Political Writings

by Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby (Editor), Terence Ball (Editor)

Author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson is among the most important and controversial of American political thinkers. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball have selected the most important of Jefferson's numerous writings, setting out his views on topics such as revolution, slavery and the role of women. The texts are supported by a concise introduction, suggestions for further reading and short biographies of key figures, all providing invaluable assistance to the student encountering Jefferson's thought for the first time.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, The United States Of America

684 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. Following the American Revolutionary War and prior to becoming president in 1801, Jefferson was the nation's first U.S. secretary of state under George Washington and then the nation's second vice president under John Adams. Jefferson was a leading proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, and produced formative documents and decisions at the state, national, and international levels. His writings and advocacy for human rights, including freedom of thought, speech, and religion, served as substantial inspirations to the American Revolution and subsequent Revolutionary War in which the Thirteen Colonies succeeded in breaking from British America and establishing the United States as a sovereign nation.
During the American Revolution, Jefferson represented Virginia at the Second Continental Congress and served as the second governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781. In 1785, Congress appointed Jefferson U.S. minister to France, where he served from 1785 to 1789. President Washington then appointed Jefferson the nation's first secretary of state, where he served from 1790 to 1793. During this time, in the early 1790s, Jefferson and James Madison organized the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose the Federalist Party during the formation of the nation's First Party System. Jefferson and Federalist John Adams became both friends and political rivals. In the 1796 U.S. presidential election between the two, Jefferson came in second, which made him Adams' vice president under the electoral laws of the time. Four years later, in the 1800 presidential election, Jefferson again challenged Adams, and won the presidency. In 1804, Jefferson was reelected overwhelmingly to a second term.
As president, Jefferson assertively defended the nation's shipping and trade interests against Barbary pirates and aggressive British trade policies, promoted a western expansionist policy with the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the nation's geographic size, and was able to reduce military forces and expenditures following successful negotiations with France. In his second presidential term, Jefferson was beset by difficulties at home, including the trial of his former vice president Aaron Burr. In 1807, Jefferson implemented the Embargo Act to defend the nation's industries from British threats to U.S. shipping, limiting foreign trade and stimulating the birth of the American manufacturing industry. Presidential scholars and historians praise Jefferson's public achievements, including his advocacy of religious freedom and tolerance, his peaceful acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from France, and his leadership in supporting the Lewis and Clark Expedition; they give radically differing interpretations of his views on and relationship with slavery.
Jefferson is ranked by both scholars and in public opinion among the upper-tier of American presidents.

Reviews

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

For your edification, entertainment, and overall reading pleasure, I am taking Jefferson's words out of his own mouth and out of the mouths of his commentators in this essay/review of mine. In my opinion, this review bears the intentional questioning of the role of the critic and interpreter in a way that asks, should writing be about the painful extraction of philosophically-dense concepts and words that make your head spin when you think about them, or is there a way to make the art of writing and act of creation equivalent to the joy of life and become, as Nietzsche foreordained, a dancing star that is able to survey the universe's eternal rotation from the vantage point of the scientific mind of the total work of art? As Joyce Abbleby and Terence Bowman express in their introduction to this volume of Jefferson's political writings, "Jefferson's words outstripped and transcended his prejudices as a man to the point that, like a sorcerer's apprentice, he had got hold of and articulated a vision whose power he felt but whose full implications he barely comprehended. His words and phrases, especially in the Declaration of Independence, would later be borrowed, repeated and refashioned for purposes that he did not intend, could not foresee and certainly could not have imagined." I assume that you will not feel the same aversion to the breathlessness of his style!

In regard to himself, Jefferson said: "I am one of those who think it a defect that the important rights, the rights not set in place by the frame of the constitution itself, were not explicitly secured by a supplementary declaration. There are rights which it is useless to surrender to the government, and yet which governments have always been fond of invading. These are the rights of thinking and publishing our thoughts by speaking or writing; the rights of free commerce, and the rights of personal freedom." Above everything, Jefferson did not want to see his bold little experiment with Americanization crushed by a too-swift move towards democratization that would be crushed by the constraint and violence of European imperialism. As he did throughout his life, Jefferson strongly believed that every American should have the right to prevent the government from infringing on the liberties of its citizens. Certain liberties, including those of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition, should be sacred to everyone. Jefferson writes that when and if an established government fails to protect our natural rights, it's only legitimate function, it is the right of the people to abolish the government and establish a new government to achieve these ends. These ideas were, and continue to be, nothing short of revolutionary. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson argued that when a government becomes unjust and infringes upon the rights of its citizens, it is the right of the people to change or abolish that government. He listed the grievances against the British monarch to justify the need for a new government. Jefferson felt that government power should not be concentrated in one central or federal government, but should be spread out among the individual states as well. Similarly, he thought states should give decision-making power to their various communities. In political philosophy, the right of revolution (or right of rebellion) is the right or duty of a people to "alter or abolish" a government that acts against their common interests or threatens the safety of the people without justifiable cause. In essence, so that the creative culture of its citizens would grow and that they would acquire a true knowledge of the political parties that they were attracted to, Jefferson felt the American people would be able to innovate for themselves and engage in mutual arguments, instead of presenting themselves as the administrators of acquired knowledge.

Jefferson was not reluctant to caution the American people in his letters, "But do not mistake me. I am not advocating slavery, nor am I justifying the wrongs we have committed on foreign people, by the example of another nation committing equal wrongs on their own subjects. On the contrary, there is nothing I would not sacrifice to secure a practicable plan of removing every vestige of this moral and political depravity." Rather than seeking out a plan that called for the external emigration of the African-American population who came to this country as slaves, nor seeking the solitude and impotence of a plan which called for the relegation of Black Americans to a specific national territory, it is my belief the Thomas Jefferson envisioned an American landscape that is very much like the one we have today, where the bitterness of the slavery experience is something that all citizens share and is common bond of generational experience. Calling it a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot,” Jefferson believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the new American nation. He also thought that slavery was contrary to the laws of nature, which decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty. During the Continental Congress's revision process to Jefferson's draft, they removed the bulk of the paragraph and reduced it to a veiled reference against slavery, complaining that King George incited "domestic insurrections among us." Jefferson included a critical paragraph on slavery in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, possibly as a strategy to blame Britain for the practice, but it was eventually removed due to opposition. "I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of 1776 to acquire self government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it," Jefferson famously said The framers of the Constitution believed that concessions on slavery were the price for the support of southern delegates for a strong central government. They were convinced that if the Constitution restricted the slave trade, South Carolina and Georgia would refuse to join the Union. The statement that Jefferson is guilty of racism because he once owned slaves and did not free all of them after his death, to me, begs the question of how can a thinker establish the trans-historical validity of his thought at the same time he is producing the history that would eventually disappear into it?

"The cement of this union is the heart-blood of every American...I do not believe there is on earth a government established on such an immovable basis. Let them in any state even Massachusetts itself raise the standard of separation and its citizens will rise in mass and do justice themselves on their own incendiaries. If they could have induced the government to some effort of suppression or even to enter into discussion with them, it would have given them some importance and brought them some notice. But a silent contempt has been the sole notice they have excited; consoled indeed by the palpable favors of the French king." Indeed, there are those who are in such a hurry to pass over the universal aspects of this problem that they would simply condemn Jefferson as a terrorist for his seemingly repressive acts. However, it has been my experience that, throughout the published letters of the New England Federalists, one reads of the complaints of an overreaching federal government that was disproportionately harming their region. The Federalists, however, were a more radical faction: they wanted to secede, not to merely nullify misbegotten laws. The meeting had been called by New England members of the Federalist Party. It was held in secret, and there were nationwide fears that the Hartford Convention would call for New England's secession from the Union. There were real political concerns that New England was being badly treated by the Union. From 1800 to 1815, there were three serious attempts at secession orchestrated by New England Federalists, who believed that the policies of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, especially the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the national embargo of 1807, and the War of 1812, were disproportionately harmful to New Englanders. While the Confederation was primarily for defense, the Dominion gave England greater control of colonial trade, manufacturing, and religion. The colonists were extremely upset by this and eventually rebelled in the Boston Revolt of 1869. The people of Massachusetts had more power over their own government than anyone else in the British empire. As the British crown raised taxes on American goods and soldiers arrived to enforce new policies, the independent minded colonists in Massachusetts became embittered and resentful. Three-fifths compromise, compromise agreement between delegates from the Northern and the Southern states at the United States Constitutional Convention of 1787 that three-fifths of the enslaved population would be counted for determining direct taxation and representation in the House of Representatives. For both soldiers, citizens and politicians, which were the three classes of people in early American civil life, the business was to be settled in the wasteland, without the assistance of any royal prerogative, where the choices are either to kill or to die for one's belief in individual liberty. Such is the meaning of the substantial rigidity of those early American patriots who died upon the ramparts. In my view, only through the grace of the divine concourse were they able to accomplish what they did.

Appleby and Bowman further evaluate Jefferson in these terms: "Skeptics rightly regard Lincoln's view of Jefferson and the declaration as wishful thinking, as political propaganda, as balm for the civil war, and subsequently as a mainstay of an American civil religion. One has even gone so far as to claim that Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was a giant (if benign) swindle and one of the most daring acts of open air sleight of hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. So successful was Lincoln that he single handedly gave the Americans a new past that would change their future indefinitely." Insofar as regarding Thomas Jefferson's political thinking to presage Lincoln's more radical opinions, we must note that Jefferson wrote in his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1777: "That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of beliefs he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics and geometry; and therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to office of trust of emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, i.e. depriving him injudiciously of those privileges and advantages to which he has a natural right." Jefferson's bill for equality makes a plea for the reform of the public mind of his time which, however, is down to our very own day in no way obsolete. Nevertheless, in this document he sets out four reasons for why government can make no law that constrains our freedom of conscience, opinion, or speech: (1) freedom of conscience is an unalienable right because people can only think for themselves; (2) free speech makes representatives accountable to “We the People”; (3) free speech is necessary for the discovery of truth and the rejection of falsehood; and (4) free speech allows the public discussion necessary for democratic self-government. Alexander Hamilton became a leading voice of the Federalists who believed that the federal government needed to be strong. On the other side, Thomas Jefferson, a Republican, argued that too much power in the hands of the federal government would lead to tyranny. Thomas Jefferson believed this national bank was unconstitutional. In contrast to Hamilton, Jefferson believed that states should charter their own banks and that a national bank unfairly favored wealthy businessmen in urban areas over farmers in the country. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom is a statement about both freedom of conscience and the principle of separation of church and state. Written by Thomas Jefferson and passed by the Virginia General Assembly on January 16, 1786, it is the forerunner of the first amendment protections for religious freedom. The First Amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791. It established a separation of church and state that prohibited the federal government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion.” It also prohibits the government, in most cases, from interfering with a person's religious beliefs or practices. Freedom of religion or belief, which protects believers and non-believers alike, empowers people in all their diversity, either individually or in community with others, to decide for themselves what they believe and how they wish to live. In summary, the central idea of the Act for Establishing Religious Freedom is to ensure that every individual has the right to practice their religion freely and without interference from the government. It promotes religious tolerance, equality, and the separation of church and state. The First Amendment does more than just prohibit the establishment of an official state religion, e.g., the Church of England. Recognizing the importance of religious beliefs to those who hold them, the Amendment is meant to prohibit any governmental interference with religion.

As regarding his position on the extent to which the government is empowered over the citizenry, Jefferson said: "I know well that a majority of that body of the legislature has not been corrupted by that strain of corruption, for the pablum of that stock-jobbing herd which sought to make it the master of every vote in the legislature. The truth is far from that. but a division, not very unequal, has already taken place in that honest portion of that body between the parties styled republican and federal, the latter being monarchist in principle already adhering to Hamilton as their leader in principle and this insuring him a majority in both houses, the whole action of the legislature was now under the dominion of the Treasury still the machine was not complete." Underneath this statement recorded in the compilation of notes and passing transactions Jefferson included in his Anas, lies the implication that he viewed Alexander Hamilton, who served as the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, as a wildly ambitious attack dog who would hammer his way into getting what he wanted. Their own notes and letters offer an insider's view of what it might have been like to have the two of them together in a cabinet meeting. Jefferson ignored the onslaught, perhaps having concluded that Hamilton and his faction were a spent force. Within four years, Hamilton would be dead, but Jefferson did not exult. And to the end he spoke only generously of his foe. The two had “thought well” of one another, he said. Hamilton's economic policies, including the establishment of tariffs to protect American manufacturing, were strongly opposed by Jefferson. Hamilton's policies favored merchants and financiers, while Jefferson, though wealthy, favored policies aimed toward ordinary farmers. The disagreement between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson on the national bank led to differing interpretations of the U.S. Constitution regarding the bank's establishment. Because Thomas Jefferson thought it would be only a matter of time before the American system of government degenerated into an “elective despotism,” he warned that citizens should act now in order to make sure that “the wolf [was kept] out of the fold."

This prompts us to ask, was Thomas Jefferson a racist? Before we condemn him as a slave-owner who did not free all his slaves at the time of his death, we must reflect that in many ways he was a product of his time, nonetheless we shall note that he was sensible enough of the human question involved to slavery to write: "Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry and God knows there is misery enough in the case of the blacks in America. Love is the peculiar nostrum of the poet, and while among the blacks their love is ardent it kindles the senses only and not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whatley but it has not produced a poet. Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer in merit of composition yet his letters do more honour to the heart than to the head. Overall, though we admit him to the first place among his own color, who have presented themselves for public judgment yet when we compare him to those writers of the race among whom he lived we are compelled to enroll him among the lowest rung of the column."

[continued in the comments section below]

[Tyler Windham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes we don't do Jefferson credit in this country; he was a child of the enlightenment, a scientist, deist with considerable Epicurean leanings, lover of history, philosophy, and, at least in his youth, plays. He was a liberal thinker who championed reason, maximal individual liberty, the "wall of separation" between religion and the state, a limited standing military, and deplored the concentrations of wealth he witnessed in Europe and desired the new nation he served to help found to remain within the hands of an idealized yeomen majority. Though Jefferson was not the most ideologically consistent of the founding generation (with the "peculiar institution" of slavery biting at his heels and heart) he was certainly one of the greatest. To truly know the ideas of the author of our ethos, the creator of our creed as a nation, then these political writings are instrumental to have.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent resource for some abridged letters of Jefferson. Peterson has done his usual high-quality job of finding the political passages in Jefferson's correspondence, and arranged them well.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant mind