Jefferson's View Research Articles

Rival Visions: How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republic ed. by Dustin Gish and Andrew Bibby

Reviewed by: Rival Visions: How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republiced. by Dustin Gish and Andrew Bibby Cara Rogers Rival Visions: How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republic. Edited by Dustin Gish and Andrew Bibby. Jeffersonian America. ( Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 330. $42.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4447-0.) The contributors to Rival Visions: How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republicagree on two primary assertions: the early republic can best be understood by using Thomas Jefferson's ideas as a "benchmark" against which to measure change; and modern debates over American identity have been "overtaken" both by a "disturbing ideological [End Page 149]conformity" and by "dogmatic partisanship" (p. 2). This collection of essays seeks to inject historical context into contemporary partisan divides by focusing attention on the rivalries that have shaped America from the beginning. As John Ragosta puts it in his chapter on Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams, "conversations in the Early Republic were oftentimes more informative than monologues" (p. 178). Rival Visionsputs differing perspectives from the early republic into conversation with one another, emphasizing "conflict more than consensus" and encompassing such varied themes as constitutional debates, technological developments, and philosophical divergences (p. 3). The political theorists, biographers, historians, and constitutional scholars who have contributed to this volume were originally inspired by a 2013 conference on Jefferson and his contemporaries held at Christopher Newport University. Editors Dustin Gish and Andrew Bibby have divided the eleven essays into three sections: "Envisioning the New Nation," "National Tensions in the Early Republic," and "Constitutional Controversies." This division is less chronological than thematic, and readers will find variety within each section. For example, in Part 1, Eran Shalev explores the different historical antecedents that the Founders drew on in order to validate their republican experiment; Darren Staloff argues that Jefferson and Adams's fundamental difference lay in their disagreement over human perfectibility; and Gish and Armin Mattes each position the Founders' experiences with—and divergent reactions to—the French Revolution as a key element to our understanding of the early American nation. In Part 2, complementary essays by Christa Dierksheide and Peter S. Onuf contain insightful discussions of Jefferson and slavery, examining Jefferson's attempts to ameliorate the institution and contrasting Jefferson's optimistic faith in enlightenment with George Washington's quiet pragmatism. Essays by Daniel Dreisbach and Ragosta are more openly in debate, offering competing interpretations of Jefferson's support for religion in the public sphere. Dreisbach argues that most of the founding generation believed that religion was necessary for virtue, and virtue for a republic, concluding that even the unorthodox Jefferson's policies and practices "had the effect of raising religion's profile and extending its influence into the public sphere" (p. 153). Ragosta, in contrast, focuses on three separate "conversations" in Jefferson's life in order to claim that the separation of church and state was, in fact, Jefferson's primary aim—and, by the early nineteenth century, one of his greatest accomplishments (p. 164). Dreisbach and Ragosta are both persuasive, and their conversation offers a useful overview of current debates surrounding religion in the early republic. Part 3 includes Jean Yarbrough's essay on Jefferson's moral sense philosophy and its connection to an agrarian lifestyle; Daniel Klinghard's analysis of Jefferson's views on technology, progress, and politics; and Charles Hobson's fascinating comparison of Jefferson and one of his most prominent rivals, John Marshall. Hobson convincingly argues that personal animosity and decades of misunderstandings and offenses between these two Virginians prevented them from ever reconciling and finding that their rival visions of America actually had several areas of overlap. This essay is a fitting end to a book that begins by [End Page 150]lamenting Americans' current ideological divisions: Hobson provides a timely warning against allowing personal animosity to cloud reasoned political debate. Rival Visionswill be of interest to all scholars of Jeffersonian America. Cara Rogers Ashland University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

The Wings of Atalanta: Essays Written along the Color Line

The Wings of Atalanta: Essays Written along the Color Line

Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship That Helped Forge Two Nations by Tom Chaffin

Reviewed by: Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship That Helped Forge Two Nations by Tom Chaffin John R. Maass Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship That Helped Forge Two Nations. By Tom Chaffin. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2019. Pp. xii, 529. $29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-11372-6.) Author Tom Chaffin provides readers interested in the two great revolutions of the late eighteenth century with a popular history, written in a dramatic style with sections and chapters alternating in focus between Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette. Chaffin holds that Lafayette is virtually unknown in America today, and that Lafayette's efforts—along with Jefferson's—during the French Revolution are also largely obscure. "A forthright retelling of their shared story—their solitary, convergent, and divergent paths through two revolutions and their final reunion—is long overdue," Chaffin explains (p. 4). This study is, the author claims, "the first sustained account of the Jefferson-Lafayette friendship and collaboration," but it is "not intended as a joint biography or as a history of the American and French Revolutions. It seeks to capture another quarry: the story of a single, and singularly extraordinary, friendship, and its role in the making of two revolutions—and two nations" (p. 4). Beginning in medias res with Lafayette's first voyage to America in 1777, Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship That Helped Forge Two Nations goes on to describe the lives of the two founders from their childhoods, their early experiences during the American Revolution (both military and political), and their important roles in the French Revolution. Loaded with detail and at times fast-paced, Chaffin's book is not a thesis-driven academic work, nor does he claim it to be. Rather, it is more a chronicle of events, which, unfortunately, gets a lot of the details wrong. Chaffin is correct in pointing out that Lafayette is much less well known in the United States than Jefferson (who was fourteen years the Frenchman's senior), so the trajectory of their lives is quite interesting to compare. Both men were among the elites of their societies, were well educated, and embraced the spirit of the Enlightenment. Each regarded the American Revolution as a salient event in history, in which they played prominent, influential roles. During the French Revolution, Jefferson and Lafayette witnessed and helped shape the tumultuous events that eventually overthrew the monarchy of Louis XVI. Chaffin's chapters on this period are quite detailed, and readers learn about Lafayette's role in the early years of the French Revolution beginning in 1789 and in the Estates-General, the National Assembly, and the National Guard. Jefferson, too, was in Paris as the United States minister to France, and he facilitated Lafayette's political efforts, particularly with Lafayette's interest in a constitution. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of their relationship was a matter on which they disagreed—American slavery. Jefferson's inconsistent views and actions regarding slavery are well known, while Lafayette eventually became an ardent abolitionist. In several sections of his book, Chaffin describes Lafayette's growing opposition to slavery once he reached American shores. Then, "by 1784, having observed slavery longer and more intimately than ever before in his life, Lafayette was rethinking his views on human bondage" [End Page 910] (p. 179). Moreover, he looked into efforts to free American slaves and read more widely among enlightened abolitionist treatises as they became available. Chaffin's book has two main weaknesses. First, he seems to oversell the notion of a unique, extraordinary friendship, and the notion of a brotherhood is simply unsupportable other than in a figurative sense. The first half of his book is not about their relationship at all but is instead the sort of dual biography that the author claims he did not intend to write. In fact, as Chaffin concedes, the pair did not meet until late April 1781, after which Governor Jefferson and General Lafayette worked together until June 2 to defend Virginia from a British invasion. Thereafter they corresponded over the years and met frequently when Jefferson was...

Thomas Jefferson, the “Libertarian” Jeffersonians of 1799, and Leonard W. Levy's Freedom of the Press

This article examines Thomas Jefferson's views on freedom of the press in connection with the existence of a federal common law of seditious libel, specifically in a Connecticut federal district court case involving Federalist critics of Jefferson who publicly libeled him. It tests the accuracy of Leonard W. Levy's thesis in Jefferson and Civil Liberties (1963) that for most of his lifetime, Jefferson opposed the notion of complete freedom of the press and refused to recognize the right of habeas corpus in criminal matters. The article finds that, despite his book's popularity with scholars hostile to Jefferson, Levy's critique of Jefferson distorted the facts and omitted evidence. With the minor exception of Jefferson's temporary acquiescence in his political supporters' prosecution of his Connecticut libelers, the article concludes, Jefferson's traditional reputation as a defender of total freedom of the press and habeas corpus remains intact.

Lincoln, Jefferson, and the Legacies of Religion

Religious Freedom: Jefferson's Legacy and America's Creed. By John Ragosta. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. 292 pp. Lincoln and Religion. By Ferenc Morton Szasz, with Margaret Connell Szasz. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014. 103 pp. We Called Him Rabbi Abraham: Lincoln and American Jewry, A Documentary History. By Gary Phillip Zola. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014. 457 pp. Prompted by the prominence of religious rhetoric and ideology in American politics, recent decades have shown an increased attention by scholars to both the religious beliefs of presidents and the intersection of religion and politics in American life. Three new studies seek to expand upon this growing field and demonstrate not only the ways that religious belief influenced Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, but also how those beliefs shaped the presidents' legacies and how those legacies have shaped Americans' national and religious identities. For John Ragosta, Thomas Jefferson's religious views are instrumental in properly understanding both the First Amendment and the appropriate relationship between church and state in American history. Ferenc Morton Szasz and Gary Phillip Zola both examine Lincoln's religious beliefs, but do so with an eye toward the many ways Americans have remembered and creatively imagined those beliefs in their own understanding of America and Americans. As such, three works are incredibly valuable studies that connect personal belief, historical context, and the complex nature of national memory in ways that can benefit historians, social scientists, and the public at large. In Religious Freedom: Jefferson's Legacy and America's Creed, John Ragosta, a former lawyer and current visiting assistant professor of history at Oberlin College, examines both Thomas Jefferson's view of religious liberty and how his legacy has been used in subsequent battles over the meaning and proper relationship between church and state in American history. Ragosta rightly notes that recent decades have seen scholars, lawyers, and politicians begin to transition from disagreements over Jefferson's views of religious freedom to arguments over the centrality or even importance of those views for the nation. By reexamining the former, Ragosta repositions Jefferson as the principal interpreter of church/state relations in America. He concludes that Jefferson, and by extension a proper reading of the First Amendment, adamantly limits the power and influence of the federal government over religious institutions and Americans' personal religious beliefs and practices. Ragosta's argument stands in contrast to those who argue that the founders never intended to limit public religion and that the Constitution allows nondiscriminatory aid to religious groups. However, he also rejects the notion that the First Amendment only served to limit the federal government's influence over states' rights in the realm of religious establishment and support. Grounding his interpretation on a deft handling of Jefferson's biography and a multitude of primary sources, Ragosta asserts that the First Amendment was a compromise between those seeking to protect the states from federal oversight and Jefferson and his supporters, who explicitly sought to limit governments of kinds from interfering with private conscience and acting in the area of religion. He then notes that all of the various positions wanted the federal government, at least, strictly out of the business of regulating religion, prohibited from making an establishment, and separated from religious issues (p. 118). In other words, states' rights activists insisted that the First Amendment be limited to the federal government exactly because it put such strong restraints on governmental interference in religious matters. Ragosta follows his skillful analysis of Jefferson's views with a discussion of Jefferson's controversial legacy and the ways that changing contexts have also altered how Americans have understood Jefferson and the First Amendment. …

Nature’s Man: Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophical Anthropology by Maurizio Valsania (review)

Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical Anthropology. By Maurizio Valsania. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Pp. 204. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by Lorri GloverIn Nature's Man, Maurizio Valsania offers a nuanced and theoretically sophisticated exploration of Thomas Jefferson's ideas about human nature, the qualities he idealized in individuals, and the importance of community to that worldview-his philosophical anthropology. In just over 150 pages of text, the work manages to link a stunning range of topics without ever feeling forced or fleeting. The three chapters read like an extended essay, weaving together what often can seem like disparate pieces to Jefferson's long career and varied writings to give a fresh take on one of the most-studied people in American history.Valsania clearly has a strong command of Jefferson's writings and ideas, and this book is written with confidence and verve. The author is equally adept when contemplating Jefferson's views on women and Native Americans as he is in discussions of Jefferson's land policies while president and attitudes toward equality and equal rights. offers novel insight on often-read Jefferson writings, including, most notably, his head and heart letter to Maria Cosway, A Summary View on the Rights of British America, and the long-delayed, much-celebrated campaign for disestablishment in Virginia, predicated on Jefferson's 1779 proposal to the Virginia legislature. In the latter case, Valsania convinces the reader that, taken with Jefferson's other legislative efforts that year, the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom captures Jefferson's distinctive perception of the individual in community, an effort at privileging individuals over their community, and thus underscores the differences between our world and his. Valsania also presents a reinterpretation of Jefferson's retirement years and what has often been seen as a narrowing of his worldview after leaving the presidency. Age and parochialism are over-argued, Valsania maintains; rather, Jefferson's increasing localism derived from a judicious re-evaluation of political and economic circumstances, characteristic of his enduring experimental temper (70).Embedded in that last interpretation is a thread running through the book: Valsania's seeming admiration for Jefferson. Several times throughout these chapters, the reader is cautioned against dismissing Jefferson as an inconsistent hypocrite. But how many serious scholars-the audience for the book-would contemplate making such a bald, ahistorical judgment? Moreover, Valsania insists that his intent is not to perform a moral evaluation of Jefferson's character, to condemn or acquit him. But in the same paragraph, after considering Jefferson's conduct while governor of Virginia and president of the United States, Valsania writes: He was eminently principled, responsible, and coherent. never acted randomly or for a personal or momentary interest (113).While readers will likely quarrel with that sanguine appraisal, they will also have to be impressed with the sensitivity with which Valsania reads only Jefferson's texts but his context, too. …

Religious freedom: Jefferson's legacy, America's creed

For over one hundred years, Thomas Jefferson and his Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom have stood at the centre of our understanding of religious liberty and the First Amendment. Jefferson's expansive vision--including his insistence that political freedom and free thought would be at risk if we did not keep government out of the church and church out of government--enjoyed a near consensus of support at the Supreme Court and among historians, until Justice William Rehnquist called reliance on Jefferson demonstrably incorrect. Since then, Rehnquist's call has been taken up by a bevy of jurists and academics anxious to encourage renewed government involvement with religion.In Religious Freedom: Jefferson's Legacy, America's Creed , the historian and lawyer John Ragosta offers a vigorous defence of Jefferson's advocacy for a strict separation of church and state. Beginning with a close look at Jefferson's own religious evolution, Ragosta shows that deep religious beliefs were at the heart of Jefferson's views on religious freedom. Basing his analysis on that Jeffersonian vision, Ragosta redefines our understanding of how and why the First Amendment was adopted. He shows how the amendment's focus on maintaining the authority of states to regulate religious freedom demonstrates that a very strict restriction on federal action was intended. Ultimately revealing that the great sage demanded a firm separation of church and state but never sought a wholly secular public square, Ragosta provides a new perspective on Jefferson, the First Amendment, and religious liberty within the United States.

Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood by Brian Steele (review)

Reviewed by: Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood by Brian Steele Jeremy D. Bailey (bio) Keywords Thomas Jefferson, Role of government, Republicanism, American exceptionalism Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood. By Brian Steele. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, Pp. 321. Hardcover, $99.00.) In Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood, Brian Steele argues that Jefferson's seeming contradictions can be resolved through a reconceptualization of the American nation in Jefferson's politics. Steele's book is ambitiously conceived and beautifully executed. It is nothing less than a stunning success. He divides his study of Jefferson and nationhood into six chapters: American Story, American Woman, American Public, American Character, American State, and American Union. The first substantive chapter sets the tone for the book by attempting to solve the creed vs. culture debate by showing what was distinctive about Jefferson's contribution to the argument for independence. Culture wins: "there is no generally applicable claim in the Declaration" (41). This argument will strike some (at least in my discipline) as going too far. Steele says that what made Jefferson's argument "distinctive" was not its rejection of Parliament's power over the colonies but rather "its historical argument about the experience that ultimately made Americans a distinct people" (24). The author argues that Jefferson perceived that it was not enough for one people to declare the causes that require them [End Page 560] to separate from another people—because "two peoples cannot become two overnight" (12). So Steele's Jefferson found his argument for expatriation in the "migration of original settlers to America" (25), an argument Jefferson derived by reversing (or extending) the application of tacit assent. This argument then enabled Jefferson to connect a historical people to a revolutionary principle. For Steele, it was both radical and "startlingly conservative" (49) at the same time. But theorizing "the people" requires more than connecting historical migration to the right of revolution, and in the next chapter Steele continues by examining Jefferson's view of republican women. The author adeptly compares Jefferson's treatment of Indian women with his criticism of women in Europe, particularly France. In Jefferson's view, both cultures upset the natural equality that women would otherwise enjoy. Indians forced women to work the soil, and the French allowed their aristocratic women to wander too close to political life, squandering their days amid the buzz of society. Each, in Jefferson's view, disturbed the gender roles dictated by nature but achievable only in republican civilization. It turns out that America was the only civilization in history that had placed women in their proper role of republican domesticity. The problem for Jefferson, as Steele notes, is that this argument presumed that the American idea rested on a contingent American notion of gender: Nature dictated that men and women be free from "artificial barriers to happiness," yet the "natural results of such freedom were clearly different for women and men" (88). Steele takes on more seeming contradictions in the following chapters. In Chapter 3, he argues that Jefferson's cosmopolitan belief that the world would one day become more republican rested on the premise that America was exceptional. This paradox rested in turn on Jefferson's assessment that Americans were uniquely able to resist tyranny whenever it would arise—meanwhile he expressed anxiety that things might get worse. This last point deserves special mention: Jefferson's sunny optimism derived from his confidence that Americans were unusually vigilant, but it was frequently clouded by his concern that such vigilance was unnatural to most people. Chapter 4 contains several important claims about Jefferson's conception of the public. For Steele, scholars have been led astray by Jefferson's comments concerning the "natural aristocracy" and by his turn to partisan organization. The first was subordinated to an educated and capable citizenry. But "the real problem was finding the public" (157). With [End Page 561] respect to the second, wards were better than parties, because "Jefferson's public would be engaged in maximum participation in and would express its legitimate voice through government at all levels rather than through extragovernmental organizations so celebrated in American mythology" (165). It is in this context that Steele treats slavery. There are...

Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves by Henry Wiencek (review)

Reviewed by: Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves by Henry Wiencek Douglas R. Egerton (bio) Keywords Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, Slavery, Race Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. By Henry Wiencek. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Pp. 336. Cloth, $28.00.) Henry Wiencek, the author of An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York, 2003), here takes on the far more daunting task of investigating Thomas Jefferson's lifelong entanglement with race and unfree labor. Compared to the uncomplicated, straightforward soldier whose military service and subsequent political career revealed a slow but steady retreat from slavery, the enigmatic master of Monticello makes for a far more elusive subject. As journalist Jon Meacham's recent biography, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York, 2012), suggests, Jefferson's views on race and his refusal to divest himself of a practice he consistently denounced are nearly impossible stories to untangle. Meacham's unfortunate solution is to say almost nothing about slavery over the course of 500 pages. Wiencek bravely wades into this thicket; but in the end, Jefferson all but defeats him as well. Master of the Mountain exhibits all of the virtues and vices of popular scholarship. Wiencek writes exceedingly well, and he has a sure eye for irony, a gift clearly required by the topic at hand. Lay readers and undergraduate students will enjoy the lively prose, and at 275 pages of text, this volume is considerably shorter than Wiencek's previous study. But most readers of this journal will find little new here, and specialists in early national slavery may regard Wiencek's effort as simplistic, lacking in nuance, and oddly deficient in both primary and secondary sources. Most historians who have examined Jefferson's interconnected public and private policies on slavery have depicted his life as a depressing [End Page 557] retreat from a brief, early antislavery stance. Shortly after election to the House of Burgesses in 1769, he drafted a bill overturning the 1723 ban on private manumissions. In Wiencek's retelling of this famous episode, the public condemnation of the senior colleague who introduced the bill on Jefferson's behalf warned him of the dangers of getting too far out in front of popular sentiment. Jefferson then inherited his father-in-law's debts, co-signed a bankrupt's note, and, doubting he could ever achieve solvency with free wage labor, spent the rest of his long life refusing to live within his means while rationalizing his ownership of black Americans. To that familiar saga, Wiencek adds what he believes to be an overlooked but key 1792 epiphany, in which Jefferson calculated a small profit each year on the birth of black children. Wiencek dubs this "Jefferson's 4 percent theorem" and suggests that the figure was based on "a phenomenon he had perceived at Monticello but never actually measured" (8-9). Although Wiencek never mentions this fact, the sum remained unmeasured as Jefferson was then in Philadelphia, far from his account books, and his rough notation—which mostly pertains to comparative costs of English and American labor, wheat prices, and the cost of mutton relative to beef—was done at Washington's request in response to one of the president's correspondents. Since Wiencek is generally unable to factor this scribble into Jefferson's overall plantation management or public policies, any discussion of it vanishes for most of the book, reappearing only near the end (246). Jefferson's ill-fated ruminations on skin complexion and biology in his Notes on the State of Virginia are hardly underanalyzed, and numerous historians have previously chronicled those white and black Virginians who were far more progressive when it came to race relations. Wiencek goes further, however, by suggesting that Jefferson penned his Notes just as his state "came close to outlawing the continuation of slavery" (48). Sadly, it did not. The fact that many planters, including Washington, took advantage of the 1782 law that allowed for individual manumission hardly indicates that the legislature came anywhere near to passing an act for gradual emancipation. Wiencek admits as much eighteen pages later, when he observes that historian...

Jefferson's shadow: the story of his science

Hundreds, even thousands, of books have been written about Thomas Jefferson's many accomplishments as statesman, leader of men, country farmer, inventor, lawyer, architect and philosopher. But until now, no author has focused on the important role of science in Jefferson's public and private life. In this remarkable new book, Keith Thomson reintroduces us to Jefferson's eighteenth-century world and reveals for the first time how Jefferson used science, thought about it, contributed to it, and became the leading scientific intellectual of his time. With a storyteller's gift, Thomson shows us a new side of Jefferson. He answers an intriguing series of questions: How was Jefferson's view of the sciences reflected in his political philosophy and his vision of America's future? How did science intersect with his religion? Did he make any original contributions to scientific knowledge? And he illuminates the particulars of Jefferson's scientific endeavours. Thomson discusses which of Jefferson's theories have withstood the test of time, his interest in the practical applications of science to societal problems, his leadership in the use of scientific methods in agriculture, and how he helped to launch at least four sciences in America: geography, paleontology, climatology and scientific archaeology. A collection of marvellous illustrations, including some of Jefferson's own sketches and inventions, completes this impressively researched book.

Protecting the Wilderness: Comments on Howe's The Garden in the Wilderness

“And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, . . . set up the tabernacle of the tent of the congregation. . . . put therein the ark of the testimony . . . bring in the candlestick, and light the lamps thereof.” No, I am not going to preach a Puritan sermon to you. I want only to remind you of the Puritan in Roger Williams who said the words that provide the title of the book under consideration. The words come from Williams's debate with John Cotton over church government: “When they [or the those who desired to Christianize the world through the use of worldly power] have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God had ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made His garden a wilderness.” For Mark deWolfe Howe, Williams's “theological wall of separation” represents the evangelical impulse in American religion and is an important source for understanding American law concerning church and state. A key contribution of Howe's monograph was to remind its readers that not only Jefferson's sense of natural law and individual rights but also Williams's congregational and biblical notions informed the First Amendment religion clauses. Howe finds fault with the Supreme Court's ignoring this dual lineage and favoring only Jefferson's Enlightenment view. For Howe, the modern Court's use of Jefferson's language to impute due process values to the religion clauses “distorts their manifest objectives” to grant religion constitutionally protected status—a status distinct from other forms of conscience, not least irreligion. These other forms of conscience are, he argues, protected by other constitutional guarantees, such as speech, press, and association.

Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union

DURING THE WINTER OF 1860-1861, PRESIDENT JAMES BUCHANAN, facing what prove to be the great crisis of the Union, argued, on the one hand, secession was illegal and unconstitutional and, on the other, the federal government had no constitutional right to coerce the seceded states back into the Union. Even if coercion were constitutional, Buchanan argued, it violate the spirit of the Union for the remaining states to make war on the others. The Union had to remain alive in the affections of the people, and their support could not be forced by arms. (1) Buchanan's argument paid silent homage to Thomas Jefferson's original notion of a voluntary union based on consent, affection, and interest rather than force. (2) So it seems natural to assume Buchanan's response to the crisis approximate Jefferson's own, had he lived to see it. Many historians go further and suggest, with Joseph J. Ellis, had he lived, gone with the Confederacy. (3) Of course, there is no DNA test to reconcile the counterfactual problem of what Jefferson would have done. But it seems worth reevaluating Jefferson's views based on his response to some of the greatest crises of union during his own lifetime. Admittedly, these episodes were less consequential than the crisis of 1860-1861, because disunion ultimately failed in the earlier examples. Nevertheless, Jefferson's response to them, as well as his conception of union generally, suggests a different conclusion than the standard view: Jefferson believed the executive had the duty to enforce federal law throughout the Union and the Union had a natural right to coerce seceding states and force them back into the fold. To be sure, Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions been understood as giving sanction to later secession movements, and it is not always a simple matter to reconcile Jefferson's views on coercion with his stance in the 1790s. Nevertheless, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions did not advocate--or even broach--secession, and there were substantial qualitative differences between them and the later claims made by some New England Federalists and South Carolina nullifiers, despite the claims to Jefferson's legacy made by the latter group in particular. (4) Much of the way we thought about and understood the 1790s has been distorted by our viewing period through the lens of later events, particularly those of the 1830s and, especially, 1860-1861. (5) This essay will focus more narrowly, then, on Jefferson's reflections on the right of the Union to coerce what he sometimes called refractory sister states and on what he actually did in the face of perceived threats to union. (6) Jefferson's thought on the problem of union first took shape during the Confederation period, during and after the Revolution. Jefferson spent a good deal of this period out of the country as American minister to France, attempting to gain commercial concessions. But he was continuously frustrated by the inability of Congress to formulate a coherent commercial policy make such a treaty attractive to the French. Repeatedly during this time, Jefferson argued the Union had the right to coerce states, by force if necessary, to provide revenue to Congress. The inability of the Confederation government to compel states to provide revenue was one of the problems lead to the writing of the Constitution. But Jefferson argued the Confederation simply needed to act on its natural right to collect taxes. It has been so often said, as to be generally believed, he complained to Edward Carrington in 1787, that Congress no power by the confederation to enforce any thing, e.g. contributions of money. But, Jefferson argued, [i]t was not necessary to give them power expressly; they it by the law of nature. Jefferson explained his reasoning: When two nations make a compact, there results to each a power of compelling the other to execute it. …

REVISITING THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF AMERICAN RADICALISM: AN ALTERNATIVE TO EMPIRE FOR A NEW GENERATION

Scholar Michael Hardt has recently published a collection of Thomas Jefferson's writings. He suggests that Jefferson's political views often work in favor of local people's movements. The challenge is to recover the best of Jefferson so that the Left might avoid a top‐down organizing approach that frequently disarms workers and ordinary citizens, despite the best intentions. Historian and labor lawyer Staughton Lynd long ago argued for local, alternative institutions as a means by which workers’ movements could gain the rights they desire based on an American revolutionary tradition. This article examines Lynd's political philosophy and the potential of decentralization to empower people's movements. It explores the meaning of unemployment councils in the 1930s to the more recent Zapatista movement. While the article takes a theoretical approach to organizing, it holds practical implications for those concerned with worker empowerment.

The Essential Thomas Jefferson

The Essential Thomas Jefferson, Jean M. Yarbrough, ed., Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2006, pp. xxxvii, 287.This is a useful collection of Jefferson's political writings well suited to undergraduate and graduate courses in political theory and especially in American political thought. There are twelve public papers and addresses (including “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” and, of course, the Declaration of Independence, excerpts from the “Notes on Virginia,” and 44 letters to various correspondents. This compares favourably with an older and larger anthology edited by the distinguished Jefferson scholar Merrill Peterson (The Portable Thomas Jefferson, New York: Viking, 1975), which features roughly the same number of public papers and addresses but also contains the “Notes on Virginia” in its entirety and some 75 letters. While the Peterson volume is more inclusive, Yarbrough's decision to excerpt the “Notes” is understandable, given how few chapters bear directly on political questions, and the selected correspondence provides an ample survey of Jefferson's views on a variety of topics.

David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (review)

Reviewed by: David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America David Allan David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America. By Mark G. Spencer. Pp. xii, 534. ISBN 1 58046 118 2. Rochester and Woodbridge: University of Rochester Press and Boydell & Brewer. 2005. £65.00. One central truism about historical scholarship is challenged head-on by Mark Spencer's new book. This is that all answers are necessarily provisional, subject to endless adjustment and further revision in the light of subsequent evidence and refinements in argument. That David Hume in Eighteenth-Century America is likely to brook no such contingency will be obvious to all who read it. For with exemplary commitment to the recovery and analysis of previously unknown data, it will scotch forever a series of assumptions, important to an understanding of the relationship between the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Revolution, that have hitherto enjoyed remarkable currency. The key claim that Spencer exposes to critical scrutiny, and then proceeds comprehensively to demolish with overwhelming empirical force, is the belief that eighteenth-century Americans either did not know much about David Hume's writings or else flatly rejected the intellectual credentials of this most sceptical of contemporary philosophers and historians. The fons et origo of this emphasis upon Hume's peripheral role in revolutionary America is undoubtedly an eminent one. Indeed, it was none other than Thomas Jefferson himself, who famously, in a judgment repeatedly cited by modern scholars, maintained that the Scot's ideas were both pernicious and fundamentally flawed. Yet Jefferson's views, as Spencer shows, although at their most vitriolic and dismissive after 1807, had evolved in significant ways over time. Curiously, Jefferson had been a frequent and enthusiastic reader of Hume's History of England in particular between the 1760s and the 1780s. He even bought his own copy of a new edition of that work for the library at Monticello as late as 1791. Rather, his later distaste was actually the result of his growing unease at the sheer attractiveness of Hume's political ideas to so many contemporary Americans, as well as fear of their seductive power in potentially reinforcing Tory principles in the newly-independent country. To Jefferson, Hume, whom he had once read sympathetically, had increasingly come to seem a substantial threat to the republic. The cornerstone of Spencer's case against taking the Jeffersonian rejection of Hume at face value is an exhaustive study of the publication history and American reception of Hume's writings through the second half of the eighteenth century. Based on an analysis of the holdings of works by individuals and institutions, he is able to demonstrate conclusively, and to provide in his Appendix A a systematic presentation of the evidence, that Hume's output was not only thoroughly familiar but also entirely welcome to very many Americans. From 1750, when the Charleston Library Society in South Carolina received its copy of the Philosophical Essays (1748)—the first recorded Hume text in the colonies—to the late 1820s, when libraries as different as that of the undergraduate Linonian Society at Yale and the town library at Roxbury, Massachusetts, had copies of the History, it is clear that American readers of all descriptions regarded Hume's works as amongst the most popular, attractive and instructive works of the age. Appendix B, meanwhile, further reinforces Spencer's argument, providing a tabulation of one of Hume's readerships in particular: those who subscribed to the first American edition of the History, Robert Campbell's Philadelphia edition, published in six volumes in 1795 and 1796. The individuals studied here were plainly significant figures in late eighteenth-century American [End Page 348] society, including a bevy of leading Pennsylvania merchants, lawyers, doctors and teachers, but also many keen readers from beyond the Alleghenies and others from as far north as Boston. Intriguingly, they were also a mixed bunch, politically speaking: some conservatives and Federalists paid handsomely to get their hands on Hume, but it is evident that many others had impeccable revolutionary credentials and were ardent Jeffersonians. Whatever else this rich body of new evidence reveals, it certainly despatches H.F. May's often-quoted assertion—about as far as serious understanding of this...

Environmental issues in American history: a reference guide with primary documents

Controversy surrounding environmental issues is not a recent development in American history. Since the time of the early settlers, issues concerning the environment have plagued certain groups of Americans. In this exhaustively researched study, primary documents support different sides of various questions, such as the use of water as an energy source, deforestation, gold mining in California, and the emergence of wildlife conservation. High school and college students will not only find this book extremely comprehensive, but will also find its heated discussions exceptionally engaging. Some of the major topics covered include differences between the way Native Americans and early settlers treated the land, The Land Ordinance of 1785, Thomas Jefferson's views about the land, the commercial progress of New England river valleys, establishing the Adirondack Forest Preserve in 1885, Theodore Roosevelt's thoughts on forest conservation, the pros and cons of hydraulic gold mining, the near-extinction of the North American bison, andThe Lacey Act Magoc's book will prove an essential asset for all American history students.

The Mechanisms of Monticello: Saving Labor in Jefferson's America

In November of 1812, Dr. Robert Patterson wrote to the recently retired Thomas Jefferson relating the peculiar and amusing events surrounding fellow Philadelphia native Charles Redheffer and his ill-fated perpetual motion machine. Patterson, a friend who shared Jefferson's fascination for machines and scientific inquiry, would have recalled the throngs of intrigued spectators who had paid admission to witness the demonstration of Redheffer's ambitious device, for throughout the American industrial revolution, a machine that would operate in perpetuity without an external, expendable power source represented the holy grail of mechanics, engineers, and optimistic tinkerers of all stripes. Indeed, Jefferson himself received dozens of letters from would-be designers of such fanciful machinery. But Redheffer's machine employed a heretofore unexamined source of generation. What paying customers saw, through a barred window, was a gravity-driven pendulum affair that presumably provided the energy to power another, separate machine through a set of interlocking gears. Hidden from view, however, and locked in an adjacent windowless room was an old bearded man, connected to Redheffer's contrivance via a long catgut belt and actually supplying power through a simple hand crank. Redheffer, it soon became clear, was feeding the poor fellow bread and water and forcing him to operate the crank drive all day long—thankless drudge work for meager wages. A bemused Jefferson noted that the "sham machinery" relied on [End Page 377] an "extensive delusion" among the general public concerning the efficacy of such inventions, for "the almighty himself could not construct a machine of perpetual motion while the laws exist which he has prescribed for the government of matter in our system; that the equilibrium established by him between cause and effect must be suspended to effect that purpose." Jefferson's response, although conversational and almost jocular, reveals a startling number of the core issues surrounding how Americans came to regard the forces of mechanization and enslavement in the fledgling union. And Jefferson's personal views not only reveal the interconnection between the two but also exemplify the various intellectual and ideological attempts to reconcile a crucial cultural dilemma, defining many of the most basic debates regarding the limits of liberty, the nature of human agency, and the proper direction of American society.1 Redheffer's thwarted deception illustrates nicely many of the themes that confronted Americans at the turn of the nineteenth century: the intoxicating promise of progressive thought, especially in science and the mechanical arts, to deliver a new order through the manipulation of labor and production; a burgeoning ethos of exhibitionism that publicized and transferred into spectacle many of the more controversial aspects of American culture; the subtly intrinsic interconnection between machinery and slavery (or the veritable enslavement of an indispensable yet increasingly degraded workforce, whatever its legal status); and the intellectualization, rationalization, and aestheticization of these themes by important cultural and literary figures. To interpret Jefferson's views and recognize their connection to the main currents of thought in the intellectual and cultural life of early America is to confront an enigmatic figure primarily through his language. It is a task that must appreciate the curious nature of literacy and communication during Jefferson's lifetime and one that must also recognize the rhetorical power and cultural force of Jefferson's public texts as well as the more searching, introspective character of his personal [End Page 378] correspondences and documents. Jefferson's letter to Patterson exemplifies an intuitive association between the textual and the material, between his rhetorical methods and the mechanical essence of the spectacle he is describing and interpreting. What brings these two strands together, in the end, is the manner in which Jefferson and Americans of this era proposed to save labor, to produce capital and goods more effectively and efficiently through the twin modes of technology and slavery. I wish to demonstrate that Jefferson's lifelong struggle to make sense of and to articulate...

Establishing Congress: Congress, the Removal to Washington, D.C., and the Election of 1800 (review)

Establishing Congress: Congress, the Removal to Washington, D.C., and the Election of 1800. By Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon, eds. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 225. Cloth, $44.95.)Establishing Congress is the fourth volume in the History of Congress, 1789-1801 Series, edited by Kenneth R. Bowling of the Documentary History of the First Federal Congress Project, and Donard R. Kennon, chief historian of the United States Capitol Historical Society. The contributors include documentary editors, political scientists, and historians, as well as an archivist and a librarian.In the least original essay in the volume, Cal Jillson portrays the presidential contest of 1800 as a struggle between two conflicting visions for America. According to Jillson, Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson's positive view of human nature led him to stand for an agricultural republic of yeoman farmers where government remained democratic and close to the people. Federalist Alexander Hamilton, harboring a more pessimistic view of human nature, preferred an urban industrial nation ordered from above by a strong federal government dominated by an energetic chief executive. John H. Aldrich sees the election of 1800 as being truly revolutionary precisely because it marked the first transfer of power from one party to an opposing one. Aldrich analyzes electoral procedures to demonstrate how very partisan the campaign was. For the first time, electors were bound to vote for either Federalists (John Adams and Charles C. Pinckney) or Republicans (Jefferson and Aaron Burr). In each state, moreover, partisan legislatures promoted their preferred candidates by choosing either winner-take-all or district-by-district voting and either popular or state legislative selection of electors. William C. diGiacomantonio addresses the aftermath of the election, when the lame-duck Federalists passed the Organic Act of 1801. Like the much more famous Judiciary Act of 1801, the Organic Act represented a last-ditch Federalist attempt to leave a permanent imprint on the federal government. The act implemented the hitherto unexercised enumerated Congressional power of exclusive jurisdiction over the federal district. Federalists pushed the measure through at the eleventh hour, fearing the Republicans would not so empower the federal government.In the only entry focused on the federal government's removal from Philadelphia to Washington in 1800, Elaine C. Everly and Howard H. Wehmann, unlike previous historians, look not to Congress's 1802 report on removal, in which partisan Republicans unfairly blasted the Federalists for corruption. Instead, Everly and Wehmann mine hitherto neglected Executive Department documents from the removal itself.C.M. Harris contends that as secretary of state and later as president, Jefferson subtly and indirectly imposed his republican ideals on the design of the U.S. Capitol. For example, Jefferson quietly substituted the name Capitol (barkening back to the principal building of the Roman Republic) in place of Congress Hall in Peter Charles L'Enfant's city plan. Jefferson also opposed entombing George Washington under the rotunda, and sought to make the House of Representatives chamber into a Newtonian Temple where legislators would be influenced by the Enlightenment's laws of nature.Rubil Morales-Vazquez examines the long campaign to build a monument to George Washington in the city that bears his name. …

Stendhal: La Chartreuse de Parme, and: Concordances des Chroniques italiennes (review)

Reviewed by: Stendhal: La Chartreuse de Parme, and: Concordances des Chroniques italiennes James T. Day Jefferson, Ann. Stendhal: La Chartreuse de Parme. Critical Guides to French Texts. London: Grant and Cutler, 2003. Pp. 87. ISBN-0-7293-0440-X Concordances des Chroniques italiennes. Jean-Jacques Hamm and Gregory Lessard, eds. New York: Olms-Weidmann, 2002. 2 vols. Pp. 1048. ISBN3-487-11757-6; 3-487-11758-4 By their striking dissimilarity, these two works are testimony to the enduring vitality of Stendhal studies. Ann Jefferson's diminutive volume capably addresses the needs of undergraduates who are still discovering why Stendhal's last masterpiece is such an important novel, while the hefty tomes of Jean-Jacques Hamm and Gregory Lessard are not so much intended to be read as to furnish textual data to specialists studying language use and thematic patterns in one of Stendhal's less well-known works, his Italian stories. Considering the many shelves of commentary available on La Chartreuse de Parme, Jefferson's manual is remarkable for its blend of concision and thoroughness. In straightforward prose, Jefferson sheds essential light on the novel's origins, on the puzzle of its narrative structure, on point of view, narrative voice, attributes of the characters, the theme of writing, the status of art in the work, and Stendhal's notion of style. Citing Balzac's published response to the Chartreuse, she locates the originality of Stendhal's novel in its improvizational composition, which stands in stark contrast to the blueprinted organization of most Balzacian fiction. Without reducing the Chartreuse in any way to a series of narrative riffs, Jefferson argues effectively for using Stendhal's improvization to account for most of the work's salient features, including its paradoxes, anomalies, and imponderables. The novel betokens improvization, as she points out, in its subordination of plot to action, for action thrives on chance encounters and requires little or no preparation. The spontaneity of the Italian characters, moreover, fits well with the narrator's discursive style, which tends to rely on motifs and formulaic features that are consistent with the traditions of oral narrative. Frequent shifts in point of view, comic reversals, and the narrator's equivocal judgments contribute to the improvisational tone, as do the unreliable eyewitnesses who cannot explain the incongruities of Waterloo. With so little interest in plotting as a means of achieving a desired outcome, Stendhal beams his most flattering light on characters who seek above all to enjoy the present moment. Jefferson offers useful commentary on the difference between "personality" and the superior attributes of une âme passionnée and provides incisive character analysis of Fabrice, Gina, Clelia, and Mosca. In a final chapter, she notes that the characters spend considerable time sending messages and reading letters, such that an "urgent, responsive, impromptu quality of writing" (76) reflects the improvisatory composition of the novel itself. In this spirit, art and natural landscapes, much like language, can be a medium of communication to lofty souls. [End Page 447] Stendhal's style, as Jefferson concludes, is more conversational than literary, and its effectiveness, paradoxically, depends greatly on what is not spoken. This handy guide to the Chartreuse will be useful to all readers, professors of literature included, who seek a deeper understanding of "one of the most discon-certing novels in French literature" (9). Stendhal's modernity, in Jefferson's view, is more accidental than prescient: the Chartreuse has baroque qualities and looks backward as much as it looks to the future. Specialists may take issue with this position, or with the lack of attention to other interpretational perspectives: biographical, political, symbolic, psychoanalytical, and so on. But as a serious student guide (supporting quotations appear in untranslated French!), this slim volume provides an exceptionally coherent overview of La Chartreuse de Parme. The concordance by Hamm and Lessard is no less admirable. Having completed similar projects on Armance (1991), Le Rouge et le noir (1998), and La Chartreuse de Parme (2000), they have now provided scholars with a resource that lists all occurrences of more than 9000 words in the Chroniques italiennes, from "a" to "zélés." Each occurrence appears in the middle of some 15 words of...

A New Republican Order, Letter by Letter

The article examines Thomas Jefferson's correspondence around the time of the election of 1800 and in the first months of his presidency, using these letters to elucidate Jefferson's view of politics, leadership and governance. Jefferson employed correspondence and letter writing, often under the guise of disinterestedness, as a way to disseminate news to his political supporters. They were also a vehicle for solidifying a party that shared his governing vision. After his election, Jefferson resorted to letter writing, occasionally concealing his identity as author at post-time to prevent interception, to shape a cabinet composed of sympathetic Jeffersonian republicans. Jefferson thus used the mails to craft a government and a political agenda that reflected his ideological position. Meanwhile Jefferson was dealing with the reciprocal correspondence from a broad constituency of ordinary Americans that reached his desk, including letters of support, congratulatory epistles and petitions for jobs.