Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address, Part II: Providence and Principle

At only six paragraphs stretching over approximately three pages, Jefferson’s First Inaugural manages to combine economy of expression with seemingly limitless vision. Coming from the scribe most responsible for the Declaration of Independence this should hardly be surprising. The Sage of Monticello has long been known for his eloquence, and his ability to convey to others the grandeur with which he viewed his nation’s potential. Indeed Jefferson’s place in history, his political career aside, is arguably as the wordsmith of the Revolution and the man who almost single-handedly gave birth to the vocabulary of American citizenship. His First Inaugural is very much a part of that effort. With an elegance that still manages to impress, it provided Americans in 1801 with a vision of their country that strove to rise beyond disputes over diplomacy, banking, taxes and censorship. Granted, Jefferson was very much a politician, and his opinions on all of these matters had been frequently expressed in the years leading up to his election as president. But in his mind, and doubtless in the minds of many Republicans, the election of 1800 represented a fundamental turning point in American history that required a corresponding political and cultural reorientation.

The Federalists, up to that point the only faction that had governed the United States, had been defeated (for good, as it turned out). Republicanism had triumphed thanks to the support of the common people, and the time had come to mend fences, unite as a nation and redefine what it was that America stood for. Where the Washington and Adams administrations had concerned themselves with regulating taxation, servicing the national debt, negotiating treaties with foreign powers, and protecting and expanding American commerce, Jefferson and his colleagues believed that the Federal government had a higher calling to serve. The United States, they believed, was a nation that had been blessed by Providence with near-limitless potential. The true end of government was to help the American people realize this potential by offering what protection and resources they could not provide for themselves. While the third part of this series will focus on discussing some of the inconsistencies in this message as Jefferson delivered it, this post will explore what it was that the 3^rd President saw in America in 1801 and how he believed its greatness could be achieved.

Within the first paragraph of his First Inaugural Jefferson provided a very succinct summation of the elements he believed constituted America’s pre-eminence in 1801. The United States were, he wrote, “A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.” This is truly a soaring vision, and the choice of terms reveals much about Jefferson’s personal views. By referring to his country as a “rising nation,” he perhaps sought to reaffirm the commonly held belief among his contemporaries that America was the culmination of Western philosophy and civilization, and the inevitable and logical conclusion of the reformist zeal of the Enlightenment. If this sounds grandiose, well, it was. But it’s important to remember that for men like Jefferson who believed very strongly in the lessons of the Enlightenment – natural rights, the universality of mankind, the importance of the search for truth – the fact that the United States seemed to embody those same values was extremely significant. Americans had, they thought, managed to condense almost two centuries of theory about politics and society and into a functioning government. They were understandably proud of themselves. In pointing to the “wide and fruitful land,” Jefferson pointed to what would become another major theme of his form of American nationalism, the importance of the land itself. America’s greatness, he believed, was in part a natural occurrence, a consequence of the land they inhabited and the things it made possible. The destiny of the American people was thus partially providential; whatever choices they made, whatever future they decided on, they owed the opportunities presented them and the resources at hand to fate and geography.  

That Jefferson also singled out the “rich productions of their industry” for praise is somewhat unusual, as he was no great fan of commerce or manufacturing (believing that they had an ultimately corrupting influence). He was, however, a proponent of the principle of free trade, notably championed by Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith. The later events of his second term as president would prove Jefferson’s dedication to the ideal of free trade among all nations as the key to world peace, and it seems likely that he would have attempted to seed the notion in his First Inaugural. Connected to that is the mention of “nations who feel power and forget right.” Though he believed that trade with foreign powers was necessary for America’s prosperity and the ultimate wellbeing of humanity at large, Jefferson had a rather low opinion of most the foreign regimes that he had encountered in his life and career. As a diplomat in the 1780s he had travelled extensively in Europe and been confronted time and again with governments who cared less for what was right than about maintaining their own power, stability, authority and wealth. The rise of the French Republic in 1793 was doubtless a beacon in the darkness for Jefferson’s idealism, but it too was eventually snuffed out. By 1801 the United States was alone among the republics of the world, and its newly-minted president was acutely aware of the fact.

Still, Jefferson felt there were reasons to be optimistic. As he put it, America was “advancing rapidly” towards a great destiny that neither he nor anyone else could envision or predict - and why not? The United States had managed to summon itself into existence in the 1770s and successfully confront one of the wealthiest and most formidable empires in the world. Subsequently it had dealt with internal rebellions, formulated a written constitution, created a series of complex government departments and apparatuses (including a bank and a national debt), subdued numerous Native American tribes on its western frontier and added three additional states to its number. From the perspective of one who had taken part in many of these events and knew firsthand the odds that were arrayed against their success, what other conclusion could there be than to say that America was destined for great things? While Jefferson may not have believed that certain nations were blessed by God, he certainly adhered to the notion that Providence had its role to play in the rise and fall of civilizations. And as near as he could tell, Providence seemed to be in America’s corner. This he repeated in the third paragraph of his First Inaugural, as he was listing the many aspects of the United States and its people that he believed were fundamental to its future prosperity. Specifically, he wrote that America was blessed to be, “kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe,” and possessed, “a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” These statements speak not only to a philosophical understanding of America’s past and its future, but also to knowledge of contemporary political realities on the world stage.

Since the earliest days of permanent settlement in what would become the United States of America, the communities that migrated there often did so girded by the understanding that they were taking part in an attempt to reform or remake human society in their new surroundings. New England Puritans, Pennsylvania Quakers, Maryland Catholics and the first trustees in colonial Georgia; all believed in some sense that the societies they were setting out to create in North America would succeed in preserving and refining the virtues they held dear by escaping from the conflict and persecution that for them defined the Old World. Connected to this sense of escape was also an appreciation of the size of the land these migrants now inhabited and the possibilities that it offered. There were no feudal landowners to collect rent, no church lands or royal forests; America was a “virgin land,” a vast and untouched canvas upon which they could paint any destiny their imagination could conjure. Whether this was true or not, those early Americans believed it; in a way so too did their descendants. Men of Jefferson’s generation might not have considered the explicit blessing of God to have been bestowed on their specific community, but they were certainly willing to ascribe their fortunate position in the world to an abstract Providence having conferred its favor on the American people at large. Intolerant Europe was far at hand, and with it the kings and emperors who had always stood in the way of the kinds of social reformation the Enlightenment championed. This was not merely the dictate of fortune but of fate, a fact that Jefferson was keen his countrymen appreciate.

At the same time, Jefferson also seemed to be expressing thanks for America’s relative isolation and abundance of territory in light of certain contemporary events. More or less continuously from 1792 to 1815, Europe was convulsed by a series of wars that drew in nearly every major power and resulted in over six million casualties. Governments rose and fell, ancient royal families were deposed and exiled, cities burned, battles raged and the status quo was rewritten year by year. Physically far-removed from the scene of conflict, the United States managed to avoid being forced to choose sides thanks to the policy of steadfast neutrality promoted by the Washington Administration. This non-interventionist stance, however, did not completely shield America from some of the negative effects of the ongoing European conflagration. France and Britain, leaders of the two respective alliances and ever seeking advantage, still regarded the United States as a threat due to American merchants’ refusal to cease trading with either side. As a result, American overseas trade became prey to seizure by both belligerents, shipping and insurance rates rose dramatically, and New England merchants and Southern farmers alike suffered greatly. While war between France and the United States over this state of affairs had been narrowly avoided by the Adams Administration, the problem persisted into Jefferson’s first term in office. As a firm believer in the principle of free trade, a persistent critic of the European monarchies that were engaged in conflict, and a much disenchanted former proponent of the French Republic, Jefferson had a great deal to be disturbed by in 1801. Still, the fact that the United States had managed to avoid being dragged into an all-out war, and had suffered little else than economic damage, was a blessing, and one which Jefferson believed was clearly due to his country’s literal separation from the tumults of Europe.   

Meanwhile, as an entire generation of Europeans was being slashed to ribbons on one battlefield after another, something similarly transformative was occurring in the United States. As early as the 1780s, American began migrating in increasingly large numbers across the Appalachian Mountains and into the Western borderlands claimed by states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut. In spite of the efforts of the government under the Articles of Confederation who preferred to maintain cordial relations with the region’s native inhabitants by regulating the pace of settlement, the migration proceeded at a disarmingly rapid pace and resulted in decades of bloody conflict with the local indigenous tribes. The federally organized and governed Northwest Territory (encompassing most of the modern Midwest) subsequently became the site of numerous battles between American military forces and alliances of local bands of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot and Iroquois, among others. All told, the so called “Northwest Indian War” claimed over two thousand casualties between 1785 and 1795 and ended in the cessation by the defeated tribes of sizable portions of Ohio, Illinois and Michigan. The relative peace that the conclusion of hostilities brought about greatly increased the flood of settlement into the Old Northwest at the same time that similar migrations were taking place in the western regions of Virginia and the Carolinas. As a result of these population explosions, and the settlers displeasure at being so far separated from their states’ eastern power centres, Kentucky was carved out of Virginia in 1791, and Tennessee from North Carolina in 1796. Though the Congress that came into existence under the Constitution after 1789 attempted to slow the pace of westward movement by setting land prices high enough to dissuade those they felt were unsuitable, the human wave that surged across the west in the 1790s was anything but orderly or organized.

Where Federalists like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton reacted with horror at what they perceived as the chaos that had taken root on the western frontier of the United States, however, Jefferson and his Republican cohorts saw in the migrants and the communities they were establishing a source political power, security, and future prosperity. What the Republicans realized, far quicker than their opponents, was that the growth and emergence of territories and eventually states in the West was altering the political map of the United States. Being mainly farmers who cared more for cheap credit and an outlet for their produce than promoting manufacturing, shipping, or other forms of commerce, the interests of Westerners seemed inevitably to lie more with the Republican-dominated Southern than Federalist-dominated Northern states. At the same time their composition, which included many landless workers and small farmers who had failed to achieve prosperity in their home states and sought to try again in the West, aligned neatly with the emerging Republican ideology of small government, decentralization and “the common man.” By appealing to these emerging western communities and promoting issues that were close to their hearts, like cheap land, low interest rates and decentralized banking, the Republicans were able to place the West firmly in their camp by 1800.

As one of the leaders of the Republican faction, Jefferson was particularly pleased by the fact that the American West was being settled by agriculturalists. Unlike residents of cities, who owned little personal property and could be easily manipulated by their employers or landlords, he believed that men who owned and worked their own land developed a far more independent mindset, and could be depended on to behave in the virtuous, rational, self-interested manner that a republic demanded of its citizens. Furthermore, because the security of their property depended on the security of their local communities, and because they had more to lose than landless workers or merchants, Jefferson asserted that settlers who embraced an agrarian lifestyle could be relied on to rise to the defence of their government when it was threatened from within or without. In time, the growth of the agriculturally-dominated American West would thus secure a future for the United States defined by stability, security, and in time prosperity as American farmers increasingly supplied the needs of a hungry world. For any of this to occur, however, America would need room to grow. Luckily, or perhaps providentially, the United States was possessed in 1801 of, “room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation,” or so Jefferson claimed in his First Inaugural. Whether this would prove true or not is another matter, but it does indicate where the 3^rd President’s mind was focused at the beginning of his first term in office, and foreshadows some of the events that would come to define his administration and his place in American history.