IN HIS 42nd year and prone to migraines that could last for two weeks or longer, Thomas Jefferson confided to a friend, Abigail Adams, that he did not expect to live beyond another 12 years. His fatalism owed something to the early death of his father, Peter, and an embedded awareness that human life was frequently a risky and provisional affair.
Jefferson confounded his own expectations. He lived to be 83, dying on 4 July 1826, exactly 50 years after playing a key part in drafting and signing the United States’ Declaration of Independence from Great Britain.
Between 11 and 28 June 1776, Jefferson — who had been born in the foothills of his beloved Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia — rented a room in Philadelphia and, armed only with a pen and a portable writing desk, wrote what a later historian described as “the most potent and consequential words in American history”.
He initiated a rebellion that would become a revolution with one elegant sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Eighty years later, Abraham Lincoln expressed his astonishment that, under the pressure for national independence, Jefferson had articulated a binding, universal truth, “revered by all . . . even though never perfectly attained . . . constantly spreading and deepening its influence”.
The declaration was only one of Jefferson’s achievements. In 1777, he drafted the hugely important Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which would guarantee the free exercise of religious opinions without interference on the part of Church or State. He served as President of the United States from 1801 to 1809 and, towards the end of his life, founded the University of Virginia, designing its curriculum and recruiting lecturers who would promulgate liberal values.
This endowment reflected his own passion for learning — the home he designed and built contained thousands of books — and his desire to foster an educated citizenry. Concerning his commitment to religious tolerance and, specifically, the motivations that ostensibly underpinned his Christian convictions, matters were more complex.
JEFFERSON’s great loves centred on literature, philosophy, and the beauty of the natural world. After his father’s death, he was taught by private tutors, including the Revd James Maury, an Anglican cleric of wide intellectual sympathies and with an excellent library. Maury encouraged his student to think historically about the human condition, and nurtured his fascination with the created order and what sustained it.
When Jefferson arrived at college at 17, each day would begin dutifully with prayers in the school chapel. Despite a library filled with theological tomes, his mind was soon elsewhere, influenced by teachers more interested in the texts of the Enlightenment than the tenets of Anglicanism.
Jefferson was persuaded by the intellectual luminaries of the former: in France, Nicolas de Condorcet; in Scotland, David Hume; in England, John Locke; and in Philadelphia, Thomas Paine, an influential free thinker from England who regarded Christian teaching as the bedfellow of superstition.
When, much later, Jefferson looked up from Monticello, his mountaintop home, the clouds, hail, sun, winds, and rain did not suggest to him the God of the Old or New Testaments. They simply evidenced Nature’s God at work, following Nature’s Law. At heart, Jefferson was a disciple of the Enlightenment and a deist, on one occasion advising his nephew to “fix Reason firmly in her seat”. Human dignity, constitutional law, and the liberty that would secure “an equal say at the table” for everyone called for the application of rationalism in preference to questionable Christian beliefs that hinged on revelation.
JEFFERSON’s defenestration of the modest faith that he held left him with the ethical teachings of Jesus for inspiration, but little else. Miracles and healings, the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the resurrection were all unnecessary and disposable. Such things, he believed, were the later accretions of dogma. Religion in its “benign” aspects could still serve a purpose, and he commended it to his compatriots, provided it was underpinned by the lamp of reason rather than ecclesial authority or tradition.
In important respects, Jefferson sought to practise the moral precepts that he had imbibed from his earliest tutors. He was a gentleman scholar, a “son of nature” (as he once accurately described himself), a humane philosopher, a champion of freedom, and a writer of genius.
At a personal level, he was capable of kindness, real affection, and friendship. Political opponents, however, fared badly and his attitude towards them could be vicious.
His longing for an inward peace was compromised by his restless ambition. Intimate liaisons behind closed doors did not end well, and his secretive nature sought to conceal them. Naïve in his belief in the Enlightenment’s promise of inexorable and unconstrained human progress, he also failed to learn from the practical wisdom of scripture in relation to the limits of human perfectibility which frequently blight the best intentions.
Jefferson’s laudable principles were damaged by his wilful blindness to the contradictions between his rhetoric of freedom and equality — his fervent wish to be seen and remembered as a compassionate friend of humanity — and the charge of hypocrisy and worse which in our own time has besmirched his reputation.
AT ONE level an influential advocate of democracy, who championed legislation to reform slavery and in some instances assisted individuals to pursue their freedom, Jefferson was also an aristocratic slaveholder who owned hundreds of human beings and beyond reasonable doubt had sex with a woman he had inherited as property. Critics argued that “he preached equality while holding down slaves” and denigrated them in his writings, in which he callously suggested that “their griefs are transient . . . their numberless afflictions less felt and sooner forgotten with them.”
Similarly, he professed an affection and respect for Native Americans and their cultures, attesting to the “Indian’s vivacity of mind . . . and strong and faithful friendships” that equalled the white man’s moral sensibilities. But like black slaves, he depersonalised them as “specimens observed in Nature”: a race apart and mentally inferior.
Such words, from a political visionary who placed equality at the heart of the Declaration and attested that anyone who enslaved Africans had stolen “their sacred rights to life and liberty”, understandably offend contemporary sensibilities. But, as noted earlier, President Lincoln was right — saying something and achieving it are two different matters. Great acts take time.
Jefferson was no political saint, but neither was he unreservedly a villain. He was a human being, and, despite the inherent flaws of its founder’s way of life, his famous declaration, with its summons to social justice and the collective good, has proved a beacon of hope to successive generations.
Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, writer, and theologian.