Thomas Jefferson, the Apostle of Americanism

by Gilbert Chinard

With this curious incident, Jefferson ends his account of the French Revolution. During the year, he had complained on several occasions that his French friends seemed unable to realize the importance of insisting on trial by jury in criminal cases. He finally persuaded one of the "abbés" to study the question thoroughly and on that occasion indicated exactly how he stood in matters of government. All told, his views had not changed much, and at that time he would not have accepted without reservations and qualifications the famous principle of "government by the people." There was still in his mind, if not in all his formulas, a tacit admission that all the people could not unreservedly participate in all branches of government. Nothing could be clearer than the distinctions he established and nothing could be less demagogical.

"We think, in America, that it is necessary to introduce the people into every department of government, as far as they are capable of exercising it; and that this is the only way to insure a long-continued and honest administration of its power." Then he proceeded to define, point by point, the extent to which the people could safely be allowed to participate in the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of the government.

1. They are not qualified to exercise themselves the executive department, but they are qualified to name the person who shall exercise it. With us, therefore, they choose this officer every four years. 2. They are not qualified to legislate. With us therefore, they only choose the legislators. 3. They are not qualified to judge questions of law, but they are very capable of judging questions of fact. In the form of juries, therefore, they determine all matters of fact, leaving to the permanent judges to decide the law resulting from those facts.[229]

Thus spoke the champion of democracy at the beginning of the French Revolution, after spending five years in Paris and supposedly permeating his mind with the wild theories of the French philosophers. And what he said of the people on this occasion did not apply to the French people alone, for he made it clear that it was the political theory applied "in America." It was essentially the theory of government by experts which he already had in mind when he proposed the reorganization of the College of William and Mary. In 1778, as well as in 1789, Jefferson did not hesitate to proclaim that if the source of all power was in the people, the people could not exercise their power in all circumstances, that they had to delegate their authority to men really qualified, retaining only the right to select them. This may not be the common acceptation of the term "Jeffersonian democracy", but I have a strong suspicion that on the whole Jefferson never changed much in this respect. He certainly never stood for mob rule, nor for direct government by the masses, and he knew too much about the delicate and complicated wheels of government to believe that the running of such a tremendous machine could be intrusted to untrained hands.

As for the French, he trusted them even less, and never believed, as long as he remained in France, that they were prepared for self-government. He refused to consider that a real revolution had started before his eyes or was even in sight. "Upon the whole," he wrote to Madison shortly before his departure from Paris, "I do not see yet probable that any actual commotion will take place; and if it does take place, I have strong confidence that the patriotic party will hold together, and their party in the nation be what I have ascribed it." Up to the last moment he held the belief that the king, "the substantial people of the whole country, the army, and the influential part of the clergy, formed a firm phalanx which must prevail."[230] The analysis of the situation sent to Jay just as he was about to leave Paris does not indicate even the possibility of establishing a republic, since the only parties he distinguished were:

... the aristocrats, comprehending the higher members of the clergy, military, nobility, and the parliaments of the whole kingdom; the moderate royalists who wish for a constitution nearly similar to that of England; the republicans who are willing to let their first magistracy be hereditary, but to make it very subordinate to the legislature, and to have that legislature consist of a single chamber.[231]

Jefferson was not the man to indulge in effusions even when he was deeply moved and throughout his mission in France he deliberately refrained from any expression of personal feelings. But the love and friendship of the French for the United States was so general and so genuine, it formed such a contrast with the cold and tenacious enmity of Great Britain, that the American minister was won and conquered by it and had to come to the conclusion that "nothing should be spared to attach this country to us. It is the only one on which we can rely for support, under every event. Its inhabitants love us more, I think, than they do any other nation on earth. This is very much the effect of the good dispositions with which the French officers returned."[232] Everybody is familiar with the closing lines of Jefferson's account of his mission to France: "So, ask the traveller inhabitant of any nation, in what country would you rather live?—Certainly, in my own, where are all my friends, my relations, and the earliest and sweetest affections and recollections of my life. Which would be your second choice? France."

These lines were written at the twilight of his life, when his memory took him back to the wonderful days he had lived in Paris, while the old régime was shedding the last rays of its evanescent glory. Less known, but far more revealing of his true feelings at the time, is a passage in one of his letters to James Madison. It is one of the very few times, and as a matter of fact, the first time when he declared that the nations of the world had to abandon their old code of selfishness and that a new principle of international life had to be recognized. For there is only one standard of morality, one code of conduct between nations as between individuals.

It is impossible—he wrote—to desire better dispositions towards us than prevail in this Assembly. Our proceedings have been viewed as a model for them on every occasion; and though in the heat of debate, men are generally disposed to contradict every authority urged by their opponents, ours has been treated like that of the Bible, open to explanation, but not to question. I am sorry that in the moment of such a disposition, anything should come from us to check it. The placing them on a mere footing with the English, will have this effect. When of two nations, the one has engaged herself in a ruinous war for us, has spent her blood and money to save us, has opened her bosom to us in peace, and received us almost on the footing of her own citizens, while the other has moved heaven, earth, and hell to exterminate us in war, has insulted us in all her councils in peace, shut her doors to us in every part where her interests would admit it, libelled us in foreign nations, endeavoured to poison them against the reception of our most precious commodities; to place these two nations on a footing, is to give a great deal more to one than to the other, if the maxim be true, that to make unequal quantities equal, you must add more to one than the other. To say, in excuse, that gratitude is never to enter into the motives of national conduct, is to revive a principle which has been buried for centuries with its kindred principles of the lawfulness of assassination, poison, perjury, etc. All of these were legitimate principles in the dark ages which intervened between ancient and modern civilization, but exploded and held in just horror in the eighteenth century. I know but one code of morality for men, whether acting singly or collectively.... Let us hope that our government will take some other occasions to show, that they proscribe no virtue from the canons of their conduct with other nations.[233]