Debating Protests, Safe Spaces, Jefferson

May I be forgiven for posting from the National Review. The article was a nice gloss on some of the logic operating...
Posted by Laura Bilhimer on Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Part II of "We're Worried About Thomas Jefferson Again, or Why Progressive Social Justice Agendas Should Not Always Be Taken Seriously"

I continued the post as follows:

Gordon Wood says it best: "Everyone, it seems, sees America in Jefferson. So the shame and guilt that Jefferson must have suffered from his involvement in slavery and racial mixing best represent the shame and guilt that white Americans feel in their tortured relations with blacks….Jefferson for this present generation has become the problem. The Jefferson that emerges out of much recent scholarship therefore resembles the America many critics have visualized in the past four decades: self-righteous, guilt-ridden, racist, doctrinaire, and filled with liberal pieties that under stress are easily sacrificed." ("Revolutionary Characters", p97) 

And then I noticed the Online Petition from U Missouri:

Sloppy, sloppy handling of history: https://www.change.org/.../the-university-of-missouri...
 They quote scholarship on Sally Hemings without ever including Sally's closest, most careful scholar Annette Gordon-Reed. Gordon-Reed is African American Pulizer Prize winning historian of great reputation. They just casually drop in "This was a man that raped 16 year old Sally Hemings, a young innocent house slave (Burstein, 2005)." Burstein is a guy who wrote a book with the titilating title of "Death and Desire at Monticello." Great. No one knows or will ever know the nature of the relationship between Sally and TJ. She could have stayed in France, but came back to Virginia with him in 1789 after earning wages and living as a free woman for about two years. We'll never be sure, but these people seem comfortable using Sally for their argument without real responsibility. 

And I went on because at this point I was all wound up:

Our first clue as to the intellectual seriousness of the petition is the hyperbolic first sentence: "The need to project a progressive environment is just as important as food and shelter to survive." NO, not quite. I have to eat before I care about Foucault and structures of power. Let me be clear that I agree college campuses are places where a continual questioning of many things should take place: our assumptions, our history--really, how we see ourselves. The whole point of a liberal arts education is to realize that how you think you see the world is not merely "how it is" but that that perspective is shaped by culture and history among various other factors. But to breezily assert that a statue of Jefferson is sending out micro-aggressions of nothing other than hypocrisy, racism and sexism--this is intellectual thuggery at its worse, especially when it poses as the enlightened assertion of Social Justice. Talk about hypocrisy. Everyone has the right to an opinion. We've been calling out TJ for slavery for as long as he's been dead, as we should. But there are informed opinions and there are opinions informed by breeze-reading, intellectual editorializing, and cultural bandwagoning. 

My mentor outside the English department at KU commented that she was "proud" of me. Which would move me to tears had I some scotch on hand. Besides the many classes I took with the inimitable Dr. Valk, the two seachanges of my college education were Western Civ II and Islam in Europe--both with Dr. Urie. Her classes were oases of intellectual diversity and independent thinking.

I'm trying to--right now--write a term paper on Jefferson, and a lot of this stuff about the recent protests and intellectual coddling has made it into a footnote.

We're Worried About Thomas Jefferson Again, or Why Progressive Social Justice Agendas Should Not Always Be Taken Seriously

I would love to rant about how much of a joke salon.com is getting to be. That historian is cut out to be one of their...
Posted by Laura Bilhimer on Friday, December 4, 2015

Reflections on Jefferson's First Inaugural Address

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 4^th 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>

Re-reading the Declaration of Independence

Reflections on the Revolution in Philadelphia

[The Declaration] was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.

-Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Henry Lee, 1825

…of all the books that no one can write, those about nations and national character are the most impossible.

-Jaques Barzun

    The Declaration of Independence: it’s a strange thing to really look at, for the first time, a thing you’ve seen your whole life. Strange too that my least favorite subject in school was early American History, and Revolutionary History in particular. Powdered wigs, documents and committees, General Washington floating rather chubbily down the Delaware: so bloodless, so boring. Hypocrites to the man, I had thought, slavery into the nineteenth century! Freedom, indeed. Once, though, I remember quite a revolutionary little pleasure of my own: an exercise in argumentation. Sometime around third or fourth grade, my classmates and I were to write Revolutionary pamphlets. As all were at liberty to represent either the British or American interest, all hands shot up for America, the eager little sycophantic would-be patriots. I—a wised-up, bespectacled nine-year-old yet to have heard of, let alone read, Edmund Burke—I puffed out my chest and raised my hand for Britannia. I alone would defend her, squash these upstart insurrectionists, and risk all for noble King George. I would rein in, and reign over, these ungrateful, incipient would-be pamphleteers!

    Though always a quiet student, I enjoyed the assignment immensely, and I think my teacher took a kind of qualified pride in my distressingly unironic enthusiasm for His Majesty’s purely paternal concern for his colonial children. Certainly such enthusiasm stemmed partly from a play of devil’s advocate, and yet I do think I began really to love the regal British red coats, and took sincere pleasure in the arch argumentation of speaking down to these my comrades: entitled, rhetorically inflated, and so woefully misinformed. They were so dreadfully dismissive of those very real institutions which had allowed that infantile entitlement to flourish in the first place. Duty, King, and Country: to dissolve those bands would be folly indeed. And who would be foolhardy enough to take on the British Navy? I got an A—or its elementary school equivalent—and no small degree of ridicule from my more patriotic classmates.

    I give you this anecdote by way of introduction, but also to try to explain to myself how I came to study American letters, and why. Taking leave of my hasty youthful Anglophilia, I find my higher education has largely revolved around a question I keep asking because it seems important, vital even: what, in any real sense, does “America” mean. I think here of Jaques Barzun's observation that the business of writing about a nation is "the most impossible." Academia too often renders questions of nationhood and national style as naïve, uncritical, even empty. The emotion of national pride, as Richard Rorty wrote, has been largely repudiated by the academic left (Rorty 252). Rorty sees the possibility of a richer national pride: Rorty’s patriot may feel humble, even ashamed, but also sincerely proud of her country. We might here recall Michael Kammen’s People of Paradox. Kammen writes of the tricky business of writing about national “style”:

There is both grandeur and pettiness in the so-called American experience. Hence its interpreter must somehow be unambiguous about ambiguities, must see several sides of many questions without being ultimately indecisive in his conclusions. (Kammen xiii)

Like Kammen, I seem to be writing around the problem of writing about America, and thus I also write around the problem of writing about the Declaration.  How does one approach such a document?

    In his brief, punchy biography (or, better, sketch) of Jefferson, Christopher Hitchens argues that “[t]here is no other example in history, apart from the composition of the King James version of the Bible, in which great words and concepts have been fused into poetic prose by the banal processes of a committee” (Hitchens 23). But credit ultimately still goes to Jefferson as the Declaration’s author, Hitchens writing that rather than “inventing” or “imagining” America, “[i]t would be truer to say…that he designed America, or that he authored it” (Hitchens 5). Thomas Jefferson thought his government “the world’s best hope,” an institution through which the strength of its people could be channeled. “I believe,” he wrote in his first inaugural address, “[our government] the only one where every man, at the call of the law…would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern” (Jefferson 493). There is blood in these words yet, I think. To understand America, or the American Experiment, we turn to Jefferson; to understand Jefferson we could do worse than to turn to the Declaration.   

    Writing to Henry Lee, a distant relative and a brother Governor of Virginia, an octogenarian Jefferson explains “the object of the Declaration of Independence”:

Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take….[I]t was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.  (Jefferson 1501)

Radical but not original. An “expression of the American mind” was still expressed on paper by one American mind in particular. And the contradictions for which Jefferson is often vilified, are the contradictions pointed to in the Declaration as rendering its authors hypocritical and probably insincere. And yet I still shiver at the words: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary…”; self-evident truths; “all men created are equal”; “inalienable rights”; life and liberty; lives, fortunes, and sacred honors. Liberty, above all, liberty. So where stem the troubles? Staughton Lynd, in his Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, identifies one particular tension within the document: “…the latent tension within the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence between an outlook on society based on property and a contrasting perspective built on conscience, or on self-determining human activity, could not long be avoided” (qtd. Kammen 237). We’re talking about, as Kammen points out, the nature of property and we’re also talking about the essence of mankind. Put together, we’re talking about the American ownership, in July of 1776, of a few hundred thousand men, women, and children. People as property.

     Natural rights and universal principles; theoretical beliefs and practical realities. Justice and reality can seldom be held in a single vision. In an 1852 commemorative speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglas would be rather frank to his audience as to just what exactly Independence Day means to the slave in America:

…a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham…your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery….There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

    Go where you may, search where you will…for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, American reigns without a rival. (Douglass 127)

We might picture the scattered applause, and gaping jaws. Still, Douglass addresses his contemporaries more than Jefferson. The Founding Fathers, Douglass writes, were “unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles” (Douglass 121). As much may be said of Jefferson, we do know. Congress cut about a quarter of Jefferson's original draft, the majority of the cut portions decrying slavery, that "execrable commerce" (Jefferson 22). The cuts crucially meant keeping the colonies together--these edits were very practical, probably necessary. He would have had to have been pragmatic, bending idealism down into the confines of  the dire situation at hand. And yet we still, with John Adams, admit pretty bitterly the probable necessity of cutting such language: "[King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery" (22). 

    Perhaps slavery was on Jefferson's mind when property became happiness. Though heavily influenced by the natural rights philosophy of John Locke, Jefferson makes a crucial change to this oft-quoted passage in Locke's Second Treatise of Government: "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… (Locke 9, emphasis original). Our inalienable rights no longer extend to ownership, but to being happy. Douglass wrote that the founding fathers “loved their country better than their own private interests” and perhaps this might help explain, if only a little, why Jefferson continued to own slaves. He held the country’s future to a higher standard; much higher than that to which he could hope to hold himself and his comrades in 1776.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of an American Slave. New York: Norton Critical          Edition, 1997.

Hitchens, Christopher. Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. New York: Harper Perennial,           2009.

Jefferson, Thomas. Writings ed. Merrill Peterson. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Kammen, Michael. People of Paradox. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Hackett Publishing, 1980.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books, 1999.