Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  Jefferson made no claim of originality in drafting the document. The object of the Declaration, he recalled later, in answer to the many requests for his sources, was “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 their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.” Jefferson said he had “turned to neither book nor pamphlet” nor to “any particular and previous writing.” Instead, he said in 1825, the authority of the Declaration rested “on the harmonizing sentiments of the day.” It was simply meant “to be an expression of the American mind.”44

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  EVEN THE FAMOUS PHRASE from the Declaration that “all men are created equal” was not new, at least not to those who considered themselves modern and enlightened. This radical idea, of course, had roots in Christianity and Western culture that went back centuries, but by the eighteenth century it had taken on for many a literal and secular significance that is still the foundation of America’s democratic faith. The slaveholding planter William Byrd, who was as much of an aristocrat as Virginia was ever to know, had read widely and was a learned member of the Royal Society, a London organization devoted to the advancement of knowledge. Nevertheless, despite his great distance from the common man, he wanted to be thought modern and enlightened and thus could not help affirming in 1728 that “the principal difference between one people and another proceeds only from the differing opportunities of improvement.” Governor Francis Fauquier of Virginia, Jefferson’s dining and music partner, made the point more bluntly: “White, Red, or Black, polished or unpolished,” he declared in 1760, “Men are Men.” James Boswell, Dr. Johnson’s great biographer, during his tour to the Hebrides in 1773, was surprised to find a black African servant in the north of Scotland whose manners were no different from those of a white servant from Bohemia. But then he realized that he had forgotten the modern presumption that culture was socially constructed. “A man is like a bottle,” he observed, “which you may fill with red wine or with white.”45

  Republicans especially had to believe that human nature could be shaped and molded and made more virtuous. If one held that human nature was “totally depraved, wicked, and corrupt,” then, said Nathaniel Chipman, a Yale graduate and eventually the chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, faith in the people’s capacity for self-government was doomed. To be sure, Chipman admitted, there were numerous examples in history of tyranny and the abuses of power, even by the people. But these, he said, were not generally produced by “any malignity, any culpable disposition in the nature of man.” They were instead “the effect of situation,” of circumstances, of the environment. In other words, enlightened liberals had come to believe that what caused individuals to behave in an evil or corrupt manner and distinguished each of them from one another was the environment in which they were raised, the circumstances that molded and shaped them.46

  John Adams agreed. He had to agree, at least at the beginning of his career, not simply because, like Byrd and Jefferson, he had read books and wanted to be thought enlightened, but, more important, because his personal experience told him that all men being created equal was true. As a young unconnected lawyer making his way in Massachusetts society, he had so often felt the arrogance and pretensions of the so-called great families that he could not help identifying emotionally with common ordinary people—“the multitude, the million, the populace, the vulgar, the mob, the herd and the rabble, as the great always delight to call them.” These “meanest and lowest of the people,” he wrote anonymously in newspaper publications in the 1760s, were far from being mere animals as some gentry called them; they were in fact “by the unalterable laws of God and nature, as well intitled to the benefit of the air to breathe, light to see, food to eat, and clothes to wear, as the nobles or the king.” Adams believed devoutly—he had to believe—as he wrote in 1766, a decade before Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that “all men are born equal.” No patriot in the decade leading up to the Revolution defended with more passion common ordinary people against those who would have them “ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and cloathed like swine and hounds.”47

  Adams came to appreciate, as much as any American did, the capacity of individuals to transform themselves. Educated people came to believe—it was the basic premise of all enlightened thinking in the eighteenth century—that individuals were not born to be what they might become. As John Locke had written, the mind originally was “a white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas,” and it was filled up through time by “Experience.”48 As Adams pointed out in 1760, Locke, with the help of Francis Bacon, had “discovered a new World.” He had demonstrated that human personalities at birth were unformed, impressionable things that could be cultivated and civilized. Experience gained through the senses was what molded and created people’s characters; it inscribed itself on the blank slate, the tabula rasa, of people’s minds. Hence, said Adams, by controlling and manipulating the sensations that people experienced, their character could be transformed. Adams took the image of cultivation seriously and literally. The “Rank and unwholesome Weeds” that had so dominated traditional society could now be “Exterminated and the fruits raised.” Barbarism could be eliminated and civility increased. This kind of enlightenment had been denied to Cicero and the ancients. The idea that only cultivation separated one person from another was, he said, “the true sphere of Modern Genius.”49

  In other words, nurture, not nature, was what mattered. This was the explosive eighteenth-century assumption that lay behind the idea that all men were created equal. Not everyone had the same capacity to reason, but since everyone had senses, this Lockean notion that all ideas were produced by the senses was inherently egalitarian.

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  MANY OF JEFFERSON’S COLLEAGUES in Virginia were not entirely happy with all this talk of being born equal. In the convention drawing up the new Virginia constitution in 1776, George Mason prefaced the document with a Declaration of Rights stating that “all men are by nature equally free and independent.” Robert Carter Nicholas raised the question of the applicability of Mason’s statement to black slaves. Could such a pronouncement be construed to free the slaves? Edmund Pendleton solved the problem by proposing to insert the clause “when they enter into a state of society,” thus placing the African slaves outside of society and unentitled to enjoy the rights of citizenship.50

  In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson offered a more radical solution to the problem by doubting his own belief in the natural equality of all human beings. In a sense he had to. If one believed in the natural equality of blacks, then slavery became impossible, which is why most enlightened thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic came to oppose slavery. Like other slaveholding southerners, Jefferson sensed this and came to realize that black slavery could ultimately be justified and explained only if black Africans were considered a different order of being, a different race, one unequal to whites.

  Although many white Americans explained the blackness of the Africans in environmental terms—the hot African sun had scorched their skin—and believed that in time living in a more moderate climate their skin would whiten, Jefferson suggested that there might be inherent differences between blacks and whites that climate and cultivation could not change. “It would be right,” he conceded, “to make great allowances of the difference of condition, of education, of conversation, of the sphere in which they move.” Nevertheless, he said, they had not taken advantage to learn from the conversation and manners of their masters. In other words, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson suggested that black Africans might be so different from whites—that they did not begin life with blank slates similar to other human beings—that education and cultivation could never make them equal.51 />
  He didn’t feel that way about the Indians. In fact, he was quick to assert that the native Indians were “in body and mind the equal of the white man” and that any difference between them and whites was “not a difference of nature, but of circumstance.” Indian women, for example, were “submitted to unjust drudgery,” but that was true of “every barbarous people.” If white Americans were “in equal barbarism, our females would be equal drudges.” Once properly civilized, the Indian women would become domesticated and the equal of American white women. Although the Indians generally had few of the advantages the black slaves had in living in close proximity to the whites, they seemed to Jefferson to possess naturally the capacity for imagination and creativity. The oratory of the Indians was rich and sublime. They were able to carve out figures and crayoned pictures that were “not destitute of design and merit . . . , so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation.” In other words, they possessed at birth the same blank slates that whites possessed.52

  Alas, however, he could not say the same for black Africans. Although he advanced his opinion “as suspicion only” and with “great diffidence,” he claimed that black Africans were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.” It was possible, he admitted, that their distinctiveness as a race was due to “time and circumstances,” as many of his fellow white Americans believed, but in the end Jefferson seemed to favor the view that the Africans’ presumed inferiority was the result of their nature at birth, not their condition as slaves. In bravery and in memory, Jefferson acknowledged, blacks were the equal of whites, and “in music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time.” But in reason they were “much inferior” to whites. And they lacked the capacity for poetry. Whereas the Indians’ imagination was “glowing and elevated,” the Africans’ was “dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” Although surrounded by black slaves, Jefferson said he had never yet found a black who “had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration,” or who had displayed “even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.” So it wasn’t their circumstances as slaves that explained their inferiority, he concluded. After all, the condition of the Roman slaves had not prevented them from becoming cultivated in ways that the African American slaves seemed unable to duplicate. Because Jefferson was unwilling to admit the great differences of circumstances between the slavery of antiquity, where the slaves were often literate and part of the households, and that of the plantations in eighteenth-century America, his entire analysis was fundamentally flawed.53

  Although many Americans, especially southern Americans, may have agreed with Jefferson, many others did not. Most Americans who thought about the issue remained committed to the natural equality of all human beings, accounting for the obvious differences of people by their differing environments and differing degrees of cultivation. Adams became one of the conspicuous exceptions. By 1809 he was telling Benjamin Rush that he believed that “there is as much in the breed of men as there is in that of horses”—the kind of ancien régime comment that made people think Adams favored a hereditary aristocracy, which he emphatically denied. But within a decade of the writing of the Declaration of Independence, it was clear that Adams no longer believed that all men were born equal.54

  The belief in the natural equality of all people had powerful implications. If all human beings were indeed equal at birth, if what separated one person from another was simply cultivation and education, then it followed that those who considered themselves enlightened suddenly felt morally responsible for the weak and downtrodden in their society. In the minds of the gentry, concern and compassion replaced smugness and indifference. If the culture—what people thought and believed—was man-made and could be changed, then the status of the lowly and deprived could be reformed and improved. Criminals were not born to behave in an evil manner and could be rehabilitated. Even “Savages,” said Adams, could be civilized.55 These Lockean assumptions lay behind all the reform movements of the revolutionary era, from antislavery to the changing ideas of criminal punishment, from the formation of dozens of benevolent societies to the obsession with education—not just the Americans’ interest in formal schooling, but their concern with a variety of ways of remaking their culture and society. These comprised everything from the histories they wrote, and the advice manuals they read, to the many icons they created—including the Great Seal, Jefferson’s Virginia capitol, John Trumbull’s paintings, and the design of Washington, D.C.

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  IN 1776 BOTH ADAMS AND JEFFERSON, along with Benjamin Franklin, were interested in designing a device for the seal of the United States. It seemed as important as drawing up the articles of war. Adams proposed his favorite classical symbol—Hercules surveying the choice between Virtue and Sloth, which was probably the most popular emblem of the eighteenth century. Jefferson suggested of all things a scene from the Bible, “the Children of Israel in the Wilderness.” Franklin proposed another biblical scene, that of Moses “lifting up his Wand, and dividing the Red Sea, and Pharaoh, in his Chariot overwhelmed with the Waters.” But, as Adams admitted, these designs were “too complicated,” and the job was turned over to the secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, who finally worked out the present Great Seal, which can be seen on the reverse side of the one-dollar bill.56

  Both Jefferson and Adams were eager to leave the Congress and get back home. Jefferson was especially eager to return to Virginia. He told his colleagues in Virginia that he needed to return because of the health of his wife, Patty; but equally important was his intensifying desire to get back in order to begin to realize the many liberal reforms he had in mind. As he recalled in his autobiography, “I knew that our legislature under the regal government had many very vicious points which urgently required reformation, and I thought I could be of more use in forwarding that work.”57 Not in the Congress and not in Philadelphia, but only in what he called “my own country” of Virginia could he take advantage of the Revolution and fulfill his enlightened dreams.58 Even something as small as the design of the state’s seal commanded his attention, and he expressed some unhappiness with what his colleagues had done. What “for god’s sakes,” he asked, did the legislature mean by adopting Deus nobis haec otia fecit (God bestowed upon us this leisure) as the motto for the state’s seal? The motto, he claimed, was puzzling to many members of Congress (but perhaps not to his Virginia colleagues who took for granted the slaves who gave them their leisure); besides, he said, the slogan was inappropriate for a country at war.59 Finally, in early September Jefferson was able to get away and return to Virginia.

  In the Virginia legislature that convened in October 1776, Jefferson immediately set about reforming his society in accord with enlightened reason. He introduced bills abolishing the legal devices of primogeniture (in which the estate passed to the eldest son) and entail (which kept the estate in the stem line of the family). “A distinct set of families,” he wrote in his autobiography, had used these legal devices to pass on their wealth “from generation to generation” and had formed themselves into “a Patrician order, distinguished by the splendor and luxury of their establishments.” By abolishing these legal devices, he hoped to destroy the privileges of this “aristocracy of wealth” in order “to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent” that was “essential to a well-ordered republic.” He wanted Virginia’s lands freely distributed as widely and as equitably as possible to its citizens.60

  Although he had expressed some doubts about the people’s ability to select the members of the upper house, he had no intention of limiting their participation in the government in general. He wanted to extend “the right of suffrage (or in other words the rights of a citizen) to all who had a permanent intention of living in the country.” This could be measured by “either the having resided a certain time, or having a family, or having property, any or all of them.” This meant gran
ting every adult male the right to vote. Although women were thought dependent and thus without voting rights, still Jefferson’s proposal for the suffrage was as broad as any made in 1776.61

  At the same time he set forth elaborate plans for revising the state’s laws. He aimed to overhaul the system of criminal punishment, introduce complete religious freedom, and create a system of public education. Having read On Crimes and Punishments (1764) by the Italian philosophe Cesare Beccaria, Jefferson was eager to liberalize the harsh penal codes of the colonial period, which had relied on the bodily punishment of whipping, mutilation, and especially execution. Like Beccaria, he wanted punishments that were proportionate to the crimes, and thus he proposed the lex talionis, the law of retaliation. So the death penalty was restricted to murder and perhaps treason, and those men guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy would be castrated. Over the next several years he gave more time to this reform of criminal punishment than to all the others put together, but much of it went beyond what most of his colleagues would accept.62

  This was equally true of his other proposals for reform. He found, as he recalled in his autobiography, that in the 1770s “the public mind would not yet bear” his proposal to gradually abolish slavery, “nor,” he wrote in 1821, “would it bear it even at this day.” He knew John Locke had proposed religious toleration, but that was not enough. “Where he stopped short,” he said, “we may go on” and establish true religious freedom. After all, toleration implied a religious establishment that merely allowed other religions to exist.63 Unfortunately, his effort was delayed and was finally passed in 1786 only through the efforts of his friend James Madison. Jefferson’s farsighted plan for creating a three-tiered—elementary school, grammar school, university—publicly funded educational system likewise was turned down by his colleagues. Still, he believed that his several reforms, as he stated in his autobiography, were based on his hope that “every fibre would be eradicated of antient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican.”64