Gilbert Chinard

“ But greatly as he admired Paine's eloquence, Jefferson did not try to emulate it; impassioned as it was, his appeal to the inhabitants of the British colonies sounded more like the summing-up of a lawyer before the jury than an emotional sermon.
Our cause is just. Our union is perfect—our internal resources are great.... We fight not for glory or for conquest. We exhibit to mankind the remarkable spectacle of a people attacked by provoked enemies, without any imputation or even suspicion of offense. ”

“ As in philosophy and war, so in government, in oratory, in painting, in the plastic arts, we might show that America, though but a child of yesterday, has already given hopeful proofs of genius, as well as of the nobler kinds, which arouse the best feelings of man, which call him into action, which substantiate his freedom, and conduct him to happiness, as of the subordinate, which serve to amuse him only. ”

“ Far from her, life lost all interest: "all things appear to me to trudge in one and the same round: we rise in the morning that we may eat breakfast, dinner and supper, and to go to bed again, that we may get up the next morning and do the same, so that you never saw two peas more alike than our yesterday and to-day." He had in mind to go back to Williamsburg, to propose, receive his sentence and be no longer in suspense: "but reason says, if you go, and your attempts prove unsuccessful, you will be ten times more wretched than ever." ”

“ Thus Jefferson was induced to take up again in his old days one of his pet schemes, the famous bill for the diffusion of knowledge.
As a matter of fact, he had never abandoned it completely, and its very purpose had been explained already in the "Notes on Virginia":
In every government on earth there is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy.... Each government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are therefore its only safe depositories. And to render even them safer, their minds must be improved to a certain degree. ”

“ It should be our endeavour to cultivate the peace and friendship of every nation, even of that which has injured us most, when we shall have carried our point against her. Our interest will be to open the doors of commerce, and to knock off all its shackles, giving perfect freedom to all persons for the want of whatever they may choose to bring into our ports, and asking the same in theirs. Never was so much false arithmetic employed on any subject, as that which has been employed to persuade nations that it is their interest to go to war. ”

“ To give the ballot to a floating population of industrial workers, unattached to the soil, who had nothing to sell except their labor, was "to brew a revolution, to pave the way for the Pisistrates, the Marius, the Caesars, who represent themselves as more democratic than they really are and than is just and reasonable, in order to become tyrants, to violate all rights, to substitute for law their arbitrary will, to offend morality and to debase humanity." ”

“ I have already printed Jefferson's correspondence with Volney, Destutt de Tracy, Lafayette and Du Pont de Nemours; many other letters, no less significant, remain practically unknown. He encouraged his European friends, Correa de Serra, Kosciusko, the Greek Coray, to keep up their courage, to hope against hope. To all of them he preached the same gospel of faith in the ultimate and inevitable recognition throughout the world of the principles of American democracy. This was not done for propaganda's sake, for no man would deserve less than Jefferson the dubious qualification of propagandist. ”

“ I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on a steady advance. We have seen indeed, once within the record of history, the complete eclipse of the human mind continuing for centuries ... even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them. ”

“ Is this a dreamer, a philosopher, a mere theorician, or a very alert and keen politician with a high ideal and an exact realization of the people's limitations? This pessimistic view of human nature and human society did not make Jefferson entirely cynical, since he kept his faith in his ideal and never questioned the eminent superiority of the republican form of government. But he knew men too well to have faith in their collective intelligence and disinterestedness, the naïve faith of so many French philosophers. ”

“ The peoples of the Old World worship at the birthplaces of their national heroes and bury their mortal remains in splendid mausoleums, pantheons or Westminster Abbeys. By a significant and symbolic contrast, the memories of Washington and Jefferson are enshrined in no ancestral homes, but in the mansions planned with loving care, in which they so expressed themselves that their very spirit seems to haunt the deserted rooms of Mount Vernon and Monticello. ”

“ Thus self-government, which had become a well established fact and a reality in America, should remain for other peoples a reward to be obtained after a long and painful process of education. It could be hoped that some day, after many disastrous experiments and much suffering, the peoples of Europe and South America might deserve the blessings enjoyed by the American people. But nothing was further from the character of Jefferson than to preach the gospel of Americanism to all the nations of the world. ”

“ She was the living evidence that under a free government a large nation could grow prosperous and powerful, simply by existing, and without preaching any new gospel she fulfilled her duty to mankind.
Whatever may be the shortcomings of this political philosophy, it was distinctly an American doctrine; one cannot imagine it to have originated in any European country, for what would have been a Utopian and chimerical dream in the Old World was within the reach of man in America. ”

“ Liberty, except liberty of speech and thought, cannot be unlimited and unrestricted in any society; it is a matter of bargain and exchange. Thus Jefferson proposed a definition of liberty entirely different from the French conception as found in Rousseau and reproduced in the "Déclaration des droits de l'homme" of May 29, 1793: "La liberté consiste à pouvoir faire tout ce qui ne nuit pas à autrui." With him, on the contrary, liberty consists in the free enjoyment of our will except in certain specific cases, to be enumerated at the time we form a social compact. ”

“ The European nations constitute a separate division of the globe; their localities make them part of a distinct system; they have a set of interests of their own in which it is our business never to engage ourselves. America has a hemisphere to itself. It must have its separate system of interests; which must not be subordinated to those of Europe. The insulated state in which nature has placed the American continent, should so far avail it that no spark of war kindled in the other quarters of the globe should be wafted across the wide oceans which separate us from them and it will be so. ”

“ It was not so much desire of expansion and imperialism as the conviction that colonies were only pawns in the game of European politics; that they could change hands at any time according to the fortunes of war; that there existed consequently a permanent danger of seeing France recover some day her former colonies or, still worse, to have them fall into the hands of the British. With England, or possibly France, on the northern border, in the Floridas, on the Gulf, and in the valley of the Mississippi, the old dream of European domination of the North American continent would revive. ”

“ Since then I have found that, in his "Commonplace Book", Jefferson copied passages from Wilson's pamphlet, although for reasons which I could not determine he omitted the very passage which presents the most striking resemblance:
All men are, by nature, equal and free: No one has a right to any authority over another without his consent: All lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it: Such consent was given with a view to ensure and to increase the happiness of the governed above what they could enjoy in an independent and unconnected state of nature. ”

“ When we shall have existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will inquire from what unfriendly causes it has proceeded, that the other countries of Europe and quarters of the earth shall not have inscribed any name in the roll of poet. But neither has America produced "one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or science." ”

“ These principles were presented by Jefferson as being essentially the result of natural conditions for which the Americans themselves were not responsible: "Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation", there was only one course for the American people to follow: "commerce and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none." ”

“ He stands alone, one of the most complicated and contradictory figures in American history—a pure patriot, whose patriotic work is almost forgotten, a catholic spirit who loved to play with ideas and paradoxes, a contrary mind, but in my opinion more widely read than any of his American contemporaries, not excepting Jefferson. A man who spent his life by the side of the severe and haughty "New England Juno", but who had more ideas in his brain than any sultan of the Arabian Nights had favorites in his harem. ”

“ To criticize his policies is an easy feat for a modern historian, for it is natural that an American of to-day should resent Jefferson's attitude as unworthy of a great self-respecting nation. Undoubtedly the President might have sent a warlike message to Congress and war would have immediately followed, but on the whole the issue had been taken out of his hands in December, 1807. The embargo, as he justly pointed out, was no new policy and no new measure; it was simply a recognition of a situation created by both France and Great Britain. ”

“ Writing to Albert Gallatin he indulged in a "poetical effusion" which shows how deeply his feelings were stirred:
I grieve for France ... and I trust they will finally establish for themselves a government of rational and well tempered liberty. So much science cannot be lost; so much light shed over them can never fail to produce to them some good in the end. Till then, we may ourselves fervently pray, with the liturgy a little parodied; Give peace till that time, oh Lord, because there is none other that will fight for us but only thee, oh God. ”

“ Desirable as it was to promote the industrial development of the United States, it was no less desirable not to encourage it beyond a certain point. Jefferson saw quite clearly that, under existing conditions, a great industrial growth of the country would have as an unavoidable result the perpetuation of slavery in the South and the even more undesirable creation of a proletariat in the North. He had always held that slavery was a national sore and a shameful condition to be remedied as soon as conditions would permit. ”

“ At any rate, Jefferson's conception of the social compact was far more rigorous, precise, and specific than any that had been proposed before. A man who had been trained as a lawyer knew exactly what a contract was, and how necessary it is, in such an instrument, to write clauses safeguarding both parties. The Bill of Rights was to serve that very purpose: it was nothing but a document enumerating, defining, and recognizing once for all a certain number of rights that every individual specifically reserved in joining a new society. ”

“ In a communication to Gouverneur Morris, Jefferson was more reserved but no less insistent upon the principle that the French Government was a government de jure as well as de facto:
We surely cannot deny to any nation that right whereon our own government is founded, that every one may govern itself according to whatever form it pleases, and change these forms at its own will; and that it may transact its business with foreign nations through whatever organ it thinks proper, whether King, Convention, Assembly, Committee, President, or anything else it may choose. ”

“ To go back to a primitive past, to the good old times, had been the dream of many political philosophers; but Jefferson's vision of that ancestral past was no dream, for it had originated in the only part of the inhabited earth where it could become a reality. This was the true background of the Declaration of Independence, the background of Jeffersonian democracy—a curious justification of the pioneer spirit by a student of history who cared little for abstract reasoning and philosophical constructions. ”

“ It is difficult to conceive how so good a people, with so good a king, so well-disposed rulers in general, so genial a climate, so fertile a soil, should be rendered so ineffectual for producing human happiness by one single curse—that of a bad form of government. ”

“ Jefferson felt such a dislike for unnecessary controversies that he was apt to adopt the tone and the style of his correspondents and apparently to accept their ideas, so that many contradictions can be found in these letters. To a chosen few only he fully revealed his intimate thoughts and without reticence, without fear of being betrayed, communicated his doubts, his hopes and his hatred. The letters he wrote to Short, Priestley, and Thomas Cooper are most remarkable in this respect. But with none of them did he communicate so freely as with his old friend John Adams. ”

“ America was not then a rich and powerful country with unlimited resources. The people had just emerged from a long and distressing financial crisis, for it took more than one generation to heal the wounds of a war which had lasted six years. The Federal Government was far from being as strong as it was destined to become. The navy was ridiculously inadequate, not only to go out and give battle to the English fleet, but even, to use Jefferson's expression, to keep the seaports "hors d'insulte". ”