The Jeffersonian Ideal

Ideas of self-government helped to hold the fractious founding generation together. Sadly, we don't speak that language anymore.

Thomas Jefferson was a complicated man. He owned over 600 enslaved people throughout his life, but he also famously wrote that “all men are created equal.” He was a passionate revolutionary, but he also became an icon to certain conservatives. Like the country he helped found, Jefferson contained multitudes.

Liberty Fund senior fellow Hans Eicholz, in his book Harmonizing Sentiments, has set out to uncover the “coherent political tradition” amidst these complications and contradictions. Originally published in 2001, a second edition was released earlier this year addressing new developments in the scholarship of the Founding. Citing a famous 1825 letter he wrote to Henry Lee, Eicholz looks to Jefferson to help understand the “American mind.”

More than just another biography of the man, Harmonizing Sentiments is a full history of Jeffersonian thought. Eicholz contextualizes the Virginian’s contradictions within the wider political and cultural conditions of early American life. The ideas animating the American Revolution did not emerge in a vacuum, and the Declaration of Independence was not revealed from on high by some mysterious source. Nor were they the province of a single man, even Jefferson. Rather, they were the result of complex historical processes Eicholz skillfully reconstructs.

For Eicholz, the central idea of early American politics is the concept of “self-government.” At the end of the day, all the members of the independence movement prized personal liberty and decentralization, whether their initial premises came from Enlightenment theory, Christian theology, the Whig political experience, or just plain common sense. As a consensus document, then, Eicholz contends that the Declaration itself “represents an application of the highest public reasoning respecting personal and political independence—what Jefferson would call ‘the harmonizing sentiments of the day,’ and what modern scholars would readily recognize as the ideal typical notions of self-government in their fullest articulation at the time.” Self-government was a virtue that held the fractious founding generation together. It gave them a concrete ideal around which to unite, a cause for which to fight.

Read more in Law & Liberty.