By today’s standards, King George III was
a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of
only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was
trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle, but in
fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of
today’s U.S. Government, you have to wonder why we celebrate our
independence. “It was a famous victory.”
Honoring Jefferson
July 1, 2004
Joseph Sobran
In observance of Independence Day,
Time magazine has put Thomas Jefferson on its cover.
Naturally, the copious articles within pay his genius worshipful lip
service, while missing the essence of it. They are more interested in
current obsessions -- such as his views on race and whether he had
children by one of his slaves -- than in his political philosophy.
The last thing Jefferson would want would be mere lip service. The
“self-evident truths” of his Declaration of Independence -- that all men
are created equal, that their Creator has endowed them with unalienable
rights, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the
governed -- were meant to be challenges, not platitudes.
Today we repeat them as if nobody ever doubted them. And we seldom
reflect on what they actually mean. But Jefferson never ceased pondering
their implications, like Euclid exploring the remotest implications of
the simplest axioms.
By today’s standards, King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He
taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His
actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power
over them in law and in principle, but in fact it was seldom exercised.
If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government, you have to
wonder why we celebrate our independence. “It was a famous victory.”
A master of several languages and many sciences, Jefferson sought to
reduce political philosophy to simple terms every American could
understand. The Declaration distills the political philosophy of John
Locke, which Jefferson regarded as the consensus of reasonable men of his
own generation.
Jefferson’s 1798 Kentucky Resolutions -- one of his most important
writings, neglected and disparaged today -- took the Declaration’s
self-evident truths a step further. He argued that the “free and
independent states,” as parties to the Constitution, must not allow the
Federal Government to monopolize constitutional interpretation; for if
that government could define the extent of its own powers, the whole
purpose of the Constitution would be defeated.
One of Jefferson’s recent biographers remarks that this argument was
“dangerously close” to an argument for the states’ right to secede from
the Union. That is exactly where it led, as the Confederacy later
contended. The states had the same right to withdraw from a Union they
deemed tyrannical that they had had to withdraw from the British Empire.
Jefferson was willing to apply the radical logic of those self-evident
truths. He was a conservative radical -- he argued against secession
except as a last resort -- but a radical nonetheless. Those truths
weren’t empty slogans; they were active principles, full of explosive
potential.
That potential exploded in 1860, when states did begin seceding. The new
president, Abraham Lincoln, who claimed to be a disciple of Jefferson,
had to ignore much of Jefferson’s thought in order to justify suppressing
secession as “rebellion.” He incessantly cited the truth that all men are
created equal, but he evaded the part about the consent of the governed
and established military dictatorships in the conquered South, while
effectively criminalizing Jefferson’s views on secession in the North.
All this set a lasting precedent for pretending to honor Jefferson while
distorting his real philosophy. Following this tradition, Time gives us a
toothless Jefferson whose views wouldn’t rattle today’s status quo. His
great enemy Alexander Hamilton, who took a far more liberal view of the
“implied powers” of the Federal Government, is much more in vogue now.
Today it’s fashionable to condescend to Jefferson by saying his
philosophy is a bit old-fashioned -- plausible in an agrarian society,
maybe, but hopelessly out of date now. Jefferson would reply that
self-evident truths are never “old”: A proposition is either true or
false. If his truths were true in 1776, they were always true, and will
always remain true.
A slaveowner, Jefferson saw that those truths were fatal to slavery. And
his personal conduct on slavery has been rightly criticized on his own
principles. But that is all the more reason to take his principles
seriously. A man of Jefferson’s intellect, merely creating a philosophy
to justify himself, would have come up with a very different set of
principles.
The best way honor Jefferson -- the only true way -- is to take his words
as seriously as he meant them.
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2004/040701.shtml
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