Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 3: Jefferson and the Union (1)

I'm not quite as partisan in my views of Thomas Jefferson as I am about Andrew Jackson. But almost.

So I was interested to see this article by historian Brian Steele of the University of Alabama-Birmingham, "Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union" Journal of Southern History Nov 2008. Steele looks at Jefferson's position on states rights and the nature of the American Union, particularly in light of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99. Those documents, which were joint products of Jefferson and James Madison, were later held up by secessionists as support for their own advocacy of treason.

Steele's conclusions are sound, though I was surprised at some of the trappings surrounding them:

This admittedly brief and tentative examination of Jefferson's response to several crises of union suggests that he was willing to enforce federal law in the face of opposition by state and local authorities, that he believed the Union was empowered to coerce a seceding state, and that he claimed executive prerogative in cases of national selfpreservation or even of national interest. This was hardly [President] James Buchanan's position in 1860 and appears much closer to Lincoln's. None of this is meant to imply that Jefferson and Lincoln embraced similar theories of union. They did not. It is meant to suggest that our reflexive assumption that Jefferson's approach to disunion would have approximated Buchanan's or even that of the fire-eaters [!?!] needs careful reconsideration. The argument here should not be misread as a contrary assertion that Jefferson would not have "gone with the Confederacy" but seen rather as a call for historians to reconsider our reflexive tendency to assume this counterfactual. [!!?!?!]

If we look at Jefferson's political career as a whole, we see a kind of alternation between fear of the potentially negative consequences of centralized power, on the one hand, and a fear of national weakness and dissolution, on the other. During the Revolution, Jefferson joined other Americans in his resistance to arbitrary metropolitan authority. But during the Confederation period, Jefferson (along with many other leading figures) saw the greatest threat to American interests (and ultimately liberty) in the inability of Congress to compel member states to perform their obligations. During the 1790s, however, Jefferson understood the Federalists in charge of the national state to be exercising authority that was unauthorized by the original compact. The correction for this would be a restoration of the proper constitutional role of the state governments. During his presidency and the Republican ascendancy, though, Jefferson saw various threats to majority rule and to the legitimate powers granted to the national state posed by outlying states. [my emphasis]

Steele is correct that Jefferson's view of federalism was not at all consistent with the arguments made by the Confederate secessionists, arguments of which the obnoxious slavery advocate John C. Calhoun was the godfather. At the same time, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions did seem to argue that states had the right to declare federal laws invalid that clearly infringed on basic Constitutional liberties.

But, good grief! Whoever that knew anything about Thomas Jefferson's political career would assume that he would have supported the Confederacy's revolt to preserve slavery? Steele seems to assume that such is a common assumption among historians of the period. And I can't say with any authority that it's not. And, yes, we can't know what would have happened if he had lived at the time something happened that didn't happen when he was actually alive.

But it still requires pretty much totally disregarding Jefferson's actual political career and picking and choosing an argument here and there as abstract justification for secession. To the extent Calhoun had any real talent as a political theorist, it was in his cleverness at spinning such arguments.

It's surprising to see Steele assuming that historians today would be inclined to adopt the Calhounian position on Jefferson's attitude toward states rights. Because Steele seems to understand that very well based on the evidence he adduces:

Nevertheless, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions did not advocate - or even broach - secession, and there were substantial qualitative differences between them and the later claims made by some New England Federalists and South Carolina nullifiers, despite the claims to Jefferson's legacy made by the latter group in particular.

As Steele explains in his article, Jefferson understood the Union under a "compact theory" by which the states had entered together in a mutual agreement among themselves to have a shared national government.

But Jefferson never viewed the United States as 13 separate nations, even under the Articles of Confederacy. And he believed even under the Articles, in which the authority of the national government was much less clearly defined than under the Constitution, the national government had the right and necessity to compel cooperation on recalcitrant states who chose to violate the shared compact. He wrote in 1786, as Steele relates:

Whenever "two or more nations enter into a compact, it is not usual for them to say what shall be done to tbe party wbo infringes it. Decency forbids tbis. And it is as unnecessary as indecent, because tbe right of compulsion naturally results to tbe party injured by the breach." Accordingly, "When any one state in the American Union refuses obedience to the Confederation by which they bave bound themselves," he told Démeunier, "the rest have a natural right to compel them to obedience." The essential point, Jefferson told Edmund Randolph, was that the Congress did not lack the "coercive powers" most people imagined "to be wanting." On the contrary, the "law of nature" quite simply gave "one party to an agreement" the authority "to compel the otber to performance." [my emphasis]

In 1798 during the Adams administration when Jefferson was Vice President but under the Constitutional system at that time was the de facto opposition leader, he wrote to an advocate of North Carolina and Virginia seceeding from the Union, Steele quotes:

... if on a temporary superiority of the one party, the other is to resort to a scission of the union, no federal government can ever exist, if to rid ourselves of the present rule of Massachusets & Connecticut, we break the union, will the evil stop there? suppose the N. England states alone cut off, will our natures be changed? are we not men still to the South of that, & with all the passions of men? immediately we shall see a Pennsylvania & a Virginia party arise in the residuary confederacy, and the public mind will be distracted with the same party spirit, what a game too will the one party have in their hands by eternally threatening the other that unless they do so & so, they will join their Northern neighbors, if we reduce our Union to Virginia & N. Carolina, immediately the conflict will be established between the representatives of these two states, and they will end by breaking into their simple units. ... who can say what would be the evils of a scission and when & where they would end?

Steele mentions Andrew Jackson a couple of times, and those mentions are worth notice here. On the question of the limits of federal power, he writes:

Strict construction of a Jeffersonian variety did limit federal power, but it also realized the full scope of federal power within those limits strictly prescribed. This is why Jefferson and Andrew Jackson (and Madison for that matter) found it necessary to call for constitutional amendments for national programs of internal improvements, on the one hand, but remained unafraid to enforce the embargo on Britain or squash nullification, on the other. All were committed to states' rights, to strict construction, and to limited government, but they nevertheless vigorously enforced federal law and even expanded federal power in certain areas. It is too simplistic to call this range of views contradiction or hypocrisy. [emphasis]

He goes own to show that Jefferson's own positions in relation to events such as the Burr Conspiracy and the embargo against trade with Britain during his Presidency, and secessionist rumblings from reactionary New England Federalists in connection with the War of 1812, against Britain demonstrated his opposition to secessionist tendencies.

Jefferson saw the Constitution and the national government as being essential for the defense of political democracy and the personal liberties that are an inseparable part of democracy. In tomorrow's post, I'll discuss a bit more about how those views affected his stance in the concrete political situations he faced during his lifetime.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, missouri compromise, thomas jefferson, slavery