杰斐逊的另一面

Another side of Thomas Jefferson: he was the icon who drafted the Declaration of Independence … the man who most ardently championed the fight for individual rights at a time when such notions were singed with controversy. And yet …
Humanist Jan-Feb, 2002

As we recall the words and deeds of the man perhaps most associated with American freedoms, we mustn't be ignorant of his unremitting campaign for the proliferation of slavery, his support of French oppression in Haiti, and his continuous subjugation of Native Americans. Indeed, while other national leaders of the time were emancipating their slaves and responding to the irrepressible thrusts of egalitarian rhetoric, Thomas Jefferson was expanding his slave population and erecting special walls that secluded them from his majestic Monticello in Virginia. In 1822--four years before his death--Jefferson's collection of slaves had risen to 267. Four years later, when he lay moribund, he found it proper only to free three, leaving the rest to languish in a nation that would grapple with the issue of forced servitude for another four decades.

David Walker, a prominent black Bostonian, was perhaps reacting to Jefferson's life of unabashed hypocrisy when in 1829 he warned African Americans that they should remember the third president as their greatest enemy. "Mr. Jefferson's remarks respecting us," Walker suggested, "have sunk deep into the hearts of millions of whites and will never be removed this side of eternity." In the end, what else could a former slave say about a man who championed freedom while proclaiming that "the amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of the excellence in the human character, can innocently consent."

Today, one cannot gaze upon the eloquent words or heroic deeds of Thomas Jefferson without also considering the more disquieting side of the man who has come to personify democracy, equality, and inalienable rights. Jefferson's legacy, his unflinching demand that government serve all the people, is forever tempered by his curious neglect and even disdain for those who didn't fit his lofty ideas for democracy. In many ways, then, Jefferson's life offers us a clear window into the experience of a great and ambitious man with profound weaknesses. This year, as we consider him during the bicentennial anniversary of his concept of a wall separating church and state, perhaps we would do well to supplant our traditional deification with a judicious and realistic portrait of the man who lived to plant the seeds of freedom for his own social class while wrenching the roots away from others.

It isn't possible to extricate venerated menn or women from the context in which they lived, and this is especially true of Thomas Jefferson. In a period when freedom was on the mind and lips of many, he was the quintessential progressive--the catalyst for revolutionary change in a time of tumult. In describing this ebullient young statesman, historian Gilbert Chinard, in Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism, has suggested that Jefferson was the essence of enlightened thought, the consummate student of progressive thinkers in the path of John Locke and Viscount Bolingbroke (Henry St. John).

When Jefferson joined other colonial representatives in Philadelphia for the crafting of the Declaration of Independence, he carried with him the authority of a large state and the cachet of an intellectual who had studied Greek and Roman philosophers and listened to many of the day's great orators. To say that Jefferson was an Enlightenment intellectual is not only obvious but is helpful in understanding this complex man. Clearly he wasn't alone in his fervor to shape a new government and was hardly unique in his allusions to human rights advocates of the age. Jefferson had been raised on the eloquence of Patrick Henry and nurtured with learned instructors at the College of William and Mary. "The organized habit of criticism," which came to define the Age of Enlightenment, was firmly entrenched in Jefferson's psyche.

Indeed, reason and republicanism were bursting from various pockets of American thought. Throughout much of the land, radical ideas were flourishing, especially among the educated elite. For Jefferson and his colleagues it had become fashionable--even expected--to celebrate democracy and equality. As a new nation, many thought the United States would be unique in its embrace of unfettered human rights. As suggested by historian Gordon Wood in The Creation of the American Republic, there was a spirit of mission and purpose to create a land that was free and removed from ancient prejudice and privilege: "They told themselves over and over again that they were a numerous, sober, and industrious people, and therefore, as history showed, the ablest to contend with and the most successful in opposing tyranny." Wood believed "for Americans the future looked auspicious indeed." Little was impossible for a land comprised of rustic wisdom and youthful vivacity.

It was in this lofty scene that Thomas Jefferson lived and developed his philosophy. Rather than being a solitary philosopher in a barren land, Jefferson was one of many young thinkers who began to exult the words of John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, tailoring them to fit the goals of a new republic. Today, however, when people look to Jefferson as the catalyst or founder for quintessentially American ideals, they are only partially right. Jefferson's views, while democratic and inclusive, were also elitist and exclusive.

From the prose of Locke, Jefferson embraced the notion that human rights were the right of all men who had the intellect to practice them effectively. Like Locke, Jefferson reserved the right to exclude those who were bereft of the requisite merit and acumen, and he was unabashed in his contempt for those who didn't meet his model of the man with natural rights. For Jefferson, rights were self-evident but only available to those who had the facility to detect and process them.

"Despite Locke's assertion that all men can have intuitive or self-evident perceptions, there is a potentially undemocratic element in this intuitive reason," writes historian Allen Jayne in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. "What is self-evident to a highly educated and intelligent individual, seen clearly like bright sunshine, would often appear as darkness to an uneducated and unintelligent person." Therefore, in Jefferson's world, according to Morton White's Philosophy of the American Revolution, rights were limited to only a few highly intelligent and educated men. "The doctrine of self-evident truth could have been easily turned into a tool of haughty dictators of principles," says White. And Jayne adds, "Lockean self-evident epistemology established possibilities for an intellectual elite to exercise normative control over a democracy just as demonstrative reason did."

In short, freedom, equality, and undiluted emancipation weren't for average citizens but for those educated few who would lead the nation to greatness. Words such as merit were often bandied about and became the refuge of those--like Jefferson--who had ambivalent feelings about the rustic hoards which were coursing through the American bloodstream and adding color to its system. In writing about Jefferson's most enduring influences, Jayne acknowledges that "Locke's Second Treatise of Government made a profound influence on Jefferson," which is obvious "in the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence."

And so, as we chronicle the legacy of the man as it relates to those who were minorities in the United States and who failed to fit the mold of the enlightened individual, we begin to appreciate the tenets buttressing Jefferson's antipathy for African Americans, Native Americans, and those agrarians who he often claimed to love. Because they were perceived as impervious to the natural reason used by educated patricians, they weren't part of the democratic experience. In many ways, Jefferson's view could be summarized by Mathew Arnold, who would live and write a generation after Jefferson's death. Culture, wrote Arnold, doesn't have its origin in a curiosity but in the "love of perfection." For those who didn't have the ability to achieve a kind of intellectual and spiritual perfection, freedom was illusory. Such people simply didn't fit into Jefferson's paradigm. They weren't eligible. "Jefferson sought freedom for the people with whom he identified--a coalition of small-holders and gentlemen," notes Woody Holton in Forced Founders. Indians and slaves weren't meant to be independent but, rather, the "fruits of independence."

Historian Howard Zinn recalls a particularly humorous event that perhaps best epitomizes the kind of selective and limited concept of human rights held by Jefferson and many of the founders. During those heady days of the John Adams administration, when various leaders had gathered in the House of Representatives, a fight took place between two congressional representatives. According to Zinn in Declarations of Independence, Matthew Lyon of Vermont spat on Roger Griswold of Connecticut as the two fought over an unknown issue. Later, after the two had been separated, a Bostonian wrote angrily of Lyon, "I feel grieved that the saliva of an Irishman should be left upon the face of an American." Earlier, it is revealing to note, Lyon had written an article deriding the Adams administration as filled with "power and an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice." For his political convictions, Lyon was tried and found guilty under the Sedition Act and imprisoned for four months.

From such an elitist view, it was easy for Jefferson see those of African descent--either from the United States or elsewhere in the hemisphere--as little more than property for exploitation and enslavement. For example, prior to the American Revolution, when the British under the colonial governor of Virginia, Lord John Murray Dunmore, sought in 1774 to use blacks as soldiers to quell a rebellion, Jefferson was one of many who began a vehement argument opposing Dunmore on behalf of slave-owners and their fear of a collective uprising.

Later, Jefferson wrote angrily in response to the governor's call for slave emancipation, suggesting, according to Holton, that "Dunmore's emancipation proclamation was a major cause of the American Revolution." Consequently, during much of the revolution, Jefferson and other founding fathers were busy trying to stifle the liberation of slaves and protect the rights of their masters. "Slaves had always resisted their condition," concludes Holton in discussing the uprising during the days of the revolution. "In 1774 they began conspiring to exploit the opportunities presented them by the imperial crisis." It was Jefferson and his colleagues, then, who found themselves in the rather dubious position of combating the liberation of a manifestly oppressed group--a clear indication of how narrow was the extent of Jefferson's philosophy.

Even during the revolution, Jefferson was quick to contradict the contentions of Alexander Hamilton when the latter suggested that slaves should be recruited as soldiers. In Jefferson's view, their participation would only spoil them as docile workers by teaching them how to fight and by opening their eyes to the possibilities Of freedom and the dream of emancipation. This might lead to slave insurrections later. Furthermore, Jefferson saw blacks as inherently inferior, unable to even comprehend the precarious situation to which they were being exposed. "While admitting that they sometimes displayed courage, he attributed their valor to their inability to fully appreciate the peril in which their actions took them," writes John Chester Miller in The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. To add insult to injury, Jefferson later approved a bill that rewarded all white men who fought in the Revolution with 300 acres of land and a healthy black slave.

When Jefferson ascended to the presidency in 1801, he was faced with the reality of the Haitian republic under black revolutionary Francois Toussaint. At that time, Napoleon Bonaparte began moving ships to Haiti to regain control of the former French colony. So Jefferson made it clear that he personally had no love for "this black republic" and that the United States would support Napoleon. According to historian Conor Cruise O'Brien in The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, Jefferson indicated that, if Napoleon could simply make peace with England, "then nothing will be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything, and reduce Toussaint to starvation."

Applying these sentiments, Jefferson reversed the policy embraced by presidents Adams and Washington and encouraged Napoleon to attack and try to recolonize Haiti. Roger Kennedy, in Orders from France: The Americans and the French in a Revolutionary World, 1780-1820, confirms that the previous federalist administrations had secured arms and food for Toussaint, but now Jefferson's Democratic Republican administration proceeded to loan France $300,000 "for relief of whites on the island." Hence, according to Kennedy, in Jefferson's eyes "a Napoleonic colony was to be preferred to a Negro republic in the West Indies, especially when France intended the reimposition of slavery and, thus, some alleviation of the fears of the slave owners" in the southern United States. When Napoleon's efforts failed, Jefferson still refused to acknowledge Haiti as a sovereign state.

In the United States, though slavery was an ensconced institution, it was clear that many citizens didn't embrace it. Also, Washington and other of the nation's founders (at least at the time of their deaths) liberated their slaves. Jefferson, however, not only compelled their continued servitude but, during his presidency, created legislation to make their lives more amenable to their southern masters. Slavery was never an issue that Jefferson wanted to resolve through integration or emancipation. Rather, his plan was to ship slaves to a colony of their own in the West Indies, to dispose of them as people unable to coexist with their white counterparts, or to simply eliminate them through forced removal. "Jefferson's slaveholding," writes Richard Lowen in Lies My Teacher Told Me, "affected almost everything he did, from his opposition to internal improvements to his foreign policy. By 1820, Jefferson had become an ardent advocate of the expansion of slavery to the Western territories."

Regarding Native Americans, Jefferson's philosophy was a confluence of contempt and condescension. He was fond of lecturing about the novelties of the native language and culture but only in the most elitist manner. For much of his life, Jefferson perceived natives as foreigners in a land that was destined to be part of a great white empire, and his policies--both overtly and more surreptitiously--were crafted to dispossess them of their homes. "The Jeffersonian vision of the destiny of the Americas," writes Anthony Wallace in Jefferson and the Indians, "had no place for Indians as Indians. In Jefferson's view, the Indian nations would be either civilized and incorporated into mainstream American society or, failing this ... exterminated."

During the early years of his adult life, Jefferson worked assiduously to wrest native lands away from various tribes. With western property representing a lucrative windfall for those who obtained it, he was one of dozens who sought patents from the British Empire for land west of the Appalachian Mountains. With little concern for native autonomy or the injustice of usurping land for profit, Jefferson and other Virginia gentlemen lobbied British officials to open the land to patents. And when British officials declined, citing the trouble and expense a protracted war with various tribes would cause, Jefferson and others were quick to make the opening of new land a patriotic issue, claiming that the failure of the English to assist them in taking native property was tantamount to oppression. This claim, as Holton suggests throughout his book, was an impetus for the gradual fissure dividing the British from the colonists. Instead of only being about taxation and representation, the American Revolution had much to do with annexing new land for white settlements and profits that would follow.

In the 1760s, Kentucky was the principal hunting ground for a variety of native tribes, and it was critical for their future survival that they maintain these grounds and remain free from continued white incursion. Indeed, earlier treaties between the tribes and the British had been consummated with the understanding that native land would be respected if natives ceased to wage war on colonists. The problem--at least from Jefferson's perspective--was that Kentucky and other western lands were being settled by the flood of new immigrants who saw the opportunity for new land as a chance for a new life. Settlers meant profits for Jefferson and his partners if they could only win patents for the land from the English government or by stealing it.

So, in the early years before the revolution, Jefferson and other venerated Americans were busy trying to reverse the promised policy of the British and open the lands for their collective avarice. According to Wallace, Jefferson made attempts to acquire "a total of about 35,000 acres." More revealing for our examination, when he became president and was confronted with violations of the treaty by white settlers who were living on native land, Jefferson took "measures to ensure that their encroachments on Cherokee land would be legitimized by appropriate land cession."

With such an unseemly record, one wonders why Thomas Jefferson has become such an American icon in the centuries following his life. While our third president was a person of exulted ruminations about the republic he and his colleagues were creating, he joins other founding fathers in their general distrust and antipathy for those who were non-European--for those who didn't fit their paradigm of a person who deserved liberty and justice. In doing this it's important to remember that Jefferson was hardly different from others of his time, and his actions were, in many ways, the harbinger of a national policy that would continue through the present day.

For no matter how much we would like to wring our hands or deride Jefferson's hypocrisy, we must acknowledge our own provincial policies in the twenty-first century--policies that have the same parochial stamp as Jefferson's. Two hundred fifty years ago the policy was punitive against people outside the established mainstream. Today, in our more enlightened age, we see scant movement on a law to extend the basic right to marry to gays and lesbians. In the Roman Catholic and Southern Baptist churches we see equally little evidence that women are being treated as equals. And in our concomitant policy toward Native Americans, there is a lamentable failure to reverse the alcoholism and abject poverty that runs rampant through their communities and is a direct result of the founding principles of the United States.

Could it be that Jefferson, with all of his lofty theories and inconsistent actions, truly does epitomize that which is best and worst in our national persona? Could it be that the compile Jefferson--replete with the blemishes of racism and genocide--more accurately personifies his country centuries after his death? For while we aspire to the apogee of democratic values--always elevating the United States above those who are less free or egalitarian--we seem willing to ignore those who don't meet our time-honored image of citizen. "Since Thomas Jefferson did more than any other founding father to shape and articulate the ideas and ideals upon which American civilization is based, it seems logical to judge him by the positive or negative impact of those ideas and ideals," writes Jayne.

To that suggestion, I agree. Jefferson, with all of his flaws and indiscretions, is the quintessential American. And like other great leaders of this republic, he accomplished much while clearly being a product--and victim--of his age.

Gregory Shafer holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan and teaches at Mott College in Flint.

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