Executive Times
		2005 Book Reviews
		Thomas Jefferson by Christopher Hitchens
		Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended)
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	Enlightenment In his short biography Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Hitchens emphasizes contradiction, neither a fresh view of Jefferson nor a controversial one. The intelligence and fine writing of Hitchens put to work on the intelligence, fine writing, and complicated life and world of Thomas Jefferson makes for a worthwhile reading experience. The roots of Jefferson’s thinking in the Enlightenment becomes a focal point for Hitchens, and shapes this narrative. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter Two: War and Revolution in Virginia, pp. 33-39: Three salient questions would demonstrate whether the American Revolution, at the Virginia level, was to be truly a change of system and not a change of master. These were land tenure, slavery, and the state maintenance of religion. Superimposed was the issue of who was to decide: the people or the traditional authorities. Land reform was the first of these battles. Jefferson detested, because of its Norman and anti-Saxon features, the local law that upheld entail and primogeniture or, to phrase it more simply, the code of English feudalism. This code meant that land could be held by families in perpetuity and that, in the case of an intestate landowner’s death, his holding would pass entirely to his oldest son. After a long argument which included a tussle between his old teacher George Wythe and the more traditionalist Edmund Pendleton, the Jeffersonian side won the day and both entail and primogeniture were eventually, and after many delaying tactics in committee, abolished. As for slavery, the best Jefferson could do was to introduce a bill that forbade the further importation of Africans into Virginia, hoping, as he put it, to stop “the increase of the evil” thereby and to leave “to future efforts its final eradication.” (In those last words, one can hear the tramp of General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.) Had Jefferson had his way, he was later to claim, all those born after a certain date would have been liberated—and then deported. As he stated baldly when recalling the bill in his Autobiography: Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. Only the first eighteen words of this passage are incised in stone on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., which was dedicated by Franklin Roosevelt, in a moment of optimism about human rights, on Jefferson’s bicentennial in April 1943. The passage actually becomes more explicit as it goes on, warning that if emancipation and expatriation were not achieved peacefully, the same outcomes would be compelled by war, and that “human nature must shudder at the prospect held up. We should in vain look for an example in the Spanish deportation or deletion of the Moors. This precedent would fall far short of our case.” It conveys some idea of the morbid guilt and horror with which slaveholders viewed the possibility of black revenge that their most enlightened spokesman could compare his chattels with a medieval Islamic army. And I scarcely need to italicize the word deletion above, except for the fact that this sanguinary euphemism is generally omitted from the record. In the result, during Jefferson’s time in Virginia politics the importation of slaves was ended and it was made easier for masters to free, or manumit, them. The temptation to do this was one that Jefferson himself resisted, except in the case of the children he fathered with Sally Hemings. Two other areas of the law allowed more scope for Jefferson’s Enlightenment convictions. The most conspicuous of these concerned religious liberty. Since its foundation, Virginia had maintained an established Episcopal Church, on the model of the Church of England. This meant that all the inhabitants of the colony were obliged to pay for the upkeep of this one clerical authority, an authority which in its turn demanded not only a confessional monopoly but the right to punish non-Anglican believers such as Baptists and Quakers. Resentment of the rich lands claimed by the Episcopalian bishops and ministers, combined with the hostility generated by the church’s support for the king, might have made it seem easy to press for dis-Establishment after 1776. However, Jefferson meant to go further than that, and to legislate for a complete separation—he was later to call it a “wall”—between religion and the state. The matter proceeded by degrees, with a gradual repeal of those laws that penalized any religious opinions or practices (or any abstention from religious observance) and of the law that compelled “dissenters” to pay for the upkeep of the established church. A majority in the legislature was still Episcopalian, and each measure was very hard fought. None more so than Jefferson’s proposed bill for establishing religious freedom, which was first presented in 1779. Its preamble stated: Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greater part of the world and through all time. Jefferson went on to say that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than our opinions in physics or geometry” and that religious tests for public office constituted no more than “bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way.” There was a small element of hypocrisy in Jefferson’s own position, since as a “Deist” he did not believe that God intervened in human affairs at all, and was thus in a weak position to claim divine authority for a secular bill. He also argued for and against himself at the close of the bill, where it is stated that while of course no future Virginia assembly can be prevented from repealing the law, such a repeal would nonetheless be “an infringement of natural right.” (Jefferson otherwise always maintained that rights belonged only to the living.) However, he was in a better logical and moral position than his rival Patrick Henry who proposed an almost polytheistic alternative whereby not one, but all of the Christian churches be supported by the taxpayer. Here, Jefferson’s great friend and ally James Madison was ready with a “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments”: Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular set of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects? That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever? . . . What influence have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of Civil authority; in many instances they have seen the upholding of the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberty of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, needs them not. When the Jefferson-Madison arguments eventually carried the day, the opposing side attempted even so to amend the preamble and to replace the words Almighty God in the first line with the words Jesus Christ. The defeat of this amendment, by a substantial majority, was cited by Jefferson as “proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahomedan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.” Until 1776, the common-law punishment for “heresy” in Virginia had been burning. The Virginia Statute was passed only one year before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and greatly influenced the omission of any mention of God from the resulting document, as well as the stipulation in Article 6, Section 3, that “no religious test” be required for the holding of any office. There were many contrasting precedents on which the Framers might have drawn, though by definition they could not have employed all of them. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 extended equal protection, and the right to hold office, only to Christians and only to those Christians who abjured the pope. The New York Constitution of 1777 allowed equality to Jews but not to Catholics. In Maryland the situation was almost the reverse, with rights for Catholics and Protestants but not for Jews, Deists, and freethinkers. Delaware required its officeholders to swear to a belief in the Trinity, while South Carolina established “Protestantism” as its official religion. Virginia was the largest state in the new Union, and because of the presence of so many of its sons in the events of 1776 it had considerable revolutionary prestige as well as weight. It is not entirely fanciful to propose that its Statute on Religious Freedom was seminal in the “establishment” clause of the First Amendment. While readers may not learn much new on the pages of Thomas Jefferson, the time spent thinking about Jefferson and his legacy, contradictions and all, is always valuable. Steve Hopkins, October 25, 2005
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