Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

Nor can there be any possible doubt as to his hostility to slavery. One of the features of his Virginia reforms was abolition. While he failed, he never doubted that ultimately the chains would fall. ‘Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free’ he wrote in his ‘Autobiography.’[393] A little later, referring to his strictures on slavery in his ‘Notes on Virginia,’ he expressed a desire to get them to the young men in the colleges. ‘It is to them I look, to the rising generation, and not to the one now in power, for these great reformations.’[394] Declining membership in a society for abolition in France on the ground that his official status would make improper a demonstration against an institution his own people were retaining, he said that ‘it is decent of me to avoid too public a demonstration of my wishes to see it [slavery] abolished.’[395] Without any of this evidence, his hostility to slavery would be irrefutably established by the Ordinance of the Northwest Territory, in the handwriting of Jefferson in the archives of the Nation, prohibiting slavery in any of the States that might be carved therefrom after the year 1800.

V

Such is the persistency of falsehood that Jefferson has come down to us vaguely as an atheist and an enemy of the Christian religion. Since this charge is to play a part in the political story we are about to tell, it calls for some attention. He was brought up in the Church of England, and his earliest recollection was of saying the Lord’s Prayer when his dinner was delayed.[396] He planned at least one church and contributed to the erection of others, gave freely to Bible Societies, and liberally to the support of the clergy. He attended church with normal regularity, taking his prayer book to the services and joining in the responses and prayers of the congregation. No human being ever heard him utter a word of profanity. During the period of his social ostracism by the intolerant partisans of Philadelphia, he passed many evenings with Dr. Rush in conversation on religion.[397] ‘I am a Christian,’ he once said, ‘in the only sense in which Jesus wished any one to be—sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others.’ On one occasion when a man of distinction expressed his disbelief in the truths of the Bible, he said, ‘Then, sir, you have studied it to little purpose.’[398] While the New England pulpits were ringing with denunciations of this ‘infidel’ and old ladies, unable to detect the false witness of the partisan clergy, were solemnly hiding their Bibles to prevent their confiscation by the ‘atheist’ in the President’s House, he was spending his nights in the codification of the ‘Morals of Jesus,’ and through the remainder of his life he was to read from this every night before retiring.[399] In his last days he spent much time reading the Greek dramatists and the Bible, dwelling in conversation on the superiority of the moral system of Christ over all others. In his dying hour, after taking leave of his family, he was heard to murmur, ‘Lord, now lettest Thy servant depart in peace.’[400]

The reason for the myth created against him is not far to seek. Just as the landed aristocracy of Virginia pursued him with increasing venom because of his land reforms, the clergy hated him for forcing the separation of Church and State. When he made the fight for this reform, it was a crime not to baptize a child into the Episcopal Church; a crime to bring a Quaker into the colony; and, according to the law, a heretic could be burned. If the latter law was not observed, that compelling all to pay tithes regardless of their religious affiliations and opinions was rigidly enforced. This outraged Jefferson’s love of liberty. The Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, who were making inroads on the membership of the Established Church, were prosecuted, and their ministers were declared disturbers of the peace and thrown into jail like common felons. Patrick Henry and his followers fought Jefferson’s plan for a disestablishment—but he won.[401] The ‘atheist’ law, which was never forgiven by the ministers of Virginia and Connecticut, was simple and brief:

No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested or burdened in his mind or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

Here we have the secret of the animus of the clergy of the time—but there were other reasons. In his ‘Notes on Virginia’ he did not please the orthodox, and Dr. Mason, a fashionable political minister of New York City, exposed him in the pulpit, holding him up to scorn as a ‘profane philosopher’ and an ‘infidel.’ Discussing the theory that the marine shells found on the high mountains were proof of the universal deluge, Jefferson had rejected it. ‘Aha,’ cried Mason, ‘he derides the Mosaic account’; he ‘sneers at the Scriptures’ and with ‘malignant sarcasm.’ When Jefferson, referring to the tillers of the soil, wrote that they were ‘the chosen people of God if ever He had a chosen people,’ and referred to Christ as ‘good if ever man was,’ the minister charged him with ‘profane babbling.’[402]

His view of creation is set forth in a letter discussing a work by Whitehurst. He believed that a Supreme Being created the earth and its inhabitants; that if He created both, He could have created both at once, or created the earth and waited ages for it to get form itself before He created man; but he believed that it was created in a state of fluidity and not in its present solid form. This was his infidelity. He probably did not believe that Jonah was swallowed by the whale—and that was enough to damn him. But if he was not a Christian, the pulpits are teeming with atheists to-day.[403]

VI

We have seen that Hamilton had no faith in the Constitution, but did yeoman service for its ratification; we have the charge that Jefferson was hostile to both; and the truth is that he was hostile to neither and favorable to both. The evidence is overwhelming.

When the new form of government was under consideration, he proposed ‘to make the States one in everything connected with foreign nations, and several as to everything purely domestic,’ and to separate the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.[404] He was bitterly hostile to any plan based on the monarchical idea, and advised its friends ‘to read the fable of the frogs who solicited Jupiter for a King.’[405] When the Convention met, he wrote Adams that it was ‘really an assembly of demigods,’ but regretted that they began their deliberations ‘by so abominable a precedent as that of tying up the tongues of the members.’[406] His first impressions of the completed document were unfavorable. In a letter to Adams he complained of the reëligibility of the President.[407] To another correspondent he complained that the proposed system would merge the States into one without protecting the people with a bill of rights.[408]