of Native Americans. . . . [N]obody asked the Creoles, Africans, and Indians beyond the Mississippi River whether they wanted to live under U.S. authority.”73 It can obviously be argued that any statesman would have done as Jefferson did when offered the Louisiana territory practically free of charge by Napoleon, but Jefferson demonstrates his commitment to a democratist perspective by justifying the acquisition of Louisiana and his desire for the Floridas as nothing more than helping nature take its course.
That Jefferson’s theory comes into conflict with his practice—that expanding the territory of the United States did imply the classic notion of empire and that this action had repercussions for the liberty and self-determination of other peoples—illustrates the distance between the democratist theory of liberty and equality from its actual practice. An understanding of the inner logic of democratism could predict that the democratist, given power of this sort, might be inclined toward expansionist or undemocratic actions in the name of “democracy.” Abstract proclamations about liberty and equality mean little in the face of actual political decision-making and the feeling that one can further the cause of democracy, even if it means taking steps that are undemocratic. Jefferson initially desired peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, but after the Louisiana Purchase he recognizes the practical difficulty of trying to assimilate them. One scholar contrasts Jefferson’s cheerful first inaugural address, in which he says that “a spirit of peace and friendship generally prevails” among our native neighbors, with his later desire to see Americans settle “the extensive country remaining vacant within our limits” at the expense of the native inhabitants.74 While Christian B. Keller sees in this dissonance Jefferson being “forced to submit philanthropic idealism to pragmatic necessity,” it is also possible to read Jefferson’s actions as being entirely consistent with his theory.75 Jefferson sincerely believes that a wholly new democratic age is possible and that violence or undemocratic means may be required to get there. Toward the end of his life, he predicts in a letter to John Adams that all of Europe will soon “attain representative government, more or less perfect. . . . [T]o attain all this however, rivers of blood must yet flow, & years of desolation pass over.” Jefferson nevertheless insists that “the object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation. For what inheritance, so valuable, can man leave to his posterity?”76
Jefferson’s treatment of Native Americans reveals the sordid underside of his desire for an “empire of liberty.” Determined to expand American territory and to civilize or oust native inhabitants, Jefferson greatly broadened federal powers during his presidency. He had formerly been opposed to the Trade and Intercourse Act, which regulated affairs with Native Americans, as an infringement of states’ rights, but after he assumed office he was not shy about making use of it. Unlike Washington and Adams and the British before them, who “regarded the Indian tribes as foreign powers, with whom diplomatic relations were to be conducted according to traditional protocols,” Jefferson took liberties that increasingly violated tribal sovereignty and acquired their lands through deception and salami tactics.77 Commerce with the Indians was one of the major ways in which Jefferson envisioned “converting” them to the American way of life. Not only would they find agriculture and consumerism rewarding, but by living outside of their means they would be forced to sell their lands in order to escape debt, Jefferson predicted. Enclosed between white settlements, the Native Americans will, “for want of game, be forced to agriculture, will find that small portions of land well improved, will be worth more to them than extensive forests unemployed, and will be continually parting with portions of them, for money to buy stock, utensils & necessities for their farms & families.”78 Jefferson writes to William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, that “to exchange lands” with the Indians, “we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and the influential individuals among them run in debt. . . . [W]hen these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. . . . In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.”79 Andrew Jackson, whose Indian removal policies are notorious, acted on precedents that Jefferson set. Jackson, in his message to Congress on the relocation of the Native Americans, declared “that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation.”80
The twin myths of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism, to which Jefferson heartily contributed, as joined to a progressive-democratic interpretation of history have helped to inspire a foreign policy that is guided by idealistic visions of natural rights. These myths have helped many who share the Jeffersonian imagination to reinterpret what would otherwise appear to be ancient methods of statecraft, characterized by territorial gains and the subjugation of native peoples, as no more than the spread of liberty and democracy. “All our liberalities to [the American Indians],” Jefferson writes to Harrison, “proceed from motives of pure humanity only.”81 One can discern modern parallels in foreign wars of intervention ostensibly motivated by “humanitarian” and “democratic” goals. While claiming to spread freedom and democracy, to be creating a more humane world, Jefferson is nonetheless willing to make use of violence and other measures that undermine his goals.
Jefferson proclaims that the evolution of mankind toward liberal democracy can be witnessed geographically, “from the savages of the Rocky Mountains” to man in his “most improved state” in the coastal towns.82 It is paradoxical that Jefferson should look to the coastal towns for an example of man in his “most improved state” given his disdain for commerce and cities in general. But while Jefferson lauds agrarian life and occasionally praises the simple ways of Native American life, he does so because he views these ways of life through a romantic and abstract lens. He believes that farmers, and to a lesser extent Native Americans, are naturally good and uncorrupted by society. They are “unevolved” or “premodern,” representing a vision of the past uncorrupted by long-standing social institutions. The abstract “people”—whether in the past, in a remote and undeveloped place, or in certain forms in the present, such as the agrarians—are thought to be good and simple but also in need of enlightenment in order to move along the locomotive of democratic history. It is the present that is to be lamented, according to the democratist, who, like Jefferson and other romantics, projects on the past or on native peoples a vision of simplicity and harmony and at the same time, like the Baconian, projects onto the future a vision of universal enlightenment.
Jeffersonian Christianity and Democratism
Jefferson’s near religious commitment to democracy and corresponding faith in the common people is well known. It should not be surprising, then, that his interpretation of democracy dovetails with his reading of Christianity. For Jefferson, Christianity, like democracy, is fully rational; the two, in fact, point toward one another. “Far from consigning religion and politics to separate spheres under the new republican dispensation,” Onuf says, “Jefferson foresaw their ultimate convergence, for an enlightened, purified Christianity—the religion of humanity that Jesus had preached—constituted the only durable foundation for republican self-rule.”83 This would be the interpretation of Christianity and democracy of Jacques Maritain, a Catholic writing a century and a half later. Maritain, whose democratist interpretation of Christianity will be examined in a later chapter, similarly sees in Christianity the impetus toward democracy and argues that the two are complementary.
In the same letter to Carr in which Jefferson tells him to “fix reason firmly in her seat,” Jefferson assures him that reason alone can lead him to the true religion. He tells Carr to read the Bible objectively as he would Livy and Tacitus and not to take anything on the authority or pretensions of the authors. Jefferson follows this advice in compiling the “Jefferson Bible.” This compendium splices together those scriptural passages that Jefferson believed reflect true Christianity, shorn of all superstitions and miracles and compatible with empiricism and knowledge of the physical world.84 Jesus, as Jefferson understands him, reforms the morals of humanity “to the standard of reason, justice, & philanthropy” and calls us to a religion of humanity.85 Democracy, like Christianity, is still awaiting its final and perfect expression; only, as Justin Garrison points out, “the future state [Jefferson] has in mind is not found in some realm radically separated from this world, as is the case with traditional Christianity, but is instead located in this world, one that is supposed to be politically, rationally, and spiritually transformed by human hands.”86 Garrison points out that Jefferson’s democracy contains its heretics, apostles, and martyrs precisely because Jefferson conflates democracy with a rationalist-Platonic Christianity.87
Jefferson’s expectation that “the whole world will, sooner or later, feel benefit from the issue of our assertion of the rights of man” is part of a broader philosophy of history that not only envisions the American democratic way as the final stage of history but also sees in the American mission an eschatological imperative. Woodrow Wilson will take up this idea with even greater fanaticism, and Maritain, although a Catholic and one apparently in the Thomist tradition, will express similar beliefs. Guided by this narrative of history, Jefferson finds transcendent meaning in mundane political events. He sees, for example, the “Revolution of 1800” as having spiritual significance. “The regeneration of Rhode island” Jefferson interprets as “the beginning of that resurrection of the genuine spirit of New England which rises for life eternal.” Reading this political event along biblical lines, Jefferson goes on, “According to natural order, Vermont will emerge next, because least, after Rhode island, under the yoke of hierocracy.”88 For Jefferson, nothing less than the hand of God helped to effect the change of power in American politics.
Jefferson’s religious faith in democracy is on display when he suggests that apparent setbacks, even those of “the Dantons and Robespierres,” must not cause the world to lose faith or America to waver from the “steady march to our object.”89 In his mind, there is a particular direction to history. When America appears to turn away from the type of republican thinking that he values, by electing his political adversaries, for example, he insists that such a state of affairs “is not a natural one.” Jefferson believes that there is but one “natural” expression of democracy: his own idea of it. He explains the turn the nation has taken under current political leadership as owing to “the irresistible influence & popularity of Genl. Washington played off by the cunning of Hamilton which turned the government over to antirepublican hands, or turned the republican members chosen by the people into anti-republicans.”90 Jefferson often resorts to conspiratorial thinking when he believes that particular political or religious forces are derailing America from its preordained mission.
Jefferson especially views traditional religion as an obstacle to the republic he envisages. In the letter in which he writes that the fate of liberty in the world is bound up with America’s fate, Jefferson expresses his hope that the rest of the peoples of the globe will “burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves.”91 For Jefferson, orthodox Christianity represents an elaborate effort to deceive the masses. In a letter to Adams he declares that early Christian leaders “saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from it’s [sic] indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power & pre-eminence.” Combining Plato’s obscure philosophy with simple Christian truths, early Christian leaders ensured perpetual employment and riches for themselves and servitude of the masses, Jefferson proffers. Jefferson believes that individual reason must be engaged to rid Americans of false and superstitious religious beliefs that ultimately get in the way of the democracy of reason that he envisions.
Imagining that a conspiracy of elites stands in the way of democracy is one of the hallmarks of democratism. This type of thinking sees numerous, unnecessary obstacles thwarting what ought to be the people’s natural will for reasoned democracy. Orthodox religion is often interpreted as a conspiracy against the people and a means of control, which is why many democratists insist that authentic Christianity is little different from a reasoned religion of humanity—which reflects many of the principles of democratism. This reasoned or “Platonic” Christianity revises traditional Christian concepts, transforming equality, for example, to mean absolute or material equality, and love of neighbor to mean diffuse love of humanity. Aspects of traditional Christianity and the Bible that do not square with Enlightenment rationality and empiricism are simply dismissed, explained as inauthentic and not a part of real Christianity. Jefferson suggests this when he tells Carr that he is “Astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature” that the sun should stand still on its axis as recounted in the book of Joshua, and Carr should apply the same standard of reason to claims that Jesus “was begotten by god, born of a virgin, suspended and reversed the laws of nature at will, and ascended bodily into heaven.”92
The vitriol that Jefferson directed toward “priestcraft” suggests that he, like the fifth-century Romans and so many others, felt that traditional Christian beliefs as interpreted by the Church were incompatible with his normative vision of politics.93 Traditional Christianity seemed to command the loyalty of its believers in a way that threatened his Democracy of Reason. Jefferson’s self-proclaimed “creed of materialism” is obviously antithetical to the Christianity that professes the divinity of Christ and looks forward to the Christian eschaton. It is not clear that these orthodox Christian beliefs can be reconciled with a political philosophy that puts its hope in this world, as Jefferson’s does.
Jeffersonian Conceit
While Jefferson believes that the principles of democracy as he understands them are self-evident and discernable through rationality, he seems continually to discover people deviating from what ought to be the norm. While he is careful to reserve his real criticism for those in power rather than the people themselves, he suggests that those who disagree with him about the proper form of government are not simply in error but corrupt or malicious. This is one aspect of the democratist Enlightenment-romantic dynamic. It is expected that people are, on the whole, rational and good. When it becomes apparent that society is not pursuing the course envisaged as the only natural and reasonable one, the democratist blames a lack of proper reasoning or a few bad actors deceiving the people. In a letter to John Taylor in 1798, Jefferson describes the Adams administration as a “reign of witches” and expresses his faith in the people “recovering their true sight.”94 Adams, in Jefferson’s mind, led the good people astray and deviated from the true principles of government. Jefferson’s first inaugural address is also telling: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” That others might have a different idea about what is normative in democracy, for example, to what degree “the direct action of the citizens” is desirable and possible—something Jefferson suggests is an art rather than a science—is not a legitimate possibility in Jefferson’s mind.95 Jefferson’s understanding of what constitutes republicanism is, for him, the final word.
At the core of democratism is an apparent faith in the people united with the insistence that they change in fundamental ways. Jefferson often exemplifies this paradoxical belief. Democratism claims that the principles of democracy are self-evident and discernable through rationality, but its elaborate prescriptions for changing existing norms and the contempt it has for existing institutions and opposing ideas suggest that it is but another manifestation of rigid ideological thinking. Jefferson exhibits an arrogance characteristic of democratist thinking when he looks forward to a time when his version of republicanism will be the only one. After his election to the presidency, he says, “I should hope to be able to obliterate, or rather,” he corrects himself, “to unite the names of federalist & republican.”96 According to Richard Hofstadter, “abstractly, Jefferson accepted the idea of political division and the reality that opposition would be embodied in the form of parties; but concretely he could never see the legitimacy of any particular opposition in his own country.”97 Rather, Jefferson could not see the legitimacy of opposition to his own system of beliefs. David N. Mayer explains that “after the successful conclusion of the War of 1812, [Jefferson] reported with apparent delight the virtual annihilation of Federalism.”98
Jefferson interprets 1776 and 1800 as two revolutions that attest to the power of reason to order politics. Anticipating what would become the dominant progressive narrative of history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, he imagines the American example, and specifically his administration’s example, as profoundly important in the global dialectic of democracy.99 “[N]or are we acting for ourselves alone,” Jefferson says in a letter to David Hall in 1802, “but for the whole human race. [T]he event of our experiment is to shew whether man can be trusted with self-government. [T]he eyes of suffering humanity are fixed on us with anxiety as their only hope, and on such a theatre & for such a cause we must suppress all smaller passions & local considerations.”100 Nearly twenty years later, Jefferson expresses the same idea: “[A]s members therefore of the universal society of mankind, and standing in high and responsible relation with them, it is our sacred duty to suppress passion among ourselves, and not to blast the confidence we have inspired of proof that a government of reason is better than one of force.”101
Like so many other democratists, Jefferson invites us to participate in an abstract and grandiose vision in which imaginative deference to The Cause overshadows historical considerations. In this way, the democratist encourages us to look past what might seem like obvious impediments if we were to examine the concrete steps necessary to pursue the vision. Those who would object to the democratist’s vision are dismissed as self-interested, parochial, myopic, or otherwise unable to appreciate the more important goal of Democracy. While Jefferson himself is often taken up with local considerations, from Virginia politics to soil conditions, he always seems to set his gaze on the good of humanity and the fate of the world. Henry Adams says that Jefferson’s provincial cares ultimately give way to a belief that “the world’s ruling interests should cease to be local and should become universal.”102 Americans are foremost members “of the universal society of mankind.”103 Local matters are trivial in comparison to the transcendent mission that Jefferson sees as America’s destiny. If the American experiment fails, Jefferson believes, the fate of self-government is sealed. It cannot exist anywhere if Americans cannot accomplish it. Jefferson’s philosophy of history vacillates between the belief that America is simply a testament to the possibility of self-government and the belief that the American example will ignite in other countries a universal desire for democracy, creating a domino effect. Even in Jefferson’s more modest moments, in which he simply lauds the American example, he nonetheless views the American founding as a world-historic event. He interprets the Revolution in France similarly and as ultimately compatible with the American Revolution. The regicide in France, Jefferson says, will inspire in other nations a “softening” of the monarchies, if not outright republican sentiment.104 It seems enough for Jefferson that the Jacobins could proclaim the same abstract, universal principles as the Declaration of Independence. “It is unfortunate,” he writes in 1795, “that the efforts of mankind to recover the freedom of which they have been so long deprived, will be accompanied with violence, with errors, and even with crimes. But while we weep over the means, we must pray for the end.”105 Rather than see the French Revolution fail, he says he would “have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is.”106 It is perhaps for this reason that Henry Adams concludes that Jefferson “was a theorist, prepared to risk the fate of mankind on the chance of reasoning far from certain in its details.”107 Jefferson, like other democratists, believes that the means are radically separate from the end. Bloodshed may be a necessary, if unfortunate, avenue for the realization of liberty. “[W]hat signify a few lives lost in a century or two?” Jefferson asks in 1787 in reference to Shay’s Rebellion. “[T]he tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. [I]t is it’s [sic] natural manure.”108 Envisioning a future in which inequality, strife, and injustice have given way to a new democratic existence, Jefferson and others are perfectly willing to accept and justify violence in the name of liberty and equality.
That Jefferson should for so long have been a herald of democracy perhaps reveals something about America’s conflicted understanding of democracy. Torn between an idealistic desire for “rule by the people” and a competing hope for a certain normative outcome, many democratic leaders (with a lowercase “d”) bristle against democracy’s demand for consent. One can see the temptation, as Jefferson did, to decree the philosophical foundations of one’s own political stance “natural” and “reasonable.” However, we are right to suspect a contradiction between abstract natural rights and a reality that does not match. High, noble-sounding ideals and projections of a wholly different future seem to ring hollow as many ordinary Americans and others who are supposed to benefit from the democratic way of life feel that they do not have a meaningful impact on politics. Jefferson’s belief that there is something new under the sun seems a product of romantic and Enlightenment optimism and the type of thinking that informs democratism. America, like every other nation, appears to be subject to the constraints and vicissitudes of history. To proclaim otherwise is not only naive but also potentially dangerous insofar as it contributes to unrealistic expectations that invite despair or revolt against reality itself.
As Jefferson demonstrates, democratism proclaims the highest democratic ideals of popular sovereignty, freedom, and equality, but in practice it inclines toward social engineering, inegalitarianism, expansionism, and a missionary zeal. Democratism is a comprehensive theory of democracy that, concretely, does not bear much resemblance to democracy in the classical or literal sense. It is often a cover for undemocratic practices. Tempering the will of the people may indeed be necessary, but the democratist is not so much interested in revising or improving this or that particular viewpoint or passion of the moment as in sweeping changes to widely held practices and beliefs. The democratist proclaims the will of the people sovereign but at the same time works to change those aspects of the popular will that do not fit within his or her own conception of what is normative. It is therefore difficult to assess the quality of the democratist’s vision, since it operates under cover of rhetorical abstraction and obfuscation. To proclaim “all men created equal” and liberty and equality the highest ideals may be of great political value but detrimental to actual democracy, giving license to practices that are decidedly undemocratic, even authoritarian. Jefferson’s proclamation “I know of but one code of morality for men, whether acting singly or collectively” exemplifies democratism’s totalizing tendency. It precludes the possibility of those practical virtues that have sustained the American republic since its inception: compromise, negotiation, and toleration of opposing viewpoints and ways of life. Jefferson was outspoken about his desire to see the party of his adversaries “obliterated.” He wished this, of course, in the name of what he took to be the common good and the will of the people. But his supreme confidence in his own interpretation of that code of morality reveals the same lack of political humility that bedevils the American republic today. Woodrow Wilson reveals this confidence elevated to the level of religious conviction. Understanding the ways that Jeffersonian democracy and Wilsonian democracy—ostensibly democratic traditions—relate and also the ways in which they fit within the broader ideological context of democratism will help to distinguish democratic illusion from democratic reality.