The New Star Chamber and Other Essays Thomas Jefferson
by Edgar Lee Masters
Jefferson's birthday in these days is not generally celebrated at the banquet board. His character lacked the militant element which lends itself to the paganistic rites of the feast, the toast, and the high-sounding eulogium. He won no battles, he conquered no visible foe, he captured no concrete strongholds. His life was intellectual and peaceful. His mind was engaged with the sciences, with historical studies, with the practical arts, with music, with polite literature and with a new form of statesmanship. He had sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. The warfare which he waged was in the domain of mind. It was against injustice, special privilege, ignorance and bigotry. These were the foes whose citadels he reduced and whose armies he subdued. Do such victories appeal to the heavy imagination of commercialism? Moreover, Jefferson is memorialized on the 4th of July, which as a national holiday really engages itself with honoring the work of this man. Who else in American history has such universal tribute paid him?
Latterly also the root and branch of despotism have flourished to some extent in this land and a systematic effort is apparent to find some other character prophetic of the day and sympathetic with its temporary movement. Jefferson will not suffer to any great extent by this conspiracy. He will come into his own in due season. He is the genius of this republic and of the republican system and his course was not accomplished to be supplanted by some secondary influence. The real logic of history is not that way. He is to statesmanship what Luther was to the reformation and Newton to science. And he shares with them to some extent their disadvantage of after-dinner talk. But, on the other hand, who else furnishes a better theme for oratory as that art should be practiced? Here was a hundred handed man. He was a great lawyer, he was a scientist, a musician, a scholar, an inventor, a writer and a statesman. Like Goethe, he studied everything and tried everything. He was mediocre in nothing that he attempted. He had observed the proprieties of life. Scandal never touched his name. Party rancor failed to impeach his motives. He was just. He was generous. He was devoted to liberty and truth. There was no humbug in him. He developed no mysticism of a flag with which to enslave the minds of his fellows. He put government in the sunlight, where its workings could be seen. He was therefore hated by those who wanted to perpetuate the superstitions of the past that the administration of public affairs is a mysterious agency not to be analyzed but to be feared and worshiped. His comprehensive mind grasped the spirit of the day. If he discovered no political principles he stated those already known in such language that they have become the very elements of thought. He is the most conspicuous success in history in the application of great principles to practical affairs. He carved out the sphere of the state. He defined the rights of the citizen in the state. He furnished every president after him, including Lincoln, with a policy and a reason for the policy. There is no system in opposition to his which is avowed and denied. Even imperialism is justified under the pretense of giving the Filipinos liberty. What greater tribute can his enemies pay him when they fear to do evil, except in the name of Jefferson? They admit his power in the land when they call the Philippine aggression the same thing as the Louisiana purchase.
What man at 33 years of age has contributed to civilization in any form such a motive power as the declaration of independence? This was an inspirational stroke which fitted into the time; in fact, we cannot conceive of the world without it. It interprets the new epoch. It is a charter of liberty beside which magna charta and the instrument of government are as dull as a declaration for slander. Who else had so elevated his mind and humanized his heart that he could have written it? It stated fundamental truths, but in such language that they armed revolution, fired the conscience of the people and raised the hopes of a discouraged land. It contains within itself all the aspiration, all the justice and all the beneficence of the human heart. It is intelligible, compact, incapable of being misunderstood or sophisticated. It means the same thing to all men. It is all-inclusive. It is a perfect repository of political truth and philosophy. It defies the insolence of monarchy and grinds to powder the absurd pretension of divine right. It takes the angry assaults of selfish expediency and special privilege without hurt. It is unchangeable in its appeal and is heard with rapture by millions once a year in every city and hamlet in the land. It challenges refutation and where proscribed is not answered. It is feared by those whose power rests upon fraud or force. It conquers, but does not wound; it leaves no sting after the mind has been subdued; it wins its way through a spirit of amity and reason. Such is the declaration of independence, defeated on many battlefields since it was promulgated. But it has never been overthrown in the forum, in the realm of reason. All victories of force are barren which are not crowned by truth and justice. It were better that they were never won.
The civil war brought to the front a form of man not intended to flourish in this country. He is that banal demagogue who wishes to clothe in the sacredness of government whatever a paramount political party chooses to do. He takes occasion to denounce protest against usurpation as rebellion and treason. He conjures with the words "sovereignty" and "the flag." At the banquet board, where his resounding hypocrisies are launched, he starts with Thomas Jefferson as the author of secession and the proximate cause of the civil war. His peroration invests with the halo of divine dispensation the Philippine despotism. The critics of that despotism are branded as traitors. They are held responsible for the death of our boys in the islands. The honor of the army engages his swelling wrath and he sits down amidst the applause of those who have more respect for the rules of golf than they have for the constitution of the United States. These are the scenes now enacted in a republic where, properly speaking, there is no such thing as the honor of the army or the act of any administration, even if crystallized into law, which forbids condemnation, oral and written, and proper effort to restore the government to liberty and law. There are many millions of men in this country who care nothing about the army and who are perfectly sure that it can have no honor while it is engaged in subjugation. They will not defer in their opinions to those who profit by that subjugation, and who would wreck the country before they would part with their anticonstitutional protective tariff. If what they say of Jefferson is true, how shall these self-appointed patriots complain? Who will explain the difference between breaking up the union by secession and destroying the union by annihilating the organic law which created the union and holds it together?
Jefferson in the Kentucky resolutions, in which the seeds of secession were said to be, attacked the palpable infractions of the constitution made by the tariff laws, the United States bank act and the alien and sedition acts. The resolutions were particularly called out by the alien and sedition acts. And a question as old as government and not yet settled arose by their passage, namely, Must people submit to tyranny to escape the charge of treason preferred by the temporary administers of the government? Human nature will take care of this problem. Men are not so cowardly or so weak that they will part with their liberties in order to earn the commendation of being loyal. The Kentucky resolutions were the prompt reaction against the studied attempts of the anticonstitutionalists to destroy the republic, but they do not advocate secession. They do not go as far as the enemies of Jefferson wish they did. Jefferson was not a secessionist. His letters to John Taylor, Richard Rush and Elbridge Gary belie the charge that he advocated secession. The argument which Lincoln used with great effect, that secession would haunt secession and ultimately break up any group of seceded states, was Jefferson's. He applied it to the case of New England, which contemplated secession on account of the war of 1812.
It was at a dinner given in honor of Jefferson's birthday, April 13, 1830, that his name was first coupled with secession and that in a vague and somewhat subtle form. For President Jackson on that occasion responded to the toast "Our Federal Union: It Must Be Preserved.'' This would have settled the character of the dinner except for the toast of Mr. Calhoun, who said: "The union, next to our liberty the most dear; may we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and distributing equally the benefits and burthens of the union." These remarks were coupled with the circumstances of the day in the south looking toward disunion which served to identify Jefferson's name with the doctrine of the right of a state to withdraw from the union.
But the Kentucky resolutions advocated nullification, not secession. They assert the right of a state to stay in the union and nullify a law of the general government. "Where powers are assumed which have not been delegated a nullification is the rightful remedy." This is the language of the resolutions. The word secession nowhere appears in them. The right to nullify is based upon the assumption that an unconstitutional law is null and void and no law. That an unconstitutional law is no law is the judgment of the supreme court to this day. That court holds now that such a law may be disregarded by everyone. If so, a state could disregard it. But the resolutions go beyond this doctrine in declaring "that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated, since that would have made its discretion and not the constitution the measure of its powers."
Now it may well be said that for the general government to legislate and the states to nullify the legislation a hazardous conflict might be produced, and therefore the power to decide ought to be somewhere. But in fact, as a theoretical question of constitutional law, where is the power? The necessity and the fact are different things. And if the general government may legislate as it thinks proper and also decide upon the validity of the legislation on the ground that the power must be somewhere and that it cannot be intrusted to the states, the states may likewise, theoretically, reply that the power must be somewhere, but cannot be with the general government because they thereby become subject to its discretion. This problem is not yet settled. It will never take the form of nullification again, and it should not. But we may be led to modify our constitution according to the Swiss constitution under which the court cannot invalidate legislation. We may even revert to the principle of the English constitution under which any law is constitutional that parliament enacts. Late republican tendencies which make our constitution a limitation upon power instead of a grant of power lead inevitably to this end. When congress becomes the judge of its constitutional energy an enlightened people will hold the balance of power at the polls.
But the condemnation of Jefferson for his theories of the nature of the republic is too particular. The charge that he caused the civil war is a gross absurdity traceable to the fumes of wine. That the states are sovereign, that the constitution is a compact, that the states may hold unconstitutional legislation to be void and may adopt such measures as they think best to protect themselves against it are propositions which Jefferson held in common with the most eminent men of his time and they were shared in by many distinguished statesmen since his day.
Hamilton himself, by fair inference, subscribed to the right of secession as early as 1790, eight years before the Kentucky resolutions were published. Madison, the father of the constitution, was at one with Jefferson on the resolutions. As early as 1803 the state of Massachusetts protested against the annexation of Louisiana and declared that "it formed a new confederacy, to which the states united by the former compact are not bound to adhere;" and as late as 1844 the same state resolved that the acquisition of Texas "would have no binding force on the people of Massachusetts." In 1814 the New England states in the well-known Hartford convention declared that infractions of the constitution "affecting the sovereignty of a state and liberties of the people" requires of the "state to interpose its authority for their protection in the manner best calculated to secure that end" and "states which have no common umpire must be their own judges and execute their own designs." This is in part the very language and in entirety the substance of the Kentucky resolutions. The federalist governors and legislatures of the New England states shrank in horror from these resolutions in 1798, but in 1814, when the embargo affected the commercial interests of the New England states, as the alien and sedition laws threatened the liberties of the whole people without regard to locality, they faced about and adopted the very blasphemy at which they had held up their hands so little a time before.
In 1851, after Mr. Webster had sifted these questions with Hayne and Calhoun, he said: "How absurd it is to suppose that when different parties enter into a compact for certain purposes either can disregard any one provision and expect nevertheless the other to observe the rest. *** A bargain cannot be broken on one side and still bind the other side." He was discussing "the union of the states" and the preservation of that union by due observance of the fugitive slave clause of the constitution. In 1848 Mr. Lincoln said in congress: "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize."
Lincoln, of course, was here speaking of the right of revolution. But it does not matter whether secession is accomplished as a compact right or as a revolutionary right so long as it is a right and not a wrong. The compact right is not needed and need not be expressed if the right exists as a revolutionary right. These principles are old and familiar. But it is to be hoped that for all time to come that questions will be settled in the forum and with the ballot. The world has seen enough of force, whether used to suppress or to liberate. The new order of things demands that peace and reason shall prevail. It recognizes human life as sacred. It even looks upon revolution as a doubtful expedient. It therefore reverts to Jefferson's words in the declaration of independence, which caution against revolution for transient causes. Revolution is generally physical force. The triumph of reason ought to and perhaps already has supplanted both.
But enough authority is cited to show that Jefferson did not stand alone in his theories of government, and that he was not a dark and treacherous influence against which all the powers of light were contending. It is a species of childish casuistry to single him out as the author of the nation's woes. This is not the philosophic view of history. Acts and not writings produce revolutions. Men are too taken up with the affairs of their own lives to forsake them under the influence of abstract doctrines. Men react because they are acted upon, and not otherwise.
Happily the question has been settled and no one wants to reopen it. This united republic, if it remains a republic, has a destiny before it immeasurably greater than if the union had been divided. But whether it could be divided and whether laws could be nullified were questions of construction upon which men differed in the early days of the republic and differed frequently upon interest. When states and groups of states north and south at different times subscribed to the principles of the Kentucky resolutions, when Madison, Webster and Lincoln in one form or another advocated them, and when a great majority of the American people elected Jefferson president upon the issue of whether these resolutions were true or false, the denouncement of Jefferson is particular and unjust.
It ill becomes a breed of statesmen who no longer mention the constitution and no longer pretend to observe it to blacken the memory of this great man whose passion for this republic is one of the purest ideals in history and whose defense of the constitution, vigilant and unremitting, rises to the sublimity of heroic legend. Jefferson was a constitutionalist. He believed in the constitution. The party which he founded was and is a constitutional party. Moreover, there has never been any other constitutional party in this country. All other opposing parties, by whatever name they have gone, have done their utmost to undermine the constitution in favor of special privilege, which is the real soul of monarchy.
In Jefferson's day as now public men had to choose between the friendship of monopolists and the friendship of the producers of wealth. Himself of the landed aristocracy of Virginia, his principles were in revolt against special privilege. He doubtless found fewer congenial spirits among those whose cause he championed than he would have found with the federalists. But he made the sacrifice and laid himself liable to the charge of demagogy, which was common even in his day. The federalists hated Jefferson because he stood in their way. He was against their bank and tariff laws and their monarchial tendencies. He exposed their schemes of consolidation and monopoly. His omnipresent influence, subtle and irresistible, baffled them. His pen was never idle; his activities permeated the land. He gathered together the people whose hearts still vibrated with the thunder of liberty and he overthrew the federalists, horse and rider. He clothed abstract principles of justice and equality in such splendor that the popular mind was won from the seductions of power and glory. The federalists found that they were not for America nor America for them. After an interregnum of monarchial drift America resumed its character and destiny. Jefferson as president righted the course of the republic. He became its tutor and trained it so thoroughly that the federalists took to cover. When they emerged it was with a new party, which bore the standard of moral principles triumphant at last by the living influence of him whose memory they abhorred.
Jefferson was at the head of and produced the classical school of American presidents. His principles embellished and strengthened the faculties of men who would have been mediocre without them. He gave form and purpose to the republic. His political canons became law. Madison and Monroe followed in his footsteps. Jackson and Van Buren learned the lesson of government from him. He was the political father of Lincoln. The speeches of every great statesman of this land are saturated with his principles. He set loose a current of liberty which flows around the world today and rocks upon its bosom the toy flotilla of imperialism. The breakers and the depths await it.
Such was the man Jefferson, who thought so little of the office of president that he did not mention it among his achievements. He wanted to be remembered as the author of the declaration of independence, the statute of Virginia for religious freedom and father of the University of Virginia. His long life was spent in the cause of liberty; in disseminating knowledge; in promoting the sciences; in lifting up the weak; in making the world fitter to live in; in constructing for the future. Who disputes his philosophy? Who says that all should not be equal before the law? Who says that men do not have the inalienable rights of life and liberty, that the office of government is to secure these and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed?
His enemies in despair have tortured his kindness into cowardice, his love for humanity into a sordid desire to use the mob. They have called him a shifty doctrinaire. The word means little. But his influence was not bourgeois. He saw the new day; he turned his back on the past. He followed his conscience and the light of his mind to the utmost limits. There was no remnant of monarchy in any of his practices or principles. He is, therefore, in America at least, the one perfect prophet of the future.
Almost to the last day of his life his mind hungered for knowledge and beauty. In the weakness of advanced age, upon the last steps of time, he was reading the bible and the Greek tragedies. His dying hours took him back fifty years through a period of revolution, awakening and progress to the day that was above all others with him. "This is the 4th of July" were the last words he uttered, and he died in the peace of a long and useful life.
