Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton?

by Clyde N. Wilson

Friends, you must have either Jefferson or Hamilton. All the fundamental conflicts in our history were adumbrated during the first decade of the General Government in the contest symbolized by these two men. Hamilton lost in the short run, but triumphed in the long run. He would find much that is agreeable in the present American regime - plutocratic kritarchy which we persist, by long habit of self-deception, in calling democracy. But Thomas Jefferson would not be at all happy with what has happened to this country; he might even suggest that the time had come for a little revolution. The host of petty intellectuals and pundits, elitists, and would-be elitists - tame scribblers of the American Empire - sense this, and so Jefferson must be dealt with appropriately. The Establishment is frightened by the rumblings they hear from the Great Beast (that is, we the American people). They are shocked to realize that Jefferson honestly did believe in the people; that he believed the soundest basis for government to be popular consent and a severely limited government.

A Little Rebellion

by Clyde N. Wilson

John Taylor of Caroline

Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.” A lack of rebelliousness among the people would demonstrate “a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. . . And what country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?”

The “rebellion” in Massachusetts had alarmed many, especially the masters of that commonwealth, who were imbued with a Puritan longing for regulated behavior and saw the tax revolt of Capt. Daniel Shays and his farmers as a threat to their control. In Jefferson’s perspective, the “rebels” were merely adhering to good American practice. What, indeed, had the recent War of Independence amounted to but resistance to heavy-handed government? And such rebellions against unsatisfactory government officials and policies had been a regular occurrence during the long colonial history of the Americans, especially in the Southern colonies.

New Book: Forgotten Conservatives in American History

by Winston Elliott III

I am looking forward to reviewing this promising new book, Forgotten Conservatives in American History, by Brion McClanahan and Clyde N. Wilson. For now a teaser from the publisher is offered to our readers.

“Americans weary of what passes for ‘conservatism’ in the circus of modern party politics owe McClanahan and Wilson profound thanks for recovering these voices of a lost tradition. Our bloated, debt-ridden, crusading empire has never needed these courageous defenders of the old republic more than it does at present. This is a sober reminder of how far we have departed from first principles and points to the quality of character needed for recovery of authentic conservatism.”—Richard M. Gamble, author of In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth

Thomas Jefferson, Conservative

by Clyde Wilson

A Review of The Sage of Monticello, by Dumas Malone, Volume Six of Jefferson and His Time, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975, 551 pages.

In 1809 Thomas Jefferson yielded up the Presidency and crossed into Virginia. In the 17 active years remaining to him he never left it. The first volume of Malone's masterpiece, published in 1948, was Jefferson the Virginian. The sixth and last is The Sage of Monticello. Jefferson begins and ends with Virginia. Keep this fact in mind. It will save us from many errors and lead us as near to the truth as we can get in regard to this sometimes enigmatic Founding Father.

No great American, not even Lincoln, has been put to so many contradictory uses by later generations of enemies and apologists, and therefore none has undergone so much distortion. In fact, most of what has been asserted about Jefferson in the last hundred years—and even more of what has been implied or assumed about him—is so lacking in context and proportion as to be essentially false. What we commonly see is not Jefferson. It is a strange amalgam or composite in which the misconceptions of each succeeding generation have been combined and recombined until the original is no longer discernible.

In Honor of Mr. Jefferson's 269th Birthday: Quotes from Russell Kirk, Clyde Wilson & Suggested Essays

by Winston Elliott III

"Temperate, sound in morals, sound in taste, learned in more than one discipline, open-handed, ready to fill great offices at personal sacrifice and then to retire modestly to Monticello--this was the genuine Jefferson, no doctrinaire egalitarian, no abstract intellectual...Jefferson indeed was a Whig through and through, with the virtues and the defects of the breed. Joined with this Whiggery was another facet of his character...a bitter partisanship, not overly scrupulous...Jefferson could be ferociously emotional in politics."

--Russell Kirk (pg. xvii, introduction to Mr. Jefferson by Albert J. Nock)

"Jefferson and his friends came to power (the “Revolution of 1800”) in opposition to the economic and moral imperialism of Hamilton and his friends - a program of taxes, manipulation of the economy for the inevitable benefit of the few and the burden of the many, moral dragooning of the population, and involvement in foreign power politics. It was this threat that Jefferson and his friends put down, and kept down, for half a century - the happiest era of the Union."

--Clyde Wilson (Thomas Jefferson's Birthday, see link below)

Recommended essays regarding Mr. Jefferson on The Imaginative Conservative:

Thomas Jefferson’s Birthday by Clyde Wilson
Jefferson Was Right by Joseph Sobran
Calhoun, Jefferson, and Popular Rule by Lee Cheek
The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition by Clyde Wilson

Posts Tagged "Thomas Jefferson" on TIC, including Jefferson Quotes

The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition

by Clyde Wilson

As a movement of thought, the resurgent conservatism of twentieth century America cannot achieve maturity without a properly worked out historical self-image - a documented and convincing picture of what traditions, tendencies, and movements it is heir to. In its earliest stages the conservative resurgence has conceived of itself largely as an extension of the European Burkean and Catholic traditions, because these were the traditions most familiar to the thinkers who first gave systematic expression to anti-Liberalism in this century. While this approach has provided a useful philosophical critique of Liberalism, it has left the history of conservatism on this side of the Atlantic in great ambiguity. Various resolutions of the ambiguity have been essayed, none satisfactory. Some Liberals have drawn the conclusion, not an entirely illogical reading of the ideas of some conservatives, that the American experience has been in toto anticonservative, i.e., anti- legitimate and anti-traditional in the Burkean sense, and that, therefore, there is and can be no American conservative tradition.[1] Some conservatives have tacitly accepted this view by evading the question of the historical roots of American conservatism.

Others have turned to a facile catholicity, linking together such diverse and inimical figures as John Adams and John Randolph, Abraham Lincoln and John C. Calhoun, into a rather eclectic chain of tradition.

In general, however, American conservatives, when they have felt the need to establish their lineage, have accepted the rather conventional and threadbare descriptive framework of liberalism-conservatism already existing in American historiography and popular lore. This conventional description postulates a Federalist-Whig-Republican conservative line on the one hand, and a Jeffersonian-Jacksonian-Populist-New Deal liberal line on the other. Conservatives have tended to identify themselves as the heirs of the first and to repudiate the second as the line of twentieth century liberalism.

Thomas Jefferson’s Birthday

by Clyde Wilson

Thomas Jefferson’s birthday went virtually unnoticed earlier this year (ed. 1993), the 250^th anniversary of his birth. Nothing is more indicative of how badly we Americans have squandered our moral capital and betrayed the substance of our history. We did have, of course, President Clinton’s inaugural journey from Monticello, though it is hard to imagine anything further from the true spirit of Jeffersonian democracy than the motley crew of socialists, spoilsmen, image manipulators, and foreign agents who make up the present leadership of the Democratic Party (except perhaps the motley crew of stockjobbers, spoilsmen, image manipulators, and foreign agents who make up the leadership of the Republican Party).

Then there was the conference on “Jeffersonian Legacies,” held at Mr. Jefferson’s University and since issued as a book and a videotape for PBS, that was devoted to a motley lot of dubiously qualified northeastern and California intellectuals preening about how much wiser and more enlightened they are about racial matters than Mr. Jefferson. In fact, Jefferson’s discussion of the American racial dilemma in Query XIV of Notes on the State of Virginia says everything true that can be said about the subject, ethically and intellectually, as will be seen a hundred years from now, should there be any men and women left who are capable of Jefferson’s range, clarity, honesty, and detachment.

Jefferson had the most capacious mind and, until his later years, the most optimistic temperament of any of the Founders. Had he never held a public office, his vast corpus of letters and writings would still be one of our most important legacies from that era. He was, on one side of his personality, a true intellectual, fond of ideas and speculation. The dull-witted and literal-minded have continually taken his statements out of context as dogmatic proposals to be enforced or opposed, failing to distinguish, as he did himself, between Jefferson the American public man and President and Jefferson the international man of letters.

Quote of the Day: Clyde Wilson

“Patriotism is the wholesome, constructive love of one’s land and people. Nationalism is the unhealthy love of one’s government, accompanied by the aggressive desire to put down others – which becomes in deracinated modern men a substitute for religious faith. Patriotism is an appropriate, indeed necessary, sentiment for people who wish to preserve their freedom; nationalism is not.”--Clyde Wilson

"From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition" by Clyde N. Wilson: A Review

by Winston Elliott III

From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition
by Clyde N. Wilson (Foundation for American Education, 2003)

"To check power, to return the American empire to republicanism we do not need to resort to the drastic right of revolution nor to the destructive goal of anarchic individualism. We have in the states ready-made instruments. All that is lacking is the will, our goal should be the restoration of the real American Union of sovereign states in place of the upstart empire under which we live." So concludes Clyde Wilson in the title essay of this very fine book.

In addition to serving as the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun he has written for Modern Age, Chronicles, Intercollegiate Review and Southern Partisan. The collection is broken into seven chapters: Agrarian Conservatism; Jeffersonians; The Lost Constitution; Empire; Imperial Irritations; Cons and Neocons; History and Historians; and Restoring the Republic.

Among the over sixty excellent essays to be found in From Union to Empire I wish to point to three that I would recommend for your particular attention. In the essential opening essay, entitled The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition, Mr. Wilson attempts to answer the question "what should American conservatism seek to conserve". In brief his answer is "the federal and constitutional republic bequeathed to us by that unique event, the American Revolution, a "revolution" which was prudential rather than revolutionary...a revolution for life, liberty, and property...a war of national independence waged without mass romantic nationalism." He describes the essential elements of the conservative American polity as "republicanism, constitutionalism and federalism."  He goes on to propose that "historically, the conservator...of these elements" has been found in the Jeffersonian conservative tradition.