Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
industrialism, with control vested in banking credit.
It is a common charge that Jefferson was consumed with suspicion, and
it is set down against him as the mark of a mean and ungenerous nature.
That in later years he was suspicious of fair-spoken advocates and
plausible programs was as true of Jefferson as of Sam Adams; he had
learned like the Boston democrat the virtue of the saying, _felix qui
cautus_, and with so much at stake he would practice caution. He feared
many things, for he was acutely aware of the incapacity of the heedless
majority to defend itself against an able and instructed minority. As
a child of an aristocratic age he fell into the mistake of visualizing
that minority in the guise of a landed gentry, rather than in the
guise of plutocracy; but in his quick fear of a minority he had all
history as counselor. When he took his seat in Washington’s cabinet
his suspicions of the Hamiltonian program were quickly aroused. He
believed that a monarchy was aimed at, and if that proved unattainable,
then a highly centralized state designed to hold in check the
democratic tendencies. His line of reasoning may be summarized thus:
In consequence of the republican enthusiasm of the early years of the
Revolution, democratic reorganization of the several state governments
had been successfully achieved. Very great progress towards democracy
had been made. Certain legislative acts of agrarian assemblies were now
being turned against democracy, to invalidate it as a working system of
government. But if agrarian majorities had used their power to enact
laws beneficial to their interests, they were only applying a lesson
learned from long experience with aristocratic legislatures. Such acts
were no serious indictment of the democratic principle, and to make
partisan use of them to justify curtailing the powers of the majority,
was a betrayal of popular rights. And this, Jefferson believed, was
the deliberate purpose of the Federalist leaders. Unable to stem the
popular tide in the several commonwealths, the wealthy minority had
devised a plan to superimpose upon the sovereign commonwealths a
centralized federal government, so hedged about as to lie beyond the
reach of local majorities, and hence able to override and nullify the
democratic will. Once safely established, this federal government would
gather fresh powers into its hands, until there emerged a rigorous
machine, modeled after the British system, and as little regardful of
the common interests. If this were not the Federalist purpose, why all
the praise of the British system as the ripe product of experience,
exactly adapted to the political genius of the English race?
In the matter of appeal to past experience, which provided the staple
of Federalist argument, Jefferson discovered fresh grounds of fear.
The past he looked upon as evil, and the record of experience was a
tale of injustice and bitter wrong. He would not have America follow
the trodden paths, for whither they led he knew too well. He would
countenance no entangling alliances with old-world upper-class systems
of statecraft, for such systems would reproduce in America the evils
it should be the chief business of America to prevent. There must be
erected here no counterpart of the European state; there must be no
king, no aristocracy, no plutocracy; but a new democratic organization
of government, in which the welfare of the whole people should be the
sole concern.
When I left Congress in ’76 [he wrote as an old man] it was in the
persuasion that our whole code must be revised, adapted to our
republican form of government, and now that we had no negatives of
Councils, Governors and Kings to restrain us from doing right, that
it should be corrected in all its parts with a single eye to reason
and the good of those for whose government it was planned.[368]
Not past experience but present need should instruct America in
drawing the plans of a new system of government and a new code of
law. In analyzing the evils of European systems Jefferson came to
certain conclusions that dominated all his later thinking, and
that may be phrased thus: The political state tends inevitably to
self-aggrandizement, the logical outcome of which is a political
leviathan, too big and too complex for popular control. With sovereign
powers vested in the hands of governmental agents, those agents lie
under a constant temptation to corruption and tyranny, and in the end
they align the powers of the state on the side of the most ambitious
and capable. The greater the power of government, the ampler its
revenues, the more energetic its administration, the more dangerous
it may become to the rights of men; for where the prize is greatest,
men struggle most ruthlessly, and what prize could be greater than the
privilege of exploiting society in the name of the state? History knows
no objective more tempting to the will to power, than the control of
the absolute state. A government adequately socialized, intent solely
upon furthering the common well-being, Jefferson would have been
unanxious about. But such governments existed only in the dreams of
Sir Thomas More and the Utopians; he could discover none such either
in the past or present. Everywhere strong governments were little more
than efficient tax-machines to support armies and provide subsidies and
places for the minority. Against such forces of corruption the people
struggle in vain.
If such was the common testimony of old-world experience--and no man
who knew the inner workings of government there would deny it--what
reason was there to expect that like causes would work unlike results
in America? To what purpose was the talk of strong government
encouraged amongst the holders of the public debt? To what end had
lobbyists for the funding bill invaded the floor of Congress? It was
idle to expect in America a nullification of the law, that where power
sits within, corruption waits without. The love of power is universal.
Most men are potential autocrats, the strong and capable may become
actual autocrats. No man is good enough, no group of men, to be trusted
with unrestrained powers--in America any more than in Europe. A
centralized government in control of the tax-machine, and secure from
popular restraint, would undo the results of the Revolutionary War. The
movement to consolidate power, Jefferson asserted, was “but Toryism in
disguise.” “The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers
into one body ... has destroyed the liberty and the rights of men in
every government which has ever existed under the sun.”
Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a
single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from
under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance
of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details
necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the
same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their
constituents, will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder
and waste.[369]
The practice of local home rule had grown up in America in response to
native conditions; it had resulted from democratic needs; and Jefferson
was too thoroughly American, too instinctively democratic, to overlook
the significance of local sovereignties in a democratic philosophy.
From the sharp contrast between American and European practice he
deduced a cardinal principle, namely, that good government springs from
a common interest in public affairs, and that such common interest
is possible only when the field of activities is circumscribed. Set
government apart from the people, or above them, and public interest
is lost in a sense of futility. The danger of an encroaching tyranny
by a superimposed sovereignty, is made easy by the public lethargy
in respect to distant and unfamiliar things, and establishes itself
through the psychology of custom. Jefferson was never greatly concerned
about stable government; he was very much more concerned about
responsive government--that it should faithfully serve the majority
will. He made no god of the political state. He had no conventional
reverence for established law and order; he inquired rather what
sort of law and order he was asked to accept, was it just or unjust.
Changing conditions make ancient good uncouth, and established
institutions tend to fall into dry-rot, or to become tyrannical. Men
are more important than constitutions, and the public well-being is
more sacred than statutes. An occasional revolution, he commented
grimly apropos of the hue and cry over Shays’s Rebellion, is salutary;
if it does not come of itself it might well be brought about. Progress
in government results from experiment; and it is easier and safer to
experiment on a small scale than on a great. Inertia increases with
size, and the more consolidated the government, the more unyielding it
becomes. The longest delayed revolutions are the gravest.
In asserting the principle of the majority will, Jefferson like other
democratic thinkers of the time, found himself countered by the
argument of abstract justice. Vehement denunciation had greeted Paine’s
doctrine that what a nation chooses to do, it has a right to do. There
can be no rights, it was confidently asserted, superior to the right.
The people may legislate, but it remains to determine the validity of
statutes in the light of justice; that which is unjust is _ipso facto_
null and void. It was Coke’s doctrine of judicial review, set up in
America after its repudiation in England, and Jefferson’s hostility
to it was bitter. As an intellectual he had none of the lawyer’s
complacency with legal principles, or conceit of the law’s sufficiency;
and as a democrat he would not yield sovereignty into the hands of the
judiciary. He had no veneration for the Common Law of England: it had
grown up by slow accretions during centuries of absolutism; how should
it be expected to answer the needs of a freer age? It must be purged
of outworn elements, imbued with democratic sympathies. The Revolution
had been fought in defense of rights that are broader and more human
than legal principles; and to hand over those rights to be interpreted
away by lawyers, seemed to him moonstruck madness. It was the law of
Blackstone rather than of Coke that he feared most--that “elegant”
canonization of the malign influences of Tory reaction, and that was
so cried up by the smatterers and “ephemeral insects of the law” in
America; whereas Coke “was as good a Whig as ever wrote”:
Blackstone and Hume have made tories of all England, and are
making tories of those young Americans whose native feelings of
independence do not place them above the wily sophistries of a
Hume or a Blackstone. These two books, and especially the former
[Blackstone], have done more towards the suppression of the
liberties of man, than all the million of men in arms of Bonaparte,
and the millions of human lives with the sacrifice of which he will
stand loaded before the judgment seat of his Maker.[370]
As Jefferson grew older his fear of judicial encroachment on the
popular will became acute, but it shifted from distrust of the Common
Law to concern over the Supreme Court. A strong and outspoken hatred
of the Federal judiciary runs through all his later writings, and he
lost no opportunity to popularize the thesis--“It is a misnomer to call
a government republican, in which a branch of the supreme power is
independent of the nation.”
The great object of my fear is the Federal Judiciary. That body,
like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming
advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is