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Now, what's this got to do with debts and constitutions?
Let's talk about this a little mit, a little bit, and I'll,
and I'll refer yet again to Jefferson's inaugural address on March 4, 1801.
When exulting at his near and late victory,
in that great revolution of 1800, Jefferson looks west.
And this is significant because remember, looking east
toward the old world, toward the metropolis as
provincial Americans had always done ,that's looking back
to the old world, toward death, toward aristocracy.
And at this period in European history, rivers of blood are
flowing because the peoples of Europe have yet to achieve their freedom.
But we, we're so-, we're sorry for them,
because after all we're students of the Scottish enlightenment.
We feel bad for everybody, but we look west and we see a great future for us.
What we see there, in this chosen land for a nearly chosen people,
is land for the thousandth, to the thousandth generation.
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How many generations did it take?
Well I'll leave that for you historians and mathematicians to figure out.
Ten, 15 something like that.
But Jefferson's not really, literally talking about a piece
of land for each one of you in each generation.
Instead he's talking about the immortality, the perpetuity of the nation.
This to me is the key idea.
That is, we become a nation because
of the relationship between and among generations.
Each one of us stands in this historic flow of time, looking backward
at our fathers with gratitude and love, let that be a warning to you.
Looking forward to the future to provide for the rising generation.
This notion that your role in world history is not simply to avoid
taxes, to get rid of the British king, but is instead to create
a new kind of republic, a nation that enjoys immortal life.
What a consolation the idea of the nation is because we
will, after all, die We will all die.
And Jefferson knows this.
It doesn't happen for a long time with Jefferson, but he has lots of death in
his own family, and it's the ordinary experience
of Americans and people all over the world.
But what a consolation if instead of the usual religious promise of
everlasting life, of salvation if you will, if you will adhere faithfully to
the prescriptions of your particular faith, if instead, you can imagine
yourself as part of a community, right here on Earth, that will live forever.
Democracy for Jefferson, and beginning with these simple ideas
about how you need to provide for the next generation.
A democracy gives rise to this kind of secular,
terrestrial immortality, and that's the modern idea of the nation.
And that's what Jefferson anticipates.
And it's in that idea of the nation and the attachments that we
all feel to each other, at least now, since you've heard me give this
lecture, it's, the, through those attachments, and
with that idea of the nation, that
we can transcend ourselves, and imagine a
glorious future for all of us collectively.
Democracy then is not simply a way we make
decisions now, it's the way we sustain ourselves across time.
Now constitutions, this is what Madison got very upset
about, we really have to write a new constitution?
Well this is the major concern for Jefferson.
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This idea of 19 years, or it was actually 18 years and eight months.
Seems kind of silly to us, mechanical, arbitrary, but it's a way if people
would agree to this, is a way that they can imagine themselves over time.
Why would we need a new constitution every 19 years?
Well, Jefferson says, and this is a key idea,
progress, in the future we will be a different people.
I was a member of the revolutionary generation, he writes
in 1816, and we deserve the respect of the following generations.
We did our job, but if they, my colleagues from the revolution, were to rise
up from the dead, and Jefferson is in a way, imagining his revolutionary
colleagues as dead and therefore, himself as dead, we would tell you that
what fit us in our barbarous youth is not fit for the success of generations.
We have outgrown the clothing that we once wore.
This is the humble modest image that Jefferson
uses to explain why we need a new constitution.
Why it's not sufficient
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Experience is everything.
Experience has taught us how to move forward to achieve a
higher level of moral and civic perfection, and we should do it.
We need a new constitution.
But how can that constitution be legitimate?
How can we feel that it's ours?
How can we avoid a
constant tumult, [FOREIGN], revolutions, bloody revolutions.
For Jefferson the civic ritual of rewriting the
Constitution would be an alternative to war and bloodshed.
A way of sustaining across the generations that notion that the spirit of 1776 lives,
not the particular formulations of the founders at Philadelphia in 1787.
Jefferson is no originalist He believes in a living constitution.
And that's why his notion of Democracy is so important.
We must all live with the knowledge and in the expectation and hope that succeeding
generations will take their place on the world stage and do the right thing.
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And what Jefferson has done here, and this is a way to think about
Jefferson's effort, his bold and in some ways silly effort, but an important one.
And that is to think of democracy in three dimensions.
Not simply as a rule for making decisions now, but as
a way of relating decisions we make now to future decisions.
There are various ways in which, in
the American system, we've tried to achieve this.
The idea of sunset law, I mentioned before.
The idea of frequent constitutional revision, which is actually true on the
state level through at least the 19th century, lots of new constitutions.
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What constitution writing does is to engage the
people in acts of civic creation and participation.
And we wonder, how do you sustain that?
Well, would party competition do it?
Does that constitute a, a renewal of our, of our civic attachments and identity?
Well, Jefferson thought it was a little more than that, that was needed.
We need to make decisions that will not bind future generations.
We need to leave them with the estate, we need to live, leave them with what nature
has given us, that they may partake of that as well, and they not be bound by us.
For Jefferson, there's a profound pathos, a very personal dimension to
this, which I've mentioned a couple of times, and that is
that he feels poignantly and intensely that in many ways, he's
never been a free man because of the incubus of debt.
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I don't want you to think of Jefferson as a victim.
He could've done something about those debts.
It's absolutely true.
He had a gift for not toting up the bottom line, and founding,
finding out how bad off he actually was until it was too late.
And then, in his retirement years, when he
couldn't - no longer had a public income from
being president or vice president, things were looking
rough for Jefferson, his family took care of him.
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And they said, don't worry about it
Grandad, we'll sustain you through this time.
But Jefferson always knew in those years, he always knew that in
fact, he was not leaving his estate to his children.
There was no estate to leave.
Far from being a steward of the property
that he had inherited, Jefferson couldn't sustain it.
He was then, not a free man.
He experienced that sense of a loss of freedom.
The solution for the individual in a question of debt, the solution for
each American in sustaining that democratic
spirit, come up to the same thing.
And that is, if we embrace this principle of generational sovereignty.
This idea that every generation finds itself poised
at this moment, this crucial moment, in the
unfolding history of the nation, with a responsibility
to the ancestors, with a responsibility to the descendants.
That sense of connectedness, those fundamental and
natural attachments, are what democracy means for Jefferson.
Professor Peter S. OnufThomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
