SOURCE: “The Language of Improvement and the Practices of Power,” in The Unfinished Revolution: Education and Politics in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson, University of Delaware Press, 1990, pp. 119-40.

[In the following essay, Hellenbrand explores the way Jefferson's thoughts on education informed his political and social philosophies.]

INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICS OF IMPROVEMENT

Between the publication of Notes on the State of Virginia and the end of his presidency, Jefferson devoted little time to philosophizing about education and planning free schools. In Virginia he reached an impasse. His legal project to reconceive patrimonial society in the image of benevolent paternalism did not pass the legislature intact. Its foundation, Bill 79, was not accepted until 1796 when the legislature empowered the country courts to decide on levying taxes for ward schools. (And these courts were reluctant to initiate such a tax.) Although Bill 80 failed too, Jefferson accomplished an end run around the legislature as a Visitor of William and Mary in 1779. He and the college's president eliminated the two professorships in scripture and theology, did away with the Brafferton, and transformed the chair in classics into the equivalent of a grammar institute. Still no bill passed that guaranteed Virginia Jefferson's longed-for natural aristocracy. The revisions of the slave code, the accompanying amendment for manumission, and the reforms in the criminal code failed, too. However, the Bill for Religious Freedom eventually passed the legislature.¹

Some pillars of Jefferson's temple of republican independence thus rose in Virginia: a law of partible descents, a law for religious freedom, and a weak provision for elementary education. But the edifice was far from complete. Indeed, the episodic and partial passage of these bills suggests that few legislators shared Jefferson's Montesquieuian sense that all the laws should share a spirit; and that in a republic, in Virginia particularly, the spirit should be that of an enlightened mentor writ large with faith in human educability tempered by an awareness of the limits of mind and species.

Undaunted by these defeats, Jefferson crusaded occasionally for the importation of foreign scholars and schools, and even for a national school system. He was attracted to Chevalier Quesnay de Beaurepaire's plan for an academy in Richmond. It projected a system of scientific societies throughout America that would rival Europe's. But he concluded that this plan was much too complex and expensive for a young agrarian republic. Then Jefferson heard that the republican faculty of the University of Geneva needed a new home. Could it not be transplanted to Virginia? Since President Washington wished to endow a college, perhaps he could be persuaded to back the scheme. In the late 1790s, Jefferson presided over the American Philosophical Society when it sponsored a competition for the best system of national education. Samuel Knox, who knew Jefferson, shared the prize. Knox's ideas, like several other proposals, recalled the pyramidical arrangement of Bills 79 and 80. In the early 1800s, Jefferson as president asked Joel Barlow and Samuel Pierre Du Pont de Nemours to conceive plans for a national university. (George Washington had displayed a similar aspiration.) In 1806, he asked Congress to reserve part of the budget for this purpose. Here though, Jefferson's own republicanism contributed to the frustration of republican education. Like others in Congress, he believed that national support for schools required a constitutional amendment to extend the powers of government in this one specific area.²

These forays into educational policy were intermittent, and they accomplished little. During these years, Jefferson merely tinkered with his educational idea, moving from local to national systems, considering native and foreign instructors, collecting course proposals from correspondents like Adams, Pictet, and Barlow. But he did not refine the central scheme of mentor and affectionate tutee. He did not reconceive the tripartite system that he believed best embraced it.

Not instructional policy but political philosophy benefited from his educational thought during these years. In late 1789, Jefferson worked out his principle of “the sovereignty of the living generation” in response to the indebtedness that helped to plunge France into revolution. He would weave this principle into the fabric of his republicanism over the next several decades. Also as early as Notes on the State of Virginia, but more thoroughly as president, he developed an Indian policy in which he played benevolent white father to the native Americans' supposed childhood. Conceiving of society as a sequence of generations each with limited authority for a limited period of time, conceiving of races in generational terms too, Jefferson recycled the relationship of mentor and affectionate friend that grounded his pedagogy. Politics, economics, and racial as well as generational relations were all explicable in the meliorist morphology of Lockean psychology and pedagogy.

After Jefferson retired from the presidency, he also responded in generational terms to the two gravest threats to his region, external manufacture and internal slavery. He wished to set up institutions that would instruct these evils away, cure them cognitively in subsequent generations. Indebtedness, Indians, manufacture and slavery: each of these problems enticed Jefferson to seek solutions in his pedagogical ideals. This chapter focuses on these subjects.

While chapter 4 considered the influence of Jefferson's educational ideas on his social reforms for Virginia in 1778 and 1779, this chapter proposes that these ideas also contributed to his social policy and even his self-proclaimed role as president. In The Political Culture of the American Whigs, Daniel Walker Howe has demonstrated the dedication to economic and moral improvement as well as the didactic tone and paternal stewardship of society that characterized Whig culture from the 1820s to the Civil War.³ This chapter argues similarly that, despite his suspicion of the patriarchal analogy of family with state, Jefferson also conceived of the republic in familial terms (“We have called by different names brethren of the same principle”); and he thought of his policies as instruments of moral improvement that were understandable as such by reason. He functioned as the father/teacher in the republic; in his rhetoric, he played the role of the nation's mentor.

“THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE LIVING GENERATION”

While Jefferson often interpreted the American Revolution as a struggle between mother country and colonial offspring, he also understood the French Revolution in generational terms. In the late eighties and early nineties, he wrote, the “young and middle-aged” squared off against the “old”—and specifically against the irresponsible finances of the entrenched ministry and the decadent habits of the queen. Thomas Paine went so far as to analogize the effect of revolution on the young with formal education. He contended that the American Revolution had been the “school” for young French republicans. His friend and correspondent Jefferson thought similarly: “The [French] officers … who had been to America, were mostly young men, less shackled by habit and prejudice, and more ready to assent to the suggestions of common sense, and feeling of common rights, than others. They came back with new ideas and impressions.” Educated by American experience—“ideas and impressions”—away from their parent stock in France, they discovered “common sense” and nurtured moral “feeling.” They indeed were schooled in the New World. Back in France, Jefferson continued, they joined with the “young nobility” who had reached the same antimonarchal conclusions through “reflection.” According to Jefferson's terms, the party of “ideas and impressions”—the soldiers who fought in the colonies—and the party of “reflection”—the noble elite who sympathized with the American cause—fused into an independent mind that naturally opposed prescriptive and usurpatory authority.⁴ France's young had come of one mind and of one age. They had coalesced into a Lockean persona since their own impressions and reflections constituted their authority.

Because Jefferson projected such a mental and generational morphology onto political events, it is not surprising that he sought a solution to entailed indebtedness in generational terms, too. In the late 1780s, he was swept up by Richard Gem's proposal that “it may be expedient to declare by a law, that after a certain term of years the payment of a loan may be void.” First Jefferson posited the “self-evident right” that “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” Then to ensure that civil government fulfilled this end, he recurred to Buffon's tables of mortality and hypothesized that if a generation was considered “to be born on the same day” and a “succeeding generation” to achieve “ripe age” on another same day, the sovereignty of the former would endure thirty-four years, the average number of years left to a person after the age of twenty-one. Later, Jefferson refined this scheme to account for the fact that each generation was in a “constant course of renewal and decay.” He suggested nineteen years as the proper term of sovereignty; for if one assumed again a fixed day for a generation's assumption of sovereignty, then a majority of them would be dead after nineteen years.⁵

Nineteen years would be the proper term for a generation's payment of debts and for the duration of its constitutions and laws. After two years of sovereignty, the term would reduce to seventeen years, and so on. Such a scheme, Jefferson believed, would enable a people to break grants in perpetuity “to the church, to hospitals, colleges, orders of chivalry.” Jefferson conceived this proposal with France in mind, but clearly he saw his new natural law as a sanction against patrimonial and patriarchal practices wherever they might be.⁶

In 1789, Jefferson aimed to halt the accumulation of massive debts by the royal government. Later in life, when he was removed from the exigency of France, he made clear the familial model of guardian and ward that shaped his generational vision of economic policy. “There have existed nations,” he said, “… who have thought that a father had a right to sell his child as a slave, in perpetuity. … A nation asserting this fratricide right might well suppose they could burthen with public as well as private debt the nati natorum, et qui nascentur at illis.” However, he countered:

We, this age, and in this country especially are advanced beyond those notions of natural law. We acknowledge that our children are born free; that that freedom is the gift of nature, and not of him who begot them; that though under our care during infancy, & therefore of necessity under a duly tempered authority, that care is confided to us to be exercised for the preservation and the good of the child only.

Jefferson concluded, “As he was never the property of his father, so when adult, he is sui generis.” Then he analogized, “We shall consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, & morally bound to pay them ourselves; & consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.”⁷

As early as the 1790s, this generational analogy also affected Jefferson's opposition to money policies in America that capitalized loan banks and that promoted the circulation of papers of debt to provide funds for the expansion of commerce and manufacture. Borrowing on a long-term schedule went against nature's law of generational sovereignty. Joined by Madison and others of this classically “country” frame of thinking, Jefferson was hardly alone in his opposition to speculative interests and Hamiltonian policy as the nineties wore on. But his constant recurrence to this familial or, more precisely, generational analogy was peculiar; it was a more stringent version of the commonly expressed desire to keep America young and virtuous—that is, untainted by commercial speculation and industrial concentration.⁸

Jefferson did not convince Madison of the wisdom of adhering to the natural law of the sovereignty of the living generation. In Numbers 49 and 50 of The Federalist Papers, Madison had objected to Jefferson's proposal in Notes on the State of Virginia, that the concurrence of two branches of government sufficed to call for a constitutional convention. Madison believed as early as 1787 that frequent conventions or even conventions at distant but “fixed periods” would destroy the “public tranquility.” Although he responded graciously to Jefferson's enlightened intentions in 1789 and 1790, he rejected his fellow Virginian's proposals. Not only did Madison suggest that the periodic dissolution of government might open the gates to factions, but also he reminded Jefferson that constricting the expenses of the living too severely would prevent them from making improvements to benefit the unborn. Defensive wars, even schools, might be severely restricted. In fact, years later Jefferson was forced to stretch his own principles and rhetoric in the Louisiana Purchase. He rationalized that act as the deed of a “guardian” who invested wisely but speculatively “the money of his ward.” Like Paine, who agreed with the rhetoric of Jefferson's formulation of generational sovereignty, Madison believed that “laws should continue to derive their force from the consent of the living.” But for Madison this consent was delivered best tacitly, by the decision not to repeal, not to amend.⁹

Despite such serious criticism, Jefferson moved his principle of generational sovereignty into the heart of his philosophy and rhetoric, even if he did not try to compel others to make it republican practice. He viewed his election as president as a triumph for the party of improvement over the factions who were committed to “the education of our ancestors.” During these same years, Edmund Burke invoked “philosophic analogy” to support his claims that a constitution should be regarded as an “entailed inheritance” from one generation to the next and the state as a patriarchal “image of relation in blood” with kingship passed on from eldest son to eldest son. Jefferson, however, extolled “the progress of the human mind.” Consequently he chided the “sanctimonious reverence” for the constitution of “the men of the preceding age.” Partible inheritance, not entail, characterized his analogy of family members with state.¹⁰

“Where then is our republicanism to be found?” Jefferson asked in 1816. “Not in our constitution certainly, but merely in the spirit of our people.” Here was Jefferson's confidence in the sovereignty of the living people taken to an extreme. This relegation of constitutionalism—of the inheritance of a fixed document—in favor of generational sovereignty was grounded firmly in the Montesquieuian concept of spirit. Republican institutions, laws, and nature would mold the young in the image of morality; and self-control would instruct their spirit. It was no worry then to allow generations to act independently when they came of age collectively. In fact, Jefferson argued that fixed opportunities to reconsider founding documents actually would ensure that the original public constitution would be “handed on, with periodical repairs, from generation to generation, to the end of time, if anything human can so long endure.”¹¹

WHITE FATHER AND BRETHREN

Jefferson believed that the “spirit of the people” in America—or more precisely, the spirit of the white yeomen—was particularly receptive to “the progress of the human mind” and “advances in science.” State paternalism, when guided by the principle of generational sovereignty, would ensure that the people possessed the skills and finances to sustain themselves and to educate their children. Clearly though, Jefferson had resisted the abuses of central government in 1798 and 1799. And in his First Inaugural, he championed “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.”¹² Were these the actions and words of a meddling executive?

Still since the late 1770s in Virginia, Jefferson supported energetic legislation and executive action on behalf of the pursuit of happiness. He favored educational institutions and broad legal reforms to diffuse republican enlightenment. These instruments envisioned equity and unity—and enforced the legitimacy of centrally sponsored local institutions—without the executive's use of police force and unilateral command, and thus without damage to the people's perception of independence. In his Second Inaugural Jefferson revealed just how central government could reshape the character of the nation. After the appropriate amendment of the Constitution, the federal government should direct the surplus in the budget to the states so that they could improve “rivers, canals, roads, arts, manufactures, education, and other great objects.” War, which inevitably siphoned these surplus funds, was “but a suspension of useful works, and a return to peace, a return to the progress of improvement.” Central government would establish the agenda of improvement that the states then would enact.¹³

Jefferson valued his presidential role of identifying moral and economic improvement for the nation. As Robert M. Johnstone has argued, he tried to gain his ends by “methods of persuasion rather than by force of command,” although both the embargo and his Indian policy showed him violating his own principle of directed harmony.¹⁴ The next sections of this chapter examine the policy of improvement—of collective education—that characterized Jefferson's Indian policy. For Jefferson, education was not just an instrument of social policy but also an ideology that helped him to define a suitable executive image and to rationalize and make consistent the less palatable and more haphazard actions of his administration and subalterns.

Forrest McDonald has suggested that Jefferson derived his executive role, of which his engagement in Indian policy is an exemplary subset, from Lord Bolingbroke's model of the “patriot king.” The father of the realm was to limit his own public action to balancing competitive interests. While this model possibly explains Washington's practice and Adams's theory, it does not capture Jefferson's peculiar crafting of an executive image as an approachable and energetic leader. He eschewed fancy dress and diplomatic formality. In his rhetoric, he characterized himself implicitly not as a condescending leader but as an instructor of all the people's reason and an executive who based policy not on fiat but on common sense. He wished to see, for instance, the dissemination to the Indians of “a knowledge of agriculture and some of the mechanical arts” so that they might become “useful members of the American family” over which he presided. After explaining that French and British depredations on the high seas violated “the common birthright of mankind,” he declared that the embargo must strike “a mind truly American” as indisputably correct. For common sense acknowledged this common birthright. In fact, he described the embargo as “a last appeal to the reason and reputation of nations” before the commencement of war, which would suspend the course of improvement. However, his actual policy was not always as forthright as his language. In the case of the embargo, he actually withheld the principal facts that were to inspire his decision since he feared starting up economic speculation and encountering early opposition in Congress.¹⁵ General appeals to reason masked a secretive and manipulative maneuver.

Persuasive appeals to reason, unassisted by compulsion and emblems of deference, were the means to consolidate authority and effect policy; so Jefferson reasoned in public. Even when he reluctantly admitted in 1808 that the means of enforcing the embargo devastated business and commerce more thoroughly than maritime depredations had, Jefferson characterized his policy as a “fair experiment” that was a creature of the will and reason of Congress. As if to dramatize how completely his own authority and policies depended on trust that others gave voluntarily, Jefferson remarked in public letters in 1808 that he would resign after two terms. Otherwise the office of chief magistrate might become tenure for life and then degenerate into “an inheritance” with all the military and regal powers of patriarchal kingship. Jefferson's persona of rational instruction and persuasion masked, sometimes from his own eyes too, the extent to which his combined authority—as president, party leader, and founding father—exacted compliance from many in Congress and consequently imposed unpopular policy like the embargo on the people whom theoretically he considered as the fount of his power and the source of common sense.¹⁶

RED CHILDREN: THE THEORY OF PROTO-REPUBLICANISM

When Jefferson explained his policies to whites, he assumed an audience of peers in need of direction but already in possession of developed reason as well as moral sense. Advances in science and politics from one generation to the next confirmed this belief. He articulated the “sovereignty of the living generation” mainly to ensure that government did not become a dead weight holding back the progressive spirit of society.

When Jefferson turned his philosophic eye on the Indians, he saw no such improvement from generation to generation. Their leaders, his language implied, uniformly recalled the most retrograde thinkers among the whites. Consequently, Indian society was backward and immature. Their leaders “inculcate[d] a sanctimonious reverence for the customs of their ancestors.” They taught, in other words, a Burkean philosophy, believing that “reason is a false guide, and to advance under its counsel … [a] perilous innovation.”¹⁷

Such views, minus the insinuated comparison of Indians with Tories and Federalists, reflected current thinking. According to Adam Ferguson, Indians were saddled with leaders who did not understand the sovereignty of the living generation and who did not see the virtue of progress and science. Thus the Indians remained in the “nursery” and “cradle” of civilization. Emmerich de Vattel concluded that Indians lived largely hand-to-mouth off the bounty of nature while still in the “first age” of civilization. Continuing this line of thought, Jefferson argued that Indians, content to skim the bounty of nature, did little to increase their numbers, which—once augmented—would beget emulation and improvements. They produced no arts, no letters, no monuments, Jefferson argued.¹⁸ Whites, he believed, had a moral duty to lead Indians out of the cultural infancy of savage hunting and barbaric grazing and into the mature estate of yeomanry, much as parents had a duty to educate and civilize their young.

Here again were pedagogy and individual morphology writ large. American yeomen and Indians displayed two stages in the life cycle of culture. While educating and improving their own young, whites also should educate and improve Indian society as a whole. Just as white adults learned about human impressionability when instructing children correctly, they would increase their own stock of knowledge in educating Indians. They would rediscover the primal character of man beneath the veneer of artificial needs that civilization imposed. This important disclosure would enable whites to suit their own culture and education more precisely to the essential nature of man, especially in America, stripping away luxuries and statutory encumbrances.

To understand completely Jefferson's policy toward Indians during his presidency, it is necessary now to step back and examine the origins and evolution of his ideas. Before white expansion and the Louisiana Purchase inspired his proposal to instruct the Indians in yeoman ways to free more land for settlement, he had interpreted Indian society in a way that was conducive to such transformation. Noble but savage too, Indians were proto-republicans. Their social order proved the natural basis of white republicanism and implicitly the speed with which they could be republicanized thoroughly. And their crude stock of political and scientific knowledge stood in need of melioration.

During the American Revolution, Jefferson was of two minds about Indians. On the one hand, he vilified them as “wretches” and “merciless … savages whose rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” On the other hand, he thought that their political and familial “manners” enacted the “moral sense of right and wrong” so impeccably that their small societies thrived without any “coercive power,” without “any shadow of a government.” Jefferson's contradiction was not peculiar. It was shared by his culture. The Indian was both noble and savage.¹⁹ Similarly, republican man often was both civilized and corrupt. In both cases, education could reform the capacity for destruction and nurture the inclination for beneficence.

In The History of the American Indians, which Jefferson knew, James Adair remarked that the Indians were “revengeful of blood.” But he also maintained that they were “governed by the plain and honest law of nature” since all their adult men were equal. Their councils followed the “plain law of nature” too, since they were presided over by elders. In Essay on the History of Civil Society, Adam Ferguson argued that “suggestions of nature” impelled the Indians to organize themselves in democratic-republican ways. Families within tribes formed “parts of a canton.” “Many such cantons assemble to constitute a national council.” Not only did these aborigines “appear to understand the objects of … confederacy,” but “without any settled form of government … but what resembled more the suggestion of instinct, than the invention of reason, they conducted themselves with the concert, and force, of nations.” Ferguson concluded that “mankind, in their simplest state” often seem on “the eve of erecting republics.”²⁰

For Ferguson and Adair, Indians were proto-republicans who relied on oratory and councils to run their affairs. Jefferson agreed. He claimed that “the circumstances of their situation” made “eloquence in council, bravery and address in war … the foundations of all consequence among them.” “The principles of their society forbidding all compulsion,” he observed, inspired them to live in communities small enough to survive with “no law.” Instead, manners ruled. Jefferson interpreted this mode of government as a significant anticipation of the manner in which republicanism relied on the people to rule themselves. He detected in the Indians' “state of nature” an indisputable “resistance to patriarchal or monarchical form[s]” of rule. As a natural society, Indians suggested that republicanism really did fulfill natural law. After all, white Americans rebelled against patriarchal kingship and attempted to reform its concomitant patrimonial institutions.²¹ Indians were the types, the forerunners, of white yeomen republicans.

To purge these red proto-republicans of savagery, to enable them to construct “great societies,” whites had to encourage Indians to attain “positive law” and “written constitutions,” Jefferson thought. Only then could Indians move from oral to written expression culturally and from haphazard gathering to agricultural industry economically. As a culture, they would mature, recording and exploring their habitat while diversifying their transactions and communications among themselves and with others. In 1816, Jefferson admired the Cherokees for codifying laws that recognized private rights in property and that thus encouraged the improvement of estates and facilitated complex exchange. Such development implied that these Indians had achieved the level of the whites' ancestors, the Saxons. This equivalence was to be expected since the Saxons, according to Tacitus, also were warriors and corn-planters and, according to Jefferson, also possessed a “constitution … in a written formula.” Ferguson believed that in “the present condition [of the Indians] … we are to behold, as in a mirror, the features of our own progenitors … our fathers.” And Jefferson contended that beyond the western frontier, Indians still lived in the “infancy of creation.”²² Instructing Indians, white republicans symbolically were nurturing those ancestors who, some centuries before, contributed to their own growth. They were fathering their ancient fathers and establishing the authority of their otherwise derivative sonship.

Jefferson did not view Indian civilization as a consciously planned artifact and ecology. He believed that the Indians' imputed habit of living “principally on the spontaneous productions of nature” condemned them to low numbers and infantilized their entire culture. They displayed only those “particular talents” that their natural environment called forth. In Ferguson's words, Indians “study no science, and go in pursuit of no general principles.” Whites, however, did not rely on the talents that mere circumstance encouraged. They educated themselves and constantly expanded the base of scientific knowledge. Jefferson reported that by the 1780s, white Americans had already produced Franklin who was unrivaled in “ingenious solutions to the phaenomena of nature.” And they claimed James Rittenhouse who, through his orrery, a mechanized planetarium that reproduced the elliptical orbits and inclinations of the planets, “approached nearer … [the] Maker than any man who has lived from creation to this day.” Also, Virginia contemplated a school system that “sought for and cultivated” those “talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich.”²³ Indians, though, only gathered what nature planted. Whites, on the other hand, tended and improved nature's stock before harvesting it both agriculturally and culturally. Improvement required, first of all, a rationalized approach to improvement. Complacency bred stasis and cultural infantilism.

RED CHILDREN: JEFFERSON'S RHETORIC AND PRACTICE AS PRESIDENT

Natural democrats and civil republicans, gatherer-hunters and barterer farmers: Indians and yeomen embodied the noble eras of human history. Convinced of the validity of this morphological view of cultural difference, President Jefferson adopted the supposedly peaceful policy of converting Indians to yeoman agriculture. He intended to inculcate the value of private property and the rudiments of the Western culture in which it was enmeshed. Of course, this process of instruction and conversion would free more Indian lands for white purchase or appropriation, as the tribes learned to intensify their means of production and economize their use of land. Jefferson did not originate this approach, though. European savants deduced it from biblical injunctions to “be fruitful and multiply” and to “till [Eden] … and keep it,” while Grotius, Vattel, and other writers on the laws of nature and nations sanctioned the practices of converting commons into private holdings and apprenticing the disappropriated savages to a higher civilization.²⁴

President Washington had wanted “an eligible plan … for promoting civilization among the friendly tribes, and for carrying on trade with them, upon a scale equal to their wants.” Secretary of War Knox proposed that the government induce in the tribes “a love for exclusive property” by presenting various chiefs with “sheep and domestic animals” and by giving the tribes the “instruments of husbandry.” “Exclusive property” had to be the first article of cultural instruction, for it helped to teach invidious distinction. As a sensed object and a dominant impression, private property preceded writing, bookkeeping, and even religion in the order of cultural instruction. In time, this “wise system” would win Indians away from the British and the French; and it also would eradicate tribal ownership of extensive hunting grounds by inculcating the habits of pasturage and private property. All this could be accomplished without either the expense of troops or the stain of extermination. The Indians, furthermore, had no choice but to yield their ways. After all, white numbers were propelled by the belief in freeholdery and an insatiable appetite for the speculative and agricultural exploitation of land. Whites' relentlessness, as Knox conceded, backed up the practical pedagogy of private property.²⁵

Consequently, the Washington and Adams administrations supported the early Trade and Intercourse Acts to federalize commerce and land purchases with the Indians and to encourage them to divide up tribal domains. Once Jefferson was elected president, Westerners like William Henry Harrison and William C. C. Clairborne advised that the present policy be pursued even more vigorously. Jefferson agreed, since it seemed a peaceful and cheap means of converting Indian dispensation into white possession. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins reported that the tribes south of the Ohio already were substantial agriculturists. He saw this fact, however, as a sign of their adjustment to white values, not as evidence of their own cultural proclivities to distinguish meum from teum and to farm the land. In fact, the Creeks had gone the next step. They elected a national council which, Hawkins added shrewdly to Jefferson, “in a few years … will be a useful instrument to approximate them to a more civilized state, and give the United States a more commanding influence over them.”²⁶

Almost immediately, President Jefferson adopted the custom of familial rhetoric when he addressed the Indians on the wisdom of getting behind the plough. Whites and reds were “born in the same land.” They were “brothers,” even “one family.” By 1803, after the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the republic, Jefferson's typical salutation changed from “Friends and brethren” to the paternalistic “My children.” But the fundamental message remained the same. Whites, he said, intended to help Indians to “learn the culture of the earth” so that they might participate in the new dispensation over nature. Meanwhile Indians “should live in peace and friendship” with one another as “family” despite the intertribal friction (that constant white encroachment caused). Lest Indians consider resisting the “natural progress” of enclosure and civilization, Jefferson reminded them that “we [whites] are numerous as the Stars in the Heavens, and we are all gun-men.”²⁷

The public language of paternalism—with its cultural condescension, urge to improve, and understated threats—came to Jefferson easily. For several decades, he had been encouraging his daughters, nephews, nieces, and grandchildren in the virtue of industry and the absolute necessity of early education for a successful life (see chapter 2). Obviously, he did not threaten these youngsters with guns. Often enough though, he compelled them emotionally. He warned them that his love depended on their progress and told them that to delay a day in profligancy or laziness was to squander time and money itself. Also many other young men flocked to him for preprofessional advice in law, architecture, natural philosophy, and economics. These youths were scions of the gentry. They were to be prepared for specialized careers, not for labor in the fields. But Jefferson considered hunter-Indians no less his children than his youthful white charges. He expected Indian society to relinquish its culture as quickly as Peter Carr and daughter Martha grew from infancy to reason, from the state of nature to civilization. And so, when Indian tribes appeared to drag their feet in the march toward civilization, Jefferson bemoaned their sanctimonious attachment to the past, much as he admonished Peter Carr for laziness and stubborness when he entered William and Mary behind in his studies.²⁸

Preaching a crusade for the yeoman education of the Indian was but one project of Jefferson's pedagogical persona in the 1790s and early 1800s. As president of the American Philosophical Society, he sponsored a competition for the best system of national education in the late nineties. As president of the United States, he encouraged several friends to plan a national university. And in 1804, he himself drafted plans for a new university in Virginia, an “academical village” in which, as he said, students and teachers were to live under “the affectionate deportment” of “father and son.”²⁹ All this was anticipated by his educational Bills 79 and 80 two decades earlier. Philosophically, these crusades acted on his belief that an impulse to improve inhabited every human breast, be it savage or civil. Politically, they moved against the cult of ancestor worship that Jefferson thought obsessed Federalists and Indians alike in the late 1780s and early 1800s. Personally, they reflected Jefferson's upbringing. His own father had cared for the orphaned Randolph children. His father's will encouraged him to tend to the education of his siblings. In William and Mary, young Jefferson became so attached to mentors George Wythe and William Small that he remembered them as his “affectionate friend[s].” And so paternalistic and pedagogical rhetoric allowed Jefferson to personalize his role in Indian policy with the memory of solicitous parenthood and educator. On a public stage, he enacted a private drama in which he magnified the role of the guardians of his own youth. Consequently, he treated whole peoples—Indian nations—as if they were individual children under a superseded dispensation.

This role of solicitous parent familiarized Jefferson's public image—and self-image, too—as a mentor who was also a peacemaker. Like Christ in the passages from the Bible that Jefferson compiled in The Life and Morals of Jesus, he came not “to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy but to fulfil.” Thus his First Inaugural address distinguished this “peaceful shore” from the “exterminating havoc” of Europe. He comforted Federalists that he intended to fulfill the legacy of that “revolutionary character,” George Washington, and of the “Sages” and “Heroes” of 1776. And by 1802, he assured Indians as well that he was a peacemaker jealous for their improvement. In his addresses to them over the next several years, he sermonized, as Christ had, against the vengeful law of “an eye for an eye.” Repudiated, in other words, was John Adams's militant rhetoric and the High Federalists' military preparedness in the late nineties. Expunged supposedly was the British policy of using the Indians as pawns in imperial gambits against France and Spain. Evidently Jefferson forgot the threats of cession and violence that he raised in the Alien and Sedition crisis of 1798 to 1799 and again during the electoral struggle of 1800. He chose to believe and to proclaim that his election and thus his policy at home and abroad was a “revolution in the principles of our government.” Unlike 1776 this revolution was “peaceable,” however, “not effected by the sword.”³⁰ It fulfilled the principles of popular sovereignty and natural law that underlay the revolution in the Declaration of Independence, and thus it trumpeted, if not the millennium per se, at least an era of peaceful economics and politics. To Jefferson this peaceful dispensation superseded bloody combat and revolution.

The key to the completion of republican dispensation for Indians and whites alike quickly became the purchase of Louisiana. Correspondents and speakers congratulated the president on making sure with one peaceful stroke that “the perpetual hostility” of the “rivalry of nations” would not plague the American continent. Just as importantly, the purchase signaled a “second Declaration of Independence,” this time from the strictures of political economy. Here was enough land to absorb the poor and unsettled and to provide an asylum for Indians while they slowly accepted yeoman ways and abandoned their conspicuous need for large territories in which to gather and hunt. Others likened the new territory to an “American Eden” with “despotism” expelled forever. They spoke of the land's “inexhaustible fertility.” They stated that it would be proper gratitude to begin earnestly the “godlike work” of converting Indian “tomahawks and scalping knives into ploughshares and pruning hooks.”³¹

Unfortunately the methods that Jefferson encouraged in others and practiced himself for converting Indians into agriculturists was hardly godlike, either in Louisiana or the existing states. He knew that just preaching conversion to private property would not accomplish it. But he also believed that force was too expensive politically and financially. As a result, he championed government trading houses—ironic schoolhouses in exchange really—in which, as he admitted crudely to Governor Harrison, “the good and influential Indians among them run into debt … and become willing to lop off land.” In short, Jefferson's practice often was to trim down Indian lands and to leave them little choice but either to farm the small parcels that remained or to move on. His addresses to Indians, though, suggested the reverse. Gradual conversion to agriculture and the patient inculcation of the requisite skills would precede the surrendering of lands.³²

Further, his method of claiming underused lands was hardly paternal and solicitous. In 1803, he intended to claim the territories of the Cahokias and Piorias by “paramount sovereignty” since only a few members survived. And these few, he suspected, could be bribed with choice spots elsewhere. With their rights in his hand, he then could claim “doubtful territories” in negotiations with the Poutewatouies and Kickapoos. This approach would secure vital lands between Louisiana and the western borders of the states. In a revealing figure of speech that Richard Drinnon has seized upon, Jefferson suggested to Benjamin Hawkins that the Indians accept the inevitability of such manipulation. They should adopt “the wisdom of the animal which amputates and abandons to the hunter, the parts for which he is pursued.” Apparently Jefferson sensed that his public pronouncements about peace and pastoral civilization rationalized a violent encroachment that was causing Indian society to cannibalize itself if it wished to survive. The father figure, the mentor, the peacemaker, covered for an executive whose actions were perhaps closer to the hunter's classic penetration of America.³³

Still, Jefferson qualified this admission to Hawkins. If Indians would begin to farm, they would surrender lands that they did not need. Anyway, the end justified the means, as Jefferson claimed when he tried to enforce the embargo on unwilling citizens several years later. And the end in sight here was an honorable “coincidence of interests,” he claimed. Indians would gain implements and agricultural skills, and whites would gain lands for their increasing numbers.³⁴

The Louisiana Purchase permitted Jefferson to protract his timetable for the inculcation of the Indians. Previously he had hoped that Indians and whites quickly would become one people with yeoman republicanism as the dominant culture. Occasionally he even anticipated intermarriages, as William Byrd and Robert Beverly had. The purchase, though, provided a needed way-station along the road to such assimilation since Indians were proving to be recalcitrant wards. In early 1803, Jefferson envisioned trading parts of Louisiana to hunter Indians for their possessions east of the Mississippi. In fact, he confided to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn in 1804 that “instead of inviting Indians to come within our limits, our object is to tempt them to evacuate them.” In 1805, he told the Chickasaw chiefs that the government had much land to trade in the West. There Indians would be able to hunt undisturbed and to adopt civilized ways as slowly as they wished.³⁵

Thus Jefferson's pedagogical and paternalistic rhetoric about the Indians barely masked a deep ambivalence, especially in the years after the Louisiana Purchase. Did he really desire assimilation in some foreseeable future? Or did the movement of Indians ever westward condone racial separation? And did this constant movement actually transform Indians into the image of primitive dispensation and infantilization from which Jefferson claimed that he wished to save them? Unfortunately his language of gradual improvement and postponed incorporation served as a smoke screen for speculators and settlers who intimidated Indians off of lands in a supposed “coincidence of interests.” Abetting these practices was the government's haphazard and hesitant prosecution of white transgressors along an immense border.

Jefferson's administration lacked the bureaucratic and financial wherewithal to accomplish its publicized ends in Indian policy. Its commitment to republican economy—rationalized partly by the financial sovereignty of the living generation—made such expenditures and enforcement almost impossible. Jefferson's republican dispensation not “to destroy but to fulfil” never took the proper measure of whites and Indians in the first place. And it just could not evolve institutions of transition equal to the tasks that its rhetoric proposed. Instead, it bequeathed a legacy of dislocation and destruction while it publicized the image of the Indian hunter as the foredoomed forerunner of the yeoman republican. Unfortunately nature's noblemen not only were superseded on the land; they also were destroyed by God's chosen people, as Jefferson's followers recognized in the 1820s and 1830s.

SCHOOLS AND THE GARDEN REDEFINED

When Jefferson retired from Washington in 1809, he had had his fill of political combat. He curbed his desire to affect national policy directly and took stock of the still formidable powers left to him in advancing age. Especially after 1814, he concentrated on a project, an academic community, that he could control completely in his waning years. He planned to go political party one better while isolated in Albemarle. He would inculcate the young in the principles of the Republican Party: state rights, subservience of commerce to agriculture, and opposition to national tariffs and debt-funding. Schools would naturalize politics in new generations of Virginians, whereas trading houses were to indoctrinate Indians in the habits of a democratic republic.

Jefferson intended to accomplish this academic goal in his own neighborhood, designing schools (Albemarle Academy, Central College, the University of Virginia) that magnified the ground plan of Monticello and that reflected his own intellectual interests and political views. The architecture and curricula of these schools as well as their proximity to Monticello suggested that he saw them as institutional embodiments of private apprenticeships that he himself could oversee as an affectionate mentor. Still attached to the language of improvement, he returned characteristically to education as an instrument of social reform and as an extension of his private influence into the public realm, across the generations.

The years of the embargo and the war with Britain during Madison's administration convinced Jefferson of the need for limited manufacture in Virginia. Agriculture, while a laudable goal for savage Indians, subjected whites to the commercial and manufacturing whims of Europe. Even in spartan American, white culture evolved new needs and desires that were not entirely artificial. Schools, Jefferson hypothesized, must symbolize and facilitate this transit of a pastoral and learned civilization to the next stage, a plateau that avoided degradation and corruption by assimilating manufacture within an agricultural economy and society.³⁶ Indeed, Virginia was threatened not just by Europe but by the commercializing North, by Massachusetts and Connecticut particularly. These states, on which Virginia depended for the processing of its raw material, always resisted the slavery formula worked into the Constitution and traditionally opposed the foreign policies of Virginia's Republicans. Too easily could the North extort political compromises from Virginia unless the state undertook to secure its economic independence.

In 1800, Jefferson's curriculum for a school system recycled the courses in Bills 79 and 80. For a university, he projected the biological and natural sciences, philosophy, and the diverse arts. Elementary and grammar schools would instruct the rudiments of reading, writing, arithmetic, and foreign languages. In 1814, after Peter Carr requested his help in planning an academy in Albemarle, Jefferson recognized the inadequacy of this scheme for the “local circumstances” of “our own social conditions.” Like his French friend Destutt de Tracy, Jefferson told Peter Carr that the people in a civilized nation fell naturally into two intellectual classes: “the laboring and the learned.”³⁷ The learned attended grammar schools and colleges. They prepared for traditional professions like law and studied the languages and the body of knowledge that political stewardship required—for some of them would rule.

Circumstances now forced Jefferson to admit another person into the union of professional schools that constituted his plan for learning at the university level: the skilled industrialist or the laborer who was also learned. In the professional schools of the university, students of law, architecture, and medicine would continue to “ramify and dilate” the skills and subjects that they had learned in the grammar schools. The school of technical philosophy, however, would “abridge those [subjects] which were taught there too much in extenso for the limited wants of the practical man or the artificer.”³⁸

Jefferson's 1814 proposal to Carr concerning an academy in Albemarle was awkward because it attempted too much. Like Carr, Jefferson believed that Albemarle required a traditional preparatory institution. Thus he proposed that the academy instruct the subjects of a grammar school. But Jefferson now saw a chance to insinuate a university with professional schools into Albemarle and the state. If one chose the academy's professors properly at the start and if the professors encouraged the best grammar students to continue their studies, then the human capital that was necessary for the success of a linked university would grow naturally. Finally Jefferson also employed the academy plan as a vehicle for meeting Virginia's need for economic diversification.

In effect, Jefferson's plan for Albemarle Academy grafted onto a grammar school a departmentalized university. And onto the university it attached a vocational institute, a department in technical philosophy at the highest grade for mariners, carpenters, soapmakers, cutlers, and others who needed to deepen their trade with an exploration of relevant scientific fields such as hydrostatics, hydraulics, geometry, and chemistry. This hybrid institution reflected Jefferson's headlong impulse to seed, in one place and at one time, the types of higher schools that Virginia required. He paid little attention to the administrative and professorial feasibility of such a diverse curriculum.

The technical school embodied the curricula that William Smith proposed for skilled laborers in the College of Mirania, that Ben Franklin—following Locke's call for vernacular and practical instruction—suggested for an English school in Philadelphia, and that Destutt de Tracy worked out in a track for technical education. Surrounded by men who were studying the traditionally learned professions and preparing for social and political stewardship in an agricultural society, these skilled workers would understand their place in Virginia's social hierarchy. They would defer to the landed leadership, who had much broader learning, and the yeomanry. They would serve the Virginia republic by accepting Jeffersonian Republicanism; they would not subvert their homeland economically.

Although Jefferson did not pursue his concern for technical philosophy when the Board of Albemarle Academy ignored it, he adhered tenaciously to the belief that education was the primary means of transmitting sovereignty to the next generation and thus of ensuring the endurance of republicanism, and Republican principles, especially in Virginia. In 1816 and 1817, he again called for a system of education that was founded on common schools. He argued that these common schools should be managed and financed in the wards, not by a central Literary Fund, not even by the counties unless the legislature so insisted.³⁹

In Jefferson's mind, common schools and the self-sufficiency of wards fused into a single principle. United, they safeguarded the sovereignty of the living that carelessness about industrial education and higher instruction exposed to subversion. Common schools, when run locally, would involve neighbors in ensuring the instruction of their own children. The schools would be but one project to remind adults of their social affiliation and collective responsibilities. Once properly affiliated, the inhabitants of wards could congregate to express their collective will on political matters, much as New Englanders did in town-meetings. Every nineteen years a new majority—a new generation—of adults could come together in these subdivisions of republican power and review the Constitution under the light of their common reason. From common school to common reason: Jefferson's generations would learn together and mature together. The affiliation and common lessons of early instruction, coupled with the homogeneous character of a largely yeoman society, guaranteed that these local convocations would accommodate Virginia's government and charter to change, not cancel the social contract completely.⁴⁰

Jefferson considered it tragic that Virginians would not act on his scholastic proposals to ensure economic equipoise and popular sovereignty. Nor would they rally behind the proposed academy, the university that he always longed for, and the common schools that would provide the ultimate reserve of principle. A majority in the legislature did not share his view that schools were the primary conduit for both stability and change from generation to generation. Still, he persevered in campaigning for some central school in Albemarle. He even economized his vision, yielding the grammar institute, giving up as well the school in technical philosophy. Eventually he muted his demands for common schools and concentrated on what he thought he could get: funds for a university.

Jefferson spent the last nine years of his life anxiously designing and financing an “academical village” in Albemarle for young men that yet might save Virginia and improve the entire republic. Southern youths, these “unwise and unworthy … sons,” he feared, were about to discard the achievements of “the generation of 1776.” Either they capitulated to the laziness and exploitation that were endemic in the South's peculiar institution,⁴¹ or like Edward Coles they considered fleeing the South for the habits of the North. The “academical village,” which was the culmination of a lifetime of educational crusades now narrowed intensely into one project, was Jefferson's last undertaking to arrest the South's fall into barbarism and the North's growth into commercial corruption. Was it coincidental that the projected architecture of the school as well as its configuration of mentors and tutees recalled Jefferson's experiences as a student in Williamsburg? He returned to the prerevolutionary dawn, to the world of his mentors, in this final effort to enlighten the young and ensure the sovereignty of the living generation and the promise of yeoman civilization. An American Narcissus, he was in love with his own youth and the republic's, too.

Notes

1. Dumbauld, [Edward], Thomas Jefferson and the Law, [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978] chap. 7, reviews the legislative history of Jefferson's proposed reforms.

2. Le Chevalier Quesnay de Beaurepaire, Memoire, Statuts, et Prospectus Concernant L'Academie des Sciences et Beaux Arts … (Paris: Callieau, 1788). Jefferson to Adams, 27 May 1795; 6 February 1795, [L. J.] Cappon, Adams-Jefferson Letters, [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974] 257-58; Jefferson to Pictet, 14 October 1795, LC [The Papers of Thomas Jefferson in the Library of Congress] no. 16950. Merle M. Odgers, “Education and the American Philosophical Society,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87, no. 1 (14 July 1943), 13, 15, 18-20. On Jefferson's interest in a national university, as well as the concern of the other founders, see Documentary History, [A Documentary History of Education in the South Before 1860 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949] ed. E. Knight, 2:8-40.

3. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1979), 20-21, 23-42, 44-46.

4. Jefferson to Adams, 30 August 1787, Cappon, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 196. Paine, Rights of Man (London: Penguin 1976), 117: Jefferson, Autobiography, [of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1959)] 80-81.

5. Richard Gem, 1-6 September 1789, Papers, [The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. J. P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950)], 15:391-92; Jefferson to Madison, 6 September 1789, Papers, 15:392-97; Peterson, “Mr. Jefferson's ‘Sovereignty of the Living Generation’,” Virginia Quarterly Review 52, no. 3 (Summer 1976), 438-41; Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1950), chap. 4.

6. Jefferson to Madison, 6 September 1789, Papers, 15:392-97.

7. Jefferson to Eppes, 24 June 1813; Jefferson to Eppes, 11 September 1813, Works, [The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. P. L. Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1905).] 11:300, 11:306-8, 11:311. This economic policy was shipped off to Congressman Eppes. But William Cabell Rives, Judge St. George Tucker, Thomas Ritchie, and John H. Cocke saw copies too, according to Dumas Malone, The Sage of Monticello (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1981), 141-42.

8. Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1982), 9-10, 131-33. I wish to supplement what McCoy particularly has pointed out about the desire of Jefferson and others to keep America “young” and virtuous, in terms of the cycle of republican life, by contouring the nation's economic propensities to the exact needs of a largely agricultural society.

9. James Madison, “Numbers 49 and 50,” The Federalist Papers, (New York: New American Library, 1961), 313-20; Madison to Jefferson, 4 February 1790, Papers, 16:147-54; Jefferson to Breckenridge, 12 August 1803, Writings, [The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds. A. A. Lipscomb and A. E. Bergh (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905.] 10:5-6; Paine, Rights of Man, 64-66.

10. Jefferson to Priestley, 27 January 1800, Works, 9:414-15; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1955), 37-39; Jefferson to Nicholas, 5 September 1799, Works, 9:79-80; Jefferson to Thomas Lomax, 12 March 1799, Works, 9:63-64; Jefferson to Robert Livingston, 23 February 1799, Works, 9:58-59; Jefferson to Priestley, 21 March 1801, Writings, 10:227-29; Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 6 September 1819, Works, 12:135-36.

11. Jefferson to Kerchival, 12 July 1816, Works, 12: 12-15.

12. Jefferson to Kerchival, 12 July 1816, Works, 12:6, Jefferson, “First Inaugural,” The Complete Jefferson, [: Containing His Major Writings, Published and Unpublished, Except His Letters] ed. S.K. Padover, [(New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1985] 386.

13. Jefferson, “Second Inaugural,” The Complete Jefferson, ed. Padover, 411.

14. Robert M. Johnstone, Jr., Jefferson and the Presidency: Leadership in the Young Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 34.

15. Forrest McDonald, The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976), 162. Jefferson to Messers. Thomas Eliot, and Others, 13 November 1807; Jefferson to the Society of Tammany, 29 February 1808; Jefferson to the Legislature of New Hampshire, 2 August 1808, all in The Complete Jefferson, ed. Padover, 522-23, 529, 532. On Jefferson's reluctance to release the relevant facts, see Peterson, Jefferson, [Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University 1970)]. 896; Leonard Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (New York: New York Times Book Company, 1973), 96.

16. Jefferson to Gallatin, 6 May 1808, Writings, 12:52-53. Jefferson to the General Assembly of North Carolina, 10 January 1808, The Complete Jefferson, ed. Padover, 528. On Jefferson's involvement in party politics, I have relied mainly on Johnstone, chap. 7; Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1798-1801 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), chaps. 6-10; Noble E. Cunningham Jr., The Process of Government Under Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), chaps. 9 and 12; and Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1974), part 1.

17. Jefferson, “Second Inaugural,” The Complete Jefferson, ed. Padover, 412-13. I have addressed pedagogical rhetoric and Indian policy more completely in “‘Not to Destroy But to Fulfil’: Jefferson, Indians, and Republican Dispensation,” Eighteenth Century Studies 18, no. 4 (Summer 1985), 523-49.

18. Adam Ferguson, Essay, [An Essay on the History of Civil Society (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, Inc., 1980)]. 1, 4; [Emmerich de] Vattel, Nations and Nature, [The Law of Nations and Nature (New York: Oceana, 1964)] 37-38; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 63-65, 97-98.

19. “The Constitution as Adopted by the Convention” and Declaration of Independence, Papers, 1:378, 1:485-86; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 62-63, 93. Excellent treatments of this polarization are: Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953]; Bernard Sheehan, Savagism and Civility (New York: Cambridge University, 1980); H. C. Porter, The Inconstant Savage (London: Duckworth, 1979).

20. James Adair, The History of the American Indians, ed. R. Berkhofer, Jr. (New York: Johnson Reprint, Co., 1968), 5, 15, 150, 378-79, 345, 427-29. Ferguson, Essay, 85-86, 89.

21. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 60-63, 92-93. Jefferson to Gilmer, 7 June 1816, Works, 11:535-36.

22. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 92-93, 164-65. Jefferson to Gilmer, 7 June 1816, Works, 11:535-36; Jefferson to Cartwright, 5 June 1824, The Complete Jefferson, ed. Padover, 293. Cornelius Tactitus, The Agricola and the Germania, trans. S. A. Handford (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 107-14, 122-23. Ferguson quoted in Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), 47; Jefferson to Ludlow, 6 September 1824, Writings, 16:75-76.

23. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 60-62, 64-65, 96, 146-48; Ferguson, Essay, 89.

24. [Hugo] Grotius, Laws, [The Laws of War and Peace (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964)]. 188-89, 206-8; Vattel, Nations and Nature, 37-38, 84-86, 143. Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 45-47, 214; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1976), 43-84; Wilcomb E. Washburn, “The Moral and Legal Justifications for Dispossessing the Indians,” in Seventeenth Century America: Essays in Colonial American History, ed. J. M. Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 15-32.

25. General Knox to President Washington, 7 July 1789; President Washington, speech, 6 November 1792, American State Papers: Indian Affairs (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 1:53-54; 2:19.

26. Prucha, 44-47; Benjamin Hawkins, “A Sketch of the Present State,” American State, 1:646-48.

27. Jefferson, “Addresses to Indians,” The Complete Jefferson, ed. Padover, 454, 458-59, 461, 464-65, 469, 471, 477, 479, 481, 483-84, 489. Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), reviews Jefferson's Indian addresses, 9-11, 21-37, 189-93.

28. Jefferson, “Second Inaugural,” The Complete Jefferson, ed. Padover, 412-13.

29. Jefferson to Tazewell, 5 January 1805, Va. no. 912; Jefferson, “Rockfish Gap Report,” [Roy J.] Honeywell, Educational Work, [The Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964)]. 257.

30. Jefferson, Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels: “The Philosophy of Jesus” and “The Life and Morals of Jesus,” ed. Dickinson W. Adams (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 147. Jefferson, “First Inaugural”; “To the Miamis,” 2 January 1802; “To the Delaware and Shawwanee Nations,” 10 February 1802; “To Brother Handsome Lake,” 3 November 1802, The Complete Jefferson, ed. Padover, 385-86, 458-59, 461. Jefferson to Roane, 6 September 1819, Works, 12:136.

31. Dunbar to Jefferson, 10 June 1803, LC no. 22832-35; Campbell to Jefferson, October 27, 1803 LC no. 23454; Samuel Brazer, “Address Penned at Worcester, on May 12, 1804, in Commemoration of the Cession of Louisiana to the United States” (Worcester, Mass.: Goodridge, 1804), 11; David Ramsay, “An Oration on the Cession of Louisiana to the United States” (Newport, R.I.: Farnsworth, 1804), 6, 14.

32. Jefferson to Governor Harrison, 27 February 1803, Writings, 10:368-73; Jefferson to the Senate and House, 19 January 1803, LC no. 22204.

33. Jefferson to Benjamin Hawkins, 18 February 1803; Jefferson to Governor Harrison, 27 February 1803, Writings, 10:362, 10:368-73; Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 87.

34. Jefferson to Benjamin Hawkins, 18 February 1803, Writings, 10:362; Jefferson to Gallatin, 23 March 1808; Jefferson to the Governors, 6 May 1808, Writings, 12:18-19, 12:52-53.

35. William Byrd, The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover, ed. L. Wright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 160; Robert Beverly, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. L. Wright (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1947), 38; “Proposed Amendment on Louisiana,” 1803, LC no. 23687-88; Jefferson to Dearborn, 2 December 1804, LC no. 25221. Jefferson, “To the Chiefs of the Chickasaw Nation,” 7 March 1805, The Complete Jefferson, ed. Padover, 471-72.

36. Jefferson to Adams, 12 January 1812, 219; Jefferson to Koskiusko, 28 June 1812, 260-61; Jefferson to Mazzei, 29 December 1813, 366; Jefferson to Leiper, 12 June 1815, 476-77; Jefferson to Austin, 9 January 1816, 502-5, all in Ford, Works, vol. 11. Jefferson to Carr, 7 September 1814, Honeywell, Educational Work, 223-26.

37. Jefferson to Priestley, 18 January 1800, Writings, 10:138-43; Jefferson to Carr, 7 September 1814, Honeywell, Educational Work, 223-26. Destutt de Tracy, Observations Sur le Système Actuel d'Instruction Publique (Paris, An IX), 2-3.

38. Jefferson to Carr, September 7, 1814, Honeywell, Educational Work, 224-26.

39. Jefferson to Cabell, 2 February 1816, Early History of the University of Virginia as Contained in the Letters of Thomas Jefferson and Joseph C. Cabell, ed. N. F. Cabell (Richmond, Va.: T. W. Randolph, 1856), 52-56; Jefferson, “Bill for the Establishment of Public Education,” 1817, Honeywell, Educational Work, 233.

40. Jefferson to Cabell, 2 February 1816; Cabell to Jefferson, 3 December 1817, Early History, 52-56, 65-66; Jefferson to Taylor, 28 May 1816, Writings, 15:17-23; Jefferson to Nicholas, 2 April 1816, Writings, 15:454; Jefferson to Kerchival, 12 July 1816, Works, 12:13-15.

41. Jefferson to Holmes, April 22, 1820, Works, 12:159.