A River Fed By Many Streams

Thomas Jefferson was not a particularly modest man. Few great and world-changing public figures are. But in a famous letter of 1825 to Henry Lee, he insisted upon taking a modest approach to his role as the principal draftsman of the document that has come to characterize the heart and soul of the American Revolution: the Declaration of Independence. He could have claimed brilliant originality for himself. He could have complained, as he had on other occasions, about the fact that the drafting committee altered his brilliant original draft in ways of which he disapproved. But he chose not to do so in this instance. The passage in question deserves to be quoted at length, as the best account we have of his considered view of the matter:

…with respect to our rights and the acts of the British government contravening those rights, there was but one opinion on this side of the water. all American whigs thought alike on these subjects. when forced therefore to resort to arms for redress, an appeal to the tribunal of the world was deemed proper for our justification. this was the object of the Declaration of Independance. not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; [. . .] terms so plain and firm, as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independant stand we [. . .] compelled to take. neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the american mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. all it’s authority rests then on the harmonising sentiments of the day, whether expressed, in conversns in letters, printed essays or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney Etc. the historical documents which you mention as in your possession, ought all to be found, and I am persuaded you will find, to be corroborative of the facts and principles advanced in that Declaration. (my emphasis added)

There are various ways that we can construe Jefferson’s words here. Perhaps we might be tempted to regard them as the gauzy recollections of an elderly statesman, offered nearly a half-century after the events in question had occurred, reflecting on a distant revolutionary dawn when American unity was remembered as strong and growing. On the contrary, a fair reading of the letter as a whole bespeaks a sharp and precise mind, not a gauzy or dreamy one. But there is nothing in what he says that suggests the sources that influenced the composition of the Declaration were few in number and easily enumerated. Everything points the other way. Even John Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government has long been taken as a likely source for some of the most famous language in the Declaration’s preamble (although a strong case can also be made for the influence of George Mason’s Virginia Bill of Rights), is only mentioned in passing, as one of several influential but diverse writers, half of them ancient and half of them modern. Of equal weight too, in Jefferson’s estimation, were a multitude of various unspecified documents that, taken together, expressed the “harmonizing sentiments of the day.” In short, Jefferson’s account tells us something important about the diffuse and mingled elements coursing around and through the words of this great document. To understand the Declaration better and to understand the various sources of its strength and enduring appeal, we will benefit from a little disentangling.

First, we should recognize that Jefferson was very much a man of the Enlightenment, and the Declaration is in many ways a document of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis upon the natural rights of all human beings, and the consensual basis for a free and legitimate civil society, and in light of its service as an important inspiration to the French Revolution thirteen years later. However, it is not only an Enlightenment document. There were and are many pre-Enlightenment background assumptions that must be taken into account, both in reading it and in assessing how it was received and understood by Americans, if it is to be fully understood today. At the same time, it was also the case, as Jefferson says to Lee, that the Declaration was a document of its times, of its historical moment, serving as a kind of press release to the world, disclosing the “Facts” of creeping British tyranny that had been usurping the habits of self-rule that had formerly been the lifeblood of the colonists’ customary way of life. It should not be read only as an abstract statement of republican principles—although it is that—but also as an explanation of the revolutionary response by the American people to particular circumstances.

This apologia included a highly traditional element: the century and a half of self-government, which were in turn indebted to a long tradition of English legal and constitutional practices, dating back at least to Magna Carta. This element is what figures most prominently in the list of grievances that form the bulk of the Declaration, nearly all of which had to do with the deprivation of customary self-rule, and the violation of inherited rights due to colonists as Englishmen. Such appeals differ fundamentally from an appeal to unalienable natural rights, because these former rights are established by precedent, and claimed as an inheritance from forebears. They also are claimed as fundamental to the exercise of liberty. And so, we have the king accused of having “refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.” The Declaration also notes the weakening or dissolving representative bodies, inhibiting the exercise of judiciary powers, obstructing immigration, imposing unelected and unaccountable imperial officials, quartering standing armies and rendering troops unaccountable to law, and so on.

Behind such language is less a notion of abstract natural rights than one of specific inherited rights, grounded ultimately in an “ancient constitution”—traceable back through the legal thought of Coke and Fortescue to Magna Carta itself, and even further back to a shadowy “Anglo-Saxon constitution,” and forward through the political struggles of the 17th century, all the way to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which finally established the supremacy of Parliament over the monarchy. The distinction between the two understandings of rights is clearer in definition than in actual practice; Jefferson himself believed that the Anglo-Saxon constitution was the “rightful root” of the English constitution, even as he believed that Americans had enjoyed the unique advantage of being able to appeal to nature directly and find its instructions “engraved in our hearts.”

But the larger point here is that an idea of the ancient constitution, and of a historical and traditional transmission and elaboration of its liberties through many centuries of British history, forms a vivid and powerful reference point in the background of eighteenth-century Anglo-American thought. The legal scholar John Phillip Reid offers a telling illustration of this fact in an essay on the subject. In spring of 1779, as the Revolutionary War raged, a British general established an outpost in what is now Maine, attempting in that act to restore the jurisdiction of the Crown in a rebellious American area. He invited the support of those loyal citizens who “are well affected to his Majesty’s person, and [to] the ancient constitution under which they can alone expect relief from the distressed situation they are now in.” But later that same year, an American general intent upon destroying the British outpost fired back with this challenge: “I have thought proper to issue this Proclamation, hereby declaring that the allegiance due to the ancient constitution obliges [us] to resist to the last extremity the present system of tyranny in the British Government.” A rhetorical skirmish, yes, but also a highly illustrative one. Each side sought to claim tradition, and the ancient constitution, for its own cause.

Finally, we should stress the important influence of Biblical religion as a background element in American revolutionary sentiment. To be sure, Jefferson does not mention it in his letter to Lee, in keeping with his well-established reputation as a skeptic and critic of religious orthodoxy. But it is also the case that, when asked to submit a proposal for the design of the Great Seal of the United States, both Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin recommended a depiction of the Exodus, described as follows:

…Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharoah who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity.

Motto, Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God.

Nor was this offered as a form of pandering to the great unwashed; Jefferson liked the motto so much that he used it on his own personal seal. The story of the Exodus, one of the defining moments in the story of the Jewish people, and a crucial figuration for Christians of God’s promise of redemption and salvation, was to be incorporated into the American story, as the symbolic expression of America’s quest for liberty against the tyranny of monarchy. It would later serve as a leitmotif in the lyrics of many African-American slave songs, such as “Go Down, Moses,” expressing a yearning for liberation from their bondage.

But the influence of religion on the revolutionary cause went much, much deeper than the ideas of elite leaders such as Jefferson and Franklin. Indeed, it is only recently that historians have begun to appreciate the breadth and depth of the religious sentiments of the time, and how they affected popular politics—and many still deny it. As Barry Alan Shain argued in The Myth of American Individualism, eighteenth-century British North American religious life was dominated by reformed Protestant religious beliefs expressed vividly in Revolutionary-era sermons, public documents, newspaper editorials, and political pamphlets. In such communities, a robust conception of original sin and a commitment to communitarian values helped to undergird a suspicious view of concentrated power, driving opposition to imperial intrusions into American life, particularly when coming from a mother country whose culture was seen as arrogant and corrupt, making it fodder for countless sermons. Alan Heimert argued that powerful evangelistic sermons were a major contributor not only to the rising sense of American national self-consciousness, but especially to the rising revolutionary sentiment of the 1770s, when it is estimated that as many as 80 percent of political pamphlets were reprinted sermons. Clearly the connection between religious duties and political activity was strong.

John Adams was no stranger to questions of political theory. But he understood this rising popular undercurrent of disaffection as a far more potent cause of the Revolution. As he wrote in his own retrospective view, offered to influential editor Hezekiah Niles in 1818:

The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People. A Change in their Religious Sentiments of their Duties and Obligations. While the King, and all in Authority under him, were believed to govern, in Justice and Mercy according to the Laws and Constitutions derived to them from the God of Nature, and transmitted to them by their Ancestors— they thought themselves bound to pray for the King and Queen and all the Royal Family, and all the Authority under them, as Ministers ordained of God for their good. But when they Saw those Powers renouncing all the Principles of Authority, and bent up on the destruction of all the Securities of their Lives, Liberties and Properties, they thought it their Duty to pray for the Continental Congress and all the thirteen State Congresses, &c.

The Declaration, then, needs to be understood as a great river of oratory that is fed by various streams, a document that held together a variety of perspectives by the forcefulness and skill of its rhetoric, and by the demands of the moment in which it appeared. Its enduring appeal, as it approaches its 250th anniversary, is nothing short of remarkable. A lingering question, though, one that the coming years will have to answer, is whether the elements that have increasingly faded into its background, namely its reliance on traditional and religious factors, including a belief in the authority of nature, that have previously place a limit upon the reach of its sprawling abstractions, will need to be restored in a culture that is rapidly losing touch with them.

The Declaration should not be read only, or even primarily, as a freestanding document. It needs the nourishing soil of those concrete, limiting factors drawn from its history if it is to retain its potency. The language of the Declaration is ultimately incompatible with a world in which those sprawling abstractions are given unlimited sway, unmoored to anything other than the promptings of the individual will, cut loose from any conception of a natural order to things, or from obligations to the past, including the inherited presuppositions and duties that had formerly given concrete definition to the Declaration’s grand assertions. To appreciate rightly the Declaration’s grandeur, we must recover those things as well.

But by the same token, we need to recover the passionate immediacy of the document, which Jefferson’s words to Lee can help us do. This was not a seminar paper. This was a work of political rhetoric, composed at a time of immense urgency, and addressing itself to fires of controversy, drawing upon the multiple streams of thought and sentiment that made up the American mind. Jefferson set out to draft a message that could command the full range of ideas and sentiments that were extant in a revolutionary America. But it did so in a way that fortified the patriot cause, in such a way that even wealthy and well-placed men found themselves willing to pledge their “lives, fortunes, and sacred Honor” to the cause of liberty. If Jefferson was right about the “course of Human events,” the opportunity to do this may yet come around again.