Mood:
incredulousTopic: Founding Documents
When we contemplate the complex and contradictory mind of Thomas Jefferson, we are faced with a real human being struggling with his ideals and often failing. Nevertheless, the most clarion moral message of the 18th century arose from his heart and spilled from a goose quill in his hand onto far more than one page of human history. Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence, a rhetorical document of extraordinary power. Did he know, when searching for the right words, that he was channeling a spiritual enegy based on Liberty and Truth that would change the world and shape new realities for ages to come? A force that would change the balance of power for all humanity?
I doubt it. He hoped, certainly, and he may have been enraptured and "carried away," but he did not have empirical knowledge that his words would be so powerful. He was passionate and he saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to push the envelope of possibility. The Goddess of Liberty possessed him with all Her fiery power, and that quill burned a demarcation into time itself, one the world will someday regard as more significant than the birth of Jesus or the Haj of Muhammed. The Great Seal of the United States proclaims for democracy a "Novus Ordo Seclorum", a new order of the ages. In the lives of those submitted to kings for 5,000 years, Jefferson is a far greater "Moses" whose deliverance has proven to be quite real in many senses, not just the spiritual power of freedom. (Franklin proposed using a scene of Moses parting the Red Sea for the Seal, but this was deemed too Christian and more secular images were chosen from Pagan antiquity instead). Despite the fact that he owned slaves, may have sexually manipulated Sally Hemings, and literally sold out Indian populations for exploitation and death, this complex and contradictory man--this real man--is an ancestor to all who aspire for a freer, better world.
It was the first such declaration of its kind. This document helped achieve what it declared--an independant nation freer than any of its predecessors. It's ideas have nourished revolutions and social change around the world, and its rhetoric colors the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the drafting of which was overseen by Eleanor Roosevelt). Indeed, the American Declaration gave birth to a whole genre, and many other independence struggles have signalled their beginning by making their own declarations in ways that imitate Jefferson's outline and style.
The Declaration begins with an affirmation of universal human rights and asserts that the existence of these things is God-given and beyond question: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." The Declaration then goes on to enumerate the crimes of King George against the people of the colonies and, making no apologies, declares a new political order legitimized not by history nor Divine Right of Kings, nor by charter of Parliament, but solely by the consent of the governed and the desire of the people to secede. Freedom, it asserts, is a natural right given universally by "nature's God." Contrary to the Bible and to European law, it declares that political order is possible apart from monarchy and demonstrates that King George was not God's anointed, but merely a tyrannical and largely incompetent man who stood between others and the true Divine Will manifest in each of them.
The Declaration's statements about human rights were radical then and now, and this rhetoric was retreated from by the time the Constitution was drafted in the next decade and a post-revolutionary oligarchy coalesced. The Declaration has no direct force in American law. The original was found hanging in a minor Washington office, fading in the sun, almost a hundred years after it was written. Some wished to forget it had ever been written--or at least to forget what was written in it. It was resurrected by abolitionists and given new life in the drive to extend citizenship to former slaves.
Jefferson was believed, by many of his contemporaries, to be too democratic, and his presidency was severely constrained because of this opposition. Had he been unrestrained, where would his ideals have led him? I think he would have been ahead of Andrew Jackson and even Abraham Lincoln, and maybe as hasty as they were.
Though the Declaration has no direct legal force comparable to statutory law, it remains, together with the Bill of Rights, the dominant template for American democratic rhetoric. The majority of people, it seems, regard the ideals of these documents as the "real America" even if we have never realized those ideals in practice. This rhetoric is beautiful and true, but it's often used to manipulate us and isn't often made real. We need to wake up, for we are far more cabable of realizing these ideals than Thomas Jefferson was.
Jefferson also knows that the Declaration of Independence is a declaration of war with an intractable exploiter, incapable of good faith or consensus because it has become deaf to its conscience and unable to see the humanity of even fellow Anglos. Nevermore, then! With a stroke of the pen and a flourish of widespread acceptance, the Declaration erased British identity and wrote "American" in its place.
Jefferson affirms that when it is justified, opportune and well-motivated, we are by nature morally right in using force to secure our independence. His recourse to force is thoughtful and deliberate and is backed by the sentiments of many he presumes to represent, who are increasingly prepared to fight colonial exploitation. He is formalizing an increasingly popular sentiment and crafting its theological basis and legal justifications. The children of colonists were colonized, and they were experienced enough to know it and what would follow; it had already been enacted on American Indians and other European populations in North America. (It is significant that in the Boston Tea Party, the rebels dressed as Indians. This was, in large part, to signal a post-European identity: American, belonging to this land, revolutionary nativism. Later, Benjamin Franklin regularly wore a coonskin cap as Ambassador to France for the same reason, and other Americans found in buckskin a new signifier of national identity. In the early days of the Republic, Jamestown was emphasized over Massachusetts as the founding colony, and Pocahontas was frequently exalted in public portraiture as "the Mother of our Country" alongside George Washington. Many travesties had been enacted against native peoples, but the Indian Removal Act, eugenics and biometrics all lay in the future. Jefferson's second inaugural address demonstrates his ability to appreciate the humanity of American Indians and esteems them more authentically than later racist or romanticized approaches).
About a third of the country was loyalist. Between 1776 and 1812, most of that third fled the colonies and the property of many was seized by revolutionaries. Life was deliberately made unbearable for them. It was far more controlled than the later French Revolution, but don't kid yourself--the American Revolution was vigorous in its repudiation of loyalism and British identity.
Clues about what Jefferson might have done are littered throughout the draft he submitted to the signers, which was revised through consensus process to reflect the final document we should all know well. I'm trying to memorize it.
So what are some of the things that are revised in the consensus process that produced the final document? Things Jefferson liked and preserved in his own papers, despite their not winning assent from the assembly? What did THIS American ancestor really think?
Here's one for today, with more to follow soon:
Jefferson thought universal human rights were "inherent and inalienable" -- that is, intrinsic to the person, impossible to distance or abstract from the actual person and his or her actual needs pursuant to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" in the real terms of day-to-day existence. For Jefferson, human rights are defined from the inside out and can only be legitimated through a social process between equals. He particularly meant "equal" in moral endowment or conscience, something that would have been far more explicit to an educated 18th century audience than to us. He is laying the groundwork to assert that the King is behaving badly and everyone knows better, and that it's time to do something about it because it's debasing the value of human life and distorting human character. At the same time, Jefferspm is undermining everything the world knew about religion and government, attacking with a double-headed axe the deep roots of illegitimate authority in religious pretense. Legitimate authority, he asserts, is lodged by God in each individual and not in any King. The law of God, he explicitly asserts in the retained opening paragraph, is mediated only by nature and not by British imperial tradition ("the laws of nature and of nature's God"); implicitly, he also claims that it is mediated by "nature's God" and not by the biblical tradition of kingship that legitimated British and continental claims, through English and Roman churches, to political authority.
It's not where they say it is, he proclaims--it's inside you, woven into every part of you. It's inalienable, to boot--you can't run away from it, sell it or have it stolen. It's there for good.
The way "inherent and inalienable" work together to strengthen the claim to a Divine "endowment" did not make it into the final version. What Jefferson is constructing is a theological challenge to the Divine Right of Kings, implicitly asserting universal sovereignty or "all men are kings". The justification for independence and war that is offered to the world is, primarily, an anti-authoritarian theological statement about the meaning and value of human life.
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" do make it into the final version, of course. What the hell is the pursuit of happiness and how would lawyers make sense of it? Whatever it is, it is either bound up with property or is its opposite: the phrase was an imitation of one of the founding generation's favorite philosophers, John Locke, who argued that we have rights to "life, liberty and property." Why did Jefferson change "property" to "happiness" ? Is it because this was not a socialist revolution, and he wanted to make no claim to universal property rights? Unlikely--concepts of socialism had not really touched political theory and may have seemed ridiculously out of reach; communalism was a fact of life in agrarian America, but institutional collectivism per se was regarded as a religious virtue remote from ordinary possibilities and was confined to religious communities like the Shakers; the 18th century expected charity, not redistribution of wealth. But Jefferson knew that property and happiness were related, and that it's hard for those without property to pursue happiness. That much would have been self-evident (and really so). Here's what a leading 18th century scholar, Garry Willis, says about Jefferson' s choice of "happiness":
the pursuit of happiness is a phenomenon both obvious and paradoxical. It supplies us with the ground of human right and the goal of human virtue. It is the basic drive of the self, and the only means given for transcending the self... Men in the eighteenth century felt they could become conscious of their freedom only by discovering how they were bound: When they found what they must pursue, they knew they had a right to pursue it.
in Inventing America, 1978
That is, the nation is built to allow people to pursue True Will. Practitioners of magical and Pagan religions can delight in the similarity of concepts. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of True Will.
We are not guaranteed happiness, but Jefferson proclaims that the new political order will be dedicated to manifesting the conditions under which ALL people may pursue it.
What must we, the descendants of Jefferson, pursue in our time?
More soon,
Copper
