Notes on the American experiment

July 2025

Thomas Jefferson was a republican in the classical sense of the word. He believed in self-government. He was paranoid about the possibility that absolutists might take power in the United States and establish a monarchy here.

Historian Jon Meacham, in his 2013 biography of Jefferson, describes our third president as a philosophical man who was skilled at the art of power. In a different era, Jefferson might have become a scientist or a scholar. But he lived during epic times, and he became a leading architect in the construction of the American republic.

Meacham’s book portrays the American Revolution as an offshoot of an ongoing political battle in Britain. Prior to the American Revolution, Great Britain had gone through a sequence of political infighting. In the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the sitting king was replaced with a new king, and a set of rules was established to limit the power of the monarch. Throughout the 1700s, then, there were two competing factions in Britain — one more supportive of monarchy, the other more concerned about rights. The American colonies inherited the politics of the parent country, even though they grew up at a distance, became practiced at the habits of self-government, and would eventually join together in a fight for political independence.

In the years leading up to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the leaders of the American colonies wanted more rights than they enjoyed within the structure of the British monarchy. After the Seven Years War with France, which concluded in 1763, Britain decided to raise revenue by taxing the American colonies. The tax schemes sparked an escalating cycle of British force and colonial resistance. The struggle for political rights in North America turned into a full-blown independence movement, which culminated in victory on the battlefield in 1783 and led to the establishment of the Constitution in 1787.

“I know indeed there are monarchists among us,” wrote president Thomas Jefferson to retired general Henry Knox in 1801. Jefferson could have written that line during any stage of his political career, from the early phases of the Revolution all the way to the end of his life in 1826.

Because the American Revolution was set within the context of British political history, there were people in the United States who still looked favorably upon the British system, up to and including monarchy, as a way to maintain order. And in Britain, the prevailing viewpoint was that the American experiment in self-government would be short-lived.

Jefferson’s fear that the United States would become a monarchy was not irrational.

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The Jefferson Memorial in D.C. via Unsplash

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Jefferson, who was a wealthy planter from Virginia, first made his mark on the national debate when he published A Summary View of The Rights of British America in 1774. In the essay, he pushed the boundaries of public opinion, setting up a rhetorical pretext for revolution before most of his countrymen had considered such a move.

The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.

During the trek on horseback to deliver the original copy of Summary View to publishers, Jefferson fell sick from dysentery and could not continue. So he gave the essay to his enslaved personal servant Jupiter to finish the journey. Jupiter continued the path alone to deliver the essay that would elevate Jefferson’s name to national recognition.

This scene from Meacham’s biography invites us to reflect on the hypocrisy of slavery that existed underneath a revolution for political freedom. To this day, Americans grapple with the fact that the primary author of the Declaration of Independence was also a slave owner.

Meacham analyzes this side of Jefferson’s life in terms of his role as a statesman. Jefferson did introduce a resolution early in his career that would have curtailed the practice of slavery in Virginia, but he soon came to believe that the institution of slavery, while immoral, was impossible to change in his lifetime. Meacham contrasts Jefferson’s complacency on this issue to his otherwise expansive and innovative political imagination on almost any other issue. Even when he contemplated, on paper, the abolition of slavery, Jefferson could not fathom a nation in which black and white people could live together under the same government. He only half-heartedly contemplated real solutions, leaving a massive debt of responsibility to a future generation.

As president, Jefferson doubled the size of the country with the purchase of the Louisiana territory in 1803. He was fascinated by the West, both aesthetically as a naturalist, and politically as a president worried about national security.

As an old man in the early 1820s, Jefferson watched, somewhat horrified, as the free states of the North and the slave states to the South began a power-struggle over Western territory.

Jefferson’s fear of monarchy was top of mind. He could imagine tyrants carving kingdoms out of the wreckage of the Union. Jefferson died not knowing whether the republic he worked to design in his own political image would survive the sin of slavery.

It is somewhat miraculous, from this perspective, that today we live in a multi-racial and multicultural society governed under the same Constitution that was crafted back in Jefferson’s time.

Last month we celebrated Juneteenth, a federal holiday on June 19 that marks the day in 1865 when Union forces arrived to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in the farthest reaches of Confederate territory.

The country is not perfect, but we retain a declared ethos of political freedom. The only reason we retain this ethos is because of the brilliant people who fought to defend it. From the abolition movement to the women’s suffrage movement to the civil rights movement, freedom fighters have used the Declaration of Independence as a rhetorical cornerstone.

We are created equal — with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The fundamental job of governments is to uphold these rights.

Frederick Douglass delivered a scathing July 4 speech in 1852 where he denounced the oppression of slavery. In arguing for abolition, he pointed to the Declaration of Independence as the key to the nation’s destiny:

The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

As practitioners of self-government, we should be willing to wade into the ugliness of our history and try to make sense of it. To do so is to be clear-eyed about who we are. We are a nation of contradictions. We aspire to democratic virtutes, but we expanded across the North American continent as any empire would have done. We are always capable of innovating according to our principles, but we are always at risk of backsliding into absolutism.

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My favorite Jefferson quote from the book comes from the campaign of 1800, when Jefferson and his supporters were fighting what they believed to be an existential campaign for the future of the republic.

After George Washington retired after two terms as president, John Adams won the presidency in 1796. Jefferson, coming in second place on that ballot, served as vice president.

There had organically emerged two major political parties. John Adams was firmly in the Federalist camp, believing in strong central government and industrial growth. Jefferson was the leader of the opposition party, called the Republicans¹, who feared that the Federalists were trying to build a monarchy by taking control of the financial system.

On the brink of war with France, John Adams and the Federalists decided it was necessary to crack down on internal dissent. They passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. The laws gave the president the power to deport foreign residents suspected of disloyalty and to jail newspaper writers who criticized the government. The fear of authoritarianism was becoming a reality.

Jefferson’s first instinct was to turn to the states as tools of resistance. He floated the idea that states had the authority to reject federal actions deemed to be unconstitutional.

Eventually, according to Meacham, Jefferson’s emotions cooled and he settled in on a belief that the democratic process would work.

Here’s what Jefferson wrote to a political ally:

A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.

Patience was not something to be endured passively, however. The Jeffersonians had been working feverishly to organize and build political momentum heading into the 1800 election. They started newspapers, wrote arguments, refuted counter-arguments, and recruited new members and candidates.

The partisan fighting of 1800 is familiar to us today. Republican newspapers attacked the “bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams.” Federalist pamphlets raised fear about Jefferson’s unorthodox faith, warning that the choice was between “God, and a religious president” or “Jefferson, and no God.”

The Federalists likewise viewed the Republicans as an existential threat to the country. Jefferson was seen as an apologist for the violent convulsions that had played out in the French Revolution. To the Federalists, pure democracy, being governed by the wild passions of the people, was an even shorter path to tyranny. After 12 years in power, the Federalists had stabilized the nation’s finances and established a foundation of order. They believed that Jefferson would destroy what had been built.

Jefferson’s party was worried that the Federalists were scheming to retain the presidency through nefarious means. Insurrection and violence, no matter which party won the contest, was a real possibility.

In the end, Jefferson won, and the transfer of power occurred without serious incident. It was a vitally important milestone and precedent for the young nation.

Jefferson turned out to be a pragmatic president. He retained his ideals of limited government by cutting taxes, reducing spending, and unwinding the Sedition Acts. But he also recognized the need for national strength. He exerted power when he thought it to be in the national interest, waging war against pirates and purchasing the Louisiana territory. While exerting power, he tried to position himself within the republican tradition, both rhetorically in affirming our democratic principles, and practically by seeking Congressional cooperation (sometimes belatedly) when his actions stretched beyond the letter of the Constitution.

As Meacham notes in the conclusion of his book, Jefferson’s style and legacy have allowed him to be venerated by politicians across the modern political spectrum. Anyone claiming to fight on behalf of the people, in defense of a free nation, can look to Jefferson for inspiration.

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George Washington famously warned the country, in his Farewell Address, of the dangers of partisanship and party. If one party sought blindly to dominate and crush the other, it would lead to a “frightful despotism.”

Jefferson viewed partisan politics as an effective and natural means of building power and enacting a vision. He was an artful and successful partisan fighter who built a coalition that reshaped the government.

Yet he understood that partisanship should have limits. He understood that a president should defend the principles of our Founding and try to bring people together.

Jefferson wrote a unifying message in his first inaugural address. This was in the immediate aftermath of the nation’s first bitter presidential campaign.

I will conclude with an excerpt from this address, which is an apt message, I think, for us today:

We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may possibly lack the energy to preserve itself? I trust not.

I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.

Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him?

Let history answer this question.

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1. Same name but not the same entity as today’s Republican Party. The modern-day Republican Party has origins in the 1850s. Abraham Lincoln was the first president elected from this party.