A Little Rebellion
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.
Persistent misrepresentation of Jefferson’s words here and elsewhere by later generations has obscured what he meant. A dangerous radical? A chronic upsetter of social order? No. Jefferson does not call for an overturn of society and its reconstruction according to some abstract plan. Think of the root meaning of the term revolution. Jefferson, in fact, is mostly satisfied with his society (Virginia), although he is interested in a few small reforms that might broaden its base. So are his followers satisfied with their portions of America. That is why they support him. Despite the hysterical and sometimes insincere denunciations of the New England clergy, the Virginia planter is no Jacobin. As he sees things, any government, with the passage of time and the accretion of abuses and bad precedents, becomes corrupted. It needs to be revolved back to its original principles.
This is not a radical program but a deeply reactionary one. What Jefferson fundamentally wants to tell us is that the people should never fear the government, but the government should always fear the people. This is not the battle cry of a movement with a radical agenda. President Jefferson comes to the White House with no agenda except to preserve the joint independence of the States United and their separate rights as “the best bulwark of our liberties.” To carry out this agenda requires a rollback of the economic and judicial corruptions introduced by the Hamilton/Adams innovators.
For the Jeffersonian democrats, Americans were fortunate to enjoy widespread property ownership, with a large body of independent citizens, and to be free of the class hegemony and conflict of the Old World, thankfully an ocean away. There is no French or Russian revolutionary fantasy here. The government is not to be used as a sledgehammer to destroy and rebuild society. In this way of thinking, the greatest enemy of society and of individual liberty is government itself. The tendency of power is everywhere and forever toward concentration. As a popular Jeffersonian saying has it, “Power is always stealing from the many to the few.”
It is this basic orientation that separates Jeffersonian democrats from “conservatives” of Jefferson’s own time and later. It explains the curious phenomenon that throughout American history the people have been “conservative,” and revolutionary changes have always come from the top down.
My point is illuminated by the argument between John Adams in his A Defense of the Constitutions of the United States and John Taylor of Caroline, the systematic philosopher of Jeffersonian democracy, in his Construction Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated. Adams’ view of history was that the popular majority always had a tendency to envy the wealth of its betters and use the government to appropriate it, and that this tendency was the chief source of destruction of a free regime.
He hoped to avoid the subversion of American republicanism by various devices that would dilute and delay an unwise popular majority: a bicameral legislature with an upper house remote from popular opinion, an executive veto, and an independent judiciary. All Adams’ devices have catastrophically failed to limit government and to preserve freedom, as Taylor plainly predicted.
For Taylor, Adams had got his history wrong. The people, in a society like that of Americans, were not dangerous. Most of the time they went quietly about their own business and demanded nothing—unless they were intolerably provoked by abuses of government. It was the “court party” that was the enemy of liberty and that would subvert the free commonwealth. History showed that there were always self-seeking minorities, would-be elites, ready to use the machinery of government to live off the labor of the majority. Sometimes this was done by force, and sometimes by fraud, as in the Hamiltonian maxim “a public debt is a public blessing.” The remedy was not to erect artificial “checks and balances” but to make sure power was widely dispersed, limited, and amenable to recall.
The Jeffersonian Constitution has been misrepresented as much as or more than Jeffersonian philosophy. It was not “strict construction,” a nonstarter, nor even states’ rights. It was state sovereignty. Jefferson (and Madison, too) may be quoted ad infinitum to this effect. The Virginia and Kentucky documents of 1798-1800 spell out beyond any doubt that the final defense of freedom in the American system is the people acting in their only constitution-making identity, that of their sovereign states. The states were the legitimate and peaceful resort to protect the liberties of their citizens and themselves as communities from federal encroachment.
Years after leaving the White House, Jefferson writes to an inquisitive foreigner,
But the true barriers of our liberty in this country are our State governments; and the wisest conservative power ever contrived by man, is that of which our Revolution and present government found us possessed. Seventeen distinct States, amalgamated into one as to their foreign concerns, but single and independent as to their internal administration.
In the last months of his life Jefferson suggested to influential Virginians that it was time once again to consider interposing the sovereignty of the state against unconstitutional federal legislation. Never for a day in his life did Jefferson doubt that the people of a state could exercise their sovereignty by leaving the Union, though it was not something to be encouraged rashly. He rather expected that the expanding country would break up into two or more confederacies. That was fine, if it was what the people wanted. Americans were rightly joined together by fellow feeling—shared blood and sacrifice—not by the armed force of Washington City.
Commentators have twisted themselves into incredible acrobatic postures and wholesaled semiplausible lies to assert that Jefferson did not really mean the plain language of what he said. Others have “explained” that Jeffersonian states’ rights was only a temporary and expedient device to defend liberty, a device now made unnecessary by the establishment of the American Civil Liberties Union. They miss the point, unwelcome to all adherents of elitist agendas and centralized power—for Jefferson, individual liberty and state sovereignty were indivisible. Properly rebellious free men defended themselves and their communities from Leviathan.
The eclipse of the Jeffersonian preference for limited power and economic freedom had less to do with politics than it did with changes in the spirit of society as the 19th century progressed. Almost from the first days of the United States, New England leadership undertook to establish the New England way as the true and only American way. This was carried out in politics, religion, education, literature, historical writing, and even in lexicography, with vigor and persistence. This is a subject worthy of a multivolume study of a phenomenon that is unrecognized today, although it was a decisive event in our history and clearly understood while it was taking place. Louis Auchincloss, in The Winthrop Covenant, gives a surface account of the persistence of this Puritan mission throughout American history.
The Puritan conquest of the North was not as easy as has been thought, but was accomplished by about 1850. James Fenimore Cooper in his Littlepage trilogy describes and laments how the unique Anglo-Dutch society of old New York was transformed by the swarm of immigrants from east of the Hudson. Meanwhile, Emerson went to Europe and absorbed the Germanized version of the French Revolution, which was really just going back to his Puritan roots. He came home a Unitarian. The mission was changed, but the intensity of the need to correct the world to conform to the New England plan remained the same. It soon brought to heel the West and the unruly Catholic immigrants.
The South was a different matter. It had developed from a different base and in a different way. Southerners were proud and determined to do it their way, individually and as a people. The South could not be converted or subverted, so it had to be destroyed, the grapes of wrath had to be trampled out. A 30-year campaign of slander and hatred, combined with economic developments, finally brought on in 1861 the circumstances in which this could be accomplished. Americans like to think that their campaign for the abolition of slavery was all about benevolence and liberty. A bit of genuine historical research into what they actually said at the time paints a different picture. The Yankees hated slavery because the slaves were a non-Anglo-Saxon element who had, in their view, hopelessly corrupted white Southerners. In the slaveholding society, white men had far too much liberty and independent power. Such liberty offended puritan sensibilities and created an evil disposition to thwart New England economic and cultural hegemony. It was not that the black man had too little liberty; it was that the Southern white man had far too much.
That crusade pretty well finished off Jeffersonian democracy. As Gen. R.E. Lee wrote to Lord Acton the year after his surrender, “the consolidation of the States into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home,” was the precursor of American ruin. Lincoln rightly remains the truly representative American. He is the symbol of the highly successful synthesis of capitalist oligarchy, puritan conformity, and perpetual social revolution from the top down that is the mainstream of American life. There are many who find that synthesis beautiful, though most often they do not really understand what it is, identifying with one or another of the elements and not with the combination itself. Money rules and permits a politics that consists almost entirely of sham battles between the old puritans, the “conservatives,” and the secular ones, the “liberals.” From time to time they all join together in a messianic war to destroy the latest menace to Lincoln’s vision: the South, the kaiser, the Red Menace, drugs, terror, etc.
They share the sense that the meaning of “America” is a mission to bring the abstract ideals of the American standard to all mankind. The only difference is that the “conservatives” want to do it by force, and the “liberals” by welfare. A Jeffersonian, if any still existed, would insist that Americans are not here to be used for anybody’s mission, and the proper point of reference is what is good for them.
The Jeffersonian spirit survived for a while underground, and now and then a weak and confused revival occurred, as in the days of William Jennings Bryan and populism. The last significant appearance was perhaps the agrarian, non-Marxist critique of capitalism in the 1930’s. Nowhere to be seen now are the old Jeffersonians, once a major American type, rebellious men who dared defend the rights of themselves and their communities from outside impositions. But buried somewhere deep in the American soul is a tiny ember of Jeffersonian democracy that now and then gives off an uncertain, feeble, and futile spark.
Clyde Wilson proudly reports that one of his ancestors took part in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.
This article first appeared in the November 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
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Thank you for helping me understand why one would distinguish the American Revolution from a French or a Russian one.
Only one simple query stays in my mind. What kind of a law is worth rebelling against? I am not sure of it is merely a law that we don't like, because there are plenty of laws that could fulfill that criteria, and life is simply too short to rebel against all of them.
And what to revolve back to, I wonder, with a revolution? In the American context, it could mean revolving back to Lincoln or Hamilton.
Beautifully done, Dr. Wilson. Cuts to the heart of the entire charade. I believe Jefferson is the most influential person this country has produced. He united the country on a platform so strong that it utterly destroyed the Federalist. Too bad he could not unseat Marshall, though he certainly tried. You mention the agrarians of the 30's as the last of the Jeffersonians, but wouldn't it have been George Wallace, since his state's rights stance was Jeffersonian in principle? I learned long ago to never question any of your assertions. Research has always proven your statements correct, no matter how doubtful they at first appeared. Your conclusion here seems rather gloomy and pessimistic. In this, I do hope you are wrong. God bless you for opening the eyes of fools, such as myself. In that alone, I believe there is hope.
In an unrelated post, I want to compliment the new website design. I thought I was at the wrong site when I first entered. It is a far improvement over the old.. Very nice, indeed!
Dr. Wilson,
Thank you for this excellent reflection. You write: "Americans were fortunate to enjoy widespread property ownership, with a large body of independent citizens...." It seems whenever and wherever this has occurred in history, liberty has usually been safe from oppressive governments in whatever form. The irony is that such circumstances usually exist when people understand that less is sometimes more; Or the main difference between Chaucer's description of "glad poverty" and England's contemporary desititution, or Jefferson's widespread, independent, yeomen and “the consolidation of the States into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home,” was simply a matter of succumbing to the age old illusion that it is easier to purchase independence than to cultivate it -- in families, schools and parishes.
One thing certain for Americans, Southerners or otherwise, is the last imaginative sighting of the thing was "the agrarian, non-Marxist critique of capitalism in the 1930’s." And I would add a few of their contemporary followers such as yourself, Wendell Berry, the late Mel Bradford, Tom Landess and .....well, the 500 or 1000 Americans who might have heard of Chronicles. Thanks again for your wise and ever fresh presentations.
Two weeks ago, I was privileged to be able to attend the 2011 Conference of the John Randolph Club in Fort Worth, Texas. There, I purchased Dr. Fleming's book entitled The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition. Dr. Fleming succinctly delineates the differences between Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. Quite often I find that I can give no voice to understandings which I have acquired through reading, study and conversation; then, I read a book or an article by a Chronicles' writer and therein find the context and the words to articulate what I already know. Such is the case after having read Dr. Fleming's comparison.
When I arrived home after the conference, Dr. Wilson's article, "A Little Rebellion," was waiting for me in the November 2011 Chronicles. It is a wonderful follow-through for the impetus gained through Dr. Fleming's article.
I, however, quite often find it difficult to share what I have come to know and what I can articulate. I enjoy telling stories, but always in the context of a conversation into which the story fits. I do not tell stories on demand; nor do I, consciously at least, actively seek opportunities and contexts which might elicit a response in the form of a narrative or story. My dilemma is that aside from Chronicles' fora or perhaps those associated with the Abbeville Institute, the anti-culture affords little to no context into which what I have learned from Dr. Fleming and Dr. Wilson can be infused. This is particularly true when I am with "conservatives," be they relatives, friends or fellows in the faith. They have become part of the false, un-Jeffersonian, dichotomy of Americanism (capitalism, corporatism) versus socialism (unionism, communism, social democracy), both willing tenants of the Hobbesian state.
South Carolina, for example, is right now beset by her enemies, enemies which Simms, Palmer, Dabney, Girardeau fully understood and called by name one hundred fifty years ago. - socialism in the form of unionism, corporatism in the form of Boeing, and the Hobbesian state in the form of the general government. The true alternative, the Jeffersonian alternative, is not even on the table; and it is not so much as a conscious thought in the minds of the players and in the remnant of the South swept up in their foolishness.
Again, however, thanks to Dr. Fleming and Dr. Wilson for providing the arguments and the words. I leave it to Providence to provide a context for the story which I might tell.
My good friend Prof. Wilson displays more wisdom and understanding in this brief piece than I have found in the last hundred volumes I have read by modern American historians. Beginning with false facts, they rush quickly into false dichotomies that pit a radical Jefferson--whether viewed positively or negatively--against Federalist conservatives--a term that means nothing in the context. This is the third time I have read this essay and continue to learn from it.
Thanks to Mr. Peters. I wish I had had more time to spend with so wise a man in Texas, but these events keep me hopping among donors, board members, and Chronicles writers. I first began working out my contrast of the two Thomases at one of our Summer Schools. The first glimmer of understanding came when I realized how important it was that Jefferson was so deeply rooted in Virginia, while Paine had no roots. Even when they appear to be saying the same things, it is from entirely different, really opposing points of view.
Dr. Wilson,
You state, "Almost from the first days of the United States, New England leadership undertook to establish the New England way as the true and only American way. This was carried out in politics, religion, education, literature, historical writing, and even in lexicography, with vigor and persistence. This is a subject worthy of a multivolume study of a phenomenon that is unrecognized today, although it was a decisive event in our history and clearly understood while it was taking place."
Multivolume might be beyond me as yet, but I am at present writing a study of this very issue, arguing the point that it is not so much Yankee liberalism/transcendentalism/unitarianism/pragmatism/what-have-you that is the American genius, but rather the reactions against it. One needs only compare the gloomier works of adopted Virginian Poe or self-loathing Yankee Hawthorne against the bubble-headed and unrealistic optimism of Emerson and his peers--an optimism which requires a good deal of reclusion from society in order to maintain: witness Thoreau's Walden Pond and Emily Dickinson's hermitage. Their temperament is one of smug complacency (which they call "self-reliance") and Whitman's "Song of Myself" is their signature poem.
Living in the very heart of New England (Western Massachusetts), but a short drive away from the residences of Hawthorne, Melville, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Jonathan Edwards, this is something I witness about me consistently and have witnessed through my otherwise excellent New England education. However, hearing so many trustafarian friends talk about going to Vermont to live a solitary idylls of gardening and writing poetry keyed me into the fantasy that that governs the upper-class New England mind--a fantasy that drove their lower classes west (where they failed dismally, as shown in Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, the northern American countryside now being largely dominated by Germans), thus forcing them to accept first Irish, then other, Catholic immigrants in order to maintain their cities (who put forth a challenge for control of the schools and wound up by taking control of the Northern cities), and of course alienating the South.
The victory in the Civil War was the end of the Yankee demographically. So has their influence vanished outside of little enclaves in rural New England? Quite the contrary. Their control of education and of the critical apparatus (publishing, journalism, etc.) is rather uncontested. Even the separate Catholic system has adopted the Yankee point of view since Vatican II. They needed to live no longer, so they made converts of others.
I can but echo Mr Peters and Dr Fleming. I only wish Mr Peters could make that muse sing to him at will.
The Puritan conquest of the North is an interesting subject, and I wish there were some good research being published on it. Sometimes I think that the entire history of America needs to be rewritten from a realist viewpoint, dealing with the war of elites against the common folk.
Of course we may have to begin in New England, where the Puritans first waged culture war against the Anglicans in order to gain and keep the upper hand in society, or so I have heard. If that's true then it's another subject which would needs extensive research, perhaps as a prelude to the later conquests.
Mr. Wilson,
The muse seems to slumber. To be a teller of stories, one must be among a story-telling folk. The sacred places and fellowships of story telling have waned, almost to the point of extinction. As a child, even as an infant, I was always, more even than almost always, among story tellers. Barely able to sit up, I would scoot under the supper table to play and listen as the adults placed memories on the table along with pork chops, greens and cornbread. On summer days, my cousins and I would sit on the back steps as our fathers made home-made ice cream and be engaged in and enthralled with the stories of WWI, the 1927 Flood, the Great Depression, and WWII, events which had marked their lives. When I read Robert Frost's poem which says, "We sit in a circle and suppose; the secret sits in the middle and knows," I place myself back in a circle of men and boys sitting around a roaring fire after a day's or a night's hunt, talking not only of the adventures of the day but of those of yesterday - the skirmish for control of Drake's Salt Works, just across the bottom, in 1864; the terror of the West and Kimbrell Clan along the Harrisonburg Road, not too far from our camp - with some in our circle claiming kin in the clan and some claiming kin as the enemies of the clan; or the decade long hunt for the buck with the white spot. History roared out of that fire, its flaming heat giving us voice to bring its characters, places and happenings to life. In the fall, as a child of seven or eight, I trailed along after my aged grandmother through great bottoms in search of hickory nuts and winter huckleberries, always scouting for a Christmas tree to be felled later. She had a story for every brook and creek; for the big black gums which housed possums, racoons and squirrels; for the big pines which had escaped the second coming of Reconstruction in the 1890's; for her childhood.
Sunday school was a place in which the subplots of the Great Story, the Story which gives meaning to all stories, was told: creation, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, Jonah and the fish; Samson and his flaws; the Nativity; the Passion; the Resurrection. The Great Story was even embedded in the curriculum of our local schools along with those of the great men of the West: the Spartans at Thermopylae; Hector and Achilles; Horatius at the bridge; Alfred in the marshes; etc.
These people and places are gone. No child sits under the table. Ice cream is not made on the back steps. Boys do not sit with men around a roaring fire; if they do, they are busy texting someone; and too often the stories, if told at all, are not worthy. It is unlikely that a boy of the 21st century will wander anywhere with a 21st century grandmother; and if he does, it is likely through a mall; and she probably has no story to tell. Few attend Sunday school, and even the great biblical stories have become politically correct. Since public schools have become state education, our heroes have been banished.
But, the muse only slumbers. From time to time, usually at Thanksgiving and Christmas, one of my cousins will create a context or pretext which rouses the muse. Uncle Willie - who left town with a circus after blowing up a laundry; who was a caddy for Al Capone, so he claims; who built a boat too large to get out of his basement; who married a Yankee Catholic and brought her home twenty years after blowing up the laundry - is always available for a story. My mother is now ninety-five. She knew her great grandmother who was born in 1830, knew her such that she knows her stories, stories which take one back to the grandparents of the great grandmother, back into the 18th century. These stories now dance in my head, sometimes as fragments and at other times in complete form.
Dr. Clyde Wilson closed his article with the following words:
"But buried somewhere deep in the American soul is a tiny ember of Jeffersonian democracy that now and then gives off an uncertain, feeble, and futile spark."
The same is, I suppose, true with the stories, not "my" stories, but certainly my stories to tell.
(I suggest a meeting of Louisiana readers of Chronicles over a long weekend in an open camp around a roaring fire in Black Lake Bayou Bottom, there to eat squirrel, venison and duck and drink such libations as might be available or be made available, poured and offered to the muse and to the belly, there to shoot the bull and chew the fat - the proper order. There we would have an Old English or Old Saxon "dream" or "drom" = "joy, music, mirth," something the Grendels of this age could never understand, in honor of Jefferson and his love of things Anglo-Saxon.)
Brilliantly succinct I said to myself reading your piece, as good as it gets. Thanks for your work Mr. Wilson.
The advantage is to the observer and so I have surmised all governments large or small today or tomorrow are of necessity conspiracies and whether or not the inevitable conspiracy of the day is salutary for the governed or primarily favors the governing elite at the expense of the governed is the question. It's how I say it to myself.
Seems to me government's fear of the people which is a good thing and not the converse is always in direct proportion to the elites' fear they're not going to be able to live off of the people and take advantage of them to their heart's content.
We're all imperfect but I agree Hamilton and Adams thought overly ill of the governed which may have been a reflection of themselves. Perhaps the only thing they had to fear was fear itself?
I guess all I'm saying is government is necessary and it is necessary to remember then all governments are inevitably conspiracies, since the advantage is to the observer.
Such a thought provoking article; among the many insights to which it provides access is that the much ballyhooed system of checks and balances, celebrated in every public school civics textbook as one of mankind's great achievements, is in fact, being artificial, and set against the will of the majority, nothing more than one of the earliest instances of social engineering. At a stroke, Professor Wilson lifts a great deal of wool from the eyes of this observer.