In my previous post in this series, I described the argument historian Brian Steele makes in "Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union" Journal of Southern History Nov 2008, that Jefferson's attitude toward federal power does not support the Confederate/John C. Calhoun position of state secession or the nature of the federal Union.
What Steele does not do in the article is to explain the political context of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99, which are largely what secessionists seized upon to claim Jefferson in support of the theories they used to justify treason and rebellion in defense of their "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy".
He does mention near the end of his article:
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.That description of Jefferson's position on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions is inadequate to the point of being misleading.
The first government under the Constitution took office in 1789 with George Washington as President. Washington was re-elected in 1792 and established the long-standing precedent (now incorporated by Amendment into the Constitution) of Presidents serving no more than two terms by declining to stand for a third term. By the time of the 1796 elections, rudimentary forms of political parties had emerged, with John Adams being the head of the Federalists and Jefferson head of what was known as the Democratic-Republican Party.
The latter organization evolved into today's Democratic Party. But it can get confusing looking at early American history, because Jefferson's party was commonly called the Republican Party until the days of Andrew Jackson's Presidency, when it began to be called the Democratic Party, as it still is today. (It's pretty much only today's grammar-challenged Republicans have ever called it "the Democrat Party".) The Federalist Party more-or-less went out of existence after Madison's first term as President (1809-1813). Today's Republican Party came into existence in 1854.
John Adams' Federalist Party was on the whole more conservative than Adams himself, conservative. But Adams supported what was the first wave of nativist and anti-"radical" hysteria in the new nation's history - sadly, far from the last one. The bogeyman in this case was the French Revolution, which Christianists like Pat Robertson to this day still hold as a key turning point for the worse in world history. Under the pretext of preventing French subversion, the Adams administration persuaded Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts allowing the President to imprison people on the basis of stating or publishing opinions the Federalists deemed to be subversive. In practice, enforcement of the law was directed almost exclusively at Republican (Jeffersonian) critics of the Adams administration, not at actual subversives. Jefferson himself as Secretary of State under the Washington administration had done more to counter actual French subversive actions (in what became known as the XYZ Affair) than the Adams administration ever did.
Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone gave a good summary of how this led to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in Thomas Jefferson: A Brief Biography (1933):
[Jefferson] had approved of the conduct of James Monroe as minister to France, which aroused much hostile Federalist comment, and believed that the bellicose spirit [against France] which swept the country after the publication of the "XYZ dispatches" was aggravated by the Hamiltonians [Federalists], with a view to advancing their own interests and embroiling the United States on the side of the British. He himself was sympathetic with Elbridge Gerry, the commissioner who proved more amenable than his colleagues to French influence, and suggested that Gerry publish an account of his experiences, but Jefferson had no enthusiasm for the existing order in France. He was glad to drop the disastrous French issue when, at the height of the war fever, the Federalists provided a better one by passing the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson rightly regarded hysterical hostility to aliens, such as his friends C. F. Volney and Joseph Priestley, and attacks upon freedom of speech a menacing the ideals he most cherished. Since the Sedition Act was applied chiefly to Republican editors, partisan as well as philosophical motives were conjoined in his opposition to it.Another critical element of the historical situation at that time was that the Supreme Court's authority to be the final arbiter of Constitutional questions had not yet been established. This was the first national crisis in which the federal government set out to blatantly violate the rights of citizens that had been specified in the Bill of Rights. The national government under the Constitution wasn't even 10 years old at that point. Jefferson and Madison were dealing with a very concrete situation where essential personal freedoms of American citizens had to be defended. They considered the Alien and Sedition Acts to be an overt, clear and dangerous attempt by the Adams administration to violate basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution. And they were correct in thinking so. The Resolutions were the most effective means they found readily available to raise a protest against the unconstitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
His most notable contribution to the campaign of discussion consisted of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. (His authorship was not disclosed until years later.) The Virginia Resolutions, drawn by Madison, were similar in tenor though more moderate. The constitutional doctrines advanced by Jefferson - that the government of the United States originated in a compact, that acts of the federal government unauthorized by the delegated powers are void, and that a state has the right to judge of infractions of its powers and to determine the mode of redress - were much emphasized in later years. His dominant purpose, however, was to attack the offensive laws as an unconstitutional and unwarranted infringement upon individual freedom, a denial of rights that could not be alienated [i.e., set aside]. The language of what was in effect a party platform was in the nature of the case extravagant, but Jefferson and Madison had no intention of carrying matters to extremes. More important from the practical point of view than any promulgation of constitutional theory was the vindication of the right of public discussion and political opposition.
In legal terms, that approach was made obsolete by the establishment of the Supreme Court's authority of judicial review in Constitutional questions starting with Marbury v. Madison in 1803.
In terms of judging Jefferson's political theory, the key point is the one Dumas Malone makes: "More important from the practical point of view than any promulgation of constitutional theory was the vindication of the right of public discussion and political opposition." The aim of both Jefferson and Madison in that case was to defend basic freedoms and the American Constitution. Defending slavery, the very opposite of freedom, or promoting the destruction of the Constitution and the Union was no part of their intention.
It's worth noting in this connection that James Madison later argued specifically against the attempt by John Calhoun to use the Virginian and Kentucky Resolutions as support for his own secessionist doctrine.
It was also part of Jefferson's democratic outlook that he viewed the states as bulwarks of liberty and counter-weights to any tendency of the federal government to overstep its bounds. That was true even in the context of the courts being the final arbiters of questions of constitutional law. And that remains part of the American federal system today, though in a very different context and with a much longer series of experiences and precedents that were available in Jefferson's lifetime.
Steele notes in his discussion of the Burr Conspiracy and resistance to the embargo on British trade during Jefferson's Presidency that Jefferson's faith in the states as bulwarks of freedom and defense of the Constitution was justified because the states were prepared to take actions in both cases that would have minimized the role the federal government would have had to play otherwise. But in both cases, defending democracy and the Constitution required opposing secessionists.
So even if one could correctly interpret Jefferson's support for the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in 1798-99 as a recognition of a state's supposed right of nullification of any law they chose - an unjustified interpretation - his position as President toward the Burr Conspiracy and the resistance to the embargo would have to be regarded as a later and more significant stance in opposition to secession and to any theory of the Union that would justify it.
Jefferson's faith in the states a bulwarks of liberty and the federal Constitution very much shaped his response to the Compromise of 1820, aka, the Missouri Compromise, which did involve the question of the ability of the federal government to limit the spread of slavery. I discussed his position on the Missouri Compromise in a 04/01/09 post in that year's series of these posts, in which I also touch on the partisan context.
He was disturbed by the part of the Missouri Compromise that seemed to restrict states rights in states above the Missouri Compromise line. But, as Steele's article shows, Jefferson was no friend of secession. The Federalist Party had been widely discredited during the War of 1812 because of pro-British Federalists in New England, some of whom encouraged the idea of the New England states seceding from the Union. Jefferson's Republicans had been genuinely disgusted by this treasonous sentiment, and were also happy to take advantage of it politically.
To Jefferson, states rights provided support for democratic rights. He also believed that the states themselves would eventually abolish slavery. But he viewed that process in the context of a "diffusionist" theory of abolishing slavery in the US, a notion that I'll be discussing in a separate post this month. One might well argue that he had not fully worked out how the emerging trends in the slaveholders' ideas and goals would affect states rights and the future of the Union. But he clearly did not see his concerns over the Missouri Compromise as any kind of sympathy for secession. He memorably expressed his concerns on this matter in a letter to John Holmes, a Massachusetts state senator who had broken from the Federalist Party over their earlier disunionist sentiments, in which he clearly views the end of the Union as equivalent to rendering the sacrifices of the Revolutionary generation "useless" and "treason against the hopes of the world":
I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect.Jefferson was very much a major player in the formation and establishment of the early precedents of the Republic. His major political goals stand out clearly in his career: defense of the America from foreign enemies; democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion; support for the Constitution and the national government as guarantor of democracy, freedom and independence; and, opposition to slavery.
Counterfactual history is counterfactual and can't be argued with certainty. But it's unthinkable to me that Thomas Jefferson would have supported a secessionist rebellion against the Constitution and the democratic national government like that staged by the Confederacy in 1860-65. Unthinkable.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, missouri compromise, thomas jefferson, slavery
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