Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
taxation--and took its stand on the doctrine of natural right to
local self-government and freedom of trade. When two years later he
drafted the Declaration of Independence the fusion was complete. The
strong influence of French humanitarianism is revealed in the passage
on slavery that was stricken out on the floor of Congress, and more
significantly in the change in the familiar phrasing of the several
natural rights. Samuel Adams and other followers of Locke had been
content with the classical enumeration of life, liberty, and property;
but in Jefferson’s hands the English doctrine was given a revolutionary
shift. The substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for “property” marks
a complete break with the Whiggish doctrine of property rights that
Locke had bequeathed to the English middle class, and the substitution
of a broader sociological conception; and it was this substitution
that gave to the document the note of idealism which was to make its
appeal so perennially human and vital. The words were far more than
a political gesture to draw popular support; they were an embodiment
of Jefferson’s deepest convictions, and his total life thenceforward
was given over to the work of providing such political machinery for
America as should guarantee for all the enjoyment of those inalienable
rights. If the fact that he set the pursuit of happiness above
abstract property rights is to be taken as proof that Jefferson was an
impractical French theorist, the critic may take what comfort he can
from his deduction.
That Jefferson was an idealist was singularly fortunate for America;
there was need of idealism to leaven the materialistic realism of the
times. It was a critical period and he came at the turn of a long
running tide. He watched the beginnings of the political shift in
America from isolated colonial commonwealths to a unitary sovereign
state; and his wide reading and close observation had convinced him
that the impending change was fraught with momentous issues for the
common man. He had meditated much on the social results of the slow
oscillations in western civilization between social decentralization
and centralization, with their contrasting political and economic
structures; and he understood how the movement from simplicity to
complexity--from freedom to regimentation--creates a psychology and
an institutionalism that conducts straight to the leviathan state,
controlled by a ruling caste, serving the demands of exploitation,
heedless of the well-being of the regimented mass. This great lesson
in social drifts he brought home to America. There had been created
here the psychology and institutions of a decentralized society, with
a corresponding exaltation of the individual and the breakdown of
caste. In the broad spaces of America the old-world coercive state had
dwindled to a mere police arrangement for parochial duties; the free
citizen refused to be regimented; the several communities insisted
on managing their affairs by their own agents. Such was the natural
consequence of free economics; but with the turning of the tide would
not the drift towards centralization nullify the results of earlier
American experience and repeat here the unhappy history of European
peoples?
To the philosophic mind of Jefferson, such a question was not academic,
but urgent and vital. He had been bred in that older world, he believed
passionately in the excellence of its virtues, and his political and
social philosophy was determined by that experience. He sprang from a
society deep-rooted in an agrarian economy, and he wished to preserve
that society. Born on the Virginia frontier, he had never seen a hamlet
so large as twenty houses before his eighteenth year; his neighbors
and associates were capable and vigorous frontier democrats, who
managed the affairs of local government with the same homespun skill
that went to their farming. “It is not difficult,” remarks an acute
critic, “to see how the great principle of Jefferson’s life--absolute
faith in democracy--came to him. He was the product of the first West
in American history; he grew up with men who ruled their country well,
who fought the Indians valiantly.... Jefferson loved his backwoods
neighbors, and he, in turn, was loved by them.”[365] This early
conviction of the excellence of a freehold order was confirmed by later
experience; wide observation and much travel convinced him that no
other people was so favored by circumstance as the American, or so
vigorously self-reliant. That such well-being resulted from a plastic
economics, he regarded as self-evident; and from this economic freedom
came political freedom. In his European travels he saw everywhere
want and wretchedness dwelling in the shadow of the aristocratic
state, and he could not dissociate the two. Political tyranny was the
outward and visible sign of greater tyrannies that ran down to the very
roots of society; the leviathan state was the convenient instrument
through which those tyrannies took their heavy toll of the common
well-being. America was a land of free men; it was exploited neither
by an aristocracy nor a plutocracy. Surely there could be no greater
or nobler ambition for an American than to assist in preserving his
country from the misery that must attend a change from the present
happy condition of democratic industry, to the serfdom of the European
wage-taker and peasant.
To a mind imbued with such conceptions the appeal of the Physiocratic
theory of social economics would be irresistible. The ground was
prepared for the sowing of the seeds of the liberal French thought.
With its emphasis laid upon agriculture, its doctrine of the _produit
net_, its principle of _laissez faire_, and its social concern, the
Physiocratic theory accorded exactly with his familiar experience,
and it must have seemed to Jefferson that it was little other than a
deduction from the open facts of American life. He had read much in
the works of the Physiocratic group, and was intimately acquainted
with DuPont de Nemours; and the major principles of the school sank
deep into his mind and creatively determined his thinking, with the
result that Jeffersonian democracy as it spread through Virginia and
west along the frontier assumed a pronounced Physiocratic bias. The
sharp struggle between Jefferson and Hamilton must be reckoned, in
part at least, a conflict between the rival principles of Quesnay and
Adam Smith, between an agrarian and a capitalistic economy. Much as
Jefferson feared the ambitions of an aristocracy, he feared quite as
much the creation of a proletariat. As he looked into the future he saw
great cities rising to breed their Roman mobs, duped and exploited by
demagogues, the convenient tools of autocracy; and counting the cost
in social well-being, he set his face like flint against the rising
capitalism. A free yeomanry he regarded as the backbone of every great
people, the producers of the real wealth, the guardians of manly
independence; and the number of factory workers measured for him the
extent of social disease. It is this Physiocratic conception that
explains his bitter hostility to protective tariffs, national banks,
funding manipulations, the machinery of credit, and all the agencies of
capitalism which Hamilton was skillfully erecting in America. Not to
have hated such things Jefferson must first have emptied his mind of
the teachings of experience and the lessons of the social philosophers.
In the _Notes on Virginia_ there is a well-known passage that amplifies
his favorite thesis that a sound American economy was an agrarian
economy:
The political economists of Europe have established it as a
principle, that every State should endeavor to manufacture for
itself; and this principle, like many others, we transfer to
America.... But we have an immensity of land courting the industry
of the husbandman. Is it best then that all our citizens should
be employed in its improvement, or that one half should be called
off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for
the other? Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of
God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his
peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the
focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise
might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in
the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation
has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not
looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the
husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties
and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and
venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools
for the designs of ambition.... Generally speaking the proportion
which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in
any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its
unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer
whereby to measure its degree of corruption. While we have land to
labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a
work-bench, or twirling a distaff ... for the general operations
of manufacture, let our work-shops remain in Europe. It is better
to carry provisions and materials to work-men there, than bring
them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners
and principles.... 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. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve
a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon
eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.[366]
Such was his attitude in 1782, an attitude identical with Franklin’s.
Thirty-four years later he had modified his views of industrialism.
The bitter experience of the Napoleonic wars, with the hardships
and losses visited upon neutral shipping, had convinced him of the
need of domestic manufactures, and he was then deeply interested in
improved machinery, new methods, original ventures. “We must now place
the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist,” he conceded, or
remain in economic dependence. But how much further the country should
be industrialized, whether it “shall be proposed to go beyond our own
supply” to compete in foreign markets, was not yet clear to him; the
problem remained still to be determined whether “the _surplus_ labor”
would be “most beneficially employed in the culture of the earth, or
in the fabrications of art.”[367] In such commentary Jefferson failed
to measure the thrust of economic determinism that drives every people
to go through with the industrial revolution, once it is begun; but
if we recall the primary principle of his political philosophy, that
the “care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction,
is the first and only legitimate object of good government,” we may
perhaps judge what would have been his attitude towards a centralized
industrialism. He would have judged its desirability, not by the
balance sheet of corporate business, but by the social ledger. As a
social economist he could not think in terms of the economic man, nor
simplify human beings to labor commodity, nor reduce the social tie
to the cash nexus. It is inconceivable that he should have shared
Hamilton’s satisfaction at the contemplation of women and children--and
many of the latter “of tender age”--wasting away in the mills; he was
too social-minded for that, too much an idealist, too human in short.
Though necessity might force him away from a simple agrarian economy,
it does not follow that he would become partisan to a centralizing