It is hard to think of a less conservative approach to cultural continuity and civilizational inheritance than Thomas Jefferson’s claim: “The earth belongs always to the living generation. … Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.” Such claims are characteristic of Jefferson; a cursory reading of his correspondence indicates that he found little value in the past.
But Jefferson was shaped by the Western intellectual and religious heritage more than even he cared to admit, and it is wrong to understand him primarily as a radical. We see this heritage at play in Jefferson’s efforts to understand the reality of the United States as a compact of independent states.
Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence declared the “United Colonies” to be “Free and Independent States.” The newly free States fought the Revolutionary War as part of a wartime alliance. They first preserved their “sovereignty, freedom, and independence” in the Articles of Confederation and then, again as States, by voting to ratify the US Constitution.
Jefferson never wavered from seeing the United States as a compact of independent states in a non-centralized union. He believed that Americans would preserve their liberty only if the several states were composed primarily of “yeoman farmers.” Jefferson idealized yeoman farmers as men who farmed merely to live well and to flourish—subsistence farmers by choice and not by unhappy chance. These farmers were not engaged in large-scale commercial farming and had no need of banks for loans. Indeed, they owned their farms. Property ownership, along with a lack of debt and no employer, is what made them independent and free of all political coercion. “Dependence,” Jefferson wrote, “begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”
This independence of the yeomen was the source of their virtue. “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,” Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson dismissed Aristotle’s metaphysics as a lesson in intellectual hubris and declared that his Politics simply no longer mattered in the age of “republican, or popular government.” But in praising the self-sufficient yeoman farmer as the linchpin of republics, Jefferson was in complete agreement with the philosopher.
Jefferson and the Physiocrats
Jefferson was heavily influenced by French Physiocrats in the way he thought about the superiority of agriculture over industry. Economic thinkers who opposed mercantilism, the Physiocrats proposed in its stead a decidedly agrarian school of thought predicated on some truths about natural law but also on mistaken ideas about surplus, production, and wealth creation.
Physiocrats stressed agriculture as the only righteous way to produce wealth. Along the way, they coined the term, laissez faire, saying that the natural laws of human exchange should be left to run on their own without government interference. In a laissez faire society, productivity would rise and benefit the common good.
The Physiocrats’ commitment to agrarianism led them to believe, falsely, that only land could produce surplus wealth. Consequently, they impugned craftsmen and large landowners as “sterile,” arguing that each produced nothing of surplus value. They criticized merchants, too, since they sold what they did not themselves create. One had to own one’s own farmland to be truly productive.
Jefferson admired the Physiocrats for connecting the laws of nature to yeoman farming. He realized, to quote historian Paul Johnson, that “the basic economic fact about the New World was that land was plentiful.” Jefferson concluded that an agricultural republic practicing laissez faire was uniquely possible in America. In America there was plenty of virtually free land and no “sterile” class of landowners to take away the farmers’ production; government needed only to protect the ultimate source of liberty, namely, property. Jefferson, rivaled perhaps only by Benjamin Franklin, was the most important physiocratic thinker in Revolutionary America.
Grotius, Vattel, and the School of Salamanca
Along with the Physiocrats, when it came to thinking about the relationship of the new federal government with the states who had ratified the Constitution and created the Union, Jefferson was most influenced by Swiss jurist, Emmerich de Vattel. Vattel had built upon the work of Hugo Grotius, who shared with the Physiocrats a philosophical and even theological debt to the Hispanic Scholastics of the long sixteenth century, better known as the School of Salamanca.
This Thomistic natural law tradition of the Hispanic Scholastics influenced the Physiocrats’ arguments that an economy should be guided only by the laws of nature.
Grotius built upon the Hispanic Scholastics’ application of natural law to societies and nations in order to understand the implications of sovereignty. But it was Vattel who elaborated on this tradition as it related to the kinds of obligations that one nation has to another. Nations, said Vattel, are as bound by the laws of nature as are the men who compose them. Like individual persons, States are sovereign actors driven by self-interest.
The events of 1798 confirmed for Jefferson that the best check on federal power was not the Constitution’s balancing act among the three branches but the countervailing power of the States.
In 1758, Vattel published The Law of Nations, which was translated into English two years later. The timing was right, and The Law of Nations found unrivaled influence among Americans at a formative time. Vattel was popular in America in part because he argued that sovereign states could participate in a union without losing their sovereignty. According to Vattel, a federal republic is a confederation, not a nation-state but rather an alliance of sovereign states. Since sovereignty could not be divided according to Vattel, any union was in reality a diplomatic imperative among sovereign states. Constitutions and federal unions cannot abrogate the laws of nature. Any union, by definition, had to be voluntary. Consent was paramount. The Articles of Confederation were even explicit about this, applying the triple redundancy of “Sovereign, independent, and free” to the newly united States.
Jeffersonian Federalism
We see Vattel’s influence on Jefferson’s federalism in his “Summary View of the Rights of British America,” written for the First Continental Congress in 1774. Jefferson accuses Parliament of stepping on “those rights which God and the laws have given equally and independently to all.” Presaging his later thinking about the American Union, he argues that the British Empire is not a dominion ruled over from London by Parliament. All the dominions of the empire are united precisely because they are under the same king, not because they are under one legislature. He calls Parliament “foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws.” In short, the American colonies are sovereign states joined together in an imperial union. Each is juridically separate and has its own legislature. The North American colonies print their own money and make their own laws, according to their own needs. This is why Jefferson’s plea ultimately is to King George III, not to natural right.
In 1798, with Jefferson now Vice President after having come in second to John Adams in the 1796 presidential election, the Federalist Party threatened civil liberties in the Alien and Sedition Acts. The pretext for these acts was the war in Europe between Revolutionary France and Great Britain (and others), which had been going on since 1793.
The three alien acts were aimed at preventing foreigners, namely, French refugees, from being naturalized, on the assumption that they would immediately join the Democratic-Republican Party. The Sedition Act, however, was aimed at American citizens by outlawing the publication of “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the US Government. While the Alien Acts helped deport or intimidate French instigators, the Sedition Act led to the imprisonment of Democratic-Republican newspaper editors and even one congressman. This prompted Jefferson and Madison to write the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, respectively.
The Kentucky Resolution contains the clearest description of Jefferson’s views on the American republic. The question at hand was what to do about an obviously unconstitutional law. Is the determination of the constitutionality of federal laws solely the prerogative of the US Government? Ten years earlier, Anti-Federalists had pointed out the problem of giving the power to determine a law’s constitutionality to the same government that made the law. The advent of political parties complicated this further, for in 1798 one political party controlled all three branches of the US government. If a Federalist president signs a bill sent to it by a Federalist Congress and an all-Federalist US Supreme Court approves of the law, what recourse do citizens have?
As he later wrote in 1811, Jefferson’s main argument in the Kentucky Resolution was that “the true barriers of our liberty in this country are our state-governments: and the wisest Conservative power ever contrived by man is that of which our revolution and present government found us possessed. Seventeen distinct states, amalgamated into one as to their foreign concerns, but single and independent as to their internal administration.” A state wields this “Conservative power” by interposing itself between its citizens and the federal government to protect them. The state protects its citizens by declaring unconstitutional laws null and void within its boundaries. State Interposition, later known as “nullification” when proposed by John C. Calhoun to nullify the Tariff of 1828, was thus promoted first not as a veiled means of protecting America’s system of race-based slavery but rather in defense of civil rights amid clear constitutional failure and against an overweening US Government dominated by the one-party-rule of the Federalists. In other words, the events of 1798 confirmed for Jefferson that the best check on federal power was not the Constitution’s balancing act among the three branches but the countervailing power of the States. Such a conclusion could have been pulled straight from Vattel.
Despite his at times hyperbolic statements, Jefferson was no radical when it came to how he thought about the subsidiary role of the US Government. Indeed, Jefferson’s agrarian constitutionalism, which emphasized the non-centralized nature of the American union, was shaped by the Western religious and philosophical heritage that he so often claimed to abhor. True, he read more deeply in contemporary political theory. But those theories, especially that of Vattel, were not spawned in a vacuum. Rather, they traced their origins backward through Grotius, the Physiocrats, and ultimately to the Hispanic Scholastics.
