This course provides an overview of Thomas Jefferson's work and perspectives presented by the University of Virginia in partnership with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Together, UVA and Monticello are recognized internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Reluctant Revolutionaries: The Context for Writing the Declaration
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Age of Jefferson
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Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence
No document is more closely associated with Jefferson than the Declaration of Independence. Listing it as the first of three achievements on his tombstone, Jefferson clearly believed the Declaration to be of profound importance. Generations of Americans have agreed, constantly quoting its phrases and invoking its ideas. But do we really understand what Jefferson was trying to do when he wrote the Declaration? In this module, we’ll explore the Revolutionary context in which Jefferson lived and worked. We’ll ask why the Declaration takes the form that it does, and also what Jefferson hoped it would accomplish. Surprisingly, the parts of the Declaration that we celebrate most frequently today may not be the ones Jefferson would have understood to be the most important.
Conoce a los instructores
Professor Peter S. OnufThomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
Corcoran Department of History
And it's worth noting as we get underway, that the war, the
Revolutionary war had been going on for 15 months before we had this declaration.
That would never again happen in world history.
That people finally, after 15 months say, you know what we're really doing?
We're breaking away from the empire. That 15 month interval
between the start of the war at Lexington
and Concord and the enactment of the Declaration.
That is a testimonial to the reluctance of the American people, if there
were such a people, to endorse this idea of breaking with Britain.
Now, what was the American Revolution all about?
What we learn in school is of course, that liberty
loving Americans enjoying security in their rights were suddenly assaulted by
British Tax policies that threatened to take their property away,
subvert their independence, even reduce them to a condition of slavery.
No taxation without representation.
It's an inspiring story, and it's predicated on
the notion that we all have this political consciousness.
This rights consciousness, this awareness of who we are, and what are claims are.
And what finally drives Americans to revolution.
Is the notion that they were being treated unequally by the British.
They weren't being recognized in their rights as Englishmen, and ultimately
their rights as men.
Well, let me tell you a different story which I think is more accurate.
The American Revolution begins when provincial elites, the
ruling classes in the various colonies or provinces
react defensively against encroachments on their rights as they see them.
On their liberty, on their freedoms. It's the concerns of
these assemblies, of these provincial legislatures.
It's the concerns of people we might now call aristocrats.
Dominant people.
Oligarchs.
In some places, like Virginia, they're pretty impressive.
They own vast acres. They're people like Jefferson.
Of course, Jefferson's not the biggest of the landholders.
Great slaveholders, landholders, or great merchants to the north.
And these people see that the new policies
that the British are enacting after the French and
Indian War, the 7 Years War, are going
to be dangerous for their traditional way of life.
It's a very conservative reaction.
But where it comes from is this, and this is an important point to keep in mind, if
there is a collective identity in America that transcends provincial
limits it's the sense that these Americans as we now call them were Britains.
Everybody in the civilized world agreed that the British Empire was the greatest
empire in modern world history perhaps greater than the classical empires.
It was an empire that combined great
force and power with liberty, with enlightenment,
with an expansive commerce that spread British trade across the globe.
Americans exalted in the greatness of the British empire.
They were imperial patriots.
This sense of identification with the empire was extreme.
In fact, you could say that Americans
thought about empire, and thought about their
place in it well before anybody bothered
to think about the empire in Britain itself.
Now, I don't mean to say that the British
policy makers had no awareness of what we call
the empire.
That they didn't have the colonial administration.
That there weren't occasional acts of parliament and more
regular supervision, more regular supervision by the board of trade.
Certainly, all this is true.
There's in fact a new minister for the southern
department who's, who's remit is to look after the colonies.
There's an imperial policy but the idea of an empire as this entity,
a greater Britain that includes Americans,
British English speaking people everywhere, people
who enjoy a tradition of liberty and the greatest claim that Britain's made.
What made them proud to be British is that they had a constitution.
You can't find it anywhere.
It's not written down.
It has, of course, many texts that contribute to this idea of a constitution.
But Americans
felt they shared in that tradition. Their local courts were common law courts.
They were very much part of a greater British world.
The question though is what was their status in this world.
What drove Americans to break away from the Empire was
the unwillingness of metropolitan Britains to recognize them as equal members
of an empire.
You could say that the beginnings of American
nationalism are a peculiarly provincial perspective on the imperial
constitution on the empire, a claim that Americans make
to be, on the leading edge of the Empire.
In 1751, Benjamin Franklin wrote his famous essay
on population, in which he suggested that the population
here was doubling every 25 years. And that before long, do the math, there
would be more Britain's in America, than there are, Britain's in the Metropolis.
You can even fantasize about the movement
of the capital from London across the oceans.
Say, a swamp on the Potomac River, or some other place,
if you're really into the fantasy as the American founders were.
And say that, one day this great empire, it's frontier, it's moving westward.
Bishop Barkley had promised the course of
empire is moving westward This is the West.
This is the future.
This vaulting sense of a providential mission, what we later call manifest
destiny, is very much a part of British thinking in the 18th century.
This is the core of American patriotism. It's a combination of
identification with the empire, loyalty to King George the
third, after he ascended in 1760, with of course
an obsessive concern and pride in provincial institutions.
Because what made Americans free British people is
that they had local institutions of law and governance under their control.
And think of the advantages of empire for just a minute.
The greatest challenge for producers,
consumers, for merchants, for agriculturalists.
In the 18th century in a trans-Atlantic world, the
great challenge is to trade freely with protection and security.
This is what the British Empire offers as the strongest government
on Earth. It offers Americans security.
This gets to the core of the question of loyalty because a
king's authority is based on what we can call the protection covenant.
You exchange your loyalty, your allegiance, for my
protection. That doesn't sound quite like a
group of individuals getting together and forming a
social contract and consenting to be governed by themselves.
No, the protection covenant suggests something more fundamental.
It's more Hobbes than Locke. It's more the need we all have for a
powerful government to give us the security that enables us to enjoy any
rights at all.
Americans aren't foolish.
They don't want to live in a state of nature.
In fact, nature was probably pretty much a dirty word in the 18th century.
Not the thing that romantics would later celebrate.
Nature is dangerous, and dark place. The word that comes to mind in the absence
of law, and order is anarchy, lawlessness. This is the great danger of a state
of war. A state of war is the state of nature
Provincial resistance to crown and Parliamentary policy
had led to a state of war.
It had left Americans in an untenable situation where
they were suffering, forgive the
modern psychological jargon, cognitive dissidence.
They were rebels.
They were making war against their lawful sovereign
and they were doing it for a long
time and it was a bad thing. They knew it
was dangerous because if they're rebels, they're common criminals.
And if the king can kill you, you deserve to die.
This is the immediate context for the Declaration of Independence.
This understanding that the situation Americans
were in, violently resisting their lawful sovereign.
Of course they were convinced that he, and their
Parliament, had violated the Constitution, had betrayed the protection covenant.
That in fact,
as Jefferson tells us in The Declaration, George the third was making war against
his loyal subjects. We had surely, right
on our side, but did we? Were we really convinced?
I'm imagining that we're all Americans now and that we're back at that moment.
What a situation to be in.
In something like a state of nature.
Do you have the right to kill your father?
Now I don't want you to share your Oedipal situation with me.
It's not an appropriate context for that.
But rage against fathers is not unknown in world
history, which is why I'm delighted to only have daughters.
Sons are deeply threatening, but of course we sons need to break
away from our fathers.
But revolution, the idea of killing the father.
It begins with this journey secret, its a, it's
overthrowing the legitimate and even natural authority of the father.
We think now that monarchy is so incredibly absurd and ridiculous.
How could any one dynasty, one family produce people worthy to rule us?
It seems absurd.
But if you asked people in the 18th century before the American Revolution
what the common sense of the thing was, they would tell you this.
They'd say, all men are created unequal.
Some are born to rule. Some are born to vast acres.
Some are born to toil. It's the nature of the thing.
And it's not just
the satisfied complacency of the status quo.
It's the fact that everyone believes that social order is a hierarchy.
Order implies connection, across class and status lines that create a larger whole.
But depends on that differentiation. Think of your body for a minute.
We've already been through your Oedipal conflicts but think
of your body.
All parts of your body are not created equal.
They do different things, it's a division of labor.
The body works precisely because of that differentiation.
How can you imagine a social whole, an organism in which every
element is identical? That's not commonsensical.
That's something truly revolutionary.
And this is what people like Jefferson thought.
They said, this is going to be a
radical reorientation, the very nature of social order.
There is, I'm saying, something profoundly
unnatural about rebellion against legitimate authority.
And monarchical authority is legitimate in the 18th century.
Well, there's a lot of resistance to the Revolution then, even among Americans.
John Adams offered the idea that one third
of the American people were in fact patriots.
That's not everybody, is it, that's not everybody rising up and
saying we believe in free government, we believe in government by consent.
One third of the people, he thought, maybe they were
loyalists, and we know that many of them fled to what became
The Maritime Provinces of Canada, and they fled all over the world.
It's a great Loyalist Diaspora.
And one thrid can't make their minds up.
That one third of the middle is probably bigger than that, and there's
a fourth category that Thomas Payne identified
for us which is the sunshine patriot.
Who's
winning? I'm on that side.
Take these four ambiguous categories, put them in motion, and you have
a picture of the confused loyalties of Americans in 1776.
And those people who for conscientious and principled reasons
said I can't make war against my monarch, my sovereign.
Well, who's supporting the high principle, here?
Or would it be the rebel?
Well, no rebel wants to be known as a rebel.
No father killer wants to go down in history as a father killer.
You've got a big job of justification before you.
Let's talk for a few minutes about what needs to
be done in 1776 and I think it will be clearer
why this cognitive dissonance is untenable, intolerable.
On one hand, if Americans are no longer protected by
George the Third, and that protection is a very real
thing, regardless of what Jefferson tells us in the Declaration
about all those horrible things the king is doing to us.
Nonetheless, Americans have been and are continuing
to be protected by George the Third up until the outbreak of war.
They know that's an important thing.
If you are going to forswear monarchical protection, you need a substitute.
The substitute is in the balance of power.
It's in alliances with other foreign powers.
For the British it was clear that if the colonies broke away
they must be looking for another mother country.
Now we, patriotic Americans would never say
that that other mother country was France.
But that's exactly what the British thought.
It's got to be one or the other.
You can't go it alone. And the fact is, we couldn't.
You had to exploit the resources of the balance
of power, to create an offset to British power, now your enemies, because this is
what the Declaration does, is to o fficially codify
the status of the British as your enemies.
That means you need friends, you need to be able to
be able to call upon the resources of the balance of power.
Because at the end of the day
1776 doesn't mean anything if you don't win the war.
It's not a declaration of a fact, it's a hope, it's a prayer and that prayer
will only be fulfilled on the battlefield. Or at sea.
You need an effective alliance. It's not just in sheer power terms.
It's as long
as you are re, rebels against a legitimate domestic authority.
Nobody can help you, and you can't claim the
status of a belligerent under the law of nations.
The law of nations applies to nations. How do you get to be a nation?
You have to be recognized as a nation. You have to act like one.
You have to be able to mobilize
your resources, present a common front,
send armies into the field, diplomats overseas.
You have to be able to tax your people.
Your people have to be willing to die for you.
That's what it means to be a nation.
Think for just a minute. Americans are now trying to achieve
the status of a recognized power among the powers of the earth.
And just a few years ago they just wanted
to be treated as equals under the British Empire.
They were proud to be British, they were anglophiles, and in a moment
because it was declared from on high they became anglophobes.
The British were their enemies.
This sudden conversion experience from old to
new, to enable Americans to make effective war.
To complete the work they had begun. Without a clear intention.
They didn't want to be independent. They had no choice but to be independent.
And what independence meant, in fact, was interdependence, to be
able to establish a workable alliance and win the war.
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