Jefferson’s Dream
The Bill of Rights
Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against.
-- Samuel Webster, 1777
Although the first shots were fired in 1775 and the Declaration was signed in 1776, the war had just begun. These colonists, facing the biggest empire and military force in the world, fought for five more years - the war didn’t end until General Cornwallis surrendered in October, 1781. Even then, some resistance remained; the last Loyalists and British left New York starting in April, and the treaty that formally ended the war was signed in Paris in September 1783.
The first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, was written in 1777 and endorsed by the States in 1781. It was subsequently replaced by our current Constitution, as has been documented in many books. In this chapter, we want to take a look at the visions that motivated what de Tocqueville would later call America’s “experiment” with democracy in a republic.
The first glimpses of a powerful American company
Very few people are aware that Thomas Jefferson considered freedom from monopolies to be one of the fundamental human rights. But it was very much a part of his thinking during the time when the Bill of Rights was born.
In fact, most of the founders of America never imagined a huge commercial empire sweeping over their land, reminiscent of Hewes’ “ships of an enormous burthen” with “immense quantities” of goods. Rather, most of them saw an America made up of people like themselves: farmers.
In a speech before Congress on April 9, 1789, James Madison referred to agriculture as “the great staple of America.” He added, “I think [agriculture] may justly be styled the staple of the United States; from the spontaneous productions which nature furnishes, and the manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country.”
In a National Gazette article on 3 March 1792, Madison wrote, “The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself.”
The first large privately-owned corporation to rise up in the new United States during the presidential terms of Jefferson (1801-1809) and Madison (1809-1817) was a bank, and its rise caused considerable consternation. Legislators railed against it for decades, particularly when the Bank started involving itself in politics, and tried to terminate its corporate charter, an effort that finally succeeded when the bank went under in 1841.
In the middle of the 30-year struggle, in May 1827, James Madison wrote a letter to his friend James K. Paulding about the issue. He said, “With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable. …they have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered.”
Thus, while Madison saw the rise of corporate power and its dangers during and after his presidency, the issues weren’t obvious to him when he was helping write the United States Constitution decades earlier. And that may have been significant when the Bill of Rights was being put together.
The Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans
Shortly after George Washington became the first President of the United States in 1789, his Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed that the federal government incorporate a national bank and assume state debts left over from the Revolutionary War. Congressman James Madison and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson saw this as an inappropriate role for the federal government, representing the potential concentration of too much money and power in the federal government. (The Bill of Rights, with its Tenth Amendment reserving powers to the states, wouldn’t be ratified for two more years.)
The disagreement over the bank and assuming the states’ debt nearly tore apart the new government, and led to the creation by Hamilton, Washington, and Vice President Adams (among others including Thomas and Charles Pinckney, Rufus King, DeWitt Clinton, and John Jay) of the Federalist Party.
Several factions arose in opposition to the Federalists, broadly referred to as the Anti-Federalists, including two groups who called themselves “Democrats” and “Republicans.” Jefferson pulled them together by 1794 into the Democratic Republican Party, united in their opposition to the Federalists ideas’ of a strong central government that could grant the power to incorporate a national bank and bestow benefits to favored businesses through the use of tariffs and trade regulation.
During the Washington and Adams presidencies, though, the Federalists reigned, and Hamilton was successful in pushing through his programs for assuming state debts, creating a United States Bank, and a network of bounties and tariffs to benefit emerging industries and businesses.
In 1794, independent whiskey distillers in Pennsylvania revolted against Hamilton’s federal taxes on their product, calling them “unjust, dangerous to liberty, oppressive to the poor, and particularly oppressive to the Western country, where grain could only be disposed of by distilling it.”
The whiskey distillers tarred and feather a tax collector, and pulled together a local militia of seven thousand men. But President Washington issued two federal orders, and sent in General Henry Lee commanding militias from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia.
The Whiskey Rebellion was put down and the power of the Federalists wasn’t again questioned until the election of 1800, which Jefferson’s Democratic Republican party won in an election referred to as the “second American Revolution” or “the Revolution of 1800.”
In the election of 1804, the Federalists carried only Delaware, Connecticut, and part of Maryland against Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, and by 1832 as the Industrial Revolution was taking hold of America, the Federalists were so marginalized they ceased to exist as an organized party.
Jefferson and Natural Rights
Back in the earliest days of the United States, Jefferson didn’t anticipate the scope, meaning, and consequences of the industrial revolution that was just starting to gather steam in Europe about the time he was entering politics in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He distrusted letting companies have too much power, but he was focusing on the concept of natural rights, an idea which was at the core of the writings and speeches of most of the Revolutionary era generation from Thomas Paine to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin.
In Jefferson’s mind, “the natural rights of man” were enjoyed by Jefferson’s ancient tribal ancestors of Europe, were lived out during Jefferson’s life by some of the tribal peoples of North America, and were written about most explicitly sixty years before Jefferson’s birth by John Locke, whose writings were widely known and often referenced in pre-revolutionary America.
Natural rights, Locke said, are things that people are born with simply by virtue of their being human and born into the world. In 1698, in his Second Treatise on Government, Locke put forth one of the most well known definitions of the “natural rights” that all people are heirs to by virtue of their common humanity. He wrote:
All men by nature are equal…in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man; … being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions… (Chapter 2)
As to the role of government, Locke wrote:
Men being…by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living…in a secure enjoyment of their properties… (Chapter 95)
cont...
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