Thomas Jefferson and the Right to Property in Revolutionary America

Abstract

THOMAS Jefferson died at the age of eighty-three on July 4, 1826. His dying words are reported to have been the inquiry, Is it the Fourth? Astonishingly, John Adams passed away during the same summer night, and it is recorded that his final utterance was, Thomas Jefferson still survives.' And indeed the great Virginian still survives, but in 1976 his image is so complex and so confused that it may be no idle task to reexamine even part of his contribution to our revolutionary era. Jefferson, we must remember, was both a man of property and a prophet of the Enlightenment. He was born the son of an Albemarle County planter, Peter Jefferson, and, thanks to the rule of primogeniture, inherited the right to two-thirds of his father's 7,500 acre estate when only fourteen years of age. Trained as a gentleman and a lawyer, Jefferson devoted himself to improving his patrimony and serving his country, Virginia. In 1767 he began the planting and planning for his magnificent house on the little mountain, Monticello, into which he moved after his marriage to the wealthy widow Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772. Martha Jefferson's father died in 1773, leaving the young couple with an inheritance of 11,000 acres of land and 135 slaves. By 1776 Jefferson managed three large plantations and several smaller ones (together they came to more than 10,000 acres) and he owned about 180 slaves. He served in the Virginia legislature and the Continental Congress, and he had begun to display the artistic, scientific, and intellectual virtuosity which characterized his entire life: he . . could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin.2 He was, as Kurt Vonnegut aptly remarks, . . a slave owner who was also one of the world's greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.3 How can one deal with such a man, such a mind, and such a revolution? My strategy is to isolate one theme in Jefferson's thought in order to blaze a tenuous trail through the richness of his mind and life and, at the same time, to try to show one of the ways in which Jefferson helped to shape the legacy of 1776: that theme is the right to property.