• 1 The author wishes to thank Helen Gibson, Peter Onuf, and the anonymous EJAS peer reviewers for thei (...)

1Thomas Jefferson’s well-established fame as an advocate of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, equal rights of men, religious freedom, and democracy has frequently been questioned. For many scholars his racist statements, his little concern for women’s rights, his apparently unrealistic anti-slavery policies, and his anti-Federalist politics suffice as proofs of the very opposite of the man. The purpose of this article is to show how the concept of politics figures at the center of Jefferson’s entire worldview. In addition to his understanding of politics itself, the concept also characterizes his social, scientific, and religious thought, as well as his lifelong dilemma as a slaveholder preaching the abolition of slavery.1

• 2 See Leonard Levy’s famous attack on Jefferson for betraying all his libertarian principles in pract (...)

2What kind of politics did Jefferson embrace? Research literature teems with somewhat confusing claims about Jefferson’s “development” as a political thinker. Leonard Levy famously claimed that, in practice, Jefferson betrayed all of his fundamentally libertarian convictions, while there is scant evidence that Jefferson can be described as a libertarian to begin with. Other scholars hold that he gradually turned from his revolutionary thinking toward either liberal or simply classical republican political thought.2

• 3 I by no means suggest that Jefferson was the only person in the country to understand religious fre (...)
• 4 On manorialism in the North, see for example, Charles W. McCurdy, Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and (...)

3Most of these speculations prove useless once Jefferson’s politics is studied as a means to certain purposes only, for most of which the country was not yet ripe. At the turn of the nineteenth century, elite, white men holding all political power did not think of enslaved people, free black women, free black men, white women, or even poor white men as ready for the freedom of conscience or general suffrage.3 As to Jefferson’s wavering on the emancipation of slaves, it is worth keeping in mind that alongside slavery, there were also other unfree forms of labor and the system of indentured servants as well as manorialism still loomed large. In New York State tenant rebellions occurred as late as in the 1840s.4

• 5 See Arthur Scherr, “Jefferson’s ‘Cannibals’ Revisited,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. LXXVI (...)

4A lot of erroneous claims have circulated in Jefferson studies. A good example is scholars’ once widely shared accusation of Jefferson calling Haitian black rebels “cannibals.” As Arthur Scherr has convincingly shown, Jefferson in fact mocked the French occupiers, not the Haitians, as “cannibals.” Once the erroneously interpreted quotation had begun circulating, scholars did not care to look for the original source on their own.5

• 6 Carl Becker’s claim is quoted in Joseph. J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jeffers (...)

5Carl Becker’s ancient claim can be refuted out of hand. It held that for Jefferson, “the only thing to do with political power, since it is inherently dangerous, is to abate it.”6 Jefferson never abated political power, as can be proved by his outstanding political career as a Virginia representative to the Continental Congress, Governor of Virginia, Minister to France, Secretary of State and President of the United States—alongside his numerous legislative initiatives, such as the Northwest Ordinance and the Virginia bill for religious freedom.

• 7 TJ to Thomas Seymour, Feb. 11, 1807 in Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball (eds.), The Political Writing (...)

6To grasp Jefferson’s understanding of politics as the very core of his intellectual landscape, one should first dismiss his, still surprisingly popular, fame as an advocate of small government. He embraced hugely expensive initiatives to build up an extensive elementary educational system and to emancipate American slaves and spoke favorably of “orderly government.”7 In other words, he was not skeptical about the significance of regular government action regarding American socioeconomic developments. The popular misunderstandings of his political vision evolve from a failure to distinguish between his views of the role on the federal government and that of state governments.

• 8 TJ to John Taylor, June 4, 1798, Thomas Jefferson’s Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson, Library of A (...)

13Jefferson warned his acquaintance and much liked political theorist, John Taylor of Caroline, that even when the Northern financial elite appeared to suppress the Southern plantation economy and free farming, it was not advisable for Virginians to speak of secession from the Union. As Jefferson noted, “an association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.”8

• 9 Ibid.
• 10 Ibid.
• 11 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, transl. by David Ross, J.L. Ackrill and J.O. Urmson, (Oxford: Ox (...)

14This is why Jefferson urged what successfully doing politics, first and foremost calls for, namely “a little patience.” Patience was all that was needed even for the Federalist “reign of witches [to] pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore the government to it's [sic] true principles.”9 “If the game runs sometimes against us at home,” Jefferson counseled Taylor, “we must have patience till luck turns, & then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are the stake.”10 Indeed, even Aristotle had held that politics was not a proper subject to teach to the young because of their characteristic impatience.11

• 12 TJ to John Taylor, June 4, 1798, TJW, 1048-1051.
• 13 TJ to Charles Clay, Jan. 27, 1790 as quoted in Stanley Elkins & Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federali (...)

15Nor was one expected to be too candid in such a “game.” Jefferson often told his correspondents not to let his private opinions or plans get “before the public.”12 A successful politician would not let one’s adversaries know in advance what the next round of bargaining would involve. Politics was about persuasion. And as Jefferson noted, it often “takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.”13

• 14 The 1964 Civil Rights Act can be seen as the pivotal legal change regarding the conspicuously slow (...)

19What history teaches about the concept of politics is this: What has come to be viewed as a moral, social or economic problem calling for a solution (particularly on the part of the ruling elite) tends to change over time. Consider, for example, that slaves were emancipated only in 1865, that women got the right to vote only in 1919, that legal segregation was ended only in 1964, and that sexual minorities are only now rapidly being recognized as fully equal with all others.14

• 15 While Michel Foucault held not only that power by definition “excludes” and “represses” but also th (...)

23But power must not be viewed as an evil itself, for when not directly tyrannical, it is always negotiable, and this ever-present, never-ending negotiation over power is the essence of politics.15 It excludes only violence, whether in the form of criminal action, riot, or a war. To be sure one is always negotiating with an opponent or an enemy, so to speak—after all, with whom else has one the need to negotiate?

• 16 See Hendrik Hartog, The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery & Emancipation in the Antebellum Nort (...)

27Keeping in mind that slavery was still legal in most states of the young nation, such slaveholding statesmen, as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, who all voiced opposition to slavery as a social institution, easily appeared moderates among contemporary lawmakers. Under the state’s gradual emancipation laws, for example, over 7,000 people were still enslaved in New Jersey in 1820—from where they were often (illegally) sold to the South.16 To what extent the leaders’ antislavery sentiments were shared in the South was a lesser issue for those Northerners who needed their connections and prestige in order to achieve anything on a national level.

• 17 TJ to Jedidiah Morse, March 6, 1822, TJW, 1454-1457 (emphasis added).

28Nevertheless, one should not confuse Jefferson’s notion of representative government with today’s political world in which numerous NGOs, lobbyists, ad hoc coalitions, grassroot movements, and the like do politics alongside governmental office holders. In his retirement, Jefferson declined the call for a membership in Jedidiah Morse’s society for “the civilization and improvement of the Indian tribes.” His reasoning was that former presidents who had once held “their constitutional stations as guardians of the nation” would there act only “by those of a voluntary society,” which might even “obstruct the operation of the government.”17

• 18 TJ to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, TJW, 1399 (emphasis added).

29Indeed, nothing in Jefferson’s worldview spoke against the blessings of the crucial eighteenth-century innovation of a regular, representative government. His main purpose was that of “making every citizen an active member of the government,” so as to “attach” every free man “by his strongest feelings to the independence of his country, and to its republican constitution.”18 Such government rested solely on majority rule with minority rights (most notable among them the individual right to disagree with the majority) and on regular elections of the office holders.

• 19 TJ to Thomas Seymour, Feb. 11, 1807, in Appleby & Ball (eds.), 273 (emphasis added).
• 20 TJ to James Madison Jan. 30, 1787, TJW, 882 (emphasis added).

30That Jefferson embraced this regular government is also evinced in his insistence that Americans were supposed to disprove the old prejudice “that freedom of the press is incompatible with orderly government.”19 Even his famous exclamation about rebellions being a blessing was expressed as their being “medicine of the sound health of government.”20 Governmental politics was simply about keeping all future socioeconomic developments in control.

• 21 Jefferson stated, for example, that whether the Americans “remain in one confederacy, or form into (...)

31As for Jefferson’s views of minimal government, it was only the federal government that was to be kept minimal. He occasionally still called it a confederation—as a synonym for the then current constitutional federation.21 The federation was fundamentally a common defensive alliance only supplemented with particular constitutional tasks of moderating relations among states and territories.

• 22 On the statute and on Jefferson’s thinking of religious freedom, see particularly Morton White, The (...)

34In the prevailing constitutional view of Jefferson’s time, the federal government was not entitled to push even its own principle of religious freedom as obligatory for every state. It was only Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that genuinely guaranteed that right for all Virginians.22 Decades later, John Adams still lamented that he had failed to get a similar law accepted in Massachusetts. And Jefferson never suggested that other states could be compelled to adopt laws of religious freedom. Like slavery, the lack of religious freedom remained an anomaly in American republicanism—well into the nineteenth century.

• 23 Ari Helo, Thomas Jefferson’s Ethics and the Politics of Human Progress (New York: Cambridge Univers (...)

37From the Revolution onward Jefferson argued that no traditional property or inherited status among free white men should affect local or state elections. Contrary to John Adams, who always insisted that in Massachusetts’s bicameral legislature the upper house should be reserved for wealthy people, Jefferson in Virginia openly (though in vain) advocated a single constituency of all white men in the elections of the Virginia House of Representatives, which would be divided into the traditional two chambers only afterwards by lottery or by a special election by the elected themselves.23

• 24 TJ to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, TJW, 1399.
• 25 See TJ, Report on Government for Western Territory, March 1, 1794, TJW, 376-378.

38Jefferson expected every white free man to become a political actor with the explicit purpose of making “every citizen an active member of the government, and in the offices nearest and most interesting to him.”24 As in Virginia, so in the new western territories Jefferson advocated adopting universal male suffrage with minimal tax qualifications.25

• 26 TJ to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, TJW, 1399. Notably, Jefferson’s plan for dividing the counti (...)
• 27 TJ to John Adams, June 11, 1812 in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete (...)

40On the lowest level, they would be of “such size as that every citizen can attend, when called on, and act in person.”26 Local self-government was, hence, only a part of the federal machinery for directing American citizens, in the name of general human progress, to “increase the comforts, enlarge the understanding, and improve the morality of mankind.”27

• 28 TJ to Edward Coles, Aug. 25, 1814, TJW, 1345.

42Coles would thus strengthen the position of both Jefferson and Madison on the issue by coming “forward in the public councils” and continuing to preach emancipation “softly but steadily” in order to gradually change public opinion.28 After all, within the new American system of majority rule (even if with severely restricted suffrage) those in the minority preserved their right to disagree with the majority, even while the system as a whole was called a representative government.

• 29 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, transl. from Greek by R. Crawley (London: J.M Den (...)

44Moreover, democracy’s fundamental dilemma appeared to be its tendency to treat all free men as equals while everyone saw clearly that people were of highly different levels of intelligence, talents, and even moral worth. The trick was simply in holding them all capable, if not of devising new policy initiatives, of choosing the best course out of various suggested policies. The fundamental provision for this to work was grasping the view of the Athenians, as stated in Pericles’s Funeral Oration in Thucydides’s Peloponnesian Wars, that “instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.”29

• 31 See on this well-known theme in Jefferson's thought, for example, Herbert Sloan, Principle and Inte (...)

48Even today, many groups of Americans are excluded from political rights, beginning with children, the mentally ill, most prisoners, and even many ex-convicts. Jefferson’s famous commitment to generational independence expressed his conviction that every American generation was historically bound to reconsider and, when needed, to revise the country’s laws and constitutions—including the federal one.31

• 32 TJ, Autobiography (1821), TJW, 44.
• 33 TJ, A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, 1778, TJW, 365-373. Quote, TJ, Autobiograph (...)
• 34 TJ to John Adams, Oct. 18, 1813, AJL, 390 (emphasis added).

49Even general education was to serve democratic political purposes. People had to learn “to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government.”32 As to elementary education, Jefferson also wished to “throw on wealth the education of the poor.”33 But the ultimate purpose was to seek out “worth and genius … from every condition of life,” and become “completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.”34

• 35 Notes, Query XIV, TJW, 264.
• 36 On Jefferson’s famous letter to Edward Bancroft, Jan. 26, 1789 in which he speculates about the pos (...)

50Hence, while genuine Jeffersonian democracy could consider every free man politically equal, there was no denying that individuals differed in their inborn intellectual capacities and natural inclinations. Even enslaved children, before their deportation advocated by Jefferson, were to be “brought up at the public expense, to tillage, arts or sciences,” and all this “according to their geniuses.”35 Nevertheless, there appears no evidence in the Jefferson archive that he ever suggested accepting freed slaves as citizens of the United States.36

• 37 Educated in ancient philosophy and politics, it appears that Jefferson viewed slavery unnatural eve (...)
• 38 TJ to Albert Gallatin, Jan. 13, 1807, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, 12 vols., ed. Paul Leicester F (...)

51Yet another accusation can be made against Jefferson’s egalitarian inclinations, his lukewarm attitude to women’s rights. In comparison, he apparently considered Americans’ constant breaching of enslaved Americans’ rights to liberty much more glaringly at odds with natural law.37 Tellingly, in 1807 Jefferson’s cabinet faced a situation in which the minor federal office of a lighthouse keeper had been taken care of by a widow after her husband’s death, and someone suggested appointing the widow to the office. Jefferson calmly turned down the proposition on the basis that an “appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”38

• 39 TJ to William Ludlow, Sept. 6, 1824, TJW, 1496-1497.

53Jefferson does not appear to ever have argued that women’s political rights would be against natural law (or the very principle of equal rights), nor that in the course of human progress women might never gain political rights. After all, when speaking of the “progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day,” he noted that where this “progress will stop no one can say.”39

• 40 TJ to Jean Baptiste Say, Feb. 1, 1804, TJW, 1144.

54Jefferson is well known for his advocacy of small, self-sufficient farmer communities as the future backbone of the new republican ordering of post-revolutionary Virginia and, hopefully, of the rest of America. One finds him constantly speaking of “moral and physical preference of the agricultural, over the manufacturing man.”40 This, of course, did not mean that equal political rights should not pertain to every manufacturing man as well.

• 41 Alexander Hamilton to Theodore Sedgwick, July 10, 1804 in Joanne B. Freeman (ed.), Alexander Hamilt (...)
• 42 Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 35, ibid., 214-215.

55Jefferson’s social vision was a vision opposed to the old society of political orders only, the kind of world which was still reflected in the minds of most of his political opponents. Alexander Hamilton famously held democracy “our real disease,”41 and thought it only natural for even every manufacturer to regard the merchant as his “natural patron” and “representative” in politics.42 Many thought that all workers and servants were naturally so dependent on their employers that it would be futile to offer them the right to vote.

• 43 TJ to George Washington, Dec. 4, 1788, TJW, 930.

57This trend in Jefferson’s social thought had nothing to do with any intention to draw away from cultural and commercial relations with the rest of the “civilized” world, namely Europe—particularly given the Americans’ “natural right of trading with our neighbors.”43

• 44 TJ to Benjamin Austin, Jan. 9, 1816, TJW, 1370-1371.

58When the Napoleonic wars eventually stopped transatlantic commerce entirely, Jefferson had no scruples over changing his view, which had always rested on a “progressive” vision of the entire transatlantic Euro-American civilization: “He, therefore, who is now against domestic manufacture, must be reducing us either to dependence” on one or the other of the fighting European powers “or to be clothed in skins,” he wrote.44

• 45 Helvétius, De l'Esprit, as in J.B. Schneewind (ed.), Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant: An An (...)
• 46 As Aristotle put it, one “must somehow be there already with a kinship to virtue” in order to learn (...)

59The Jeffersonian progressive worldview included a belief in universal moral enhancement over time. His conciliatory understanding of the apparently constant tension between individual self-interest and genuine, disinterested benevolence can be grasped by keeping in mind Helvétius’s ironic remark that one “who to be virtuous must always conquer his inclinations, must necessarily be a wicked man.”45 By the same token, even Aristotle had held that in order to learn anything from moral philosophy one must already to be inclined to a virtuous life.46

• 47 TJ to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Julian P. Boyd et al. (eds.), Prin (...)

60Jefferson always thought that a reasonable human being would naturally be more inclined toward the good than the bad simply because people were social by nature: “Man was destined for society. His morality therefore was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong merely relative to this.”47

• 48 TJ to Caesar A. Rodney, Feb. 10, 1810, TJW, 1217.

61Hence, there was a “connection which the laws of nature have established between” human “duties and interests.”48 Majoritarian democracy, Jefferson believed, was a means to that end. But democracy, being a political construction, was also a moral compromise, given that even a righteous man had to submit oneself to occasional wrongs the majority was willing to tolerate, such as slavery.

• 49 “Extract from Thomas Jefferson’s Memoir on the Megalonyx” (Feb. 10, 1797) in (Thomas Jefferson Foun (...)
• 50 Ibid.

67The concept of the great chain of being, as pertaining to all natural species, appeared to suggest, as Jefferson held that, since the “movements of nature are in a never ending circle,” so an “animal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still probably moving in that train.”49 The fundamental presumption behind all this was that “if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should evanish by piece-meal.”50 Yet, the crucial feature of this statement is not its factual character but the term “probably” included there.

• 52 Notes, Query VI, TJW, 170.

69In other words, Jefferson fully grasped the notion that individual plant and animal species could become endangered, and even extinct, given that entire stars might vanish from the universal order of things. It was this notion of constant change as regulated by some immutable principles of nature itself in which Jefferson believed. The problem was that humankind did not know the principles, which is why we find Jefferson proclaiming that nature “has hidden from us her modus agendi.”52 This modus agendi one could safely presume to be consistent with the entire system’s survival.

• 53 TJ to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820, TJW, 1444.

71“Jeffersonian progress” called for new knowledge, not for new philosophies. Building entire worldviews upon deistic, idealistic, or materialist philosophical positions did not amount to attaining new knowledge. “[O]nce we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind,” Jefferson confidently proclaimed referring to the difference between philosophy and empirical study.53

• 54 Notes, Query XIV, TJW, 270.

74We know, for example, that Jefferson read Buffon, but we do not know if he ever became familiar with Buffon’s quite late definition of a species as any group of animals with offspring capable of reproducing themselves (hence for example, the difference between a donkey and a mule). That would have clarified Jefferson’s use of terms in his speculations about whether black people were “originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances” or a “different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species.”54

• 55 Ibid.
• 56 Notes, Query XIV, TJW, 270. For an odd example of viewing Jefferson as the founder of American raci (...)

75Any interracial reproduction he called, in fully racist terms, “staining the blood” of the whites.55 But he still insisted on its being a “suspicion only” that black people “are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”56

• 57 See, for example, Jefferson’s comparison of American achievements in warfare, physics, and astronom (...)

76The reason for early modern scientists’ often astonishing ideas about ethnic differences resulted from the simple fact that they were all European scholars, automatically considering their own Christian culture as the standard for the rest of humankind. Jefferson, for his part, was mainly worried about Americans proving themselves capable of attaining the same level of civilization with Europeans.57

• 58 Notes, Query VI, TJW, 187 (emphasis added).

77Because of Jefferson’s harsh critique of Africans’ alleged backwardness, academics rarely put any emphasis on his suspicions about the innate characteristics of Native Americans. He was by no means certain that the American Indian would be capable of attaining true (Euro-American) civilization. Just as with African Americans’ probable inferiority to white Americans, so with Native Americans Jefferson used careful language: Noting that “more facts are wanting,” he stated only that “we shall probably find that they [the Indians] are formed in mind as well as in body on the same module with” the European homo sapiens.58

• 59 Notes, Query XIV, TJW, 266.
• 60 TJ to John Adams, June 11, 1812, AJL, 307.

78Jefferson’s actual claim was that Native Americans were still far below the level of white man’s civilization, although there were proofs of “the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation.”59 Unfortunately, he thought, their “steady habits permit no innovations, not even those which the progress of science offers to increase the comforts, enlarge the understanding, and improve the morality of mankind.”60

• 61 Notes, Query XIV, TJW, 270.

79This is why he thought Indians should be amalgamated to white society. All in all, however, Jefferson’s central complaint about any genetic differences among different populations was that of insufficient research: “To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history.”61

• 62 TJ to William Ludlow, Sept. 6, 1824, TJW, 1496.
• 63 TJ to Joseph O. Cabell, Feb. 2, 1816, TJW, 1381.
• 64 TJ to Martha Jefferson, May 21, 1787, TJW, 896.
• 65 TJ to John Langdon, March 5, 1810, TJW, 1221-1222.

80Jefferson was equally judgmental about the quality of certain white Americans, calling the western pioneers “our semi-barbarous citizens,”62 and warning his young disciples not to mingle with “the drunken loungers”63 in town centers, and particularly counseling them against idleness—leading to ”ennui, the most dangerous poison of life.”64 Inactivity in developing one’s skills and talents was in itself harmful. Most European monarchs Jefferson characterized as “fools,” “idiots,” or “mere hogs,” who had been nourished “in all their passions” by their lackeys and who “in a few generations” had “become all body and no mind.”65

• 66 TJ to Doctor Walter Jones, Jan. 2, 1814, as in Ford (ed.), The Works, vol. 11, 375. To Wilson Jeffe (...)

82Let us next turn to Jeffersonian “life politics,” namely the idea that every human individual was born and lived for personal self-development. There is no question that in Jefferson’s mind, people were—regardless of their origins—born with varying levels of intelligence, varying talents, and even with varying moral sensitivity. What mattered were not one’s inborn capacities, he thought, but what one made of them. Hence, Jefferson hailed not George Washington’s intelligence, but his prudence in “never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed.”66

• 67 TJ to Martha Jefferson, May 21, 1787, TJW, 896-897.
• 68 TJ to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787, Papers, vol. 12, 16.
• 69 TJ to Robert Skipwith, Aug. 3, 1771, Papers, vol. 1, 76-77.

83Jefferson advised his daughter Martha to daily develop “those principles of virtue and goodness which will make you valuable to others and happy in yourself.”67 He similarly encouraged his nephew, Peter Carr, to look for “incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness” that would naturally follow from its very “exercise.”68 To his friend Robert Skipwith, Jefferson noted on moral education that “dispositions of the mind, like limbs of body, acquire strength by exercise. But exercise produces habit; and in the instance of which we speak, the exercise being of the moral feelings, produces a habit of thinking and acting virtuously.”69

• 70 Notes, Query VI, TJW, 156.

86All in all, for anyone who believed that scientific progress in both natural and moral sciences provided the only route toward the truth, Jefferson recommended a simple doctrine that “ignorance is preferable to error.”70 This is why he never attempted to develop a philosophy of his own. Jefferson left idle speculations about the ultimate character of the natural ordering of the universe to philosophers, whose ideas might or might not generate as hypotheses for the empirical scrutiny of things.

• 71 TJ to John Adams, Aug. 15 1820, TJW, 1443-1444. Here Jefferson differed “from the material Atheist (...)

87Jefferson characterized his own philosophical position as that of a materialist deist. He believed that only matter can have rationality (although science could not yet explain how) and that the universe must have been organized by some higher rationality rather than by mere contingency.71 Moreover, what would happen to the notions of free will and moral obligation if one fully agreed with the few atheists who appeared to believe that the universal order was either entirely contingent or, as the famous French scientist Laplace thought, entirely predetermined?

• 72 TJ to Jean Baptiste Say, Feb. 1, 1804, TJW, 1144. On another occasion Jefferson held that “the King (...)

88By contrast, the inherently rational ordering of the world would necessarily also render our true, long-term interests as social animals compatible with true morality. As Jefferson put it, “so invariably do the laws of nature create our duties and interests, that when they seem to be at variance, we ought to suspect some fallacy in our reasoning.”72 In essence, all religious studies dealt with morality. But Jefferson’s most conspicuous dilemma was of moral character as well. Regardless of his famous preaching against slavery he never managed to solve the problem on a personal, a national, or a state level.

• 73 For details on Jefferson’s public statements and acts regarding the issue of slavery, see for examp (...)
• 74 See, for example, Ari Helo & Peter Onuf, “Jefferson, Morality, and the Problem of Slavery,” The Wil (...)
• 75 Ibid.

89Jefferson opposed the institution of slavery for his entire political career.73 Even before the Revolution he insisted that the colonists would be willing to let go of slavery.74 His latest summary of how to achieve general emancipation in Virginia, and eventually in other Southern states as well, was written in 1825, a year before his death.75

• 76 See on Monroe and slavery, for example, Matthew Costello, “The Enslaved Households of President Jam (...)

90Let us next consider Jefferson’s position as an “antislavery slaveholder” as he depicted it himself. For many scholars such an identity may seem a contradiction in terms. Among other national figures considering themselves as antislavery slaveholders one finds, for example, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, and Abraham Lincoln’s much admired Whig leader Henry Clay in the 1850s. None of them freed all their slaves. Even the Union General Ulysses S. Grant owned a slave in the 1850s, and his wife apparently owned slaves during the Civil War.76

• 77 On Jefferson talking of free black Americans as “pests in society by their idleness, and the depred (...)

92Regardless of few scholars still adamantly opposing the view that Jefferson much more likely than not had a decades-long intimate, perhaps coerced relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, one might also expect this relationship to have somehow affected his opinions about racial issues. Yet, Jefferson never refuted his early condemnation of interracial relationships as expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787). Nor does his later correspondence give any hint that his harsh opinions about African Americans ever softened.77

• 78 Some scholars argue that Jefferson’s 1819 letter to Joel Yancey would disprove his abolitionist int (...)

93Regardless of his glaringly racist opinions, Jefferson remained absolutely convinced that slavery had to be abolished. More consistent with his racist suspicions was his additional condition for abolition that the entire African American population needed to be exported from the United States to form a nation of their own. Even so, Jefferson never thought slavery a morally acceptable institution for any human beings, no matter how allegedly culturally inferior to white, Euro-American civilization.78 On a personal level, the plan of abolition was, therefore, necessary to clear his own conscience, both as an individual and as a statesman.

• 79 As earlier, see Helo, Thomas Jefferson’s Ethics 2014, 40-45.
• 80 Notes, Query XVIII, TJW, 289.

94Jefferson’s plan of abolition remained the same for fifty years.79 Even his early draft of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 included a section condemning slavery. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, written shortly after the Revolution, he believed that slavery would be abolished soon, given that the “the spirit of the master” was already vanishing.80 In Notes, he also presented his plan that all enslaved children would be separated from their parents, schooled, and exported at public expense to whichever part of the world would be most appropriate to set them free and build a nation of their own—presumably under the protection of the United States.

• 81 TJ to Jared Sparks, Feb. 4, 1824, TJW, 1484-1487.

95Jefferson never went into exact details on how young enslaved people would be educated and prepared for their forced deportation, most probably because any such plan would have only become a political flashpoint on its own. As late as 1825 he insisted that he had never changed his mind about his plan.81 Nor did he ever suggest that it could be put it into effect without a democratic majority in Virginia. It was a plan for his home state only, hopefully to be followed by the rest of the Southern slaveholders.

• 82 Padraig Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Phila (...)
• 83 One can always speculate whether the Virginia slaveholders, Jefferson included, thought of profitin (...)

99In 1820, there were still tens of thousands of slaves in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and other Northern states awaiting emancipation under those states’ gradual emancipation laws. The figure in New York alone was 20,000 enslaved people.82 Imitating Northern states’ abolition policies appeared to require diminishing the number of slaves and hence the economic interest in the system itself in all Southern states. This was Jefferson’s reason for turning into an advocate of spreading slavery.83

• 84 TJ to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, TJW, 1434.
• 85 TJ to Albert Gallatin, Dec. 26, 1820, TJW, 1449. My interpretation runs directly counter to that of (...)

100In 1820 Jefferson condemned the Missouri debate for turning a matter of state sovereignty into a federal-level controversy. In his eyes, Congress appeared ready to sacrifice all the Revolutionary generation’s efforts “to acquire self-government and happiness to their country.”84 Spreading slavery to the West was not properly speaking a moral issue at all, Jefferson argued, “because the removal of slaves from one state to another, no more than their removal from one country to another, would never make a slave of one human being who would not be so without it.”85

• 86 TJ to Jared Sparks, Feb. 4, 1824, TJW, 1485; For an extensive, classic account of Jefferson’s own r (...)

102Nevertheless, Jefferson’s solution called for a genuine political decision for ending slavery, not for every slaveholder attempting the emancipation on his own—possibly against the hopes of neighboring planters. Moreover, the political solution entailed surrendering slave children to be schooled prior to their deportation without any full compensation to masters. The plan would be hugely expensive, but the costs were supposed to be shared by the state and, to an extent, even by the federation in the form of selling public lands. As Jefferson explained to Jared Sparks in 1824, enslavers’ actual losses in their “property” (people) would still amount to a fifty percent increase in their contemporary direct taxes.86

• 87 For his statement that “my religion . . . is known to my god and myself alone,” see TJ to John Adam (...)
• 88 Ibid.

104Jefferson was never a conventionally religious man, and consistently opposed the power of the priests, no matter of which Christian denomination. To be sure, he insisted he was a Christian himself. But his Christianity was known to himself alone, and had very little to do with what any religious authorities would dictate about such a religion.87 To assess his religion in moral terms, it thus followed that evidence of it “before the world is to be sought in my life. If that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.”88

• 89 Notes, Query XVII, TJW, 285.
• 90 TJ to John Adams, April 11, 1823, TJW, 1469.

107Jefferson referred to this crucial distinction between the dictates of moral, natural law and any religious doctrines by calmly noting that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god.”89 By the same token, he ridiculed not only the traditional doctrine of trinity, but also the New Testament story of the birth of Jesus: “the day will come,” Jefferson wrote, “when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter [sic].”90

• 91 TJ to William Short, April 13, 1820, Dickinson W. Adams & Ruth W. Lester (eds.), Jefferson’s Extrac (...)
• 92 TJ to Alexander Smyth, Jan. 17, 1825, Extracts, 416.

108As for the historical Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson claimed he read his teachings just as he read “other antient and modern moralists, with a mixture of approbation and dissent.”91 On examining the Apocalypse he noted that what “has no meaning admits no explanation.”92 To be sure, Jesus’s love commandment was in Jefferson’s view the most striking step forward in human moral convictions in world history. Jefferson considered universal benevolence an absolutely necessary supplement to mere justice in genuine moral thought. This alone of what Christianity taught was, to Jefferson, unequivocally true.

• 93 TJ to Miles King, Sept. 26, 1814, Extracts, 360.

109Religious thinking for Jefferson had to accord with the notion that a human being believing in scientific progress is always claiming to know less rather than more. Science in its modern, Jeffersonian, meaning referred to investigating things of which no authority other than empirical science could provide genuine knowledge. Insofar as this had to with moral aspects of human life, Jefferson also dismissed the contemporary theoretical disagreements on the actual source of human morality as either God-given, natural, emotional, rational, or wholly arbitrary (in the sense of arising from grasping our true self-interests as social animals). This is why, for Jefferson, any “religion” was “substantially good which produces an honest life.”93

• 94 TJ to Miles King, Sept. 26, 1814, Extracts, 360 (emphasis added).

110Jefferson’s natural religion entailed freedom of conscience. This freedom did not concern some more or less vague definition of religion, but human morality itself. True morality, in Jefferson’s eyes, consisted in “acting honestly towards all, benevolently to those who fall within our way, respecting sacredly their rights bodily and mental, and cherishing especially their freedom of conscience, as we value our own.”94 Moreover, to develop one’s moral sense, one first and foremost, needed to stay honest to oneself.

• 96 TJ to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, Extracts, 356.

112In other words, religious issues were supposed to remain personal because they demanded absolute consistency and honesty to oneself and to one’s own comprehension. This is why young Peter was not advised to find the truth about God, but to become answerable for the rightness of his decision, meaning that he should never compromise his most genuine beliefs, while respecting others who believed differently. After all, no absolute knowledge on such matters as divinity or the ultimate character of our moral obligations was available. As for non-religious thinkers, Jefferson was absolutely confident that such “virtuous atheists”96 as Condorcet, Helvétius, and de Tracy would be just as capable of moral feelings and reasoning as any other man.

• 97 TJ, Autobiography (1821) as extracted from Monticello Website, “Jefferson Quotes and Family Letters (...)

113In sum, there is nothing too surprising in Jefferson’s note in his autobiography of 1821 that his draft for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was to provide full freedom of conscience. Its protection pertained equally to “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.”97

• 98 See for these accusations against Jefferson’s sectional motives for establishing the University of (...)

114Religious issues played a part even in Jefferson’s retirement years fondest project of establishing the University of Virginia. Notably, even while the University of Virginia was largely built by enslaved people, there is scant evidence in the Jefferson archive for the widely held scholarly view that it was primarily devised to promote any particularly Southern values or the slaveholding elite’s political interests in slaveholding.98

• 99 For an early historical characterization of the first set of university faculty, see Herbert Baxter (...)

115Instead, Jefferson maintained his quite scandalous conviction that religious studies did not belong to university level education at all. Universities were supposed to become temples of truth, not of religious debates. By the same token, most of the professors Jefferson wished, and partly managed, to acquire for the institution were European. Others were such Americans as George Tucker, who (like his famous cousin St. George Tucker) opposed slavery and eventually freed his slaves—persons who had spoken for abolition for decades in Virginia just like Jefferson and Madison.99

• 100 TJ to Martha Jefferson, Nov. 28, 1783, TJW, 782.
• 101 TJ to Martha Jefferson, Dec. 11, 1783, TJW, 784.

117Jefferson hence counseled his daughter Martha to always embrace both “what is right or what is clever.”100 and referred to her “conscience” as the only “faithful internal Monitor” by which one would “always be prepared for the end of the world: or for a much more certain event which is death.”101

• 102 TJ to John Adams, Sept. 12, 1821, Cappon (ed.), The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 575.
• 103 TJ to John Adams, June 17, 1813, AJL, 335.

118Throughout his life Jefferson viewed himself as an advocate of the Enlightenment notion of general human progress in terms of economic, scientific, and moral advancement of the human race. This is why he was genuinely horrified with the 1815 Vienna Conference when Europeans reverted to the hierarchical ideals of the society of order, thus apparently leaving the United States alone “to preserve and restore the light and liberty” to humankind.102 Even so, the retired stateman could well subscribe to the Epicurean maxim of his personal happiness consisting of “ease of body and tranquillity of mind.”103

• 104 Quotation, TJ to William A. Burwell, Jan 28, 1805, Ford (ed.), The Works, vol. 10, 126.

123Moreover, Jefferson was convinced that all involved were probably prejudiced: black people would aim to avenge their mistreatment by whites whenever possible, and the contemporary political elite already resisted any substantial political reforms. After all, in the name of moral benevolence the members of this elite itself were responsible for representing children, women, slaves, and the huge number of white, adult male Virginians whom they still denied political rights—against Jefferson’s demands. Among those privileged few, Jefferson noted, “There are many virtuous men who would make any sacrifices to affect it [emancipation of slaves], many equally virtuous who persuade themselves either that the thing is not wrong, or that it cannot be remedied.”104