American Sphinx (10 page)

The truth was much messier. With regard to the trade, Jefferson knew from his experience in the House of Burgesses that many established slaveowners in the Tidewater region favored an end of imports because their own plantations were already well stocked and new arrivals only reduced the value of their own slave populations. Ending the trade in Virginia, in short, was not at all synonymous with ending slavery. With regard to slavery itself, Jefferson’s formulation made great polemic sense but historical and intellectual nonsense. It absolved slaveowners like himself from any responsibility or complicity in the establishment of an institution that was clearly at odds with the values on which the newly independent America was based. Slavery was another one of those vestiges of feudalism foisted upon the liberty-loving colonists by the evil heir to the Norman Conquest. This was complete fiction, of course, but also completely in accord with Jefferson’s urge to preserve the purity of his moral dichotomies and his romantic view of America’s uncontaminated origins. Slavery was the serpent in the garden sent there by a satanic king. But the moral message conveyed by this depiction was not emancipation so much as commiseration. Since the colonists had nothing to do with establishing slavery—they were the unfortunate victims of English barbarism—they could not be blamed for its continuance. This was less a clarion call to end slavery than an invitation to wash one’s hands of the matter.
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Second, Jefferson tried once again, as he had tried before in
Causes and Necessities,
to insert his favorite theory of expatriation, claiming that the first settlers came over at their own expense and initiative “unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain.” His obsessive insistence on this theme derived from his devotion to the Saxon myth, which allowed for the neat separation of Whiggish colonists and feudal or absolutist English ministers. The tangled history of imperial relations did not fit very well into these political categories, but Jefferson found it much easier to revise the history (i.e., claiming there had never been any colonial recognition of royal or parliamentary authority) than give up his moral dichotomies. Once again his colleagues in the Continental Congress found his argument excessive.
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Third, the last excision came toward the very end of Jefferson’s draft. It was a rousingly emotional passage with decidedly sentimental overtones that condemned “our British brethren” for sending over “not only souldiers of our common blood, but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us.” It went on: “These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren. We must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends; but a communication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity. Be it so, since they will have it. The road to happiness & to glory is open to us too. We will tread it apart from them. . . .” This was a remarkable piece of rhetoric that Jefferson apparently regarded as one of his better creations. Even at the end of his life he was bitter about its deletion. “The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many,” he recalled, and therefore “those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offence.”
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What strikes the modern reader is not the timidity of the Continental Congress for excising the passage so much as the melodramatic sentimentalism of Jefferson in composing it. As with the expatriation theory, Jefferson was anxious to depict the separation of the colonies from the British Empire as a decision forced upon the colonists, who are passive victims rather than active agents of revolution. But here the broken bonds are more affective than political. A relationship based on love and trust has been violated, and the betrayed partner, the colonists, is bravely moving forward in life, wounded by the rejection but ready to face alone a glorious future that might otherwise have been shared together. This is a highly idealized and starkly sentimental rendering of how and why emotional separations happen, a projection onto the imperial crisis of the romantic innocence Jefferson had displayed in his adolescent encounters with young women, an all-or-nothing-at-all mentality that the other delegates found inappropriate for a state paper purporting to convey more sense than sensibility.

AMERICAN CREED, AMERICAN DREAM

T
HE MOST FAMOUS
section of the Declaration, which has become the most quoted statement of human rights in recorded history as well as the most eloquent justification of revolution on behalf of them, went through the Continental Congress without comment and with only one very minor change. These are, in all probability, the best-known fifty-eight words in American history: “We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain [inherent and] inalienable Rights; that among these are life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is the seminal statement of the American Creed, the closest approximation to political poetry every produced in American culture. In the nineteenth century Abraham Lincoln, who also knew how to change history with words, articulated with characteristic eloquence the quasi-religious view of Jefferson as the original American oracle: “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecaste, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” The entire history of liberal reform in America can be written as a process of discovery, within Jefferson’s words, of a spiritually sanctioned mandate for ending slavery, providing the rights of citizenship to blacks and women, justifying welfare programs for the poor and expanding individual freedoms.
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No serious student of either Jefferson or the Declaration of Independence has ever claimed that he foresaw all or even most of the ideological consequences of what he wrote. But the effort to explain what
was
in his head has spawned almost as many interpretations as the words themselves have generated political movements. Jefferson himself was accused of plagiarism by enemies or jealous friends on so many occasions throughout his career that he developed a standard reply. “Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing,” he explained, he drew his ideas from “the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in letters, printed essays or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.”
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This is an ingeniously double-edged explanation, for it simultaneously disavows any claims to originality and yet insists that he depended upon no specific texts or sources. The image it conjures up is that of a medium, sitting alone at the writing desk and making himself into an instrument for the accumulated wisdom and “harmonizing sentiments” of the ages. It is only a short step from this image to Lincoln’s vision of Jefferson as oracle or prophet, receiving the message from the gods and sending it on to us and then to the ages. Given the creedal character of the natural rights section of the Declaration, several generations of American interpreters have felt the irresistible impulse to bathe the scene in speckled light and cloudy mist, thereby implying that efforts to dispel the veil of mystery represent some vague combination of sacrilege and treason.

Any serious attempt to pierce through this veil must begin by recovering the specific conditions inside that room on Market and Seventh streets in June 1776. Even if we take Jefferson at his word, that he did not copy sections of the Declaration from any particular books, he almost surely had with him copies of his own previous writings, to include
Summary View, Causes and Necessities
and his three drafts of the Virginia constitution. This is not to accuse him of plagiarism, unless one wishes to argue that an author can plagiarize himself. It is to say that virtually all the ideas found in the Declaration and much of the specific language, especially the grievances against George III, had already found expression in those earlier writings.

Recall the context. The Congress is being overwhelmed with military reports of imminent American defeat in New York and Canada. The full Congress is in session six days a week, and committees are meeting throughout the evenings. The obvious practical course for Jefferson to take was to rework his previous drafts on the same general theme. While it seems almost sacrilegious to suggest that the creative process that produced the Declaration was a cut-and-paste job, it strains credulity and common sense to the breaking point to believe that Jefferson did not have these items at his elbow and draw liberally from them when drafting the Declaration.

His obvious preoccupation with the ongoing events at the Virginia convention, which was drafting the Virginia constitution at just this time, is also crucial to remember. Throughout late May and early June couriers moved back and forth between Williamsburg and Philadelphia, carrying Jefferson’s drafts for a new constitution to the convention and reports on the debate there to the Continental Congress. On June 12 the Virginians unanimously adopted a preamble drafted by George Mason that contained these words: “All men are created equally free and independent and have certain inherent and natural rights . . . , among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” The
Pennsylvania Gazette
published Mason’s words the same day they were adopted in Williamsburg. Since Jefferson’s version of the same thought was drafted sometime that following week, and since we know that he regarded the unfolding events in Virginia as more significant than what was occurring in Philadelphia and that he was being kept abreast by courier, it also strains credulity to deny the influence of Mason’s language on his own.
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While that explains the felicitous phrase “pursuit of happiness,” which Mason himself could have picked up from several English and American sources, it does not explain Jefferson’s much-debated deletion of “property,” the conventional third right memorialized in Locke’s
Second Treatise on Government.
He made that choice on his own. He was probably aware that Mason’s language had generated spirited opposition from a segment of the planter class in Virginia who worried that it implied a repudiation of slavery; they insisted on an amendment that excluded slaves by adding the qualifying clause “when they enter into a state of society.” All this suggests that Jefferson was probably aware of the contradiction between his own version of the natural rights philosophy and the institution of slavery. By dropping any reference to “property” he blurred that contradiction. This helps answer the intriguing question of why no debate over the issue occurred in the Continental Congress, as it did in the Virginia convention. Perhaps the debate over the slave trade provision also served that purpose.
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Beyond the question of immediate influences on Jefferson’s choice of words and his way of framing the case for independence, however, lies the more murky question of the long-term influences on his political thinking. Granted that his own earlier writings and drafts of the Virginia constitution almost certainly lay strewn across his lap and writing desk, where did the ideas contained in those documents come from? Granted that we know beyond a reasonable doubt what Jefferson was looking at, that he and the other delegates in the Congress were under enormous pressure to manage the ongoing war as military disaster loomed in Canada and New York, so he had little time to do more than recycle his previous writings, what core of ideas was already fixed in his head?

The available answers fall into two primary headings, each argued persuasively by prominent scholars and each finding the seminal source of Jefferson’s political thought in particular books. The older and still more venerable interpretation locates the intellectual wellspring in John Locke. Even during Jefferson’s lifetime several commentators, usually intending to question his originality, noted that the doctrine of natural rights and the corollary endorsement of rightful revolution came straight out of Locke’s
Second Treatise.
Richard Henry Lee, for example, claimed that Jefferson had merely “copied from Locke’s treatise on government.” Several conclusions followed naturally from the Lockean premise, the chief ones being that Jeffersonian thought was inherently liberal and individualistic and, despite the substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for “property,” fundamentally compatible with America’s emerging capitalistic mentality.
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The second and more recent interpretive tradition locates the source of Jefferson’s thinking in the Scottish Enlightenment, especially the moral philosophy of Francis Hutcheson. The key insight here is that Jefferson’s belief in the natural equality of man derived primarily from Hutcheson’s doctrine of the “moral sense,” a faculty inherent in all human beings that no mere government could violate. Moreover, the Scottish school of thought linked Jefferson to a more communal or collectivistic tradition that was at odds with Lockean liberalism and therefore incompatible with unbridled individualism, especially the sort of individualism associated with predatory behavior in the marketplace.
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There is, in fact, a third most recent and most novel interpretation, at once brilliant and bizarre, that operates from the premise that Jefferson intended the Declaration to be read aloud or performed. This claim is based on the discovery that his final draft was punctuated by a series of quotation marks designed to guide the reading of the document in order to enhance its dramatic effect. This discovery has led to the conclusion that Jefferson was influenced by the new books on rhetoric by such English authors as James Burgh and Thomas Sheridan, in which spoken language was thought to derive its power by playing on the unconscious emotions of the audience. The secret power of the Declaration, so this argument goes, derives from Jefferson’s self-conscious orchestration of language, informed by the new rhetoric, which overrides all contradictions (i.e., slavery and human equality; individualism and community) in a kind of verbal symphony that still plays on within American political culture.
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