Thomas Jefferson and the Idea of America
The man, the contradictions, and the principles that helped create a nation
Thomas Jefferson’s largest contribution to the American founding was not institutional but intellectual. Washington made independence possible and gave the new presidency legitimacy. Madison helped construct the constitutional system that followed. Hamilton supplied much of the financial and administrative architecture necessary for the federal government to function. Jefferson contributed something less tangible but no less durable: an explanation of what American independence was supposed to mean.
By the summer of 1776, the dispute between Britain and its American colonies had moved beyond taxation, representation, trade restrictions, military occupation, or the conduct of George III. Independence required more than a catalogue of grievances. The Continental Congress was undertaking the extraordinary act of dissolving an existing political relationship and needed to explain the principle upon which one people could legitimately reject one government and establish another.
Jefferson did not claim to have invented the answer. Natural-right theory had deep intellectual roots. John Locke had written about rights, consent, and the purposes of government generations earlier. English constitutional traditions shaped colonial expectations of lawful authority, and George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights had preceded Jefferson’s work by only weeks. Looking back nearly fifty years later, Jefferson said the Declaration had not been intended to discover new principles but to give an “expression of the American mind.”
His particular gift was to compress a much larger body of political thought into language capable of surviving the immediate controversy that produced it. “All men are created equal.” Certain rights are unalienable. Governments exist to secure those rights and derive their legitimate authority from “the consent of the governed.” These were not simply arguments against George III. They located political sovereignty in a fundamentally different place. Rights did not descend from government to the individual as privileges. Government acquired authority from people who possessed rights before government existed.
The universal character of that language immediately exposed a contradiction Jefferson never resolved in his own life.
The man who wrote the Declaration enslaved more than 600 human beings over the course of his lifetime. Enslaved men, women, and children worked at Monticello and Jefferson’s other properties, sustained the plantation economy upon which he depended, and remained subject to a legal system in which they could be bought, sold, mortgaged, transferred, and separated from their families. Jefferson criticized slavery and recognized the danger it presented to the republic, but he remained a slaveholder until his death and freed only a small number of the people he held in bondage.
Any serious treatment of Jefferson has to hold those facts together. The attempt to preserve only the author of liberty requires ignoring too much of the man; reducing him entirely to hypocrisy is equally inadequate. Jefferson articulated a universal claim that the political and social order of his own generation was unwilling to apply universally.
The consequences did not remain confined to that generation. Abolitionists drew upon revolutionary claims of natural equality in attacking slavery. Lincoln returned repeatedly to the Declaration and made its equality principle central to his interpretation of the nation’s founding purpose. In the twentieth century, Americans excluded from full participation in national life continued to invoke the same language in demanding equal citizenship. The Declaration supplied a standard against which the country could be judged by people the original political system had failed to include.
The same conviction that certain areas of human liberty existed beyond the rightful reach of political authority shaped Jefferson’s work on religious freedom. His Virginia statute began from the assertion that “Almighty God hath created the mind free” and rejected compulsory religious support, legal penalties based upon belief, and governmental efforts to determine religious conformity. Jefferson drafted the measure in the 1770s; James Madison later revived the effort in Virginia, and the statute became law in 1786.
Its importance went beyond religious tolerance. Tolerance still assumes the existence of an authority entitled to decide which beliefs it will permit. Jefferson’s argument denied government that premise. Conscience was not free because the state had chosen to leave it alone; conscience was free because the state possessed no legitimate jurisdiction over belief in the first place. That distinction became one of Jefferson’s most important contributions to the American understanding of religious liberty.
His commitment to education followed from the same conception of republican government. A political system based upon popular sovereignty transferred responsibility as well as authority to the citizen. If the people were expected to choose representatives, evaluate public conduct, recognize abuses of power, and make decisions about the direction of government, widespread ignorance became more than a personal disadvantage. It became a weakness in the political system itself.
Jefferson spent decades advancing educational proposals that Virginia never fully adopted, but the principle remained consistent: a republic could not safely claim that sovereignty rested with the people while allowing knowledge to remain concentrated among a narrow governing class. The University of Virginia became the most enduring institutional expression of that belief. Jefferson involved himself deeply in its organization, curriculum, architecture, and development because he regarded education as part of the long-term structure necessary to sustain republican government.
The difficulty came when Jefferson’s distrust of concentrated power encountered the demands of governing. His conflict with Alexander Hamilton during Washington’s administration was larger than the famous personal rivalry between the two men. Hamilton believed the survival of the United States required durable federal institutions, public credit, commercial and financial development, and sufficient national power to protect the country’s economic and strategic interests. Jefferson feared that concentrated political and financial authority could recreate forms of dependency Americans had fought to escape and preferred greater reliance upon states, local institutions, agriculture, and a narrower interpretation of federal power.
Neither vision prevailed intact. American government developed national capacities Jefferson often resisted while retaining a political culture deeply influenced by his suspicion of concentrated authority. The disagreement between Jefferson and Hamilton therefore survived them because the underlying problem survived them: how much power a national government requires to function effectively without accumulating enough power to threaten the liberty it exists to protect.
Jefferson’s election in 1800 gave that new constitutional order one of its earliest serious tests. The contest produced an Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, forcing the House of Representatives to determine the presidency after thirty-six ballots. Yet the crisis ended with power passing from the Federalist administration of John Adams to its Republican opponents through constitutional processes rather than violence. The transfer established an important precedent at a time when peaceful changes of power between organized political rivals could hardly be taken for granted.
The presidency soon presented Jefferson with a different problem. France’s willingness to sell Louisiana in 1803 offered the United States an opportunity of extraordinary strategic importance. Control of New Orleans and access to the Mississippi River were vital American interests, and acquisition of the territory would dramatically enlarge the geographic possibilities of the young republic. Jefferson nevertheless confronted an obvious difficulty: the Constitution contained no express provision authorizing the federal government to acquire foreign territory and incorporate it into the Union.
For a political leader associated with a restrictive interpretation of federal power, the problem was not academic. Jefferson drafted proposed constitutional language that would have authorized the acquisition, but the amendment was never pursued. The purchase instead proceeded through the treaty process and congressional action.
The significance of that decision is greater than the familiar accusation that Jefferson abandoned strict construction when it became inconvenient. The episode illustrates the collision between constitutional theory and governing responsibility. Jefferson had spent years warning against expansive readings of national power, then confronted a strategic opportunity of enormous consequence that the constitutional text did not explicitly anticipate. He chose the opportunity, and in doing so participated in the continuing American process of defining governmental power through practice as well as theory.
The Louisiana Purchase changed the scale of the country and the problems it would eventually have to confront. Territorial government, relations with Native nations, western settlement, slavery, representation, and the political balance between free and slave states became increasingly bound to expansion. The purchase helped make a continental United States possible, but it also enlarged the arena in which unresolved conflicts from the original republic would be fought.
Jefferson himself left unusually clear evidence of how he ranked the achievements of his long public life. Before his death in 1826, he designed his grave marker and specified the inscription:
“Author of the Declaration of American Independence
of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
& Father of the University of Virginia.”
He instructed that nothing else be added and explained that these were the accomplishments by which he most wished to be remembered.
The choice was deliberate. Jefferson identified a declaration defining the basis of legitimate political authority, a statute placing conscience beyond governmental coercion, and an educational institution intended to prepare citizens for self-government. He chose ideas and institutions designed to outlive political office.
That may be the clearest way to understand Jefferson’s place in the creation of America. His importance does not depend upon treating the United States as the execution of a single Jeffersonian design; it plainly was not. The country developed through competing philosophies, constitutional compromises, territorial expansion, war, amendments, judicial interpretation, economic transformation, and struggles over citizenship that Jefferson could neither control nor foresee.
What endured was the standard he helped put into words. Political power was required to justify itself in relation to rights it had not created, authority it did not inherently possess, and citizens from whom its legitimacy ultimately came. Once those propositions entered the American founding, later generations could argue over their meaning, broaden their application, expose their violations, and demand that the country account for the distance between what it practiced and what it professed.
Jefferson did not settle the meaning of America in 1776. He helped establish the terms on which Americans would continue trying to settle it.
