42 of 56 · Virginia
JEFFERSON
A Notes on Liberty
63 lessons. 7 chapters. In his own words.
He wrote that all men are created equal and did not free the men he held. The sentence outran the man. That is not nothing.
Thomas Jefferson · 1743–1826 · Drafter · president · contradiction
01
A Drafting Table
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When the committee looks at you, write.
“The committee for drawing the declaration of Independence desired me to do it. It was accordingly done, and being approved by them, I reported it to the house on Friday the 28th of June.”
Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography · 1821
Adams insisted. Sherman was no stylist. Franklin would edit. The table was in a rented room on Market Street. Drafting is not inspiration. It is assignment plus a closed door.
Do not aim at originality. Aim at the American mind.
“Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it 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.”
The sentence is the country. Everything after it is logistics. He knew he was taking dictation from a public already convinced. A drafter who wants to be a prophet will write a sect. Write the minutes of a consensus.
Place before mankind the common sense of the subject.
“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.”
Plain and firm. Not clever. Not new. Command assent. If the farmer in Culpeper cannot say it back, you have failed the assignment however well it reads in Paris.
Let Franklin change a word. Let Congress cut a page.
“The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with still haunted the minds of many. For this reason, those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out.”
Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography · 1821
He hated the cuts, including the attack on the slave trade. The committee and the house were still the authors. A drafter who cannot survive edits is a diarist. Pocket the mutilations. Keep the spine.
Omit the presidency from the stone.
“Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.”
Self-written epitaph of Thomas Jefferson · 1826
He ranked the drafting table above the executive chair. Believe the ranking. The country is a set of texts that outlive the men who sat. Write three that can stand without you.
Rehearse the break two years early.
“The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”
A Summary View of the Rights of British America · 1774
A Summary View was the draft before the draft: instructions he wrote that Virginia was not quite ready to send. Practice the sentence in public before the committee assigns it. When they look at you, you will already have the cadence.
Turn to neither book nor pamphlet while you write it.
“I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”
Letter to James Madison · 1823
Closed door, rented room, a head already stocked. Research in the act is often delay dressed as rigor. Load the mind for years. Then write in a sitting. The library is for the decade, not for the night.
The portable desk is an instrument, not a relic.
“It was made from a drawing of my own, by Ben. Randall, cabinetmaker of this city.”
Thomas Jefferson on his writing box, letter to his granddaughter · 1825
He designed the desk the way he designed the sentence: portable, his, adequate. Tools you specify are tools you will actually use. Do not wait for a marble table. Specify a box that can travel, then fill it.
Laws of nature, and of nature's God — write both jurisdictions.
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them.”
The Declaration of Independence · 1776
Nature, then nature's God. He would not leave the title dependent on a court in Westminster or a bishop. Ground the break where a king cannot reach. Then list the facts. Philosophy first, invoices second. That is a draft.
02
Self-Evident
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Write the sentence so it can try the writer.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The Declaration of Independence · 1776
Self-evident is a dare. If it is true, it judges Monticello. If it is a flourish, it is a fraud. He wrote it as if it were true. The rest of American argument is collection on that debt.
Sacred and undeniable was the first try. Self-evident is better.
“We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Jefferson's draft of the Declaration · 1776
Franklin or Adams, or both, helped push sacred into self-evident. Theology became epistemology. The claim got harder. Take the edit that removes your incense and leaves the blade.
Happiness is not a mood. It is a jurisdiction.
“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The Declaration of Independence · 1776
Property was Locke's third. He widened it. Pursuit is the verb that matters: a right to the chase, not to the kill. Governments exist to keep the course open. Close the course and you have refuted your own parchment.
To secure these rights, governments are instituted.
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The Declaration of Independence · 1776
Rights first, state second. Consent is the title deed. A beautiful sentence about equality with a king still attached is a poem. Attach the apparatus. Otherwise you have only accused.
All its authority rests on the harmonizing sentiments of the day.
“All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.”
He named his sources like a man unafraid of the footnote. Good. Self-evident does not mean unsourced. It means the room already knew. Your job was pitch and compression.
Not born with saddles. Not born booted to ride.
“The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
Letter to Roger Weightman · 1826
Last public letter, ten days from death. He reached back to a Leveller image and aimed it at the next century. Self-evident had always meant this. If your equality still needs a saddle, you have not read your own parchment. Dismount.
Let the Fourth be a signal, not a birthday party.
“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves.”
Letter to Roger Weightman · 1826
He wanted the anniversary to travel. A national feast that does not arouse anyone is a picnic. Burst the chains is the verb. Later is allowed. Never is not. Write for the parts that have not heard it yet.
Equal and exact justice, not a mood of equality.
“Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political.”
First Inaugural Address · 1801
The sentence from 1776 has to become an administration. Exact is the word that hurts: not poetic justice, measurable. He failed it in his fields. Keep the standard anyway. A hypocrisy that leaves a rule is still more useful than a silence.
Unalienable means you cannot sell the thing, including to yourself.
“They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
The Declaration of Independence · 1776
Unalienable is a prohibition on contracts of servitude, including the ones a desperate man would sign. He wrote it and enforced the opposite in his labor system. The word still indicts the system. Use the word. Do not let his practice define its reach.
03
The Earth Belongs to the Living
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The dead have no vote in the soil.
“I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.”
Letter to James Madison · 1789
Usufruct: use, not consumption of the capital. He was in Paris, watching a dying order cling to entail and church land. Do not let graves farm the living. Rewrite the leases.
A generation is a term of years. Do not bind the next one in perpetuity.
“No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation.”
Letter to James Madison · 1789
He wanted sunsets on constitutions. Madison, the builder, flinched. Take the insight even if you refuse the mechanism. Ask of every law: who is being governed from the grave.
Debt is how the dead rule.
“The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead. The will and the power of man expire with his life, by nature's law.”
Letter to John Wayles Eppes · 1813
Public debt as entail. He was not always consistent — Louisiana was not paid in coin from the sofa. The principle still cuts. If you cannot justify the note to a child not yet born, do not sign it.
Usufruct means you do not get to wreck the place.
“The living generation may use the earth, but they may not commit waste upon the inheritance.”
Letter to James Madison (the usufruct argument) · 1789
Use is not pillage. He loved improvements, crops, a university on a hill. The living are tenants with a duty to the next tenants. Extract less than you plant.
Apply the maxim to your own mountain.
“Monticello was an instrument of the living Jefferson, and of the people whose lives were bound in its fields.”
Notes on the State of Virginia, and the Monticello farm books · 1785
He wrote that the earth belongs to the living, and held living people as stock on that earth. The maxim is better than the mountain. Keep the maxim. Do not let the mountain lecture you about liberty.
Those who labour in the earth are the chosen, if anyone is.
“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”
Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIX · 1785
Agriculture as a moral theory. He meant a republic of freeholders. He ran a mountain of forced labor and called it a farm. Keep the preference for the living earth. Strip the romance that hid the overseer. Plant. Do not pretend planting is innocent when the hands are not free.
Uncultivated land beside unemployed poor is a stolen commons.
“Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.”
Letter to James Madison · 1785
He wrote this from a class that monopolized land and people. The sentence is still better than the class. If property has locked the soil and the poor stand idle, the code has overreached. Shorten the reach. That is usufruct with a spine.
Cultivators are the most valuable citizens. Then count who is counted.
“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.”
Valuable, vigorous, independent — he did not include the people who actually hoed Monticello. A theory of farmers that erases the enslaved is a census of power. Hold the praise. Enlarge the list of cultivators until it hurts the mountain.
Remain agricultural only if the acres remain free.
“I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural.”
Letter to James Madison · 1787
Virtue from the soil, corruption from the workshop: his fear of cities. Cities came. So did the question he dodged: whose agriculture. A yeoman republic built on slaves is an aristocracy with dirt on its boots. Choose the dirt. Free the boots.
04
An Educated Citizen
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Ignorance and freedom do not cohabit.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey · 1816
Not a metaphor. A constraint. Uneducated consent is an invitation to a new king with better posters. Fund the school as if it were a fort. It is.
The remedy is not to take the power from them.
“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”
Letter to William Charles Jarvis · 1820
Elites always discover that the people are not ready. His answer is the only republican one: teach, do not seize. If you cannot live with that answer, you are not a republican.
Diffuse knowledge on purpose. Do not wait for fathers.
“The most effectual means of preventing tyranny would be to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.”
Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge · 1779
A ladder of schools from ward to university, paid in public. Virginia did not fully buy it. The blueprint remains. Talent is scattered. The treasury should go find it.
Found a university as if it were a fourth founding document.
“Father of the University of Virginia.”
Self-written epitaph of Thomas Jefferson · 1826
He designed the lawn, hired the faculty, fought the curriculum, and put it on the stone with the Declaration. A republic that cannot reproduce its mind will rent one. Build the mill.
Educate for citizens, not for clerks of a church or a court only.
“I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man.”
Letter to Cornelius Camden Blatchly · 1822
Light as policy. Not ornament for sons of planters — though too often it was that in practice. Hold him to the wider sentence. The ward school is the real university.
Fix reason in her seat. Then put every opinion on trial.
“Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than of blindfolded fear.”
Advice to a nephew, which is to say a syllabus. Fear is a poor tutor. He wanted a mind that could survive a library and a pulpit both. Educate for the tribunal, not for the echo. If your school cannot bear the question, it is a chapel.
Follow truth wherever it leads. Tolerate error while reason can still fight.
“This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
Letter to William Roscoe, on the University of Virginia · 1820
A university as a clause of the Statute. He put it on the stone with the Declaration. Build the mill where error is allowed in the door and not allowed to lock it. If reason is not free to combat, you have founded a sect with a lawn.
Hunt genius in the wards. Do not wait for it to be well born.
“Those persons whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard, the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.”
Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge · 1779
Nature scatters the endowment. Fathers scatter the tuition. His ladder was meant to correct the fathers. Virginia underbuilt it. Build it anyway. A republic that educates only its planters is a county with a flag.
An honest heart first. A knowing head second. Drill both.
“An honest heart being the first blessing, a knowing head is the second.”
Order of blessings, not a slogan against books. He wanted both in one citizen. Heart without head is a mob. Head without heart is a clerk of despotism. The ward school exists to marry them before the world divorces them.
05
No Established Faith
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God made the mind free. Write that down as statute.
“Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint.”
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom · 1786
Drafted 1777, passed 1786, with Madison doing the floor work while Jefferson was in France. A statute, not a sentiment. Conscience without a repeal of the assessment is a hobby.
Compelling a man to fund what he abhors is tyranny.
“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom · 1786
The tax is the test. Fine words about liberty with a mandatory tithe is an establishment with better copy. Follow the shilling. Where it is forced, the mind is not.
Twenty gods, or none. Neither picks your pocket.
“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII · 1785
Pocket and leg: the jurisdiction of the state. Opinion is outside it. This still offends everyone who wants a holy commonwealth. Good. Keep offending them with the boundary.
Swear hostility to tyranny over the mind.
“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
Letter to Benjamin Rush · 1800
He wrote it as the clergy came for him in a campaign. Use it as a personal statute. Priests, pamphleteers, parties, algorithms — the form changes. The hostility should not.
Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions.
“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom · 1786
Geometry is the tell. He wanted belief in the same category as a proof you may reject. Hold public office open to the heretic. A test oath is a small inquisition that has learned manners.
Question even the existence of a god. Especially then.
“Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than of blindfolded fear.”
He mailed this to a boy. That is a founding. A faith that cannot survive the question is a political instrument, not a conviction. Put the question in the family. Then you will not need a statute to make the adults brave.
Opinions in religion shall not touch civil capacity.
“All men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom · 1786
No wise diminish, enlarge, or affect. The whole of a test oath dies in that clause. Profess. Argue. Then vote, sit, testify, inherit. A capacity that shifts with the creed is a caste. Repeal the caste in statute, not in a sermon.
Error needs the state. Truth can stand without it.
“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”
Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII · 1785
Establishments exist because the doctrine is weak. He said the quiet part and made a country try to live it. If your truth requires a sheriff, it is not yet a truth. Fire the sheriff. Keep talking.
Sects censor each other. That is the advantage of difference.
“Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other.”
Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII · 1785
He did not want a warm soup of agreement. He wanted rival pulpits keeping one another honest. Uniformity is a police action. Difference is a technology. Protect the quarrel. It is cheaper than an inquisition and cleaner.
06
The Debt
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Tremble when you write equality and hold men.
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII · 1785
He knew. He wrote the fear down and kept the keys. More than six hundred human beings were held in his lifetime. The sentence is not a defense. It is an indictment he authored against himself and us.
Name the commerce. Do not call it household.
“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.”
Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII · 1785
Commerce. Despotism. He had the right nouns. Sally Hemings — his wife's half-sister, mother of children whose father the mountain did not officially admit. Do not launder this into complexity. It is despotism with a violin.
The wolf by the ear is not a policy. It is a confession.
“As it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
Missouri. He put justice on a scale and watched himself choose the other pan. Self-preservation of what. Of a class, a crop, a peace for white Virginians. Call the choice by its name. He did, then declined it.
A draft against the slave trade that Congress struck is not manumission.
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.”
Jefferson's draft of the Declaration, passage struck by Congress · 1776
True of the king. True of the drafter's class. Congress cut it to keep South Carolina and Georgia, and to avoid the mirror. A deleted clause does not free anyone. Deeds do. He signed few.
The sentence outran the man. Collect anyway.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
The Declaration of Independence · 1776
He did not free them. He freed almost none in life, a handful of Hemingses in death, and never the principle in his own fields. Do not whitewash. Do not burn the sentence to punish the author. Use it against him, and against every heir who quotes him for comfort. That is the debt. Pay it in the only currency that works: other people's liberty, actually released.
A prodigy would keep his morals. He knew he was not one.
“The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”
Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII · 1785
He diagnosed the house while living in it. Master and slave, boisterous passions, unremitting despotism. Then he went back to the farm books. Analysis is not manumission. If you can write this and keep the keys, you have proved the sentence about depravity on yourself.
Written in the book of fate. Unwritten in the deed book.
“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”
Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography · 1821
He believed the ending and refused the chapter. Colonization was his next sentence: free, and gone. That is not emancipation as equals. It is a wish to be rid of the evidence. Fate that never reaches the county recorder is literature. Record it or stop quoting fate.
Execrate the statesman. He was describing a mirror.
“With what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other.”
Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII · 1785
One half trampling the other. Despots and enemies. He loaded the execration and served the office anyway. Do not soften this into complexity. He saw the moral wreck, named the wreck, and left the wreck standing with his name on the gate.
Five freed in a will is not the sentence from 1776.
“In death he freed a handful of the Hemings family and left hundreds of others to the auction and the heirs.”
Will of Thomas Jefferson and the Monticello farm books · 1826
Sally Hemings's children got a door. The rest got the debt. A mountain mortgaged to the principle he would not apply is not a tragic paradox. It is a choice, repeated for fifty years. Face it. The Declaration still collects. Pay in actual liberty, not in tours of the house.
07
The Long Correspondence
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Reconcile before the obituaries.
“A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind. It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.”
Rush brokered it. Eleven years of frost, then this. Two old enemies remembered the labor. Pride is expensive in the last decade. Spend the postage.
Explain yourselves to each other before you die.
“You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.”
John Adams to Thomas Jefferson · 1813
Adams's line. Jefferson honored it for fourteen years. The correspondence is a second founding: two minds, no audience required, everything still at stake. Find the rival who can still teach you. Write him.
Prefer the dreams of the future to the history of the past.
“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. So good night. I will dream on, always fancying that Mrs Adams and yourself are by my side marking the progress and the obliquities of ages and countries.”
From Monticello to Quincy, in the long dusk. He had wreckage enough behind him. He still faced forward. Bitterness is a way of rereading. Dreaming is a way of remaining in office without a title.
Keep the channel open until the same calendar takes you both.
“Thomas Jefferson survives.”
Attributed last words of John Adams · 1826
July 4, fifty years from the Declaration. Adams in Quincy, Jefferson already gone at Monticello that morning. Maybe Adams said it, maybe the room needed it said. The letters had already done the surviving. Write until the hand stops.
A life in letters is a second body.
“For a letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind.”
He wrote thousands. To Madison on the earth, to Rush on the mind, to Adams on time. The public man is a set of acts. The private file is how the acts get judged. Leave a file that can stand the light. Then die on the anniversary, if you must be theatrical. The letters will not care. They will still be at work.
I cannot live without books. Make that a correspondence too.
“I cannot live without books.”
Five words to a rival who had become the other library. The late letters are a second university: two men, no faculty, the syllabus still open. Keep a reader who can hurt you. Send him the next volume. Die still in the argument.
Give up the earth before you give up the moral act.
“Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act.”
Counsel to a nephew he would not take in the quarter. That does not cancel the counsel. It indicts the counselor. Write the hard rule to the young. Then live as if they will compare the letter with the mountain. They will.
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. Mail that.
“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
Letter to James Madison · 1787
Shays in the background, Paris in his window. He would not let the new government become a nervous parent. Tell Madison. Tell the nervous. Storms that never come are a still air in which tyrannies ripen. Permit a weather. Then count the damage like an adult.
Keep arguing the world in the last decade.
“The flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.”
Late in the correspondence, still arguing the world. The letters were not souvenirs. They were a second front. Keep a rival who can still enlarge the map. Write him until the hand stops. Posterity will eavesdrop anyway.