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.
Jefferson’s Reputation from the Civil War to the Cold War
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Age of Jefferson
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From the lesson
Thomas Jefferson, American Icon
Thomas Jefferson is an American icon. He has also been one of the most polarizing and controversial figures in American history. In this introductory module, we’ll explore how Jefferson’s reputation has changed and evolved over the last two centuries. We’ll discover what Jefferson considered to be his most important contribution to the “Age of Enlightenment” in which he was living. We’ll discuss why some people in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have viewed Jefferson and his ideas with skepticism or worse while others have embraced Jefferson. Overall, learning about how people from many different backgrounds and perspectives have interpreted Jefferson throughout history will help us understand why it’s so important to think critically and honestly about Jefferson’s life and legacy today.
Meet the Instructors
Professor Peter S. OnufThomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
Corcoran Department of History
All right, these are some gloomy pictures. Jefferson's fading on the horizon.
You can see him going down with the entire enlightenment.
Who needs Thomas Jefferson? How does he speak to us?
Well,
it was Abraham Lincoln who had an answer to that.
It's the short version, we could spend
an entire course talking about Jefferson's reputation.
But this is important.
Abraham Lincoln of course was the great
American president, in the American Civil War.
And he fought a great struggle for the
Union that Jefferson and his revolutionary colleagues had created.
It was a war for union, for preserving the Union.
And Lincoln told us, this was the last hope
of mankind. That if the North didn't preserve the
Union, then the very idea of
republican government would fail. Can you imagine the sense of
fragility and vulnerability?
Because what is Lincoln concerned about in the nineteenth century?
It's not just that there are foreign enemies.
The autocracies of Europe, monarchies of Europe.
The spurious make-believe empire of Napoleon, and other regimes that
are based on aristocratic monarchical principles, authoritarian
principles.
But imagine with Lincoln, that you don't have to look abroad for enemies.
They are here, within our own people.
The slave power of the South would destroy this union, and would establish
a new confederate republic, based on the fundamental principle
of slavery and inequality.
It wasn't just Jeremy Bentham who thought Thomas Jefferson was nuts, it
was his fellow Virginians and Southerners as they moved toward civil war.
Oh, Jefferson might be of some use in his emphasis on state's rights.
And minimal government, and constitutional interpretation.
But when Jefferson said, all men are created equal, he crossed
a line.
He threatens the fundamental institution of the South.
The institution, that was fundamental to his own prosperity and wellbeing.
The institution of slavery.
So Lincoln you would think, Lincoln came out of the American Whig Party.
You might say it was the anti-democratic party, big D, democratic party,
the of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, Lincoln comes from that tradition.
From a Whig to a Republican, with a big R. Not democratic yet.
And here is a key moment in American history.
And in the history of Jefferson's reputation.
Rather than repudiating Jefferson, Lincoln identified with Jefferson
because for him, four score and seven years
ago, as he said at Gettysburg, he was not talking about 1787 if you do the math.
It's a little beyond me now, I used to be a math whiz.
He's talking about 1776.
He's honoring Jefferson, not Jefferson's sidekick Madison.
It's not those people who wrote the Constitution.
It was the original patriots.
The patriots of 1776.
And Lincoln is reaffirming in a skeptical century against
the conventional wisdom that natural rights claims that ground the republic
are foundational. And this will be the American mission
in the modern world, is to redeem the idea of self-government.
And Lincoln associates keeping the Union
together, creating a powerful nation vindicating
the national purpose, the manifest destiny of the United States, he associates
all of these things with Thomas Jefferson.
If it weren't for Lincoln's conception of his mission
as a war president, to preserve the Union, and
to preserve the handiwork that Jefferson and his colleagues had created,
then Jefferson would indeed have sunk beneath that horizon, and we'd live,
in a different world.
We could spend a lot more time talking about Jefferson's reputation.
But let me give you a brief overview.
After the Civil War, notwithstanding Lincoln's great work, you can say
that Jeffersonian ideas were increasingly recessive,
to use that notion from genetics.
And again, this was the century as you probably know, or the
half century after the American Civil War in which the idea of power
that I talked about before became predominant.
This was the era of the so called robber barons.
This was the era of laissez faire.
Let those who have power triumph because
well, didn't Darwin tell us about evolution?
Are you thick? We're talking about Jefferson.
Jefferson's declining reputation.
After the civil war, notwithstanding Lincoln's
heroic work, what lingers in the American political nation
is the idea that we had to destroy the slaveholding republic.
We had to beat the confederates and Jefferson is
inextricably linked to the great sin of the early republic.
Not just slavery, the other sin,
the notion that you could secede from the union
and pursue your own destiny as a slaveholding republic.
That's off the table.
Jefferson the secessionist, the nullifier, the apostle of state's
rights, the slaveholder is in disgrace.
This is Hamilton's brief moment in the early twentieth century.
I'ts had to imagine somebody
like James Parton, the author of an early Jefferson biography who says, if Jefferson
is right, America is right, if America is wrong, Jefferson is wrong.
1874, can you imagine that about Alexander Hamilton?
There was a Hamilton revival, until 2008. Down goes Hamilton.
Jefferson is still with us, though. What happened?
Why did Jefferson's reputation revive?
Is it just the Declaration of Independence?
Is it that we keep being reminded as Lincoln was that if
we look back to the beginning of the republic, there is Jefferson.
There is Jefferson's vision. We can mock it, we can deride it.
We can call him a hypocrite. We can say,
oh you don't really mean those things, but when we call
Jefferson a hypocrite, we're really talking
about America, to borrow from Partan.
If Jefferson is a hypocrite, we are all
hypocrites. So why did Jefferson's reputation revive?
When we're thinking about the long course of American
history, we tend to forget the rest of the world.
A point I'm going to get back to in just a minute.
We tend to look at our navels.
Not naval with an a, because we're not worried about, that, that was silly.
We're not worried about [LAUGH] about having
great power, we're worried about our navels.
We're looking at our navels.
Because that's really is the foundation of the idea of
American exceptionalism, is that the history of no place else matters.
It's our history isn't it?
Well something happened in the long twentieth century.
We've been talking about the long nineteen century.
And the rejection
of natural rights. And this apatheosis of power.
In the twentieth century, well the world went about wrecking itself, didn't it?
Two great wars.
This was the heyday of militant
nationalism, but also militant ideological universalism
in which, that would be these great programs for the renovation of mankind.
And that's what did it for Jefferson.
Was the idea, that comes out of a long socialist and communist tradition.
That democracy is a fraud.
If
you look at America after the Civil War, into the
twentieth century and you said, do the people really govern themselves?
What's the most striking thing to you?
If you're observing the United States from abroad.
Well, it might be racial segregation in the south under Jim Crow laws.
It might be the way whole classes of people are denied rights.
It might be that this is the land of the self-satisfied
fat cat. The Babbits of the world.
The great robber barons. You say democracy, nice idea.
But where is it? Let's put it into practice.
And talk about the apotheosis of power, and the democratic dream,
they come together in the idea that, socialist revolution could impose
an equitable regime on mankind, for its own good.
This is the great totalitarian temptation of the 20th century,
that you could fulfill the dreams of the enlighment.
Through a powerful state.
This is an ideology with enormous appeal
as we become increasingly globalized and aware of a larger world, we are aware.
Of large differences in the world, of to recur to our theme of
inequalities, are we going to be patient, my fellow citizens
of the world, and wait for things to work out?
We'll all be dead.
We need revolution and we need revolution now.
And the answer to this from Americans and people throughout the, the liberal
west is we had revolution and the revolution was then.
And we have established the foundations of a liberal and just society.
Of course, liberal westerners would say, we haven't lived up to
all the possibilities, the opportunities, the
promises of liberal modern democratic regimes.
But democracy, this is the bottom line, is not a fraud.
Democracy is
the only hope for mankind. Don't forget that, said Franklin D.
Roosevelt.
I'm going to put up a monument in Washington.
And you will see Jefferson there and read his inspiring words.
I want to put him on the $2 bill.
We're going to have a massive addition of his papers
and documents and all those trivial stuff you can imagine,
but it's all going to be there because it, it came from the great man.
We need to understand Jefferson because it's Jefferson
who had a vision for a democratic world.
And that's what we're fighting World War II for.
Isn't it, my fellow Americans?
This is the great heyday of Jefferson and the twentieth century.
When he is associated with the cause of the free world.
When he is seen not just as a great American.
Keep this in mind.
Jefferson is portrayed as a renaissance man.
Now, we're not going to have a quiz now folks.
But the Renaissance did not take place in America.
We are associating American history now, the
American experiment republican government, with western history.
In fact, the idea of the west, and studying western civilization becomes
crucial in the emergence of the modern idea of the liberal arts in America.
Civilization.
It's a collective enterprise, it's something like an early vision
of NATO. That was a joke.
[LAUGH] The western alliance, it's deeply grounded.
You know when the Europeans tried to
come up with currency and icons of European-ness?
All they can do is talk about civilization.
Well they even do what the Americans did.
They evoke the classical past.
They're a little dodgy with this Christianity business.
Americans are much more forthright about being Christian.
In Europe there's so many people who used to be Christian.
So few people who are now, that doesn't really work very well.
But you can think of Europe as a great historical theme park, in
which the history of Christianity and civilization are, are thick on the ground.
And, and you can, you can see it there.
But, imagine Americans then, placing themselves at the
center of that history. The history of western civilization.
Because, liberty, freedom, those ideas.
Though,we put them into practice.
They come out of the tradition of western political philosophy.
John Locke, down with Thomas Hobbes, up with John Locke.
The social contract.
The idea that government, to be legitimate, has to be based on consent.
That's an English enlightenment idea that was put into practice in America.
Put into practice, but this is the key
thing, not for Americans alone, but for the world.
And to create a better world in the future.
This is where we see the redemption
of Jefferson's image in the political imagination.
Now we're going to spend a lot time in future weeks talking about slavery.
And we're going to talk about how Jefferson's
image went into rapid decline after the
Cold War period in this great period of struggle against this new despotism of
communism, the new idea of totalitarian imposition of equality
without consent. We're going to talk about how Jefferson
is increasingly seen living a lie in his own life.
The lie of exercising tyrannical authority over
of his fellow human beings in order to
promote his own selfish, sybaritic interest.
But Jefferson keeps coming back.
As I said, 1989. The phrase, the end of history.
We associate this with Francis Fukuyama,
the modern political philosopher and writer.
He wrote a influential book that was published around
the time of the collapse of the Soviet empire.
In which, Fukuyama says, channeling Jefferson,
who had said similar things himself.
Now it is clear to all the peoples of the world that the only
way to go is with free markets and
liberal democratic politics. They are inextricably joined.
Well, China refutes that of course.
But this is the great idea of Fukuyama's book.
The end of history is the end of any other possibility.
Fukuyama knows that things are going to happen.
We'll have hurricanes and storms and wars.
But they will be trivial in comparison to that now
universal understanding across the globe that governments must be democratic.
And economies must be liberal.
Jefferson said much the same thing.
He said, in Europe, he wrote to a European correspondent, you will
continue to have the fodder, the material to write histories, to chronicle.
You'll continue to have these stupid wars between one dynasty
and another, one power and another, and you'll have history.
Here in America,
we have nothing to write about because we are at the end of history.
We have a system here in the United States that's
our federal union of peaceful coexistence among free republican states.
World, world, what are you waiting for?
Well we're still waiting for it.
But think of the European Union, as a crude
perhaps ultimately ineffective ineffectual effort to achieve the same thing.
Peace among warring states.
A much more ambitious program indeed, than the one the Americans set themselves,
as they rallied together against British despotism and the American Revolution.
[MUSIC]
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