Thomas Jefferson, the Apostle of Americanism

by Gilbert Chinard

In his plan for a Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, Lafayette some twelve years later included "la recherche du bonheur", in memory of the American Declaration of Independence, but "la recherche du bonheur" disappeared in the committee and was never mentioned again in any of the three Declarations of the French Revolution. The nearest approach to it is found in the first article of the Declaration of June 23, 1793; but it simply states that the aim of society is common happiness—and this is quite a different idea. Whether it was right or not, Jefferson, when he reproduced the terms used by George Mason in the Virginia Bill of Rights, gave currency to an expression which was to influence deeply and even to mold American life.

In that sense, it may be said that the Declaration of Independence represents the highest achievement of eighteenth-century philosophy, but of one aspect of that philosophy that could not develop fully in Europe. Trees that are transplanted sometimes thrive better under new skies than in their native habitat and may reach proportions wholly unforeseen.

Thus the Declaration of Independence written to express the sentiments of the day probably shaped the American mind in an unexpected manner. It was essentially a popular document planned to impress the masses, to place before the young nation at its birth a certain ideal and a certain political faith, but it was also a legal and judicial document intended to make more precise the reasons why the united American colonies had finally resolved to separate from the mother country.

For this part of the Declaration Jefferson drew largely from the "Constitution" he had drafted for Virginia and sent to Randolph by Mr. Wythe. He was his own source—the more so as he substantially repeated many of the grievances enumerated two years earlier in the "Rights of British America." But here again he markedly improved the first version, which was a monotonous recital of dry facts, starting with a legal "Whereas" and beginning each article with a clumsy participle. "By denying his Governor permission:... By refusing to pass certain other laws ... By dissolving Legislative Assemblies," became in the Declaration the dramatic presentation of facts by a prosecuting attorney and not the summing-up of a case by a judge. But the final renunciation of the mother country has an unsurpassed dignity, a finality more terrible in its lofty and dispassionate tone than any curse:

"We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends." There again one is reminded of the well-known French formula: "beau comme l'antique." Twice in its history the supposedly young and uncultured people had the rare fortune to find spokesmen who, without effort and laborious preparation, reached the utmost heights. The Declaration of Independence, with its solemn renunciation of ties of consanguinity, reminds one of the tone of the Greek tragedy; while the only parallel to the Gettysburg address is the oration pronounced by Pericles over the warriors who had laid down their lives during the first war of Peloponnesus.

Such heights can only be reached if the author is moved to his innermost depths. Singularly unimaginative in ordinary circumstances, for once in his life Jefferson was superior to himself: the student of Greece, the refined Virginian, became truly the voice of the people. But great effects often have small causes. We may wonder if he would have spoken with that same suppressed emotion, fiercely burning and yet controlled, if at that very time he had not been laboring under an emotional stress that never recurred in his life.

While he was in Philadelphia, writing the first draft in which he opened to the people of America "the road to glory and happiness", he could well wonder whether his personal happiness was not about to be destroyed.—His mother had recently died, he had just lost a child and had left in Monticello a beloved companion dangerously ill. "Every letter brings me such an account of the state of her health, that it is with great pain I can stay here," he wrote to Page (July 20, 1776), and for those who knew how reserved he was in the expression of personal feelings, the restraint in his expression hardly conceals the anxiety and distress by which he was torn.

There were also other reasons for his desiring to go home. Jefferson had always understood that as a delegate to Congress his duty was not so much to make a record for himself as to voice the sentiments of the people he represented and to carry out their instructions.[48] He was much worried about his standing with the Virginia Convention and suspected that some members were trying to knife him in the back. The Convention had just proceeded to elect delegates for the next Congress. Harrison and Braxton had failed to be reappointed, and Jefferson was "next to the lag."—"It is a painful situation," he wrote to William Fleming, on July first, "to be 300 miles from one's county, and thereby opened to secret assassination without a possibility of self-defence."[49]

A week later, he wrote to Edmund Pendleton to decline his new appointment as a delegate to Congress:

I am sorry that the situation of my domestic affairs, renders it indispensably necessary that I should solicit the substitution of some other person here in my room. The delicacy of the House will not require me to enter minutely into the private causes which render this necessary. I trust they will be satisfied. I would not urge it again, were it not unavoidable.[50]