Thomas Jefferson: Author of America by Christopher Hitchens - Page 3

Of Jefferson's presidency, Hitchens says, "the record as it comes down to us makes it possible to state that without Thomas Jefferson as president, it is in the highest degree improbable that the United States would exist as we know it today, or even as it was a century ago." In his first term, with the Barbary Wars, the Louisiana Purchase and the Louis and Clark expedition, Jefferson solidified American independence and increased the young nation's prestige and power, presaged the expansion of the Union and Manifest Destiny, and, perhaps most importantly, helped set in motion a tragedy that would not play out until 1865 at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

In his waning years, Jefferson retired to Virginia, to his farm and to his slaves. He sided with the Southern slaveholders in the debate over the Missouri Compromise (which Hitchens calls "a child of the Louisiana Purchase"). A private 1826 letter made public after Jefferson's death raised the specter of secession and "helped create the moral basis for the 'state's rights' ideology of John Calhoun."

Always aware of slavery's stain, but afraid of its alternatives, Jefferson ultimately preferred to defer the question to the next generation. In doing so, he nearly helped to destroy the America that he had literally authored into existence in 1776. Abraham Lincoln's bold act was to embrace the ideology in Jefferson's words and to exhibit the moral courage to follow the meaning of "all men are created equal" to its inevitable conclusion. According to Gary Wills, through the Gettysburg Address (and posthumously, with the adoption of the 13th and 14th Amendments), Lincoln was able, with Jeffersonian ideals, to redeem the "recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise," enshrining equality in the Constitution and giving it the force of law.

Article Author: Pete Blackwell

Pete Blackwell is a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm. He lives in St. Louis, Gateway to the West and proud home of Provel cheese.

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