Jefferson was always committed to the rights to revolt and to secede. They are of the gist of his Declaration of Independence and his sanction of bottom-up government. Republican government, he often says—especially in three singular letters in 1816—is government by the vox populi (lit., voice of the people). He writes to Samuel Kercheval (12 July 1816):
Governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of the people, and execute it.
That is a bold, and loud, claim which invites us to take embodying and executing the will of the people conditions needed for sound, republican governing. Remove those conditions, then a government is no longer Jeffersonian republican. And so, when a government, parochial or federal, fails to reflect the vox populi, the people have a right to revolt or secede.
While advocating those rights, it is worth underscoring that Jefferson dreaded secession. The concern of disunion, of undoing all that the American Revolutionists had fought valiantly to gain, was always worrisome. Jefferson wrote in the first draft of a letter to Elbridge Gerry (13 May 1797):
I would rather even join my brethren in European wars if that alone can save us from disunion among ourselves.
That sentiment is peculiar, seemingly contradictory, for Jeffersonian republicanism was designed as an irenic alternative to the amaranthine broils of European nations. Moreover, Jefferson ever championed minimal, demassified government—a relatively loose linkage of states—so why should the threat of secession have been such a frightening botheration? Why should the unity of the fledgling nation be so crucial to Jefferson?
Fear of disunion was persistent throughout his tenures as vice-president and president. When John Taylor campaigned for secession on account of the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson opted to stay the course. Moreover, Jefferson continually worried about the secession of the New England states, urged to secession by Massachusetts congressman Josiah Quincy, especially during the embargo against England in Jefferson’s second term as president.
There too is something unsettling, even panicky so, about the notion of disunion for Jefferson. He writes often as if disunion is a moral abomination that trumps all other conceivable moral abominations. That is graspable, given the struggles that members of the Continental Congress endured on the road to American independence and nationhood.
What precisely was at stake with the fledgling union of states?
As Colin Bonwick notes in “Jefferson as Nationalist,” there was no “natural unity among the thirteen colonies,” as “each was politically and legally distinct from its neighbors, and each possessed its own social and commercial characteristics and thus had divergent interests.” So, one of the chief functions of the federal government was to “discourage centrifugal tendencies among states and promote their convergent interests.” That scenario was similar to that of the Greek poleis (city-states) which banded together, though each was an independent political entity, to fight off the massive Persian army early in the fifth century BCE (490–479).
It follows that the federal government—thin in terms of its numbers, mechanisms, and costs—needed to possess at least the persuasive capacities to encourage allegiance to some common ideals to preserve unity. Yet, development of an American union after the Revolutionary War was an option, not an imperative. In Jefferson’s eyes, the key to discouraging centrifugal tendencies of states was the federal government’s promotion of citizens’ rights, and for that, a bill of rights, was no mere embellishment to the Constitution, but a needed addition to it. Contrary to Madison, Jefferson realized that human rights could not merely be assumed; they needed to be written into the laws.
There is more to the story. Jefferson was clear that republicanism was an “experiment” or “great experiment”—a term he often employed—I have spotted over 20 instances in his writings—and a topic worth discussing fully on another occasion. To Archibald Stuart (23 Dec. 1791), Jefferson says:
Tho’ the experiment [of republican government] has not yet had a long enough course to shew us from which quarter encroachments are most to be feared, yet it is easy to foresee from the nature of things that the encroachments of the state governments will tend to an excess of liberty which will correct itself … while those of the general government will tend to monarchy. … I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
He writes to James Madison (24 Dec. 1824):
We owe every other sacrifice to ourselves, to our federal brethren, and to the world at large, to pursue with temper and perseverance the great experiment which shall prove that man is capable of living in society, governing itself by laws self-imposed, and securing to it’s members the enjoyment of life, liberty, property and peace; and further to shew that even when the government of it’s choice shall shew a tendency to degeneracy, we are not at once to despair but that the will & the watchfulness of it’s sounder parts will reform it’s aberrations, recall it to original and legitimate principles and restrain it within the rightful limits of self-government. And these are the objects of this Declaration and Protest.
Jefferson did not know that government vox populi would work. He merely knew that prior “aristocratic” governments did not work—at least, they did little to advance the wellbeing of their “citizens.” He also believed, as he again stated in his Second Inaugural Address and pace Montesquieu, that a government vox populi could be large and strong: size being (roughly) positively correlated with strength: an extraordinary statement. He articulates in his Second Inaugural Address what can be dubbed the Principle of Republican Strength:
The larger our association, the less will it be shaken by local passions.
The key was bottom-up governing: the nation comprising states, states comprising counties, and counties comprising wards, and the federal government staying out of the affairs of its citizens at the lower levels of governing. Thus, we might say that Jefferson the scientist loathed the thought of secession because it disallowed the possibility of putting to the test his “republican” principle. Jefferson the scientist—and he often said that science was dearer to him than politics—was obsessed with knowing whether his republican experiment would work.
Enjoy the accompanying video….
