Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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James P. Young

perpetual law so that every constitution should expire after the length of a

generation or nineteen years (Jefferson 1984,p.963; Shklar 1998,p.96).

But it is the conception of rights that stands out. This idea was linked

in his mind to a deep aversion to monarchy that permeates his work cou-

pled with a constitutional theory that was strongly opposed to centralised

government or a strong executive power. This was the core of his concep-

tion of democratic republicanism. Personal considerations aside, his hatred

for the Federalist Party grew out of his belief that it was made up of

secret monarchists. To him, most of the Federalist policies, embodied by

Alexander Hamilton operating as party leader from his position as President

Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, including the commitment to a

national bank, the hopes for a strong manufacturing sector in the economy,

the insistence on a loose constr uction of the terms of the constitution, the

urban roots of the Federalist political base, and Hamilton’s belief in a stand-

ing army, coupled with his presumed militarism, all pointed in a direction

Jefferson desperately wanted to avoid.

For his part Jefferson favoured an agrarian society. In Notes on the State

of Virginia he wrote, ‘Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people

of God.’ He believed corruption among agrarians to be unknown. Those

who desert the soil risk becoming dependants, a condition that breeds

‘subservience and venality . . . The mobs of great cities add just so much

to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the

human body’ (Jefferson 1984,pp.290–1). And in a letter to James Madison

he argued that as long as there was open land in America, national virtue

would be secure. To him the conclusion was clear: the development of large

cities must be avoided. Therefore, he argued, ‘Let our workshops remain in

Europe’ (Jefferson 1984,p.918).

Jefferson and his followers saw the literal construction of the constitu-

tion to be particularly crucial. As Henry Adams wrote, ‘The principle of

strict construction was the breath of his political life. The Pope could as

easily triﬂe with the doctrine of apostolic succession as Jefferson with the

limits of executive power’ (Adams 1986,p.362). An early interpretative

17 Jefferson also displayed a remarkable enthusiasm for revolution. ‘A little rebellion now and then is a

good thing’, as necessary as storms in the physical world. More ﬂamboyantly he wished never to go

more than twenty years without a rebellion. ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time

with the blood of patriots and tyrants’ (Jefferson 1984,pp.882, 911). One must suspect that these

statements were purely rhetorical since at about the same time he worried to James Madison about

the ‘instability of our laws’ (Jefferson 1984,p.918). As President he made no proposals consistent

with these views. It should also be said that as President he compiled a rather weak record as a civil

libertarian. Cf. Levy 1963.

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From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

crisis arose over the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed by the Federalist gov-

ernment in 1798 in response to French provocations. These were acts of

the national government giving it the power to deport aliens and prosecute

seditious libel. The Jeffersonian position as expressed in the Kentucky Res-

olutions drafted by Jefferson and the Virginia Resolutions drafted by James

Madison was full of portent (Jefferson 1984,pp.449–56;Madison1999,

pp. 391–2;cf.Adams1986,pp.96–9; McDonald 2000,pp.40–3). Both sets

of resolutions rested on the assumption that the American constitutional

union was founded on a compact between sovereign states which had del-

egated certain speciﬁc powers and no others to the national government.

Since, in their view, Congress had not been delegated such powers by the

states, and in fact had been forbidden such powers, the Alien and Sedition

Acts were, in Jefferson’s repeated usage, ‘altogether void and of no force’,

so that the offending legislation could be ‘nulliﬁed’ by the states, while

Madison asserted the states’ authority to ‘interpose’ their powers so as to

‘arrest the progress of the evil’. Jefferson went still further by mounting an

argument against the important constitutional clause giving Congress the

power to make ‘all laws which shall be necessary and proper’ to carry out

its vested powers. He insisted on a very narrow interpretation saying that

the clause itself, if freely interpreted, ‘goes to the destruction of all limits

prescribed to their power by the Constitution’ (Jefferson 1984,p.452).

For the next hundred year s and more, these contentions were to be central

to many of the major debates in American politics. In particular, south-

ern leaders were to use these arguments about the nature of the federal

union in the developing controversy over slavery that culminated in the

Civil War.

However, once in ofﬁce, Jefferson was far less scrupulous in the applica-

tion of his strict constructionalist principles than the rhetoric of the Virginia

and Kentucky Resolutions would lead one to expect. The major event of

Jefferson’s ﬁrst term in ofﬁce was the purchase of the Louisiana territory

from France, which even he said made ‘blank paper’ of the constitution,

not to mention of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions as well (Jefferson

18 Late in life, in a series of letters to friends, Jefferson proposed an even more radical scheme of

decentralisation, arguing that the country should be divided into wards of such size that all citizens

could attend meetings and act in person. This was to encourage a sense in the citizens of genuine,

participatory self-government. While these letters doubtless expressed his deep feelings, Jefferson

understood that the system would not work beyond the scope of New England town meetings

(Jefferson 1984,pp.1225–7, 1377–81, 1391–1402). The greatest impact of these thoughts was on

important twentieth-century thinkers such as Hannah Arendt (Arendt 1963,pp.252–60; cf. Matthews

1984,pp.81–91 and Young 1996,pp.86–7).

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James P. Young

1984,p.1140;Adams1986,p.366). And, once the territory was acquired,

he imposed a system of rule on the inhabitants that was deeply undemo-

cratic (Adams 1986,pp.381–6). The sweep of events simply overcame his

principles. The opportunity to purchase the vast territory was too tempting

as a means to further his dream of an agrarian empire for Jefferson to pass

up. In the process he displayed a ﬂagrant disregard for the ‘principles of

ninety-eight’, as they were called, and, in acquiring the territory by treaty

rather than by a constitutional amendment he undermined his commit-

ment to a strictly limited national government. This was a momentous

event. As Henry Adams observed, ‘The doctrines of “strict constr uction”

could not be considered as the doctrines of the government after they had

been abandoned in this leading case by a government controlled by strict

constructionists’ (Adams 1986,p.386). The theory remained current and

important, but it became clear that in practice it could be ignored in the

pursuit of a particular policy. Jefferson established the norm. Historically the

theory of strict construction has proved to have some considerable rhetor-

ical force, but it is rarely adhered to in a way satisfying to constitutional

purists.

But at least in the case of the Louisiana Purchase the policy Jeffer-

son pursued had merit and was successful. During his second term he

held fast to principle and the result was disaster. By nature Jefferson was a

paciﬁst, so that when it appeared that something had to be done to counter

British interference with American shipping Jefferson imposed an embargo

rather than resort to force. What followed was not what he expected. His

own southern base suffered economically and the need to turn to domestic

production to replace the cut-off of imports stimulated the manufacturing

industries of New England. Alexander Hamilton could hardly have wished

for more. By 1816 Jefferson came to understand, however grudgingly, ‘that

manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort’

(Jefferson 1984,p.1371).Intheend,heevencametoaccepttheBank

of the United States, a private institution with close connections to the

government, over whose constitutionality he had debated with Alexander

Hamilton during the administration of George Washington (Hamilton 2001,

pp. 613–46,esp.pp.613–16; Jefferson 1984,pp.416–21; McDonald 2000,

pp. 30–1). Indeed, James Madison, his successor and disciple, agreed to the

re-chartering of the Bank of the United States in 1816. On this matter,

Jefferson was the clear loser, since the Supreme Court, in the vitally signif-

icant case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), accepted Hamilton’s interpre-

tation of the necessary and proper clause of the constitution and endorsed

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From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

the bank Jefferson so distrusted, while rejecting his strict constructionist

theory of constitutional interpretation. One could argue that the expansion

of national governmental power underwritten by the holding in McCul-

loch that governmental power need only be ‘implied’ rather than explicitly

granted by the constitution is the single most important decision in the

history of American constitutional law. This opened up a theory in which

government represents the people rather than the states, a nationalist posi-

tion which in turn stimulated an enormously signiﬁcant revival of states’

rights arguments (Davis 2003,pp.49, 45–9).

Jefferson was caught up in forces beyond his control. He could neither

resist the enormous opportunity offered by Napoleon’s willingness to sell

the Louisiana territory, nor cope with the economic problems created when

he attempted to pursue his foreign aims by means of the embargo. Perhaps

the most striking interpretation of Jefferson’s presidency was offered by

Henry Adams. In effect, Adams contended, Jefferson out-federalised the

Federalists. ‘It was hard’, he wrote, ‘to see how any President could be more

Federalist than Jeffer son himself’ (Adams 1986,p.354). As Joyce Appleby

has argued, matters are really more complex than that, since Jefferson did

in fact enact a good deal of his domestic programme, so that he cannot

be said to have completely gone over to the opposition, but there is still

much to be said for the Adams thesis if we consider the constitutional

issues inherent in Jefferson’s exercise of executive power (Appleby 1984,

p. 103, 2000,p.31).

The extent to which the Jeffersonians, in spite

of their rhetoric, came to accept so much of the Hamiltonian programme,

even after the demise of the Federalist Party, lends real support to the idea of

consensus in spite of Henry Adams’ remark about the great divide separating

the two.

One more consideration remains, a concern that adds a tragic dimension

to any account of Jeffersonian thought and practice. Jefferson was, of cour se,

a slave-holder, as were many of the founders of the American republic. But

he was simultaneously the single most prominent spokesman for a theory of

natural human rights. The contradiction was huge and he was fully aware

of it. He repeatedly expressed foreboding over the continued existence of

slavery. In Notes on the State of Virginia he reﬂected, apropos slavery, that

God’s justice ‘cannot sleep forever’, and, late in life, he likened slavery to

a ‘ﬁre bell in the night’. ‘We have the wolf by the ears’, he wrote, ‘and

we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale,

19 For a fuller treatment of the Adams thesis see Young 2001,pp.53–5.

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James P. Young

and self-preservation in the other’ (Jefferson 1984,pp.298, 1434; cf. Miller

1977). But he himself was unable to answer the bell, largely because of

his deep-seated belief in the natural inferiority of the black race, not to

mention his personal economic dependence on slavery. Not only are slaves

black, but monotony ‘reigns in [their] countenances’ and the ‘Oranootan’

prefers black women over those of his own species. They are more tolerant

of heat and less of cold, he opined; they have a ‘disagreeable’ odour, and

while often brave, this may be due to ‘a want of forethought’ (Jefferson

1984,pp.264–5, 288). The Negro is happy and simple-minded and beneﬁts

from contact with whites, ‘but their inferiority is not the effect merely of

their condition of life’ (Jefferson 1984,p.265). He conjectures that nature

has slighted them in the ‘endowments of the head’, though not of the heart

or the ‘moral sense’ (Jefferson 1984,p.269). His tentative ‘suspicion’ is that

‘the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and

circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body

and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species

of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different

qualiﬁcations’ (Jefferson 1984,p.270).

Jefferson viewed the slave system as a danger to the virtue of the republic.

It is an ‘unhappy inﬂuence’, leading to a ‘perpetual exercise of the most

boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and

degrading submission on the other’. ‘The man must be a prodigy’, he

continued, ‘who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such

circumstances’ (Jefferson 1984,p.288). Following the Revolution Virginia

ﬂirted with emancipation, but deep down Jefferson thought the idea to be

impossible if it required the former slaves to live among the whites. Any

interest he had in abolition was largely ‘theoretical’ (Davis 1975,p.178).

His strongest convictions arose when he wrote, ‘Deep rooted prejudices

entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of

the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions

which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into

parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in

the extermination of the one or the other race.’ If slaves were ever to be

freed they must be removed, that is ‘colonised’, to some other suitable

place (Jefferson 1984,p.264). Part of Jefferson’s tragedy, and of the nation’s,

is that, with the exception of his apocalyptic conclusion, his fears were

not that far off the mark and were shared with so great and ultimately

successful an anti-slavery leader as Abraham Lincoln. Jefferson’s thinking on

this subject was not original but important because it is so typical of his time

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From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

as to be symptomatic (Jordan 1968,p.429).

His failure proved to be the

nation’s failure as well, a failure that could be rectiﬁed, if only in part, by

the Civil War. But before taking up this issue, it is necessary to give some

consideration to the legacy of Andrew Jackson and his followers.

3 Jacksonian democracy

The ‘Age of Jackson’ was not primarily an intellectual movement, though

it produced some interesting ideas and was of great signiﬁcance politically,

socially and economically. It showed the possibilities of populist presidential

leadership and was the ﬁrst approximation anywhere of a mass-based polit-

ical movement acting in electoral politics. It is perhaps the most American

of all political periods, since as Gordon Wood writes, ‘The Jacksonian era

was the period that deﬁned the basic elements of America’s individualistic

and egalitarian get-up-and-go materialistic culture’ (Wood 2001,p.49).

A central theme of Jackson’s presidency was the ﬁght against concentrated

power in the economy and above all the Second Bank of the United

States. Supportive journalists such as Walt Whitman and the editors of the

Jacksonian Democratic Review enthusiastically endorsed the principle that the

government that governs least governs best, while journalist William Leggett

in particular was a militant advocate of laissez-faire economic principles (Blau

1954,pp.131, 27, 66–8).

In his ‘Political Testament’, Jackson himself inveighed against monopoly

and exclusive privilege while arguing on behalf of ‘the agricultural, the

mechanical, and the labouring classes’ (Blau 1954,pp.17–18). Such lan-

guage introduces the sense of class conﬂict stressed by Arthur Schlesinger,

Jr. in his paradigmatic The Age of Jackson (Schlesinger 1945). But this should

not be taken to suggest that Jacksonian democracy can be seen as starting

a campaign for a modern welf are state. Writers like Leggett made it quite

clear that once equal competitive conditions had been achieved, ‘As a gen-

eral rule, the prosperity of rational men depends on themselves’ (Blau 1954,

pp. 76–7). Therefore, it is quite plausible for Richard Hofstadter to see

Jacksonianism as an episode in the development of liberal capitalism (Hofs-

tadter 1973,pp.44–66). But Hofstadter’s emphasis on rising capitalism and

Schlesinger’s on class conﬂict are complementary rather than contradictory.

These perspectives point to the possibility of serious debate even within

20 Jordan 1968 is the starting point for any discussion of Jefferson’s ideas on race. See pp. 429–81.Cf.

Dain 2002,pp.26–39 and Davis 1975,pp.164–84.

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James P. Young

the conﬁnes of a liberal capitalist system of the sort posited by Hofstadter

and Hartz. As Hartz observed, ‘You do not get closer to the signiﬁcance

of an earthquake by ignoring the terrain on which it takes place’ (Hartz

1955,p.20). The conﬂict was real though it often took the form of highly

competitive individualism rather than class-oriented collective struggle.

From this viewpoint, Jackson was being perfectly consistent when he

attacked the ‘money power’. Marvin Meyers comments, ‘There is in these

words undoubtedly some appeal against the rich.’ But this, he argues, is a

secondary meaning. The speciﬁc language is important. Jackson castigated

the ‘money power’, but not the rich, a position quite consistent with

the thinking of Jefferson. The real enemy was corporate paper money;

hence t he assault on the monopoly power of the ‘monster bank’, as Jackson

liked to call it (Meyers 1960,p.23). The capitalism that Jackson endorsed

was small-scale, non-monopolistic and highly competitive, a conclusion

consistent with recent historical research which strongly suggests that the

tensions of the Jacksonian era were a response to the rapid emergence of

a market economy, a view quite consistent with Schlesinger’s classic study

(Schlesinger 2000,p.371; Sellers 1991).

Two other aspects of Jacksonian democracy are also very important. The

widening of the right to vote led to a marked increase in what Judith Shklar

called one of the major ‘emblems of public standing’ (Shklar 1991,p.3). As

far back as the colonial period, white male suffrage was fairly widespread,

and during the Jacksonian movement most of what remained of property

qualiﬁcations disappeared, though of course, as Shklar insists, the existence

of slavery and the disenfranchisement of blacks and women hung like a

dark cloud over the nation (Shklar 1991,esp.pp.43–7). Equally important

was the emergence of what might be called a producerist ideology which

stressed the right to earn, the work ethic and the importance of free labour,

positions which were to be of major importance in the emerging struggle

over slavery (Shklar 1991,pp.63–79; Young 1996,p.97).

4 Antebellum reform

Coterminous with the events of Jacksonian democracy was a major set

of interrelated reform movements, not speciﬁcally Jacksonian in character,

21 For a good contemporary discussion of the major forces at work in Jacksonian America see Masur

2001. Of course, the classic work on the subject remains Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,

a masterpiece somewhat marred by excessive reliance on upper-class informants.

390

From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

the most important of which were anti-slavery and women’s suffrage. It

is also important to take into account the deep currents of evangelical

Protestantism which powered these movements (Lowance 2000,pp.49–84;

Morone 2003,pp.144–68). A convenient place to begin is 1831,which

saw Nat Turner’s bloody slave rebellion in Virginia that was so terrifying to

slave owners, and the publication of William Lloyd Garrison’s ﬂamboyant

ﬁrst editorial in his inﬂuential anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator. Then, in

1833 the American Anti-Slavery Society, the ﬁrst organisational movement

of its kind, was founded under the leadership of Garrison and the Lane

Seminary debates were held in Ohio and became a major source of anti-

slavery sentiment (Dumond 1961,pp.158–65).

Anti-slavery was a very complex cause. Thus it was possible for some-

one like Abraham Lincoln to be anti-slavery without being an abolitionist,

because he believed the national government lacked both the political power

and constitutional authority to abolish slavery, while at the same time crit-

icising slavery as a violation of the Jeffersonian theory of natural rights.

Broadly speaking, there were two wings to the anti-slavery movement,

reformers and radicals. Reformers saw slavery as an excrescence on a basi-

cally sound system while radicals, like Garrison, attacked the constitution

and called for a root and branch reconstruction of both society and politics

(Kraditor 1969,p.8). Garrison, though anti-clerical, was deeply moralistic

and might be said at least to have a relig ious temperament. He was also

profoundly anti-political with a total belief in achieving his goals through

moral suasion and a refusal to see that he might need allies who might not

fully share his ideals. Slavery was an evil, and so too was the constitution,

a ‘covenant with death, and an agreement with hell’, as he put it in 1844.

The ofﬁcial motto of the American Anti-Slavery Society was ‘No Union

with Slaveholders’. It would, he thought, be better for the North to secede

from the South than to corrupt itself by continuing to be bound together

with slave-holders (Thompson 2004,pp.230–45).

Aside from the belief that slavery was wrong, little else was generally

accepted within the movement. Particularly in the early years, Jeffer son’s

thought being a good example, there was much support for emancipation

followed by colonisation of the freed slaves in Africa or Latin America,

though this idea declined due to its impracticality and the belief of the

Garrisonians that it too was inherently racist and wrong (Lowance 2000,

pp. 92–4, 108–12, 117–19). There were arguments from religion and eco-

nomics, debates over whether the constitution was anti-slaver y or pro-

slavery, proposals for political action set against the belief that relief was

391

James P. Young

beyond politics, passionate attacks on the inhumanity of slavery and fre-

quent appeals to ‘higher law’, particularly the Declaration of Independence,

which became a potent ideological weapon

(Dumond 1961,pp.232–3).

The problem of the meaning of the constitution with respect to slavery,

the humanitarian critique and the bearing of the Declaration of Inde-

pendence on slavery are particularly important. Some of those opposed

to slavery considered the constitution to be ﬂawed due to such clauses as

that giving slave states a base for representation that included three-ﬁfths

of the slaves, the provisions for the return of fugitive slaves, and the ban

on prohibiting the slave trade until 1808. But nonetheless this group saw

opportunities in the constitution to choke off the institution of slavery by

controlling its expansion and placing it under ‘ofﬁcial odium’. Radicals such

as the Garrisonians looked at the same clauses and saw a different constitu-

tion, ‘conceived in compromise and dedicated to the perpetuity of slavery’.

Still others saw it as a thoroughly anti-slavery document which included the

right to abolish the institution (Kraditor 1969,pp.185–6). Whether anti-

slavery people chose to work within the political system or agitate from

outside obviously was much affected by the hermeneutical stance adopted

towards the constitution.

The humanitarian critique was important and powerful. Theodore

Dwight Weld’s American Slavery As It Is, a long, well-documented chronicle

of atrocities, was widely read and was the best selling anti-slavery tract until

the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous sentimental novel Uncle

Tom’s Cabin. Weld also tirelessly propagated the idea of the higher law (Weld

1838). So too did the increasingly famous author of Narrative of the Life of

Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, the ﬁrst of three

important autobiographies published by Douglass. His graphic description

of the horrors of slavery derived great power from the fact that it was a well-

written ﬁrst-hand account and it too sold very widely in the United States

and abroad (Douglass 1994,pp.1–102).

Douglass’ great speech ‘What to

the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ was also a powerful appeal to the abused

ideals of Jefferson’s Declaration, an appeal symbolically delivered on the

ﬁfth of July rather than the fourth to signify his sense of the betrayal of the

22 The anti-slavery literature is large and widely scattered. For surveys of these and other issues see the

documents in Lowance 2000; Pease and Pease 1965; a nd Thompson 2004. The Thompson volume

is especially interesting because it is edited by a political theorist with an interest in ends/means

relationships.

23 The importance of Douglass’ book is indicated by the f act that it was published with prefatory

material by both William Lloyd Garrison and his fellow militant abolitionist Wendell Philips.

392

From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

promise of the Declaration inherent in the continued existence of slavery

(Douglass 1994,pp.431–5).

Douglass’ career is particularly notable as it took him from slavery to a

position as close to the political establishment as possible for an African-

American in his time. He moved from being a stout advocate of Garrisonian

rejection of the constitution, to a ﬂirtation with the violence of John Brown

(Hyde 2002; Menand 2002; Stauffer 2001), to a political position which

required him to argue, rather unpersuasively, that the constitution was anti-

slavery and which closely linked him to the complex politics of Abraham

Lincoln (Thompson 2004,pp.144–56). In the end it was not the anti-

political position of Garrison, but the activities of the Liberty Party and the

Free Soil Party, which combined with the remains of the Whigs and came

together to form the new Republican Party which, under the leadership

of Abraham Lincoln, ﬁnally abolished slavery (Dumond 1961,pp.290–305,

357–64; Foner 1970).

The anti-slavery movement was also closely linked in many instances

with the drive for women’s suffrage. The perfectionist ideology and the

anti-clericalism of Garrison were particularly appealing to Elizabeth Cady

Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and their feminist colleagues, as, of course, was

Garrison’s commitment to women’s suffrage (Lowance 2000, 122–5; DuBois

1999,pp.31–40;Davis2001,pp.359–76). Douglass too was a staunch sup-

porter of women’s rights (Douglass 1976). Stanton even remarked that

anti-slavery was a source of the women’s rights movement ‘above all other

causes’, not because women discovered their own oppression through their

encounter with slaver y, but because they learned from the anti-slavery cru-

sade how to tur n their cause into a political movement (DuBois 1999,

pp. 31–2).

Stanton’s particular cause became the achievement of women’s suffrage.

In the present context, the most interesting document is the ‘Declaration

of Sentiments’, drafted largely by Stanton and delivered at the ﬁrst women’s

rights convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. Modelled closely on

Jefferson’s Declaration, its most crucial passage is Jefferson’s text with the

addition of two crucial words. She begins, ‘We hold these truths to be

self-evident: that all men and women are created equal . . . ’ (Stanton 1881,

pp. 71–4). At the heart of the message was a Jeffersonian natural rights

liberalism and the central goal was the drive for women’s suffrage, a truly

radical position since, while not denying that women had special familial

responsibilities, ‘the demand for the vote challenged the male monopoly

on the public arena’ (DuBois 1987,p.130). Surely this was part of the

393