This course provides an overview of Thomas Jefferson's work and perspectives presented by the University of Virginia in partnership with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Together, UVA and Monticello are recognized internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Creating an American People
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From the course by University of Virginia
Age of Jefferson
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From the lesson
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence
No document is more closely associated with Jefferson than the Declaration of Independence. Listing it as the first of three achievements on his tombstone, Jefferson clearly believed the Declaration to be of profound importance. Generations of Americans have agreed, constantly quoting its phrases and invoking its ideas. But do we really understand what Jefferson was trying to do when he wrote the Declaration? In this module, we’ll explore the Revolutionary context in which Jefferson lived and worked. We’ll ask why the Declaration takes the form that it does, and also what Jefferson hoped it would accomplish. Surprisingly, the parts of the Declaration that we celebrate most frequently today may not be the ones Jefferson would have understood to be the most important.
Meet the Instructors
Professor Peter S. OnufThomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
Corcoran Department of History
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There's nothing written in the book of fate that says Americans must be
independent and they must be free. They are, in fact, frustrated
Britons, imperial patriots, who found themselves
on the outside and needing to think in new bay, new ways about who they were.
And that gets to our next major theme and that is,
what work does the Revolution do?
Now, metaphorically of course, what it does is to kill the king.
It's an act of patricide. And it provides a bill of indictment.
The vast majority of the Declaration lists all
the grievances Americans have against George the Third.
These are all justifications.
They go on forever. What they
constitute collectively, and it's really boring for us today, but read them
with an open mind, as if you had just lived through the things
that Jefferson was listing there. About the quartering act in New York.
About the depredations on Boston.
Think of all the things listed in the Declaration.
This is your instant pedigree, it's history.
What the Declaration does then, is first it un-kings the king.
We'll get to the next point, what do you put in place of a king?
It un-kings the king, it kills the king, and then
it does this very important work of giving us a collective history.
This is where we came from. Every nation has
to have a history. It's a bit of a paradox.
You didn't exist before.
There was no America until the Declaration of Independence.
But now, we need to fabricate through this
process of synthesis, all the different strands, all
those complaints that now feature in our textbooks
about the coming of the revolution, the imperial crisis.
Now they constitute a coherent narrative.
It's a narrative [COUGH] that reinforces the idea
that George the Third has betrayed his covenant.
It describes some of the things that he has done to us.
He has unleashed the merciless savages on the frontier.
He has sent mercenaries among us.
The Hessians and other, other hired guns from German states.
And then, hitting closest to home, he has fomented servile insurrection.
Lord Dunmore, in Virginia, in November of 1775, had invited
the slaves of Virginia to escape to British alliance and to constitute
a counterrevolutionary force. And this was not an isolated incident.
What we find then, is danger on every front, attacks on us,
violent assaults depriving us of life, liberty, and property.
So the logic of the Declaration is, we did not
want to do this, we did not initiate this violence.
Instead, we have patiently suffered a long train
of abuses, a quotation from Locke's second treatise.
We suffered and continue to suffer, more than those 15 months,
because the grievances go back for years. It is a kind of
sentimental geography that Jefferson's describing, and feelings are very
important here, because it's our capacity to identify with our brethren.
We now think of people from Massachusetts, if we're from Virginia, as our brothers.
A rare moment in American history,
that you have this sense of identification across vast distances and among people
who were so unlike. When the congresses assembled, in
Philadelphia, there was, I'd like to say, a shock of un-recognition.
People didn't see each other in the deligates from other states.
Northerners, people like John Adams, saw the great slave
holders of South Carolina and Virgnia as nabobs, as great
aristocrats, people who drove carriages around, not virtuous Yankee farmers.
There was a world of difference among Anglo-Americans.
In fact, what principle of union was there?
13 colonies that happened to be contiguous.
There were 30 in all.
Not everybody in the British Empire in the Western
Hemisphere said, yeah, intolerable, we're going to become
Americans. It was a choice that was made in
these 13 continental colonies, not the islands, not Canada,
even though, the Americans invited the Canadians, for your
own good, we may have despised you when
you were French and papist and we're protestant,
but now you are subjected to the British
authority, you are being exploited, we will liberate you.
For some reason, the French Canadians did not want to be liberated.
But there are limits to this movement. It's not as if spontaneously
everybody in the hemisphere says, yes to this.
And then think for a bit about those 13 colonies, as I've suggested, and all
the differences they have, because there's no such
thing as a domestic national or proto-national market.
All of these colonies exist in a trading world that leads
them away from the North American mainland, to trade with the
West Indies, particularly with Europe, with
Britain particularly, with Southern Europe, with Africa.
Each political economy is distinctive and has a distinctive relationship to Britain.
There is no self-evident unity among Americans.
So, this is the work that has to be done. We have to tell a story about ourselves
which enables us to think of each other as being fellow nationals.
We have to invent ourselves as a people.
Much of the work is negative, and it has to do with that catalog of abuses.
It's a community of suffering, and we show an 18th century
senpa, sense, sensibility, a sentimentality,
an abil, an ability to feel
the pain of others, and therefore, to see them as our equals.
So, we have this community of suffering, we've
all these abuses, we also have this sense, coming
out of our experience in the British Empire, of
a kind of continental destiny, the idea of continent.
As I've mentioned before, the idea of continent gives us a place.
We're almost a people, and we have a place, and it can be our place if we
can come together.
Well this is the real business of the Declaration.
It takes place, as I've suggested, not in those principles laid
out in the first two paragraphs, in fact, let me say this about those principles.
They're fine, I'm all for social contract ideas.
I'm a liberal, we're all liberals. We believe in consent.
It seems
common sensible to us, now.
But here's the thing, remember, the real work of the Declaration is to
authenticate the claims of a new people on the face of the earth.
That's what comes first.
Those social contract ideas come second.
We become republican, with a small R. We become republican
partly out of default, there's no choice. If you're not a
subject of a legitimate monarch, what else could you be?
It's the default, but it's also, we need a
set of ideas that give legitimacy to this revolution.
It's not a rebellion, it's a revolution. Things will turn completely.
We're not just looking for an, sort-term advantage.
We don't, are not simply resisting a few taxes.
We want to change
things fundamentally.
And that idea of republicanism is, in a sense, opportunistic.
It is the way we justify the real goal, which is, now, despite
ourselves, we have become a nation, we have to function like a nation.
And so, our pedigree, I've talked about how history provides a story for a nation.
The highly compressed gloss on that history is social compact theory.
It's a conjectural history of the way
political societies begin, legitimate ones, by agreement.
Because, even exponents of monarchy in the 18th century would say the right of a
monarch to rule is based on the welfare of the people that he rules.
That covenant I've talked about works two ways.
And so it's not surprising that, if you eliminate the king,
and you have a revolution that turns things upside down, that authority has
reverted to the people, the people as the original source.
That's not a terribly radical idea,
but Americans need to implement it.
They need to convince themselves that they have a right to do this.
And this is why it's so important for Americans to write
state constitutions in the middle of the war.
They don't wait until peace, and they say, okay, now
we've got time, our best men are not in the battlefield,
they're underemployed college professors, let's bring
them together and let's draft a constitution.
It's precisely because of the legitimacy problem, we don't have any right to
do this, that Americans organized constitutional conventions.
And they take this business very seriously.
They're dealing with the problem of legitimacy.
Do we have a right to rule ourselves? So, what is the Declaration doing?
Well, Thomas Jefferson, notoriously, wished he had not been in Philadelphia,
and for his immortal reputation, what a blow that would've been.
No University of Virginia,
none of the great things we associate with Jefferson.
If he had gone home to Williamsburg, not his home,
but where the government was, where the convention was meeting.
If he'd gone to Williamsburg and been there to
write that Constitution, this is what really angered John Adams.
He had been the author, in 1780, of the great Constitution of Massachusetts,
the longest continuing, continuously running constitutional road show in world
history, there it was in Massachusetts. What do we have in Virginia?
Virginia constitution is a joke.
And Jefferson spends the rest of his career regretting that he had not
been able to write a decent constitution for Virginia, because that's what matters.
If there's going
to be a successful new regime in America, it's because the republican principle
has been implemented in the states, the new self-proclaimed
states, that's popular sovereignty in the states.
Well, Jefferson's stuck in Philadelphia, but he's got work to do, too.
And that's the point of my talk today. What is
the work and how does he do it? Un-kinging the king.
Deciding that the English are enemies. That there's no hope for reunion.
But there's more going on.
When he's drafting a reading list for students at
the University of Virginia, Jefferson lists the Declaration of Independence.
Well, you might say that's pride of authorship, of
course, but then he tells us what it does and
why we need, we students at the university, need
to read the Declaration of Independence as a fundamental text.
It's not just a text for the moment.
We need to remember it and honor it, because it is,
I am quoting, the fundamental act of union of these states.
He didn't say, it was the first bold
articulation of natural rights principles, it wasn't the
first great statement of social contract theory, not just as theory,
by putting it into practice. No, he says, it's an act of union.
This is what it's hard for us to remember.
Today, I mean, Abraham Lincoln talked about Jefferson, celebrated
him for articulating the core principles of the regime.
And, it may be worth remembering that Lincoln did
so on behalf of the Union, as he understood it.
But what does Jefferson mean by Union? Lincoln's Union is a different beast.
What is Jefferson's Union?
Well, I've suggested some of the outlines
of this, but what really matters, what really
matters for Jefferson, are the commitments that
he and his fellow patriot leaders are making
to the revolutionary cause. We are signing our own death warrants.
We're putting our names on the dotted line.
George the Third, are you looking for some people to string up?
People you can hold responsible for this unnatural rebellion.
We are the rebels you
are looking for.
It's not surprising that there's a morbidity
in the subtext of the Revolution. Death is a major concern.
Lots of blood has been spilled already. More, much more will be spilled.
Blood, it's blood that makes this Union sacred.
We pledge our sacred honor to each other.
We will put our lives on the line. We represent, embody, our
peoples in their respective states, who have already been dying for this cause.
This sounds somewhat romantically nationalistic, and it is.
This is what we mean by something new being born in this part of the world.
It's the image of birth in blood, of sacrifice.
This is no longer a question of, oh, was George the Third a legitimate
successor in the Hanoverian Dynasty? No, this is a question of
our exercising our primal right to determine
our own destiny. And it's in this
bloodbath that a new nation was born.
But let's think about who's signing on, and what their signing
on signifies. And I recur to the notion of sentiment and
feeling, and a word that Jefferson uses, sacred honor.
Honor, it's odd.
If we look at the first couple of paragraphs, we're blown away
by the, the sheer universal modernity
of those principles of government, of consent.
Yes, that's us.
We read ourselves in those paragraphs.
But the paragraphs that really mattered, the signatures that really mattered, were
statements by honorable gentlemen, men of feeling, men of principle,
men who felt they could speak for their entire colonies, become states,
that they were willing to die, as honorable gentlemen would.
This is
a dissonance that I think set the core of the American Revolution between what we
think of as democracy and republicanism and that aristocratic
thrust to the Declaration's concluding paragraphs.
That is, men of honor pledging to each other.
But they're not only pledging to each other and
creating a union, a more perfect union, a perpetual union.
A union of states, but it transcends that, because it's also a union of persons.
It's embodied in these people.
They have made a commitment to each other, forever.
They're also making commitments on behalf of their peoples.
It's often been said that the Declaration of Independence conjures up
a people and declares itself independent of people that had never
existed before. There's a profound circularity to that.
But that's not the only work that the rev, that the Declaration
is doing, it's also conjuring into existence the peoples of the respective
states, as if they were something more than the sum of their parts,
not just an aggregation of patriot citizens, but a people, a kind of
organic whole, a super family.
And here, we get the real meaning of equality.
It's not the equality of the contract theorists It's the equality that we all
share, everybody in this larger enterprise of promoting
the freedom and liberty of our respective states and of the nation as a whole.
It's the equality we enjoy as national citizens,
as part of the larger body of citizens.
That's the equality that the revolution really conjures up,
not the libertarian fantasy of, every man a sovereign.
It's instead, the sublimated, organic connection that this
great family of families, because Union, at the
end of the day, means not just contract
or an agreement among representatives of different states.
That's what the Constitution was, and that's why Jefferson
always thort, thought that Jeffer, that the Declaration was
more important than the Constitution, because the Declaration created
the people who would then write themselves a Constitution.
And in doing so, it created separate
peoples, a plurality of peoples, yet one people.
And that one people was glimpsed in this
act of collective sacrifice, this signing on the line.
Nobody's ever been able to make sense out of
Jefferson on the question of state's rights, indvidual rights.
Was he a nationalist?
Well, he was everything to everybody, there's no question about it.
But the great contribution of the Declaration, and
why it was so important for Jefferson as
he looked back over the course of his
career, was, that was the beginning of something.
It was the beginning, of national history.
Everything changed on July 4th, 1776.
Jefferson didn't think he had done it all
by himself, but he had given voice. He'd been there, the right
pen, at the right place, on the right paper, or parchment.
He was there at the moment of birth, and for him,
that was everything.
That was the meaning of his life, that he had participated in this primal moment.
The idea of, where did those ideas come from, not important.
That's of secondary significance to Jefferson.
Of course, I ripped off John Locke.
You could accuse me of plagiarism if you like, but that's not the point.
He had a vision of the nation.
A vision which is inflected with, paradoxically, an aristocratic
perspective, the assumption that he could speak for vast numbers of people, that
he could see far into the future as a man of
the Enlightenment, that he could glimpse the possibility of true union.
That,
that union was the nation. That, where there had been 13 peoples.
And maybe even, as I'm suggesting, those
13 provincial populations did not constitute peoples.
What does it mean, a people, when we're
having a civil war, in every state, in America?
And that's not the American Civil War, that's the Revolution.
Well the people is
a vision.
The idea of the people is a vision, and it's a meaningful one.
And, what it suggests, and this is what I want to conclude with.
Jefferson's vision is powerful
because he sees into the future, and he sees that
future being made by, and shaped by, a great nation.
A nation that didn't know it was going to exist.
That was, in many ways, an accident and an
unintended consequence of the failure of the British Empire.
But when he glimpsed the possibilities of, not only the
alliance among the states, but as the great icon of democracy,
turning to the people of those states and saying, we can
all be leveled up to the shared community, the shared commitments.
It's that vision of nationhood, that has inspired
Americans, and that sustained Jefferson over the course
of his long life. And that's the legacy of the Declaration.
If the republic fails, and who knows, it may be failing within the next
year or two, maybe the Declaration will seem like an archaic, well, a fantasy.
It lasted for a while.
It was a good idea.
Do we believe there is such a thing an American nation?
If you have trouble,
now, imagining an American nation, a larger
community within which you share, I invite
you to look forward with people like Jefferson, and what, tell me what you see.
What possibilities you see for harmonizing these different elements, these different
places and these people, for achieving a rule in a place in world history.
What hope could there be for these 13 scattered colonies along the
shore of the Atlantic Ocean, on the west side of the Atlantic?
And it's that hope that Jefferson has for the future, the hope
of a nationalist with a vision of national greatness, that has been
indelibly, inextricably linked in our collective memory with Thomas Jefferson.
No, he may not have written it.
It may not be is words. Yes, he was well edited.
But history, the history of this nation,
could have taken any, many different directions.
The one thing that we can say looking back is that there has been, throughout the
long course, as we now see out of
our history, this transcendent idea, for better or worse,
we are a people.
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