Self-Government Requires Self-Governing Citizens

During the first four decades of the American Republic, the irascible William Findley was the leading state politician of the Western Pennsylvania backcountry. He had seen action as a captain in the American Army during the Revolution, was an outspoken Antifederalist during the state's ratifying convention, and was a persistent critic of both state and national public finances. Many a high-born Philadelphian of the likes of Robert Morris and James Wilson, crossed swords with William Findley, only to come away with a healthy respect for his tenacity and shrewd political sense. It came as little surprise that Findley would write the definitive critique of the first administration's handling of the western counties' resistance to the federal excise tax on whiskey in the early 1790s. In that work Findley felt compelled to remind his readers that America was not great because of those in power or because of its “privileged orders,” but derived its “dignity and importance, through the natural and honorable channels of prudence and industry.” These were not political qualities, but social values of individual responsibility and integrity. Government in America was not their source. They sprang from the people through their own private and civil associations. But when government exercised power badly it threatened to break up those “natural and honorable channels.” State and society were not the same. It was not so long ago that this distinction was still part of the American understanding. 

The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson

by James W. Ely, Jr.

The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson by David N. Mayer,  University Press of Virginia, 1994    

Thomas Jefferson continues to fascinate scholars. A voluminous literature examines his long public career and extensive comments on political issues. Historians have shown particular interest in exploring the elusive philosophical underpinnings of Jefferson’s political persuasions. David N. Mayer makes a valuable contribution to this debate with his comprehensive study of Jefferson’s constitutional principles as they matured from the 1760s to the 1820s.

Mayer identifies three sources that shaped Jefferson’s thinking about constitutional questions. From the English Whig tradition, Jefferson derived the notion of a constitution as a check on the power of government in order to protect individual rights. The federal aspect of his thought emphasized the division of governmental authority into state and national spheres, each of which was further divided into distinct executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Jefferson also gave special weight to the republican character of government, in which governmental authority rested on popular sovereignty and majority rule. Mayer points out that Jefferson’s constitutionalism developed over time and was often influenced by the course of political events. Rejecting criticism that Jefferson as president did not always act in conformity with his previously articulated views, the author maintains that Jefferson’s use of power was remarkably consistent with his constitutional theory.

It is Our Duty to Leave Liberty to Our Posterity

Honor, justice and humanity call upon us to hold and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty, which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children; but it is our duty to leave liberty to them. No infamy, iniquity, or cruelty can exceed our own if we, born and educated in a country of freedom, entitled to its blessings and knowing their value, pusillanimously deserting the post assigned us by Divine Providence, surrender succeeding generations to a condition of wretchedness from which no human efforts, in all probability, will be sufficient to extricate them; the experience of all states mournfully demonstrating to us that when arbitrary power has been established over them, even the wisest and bravest nations that ever flourished have, in a few years, degenerated into abject and wretched vassals.

--John Dickinson, A New Essay by the Pennsylvania Farmer, 1774

A Teaching for [r]epublicans: Roman History and the Nation’s First Identity

by M. E. Bradford

The Federal District of Columbia, both in its formal character as a capital and also in its self-conscious attempt at a certain visual splendor, is, for every visitor from the somewhat sovereign states, a reminder that the analogy of ancient Rome had a formative effect upon those who conceived and designed it as their one strictly national place. What our fathers called Washington City is thus, at one and the same time, a symbol of their common political aspirations and a specification of the continuity of those objectives with what they knew of the Roman experience. So are we all informed with the testimony of the eye, however we construe the documentary evidence of original confederation. So say the great monuments, the memorials, the many public buildings and the seat of government itself. So the statuary placed at the very center of the Capitol of the United States. And much, much more.

Always a Friend to Peace

"Always a friend to peace, and believing it to promote eminently the happiness and prosperity of nations, I am ever unwilling that it should be disturbed, until greater and more important interests call for an appeal to force. Whenever that shall take place, I feel a perfect confidence that the energy and enterprise displayed by my fellow citizens in the pursuits of peace will be equally eminent in those of war." --Thomas Jefferson to John Shee, 1807. ME 11:140

M.E. Bradford' s Constitutional Theory: A Southern Conservative's Affirmation of The Rule of Law

by Marshall DeRosa

M.E. Bradford

A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution. (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Company Publishers, 1979). Cited in the text as Guide.

Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1985). Cited in the text as Remembering.

A Worthy Company: The Dramatic Story of the Men Who Founded Our Country. (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1988).

The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary & Political. (Peru, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Company Publishers, 1990). Cited in the text as Reactionary.

Against The Barbarians and Other Reflections on Familiar Themes. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1992). Cited in the text as Barbarians.

Original Intentions On The Making Of The United States Constitution. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1993). Cited in the text as Intentions.

M.E. Bradford's constitutional theory is firmly grounded in the original intent of the Framers. His scholarly links to original intent are twofold; original intent is the only way to legitimately apply the U.S. Constitution to contemporary politics and it is better than any alternative at procuring good government.

What is the proper role of military power for a Republic?

by Winston Elliott III

What is the proper role of military power for a Republic? Is it the role of a Republic to maintain a large military presence in foreign lands? For what purpose would a Republic expend large amounts of blood and treasure to promote "democracy" in far away nations? What does this say in relation to countries, such as Cuba, which are much closer to us and living under repressive governments? Would the framers of our governmental institutions (Washington, Jefferson, Adams) support a long term (10 years in Afghanistan, over 50 in Korea) placement of troops in foreign lands? Is it the Republic's duty to spend whatever is necessary (in lives and borrowed money) for as long as it takes to impose order in places where cultural mores and tribal hatred systemically undermine the conditions which are necessary for ordered freedom to flourish? Is the militarization of our foreign policy a reasonable price to pay for these efforts? Is it likely that our zeal to "make the world safe for democracy" will call for policies and expenditures which undermine republican principles in our own home? If we are in a state of fiscal & moral crisis in this nation is it responsible to make such expenditures even if the goals are determined to be legitimate? Are we truly in a position to tell other nations to get their house in order in light of the state of decay of our Republic?

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.

Inspired by Liberty & Virtue: The Education of the Founders of the American Republic (video)

by E. Christian Kopff

This presentation was the keynote address given to the Free Enterprise Institute's Founders' Day Breakfast, November 2011. A slightly revised text version of this address can be found here.

The Equality Racket

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Our mainstream media have discovered a new issue: inequality in America. The gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the nation is wide and growing wider.

This, we are told, is intolerable. This is a deformation of American democracy that must be corrected through remedial government action.

What action? The rich must pay their fair share. Though the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 50 percent have, in some years, paid nothing, the rich must be made to pay more.

That’s an appealing argument to many, but one that would have horrified our founding fathers. For from the beginning, America was never about equality, except of God-given and constitutional rights.

Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic

by Kevin R. C. Gutzman

Virginia’s revolutionary May Convention adopted its three resolutions of May 15, 1776. In doing so, it decided to craft a declaration of rights, a republican constitution, federal relations with other former British colonies in the New World, and foreign alliances for the fledgling Virginia republic. It did more than that, however:  it also touched off a decades-long dispute about the meaning of republican self-government, about the shape the Virginians’ new republic would take. On the mid-May day that it ran up a continental union flag atop the old colonial capitol at Williamsburg, James Madison said, Virginia staked its claim to self-government.  What proved more difficult was deciding what self-government would mean.

The American Revolution proceeded simultaneously on two levels:  the state and the federal. The federal Constitution ratified in 1788 provided an international context in which the sparsely populated, weak new states could conduct the experiment in republicanism the Revolution was meant to inaugurate,[1] and the founding of the federal republic has naturally drawn the bulk of historians’ attention. While federal reform was essential, and while Virginians took the lead in achieving it, the state-level activity of those years struck contemporaries as more important. As Thomas Jefferson noted in 1776, independence would have been for naught without success in state-level reforms of government and society.[2]

The Revolutionary Conservatism of Jefferson’s Small Republics

by Arthur J. Versluis

By the early twenty-first century, Americans had become accustomed to, even took for granted, virtually everything against which George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had warned: gigantic public and private debt, a massive national government, entangling foreign alliances, a standing army, undeclared war in the form of military interventionism, the destruction of American agrarianism, and the list goes on. What some called a “New World Order,” others an “Imperial America,” had become very nearly the equivalent of the former Soviet Union: a huge, unwieldy, unsustainable, bureaucratic, increasingly totalized state. Given the gigantism of the American state by the beginning of the twenty-first century, one finds it hard to recall that this was not always the case, that indeed, even fifty years before, let alone a hundred and fifty, the American polis was weighted much more toward the local and regional than to the national government. In the course of its history, the very notion of an American confederation had been lost. In what follows, we will explore and seek to recover the revolutionary conservative principle of Jeffersonian American autonomy.

An Excerpt from: James Madison and the Making of America

by Kevin R. C. Gutzman

James Madison, Jr. entered the world at midnight of the night of March 16-17, 1751.[1] By chance, he was an American prince.

James Madison, Sr., the master of Montpellier in Piedmont Virginia’s semi-frontier Orange County, was the wealthiest man in the county. His lands were extensive, his slaveholdings were notable, and his family connections were impressive. In a society that privileged the wealthy to a notable degree, James, Jr.’s world was his oyster.

Piedmont Virginia lay west of the Tidewater region that had been dominated by Virginia planters for well over a century. Life was cruder there, and tradition less powerful. Social status figured very strongly in a young man’s life, but not to the degree that it did in the coastal counties. If James Madison, Jr. ever experienced having a common Virginian doff his hat as young Madison passed, then, he was not quite so snobbish as a Byrd, Carter, or Harrison. Still, like them, Madison knew his place.

James Madison and the Making of America

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Kevin Gutzman’s James Madison and the Making of America takes what we thought was a familiar story and gives it a fresh and important interpretation that challenges old orthodoxies and helps us better understand important episodes in American history.

For instance, proper credit for the world-historic Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom is at last granted not to its draftsman, Thomas Jefferson – who had his gravestone list the statute along with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia as his proudest achievements – but to James Madison, who actually managed to get the statute enacted (and who would have nothing inscribed on his gravestone).

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 Meaning of Liberty During the American Revolution (Part II)

by Bradley J. Birzer

The Meaning of Liberty During the American Revolution (Part II). Part I here.

The Meaning of Liberty During the American Revolution

by Bradley J. Birzer

The Meaning of Liberty During the American Revolution (Part I).

Republicanism and The Federalist

by George W. Carey

Hamilton, Madison, Jay

The first essay of The Federalist provides a convenient point of departure for exploring Publius's conception of republicanism and the problems associated with it. Towards the end of this essay, he informs us that among the "interesting particulars" he intends to take up in the subsequent papers is "The conformity of the proposed Constitution to the true principles of republican government" (36).[1] The word "true" immediately attracts our attention because it clearly suggests that mistaken or distorted principles or notions of republicanism are abroad. Moreover, though this is more debatable, we may also surmise that Publius wants to undertake this mission because the proposed constitution, when "measured" against these mistaken principles, turns out to be something less than republican. We might also infer that he feels the need to show that the character of the proposed Constitution is in fact republican because if it were otherwise the people would not and/or should not ratify it. Indeed, at a later point, he does write that "if the plan of the convention … be found to depart from the republican character, its advocates must abandon it as no longer defensible" (39:240).