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The Philosopher of Jeffersonian Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Benjamin F. Wright Jr
Benjamin F. Wright Jr*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

Few movements in the history of American politics and political thought have been of equal immediate or enduring importance with that associated with the name of Thomas Jefferson. And yet Jefferson never published anything other than very brief and inadequate discussions of the principles for which he stood. His only systematic exposition of his political ideas is found in his famous Notes on Virginia. This work, however, was written in 1781-82 and deals but remotely with the issues which were to occupy the stage after 1789. Neither in Jefferson's own writings nor in those of Madison and Monroe, his successors as official head of the Republican party and as president of the United States, do we find any adequate exposition of the theories associated with the era of Jeffersonian democracy. It is only in the extensive works of John Taylor of Caroline, a friend and associate of these men in the political battles of that period, that such an exposition is to be found. Jefferson wrote that “Colonel Taylor and myself have rarely, if ever, differed in any political principle of importance.” John Randolph said that Taylor's “disinterested principles” were “the only bond of union among Republicans.” And Timothy Pickering calls him “the Goliath of the party.” As Henry Adams has said, Taylor was regarded as a political thinker of the first rank by the Virginia school and by many other leaders of his time, but it is equally true that his writings have occupied a position of obscurity since his death. This obscurity, however, does not alter the fact that they were influential in their time and are today the best source of information concerning the principles of both the earlier and later phases of the movement initiated by Jefferson during the first years under the Constitution.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , November 1928 , pp. 870 - 892
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1928

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References

1 Jefferson, , Writings (ed. by Ford, ), X, 170Google Scholar.

2 Bruce, W.C., John Randolph of Roanoke, II, 235Google Scholar; also 607.

3 Lodge, H. C., Life and Letters of George Cabot, 442Google Scholar.

4 History of the United States, IX, 195Google Scholar.

5 The best account of Taylor's life and career is Dodd, W. E., “John Taylor of Caroline, Prophet of Secession,” John P. Branch Historical Papers, II, 214–52Google Scholar. Shorter accounts are found in Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography (ed. by Tyler, L. G.), II, 88Google Scholar; and Wingfield, Marshall, History of Caroline County, 190Google Scholar.

6 See Rowland, K. M., Life and Correspondence of George Mason, I, 341Google Scholar, where the work of Taylor in the Virginia Assembly of 1779 is referred to.

7 Madison, Writings (ed. by Hunt, ), V, 41Google Scholar.

8 In a letter to Pendleton written from Philadelphia February 23, 1793, Madison said: “I seize the opportunity in this case with the more avidity, as it permits me at the same time, to tell you how much we have been charmed with the successor to Col. R. H.L. and to entreat your coöperation with a number of his other friends in overcoming his repugnance to his present station. His talents during the fraction of time he has been on the federal theatre have been of such infinite service to the republican cause, and such a terror to its adversaries, that his sudden retirement, on which he is strongly bent, ought to be regarded as a public calamity and counterworked by all the means his friends can use.” Writings, VI, 123Google Scholar.

9 See his letter to Jefferson, , June 25, 1798, reprinted in the Branch Papers, II, 271–76Google Scholar.

10 On his work in the Senate see Annals of Congress, 8th Cong. 1st sess. (1803-04), 50; 18th Cong. (1823-24), 558-66, 601-02, 659, 675-87. See also the Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, VI, 263, 312, 344, 348, 356; Monroe, Writings (ed. by Hamilton, ), V, 121-49, 161Google Scholar. The sketch by Dodd referred to above, and the comments in Adams, Henry, History of the United States, I, 148, 338Google Scholar, II, 105, and in Beveridge, , Life of Marshall, IV, 146Google Scholar, are also of value. There is an interesting discussion of Taylor's early attitude toward secession in G. Hunt, Disunion Sentiment in Congress.

11 The economic aspects of two of these pamphlets are admirably summarized by C. A. Beard in his Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, Ch. VII.

12 In a letter to Madison, May 15, 3794, he refers to its authorship, and says of it that “it is one of those things which merits to be preserved.” Writings (ed. by Ford, ), VI, 511Google Scholar.

13 Definition of Parties, 5.

14 Ibid., 9. “A paper junto can find an interest in restraining population even at the expense of the constitution. The danger and difficulty, with which our frontiers are extended, invariably engenders an intrepid republican spirit. The enmity of this spirit to an intriguing junto, is so constant, that it is already regarded as a deadly foe. Besides, an aristocracy for ever obstructs mankind in the pursuit of competency and happiness, because by compressing them within the locality of their devices, they are more easily brought to the magical mint, and coined into money.” Ibid., 13.

15 Ibid., 11.

16 Ibid., 16.

17 Ibid., 15.

18 Arator (4th ed.), vi.

19 Ibid., 19.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., 22. A pamphlet, probably by Taylor although it appeared under the pseudonym “Curtius,” which appeared just after Arator is the Defence of the Measures of the Administration of Thomas Jefferson (1804). In this he discusses and defends the program of economy and simplicity in government, the Louisiana Purchase, and the land policy of Gallatin, which, he says, prevented “the immediate monopoly of the public lands by a few leviathan speculators.”

22 American Political Science Review, XXI, 9Google Scholar. Beard devotes a chapter of his Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy to this book. He there treats it as though it were solely an economic argument. Such an interpretation necessarily neglects many important aspects of Taylor's theory.

23 Inquiry, v. “… both had paid too much respect to political skeletons, constructed with fragments torn from monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, called, in these essays, the numerical analysis; and too little to the ethereal moral principles alone able to bind governments to the interest of nations.”

24 Ibid., 14.

25 Ibid., 42

26 Ibid., 61. He continues: “A spell is put upon our understandings by the words ‘public faith and national credit,’ which fascinates us into an opinion, that fraud, corruption and oppression, constitutes national credit; and debt and slavery, public faith… Public faith is made with great solemnity to mount the rostrum, and to pronounce the following lecture:

“Law enacted for the benefit of the nation, is repealable; but law enacted for the benefit of individuals, though oppressive to a nation, is a charter, and irrepealable. The existing generation is under the tutelage of all past generations, and must rely upon the responsibility of the grave for the preservation of its liberty. Posterity, being bound by the contracts of its ancestry, in every case which diminishes its rights, man is daily growing less free by a doctrine which never increases them. A government intrusted with the administration of public affairs for the good of a nation, has a right to deed away that nation for the good of itself or its partisans, by law charters for monopolies or sinecures; and posterity is bound by these deeds. But although an existing generation can never reassume the liberty or property held by its ancestor, it may recompence itself by abridging or abolishing the rights of its descendant.”

27 Ibid., Sections III-v. Cf. Beard, op.cit., 334 ff.

28 Ibid., 400 ff. Taylor challenged the correctness of John Adams's appeal to natural law, but he does not hesitate to do the same thing himself, although, of course, with somewhat different conclusions. He states that “a theory or hypothesis cannot even pretend to plausibility, unless it is deduced from some general law of nature.” Ibid., 403. Again he says: “The basis of our policy …. is the constancy of nature, in her moral, as well as in her physical operations.”

29 Ibid., 437-46.

30 Ibid., 428-29. To those who are familiar with Adams's Defence it is unnecessary to say that Taylor is writing, although not very clearly, about the division of powers between the people and their government, and between the state and federal governments. Adams had dealt primarily with the division of powers among three departments in the same government. For the correspondence between the two men growing out of this book, see Adams's, Works, VI, 455 ff.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., 512 ff.

32 Ibid., 548-49.

33 Ibid., 551-79. Poverty may contemplate with toleration the wealth which flows from industry and talents; it is “justly exasperated against the wealth which flows from fraudulent laws.” The introduction of aristocracy into the United States by law will result in unusually violent animosities between rich and poor, because in this country the means for controlling them are less. It is to the fraudulent legal modes of acquiring wealth that “mankind are indebted for the pernicious and impracticable idea of equalising property by law.” Destroy the evils of legal privilege and monopoly and no more will be heard of the equally artificial and almost equally undesirable alternative of abolition of private property. Ibid., 562-64.

34 Ibid., 571.

35 Ibid., 569.

36 Ibid., 571. For an earlier view of the causes of party in the United States see Taylor's letter to Jefferson, , June 25, 1798. John P. Branch Historical Papers, II, 271–76Google Scholar. There he not only discusses the financial ills of the nation but also proposes several political remedies, among them short terms, rotation in office, and a new method of repealing laws.

37 Ibid., 656.

38 In a letter of January 19, 1821, Jefferson wrote: “If Congress fails to shield the States from dangers so palpable and so imminent, the States must shield themselves, and meet the invader foot to foot…. This is already half done by Colonel Taylor's book [which] is the most effectual retraction of our government to its original principles which has ever yet been sent by heaven to our aid. Every State in the Union should give a copy to every member they elect, as a standing instruction, and ours should set the example.” Writings (ed. by Ford, ), X, 184Google Scholar.

39 A government “possessing an absolute power to distribute property, according to the pleasure, the pride, the interest, the ambition, and the avarice of its administrators,” is the master rather than the servant of the nation. Construction Construed, 12. In this country we have guarded against interference with the freedom of religion by the government, but we have failed adequately to guard against interference with property. The result has been that there has been created “a monied interest at the expense of the whole community, which is gradually obtaining an influence over the federal government, of the same kind with that possessed by a similar sect over the British Parliament.” Ibid., 233.

40 Section 3.

41 Ibid., 27.

42 Ibid., 52.

43 Ibid., 82-84.

44 Ibid., 165.

45 Ibid., 171.

46 Ibid., 92 ff.

47 Further on he says: “The federal is not a national government; it is a league between nations. By this league, a limited power only over persons and property was given to the representatives of the united nations. This power cannot be further extended under the pretext of national good, because the league does not create a national government.” The exercise of sovereign powers over persons and property, “even by a government really national, and absolutely sovereign, has uniformly resulted in oppression, although the persons thus legislated out of natural rights, are actually represented; but under the federal government, in which local and personal interests are not, and cannot be represented, an exercise of these powers, utterly unnecessary to a fair and free government, must produce mischiefs of ten-fold magnitude. These local and personal interests were therefore left as politically and geographically arranged, into distinct compartments; and a federal was preferred to a national government, because that commixture of local interests, and inextricable sympathetic cohesion, which infuse into election and representation their substantial value, was stopt by the nature of the state governments, and could not be extended to a national government, by melting up the states into one vast empire.” Ibid., 234-35.

48 Ibid., 291.

49 The new confederation to be substituted for the old one, ought to be stated without disguise, that it may be duly estimated, and compared with its rival. It proposes to draw a geographical line between slavery and no-slavery; to train the people on each side of it, into an inveterate habit of squirting noisome provocations at each other through the press; and to create a degree of animosity as an ally to ambition and avarice, quite sufficient to induce a preponderating balance to exert its whole energy, in obtaining exclusive advantages… Congress would be converted. … into a convention, meeting annually to make new bargains for obtaining a preponderance, and local advantages over each other; or in fact to make annually a new federal constitution. To those who saw the difficulty of making that we now have, the consequences of this species of policy will be quite plain.” Ibid., 292.

50 Ibid., 294.

51 Ibid., 295-314.

52 Tyranny Unmasked, 32-33.

53 Ibid., 40.

54 Ibid., 222.

55 Ibid., 4-21.

56 Ibid., 260 ff.

57 Ibid., 263.

58 “If the declaration of independence is not obligatory, our entire political fabrick has lost its magna charta, and is without any solid foundation. But if it is the basis of our form of government, it is the true expositor of the principles and terms we have adopted. The word ‘united’ is used in conjunction with the phrase ‘free and independent states,’ and this association recognises a compatibility between the sovereignty and the union of the several states.” New Views of the United States, 2. Although Taylor does not make clear at this point whether he believes that sovereignty is found in the people or in the governments of the states, it may be presumed from the discussion in Construction Construed that it is in the people. See Sec. V above.

59 Ibid., 14.

60 Taylor based his account of the convention upon its journal and, to a lesser extent, upon the notes taken by Yates and the account by Luther Martin. Madison's notes were not published until many years later.

61 Ibid., 19. See also 44.

62 Ibid., 32; also 49, 63. For Madison's answer to Taylor's charge that he favored a consolidated government, see his letters to Garnett, R. S. and Trist, N. P. in his Writings (ed. by Hunt, ), IX, 176, 475Google Scholar.

63 Ibid., 37. For summary of his argument see 176-77.

64 Ibid., 147.

65 Ibid., 121.

66 Ibid., 127.

67 Ibid., 142. “The supreme court was not intrusted with the trial of impeachments, as was proposed in the convention, because its judgments might deprive individuals of a few political rights; but it is contended that it possesses, constructively, a power to try impeachments of whole states, and to deprive them of political rights, infinitely more important. It was not allowed to disqualify an individual to hold a federal office, one political right, but it is said to be tacitly authorized to deprive all the individuals of the United States, of reserved constitutional rights without any restriction. It was not intrusted with a power to deprive the descendants of a guilty individual of any political rights whatsoever; but, say the consolidators, it may deprive all the descendants of the present generation of political rights, by its precedents …. to confound legislative and judicial power in the same body of men, creates a tyranny, which both makes the law and applies the sword; and to enable a single court to cut off state rights by a supreme power of construing the constitution, would confound the power of creating a constitution, with the power of construing laws, and render these rights as precarious, as human heads are, under an absolute monarchy.” Ibid., 151-52.

68 Ibid., 237 ff. The last chapter is entitled “Construction” and consists of long extracts from Swift's allegory, “Tale of a Tub,” with applications to the methods of the Americans who are construing this into a nationalistic system.

69 Ibid., 238.

70 Life of John Marshall, IV, 58 nGoogle Scholar.

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