Jeffersonian America

How Jefferson and His Contemporaries Defined the Early American Republic

Dustin Gish, Andrew Bibby, Dustin Gish, Andrew Bibby

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813944487
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The emergence of the early American republic as a new nation on the world stage conjured rival visions in the eyes of leading statesmen at home and attentive observers abroad. Thomas Jefferson envisioned the newly independent states as a federation of republics united by common experience, mutual interest, and an adherence to principles of natural rights. His views on popular government and the American experiment in republicanism, and later the expansion of its empire of liberty, offered an influential account of the new nation. While persuasive in crucial respects, his vision of early America did not stand alone as an unrivaled model.

The contributors to Rival Visions examine how Jefferson's contemporaries—including Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and Marshall—articulated their visions for the early American republic. Even beyond America, in this age of successive revolutions and crises, foreign statesmen began to formulate their own accounts of the new nation, its character, and its future prospects. This volume reveals how these vigorous debates and competing rival visions defined the early American republic in the formative epoch after the revolution.

Part One

Envisioning the New Nation

Part one focuses on the republican character of the new nation and its place in history. Each essay weaves into its presentation rival visions articulated by Jefferson’s contemporaries on key problems confronting the new American republic. We open with the broader rhetorical problem of fashioning a unique self-understanding of the new nation in light of historical and ideological precedents from the past. The prospects for the new American republic also depended upon near-term success in formulating national diplomatic policy and generating a revolutionary form of republican politics that would begin to define the place of the United States of America within the existing framework of international powers.

Rival Histories

The Early American Republic’s Quarrel with Time

Eran Shalev

In the summer of 1776, colonial British North Americans declared their independence from the empire and established a republic. This bold act caused numerous practical problems, which would be impressively dealt with, if only partly solved, a decade later with the ratification of a federal constitution. However, national independence also generated a lasting intellectual problem: the American union of states was a modern polity, but as such it was a nation that lacked firm historical precedence. Numerous citizens of the early United States rose to the challenge of rationalizing and justifying and placing their revolutionary political experiment in a historical context. They did so by elaborating compelling historical narratives, in light of which they attempted to describe and glorify their republic. The generation of founders thus presented themselves as the predecessors of free Anglo-Saxons and drew on classical polities, from Carthage to Athens and especially Rome. They lengthily compared themselves to the biblical Israelite federation and their leaders to Old Testament figures. They studied the mistakes of the more recent confederacies such as the Swiss and the Dutch. They also observed allegedly timeless (and thus history-less) Native Americans to validate their republicanism in an age when the major European nations were ruled by absolutist monarchs.

The absence of ancient European ruins and traces on the American landscape could—perhaps should—have created an American present undetermined by the past, a history that could actually begin at the beginning, with the founding.1 Early American citizens continually appealed, however, to history to trace and analyze the tension between attempts to conduct a modern revolution and to found a nation. They were deeply attracted to and reliant on the past to explain their accomplishments.2 Hence, we cannot properly understand the political choices and claims made by the generation of American state builders unless we realize the crucial role that history had in forming their political worldviews. Without a full grasp of the nature and scope of their attraction to history, and the importance of a historical frame for political action, we cannot fully appreciate how revolutionary-age political actors decided to make the break from Britain, how they justified that rupture, and how they constructed their new, independent states and federal union. Taking the Anglo-Saxonism of Thomas Jefferson as a starting point for the various pasts to which Americans in the Early Republic appealed, this chapter demonstrates the extent to which revolutionary-era Americans were compelled to represent and understand their actions in terms of historical analogy as well as explore the deep relationship of history, revolution, and political imagination in the late eighteenth century.

---

As a member of the committee (along with Benjamin Franklin) to design a Great Seal for the new United States, Thomas Jefferson proposed in July 1776 an impression that would render Hengist and Horsa, the legendary Germanic brothers who were the first to settle England. Jefferson’s recommendation was characteristic at a time in which the Anglo-Saxons provided revolutionary white Americans with a common paradigm for a free society ruled by law. Anglo-Saxon history offered a narrative of a people exerting their right to relinquish their country and associating together into a new free political society and independent state. Patriot Americans readily recognized this historical pattern from their own past, identified with it, and adopted it without hesitation as imperial tensions grew.

Revolutionaries found the Dark Age Germanic tribes, who stemmed from the thick of northern Europe’s forests and settled the English isle in the early fifth century, especially attractive during the decade of resistance to British attempts to tax the North American colonies (1765–75). They were fascinated by the free and raw form of government that the Anglo-Saxons imported with them to England, which enabled the English, so was commonly believed, to retain their identity as a free people through centuries of conquests and upheavals. Hence, while American colonists argued against parliamentary arbitrariness, they repeatedly appealed to an Anglo-Saxon golden age of freedom. Patriots viewed the actions of the English Parliament through the prism of the “Norman yoke” that followed the age of the Anglo-Saxons and was meant to subdue their tenacious spirit of liberty, molded in the German forests and now given a new birth in the New World. Revolutionaries embraced this view of history, which has come to be called “Whig,” and positioned themselves in numerous speeches, sermons, and petitions as virtual and literal descendants of the Anglo-Saxons and their free society.

Revolutionary Americans made use of the Saxons as they scrambled for legalistic support for their argument for separation from Britain. Thomas Jefferson famously made such use of the Saxon past in his Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) in which he reminded his audience that the Saxons, “in like manner” of American colonists, “left their native wilds and woods in the north of Europe, had possessed themselves of the island of Britain, then less charged with inhabitants, and had established there that system of laws which has so long been the glory and protection of that country.” Like American colonists, the Saxons’ migration was voluntary and self imposed, but even more importantly, there was never “any claim of superiority or dependence asserted over them by that mother country from which they had migrated; and were such a claim made, it is believed that his majesty’s subjects in Great Britain have too firm a feeling of the rights derived to them from their ancestors, to bow down the sovereignty of their state before such visionary pretensions. And it is thought that no circumstance has occurred to distinguish materially the British from the Saxon emigration.”3

The role of the Saxons did not end, however, with similarity of circumstances and analogical legalistic logic, which was meant to prove that American colonials were no less under the dominion of Parliament than the British under a European dominion. Revolutionaries, such as “Demophilus” (possibly George Bryan), in his extensive The Genuine Principles of the Ancient Saxons (1776), identified extremely appealing aspects in the presumed Germanic political culture that would be useful for Americans to emulate. Demophilus pointed out that “it is reported by historians that our Saxon forefathers had no kings in their own country, but lived in tribes or small communities, governed by laws of their own making, and magistrates of their own electing.” With the Continental Congress providing Americans with a wartime ad hoc council and colonists searching for a more permanent solution for coordination and cooperation, the Saxons also presented an appealing union in which “shires became united together into a kingdom.” This raw tribal democracy thus seemed to demonstrate an appealing confederacy in which “a number of these [Saxon] communities were united together for their mutual defence and protection.” The famed Saxon Witenagemot, the meeting of the deputies of the people, was an admired example for prudent legislature. Whatever the American solution to the problem of governance would be, however, they would profit from the Saxon principles: “wherever a combined interest was concerned and the people at large were affected by it, the immediate deputies of the people, met together to attend the respective interests of their constituents, and a majority of voices always bound the whole, and determined for any measure, that was supposed to operate for the good of the whole combined body.”4 This medieval republicanism had a great appeal for Americans as they were preparing to take a leap into the revolutionary dark abyss.

As Americans reacted to the unfolding imperial crisis, they repeatedly commented on the “small [Saxons] republics,” which “met in council upon their common concerns; and being all equally interested in every question that could be moved in their meetings.” It was thus commonly held that the Saxons “maintained that natural, wise and equal government, which has deservedly obtained the admiration of every civilized age and country.” Hence, it was from the prevalence of that tradition that the Saxons “have been enabled to astonish” future generations, “commissioned to treat with them, by displays of their sublime policy” of equality and deliberation. It naturally followed that Americans should look at “this ancient and justly admired pattern, the old Saxon form of government” as “the best model, that human wisdom . . . has left them to copy.”5

Versed in Saxon political culture, revolutionary Americans used historical analogy in lieu of legal precedence. Underlying these readings, as well as the colonists’ case against Parliament, was the belief that English subjects lived under an ancient and unwritten customary constitution that guaranteed an array of cherished liberties, such as the right to consent to taxation, to be represented in parliaments, and to be tried before a jury of peers. That ancient and unwritten constitution was formed, so they argued, in northern Europe by Germanic tribes that exercised a rudimentary but pure democracy, and it limited monarchs who acted as agents of their free subjects, who legislated in a primeval parliament. This remote and pristine republican-like past was interrupted, according to the prevailing Whig narrative that revolutionaries gladly adopted, by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced tyranny and corruption into English governance. The unwritten constitution prevailed over Norman encroachments, however, and continued to restra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Envisioning the New Nation
• Part Two: National Tensions in the Early Republic
• Part Three: Constitutional Controversies
• Notes on Contributors
• Index