Before he died, Thomas Jefferson spelled out plainly exactly how he wanted to be remembered by posterity. He instructed that his tombstone contain three epitaphs: author of the Declaration of Independence, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. To those of us looking backward, Jefferson seems to have selected three unusual titles for his grave. There is, after all, no mention of his presidency, or that he was our nation’s first Secretary of State. Many Americans may be unaware of the history of religious freedom in Virginia. They may think of the University of Virginia as an especially good state university, but nothing more. Yet for Jefferson, these two endeavors and the Declaration of Independence represented the high points of his career.
Each of the three achievements, though, embodied the sort of liberalism he hoped would be the future of humanity. In its political sense, “liberalism” was a new word in Jefferson’s day, one that he seems to have used just once—to congratulate John Adams on the similar disestablishment of state religion in Massachusetts. With good reason, Jefferson believed himself to have played a prominent role in promoting a liberal future. In this work, Jefferson joined a small group of other Americans—most famously Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine—who worked to create a new era of thought and government. These Americans offered a robust account of the liberal project, not just as a way to structure politics and economics, but also as a code of morality.
The version of liberalism espoused by these eighteenth century statesmen and thinkers serves as a clear refutation of a view increasingly common among populist-aligned critics of the enlightenment. Professor Aaron Zubia recently offered an especially thoughtful version of this line of attack. He argues that Enlightenment liberals in general and Thomas Jefferson in particular ground their politics in an Epicurean view of human life. At bottom, Zubia contends, liberalism is morally vacuous—grounded in no particular conception of virtue and ethics but instead in a desire for simple material comfort. In Zubia’s eyes, men like Jefferson and Franklin replace the heroic virtues of bygone ages with simple bourgeois living. The moral system sketched out by Jefferson and his compatriots proves that as eloquent and well-intentioned as attacks upon liberalism such as Zubia’s may be, they are simply not true.
The Declaration of Independence is more than a formal separation letter and far more even than a statement of the limits of government power. Instead, it is a bold declaration of the moral ends of human society. Likewise, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom grounds its disestablishment of the Episcopal Church not in a simple belief in separation of church and state—instead it is a deeply moral piece of legislation arguing for freedom of conscience. The University of Virginia demonstrates this point even more forcefully, since Jefferson believed that democracy can only survive with a moral people and that a public education is vitally important to crafting such a body of citizens.
No one today can think Jefferson to have been morally upright in all that he did. His writings and his work to achieve a liberal society—in some areas—are impossible to reconcile with his enslavement of other human beings, or the particularly cruel ways that he treated them. And yet he stands at the founding of our country. His proudest accomplishments survive, and it falls to us to explain how such a man could contain such contradictions. [1]
Human Nature and Human Morality
The most famous moment of Jefferson’s career came fairly early in his life. At age thirty-three, the Second Continental Congress appointed him the primary draftsman of the Declaration of Independence. Though ostensibly just a formal legal document meant to effect American separation from the British Empire, Jefferson chose to base the Declaration on universal moral truths that he thought to be the basis of all human ethics: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In a dissent from much of the world around him, Jefferson went on to argue that it is the purpose of government to protect and promote the rights of the people. Further, when government begins to abridge the rights of its citizens, then the people may resort to the ultimate right of altering or abolishing their political system.
Jefferson’s outline of the social contract as the heart of American government is by now quite well known. However, conservative critics of liberalism such as Patrick Deneen read the Declaration less as a moral document and more as a statement of atomistic, antagonistic principles: a bold assertion that the power of government should be deeply limited with little to no concern for morality or virtue.[2] Such critics reveal their true ignorance of Jefferson. The Virginian made clear throughout his career that the ideas in the Declaration were not an attempt to leave government out of moral questions but instead a reflection of the deepest moral truths available to human reason.[3]
In the key passage of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson argued that the heart of human ethics is a belief in the fundamental equality of all people.[4] By this Jefferson did not mean that we are all equally smart or good looking. Rather, he intended to point out that we humans are all equally capable of moral and personal improvement.[5] To put this another way, he rejected the early modern view that each of us is born to fulfill a certain destiny in life: some men are born to be kings, others priests, some farmers, others laborers. As William Perkins had argued in his 1603 Treatise of the Vocations or the Callings of Men, God preordained everyone’s place in creation, giving individuals very little free choice in where they settled in life.[6] Jefferson believed that at bottom no such genetic or hereditary principle can rationally govern the vocations of men.
From this insight on the nature of humans, Jefferson built an anthropology that considered us, in the final analysis, moral beings, capable of making significant changes in the world and in our social stations. Since our ability to shape our own destinies and future is the most uniquely human thing about us, Jefferson placed it at the head of his larger account of human nature. As he saw it, each individual possesses by birth an innate “moral sense.” By this he meant some ability to adjudicate between right and wrong on our own. As Jefferson described it to his nephew Peter Carr: “The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.”[7] This moral sense, like any other form of knowledge, can only ever be truly developed from use. This means that the only avenue to become a good person, to fully cultivate a robust conscience, is to make moral decisions for ourselves.[8] It is in this respect, in our possession of a strong moral sense, that each of us is truly equal. [9] It follows that the idea that some people are entitled to rule over others is simply false—government by all the people and their cumulative moral sense is the only just approach to politics available to us.[10]
It should be noted that for all his belief in human equality as the heart of both morality and our own nature, Jefferson often failed to uphold these same principles in his own life. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and champion of the rights of man, was also the owner of over 600 of his fellow human beings.
This deep lapse in Jefferson’s own “moral sense” is often explained away through his practical inability to free his slaves due to his immense personal debt. There is no doubt an element of truth to this, but in a deeper sense Jefferson simply failed to apply his philosophy fully enough.
The germ of Jefferson’s mistake began, in many ways, with his obsession with positivistic science. He often expressed his belief that the surest path to human knowledge lay in scientific experimentation. If something could not be proven through the power of the human senses, then we cannot say with much certainty that something is true.[11] This vaguely materialist understanding of human knowledge led Jefferson on the issue of race to undermine his own broader moral system. At the time, much of the scientific research produced argued that the various races were in fact subspecies. This so-called “scientific truth” as Jefferson understood it, made him deeply uncomfortable. As he made clear numerous times throughout his life, he did not want it to be the case that black people are biologically inferior, but he certainly thought this to be the sad reality of life.[12]
Yet ultimately, Jefferson’s moral system remains worth reading and thinking through. For one, he admitted the dangers of an overreliance on the positivistic science that he subscribed to. In his now famous dialogue between the head and the heart, the heart firmly asserts that the moral sense is the purview of sentiment and not cold rationality: “Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the incertain combinations of the head. She [creation] laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not in science.”[13] In addition, Jefferson coupled all of this with a belief in true human progress. Too often today we are not especially inclined to imagine history is on an upward trajectory. For Jefferson, there was no question that the trend of history is ever upward; in such light, he could tell himself that the death of slavery was preordained—and this reassurance led him astray. One bitter lesson we’ve learned since the Enlightenment is that there are no guarantees about moral progress; the forward march of history only continues when living human beings continue to make it happen.
Freedom and Morality
The second crowning achievement of Thomas Jefferson’s career—drafting the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom—builds upon his understanding of human nature. Because all individuals are born with an innate moral sense, and because this sense can only develop through use, the government must—within reason—avoid the business of telling people what to think, feel, or do.[14] Jefferson thought the right of conscience to be the greatest right available to man, and that this right emerged from our ability, our need, to make most moral decisions ourselves.[15] This gives a certain picture of a government’s role in the lives of its citizens. Unlike the Puritan settlers of New England, Jefferson thought the state should largely leave morality to the citizens—to allow every individual to explore and develop his own moral sense. As he put it in his Notes on the State of Virginia: “The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend only to such that are injurious to others.”[16] Thus Jefferson developed a moderately libertarian general approach to government that has nothing to do with moral relativism, but instead begins with the demands of a clear system of ethics.
From this philosophy of politics, Jefferson built an entire career of legislative and executive priorities. Upon completing his work in the Continental Congress, he returned to his native state of Virginia for the explicit purpose of rebuilding his native government upon the liberal philosophy he thought should now govern the whole country. As a member of the Virginia legislature, Jefferson teamed up with James Madison to reform the state’s civil society. In practice, Jefferson tended to be the power behind the scenes that drafted the new legislation, while Madison ensured its passage.
Of his many legislative achievements, Jefferson was always proudest of his role in disestablishing the Episcopal Church in Virginia, removing it as the official church of the state. As some indication of his pride in this accomplishment, while serving as Ambassador to France, Jefferson sent the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom to every figure of prominence he could find on both sides of the Atlantic. The law derived not from Jefferson’s hatred of Christianity, or the Episcopal Church in particular—as his opponents often said—but because of his sincere belief that religion should be left between each man and his god rather than settled by fiat.
In an almost Quaker-ish way, Jefferson believed that salvation was achievable only through the will of the individual and the cultivation of their moral sense.[17] As such, the only duty of government in regard to religion is to ensure each citizen has the ability to pursue their reason to whatever religious conviction they deem best. On a practical level Jefferson also doubted that a religiously homogenous society would ever be possible again, if it ever had been.[18] More than this though, Jefferson believed that religious diversity actually improved society by offering the moral sense a variety of options for fulfilling its appetite for the divine.[19] In this, Jefferson anticipated future liberals such as William James, who ably showed that the great multiplicity of religious views found in society express variations of personal disposition and conscience, whose ultimate outcome helps to forge a more open and diverse society.[20]
The first major reform the legislative team of Jefferson and Madison accomplished was the abolition of primogeniture in Virginia. [21] This ancient legal convention dictated that only the eldest child must inherit the entirety of his father’s estate. In Europe, it had produced a concentration of property and titled privileges in the hands of a landed gentry. Primogeniture had been working toward the same end in Virginia at the time. Jefferson himself had benefitted from the law, inheriting all of his father’s vast fortune and occupying an exalted place in Virginia as a matter of birthright. Yet Jefferson felt that the idea of primogeniture and a hereditary aristocracy flew in the face of liberal equality.
Jefferson’s time as the American Ambassador to France had truly proven this to him, and he made clear at the time that any economic system which so heavily concentrates power in the hands of the few is incompatible with democracy. As he told Madison: “Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as common stock for man to labor and live on.”[22] Much is often made of Jefferson’s agrarianism, and there can be no denying that he believed the best society to be composed of smallhold farmers, as unlike his own planter class as they are Hamilton’s professional merchants. Jefferson’s preference had much more to do with his belief that drastic income inequality is incompatible with a republic. To Jefferson’s mind, at least a roughly equal distribution of property served as an important tool in giving to each citizen the ability to freely pursue the dictates of their own conscience and ensure that they never found themselves subjected to the whims of despots, either local or distant.[23] Jefferson put this point plainly to Madison: I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.”[24]
Jefferson’s quest to create a restrained and benevolent version of government also included a rewriting of the Virginia criminal code. Though ultimately unsuccessful in bringing this law to fruition, Jefferson sought to rebuild the criminal justice system of his state on a more benevolent basis. Since the colonization of Jamestown, Virginia had instituted a number of incredibly harsh laws for theft and other petty crimes. Most criminal statutes called for the convicted to lose their hands or their life. The law displayed little respect for inmates, who were treated only slightly better than the state’s enslaved population. Jefferson aimed to undo all of this, to found the Virginia criminal code in a respect for the rights of the convicted.[25] He did this, he later explained to French and Virginian public officials, because he believed the goal of criminal codes should not be punishment but reformation—to help guide and improve the moral sense of the accused. In short, the criminal law existed to rehabilitate criminals rather than visit public revenge upon them. Over time, this radical notion of criminal justice would become the hallmark of liberal public policy.
All of these major policies emerged from Jefferson’s attempt to craft a political order unlike any before. Not since Ancient Rome, he argued, had man sought to seriously build a government based upon the will of the people.[26] Such a bold endeavor may have been a lofty enough goal as is, but Jefferson wished to go further than the noble patriarchs of classical antiquity. For him the age of Enlightenment was not an abstract thing—Enlightenment meant a real and achievable effort to create a political system that permitted the necessary human freedom to develop the moral sense.[27] It is for this reason that he sincerely declared to his friend Benjamin Rush that he had “sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”[28]
A Wise and Virtuous People
On leaving the presidency, Jefferson did not leave public life. Aside from the prolific correspondence he kept up with current and former public officials, he poured a great deal of his considerable energy into the creation of a new public university in the state of Virginia. This project—which he had been formulating since at least his time as Secretary of State—in some ways may seem a bit of a letdown. After all, as impressive as founding a university may be, it surely pales in comparison to declaring independence, establishing religious liberty, being president, or maybe even serving in the cabinet. Yet Jefferson thought education to be an important part—perhaps the most important part—of the liberal project he had worked for decades to promote. Just because Jefferson believed government had no role in telling humans what to believe did not mean he thought government had no place in helping develop the moral sense of the people. In fact, Jefferson thought there could be no higher duty than providing the tools to the citizens necessary for them to cultivate virtue.[29]
Jefferson contended that a virtuous people was more than a nice luxury—calling upon the history of all free societies as his evidence, he thought that republican government required a certain sort of people to sustain itself. If the citizenry loses its sense of virtue and starts to become corrupt, they are liable to empower some sort of despotic oligarchy to seize control of the state. Jefferson thought a people deprived of virtue would be pretty easy to spot—a frivolous citizenry more concerned with luxury and political intrigue than an honest dedication to the improvement of the human condition.[30] This was the exact scenario he feared Alexander Hamilton’s mercantilist economic policy was bringing about.
If Jefferson feared, he also hoped. He spent his days dreaming of a virtuous people, the Americans of the future, who could create a truly novel “Empire of Liberty.” Such a citizenry would need, and have, a fully developed moral sense, and as such they would be honest, selfless, frugal, and live for the improvement of the human condition. Though we can never force anyone to develop their moral sense, Jefferson did think that through education, you could give them the tools of self-enlightenment. As such, he described the goal of the University of Virginia in terms far removed from the too often purely technical education of the modern day:
the advantages of a well-directed education, moral, political and economical, are truly above all estimate. Education generates the habits of application, of order, and the love of virtue … Education … engrafts a new man on his native stock, and improves what in his nature was viscous and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.[31]
Jefferson also worked unsuccessfully to establish public education in Virginia.[32] As important as the development of future leaders may be, he understood that not all people can or should fulfill that particular vocation in life. As such, Jefferson thought that Virginia needed a public education system capable of acquainting most citizens with the necessary tools to develop their moral sense.[33] Most of us would think of the conscience growing and learning primarily from the humanities, but Jefferson saw science as a vitally important step in teaching the rational practicality necessary to put the moral sense to good use.[34]
As vital as Jefferson found traditional classroom education, he thought that the government could help cultivate the moral sense in one other important respect: through funding fine art. This may strike the modern reader as unusual or frivolous, but Jefferson frequently argued that exposure to beautiful things could elevate the human soul.[35] More than most American politicians today, he believed that the visual world that surrounds us plays an important role in shaping who we are.[36] As such, he worked quite hard to ensure the construction of classically inspired public buildings in both Richmond and Washington, D.C.[37] He also set aside considerable time to ensure that commissioned public art met his exacting aesthetic standards.[38] In all of these cases, he hoped to create an environment around Americans that would inspire them to reach for even greater beauty in the world around them and in their own souls.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, Thomas Jefferson is both a unique and a fully typical liberal of his time. In many ways, Jefferson shows that there is an element of truth to this understanding of government. Throughout his life he advocated for curbing the power of the state and believed that government should never force anyone to behave in certain ways, short of preventing citizens from harming one another.
However, in every other sense that matters, Jefferson wasn’t an atomistic individualist. He argued from the earliest days of his public life that each human is endowed with the incredible ability to make our own moral choices and that we all possess an innate sense of right and wrong to help guide those choices. He believed that we could develop that moral sense, and he thought that a virtuous society was the right venue for doing so. In this respect, he contended, we are all normatively equal.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the founding fathers of the United States signed a document dedicated to the principle of human equality—as articulated by Thomas Jefferson. In so doing they set out to build a republic upon a foundation of liberal morality as it emerged in those final days of the Age of Enlightenment. There could be no task more noble or important for today’s liberals than to reawaken that sense of liberal civic morality.
Notes
Editor’s note: The texts of these documents may in general be retrieved at Founders Online, a project of the National Archives.
[1] Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814.
[2] Patrick Deneen, ed., Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents, St. Augustine’s Press, 2016.
[3] Thomas Jefferson to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826.
[4] Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, April 16, 1784.
[5] Thomas Jefferson to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826.
[6] William Perkins, Treatise on the Vocations or the Callings of Men, 1605.
[7] Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787.
[8] Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814.
[9] Thomas Jefferson to William Green Munford, June 18, 1799.
[10] Thomas Jefferson, Response to the Citizens of Albemarle, February 12, 1790.
[11] Thomas Jefferson to William Short, October 31, 1819.
[12] Thomas Jefferson to Henri Gregoire, February 25, 1809.
[13] Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 12, 1786.
[14] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785.
[15] Thomas Jefferson, Draft of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1777.
[16] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785.
[17] Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Rush, April 12, 1803.
[18] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785.
[19] Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Rush, April 12, 1803.
[20] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902.
[21] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, October 28, 1785.
[22] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, October 28, 1785.
[23] Thomas Jefferson to William Green Munford, June 18, 1799; Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801.
[24] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, October 28, 1785.
[25] Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments, 1779.
[26] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, February 28, 1796.
[27] Thomas Jefferson to William Green Munford, June 18, 1799; Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801.
[28] Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800.
[29] Thomas Jefferson, Memorial on the Book Duty, November 30, 1821.
[30] Thomas Jefferson to John Langdon, March 5, 1810.
[31] Thomas Jefferson, Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia, August 4, 1818.
[32] Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, 1779.
[33] Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, 1779.
[34] Thomas Jefferson to John Trumbull, February 15, 1789.
[35] Thomas Jefferson to Madame de Tesse, March 20, 1787; Thomas Jefferson to Francois d’Ivernois, February 6, 1795.
[36] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 20, 1785.
[37] Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 1, 1785; Thomas Jefferson to William Buchanan and James Hay, January 26th 1786; Thomas Jefferson to Major l’Enfant, April 10, 1791.
[38] Thomas Jefferson to William Cabell Rives, November 25, 1825.
