Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson

by Robert W. Tucker, David C. Hendrickson

None of the founding fathers seems more elusive than Thomas Jefferson. A Virginian nationalist, a slave-holding philosophe , an aristocratic democrat, a provincial cosmopolitan, a pacific imperialist--the paradoxes loom as meaningful and portentous as America itself. Indeed, they
represent the deep contradictions of his policies as well as personality, laid bare here in a provocative study of Jefferson's statecraft.
Empire of Liberty takes a new look at the public life, thought, and ambiguous legacy of one of America's most revered statesmen, offering new insight into the meaning of Jefferson in the American experience. Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson vividly portray a complex man driven by his
passion for liberty and his longing for a vast empire. They explore how Jefferson developed a new approach to diplomacy in the course of his bitter debates with Alexander Hamilton. This new diplomacy joined a policy of territorial and commercial expansion with a dread of war and a reliance on
economic sanctions. It was with such an outlook that Jefferson met the two great crises of his the threat to American security posed by the French acquisition of Louisiana and the restrictions on American commerce prompted by the death struggle between Britain and France. The policy
produced paradoxical success in the Louisiana crisis but led to complete failure in the form of the Embargo. Taken to escape the alternatives of national humiliation and war, the Embargo led first to humiliation and then, ultimately, to war. The system of war that Jefferson had hoped after hope to
reform by the Embargo was not reformed. In the end, Jefferson came close to embracing measures which called into question almost every principle of government he professed to believe.
Empire of Liberty examines Jefferson's legacy for American foreign policy in the light of several critical themes which continue to be highly significant the struggle between isolationists and interventionists, the historic ambivalence over the nation's role as a crusader for liberty,
and the relationship between democracy and peace. Written by two distinguished scholars, this book provides invaluable insight into the classic ideas of American diplomacy.

Genres: History, American History, Biography

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Robert Warren Tucker was an American realist writer and teacher who served as Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University, Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Tucker received his B.S. from the United States Naval Academy in 1945 and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1949. He was co-editor of The National Interest from 1985 to 1990, and president of the Lehrman Institute from 1982 to 1987. During his lifetime, he published essays in Foreign Affairs, World Policy Journal, The National Interest, Harpers, and The New Republic. His 1977 book The Inequality of Nations is a highly skeptical analysis of the Third World's efforts to redistribute power and wealth in the international system.

Reviews

[Mr. Monahan]

In Empire of Liberty, co-authors Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson tackle the legacy of two terms worth of Thomas Jefferson’s foreign policy At the heart of their assault on the third President is a criticism—or rather highlighting of a major inconsistency—in the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. With excellent historiographical references and incredibly detailed annotations, the authors establish the baseline of their work: Jefferson diplomatic coup in acquiring the Louisiana Territory from a powerful Napoleon. Tucker and Hendrickson then aspire to build on scholarship that suggests an alternate reality: a Jefferson of sworn opposition to European entanglements panicking, and then dragging his feet in a diplomatic waiting game, desperate to secure deposit rights in New Orleans. Ultimately, the authors offer a repudiation of Alexander Hamilton’s plan of action (formerly dismissed as a ploy to embarrass the Jeffersonian Republicans, but recently being historiographically exhumed and reexamined) to bring war to any European nation that threatened the Mississippi economy. The result is a tarnished Jefferson, deprived of his pristine diplomatic crown-jewel; or at least deprived of its former magnitude.

What is more convincing about the work of Tucker and Hendrickson is not its attempt to discredit Jefferson as a politician, but its success a striping the idea that one man, alone, can be responsible for such momentous shifts in power, policy, or in this case land. The Louisiana Purchase in Empire of Liberty is not the familiar textbook tale of Jefferson, Livingston, Madison, and Monroe courageously improvising a monumental real estate deal that would secure America from European aspiration and guarantee prosperity in the West. Tucker and Hendrickson’s Louisiana Purchase is the tale of a chain of global events that includes a slave-revolt, a World-War, a failed invasion, and a series of complex political maneuvers, counter-maneuvers, and bluffs that, somehow, results in the transfer of a claim to a large portion of interior of North America into American hands. While it would going to far to say the authors attribute this occurrence to “luck,” it is fair to say they portray a more complex and thus external to Jefferson series of events leading to this event. It would seem this work of scholarship makes clear yet more reflection on Jefferson and the legacy that goes with his name.

[Leonardo]

Ya en esta primera fase, entonces, se afirma un nuevo principio de soberanía, diferente del europeo: la libertad es hecha soberana y la soberanía definida como radicalmente democrática dentro de un proceso de expansión continuo y abierto. La frontera es una frontera de libertad. ¡Qué hueca hubiera sido la retórica de los Federalistas y cuan inapropiada su “nueva ciencia política”, de no haber presupuesto este vasto y móvil umbral de la frontera! La misma idea de escasez que–como la idea de guerra–estuvo en el centro del concepto europeo de soberanía moderna es eliminada a priori de los procesos constitutivos de la experiencia Americana. Tanto Jefferson como Jackson comprendieron la materialidad de la frontera y la reconocieron como la base que sostenía la expansividad de la democracia.

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