Thomas Jefferson and the American Mind

National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, by Michael Auslin (Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $30)

In National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, Michael Auslin has written a fascinating history of the fortunes of liberty and equality in a country still seeking to fulfill pledges Thomas Jefferson made 250 years ago. Yet unlike some intellectual historians, Auslin does not overegg his pudding by delving into every conceivable book or source that might have influenced Jefferson, a voracious reader. Instead, he gives a succinct overview of the Scottish Enlightenment’s influence on the Declaration’s author and does not belabor John Adams’s deprecation of what he saw as the document’s lack of originality, beyond noting that the Massachusetts Founder was rivalrous and cussed. As Auslin points out, the late historian Pauline Maier uncovered no less than 90 instances of colonial American writers extolling the natural rights so essential to the Declaration. James Grant, in his excellent biography of Adams, refers to the Declaration, from the standpoint of his subject, as “a glorious anti-climax.”

Nevertheless, Jefferson was right to refute claims that the document contained “no new ideas,” whether made by Adams or by Jefferson’s fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee, who claimed that the Declaration was simply a retread of Locke’s Second Treatise on Government (1689). Yes, Jefferson was deeply influenced by Locke’s treatise, but for Locke’s trio of rights, “life, liberty and property,” he substituted “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This was a pivotal change, as Joseph Ellis astutely remarks: “By dropping ‘property’ altogether, Jefferson deftly deprived slave-owners of the claim that owning slaves was a natural right protected by law.” Nevertheless, as Jefferson told James Madison, he had “not considered it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether.” On the contrary, he “intended it as an expression of the American mind.”

Jefferson’s prophetic understanding of the power and appeal of what he had written is at the heart of what makes Auslin’s book so special. The author shows at every turn how the Declaration’s preamble, not its scattershot calumnies against George III, has haunted nearly every aspect of American history—mostly for the country’s abiding good.

The document accompanied the Continental Congress like an importunate chorus, never letting the colonists forget to what they had pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. It marched with Washington’s troops. It harried the Constitutional Congress, especially with regards to slavery, acquainting the young nation with the discontents of moral compromise. It governed the judicious counsels of the Federalists, even while encouraging the Anti-Federalists. It inspired “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It followed the country’s westward expansion, making Americans think twice before taking slavery with them into states newly formed. It animated the oratory of the Abolitionists. It fueled the saeva indignatio of Anthony Benezet and Frederick Douglass. It led to the desperate punt of the Missouri Compromise (1820), which made Missouri a slave and Maine a free state—the same Missouri that would form and transform Mark Twain’s moral imagination. It put steel in Lincoln’s resolve to save the Union during the Civil War, when slavery was poised to destroy it. It reminded Americans of why the complexities of Reconstruction, bedeviled as that project was by corruption, bigotry, and misrule, were worth sorting out. It inspired Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat elected president after the Civil War, to reform the federal civil service. It rallied Americans in the Great War in their fight against Prussian despotism. It rallied them, again, in the Second World War against the tyrannical barbarism of Hitler and Mussolini. It led Franklin Roosevelt to urge that “Jefferson’s cause was a cause to which we are also committed, not by our words alone but by our sacrifice,” since “the very purpose of the American Revolution . . . called for the abandonment of privileges.” It gave Americans the casus belli they needed to fight and win the Cold War. It irradiated the Civil Rights era. It gave the Bicentennial its unforgettable exuberance. It has latterly nurtured a new generation of patriotic, but never uncritical historians, of whom Auslin is admirably representative.

However, in claiming that the eighteenth-century colonies were somehow “more dynamic” than eighteenth-century England, Auslin missteps. After all, a place that gave the world Swift, Burke, Pope, Hume, Blake, Chatham, Johnson, Boswell, Cobbett, Adam Smith, Lady Mary Montagu, Fanny Burney, and Horace Walpole cannot be said to have lacked dynamism. Moreover, as Andrew Roberts points out in his superb biography of George III, “In terms of genuine, as opposed to theoretical liberties, Britain was well ahead of North America—Dissenters could operate in Britain without licenses, for example, which was not the case in all the colonies—and as the Mansfield Judgment attested, slavery was illegal in Britain and Canada.”

Auslin’s description of the 1976 Bicentennial nicely captures the essence of why his theme rewards study.

In a cynical era, it was perhaps naïve to believe the Declaration still answered the aspirations of Americans, and yet how else to explain the tens of millions who celebrated it? No republic had lasted as long as the United States, and there was little doubt that much of the reason for the survival of the world’s oldest democracy was the philosophy embedded in its founding document. Though many felt the country needed to do more to live up to its promise, the Bicentennial reminded Americans how much was worthy of being conserved to protect the Declaration’s goal of individual liberty.

Here is precisely the “expression of the American mind” that Jefferson meant his document to commend—a welcome alternative to the sanctimonious censoriousness that we hear from too many academic historians. “History,” Gibbon once wrote, echoing Voltaire, “is . . . little more than the register of the crimes, folly, and misfortunes of mankind.” What makes Auslin’s history of Jefferson’s Declaration so compelling is that it is the register of mankind’s struggle for redemption, which no one can reasonably deplore for not being the work of a day.

There is another parallel to Gibbon in Auslin’s book. Throughout his treatment of the intellectual genesis of the Declaration, he stresses the extent to which Jefferson was influenced by another Virginian, George Mason, whose Virginia Declaration of Rights opened by affirming: “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights.” Mason, like Jefferson, was also a guilt-wracked slave-owner, who believed, pace Gibbon, that it was not “barbarism and religion” that destroyed the Roman empire but slavery—“an evil,” as he said, “very pathetically described by Roman historians.” Reading this, one wonders whether one reason why Jefferson included his strictures against slavery in the Declaration—which his colleagues suppressed, lest South Carolina and Georgia object—was because he, too, in his prophetic soul, realized that if slavery were left unaddressed it could destroy the new republic.

However, the would-be slavery critic in Jefferson hardly shone here, for he had the effrontery to blame George III for the colonists’ slave-owning, which doesn’t say much for his rhetorical judgment. In this respect, Auslin is warranted in seeing his hero, as Gordon Wood sees him, “as a combination of visionary and backroom politician.” Vituperative opportunism—not only love of liberty—drove his pen.

Nevertheless, Auslin is right to argue that the preamble of Jefferson’s Declaration remains the country’s best rallying cry for unity. Why? “It has as much to teach us about the bonds that tied generations of Americans together as it does about liberty and equality.” Indeed, he proves as much throughout his brilliant tour d’horizon. Readers looking for a well-researched, well-written book to help celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday need look no further: National Treasure is itself a treasure.