Читать книгу Thomas Jefferson, the Apostle of Americanism - Gilbert Chinard - Страница 11

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Until very recently the material for a study of the formative years of Thomas Jefferson was very scanty. Many of his earliest letters have disappeared and he always felt a strong disinclination to analyze himself in writing. It was also contrary to his training and to the customs of his milieu to discuss personal matters too frankly and too openly. An American Jean-Jacques Rousseau baring his heart to posterity would have been as out of place as a man from the moon in New England or Virginia. But what he did not express as his personal feelings, he copied from the philosophers and poets he read during his studious nights or when resting under a tree on one of the hills surrounding Shadwell. The two commonplace books I have recently published, written by Jefferson during his student days and consulted by him throughout his life, could rightly be called "Jefferson self-revealed."[11] They enable us at any rate to determine with a fair degree of certainty the sentimental and intellectual preoccupations that filled his mind when examining the problems of society and the universe.

It does not seem that, until 1764, that is to say until the unfortunate ending of his love affair with Belinda, Jefferson had ever been touched by any religious doubt. When, in July, 1763, he foresaw the possibility of being rejected, he wrote to Page a long letter in which he appears still strongly marked by the Christian training he had received in his family and at the hand of Mr. Douglas and the Reverend Mr. Maury:

Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of one of his creatures in this world; but that he has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it, is what I have steadfastly believed.

The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes, should be one of the principal studies and endeavors of our lives. The only method of doing this is to assume a perfect resignation to the Divine will, to consider that whatever does happen, must happen; and that, by our uneasiness, we cannot prevent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after it has fallen. These considerations, and such others as these, may enable us in some measure to surmount the difficulties thrown in our way; to bear up with a tolerable degree of patience under this burden of life; and to proceed with a pious and unshaken resignation, till we arrive at our journey's end, when we may deliver up our trust into the hands of him who gave it, and receive such reward as to him shall seem proportioned to our merit. Such, dear Page, will be the language of the man who considers his situation in life, and such should be the language of every man who would wish to render that situation as easy as the nature of it will admit. Few things will disturb him at all: nothing will disturb him much.[12]

This note of Christian stoicism is exactly what might be expected from a young Protestant whose mind was not particularly perturbed by metaphysical problems. At that time Jefferson did not even conceive that there might exist a code of ethics resting on a different basis. If Doctor Small had helped him to find his exact relation to "the system of things in which we are placed", he was satisfied that complete resignation to Divine Will was the only wisdom. It may be safely assumed that three years after meeting Governor Fauquier, Thomas Jefferson had retained intact the faith of his youth.

What brought a change in his attitude and disturbed his equilibrium is certainly not the influence of the "infidel French philosophers." The volume of extracts which I published under the title of "The Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson" does not contain a single quotation from Voltaire, Diderot, or Rousseau, and French literature is represented only by a few insignificant lines from Racine. It is more likely that the first doubts were injected into his mind by the reading of Bolingbroke. He did not even need the assistance of Fauquier to lead him to the English philosopher. The catalogues of the old libraries of Virginia frequently mention Shaftesbury's "Characteristics" and Bolingbroke's "Works."[13]

Whether it was from the town bookstore or from Fauquier's own library, the fact remains that sometime, when still a student, but certainly after 1764, Jefferson obtained a copy of Bolingbroke and came to question the authenticity of the Bible as a historical document. It may have been due to the sentimental shock he had suffered, or simply to the critical attitude developed in him by his study of legal texts and decisions, but there is little doubt that he put into practice at that time the advice he gave later to Peter Carr, when he told him to "question with boldness the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfold fear. You will naturally examine first, the religion of your own country. Read the Bible, then, as you would read Livy or Tacitus."[14] He therefore went systematically through Bolingbroke, learned from him methods of historical criticism and scientific doubt, weighed the evidence with a legal mind and came to very definite conclusions. At this decisive turn in his life, Jefferson might easily have become a sceptic and a cynic, like so many men of the eighteenth century. As a matter of fact, a careful study of his "Literary Bible" indicates that at least for a time he was extremely cynical in his attitude towards women. This may have been due to the cruelty of Belinda, but it was more than a passing mood, for as late as 1770, two years before his marriage, he scribbled on the margin of his account book a Latin doggerel clearly indicating his distrust of the female kind:

Crede ratem ventis, animum ne crede puellis Namque est foeminea tutior unda fide. Foemina nulla bona est, sed si bona contigit ulla Nescio quo fato mala facta bona est.

From Euripides particularly he collected with a sort of waggish pleasure the strongest denunciations of women in the old poet and repeated with him "Mortals should beget children from some other sources, and there should be no woman-kind: thus there would be no ill for man"—and again, "O Zeus, why hast thou established women, a curse deceiving men, in the light of the sun?"

In Milton he found an echo of Euripides' misogynism and from "Paradise Lost" and "Samson Agonistes", he compiled a pretty set of accusations against female usurpations. His conclusion at that time was probably that of the old English poet, and he affirmed his superiority over the treacherous sex by repeating after him:

Therefore God's universal law

Gave to man despotic power

Over his female in due awe.[15]

His outlook on life must have been very gloomy, if we are to trust certain quotations from Greek and Latin authors. To matters of mythology, descriptions of battles, and grandiose comparisons in Homer, Jefferson apparently paid no attention. He saw in the old poet a repository of ancient wisdom and the ancient philosophy of life. From him he collected verses in which he found expressed views on human destiny—a courageous, stoic, yet disenchanted philosophy, summed up in two lines from Pope's translation:

To labour is the lot of man below

And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.

When he read from Cicero's "Tusculanae" he selected passages with a view to confirm the deistic and materialistic principles towards which he was leaning at the time: "All must die; if only there should be an end to misery in death. What is there agreeable in life, when we must reflect that, at some time or other we must die." This particular piece of reasoning seems to have struck Jefferson quite forcibly, for he repeated it again and again fifty years later in his letters to John Adams: "For if either the heart, or the blood, or the brains, is the soul, then certainly the soul, being corporeal, must perish with the rest of the body; if it is air, it will perhaps be dissolved; if it is fire, it will be extinguished."[16]

It was then that he copied and evidently accepted the statement of Bolingbroke that "it is not true that Christ revealed an entire body of ethics, proved to be the law of nature."

The "law of nature"—what was meant by the word? Was it the Epicurean maxim of Horace—"enjoy to-day and put as little trust as possible in the morrow?" If such had been the conclusion reached by Jefferson he could have followed the line of least resistance and enjoyed the good things of life, the good wines of the Raleigh Tavern, the pretty girls and all the social dissipations of many of his contemporaries. Such would have been Jefferson's destiny, had he been born in the Old World. Had he been made of weaker stuff he would have become one of the fox-hunters, horse-racers and card-players of the Virginian gentry. But he was saved by his aristocratic pride and the stern teaching of the old Stoics.

He was conscious that he was of good stock, and he had read in Euripides that "to be of the noble born gives a peculiar distinction clearly marked among men, and the noble name increases in lustre in those who are worthy."[17]

To be ever upright and to be worthy of one's good blood, this was the simplest, most obvious and most imperious duty. It would have been very difficult for Jefferson to believe any longer that "at the end of the journey we shall deliver up our trust into the hands of him who gave it and receive such reward as to him shall seem proportionate to our merit", which was his belief in 1763. There was not even much to obtain in our life as a reward, for most societies are so organized that "whenever a man is noble and zealous, he wins no higher prize than baser men."[18] Still the fact remained that, after the collapse of all the religious superstructure, the foundations of morality were left unshaken, so Jefferson undertook to rebuild his own philosophy of life according to Bolingbroke's advice, with the material at hand. For it was evident that "a system thus collected from the writings of ancient heathen moralists, of Tully and Seneca, of Epictetus, and others, would be more full, more entire, more coherent, and more clearly deduced from unquestionable principles of knowledge."[19]

But he would take nobody's word for it, he would accept the teachings of no professor of moral philosophy; every man had to think for himself and to formulate once for all his own philosophy. When writing to his nephew, who he thought might go through the same crisis, Jefferson declared some forty years later that:

Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this. This sense is as much part of his nature, as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality and not the TO KALON, truth, etc. as fanciful writers have imagined. The moral sense, or conscience is as much a part of man, as his leg or arm.

But this is the Jefferson of 1808, the mature man, almost the aged sage of Monticello. How far he was from having reached that poise and that clear vision of the moral world, appears in the confusion and contradictions of the abstracts collected in the "Literary Bible." Yet when he read Homer, Euripides, Cicero, Shakespeare, and even Buchanan, Jefferson had a clear and single purpose. He was reading more for profit than for pleasure, to gather material with which to build anew, by himself and for himself, a moral shelter in which he could find refuge for the rest of his days. He was not thinking then of devoting his life to his country; if he had any patriotism, it was dormant, and if he had any sense of abstract justice it is nowhere manifest. And yet, quite in contrast with the general run of quotations in the "Literary Bible" are some maxims scribbled in one of his unpublished Memorandum books under the year 1770. He had already levelled the top of the hill on which he was to build Monticello and was digging the cellar. But one day, after noting carefully that "4 good fellows, a lad and two girls, of about 16 each, have dug in my cellar a place in 8 hrs. ½, 3 feet deep, 8 feet wide and 16½ feet long," he stopped to recapitulate the most striking maxims by which he intended to regulate his life:

… no liberty no life—endure and abstain—bonum est quod honestum, macte virtute esto, nil desperandum, faber suae quisque fortunae, fari quae sentiat, what is, is right—ex recto decus—ne cede malis sed contra audientior ito—long life, long health, long pleasure and a friend—non votum nobis sed patriae—fiat justitia ruat cœlum.

Clearly between the time he compiled his "Literary Bible" and this entry in the Memorandum book, a considerable change had taken place in Jefferson's mental world. What was dormant had been awakened, what was non-existent had been created. Let those who are looking for influences hunt for pale reflections of these maxims in the writings of the French philosophers. I cannot perceive any. I would even say that there is no distinct influence of Bolingbroke, for Jefferson borrowed from Bolingbroke methods of approaching certain problems rather than definite ideas. The young Virginian made use, for a short time only, of the critical reasoning employed by the English philosopher, but when it came to building anew, he gathered all the material, stone by stone and maxim by maxim, from the old Greek Stoics. It was a pessimistic yet courageous philosophy of life, far different from eighteenth-century optimism. By a strange anomaly, the son of the pioneer, the young man supposedly brought up under frontier influence, felt more kinship with Greece and republican Rome than with the philosophers of London, Paris or Geneva. During this early period of his life and when he had rejected the Christian system of ethics, the young Virginian found the moral props he needed in Homer's simple code of honor and friendship; in echoes from the Greek Stoics discovered in Cicero; and through them also was revealed to him a conception of patriotism and devotion to public duty which was to mold the rest of his life.

In the transformation that took place in Jefferson's attitude towards life, it would be unjust to leave out the influence exerted by Patrick Henry. The young student was present when Henry delivered his famous speech in the House of Burgesses in 1765 and ended the speech with the defiant declaration, "If this be treason make the most of it." "He appeared to me," wrote Jefferson, "to speak as Homer wrote; his talents were great indeed, such as I never heard from any man." From Henry he did not receive any particular political philosophy, but from him he learned the value of those striking formulas which remain in the memory of men, become mottoes and battle cries of political campaigns. He liked the vehemence and completeness of Henry's affirmation and when, in 1770, he wrote in his memorandum that maxim of all revolutionists and radicals of every age—fiat justitia ruat cœlum, let there be justice, even if the heavens should crumble down—he was thinking as much of the Virginia orator as of the Romans of old.

A last item in the same memorandum book of 1770 may justify the supposition that still another influence had entered Jefferson's life. By that time he had forgotten the fickle Belinda who had played with his heart, but he was no longer a woman-hater. When he quoted from Pope "the sleepy eye that speaks to the melting soul", he was already thinking of the young and attractive widow he was to marry two years later.

In the meantime he had been pursuing assiduously his law studies and his readings of political philosophers. Very early after entering college, he had decided that he would not be satisfied with the study of belles-lettres, or the life of a gentleman managing a large country estate. The clergy and the law were the only two professions open to a young man of distinctly aristocratic tendencies. He chose the law and began his training under the direction of Mr. Wythe. This training was markedly different from the instruction he would have received in Europe. There was no regularly organized law school at Williamsburg; candidates for the Bar had to prepare themselves under the direction of an old practitioner; they attended the sessions of the court and prepared briefs for their master; they studied by themselves and consequently were much more familiar with the practice than with the theory of jurisprudence. No examination was given by a regular faculty; but a license to practice law and to hang out his shingle was obtained by the candidate after appearing before a special board of examiners. In the case of Patrick Henry, the examiners had been John Randolph, afterward Attorney-general for the Colony, Peyton Randolph, Mr. Wythe and perhaps Robert C. Nicholas. If Henry "got by" after six months' study, thanks to his phenomenal fluency and "aplomb", it took Jefferson six years before he considered himself sufficiently prepared to appear before the examiners. A large part of his time however was spent at Shadwell in agricultural pursuits and independent study; but he came regularly to Williamsburg to consult Mr. Wythe, to attend the sessions of the Court, to buy books, and also to attend during the winter the many functions given by the brilliant society of the capital of Virginia. These years, the most important of all in the formation of Jefferson's political theories, can now be studied in the "Commonplace Book", long thought destroyed, which even Randall had not been able to find, but which is now safely deposited in the Library of Congress. It is a most revealing compilation and throws an unexpected light on the origin of Jefferson's political doctrines.

It contains first of all no less than five hundred fifty-six articles analyzing special cases from the Reports of Cases in the King's Bench, George Andrews, Robert Raymond, William Salkeld and Coke's "Institutes", for in a colony where no attempt had been made to codify the body of existing laws, and where the common law was the supreme law of the land, the first prerequisite to becoming a good lawyer was to assimilate an enormous number of cases and precedents. Jefferson proceeded, like all the law students of his time, to dig in "Coke upon Littleton" and others, putting down in his "Commonplace Book" decisions, discussions, definitions, matters of importance to a country lawyer, such as wills, devises, commercial contracts, cases on larceny, trespassing, debts, damages, bankruptcy, leases, libels; and he did it with his customary thoroughness and clarity. A detailed study of the "Commonplace Book" would be most illuminating for those who, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, still maintain that Jefferson was an impractical philosopher, interested only in abstract principles and in theory. On the other hand, he was not simply a country lawyer, either. If he had not seemed to manifest any interest in the abstract study of the principles of law, in what he used to call "metaphysical disquisitions", he was keenly interested in the historical development of the legal structure on which rested modern society and particularly the colonial society of Virginia.

He carefully went through Lord Kames' "Historical Law Tracts" and studied from him the history of criminal law, promises and covenant, property, securities upon land, courts, briefs. It is in Kames that he found a definition of society which he could have written himself and which expresses his political individualism and subordination to law:

Mutual defence against a more powerful neighbor being in early times the chief, or sole motive for joining society, individuals never thought of surrendering any of their natural rights which could be retained consistently with their great aim of mutual defence.

This is elaborated upon in the passage quoted from the "History of Property":

Man, by his nature, is fitted for society, and society by its conveniences is fitted for man. The perfection of human society consists in that just degree of union among the individuals, which to each reserves freedom and independency, as far as is consistent with peace and good order. The bonds of society where every man shall be bound to dedicate the whole of his industry to the common interest would be of the strictest kind, but it would be unnatural and uncomfortable, because destructive of liberty and independence; so would be the enjoyment of the goods of fortune in common.

I am perfectly aware of the undeniable influence of Locke upon the theory of Kames; and it would be very unlikely that Jefferson had not read at that date Locke's "Treatise on Civil Government." The fact remains, however, that neither Locke, nor so far as I know any political thinker of the period, had yet so clearly defined that particular combination of individualism and respect for peace and order so characteristic of American democracy. We shall see in one of the following chapters how Jefferson, elaborating on this statement of Kames, derived from it all his conception of natural rights. The Scottish Lord was for him a master and a guide.

In Sir John Dalrymple, author of an "Essay Towards a General History of Feudal Property", in Francis Stoughton Sullivan's "An Historical Treatise of the Feudal Laws and the Constitution of the Laws of England", Jefferson studied the history of primogeniture and of entails and came to the conclusion that both of them had foundation neither in nature nor in law, and certainly did not appear in England before the Norman Conquest. He reached to the same finding in his long dissertation on the original common law, and thus we can trace directly through the "Commonplace Book" the sources of the Bill on Primogeniture, of the Bill for Religious Freedom, and of the Law to Abolish Entails, which Jefferson considered as forming a system "which would eradicate every fibre of ancient or future aristocracy and lay a foundation for a government truly republican."

Some of the entries in the "Commonplace Book" were evidently made after the period with which we are dealing in this chapter, although most of them can be dated before 1776. We have no means of determining whether Jefferson had undertaken a systematic study of federative governments when he was still a student, or at what time he copied the many extracts and quotations from Montesquieu. Nor can we enter here into a detailed discussion of all the articles. One or two facts, however, stand out even after a superficial glimpse of this repertory of ideas on government and society. The first is that Jefferson at that date, and indeed during most of his life, was not interested in abstract principles or in theoretical discussions. His was eminently the mind of a lawyer, and it is not for a lawyer to arrive at a definition of justice but to determine what the law says on a particular point. Yet in a country where law is not codified and the common law is the basis of the legal structure, it is impossible to find out what the law is without undertaking a historical study of the cases at hand in the different repertories. Men are either fallible or dishonest, false interpretations creep in, texts are distorted from their original meaning, and thus it becomes necessary to apply to legal decisions the rules of historical evidence formulated by Bolingbroke.

After undertaking such a study, Jefferson arrived at a very curious conclusion; that at a time which was not buried in a mythological past, the Anglo-Saxons had lived under customs and unwritten laws based upon the natural rights of man and permitting the individual to develop freely, normally and happily. In the course of time, these free institutions deteriorated through the nefarious influences of several agencies. Unwritten law became written law and jurists succeeded in concealing under their sophistry and verbiage the primitive intent of natural legislation. Priests, striving to extend their domination over a realm which primitively was foreign to them, introduced religious prescriptions into civil laws and thus diminished the rights of the individual. Conquerors and a long lineage of hereditary kings further modified primitive institutions in order to provide an apparently legal foundation for their usurpations, until the people, no longer able to withstand patiently the evils of tyranny, arose and recovered at least some of their rights.

Such a conspectus of the history of England was neither new nor original; it was one of the favorite contentions of English jurists during the eighteenth century, and nowhere perhaps is it more forcibly developed than in the last chapter of Blackstone's "Commentaries", "Of the rise, progress and gradual improvements of the laws of England." It is fundamentally also the doctrine of Jefferson, who went much farther than any of the English political thinkers in his revindication of the Saxon liberties.

One may see already how such a conception differs from the theories of Rousseau and the French philosophers, and indeed from those of the English philosophers. And this is easily explained, even if too seldom realized. Born in the eighteenth century, Jefferson is in some respects a man of the eighteenth century, but no greater mistake could be made than to apply to him the same standards that apply to European political thinkers. The very fact that he was born and grew up in a remote colony prevented him from joining any particular school of political philosophy. He had comparatively few books at his disposal, certainly fewer gazettes, and only faint echoes of the philosophical battles raging in Europe reached the capital of Virginia. During the long winter evenings at Shadwell, he had ample time to think, to sift from the books he was reading, not matter of passing interest, but matter of practical value and principles susceptible of being applied to the society which he knew and in which he lived. He could not have the cosmopolitan and universal outlook of thinkers who had traveled and met with representatives of many nationalities. His "Literary Bible", as well as his "Commonplace Book", contains many examples which might be used to illustrate his provincialism or, if one prefers, his regionalism.

No man can become genuinely interested in things he has never seen and cannot imagine. He had never seen the English countryside and so, when he copied from Thomson's description of spring, he selected only passages that could apply as well to the landscape of Virginia as to the scenery of old England. Even when he read Horace he eliminated verses with too much local color, unknown plants, unfamiliar dishes and beverages, until the descriptions of a Roman farm by the old poet would fit a typical Virginia plantation with the slaves singing in the great courtyard after the day's work is done. He knew Latin and Greek, French and Italian, and perhaps even German; for the time and place his library was rich and varied. He had read Milton, Shakespeare, Dryden, Buchanan, Thomson, Thomas Moss; he had studied Kames, Pelloutier, Stanyan, Eden, Baccaria, Montesquieu and possibly Voltaire's "Essai sur les Moeurs", but from each of these he had culled facts and definitions rather than principles and theories. He had read some books of travel and listened with enjoyment to Fauquier's accounts of his long voyages. He was dreaming of visiting England, the continent and the Mediterranean, but the only form of society he knew was the colonial society of Virginia. No cosmopolitan tendencies would develop in such surroundings. Superior as he was in intelligence and culture to his fellow students and to the young gentry of Williamsburg, Jefferson, at the age of twenty-five, was not yet an American; he was distinctly a Virginian.