D R A F T
Jefferson Revisited
Arguments for Understanding Him Better
Which Also Means to Understand Our Situation Better
Third, slightly modified version
by
2 October 2005
This
is a draft only. The English language must be improved for a final version.
Address of the
author:
Hans Dolezalek
148 East Creek Drive
Menlo Park CA 94025-3660
USA
Tel.: +1 (650) 328-9737
E-Mail: Hdolezalek at AOL dot COM
Prologue
Obviously, this is not a
scientific paper.
In
an environment, in which Kuhn had us confused with his paradigm-theory
of scientific development, we find true historians, such as Steven Ambrose, but also a large number (often on university
chairs) revisionist and or relativistic “historians” for whom historic truth
more or less does not exist. That is an important problem because every serious
citizen who wants to base his political acts (including his voting) on
responsible, reasonable and well-founded decisions, will soon discover that his
thinking and that of his environment is
influenced by his and their concept of the history of our nation.
I
grew up, from 1912 to 1961 in a Germany in which until 1945 an extremely
one-sided concept of the history of that nation determined the way of thinking
and, alas, many of the actions of its citizens, and in which, after 1945, it
was almost impossible, anyway very
difficult to find a way out of that concept. .
On
this background, considering what I said above in the first paragraph, and
having learned the Jefferson principle of eternal vigilance and the
democratic necessity of responsible action, I felt that we should consider this
nations history not only on the basis of the many and contradictory
presentations of the professional historians but also in simpler ways of trying
to think through - on our own - the basic trend and facts of that history; ways
simple enough that most of our thinking citizens can participate.
This
text is such an attempt.
This
is the Third Version. Small changes have been made throughout the
text and some paragraphs have been removed. One modification is a personal
addition in a short new chapter 10 on page 21, giving some more information on
the author and the writing of this text.
Chapters:
1. Introduction.................... ........................................................................
5
2. On the Spiritual
Environment.................................................................. 7
3. A Gap Between the European and the
American Spiritual Situation...... 8
4. Democracy by Better
Numbers...............................................................10
5.
Religion...................................................................................................11
6. Jefferson, the
Sphinx?.............................................................................13
7.
Slavery....................................................................................................
15
8. The
Indians............................................................................................ 19
9. A Brief
Conclusion.................................................................................
20
10. How
this Text Came Into
Life............................................................... 21
1. Introduction
.Obviously, a person
who is unable or unwilling to learn from history, risks to miss important
positive features (which might be important at present) and/or to repeat
mistakes of the past. And, contrary what some adherents of “postmodern
‘philosophy’ “ claim, there is not only truth in history, but the “real”
history is true. It is, however, extremely difficult to detect that truth and
it may be humanly impossible to detect the whole truth. For any attempt to
approach that truth, the historian must, temporarily, separate himself
(herself) from many facts of present day live. Indeed. such ability constitutes
the most important and, at the same time, the most elegant ingredient feature
of The Historian. It may be easier to
obtain if the historian does not only know the history of his own environment
but that of other nations, too - and even more, if he has lived himself in more
than one environment with its consequences from its history and thus directly
experienced the differences between such consequences.
To quote just one recent source: Timothy
Foote says in his article1:
“It is the custom now for Americans to judge the
American past harshly and with a really notable lack of understanding, as if
the people who lived then were exactly like us”.
I
agree but would have written “wrong and harshly”. This term “wrong” is
right because some facts and truths which we know now were unknown then. To
expect that Jefferson would have known the, since then often researched,
differences between NATURE ands NURTURE, and to blame him because he did not
act accordingly, would not be much better than to reproach him that he (while in Paris 1784-1789) did not
participate intensively in the constitutional negotiations taking place in
Philadelphia by using e-mail...! The debate on NATURE and NURTURE is going on
since a long time and continues today, but Jefferson could not have
known much of Lamarck’s hypotheses and nothing about Darwin’s
theory of evolution. This simple fact is of some importance in regard to the
debate about Slavery, see here in chapter 7, below.. .
Historical
persons, and so also Thomas Jefferson, cannot be correctly considered on
any other base than that of their own time. What he learned and experienced as
a child and a young man were versions of the information and the various
attitudes available at that time - and what he then developed in own ideas and
acquired as an own knowledge, was still based - in agreeing or disagreeing - on
his period’s attitudes. If we want to find out what of all this is still valid
today and maybe valid tomorrow or, maybe, for all times, we have to know the
human history since then in sufficient
detail.
To
present a really simple example: maybe, Alexander von Humboldt, during
his visit to Washington2
has asked President Jefferson how long it would take to travel
from the White House to Monticello; the answer would have probably been: “a few
days” – but we know today that
it takes less than three hours. However, if Humboldt would have asked Jefferson
whether the government is imposed on the people by God, the answer would be:
“No, the people install their administration themselves” - and that answer
would still be valid today and - or so we hope - for the future as well. —
Or, remember Goethe’s famous poem
“Amerika du hast es besser” in which he claims that America’s fate is
better because (among other reasons) there are no basalts. That opinion
reflects the stand of knowledge at his time and also a geological hypothesis
which shortly thereafter was proved to be wrong. Another reason given by him
was that the American fate is fortunate because there are no forts and castles
in America. Well, America abounds in forts from the pre-Columbus time and from the pioneer centuries and also in
castle-like buildings, for example the main buildings of some of its
universities. In spite of that, what Goethe really meant, was and is
true - and it was expressed at about the same time by George Washington
when he advised the Americans not to learn from Europe.
In
Jefferson’s times and a long, long time thereafter, the general
opinion was that the differences in civilization between Europe and Africa (and
the American Indians) were due to racial differences. Recently, Jared
Diamond, in his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Fates of Human Society”3
very convincingly demonstrated that this assumption is false. The (finer)
cultural differences between the peoples in Europe themselves (and also in
comparison to peoples in the Middle
East and Northeast Africa) are also not primarily determined by race but be the
fact that ideas have consequences. To a great extent ideas determine the future. This fact - easily acknowledged by
some thinking - is especially important for a consideration of Jefferson
and of our history since then.
In
addition to te necessity to look at historic persons in the context of their
own time, there is a second point which is often not seen. For the average
human of today, it may be impossible to rise himself up to the eminent power of
thinking and projecting ideas into the future as outstanding persons such as Jefferson
or Goethe possessed. We can only try to approach such a capability,
hoping that our own thinking was at least in the right direction.. Of course,
try we must. We must try to find the rationale behind them. ask
what they - e.g. Jefferson - was thinking before he said, wrote or did
anything - from where came his reasons?.
2. On the Spiritual Environment .
We cannot get a satisfying
feeling for the spiritual environment in which the American “Founding Fathers”
thought, debated and acted if we do not fully realized in which way the
settlers in the new continent experienced and had to deal with facts which were
given then and there but which also have a remarkable validity in other times
and other continents, i..e. which in their essence were simply human - in spite
of the fact that the peoples in Europe did not encounter them at all or only
very marginally.
One such fact is that 100%
personal freedom was accessible to every new settler who wanted it: he had to
go only 10 or 100 miles farther to the West. That situation prevailed more or
less outspoken until the 1860's, when the transcontinental railroad was opened,
and in part until the 1920's when large parts of the prairie (til then overlooked)
opened to settlement (and many farmers from Vermont went then there). This fact
had two important consequences: (1) Because of it, the people who did not got
to the “West” enjoyed also more freedom because they had the possibility to
escape any unwanted suppression; and
(2) the ones who went also had with their 100% freedom a 100% personal
responsibility. This connection between freedom and responsibility, albeit
often a difficult connection, remained a fundamental trait of the American
national character.
A second fact is the habit to
give any new settler - farmer - the same amount of land. This remained an
important habit - or part of habits - until near the end of the 19th
century (if you fly over the mid-western states and look down you see the
regular rectangular division of the land into
pieces of equal sizes, at many places). These farmers and their
neighbors and friends learned two things from the consequences of these equal
distributions: (1) After ten years, the one farmer was successful and another
one not; and all of them and their neighbors and friends knew why: except for
the cases in which there was sickness or one piece of land was especially poor,
the two things which mattered were good planning and hard work. So, the large importance of hard work and
good planning became part of the American national character, (2) It would be
unjust if - after such years, one would enforce a return to equality. So, the
American opinion on equality is aiming at equality of the starting conditions
or equality of the opportunity and not to equality in the result. It is here, where probably the sharpest
division of opinions in America and Europe exists.. .
Because of the particular
importance of this point, we want to say more about it, leaving aside other
experiences which the new settlers hade made.
3. A Gap between the European and the American Spiritual
Situation
When Thomas Jefferson
was, in fact, the second American Embassador to the Royal Court of France
(after Benjamin Franklin). his old friendship with the Marquis de la
Fayette was taken up again, and in spite of an age difference of only ten
years, a kind of father-son relationship developed. It was mostly maintained by
letters, carried back and forth by messenger boys (that is why we know so much
about this, the letters are still available). One important subject in that
exchange was the relationship between personal freedom on one side and equality
between men on the other - and the status of the individual personality of each
human being is invariably tied to that relationship. Unless it is clearly
stated which “equality” is meant [(i) equality before the court, (ii) equality
of start conditions or of opportunity, or (iii) equality in the result], case
(iii) generally takes priority. The American point of view is that personal
freedom is more important than equality. Already on 12 June 1776 the Virginia
Assembly accepted the first Declaration of Human Rights which truly deserves
this name The significance of it was expressed by a man who probably was the
sharpest thinker of the French Revolution of 1789 (or Revolt, as Hannah
Arendt called it), the mathematician, philosopher and politician Marquis
de Condorcet. He stated the
following:
.
“ La
premiPre déclaration des droits, qui en véritablement mérite
le nom, est celle de Virginie, arrLtée
au 12 juin 1776, et l’auteur de cette ouvrage a des droits á la reconnaissance
éternelle du genre humain. Six autres d’États d’Amérique ont suivi l’exemple de
la Virginie.”4. .
The first article of the
Declaration begins with :”....that all men are by nature equally free and
independent”. For me, if I see all men as “equal”, I see a field of, say,
wheat; if I read “equally independent”, I see a natural forest where trees of
different kinds live together. The
majority of the first thirteen states accepted that declaration as part of
their own human rights declaration.
In June/July 1789, Lafayette
prepared a Human Rights Declaration to be presented to the French General
Assembly. .and this topic came up in his exchange with Jefferson. Jefferson
proposed that they meet for dinner in the house of the Duchess of Danville
on 7 July (i.e., one week before Lafayette ordered the storming of the
Bastille). In Lafayette’s draft, freedom and equality were treated as
equally important, i.e., opposite to the American opinion (the wording in the
American Declaration of Independence, 13 years earlier, is to be explained in a
different way). We have no report on the discussion at the dinner, so we do not
know whether Jefferson tried to convince Lafayette, but if he
tried, he failed. After Lafayette presented his draft to the General Assembly,
several other declarations were also submitted in which the relative weight of
freedom and quality did not change significantly. However, when in the “Year
One”, 1793, the final declaration was accepted, equality was very high in
importance, freedom not much more than a little by-product and so it
remained. It turns out that the evening
of the 7 July 1789 was the last occasion at which the American point of the
preponderance of Freedom could have become also the French (i.e. the European)
one and with it the status of the Individual- and that occasion did not
succeed. The consequences were terrible: e.g.,all, or nearly all of the immense
cruelties of the 20. Century are based on the neglect of human dignity and the
preponderance of equality in the result.
This fact is not unknown to
the French themselves. In 1906, the famous French political thinker, Léon
Duguit wrote in his standard book that governments which are dictatorships
or are inclined to become dictatorships, always reduce the weight of freedom
and enhance the weight of equality. He referred expressly to the situation
1789/1793 described above. His book was re-edited several times until 1926 and
in that process was greatly modified, but this particular statement remained in
it.
4. Democracy by Better Numbers
The present “Metric System”
is generally, and rightly so, contributed to the French Revolution of 1789...However,
it is of interest to learn a little more about this. While Thomas Jefferson
was the American Ambassador (kind of) in Paris, 1784-1789, he developed a close
friendship with the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) which lasted until
the latter’s death (probably murder by the French government). They both agreed
that in a democracy the complicated systems of coinage and of measures of all
kinds must be replaced by systems based on the decimal system, numbers easily
divided by ten. The American dollar had by then already been divided into one hundred cents, and people
who did not command a higher degree of mathematics could handle this - until
then they obviously were often betrayed by others who could more easily divide
numbers by 5 or 6 or 12 or 16 etc. After Jefferson returned to America,
he began to discuss and propose decimal systems for other measures such as
length, area, volume, weight - these things were also discussed in France and
in England. That was of great importance in a democracy, again because
deliberately false calculations were often applied when land was sold or goods
were measured. Jefferson
accepted, as a fixed ground measure for length, the length of a pendulum which,
placed on the 45o latitude would swing in exactly one second - which
easily could be measured with almost any desired accuracy. Unfortunately, Jefferson
was not successful in this regard, so that even today we in the USA have to
deal with factors of 3, 12, 16 etc. instead of 10 - this is and remains a large
burden on American life and American economy.
By-the way: the unit of length suggested by Jefferson would have
been better than the somewhat unwieldy “meter”.
More on this problem can be
found in an interesting book “Measuring America” by the Englishman.Andro
Linklater (NewYork 2002, Walker & Co.).
5. Religion
The following words by Jefferson
are generally known, even inscribed in stone inside the Jefferson-Monument in
Washington:
“God who gave us life gave us
liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have
removed their only firm basis. a conviction in the minds of the people that
these liberties are a gift of God? That
they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep
forever.” . . . . .
A stronger belief in the existence and activity of God could
hardly be found than Jefferson expressed in these words.
Also, God is referred to in
the Declaration of Independence.
More detailed, Jefferson expressed
his conviction in the Inaugural Address as the new President which he gave on
4 March 1801: “....enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and
practiced in various forms, yet all of them including honesty, truth,
temperance, gratitude, and the love of man, acknowledging and adoring an
overruling Providence , which by all its dispensations proves that it delights
in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness thereafter; with all
these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous
people?.....”
Jefferson also believed
in, and introduced, the strong separation of Church and State - this is
one of only three achievements he considered important as features of his own
live. We certainly can see that this separation was thought of as necessary for
a strong and living religion. .After all. it was generally not so that the
Church took over the State, but vice versa: the ruler of the State forced the
church under him - and the necessity was to liberate the Church from such a
rule.
What about the “Jefferson
Bible”? After a livelong internal struggle and many discussions over the
decades, Jefferson in 1804 set out and finished in 1818 to edit Gospels in order to uncover the essence of true
religion in the simple story of the life of Jesus. He omits the Annunciation, the Virgin Birth and even the
Resurrection. By doing this, Jefferson
increases the importance of following Jesus for every citizen: if
the simple human being called Jesus could do this, everybody could -
and in the same way Jefferson’s Bible even increases the traditional sight that Jesus became
human. Finally, in this way, Jefferson demonstrated that not only
Christians could and should follow Jesus’ ways which is a point of view
of tremendous importance in our days5.
To make the situation more
clear, a remark may be permitted with regard to the “Constitution” of the
European Union, under discussion now (July 2003) . There, religion is not
mentioned, the word “GOD” does not appear
-- as it also does not
appear in the American Constitution of
1787. The deciding difference is,
however, the fact that the
writers of the proposed European Union Constitution expressly ask what the
spiritual foundations of Europe are, a question which was not alien to the Founding Fathers but then did
not need any express mentioning. So, may we state that the Americans did not
exclude GOD but present day Europeans may arriving at just doing that?.
6. Jefferson the Sphinx ?
John Ellis has tried to
paint Jefferson as an American Sphinx6 and he got even a prize for that. But he
is wrong. On page 145 in his book he
writes: “Of course, the gap between “what ought to be” and “what would be allowed” constituted the
central dilemma of Jefferson’s overall cast of mind on almost all political topics”.
- Like Joe Ellis, several other American historians of the late 20th
century saw in Thomas Jefferson a person with a split personality,
calling him an enigma or a man whom one cannot understand. I believe that this
is fundamentally wrong..
It would be more truthful to
see in him a leading philosopher and politician who found himself, beyond his powers to change it, in an environment which imposed on him a
somewhat tragic position. Basically a philosopher with an extremely broad and
deep-going wisdom and propelled to speak about the goals toward which mankind, at least his nation,
should develop, he also was aware that politics
is the art of the possible, and he could not escape his duty to be a
politician. Thomas Jefferson
acting as a good politician also
knew (what some of to-days “historians” seem to have forgotten): that one can
only execute that “art of the possible” if one is very clear and determined
about one’s goals, even if it may be unwise to state in public what one’s goals
are. - This happened when the democratic foundations were
still weak and to some degree undefined, and he could not fail to see that his
possibility to do anything to forward his philosophical perceptions toward a
later realization would disappear if he would not be re-elected to his
political position. Yes, if Jefferson would have relinquished his
political state and withdrawn to be a writing philosopher only, there
would not have been another politician
equally capable to forward his perceptions, step by step and through apparent
contradictions. There was no way out of
this tragic situation. It was his duty to remain a politician and to
speak out, as well as the situation allowed, his philosophical perceptions.
If we wish to look into a
hypothetical situation and assume that Jefferson had only one goal in
life: namely to free the slaves, one could make the point that he would have to
behave as he indeed behaved throughout
his life.(of course, this is hypothetical only, his overriding goal was the
liberation of the American nation). In his later years, Jefferson and
his friends were very well aware that what they had created in 1776 was yet an
unproven experiment: the outcome of the French revolution of 1789 had
been the dictatorship of Napoleon,
lasting until 1815.. How deep that danger was felt, we can derive from the fact
that he and John Adams had to live long enough to see the fiftieth
anniversary of the 4th of
July 1776 before they could allow themselves to die.
Jefferson, as all true political leaders, understood well that
in order to invite people to try new ways, one must first state clearly - but
without attacking the opposition too strongly - what this new way should be. At
the same time, however, one must test whether the time is already mature enough
for the people to accept one’s proposal immediately. If it is not - and Jefferson
often was so far ahead of his time that it was not ready - by a too strong
support one endangers the possibility of realization. Not only that - Jefferson
would have endangerd his chance to
be re-elected to the Assembly the next time and thereby risked to loose any
possibility to do anything for his goal. In the case of Slavery, if he alone
would have freed his slaves, he probably would go bankrupt very soon and
thereby even loose his right to vote.
7. Slavery
In the year 1996, or so, Conor
Cruise O’Brian of England stated: “Thomas Jefferson should be condemned as
a racist and expelled from the American pantheon” and THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY of
October 1996 publishes a long article with many debates on it and shows on its
cover how a Jefferson-Bust is knocked of its pedestal by a wrecking ball. and
splitters. That was in a period of American writing on history by some in a revisionist manner,
i.e. taking from history as from a quarry just the blocks which suit you in
your present day politics What we need now is, instead, to investigate history
more carefully and more by having as our background the absolute necessity to
report on historical figures and deeds as much as is possible on the basis and
in the context of their own time - as we already stated in our Introduction.
We are probably right when we
assume that Thomas Jefferson at an age of about 20 already saw
that the liberation of the slaves was an extremely difficult problem; not only
the slaves but also the indentured laborers (from Europe) provided extremely
large benefits to their owners, they were often cruelly treated. (For a
description of that situation see Edmund S. Morgan “American Slavery,
American Freedom; The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia”)7. Certainly, the
moral standards of the Quakers were not reason enough to convince many
plantation owners to sacrifice these benefits, a more authentic voice had to be used; it had to come out of the
Virginia General Assembly.. However, if
someone in that Assembly or outside of it would speak too forcefully for the
liberation of the slaves, he certainly would not be re-elected as an Assembly
Member and thereby loose all influence.
Therefore, some Assembly Member had to start the movement but with some
caution. The young Jefferson must also have known that if he or any
Virginian plantation owner alone would
set his slaves free, he would in short time go bankrupt, loose his plantation
and would no longer be eligible as an Assembly Delegate, could not even vote
anymore. His cause to start and promote the long effort to free the slaves would
have been completely lost.
After Thomas Jefferson,
in following his ideas, had introduced a bill in the Virginia General
Assembly in 1765, to the effect that
all slaves in Virginia were to be let free, and had become solidly and
overwhelmingly defeated, he became known
as the man who wanted to free the slaves but obviously was not
(yet) taken very seriously.
A further step was taken by
Jefferson when he wrote, in 1776, the Draft for the “Declaration of
Independence”. In this Declaration, he writes: “The history of the
present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and
usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute
tyranny over these states. To prove this, lets facts be submitted to a candid
world.” This is followed by a long and
detailed list, including many paragraphs beginning with the words “He has....”.
One of them was the following:
“He has
waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights
of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who were offended by
him,.captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere. “
These additional words were
eliminated by the members of Congress before the text was printed, maybe before
they voted. They felt that time was not yet ripe for this particular
statement. However, in the present
year, 2003, these words again have been
added to the “Declaration of
Independence” as it is displayed in the
new American History Building Complex in Philadelphia.
Generally, Jefferson
must have heard from well-meaning friends a hundred times that the slaves are different, they look different, they think different,
have no or a different intelligence, they smell different and so on. It was, or
became obvious to him., that at least 90% of his white compatriots thought
about the slaves in such terms. The knowledge about the relationship between
nature and nurture, still incomplete in our present times, was hardly a topic
of much thinking then. Therefore, people did not realize that the slaves had
little or no incentive to develop that type of intelligence which the whites
promoted in and among themselves; that long-lasting and close family ties often
did not exist in which a youngster could grow up following his intellectual
wishes. They did not realize that the fact that most - nearly all - slaves
arriving in America had been slaves in Africa and therefore developed a kind of
intelligence which is practical for surviving under an often cruel and
extremely powerful master - but that such type of intelligence was not proven
to be typical for their race. -- Thus,
an insufficient and incompetent intelligence and knowledge of the whites in
America helped to produce that wrong
image of the blacks. We cannot expect that Jefferson himself was free of
such misconceptions. Yes, we know that he was not but first accepted them
himself and then struggled for all of his life with them. This is visible in
the draft for his book on Virginia and the many changes he made - on his own
changed attitude or advised so by
friends - in that draft. The draft and the many changes he made by later
writing between the lines or by pasting additional pieces of paper to it is now
preseerved by the Massachusetts Historical Society. For a detailed description
see Douglas L. Wilson: “Jefferson Unbound”8. It is, however irrelevant: whether or
not he believed them, he had to taken into account that nearly all his
contemporaries were convinced about them. Any potential attempt of his to
change the opinion of them was, at best, uncertain, and would require a long
time of effort.
Jefferson must have felt, maybe subconsciously, that to give
the slaves true freedom, first de iure,
than de facto - that freedom could never come because of any number of
possibilities, which in a deeper sense were marginal - no, freedom must come
for only one reason - overriding all others: the slaves must be free because by nature all men are equally
free.
In order to get or maintain
some influence on his friends and others, in response for what his friends had
told him in 1765 and thereafter, he must show them that he understood many of
their attitudes - yes, not only that,
but that he himself had come to the same conclusion by his own
experience (see above) but that
he was thinking further ahead and more fundamentally so, and therefore was
convinced that the slaves must be free; that
- whatever one may think about them -
they still have an inherent right to be free.. So, he stated, a bit
reluctantly (stating that his experience is limited) that the slaves may be
musical, may have fine human feelings but not enough intelligence and that -
probably for a good reason in their living situations or because for some
inherited feature - did not smell
pleasantly - but that they must be
free, nevertheless. By taking that stand and writing and speaking in that way,
he reduced the features of the general opinion indicated above, to something to be neglected in comparison
to one thing: freedom.
As already indicated, Jefferson
must have recognized that there will be much time, many years, no, even many
decades before the freedom would come. If a reader of this text should doubt
that so much time was necessary, he may consider the struggles Abraham
Lincoln had first with himself and then with others on this issue.. They
are marvelously portrayed in the film
“Abraham and Mary Lincoln, A house Divided” by David Grubin9,
available as a three-band-video from PBS Home Video’s “American Experience”;
ISBN 0-7806-3489-6 - it’s the situation
100 years later – Another 100 years
later, let the situation impress you in
another film with the title “Simple Justice”10. Even if we have already considered it, it is
for us still worthwhile to see these two videos because they portray vividly
and precisely what a large fight that was. Decades had to pass before John
Brown dedicated his life to the liberation of the slaves and started a
dramatically failing revolt which nevertheless produced a march song for the
Union Troops during the Civil War, ending with the statement “his soul is
marching on”. Several hundred thousand Americans had to die before the
Emancipation Declaration and finally the 13th Amendment of the
Constitution became a reality - and that was not the end. Not before 1954, Thurgood
Marshall finally obtained a certain legal equality, and ten and more years later the simplest implications of
such an equality had to be fought for, resulting in even more dead. Even, today
we are not yet at the end, 236 years after 1765.. .
..
This two-centuries long
development was started because Thomas Jefferson took the lead. Of course, the problem accompanied him
throughout his life..
The development was promoted
by the fact, that the desire for freedom, in general, got such a boost from the
general political development from 1774 to 1781 or, better, 1788; codified by
none better than by George Mason and the Virginia Declaration of Rights
of 12 June 1776 which begins with the statement that all men are by nature
equally free. We have mentioned it already above in chapter 3.
Another decisive promotion of
democratic thinking was given, indeed produced, by George Washington when he, being not only the by far
most powerful man in the United States and also the most admired one, withdrew
to be a private citizen and farmer on Mount Vernon. Such a thing had not
happened before, and Napoléon demonstrated shortly thereafter that such
a behavior was still extraordinary - only at the present times, we are generally,
but not yet exclusively, accustomed to
such a behavior. Therefore we must realize that Jefferson and his
American contemporaries had to be on the alert all the time that the central
power was not becoming too powerful. That may explain some of Jefferson’s
later actions and advices given when he was the “Sage on Monticello”. Even if such actions and advices are to be
considered today as being wrong and to be regretted, at that time they may have
been the best ones, yes must be the ones which had the effect that we can think
differently today.[I have, in 1996, discussed this problem in greater detail
than presented here].
What we have said about
Slavery covers only a part of that whole problem. If you look, e.g., at the
vol.204, no.3, pages 2-29 of the”NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC” magazine (September 2003)
you may get a feeling that we even today are far from having it solved . In all
nations slavery is illegal, but in more than 120 present nations - including
the US, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands - are still some forms of
de facto slavery in existence, amounting to a total number of about 27 Million
people.
8. The Indians
The tragic situation of which
we spoke above in chapter 2, may also be illustrated by looking into the
relationship between Jefferson and the Indians. Jefferson knew,
of course, that the Indians could be extremely cruel - see his remark on that
topic in the Declaration of Independence. Nevertheless, : he had a very high opinion of the Indians.
Anthony J.C. Wallace. In his book “Jefferson and the Indians. The Tragic Fate
of the First Americans”11 on page 77: “The Indian of North America
(is) as ardent as the white man, free, brave, preferring death to surrender,
moral and responsible without compulsion by government, loving to his children,
caring and loyal to family and friends, and equal to whites in veracity and
activity of mind” Some time later he wrote that he “had seen some thousands [of
Indians] myself , and conversed much with them, and have found in them a
masculine, sound understanding...I believe the Indian to be in body and mind
equal to the white man.” He developed a
plan, in which the Indians should get ample and good land beyond the
Missisippi, while the ones who did not want to go there, could stay where they
are but then would be subject to the laws which govern there. However, the
political situation interferes strongly also here. Jefferson was, of
course, not always able to withstand successfully the urgent demand of the
citizen who wanted Indian land. and nobody could predict the mass immigration
to America in the19th century.
- I should note here, that what
I stated above in the first paragraph,
applies to Wallace also:
his overall view of Jefferson is flawed by the same misconception
we now find so general: not seeing the (somewhat tragic) unavoidable but often
conflicting two roles: as a philosopher and a politician..
9.
Brief Conclusion
I am too old to be
pessimistic, and I believe that the truth about Jefferson will see the
light again:
1. Thomas Jefferson was not the first American
calling for the liberation of the slaves but he was the most determined and
most successful person to start the movement for that liberation; without him it would have taken an even longer time to make
progress toward this goal.
2. Thomas Jefferson was a skillful politician;
he knew what he was aiming at; he knew when to take further steps, and he knew
when to avoid further steps toward his goals because the time was not ripe for
it.
3 a. There is no proof that Jefferson had a sexual
relationship with Sally Hemings.
b. The rumor to the contrary was set into the world by a
highly unreliable person.
c.
Realizing that there is almost
never a way to prove a negative, It can
be stated that the (all of) the many efforts to prove that rumor have failed,
with the result that the probability of its being true is much less than 50%.
10.How This Text Came Into Life
When, after having lived in Germany for fifty years, I came to America in 1961, I knew practically nothing about Thomas Jefferson, knew hardly his name. A few years later, the famous German journalist Klaus Harpprecht invited my interest to the exchange of letters between Adams and Jefferson, so, I read it and was caught. Also, I had an urgent reason to understand the American democracy but found that nobody could help me in that - I had to study parts of American history, and so I did. I did not do it at a university or by reading textbooks, but by going to the sources wherever I could find them; it was not difficult to find more and more over the decades it took to do this study (from 1961 to 1993 only at weekends and in evening hours). To give one example: in one case, I insisted to see the original piece of paper myself: that was a letter by Lafayette to Jefferson written in Paris in 1789, with handwritten remarks by Jefferson at the margin - I insisted that the Library of Congress showed it to me; they held it with white gloves and I was not allowed to touch it. I spent many weeks at the Library of Congress, including their rare book division, I looked in the National Archives, at the Lincoln Library in Indiana, the Library of the Naval Research Laboratory, the University libraries at Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, at the one or other of the libraries at Stanford University, etc. I also had a large exchange of letters and many personal discussions, and after a long while I gave a few speeches - a few years ago I was invited to give the key speech at a 4th of July celebration. - By training and profession a physicist, I had learned something about insisting on proof and not to fall prey to assertions. -- Much of what I found, I communicated also to Germany; so in a recently published German book, I am mentioned as “der lebenserfahrene Interpret Amerikas”; thanks, Barthold.
Alexander von Humboldt was in the United States from 23 May to 30
June 1804.. I invented that question. However, it was a question which in all
likelihood was discussed between Jefferson and Humboldt, because
the latter was invited to visit Monticello - that visit did not materialize.
For details see: “Friend of Thomas Jefferson” on pages 165-176 of Douglas
Botting: “Humboldt and the Cosmos” Michael Joseph Ltd., London 1973, ISBN 7181-1137-0
see,
e.g., : :A.Condorcet O’Connor et M.F.Arago:” Oeuvres de Condorcet” Tome neuviPme: Idées sur le Despotisme, XXI, p. 168.
Paris 1947. Firmin Diderot FrPres.
5 Thomas Jefferson: “Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”, now
edited under the title “The Jefferson Bible” by Beacon Press, Boston 1989,
ISBN: 0-8070-7714-3
Joseph J. Ellis:
“The American Sphinx. The Character of Thomas Jefferson” Vintage Paperback. ..A.A.Knopf
1996/1997
Edmund S. Morgan “American Slavery, American Freedom; The
Ordeal of Colonial Virginia”; W.W.Norton and Company., New York and London,
1975, ISBN 0-393-09156-2
PRESERVATION
53:6:48-53, November/December 2001. Edited by the National Trust for
Historic Preservation in Washington DC
”Abraham and Mary Lincoln, A house Divided”
by David Grubin available as a three-band-video from PBS Home Video’s
“American Experience”; ISBN 0-7806-3489-6