Jefferson and Hamilton (12 page)

Jefferson never sought to unravel the reasons behind his reform proclivities. One of his best biographers, Merrill Peterson, concluded that Jefferson probably “did not understand them himself.”
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Jefferson did say that his convictions stemmed from his “life of inquiry and reflection,” though he also insisted that his transforming journey had begun in college, where he “heard more good sense, more rational and philosophical conversations than in all my life.”
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But something made Jefferson receptive to the new ideas he heard from Professor Small and others, and to reconsidering old ways of thinking. His republicanism may have been nourished by his shock at recognizing that many of his dissolute and unproductive college classmates—most of whom were scions of aristocratic families—would someday be politically and socially powerful simply because of their birthright. It may have come from sitting with their ilk in the House of Burgesses, where he discovered soon enough that given the “bigoted intolerance” of most of his fellow assemblymen, nothing “liberal could expect success.”
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It is also possible that Jefferson may have sensed a contemptuous or patronizing tone among greater planters who interacted with his uneducated, parvenu father. He possibly felt that doors were shut to Peter Jefferson because he had not hailed from an elite and powerful family. Or, his republicanism may have come about in a circular manner. Critical thinking might have led him to comprehend the evil of slavery, which in turn might have led him to the conviction that republicanism offered the best hope for purging the land of that stain and, simultaneously, of improving the lot of humankind.

Jefferson had launched his reform efforts prior to independence. While trapped in Philadelphia, he had drafted a constitution and sent it to Williamsburg sometime in the spring of 1776. Much that he proposed was in step with the thoughts of others who were simultaneously contemplating constitutions for their states, but one suggestion was designed to lay “the axe to the root of Pseudo-aristocracy.”
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Believing that possession of land was the key not merely to individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness but also to the very survival of an American republic, Jefferson urged Virginia to take a step that had never previously been attempted by any American province. He suggested that Virginia give fifty acres to each free, landless man. This would
immediately bestow suffrage rights on all adult, white males, and it also had the potential to launch a real social and political revolution. Most assemblymen considered such largess to be too radical. Besides, in a state where great fortunes could be made from speculating in land, and in which most of the land was owned by men of the social class that dominated the assembly, Jefferson’s proposition never stood a chance. But he did not give up. Once he arrived back in Virginia in the fall of 1776 and took a seat in the legislature, Jefferson worked with others to open the west. The assembly voted to make Kentucky a county. When the war was over, settlers could look forward to crossing the mountains to the bluegrass country, where cheap—if not free—land would be abundantly available.
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This was just the start. Five days after reentering the legislature, Jefferson took a potentially far-reaching step. He proposed that the state’s legal code be reviewed and “adopted to our republican form of government.” The legislature agreed and appointed him to the five-member Committee of Revisors to undertake the project. Two of the revisors, not being lawyers, rapidly dropped off the committee. The three remaining members—Jefferson, Wythe, and Edmund Pendleton—agreed to equally divide the work. They also concluded that it would be too “bold” to ask the legislature to “abrogate our whole system.” Furthermore, it would delay the completion of the work for an eternity. Nevertheless, the committee from the outset saw its role as one of “modifying” and “modernizing” Virginia’s laws. In January 1777 the three revisors “repaired to our respective homes,” as Jefferson said, and took up their task. Three years passed before their work was completed.
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Not everything recommended by the recodification committee was especially enlightened, including two areas for which Jefferson was responsible. His overhaul of the criminal code reduced a staggering number of capital crimes to just two; treason and murder. However, ignoring reforms that were already in place in some parts of Europe, he recommended a string of barbaric punishments for several crimes. So harsh was his criminal code that Jefferson himself subsequently called it “revolting” to “the modern mind.” It may have been that he was boxed in by others on the committee. He later hinted at having adhered to the wishes of his two colleagues who believed that macabre punishments would deter crimes.
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The Virginia legislature, which seldom distinguished itself as a beacon of enlightenment, was so appalled by the savagery of the proposed criminal code that it refused to enact it.
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Jefferson drafted the section on slaves and free blacks as well. Despite his resplendent and inspiring passages on liberty and equality in the Declaration of Independence, he was hardly forward-looking on matters of race. In fact, his outlook was all too conventional for the time. He admitted his abhorrence
of the color black and said that he found Africans’ “wooly hair” and physiques to be repugnant. Accepting abundant racial stereotypes (he called them “Deep-rooted prejudices”), Jefferson believed that blacks were slow, lazy, oversexed, less capable than whites of reasoning, and on the whole an inferior race.
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With Jefferson taking the lead, the Committee of Revisors proposed making it illegal for slaves to be brought into Virginia, a step the House of Burgesses had unsuccessfully sought before the Revolution, but which the legislature approved in 1778.

Despite his racism, Jefferson wished to abolish slavery. He thought it an abomination for both races, and he believed its abolition would break the aristocracy’s stranglehold on Virginia. However, when members of the legislature who had drafted an emancipation bill asked him to include it in the revisal of the laws, Jefferson demurred, though he agreed to its submission as “an amendment … to be offered the legislature whenever the bill should be taken up.” Scholars have criticized Jefferson for refusing to incorporate the plan in the revised statutes, but he was a savvy politician who doubtless knew that the bill had no chance of passing during the war, and that to try and fail at this juncture likely would only make it more difficult to secure passage at a more favorable moment. Nevertheless, his consent to the amendment sheds light on Jefferson’s thinking with regard to ending slavery in Virginia.

The bill that he tacitly endorsed provided for the gradual end to slavery and for the removal from the state of those who were set free. It stipulated that all children born to slaves following some predetermined date were to be gradually emancipated. The females were to live with their parents until age eighteen, the males until age twenty-one; during those years, they were to be trained at public expense in farming and other pursuits. Upon reaching adulthood, they were to become “free and independent,” though they were to be colonized at some undisclosed location outside the state, where they were to remain under Virginia’s protection until they were self-sustaining. A couple of years after this legislation was drafted, Jefferson defended the decision to require the freedmen to leave the state on the grounds that the two races could never live together in harmony. In addition, he hinted that the expulsion of emancipated blacks was necessary for warding off race-based politics that would inevitably splinter whites.
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The emancipation bill was never introduced. Years later, Jefferson said that “the public mind would not yet bear the proposition,” and there is little reason to doubt his assertion. However, in 1783, thinking that a state constitutional convention was about to be called, Jefferson privately prepared a draft constitution (which was published in the middle of that decade). The draft specified that Virginia was not “to permit the introduction of any more slaves to reside
in this state, or the continuance of slavery beyond the generation which shall be living on the 31st day of December 1800; all persons born after that day being hereby declared free.” It said nothing of colonization of those who were freed. Jefferson’s constitutional thinking counted for nothing, as the proposed constitutional convention never met.
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Though the emancipation plans went nowhere, the Committee of Revisors—following Jefferson’s lead—proposed that it be made easier for slave owners to manumit their slaves, after which those who were freed would have to leave the state. So too would white women who bore children fathered by black men, and of course they would have to take their child into exile as well. Both recommendations eventually became law. The legislature also enacted a tightened slave code that Jefferson drafted, statutes that made already unsparing laws even harsher. Neither the Committee of Revisors nor the legislature considered citizenship for free blacks, and neither contemplated bequeathing to blacks the same legal rights enjoyed by whites.
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Jefferson waged battles for change in three other areas: land, religion, and education. During his first days back in the assembly in 1776, he secured the repeal of the entailing of estates. Entail, a carryover from medieval England, was designed to keep the land of a family intact, and under the practice the heir to entailed land could not sell the inherited property. Though not every estate in Virginia was entailed, many were, with the result that over several generations the practice had contributed to the concentration of property in fewer and fewer hands. For example, late in the seventeenth century, John Pleasants, a Tidewater planter, had entailed his nine thousand acres among three children; a century later, at the time of independence, the property remained in the hands of just three persons. Had Pleasants’s land never been entailed, some four hundred of his descendants might have owned a piece of the original estate by 1776. Jefferson was not only committed to individual freedoms; he also believed that the living should not be shackled by the practices of those who had lived in earlier times. What is more, practices such as entail facilitated the hegemony of Tidewater planters in the colonial assembly. Jefferson understood that the abolition of entail would over time weaken the aristocracy and redistribute political power in Virginia. Many of Virginia’s aristocrats understood that as well, and some ranted against Jefferson’s “cursed bill,” exclaiming that its reform-minded author was carrying on like a “midday drunkard.” Some influential Virginians hated Jefferson ever afterward.
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But their enmity did not stop him. Once the Committee of Revisors came into being, Jefferson also went after primogeniture, which required that a father’s property be bequeathed to his eldest son. Like entail, primogeniture
was non-compulsory, but the recodified law proposed by the committee, and enacted in 1785, eliminated the option.
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Virginia had greeted independence by guaranteeing freedom of religion, though, as had been true for 150 years, the province still had an established church (the Church of England before independence, the Episcopal Church thereafter). Established churches could force all citizens to attend their services and pay tithes for their support, and they not infrequently formed an alliance with the aristocracy, standing arm in arm against change. By the time Jefferson reached Williamsburg in the autumn of 1776, the legislature had been inundated with petitions from those who urged more substantive changes in the realm of religious freedom. Conservatives fought back, hoping among other things to retain laws that required church attendance and punished heresy and blasphemy. Jefferson joined the fight for greater religious freedom, which he subsequently called the “severest contest in which I have ever been engaged.”
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The battle raged for years, and its outcome was never certain. In 1777, as part of recodification, Jefferson drafted a statute for religious freedom, but he did not feel that the time was right for its introduction. Finally, in 1779, his proposed law was introduced. It would have instituted comprehensive change, literally bringing Virginia from the premodern to the modern world in the sphere of religion. It stated that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support” any church or religion, and that none “shall be restrained, molested, or burthened … on account of his religious opinions or belief.” It continued: “all men shall be free to profess … their opinions in matters of religion” and those opinions “shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.
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After a bruising struggle, the legislature postponed action on Jefferson’s bill; long after he left the assembly, his friend James Madison secured its passage. It was rapidly adopted as a model for laws of religious freedom in several states, and years later was incorporated in the U.S. Constitution through the First Amendment. Jefferson prayed that it might have some influence in Europe as well. Had “the almighty begotten a thousand sons, instead of one,” they could not have eradicated the “ignorance, superstition, poverty and oppression of body and mind” that churches had inflicted, he once remarked. But he believed that a law of the sort that he had written might “emancipate the minds” of Europe’s masses.
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Next to land reform, Jefferson believed that nothing was more crucial for sustaining republicanism than providing wider educational opportunities. To do so, he said, would establish “a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy.” He later asserted that “a nation
[that] expects to be ignorant and free … expects what never was and what never will be.” Should the citizenry be “inattentive to public affairs,” he additionally warned, officeholders “shall all become wolves.” Jefferson drafted a bill that called for three years of free public education for all white children in Virginia and for the establishment of public college preparatory schools for the most promising students. Those who excelled in the prep schools were to be the recipients of three years of free education at the College of William and Mary. While it was under consideration, Jefferson called the proposed education law “by far the most important bill in our whole code.” But as was the case with his forward-looking land distribution proposal, his educational recommendations were not enacted. Nor, for that matter, did the publicly endowed state library system that he advocated come into being. Jefferson’s proposals failed, he charged, because the “wealthy class [was] unwilling to incur” the expense that would result from “throw[ing] on wealth the education of the poor.” Not for the last time in American history, the wealthiest in society refused to make a sacrifice from which they perceived little or nothing of benefit to themselves.
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