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July
4, 2003
Jefferson is for Today
"The
Mass of Mankind Has Not Been Born with Saddles on Their Backs"
By LENNI BRENNER
Thomas Jefferson to Roger Weightman,
declining to attend the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of
Independence in the District of Columbia. This was the last letter
written by Jefferson, who died 10 days later, on July 4, 1826.
--LB
Monticello, June 24, 1826
Respected Sir -
The kind invitation I receive from you,
on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be
present with them at their celebration of the fiftieth anniversary
of American Independence, as one of the surviving signers of
an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world,
is most flattering to myself, and heightened by the honorable
accompaniment proposed for the comfort of such a journey. It
adds sensibly to the sufferings of sickness, to be deprived by
it of a personal participation in the rejoicings of that day.
But acquiescence is a duty, under circumstances not placed among
those we are permitted to control. I should, indeed, with peculiar
delight, have met and exch anged there congratulations personally
with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who
joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election
we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword;
and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our
fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity,
continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world,
what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later,
but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the
chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded
them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security
of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores
the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom
of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of
man.
The general spread of the light of science
has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that
the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs,
nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately,
by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For
ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh
our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion
to them.
I will ask permission here to express
the pleasure with which I should have met my ancient neighbors
of the city of Washington and its vicinities, with whom I passed
so many years of a pleasing social intercourse; an intercourse
which so much relieved the anxieties of the public cares, and
left impressions so deeply engraved in my affections, as never
to be forgotten. With my regret that ill health forbids me the
gratification of an acceptance, be pleased to receive for yourself,
and those for whom you write, the assurance of my highest respect
and friendly attachments.
Th. Jefferson
July 4th reminds literate Americans of at least
five words, "all men are created equal," from Thomas
Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. But few know one word
from his last statement on it, a masterpiece, written 10 days
before his death on - yes - the 4th of July, 1826, the 50th anniversary
of the document that created our modern political world.
Jefferson's stature fell from national
demigod to all-too-human in the wake of Fawn Brodie's book, "Thomas
Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait," and recent DNA documentation
that he fathered at least one child by a slave, Sally Hemmings.
Nor did the dying author of the earthshaking phrase free his
other slaves, as Washington did.
Nevertheless, that doesn't diminish the
impact of his youthful words. As America's ambassador, he was
lionized by Paris in 1789. His egalitarianism was what they wanted
when they stormed the Bastille. Later, John Brown's abolitionism
was based on the Declaration and the Bible, and Lincoln at Gettysburg
was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal."
Modern republicanism, like its ancient
models, was created topdown, by some of the educated privileged.
In his writings on slavery we find primordial racism mixed with
noble sentiments. In his 1781 "Notes on the State of Virginia,"
he announced the blacks' "own judgment in favor of the whites,
declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the
preference of the orangutan for the black woman over those of
his own species."
Yet his "Autobiography" truthfully
relates how, "in 1769," at 26, he "became a member
of the legislature ... I made one effort ... for the permission
of the emancipation of slaves which was rejected." He returned
to the question in the Declaration's original version. George
III had
"waged cruel war against human nature
itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty
in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating
and carrying them into slavery ... Determined to keep open a
market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted
his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit
or restrain this execrable commerce."
He added that the British organized slaves
to kill rebel masters. But other signers saw what Jefferson wouldn't.
They couldn't denounce Britain for American slavery without being
hypocrites. The passage was struck.
The Notes gave his emancipation plan.
Blacks born after passage would be colonized to a place under
US protection until they became a sovereign state. "It will
be asked, why not retain them and incorporate the blacks into
the state?" But
"Deep-rooted prejudices entertained
by the whites; ten thousand recollections by the blacks, of the
injuries they have sustained ... will produce convulsions, which
will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or
the other race."
For him, "the improvement of the
blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture
with the whites ... proves that their inferiority is not the
effect merely of their conditions of life." But he noted
the absence of naturalist studies of blacks. "The opinion
that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination,
must be hazarded with great diffidence. To justify a general
conclusion, requires many observations ... I advance it, therefore,
as a suspicion only."
Indeed, when Benjamin Banneker, a free
inventor, sent him a copy of his Almanac, Jefferson delighted
to reply that "nobody wishes more than I do to see such
proofs ... that nature has given to our black brethren, talents
equal to those of the other colors."
In 1784, Congress, under the Articles
of Confederation, defeated his proposal to prohibit slavery,
after 1800, in the western territories from Alabama to Ohio.
But three years later, it declared that everyone born north of
the Ohio River was automatically free, and the Constitutional
Convention arranged to ban slave importation in 1808.
Lincoln was correct:
"(T)o the extent that a necessity
is imposed upon a man, he must submit to it. I think that was
the condition in which we found ourselves when we established
this government. We had slaves among us; we could not get our
Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery; we
could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more;
but having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy
the principle that is the charter of our liberties."
As the slavery issue went into political
limbo in the US, Jefferson began to deteriorate as a thinker
on the question. He refused to sign a French call to outlaw the
slave trade. He didn't propose a ban on slavery in the Louisiana
Territory that he bought from the French. By 1820 he opposed
the Missouri compromise, which allowed slavery there, but barred
it in the rest of the Territory, north of 36Ao 30'.
Jefferson saw the new attacks on slavery
as an election ploy by former Federalists. "As the passage
of slaves from one state to another, would not make a slave of
a single human being ... so their diffusion over a greater surface
would ... proportionately facilitate the accomplishment of their
emancipation."
Unreality can go no further. Nevertheless
we must apply the historical statute of limitations. The 1st
modern political thinker could not possibly understand what we
learn, after the event, from his trajectory: If you are in politics
and, for whatever reason, you do not fight what you know to be
profoundly evil, inexorably you adapt to it and rationalize accommodation.
Therefore he fancied that extending slavery would hasten emancipation,
the last thing slavery expansionists intended.
Given his accommodation to slavery, what
then is still significant in Jefferson's thought? The only republics
then in existence, Switzerland, Genoa and Venice, were aristocracies.
Collectively, the founding fathers established a huge and successful
republic of commoners. Republicanism became the progressive norm,
worldwide. Beyond that, his lasting personal contribution was
his lifelong actions and writings separating church and state.
Jefferson's epitaph deliberately omitted
his being twice elected President, and listed what he considered
his major achievements, the Declaration, Virginia's Statute of
Religious Freedom, and the establishment of the University of
Virginia.
In 1786, with able assistance from James
Madison, his lifelong associate, he succeeded in disestablishing
the Episcopal Church in Virginia. In 1802, as President, he defined
the meaning of the 1st Amendment on religion in a letter to the
Danbury, Connecticut Baptist Association:
"Believing with you that religion
is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he
owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that
the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and
not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act
of the whole American people which declared that their legislature
should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building
a wall of separation between Church and State."
Jefferson wanted to say more. He sent
his draft reply to his Attorney General with a note:
"The Baptist address ... furnishes
an occasion, too, which I have long wished to find, of saying
why I do not proclaim fastings and thanksgivings, as my predecessor
did. The address, to be sure, does not point at this, and its
introduction is awkward. But I foresee no opportunity of doing
it more pertinently. I know it will give great offense to the
New England clergy; but the advocate of religious freedom is
to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from them."
He was persuaded him not to gratuitously
pick a fight, and the reply ultimately didn't deal with thanksgivings.
But in 1808, he did explain his policy in a letter to Reverend
Samuel Miller:
"I do not believe it is for the
interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct
it's exercises, it's discipline, or it's doctrines; nor of the
religious societies that the general government should be invested
with the power of effecting uniformity of time or matter among
them. Fasting & prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining
them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right
to determine for itself the times for these exercises, &
the objects proper for them, according to their own particular
tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands,
where the constitution has deposited it."
If he had no choice but to adapt to the
continued existence of black slavery, he never compromised his
right to think for himself. As he was victorious on this early
on, and proud of his Presidential separatism, his writings on
religion, psychologically uncorrupted by political necessity,
could continue to be vigorous and are literary classics thru
to his final testament.
In a 1787 letter to a young nephew, Jefferson
told him to "Question with boldness even the existence of
a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the
homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."
In an 1800 epistle, he explained why
the clerics were "in arms" against him. "They
believe that any portion of power confided in me will be exerted
in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly, for
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against
any form of tyranny over the mind of man."
In his Presidential days, his followers
were called the Republican Party. It became universally known
as the Democratic Party in the 1820s. The present Republicans
took the vacated name when they set up in 1854, against the Democrats,
to identify with Jefferson. Yet can anyone imagine a major 2004
Presidential contender from either party talking like him about
Judaism and Christianity? Jesus,
"Like Socrates & Epictetus ...
wrote nothing himself. But he had not, like them, a Xenophon
or an Arrian to write for him. On the contrary, all the learned
of his country, entrenched in its power and riches, were opposed
to him lest his labors should undermine their advantages; and
the committing to writing his life and doctrines fell on the
most unlettered and ignorant men; who wrote, too, from memory,
and not till long after the transactions had passed.
According to the ordinary fate of those
who attempted to enlighten and reform mankind, he fell an early
victim to the jealousy and combination of the alter and the throne,
at about 33 years of age, his reason having not yet attained
the maximum of its energy, nor the course of his preaching, which
was but of 3 years at most, presented occasions for developing
a complete set of morals.
Hence the doctrines which he really delivered
were defective as a whole, and fragments only of what he did
deliver have come down to us mutilated, misstated, and often
unintelligible.
They have been still more disfigured
by the corruptions of schismatising followers, who have found
an interest in sophisticating and perverting the simple doctrines
he taught by engrafting on them the mysticisms of a Grecian sophist,
frittering them into subtleties, and obscuring them with jargon,
until they have caused good men to reject the whole in disgust
and to view Jesus himself as an impostor. Notwithstanding these
disadvantages, a system of morals is presented to us, which,
if filled up in the true style and spirit of the rich fragments
he left us, would be the most perfect and sublime that has ever
been taught by man."
The 'good men' referred to in this 1814
letter were rare to nonexistent in America, but ambassador Jefferson
had met or read them.
"If we did a good act merely from
the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence
arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say, as some
do, that no such thing exists. We have the same evidence of the
fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their own affirmations,
and their reasoning in support of them. I have observed, indeed,
generally, that while in Protestant countries the defections
from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in
Catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert,
D'Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous
of men. Their virtue then, must have had some other foundation
than the love of God."
In 1819 or 1820, he produced "The
Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," aka "the Jefferson
Bible." He took scissors to Greek, Latin, French and English
versions of the gospels, cutting out every bit of "monkish
ignorance and superstition." Even Jesus is not without philosophical
sin, he explained in a covering letter:
"(I)t is not to be understood that
I am with Him in all His doctrines. I am a Materialist; He takes
the side of Spiritualism. He preaches the efficacy of repentance
towards forgiveness of sin. I require a counterpoise of good
works to redeem it, etc."
Jefferson's Jesus is born in Luke 2:1
thru 2:7 and is laid in the manger. But everything about angels
appearing to shepards, telling them of the savior's birth, was
cut to Luke 2: 21, as, eight days later, he's circumcised. Jefferson
leaps over predictions that he's the messiah to Luke 2: 39, where
the family returns to Nazareth. Everything is cool until mom
and pop lose him at 12, on a trip to Jerusalem, and find him
challenging "the doctors" in the temple. His "How
is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my
Father's business" is snipped out. Jefferson has no time
for 12 year old saviors.
So it goes until John 19:41-2, as they
put Jesus in the sepulcher. Jefferson segues to Matthew 37:60,
where they 'rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher,
and departed." The author of the Declaration of Independence
believed Jesus was a great philosopher, not the son of God, nor
the messiah, and philosophers don't rise from the dead.
Jefferson is For Today
Jefferson believed there was a God. However
he was learned in the history of religious fanaticism and separated
church and state because he believed connecting them was corrupting
for both. Thanks to him and Madison, if America wasn't perfect
in this regard, it was the best there was. But he never tried
to convert anyone to his religious skepticism and it never took
root among the people. They didn't read Greek and Latin or study
law. They knew little science. Most were barely literate. Once
separation was established, religion flourished. Eventually the
two 'Jeffersonian' parties became bywords for corruption, and
pandering to religious voters became normal. "In God we
trust" got onto our money, "under God" into the
school Pledge of Allegiance, and now the US simultaneously militarily
protects Islamic fundamentalist Saudi Arabia and Israel, an Orthodox
Jewish state.
Paradoxically, the Bush administration's
determination to destroy Jefferson's wall elevates his religious
writings to a central position in contemporary America. Now is
the time to publicize them to build his wall, straight up to
high heaven above. Bush is a classic Christian God and country
right-winger. But his country's defining statements are Jefferson's
Declaration and Madison's Bill of Rights. Any critical mind reading
the two authors, and then listening to Bush babbling about a
"crusade" against Islamic fundamentalism immediately
sees that there is not a spec of Jefferson and Madison in him.
And it is still Jefferson's wall that legally defines the relationship
between religion and America's government.
In terms of education, the country is
catching up with him. It is no accident that the antiwar movement
has been rooted in the campuses since the 60s. Today, sending
their kids to college is the normative American ambition. Already,
even 17% of Blacks over 25 have degrees.
One out of seven Americans now say they
have no religion. But the Declaration's "nature's God"
is still the God of most of the educated. If Bush's base is the
47% of Americans (57% of Blacks) who believe God created the
world about 10,000 years, 42% combine belief in a God with the
knowledge that the world is millions or billions of years old.
Tens of millions have abandoned their
birth religion. In 2001, 49% of all American Jews, the most educated
stratum on the planet, said Judaism was no longer their religion.
The classic WASP religions, Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism,
are losing their educated. Millions have poured out of the Catholic
Church and the rate of abandonment is accelerating in the wake
of the molestation scandals.
In religious sect after sect there is
a battle over women and gay ministers. Forty-four percent of
Americans now believe that atheists can go to heaven. While I
must laugh at the notion of them leaving the porch light on for
me for a heaven that I wouldn't even think of visiting (Too many
Confederate soldiers already there), nevertheless, that growing
posthumous ecumenicalism symbolizes the move away from the theological
fanaticism encouraged by Bush and accepted as given by electoral
liberals.
Our moral standards are changing. A majority
of Americans now believe premarital sex is OK. By now a majority
of 18 to 30s believe marijuana should be legal.
Scientific American and Science magazine,
the popular 'techie' journals, are alarmed at Creationist attacks
on evolution and Bush's patronage of them. They are also scandalized
at the Democrats adaptation to the religious right.
In 6/02, the Senate voted 99-to-0 to
condemn a federal court ruling, striking "under God"
from the Pledge of Allegiance. Among these degenerates was Paul
Wellstone, our liberals' latest hero. In the House, only three
Representatives voted no. On 3/4/03, the Senate voted 94-to-0
to condemn the 9th Circuit Courta*TMs later position, upholding
most of the earlier decision.
Most progressives think the Democrats
automatically oppose Bush's pandering to the religious right.
But reality is more complex. When Geraldine Ferraro represented
a Catholic congressional district, she was against abortion.
The same with Dick Gephardt and Dennis Kucinich. But suddenly,
when they developed national ambitions, like Paul they saw the
light and got in harmony with the national party, which knows
it would lose its liberal wing if it abandoned abortion, nationally.
But such "voting my district" Catholic pandering is
still the norm for many local Democrats.
Wellstone voted to condemn the court
because his "democratic wing of the Democratic Party"
are "economic populists." Their electoral strategy
is to take an economic position a big whole nickel better for
ordinary Americans than Bush, without losing votes by unnecessarily
differing with Joe Sixpack when it comes to his prejudices.
That may or may not work for them, electorally.
But it is impossible to believe that Jefferson would have voted
for putting in "under God," when it is well known that
it was inserted in 1954 to contrast the US with 'Godless, atheist
Communism.' Their Senate votes should remind us is that, in life,
Modern Democrats, including their liberals, have a dreadful record
when it comes to keeping politics and religion separate. We must
always remember that it was the Democrats who 1st patronized
Israel, an Orthodox Jewish state, and it was two Democrats, Jack
and Bobby Kennedy, who committed the vilest violation of religious
freedom in American history, the wiretapping of Martin Luther
King.
Educated Americans know they should know
more about the Founding Fathers and the history of the 1st Amendment.
It is up to us to take Jefferson and Madison on religion and
separation of church and state to them.
I'm certain there is no God. But that
isn't the issue. Some atheists, as with Stalin, have committed
crimes as great as their theological competitors. The tasks before
us are separation of religion and politics and the popularization
of scientific knowledge. It is up to all progressives to mobilize
the one in seven non-religious, the principled scientists, and
the many Christians, Jews, Muslims and other religious who believe
in separation, to defend it against its enemies, the Senatorial
scoundrels and their infamous Republican and Democratic parties.
Lenni Brenner,
editor of 51
Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, can
be reached at BrennerL21@aol.com
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Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
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