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.
Debt and Aristocracy
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Age of Jefferson
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'The earth belongs to the living'
In 1789, Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison from Paris in which he asserted that “the earth belongs to the living.” Calculating that a single generation could be said to last nineteen years, he proposed that no debts should be incurred that could not be paid off in nineteen years; that all laws should be re-written every nineteen years; and that Americans should re-write even their constitutions every nineteen years. Madison thought the ideas Jefferson outlined in this letter to be wildly impractical, and most commentators since then have come to the same conclusion. In this module, however, we’ll explore what Jefferson was getting at in claiming that “the earth belongs to the living.” In so doing, we’ll discover how this phrase expresses an idea that lies at the very core of Jefferson’s conception of equality, democracy, and the American nation.
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Professor Peter S. OnufThomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
Corcoran Department of History
Well this is not an abstract issue.
This is not just an exercise in mathematics and in playing with numbers.
For Jefferson it addresses a very real problem.
And that problem is debt.
Now this theme of the dead hand of the past is what I'm gonna come back to
recurrently.
Because this is absolutely central to Jefferson.
What does debt mean to Jefferson?
Well debt is something that makes the Atlantic economy possible.
Now let's start with the good things about debt.
Virginia planters, like Jefferson, depend on their credit worthiness,
their ability to borrow, in order.
They're borrowing against their crops in order to survive,
in order to live the good life that planters think they're entitled to.
Now it turns out and Jefferson admits this, by the time of the revolution.
There's two to three million pounds of indebtedness.
That Virginia planters are indebted to their British merchant houses.
He says in 1786, three years before he writes the letter to Madison.
He writes to a French encyclopedist.
And he says the debts that Virginians have to their British merchant houses.
Make the planters of Virginia a species of property.
A species of property to certain mercantile houses in London.
What would a planter who owns slaves mean by species of property?
This is the thing that's most stunning to us now.
The claim that Jefferson and other revolutionaries would make.
The claim that slave holders would make, that they were being treated like slaves.
It seems extreme and from our perspective somewhat tasteless, disproportionate.
You can't be serious, Jefferson.
But what does he mean?
Why is this so important to him?
Jefferson is intensely conscious.
Of the ways in which debt limits his freedom of action.
You say well too bad, you've been enjoying the benefits of all that great wealth.
That has been passed down through the generations that you married into.
Too bad for you, but Jefferson says no you don't get it.
The important thing here is that in a free government of a free people.
Consent is the fundamental principle.
Consent, freely offered.
And the great enemy of consent is influence.
Somebody who has control over you.Somebody who limits your freedom of action.
Because how can we enter into meaningful contracts with each other?
How can we form a government?
How can we write laws, if we're not fully consenting?
Remember, these are the foundational principles that are laid out
in the Declaration of Independence.
Consent is the beginning of everything.
So here we have this tension, this paradox.
We declared our independence.
But are we truly independent?
Patriots talked about being reduced to a condition of slavery.
That's not just Jefferson.
It's because of these taxes,
that are being imposed on the poor Americans against their will.
Without their representation.
So everything changes in 1776 but maybe it doesn't.
Because those debts that Virginia planters owed to their British creditors.
Were still good, or I should say bad, when the peace came.
What a good reason to have a revolution, folks, is to get rid of the national debt.
To get rid of those personal debts.
What an incentive that is, and you go to all the trouble.
Many of you die and you accumulate new debts.
Because you had to pay for that stupid war and it turns out you've earned nothing.
I don't want to be dissolutioning, but
the outcome of the American Revolution is a real bummer.
The Americans find themselves taxed at a higher level than they've
ever experienced before.
The American economy is at a standstill for a generation.
So, here is the dilemma that Jefferson faces.
And you may say, well,
this is whining and wenching from somebody who should know better.
But, know for Jefferson we're talking about fundamental principles.
And what we're really talking about is democracy itself.
Let me see if I can make this point clearly.
Jefferson's notion of the dead hand of the past reaching into your pocketbooks now.
That those debts that you've inherited from your parents.
That the nation has, that those debts limit your freedom and
make self government impossible.
Well, what's the connection with democracy?
I've suggested first of all is that question of consent.
But here let's get back to the letter.
And what Jefferson says is, these themes that we've been talking about in Paris.
And that Jefferson was sharing with his friend Madison.
They really are appropriate to this moment in France.
And some of you know what happened in France.
This was a real revolution.
This is when they changed the calendar.
They really did start time all over again.
They destroyed all remnants of feudalism.
They destroyed the established Roman Catholic church.
Everything became the people's.
We did start all over again in France.
And Jefferson is known to be a great enthusiast for the French Revolution.
This is something that had to happen in France.
And that is a complete revolution of property relations.
That all perpetuities, all monopolies, all feudal privileges.
All corporations that live forever.
All of these things had to be destroyed and abolished.
If it were going to be possible for the French people to rule themselves.
This is pretty strong stuff for a slave holding planter in Virginia.
Does he really want to throw all property relations in the air?
Obviously not.
Jefferson sees the advantage in America.
That one Feudalism has not been established here.
And we can take steps right now my fellow Americans.
To make sure that there will be no great aristocratic estates.
Because aristocracy and this is the antonym,
this is the opposite of democracy.
Aristocracy means the rule of a few privileged families forever.
A few privileged families that constitute the State itself,
that control the government.
That have a compliant religious establishment,
that justifies the status quo.
Their right to rule that tells you that all men are created unequal
This is the great problem.
And that is, aristocracy is the perpetual rule
of a few families at the expense of all other families.
What would Jefferson do about it?
For one thing, let's strike off laws.
That allow for the entail, a property that is estates are kept entire.
They can never be broken.
They will pass through the generations.
Whatever you do, you can be confident that you will become the master of that estate.
If you're the eldest son, especially if we have a rule of primogeniture.
That the first son comes into that estate and it won't be divided.
We will not allow for a subdivision of property, a distribution and
circulation of property.
That will undercut the power of those few privileged families.
So land laws is crucial for Jefferson.
He says you know, if we strike now, if we cut aristocracy at its roots.
By passing laws that abolish entail and primogeniture.
Then perhaps with that great,
great reservoir of land to the west, all that free land.
With land for
the thousand to the thousand generation as he tells us in his inaugural address.
Then we will never have those vast inequalities.
We will never have great estates,
all house holders will have farms of their own.
That's the Jeffersonian vision.
We don't need the kind of revolution the French need.
But what the French have shown us and illuminated for
us is this fundamental principle.
And that's why he's telling Madison we have to act now.
We have to act now to preserve what Benjamin Franklin called the happy
mediocrity of American estates.
That is that all farmers are.
In a real sense created equal.
Aristocracy versus democracy, the rule of the present generation.
As opposed to the rule of the founders of dynasty's.
Who live forever through successive generations.
That for Jefferson epitomizes the great change.
The fundamental change between an old world, the old regime.
Based on inequality and hierarchy and a new republican or democratic regime.
Let's talk about the word democracy for a minute.
It's associated with Jefferson.
He's the iconic figure.
But what does he really mean?
The best way to understand Jefferson on democracy is to look at what
he is opposed to.
And he is opposed to aristocracy,
the accumulation and domination of a few great families.
Now, democracy seems so, obviously, the best regime.
The best way of governing ourselves, we take it for granted.
It's the American way.
But, in Jefferson's time, for many people democracy was a dirty word.
And there's a reason for this, folks.
And that is, Democracy means that we don't have subordination.
We don't have rule based on the superiority of some over others.
Instead we have these centrifugal forces.
What might become an anarchy?
What is to keep people together?
What is to keep people together?
This is the question that Jefferson confronts.
What will be the bonds of social solidarity?
Or when he talks about those mercantile houses.
To which Virginia planters are attached he's using a key word, and
that is attachment.
What will attach us to each other if we don't know our place
in a hierarchy, in an unequal world.
We have nobody to look up to.
We only have ourselves to look at in the mirror.
What's to keep us together.
[MUSIC]
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