Principles, Opinions, and Promise in Jefferson’s
First Inaugural Address
Today the new
political year commences—The new order of things begins.
-John Marshall, morning of March 4, 1801
Writing to America’s freshly inaugurated third
president in March 1801, Benjamin Rush congratulated a very dear, old friend on
a different kind of inauguration—that of “a new era” in American political
life:
You
have opened a new era by your speech on the 4th of March in the
history of the United States….Old friends who had been separated by party
names, and a supposed difference of principle
in politics for many years, shook hands with each other, immediately after
reading it, and discovered for the first time, that they had differed in opinion only, about the best means of
promoting the interests of their common country. (Cunningham 40)
“It would require a
page,” Rush continued indulgently, “to contain the names of all the citizens
(formerly called Federalists) who have spoken in the highest terms of your
speech” (40). Not everyone, of course, was so optimistic. Thomas Rodney, a
Continental Congressman from Delaware, admitted in his diary that although
Jefferson “pours out oil on the Pot that has been boiling over so long….where
parties are so inveterated…as in America, perhaps he will fail, and by
Endeavouring to gain his adversaries, loose his friends” (Cummingham 40). He
would lose some.
But to Jefferson the possibility of healing
political wounds was, he confided to Elbridge Gerry, “almost the first object
of my heart” (WTJ 1089). “It will be a great blessing to our country if we can
once more restore harmony and social love among its citizens,”; for such a
reconciliation Jefferson would “sacrifice everything but principle”
(1089). Jefferson refers, of course, to
the widening political division between Federalists and Republicans: between
those who believed the Tenuously United States required above all an
authoritative central government for which the people should and would put up
with a certain degree of necessary tyranny; and those who remembered, and felt
still the fetters of monarchy, of tyranny, of authoritarianism, of civic
enslavement. For the latter, anything would be pledged to keep the experiment
of democracy alive; anything, says Jefferson, but the abandonment of
principles, principles Jefferson would claim as common-ground with Federalists.
And yet he also knew that the fate of the American experiment depended on who
would next sit in the hot seat in 1801: which vision of America would win? The
surety of centralized power, or the risks of a more delicate democracy?
So we dance between tyranny and liberty. The
stakes couldn’t have been higher for Jefferson, and for the country. The tang
of tyranny was still in the mouths of most Americans, a taste left over after
the monarchial flirtations of the Adams and Washington administrations. If not
exactly elated to have been elected to the highest office of his country, I
think he was relieved. “[T]his Government,” Jefferson softly spoke out on that
March morning, is “the world’s best hope” (WTJ 493). Its strength comes not
from an overbearing central authority, but from the physically dispersed yet culturally—principally—united
hearts and minds of its citizens. America’s government was “the only one where
every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and
would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern”: here
would be found the well of our enduring strength (493). Jefferson speaks here
of a general sense of civic duty, but he speaks also of his own call to office
(we might remember Kant’s remarks on duty: “Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name
that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating, but requirest submission”
(Kant 92)). Jefferson felt this all-encompassing call to serve his country, to
do what would be asked of him. The country needed, he knew, a Republican in the
(brand new) White House.
From among the stated “invasions of the
public order” came a most serious breach of civil liberties enacted by his own
friend John Adams. Adams had taken a hard line during his own presidency in
quelling activities he saw as unpatriotic, and, so, dangerous: radicalism,
disloyalty, insurrection, protests and slurs on the government (and, worse, on
himself). He retaliated with The Sedition Act of 1798, which Jefferson happily
allowed to expire at the end of Adams’ presidency. Jefferson cites “freedom of
the press” as an “essential principle[] of our Government”: this difference of
opinion would sever his friendship with John and Abagail for about a decade. “I
cannot agree,” writes a bitter Abagail to Jefferson in 1804 (in what would be
the last Adams-Jefferson letter mailed until 1812), “in opinion, that the
constitution ever meant to withhold from the National Government the power of
self defense, or that it could be considered an infringement of the Liberty of
the press, to punish the licentiousness of it” (Cappon 281-82). In particular,
Jefferson’s pardoning of James Callendar, the rather outrageous political
writer jailed until the Sedition Act, was to the Adams’ “a personal injury”
(Cappon 274).
The Adams-Jefferson falling-out gives us, I
think, a taste of the political climate Jefferson was stepping into: it must
have been toxic. Thus on that March
morning in 1801, Thomas Jefferson knew he had to do something impossible: in a
single speech he had to mend, he had to have a vision; and he had to, in a
couple thousand words, articulate the “creed of our political faith, the text
of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we
trust” (WTJ 495). For the Republican sensibility finding “the voice of the
nation” would be tricky. How do you privilege national unity without minimizing
the Republican virtues of liberty and difference? On this day, insists
Jefferson, “[w]e are all Republicans, we are all Federalists” (WTJ 493).
Jefferson turned differences of party principles into differences of party
opinions: “every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle” (493).
We may differ in opinions, but Americans must share common, essential
principles. The primary circle of allegiance must be expanded from Republican
or Federalist to a wider identity: American.
We find this kind of patriotism today in
rhetorical form in the mouths of many, and yet often we find it ringing a bit
hollow: either too cheap or just insincere. The stakes were so much higher in
1801: the experiment had just begun, and no one, including Jefferson, knew
where it would lead. In 2004 on a Tuesday night in Boston, a relatively unknown
Senatorial candidate from Illinois looked back in order to look forward. He was
giving us permission, I think, to feel a kind of qualified pride. Although he
wasn’t yet running for president, Obama told an audience that “our pride is
based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two
hundred years ago….we are called to reaffirm our values and our commitments, to
hold them against a hard reality and see how we are measuring up to the legacy
of our forbearers and the promise of future generations” (Obama 2). Obama was
echoing Jefferson that night: “[T]here are those who are preparing to divide
us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers….Well, I say to them tonight,
there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United
States of America” (4). Delegates at the Democratic National Convention that
night must have wondered, waving their blue and red Kerry-Edwards signs,
whether they had just nominated the wrong man for the job.
“The task is above my talents,” admits
Jefferson. The man had a penchant for hyperbole and a sometimes misleading
exaggeration of sentiment. But even if we’ll never know whether the admission
is largely rhetorical or else deeply serious, the approach must have been
incredible: he wore no ceremonial sword, and asked “indulgence for [his] own errors”
in executing “the post you have assigned me” (WTJ 495). He spoke of a “political faith” of which it’s
hard not to be cynical. Two hundred years later Barack Obama invoked “the
audacity of hope…the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a
belief that there are better days ahead” (Obama 5). Jefferson’s political
reconciling did not endure long, and—like any politician—he soon got his hands
necessarily dirty; the nation would be at war with itself in sixty years. But
after two hundred or so, a black man, a “skinny kid with a funny name,” would
take the same oath as did Jefferson that day in 1801 (5). Jefferson’s
“essential principles,” and the promises held within his Declaration would come
to fruition in a concrete way, even as the vogue of opinion continues to check
and question the validity of such principles and such promises.
Works
Cited
Cappon, Lester J. The Adams-Jefferson Letters. New York:
Clarion Books, 1971.
Cunningham, Noble E. The Inaugural Addresses of President Thomas
Jefferson, 1801 And 1805.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
Jefferson, Thomas. Writings ed. Merrill Peterson. New York:
The Library of America, 1984.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason trans.
Abbott. New York: Dover Philosophical
Classics, 2004.
Meacham, Jon. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. New
York: Randon House, 2012.
Obama, Barack.
“Transcript: Illinois Senate Candidate Barack Obama.” The Washington Post, 27 July 2004.
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751- 2004July27.html>
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