Va-Hist Subscribers:

This has certainly been a busy day for discussions of new literature
relating to Thomas Jefferson. The following book review and response by the
author of the book originally appeared on H-SHEAR.

Please follow the letter and spirit of the copyright notice at the end of
the review.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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Visit the Library of Virginia's web site at http://www.lva.lib.va.us


-----Original Message-----
From: H-South Review Editor Ian Binnington [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 19 January, 2001 1:23 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Crosspost: H-SHEAR Review, Brewer on Onuf, _Jefferson's Empire_
and Reply


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (January, 2001)

Peter S. Onuf. _Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American
Nationhood_.  Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.  xi +
250 pp.  Notes, bibliography, and index.  $27.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-813-91930-4.

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Holly Brewer <[log in to unmask]>, Department of
History, North Carolina State University.

"We Shall all be Americans"?

"Slaves with us [in Virginia] have no powers as citizens.  Yet, in
representation in the [Federal] Government, they count in the proportion of
three to five. . . . In truth, the condition of different descriptions of
inhabitants in any country is a matter of municipal arrangement, of which
no foreign country has a right to take notice" (p. 121).  So Jefferson
wrote in 1816 to Samuel Kercheval in the Valley who questioned the
Constitution's granting representation on behalf of slaves, even though
they were not permitted to vote themselves.  Property and other
qualifications restricted the suffrage in Connecticut, continued
Jefferson.  Why was the situation of Virginia's slaves any different from
that of the majority of the population in Connecticut?  Peter Onuf's new
book asks "Was it?  Why did Jefferson refer to Virginia and Connecticut as
"foreign countr[ies]"?

Onuf's effort to weave together the complicated strands of Jefferson's
thinking about equality, consent, nation and empire into a coherent whole
marks a refreshing break from the now too familiar query of how he
contradicted himself.  Essentially, Onuf tries to follow Jefferson's
"tortuous" logic (p. 141), asking how Jefferson could justify slavery and
Indian removal and hold, as he did, his ideas about equality. How could a
republican who believed in equality be a champion of empire? Did not
Jefferson feel terrible strain? With the exception of Jefferson's one
remarkable quote from his Notes on the State of Virginia that "justice
cannot sleep forever," that God would side with the slaves if they should
rise up (p. 147), Onuf argues he did not.  Even Jefferson's position on the
Missouri crisis was largely "consistent with his Revolutionary principles"
(p. 11).

Essentially, Onuf contends that Jefferson had ideas about nation (and race)
that made both Indians and slaves into "captive nations" ineligible for
citizenship.  Jefferson deemed them too inferior in their way of living
(Indians) or attributes (black slaves) to measure up to his vision of who
should be included among the free and equal within the Virginia or United
States nations.  Especially, both "captive nations" either would sanction
unjust force (coerced consent) or would use it if allowed.  Native
Americans, in Jefferson's view, used force to make their women do men's
work and refused to make civilized use of the land.  Slaves would use force
to retaliate against their former masters, if once allowed, en masse, to
become full citizens.

Jefferson seems to have suggested that neither group was properly attached
to republican ideas and in some sense thus forfeited their rights.  Native
Americans, particularly, were "wilderness aristocrats" dependent on corrupt
British patronage. Onuf's analysis is in some ways more damning than Paul
Finkelman's or Joseph Ellis's.  The implication is that Jefferson had no
room for diversity, whether cultural or racial, no tolerance, even for
differences of opinion.  Even Federalist "monocrats" (e.g.  secret
supporters of monarchy and aristocracy) were "false citizens" who
logically, based on their disaffection to the principles of the republic,
should be excluded from participation (pp. 89-90).  Onuf goes so far as to
suggest that Jefferson represented the majority view, and that he would
have sanctioned Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal policy.

The two hinges on which Onuf's analysis swings are his interpretation of
Jefferson's ideas about nation and about empire.  In Jefferson's vision,
empire was not a negative, but a positive "empire of liberty" based on the
"consent of the governed," not force or coercion.  It need not involve
domination, but simply the spread of a principle of government. More
chillingly, Onuf suggests that nation, for Jefferson, could be defined in
part in "hereditary" terms (e.g. p. 77).  It thus could encompass ideas
about race (e.g. p. 169).

Of the five main chapters of this book, all but chapter two were previously
published elsewhere (although ch. 3 was published only in German).  Chapter
5 was given as Onuf's presidential address to SHEAR in 1997 and was
published in the _Journal of the Early Republic_ in 1998.  All were given
previously as papers.  Due to this originally separate state (no pun
intended), some of the chapters overlap a bit in content. Still, the book
represents a focused collection of Onuf's thoughts on _Jefferson's Empire_.

In researching this book, Onuf steeped himself in Jefferson's
writings.  This is his strength, but also his weakness.  We enter into
Jefferson's conflicted feelings in a way that makes clear that they have
become, to some degree, Onuf's as well. "My conflicted feelings . . . are
about Jefferson's larger project itself [the empire of liberty], the
project that inspired in him such hope and such despair.  Perhaps,
anti-biographer that I am, I have begun to identify with my subject" (p.
10).  This makes Onuf's analysis powerful and insightful.  We do, in fact,
follow Jefferson's tortuous logic. We are able, especially, to glimpse
Jefferson's conflicting values, values in conflict to a great degree within
Republican ideology.

But I found myself wishing that Onuf would acknowledge a bit more the ways
that force was used in the system of slavery (i.e. not to make Jefferson a
hypocrite, but to underline his tortuous logic more than Jefferson himself
was willing to do).  I found myself resenting slightly Onuf's use of
Jefferson's term "restrictionists" for those who sought to limit the
expansion of slavery into the Northwest.  Surely their stance could be
discussed on their own terms, however briefly? I was also not convinced
that Jefferson simply "was unable to transcend the prejudices of his day
(in his case, masquerading as science)" (p. 148) on the question of
race.  Onuf gave no evidence about those scientific ideas about
race.  Indeed, race became a "science" only in the very late eighteenth
century.[1] Only when one attaches oneself to equality -- does "race"
become an important excuse for maintaining rank.  Jefferson speculated, in
short, that blacks were not fully human in order to reify older status
distinctions that did not fit with his ideas about equality.  In a similar
vein, I see Jefferson as having great compunction about justifying anything
on the basis of inherited right (especially status) -- so that I am not
fully convinced by Onuf's contention that Jefferson encompassed only white
Virginians -- via inheritance -- into nationhood.  How does this mesh with
Jefferson's principle of a compact that must be renewed with each
generation?  Or Jefferson's ideas about citizenship, that rested so much on
choice?[2]

Following Onuf's own analysis, I also wondered whether Jefferson would
really have supported Andrew Jackson's project of removal (and whether it
was inevitable, p. 33).  Many groups of Indians, after all (the Iroquois
are the best example) retained some of their native lands and were not
"removed."  Especially for the Cherokee, who "civilized"  following
Jefferson's instructions -- might he not then have admitted them as members
-- citizens -- of his empire of liberty, given his other statements about
their equality?

I especially wished for a clearer sense of the change in Jefferson's views
over time.  Jefferson's 1784 version of the Northwest Ordinance proposed to
exclude slavery, for example, yet his position during the Missouri crisis
was the opposite. These suggest to me the ways in which Jefferson was
struggling with the logic, the dilemmas, the contradictions within
Republican ideology--and that he saw them especially clearly in the years
just following the Revolution and his grand statement of principles in the
Declaration of Independence.  Over time, he seems to have developed the
"tortuous logic" to justify a different stance.  I agree with Onuf that his
was not necessarily a "betrayal" of his own Revolutionary principles -- but
it should perhaps be described as a retreat, or as a rebalancing of his
different principles and priorities.

These quibbles aside, Onuf's analysis makes an important contribution to
our understanding of Jefferson's ideas.  His discussion of the Missourri
crisis, that highlights the equal rights of nations (or states) and the
question of non- intervention in the affairs of other nations, is
especially powerful.  "The Missourri crisis juxtaposed the claims of state
equality, self-constitution, and noninterference, the foundational premises
of Jeffersonian federalism -- and liberal internationalism -- against
restrictionist assertions that regimes founded on slavery could not be
republican because they were not based on the free consent of their
peoples" (p. 146). This book made me think again about these terribly
important problems and gave me greater insight into how Jefferson struggled
to reconcile his conflicting values and desires.  Onuf is right that we
have not even now resolved the tensions within American ideology--within
the interwoven republican and natural rights theories about nations,
empire, equality, and consent. These haunt our foreign policy as well as
our domestic. _Jefferson's Empire_ is necessary reading for anyone puzzling
over Jefferson and the legacy of the American Revolution.

Notes

[1].  Londa Schiebinger's _Nature's Body: Gender and the Making of Modern
Science_ (Boston, 1993) suggests that "The contours of racial and sexual
science in the eighteenth century followed the broader political struggles"
(p. 183).  In his classic _White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the
Negro, 1550-1812_, Winthrop Jordan identified some racial prejudice that
distinguished "breeds of men" before the Revolution in the writings of
(anti-Republican)  Englishmen such as Hume and Oliver Goldsmith (ch.
6).  But these (relatively unusual) arguments were used to support older
ideas about a great chain of being, that justified all forms of hierarchy
in society, including monarchy.  Even scientists such as Linnaeus (who
originated the ideas about genus and species) in the 1730s, the Comte du
Buffon (1749-1788), and the Virginian, Dr. John Mitchell (1745), included
blacks among all men and did not use their skin color to argue for innate
differences in capability. While some prejudice did clearly antedate
Jefferson in Virginia and Europe, a coherent scientific racism did
not.  Jefferson, in short, had choices and was actively engaged in
scientific debates.  His position -- more than any of the "scientists" who
preceded him -- was much more on the side of innate differences in the
reasoning ability (and even the humanness) of blacks, even if offered as "a
suspision only."

[2]. See, for example, Jefferson's "Notes on British and American
Alienage," in Julian P. Boyd, et. al., eds. _The Papers of Thomas
Jefferson_ (Princeton, NJ, 1950-) 2:477.

Copyright (c) 2000 by H-Net, all rights reserved.  This work may be copied
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____________

Date:    Wed, 17 Jan 2001 08:41:23 -0600
From:    Stacey Robertson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Peter S. Onuf responds to review of _Jefferson's Empire_

Reply to Holly Brewer, by Peter S. Onuf

Thanks to Holly Brewer for the thoughtful review of my book.  She raises
some good questions, and I am happy to respond to them.

First, let me clarify the "captive nation" idea, which I apply to enslaved
Africans and African-Americans, not to Indians.  The common theme in my
discussion of Jefferson's racial attitudes is that he saw the new American
nation in a state of war with both peoples.  The compelling danger of slave
insurrections or of conflicts with the "merciless savages" which he
elaborated in the Declaration of Independence was exacerbated by the
sponsorship of Britain or other counter-revolutionary imperial powers.  My
argument is that Jefferson's ideas about race and nation were forged in the
crucible of war: the American people was defined in opposition to its
enemies.  In the case of enslaved Africans, the only prospect for peace
(since slavery itself simply institutionalized and perpetuated the state of
war) was emancipation and expatriation, or colonization somewhere beyond
American borders.  Indians faced a seemingly more benign prospect: if they
fully embraced the tenets of republican civilization, they could blend into
a single great American people.  Then, Jefferson wrote, "We Shall all be
Americans."

Brewer's discussion of the translation of traditional statuses into racial
distinctions under the aegis of revolutionary republican conceptions of
equality makes good sense to me.  I don't think we have any significant
disagreement on this point.  I don't argue that Jefferson invoked "a
coherent scientific racism," but merely suggest that he  resorted to the
language of contemporaneous "science" or natural philosophy to describe
racial differences, most notably in the _Notes on Virginia_.   I do not
quarrel with her formulation, that he reified "older status distinctions
[or, as I put it, "the prejudices of his day"] that did not fit with his
ideas about equality." I would simply add that Jefferson's conception of
nationhood, of whites and blacks as distinct peoples, was critical for
defining racial boundaries.  Jefferson may have had a "suspicion" that
blacks were inferior, but he was absolutely certain that they were
_different_, and this is why it was so critical to him that emancipation be
followed by colonization.  And, I would also add, his faith in colonization
constituted a repudiation of the premise "that blacks were not fully
human," notwithstanding his prejudices--or his "scientific"
observations.[1] Jefferson's republicanism was predicated on national
self-determination: individuals could only enjoy the full measure of their
natural rights when the peoples to which they belonged were free to
determine their own destiny. This is why Virginians should not only
emancipate their slaves, colonize them in "such place as the circumstances
of the time should render most proper"--anywhere but in Virginia--and
"declare them a free and independant people."

Brewer is also on the mark in her commentary on Jefferson's hostility to
inherited status distinctions.  But just as she provocatively suggests that
an emphasis on equal rights translates rank into race, I would argue that
the obliteration of aristocracy leads to the apotheosis of the "people." In
the place of ascription, and of immortal aristocratic families with their
perpetual, state-supported monopoly on the land, Jefferson imagined the
reign of merit and equal opportunity.  Nationhood dissolved differences,
making all members of the national community in some sense equal, but it
did so by "imagining" the people as immortal, and their claim to their
"chosen country" as sacred.  (In his Inaugural address, Jefferson looks
westward, where he sees "room enough for our descendants to the thousandth
and thousandth generation"--and no Indians!) I would suggest that the
"nation" thus can be seen both as the negation of the old regime of
unequal, hierarchical relations and as the universalization of the
aristocratic sense of proprietorship and privilege to the limits of the new
national community.

I don't mean to suggest that Jefferson was a precociously full-blown
romantic nationalist.  But I do want to underscore tensions between the
inclusiveness of his conception of republican empire--and of a peaceful
inter-national order, in which all peoples governed themselves--and the
exclusiveness that nation-making necessarily entailed, particularly at a
time when Americans found themselves surrounded by enemies (including
potential enemies in their own midst).  In his more optimistic moments,
Jefferson believed that the American people could incorporate and
assimilate immigrants from many different nations, including Indians
displaced from the West (but never blacks).  And we can certainly imagine
the boundaries of nationhood being pushed far beyond the limits Jefferson
thought possible.  But I would only suggest that Jefferson's legacy is more
complex and conflicted, that other, darker and less inspiring narratives
can be traced back to his protean conception of American nationhood.

Of course, there are many other pathways into our past, and some of them
might have been clearer had I provided a fuller account of the historical
contexts within which Jefferson acted. In trying to uncover the deeper
logic and coherence of Jefferson's positions, I also risk obscuring "the
change in Jefferson's views over time."  But this is where I made my
choice, to get as close as I could to Jefferson's way of thinking.  The
result has been for me more than a little discomfiting.  "Deeply
conflicted" about Jefferson as I am, it would be a great relief simply to
judge him and move on.  After all, as Brewer I think correctly notes, my
"analysis is in some ways more damning than Paul Finkelman's and Joseph
Ellis's."  But judging suggests distance from our subject, a morally
superior vantage point, the possibility of some kind of final
verdict.  Alas, as Brewer concludes, "we have not even now resolved the
tensions within American ideology."  These are the tensions I hoped to
illuminate and I am gratified that my account of them has engaged Holly
Brewer's critical attention.


[1] On this subject, I am indebted to Ari Helo's brilliant doctoral
dissertation, "Thomas Jefferson's Republicanism and the Problem of Slavery"
(Tampere University, Finland, 1999).

Peter S. Onuf
University of Virginia
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