chose to inaugurate his first presidency, with a statement of his mission in politics. As president after 1801 Jefferson set about reducing government, cutting the budgets of the army and navy and closing diplomatic missions. He was elected for a second term and in 1807 signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves – this despite being himself a slave owner and fathering a child with one of his slaves.
Jefferson retired in 1809, aged sixty-five, but went on to found the University of Virginia. He died on 4 July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of his Declaration of Independence.
Friends and fellow citizens, called upon to undertake the duties of the first executive office of our country, I avail myself of the presence of that portion of my fellow-citizens which is here assembled to express my grateful thanks for the favour with which they have been pleased to look toward me, to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire … Utterly, indeed, should I despair did not the presence of many whom I here see remind me that in the other high authorities provided by our Constitution I shall find resources of wisdom, of virtue, and of zeal on which to rely under all difficulties.
Jefferson’s modesty would be excessively false were it not for his political purpose. His intention is not so much to diminish himself, but rather – like Cicero in the Temple of Concord – to venerate the republic, beside which any individual must appear small. Jefferson, in fact, had named Cicero as an influence on his drafting of the Declaration of Independence.
We know, from the three handwritten texts that survive in Jefferson’s papers at the Library of Congress, that he amended his script to make it more overtly republican with each iteration. His first sentence originally read ‘executive magistrate’. The final version instead lauds ‘the executive office’, which transfers the honour from himself, the president, to the office, the presidency.
Jefferson sought to embody this humility in the spartan festivities of the day. Even though he had done so much to bring the city of Washington DC into being, Jefferson eschewed the splendid parades that had inaugurated George Washington and John Adams. In the Senate Room, the only completed room in the new Capitol, he dressed in the habit of a plain citizen without any badge of office or ceremonial sword. There was no festive ball afterwards either. Legend has it that after his lecture he walked back to his boarding house, where he stood in line for dinner to be served as usual.
The absence of flourish in the speech was taken to excess in the manner of delivery. Jefferson’s tone was so low that, apart from those at the front, most of the audience had to read what he said in the Washington papers the following morning. Before electronic amplification, to be audible to a sizeable audience was no easy task. Early presidents scattered emissaries around the crowd, whispering the text as the principal spoke.
During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.
This call for unity sounds routine today. Kennedy said it; Obama said it; every president says it. But Jefferson needs to say it. Technology has quickened politics but it hasn’t coarsened it much and the election of 1800 remains one of the nastiest in American history. Under the pretext of articulating differing destinies for the republic, the two candidates, John Adams, the New England lawyer from a modest background, and Jefferson, the lofty Virginia intellectual, conducted an acrimonious campaign. Jefferson accused Adams of being pro-English, quite an accusation to level at a Founding Father of the republic, and Adams countered by mocking Jefferson’s association with the violence of revolutionary France and by revealing that Jefferson had fathered a child with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. When Jefferson won, Adams churlishly left Washington DC before the new president spoke. Hence, if the emollient tone is laid on thick that’s because a lot of mollifying was required.
Jefferson worked hard on this pivotal section, balancing minority rights against the will of the majority. The tactic worked. The Federalists of the time praised Jefferson’s caution and wisdom. James Monroe wrote that the speech conciliated the opposing party. Note how this is done by avoiding specific positions, on which a speaker can be pinned down. Instead, Jefferson elevates his language into the floridly abstract. This is a more flowery section than the rest, which is usually the tip-off that a writer has less to say.
But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
This passage is the fault line of the American republic, the substance of the dispute between Jefferson and Hamilton about where power should lie. It is the great political cleavage that persists in our time: Democrats for a little more government, Republicans for a little less. There is no easy philosophical reconciliation, so Jefferson does what good rhetoric often does. He slides over the difference with a well-balanced, high-minded, euphonious sentence – ‘We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists’ – and evokes the virtues of the nation which belong to Americans of any persuasion. All presidents do this. Barack Obama said there were no blue states or red states, there was just the United States. Jefferson had more call to do it than most, as he was nursing an infant democracy that was prone to tantrum.
Note how unequivocal and confident Jefferson is in declaring the United States to have the strongest form of government on earth. Then, cleverly, at the end of this section he brings the people to his side, drawing the implicit contrast that I, the Republican, trust the people, whereas you, the Federalist, arrogate power to the state. He concludes with a vivid rhetorical question about whether we have found angels in the form of kings to govern men, then adds the redundant answer that history will be the judge. Or to put the effect more bluntly but less poetically: No, we haven’t and we never will. This is why we need to curtail power; it is why we need democratic institutions. Because men are not angels.
Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe;
