Jefferson on the Demise of Liberty

There is a fondness in times of hard-fisted rule in America to resort to the famous quotation of Thomas Jefferson regarding the husbanding of the Tree of Liberty with a bloody nutrition.  The observation appears in a letter written by Jefferson, while serving as America’s representative in France. 

Some will not give this short letter a full reading, and that saddens me.  But if you will take the five minutes his letter's words command, you will see more than just a call for citizens to become the arborists of liberty, you will see Jefferson's prophecy on the death of a free people.

First, here's Jefferson's letter:

THE NEW CONSTITUTION**
To William S. Smith 
Paris, Nov. 13, 1787

DEAR SIR, -- I am now to acknoledge the receipt of your favors of October the 4th, 8th, & 26th. In the last you apologise for your letters of introduction to Americans coming here. It is so far from needing apology on your part, that it calls for thanks on mine. I endeavor to shew civilities to all the Americans who come here, & will give me opportunities of doing it: and it is a matter of comfort to know from a good quarter what they are, & how far I may go in my attentions to them. Can you send me Woodmason's bills for the two copying presses for the M. de la Fayette, & the M. de Chastellux? The latter makes one article in a considerable account, of old standing, and which I cannot present for want of this article. -- I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: & very bad. I do not know which preponderate.

What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: & what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent & persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, & what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves.

Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can history produce an instance of rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it's motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independent 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen-yard in order. I hope in God this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted. -- You ask me if any thing transpires here on the subject of S. America? Not a word. I know that there are combustible materials there, and that they wait the torch only. But this country probably will join the extinguishers. -- The want of facts worth communicating to you has occasioned me to give a little loose to dissertation. We must be contented to amuse, when we cannot inform.

___________________________________________

So, there it is. 

Jefferson sees how the Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts, a solitary instance among 13 independent States in eleven years is being made the justification for the erection of a fearful and monstrous central power.  (In case you had not known, the immediate cause of the call for the 1787 Convention in Philadelphia was the aftermath of a farmers’ rebellion, Shays Rebellion, in Massachusetts.  In face of calls for assistance from Massachusetts, the existing confederacy government could not timely respond, because the capacity of the central government to respond was severely constrained by the structure and provisions of the Articles of Confederation.  That perceived weakness was harked upon as a great danger to the peace of the States individually, and therefore a risk of harm to the confederacy generally.) 

Jefferson’s principal concern in his correspondence with William Smith is the omission in the proposed Constitution of a limitation on the duration in office of the President.  He invokes the instance of the Stadtholders.  These Stadtholders were appointed the rulers of the Dutch Republic to stand in the place (stadtholder literally means place holder) of the Holy Roman Emperors.  Though some Stadtholders served briefly, others served extended periods as the Chief Magistrate of the Dutch Republic; some served up to forty years.  So we know from his letter that Jefferson saw the failure to expressly limit the term of office of the President a serious defect inconsistent with liberty.

Jefferson also peels away the real significance of Shays Rebellion.  Shays Rebellion and the Confederacy’s inaction responding to it were the direct cause of the call for a Convention to amend the Articles of Convention, and thus the indirect cause of the ultimate supplanting the Articles of Confederacy by the Constitution.  Jefferson’s mathematics makes that relatively insignificant rebellion an evil reduced to a once in a century and a half problem:  “We have had 13 states independent 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion?”  Imagine that, more than five generations of peace between kerfuffles.   

Just as significant is Jefferson’s willingness to accommodate misunderstandings of the affairs of public life in the citizens of the Nation: 

“[C]an history produce an instance of rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it's motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. …. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them.”

The answer to such as Shays Rebellion is not, in Jefferson’s view, to hammer the uninformed, the misinformed or the poorly informed:  “Set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them.”  Jefferson there goes on to utter his famous principle for the husbanding of liberty:  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure.”

But, as I suggested in the opening paragraph, Jefferson also prophesied the demise of liberty.  Before closing out these thoughts, it is worth examining his rumination on this point.

Did Jefferson fear the collapse of the new Nation under the anarchy of widespread and frequent unrests among the People, the mirroring and multiplication of Shays Rebellion across the Thirteen States?  Did he imagine a re-acquisition of the colonies by the Crown of Great Britain?  Did he foresee the rise of the Natives, pushing the colonists into the sea?

Not at all. 

In fact, Jefferson’s prophecy is not that a Nation – our Nation – would expire.  Rather, Jefferson foresaw the demise of liberty.  Jefferson saw the harm in what you and I now see.  The demise of a nation on bed of apathies.  Having discussed the relative harmlessness of Shays Rebellion and imagined future rebellions of its kind, he directly prefers such rebellions over the alternative:  “If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”  You see, in his view, even if Shays Rebellion rose on ignorance, it is a sign of the health of a free People that such rebellion arises; the alternative – the passive acceptance of unacceptable abuses of liberty by those that govern – is “the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”

So we now watch to see how this People act in response to the desperate loss of liberties by a thousand cuts.  Cuts that range from interpositions such as ASSET FORFEITURE, to NSA domestic surveillance of every form of electronic communication absent any justifiably granted and constitutionally sound warrant.  Even if we are ignorant in thinking these to be impositions, it is our contentment to live under them, rather than to depose the tyrants who, even only perhaps seem to have imposed them, that marks the death rattle of our liberties.

Sic Semper Tyrannis.

**Jefferson’s letter to William Smith is part of an EXCELLENT Jefferson collection available online.  The letter is online at http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-singleauthor?specfile=/web/data/jefferson/texts/jefall.o2w&act=text&offset=5674387&textreg=1&query=tree+of+liberty