SOURCE: “Jefferson's Empire,” in Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood, University Press of Virginia, 2000, pp. 1-17.

[In the following essay, Onuf explores Jefferson's visions of America as a nation and as an empire, taking into account the more regressive tendencies of Jefferson's political thought.]

Thomas Jefferson cherished an imperial vision for the new American nation. Future generations of Americans would establish republican governments in the expanding hinterland of settlement. This rising empire would be sustained by affectionate union, a community of interests, and dedication to the principles of self-government Jefferson set forth in the Declaration of Independence. It would not be, as the British empire in America had become over the previous decade, an empire built on force and fear, remote provinces subject to the despotic rule of a distant metropolitan government. Instead, the new regime, deriving its “just powers from the consent of the governed,” would show that the empire of liberty was illimitable.¹

“Who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively?” an exultant Jefferson asked in his Second Inaugural Address (4 March 1805).² The British empire had overreached and collapsed because it was insufficiently republican, not because popular forces exercised disproportionate power in radically imbalanced colonial constitutions. Too much democracy was not the problem; it was instead the sovereign solution to the problem of size, for only a free people could sustain its own union over the vast spaces of the American continent. “We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun,” Jefferson told his English friend Joseph Priestley in 1801, “for this whole chapter in the history of man is new.” The greatest novelty was “the great extent of our Republic,” its imperial domain.³

Jefferson's vision of the American future has seemed prophetic to subsequent generations as they pursued their own happiness and fulfilled the nation's destiny. If in March 1801, in the aftermath of a crisis that had threatened disunion and civil war, and at a time when the federal government had virtually no military capability, Jefferson could say that this was “the strongest Government on earth,” he must have sensed something of the new nation's future power, its awesome potential for continental, hemispheric, and, ultimately, global preeminence.⁴ Yet by invoking Jefferson's vision Americans could assure themselves that their great power would only be exercised for good purposes, to serve the interests of mankind. Jefferson's optimistic account of the new nation's and the world's glorious future has been contagious and inspirational. Articulating the fundamental premises of democratic self-government in the Declaration and projecting them across space and time—for subsequent generations of Americans, for peoples everywhere—he has been for grateful followers of many political persuasions nothing less than the “man of the millennium.”⁵

In celebrating Jefferson's progressive vision, Americans congratulate themselves on their own good fortune. But did the author of the Declaration of Independence have any idea of what the new nation would become? Was its destiny manifest to him? This book is my answer to these deceptively simple questions. It revolves around two major themes, “empire” and “nation,” and their relationship to one another. For American Revolutionaries “empire” did not necessarily suggest, as it does now, dangerous concentrations of power and schemes of world domination. Jefferson envisioned “an empire for liberty,” an expanding union of republics held together by ties of interest and affection. For this bold experiment in republicanism to succeed, Americans would have to be a united people, conscious of themselves as a nation with a crucial role to play in world history. Their destiny was not to be a great power in the conventional sense but rather an inspiration to other peoples to “burst the chains” of despotism “and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”⁶

It is all too easy for us to see through such rhetoric to the interests it so obviously served.⁷ From Jefferson's day to our own, critics have emphasized discrepancies between his idealistic professions and less exalted practices, often concluding that the Virginia planter was a great hypocrite. For many present-day commentators Jefferson's failure to address the problem of slavery generally and the situation of his own human chattel in particular is in itself the most damning possible commentary on his iconic standing as “apostle of freedom.” If further evidence was needed to banish Jefferson from the national pantheon, the recent confirmation of his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings provides it: the master of Monticello could not even live up to his own infamous strictures against race mixing in his Notes on the State of Virginia.⁸

No historian can avoid the controversies swirling around Jefferson. I may disclaim any intention to inflate, deflate, or reposition the mythic Jefferson. But readers will want to know how I really feel: what undisclosed biases are at work in this book? Let me say, as I always do when pressed, that I am “deeply conflicted.” And let me ask my readers, how can you not be conflicted about this enlightened man of reason who preached the gospel of liberation while implicated in what he called the “unremitting despotism” of slavery, perpetually exercising “the most boisterous passions”?⁹ We might wonder why Jefferson, so conscious of posterity, did not leave us the kind of evidence—of inner conflict, agonizing self-doubt, guilt, and despair—that would enable us to identify with him. I can understand why my distinguished predecessor at the University of Virginia, Merrill D. Peterson, called Jefferson “impenetrable,” for by insisting that the “real” man can never be known, we can sustain our belief in an inner space where his contradictions were engaged, if not resolved, and his ideals were securely grounded, a space within which Jefferson silently suffered.¹⁰

I do not pretend to know Jefferson better than his biographers, though I would suggest that we already knew a great deal about the inner Jefferson when Peterson published his Jefferson and the New Nation in 1970, and that much excellent scholarship since then has illuminated formerly obscure aspects of his personality.¹¹ Our problem here is not lack of knowledge or insight. It is instead that we have failed to grasp the large contours of Jefferson's political philosophy, his vision of the future, his understanding of the meaning of the American Revolution. Jeffersonian ideals are so woven into the fabric of our national self-understanding that we have trouble distinguishing one from the other, Jefferson from America. To understand Jefferson—and ourselves as well—we need to explore his nation-making project, extricating his intentions, as much as we can, from the outcomes that constitute our history. The point is not to explain, extenuate, or forgive him for his sins, by surrounding him with a generation of equally great sinners or by invoking the material conditions—namely, his dependency on slave labor—that prevented him from living up to his own ideals. Rather, my goal is to reconstruct the moral and ideological framework within which Jefferson made his “bold and doubtful” choice for independence, the moment that defined his conception of himself even as it launched the American experiment in republican government.¹² Even though Americans—like all other peoples—have redefined themselves continuously throughout their history, Jefferson's conception of American nationhood has been the touchstone for all these definitions, their deepest source.

The American Revolution was the central event of Jefferson's life. The protracted political and constitutional crisis preceding the break with Britain prepared the way for his republican revelation. As the fundamental opposition between British despotism and American freedom became suddenly clear, Jefferson embraced the new gospel with a convert's zeal. Until his dying day, his experience of the political world was shaped by this republican faith. Every great crisis was a test of patriotism and loyalty, requiring a return to Revolutionary first principles. Jefferson's strength as a party leader was his obliviousness to the changing character of American political life: his opponents were always the new nation's enemies, counter-Revolutionary conspirators against independence and union or their uncomprehending dupes. Yet if, as historians generally agree, Jefferson was a poor judge of his opponents' motives, his ideological convictions helped keep memories of the Revolution fresh, thus fostering popular patriotism and national identity in the post-Revolutionary age. Jefferson's fixation on the recent but ever receding Revolutionary past has also, paradoxically, kept his memory fresh for subsequent generations of Americans. As Jefferson looked backward to the timeless truths he believed had animated the Revolutionaries, his followers have taken him to be a visionary, looking forward to the progressive vindication of republican principles in the unfolding narrative of American history.

The past, we are told, is a “foreign country” or, as Daniel Boorstin put it in the title of his influential study of Jefferson's thought, a “lost world.”¹³ There is a rich literature on Jefferson as a Renaissance man or as a man of the Enlightenment, suggesting his extraordinary range of achievements and situating him in a European frame of reference. But when it comes to his great life's work, the creation of a new nation, we see him in a much more narrowly American frame: as his past is telescoped into our present, the “foreign country” dissolves into “America.” These two images of Jefferson, European and American, accurately reflect the ambivalent position of his youth when, as an ambitious Anglo-American provincial on the edge of the civilized world, he looked across the Atlantic to the British metropolis for markets, credit, consumer goods, cultural standards, political ideas, and self-definition. Independence may have made a self-conscious “American” out of Jefferson, but the gravitational pull of the metropolis remained powerful for the former provincial. The Anglophile now became Anglophobe, redirecting his gaze toward France and a more diffuse and expansive conception of (European) civilization and a “republic of letters” in which provincial Americans could aspire to an equal standing.¹⁴

Jefferson could never escape Europe.¹⁵ Indeed, it was the strength of Europe's attraction that animated his nation-making project. Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, an encyclopedic effort to comprehend his own state, was drafted with an elite European readership in mind. Challenging the comte de Buffon's degeneracy thesis, Jefferson vindicated American nature in the Notes, showing that American animals, including Indian peoples, were as large or larger and as well endowed as their European counterparts. Cultural nationalists were obsessed with such comparisons: their “new world” was always, necessarily, defined against—and therefore in terms of—the Old World. This seems obvious enough from our modern perspective: after all, it would take many generations before the new national culture could transcend its provincial sources, before there would be sufficient wealth, leisure, and historical experience for an enterprising people to fashion a culture for itself befitting the founders' bold experiment in nation making. But the distinction we make between politics and culture would have been meaningless to Jefferson, for claims to independent nationhood themselves expressed powerful provincial impulses. The idea of “nation,” a characteristically modern idea that Americans themselves helped invent, constituted an imaginative bridge across the great chasm between center and periphery, metropolis and provinces.¹⁶

Revolutionary Americans did not aspire to isolation but rather to closer integration in the European world.¹⁷ In Jefferson's memorable words, the United States would “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them”; as a nation among nations, Americans would be “separate” from Britain, no longer subject to the despotic rule of the foreigners Britons had revealed themselves to be in the imperial crisis, yet fully the “equal” of all other recognized nations and sharing in their common civilization.¹⁸ The Revolutionaries' boldest claim, that there was a distinct American people, capable of asserting its rights before the world, was bold because it had so little basis in historical experience or collective self-consciousness before the Revolutionaries began to make their claims, rewriting British and colonial history to support them and vindicating them on the battlefield. Few patriots were fully conscious that they were inventing themselves as a people before the brute facts of the case, war itself, stared them in the face; even then, reluctant Revolutionaries talked of reconciliation, seeking to avert or at least delay the final rupture. The differences between American whigs and tories, the central pivot of Jefferson's political worldview, were not so great after all: patriots of all stripes were first of all provincial Britons, anxious about their identities as well as their rights. As the imperial crisis deepened, Jefferson and his radical colleagues recognized that nothing less than independent nationhood would secure full and equal participation in the civilized, European world, the pinnacle of provincial ambition.

My depiction of Jefferson as the quintessential provincial, proud of his own “country” of Virginia yet inexorably drawn toward the imperial metropolis, constitutes the crucial link between the two major themes of this book, “empire” and “nation.” For provincial Britons “empire” did not evoke, as it now does, centralized, despotic, and arbitrary rule; to the contrary, it was only by imagining a transcendent, inclusive, imperial community, a greater Britain that reached across the Atlantic, that colonists could plausibly claim—to their own satisfaction, at least—the “rights of Englishmen.” Thinking of themselves as Britons, provincial patriots could also take pride in being part of an empire that, as Anthony Pagden writes, was widely admired by contemporary European commentators for securing law and liberty and fostering extraordinary prosperity in a widening sphere of common “interests and benefits.”¹⁹

Of course, the patriots' idealized image of empire was not widely shared in British policy-making circles, nor was it embraced by all segments of the provincial ruling classes. Even the most sympathetic “friends of America” in Britain could not overcome the condescending attitude characteristic of metropolitans or understand, finally, how the increasingly exaggerated claims of the colonial radicals could be reconciled with any sort of political connection at all. But it was nonetheless true that the provincial apotheosis of empire drew inspiration and strength from powerful tendencies in metropolitan political culture: this is, after all, precisely what makes provincials provincial. The language of British nationalism, the celebration of Britain's vaunted constitution, its Protestant heritage, its imperial domain, enabled provincials to articulate their own identities in their own increasingly idiosyncratic idioms. This was the language that Jefferson and his fellow nation makers invoked when they declared that George III's tyrannical abuses had made one people, the people of a united empire, into two, British and American. “We might have been a free & a great people together,” Jefferson lamented in the original draft of the Declaration, “but a communication of grandeur & of freedom” was now all too clearly beneath the “dignity” of proud Britons who no longer acknowledged the ties that sustained imperial union. “We must endeavor to forget our former love for them.”²⁰

Jefferson's rage was directed at George III and, through him, at a British people who were suddenly revealed to him as distinct and alien. His sense of betrayal was a measure of his devotion to the imperial ideal that the British king had so egregiously violated. Jefferson's empire was thus republican in several senses, most conspicuously in its rejection of the aristocratic and monarchical old regime and its corrupt state apparatus. For Jefferson, the new American “empire for liberty” would be defined against monarchy. He was always on the lookout for monarchical tendencies that might subvert the new regime—tendencies that his nemesis Alexander Hamilton seemed perversely delighted to display. As Jefferson fought the good fight against “aristocrats” and “monocrats,” his republicanism focused increasingly on the need for a virtuous and vigilant citizenry, capable of defending its liberties against internal as well as external threats. This is the republicanism that seems so “classical” to modern writers, though the emphasis on the equal rights of consenting citizens is also, indistinguishably, “liberal.”²¹

Jefferson's empire was republican in yet another, less familiar, and less equivocally classical way: American experience with the British empire notwithstanding, Jefferson cherished the belief that the new nation would be able to sustain a hierarchy of legitimate authorities, grounded in the sovereignty of the people, ascending from village or “ward” to an all-inclusive union of state-republics.²² Each successive layer or “sphere” of authority secured the rights of its constituent elements—whether individual citizens or corporate entities—while its own rights were in turn secured at still higher levels of association. The desideratum at each level was equality: within the citizen body, “all men are created equal”; in the union, all states were equal. The tattered remnants of this republican legacy are barely recognizable to us in what we now call “federalism.” Jefferson's republican empire, an expanding federal union of free republican states, was demolished in the Civil War.

Jefferson's hopes for the federal union, this “new thing under the sun,” reflected the continuing power of the imperial ideal in his thinking. Yet this ideal was always yoked to, and defined by, Americans' actual experience in the far-from-ideal British empire. Thousands of patriots had to lose their lives in a bloody war for independence, the new nation's self-defining moment, so that liberty might be secured. Americans learned that they must be vigilant, ever ready to make the last sacrifice, in order to check the designs of illegitimate, overreaching power. To defend their rights, a free people must first know what those rights are. The British empire failed because it did not have a constitution, defining spheres of authority and so securing the rights of colonies and colonists. With the ratification of the federal Constitution, the Americans rectified this fundamental defect. As long as the Constitution was properly construed, their union would be perfect.²³ This was Jefferson's message in his First Inaugural: “Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own federal and republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government.” The fulfillment of the imperial ideal, true and enduring union, was attainable: “Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind.”²⁴

Jefferson's paean to union beautifully encapsulates the historical problem I address in this book. In our minds Jefferson's federalism is closely associated with a union-destroying devotion to states' rights, local privilege, and the defense of slavery. Such associations are not mere anachronisms but rather plausible characterizations—repeatedly made by contemporary political opponents—of the reactionary and regressive tendencies of Jeffersonian Republicanism. In his darker moments Jefferson himself despaired of the union as it actually was, wondering if there had been any point, after all, in the break with Britain. How can we, in turn, not despair of Jefferson himself when he tells us in the midst of the Missouri crisis that the effort of the “restrictionists” to keep the new slave state out of the union would constitute “treason against the hopes of the world” and thus make the sacrifices of the “generation of 1776” utterly “useless”?²⁵

Jefferson was convinced that congressional interference in Missouri's self-constitution as a republic would lead to the “scission” of the union, thus demonstrating the futility of American aspirations to transcend the never-ending cycle of wars among the disunited states of Europe. Convinced as we now are that racial slavery was the early republic's radical flaw, Jefferson's concerns can only seem pathetically, even tragically misplaced. But we should listen carefully to what Jefferson was saying. Jefferson did not think the world's hopes were pinned to the spread of slavery, or that the particular provisions of the federal compact securing the peculiar institution were deserving of veneration. Jefferson, the republican Revolutionary, did not think he was defending the status quo. For him, the crucial connection was between union and hope. Harking back to an idealized vision of the British empire, looking forward to the republican millennium of a world of free peoples in ever more harmonious union, Jefferson despaired for his country because of his vaulting idealism, not because he was determined to secure his class position or the dominion of his class over a captive nation held in unjust subjection. Jefferson heard the “fire-bell in the night” because the union was at risk; the union, the new republican empire of liberty that Jefferson saw spreading across the continent, was to him the whole point of the American Revolution.²⁶

When we look at Jefferson in moments of crisis—in the Missouri controversy, during the “reign of witches” of the late 1790s,²⁷ in the years when the British empire was torn apart—his hopes for the future are thrown into stark relief. The dialectic of hope and fear characterized the whole Revolutionary generation, of course, though in Jefferson it took an extreme, schematic form, deriving from and sustaining a series of powerful binary oppositions: New World against Old, republicanism against monarchy, consent against coercion, independence against submission, freedom against slavery. The positive terms in these pairs described Jefferson's great political project: liberation from tyranny in order to achieve union. Jefferson did not make a fetish of a strictly construed constitution as an end in itself but rather as the guarantee of equality, the fundamental precondition of uncoerced consent, the threshold of genuine union. This was, finally, a union that transcended mere interest. It was also a union of “heart” and “mind,” of a people bound by the love that dedication to republican principles made possible.

This account of Jefferson's political thought is not offered in anything resembling a conventional biographical narrative. Each chapter ranges widely through Jefferson's career, seeking to get at the illuminating moments when his thinking on a crucial theme took on its characteristic and influential form. As I wrote, Jefferson's personal presence became increasingly palpable to me, even though I had not intended to look for him. The Jefferson I have come to know is not the proverbial flawed founder, the great visionary with the feet of clay. My Jefferson may be those things but is more interesting to me because he responded with so much feeling to the ideological currents of his day, currents that he hoped to direct, but that sometimes, as he stood by hopelessly, flowed on in unexpected directions. I am no less deeply conflicted than I was when I started this project, perhaps more so, but it is not because I am disappointed in Jefferson or feel that he has let me or us down by not being a better man than he was. My conflicted feelings are instead about Jefferson's larger project itself, the project that inspired in him such hope and such despair. Perhaps, antibiographer though I am, I have begun to identify with my subject.

Jefferson's Empire is not organized according to a straightforward chronological scheme. Indeed, in chapter 4, on “Federal Union,” where I come closest to biography, I follow a reverse chronology, beginning with Jefferson's response to the Missouri crisis and the autobiographical reflections it prompted and moving back to the drafting of the Declaration of Independence when he gave voice to the new nation's aspirations for a more perfect union. My intention is to take a fresh look at what we think we already know so well. According to the conventional reading of his political life, the aging Sage of Monticello departed from his true principles when he advocated admitting Missouri as a slave state, betraying the American Revolutionary creed he had so memorably expressed in younger, better years. But what if Jefferson's position on Missouri, repellent as we now find it, was in fact consistent with his Revolutionary principles? This possibility may not make us any more sympathetic to his antirestrictionist, proslavery posture, but it will force us to take another look at the Revolution itself. As we do so, Jefferson's hopes for the new republican empire will come into clearer focus. With the overthrow of King George III's corrupt and despotic regime, Jefferson fervently believed, republican America would enjoy the peace, prosperity, and progress that the British imperial connection had once promised.

Americans sought to secure their new republican empire in a federal union that preempted the concentration of despotic power in a domineering metropolis. Secured in their respective rights, the new state-republics would be drawn into ever closer union by their harmonious interests, common principles, and reciprocal affection. Yet, as Jefferson discovered, these exalted expectations were repeatedly frustrated, and never more ominously than when Americans were divided along sectional lines, whether over the expansion of slavery, the conduct of the War of 1812, commercial diplomacy, or financial policy. In these perilous moments Jefferson and his fellow Americans were prone to forget that they constituted a single great people, poised to spread republican institutions across the continent. The expansive notion of American nationhood, predicated on a spontaneous harmony of interests in a decentralized federal regime, then threatened to give way to parochial loyalties and mutually destructive impulses. The inclusive boundaries of nationhood thus could suddenly contract, making righteous Americans foreigners to one another, and so obliterating the supposed difference between New World and Old.

If it were merely a matter of writing another obituary for antebellum America, my own feelings might not be so engaged in this project. Jefferson's blasted hopes for the union as a peaceful and progressive alternative to the European balance of power could be treated with the historian's customary detachment, perhaps as a sobering reminder of the intractability of international politics. Jefferson's union is fading from memory, remembered only for its bloody demise in the Civil War or its brutal exploitation of enslaved African Americans. But if the old federal system collapsed, the new nation that Jefferson helped to create is very much with us. The historical irony is that Jefferson's nationalism grew out of his devotion to the union: Americans could only sustain a decentralized regime, an empire without a metropolis, a consensual union of free republics, if they were a truly united people. The ambitious young provincial became a precocious nationalist because of his abiding fealty to the imperial ideal; he invoked the language of nationhood against the state-building designs of centralizers and consolidationists, the “nationalists” of our conventional founding narrative. These nationalists may have triumphed with the destruction of Jefferson's union in the Civil War. But the echoes of Jefferson's imperial vision can still be heard in the language of American nationhood.

What did “nation” mean to Jefferson? What does it mean to us now? These are not questions historians have often asked themselves, at least until recently.²⁸ We know who “we” are; our collective identity as a people is the premise and point of departure of modern American historiography. Even, perhaps especially, when we focus on the conflicts, divisions, and exclusions that now give our history its narrative structure, we take the national framework for granted. It is hard to resist the judgment, for instance, that by failing to deal effectively with slavery, the founders failed to live up to their own nation-defining ideals; yet we also know that we are somehow implicated in, somehow obliged to acknowledge and rectify, this tarnished legacy. The myth of nationhood authorizes these complex and ambiguous transactions with previous generations. But how did the Revolutionaries come to see themselves as a generation, as a nation that could legitimately determine its own destiny? In his most famous meditation on the problem of generations, in a letter to James Madison in 1789, Jefferson wrote, “We seem not to have perceived that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another.”²⁹ The existence and integrity of every people, or nation, or generation should be self-evident, if only we would look. Yet the reasoning here was obviously circular: in some sense we already have to know ourselves as a people before there can be anything to see. Where did this knowledge come from?

Historians have identified “popular sovereignty” as the great invention of the Revolutionary age, the liberating “fiction” that enabled Americans to justify their self-constituted political societies.³⁰ The concept was indeed a protean one, capable of covering much confusion and avoiding many hard questions about who would govern whom. The crucial issue could not be finessed, however: real people had to see themselves as part of the “people”—or “peoples”—who were supposed to be the ultimate source of legitimate authority, if the new republican regime was to survive and prosper. This self-understanding, the intuitive knowledge Jefferson prescribed, had concrete implications for political life, as the people's duly elected (or self-appointed) leaders waged war against their presumed enemies, foreign and domestic. The political and constitutional conflicts that marked the progress of state building, like the mobilization of patriot forces against British tyranny during the Revolution, sustained a continuing, creative tension between the lofty idea of a sovereign people and more mundane struggles for advantage.

Jefferson never doubted who the “people” really were. But he also knew that his countrymen were all too frequently ignorant and complacent, and thus vulnerable to the seductive wiles of their real enemies. Chronic concern that Americans would sink into a state of collective unconsciousness, forgetting that they were a people, made Jefferson into a self-conscious nationalist, ever vigilant in the face of pervasive threats to the new nation's integrity and security. This was a nation defined by its enemies, at home and abroad. But it was also the ultimate culmination of Jefferson's imperial ideal: a republican people, fully conscious of itself, would be enlightened enough to sustain consensual union and strong enough to resist coercion by any enemy. Union was predicated on shared commitment to “federal and republican principles” that in turn depended on reciprocal recognition and identification among citizens in an inclusive national community.

During the great party struggles of the 1790s, the lineaments of national community came into sharpening focus for Jefferson. When Republicans identified themselves with the patriots of 1776 and called on their fellow citizens to return to Revolutionary first principles, they also offered an imaginative genealogy that linked two generations to a common purpose. For Jeffersonians, the “revolution of 1800” constituted a reenactment of the War for Independence, thus sustaining the founders' living presence, the myth of identity across generations, that makes nations seem immortal.³¹ At the same time, the consciousness of one generation giving way to the next suggested an organic, quasi-familial conception of the nation. Over time the thickening weave of family connection, interdependent interest, and affectionate fellow feeling would provide rich soil for raising young patriots.

Imagining America's future in the passage of one generation to the next, Jefferson showed himself to be a sentimental nationalist.³² The sentimental assumptions of his nationalism are most clearly apparent in his thinking about the three great races, European, African, and Indian, who called the American continent home. Jefferson had no illusions about the profound injustice of racial slavery. Yet it is striking that he apparently worried so little about the wrong done to individual slaves, including the many hundreds of human beings he owned and exploited over the course of his long life. In chapter 5 I suggest that Jefferson was much more troubled by the injustice to enslaved Africans as a people. Stolen from their own country, the captive nation of slaves could only look at their captors as enemies. At the same time that Americans proclaimed their own existence as an independent people, they thus encountered an internal enemy, determined to overthrow the rule of their masters and prepared to ally themselves with the British tyrant. For the sentimental Jefferson the new republic would be a community of love; but blacks, never forgetting “the injuries they have sustained,” and whites, with their “deep rooted prejudices,” could only hate one another—until the captive nation was sent away, to a country of their own, where the captors would “declare them a free and independant people.” Only then could full justice be done. Only then could these two nations, each in possession of its own country, claim its “separate and equal station” among “the powers of the earth.”³³

Jefferson argued that slavery had a demoralizing effect on white masters as well as black slaves. The despotic rule of master over slave was hardly a model of social relations for impressionable young republicans. Perhaps even more troubling, I suggest, was the fact that the presence of this enslaved people, coerced into working the land for their masters' benefit, denied Virginians the direct, unmediated relationship with their “country” that they sought to vindicate in their struggle for independence against Britain. The virtuous farmer is an American icon; his virtue consists not only in his vaunted independence but in his patriotism, for his relation to his own land is a microcosm and metaphor for the people's love of their country. Jefferson's conception of the new American nation dictated, or rationalized, the expatriation and colonization of enslaved blacks; it also led this great planter to celebrate the agrarian virtues of nonslaveholding yeoman farmers. It was with these hardy patriots in mind that the imperial Jefferson looked westward in his Inaugural Address, to the “chosen country” beyond the frontiers of settlement where there was “room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.”³⁴

Jefferson's hyperbole here is astonishing. But he was not really talking about boundless spaces: at this point the Louisiana Purchase was not even a speck on his horizon. Talk about thousands of generations was instead a paean to the immortal nation, an exultant leap into futurity for a people who had barely survived the transit from the first generation to the second. But obstacles had to be overcome before the nation could fulfill its destiny. Early American policy makers could not overlook the presence of Indian peoples. For the philosophic observer it might be only a matter of time—a very few of the thousands and thousands of generations Jefferson had in view—before the Indians faded away, in futile resistance to the inexorable advance of republican civilization or by assimilation with the Americans. Yet the Indians remained a formidable threat throughout the first decades of national history. During the Revolution, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration George III had unleashed “merciless Indian Savages,” vicious remnants of once proud nations, against the American frontiers.³⁵ As tools of counterrevolution, these “Savages” threatened to deny the rising generation its birthright, preempting the formation of new self-governing republics within the new nation's imperial domain.

Jefferson's empire was threatened on all sides, at home and abroad. To counter those threats, Jefferson imagined a new nation, a people “with one heart and one mind,” the living embodiment of his imperial ideal. American nationhood was supposed to be the first great step toward the republican millennium, when self-governing peoples across the world would join in peaceful, prosperous, harmonious union. Enslaved Africans had to be repatriated to their own country, so that they too could participate in this progressive development—and so that the new nation could be freed from a chronic and demoralizing state of internal war that threatened to subvert its republican institutions. Indian nations, remnants of an earlier, savage stage in human history, either must accept the gifts of civilization and become part of the American nation, or they must face removal and extinction. The western hinterland constituted a single country, the future home of one great people.

Jefferson's imperial vision is most conspicuous to us now in the history of a federal union that would be destroyed in a civil war, thus finally sharing the fate of the British empire itself, the original inspiration of his vision. But if the constitutional form of Jefferson's empire of liberty collapsed, it left an enduring legacy in the language of American nationhood. Jefferson believed that the continuing existence and future prosperity of the new federal republic—an empire without a metropolis, a regime of consent, not coercion—lay in the character of the people, the source of all legitimate authority. In effect, the nation was conjured into existence in order to secure and sustain a new and improved republican empire. Yet when the imperial superstructure collapsed, the national foundation survived. By 1861, the idea that Americans constituted a single people was powerful enough to justify a massive war against supposedly misguided Americans who wanted to take their states out of the union. For those who would preserve the union at any cost, the Revolutionaries' vision of perpetual peace in an expanding republican empire was mere delusion, the archaic fantasy of another age.

Can we conclude that Jefferson's great invention, his conception of American nationhood, ultimately subverted his great hope, his vision of republican empire? Though such a formulation resonates with Jefferson's despair during successive crises of the union, it seems much too neat. The juxtaposition between “empire” and “nation” that I elaborate throughout this book obscures the flow of meaning from one term to the other. Something of what Jefferson and his fellow founders hoped for in their new republican dispensation is still discernible in our self-understanding as a people.

Nationalists are now often depicted as advocates of essentialism, exclusivism, and hatred of alien others. Yet it remains true today, as it was in American Revolutionary days, that national self-determination is the threshold of political modernity, of full participation in international society; and if cosmopolitans now eschew the crude ways in which nationalists have defined nationhood—evoking as Jefferson did a mystical identification of land and people through time and across space—they generally acknowledge the need for affective and effective communities of some sort, “nations” at a more highly evolved state of political “civilization.” And for peoples seeking to determine their own political destiny and so to participate in the democratizing modern world, nationhood is clearly a great boon, not a source of agonized ambivalence. For these new nationalists, Jefferson remains a powerful icon.

Yet in Jefferson's own country—in this no longer new nation—we have come to recognize that civilization is not necessarily an unmitigatedly good thing. For Americans, the protracted and destructive assault on Indian peoples in which Jefferson played such an important role, like the trade in human beings that made Jefferson and the new nation so prosperous, raises acutely discomfiting questions about both “progress” and “civilization.” At the end of the “American Century,” we may also wonder if the universal values that American policy makers espouse have not sometimes, too often, been the cover or pretext for the projection of less laudable national interests. It is a nice irony that foreign policy critics have decried American “imperialism,” thus identifying the United States with other “great powers”—and, implicitly, with the British imperial regime that the American Revolutionaries thought they had demolished. For the central premise of the Jeffersonian creed was that the Revolution had given rise to a new dispensation, a republican empire that was the very antithesis of the Old World balance of power. This republican “imperialism” survives both in the professions of American foreign policy makers and in the skepticism of their critics.

The modern dialogue about professions and practices is itself the legacy of the Enlightenment, signifying our sense of ourselves as reaching toward a higher stage of moral and political development. This is where we begin with Jefferson, optimistically looking toward the progress of civilization in his new world, yet fearing that the new nation might forfeit its historic opportunity. We may see things differently, or think we do, but we find ourselves in much the same place. And we are still speaking the language of American nationhood.

Notes

1. The Declaration of Independence as Adopted by Congress, 4 July 1776, TJP 1:429-33, at 429.

2. TJ, Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1805, TJW, 518-23, at 519.

3. TJ to Dr. Joseph Priestley, 21 March 1801, in L&B, 10:227-30, at 229.

4. TJ, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801, TJW, 492-96, at 493.

5. “He is without a doubt the man of the millennium,” according to filmmaker Ken Burns, quoted in an Associated Press story, “Tourist Sites Hope Jefferson Film Brings Visitors,” Charlottesville Daily Progress, 5 Feb. 1997. The classic study is Peterson, Jefferson Image in the American Mind; on TJ's role in the early development of his image, see McDonald, “Jefferson and America: Episodes in Image Formation.” For TJ's standing in the American pantheon, see Onuf, “Scholars' Jefferson”; Ellis, American Sphinx, 3-23; Maier, American Scripture, ix-xxi, 154-215; Lewis and Onuf, “American Synecdoche.”

6. TJ to Roger C. Weightman, 24 June 1826, in L&B, 16:181-82, at 182. For an appreciation of TJ's imperial vision, written in the wake of a world war against totalitarian regimes, see Boyd, “Jefferson's ‘Empire of Liberty.’”

7. For a critique focused on foreign policy, see Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, esp. 157-71.

8. Foster et al., “Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child.” On the relationship, see Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. For the impact of race and slavery on TJ's reputation, see French and Ayers, “Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson.” The implications of the DNA study for our understanding of TJ, slavery, and race relations are explored in Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.

9. Notes, Query XVIII (“Manners”), 162.

10. For Peterson's “mortifying confession” that TJ “remains for me, finally, an impenetrable man,” see his Jefferson and the New Nation, viii.

11. Burstein, “Problem of Jefferson Biography.” Burstein's Inner Jefferson is a particularly revealing portrait. I am indebted to TJ's biographers, particularly to Peterson's Jefferson and the New Nation and Malone's Jefferson and His Time.

12. TJ to Roger C. Weightman, 24 June 1826, in L&B, 16:181-82, at 181. For TJ's moral vision, see Helo, “Jefferson's Republicanism and Slavery,” and Yarbrough, American Virtues.

13. Boorstin, Lost World of Thomas Jefferson.

14. Malone, Jefferson the Virginian; Wilson, “Jefferson and the Republic of Letters.” For the problem of Anglo-American provincial culture, see Greene, “Search for Identity.”

15. See Ceaser, Reconstructing America, 19-65.

16. On nationalism, see Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780; Anderson, Imagined Communities; Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. On British (and greater British) national identity, see Colley, Britons; on the United States, see Onuf, “Federalism, Republicanism, and Sectionalism,” and Waldstreicher's In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes.

17. See Onuf and Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World.

18. The Declaration of Independence as Adopted by Congress, 4 July 1776, TJP 1:429-33, at 429.

19. Pagden, Lords of All the World, quotation at 157.

20. TJ's “original Rough draft” of the Declaration of Independence, TJP 1:423-28, at 427.

21. For discussion of the key texts in the debate over TJ's “republicanism” and “liberalism,” see Onuf, “Scholars' Jefferson,” 675-84.

22. Onuf, Republican Legacy in International Thought.

23. See Mayer, Constitutional Thought of Jefferson.

24. TJ, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801, TJW, 492-96, at 493-94, 493.

25. TJ to John Holmes, 22 April 1820, in L&B, 15:248-50, at 250. The brief quotations in the following paragraph are from this letter, at 250, 249.

26. For the early American union, see Hendrickson, Ideological Origins of American Internationalism.

27. The phrase is from TJ to John Taylor of Caroline, 4 [misdated 1] June 1798, in L&B, 10:44-47, at 46.

28. For a redefinition of American nationhood in a way that transcends the Anglo-American “ethnocultural identity” of TJ's “First Republic,” see Lind, Next American Nation, quotation at 27. I am skeptical that national identity can be so neatly calibrated to the successive “republics” Lind describes. See note 16 above.

29. TJ to James Madison, 6 Sept. 1789, TJP 15:392-98, at 395.

30. Morgan, Inventing the People.

31. For the “revolution of 1800,” see TJ to Judge Spencer Roane, 6 Sept. 1819, in L&B, 15:212-16, at 212.

32. For the sentimental TJ, see Burstein, Inner Jefferson. Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, and Burstein, Sentimental Democracy, track sentimental themes through the larger culture.

33. Notes, Query XIV (“Laws”), 138.

34. TJ, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801, TJW, 492-96, at 494.

35. The Declaration of Independence as Adopted by Congress, 4 July 1776, TJP 1:429-33, at 431.

Abbreviations

JMP: William T. Hutchinson, William M. E. Rachal, et al., eds. The Papers of James Madison: Congressional Series. 17 vols. Chicago Charlottesville, Va., 1959-91.

L&B: Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. 20 vols. Washington, D.C., 1903-4.

Lib. Cong.: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Notes: Thomas Jefferson. Notes on the State of Virginia. Ed. William Peden. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1954.

TJ: Thomas Jefferson

TJP: Julian Boyd et al., eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. 27 vols. to date. Princeton, N.J., 1950—.

TJW: Merrill D. Peterson, ed. Jefferson Writings. New York, 1984.

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