Jefferson’s American Nation

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From the course by University of Virginia

Age of Jefferson

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University of Virginia

Age of Jefferson

271 ratings

This course provides an overview of Thomas Jefferson's work and perspectives presented by the University of Virginia in partnership with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Together, UVA and Monticello are recognized internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

From the lesson

'The earth belongs to the living'

In 1789, Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison from Paris in which he asserted that “the earth belongs to the living.” Calculating that a single generation could be said to last nineteen years, he proposed that no debts should be incurred that could not be paid off in nineteen years; that all laws should be re-written every nineteen years; and that Americans should re-write even their constitutions every nineteen years. Madison thought the ideas Jefferson outlined in this letter to be wildly impractical, and most commentators since then have come to the same conclusion. In this module, however, we’ll explore what Jefferson was getting at in claiming that “the earth belongs to the living.” In so doing, we’ll discover how this phrase expresses an idea that lies at the very core of Jefferson’s conception of equality, democracy, and the American nation.

Love and Democracy16:15

Jefferson’s American Nation10:44

Meet the Instructors

Professor Peter S. Onuf
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
Corcoran Department of History

[BLANK_AUDIO]

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.

For me, this is one of the key phrases in all of Jefferson's writings.

Thousandth to the thousandth generation.

Well, you know, we ran out of land a lot sooner than that.

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.

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

to keep wearing that constitutional clothing from 1787.

Because we've outgrown it.

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.

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.

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.

And that's why the political project, his prescriptions for democracy, converge

with his personal dilemma of the debts that have been entailed on him.

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.

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.

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