Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 13, 1993 TAG: 9304130357
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THOMAS JEFFERSON, POLITICIAN
THE WORLD into which Thomas Jefferson was born 250 years ago today was still uncomplicated enough for a man of his abilities to become proficient in an array of endeavors. Of course, his abilities were extraordinary.By formal occupation a (financially unsuccessful) farmer and planter, Jefferson was also a scholar, scientist, librarian-bibliophile, inventor, architect, diplomat, writer, philosopher of religion and educator. In some of those fields, he was among early America's top practitioners.
That's enough to make him an interesting figure of history. It is Jefferson's political life and thought, however, that make him a central figure in American history and a significant one in world history.
Jefferson himself seemed aware that the political arena would be the primary source of his legacy. In now-familiar instructions for the epitaph on his tombstone, he asked to be remembered as author of the Declaration of Independence, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.
The declaration's centrality to American political tradition is obvious. It and the U.S. Constitution are the foundation for the legitimacy of American government. And because America holds a special place in world history, Jefferson's ideas - applications of Enlightenment philosophy and expressions of democratic virtue - are a part of world history, too. The name Jefferson is invoked around the globe in support of values that democrats cherish.
The Statute of Religious Freedom was precursor to the First Amendment of that Constitution. (American minister to France at the time, Jefferson wasn't around for the writing of the Constitution. But James Madison, Jefferson's friend and collaborator, was.) In 1779, when Jefferson proposed the statute, Virginia already had disestablished the state church. But to Jefferson, that wasn't enough. Religious freedom did not simply mean tolerance of dissenting churches or even equal treatment of all sects, but rather a divorce of church from state.
The University of Virginia, third on Jefferson's list, is less overtly political. But to Jefferson, public education is the means by which republican leadership is to be trained - by which his "aristocracy of virtue and talent," rather than of birth and wealth, is to arise. At least in part, the university embodied his political thinking.
Some years ago, in his book "The Jefferson Image in the American Mind," historian Merrill D. Peterson showed how changing views of Jefferson have reflected changing American preoccupations. In his own time, it was Jefferson the partisan. After all, he co-founded what evolved into the Democratic Party; waged nasty propaganda war against the opposition Federalists; engaged during the Washington administration in sharp-elbowed bureaucratic battle against fellow Cabinet member Alexander Hamilton; twice won election to the presidency.
Later, it was Jefferson the Southern hero. Southern slaveholders and white supremacists saw in Jefferson's oft-stated fear of centralized authority a justification for their states-rights philosophy - despite the irony of using such alleged rights to defend slavery and bigotry rather than to uphold human rights, as in Jefferson's conception.
More recently, it has been Jefferson the human-rights advocate. The emphasis has been on the implications of his holding in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." Noted, too, in this age of debunking, has been the irony that the writer of those words remained a slaveholder all his life, albeit one deeply troubled by the institution.
For that matter, neither did women have equal rights in Jefferson's day, nor were people without property allowed to vote. Yet as historian Gordon Wood notes in his new book, "The Radicalism of the American Revolution," to focus on what Jefferson's generation failed to accomplish is to miss the significance of what it did. It laid the groundwork for the anti-slavery and women's-rights movements of the 19th century, Wood says, and for the general egalitarian spirit of the 20th.
Jefferson planted seeds not only for a new country, but for the progress of that nation since, and for the spread of its ideals everywhere.