It is well-known today that Thomas Jefferson considered his Declaration of Independence, his Bill for Religious Freedom, and his University of Virginia to be his greatest contributions to humanity. That is why he had those deeds inscribed proudly on his tombstone.
Yet perhaps his greatest legacy, mostly flouted today because of scholarly indifference to the large moral dimension of his political thinking and because of the tendency of scholars today to paint Jefferson to be a bigot, concerns his hatred of political bigotry.
In response to an inquiry of Francis Hopkinson concerning his political orientation, Jefferson, still in France, replies (13 Mar. 1789):
I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
He then adds that he is even more removed from the Antifederalists. He is, here, referring to the Federalist-Antifederalist debate concerning ratification of the Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the Republican Party, was not a political partisan.
How can that be the case?
Upon his return to the American political scene after his tenure in Paris, Jefferson tells Edward Rutledge (24 June 1797) of the heated bipartisan climate of the time:
The passions are too high at present, to be cooled in our day. You & I have formerly seen warm debates and high political passions. But gentlemen of different politics would then speak to each other, & separate the business of the Senate from that of society. It is not so now. Men who have been intimate all their lives, cross the streets to avoid meeting, & turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats. This may do for young men with whom passion is enjoyment. But it is afflicting to peaceable minds. Tranquillity is the old man’s milk.
What are we to make of the continued political bickering between Jefferson and Hamilton, when both were part of Washington’s cabinet?
I have consistently maintained that while Hamilton was arguing for political space—strong, centralized, discretionary government would be politically efficient and effective apropos of domestic and foreign concerns—Jefferson was arguing for philosophical space. For Jefferson, the mutual demands of Lockean liberalism—freedom from governmental intrusion, regard for rights, the right of revolution against tyrannical government, etc.—and the “republicanism” found in the ancient Greeks and Romans as well as in the moral-sense and moral-sentiment theorists of his day made the wellbeing of individuals in a polity and the polity itself mutually entailing—hence, my Liberal Eudaimonism. In short, a political entity thrives if and only if the individuals thrive and the polity thrives.
What did Jefferson think of partisan bickering in his day?
Jefferson settled on the view that it was due to “the nature of man.” He tells John Taylor of Caroline (1 June 1798) that nature, and he is certainly like a good Hippocratic physician not excluding the effects of the environment (e.g., climate), has made two sorts of men of “opposite parties, and [of] violent dissensions and discords.” At any one time, one must prevail over the other. Yet that is no reason for schism.
If on a temporary superiority of the one party, the other is to resort to a scission of the Union, no federal government can ever exist. If to rid ourselves of the present rule of Massachusetts and Connecticut, we break the Union, will the evil stop there? Suppose the New England States alone cut off, will our nature be changed? Are we not men still to the south of that, and with all the passions of men? Immediately, we shall see a Pennsylvania and a Virginia party arise in the residuary confederacy, and the public mind will be distracted with the same party spirit. What a game too will the one party have in their hands, by eternally threatening the other that unless they do so and so, they will join their northern neighbors. If we reduce our Union to Virginia and North Carolina, immediately the conflict will be established between the representatives of these two States, and they will end by breaking into their simple units.
Men are my nature, he sums, disposed to bickering. Should it turn out that one party comes to destroy the other and assimilate its members, then the members of the victorious party will soon disagree among themselves and split, and that happened after Jefferson left the presidency. Moreover, should it turn out that a government is elected that is negligent of rights, then “we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost.”
Jefferson, we know, was soft-spoken, fond of quiet conversation, and illy disposed to public displays—speeches especially. Yet as a dyed-in-the-wool progressivist, he was ever wedded to conciliation, given the quarrelsome nature of people. There could be no hint of progress without conciliation. He says to Marquis de Lafayette (6 May 1789), “People can never agree without some sacrifices.” He adds in a letter to Benjamin Waring et al. (23 Mar. 1801) upon taking the office of the presidency:
In every country where man is free to think and to speak, differences of opinion will arise from difference of perception, and the imperfection of reason; but these differences when permitted, as in this happy country, to purify themselves by free discussion, are but passing clouds overspreading our land transiently, and leaving our horizon more bright and serene.
The remedy for discord—and sensible it is—is free discussion, and free discussion demands mutual respect for the thoughts of all discussants as well as a willingness to concede that one’s own thoughts might be wrong.
Jefferson’s greatest writing, in my opinion, is his First Inaugural Address. Having survived the muckraking in his campaign for America’s first office, it was thought by all that he would address the heavy actions of the Adams’ High Federalists (e.g., Sedition Act and Midnight Appointments) in his inaugural speech. Instead, he overpassed those actions and said in an eloquent, foudroyant manner:
Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have been called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
The problems today are, first, reason is greatly misprized and, second, few persons enter into any discordant discussion with the thought that they might be wrong. Politicians in our day spew forth unreasoned claims which are swallowed unthinkingly by adherents of their party. When adherents of one party, say R, engage in argument with those of another, say D, the result is predictably rancor, even hatred, because members of D have not recognized the rightness of the claims of members of R, and conversely. The ancient Romans had a practice, an inheritance from the Greeks, of arguing in utramque partem—of arguing thoroughly both sides of an issue—and a practice that academic institutions ought to revisit.
Jefferson’s greatest political legacy, I maintain, is his sentiment that republicanism is not viable without cool, reasoned discussion of differences of opinion—an opportunity, as Socrates once stated, of abandoning falsehood and gaining truth—and then conciliation, if differences cannot be overcome. For any thriving polity to advance, there must be a commitment toward conciliation, till truth can be disclosed and accepted.
In this election year in our country, I have noticed in attempted discussions with others both sides of American politic spectrum that reasoned discussion is impossible. Things become even worse when I relate to them that I am not partisan, because I do not need anyone else, thinking for me on significant issues. In agreement with Thomas Jefferson, I maintain that political partisanship is an “addiction [that] is the last degradation of a free and moral agent”—a surrender of personal autonomy to governmental authorities, on the Left or Right, who know better than I do what is in my own best interest and how I ought to think on political issues.
Why is it that we are so afraid to think for ourselves?
Freud addresses that in his 1921 work, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” There is comfort in numbers, in belonging to a group—“I must be right because so many others think as I do”—but that security comes at a prodigious price: loss of personhood, loss of autonomy, and surrender of my own rationality to the mob-mentality of any group, impervious to reason and quick to fury when anyone challenges any of its core principles.
I taught philosophy for over 30 years and I ever prodded students to think—not to think like me, but to think. That was a Sisyphean task. Learning to think rationally and with integrity is a life-altering experience, but it demands that thinkers take ownership of their thoughts and actions. Taking ownership is an unsettling notion.
I end with Thomas Jefferson. Because not every difference of opinion is a difference of principle, morality-upstanding persons can disagree politically without rancor, without hatred. We have only to reconsider the friendship of Jefferson and Adams—two men whose political views could not have been more different and yet two men who cared deeply about the wellbeing of the other.
