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

Sic Semper Tyrannus, Assassin's Creed or Liberty's Credo?

So I reposted a poster here about American assassins and noted the designation of one's political affiliation as Anarchist-Socialist.

As the old Indian said in the Outlaw Josey Wales, I went home and thought about that.  "Anarchist-socialist."  "Anarchist-socialist."

Then, of course, I knew what bothered me.  "Anarchist-socialist" makes as much sense as "dry-wetness" or, perhaps, "wet-dryness."  In other words, it makes no sense at all.  Anarchism is a state in which no one rules over another.  Socialism is quite far down the other end of the liberty-slavery spectrum, certainly closer to slavery than to liberty.  Where collective decisions limit the both the uses of capital and freedom of choice in the larger, non-abortion, sense.

A friend on Facebook took issue with my self-description as an anarcho-capitalist.   But it is what it is.  I have seen tyrannies, I have watched their depredations on mankind, and in their own small way, I have felt their sting in my own life.

I have seen the tyranny of clergy.

A child of the Catholic faith, I grew up in a family that loved and respected the hierarchical church, the Primacy of Peter, and all.  That hierarchy and the trust it demanded were too capable of abuses.  My life has a shape in it, a vein that runs through it, that is the product of the abuse of that hierarchical authority.  I have lived under the shadow of clergy abuse, a natural product of disproportionate positional authority. 

I am living to seen the political tyranny of our own presidency, who, in the shadows of his own failed moral suasion, has moved to rule by executive order.  In my own lifetime, I have seen political tyrants stand up -- Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Tito -- and I have seen them fall down -- Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Idi Amin.  I honestly hope to see the political tyranny of Obama laid down in the silent grave of history alongside the tyranny of those others.

I have seen the tyranny of ideas.

This last may seem strange without explanation.  So let me explain.  Ideas can be a spark that ignite the passions, or a spark that ignites a fire of enlightenment.  Oliver Wendell Holmes, evil as he was, understood this capacity of an idea and expressed it in defense of liberty of speech in his most famous dissent, in Gitlow v. New York:

It is said that this manifesto was more than a theory, that it was an incitement. Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and, if believed, it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason.

But there are ideas whose persuasive capacity cannot burn and cannot brighten.  So when one who is smitten with a failed idea does not see the idea giving birth to fire or light in the hearts and minds of others, then the temptation can be to artificially bring about by force what is not native to the idea.  Some ideas that burn brightly and enlighten are so well-stated in the words of those who have trod the path of sweet liberty won against tyranny before me that they serve by themselves to explain:  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  Decl. of Ind.  "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"  Patrick Henry.

Where this thinking leads me is to these questions:  is liberty such an idea, one that burns not brightly, that lends no light?  If liberty burns brightly, how are our present lights so dim?  If liberty throws its light freely, how are so many living in a preferred shadow of government direction, government control?