Jefferson and the Declaration (Winter 2020 | Volume: 64, Issue: 1)

Jefferson and the Declaration

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Authors: Peter Onuf

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

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Winter 2020 | Volume 64, Issue 1

Thomas Jefferson

Notwithstanding the assaults of generations of iconoclastic critics, Thomas Jefferson remains an American icon. A touchstone for partisans of all persuasions, the author of the Declaration of Independence has risen above partisanship as America’s “inventor,” the great apostle of democracy and national self-determination. His eloquent formulations of “self-evident ... truths” constitute the American creed: “all men are created equal”; “they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and unalienable Rights,” including “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”; and the governments men institute to secure these rights derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Historians may insist, and Jefferson would have agreed, that these principles were hardly original; they may acknowledge that he was a gifted writer but emphasize the crucial editorial role of fellow congressmen who purged the document of most (but not all) of its embarrassing rhetorical excesses; or they may be appalled by the bald hypocrisy of a Virginia slave owner holding forth on the rights of man. 

Jefferson said the Declaration of Independence was “intended to be an expression of the American mind.”

But Jefferson’s language and the man himself seem impervious to historians’ qualifications and caveats. Because modern Americans know what Jefferson really meant, they know their man. They think they know Jefferson because Jefferson — in visionary moments — seems to know them. Jefferson’s Declaration announced a new epoch in world history, transforming a provincial tax revolt into the opening salvo of a great struggle to liberate humanity from the tyrannies of the past; his first inaugural address, of March 4, 1801, reaffirmed the universal republican principles of 1776 while envisioning a glorious, specifically American, future in this “chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.

Jefferson’s language continues to resonate, but its radical edge has been lost. In an 18th-century world, where all men were self-evidently created unequal, the principle of equality threatened to turn the world upside down, subverting social and political order, even family governance. But what does “equality” mean now, when most right-thinking Americans take it for granted, assuming it to be compatible with — and even to make legitimate — the glaring inequalities in contemporary society that we also take for granted? And what about that “chosen country,” now that there is no longer “room enough” for further waves of settlement and improvement? 

Americans today often forget how radical Jefferson's idea was that "all men are created equal." Society was highly stratified and divided by religious and other affiliations. Common people were often mocked, as in Samuel Butler's "Hudibras Encounters the Skimmington." Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Americans today often forget how radical at the time was Jefferson's idea that "all men are created equal." Society was highly stratified and divided by religious and other affiliations. Common people were often mocked, as in William Hogarth's "Hudibras Encounters the Skimmington" — a procession in a country