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Jefferson's Empire Approriate For Todays World, April 9, 2003
Peter S. Onuf's book, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood, is actually a collection of five essay that, as he says in his introduction, were prepared for different conferences at different times and places. His book is a scholarly coherent and original whole that revolves around two major themes of Jefferson's ideas of empire and nation and their relationship to each other. This is not a biographic narrative, but Onuf's argument that Jefferson believed the American Revolution was the first, powerful step toward a world empire of independent, republics bound together in a union of mutual affection and support. First, the establishment of independent republics forming an expanding union, essential to republicanism, on the American continent. The European continent would follow, and finally a worldwide union of free and independent states, bound together in mutual admiration, aid and affection.
Thomas Jefferson's ideal of revolution, that he called the "Spirit of 1776" would become the "Spirit of Everyman." Onuf argues in his introduction that Jefferson's vision of an empire of liberty would not reflect the corruption Jefferson attributed to the British Empire, and the more enlightened people of Europe would embrace this new way of political rule and life. Jefferson's empire would be made up of independent self-ruling people. The American Revolution would transform the world!
In Onuf's first chapter, "We shall all be Americans," Thomas Jefferson was referring to the American Indians, whom he idealized as natural republicans when they were in their "natural state" and uncorrupted by the British. Jefferson accused the British of being guilty of misguiding and misleading the natives in their mutual quest to fight and overcome the American colonists. In his second chapter, titled Republican Empire, Onuf's illustrates his argument that Thomas Jefferson's vision of an "American Empire" is founded in his experience of the American Revolution. Jefferson believed that a republican empire that avoided a central metropolitan power would be less self-serving, less onerously oppressive and less threatening to liberty. Onuf states, "Banishing metropolitan power from the New World, Jefferson imagined a great nation, a dynamic and expansive union of free peoples."
For Jeffersonians, the "Spirit of 1776" evoked both the Revolutionaries vaulting ambition to inaugurate a new world order and the desperate measures that they had been driven to by the collapse of the old imperial order. This was, as Onuf explains, the same old imperial order that Jefferson as a younger man had embraced and hoped to emulate in his public and private life. In Onuf's third chapter, "The Revolution of 1800," he illustrates the time and feeling of the era of a major sea change from the Federalist government, to Jefferson's principles founded in his proclaimed "Spirit of 1776."
Illustrating our Third President's reasoning Onuf quotes Jefferson, "The revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principle of our government as that of 1776 was in its form; not effected indeed by the sword, as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people. The nation declared its will by dismissing functionaries of one principle, and electing those of another, in the two branches, executive and legislature, submitted to their election."
Onuf goes on to explain that even Jefferson himself could not have fully grasped what becoming a people of revolution meant in 1776. Their national identity, states Onuf, did not begin to clarify until the revolution of 1800. Onuf explains that the crisis of the 1790s, with the limitations being placed on civil liberties had `roused the people from their slumbers' with the result that the people began to become conscious of themselves as a nation. According to Onuf, the transformation of Madisonian pessimism into Jeffersonian optimism constituted a crucial epoch in American political history.
In chapter four, "Federal Union," Onuf shows that Jefferson could not, even in retirement, stay uninvolved in national politics. Missouri was to be admitted as a state that would not allow slavery, a "free state" of the union. The controversy heated up as people chose sides to debate the admission of a state that would be required to ban slavery. Thomas Jefferson characterized the controversy as "a fire-bell in the night." The "Spirit of 1776" itself was under attack. To Jefferson, the eventual Missouri Compromise was not a compromise, but a grievous wound to the union that he feared would never heal.
In his fifth chapter, "To Declare Them a Free and Independent People," Onuf takes up the most difficult part of understanding Thomas Jefferson. Onuf illustrates Jefferson's attitude toward slaves by quoting from Jefferson's autobiography. "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free." In spite of the fact that Jefferson himself was a slave owner, he expressed his belief that everyone should be free. Concerning slavery, in his Notes On the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote the prophetic and unforgettable words; "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
Throughout this fascinating work, Onuf demonstrates that Thomas Jefferson is all too human. In spite of Thomas Jefferson's great contributions as one of our founding fathers and his ideals of freedom and the revolutionary "Spirit of 1776," he is not just an American icon. He is a man, of human contradictions, faults and greatnesses. His relationships with the American Indians and his slaves show his human faults, as well as his humanity.
Onuf shows that we are indebted to Thomas Jefferson for much of our common language of American Nationhood. As the leading Jefferson scholar, Onuf does not disappoint the advanced reader in this well-reasoned, scholarly work. It should be read, studied, enjoyed, shared, debated and on the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in the history of Thomas Jefferson and the American Nation.
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