If Jefferson Was Right

By Timothy Sandefur

Monday, April 13, 2026

 

Few historical figures have experienced the whiplash of public opinion more than Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, who was born 283 years ago today, was both despised and adored during his own lifetime, and his popularity has ever since waned and waxed with shifting political attitudes. The renowned Jefferson scholar Merrill Peterson even devoted an entire book (The Jefferson Image in the American Mind) not to Jefferson’s life, but to the various changes in public perceptions of his legacy. It’s no surprise, then, that as we approach America’s 250th birthday — a day uniquely tied to the man primarily responsible for the Declaration of Independence — that legacy is again something of a battlefield.

 

As recently as 1993, President William Jefferson Clinton traded on his middle name to such a degree that he began his inauguration day by touring Monticello. But since then, the Virginian’s fortunes have fallen to the point that historian Pauline Maier opened her book American Scripture with the assertion that Jefferson is “the most overrated person in American history.”

 

Naturally, assertions like that have more to do with today’s politics, especially racial politics, than with the man’s actual achievements. Since the ink on the Declaration was damp, he has been condemned for being a lifelong slaveholder despite professing the equality of all mankind. The 1998 publication of research showing that his DNA is shared by male descendants of Sally Hemings — the enslaved woman rumored for centuries to have been his concubine — seems for many to have permanently stamped him as a worthless hypocrite. However that may be, it’s at least clear that in our search for historical figures to admire, Jefferson is now often treated as embarrassing or passé. In 2021, New York City ordered a statue of Jefferson removed from its City Hall after publicly displaying it for nearly two centuries.

 

That probably wouldn’t have bothered him much. Jefferson firmly believed that “the earth belongs to the living,” and that each generation of Americans should (soberly and knowledgably) pore over his record to decide for themselves what they think. And the truth is that, for all his flaws — some severe, indeed — Jefferson was immensely admirable, and his achievements deserve the honor and thanks of all Americans.

 

A brilliant polymath, equally at home in mathematics, law, history, architecture, ancient literature, and archaeology (of which he was a true pioneer), Jefferson became one of the models of the American intellectual. He was a splendid writer, with a gift for immortal phrases. And he was an enthusiast for everything really new about the New World.

 

Like his contemporaries, Beethoven and Goethe, he straddled the rational Enlightenment and the passionate Romantic era, and from an early age he brought his high idealism about individual freedom and American exceptionalism to politics. He was a radical for independence, so extreme that in 1775 he told a Tory relative he would gladly “lend my hand to sink the whole island [of Great Britain] in the ocean.” He was 32 at the time.

 

His enthusiasms led him to dream of the overthrow of all despotisms, at a time when many thought that average people were too ignorant, foolish, and corrupt to make law for themselves — and that they needed to submit unquestioningly to their “betters.” He exposed the fallacy of that idea when he said, “Sometimes it is said that man cannot 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.”

 

Jefferson’s sometimes exaggerated rhetoric about the innate virtue of the common man often brought ridicule from critics, but they usually missed his real point, which was that however bad ordinary people might be at running their own lives, there’s no reason to think government bureaucrats will do a better job of it. The best option is instead what he called “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, [and] leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits.”

 

As president, he largely accomplished that. He cut taxes and spending, signed legislation banning the slave trade, sought peaceful resolution of American conflicts with Britain (but made war on the Barbary pirates), oversaw the demise of the grotesque Alien and Sedition laws, bought Louisiana, and eliminated highfalutin practices — such as the State of the Union address — that had been devised to overawe the people with government’s grandeur. His libertarianism was far from perfect. But compared to others of his era, he was astonishingly advanced.

 

Of course, slavery remains the great cloud over his life — as he himself expected. He had opened his career in the 1770s as a radical on the subject, even bringing a half dozen of what we would now call civil rights lawsuits challenging aspects of Virginia slavery law. (In one case, his rhetoric about the equal rights of man outraged the judge so much that the court ruled against him without even hearing the other side’s argument.) Later, he tried unsuccessfully to make it legal for Virginians to free their slaves, and — again without success — to ban slavery in ten western states. His 1785 book Notes on Virginia contained such eloquent passages condemning slavery that John Adams said it was “worth diamonds.”

 

And — contrary to the views of many intellectuals today — Jefferson did indeed believe that “all men are created equal” included all people. It’s now commonplace to assert (in the words of a commentator in last year’s six-hour History Channel attack on him) that Jefferson “didn’t write those words considering black people.” But this is simply not true. He even tried to insert a bold attack on slavery into the Declaration of Independence itself, and he wrote afterward that “nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.” When critics challenged him about the racist remarks he published in the Notes, Jefferson replied, “My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State. . . . I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.” Indeed, Jefferson even counseled then-Governor James Monroe against executing the leaders of a slave uprising in 1800, on the grounds that the enslaved were justified in seeking to liberate themselves. There can be no reasonable doubt that Jefferson emphatically believed in the equal right of all human beings to freedom.

 

But over time, he did cease drastic efforts against the institution, and by his retirement, he had basically given up. When his neighbor Edward Coles wrote him in 1814 to “entreat and beseech you to exert your knowledge and influence in devising and getting into operation some plan for the gradual emancipation of slavery [sic],” he demurred. Coles took his own slaves to Indiana, freed them, and gave them land. But Jefferson, while admitting that it was “a mortal reproach to us that they should have pleaded [for liberty] so long in vain,” told Coles “No. . . . This enterprise is for the young.”

 

That moment does deserve condemnation, for if Jefferson had taken some dramatic step at that moment to call attention to the urgent need for action against slavery, he might have altered the country’s fate. He was right that public opinion had to change before slavery could be eliminated — but only drastic action by a universally admired figure could have given public opinion the push it needed, and he was the only man who fit that bill. His silence at that moment was the greatest failure of his political life.

 

Yet even here, Jefferson compares favorably to many contemporaries — James Madison, for instance, who appears never to have uttered a public word against slavery, whereas Jefferson often risked his career by doing so. Moreover, it was Jefferson’s denunciations of slavery that set the template for the abolitionist movement that began after his 1826 death. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and other anti-slavery activists were proud to associate themselves with Jefferson, because he so often attacked the “peculiar institution.” And in 1842, the 75-year-old John Quincy Adams — who had known Jefferson from infancy — told Congress that “there was not an abolitionist of the wildest character in the Northern States [who would not] find in the writings of Jefferson, at the time of the Declaration of Independence and during his whole life down to its very last year, a justification for everything they say.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the abolitionist movement without Jefferson’s legacy — and it’s literally impossible to condemn slavery without invoking the principles of equality and liberty to which he devoted his life.

 

In 1874 — less than 50 years after Jefferson’s death — biographer James Parton wrote, “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.” That seems a silly thing to say; Jefferson himself would have considered it blasphemous to suggest that the country’s “rightness” could rise or fall with the reputation of a single man. Yet Parton’s deeper point was correct: The principles of liberty Jefferson articulated, and for which he became a metaphor, do indeed lie at the core of what Americanness means. “We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun,” Jefferson told a friend, after defeating the authoritarian Federalists in 1800, “for this whole chapter in the history of man is new.” If the ideas of freedom expressed in the Declaration are indeed self-evident, then what we now call the American Dream is, in that profound sense, “right.” But in our day no less than his, that’s a question that can never be answered once and for all. The rightness or wrongness of the nation’s legacy can only be determined by our actions in the present — because the earth belongs to the living.