The Jefferson Lies

by David Barton

  Personal feelings must be subjugated to objective truth. Either Jefferson did or did not promote emancipation, did or did not encourage public religious expressions, did or did not include religion in education, regardless of whether someone agrees or disagrees with him on those issues. Truth is transcendent and immutable, not individually constructed and interpreted. Therefore, in order to overcome Poststructuralism, make the quest for objective truth the highest goal. Realize, too, that achieving this goal will always require hard work and deliberate, even aggressive, effort rather than just sitting back and complacently accepting whatever is set before us.

  Jefferson expressed this truth when he declared, “If a nation expects to be ignorant, and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”10 You can have truth and security; or you can have an unworried oblivious ease; but you cannot have both at the same time.

  The antidote to Modernism is to learn about and understand the past, not just the present. Unfortunately, this is becoming difficult for two reasons. The first is a growing lack of knowledge about even the most basic facts of American history among those who have been educated in our governmental school system. For example, for citizens who have been trained with our current educational methods:

  • 65 percent do not know what happened at the Constitutional Convention.

  • 88 percent cannot name even one writer of the Federalist Papers.

  • 40 percent cannot name an American enemy during World War II.

  • 81 percent cannot name even one of the federal government’s powers.

  • 70 percent do not know that the US Constitution is the supreme law of the land.11

  Because our educational system now graduates students lacking even minimal proficiency of the simplest facts, whatever extravagant charges Modernists may make about Jefferson or any other historical figure or event seem plausible. The general public is simply no longer knowledgeable enough about history to recognize the claims as false. Regrettably, much of this growing historical illiteracy is actually a direct result of current education laws.

  For example, federal laws such as “No Child Left Behind” require student accountability testing in order for schools to secure federal funds, but that testing covers reading, math, and science, not history. Most schools instruct their teachers to focus on teaching students the subject matter covered in the testing, whether mandated by state or federal law. History is rarely a part of that focus, so it receives minimal attention.

  The second impediment to historical literacy is evolution, which is not simply a science controversy but rather a philosophy-of-life debate. Even attorney Clarence Darrow, who argued the case for evolution in the famous 1925 Scopes trial,12 acknowledged that he was arguing it as “a death struggle between two civilizations.”13

  When evolutionary belief is applied to law, it results in the “living Constitution,” asserting that what was written two centuries ago is not applicable today and that judges must allow the Constitution to evolve to meet today’s needs. Constitutional history, therefore, becomes irrelevant, and has largely been dropped from legal studies in most law schools.

  When evolutionary belief is applied to education, it results in the constant seeking of new methodologies of instruction, even if the old ones still work well. Consequently, traditional “old” math instruction that involves memorizing the math tables is discarded and replaced with “new” math. Of this, a US senator correctly observed:

  This new-new mush-mush math will never produce quality engineers or mathematicians who can compete for jobs in the global market place. In Palo Alto, California, public school math students plummeted from the 86th percentile to the 56th in the first year of new math teaching. This awful textbook obviously fails to do in 812 pages what comparable Japanese textbooks do so well in 200. The average standardized math score in Japan is 80. In the United States it is 52.14

  Similarly, on the grounds that old methods of teaching English are boring and need to be evolved, diagramming sentences and traditional grammar instruction was dropped several years ago. But now only one-fourth of students can write at a proficient level, and only 1 percent can write at an advanced level.15

  Since evolution seeks to leave the past behind and move forward to something new, the academic study of history is the most severely impacted by this philosophy. After all, since evolution states that man is ever progressing, then what is in the past is of little relevance today. The study of history is therefore a complete waste of time.

  Embracing this evolutionary approach to history, several states have adopted what is now termed the Twentieth-Century Model, requiring high school students to learn only that which happened from 1900 forward and sometimes back to 1877 (from Reconstruction forward).16

  It would seem that high school students—young adults on the verge of entering active national citizenship—should study the Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights along with responsible civics and participatory constitutional government. But in most states, these specific topics are covered in fifth-grade history; and what eleven-year-old really cares about habeas corpus, trial by jury, the rights of conscience, judicial tyranny, or taxation without representation? Fifth graders don’t, but high schoolers should. Yet we teach this material to fifth graders and not high schoolers.

  But early American history is not only de-emphasized in high school, but also among post-graduate institutions. According to the US News and World Report, none—not one—of the fifty-five elite colleges and universities they ranked requires any course in American history for graduation,17 and none of the top fifty even requires a course in Western history.18 Since all that matters today is who we are now rather than who we were then, history courses have been replaced with modern culture courses.

  But for the more than 80 percent of Americans who believe that God made man,19 there is still much that can be learned from history. In fact, God Himself insists that we study history, admonishing us to “remember the former things of old” (Isaiah 46:9) and “call to remembrance the former days” (Hebrews 10:32 KJV). As the Apostle Paul explained in 1 Corinthians 10, history provides lessons and illustrates principles that we can still apply today (see also Romans 15:4). But with so many Americans having been separated from even a rudimentary knowledge of their own history and its simplest facts, Modernism now has far too significant an influence.

  One of the best ways to overcome Modernism is similar to the antidote for Deconstructionism: biographical history. Study history through the eyes of those who made it. For generations we examined the American Revolution by reading biographies of Paul Revere and George Washington; we studied the Civil War by reading the life and struggles of Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman; we learned the progress of science by reading about the tireless efforts of George Washington Carver and Thomas Edison. This long-established custom of learning history by studying the lives of its heroes has fallen into disfavor over the past half-century, but it is this practice that best overcomes Modernism, for it helps us understand what it was like to walk in another’s moccasins and thus understand their times and circumstances. Fortunately, many early biographies are still readily available today and can be downloaded, printed, or read online through sites such as Google Books, Gutenberg, PageByPageBooks, Monergism, ReadPrint, Archive, and others.20

  In my personal experience, I have found that biographies written before 1900 tend to present the most honest and accurate view of the good, the bad, and the ugly about the individuals they cover. Older books generally have not been infected with our modern agendas and therefore more accurately acquaint us with the period, customs, facts, and circumstances of that particular time. I place about a 75 percent confidence in biographies printed from 1900 to 1920 since various historical agendas were beginning to emerge at that time. I place only about a 50 percent reliance on biographies from 1920 to 1950 and less than a 20 percent reliance on those from the 1960s forward. Generally,
the newer the book, the more likely it has been infected with the five modern malpractices. Exceptions to this trend are books that have an abundance of primary source documentary citations, such as those by David McCullough, Dumas Malone, Daniel Dreisbach, James Hutson, and others.

  In short, to overcome Modernism, develop a broader, macro knowledge of historical persons, events, customs, and beliefs rather than just the modern micro view.

  The remedy for the fourth malpractice, Minimalism, is to establish context. Because human nature always has and always will prefer things to be simple, the tendency toward Minimalism is definitely not a new problem. In fact, it has been a trap to be avoided by Christians for the past two millennia. Its solution was long ago set forth by the Apostle Paul when he stated that he “did not shrink from declaring . . . the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) rather than just picking and choosing items that interested him. He similarly admonished those following in his steps to “rightly divid[e] the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15 KJV)—that is, to look at the complete picture and then make an accurate analysis.

  Those recommendations from Paul about how to avoid theological problems are exactly the same for avoiding historical ones. Get the entire context of what is being said; don’t separate something from its historical setting. Thus, when a line is lifted from a letter—such as Jefferson’s “separation of church and state” or “question with boldness even the existence of a god” phrase—go back and read the whole letter. And when a word or phrase that you don’t understand appears in a quote, look it up so that you can grasp its meaning and thus understand its context.

  The solution for Academic Collectivism is to personally investigate, study, and search out information rather than just accept what the “experts” claim. Become like a jury member of old; get all the evidence, listen to both sides, and reach an independent conclusion warranted by the facts.

  The Apostle Paul especially endorsed this approach. He made three extended journeys that carried him from one end of the known world to the other. Having personally seen countless cultures and peoples, he identified those from Berea as being the most noble. He particularly praised them because they did not believe what he told them until they had personally investigated and confirmed it for themselves. Frankly, they were not impressed by the fact that he was an Apostle or that he had been commissioned by Jesus Himself on the road to Damascus. Instead they “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11 NIV). It is truth that matters, not one’s credentials. Therefore, insist on checking primary sources.

  Consider the work In Search of Christian America.21 Three academics purported to investigate whether the American Founding, defined as the period from 1760 to 1805, was Christian. They concluded that it was not. On what historical basis did they reach this conclusion? Strikingly, 88 percent of the “historical sources” on which they relied to reach their conclusion were published after 1900 and 80 percent were published after 1950. When a book examining the period from 1760 to 1805 does so by analyzing sources printed two centuries afterward, an errant conclusion is not surprising. But this is a common practice in Academic Collectivism: regurgitate what other modern “experts” have said rather than check the original sources. The solution for this problem is to investigate and check the sources for ourselves. As Thomas Paine long ago affirmed, “[I]nvestigation always serves to detect error and to bring forth truth.”22

  By practicing these remedies, the five traps of modern historical malpractice can be avoided. Learning accurate history should be our objective.

  By the way, history was defined in America’s original dictionary (1828) as “an account of facts” and “a narration of events in the order in which they happened, with their causes and effect.”23 All five modern historical devices fail to meet important parts of this definition.

  Deconstructionists avoid telling about “events” in the way “they happened,” preferring instead to selectively pick out a few things in order to construct a negative image. Poststructuralists avoid “an account of facts,” believing instead that history is subjective and must therefore be individually interpreted based on the way one feels about what happened. Modernists and Minimalists both sidestep “causes and effects,” one by avoiding context and the other by dismissing because examining them “causes and effects” would make things too complicated. And Academic Collectivists avoid “a narration of events,” preferring instead to narrate only what other so-called “experts” have said about those events.

  To ensure that justice is done in the portrayal of historical events and persons such as Thomas Jefferson, we must reestablish the traditional examination of history free from agendas. Since the practice of biographical history contributes so much to an accurate portrayal of historical fact, it is worth closing this work with some glimpses into the personal life of Jefferson, showing something of his heart, faith, and character.

  Jefferson was one of the rare men who became a hero in his own lifetime, yet unlike many others who attained that distinction, he always remained humble and unpretentious, living and acting as the common person for whom he had sacrificed so much. As a result, people would often converse with him without recognizing who he was. Jefferson’s granddaughter related such an account:

  On one occasion while traveling, he stopped at a country inn. A stranger who did not know who he was entered into conversation with this plainly-dressed and unassuming traveler. He [the stranger] introduced one subject after another into the conversation, and found him perfectly acquainted with each. Filled with wonder, he seized the first opportunity to inquire of the landlord who his guest was, saying that when he spoke of the law, he thought he was a lawyer; then turning the conversation on medicine, felt sure he was a physician; but having touched on theology, he became convinced he was a clergyman. “Oh,” replied the landlord, “why I thought you knew the Squire.” The stranger was then astonished to hear that the traveler whom he had found so affable and simple in his manners was Jefferson.24

  On another occasion Jefferson was going from Washington back home to Charlottesville, riding on horseback in company with others. As they approached a stream that had no bridge, they saw a traveler on foot standing and waiting at the edge of the stream, hoping to hitch a ride across. He silently watched the others pass and ford the stream, but upon seeing Jefferson (and not knowing who he was) he stopped him and asked if he could mount behind him and ride to the other side. Jefferson graciously agreed, and after putting the traveler down across the stream, he rode on to catch up with the rest of his party. A man who had witnessed the scene approached the traveler and asked why he had not asked any of the others to carry him across the stream. The traveler replied, “From their looks, I did not like to ask them; the old gentleman looked as if he would do it, and I asked him.”25 He was shocked to learn that the man who had carried him across the stream had been the president of the United States, but such was the character of Jefferson. Whenever he had the opportunity to help others or show kindness, he did so. This fact was further attested in his account books by the frequent charity he bestowed, often secretly, on those he saw in need, regardless of where or when he saw them.

  Jefferson was not only unassuming and humble but he was also good-natured, and his manners never deserted him—even to those who opposed him. For example, on one occasion while returning on horseback to Washington, he greeted a passing pedestrian. The stranger did not recognize President Jefferson, but the two began a friendly conversation that soon turned to politics. The man began to attack and deride the president, even repeating several of the lies that had been spread about him. Jefferson was amused, and “he asked the man if he knew the President personally? ‘No,’ was the reply, ‘nor do I wish to.’ ‘But do you think it fair,’ asked Jefferson, ‘to repeat such stories about a man and condemn one you dare not face?’ ‘I will never shrink from meeting Mr. Jefferson should he ever come in my way’ replied the stranger.”26

  Jefferson then prom
ised him that if he would come to the White House at a certain time the next day, that he would personally introduce him to the president. The next day the stranger appeared for the meeting and was taken to meet President Jefferson. The man was immediately embarrassed and began to apologize, but Jefferson, with a grin on his face, laughed off the apology and extended his hand in welcome greeting. The two then spent several hours in delightful conversation, and when the man rose to depart, Jefferson prevailed on him to stay for dinner.27

  Jefferson was truly an amiable, polite, and pleasant individual. He also maintained a lifelong passion for accuracy and truth that was apparent on many occasions, including while serving America overseas in France. On one occasion he engaged in a discussion with the famous French naturalist Georges Comte de Buffon, who had penned a massive thirty-six-volume encyclopedia on natural history. Jefferson, himself a noted naturalist, had examined that enormous work and found inaccuracies relating to some American animals, specifically the American moose. He pointed these mistakes out to Buffon, who disagreed. Jefferson then secretly wrote his old friend General John Sullivan, then serving as the governor of New Hampshire, and asked him to send a moose skeleton. The general was surprised by the request but arranged a hunting party, bagged a moose, and sent its frame to Jefferson in Paris. Jefferson then arranged for a dinner with Buffon and during the meal produced the moose skeleton.

  Buffon immediately acknowledged his error and expressed his great admiration for Mr. Jefferson’s energetic determination to establish the truth. “I should have consulted you, monsieur,” he said with usual French civility, “before publishing my book on natural history, and then I should have been sure of my facts.”28

  Although a famous public figure, Jefferson loved and cherished his private life, especially time with his family. He had lost so many of his own precious children, and according to his grandson Thomas, he loved his grandchildren as if they were “the younger members of his family.”29 Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen recalled of her grandfather: