At the Margin of Decision: Jefferson as Philosopher of the American Revolution

   

How did Thomas Jefferson perceive himself? This question has a foot in the subject of historical method as well as philosophic orientation. On his headstone at Monticello, Jefferson set out the three things for which he hoped he would be most remembered:

Each of these encompassed a grand philosophic principle aimed at the freedom of the person in both rights and thought. For an older historiography going back to the fifties and sixties, this was consonant with the view of Jefferson as the philosopher of the American Revolution.[2] Much has happened since those days to divert attention from that way of interpreting Jefferson’s legacy, but to my mind, it remains the correct reading both in terms of how Jefferson understood himself and in terms of how historical context is best interpreted.

A considerable amount of current scholarship seems to go to the question of why Jefferson compromised on his most fundamental philosophical premises, especially as they related to his moral opposition to slavery. This is certainly the case with Alan Taylor’s recent descriptions of master, servant and slave relations in Virginia in his Thomas Jefferson’s Education (2019).[3]

Taylor presents a vivid portrayal of Virginia aristocratic society right down to its architecture and geography. He presents a convincing case of all the reasons why Jefferson compromised those ideals. But it deepens the mystery of why Jefferson held his original commitments to begin with. Afterall, the thesis of slavery as a positive good, was already well established in the New World, most especially in the Caribbean. Wouldn’t the path of least resistance for Jefferson and most of his contemporary planters on the continent, have been to follow this same route?

But Taylor’s narrative really focuses on Jefferson’s life after 1780. More specifically his analysis begins with Notes on the State of Virginia.[4] But that’s too late and provides no explanation for Jefferson’s initial thoughts on rights, liberty and slavery leading up to the Summary View and the Declaration. If context really matters, it matters as much in the micro-details of his early education as the macro structures impinging on him. Here is where the force of ideas really comes into play.

Like their continental counterparts, colonial leaders in the sugar islands protested against Parliamentary intrusion into their internal affairs. This often encourages scholars to assume a similitude in thought and action between the communities that is in actuality more nominal than real.

Prior to the Somerset Case in 1772 in which chief justice Lord Mansfield found no precedents in favor of slavery in the laws of England, the greatest colonial planters were especially keen to ensure control over their personal servants when traveling through the realm. This was a point of considerable agitation to a great many reformers who took special pains to argue the incompatibility of slavery with English laws.

To counter such arguments, men like Edward Long of Jamaica explicitly contended in support of slave ownership in England itself. Much of this was based upon their understanding of earlier feudal practices, especially the laws of villeinage. Conceding that such practices had receded in England, it had nonetheless, Long insisted, “sprung up once more in the remoter parts of the English dominion,” and was still recognized in certain sources of authority on the English common law.[5]

But there were other sources as well, many from the same philosophical tradition of which Jefferson’s first mentor, Professor William Small of William and Mary College, was himself a product.[6] These authorities disputed the legitimacy of feudalism and argued that the most illiberal aspects of medieval England could be traced back to the corruptions of Norman tyranny imposed on the Saxons after the Conquest of 1066. And these were, in fact, the very sources Jefferson apparently favored in his first years of study.

Since the new edition of Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book edited by David Konig and Michael Zuckert, it is now recognized that the legal entries copied up through item number 556, likely occurred much earlier than historian Gilbert Chinard had originally estimated. What do these entries reveal? Jefferson had at first followed one of the more frequently cited legal sources, William Salkeld, on the ancient feudal precedents of common law, but when he reached the passages on villeinage, he suddenly did an about face and turned to Salkeld’s critics.

Salkeld had been one of those early authorities to argue on behalf of retaining bound servitude in England, contending “vigorously for the owner’s property interest in the slave’s person.” But Jefferson rejected the basis of Salkeld’s interpretation and turned to another source, Lord Raymond’s reporting of the very same cases, and here he “omitted Salkeld” and his commentary, and substituted Raymond’s denial of those precedents that appeared to support any “property classification for the person of the slave.”[7]

Other authorities were then later added by Jefferson to his earlier notations. These sources challenged the very validity of Salkeld as a source, contending instead for a more liberal interpretation of the more ancient Saxon laws that supposedly preceded the Norman impositions of feudalism.

Among these authorities were Lord Kames and Sir David Dalrymple both of Scotland who strengthened the young Jefferson’s “belief in the purity of Saxon legal institutions” and the degradation of those institutions “by the Norman yoke of feudalism.”[8]  Such sources formed much of the basis for the decision that would eventually be reached years later in Somerset and its Scottish counterpart Wedderburn v. Knight (1777), but Jefferson had apparently already arrived at that conclusion on the ultimate illegality and injustice of slavery.

The time spent on these matters and the depths to which Jefferson’s researches took him in law, politics and philosophy can thus be seen in great detail. These formed the foundation of his immediate interests and formed the basis of his first cases as a young attorney in which he sought the manumission of enslaved persons and entered into the sponsorship of legislation with Richard Bland to limit and eventually curtail slavery in Virginia.[9]

Ultimately, Jefferson did not follow through with those early commitments in his own life, but he also never wavered from the conviction that enslavement in all forms was an evil. Having been born to the life of the mind in a way that few other Americans of his day were, it is perhaps not surprising that he was especially drawn to freedom of thought even above other liberties. He articulated this inclination in bold strokes to his friend Benjamin Rush in 1800 when asserted, “I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (emphasis added).[10]

That contemporaries as well as later generations continued to raise the Declaration as a counter to human bondage is testimony to the power of the synthesis of ideas that Jefferson referred to as the harmonizing sentiments of the day. It remains to Jefferson’s credit that he never repudiated that part of his philosophic labors. But why he did not relinquish the conviction that slavery in all forms is an evil, would surely be as interesting a topic for discussion as to why he went no further than he did.

[1] “Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, “Jefferson's Grave and Tombstone,” Monticello.org, March 5, 2025, https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/jeffersons-gravestone/

[2] Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (1950); Merril D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (1970).

[3] Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson’s Education (2019).

[4] See Taylor, p. 133.

[5] Edward Long, “Candid Reflections,” in Greene and Yirush, ed.s, Exploring the Bounds of Liberty, vol 3 (2018), p. 2154.

[6] Martin Clagett, A Spark of Revolution: William Small, Thomas Jefferson, and James Watt; The Curious Connection Between the American and the Industrial Revolution (2022).

[7] See “Introduction,” in Jefferson’s Legal Commonplace Book, David Thomas Konig and Michael P. Zuckert, ed.s, (2019), pp. 14-18.

[8] Ibid. p. 17.

[9] Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary (2017), 128-129.

[10] From Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 23 September 1800 at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-32-02-0102