When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  Jefferson’s modesty would be excessively false were it not for his political purpose. His intention is not so much to diminish himself, but rather – like Cicero in the Temple of Concord – to venerate the republic, beside which any individual must appear small. Jefferson, in fact, had named Cicero as an influence on his drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

  We know, from the three handwritten texts that survive in Jefferson’s papers at the Library of Congress, that he amended his script to make it more overtly republican with each iteration. His first sentence originally read ‘executive magistrate’. The final version instead lauds ‘the executive office’, which transfers the honour from himself, the president, to the office, the presidency.

  Jefferson sought to embody this humility in the spartan festivities of the day. Even though he had done so much to bring the city of Washington DC into being, Jefferson eschewed the splendid parades that had inaugurated George Washington and John Adams. In the Senate Room, the only completed room in the new Capitol, he dressed in the habit of a plain citizen without any badge of office or ceremonial sword. There was no festive ball afterwards either. Legend has it that after his lecture he walked back to his boarding house, where he stood in line for dinner to be served as usual.

  The absence of flourish in the speech was taken to excess in the manner of delivery. Jefferson’s tone was so low that, apart from those at the front, most of the audience had to read what he said in the Washington papers the following morning. Before electronic amplification, to be audible to a sizeable audience was no easy task. Early presidents scattered emissaries around the crowd, whispering the text as the principal spoke.

  During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.

  This call for unity sounds routine today. Kennedy said it; Obama said it; every president says it. But Jefferson needs to say it. Technology has quickened politics but it hasn’t coarsened it much and the election of 1800 remains one of the nastiest in American history. Under the pretext of articulating differing destinies for the republic, the two candidates, John Adams, the New England lawyer from a modest background, and Jefferson, the lofty Virginia intellectual, conducted an acrimonious campaign. Jefferson accused Adams of being pro-English, quite an accusation to level at a Founding Father of the republic, and Adams countered by mocking Jefferson’s association with the violence of revolutionary France and by revealing that Jefferson had fathered a child with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. When Jefferson won, Adams churlishly left Washington DC before the new president spoke. Hence, if the emollient tone is laid on thick that’s because a lot of mollifying was required.

  Jefferson worked hard on this pivotal section, balancing minority rights against the will of the majority. The tactic worked. The Federalists of the time praised Jefferson’s caution and wisdom. James Monroe wrote that the speech conciliated the opposing party. Note how this is done by avoiding specific positions, on which a speaker can be pinned down. Instead, Jefferson elevates his language into the floridly abstract. This is a more flowery section than the rest, which is usually the tip-off that a writer has less to say.

  But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself ? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

  This passage is the fault line of the American republic, the substance of the dispute between Jefferson and Hamilton about where power should lie. It is the great political cleavage that persists in our time: Democrats for a little more government, Republicans for a little less. There is no easy philosophical reconciliation, so Jefferson does what good rhetoric often does. He slides over the difference with a well-balanced, high-minded, euphonious sentence – ‘We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists’ – and evokes the virtues of the nation which belong to Americans of any persuasion. All presidents do this. Barack Obama said there were no blue states or red states, there was just the United States. Jefferson had more call to do it than most, as he was nursing an infant democracy that was prone to tantrum.

  Note how unequivocal and confident Jefferson is in declaring the United States to have the strongest form of government on earth. Then, cleverly, at the end of this section he brings the people to his side, drawing the implicit contrast that I, the Republican, trust the people, whereas you, the Federalist, arrogate power to the state. He concludes with a vivid rhetorical question about whether we have found angels in the form of kings to govern men, then adds the redundant answer that history will be the judge. Or to put the effect more bluntly but less poetically: No, we haven’t and we never will. This is why we need to curtail power; it is why we need democratic institutions. Because men are not angels.

  Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honour and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter – with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens – a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good governme
nt, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

  To us, wearied by repetition at a time when democracy can feel old and worn, a claim to American superiority sounds arrogant. But in early American speeches this was a claim of hopeful naivety and youthful excitement in an era when democracy was a novel experiment at home and a rarity anywhere else. So look past that claim towards the really suggestive words here, which are ‘to close the circle of our felicities’. As well as begging the listener to pay attention, the phrase concludes a profound point: wise government is defined more by what it prevents than either what it does or what it permits. This passage could be read as the origin of the American suspicion of the encroachment of the federal government, and it is that too, but the point runs deeper. Perhaps the greatest achievement of democratic politics is that public authority is limited to create the space for private autonomy. It closes the circle of our felicities.

  The circle closes here, though, over a dark question. It is inconceivable surely, as he drafted the speech in the two weeks before the Inauguration, that Jefferson did not reflect on his slaves. Not for them the bread they have earned. The fellow-feeling and empathy of the rest of this passage hardly seems consistent with such a blind spot, although we can also hear a vocabulary of politics that seems lost to us now. It would be a brave politician today who would wish for happiness and blessings, but it was an idiom that came easily to Jefferson and his peers. Political conversations are drier than they were and Jefferson has something to teach us. Blessings and happiness should find their way back into our rhetoric.

  About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigour, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people – a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labour may be lightly burdened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.

  This passage is the last word on democratic liberties. Try editing it. Try cutting. It is all but impossible to take out a single phrase without doing grievous harm to the whole. Jefferson provides the most comprehensive spoken list since Pericles of the attributes of democracy. This is democracy’s evergreen. It is a checklist of institutions and a standard against which to measure how close a nation approximates to the ideal of popular power. The most resonant phrase in the speech – ‘equal and exact justice for all men’ – is almost a direct quotation from the Funeral Oration of Pericles. The quotation is almost lost in the litany of virtues, but this is a supreme definition of minority rights which shines in the text today as much as it did then. Of course, it wasn’t exactly true. Not every person in America was a bearer of rights. But that does not mean this passage should be thought of as hypocritical. It’s not; it’s a statement of an ideal, a foundation myth and a utopian aspiration. As he did in the Declaration of Independence, when he simply asserted that all men were created equal and were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Jefferson is setting a standard. America didn’t meet it then; no nation does now. But the claim that liberal democracy represents the terminus of political philosophy rests on the list of popular freedoms contained in this passage. The political battle to instantiate them in existing societies goes on but, philosophically, this is the last word.

  I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favour which bring him into it … I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts … Relying, then, on the patronage of your good will, I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choice it is in your power to make. And may that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favourable issue for your peace and prosperity.

  There is a crucial wisdom about politics as a career here which is also captured in Enoch Powell’s less accurate axiom that all political careers end in failure. Some careers do pass through success but no success is ever final; politics must go on. The point Jefferson is making here is that the political capital of a leader is at its highest at the beginning of his tenure, when experience is least, and statecraft at its least developed. The statesman’s learning and his popularity run counter to each other. As wisdom gathers, popularity declines. See Tony Blair’s A Journey for a dramatic recent example of the process. Barack Obama is an example of a swell of general hope giving way to specific disappointment. Donald Trump will be subject to the same law of political inflation and deflation.

  Jefferson makes a plea that sounds today all too contemporary. He asks forgiveness for his mistakes, and appeals to those who may not be able to see the whole picture to forbear from judgement. Perhaps the most corrosive aspect of modern political culture is the rush to judge on the assumption that every error must be self-serving. Elegantly, Jefferson asks here for a lost art of democratic politics: patience and understanding. It is a lesson we would do well to heed, though we have forgotten how to do so.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Government of the People, by the People, for the People

  The Gettysburg Address

  19 November 1863

  Abraham Lincoln said simply in a sentence something it can take whole books to complicate. If there were a manifesto for democratic politics, Lincoln’s most famous line might be too long to be the title, but it would certainly offer the subtitle. Given that he could cram so much into ten words, it is a wonder he needed all of 272 for the whole speech.

  Abraham Lincoln was not, however, the man who really delivered the Gettysburg Address. That honour goes to the forgotten orator Edward Everett, who was top of the bill on the Pennsylvania battlefield in November 196
3, to speak the funeral eulogy after the poets Longfellow, Whittier and Bryant turned the invitation down. Lincoln’s task was to come on afterwards and do what were, by comparison with Everett’s lavish address, parish notices. It is the greatest example of stealing the show in all the arts.

  Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) served as the sixteenth president of the United States of America from March 1861 until his assassination by a resentful Confederate-supporting actor, John Wilkes Booth, in Ford’s Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865. He is one of the icons of American democracy, famously immortalised at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. His is the name most often summoned in the speeches of the presidents who followed him. He is the re-founding father of the American constitution.

  Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky, the son of a frontiersman. It was, according to Lincoln himself, ‘a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods’. It was not a literate childhood, and in later life he thought himself lucky to be able to ‘read, write and cipher’. Political opponents would later patronise him by wondering how a man of such unpromising literary beginnings could command the language as he did. The answer is bound to be a mystery, especially as he was a self-effacing man. In the words of the writer and diplomat John Bigelow: ‘He [Lincoln] was so modest by nature that he was perfectly content to walk behind any man who wished to walk before him.’

  Lincoln’s political career began when he joined the Illinois state legislature in 1834 and, self-taught in the law, was admitted to the Bar in 1837. ‘His ambition’, said his law partner, ‘was a little engine that knew no rest.’ This led Lincoln to a term in the House of Representatives between 1847 and 1849. His political zeal was awakened by the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed states and territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.