thomas jefferson analysis essay

Background Essay: The Declaration of Independence

Background Essay: Declaration of Independence

Guiding Question: What were the philosophical bases and practical purposes of the Declaration of Independence?

• I can explain the major events that led the American colonists to question British rule.
• I can explain how the concepts of natural rights and self-government influenced the Founders and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

Essential Vocabulary

Directions: As you read the essay, highlight the events from the graphic organizer in Handout B in one color. Think about how each of these events led the American colonists further down the road to declaring independence. Highlight the impacts of those events in another color.

In 1825, Thomas Jefferson reflected on the meaning and principles of the Declaration of Independence. In a letter to a friend, Jefferson explained that the document was an “expression of the American mind.” He meant that it reflected the common sentiments shared by American colonists during the resistance against British taxes in the 1760s and 1770s The Road to Independence

After the conclusion of the French and Indian War, the British sought to increase taxes on their American colonies and passed the Stamp Act (1765) and Townshend Acts (1767). American colonists viewed the acts as British oppression that violated their traditional rights as English subjects as well as their inalienable natural rights. The colonists mostly complained of “taxation without representation,” meaning that Parliament taxed them without their consent. During this period, most colonists simply wanted to restore their rights and liberties within the British Empire. They wanted reconciliation, not independence. But they were also developing an American identity as a distinctive people, which added to the anger over their lack of representation in Parliament and self-government.

After the Boston Tea Party (1773), Parliament passed the Coercive Acts (1774), punishing Massachusetts by closing Boston Harbor and stripping away the right to self-government. As a result, the Continental Congress met in 1774 to consider a unified colonial response. The Congress issued a declaration of rights stating, “That they are entitled to life, liberty, & property, and they have never ceded [given] to any sovereign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent.” Military clashes with British forces at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill in Massachusetts showed that American colonists were willing to resort to force to vindicate their claim to their rights and liberties.

In January 1776, Thomas Paine wrote the best-selling pamphlet Common Sense which was a forceful expression of the growing desire of many colonists for independence. Paine wrote that a republican government that followed the rule of law would protect liberties better than a monarchy. The rule of law means that government and citizens all abide by the same laws regardless of political power.

The Second Continental Congress debated the question of independence that spring. On May 10, it adopted a resolution that seemed to support independence. It called on colonial assemblies and popular conventions to “adopt such government as shall, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce [lead] to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular and America in general.”

Five days later, John Adams added his own even more radical preamble calling for independence: “It is necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said Crown should be totally suppressed [brought to an end].” This bold declaration was essentially a break from the British.

“Free and Independent States”

On June 7, Richard Henry Lee rose in Congress and offered a formal resolution for independence: “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved [set free] from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” Congress appointed a committee to draft a Declaration of Independence, while states wrote constitutions and declarations of rights with similar republican and natural rights principles.

On June 12, for example, the Virginia Convention issued the Virginia Declaration of Rights , a document drafted in 1776 to proclaim the natural rights that all people are entitled to. The document was based upon the ideas of Enlightenment thinker John Locke about natural rights and republican government. It read: “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights … they cannot by any compact, deprive or divest [take away] their posterity [future generations]; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

The Continental Congress’s drafting committee selected Thomas Jefferson to draft the Declaration of Independence because he was well-known for his writing ability. He knew the ideas of John Locke well and had a copy of the Virginia Declaration of Rights when he wrote the Declaration. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were also members of the committee and edited the document before sending it to Congress.

Still, the desire for independence was not unanimous. John Dickinson and others still wished for reconciliation. On July 1, Dickinson and Adams and their respective allies debated whether America should declare independence. The next day, Congress voted for independence by passing Lee’s resolution. Over the next two days, Congress made several edits to the document, making it a collective effort of the Congress. It adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4. The document expressed the natural rights principles of the independent American republic.

The Declaration opened by stating that the Americans were explaining the causes for separating from Great Britain and becoming an independent nation. It stated that they were entitled to the rights of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

The Declaration then asserted its universal ideals, which were closely related to the ideas of John Locke. It claimed that all human beings were created equal as a self-evident truth. They were equally “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” So whatever inequality that might exist in society (such as wealth, power, or status) does not justify one person or group getting more natural rights than anyone else. One way in which humans are equal is in possession of certain natural rights.

The equality of human beings also meant that they were equal in giving consent to their representatives to govern under a republican form of government. All authority flowed from the sovereign people equally. The purpose of that government was to protect the rights of the people. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The people had the right to overthrow a government that violated their rights in a long series of abuses.

The Declaration claimed the reign of King George III had been a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations ” [illegal taking] of the colonists’ rights. The king exercised political tyranny against the American colonies. For example, he taxed them without their consent and dissolved [closed down] colonial legislatures and charters. Acts of economic tyranny included cutting off colonial trade. The colonists were denied equal justice when they lost their traditional right to a trial by jury in special courts. Acts of military tyranny included quartering , or forcing citizens to house, troops without consent; keeping standing armies in the colonies; waging war against the colonists; and hiring mercenaries , or paid foreign soldiers, to fight them. Repeated attempts by the colonists to petition king and Parliament to address their grievances were ignored or treated with disdain, so the time had come for independence.

In the final paragraph, the representatives appealed to the authority given to them by the people to declare that the united colonies were now free and independent. The new nation had the powers of a sovereign nation and could levy war, make treaties and alliances, and engage in foreign trade. The Declaration ends with the promise that “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

Americans had asserted their natural rights, right to self-government, and reasons for splitting from Great Britain. They now faced a long and difficult fight against the most powerful empire in the world to preserve that liberty and independence.

Related Content

The Declaration of Independence Answer Key

The Declaration of Independence

America's Founders looked to the lessons of human nature and history to determine how best to structure a government that would promote liberty. They started with the principle of consent of the governed: the only legitimate government is one which the people themselves have authorized. But the Founders also guarded against the tendency of those in power to abuse their authority, and structured a government whose power is limited and divided in complex ways to prevent a concentration of power. They counted on citizens to live out virtues like justice, honesty, respect, humility, and responsibility.

Background Essay Graphic Organizer and Questions: The Declaration of Independence

Declaration Preamble and Grievances Organizer: Versions A and B

Thomas Jefferson Looks Back on the Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence

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Summary: “the declaration of independence”.

The Declaration of Independence is one of the founding documents of the United States of America. The text was written primarily by Thomas Jefferson in June of 1776 after the Second Continental Congress appointed him the chair of the Committee of Five (the others were John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman), a group designated to draft a statement declaring the American colonies independent from Great Britain. Jefferson based his draft on existing documents such as George Mason’s draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and Enlightenment-era texts by authors such as John Locke. Jefferson would later say he was not striving for originality but to express the American mind. The Continental Congress edited Jefferson’s draft and signed the Declaration on July 4, 1776. John Dunlap printed copies of the Declaration that same night. Today, the original document is among the most important in American history and is on display in the rotunda of the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC.

This study guide makes use of the transcription of that version produced by the National Archives .

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The Declaration opens with a preamble explaining why the document was created: It is necessary to provide reasons when one nation severs its political ties to another. Jefferson argues that all men are created equal and possess rights that should not be denied by any government. These rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When a government fails to secure or defend these rights, the people are justified in overthrowing that government and replacing it with one that they believe will do so. While a people ought not to overthrow a government for minor reasons, the British government has committed a long list of abuses against the colonists who, as a consequence, now declare their independence.

The Declaration identifies 27 abuses committed by King George III. For example, he has not allowed the colonists to be represented in Parliament. He has eliminated created new offices designed to harass colonists. He has made the military independent of, and more powerful than, civilian governments. He also imposed, along with Parliament, policies to which the colonists could not and did not consent, including legislation that imposed taxes on the colonists and required them to house British soldiers. Additionally, he abridged the colonists’ rights to trial by jury and free trade. Finally, he has not defended the borders of the colonies but instead has used the British military to seize American ships and made it clear that he intends to pay foreign mercenaries, if necessary, to suppress insurrection in the colonies.

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Because of these grievances, the colonial governments have tried to petition the British government peacefully to resolve the tensions. The king has ignored these petitions. Individual colonists who appealed to individual British citizens about their concerns have also been ignored. Even appeals to shared customs and heritage have fallen on deaf ears. After these repeated diplomatic efforts, the colonists are left with no choice but to declare independence.

The resulting nation will be called the United States of America and will claim the rights granted to all nations, including the right to make war and peace, ally with other nations, trade freely, and do anything else that nations are allowed to do. The signers pledge their lives, fortunes, and honor to the cause and believe they are protected by a higher power.

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Thomas Jefferson

Scholars in general have not taken seriously Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) as a philosopher, perhaps because he never wrote a formal philosophical treatise. Yet Jefferson was a prodigious writer, and his writings were suffuse with philosophical content. Well-acquainted with the philosophical literature of his day and of antiquity, he left behind a rich philosophical legacy in his declarations, presidential messages and addresses, public papers, numerous bills, letters to philosophically minded correspondents, and his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia . Scrutiny of those writings reveals a refined political philosophy as well as a systemic approach to a philosophy of education in partnership with it. Jefferson’s political philosophy and his views on education were undergirded and guided by a consistent and progressive vision of humans, their place in the cosmos, and the good life that owed much to ancient philosophers like Epictetus, Antoninus, and Cicero; to the ethical precepts of Jesus; to coetaneous Scottish empiricists like Francis Hutcheson and Lord Kames; and even to esteemed religionists and philosophically inclined literary figures of the period like Laurence Sterne, Jean Baptiste Massillon, and Miguel Cervantes. In one area, however, he was behindhand: his views on race, the subject of the final section.

1. Life and Writings

2.1 the cosmos, 2.2 nature and society, 3.1 religion and morality, 3.2 the moral sense, 4.1 the “mother principle”, 4.2 the “natural aristoi ”, 4.3 usufruct and constitutional renewal, 4.4 revolution, 5.1 a system of education, 5.2 education and human thriving, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

From 1752 to 1757, Jefferson studied under the Scottish clergyman, Rev. William Douglas, “a superficial Latinist” and “less instructed in Greek,” from whom he learned French and the rudiments of Latin and Greek. With the death of his father in 1757, Jefferson earned a substantial inheritance—some £2,400 and some 5,000 acres of land to be divided between him and younger brother, Randolph—and then began to study under Rev. James Maury, “a correct classical scholar” ([Au], p. 4).

From 1760 to 1762, Jefferson attended William and Mary College and there befriended Professor William Small. He wrote in his Autobiography, “It was my great good fortune, and what probably fixed the destinies of my life that Dr. Wm. Small of Scotland was then professor of Mathematics, a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners, & an enlarged & liberal mind.” Small, Jefferson added, had become attached to Jefferson, who became his “daily companion when not engaged in the school.” From Small, Jefferson learned of the “expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed” ([Au], pp. 4–5). Small introduced Jefferson to lawyer George Wythe, who “continued to be my faithful and beloved Mentor in youth, and my most affectionate friend through life,” and under whom Jefferson would soon be apprenticed in law—and Wythe introduced Jefferson to Governor Francis Fauquier, governor of Virginia from 1758 till his death ([Au], pp. 4–5). Small and Wythe especially would prove to be cynosures to the young man.

Upon leaving William and Mary (1762) and to the time he began his legal practice (1767), Jefferson, under the tutelage of Wythe ([Au: 5), undertook a rigorous course of study of law, which comprised for him study of not just the standard legal texts of the day but also anything of potential practical significance to advance human affairs. For Jefferson, a lawyer, having a mastery of all things except metempirical subjects and fiction, would be a human encyclopedia of useful knowledge. Advisory letters to John Garland Jefferson (11 June 1790) and to Bernard Moore (30 Aug. 1814) show a lengthy and full course of study, involving physical studies, morality, religion, natural law, politics, history, belle lettres, criticism, rhetoric, and oratory. Thereby, a lawyer would be fully readied for any turn of events in a case. As lawyer, Jefferson’s focus, David Konig notes, was cases involving property—e.g., the legal acquisition of lands and the quieting of titles—and that, adds Konig, shaped his political thinking on the need of the relative equal distribution of property among all male citizens for sound Republican government.

As lawyer, Jefferson took up six pro bono cases of slaves, seeking freedom. In the case of slave Samuel Howell in Howell v. Netherland (Apr. 1770), Jefferson argued, in keeping with sentiments he would include years later in his Declaration of Independence, “Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.” The case was awarded to Netherland, before his lawyer, George Wythe, could present his case (Catterall, 90–91).

Jefferson would practice law till August 11, 1774, when he passed his practice to Edmund Randolph at the start of the Revolutionary War.

In 1769, Jefferson gained admittance to the Virginian House of Burgesses. Delegates’ minds were, he said, “circumscribed within narrow limits by an habitual belief that it was our duty to be subordinate to the mother country in all matters of government” ([Au], p. 5). Jefferson’s thinking inclined otherwise. The experience in the House of Delegates substantially shaped his revolutionary spirit.

On February 1, 1770, Jefferson lost most of the books of his first library when a fire razed his house at Shadwell. Of the loss of his books, he wrote to boyhood friend John Page (21 Feb. 1770), “Would to god it had been the money [that the books cost and not the books]; then had it never cost me a sigh!” He was to have two other libraries at Monticello in his life, which, because of his passion for learning, centered on books. When he built his residence at Poplar Forest early in the nineteenth century, he kept there a number of books—focused on philosophy, history, and religion—for his own enjoyment.

Jefferson took as his wife Martha Wayles Skelton on January 1, 1772. In that same year, daughter Martha was born. In 1778, daughter Mary was born.

Upon retirement from law in 1774, Jefferson wrote Summary View of the Rights of British America—“an humble and dutiful address” of complaints addressed to King George III of England. The complaints concerned numerous American rights, contravened, and aimed at “some redress of their injured rights” ([S], 105). Due to its trenchant tone, it earned Jefferson considerable reputation among congressmen as a gifted writer and as a revolutionist.

Jefferson was elected to the Continental Congress in 1775 as its second youngest member. He was soon invited to participate in a committee with John Adams, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, and Robert Livingston to draft a declaration on American independence. It was decided that Jefferson himself should compose a draft. As John Adams writes to Timothy Pickering (6 Aug. 1822) concerning his reasons for Jefferson being the sole drafter of the document: “Reason 1st. You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason 2nd. I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular; You are very much otherwise. Reason 3rd. You can write ten times better than I can” (Adams). For over two weeks, Jefferson worked on the Declaration of Independence in an upper-floor apartment at Seventh Street and Market Street in Philadelphia.

The document was intended to be “an expression of the American mind” and was put forth to the “tribunal of the world.” Jefferson’s draft listed certain “sacred & undeniable” truths: that all men are created “equal & independent”; that “from that equal creation,” all have the rights “to the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness”; that governments, deriving their “just powers from the consent of the governed,” are instituted to secure such rights; and that the people have a right to abolish any government which “becomes destructive of these ends” and to institute a new government, by “laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness” ([D], 19).

Rigorous debate followed. Excisions and changes were made to reduce Jefferson’s draft to three-quarters of its original length, though the basic structure and the argument therein—a tightly structured argument that begins with rights, turns to duties of government, and moves to a justification for revolutionary behavior when citizens’ rights are consistently transgressed by government—was unaltered. Thus, the Declaration contained the rudiments of a political philosophy that would be fleshed out in the decades that followed. The document, not thought to be significant at the time, was approved on July 4, 1776, and it would become one of the most significant political writings ever composed.

Not long after Jefferson finished the Declaration on Independence, he was appointed to a committee to revise the outdated laws of Virginia, as a result of a bill introduced to the General Assembly of Virginia. That was a hefty task, which Jefferson—as part of a committee comprising also Thomas Ludwell Lee, George Mason, Edmund Pendleton, and George Wythe—began in 1776. Of the five, Lee and Mason excused themselves, and revision, comprising 126 bills, was undertaken by Jefferson, Wythe, and Pendleton. Revision was completed in 1779, a period of not quite three years. Notable among the bills Jefferson drafted, were Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge and Bill for Religious Freedom. The latter was passed while Jefferson was in France as Minister Plenipotentiary; the former, requiring educative reforms that demanded a system of public education, did not pass.

From 1779 to 1781, Jefferson began tenure as governor of Virginia. During his governorship, he reformed the curriculum of William and Mary College by “abolishing the Grammar school,” eliminating the professorships in Divinity and Oriental languages, and supplanting them with professorships in Law and Police; Anatomy, Medicine, and Chemistry; and Modern Languages ([Au], p. 5). He also began his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia , in which he described the geography, climate, and people of Virginia and their laws, religions, manners, and commerce, among other things. The book, in general, was well received by his Enlightenment friends and did even more to enhance his reputation as a gifted writer.

Jefferson’s wife Martha died on September 6, 1782. Overwhelmingly distraught, he found some consolation in an invitation to function as Minister to France—he needed to be away from Monticello—which he did from 1784 to 1789. He ended the post at the bidding of George Washington, who asked him to be his Secretary of State—a post he held till 1793. Political disagreements between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton on political issues resulted in formation of the Republican and Federalist parties—the former, championing small, unobtrusive government and strict constructionism; the latter, larger, strong government and a less strict interpretation of the Constitution. After a brief retirement, he was elected Vice-President of the United States for one term that ended in 1801, and then President of the United States, which lasted two terms. His presidency, which began triumphantly with his conciliatory First Inaugural Address, was highlighted by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which doubled the size of the country; the subsequent Lewis and Clark Expedition, which ended in 1806; and the failed Embargo Act of 1807, which aimed, among other things, to punish England during its war with France, by prohibiting exchange of goods. During his tenure as president, his daughter Maria died (1804).

In retirement, Jefferson resumed his domestic life at Monticello, continued as president of the American Philosophical Society (a position he held for nearly 20 years), and began activities that would lead to the birth of the University of Virginia, which opened one year before his death. Irretrievably saddled with debt throughout his retirement, he sold his library, approximately 6,700 books, to Congress in 1815 to pay off some of that debt. He died, as did John Adams, on July 4, 1826. On his obelisk, there was written, upon his request ([E]: 706):

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.

Jefferson wrote prodigiously. He penned some 19,000 letters. He published Notes on the State of Virginia (English version) in 1787. He wrote key declarations such as Summary View of the Rights of British Americans (1774), Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (1775), and the Declaration of Independence (1776); authored numerous bills; and wrote his Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States, a modified copy of which was still in use till 1977. He put together two harmonies, The Philosophy of Jesus (1804)—no copies are known to survive—and The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (1820), by extracting passages from the New Testament. Last, Jefferson undertook late in life an autobiography (never completed), “for my own ready reference & for the information of my family” ([Au]: 3).

2. Deity, Nature, and Society

Like many other contemporaries he read—e.g., Hutcheson, Kames, Bolingbroke, Tracy, and Hume—Jefferson was an empiricist, and in keeping with Isaac Newton, a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. To John Adams (15 Aug. 1820), he writes, “A single sense may indeed be sometimes decieved, [ 1 ] but rarely: and never all our senses together, with their faculty of reasoning.” Jefferson continues: “‘I feel: therefore I exist.’ I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space.” Given matter and motion, everything else, even thinking, is explicable. As all loadstones are magnetic, matter too is merely “an action of a particular organization of matter, formed for that purpose by it’s creator.” Even mind and god are material. “To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings.”

To Massachusetts politician Edward Everett (24 Feb. 1823), Jefferson says that observed particulars are found to be nothing but concretizations of atoms. He cautions, “By analyzing too minutely we often reduce our subject to atoms, of which the mind loses hold.” That suggests a sort of pragmatic atomism— viz ., atoms being merely arbitrary epistemological stopping points in the analysis of matter to keep the mind from entertaining the dizzying thought of dividing without end.

Jefferson, however, was not a metaphysical atomist of the Epicurean sort, but a nominalist like philosopher John Locke (1690). To New Jersey politician Dr. John Manners (22 Feb. 1814), he says:

Nature has, in truth, produced units only through all her works. Classes, orders, genera, species, are not of her works. Her creation is of individuals. No two animals are exactly alike; no two plants, nor even two leaves or blades of grass; no two crystallizations. And if we may venture from what is within the cognizance of such organs as ours, to conclude on that beyond their powers, we must believe that no two particles of matter are of exact resemblance.

Humans categorize out of need, for the “infinitude of units or individuals” outstrips the capacity of memory. There is grouping and subgrouping until there are formed classes, orders, genera, and species. Yet such grouping is man’s doing, not nature’s. [ 2 ] Jefferson begins with biota—the system he questions is the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’—and works his way down to “particles of matter.”

In Jefferson’s cosmos, which is Stoic-like in etiology, all events are linked. The hand of deity is manifestly behind the etiological arrangements. Jefferson writes to Adams (11 Apr. 1823):

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the universe; in it’s parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to percieve and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of it’s composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their courses by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters, and atmosphere; animal and vegetable bodies, each perfectly organized whether as insect, man or mammoth; it is impossible not to believe, that there is in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a Fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.

The language of perception is in keeping with his empiricism; the language of feel, with his appropriation of philosophers Destutt de Tracy’s (1818/1827: 164) and Lord Kames’ (1758: 250) epistemology. Appeal to an ultimate cause implies a demiurge, of whose nature little can be known other than its superior intelligence and overall beneficence. [ 3 ] There is nothing here or in any other cosmological letters to suggest that deity privileges human life any more than, in David Hume’s words, “that of an oyster” (1755 [1987]: 583).

Jefferson continues in his 1823 letter to Adams. Deity superintends the cosmos. Some stars disappear; others come to be. Comets, with their “incalculable courses”, deviate from regular orbits and demand “renovation under other laws.” Some species of animal have become extinct. “Were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos.”

What precisely does divine superintendence entail?

William Wilson argues that the “‘cut’ of Jefferson’s mind” demands theism—divine interpositionism. He writes:

Calling him a deist registers great misunderstanding of that mind. But the root of his thinking remained Newtonian, including its belief in an omnipresent divine activity in nature. The God of deism from this point of view would be a complete abstraction. As the statistician reduces a person of flesh and blood to a mere integer, so the deist reduces God to a functionary of no real description who abandons nature to a well-ordered dust. (Wilson 2017, 122)

Holowchak thinks that it is unlikely that divine superintendence—i.e., extinction and restoration—implies supernatural intervention in the natural course of events (e.g., TJ to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 25 Sept. 1816, and TJ to Daniel Salmon, 15 Feb. 1808). It is probable, thinks Holowchak, that a natural capacity for restoration exists in certain types of matter in the same way that mind, for Jefferson, is in certain types of matter (2013a). Deity’s superintendence is likely the capacity for pre-established cosmic self-regulation comparable in some sense to the work of a thermostat in regulating the temperature of a building. [ 4 ] Following Lord Bolingbroke whose views from Philosophical Works he “commonplaced” early in life ([LCB]: 40–55), Jefferson believed that to posit that God needed to intervene in cosmic events to keep aright them (e.g., by sending down Jesus to save humanity) was to belie the capacities of deity. God, thought Bolingbroke, and Jefferson’s god owed more to Bolingbroke than to any other thinker, got things right the first time.

How for Jefferson does man leave the state of nature and enter into society? Jefferson appeals to nature in what one scholar calls a “middle landscape” manner (Marx 1964: 104–5). The happiest state for humans is one that seeks a middle ground between what is savage and what is “refined.” Jefferson’s vision, thinks Marx, is Arcadian. Jefferson’s aim, early writings indicate (e.g., TJ to James Madison, 20 Dec. 1787 and [NV]: 290–91), was for America to be a pastoral society that had the freedom of primitivism, because it was neither materialist nor manufacturing and it had an abundancy of land. America, because it was neither primitive nor uncultured, could have the trimmings of cultured societies, without their degenerative excesses.

Jefferson’s natural-law theory is Stoical, not Hobbesian or Rousseauian. For Jefferson, the basal laws of nature that obtain when man is in the state of nature are roughly the self-same laws that obtain in civil society. They are also roughly the same basal laws that obtain between states.

The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in the state of nature, accompany them into a state of society, and the aggregate of the duties of all the individuals composing the society constitutes the duties of that society towards any other; so that between society and society the same moral duties exist as did between individuals composing them, while in an unassociated state, and their maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation ([F]: 423).

The ideological frame that allows for social stability is in the Declaration of Independence, in which Jefferson lists two self-evident truths: the equality of all men and their endowment of unalienable rights.

“Equality” for Jefferson comprises equality of opportunity and moral equality. Equality of opportunity recognizes the differences between persons—e.g., talents, prior social status, education, and wealth—and seeks to level the playing field through republican reforms such as introduction of a bill to secure human rights; elimination of primogeniture, entails, and state-sanctioned religion; periodic constitutional renewal; and and educational reform for the self-sufficiency of the general citizenry. To remedy the unequal distribution of property, Jefferson advocates in his Draft Constitution for Virginia that 50 acres of property go to every male Virginian [ 5 ] ([CV]: 343). Moral equality recognizes that each human deserves equal status in personhood and citizenship, hence again the need of republican reforms of the sort listed above.

Rights are held to obtain, whether or not holders recognize them, and they have a moral dimension apart from their obvious legal dimension. There are, for instance, the moral obligations to obey the law and to recognize and uphold the rights of others. [ 6 ]

Jefferson, mostly following Locke, mentions three unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The right to life constitutes a right to one’s own personhood. The rights to liberty and pursuit of happiness (Locke lists property instead of happiness) entail self-determination through labor, art, industry, and self-governance. Government has no right to control the lives of its citizens or dictate a course of happiness. Therein lies the foundation of Jeffersonian liberalism.

There is also the right to revolution, which entails the right to abolish any tyrannical form of government, given long abuses.

3. Morality

The right to the pursuit of happiness implies too that all persons are free to worship as they choose. Since religion is a matter between a man and his deity (e.g., TJ to Miles King, 26 Sept. 1814), no one owes any account of his faith to another. Moreover, legislature should make “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and state ([DB]: 510). [ 7 ]

Being personal, religion ought not to be politicized. When the clergy engraft themselves into the “machine of government,” they prove a “very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man” (TJ to Jeremiah Moor, 14 Aug. 1800). All people, Jefferson asserts, should follow the example of the Quakers: live without priests, be guided their internal monitor of right and wrong, and eschew matters inaccessible to common sense, for belief can only rightly be shaped by “the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition” (TJ to John Adams, 22 Aug. 1813).

The true principles of morality are the “mild and simple principles of the Christian philosophy” (TJ to Gerry Elbridge, 29 Mar. 1801)—the principles common to all right-intended religions. Jefferson writes to Thomas Leiper (21 Jan. 1809):

My religious reading has long been confined to the moral branch of religion, which is the same in all religions; while in that branch which consists of dogmas, all differ, all have a different set. The former instructs us how to live well and worthily in society; the latter are made to interest our minds in the support of the teachers who inculcate them. [ 8 ]

Thus, the principles common to all religions are few, exoteric, and the true principles of morality. [ 9 ]

Though chary of sectarian religion due to the empleomania of sectarian clerics and a sharp critic of Christianity in his youth ([NR]), “Christianity,” deterged of its political trappings and metaphysical twaddle, in time became special to Jefferson (e.g., TJ to John Adams, 12 Oct. 1813 and 24 Jan. 1814). He states to Dr. Benjamin Rush (21 Apr. 1803):

I am a Christian, in the only sense [Jesus] wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to him every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other.

Jesus’ teachings make up the greatest moral system, and Jesus is “the greatest of all the [religious] reformers.” [ 10 ] To Benjamin Waterhouse (26 June 1822), Jefferson writes:

The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man. 1. That there is one only God, and he all perfect. 2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments. 3. That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself, is the sum of religion.

Consequently, Jesus’ message comprises love of god (being one, pace Calvin, not three), love of mankind, and belief in an afterlife of reward or punishment.

Yet much in the Bible, Jefferson thought, was redundant, hyperbolic, bathetic, absurd, and beyond the bounds of physical possibility (e.g., TJ to John Adams, 28 Oct. 1813). That was confirmed by inspection of a late-in-life “harmony” Jefferson constructed, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (1820), in which the virgin birth, miraculous cures, and resurrection were excised. Christ was neither the savior of mankind nor the son of God, but the great moral reformer of the Jewish religion([B]).

Even after he purged the Bible of its corruptions—in his own words, after he plucked, in an oft-used metaphor, the diamonds from the dungheap (TJ to John Adams, 12 Oct. 1813, and TJ to )—to try both to make plain Jesus’ true teachings and to give a credible account of the life of Jesus, Jefferson did not completely follow Jesus’ uncontaminated teachings. He did think love of God was needed for one to be of upstanding virtue, for each could see and feel the existence of deity in the cosmos. Thus, atheists, however ostensibly virtuous, suffered from a defect of moral sensibility. Yet when Jefferson expressed his own view on the branches of morality (true religion), he did not mention belief in an afterlife, as did Jesus. [ 11 ] His 1814 letter to Law (13 June) mentions belief in an afterlife merely as one of the correctives to lack of a moral sense, along with self-interest, the approbation of others upon doing good, and the rewards and punishments of laws. Given that, along with his out-and-out commitment to materialism and given the evidence of four letters that unequivocally express skepticism apropos of an afterlife, [ 12 ] and given that he and his wife wrote about the “eternal separation” they were about to make on her deathbed, it is probable, asserts one scholar, that he did not believe in an afterlife (Holowchak 2019a, pp. 128–2). So, belief in an afterlife, one of the chief teachings of Jesus, was likely not an essential part of morality for Jefferson. In contrast, Charles Sanford, noting that Jefferson appeals to the hereafter in several letters and addresses, offers a small-step argument in defense of belief in an afterlife. “‘The prospects of a future state of retribution for the evil as well as the good done while here’ [are] among the moral forces necessary to motivate individuals to live good lives in society.” He adds: “Jefferson had begun with the conviction that God had created in man a hunger for the rights of equality, freedom, and life and a desire to follow God’s moral law. It was only a small step further to believe that God had also created man with an immortal soul” (152). [ 13 ]

Finally, Jefferson later in life claimed to be a Unitarian. What did “Unitarianism” mean for him?

Jefferson finds the notion of three deities in one inscrutable, and therefore physically impossible. Here he falls back on his naturalism. He allows nothing inconsistent with the laws of nature, gleaned through experience. The sort of Unitarianism Jefferson promotes is not a religious sect, but instead a manner of approaching religion. Of his Unitarianism, Jefferson asserts to John Adams (22 Aug. 1813), “We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe.” To Dr. Thomas Cooper (2 Nov. 1822), Jefferson contrasts Unitarians with sectarian preachers, so Unitarians can be grasped as persons living fully in accordance with the dictates of their moral sense faculty. To Benjamin Waterhouse (8 Jan. 1825), Jefferson states that Unitarianism is “primitive Christianity, in all the simplicity in which it came from the lips of Jesus.” Such letters show plainly that monotheism, incomplexity, and non-sectarianism are dependent issues. Jefferson made purchase of monotheism because it and benevolence were key tenets of Jesus’ uncorrupted teachings. Those two tenets, letters indicate, were the framework of his Unitarianism, or of any right religion.

For Jefferson, morality was not reason-guided, but dictated by a moral sense. Here he followed Scottish empiricists, [ 14 ] such as William Small (Hull 1997: 102–5 and [Au]: 4–5)—the only non-minister at William and Mary College—and Francis Hutcheson and especially Lord Kames. [ 15 ]

To nephew Peter Carr (19 Aug. 1785), Jefferson says that the god-given moral sense, innate and instinctual, is as much a part of a person’s nature as are the senses of hearing and seeing, or as is a leg or arm. Jefferson’s comparisons to hearing and sight invite depiction of the moral sense tied to a bodily organ, like the heart (TJ to Maria Cosway, 12 Oct. 1785). Like strength of limbs, it too is given to persons in a greater or lesser degree, and can be made better or worse through exercise or its neglect.

A letter to daughter Martha (11 Dec. 1783) suggests the moral sense works spontaneously, without any input of reason. The language of “feel” is critical.

If ever you are about to say any thing amiss or to do any thing wrong, consider before hand. You will feel something within you which will tell you it is wrong and ought not to be said or done: this is your conscience, and be sure to obey it. [ 16 ]

One ought to resist the temptation to act viciously in circumstances when vice will not be detected. He tells Carr (19 Aug. 1785) to act always and in all circumstances as if everyone in the world were looking at him. Jefferson bids grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph (24 Nov. 1808) to appeal to moral exemplars before acting, and he lists Small, Wythe, and Peyton Randolph. “I am certain that this mode of deciding on my conduct, tended more to correctness than any reasoning powers I possessed.” Thus, one can use the moral sense unerringly, or relatively so, if one disregards the intrusions of reason and assumes that all of one’s actions are under the scrutiny of cynosures—i.e., there will be no temptation to act from the pressure of peers. In another letter to Carr (10 Aug. 1787), Jefferson disadvises his nephew to attend lectures on moral philosophy and appeals counterfactually to a ham-handed creator. “He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science.” Here and elsewhere, [ 17 ] Jefferson is explicit that reason is uninvolved in moral “judgments.”

Not everyone possesses a moral sense. Napoleon, he tells Adams (25 Feb. 1823), is an illustration. To Thomas Law (13 June 1814), Jefferson says that want of the moral sense can somewhat be rectified by education and employment of rational calculation, but such educative remedies are blandishments not aimed to encourage morally correct action, because that is impossible without a moral sense, but to discourage actions with pernicious consequences. In short, one without a moral sense can be induced or shaped to behave as if having a moral sense, though such actions would merely be consistent with morally correct actions, not be morally correct actions.

Finally, the function of reason, he says in his 1787 letter to Carr, is “in some degree” to oversee the exercise of the moral faculty, “but it is a small stock which is required for this”. Reason might function, thinks one scholar, (1) to encourage or reinforce morally correct action, [ 18 ] (2) to keep the moral sense vital and vigorous, (3) to instill the first elements of morality in children through exposure to history, (4) to allow for cultural sensitivity to morally retarded cultures, (5) to continue moral advance through reading history as adults, (6) to help make plain the rights (especially derivative rights) of humans, (7) to form general rules to serve as rough guides human action, [ 19 ] and (8) to encourage moral improvement through breeding for morality (Holowchak 2014b, 177–80). None of those functions, however, directly involves reason in moral “judgments.”

Jefferson also believed, following the lead of many thinkers of his day—e.g., Francis Ferguson, John Millar, Lord Kames (1798 and 1774), William Robertson, Claude Adrien Helvétius, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot—that humans were morally progressing over time (e.g., TJ to John Adams, 11 Jan. 1816, and TJ to P.S. Dupont de Nemours, 24 Apr. 1816). There were, however, periodic glitches—periods of moral stagnation or decline. The belligerence between England and France in Jefferson’s later years was to him evidence of such decline. Still, such moral declinations, considered overall, were temporary setbacks or “retrogradations,” not genuine declinations. In a letter to Adams (1 Aug. 1816), he writes that the Americas will show Europe the path to moral advance.

We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priest and kings, as she can.

Thus, moral progress is movement, prompted by embrace of liberty and respect for humans’ rights, toward the ideals of love of deity and love of humanity through beneficence—the ideals taught best by Jesus. [ 20 ]

4. Political Philosophy

In his First Inaugural Address (1801), Jefferson lists the “essential principles of our Government” in 15 doctrines—perhaps his first attempt at a definition of republicanism ([I 1 ]: 494–95).

• Equal and exact justice to all men, irrespective of political or religious persuasion;
• peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, without entangling alliances to any;
• Federal support in the rights of states’ government;
• preservation of constitutional vigor of the Federal government;
• election by the people;
• absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority;
• a well-disciplined militia;
• supremacy of the civil over the military authority;
• light taxation;
• ready payment of debts;
• encouragement of agriculture and commerce;
• the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason;
• freedom of the press;
• protection by habeas corpus and trial by juries impartially selected; and
• freedom of religion.

Fifteen years later in a series of letters, Jefferson again grapples with a definition of “republicanism.” To P.S. Dupont de Nemours (24 Apr. 1816), Jefferson lists nine “moral principles” upon which republican government is grounded.

I believe with you that morality, compassion, generosity, are innate elements of the human constitution; that there exists a right independent of force; that a right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings; that no one has a right to obstruct another, exercising his faculties innocently for the relief of sensibilities made a part of his nature; that justice is the fundamental law of society; that the majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society; that action by the citizens in person, in affairs within their reach and competence, and in all others by representatives, chosen immediately, and removable by themselves, constitutes the essence of a republic; that all governments are more or less republican in proportion as this principle enters more or less into their composition; and that a government by representation is capable of extension over a greater surface of country than one of any other form.

Among the nine principles, the seventh

Action by the citizens in person, in affairs within their reach and competence, and in all others by representatives, chosen immediately, and removable by themselves, constitutes the essence of a republic.

comes closest to the essence of republicanism. To John Taylor (28 May 1816), Jefferson attempts a “precise and definite idea” of republicanism:

A government by its citizens in mass, acting directly and personally, according to rules established by the majority.

Every other government is more or less republican, in proportion as it has in this composition more or less of this ingredient of the direct action of the citizens.

To Samuel Kercheval (12 July 1816), Jefferson gives his “mother principle”:

Governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.

A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns (not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city, or small township, but) by representatives chosen by himself, and responsible to him at short periods).

Such writings suggest the following “barebones” definition of “republic” for Jefferson, or a “Jeffersonian republic”:

A government is a Jeffersonian republic if and only if it allows all citizens ample opportunity to participate politically in affairs within their reach and competency; it employs representatives, chosen and recallable by the citizenry and functioning for short periods, for affairs outside citizens’ reach and competency; it functions according to the rules (periodically revisable) established by the majority of the citizens; and it guarantees the equal rights, in person and property, of all citizens.

The definition is barebones for several reasons. First, it does not fully capture the normative essence of Jefferson’s description of what is “proper for all conditions of society” in his letter to Dupont de Nemours. Yet it is not normatively neutral, as it speaks of equality of opportunity for each citizen to participate in government and it guarantees equal rights. Second, the definition ignores the partnership of politics and science, which is part of Jefferson’s conception of a republic. Jefferson insisted on periodic revisions of the Constitution at conventions to accommodate changes in the peoples’ will, when suitably informed. Such changes were not arbitrary, but dictated mostly by advances in science. [ 21 ] Jefferson writes to Samuel Kercheval (12 July 1816), “The laws and constitutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” Thus, a republic for Jefferson is essentially progressive and scientific, not static and conservative.

Thus, Jeffersonian republicanism is a schema for government by the people, not any particular system of governing. It is not wedded to any particular constitution—constitutions, Jefferson is clear, are merely provisional representations of the will of the people at the time of their drafting (TJ to George Washington, 7 Nov. 1792)—but to the principle of government representing the will of the people, suitably informed. That is why Jefferson says in his First Inaugural Address that for the will of the majority to be reasonable, it must be rightful ([I 1 ]: 493). [ 22 ] Thus, Jeffersonian republicanism is essentially in partnership with science.

Jefferson’s attempts at defining “republic” and his nine moral principles “proper for all conditions of society” shows that republicanism is a political philosophy. For Jefferson, republican governing is essentially progressive, and being government of and for the people, it aims at involving all citizens to their fullest capacity. Over the centuries, he recognized, human potentiality had been stifled by coercive governments. Instantiation of republican governing, thus, was an attempt to impose the minimal political structure needed to maximize human liberty, free human potentiality, and ensure the political ascendency of the “natural aristoi, ” the talented and virtuous, and not the “artificial aristoi, ” the wealthy and wellborn.

Jefferson’s republicanism was both democratic and meritocratic. It was democratic in that it aimed roughly to have no person disadvantaged at the start of life. That would be the same for Blacks, who were the equals of all others in moral sensibility—hence, their desert of equal rights and equal opportunities. Democratic republicanism demanded recognition of moral equality and equality of opportunity. Yet Jefferson realized that each person’s dreams, intelligence, and talents varied greatly. Thus, Jeffersonian republicanism was also meritocratic in that all persons were allowed to do with their life what they saw fit to do with it, so long as in doing so they did not disallow others the opportunity of doing what they saw fit to do. The most talented and virtuous, he assumed, would naturally strive to exercise fully their talents and virtue through politics and science.

Jefferson recognized two classes of people: laborers and learned (TJ to Peter Carr, 7 Sept. 1814). His distinction, however, was not determined by birth or wealth, as it was by most others of his day, but by merit. To John Adams (28 Oct. 1813), Jefferson writes:

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class.

What Jefferson claimed here was that the traditional, centuries-old class distinction, founded on birth or wealth, was in effect politically obsolete. What made men “best” was talent (i.e., skill, ambition, and genius) and virtue.

Jefferson then tells Adams that the natural aristoi comprise “the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trust, and government of society.” He adds that that government is best which allows for “a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government.” Through “instruction, trust, and government,” the natural aristoi will be not only political officials, but also teachers, trustees, and practitioners or patrons of science. [ 23 ]

To ensure that political offices will be held by the natural aristoi , there must be, inter alia , public access to general education and free presses for dissemination of information to the citizenry. With the citizenry generally educated, one has, Jefferson continues to Adams, merely “to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo- aristoi, ” and “in general they will elect the real good and wise.” [ 24 ] That is much preferable to the centuries-old method of allowing the wealthy and wellborn to govern at the expense of the people.

For Jefferson, constitutions, unlike the rights of men, are alterable, in conformance to the level of progress of a state. Thus, constitutions are to be replaced, altered, or renewed pursuant to humans’ intellectual, political, and moral progress.

To James Madison (6 Sept. 1789), Jefferson writes:

The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another … is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. [ 25 ]

Beginning with the evident proposition—“the earth belongs in usufruct to the living”—Jefferson aims to prove that the deeds of each generation, defined by a nineteen-year period, [ 26 ] ought to be independent (or relatively so) of each other. Moreover, “usufruct” implies that each generation has an obligation to leave behind their property to the subsequent generation at least in the same condition in which it was received. For instance, any debts one incurs while owning some land are not to be inherited by another who obtains possession of that land after the former passes. What applies to individuals applies to any collection of individuals.

To instantiate the principle, there must be a period of adjustment. Present debts will be a matter of honor and expediency; future debts will be constrained by the principle. To constrain future debts, a constitution ought to stipulate that a nation can borrow no more than it can repay in the span of a generation. Temperate borrowing would “bridle the spirit of war,” inflamed much by the neglect of repayment of debts.

Usufruct theoretically fits neatly with Jefferson’s notions of political progress and of periodic constitutional renewal. Concerning the latter, he writes to C.F.W. Dumas (10 Sept. 1787):

No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. … Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19. years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.

At the end of nineteen years, there will be a constitutional convention, at which defects in laws can be addressed and changes can be made. [ 27 ] Should the principle of usufruct be adopted, republican government would have a built-in mechanism for obviating revolutions. [ 28 ] Without the debts and wars of one generation passed on to the next in a Jeffersonian republic and with that republic’s constitution being renewed each generation to accommodate the needs and advances of the next generation, Jefferson thinks, the stage is set for political progress.

James Madison wrote a lengthy letter several months later (4 Feb. 1790) in reply to Jefferson’s usufruct letter, and politely proffered “some very powerful objections.” Jefferson never answered that letter, though he never renounced generational sovereignty.

Even well-intended governments can still go astray. Jefferson writes in his Declaration of Independence,

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles, & organizing it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness ([D]: 19).

However, long-standing governments ought not to be changed “for light & transient causes,” otherwise one risks supplantation of a corrupt government with another that is equally or more corrupt. Yet

when a long train of abuses & usurpations pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is [citizens’] right, it is their duty to throw off such government, & to provide new guards for their future security ([D]: 19).

In his Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson states that for revolution to occur, there needs to be “many unwarrantable encroachments and usurpations” ([S]: 105). He adds,

Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery ([S]: 110).

Therefore, a government becomes destructive when its abuses and usurpations are (1) many and long, (2) directed to the same end, and (3) clearly indicative of despotism.

For Jefferson, some amount of turbulence is one of the consequences of liberty. The manure of blood is needed for healthy governing because those governing will tend over time, Jefferson says to William S. Smith (13 Nov. 1787), to govern in their own interests, if not carefully watched. Moreover, those governed will assume mistakenly that rights once granted will be rights always granted. So, rebellion is the mechanism whereby those governing, Jefferson tells James Madison (30 Jan. 1787), are periodically reminded that government in a Jeffersonian republic is of and for the people—that is, that the will of the majority, fittingly educated, is the standard of justice.

The turbulence of which Jefferson speaks in the letters to Smith and Madison are illustrations of rebellion, says Holowchak (2019a, 73–76), not revolution. In contrast, revolution for Jefferson, following his Declaration, is a complex phenomenon. Unlike a rebellion, it is never to be undertaken for slight reasons or because of singular cases of governmental abuse. The difference, for Holowchak, is one of scope, size, and persistency. Rebellions, often violent, are generally quick signals to government concerning abuses, usually parochial. Revolutions, essentially violent, are long-term, well-planned, complex attempts at overthrowing a government, deemed habitually abusive.

One thing is clear. Revolutions or elitist rebellions, for Jefferson, are larger, more persistent, and more complex than rebellions or populist rebellions. To John Adams (4 Sept. 1823), Jefferson writes of the beginning, sustainment, and resolution of revolutions. “The generation which commences a revolution can rarely compleat it. Habituated from their infancy to passive submission of body and mind to their kings and priests, they are not qualified, when called on, to think and provide for themselves, and their inexperience, their ignorance and bigotry make them instruments often, in the hands of the Bonapartes and Iturbides to defeat their own rights and purposes.” Revolutions cannot be expected to establish a sustainable, free government in the first effort.

Moreover, the revolutionary generation is generally suited to begin and sustain the revolution, Jefferson continues in the letter to Adams, but not to resolve it. It is, for Jefferson, incapable of fixing a viable republican constitution. There are, thus, generational responsibilities for a Jeffersonian revolution to succeed. The role of the first generation is inchoation. Subsequent generations must sustain and complete the initial effort to usurp the coercive government. In the final stage, there is implementation of a constitution, reflective of and beholden to the will of the people.

It is because of the complexity and cost, in terms of human lives, that Jefferson maintained that revolutions ought only to be undertaken in cases of extreme, consistent despotism. As he writes in his Declaration ([D]: 19), “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” Still, he thought that they were “mechanisms” needed in republican governments, for there is a human tendency for those in power to be seduced by that power (TJ to Spencer Roane, 9 Mar. 1821).

5. Philosophy of Education

Jefferson’s views on education fit hand in glove with his political philosophy. [ 29 ] To facilitate a government of and for the people, there must be educational reform to allow for the general education of the citizenry for fullest political participation, to enable citizens to carry on daily affairs without governmental intervention, and to funnel the most talented and virtuous to a first-tier institution like the University of Virginia.

The sources of Jefferson’s views on education were many. From the French, Jefferson learned that education ought to be equalitarian, secular, and philosophically grounded (Arrowood 1930 [1970]: 49–50). He likely studied the works of Condorcet, La Chalotais, Diderot, Charon, and Turgot, and was influenced by men such as Lafayette, Correa de Serra, Cuvier, Buffon, Humboldt, and Say. Moreover, Jefferson corresponded with or read the works of Britons and Americans such as John Adams, Priestley, Locke, Thomas Cooper, Pictet, Stewart, Tichnor, Richard Price, William Small, Wythe, Fauquier, Peyton Randolph, and Patrick Henry (Holowchak 2014a, 69). That education ought to be scientific and useful was emphasized by William Small at William and Mary College as well as his uptake of the empirical philosophers of his day and their disdain of metempirical squabbling.

Jefferson’s educational views are spelled out neatly in four bills proposed to the General Assembly of Virginia (1779), in his Bill for Establishing a System of Public Education (1817), in his Rockfish Gap Report (1818), and in key letters to correspondents—e.g., Carr, Banister, Munford, Adams, Cabell, Burwell, Brazier, and Breckinridge.

When Jefferson, Pendleton, and Wythe undertook the task of revising the laws of Virginia in 1776, Jefferson drafted four significant bills—Bills 79 to 82.

I consider 4 of these bills … as forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican. [ 30 ] ([WTJ5]: 44)

Bill 79 proposed to create wards or hundreds, each of which would have a school for general education in which “reading, writing, and common arithmetic should be taught” ([BG]). Virginia was to be subdivided in twenty-four districts, each of which would have a school for “classical learning, grammar, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic” ([BG]). Bill 80 proposed to secularize William and Mary College and add to its curriculum by enlarging its “sphere of science” ([BWM]). [ 31 ] Bill 81 proposed to create a public library for Virginia for scholars, elected officials, and inquisitive citizens ([BL]). Bill 82, the only bill that would eventually pass (1786), proposed to disallow state patronage of any particular religion ([BR]; [Au]: 31–44).

Jefferson made it clear (TJ to George Wythe, 13 Aug. 1786) that Bill 79—concerning implementation of wards and ward schools—was “the most important bill of our whole code”, as it was the “foundation … for the preservation of freedom and happiness” in a true republic. It was the key to engendering the sort of reforms needed for Jeffersonian republicanism—reforms aimed at an educated and thriving citizenry.

It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of education,

he says to George Washington (4 Jan. 1786). “Wherever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” he writes to philosopher Richard Price (8 Jan. 1789). [ 32 ]

Yet Jefferson’s trust in the people was not unconditional. He never asserted categorically that government for and of the people must, or even can, work. Experience had shown him that governments in which officials were not elected by and beholden to the people did not work—i.e., they were ultimately unresponsive to the needs of the people—and so he often called republicanism an “experiment” or “great experiment” (TJ to John Adams, 28 Feb. 1796, and WTJ5: 484). If citizens’ rights were to be respected and defended and if governors were not to govern in their own best interest but as stewards f the citizenry, all citizens needed a basic education—hence, the indispensability of ward-school education.

Given two classes of citizens, the laborers and the learned, Jefferson recognized two levels of education ([R]: 459–60). The laborers—divided roughly into husbandmen, manufacturers, and craftsmen—needed to conduct business to sustain and improve their domestic affairs. Thus, they needed access to primary education. The learned needed access to college-level (Jefferson’s intermediary grammar schools) and university-level education. To Peter Carr (7 Sept. 1814), Jefferson writes,

It is the duty of [our country’s] functionaries, to provide that every citizen in it should receive an education proportioned to the conditions and pursuits of his life.

Needs are not all personal. People are, for Jefferson, social creatures, republics are progressive, and thus, citizens have political duties. Education is critical. “If the condition of man is to be progressively ameliorated, as we fondly hope and believe,” writes Jefferson to the French revolutionary Marc Antoine Jullien (6 Oct. 1818), “education is to be the chief instrument in effecting it.” To fit and function in a stable, thriving democracy, all citizens are expected to know and assume a participatory role to the best of their capacities.

To promote both fullest political participation and moral progress, Jefferson realized that educational reform had to be systemic. In a letter to Senator Joseph C. Cabell (9 Sept. 1817), Jefferson outlines six features of that system.

• Basic education should be available to all.
• Education should be tax-supported.
• Education should be free from religious dictation.
• The educational system should be controlled at the local level.
• The upper levels of education should feature free inquiry.
• The mentally proficient should be enabled to pursue education to the highest levels at public expense.

Only a system could offer all citizens an education proportioned to their needs: the laborers, a broad, general education; the learned, an education suited to their idiosyncratic needs (Bowers 1943: 243 and Walton 1984: 119). Jefferson gets across that point to academician George Ticknor (25 Nov. 1817) in the manner of Bacon by limning the important truths—“that knowledge is power, that knowledge is safety, and that knowledge is happiness.” That knowledge is useful, data-driven.

Overall, observation showed that human capacities were greatly underdeveloped (TJ to William Green Munford, 17 June 1799). Consequently, education needed to tap into untapped human potential in morally responsible ways.

As well might it be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable both in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth ([R]: 461).

Human perfectibility, for Jefferson, was a matter of improved efficiency of living, which implied not merely progress in the fields of human health and human productivity through discoveries and labor-saving inventions, but also and especially moral improvement. Moral improvement was much more important than exercise of rationality (e.g., TJ to Maria Cosway, 12 Oct. 1786). Pure rationality was a matter of humans abstracting from reality; moral sensibility was a matter of humans immersed in reality.

Still Jefferson thought courses in morality were unneeded, if not injurious. “I think it lost time to attend lectures in this branch,” Jefferson writes to Carr (10 Aug. 1787), for moral conduct is not a matter of reason. That of course was consistent with the empiricism of his day—e.g., Lord Kames and David Hume. Nonetheless, Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia has a role for education in moral development. The first stage of education is not the time to encourage critical engagement with material like the Bible, for human rationality is not sufficiently developed, but instead a time when children should store historical facts to be used critically later in life. While doing so, the “elements of morality” can be instilled. Such elements teach children, says Jefferson in Aristotelian fashion, that

their own greatest happiness … does not depend on their condition in life in which chance has placed them, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation [i.e., industry], and freedom in all just pursuits ([NV]: 147).

Moral “learning” is, thus, less a matter of ingesting and digesting moral principles to apply to circumstances—there were no inviolable principles for Jefferson, as morality was a matter of sensing the right thing to do in circumstances—but of placing faith in the capacity of one’s moral sense to “decide” the right course of action without the corruptive influence of reason or peer pressure (TJ to Martha Jefferson, 11 Dec. 1783, TJ to Peter Carr, 19 Aug. 1785 and 10 Aug. 1787).

Because of the subordination of rationality to morality, education must be useful. It must engender effective, participatory citizenry and political stability. Jefferson always insisted on the practicality of education, because his take on knowledge was Baconian. [ 33 ] Consider what Jefferson says to scientist and physician Edward Jenner (14 May 1806) on behalf of the “whole human family” for his discovery of a vaccine for small pox.

Medecine has never before produced any single improvement of such ability. Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood was a beautiful addition to our knowledge of the animal economy, but on a review of the practice of medicine before & since that epoch, I do not see any great amelioration which has been derived from that discovery, you have erased from the Calendar of human afflictions one of it’s greatest. Yours is the comfortable reflection that mankind can never forget that you have lived.

Yet every scientific discovery is potentially fruitful. “No discovery is barren; it always serves as a step to something else” (TJ to Robert Patterson, 17 Apr. 1803).

“Useful” for Jefferson was broad and with normative implications. [ 34 ] A complete education for Jefferson would produce men who were

in all ways useful to society—useful because intelligent, cultured, well-informed, technically competent, moral (this particularly), capable of earning a living, happy, and fitted for political and social leadership (Martin: 37).

Useful implied socially and politically active. Male citizens of greatest virtue and greatest genius would contribute by participation in science and in the most politically prominent positions. Lesser citizens would contribute more modestly and mostly at local levels through, for illustration, jury duty, participation in militia, and voting for and overseeing elected representatives.

Finally, education for Jefferson was a way of living. Its aim was to give persons the tools they would need to make them socially and politically involved, free, self-sufficient, and happy. As Karl Lehmann (201–2) notes:

To Thomas Jefferson, school would never be a ‘finishing’ agency. From each stage, man would have to move on in a never ending process of self-education…. The narrow professional who had but a technical knowledge of his little vocational area was a curse to him. Education had to be broad in order to assure the freedom and happiness of man.

Jefferson’s views on race have been the focus of considerable discussion in the secondary literature. [ 35 ] Those views, which would be considered today as racist, were likely influenced by the views of the leading naturalists of his day. In that regard, he was the product, not ahead, of his time.

Most of the discussion of Jefferson’s views on Blacks concerns his Notes on the State of Virginia. In Query XIV, Jefferson writes, “In memory [Blacks] are equal to the whites” ([NV]: 139). “In reason,” Jefferson says, “[Blacks are] much inferior [to Whites], as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid” ([NV]: 139). He adds, “Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration” ([NV]: 140). “In imagination [Blacks] are dull, tasteless, and anomalous,” and that is evident in their art. In music, Blacks have accurate ears “for tune and time,” are generally more gifted than Whites, and are capable of a “small catch,” as illustrated by their talent with the “Banjar,” a guitar-like instrument “brought … from Africa.” “Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.” Despite their misery, which “is often the parent of the most affecting touches of poetry,” they have “no poetry” ([NV]: 40–41 and 288n10).

Inferiority of mind and imagination, he adds, is also confirmed, in Jefferson’s estimation, by “the improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites,” and that “has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life” ([NV]: 141). Here he may be referencing “observations” in scientific texts of his day in his library.

In morality, Jefferson admits, Blacks are the equals of all others.

We find among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity, and as many as among their better instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity.

What he takes to be their “disposition to theft,” Jefferson explains thus: “The man, in whose favour no laws of property exist, probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favour of others.” Might not a slave “justifiably take a little from one, who has taken all from him” ([NV]: 142).

All such conclusions, Jefferson says, are provisional: They have the confirmation of observation, but Blacks as well as “red men” hitherto have not been the subjects of natural history.

The opinion, that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence. To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the Anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analysis by fire or by solvents. How much more then where it is a faculty, not a substance, we are examining; where it eludes the research of all the senses; where the conditions of its existence are various and variously combined; where the effects of those which are present or absent bid defiance to calculation; let me add too, as a circumstance of great tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them. To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks … are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind ([NV]: 143).

Though he stated that Blacks and Native Americans had not been the subjects of natural history, there was a large body of literature by leading naturalists of his day—e.g., Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus ([1758] 1808), Oliver Goldsmith ([1774] 1823), and “Georges” Cuvier ([1817] 1831)—to which Jefferson had access and which he doubtless assimilated. That literature viewed Blacks and Native Americans as inferior to white Europeans, and the overall tendency was to associate darker skin with increased inferiority. [ 36 ] Prominent philosophers like David Hume (1755 [1987]: 208n10), Adam Smith (1759 [1982]: 208), and C.F. de Volney in (1802 [2010]: 68) also asserted the inferiority of Blacks and Native Americans.

This smattering of the “science” of Jefferson’s time shows that some of the most esteemed scientists held that Blacks and Native Americans, considering each as a race or subspecies of humans, were regarded as inferior or defective. [ 37 ] Jefferson owned and was informed by most of that literature, since he tended to be aware of recent developments in all of the sciences. Thus Jefferson’s “observations” were tainted by the “observations” or prejudgments of the authorities of his day. Despite his view of them as inferior, he recognized Blacks, as moral equals of all others, had the same rights as all other men. He writes to Bishop Grégoire (25 Feb. 1809):

Whatever be [Blacks’] degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.

Nonetheless, Jefferson’s view of Native Americans was inconsistent with those naturalists who viewed them too as a race inferior to Europeans, and that requires some explanation. In Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia , Jefferson offers a brief analysis of Native Americans as a race. Not having had the “advantages” of exposure to European culture that Blacks have had, still Native Americans “often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit” ([NV]: 140). Their carvings and drawings “prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation.” [ 38 ] He continues,

They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. ([NV]: 140)

One may wonder how much “advantage” Jefferson imagines Blacks should demonstrate on account of their exposure to the “culture” of their oppressors while enslaved. But Jefferson maintains that though “most of [the Blacks in America] have been confined to tillage, to their own homes, and their own society” and have had little direct exposure to sciences and the arts,

many have been so situated, that they might have availed themselves of the conversation of their masters; many have been brought up to the handicraft arts, and from that circumstance have always been associated with the whites. Some have been liberally educated, and all have lived in countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree, and have had before their eyes samples of the best works from abroad ([NV]: 139–40).

Thus, Jefferson’s assessment of Blacks differs from his assessment of Native Americans. It is unclear whether that difference is natural or nurtural. The intimation in Notes on the State of Virginia and in a letter to Edmund Coles (25 Aug. 1814) is natural, though in other letters (e.g., TJ tp Benjamin Banneker, 30 Aug. 1791, and TJ to Bishop Grégoire, 25 Feb. 1809), the suggestion is nurtural, though deficiencies are so pronounced that there can be no rapid change of situation. With Native Americans, the scenario is otherwise.

There is also a sentiment commonly expressed in the secondary literature (e.g., Risjord 2002: 50–1, and Holowchak 2012, 243–48) that Jefferson had a personal, or political, interest in defending Native Americans that he did not have for Blacks. Buffon—perhaps the greatest naturalist of his day—argued that since the continent of North America was colder and wetter than that of Europe, [ 39 ] its biota, Native Americans included, were inferior ([NV]: 48). Consequently, “the savage” was feeble, glabrous, passionless, and compared to Europeans, was sexually less potent, less sensitive, and more timid, among other things ([NV]: 58). Abbé Raynal said more. What was true of Native Americans would eventually prove true of any Europeans transplanted in America ([NV]: 64). Jefferson put considerable effort into refuting Buffon and Raynal ([NV]: 60–64), which he did, as most scholars concede (e.g., Peden 1954: xxiii), with remarkable success, though his aim was further, open discussion more than it was refutation ([NV]: 54).

One thing seems clear, however. His mistaken views of Blacks and his views of Native Americans shaped his political thinking. Jefferson’s political vision was of an American nation that was wedded to liberty, happiness, and mostly agrarian living, that instantiated irenic republican governance, and that would in time serve as a model for other parts of the globe (Holowchak 2017b, 131–51). That vision, for success, required in his eyes the fullest cultivation of genius and morality in the youthful nation (McCoy 1980: 136). Native Americans, it seems, passed on both accounts. Blacks, however, were to him wanting in genius. Thus, only Native Americans could be integrated into the fledgling nation, which held the prospect of covering, as an “empire for liberty,” the North American continent (TJ to James Madison, 27 Apr. 1809) and perhaps even the South American continent (TJ to James Madison, 24 Nov. 1801). In Jefferson’s view, Blacks could not be integrated, for any admixture of black blood with white blood would taint the offspring, and thereby threaten the success of Jefferson’s republican experiment. So, every slave would eventually have to be “removed beyond the reach of mixture” ([NV]: 137–38 and 143). Thus, he thought everyone would be best served if Blacks were educated, emancipated, and expatriated; so too would Whites.

Jefferson’s views on race of course have been roundly refuted by modern science, which shows that race biologically is an empty category.

What, however, of Jefferson’s views and actions on the elimination of slavery?

We do know that Jefferson consistently spoke out loudly against the institution of slavery and that, as lawyer and politician, he worked hard toward its eradication. He, for instance, undertook six pro bono cases on behalf of slaves, seeking freedom, and never defended the rights of a slaveholder. He crafted spirited declamations of slavery in his Summary View ([S] 115–16), initial draft of the Declaration of Independence ([Au] 22), his Notes on the State of Virginia ([NV]: 162–63), and in several letters.

Nonetheless, he did little in retirement, when he could have tried to do more.

Yet as he matured, Jefferson did little to advance the issue, because he believed that that effort might be more harmful than beneficial. The time, he consistently said, was not right. As early as 1805 (TJ to William Burwell, Jan. 28), he expresses skepticism concerning the eradication of slavery.

There are many virtuous men who would make any sacrifices to effect it, many equally virtuous who persuade themselves either that the thing is not wrong, or that it cannot be remedied, and very many with whom interest is morality [i.e., those who recognize its immorality, but think sympathy is equivalent to action]. The older we grow, the larger we are disposed to believe the last part to be.

To Edward Coles (25 Aug. 1814), he writes of the “general silence” on slavery as indicative of public apathy among younger generations.

I have overlived the generation with which mutual labors & perils begat mutual confidence and influence. This enterprise [abolition of slavery] is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation.

He even castigates Coles when the latter considers emancipation of his own slaves—a precipitous act.

The laws do not permit us to turn them loose, if that were for their good: and to commute them for other property is to commit them to those whose usage of them we cannot control. I hope then, my dear sir, you will reconcile yourself to your country and its unfortunate condition.

Jefferson’s mistaken views on Blacks and his refusal upon retirement to do more to eliminate the institution of slavery have prompted considerable critical discussion in the secondary literature (see fn. 38). On the one hand, most see Jefferson as racist. McColley (1964), Cohen (1969), Miller (1977), and Dawidoff (1993) argue that Jefferson’s racial views were hypocritical rationalizations for his slaveholding and large living. Finkelman (1994), O’Brien (1996), and Magnis (1999) state that Jefferson was driven by a profound hatred of Blacks. On the other hand, Levy (1963), Mayer (2001), Burstein (2005), and Holowchak (2013b and 2020a) argue that though Jefferson held false views concerning Blacks, it is anachronistic to call him a racist, as ignorance concerning racial differences by commoners and scientists was at the time rife. Jefferson, ultimately, was a product of the ignorance and prejudgments of his time.

• WTJ1: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being his Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private: Published by the Order of the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library, from the Original Manuscripts, Deposited in the Department of State , 9 vols., H.A. Washington (ed.), Washington: Taylor & Maury, 1853–54.
• WTJ2: The Works of Thomas Jefferson , 12 vols., P.L. Ford (ed.), New York: Putnam, 1902.
• WTJ3: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson , Definitive Edition , 20 vols., A.A. Lipscomb and A.E. Bergh (ed.), Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907.
• WTJ4: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson , 42 Vols. (to date), J. Boyd et al. (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–present.
• WTJ5: Thomas Jefferson: Writings , M.D. Peterson (ed.), New York: Library of America, 1984.
• WTJ6: Early History of the University of Virginia , J.W. Randolph (ed.), Richmond, VA: C.H. Wynne, 1856.

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• [M] Memorandum: Services to My Country, in WTJ5: 702–4.
• [NV] Notes on the State of Virginia , 1785, in Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia , William Peden (ed.), Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954.
• [R] Rockfish Gap Report, 1818, in WTJ5: 457–73. [ [R] available online ]
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Collection Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606 to 1827

American sphinx: the contradictions of thomas jefferson.

An essay by historian Joseph Ellis from the November-December 1994 issue of Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress .

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. This essay was originally published in the November-December 1994 issue of Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress and bears a slightly different title from the book that followed it. This essay may not be reprinted in any other form or by any other source. For more recent writings by Ellis and others, see the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation's Jefferson Web site, Monticello: The Home of Thomas Jefferson External , including discussion of Sally Hemings and the Hemings family External .

A Reincarnated Jefferson

The idea clicked into full consciousness one cold evening in November of 1993, in a large brick church in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was election night, and the streets of Worcester were clotted with drivers heading for the polls. The occasion that lured me into this morass was the public appearance of Thomas Jefferson. Or rather, the performance of an impersonator named Clay Jenkinson, who portrayed a reincarnated Jefferson, alive among us in the late 20th century.

I figured that a maximum of 40 or 50 hardy souls would show up. After all, this was a semischolarly affair, designed to bring Jefferson to life without fanfare or patriotic pageantry. Maybe down in Charlottesville or Richmond you could pack them in by murmuring, "Jefferson lives," but this was New England, which has a long outstanding suspicion of Virginia grandees.

As it turned out, about 400 enthusiastic New Englanders crowded into the church. Jenkinson began talking in the languid cadence of the Tidewater about Jefferson's early days at the College of William and Mary, his thoughts on the American Revolution, his love of French wine and French ideas, his accomplishments and frustrations as a political leader and president, his obsession with education, his elegiac correspondence with John Adams, his bottomless hope in America's democratic prospects. Jenkinson obviously knew his stuff. He was delivering an elegantly disguised history lecture that drew upon modern Jefferson scholarship quite deftly. The audience was entranced.

At the end, still in character and costume, Jenkinson took questions. What would you do about the health-care problem, Mr. Jefferson. Who is your favorite modern-day American president? Should we do something about the atrocities in Bosnia? Sprinkled into this mixture were several questions about American history and Jefferson's life: Why did you never remarry? What did you mean by "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence? Why did you own slaves? This last question was the only one with a sharp edge, and Jenkinson handled it carefully. Slavery was a moral travesty, he said, an institution clearly at odds with the values of the American Revolution. He has tried his best to persuade his countrymen to end the slave trade and gradually end slavery itself. But he had failed. As for his own slaves, he treated them benevolently, as the fellow human beings they were. He concluded with a question of his own: What else would you have wanted me to do?

This seemed to satisfy the audience. But I was struck by the fact that when Jenkinson-as- Jefferson volunteered information on his less admirable features--his accommodation with slavery, his stiffbacked formality toward women, his tendency to gloss over complex social problems with felicitous language--the audience did not follow up. That's not what they had come to hear. If Jefferson was America's Mona Lisa, they had come to see him smiling.

Even so, I was surprised that no one asked a question about Sally Hemings, the young mulatto slave who was reputed to be Jefferson's lover and the mother of four of his children. My own experience as a college teacher suggested that most students could be counted on to know two things about Jefferson--that he wrote the Declaration of Independence and that he had been accused of an affair with Sally Hemings. This piece of scandalous gossip first surfaced when Jefferson was president, in 1802, and subsequently affixed itself to his reputation like a tin can that then rattled through the pages of history. A best-selling biography of Jefferson by Fawn Brodie, published in 1974, revived the old rumor for the modern generation, although in Brodie's version Jefferson and Sally loved each other, transforming the story of rape and subjugation (itself probably untrue) into a tragic but touching romance (an utter fabrication).

Jenkinson surprised me. He was neither historian nor an actor. A late-thirty-ish Midwesterner somewhat shorter than Jefferson's 6 feet 2 1/2 inches, he had graduated from the University of Minnesota and gone on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar to study English literature. Currently on the faculty of the University of Nevada at Reno, he began assuming Jefferson's identity in 1984, when he helped found "the Great Plains Chautauqua," which was described as "a traveling humanities tent show" based in Bismark, North Dakota.

Jenkinson, who called himself a "scholar-impersonator," had somehow made Jefferson his own. Several state legislatures, scores of college and university audiences, and an even larger number of public gatherings like the one at Worcester had found his renderings of Jefferson impressive. A few months after I saw him, Jenkinson was the star attraction at a gala Jefferson celebration hosted by President Clinton, where he won the hearts of the White House staff by saying that Jefferson would have dismissed the entire Whitewater investigation as "absolutely nobody's business."

I met Jenkinson earlier that evening at a dinner put on by the American Antiquarian Society. The room was full of local business leaders, school superintendents and state politicians. Also present were two filmmaking groups. From Florentine Films came Camilla Rockwell, who told me that Ken Burns, the leading documentary filmmaker in the country, was planning to do a major project on Jefferson for public television. And from the Jefferson Legacy Foundation came Bud Leeds and Chip Stokes, who had recently launched a campaign to raise funds for a big-budget commercial film on Jefferson. Leeds and Stokes were flying out to Los Angeles the next morning to confer with Francis Ford Coppola and other Hollywood luminaries about scripts and actors. Their entourage also included an Iranian millionaire who told me that he had fallen in love with Jefferson soon after escaping the persecution of Islamic fundamentalists, an experience that made him appreciate the Jeffersonian belief in religious freedom and the separation of church and state.

I found myself wondering what other prominent historical figure could generate this kind of turnout. Certainly not George Washington. He has the biggest monument on the Mall, and the capital city itself carries his name, but he is just too patriarchal, too distant. Jefferson is Jesus, who came to live among us. Washington is Jehovah, aloof and alone in heaven.

Maybe Lincoln, usually the winner whenever polls try to measure public opinion on great American presidents, would draw such a crowd. Ordinary citizens tend to know as much about the Gettysburg Address as about the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln is magical too, but his is a different kind of magic, a more somber magic with a tragic dimension. Jefferson is light, graceful, inspiring. Lincoln is heavy, biblical, burdened. Lincoln is more respected, but Jefferson more loved.

That, at least, was what I was thinking as I drove home from Worcester that November evening. I even conjured up a picture of Jefferson atop some American version of Mount Olympus, dismissing competitors for the summit with a flick of that famous wrist, the one that wrote the Declaration of Independence--and that never healed properly after he broke it vaulting over a fountain in Paris while rushing to meet Maria Cosway, the object of his affections.

A silly thought, to be sure, but just the kind of extravagant enthusiasm that seemed to flower in the popular imagination wherever and whenever the Jefferson myth got planted. At the center of the silliness, however, is an idea that I had half-known but never fully appreciated until that night: Jefferson is America's special addiction, and something is going on out there in the minds and hearts of ordinary Americans at this moment in our national history to make that addiction particularly powerful. It is as if the American citizenry harbors some worrisome questions about the state of the republic and looks to him as America's oracle to provide reassuring answers.

Jefferson as "America's Everyman"

Once such an interpretive pattern lodges itself in the mind, of course, it quickly pulls half-forgotten odds and ends of one's memory and aligns them within the new grid-work. What came to my mind was a thesis advanced 30 years ago by Merrill Peterson in The Jefferson Image in the American Mind .

Peterson discovered that Jefferson had become America's Everyman, the cult hero for wildly divergent and often antagonistic political movements throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The term Peterson used was "Protean Jefferson," which gave a respectably classical sound to what others might regard as Jefferson's disarming ideological promiscuity. Southern secessionists loved him; Northern abolitionists worshiped him; Gilded Age moguls echoed his warnings about federal power; Populists adored his advice about the evils of a banking conspiracy and the superiority of agrarian values. In the 1925 Scopes trial, both William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were sure that Jefferson agreed with their positions on evolution. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt both claimed him as their guide to the problems of the Great Depression. In the 1930s isolationists and interventionists cited him as their spiritual mentor.

At some point, as this Jeffersonian procession passed by, I began to wonder whether there was anything Jefferson did not stand for. Was he a real historical person who once lived "back there" in time? Or was he a free-floating Rorschach test we carried around with us "up here" in the present?

These questions had ominous implication for anyone who harbored the traditional assumption that the quest to understand historical figures was a scholarly affair that would, albeit incrementally and gradually, contribute to the popular understanding of who they were and what they stood for. It seemed that Jefferson was simply too resonant, too interactive, too inherently elusive for that. The people who had gathered in Worcester carried assumptions about what Jefferson stood for that were infinitely more powerful than any set of historical facts. America's greatest historians and biographers could labor for decades to produce the most authoritative and sophisticated studies of Thomas Jefferson--Peterson, in fact, had proceeded to do precisely that--and their findings would bounce off the popular image of Jefferson without making a dent. Jefferson was not just a uniquely powerful touchstone, not just a seductively enigmatic historical hero. He was the Great Sphinx of American history. Coming to terms with Jefferson meant coming to terms with the most cherished convictions and contested truths in contemporary American culture.

My emerging hypothesis--that we are in the midst of a resurgent love affair with Jefferson that speaks, in some mysterious way, to our current ideological condition--evidently was shared by the political maestros at the White House, whose overnight polls provided up-to-the-minute readings of the American pulse. The week of his inauguration, Bill Clinton retraced Jefferson's trip from Monticello to Washington. And the White House staff made a point of apprizing the press that the new president was reading an advance copy of a soon-to-be-published popular biography of Jefferson by Willard Sterne Randall.

Clinton had also contributed, if unintentionally, to this interest in Jefferson during the presidential campaign. Allegations that Clinton was a womanizer prompted a flurry of newspaper and television reports on the sexual improprieties of past presidents, especially John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the very month of the presidential election, The Atlantic Monthly put Thomas Jefferson on its cover and featured an essay by Douglas Wilson, a distinguished Jeffersonian scholar, titled "Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue."

A month or two later, I received a letter from Mary Jo Salter, a good friend who also happens to be one of America's most respected poets. Mary Jo was in Paris, where she was continuing to perform her duties as poetry editor of The New Republic and completing a volume of new poems. The longest poem in the collection, it turned out, focused on none other than the ubiquitous Mr. Jefferson.

This seemed too coincidental. Could it be that politicians, propagandists, poets and impersonators were all plugged into the same cultural grid, which somehow had its main power source buried beneath the mountain at Monticello? Mary Jo said that she wanted me to suggest some books and articles about Jefferson and his time. I responded with a list of books, most of which she had already read. What I wanted in return was an answer to the simple question: Why Jefferson?

For a poet of Mary Jo's sensibility, it was clearly not a question of politics, at least in the customary sense of the term. She is not one to slide her mind into comfortable ideological grooves or sing patriotic hymns about freedom and democracy. Like any serious poet, she tends to defy trends, listen to her own internal voice, make her own music.

And that was just the kind of answer she gave to my question. "I knew I had the first part of a poem when I ran across a mention somewhere of TJ buying a thermometer on July 4, 1776--and recording a peak temperature of 76 degrees," Mary Jo recalled in a letter. It was a coincidence that caught her eye, a detail with poetic possibilities. Then she encountered one of history's eeriest coincidences--the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the same day, July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. For Mary Jo, it was perfect springboard for her imagination. As she put it, these coincidences were "poignant and eminently visual events."

Finally, she said that she was attracted to Jefferson's accessible complexity, what she called his "variousness." This was quite similar to Merrill Peterson's image of Protean Jefferson, but with a difference. Peterson emphasized the many meanings that posterity has imposed on Jefferson. Mary Jo was emphasizing the various and varied personae that actually existed inside Jefferson. "We love the fact that our favorite politician was a writer and a farmer and a scientists and an aesthete and a violinist," she wrote, "partly because we all wish to squeeze more out of our own 24-hour days...." Her Jefferson was a fascinating bundle of selves that beckoned to our modern sense of multiple identities. The poet, so it seemed to me, was getting closer to the essential appeal of Jefferson than were the biographers and historians.

The 250th Anniversary of Jefferson's Birth: Evocations

Meanwhile, the Jeffersonian flood was reaching new heights. During the year-long celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jefferson's birth, it seemed that every publishing house in America brought out a book on some aspect of his career or character. In addition to the full-length biography by Willard Sterne Randall, there were 17 new books with Jefferson's name in the title published in 1993. One of them, a novel by Max Byrd ( Jefferson ), offered an utterly captivating depiction of Jefferson's French phase and an evocation of his layered personality that rivaled Mary Jo's account in its imaginative power. (Byrd's novel supported my hunch that one needed the leeway provided by fiction or poetry to handle Jefferson's character compellingly.) Meanwhile, a major exhibition on "The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello" attracted upwards of 600,000 visitors to Monticello last year (Elvis' Graceland just barely surpassed this figure.) And from Paris, Mary Jo wrote to say that James Ivory and Ismail Merchant had set up production there for a film called "Jefferson in Paris," focusing on the romantic interlude with Maria Cosway and, so I learned later, starring Nick Nolte in the title role.

Nothing like this had accompanied the 250th birthday of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin or John Adams. Nor had Lincoln's 150th birthday generated anything like this popular outpouring. It was as if one had attended a Fourth of July fireworks display and, instead of the usual rockets and sparklers, witnessed the detonation of a 2-megaton bomb.

As a cultural phenomenon, the Jeffersonian explosion was not a movement controlled or shaped by scholars or professional historians. Jefferson was part of the public domain, with daring power outside the academic world. The folks who ran publishing houses, produced films and mounted exhibitions, as well as the foundation directors who gave away money for worthy causes, obviously regarded Jefferson as a sure bet. The market for things Jeffersonian was wide and deep and strikingly diverse. It was--well, what other word fit so nicely?--democratic, in the Jeffersonian sense of the term.

The admiration for Jefferson was as much a psychological as a political phenomenon. In the hands of a poet like Salter or a novelist like Byrd, Jefferson became not Everyman but Postmodern Man, a series of overlapping and interacting personae that talked to us but not to each other. He could walk past the slave quarters on Mulberry Row at Monticello without qualms or guilt while daydreaming about the rights of man with utter sincerity. He could purchase the finest and most expensive art and furniture for his many residences, all the while idealizing the pastoral virtues of the sturdy farmer. He could fall in love with beautiful women in fits of rhapsodic passion but never allow the deepest secrets of his soul to be shared with any living creature. He was, like us, layered and conflicted but, as we wish to be, always in control, the perfect model for his beloved ideal of "self-government."

Historians Rethink Jefferson

In the academic world, the winds were gusting in a different direction. Not that scholars had ignored Jefferson or consigned him to some second tier of historical significance. Far from it. The number of scholarly books and articles focusing on Jefferson or some aspect of his long career continued to grow at a geometric rate; it requires two full volumes just to list all the Jefferson scholarship, much of it coming in the last quarter century. The central scholarly project, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson , continues to appear from Princeton University Press at the stately pace of one volume every two years or so (25 volumes had appeared by 1993). And Dumas Malone's authoritative biography, Jefferson and His Time , is an equally stately six-volume behemoth that, thanks to introductory offers from the Book-of-the-Month Club and History Book Club, graces the libraries and coffee tables of countless American homes.

The problem, then, was not a lack of academic interest or scholarly attention. The problem was a lowered academic opinion of the man and his accomplishments. Jefferson's captivating contradictions had come to be seen by many historians as massive hypocrisies, his elegant articulations of the American creed as platitudinous nonsense. The love affair with Jefferson that flourishes in the public domain had finally turned sour in the academic world. Once the symbol of all that is right with America, Jefferson had become the symbol of much that is wrong.

You could look back and, with the advantage of hindsight--which is, after all, the historian's crucial intellectual asset--locate the moment when the tide began to turn. In 1968 Winthrop Jordan published White over Black , a magisterial reappraisal of race relations in early America that featured a section on Jefferson. Jordan's book, which won the major prizes, offered a subtle and psychologically sophisticated assessment of Jefferson's attitudes toward slavery and blacks, suggesting that he was emblematic of white American society in the way his deep-seated racist values were hidden within folds of his personality.

White over Black was hardly a heavy-handed indictment of Jefferson. Jordan's major point was that racism had infiltrated the American soul very early in our history and that Jefferson simply provided the most resonant example of the virulence of racist values and the commingling of racial and sexual drives. Jordan's interpretation adopted an agnostic attitude toward the allegations of a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings. It is one of those intriguing pieces of gossip that can never be proved or disproved. Regardless of his relationship with Hemings, Jordan argued, Jefferson's deepest feelings toward blacks had their origins in primal urges that, like the sex drive, came from deep within his subconscious. Many other scholarly books and articles soon took up related themes, but Jordan's account set the terms of the debate about the centrality of race and slavery in any appraisal of Jefferson. And once that became a chief measure of Jefferson's character, his stock was fated to fall.

Another symptom of imminent decline--again, all this in retrospect--was a 1970 essay by Eric McKitrick, a professor of history at Columbia University, in the New York Review of Books . McKitrick was reviewing the recent biographies of Jefferson by Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, who were not only experts on Jefferson but the avowed ringleaders of what has been called the "Charlottesville Mafia," scholarly keepers of the Jefferson flame. In the course of a fair-minded assessment, McKitrick had the temerity to ask whether it might not be time to declare a moratorium on the generally benign and gentlemanly posture toward Monticello Man that was the hallmark of Malone's and Peterson's works. "What about those traits of character that aren't heroic from an angle?" asked McKitrick, mentioning Jefferson's accommodation and dependence upon slavery as well as "the frequent smugness, the covert vindictiveness, ...the hand-washing, the downright hypocrisy." What about his very un-Churchillian performance as governor of Virginia during the American Revolution, when he failed to mobilize the militia and had to flee Monticello on horseback ahead of the marauding British army? What about the fiasco of his American Embargo in 1807, when he clung to the illusion that economic sanctions would keep us out of war with England, even after it was clear that they only devastated the American economy?

The list of critical questions went on, effectively making the general point that interpretations of the man guided by Jefferson's own world view, what McKitrick called "the view from Jefferson's camp," had just about exhausted their explanatory power. What we obviously needed from the next generation of Jeffersonian scholars were some less fastidious and less friendly biographers who did not have their hearts or headquarters at Charlottesville.

The 1992 "Jeffersonian Legacies" Conference

Rather amazingly, it was in Charlottesville that the scholarly reassessment of Jefferson reached a crescendo. It happened in October 1992, when the University of Virginia convened a conference to commemorate its founder under the apparently harmless rubric of "Jeffersonian Legacies." The result was an intellectual free-for-all that went on for six days and nights. The conference spawned a collection of 15 essays published in record time by the University Press of Virginia, an hour-long videotape of the proceedings shown on PBS, and a series of newspaper stories in the Richmond papers and The Washington Post . Advertised as a scholarly version of a birthday party, the conference assumed the character of a public trial, with Jefferson--and the version of American history he symbolized--cast in the role of defendant.

The chief argument for the prosecution was delivered by Paul Finkelman, a hard-charging historian from Virginia Tech. "Because he was the author of the Declaration of Independence," said Finkelman, "the test of Jefferson's position on slavery is not whether he was better than the worst of his generation, but whether he was the leader of the best." The answer had the clear ring of an indictment: "Jefferson fails the test." For Finkelman, historians like Malone and Peterson had been mesmerized by the "d-word," Jefferson as the apostle of democracy. The more appropriate d-words were dissimulation, duplicity and denial.

According to Finkelman, Jefferson was an out-and-out racist who believed that blacks were inherently inferior to whites and who rejected the possibility that blacks and whites could ever live together on an equal basis. Moreover, his several attempts to end the slave trade or restrict the expansion of slavery beyond the South were halfhearted, as was his contemplation of a program of gradual emancipation. His beloved Monticello and personal extravagances were possible only because of slave labor. Finkelman argued that it was misguided--worse, it was positively sickening--to celebrate Jefferson as the father of freedom. In Finkelman's view, Jefferson was the ultimate symbol of the discrepancy (another d-word) between American rhetoric and American reality.

If Finkelman was the chief prosecutor, the star witness for the prosecution was Robert Cooley, a middle-aged black man who claimed to be a direct descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Cooley offered himself as "living proof" that the story of Jefferson's sexual relationship with one of his slaves was true. No matter what the Charlottesville Mafia or the tour guides at Monticello said, several generations of blacks living in Ohio and Illinois were certain they had Jefferson's blood in their veins. Scholars always talk about the absence of documentation and hard evidence, but how could such evidence exist? "We couldn't write then," Cooley explained. "We were slaves." And Jefferson's white children had destroyed all written records of the relationship soon after his death. Cooley essentially pitted the oral tradition of the black community against the scholarly tradition of professional historians. Cooley's version of history might not have had the bulk of the hard evidence on its side, but it clearly had the political leverage. Whether or not Jefferson had an affair with Sally Hemings, he was guilty of so many other moral crimes that it hardly made any difference. The Hemings story was either true literally or true metaphorically. The Washington Post reporter covering the conference caught the mood: "What tough times these are for icons!"

If the historical profession had any final words of wisdom to offer in the wake of what was being called "the cacophony at Charlottesville," they came from Gordon Wood, generally regarded as the leading historian of the Revolutionary era. Wood, a conference participant, was asked to review the published collection of essays for The New York Review of Books .

Wood called for a halt to the appropriation of prominent historical figures like Jefferson to serve as rallying points for modern-day political constituencies on the left or right. "We Americans make a great mistake in idolizing...and making symbols of authentic historical figures," warned Wood, "who cannot and should not be ripped out of their own time and place." And Jefferson had been especially abused: "By turning Jefferson into the kind of transcendent moral hero that no authentic historically situated human being could ever be, we leave ourselves demoralized by the time-bound weaknesses of this eighteenth-century slaveholder." In effect, the canonization of Jefferson as our preeminent political saint, Wood was suggesting, virtually assured his eventual slide into the status of villain. Why? Because we know too much about him. And what we know would always undercut his saintly and heroic status, leaving us disappointed and then angry, much like a starry-eyed fan who makes the mistake of actually getting to know his idol. We invested too much in Jefferson. The core of the problem is not his inevitable flaws but our unrealistic expectations.

Coming from a historian of Wood's reputation, who had no special affection for Jefferson and no special ties with the Charlottesville Mafia, the assessment had the realistic ring of common sense, a welcome note of sobriety amid a band of shrill partisans. It was rooted in the sound scholarly recognition that the late 18th century is a foreign country with a separate culture of its own. The historian's job is not so much to protect Jefferson's reputation as to protect the integrity of the past from modern-day raiding parties with obvious ideological agendas.

All of which makes complete scholarly sense but absolutely no practical difference. Jefferson is not like most other historical subjects--dead, forgotten and nonchalantly entrusted to historians, who presumably serve as the gravekeepers for buried memories no one really cares about anymore. Jefferson has risen from the dead. Lots of Americans care about the meaning of his memory. Historians could not control his legacy because it has escaped from the past, which they oversee, and is living in the present, a foreign country for most of them.

Evidence of Jefferson's natural tendency to surge out of the past and into the present kept popping up in the press in the months after the Charlottesville conference. In The New York Review of Books , Garry Wills used his review of the exhibition at Monticello to paint an unflattering portrait of Jefferson as a compulsive consumer of expensive French wines, art and furniture, an indulged aristocrat whose exorbitant tastes belied his rustic rhetoric about yeoman farmers and republican virtue. A few months later, The New York Times reported on a mock trial of Jefferson by the Bar Association of New York City, presided over by none other than Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The indictment consisted of the following three counts: that he subverted the independence of the federal judiciary; that he lived in the lavish manner of Louis XIV (Wills' charge); and that he frequently violated the Bill of Rights. Though Jefferson was found not guilty on all charges, the salient fact was that he had been moved off his pedestal and into the witness box.

The "Jeffersonian Surge"

Whether the most appropriate command was "back to the future" or "forward to the past," many of the professional historians with whom I spoke were relieved when the 250th anniversary of Jefferson's birth was over. It meant that they could reclaim the historical Jefferson and "get on with their own work," free of the anachronistic questions about relevance and legacies. When I asked my academic colleagues about the phenomenon I was now calling the Jeffersonian Surge, most of them expressed bemused indifference. It was all hype, they observed, like one of the feeding frenzies in the contemporary talk-show culture--Jefferson as the historical equivalent of Michael Jackson or Tonya Harding. Or it could be explained pragmatically: Jefferson had managed to get himself institutionalized with a mansion at Monticello, a university at Charlottesville and a memorial on the Tidal Basin in Washington, so there were several permanent constituencies poised to plug his birthday for self-interested reasons. For a professional historian, the thing to do when confronted with this kind of loony sensationalism is to stand still, close one's eyes and wait for it to pass.

One exception to this general pattern was Peter Onuf, the successor to Merrill Peterson as Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia. Onuf predicted that scholarly criticism of Jefferson would seep into popular thinking, as the idealization of racial and ethnic diversity became an essential measure of America's dedication to equality. In effect, the democratic revolution Jefferson helped launch had now expanded to include a form of human equality--racial equality and integration--that Jefferson clearly could never have countenanced or even imagined. The next generation of Americans was not likely to raze the Jefferson Memorial or chip his face off Mount Rushmore, but the scholarly trend boded badly for Jefferson's reputation with posterity. As more Americans became aware of Jefferson as a slave-owning white racist, Onuf suggested, this flaw had the potential to trump all his virtues. The critical, even hostile, judgement of scholars was a preview of coming attractions in the larger popular culture.

In the October 1993 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly , the leading journal of early-American historians, Onuf suggested that the fascination with Jefferson's psychological complexity was gradually changing to frustration. The famous paradoxes that so intrigued poets, novelists and devotees of the "postmodern Jefferson" were beginning to look more like outright contradictions. The most glaring contradiction, his words in the Declaration of Independence as opposed to his lifelong ownership of slaves, was merely the most obvious disjunction between Jeffersonian rhetoric and Jeffersonian reality. Onuf described the emerging scholarly portrait of Jefferson as "a monster of self-deception," a man whose felicitous style was a bit too felicitous, concealing often incompatible ideals or dressing up platitudes as pieces of political wisdom that, as Onuf put it,"now circulate as the debased coin of our democratic culture." For Onuf, the multiple personalities of Jefferson were looking less like different facets of a Renaissance man and more like the artful disguises of a confidence man.

It occurred to me that the scholarly frustration Onuf described might derive from the realization that Jefferson's enigmatic character was never going to yield to conventional biographical or historical techniques (if, after all this time and effort, he remained the American Sphinx, well then, to hell with him). Onuf's point, on the other hand, was that a deconstructed Jefferson, a Jefferson divided into several disjoined selves that flickered into focus whenever convenient, then faded away whenever accountability was required, was hardly the stuff of a national hero. At some point, obliviousness stops looking like serenity and starts looking like hypocrisy.

With Jefferson, however, just when you think you have him cornered in an escape-proof room and are about to make an arrest, a trapdoor always seems to appear out of nowhere and he slips away to another adventure. The same week that I wrote the preceding paragraph, my eye came upon the following statement in boldface type in The New York Times Book Review : "Is your self shattered, your life riddled with inconsistency? Cheer up. That means you are resilient, postmodern."

This tongue-in-cheek observation was part of a serious review of a new book by Robert Jay Lifton called The Protean Self . The title echoed Merrill Peterson's description of Protean Jefferson, but with a new twist on its positive implications. Apparently Lifton, a prominent psychiatrist, was announcing that the new psychological ideal for the postmodern world was, in the reviewer's words, "a shapeshifter capable of assuming multiple identities without pathological fragmentation." In a world of jarring, unpredictable change, a world lacking clear borders between illusion and reality, with no shared sense of truth or morality, a premium was put on the ability to keep on the move inside yourself. The emerging psychological model was the "willful eclectic" who could live comfortably with contradictions.

This, of course, is a perfect description of Jefferson, or at least the version of Jefferson that scholars find so frustrating and, if Onuf is right, so reprehensible. But if Lifton is right, hypocrisy is an outmoded concept and Jefferson's disjointed personality is becoming the role model for postmodern society. (The trapdoor was opening again.) At any rate, I was grateful for Lifton's intriguing thesis because it helped me to understand what I meant when I used the term "postmodern." It also helped explain why poets, novelists and filmmakers are more favorably disposed toward Jefferson than scholars. They are more patient with and fascinated by Protean Jefferson because as artists they are more attuned to the interchangeable identities of the postmodern world.

Jefferson Today, A "Free-Floating Icon"

In the end, however, my thoughts returned to the faces of those ordinary Americans who had gathered at Worcester to celebrate Jefferson as their favorite Founding Father. They had absolutely no interest in deconstructing Jefferson or worshiping the disassembled parts of some engagingly incoherent hero. They were somewhat vulnerable, I suspect, to criticism of their idol as a racist. If the mounting scholarly case against Jefferson did filter down to the broader populace, it could do damage. But it seems clear to me that the deep reservoir of instinctive affection for Jefferson will probably remain intact. In its own way, the apparently unconditional love for Jefferson is every bit as mysterious as the enigmatic character of the man himself. Like a splendid sunset or a woman's beauty, it is simply there. It is the ultimate energy source for the Jeffersonian Surge.

Grass-roots Jeffersonianism, what we might also call Jeffersonian fundamentalism, has a long history of its own, but for our purposes its most instructive feature is the change in its character over the past 50 years. For most of American history, Jefferson was cast in the lead role in the dramatic clash between democracy and aristocracy, with Alexander Hamilton usually playing the opposite lead. If this dramatic formulation often had the suspicious odor of a soap opera, it also had the decided advantage of fitting neatly into the mainstream political categories and parties: It was the people against the interests, agrarians against the industrialists, the West against the East, Democrats against Republicans. Jefferson was one-half the American political dialogue, the liberal voice of "the many" holding forth against the conservative voice of "the few."

This version of American history always had the semifictional quality of an imposed plot line, but it stopped making much sense at all by the New Deal era, when Franklin Roosevelt invoked Hamiltonian methods (i.e., government intervention) to achieve Jeffersonians goals (i.e., economic equality). After the New Deal, most historians abandoned the Jefferson-Hamilton distinction altogether and most politicians stopped yearning for a Jeffersonian utopia free of all government influence. The disintegration of the old categories meant the demise of Jefferson as the symbolic leader of liberal partisans fighting valiantly against the entrenched interests. In a sense, what happened was that Jefferson ceased to function as the liberal half of the American political dialogue and became instead the presiding presence who stood above all political conflicts and parties.

And this, of course, is where he resides today, a kind of free-floating icon who hovers over the American political scene much like one of those dirigibles cruising above the Super Bowl, flashing words of encouragement to both teams. Formerly the property of liberal crusaders, he is now claimed by Democrats and Republicans alike. In fact, the most effective articulator of Jeffersonian rhetoric in the last half of the 20th century has been Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge, whose belief in less government, individual freedoms and American destiny came straight out of the Jeffersonian lexicon. Jefferson is not just an essential ingredient in the American political tradition, but the essence itself.

If you really press the issue, if you edit out all the extraneous voices and get to the core of Jefferson's thinking, the primal stuff consists of a single sentence of 35 simple words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness .

These are the magic words of American history. To question them is to commit some combination of sacrilege and treason. Actually, they are not quite the words Jefferson first composed in June of 1776. His original draft, the pure Jeffersonian version of the message before editorial changes were made by the Continental Congress, makes it even clearer that Jefferson intended to express an essentially moral or spiritual vision:

We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness .

Two monumental claims are being made here, one explicit and the other implicit. The explicit claim is that the individual is the sovereign unit in society. His natural state is freedom and equality with all other individuals. This is the natural order of things. All restrictions on this natural order are illegal and immoral transgressions, violations of what God intended. The implicit claim is that the removal of those artificial and arbitrary restraints on individual freedom will release unprecedented amounts of energy into the world. The liberated individual will, in effect, interact with his fellows in a harmonious scheme that recovers the natural order and allows for the fullest realization of human potential.

Now if you say that these claims are wildly unrealistic and utopian, the kind of news that is just too good to be true, you would be completely correct. Jefferson was not a profound political thinker. As John Adams and James Madison sometimes tried to tell him, his efforts at political philosophy were often embarrassingly superficial and sometimes downright juvenile. But Jefferson was less a cogent or logical political thinker than a brilliant political theologian and visionary. The genius of his vision is first to propose that our deepest personal yearnings are in fact achievable, then to articulate opposing principles in a way that conceals their irreconcilability. Jefferson guards the American creed at an inspirational level, where all of us can congregate as individual Americans regardless of race, class or gender and speak the magic words together.

Here is the point where being a scholar and being an American divide. The natural instinct of the scholar is to pull Jefferson down from the high ground, to document the many ways that Jefferson himself failed to accept the full implications of his vision--slavery, racism and sexism are chief offenses--and to expose the inherent contradictions embedded within the creed.

The overwhelming feeling of ordinary Americans, however, is quite the opposite. That gathering of citizens in the Worcester church is illustrative. As they sat together in Jefferson's presence, they could simultaneously embrace the following propositions: that abortion is a woman's right, and than an unborn child cannot be killed; that health care for all Americans is a moral imperative, and that the government bureaucracies required to oversee health care (or welfare, or environmental protection) stifle individual freedom; that blacks and women (and gays and lesbians) cannot be denied their rights as citizens, and that affirmative-action programs are misguided violations of the egalitarian principle.

The Jeffersonian magic works because we permit it to function at a rarefied rhetorical level where real-world choices do not have to be made. As we segregate ourselves into a bewildering variety of racial, ethnic, gender and class categories, all defending our respective territories under the multicultural banner, there are precious few plots of common ground on which we can come together as Americans. Jefferson provides that space, which is actually not common ground at all, but a midair location floating above all the battle lines. In this Jefferson space we become, at least for a moment, an American chorus instead of an American cacophony.

What William James said about religious experience is also true for the Jeffersonian experience: If you have not had it, no one can explain it to you. But you do not need to be an American to feel the spirit move. In fact, the Jeffersonian Surge is probably stronger in parts of Central Europe than anywhere else. You could give a party for Jefferson in contemporary Gdansk, Prague or St. Petersburg and be pretty certain that an enthusiastic band of celebrants would show up seeking the same inspiration as those Worcester residents.

At the end of August, The Washington Post published a long story on a wealthy Iranian named Bahman Batmanghelidj. His picture looked familiar, and then I recognized him as the philanthropist I met in Worcester. It turned out that Batmanghelidj was rallying opposition to the Merchant and Ivory film on Jefferson, which supposedly sanctions the story of Jefferson's liaison with Sally Hemings.

"Americans don't realize," Batmanghelidj warned, "how profoundly Jefferson and his ideas live on in the hopes and dreams of people in other countries. This movie will undercut all that. People around the world will view it as the defining truth about Jefferson. And of course it is a lie."

Well, yes, it almost certainly is. But then so is a hefty portion of the more attractive sources of Jefferson's image. Batmanghelidj's crusade was just the latest skirmish in the escalating struggle over Jefferson's legacy. The stakes are high, as can be seen in the stark formulation of James Parton, one of Jefferson's earliest biographers: "If Jefferson is wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right."

The ongoing debate about Jefferson is less an argument about the man himself than about what he stands for. It is not even an argument about whether what he stands for is a viable idea or a seductive illusion. After all, every great nation draws inspiration from illusions. The debate is about whether those illusions still work for us and whether the abiding Jeffersonian optimism that underlies them is still justified.

by Joseph J. Ellis

Books and Articles Discussed in this Essay

Fawn Brodie. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History . New York: Norton, 1974. LC Call Number: E332 .B787

Merrill Peterson. The Jefferson Image in the American Mind . New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. LC Call Number: E332.2 .P4

Douglas L. Wilson, "Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue," The Atlantic Monthly , 270:5 (November 1992), 57-74. LC Call Number: AP2 .A8

Willard Sterne Randall. Thomas Jefferson: A Life . New York: H. Holt, 1993. LC Call Number: E332 .R196 1993

Max Byrd. Jefferson: A Novel . New York: Bantam Books, c1993. LC Call Number: PS3552 .Y675 J44 1993

Garry Wills, "The Aesthete," The New York Review of Books , August 12, 1993. LC Call Number: AP2 .N6552

Susan R. Stein. The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello . New York: H. N. Abrams, in association with the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1993. LC Call Number: E332.2 .S84 1993

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Ed., Julian P. Boyd. Vols. 1-. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950- LC Call Number: E 302 .J442 1950a

Dumas Malone. Jefferson and His Time . 6 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948-1981. LC Call Number: E332 .M25

Wintrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968; New York: Norton, 1977. LC Call Numbers: E185 .J69; E446 .J68, 1977

Eric McKitrick, "The View from Jefferson's Camp," The New York Review of Books , December 17, 1970. LC Call Number: AP2 .N6552

Peter S. Onuf, ed. Jeffersonian Legacies . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. LC Call Number: E332.2 .J48 1993

Gordon S. Wood, "Jefferson at Home," New York Review of Books , 1993. LC Call Number: AP2 .N6552

Peter Onuf, "The Scholars' Jefferson," William and Mary Quarterly 3d Series, L:4 (October 1993), 671-699. LC Call Number: F221 .W71

James Parton. Life of Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States . Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1874; New York: Da Capo Press, 1971. LC Call Number: E322 .P27 1971

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The first amendment, historic document, first inaugural address (1801).

Thomas Jefferson | 1801

The Election of 1800 was one of the most important elections in American history.  Following a bitter contest, Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams, marking the first time in American history that an incumbent President lost a reelection bid.  This led to the peaceful transfer of power from one President (and political party) to another—in the process, setting an important precedent for early America and an example for the rest of the world.  On March 4, 1801, Jefferson was sworn in as the third President of the United States.  In his First Inaugural Address, Jefferson called on the American people to approach one another with civility and magnanimity—famously announcing, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”  To that end, Jefferson discussed the need for his fellow Americans to “unite in common efforts for the common good,” the importance of equal rights for political minorities, and the value of the American people uniting “with one heart and one mind” and restoring “that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things.”

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A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye – when I contemplate these transcendent objects, and see the honor, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved country committed to the issue and the auspices of this day, I shrink from the contemplation, and humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking. . . .

During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety. But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter – with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens – a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people – a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Benjamin Banneker — Benjamin Banneker’s Letter to Thomas Jefferson: Ethos, Pathos, Logos

Benjamin Banneker's Letter to Thomas Jefferson: Ethos, Pathos, Logos

• Categories: Benjamin Banneker Ethos Thomas Jefferson

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Published: Sep 1, 2020

Words: 502 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

In summary, Benjamin Banneker's letter to Thomas Jefferson is a persuasive argument against slavery, employing rhetorical techniques such as ethos, pathos, and repetition to convey its message.

Ethos is established through Banneker's reference to the Declaration of Independence, using Jefferson's own words to challenge the contradiction of advocating for freedom while supporting slavery. This enhances Banneker's credibility.

Pathos is effectively employed through emotionally charged language, evoking sympathy for the suffering of enslaved individuals. Banneker's personalization of their hardships and use of pronouns like "his brethren" connect with readers on an emotional level.

Repetition, notably the use of "sir," maintains a respectful tone throughout the letter, despite vehement disagreement. It appeals to Jefferson's authority while urging him to reconsider his position.

Banneker's letter is a testament to his rhetorical skill and unwavering commitment to ending slavery. His strategic use of these rhetorical elements highlights the contradictions within Jefferson's principles and calls for a reevaluation of the institution of slavery.

Prompt Examples for the Benjamin Banneker Essays

• The Use of Ethos in Benjamin Banneker’s Letter Explore how Benjamin Banneker employs ethos in his letter to Thomas Jefferson to establish credibility and trust in his argument against slavery, using references to historical documents and biblical references.
• Pathos and Emotional Appeals in Banneker’s Letter Analyze the emotional impact of Banneker’s use of pathos, including emotional diction and personalized language, to evoke sympathy and engage the readers in his condemnation of slavery.
• The Significance of Repetition in Banneker’s Argument Discuss the role of repetition in Banneker’s letter, specifically the repeated use of “sir,” and how it serves to convey respect, assert authority, and appeal to Thomas Jefferson’s sense of morality.
• Rhetorical Appeals and Their Effectiveness in Banneker’s Argument Examine how Benjamin Banneker combines ethos, pathos, and repetition to make a persuasive case against slavery in his letter to Jefferson, and evaluate the overall effectiveness of his rhetorical strategy.
• The Impact of Banneker’s Letter on Abolitionist Movements Explore the historical significance of Benjamin Banneker’s letter in the context of abolitionist movements and its role in challenging the institution of slavery in the late 18th century.

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Benjamin Banneker’s Letter to Thomas Jefferson Rhetorical Analysis

This essay will provide a rhetorical analysis of Benjamin Banneker’s letter to Thomas Jefferson. It will examine how Banneker uses ethos, pathos, and logos to argue against slavery and appeal for racial equality. The piece will discuss the historical context of the letter and its significance in the discourse on slavery and human rights. PapersOwl offers a variety of free essay examples on the topic of Declaration Of Independence.

How it works

• 1 Benjamin Banneker’s Plea for Justice
• 2 Thomas Jefferson: A Contradictory Figure
• 3 The Power of Rhetorical Analysis
• 4 Appealing to Morality and Logic
• 5 References:

Benjamin Banneker’s Plea for Justice

In 1791, Benjamin Banneker, who has a son of former slaves parents had written a letter to Thomas Jefferson in a nice but efficient way; the letter written challenged the author of the Declaration of Independence and even the united states secretary of State at the time; Thomas Jefferson” on the main topics regarding class, freedom, and race at the time. In the letter written, he impressively touched on all the topics of how African Americans, blacks, were being treated badly and discriminated against as white privileged citizen who was seen as people who were above us African Americans during such time.

Banneker saw this as injustice and addressed it in his letter; Banneker showed how he felt toward such a crisis using heartfelt words so he and Jefferson could reach a point of common ground.

Thomas Jefferson: A Contradictory Figure

By 1791, Jefferson had already authored the Declaration of Independence, serving as the United States Secretary of State. I would completely bash Jefferson; he did try, in his political career, to make somewhat attempt to deliberately end slavery in the United States. In 1778, he composed a law in Virginia that forbade any importation of oppressed African Americas, and even in 1784, he moved a law that would ban slavery in the developing territories in the north. But even despite Jefferson’s doubts about the slave trade, he continued to still believe in the main basic moral of social supremacy “whites over blacks.” There’s even evidence that Jefferson privately owned and had even auctioned up to 500 slaves.

The Power of Rhetorical Analysis

Even after reading the letter, we could acknowledge that Jefferson was a modern politician during such a time; Banneker cunningly used the U.S. Constitution to petition Jefferson’s ideas for the future. We see that because Banneker even states in the letter written; ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are designed equal.’ Banneker wants to show how the constitution has been broken, the documentation of which the Country was basically established. Banneker even explains that if the constitution states that ‘all men are created equal,’ then surely the system of slavery should not subsist. That little existence of slavery contradicts everything the Country stood for, like; freedom, for example.

Banneker uses references to the Declaration of Independence and the Bible to fight the movements of slavery. First, Banneker’s regards to the Declaration of Independence to justify slavery is unconstitutional. This allusion we see is strong because Jefferson supported writing the document and were his intentions. Moreover, Banneker notes that for Jefferson to truly believe his ideas, he must support them for everyone, despite race. Similar to this, Banneker alludes to the Bible. This is powerful because Jefferson and Washington are spiritual men, and Banneker identifies their transgressions through the eyes of God. Banneker politely challenges the morality of both men by including an implication that brings him level with the power of God.

Appealing to Morality and Logic

Conclusively, I support Banneker’s arguments. Benjamin Banneker uses rhetorical devices like ethos and logos, as well as his use of repeated formal diction, which gives persuasion towards his argument against slavery, which is why I believe his arguments are thorough. Throughout, Banneker uses repetition to keep a formal tone and logically present his argument. Equally powerful, his references to the Bible and the Declaration of Independence form a strong case against slavery.

References:

Letter to Thomas Jefferson from Benjamin Banneker, August 19, 1791. (n.d.). The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Monticello. (n.d.). Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. 

American Sphinx: The Contradictions of Thomas Jefferson. (n.d.). National Endowment for the Humanities. 

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