Reassessing Jefferson

THOMAS JEFFERSON, in one of his frequent moments of extreme perspicacity, invented the doctrine of "generational sovereignty", according to which, each generation is inherently entitled to remake society in its own image, according to its own lights. Using actuary tables, Jefferson concluded that a "generation" was a period of time amounting to nineteen years, and that, as each generation faded from the stage of life, it should make no attempt to permanently imprint its stamp on the forthcoming one. Thus, he believed that all patents should be granted for a period of nineteen years, which in fact they are to this day, and that a new or revised constitution should be placed in effect once every nineteen years, representing current circumstances, which is indeed not done today. Along these lines, Jefferson, like native Americans, considered each generation's use of the land to be a mere borrowing, not ownership, and that all land and mineral resources should be exploited in such a way as to give the next generation the opportunity to utilize them anew. Accordingly, Jefferson was not a great advocate of any hereditary privilege, inherited titles, or inherited anything. Early Jeffersonian scholars tended to venerate him, while more modern scholarship has produced a cohort of historians who bedevil him; it is now fashionable to point out that the third president was something of a hypocrite. Jefferson, the advocate for all men being created equal, who owned slaves. Jefferson, the advocate of decentralized government, who ruled as a virtual tyrant in his own five thousand acre domain in Virginia. Jefferson, who repeatedly emphasized how much he abhorred politics, while steadfastly pursuing political power at every turn. Jefferson, the moralist whose personal behavior was far from "moral", by our standards, or the standards of his own day. Still more recent scholarship is beginning to be a bit more balanced, because, in the last twenty five years, Jefferson's vast collection of correspondence and other writings have been more thoroughly scrutinized, documentation has been uncovered concerning the dealings with and viewpoints of Jefferson's associates, and what emerges is a portrait of a person enormously complicated, contradictory, but no more so than most of the rest of us. That's the value of what traditionalist often deride as "revisionist" history; it shed new light, as history, over time, takes a deep breath, adds new information to the mix, and arrives at more accurate conclusions. No matter what the subject of historical analysis, modern analysis is vastly superior to that of previous generations, if for no other reason than the passing of time provides a better, broader perspective with which to examine our past.