Both Monticello and Mount Vernon are imposing estates. Both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were imposing historical figures. What do the homes tell us about the statesmen? Quite a bit. Practically since the nation’s founding, there have been those, particularly among intellectuals, who deprecate the reserved, stoic, and to some stolid Washington. Such people much [...]
The crybullies currently raging through American campuses collecting scalps (oops! microaggression) have set their sights on dead villains as well as live ones. The motivation is the same, of course, to harness the resentment they have learned in school as a tool of self-aggrandizement in power, influence, and cheap pride. This will not end well [...]
American conservatives, when they have felt the need to establish their lineage, have accepted the rather conventional framework of liberalism-conservatism, already existing in American historiography and popular lore. But one possible tradition of American conservatism is the Jeffersonian tradition. As a movement of thought, the resurgent conservatism of twentieth century America cannot achieve maturity without [...]
Until 1947, few Americans knew about Thomas Jefferson’s comment, made in a private letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, that the First Amendment’s guarantee against a federally established church made a “wall of separation between church and state.” It was in that year, in the case of Everson v. Board of Education, that the Supreme [...]
Our Southern forebears did not practice economics. They practiced political economy—which is concerned with human well-being. Those old-time Southerners did not assume that man is to be understood wholly or chiefly as an economic being. Economics, as practiced today, is a utilitarian and materialistic study. It is concerned with maximizing profit, with describing the actions [...]
Much has been written in the past century about the state of American constitutionalism and the political culture that serves as its animating force. Some scholars have argued that American constitutionalism has evolved so far from its founding principles that political practice today would be unrecognizable by the eighteenth-century Framers. These critics submit that the [...]
Section I The Legacy of the Declaration When American schoolchildren first discover that they have a place in the world they sometimes give their addresses a wonderful form. Transformed for our case, it would be: “Proper Name, St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland, the United States of America, the North American continent, the Earth, the Solar System.” [...]
The total absence of a distinct executive branch under the Articles of Confederation produced a government severely handicapped in the day-to-day management of its affairs. It was the founding generation’s own experience that persuaded it that instilling “energy in the executive” was critical to any constitutional design that aimed to promote sound government. The following [...]
Thomas Jefferson is perhaps the greatest enigma of the American age. He wrote and spoke on so many topics that he has become the symbol of virtually every strain of uniquely American political thought. Jefferson is the democrat, the agrarian, the federalist, the republican, the radical, the conservative, the statesman, the planter, the intellectual, the [...]
Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity by Alf J. Mapp, Jr. Reviewing selected letters of Edmund Burke in the American Spectator in 1985, Professor Charles R. Kesler claimed that American conservatives attempting to propagate Burke’s principles “have always faced an embarassing obstacle: namely the almost complete lack of a Burkean tradition in America.” [...]
The name Thomas Jefferson is still significant, witness the relentless efforts of the present regime, which fears the real Jefferson, to destroy his favorable image. A cynical but true saying that sometimes passes around among historians is “He who controls the present controls the past.” Man is a symbolizing creature, and political struggles can be [...]
The constitutions or laws of many nations provide for what is called “religious liberty.” In practice, this liberty is under severe restrictions in numerous countries, if it exists at all. The fact is that no one can really talk about religious freedom without examining what the “religion” holds. Grace builds on nature but does not contradict [...]
The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800, by Conor Cruise O’Brien The Long Affair both succeeds and fails. By attacking the American iconic hero of liberty, Conor Cruise O’Brien succeeds in producing a stir, particularly among Jefferson scholars. The Irish scholar-politician selected passages for inclusion in The Atlantic Monthly (October 1996), entitled [...]
John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, was the chief pamphleteer of the Jeffersonian Republicans during the 1790s. With vigor, he attacked the Hamiltonian system with its national bank and privileges for the wealthy. Despite Taylor’s prominence in the Jeffersonian party and in forming its ideological expression, his significance has not always been understood. Historians have [...]