Would the freethinking Jefferson be elected today?

Humanist, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Sidney M. Goetz

Thomas Jefferson was elected in 1800 as the third president of the United States. As one of the nation's founding fathers and author of the Declaration of Independence, he helped enunciate the principles upon which democracy was established and flourished in the New World. Throughout most of U.S. history he has been acknowledged as one of our most beloved and revered figures. But the political, economic, social, and technological climate of eighteenth-century America was much different from that of today and the question begs: if he ran for office in the twenty-first century, would Jefferson be elected president?

It is particularly appropriate that we analyze this question at this time, having just celebrated the 225th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and are now honoring the bicentennial of Jefferson's "wall of separation" letter of January 1, 1802, to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut.

So would Jefferson be elected today? To determine this, we must study the man.

Actually, there are two versions of the Jefferson persona with which we must contend. The first is the version most Americans grew up with--and espoused by Jefferson's earliest and most celebrated biographers, Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson--of a truly Renaissance personality. Perhaps no one in Western history except Aristotle or Leonardo da Vinci ever matched Jefferson in the range of activities, the fertility of thinking, and the multiplicity of interests.

The son of a Virginia land surveyor, Jefferson was a lawyer, politician, mathematician, inventor, surveyor, architect, paleontologist, philosopher, farmer, and fiddler. He set up the public educational system, built a university, founded a great political party, and helped design the nation's Capitol. He invented machines and gadgets; collected scientific materials in the fields of zoology, geology, and anthropology; and wrote a classic essay on poetry. He was instrumental in establishing the nation's coinage, doubled the territory of the United States, codified the legal system of Virginia, and invoked the "wall" metaphor in defense of separation of church and state. Everything interested him; nothing was alien to his mind.

One of the principal builders of the republic, Jefferson held nearly every important public office and enriched them all with his wisdom, humanity, and democratic spirit. He was a member of Congress, governor of Virginia, ambassador to France, Secretary of State, vice-president, and two-term president. Among his famous writings, he authored the Declaration of Independence and Virginia's famous statute of religious freedom.

But above his intellectual interests and political activities, Jefferson stands out as a major philosopher and theorist of U.S. democracy. In brilliant letters--his total correspondence runs to 18,000 pieces--in essays, in addresses, in conversations, and in lectures, Jefferson expressed his ideas of progress, democratic government, and human freedom with a consistency, depth, and beauty rarely exceeded. Jefferson was a passionate champion of the rights, freedom, and dignity of humanity (as was Abraham Lincoln, who later resembled him spiritually). He devoted his life to the realization and spread of the democratic ideal. Today his words continue to inspire.

But, of course, Jefferson was human, not a saint. The "flawed" man has been discussed more recently by such biographers as Fawn M. Brodie of the University of California at Los Angeles and Conor Cruise O'Brien, the Irish scholar and politician and former member of the parliament of the Irish republic. As they note, Jefferson, despite his brave words about equality and the abomination of slavery in the southern states, was himself a slaveowner and refused to free his own slaves, most of whom he inherited, along with a large estate, from his father-in-law. And from the modern technology of DNA testing, we now know that Jefferson was almost certainly the father of one or more sons by his household slave, Sally Hemings, who was biologically his wife's half-sister. And so this celebrated founding father of ours became an early and leading example of miscegenation. (incidentally, marriage between blacks and whites was forbidden by Virginia statute until the mid-1960s.)

Jefferson was also, perhaps, one of the earliest Unitarians in the United States. He scorned the Christian notion of Jesus' immaculate conception and the church's basic doctrine of the Trinity. He distrusted the clergy and ridiculed the entire structure of mortal sin and heaven and hell that the priests of Anglican Virginia had developed. In an August 10, 1787, letter sent from Paris to his seventeen-year-old nephew, Peter Carr, Jefferson advises:

   Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object ... divest yourself
   of all bias ... shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which
   weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call
   to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the
   existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the
   homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear....

      Those facts in the Bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be
   examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur
   to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from God. Examine upon what
   evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so
   strong as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change in the

   laws of nature in the case he relates....

      You will next read the New Testament. It is the history of a personage
   called Jesus. Keep your eye on the opposite pretensions 1. of those who say
   he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended and reversed the laws
   of nature at will, and ascended bodily into heaven; and 2. of those who say
   he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic
   mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity.... Do not be frightened
   from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences.... In fine, I repeat
   that you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe or
   reject anything because any other persons, or description of persons have
   rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by
   heaven and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the
   decision.