Jefferson: Change and Continuity

Today is Thomas Jefferson’s 250th birthday, and the major local celebration is at the Huntington Library in San Marino. From the library’s own holdings, research director Robert C. Ritchie and UCLA historian Joyce Appleby have assembled a small but wonderfully astute exhibit focused not on 1776 and the Declaration of Independence but on 1800, the almost equally fateful year when Jefferson was elected President.

The parallels they draw to the present moment are as provocative as they are judicious. Jefferson, a liberal, took office after 12 years of conservative rule. During those years, the ruling Federalist Party deplored the rise of party politics in the new American republic, all the while declining to admit that Federalist policies were in any way partisan. To the Federalists, Federalism was simply what the United States of America was. Accordingly, anyone who opposed Federalism was simply not quite American.

What made Federalism conservative was its view that the United States was the daughter of England, essentially English in its institutions as well as its language and religion and residually loyal to England. Though no Anglophobe, Jefferson did not regard England sentimentally as his mother country. He believed that were the new American state to stumble, the English were fully ready to move back in. Americans were being impressed into British naval service. An English population, unreconciled to the American Revolution, remained north of the border in Canada. Vigilance was in order.

Intellectually, Jefferson stood for what was French in the American tradition; and for this the Federalists portrayed him as a dangerous radical. Morally, in a “character issue” campaign that makes the 1992 campaign look genteel, they claimed that he was a libertine--even, the greater horror, a French libertine. Jefferson admitted to his closest political allies, in a letter that is part of the exhibit, that he had propositioned the wife of a friend. (Apparently she spurned him.) But Jefferson insisted, and historians agree, that innumerable similar charges were Federalist fabrications.

The campaign to stop Jefferson was, in short, extremely bitter, and it failed. But what changed with Jefferson’s victory was both less than the Federalists had feared and more than they could imagine. Jefferson’s election proved to them, to the country and to the world that a regime could change, essentially, all its key personnel, up to and including its equivalent of the crown--and yet not fall. Jefferson did not change the American government, he only changed the government’s policies.

By now we are used to that improbable blend of change and continuity, having managed it for 200 years. But when Jefferson did it for the first time, the whole world, including much of America, wondered whether it could be done. By recreating the moment, the Huntington has given us a marvelous history lesson.