We are all Federalists,
we are all Republicans.
You know, these
are healing words,
important words that come
from Thomas Jefferson's
first inaugural address.
You know, he's
elected in 1800 in one
of the more contested
and contentious elections
in the country's history.
And in 1801, he stands
before Congress and he
delivers these words.
And they great meaning.
You'll know from having
read your textbook
that the latter half of the
1790s, many of Washington's
greatest fears, would
the revolution survive
the death of the great man,
had come to be realized.
They were coming to fruition,
especially around partisanship
where we have the Federalist
party in control using laws
like the Alien and Sedition Act,
Francophobia, Anglophobia, all
of these things to sort of drive
out the oppositional party,
including imprisoning
them for standing up
against the government.
And when Jefferson is elected,
there's a lot of thought
that there's going to be a
counter-terror that he will use
his power now, now that
his party is in power,
to drive out the
Federalists, to abuse power.
And he doesn't do this.
The election of
1800 in many ways,
and we'll talk
about these ways, is
the triumph of the revolution.
Many of the final, key points
that have been in contest
will be resolved and
will move forward.
And when Jefferson says
we are all Federalists,
we are all Republicans, he's
offering forgiveness of a sort.
He is saying I
accept the existence
of an oppositional party
as necessary and proper
to a functioning democracy,
that oppositional thought
and political
opponents are reality.
He lets the Alien and
Sedition Acts expire,
he doesn't contrive to
misuse the law and his power
to drive out his opposition
to promote his ideology.
Now, that being said,
make no mistake.
Jefferson is an ardent,
ambitious, and driven partisan.
He goes to great lengths to say
yes, I accept your existence,
but I am going to drive you
out, through legal means,
through proper means,
through competition.
One of the first
things he does is
that when John Adams in the
last moments of his presidency
had all these appointments on
his way out, these midnight
appointments, Jefferson refuses
to acknowledge any of them.
And in fact, every opportunity,
every chance he gets,
every court seat,
every staff position,
he puts not just a
Democratic Republican,
but an ardent, motivated
Democratic Republican.
And really, the Federalist
party after this moment
will become really a
very regionalized party,
limited mostly to New England.
And their power will
continually shrink.
And by the 1820s, they
all but disappear.
And except for John Marshall,
Chief Justice on the Supreme
Court, very little else
of the Federalist vision
is kept alive.
So Jefferson is an ardent
partisan and an effective one,
that the Democratic
Republicans become
the dominant national
party, mostly
through the efforts
of Jefferson.
But part of what he's doing,
he has a vision for a republic,
and it starts with not
using counter-terror, not
using ideological warfare
to drive out your opponents.
We accept bipartisanship
as part of an effective and
liberty-loving democracy.
So Jefferson strives
to save the revolution.
And along with accepting
oppositional partisanship
and competing vigorously
and effectively
to promote his own party,
the Democratic Republicans,
he also strives to
save the revolution
from the ideology
and the policies
of the Federalists,
which had been dominant
all through the 1790s.
And in order to sort of
frame this discussion,
as I like to do,
I'm going to draw
on the work of a historian,
another historian
I like, a historian
named Drew McCoy, who
wrote one of the more persuasive
and thoughtful analyses
of Thomas Jefferson's
historical sense of his self,
his revolutionary ideology,
his Enlightenment optimism,
and how all of those
found their way
into his actual practical
and pragmatic policies
as president.
The book I'm referring to is
called The Elusive Republic,
The Elusive Republic.
And it's a wonderful book.
And the way he
looks at it is this,
is that he says Jefferson
had a few very key elements
of Federalism that
he felt required
his active undoing, that he
had to really make an effort
to get rid of.
A lot of it had to do
with this whole Federalist
idea of trying to model the
early American government,
the government of
the United States,
after the government of
England, that England
was serving as this model.
One of it was just sort
of structurally, this idea
that the Federalists
would set up
this sort of court of
elite, talented men
who were revered
for their merit,
but they were still a
small, elite group governing
on behalf of others
right, that sort
of classical Republican idea,
whereas Jefferson really
wanted much more of a
liberal Republican idea,
to really bring in more
of the common individual
and to promote them in
this larger government.
So he didn't like this
sort of elite court
model of English government.
And more importantly than that,
what he really and specifically
didn't like was the
way we were mimicking
the English economic system,
this way that the government
was directly involved in
promoting finance and banking
and manufacturing
and urban growth, all
of those visions of
Alexander Hamilton
that had come to fruition
during the 1790s.
Jefferson saw these-- he
didn't see them as practical,
he saw them as corrupting.
He said if we really
look at European society,
he goes I don't want to
be like European society.
It leads to large urban centers
with huge differentiation
of wealth, a very wealthy group
and large amounts of landless,
dependent workers.
In his mind, it
led to governments
with too much power
and dependency.
This is a real
idea for Jefferson,
this idea that too many
people under those systems,
especially in a growing, urban,
manufacturing-based system
are dependent, they are
not self-sufficient.
And large groups of
dependent individuals
are a real problem
for democracy.
People will be motivated
by their passions instead
of their intellect
and their reason.
And this isn't just
ideological for Jefferson.
He says it's practical.
He goes there are more
riots, there is more crime,
there is less food security
in England and in France,
that their governments
are more tyrannical,
and it's a result of the sort
of government they've developed.
And ideologically, what
Jefferson will promote,
and he will do this
both as an ideology
but also in practical
terms, is this idea
of the philosophy of
agrarianism, philosophy
of agrarianism, which
we talked about a bit
in an earlier lecture.
But I'm going to say it
again, that this idea
that Republican virtue and
the democracy of an individual
and a nation is best
promoted and preserved
if most people were
market-oriented farmers.
And that's important, that
entire term, not just farmers,
and not just market oriented,
market-oriented farmers,
the idea that if you owned
land, and you made it productive
using just enough of your
rationality, your forethought,
your understanding of global
economics and hard work
and skill, that you would
apply that to your land,
you could engage in
these foreign markets,
and make a decent living,
own a piece of the country,
make the country better
through your intellect
and your hard work.
This is the essence
of what Jefferson
wants in his republic.
He says it's not just
idealized, it really
is the best thing for democracy.
Because embedded in it is
this idea of independence,
that individuals and
families own the land,
make it productive, and
they achieve not just
a nobility, which is
part of it, there's
a bit of a mythical nobility
in this, but true independence.
They don't rely on someone
else for their sustenance,
for their pay.
They are the best
sort of people.
When they participate
in a democracy,
they do it not as people who
are desperate or dependent
on someone to give
them something,
but because they
want what's best
for farming, for markets, for
their family, for the future.
That's the essence,
that Republican virtue
is inseparable from
lifestyle and work choices.
It's that they have
to go together.
And the opposite of this is what
these governments of Europe,
where you wed
together high finance
and subsidizing of manufacturers
and promotion of urban growth,
relocation of rural
people to cities,
which creates a
fairly powerful nation
state, capable of
waging global war right
and great levels of wealth.
But it also created
massive amounts
of dependency, these
ever-growing masses
of low skilled, non-land-owning,
non-property-owning, uneducated
urban workers, whose numbers
grow and grow and grow.
And this leads to instability,
to riots, to crime.
This was fairly well
known in Jefferson's time.
It's well known in our time.
There is a problem
with dependency.
And Jefferson felt
the way to combat
that, that America, especially
for a democracy, because those
who are dependent, and
this is really the key,
are more likely to be
swayed by their passions,
to give in to a demagogue who
promises things or manipulates
their wants to aggrandize
themselves for power.
And that's the big fear
of all democracies.
Whereas market-oriented
farmers are far more
likely to be rational
in their approach
to democracy, that
that connection
between self-reliance and
independence versus dependence
is really at the heart of what
will keep Republican virtue
alive for Jefferson.
And I want to just
say one other thing
to add to this, why
market-oriented farmers,
another thing.
A lot of Americans are
subsistence farmers
at this time.
And while Jefferson
said that's better
than being a low-skilled
wage worker in a city,
you are able to own
property, and you
are more or less
self-reliant, for Jefferson,
it wasn't enough.
He felt that you
would lack ambition,
you would be provincial,
you'd be less educated.
He wants his landowning,
democratic farmers to be wise,
to have a broader
view of their efforts.
It's not enough just
to be independent.
That's the first step.
But this idea of creating
national conditions that
promote not just
subsistence farming and land
ownership, but market farming,
rational participation
in global markets, this will
underpin the greatest successes
of the Jefferson presidency.
So I'm going to back
this up a little bit,
because there's kind of a
theoretical and ideological
world that Jefferson is
directly responding to.
And I just feel it's important
to understand it, to place this
within the Enlightenment, of
which Jefferson is very much
a part and means to be a part.
And it shows us the way being
both an Enlightenment thinker
and leader as well
as a practical leader
could mesh together during
this period of time.
So in the 1760s,
Benjamin Franklin,
America's Enlightenment
leader, is living in Europe.
And while doing many
different things in Europe,
one of the things
he does is he writes
an analysis of why it seems
great European societies always
result in what he called decay.
Why do they seem to devolve?
They seem to go through
this period of great success
and growing wealth, and
then all of a sudden,
they seem to shift towards
tyranny, urban success
turns into urban
overpopulation, and they
begin to have more
problems than successes,
that the bottom end seems to get
more unstable, more dependent,
sort of a decaying civilization.
What causes civilizations
to go from youth to maturity
to this old age and decay?
And as a typical
Enlightenment thinker,
he kind of observes what
he sees in London and Paris
and reads other
Enlightenment works.
And he sort of pens
together this analysis.
And he says well, there are
two categories of causes.
One he says are natural
causes of decay.
And these natural causes are
more or less unavoidable.
And they're exactly
what you think,
is that as a country
becomes more successful,
settles more of its land,
and cultivates it, sure,
the population is going to grow.
But you always hit this
point, especially when you
have really hard, defined
national boundaries,
where the amount of cultivated
land and the yield you can pull
off of that land is outstripped
by population growth,
that the population grows faster
than the resources the land can
produce.
And in this period
of time, you'll
see a huge swing
towards urbanization,
and ever-expanding growth
in dependent, landless,
low-skilled workers
moving to cities,
and that this sort
of natural cause
is really one of the great
driving forces behind the decay
of all civilizations.
But he also points to what
he calls artificial decay.
And artificial decay mostly is
about societal and government
structures that promote
corruption, tyrannies,
things that privilege small
groups to the exclusion
of large groups, luxury living,
all these sort of things, those
who would take advantage
of this ever-large,
growing group of landless
poor for self-aggrandizement.
These were seen as the
artificial causes of decay,
corruption being the key word.
And this is pretty
widely accepted.
Most people would
agree with Franklin.
And many of the leaders
of the revolution
would look at these two
causes, natural decay,
artificial decay, and
say yeah, natural decay
seems somewhat inevitable, but
we can actually do something
about artificial decay.
And in fact, the
revolution itself
focuses on this artificial
causes of decay.
That's what they're attacking,
the corruption of a monarchy
and the need for
self-rule and virtue,
how do we get virtue, that's
all under this artificial decay,
a way to keep your
country, prolong
its youth and its vigor.
There's one key thinker,
who Jefferson actually
writes a long response
to, and it's probably
the most popular thinkers on
this idea of natural decay,
and that is a Britishman named
Thomas Malthus, Thomas Malthus.
And in fact, his theory
is so prevalent is called
Malthusianism,
and sometimes it's
referred to as the
Malthusian trap.
And what Thomas
Malthus said was this.
He said yeah, it's
illusory to think
that you can attack these
artificial causes of decay
and somehow forestall
the devolution that
awaits all civilizations.
He says these natural
causes, the fact
that all societies ultimately
run headlong into the inability
to produce enough food to deal
with their population growth
within a confined boundary.
He says that's an
inescapable reality.
Everything else is illusory.
This is what awaits all of us.
He's one of the very few
pessimistic Enlightenment
thinkers.
Most of the
Enlightenment thinkers
found some way towards optimism
or a better future or a way
to change things for the better.
Malthus is a determinist, and a
biological determinist at that.
So it's almost inescapable.
In fact, he had a great
way of saying this he said,
"The irrepressible
passions between the sexes
results in a geometric
population growth,
whereas the supply of food
and the means of nourishment
could only increase
arithmetically."
And by geometric, he
means exponentially.
And specifically, he says that
no matter what history you
look at, from Rome
to France to England,
the same thing happens.
You have this great youth as you
expand and settle and cultivate
your land.
You create new techniques
that increase yield,
populations grow,
people move to cities
and manufacturing
begins to happen.
But soon, as population because
of this cultivation of lands
grow faster and faster,
you can't meet that need,
and you will always have all of
a sudden this huge, expanding
group of low-level, unskilled,
propertyless workers
who are hungry and desperate.
And meeting their needs leads
to corruption, leads to decay,
leads to tyranny, leads
to all these problems.
He says it's in
inevitable stages.
And he sets this as the
stages of all civilizations
and countries, a youth,
a middle age, and then,
what he calls old age.
And as he looked at Europe in
the late 18th century, which
is war torn and is the rise of
these powerful nation states,
he says yeah, they're all in
this old age, that's what's
causing all this instability.
And he said specifically,
he even talks about America.
He says America in
its youth, yeah, it
has an incredible
amount of land,
but eventually, the same,
unavoidable, natural cause
of decay will come
to America as well.
It's just a matter of time.
Now, Jefferson, as I said,
actually responds to Malthus.
He actually writes treatises
about Thomas Malthus
and why Malthus is wrong.
And as president, he
actually is able to begin
policies that address
the concerns of Malthus.
Jefferson is the ultimate,
optimistic Enlightenment
thinker, certainly in
the American sense.
And he felt he could create
practical policies that
would combat both the artificial
and natural causes of decay,
because he believes
they're both real.
And in doing that, he
would restore and preserve
the sort of virtuous heart of
the revolutionary republic.
He say the problem
with the Federalists
was they were creating these
artificial causes of decay.
Their style of government is
one of those artificial causes.
And that was pretty
easy to address,
was basically the
election of his party.
Yes, he accepts the existence
of an oppositional political
party, but he would go
on to promote his party
in every position he could.
They would increase
state rights,
he would get the government out
of the business of investing
in manufacture,
they would refuse
to invest at all in what he
called internal improvements.
All things like canals
and road building
was done with private money.
He wouldn't get involved in it.
He would not do anything
that promoted urban growth
or urban manufacturing.
He would keep taxation low.
All of these ideas
of sort of reducing
the size of this powerful
and potentially corrupt
English-style
government, that actually
was pretty easy to address in
terms of this point in time.
And that's how
Jefferson addresses
the artificial causes.
He would even go also
pursue Washington's vision
of no entangling alliances,
because he understood
that we had to have these
commercial relationships
with everybody without
getting involved
in their quarrels and
their political battles
and their wars.
The second part,
and this is really
which would address both the
artificial causes of decay
and specifically,
the natural causes,
was something very concrete.
He knew we needed to
have unobstructed access,
America had to have
unobstructed access
to vast amounts of free land.
And not just to get the land,
but really important in terms
of just having land was
securing navigable rivers,
rivers you could
sail up and down
and reach ocean-based
ports, to secure ports,
to explore and settle and
develop coastlines, basically,
to take this huge, vast
North American continent
and bring it into the
nation state rationally
and effectively.
And the reason you
want to do this
is because this is how
you create market farmers.
There's two things they need.
They have to have land,
this free supply of land.
He understood from the
Northwest Ordinances
how valuable this
really could be,
how this keeps
Republican virtue alive.
We really do have this
massive amount of land.
And secondly, it's
not just the land.
Because he doesn't
want them just to be
backwoods subsistence farmers.
Part of this vision
is you have to have
a real sense of geographic
space and shape and possibility,
securing the rivers and
the coastlines all the way
to the Pacific, because we have
to take this huge chunk of land
that's presently unsettled by
Americans, make it productive,
and have a way to
take that produce,
those productive
elements, and ship them
into these global markets.
And it sounds simple
enough, but he really
has a very concrete way
he goes about doing this.
In fact, it becomes the
policies of America roughly
for the next 100 years.
The way he says about
Malthus, he says,
Malthus is too pessimistic.
And the real problem with
Thomas Malthus is this,
he says he's too European.
He's got a completely European
notion of space and geography,
with these really hard defined
national boundaries or island
states, like England.
He says yeah, but
he doesn't really
understand how vast the
continent of North America
is, how massive
our coastlines are,
how huge the opportunities are
for market farming in America.
He says he can't begin to
understand, the way that Thomas
Paine made that
argument in Common Sense
that America is truly
a continental nation,
different from all of
Europe, that its size
and its massiveness creates
a whole different level
of possibilities for freedom.
And again, Jefferson
sees this as not
just ideological, but
practical, that Malthusianism--
he converts the
Malthusian trap of Europe
to being part of
his practical plan
for preserving
liberty in America.
He says, you know
what, you're right.
In Europe, you are
suffering old age,
you are at the end stage
of this Malthusian trap,
you have a lack of food security
and large, urban, dependent
populations without
secure food sources.
America will
preserve its liberty
by being the market producers of
farm goods for old-age Europe.
And in fact, we do.
Jefferson's presidency and
every presidency after that
goes to great lengths to
establish and maintain
America's market trade of
farm and agricultural goods
to Europe.
He says that in fact, it's
a symbiotic relationship.
He takes the sort of
absolute pessimism of Malthus
and makes it sort of this
optimistic market view, where
America has this
incredible amount
of untapped land, untapped
navigable rivers and coastlines
and ports.
And as we develop
that, we will be
able to forestall the
development of manufacturing
in cities and urban
squalor, because we'll
make our money by selling
that produce to people who've
already reached old
age, who've reached
this age of manufacturing
and urban overcrowding.
It's the perfect relationship.
In this war-torn Europe
with Napoleonic armies
raging across Europe, it's real.
He's actually not wrong.
His vision is correct.
And specifically,
the way he does this
is this acquiring of
massive amounts of land.
In 1803, Jefferson has
one of the greatest
moments of his presidency.
We acquire the
Louisiana Purchase.
The Louisiana Purchase,
we buy it from France.
And to think about
the size of this,
it is basically
all of the valleys
in the regions that feed
into the Mississippi River
and the Missouri River, these
two giant, navigable drains
of the interior of
continental America
that flow out to
the Gulf of Mexico.
It's the Great Plains, it's
Oregon, it's the upper Midwest,
it's chunks of Big Sky country.
It's this huge-- he more than
doubles the size of America,
and not only doubles the
size in just getting land,
but the land he gets is
fed by these great rivers,
navigable rivers
all across it that
feed into the Missouri
and the Mississippi
and connect us to these global
markets out through Louisiana
and into the Gulf of Mexico.
Jefferson will make the
exploration and the charting
and the rationalization and the
understanding of the Louisiana
Purchase a ground-zero
policy for him.
He knows how important this is.
That's why we have
Lewis and Clark
and why we begin to
think of ourselves--
this sense of America is about
settling these big spaces
and cultivating them and
making them the home of sort
of rationalist market farming.
It is this relief valve
for Eastern overcrowding.
And this vision is
aided again and again
over the next 100 years.
The Mexican Cession,
1848, another massive--
we fight this war against
Mexico, after which we annex
Texas, we take all of the
Southwest, Arizona, New Mexico,
we get California and
Colorado and parts
of Montana and Wyoming.
All that comes from
the Mexican Cession.
It's a huge expansion.
After that, 1867, we have
something called Seward's Folly
where secretary
of state Seward is
able to buy from the Russians
Alaska, this massive frontier,
which they called a folly,
because everyone thought
it was a frozen wasteland.
But they were wrong.
As we know, it is full of
almost unimaginable amount
of extractable natural wealth.
And he buys it for like $0.02
an acre, huge expansion.
After 1898, American
territorial--
after a war with Spain, we'll
gain holdings in the Caribbean
and throughout the Pacific
Ocean, we bring in Hawaii.
American territorial expansion
over the next 100 years
does in fact happen.
We do end up with these
huge chunks of land.
And market agriculture
and extractive,
natural-resource
economies will absolutely
underwrite American national
success, a certain amount
of American independence,
American market agriculture
as this sort of defining
aspect of being American,
and access to land, for the
next 100 years and beyond.
In that, Jefferson is correct.
His vision was in part right.
He does define
America as something
very different from what's
happening in Europe, then
or now.
And it has everything
to do with acquiring
the space that Thomas Malthus
really couldn't understand.
And he doesn't
just get the land,
he gets the land, the navigable
rivers, the coastlines.
He knows how to develop it.
And ensuing administrations and
presidents would do the same.
And in effect, certain
elements of Republican liberty
are preserved by this.
We do forestall a long,
long period of time,
until really very modern times,
rapid, urban-manufacturing
growth.
This is part of America,
this does define America
through this period,
that Jefferson's vision
is somewhat correct.
It does help address
both the artificial
and the natural causes of decay.
And for right now, I
just want to point out
that this is one of those
great moments for Jefferson.
Jefferson is such a
confusing and confounding
historical figure
in American history.
And yes, as we talked
about, he had those moments
of smallness and
weakness that presaged
long-term American problems,
sectionalism and slavery
being the two biggest, of which
Jefferson, as big as he was,
wasn't bigger than that.
And yet there's the
other side of Jefferson,
the idealistic and pragmatic
Enlightenment thinker who
is able to shape
American policies, ideas
about neutrality, about
commercial relationships,
about expanding.
As he said, the way we defeated
the Malthusian trap is America
has the ability to
expand across space
without advancing in time.
We could preserve this
idea of Republican virtue
through land access
and commercial farming
and extraction far longer
than anyone could imagine.
And in some ways,
it's very, very true.
This is the best of Jefferson.
However, I want to come back
to the historian Drew McCoy.
Drew McCoys' book, as I said,
is called The Elusive Republic,
this idea this empire of
liberty that Jefferson
was trying to build doesn't
come to full fruition.
The truly idealized
and idealistic world
doesn't happen.
Elements of it survive.
Aspects of American
exceptionalism
are absolutely embedded in this,
massive acquisitions of land,
the way it's
converted and settled
from Jefferson's Northwest
Ordinances up to the Homestead
Act and beyond.
However, what Jefferson
didn't really consider
is that this territorial
expansion, the securing
and charting and
management and development
of all of this territory,
the securing of ports,
the development of
coastlines, the creating
of durable, commercial
relationships
in a world that was mostly full
of closed, hostile economies.
All of that took a
massive expansion
in the powers of the
central government.
In many ways,
first and foremost,
we needed an expanded, powerful,
professional military right.
Sustained expansion in military
and spending on military
and the raising of taxes
to make that happen
is also a major
part of this story.
I mean, the Civil War
is fought in large part
over settling the
Mexican Cession,
would it allow slavery or not.
The War of 1812 is
really, in many ways,
about being able to exploit
the Louisiana Purchase.
And the whole, great, open
space wasn't really open,
it is full of Native Americans
who were pushed off their lands
through military means.
And securing ports all the way
through the war with Spain,
this all required a massive
expansion in government.
And also just the bureaucracy
it takes to manage all of this,
to settle it, the taxation
it takes to develop it,
eventually Jefferson and
later, Madison's ideas of not
investing in internal
improvements,
well, that's thrown to the wind.
America gets very much
involved in investing money
in roads and canals
and railroads,
that this is very
much the story of how
we convert this land into market
land that we could settle.
And so what makes his
vision ultimately elusive
is the very government that
he was trying to get rid of,
the sort of artificial
government of the Federalists
ultimately, because
of the policies
he pursues, because of
this massive continent
we try to make a land for
Republican virtue and farmers,
requires a dynamic, powerful,
centralized, bureaucratic
government as envisioned
by men like Hamilton
and the Federalists.
And what this ultimately means
for us now, I don't know.
It's a little unclear.
We have to look at the
different elements.
Which elements of
Republican virtue,
which aspects of the
artificial causes of decay
have we forestalled?
Which elements of natural
decay, the natural causes,
and the artificial causes
are still with us today?
That's what's left
for us to think about.
Thank you.
