Read Online American Sphinx by Joseph J. Ellis - Free Book Online
Authors: Joseph J. Ellis
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entire mismanagement of imperial policy toward America on Parliament or “the evil ministers to the king,” still the accepted approach within even the radical camp, Jefferson made the king complicitous in the crimes against colonial rights. He accused George III of negligence: permitting colonial assemblies to be dissolved; refusing to hear appeals from aggrieved petitioners; delaying the passage of land reforms. But he also charged the king with outright acts of illegality on his own: sending armed troops into colonial cities to put down lawful demonstrations; prohibiting the natural migration of colonial settlers beyond the Appalachian Mountains. He even introduced the charge that provoked such spirited debate when included in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence—namely, that George III had perpetuated the existence of chattel slavery by repeatedly blocking colonial efforts to end the African slave trade. In effect, with the advantage of hindsight, it is possible to see
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as a preliminary draft of the bill of indictment against George III contained in the Declaration, written a full two years before the more famous document and before Jefferson had even taken his seat in the Continental Congress. 16
The second latent feature in
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that went unnoticed at the time is of even greater significance in exposing Jefferson’s cast of mind at the dawn of his public career. It is an elaborate and largely mythological version of English history. In the midst of his litany against monarchical abuses of power, Jefferson inserted a long paragraph in which he traced the origin of such abuses back to the Norman Conquest. The source of the colonial problem with British authority did not date from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765; the problem really began in 1066, when the Normans defeated the Saxons at the Battle of Hastings. This was the origin of what Jefferson called “the fictitious principle that all lands belong originally to the king. . . .” All of English history since the Norman Conquest had been an unfortunate aberration, known under the name of feudalism, which then flared up in a most virulent form in the recent royal exercise of arbitrary power in the colonies. Jefferson indulged his own “fictitious principle” by purporting to discover in the Saxon past of pre-Norman England, and before that in the forests of Germany, a set of people who lived freely and harmoniously, without kings or lords to rule over them, working and owning their land as sovereign agents. 17
The “once upon a time” character of Jefferson’s interpretation, which has also come to be known as the Whig interpretation of history, deserves studied attention as a crucial clue to Jefferson’s deepest intellectual instincts. He had been exposed to the central story line of Whig history in several books that he read as a young man, chiefly Paul de Rapin’s multivolume
History of England
and Sir John Dalrymple’s
History of Feudal Property in Great Britain.
He had also read in translation Tacitus’s
Germania,
the key source for the Whig historians because of its description of the Saxon model of representative government before contamination by feudal monarchs. So Jefferson’s youthful reading in standard works of Whig history unquestionably helped shape his political thinking before 1776 and was one reason he consistently referred to “the ancient Whig principles” as the wellspring for the values underlying the movement for American independence. But the appeal of the Whig histories derived from something more than their rhetorical or logic power. They were influential precisely because they told a story that fitted perfectly with the way his mind worked. Their romantic endorsement of a pristine past, a long-lost time and place where men had lived together in perfect harmony without coercive laws or predatory rulers, gave narrative shape to his fondest imaginings and to utopian expectations with deep
Summary View
as a preliminary draft of the bill of indictment against George III contained in the Declaration, written a full two years before the more famous document and before Jefferson had even taken his seat in the Continental Congress. 16
The second latent feature in
Summary View
that went unnoticed at the time is of even greater significance in exposing Jefferson’s cast of mind at the dawn of his public career. It is an elaborate and largely mythological version of English history. In the midst of his litany against monarchical abuses of power, Jefferson inserted a long paragraph in which he traced the origin of such abuses back to the Norman Conquest. The source of the colonial problem with British authority did not date from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765; the problem really began in 1066, when the Normans defeated the Saxons at the Battle of Hastings. This was the origin of what Jefferson called “the fictitious principle that all lands belong originally to the king. . . .” All of English history since the Norman Conquest had been an unfortunate aberration, known under the name of feudalism, which then flared up in a most virulent form in the recent royal exercise of arbitrary power in the colonies. Jefferson indulged his own “fictitious principle” by purporting to discover in the Saxon past of pre-Norman England, and before that in the forests of Germany, a set of people who lived freely and harmoniously, without kings or lords to rule over them, working and owning their land as sovereign agents. 17
The “once upon a time” character of Jefferson’s interpretation, which has also come to be known as the Whig interpretation of history, deserves studied attention as a crucial clue to Jefferson’s deepest intellectual instincts. He had been exposed to the central story line of Whig history in several books that he read as a young man, chiefly Paul de Rapin’s multivolume
History of England
and Sir John Dalrymple’s
History of Feudal Property in Great Britain.
He had also read in translation Tacitus’s
Germania,
the key source for the Whig historians because of its description of the Saxon model of representative government before contamination by feudal monarchs. So Jefferson’s youthful reading in standard works of Whig history unquestionably helped shape his political thinking before 1776 and was one reason he consistently referred to “the ancient Whig principles” as the wellspring for the values underlying the movement for American independence. But the appeal of the Whig histories derived from something more than their rhetorical or logic power. They were influential precisely because they told a story that fitted perfectly with the way his mind worked. Their romantic endorsement of a pristine past, a long-lost time and place where men had lived together in perfect harmony without coercive laws or predatory rulers, gave narrative shape to his fondest imaginings and to utopian expectations with deep
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