The Mail may be hyperventilating, but it is always such fun rubbing Viner’s nose in it. And for all that, even in Finland, where they are more used to such things, cold is a dangerous beast. But now there is no more warming, and snow is getting more common, we’d better get used to that idea.

Richard Blake’s novel The Sword of Damascus, has now been published in paperback by Hodder & Stoughton. His earlier novels have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, Slovak and Complex Chinese. This is the fourth in his series of critically-acclaimed and internationally best-selling historical thrillers.

Set in 687 AD, Sword of Damascus takes place against the life or death struggle of the Byzantine Empire against the first and greatest expansion of Islam. Expelled, after nearly a thousand years, from Syria, Egypt and increasingly from North Africa, the formerly dominant power of the Mediterranean world has been pushed further and further back – even to the very walls of its capital, Constantinople.

Everyone knows that Europe owes two debts to Greece – for the victories at Marathon and Salamis that turned back the Persians. But who now remembers our third debt – to the supposedly decadent Byzantines? For they do save themselves from utter defeat, and they buy time for the rest of Europe. Almost at the last moment, they come up with Greek Fire, a mysterious liquid – or is it a gas? – that turns back the Islamic advance and restores Byzantine control of the seas.

Yes, without this “miracle weapon,” Constantinople would have fallen in the 7th century, rather than the 15th, and the new barbarian kingdoms of Europe would have gone down one by one before the unstoppable cry of Allah al akbar! But for Greek Fire, Edward Gibbon’s famous surmise would have become the truth:

“…the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”

But what importance has all this to old Aelric, who writes his memoirs and waits patiently for death in the remote wastes of northern England? Little does he expect a double siege of his monastery, a kidnapping, a near-fatal chase through the Mediterranean, and a confrontation at the end of this that will settle the future of mankind. Will age have robbed Aelric of his charm, his intelligence, his resourcefulness, or of his talent for cold and homicidal duplicity?

Comments on Richard Blake’s Earlier Novels

‘Vivid characters, devious plotting and buckets of gore are enhanced by his unfamiliar choice of period. Nasty, fun and educational.’ Daily Telegraph

‘He knows how to deliver a fast-paced story and his grasp of the period is impressively detailed’ Mail on Sunday

‘A rollicking and raunchy read . . . Anyone who enjoys their history with large dollops of action, sex, intrigue and, above all, fun will absolutely love this novel.’ Historical Novels Review

‘Fascinating to read, very well written, an intriguing plot and I enjoyed it very much.’ Derek Jacobi, star of I Claudius and Gladiator

Read Chapter One

For review copies, contact Eleni Lawrence at Hodder & Stoughton.

Richard Blake is available for interview.

Much has been made of last Thursday’s announcement that, as reported by the New York Times, the US Department of Defense will take its “first major step toward shrinking its budget after a decade of war.” The plan represents only a minor modification (if even that), but has been presented — by both its proponents and detractors in the US political establishment — as a veritable sea change.

President Barack Obama’s apologists on what I’ll call “the acceptable left,” those who still somehow believe that the president isn’t just a war-embracing clone of his predecessor, regard the “cuts” as a step in the right direction. From more overtly imperialist quarters come the groans and yowls one would expect, addressed to predicted closures of military bases and the waning of American global strength.

As always, the devil’s in the details. Slate’s Fred Kaplan observes that Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary too once attempted this sleight of hand: “He would insist that he was making drastic cuts by comparing his budget with what he’d projected it to be (sincerely or not) the year before — while, in fact, he was requesting massive increases.”

Assessing the proposed shift, then, we would be wise to retain our incredulity at the tortuous Newspeak of the political class. Viewed in the light of war’s actual purpose as Big Business for a connected elite, the scores of doomsday scenarios used to sell it become less plausible.

For market anarchists, war in many ways represents the epitome of the state’s interaction with human civilization; indeed, I have often suggested that to be consistently and undeviatingly anti-war means to be anti-state.

And to reject war and the state, in turn, is to favor a safer world, not the treacherous, entropic nightmare prophesied by today’s flag-bearers of military adventurism. That nightmare is largely descriptive of the world we live in today, one disfigured by America’s military empire and the economy built up around (or inside of) it.

Anarchism does not prescribe, it allows, swapping the rigid systems of compulsion with the adaptability of universal freedom; those who worry that it indeed allows too much might do better to direct their perturbation at the impunity allowed by arbitrary authority, the defining attribute of the social institution we call the state.

The anarchist’s definition of the state, phrased by Benjamin Tucker as “the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will,” is central to her analysis of social and economic justice. Anarchists don’t at all seek to abolish security, justice, order or even necessarily law.

Our argument for dispensing with the state is, in point of fact, that the state is a deeply and unavoidably malefic force, positioned directly against those worthy societal goals. Cutting through the disinformation that screens it, we find that the state wages war on those goals to make Raytheon, Boeing and Northrop Grumman rich.

The choice posed by market anarchism — based on voluntary association and trade — is not that of rules or no rules, but of individual sovereignty or top-down control. Should individuals and noncompulsory community organizations make decisions for themselves, or should a modern, state-corporate nobility, protected by law from the consequences of its actions, decide for all?

The war economy is a command and control economy, and neither Leon Panetta nor Barack Obama is going to do anything to change that; they work for it and not the other way around. To truly end the racket of neocolonialist domination, society must genuinely support peace and security by casting the state aside — regardless of what Washington says.

A nation in decline

England is a nation in decline, and as much as conservatives hope for the leadership to emerge that could stem the decline and encourage a cultural renaissance, we know in our bones that this will not, or cannot, happen. Patriotism seems to contain the seeds of its own antidote: revulsion—revulsion against what England has become. Just like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s novel 1984, who dreamt of the ‘Golden Country’,England is for us an image far removed from the country around us. If we love that image, we have to recoil from the Real England that surrounds us in our daily lives. We feel less and less confidence that there is any real thread of connection between the Golden Country and the Real England of today. Would a conservative be prepared to fight for a country such asEngland today? And if so, why? Out of nostalgia? Or confusion?

Cultural pessimism means that we no longer admire the country we have become. And so we can no longer be conservative. Being conservative means resisting change. The way things have always been done seems best to a conservative. A conservative does not inhabit the realm of theory, but the practical realm of a comfortable culture: he points to the society and culture around him and hopes that politicians and their grandiose schemes will not make pointless changes that destroy that world for him. We, however, can point to nothing. Everything has already been changed, and not for the better. So we embrace the idea of change, but do so knowing that change in order to recreate the past cannot come. It is because we have become lesser people than our forbears that we, or the wider nation at any rate, no longer wish to have a great culture, to be a great nation, and so the only change that will come is more of the cultural slide downwards that we have already experienced.

Nostalgia

Now that a great culture has been “deconstructed”, we can no longer remember clearly what it was like to be English. Most of us were not around in the 1950s to remember those years ourselves; we can only garner information about that period from books or films. Those of us, like myself, brought up in the 1970s and 1980s, can remember the days before the ‘chav’ culture was so fully triumphant, the days before anti-social behaviour became the established norm on the less wealthy housing estates. But we are constantly told that our memories are faulty, and that thatEnglandwas less vibrant, more prejudiced, more class-ridden. The truth is we are having our consciousnesses overwritten by fresh data, overwritten by the new interpretations of the past insisted on in the media and education systems.

Yet the numbers of us who have real memories, or folk memories, of a better world are relatively large. The success of historical television dramas such as Downton Abbey and lighter dramas such as the Midsomer Murders testifies to some kind of yearning for traditional Englishness. A full DVD set of All Creatures Great and Small about the life of a country vet is possibly one of the most pleasurable companions in audiovisual format. The Mad Men series set in theUS in the 1960s has also attracted a great following, owing to its depiction of a world where the women were feminine, the men smoked, and social comment on race and other topics was free.

I am sure poverty was a problem in the post-war era, but I am not so sure that our economic modernisation had to go hand in hand with our social deterioration; indeed, that very deterioration of the fabric of society in turn imperils the economy, as has become abundantly clear in the current economic crisis. Countries and territories such asJapanandHong Konghave managed to forge a path to modernity without losing their own cultural values, and it is hard to deny that we would have done well to have followed a similar approach.

Those telling us that we have to move on becauseEngland—the Real England that surrounds us—has moved on are forgetting one important thing. Even the liberals who have encouraged social change are not happy with the country that has been created. If the promotion of equality between the sexes, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and even ‘gay’ equality has been as positive for society as is insisted by our current leaders, then why is society more fragmented and more violent, why are so many struggling to raise their children with healthy social values, why were so many tricked into buying overpriced properties financed by two incomes, and why have so many people spent the best part of the last decade living on social handouts? Positive change would be welcomed, almost naturally. It would not require greater and greater state intervention to prevent supposedly positive developments from overwhelming us. There has to be something wrong; it is inadequate simply to claim that change must always be welcomed.

Change creates new vested interests, people who enjoy the bread and circuses, people who feel empowered by the political focus on sex, race and sexuality, people who benefit from the huge expansion of the state. Consequently, reversing negative social trends becomes ever harder. It is easier to accept that the world has changed. Yet there is nothing wrong with pointing out that we are going in the wrong direction. Even as we do so, we know ourselves the will to dig ourselves out of the hole, or succession of holes, we are creating for ourselves is simply not there.

Just let go?

Are we supposed to love this society? Or should we despise it? And if we do despise it, does that not mean that the basic preconditions for social or cultural improvement no longer exist? Roger Scruton, one of our best conservative writers, wrote in his England: An Elegy, that we should mourn forEngland (that is, mourn forEngland conceived as the Golden Country) and move on. As a coping strategy, that makes sense. But on a day-to-day basis, it is impossible to ignore the culture around us. Those living in neighbourhoods afflicted by the loud playing of popular music and screaming in the streets until 4 in the morning cannot simply say, “I have mourned for a decent neighbourhood and moved on”; they are faced with a depressing and dispiriting environment on a daily basis.

The creation of multiculturalism is similarly not a development that can be simply accepted, because it destroys any connection between the individual and the nation as a whole. Culture is what binds individuals to a society; lack of a common culture converts us all into guests in a hotel, an establishment for which we rightly feel nothing. Those who appear to have accepted the new dispensation have actually become more cynical individuals, seeing in society a tool for personal enrichment and not anything of value in itself. Love of country is a basic natural instinct that underpins any healthy society. Just as personal discouragement is a recognised condition in mental health that prevents a person from functioning normally, social discouragement is also a condition, a disease of the social body, a state of affairs that cannot be accepted and embraced.

So it seems impossible to let go entirely and reconcile ourselves to discouragement, impossible to ignore completely the negative social trends that dampen the vigour of our lives. That these trends are described as vibrancy empties words of any meaning. Our lives are weakened, not strengthened, by social and cultural conflict and casual lack of respect for neighbours and others we come into contact with. What is described as vibrancy is actually discouragement and dreariness in social life. Government coercion to create a diverse society with no common values or culture means that unfreedom is added to the list of our complaints, an unfreedom that is enthusiastically peddled by a well-staffed and well-paid bureaucracy that we have to pay for.

What is wrong with being unfree, you may ask? Chinais unfree, at least insofar as there is no popular participation in government and no freedom of social debate. Will it be so bad to be like the Chinese? Could it even be reasoned that our current cultural problems are caused by an excess of freedom? By allowing everyone to do what he wants, have we created a society with no centre of gravity? To this I would answer that the Chinese remain Chinese, that the Chinese government is not seeking to replace or culturally reconfigure the entire population, and so in many ways our government is worse than theirs. Secondly, our culture, the culture of the Anglo-Saxon countries, has traditionally emphasised liberty in a way that is not the case with China, and so our recognition that we are no longer as democratic or as free as we once were is harder for us to accept. Finally, we should be clear that government coercion is required to create a multicultural society, as human beings in a single society tend to create a common culture when left alone by the authorities. So unfreedom and social discouragement go hand in hand inBritain today.

Reacting to social decay

Ironically, when classically educated, our rulers were well aware of the danger that immigration could destroy the bands of society. In Dryden’s translation of Juvenal’s Third Satire, we read:

In short, no Scythian, Moor, or Thracian born,
But in that town which arms and arts adorn.
Shall he be placed above me at the board,
In purple clothed, and lolling like a lord?
Shall he before me sign, whom t’other day
A small-craft vessel hither did convey,
Where, stowed with prunes, and rotten figs, he lay?
How little is the privilege become
Of being born a citizen ofRome!

How little is the privilege become of being born a British subject! With daily reminders of this, we could well become curmudgeons, like Gildas in the 6th century, who lamented the condition of Britainin his On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain. A pessimistic view also engulfed other remnants of forgotten civilisations, such as the émigré Russians in Paris between the wars. What is different about what is happening to us, however, is the demographic change that is overwhelming our society. The original Italian stock of Italy maintained its demographic dominance and assimilated immigrants from Greece in ancient times. The ancient Britons and the Angles and Saxons later merged into a new English-speaking society with a Celtic fringe. The Soviet experiment in Russia came to an end, allowing a certain restoration of some parts of Russian culture, including the Russian Orthodox Church, in Russia today. In our case, however, the sheer disparate nature of the origins of the incoming population groups and the official encouragement for them not to forge a united culture make social anomie from now on the most likely outcome, at least for now.

Given that the political and media worlds are dominated by people who support the discouragement of our society, there is little reason to expect an improvement. Anger is one possible reaction to what has happened to our country, and I cannot deny that anger would be justified, although achieving little in the way of positive results. It seems all we can do that is more productive than a complaining or angry reaction is to try to create corners for ourselves in which to lead happy lives or establish social networks, regardless of what is happening in society more broadly. The problem is that, even if successful, we lead devalued lives. We can do what we can in the forgotten corners ofEngland, but, now there is no longer a nation or national culture, our achievements will all die with us. We have become zombies, the living dead, adherents of a culture that even we know has already passed on.

I can offer no real answer to the question of how to live a worthwhile life during the death of a culture. We should try to speak up as and when we get the chance to. We should support other members of the English nation who are penalised for speaking out. We should not vote for or otherwise support political parties that encourage our national decline. But we should also be realistic in our expectations, and try to find niche locations and occupations for ourselves to enjoy our lives despite the dispiriting backdrop. Such political work as we can do should be engaged in with the object of deriving a certain enjoyment therefrom, forging links with other like-minded Englishmen and thus creating a counter-culture. The long-term future of that counter-culture is itself in doubt, but we are on this earth and have a right to cultural expression, and we should make the most of it. Cultural pessimism does not imply that we should always be glum, but it does point to a certain detachment from the culture and even the wider interests of Englandtoday. I will certainly not be keeping my fingers crossed that the bond markets spare the state and its hangers-on during the current economic downturn, but all we can do is to wait to see how our economic difficulties play out. Roll on the crisis! As Lenin said, the worse, the better!

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[The below information can be downloaded in .pdf format and printed in a handy card format by clicking here.]

Your Rights

If you are stopped and searched under section 44 of the Terrorism Act, you do not have to give your:

• Name
• Address
• Date of Birth
• DNA, or
• Reason for being there
• Nor do you have to explain where you are going

However, if the police decide that there is reasonable suspicion to arrest you for an offence, you do have to give your name and address.

• You do not have to comply with any attempt to photograph you, although you cannot flee the scene.
• The Police cannot delete any images on your camera. They can only view them in very limited circumstances.
• If you are driving a vehicle, when stopped you must give your name and address.
• Failure to stop or obstructing a police constable acting under section 44 is a criminal offence.

Police Powers

Under s44, a police constable in uniform is entitled to:

• Pat you down
• Detain you for the duration of the search
• Remove outer clothing
• Require you to remove any item which he reasonably believes you are wearing to conceal your identity
• Look through your pockets and anything you are carrying
• Seize any article he reasonably suspects is intended to be used in connection with terrorism.
• Search your vehicle and anyone in it.

What You Should Do

• Insist on a written record of the search
• Make sure it is legible and includes details of  the officers’ shoulder number and the reason for the stop.
• Note exactly why they said you were being stopped and searched – this may be more extensive than the reference in the record slip.
• Ask to see the officers’ warrant card and note the number. (This is useful when making a complaint if they have moved stations and their shoulder number changes)

Note: Police Community Support Officer (PCSO) may not perform a s44 search without a police officer present.

Other Laws

• It is not against the law to photograph police, vehicles or equipment, unless the images are “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”.
• It is not against the law to take photographs in an area where an authority under section 44 is in place.
• Using a tripod or other equipment on a public right of way can be considered obstruction. Simply standing still on a public right of way (as to take a photo) can be deemed an obstruction in certain circumstances.
• Although it is rarely used, the Official Secrets Act prohibits photography that threatens the security of the state. This includes:

1. Military establishments and munitions stores, aircraft and ships
2. Civil Aviation property and naval dockyards
3. Railways, road, waterway, power stations, waterworks and nuclear power stations that have been defined as prohibited places by the Secretary of State.
4. Telephone exchanges and communications centres operated by the Crown
5. Anywhere else that is a prohibited place by order of the Secretary of State

• You can photograph private property if you are on public property or a public right of way
• Private property owners may impose restrictions on photography, this only applies to photographs taken from somewhere on their property. Restrictions may not always be obvious but will still apply. They cannot be imposed after the photography has occurred.
• Private property owners or their agents (for example security guards) may not view or delete images on your camera or demand your name and address. They may require you to leave immediately and by the most direct route without giving any reason if they choose.
• There is no right to privacy in a public place, however, there are circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, particularly if they are inside their own home. Childrens privacy rights are particularly protected. You therefore need to be aware that publication without consent may leave you open to legal action.

Disclaimer - While care has been taken to ensure that the information contained in this guide is accurate it does not provide a comprehensive in-depth discussion of the relevant law. The information it contains is of a general nature and is not intended to be legal advice. The guide is provided without warranty as to the accuracy of the information it contains. The author, publisher and distributor of this guide will not be held responsible for any loss suffered by any person that is directly or indirectly attributable to reliance on the information contained in this guide.

This guide was compiled by David Hoffman, Marc Vallée and Jonathan Warren with additional legal advice from Anna Mazolla at Hickman & Rose.

Thanks and credit is duly given to;

http://www.photographernotaterrorist.org

Who provided the selected information contained herein.

Libertarian Heritage No. 28

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/?q=node/688

Introduction

A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind.  It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow-laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.¹

These words were written 200 years ago by Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams dated 21^st January 1812.

Thomas Jefferson (like John Adams) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.  His face is one of the four that look out from Mount Rushmore, carved out of granite rock on that famous South Dakota Memorial, reminding all Americans that he was a significant figure in their history.  He was America’s third President and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.  He was a lawyer and a Virginia planter, as well as a politician and statesman.

He was also a man of many talents as R.B. Bernstein points out:

He was a talented architect, a skilled violinist, a venturesome student of religion, a devoted amateur scientist and sponsor of scientific research, a connoisseur of food and wine, an enthusiastic tinkerer who loved to adapt and improve upon new inventions, and perhaps the finest writer of his age.²

The inscription on his grave, decided upon by Jefferson himself in the last year of his life, lists the achievements by which he most wanted to be remembered:

HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON APRIL 2, 1743 O.S. – JULY 4, 1826 AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND OF THE VIRGINIA STATUTE FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.³

During his lifetime Jefferson held a number of positions of high office: he became the Governor of Virginia, the first US Secretary of State under George Washington, the Vice President of the United States under John Adams, and then the President for two consecutive terms of office from 1801 to 1809, but none of these accomplishments are mentioned on his tombstone at the family cemetery at Monticello.

What is also not mentioned is that when Thomas Jefferson was President he was responsible for doubling the size of the United States.  He did this by arranging the purchase of the whole of the Louisiana Territory from France at the bargain price of fifteen million dollars (that is less than 4 cents per acre).

It is clear that the achievements of which he was most proud had nothing to do with status or acquisition; they were all about his contributions to the furtherance of his treasured ideals: freedom and enlightenment.

In this essay I look at the life and work, and in particular the words of Thomas Jefferson, and conclude by suggesting that ‘the Sage of Monticello’ (as he was known), despite being a slaveholder, is worthy of the epithet ‘Libertarian Wordsmith,’ because of the libertarian principles he expressed and the mastery of words he demonstrated.

Jefferson the man

Jefferson has been described as ‘Tall, lean, and freckled, with reddish hair and hazel eyes.’⁴

A contemporary of his, William Maclay, described Jefferson’s demeanour:

He sits in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other…  (H)is whole figure has a loose, shackling air.⁵

However when he stood up his posture was erect, as Isaac his ex-slave pointed out: “Mr Jefferson was a tall, straight-bodied man as ever you see,” he recalled.  “Nary a man in this town walked so straight.”⁶  Isaac also remembered Jefferson’s fondness for singing, “hardly see him anywhar outdoors, but that he was a-singin’.”⁷

Another contemporary, Senator Daniel Webster, described the eighty-one year old Jefferson as follows: “His general appearance indicates an extraordinary degree of health, vivacity and spirit.”⁸

These few contemporary descriptions of his physical appearance and general demeanour, help to provide an introduction to Thomas Jefferson the man.

Ancestry

Jefferson’s mother, Jane, was born into the wealthy Randolph family, who were part of Virginia’s planter elite and proudly claimed descent from British nobility.  His father, Peter Jefferson, was a self-made man, who was a talented surveyor and mapmaker as well as a farmer, tobacco planter and slaveholder.  He was descended from Welsh immigrants.

It is interesting to note that Thomas Jefferson’s great-great grandfather, on his mother’s side of the family, was William Lilburne, first cousin of the Leveller leader and English freedom fighter ‘Free-born John’ Lilburne.  John had fought on the side of Parliament in the English Civil War, as did his brothers Robert and Harry.  Robert was a Roundhead and regicide who, along with Oliver Cromwell and others, signed Charles I’s death warrant.  Henry was a turncoat, who joined the Parliamentary Army but later switched sides to become a Royalist.

Fred Donnelly, referring to Thomas Jefferson’s ancestral link to the Lilburne bothers; Robert, John and Henry, noted:

…he was a fifth generation descendant of their uncle, one George Lilburne (1586-1676) a substantial businessman of Sunderland who was briefly John Lilburne’s financial partner in a London brewery.⁹

The reason why this connection is so interesting is that John Lilburne and Thomas Jefferson shared much in common politically, as Donnelly points out:

The fundamental issues of political liberty raised by the English Leveller movement are echoed in the political discourse of late eighteenth century America.  Moreover, there was a shared belief in ‘natural law,’ the fundamental principles on which society was thought to be based…  This in turn connected with the notion of an ‘ancient constitution’ that predated the Norman Conquest and contained a heritage of basic freedoms, liberties and property rights.  The Levellers, Thomas Jefferson and many others shared a litigious argumentative framework in which  “ancient constitutionalism was the instrument that lawyers, constitutionalists, and parliamentarians used over several centuries to neutralise arbitrary power by placing a rein on discretionary decision making”.¹⁰

When Jefferson travelled to England in 1786, he met with John Adams.  Both men were very aware of the similarities between the causes of the English Civil War and the American War of Independence, (i.e. taxation without representation) and they made a point of visiting two sites of the English Civil War.  At the time, John Adams remarked:

Edgehill and Worcester were curious and interesting to us, as scenes where freemen had fought for their rights.  The people in the neighbourhood appeared so ignorant and careless at Worcester, that I was provoked and asked, ‘And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for?  Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground; much holier than that on which your churches stand.  All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.’  This animated them, and they seemed much pleased with it.  Perhaps their awkwardness before might arise from their uncertainty of our sentiments concerning the civil wars.¹¹

Edgehill is the site of the first major battle of the first English Civil War; Worcester is where the last battle of the third and final English Civil War took place, and so they are significant places, representing between them the beginning and the end of the English Civil War(s).

It is worth noting here that the main difference between the Levellers and the American Patriots is that the Levellers failed to establish a new constitution based on their document, the Agreement of the People, whereas the Americans did succeed in establishing a new constitution, based on the ideals outlined in their Declaration of Independence.  As Nicholas Elliott pointed out:

Americans founded a republic with a government limited by constitution; they enacted what the levellers had proposed.¹²

Early life

Thomas Jefferson was born at Shadwell, in Albemarle County, Virginia in April 1743.  He was the third child in a large family.  Thomas had two older sisters, Jane and Mary, and four younger sisters, Elizabeth, Martha, Lucy and Anna.  He also had a brother, Randolph, twelve years his junior.

Jane, with whom he shared a love of music, became his favourite sister, but tragically she died at the age of 25.

Thomas’s father, Peter Jefferson, died in 1757 at just forty-nine years old.  One of Peter Jefferson’s greatest achievements was to produce the first accurate map of Virginia, which Thomas proudly included in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, published thirty years later in 1787.  Thomas inherited several thousand acres of landed estate and dozens of slaves as well as livestock from his father.

Thomas Jefferson’s formal education had been focussed on the study of Latin and Greek, and he had been guided and nurtured in these and other subjects at a local private school run by the Reverend William Douglas.  After
his father’s death, Jefferson was sent to lodge and learn with a new tutor the Reverend James Maury, who Jefferson described as a “correct classical scholar.”  In March 1760, shortly before his seventeenth birthday, Jefferson enrolled at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg (Virginia’s colonial capital), where he attended until 1762, and where today on campus stands a full-length statue of him as a memorial.

He went on to study law in Williamsburg for five years under George Wythe (pronounced with) before being admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767.  As Jefferson records in his autobiography:

Mr Wythe continued to be my faithful and beloved mentor in youth, and my most affectionate friend through life.  In 1767, he led me into the practice of law at the bar of the General court, at which I continued until the Revolution shut up the courts of justice.¹³

The building of Jefferson’s mountaintop home, Monticello, began in 1768.  As a boy, Jefferson had dreamed of having a mansion built on this ideal site in full view of Shadwell.  Inspired by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio, Jefferson planned a neoclassical design for his property; he then oversaw its construction and spent many years altering and perfecting it, long after he had moved in.

Virginia House of Burgesses, 1769-1775

Jefferson’s political career began when he was elected as burgess by the voters of Albemarle County and he joined the other members of the legislative Assembly at the Virginia House of Burgesses in May 1769.  Jefferson was now twenty-six years old.  This is when his opposition to the condition of slavery first became apparent:

I made one effort in that body for the permission of the emancipation of slaves, which was rejected: and indeed, during the regal government, nothing liberal could expect success.¹⁴

Marriage and inheritance

On 1^st January 1772, Thomas Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton, a 23-year old widow.  They moved into the partially completed mansion house, Monticello, and nine months later their first child was born.

On 23^rd May 1773 Martha’s father, John Wayles, died leaving Jefferson and his new wife 135 slaves and thousands of acres of land from the Wayles estate.  Among the slaves were eleven members of the Hemings family.  Jefferson also inherited Wayles’s debts which were considerable.

From the Boston Tea Party to the First Continental Congress

It all began with the Stamp Act of 1765, a new tax imposed on colonists without their consent, causing tension between the thirteen colonies of British America and Great Britain.  This was followed a few years later by the unpopular Tea Act.

The Tea Act passed by the British government in 1773, reduced the tax on imported British tea to the advantage of British merchants.  This angered American colonists so much that they boycotted the tea and when British ships entered Boston harbour, patriots dressed as Indians boarded the ships and dumped the cargo of East India Company tea overboard.  This famous event has become known to history as the Boston Tea Party.

In response to the Boston Tea Party, the parliament of Great Britain passed the Boston Port Act of 1774, banning the city’s trade by blockading the port of Boston.  As a protest, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other members of Virginia House of Burgesses decided to call for a day fasting in Virginia in sympathy with their sister colony, Massachusetts.  To assist them with the wording of their proclamation they referred to John Rushworth’s Historical Collections, a multi-volume reference work that included state papers dating back to the English Civil War.

Jefferson recalls what happened:

With the help, therefore, of Rushworth, whom we rummaged over the revolutionary precedents and forms of the Puritans of that day, preserved by him, we cooked up a resolution, somewhat modernizing their phrases…to implore Heaven to avert us from the evils of civil war, to inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and to turn the hearts of the King and Parliament to moderation and justice.¹⁵

This is how the proclamation was finally worded:

This House being deeply impressed with Apprehension of the great Dangers to be derived to British America, from the hostile Invasion of the City of Boston, in our sister colony of Massachusetts Bay, whose Commerce and Harbour are on the 1^st Day of June next to be stopped by an armed Force, deem it highly necessary that the said first Day of June be set apart by the Members of this House as a Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer, devoutly to implore the divine Interposition for averting the heavy Calamity, which threatens Destruction to our civil Rights, and the Evils of civil War; to give us one Heart and one Mind firmly to oppose, by all just and proper Means, every Injury to American Rights, and that the Minds of his Majesty and his Parliament may be inspired from above with Wisdom, Moderation, and Justice, to remove from the loyal People of America all Cause of Danger from a continued Pursuit of Measures pregnant with their Ruin.¹⁶

Lord Dunmore, Governor of Virginia, on receiving a copy of this proclamation immediately called a meeting of the burgesses at the council chamber and made the following statement:

I have in my hand a Paper,” he told them,” published by order of your House, conceived in such Terms as reflect highly upon his Majesty and the Parliament of Great Britain; which makes it necessary for me to dissolve you, and you are dissolved accordingly.¹⁷

Undeterred, the burgesses called their own meeting in the Apollo room at the Raleigh Tavern to discuss their next move.  The committee of correspondence agreed to contact the committees of the other colonies, with the proposal that they each appoint delegates, who would meet annually at a general Congress, in order to create a united colonial front; an attack on one colony would then be treated as an attack on all colonies.

It was also agreed that the day of fasting on 1^st June should go ahead as planned and when that day came it was a solemn occasion, with fasting observed, sermons delivered and prayer meetings taking place throughout the state of Virginia.

As Kevin J. Hayes noted:

The event profoundly affected Jefferson and reinforced his devotion to the cause of liberty.  The behaviour of his fellow Virginians this day bolstered his decision to pen the harshest denunciation of the crown that he or, for that matter, any colonist had yet written, a work that appeared in pamphlet form as A Summary View of the Rights of British America.¹⁸

In this pamphlet, Jefferson expresses his view that:

America was conquered, and her settlement made, and firmly established, at the expense of individuals, and not of the British public.  Their own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for their settlements, their own fortunes expended in making that settlement effectual; for themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have a right to hold.  Not a shilling was ever issued from the public treasures of his Majesty, or his ancestors, for their assistance, till, of very late times, after the colonies had become established on a firm and permanent footing.¹⁹

The first meeting of the Continental Congress was convened on 5^th September, 1774, at Carpenter’s Hall, Philadelphia.  Virginia delegates brought copies of Jefferson’s Summary View with them.

At this time colonists regarded themselves as Englishmen and therefore of deserving all the rights of ‘free-born Englishmen’.  However, there were differences of opinion: some delegates sought compromise with the British Government, whereas others demanded complete independence.

An agreement was reached to implement a total boycott of British goods, to be followed up by a meeting in May 1775 to review the situation.  Before that date came, the first shots of the revolutionary war were fired.

Jefferson’s role in the American War of Independence

The battles of Lexington and Concord, in April 1775, in which local American militia – known as Minutemen – exchanged fire with the British Redcoats, were the events that sparked the American War of Independence, otherwise known as the American Revolutionary War.  It could also be called a civil war because many colonists remained loyal to the crown, fighting on the same side as British troops against the American rebels.

When the second Continental Congress met in May 1775, its members appointed George Washington as Commander-in-Chief of the new army.

But what was Jefferson’s role in this war?

Jefferson was a gentleman and a scholar but no warrior; unlike George Washington he neither commanded troops in the American War of Independence nor fired a single shot against the enemy.  When British troops approached Monticello in 1781, Jefferson escaped on horseback.  His political enemies accused him of cowardice, although he was exonerated from any wrongdoing by the Virginia Assembly.

Jefferson was also no orator.  Unlike Patrick Henry, he did not make stirring speeches.  He did not attend the First Continental Congress in 1774.  He was part of a delegation from Virginia to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia from 1775 to 1776, but he hardly said a word.  As John Adams recalled, “during the whole Time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.”²⁰

His strength was in the written word.  His revolutionary writings were inspirational to the cause.  It all began with A Summary View of the Rights of British America, a pamphlet he penned in 1774, which was subsequently printed and circulated throughout the colonies, marking Jefferson as a revolutionary radical even before his first attendance at Congress.  He followed this by composing a document entitled Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking Up Arms, an address he drafted at the request of Congress.

The American Revolutionary War formally ended with the signing of the Treaty Of Paris in 1783, but this was long after the Americans had made their Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence

Jefferson’s mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, died in the spring of 1776 at the age of fifty-six.  Perhaps this was the reason that Jefferson suffered from a severe migraine that lasted several weeks at this time, a condition he was afflicted by periodically throughout his life.  It was later in that same year, Jefferson was to compose that most important of documents: the United States Declaration of Independence.

When the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1776 they appointed a Committee of Five – John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman – to draft a document declaring independence from Great Britain.  The Committee assigned Thomas Jefferson the task of writing the first draft.

John Adams referred to Jefferson’s ‘happy talent for composition and singular felicity of expression’²¹ making him the obvious choice to prepare the draft of the Declaration of Independence.

The beginning of the second paragraph of the preamble to the Declaration in its finalised form reads as follows:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life , liberty , and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter and abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness…22

This is of course the most quoted and most widely known part of the declaration.  Much of the rest of the declaration reads as a list of grievances against George III, the king of Great Britain at the time.  Jefferson’s criticism of the king’s involvement in the slave trade, included in Jefferson’s original draft but later struck out by Congress, reads as follows:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.²³

This clearly shows Jefferson’s opposition to the slave trade and to whom he attributed blame for imposing slavery upon America.  Jefferson’s original version of the Declaration and details of the changes made to it are recorded in his autobiography.

The ideals expressed in the Declaration were not totally original but then Jefferson did not make that claim:

Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.²⁴

The declaration was adopted in its final form by Congress on or around 4^th July, the date which continues to be celebrated in America as Independence Day.

When the Declaration was signed it was a very solemn occasion because the signers knew that they were putting their lives on the line; if the American Revolution failed they would all be hanged for treason.

The House of Delegates in the General Assembly of Virginia, 1776-1779

Jefferson served in the House of Delegates in the General Assembly of Virginia from 1776 to 1779.  Now that the United States had declared their independence from Britain, individual states were in a position to change their laws.  Jefferson was determined to take this opportunity to introduce reforms to Virginia law and eradicate the last remnants of feudalism.  He succeeded in the abolition of entail (that restriction of the inheritance of estates to designated heirs) and proposed also the abolition of primogeniture (the aristocratic tradition that the eldest son always succeeds to the ancestral estate to the exclusion of all others) a proposal which did eventually became law in Virginia in 1785.

Jefferson also wanted to separate the State Of Virginia from the established Church, thus creating what he called ‘a wall of separation’ between Church and State, and he believed this could be achieved by introducing a law of religious toleration.  In 1777, he drafted a religious liberty bill for this purpose, which he proposed in 1779.  This did eventually pass into law as the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786.

Jefferson strongly supported a bill banning the importation of slaves into Virginia and this was passed into law by the General Assembly in 1778.

Governor of Virginia, 1779-1781

Jefferson was appointed Governor of Virginia on 1^st June, 1779, during the American War of Independence and during his tenure he transferred the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond, where it still is today; however when it was invaded by the British he was criticised for not providing adequate defence.

Notes on the State of Virginia

Jefferson began compiling his Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781, when he was staying at Poplar Forest with his family, after his retreat from Monticello to escape invading British troops.  Poplar Forest, a property Jefferson had inherited from his father-in-law, John Wayles, was about seventy miles or so from Monticello, in county Bedford.  A riding accident, in which Jefferson broke his arm, forced him to take time out to recuperate, thus allowing him the opportunity to work on this project.  His book, Notes on the State of Virginia, was published in London in 1787 and in the preface he noted:

The following Notes were written in Virginia in the year 1781, and somewhat corrected and enlarged in the winter of 1782, in answer to Queries proposed to the Author, by a Foreigner of Distinction, then residing among us.²⁵

The ‘Foreigner of Distinction’ was Francois Marbois, Secretary of the French Legation at Philadelphia, who had submitted questionnaires to delegates from all thirteen states.  Jefferson was the ideal person to answer these queries on Virginia, as he already had much of the information to hand.

The Notes included details of the state boundaries, the state constitution and existing colonial charters.  Rivers, mountains and waterfalls were listed and natural features described.  Trees and plants were recorded in all their varieties and centres of human population such as cities, towns and villages were all noted.

Within its pages, Jefferson took the opportunity to express his criticism of slavery.  Commenting on these passages John Adams said, “are worth Diamonds.  They will have more effect than Volumes written by mere Philosophers.”²⁶

The death of his wife

Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s wife, died on 6^th September 1782, aged thirty-four.  A month earlier, she had given birth to Lucy, their sixth child, and then fallen ill.  Jefferson stayed with his wife throughout her illness and was badly affected by her death as Bernstein describes:

For weeks thereafter he was delirious.  After he left his sickbed, he roamed the grounds of Monticello, sometimes on horseback but more often on foot, with his nine-year old daughter Martha as his only companion.  In these rambles, his daughter recalled, he often gave way to his grief.  He burned all of his wife’s letters and papers – except one.  On her deathbed, Martha had begun to copy a quotation about the death of a loved one from their favourite novel, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, but she was too weak to complete it, and he finished it for her.  Now he kept that lone scrap of Martha’s writing, folded around a lock of her hair, locked in a secret compartment of his desk.²⁷

Money and the Ordinance of 1784

In 1784, at the Federal Congress in Philadelphia, Jefferson proposed the introduction of a new decimal currency for the United States based on the Spanish dollar, to replace the existing British pounds, shillings and pence; but this new American coinage system did not come into use until 1792.

Jefferson wrote the Ordinance of 1784 setting out the principles on which any newly created states to the West would be admitted to the Union of existing states.  Jefferson’s proposal that slavery should be banned from all new states by 1800 was defeated by one vote.  Jefferson later remarked:

…the fate of millions unborn [was] hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment!²⁸

Jefferson in Paris, 1784-1789

Jefferson was sent to Paris in 1784 as a diplomat to negotiate commercial treaties with European nations on behalf of the United States.  He joined his friends John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who were already there, to carry out this important task for their fledgling nation.

When Benjamin Franklin retired in 1785, Jefferson succeeded him as American minister to France.  Shortly afterwards John Adams left Paris to take up his appointment as American Minister to Great Britain.

While living in Paris, Jefferson learned to appreciate French culture and in particular Gallic architecture, music and fine wine.  He liked beautiful things.  He also liked beautiful women.  In 1786, while still in Paris, he had a flirtatious dalliance with a married woman, Maria Cosway, to whom he famously wrote his ‘Head and Heart’ letter, but the relationship did not last and she eventually ran off with an Italian opera singer, Luigi Marchesi, in 1790, forsaking not only her husband but also her child.

Jefferson was in Paris in 1789 at the time of the storming of the Bastille and actually witnessed many of the events that occurred at the beginning of the French Revolution.

Jefferson was acquainted with several leading members of the French Revolution, with whom he corresponded and dined, including his good friend, the Marquis de Lafayette.  His sympathy for the French Revolution remained strong during this period, despite the violence, because he saw it as a continuation of a process that had begun in America; France in his view was following the example set by America.

Shay’s Rebellion

Daniel Shay led a rebellion in Massachusetts against excessive taxation and this popular but bloody uprising against the state authorities became known as Shay’s rebellion.  Jefferson, who was in Paris at the time, commented on the rebellion in a letter dated 13^th November 1787 to John Adam’s son-in-law, William Stephens Smith:

God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.  The people cannot be all, & always, well informed.  The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.  If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy; the forerunner of death to the public liberty.  We have had 13 states independent 11  years.  There has been one rebellion.  That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state.  What country before ever existed a century & half without rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?  Let them take arms.  The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them.  What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?  The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.  It is it’s natural manure.²⁹

Secretary of State, 1789-1794

Jefferson returned to America from France in the autumn of 1789, and on his return he received a letter from George Washington, informing him that he had been nominated and confirmed as Secretary of State by Congress and urging him to accept the appointment.  Although reluctant at first, Jefferson took up the post in March 1790, in the nation’s temporary capital, the city of New York.

During Jefferson’s absence from America, the United States Constitution had been drafted by James Madison, approved by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and ratified by individual states.  Jefferson involvement had been to supply James Madison with many books from France to assist him in the framing of the Constitution and, after receiving a copy of the completed document in November 1787, to suggest, in a letter to Madison, that a Bill of Rights was needed:

Let me add that a bill of rights is what people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, & what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences.³⁰

George Washington had been elected as the first president of the United States.  Now Jefferson had become a member of George Washington’s cabinet.

The two burning political issues of the day, ‘Assumption’ and ‘Residence’ had reached stalemate.  ‘Assumption’ was the proposal that the federal government should assume all the states’ debts, including war debts, and this idea, which was championed by Alexander Hamilton, received much opposition in Congress.  The ‘Residence’ issue was about the location of the permanent capital of the United States and this again was a contentious issue.  Jefferson’s idea was to have a dinner party and invite Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the two adversaries and see if the matters could be resolved in a congenial setting.  This is Jefferson’s account of what happened:

They came.  I opened the subject to them, acknowledged that my situation had not permitted me to understand it sufficiently but encouraged them to consider the thing together.  They did so.  It ended in Mr.  Madison’s acquiescence in a proposition that the question [I.e. assumption of state debts] should be again brought before the house by way of amendment from the Senate, that he would not vote for it, nor entirely withdraw his opposition, yet he would not be strenuous, but leave it to its fate.  It was observed, I forget by which of them, that as the pill would be a bitter one to the Southern states, something should be done to soothe them; and the removal of the seat of government to the Potomac was a just measure, and would probably be a popular one with them, and would be a proper one to follow the assumption.³¹

The dinner party had taken place in late June 1790 and a bargain had been struck.  The Residence Bill was passed by the House on 9^th July and the Assumption Bill was passed on 26^th July.  The permanent capital would be built on the Potomac River, where it is today known as Washington DC, and this transfer would take place after a ten-year residence at Philadelphia.  Alexander Hamilton had got a key part of fiscal policy approved and Jefferson had facilitated the compromise.

Jefferson finally resigned from his post in December 1793, but not before the evolution of two political factions, one of which was led by Jefferson himself.

Republicans versus Federalists

In the early years of post revolutionary American politics, in the early 1790s, two parties emerged with different views on how the country should be run: they were known as the Republicans and the Federalists.  Jefferson became the leading spokesperson for the Republicans and his views have been summarized as follows:

Only a republic could preserve liberty, Jefferson insisted, and only virtue among the people could preserve a republic.  And agriculture, he contended was the true basis of republican virtue.  As he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”  To preserve liberty, Jefferson argued government had to be as close to the people as possible.  To him, that meant decentralised government, giving power over domestic issues to the states, the level of government closest to the people, and not to a distant federal government.³²

Alexander Hamilton, the most prominent Federalist, took a completely different view:

In contrast, Hamilton saw himself as free from local interests and prejudices, a true advocate of the national interest.  Rejecting the claim that he was biased against agriculture, he argued for a balanced economy resting on agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing, with each supporting the other two.  Doubting the state government’s ability to respond to national problems, he maintained that the only a strong general government could defend American interests effectively.  Finally he did not share Jefferson’s faith in the people’s wisdom, nor did he believe that allying the rich with the government would create a corrupt aristocracy and destroy liberty.³³

The Federalists’ vision included a central bank, direct federal taxes, import tariffs and a standing army.  The Republicans (or Democratic-Republicans as they were alternatively known) were much more libertarian, wanting instead virtually no government at all.

Vice President, 1796-1800

In 1796, Jefferson was elected to the Vice Presidency to serve the Administration of the second US President, John Adams.  His main role was to preside over the Senate and he decided that what he needed was a Senate procedures manual; so he proceeded to write one.  This was later published in 1800 under the title, A Manual of Parliamentary Practice and has been a useful reference for members of the US Congress ever since.

In 1797 Jefferson was chosen as President of the American Philosophical Society, an organisation founded by Benjamin Franklin, and whose basic purpose, according to one of its councillors, Charles Thompson was, “the improvement of useful knowledge more particularly what relates to this new world.  It comprehends the whole circle of arts, science and discoveries especially in the natural world.”³⁴

The Alien and Seditions Acts were introduced by John Adams’ administration in order to strengthen national security at a time when war with France was a real possibility.  The Alien Act made provision for foreigners, deemed dangerous by the authorities, to be expelled from the country and the Sedition Act ensured that open criticism of the government, either in speech or print, was punishable by the law.  Jefferson was opposed to both the Alien and Seditions Acts, as he regarded them as attacks on individual liberty.

On 4^th July 1798, just after the enactment of the Sedition Act, he wrote to the Virginia pamphleteer and planter John Taylor of Carolina:

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 it’s true principles.  It is true that in the mean time we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war & long oppressions of enormous public debt…  If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns & then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are the stake.³⁵

Jefferson found an ally in James Madison, who also opposed the Alien and Seditions Acts.  Bernstein describes how their concerns prompted Jefferson to draft the Kentucky Resolutions and Madison, the Virginia Resolutions:

Angered by what they saw as a Federalist bid to establish tyranny, Jefferson and Madison tried to spur the states to resist the Alien and Seditions Acts.  Jefferson drafted two sets of resolutions that Kentucky’s legislature adopted in 1798 and 1799.  His Kentucky Resolutions declared that a state could strike down, or nullify, unconstitutional federal laws, preventing them from having effect within its own borders.  Jefferson’s arguments carried him dangerously close to embracing secession – the idea that a state could leave the Union.  Meanwhile, Madison penned resolutions that the Virginia legislature adopted in 1798.  Stopping short of nullification, the Virginia Resolutions argued that a state could thrust itself between its own citizens and federal authority and ask the other states to consider whether the federal government was overstepping its legitimate powers – a doctrine known as interposition.³⁶

President Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was elected President of the United States in 1800 and took office in 1801.  A few months before the election, in a letter to Benjamin Rush, Jefferson made the following statement:

I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.³⁷

Jefferson’s first term is remembered for the positive actions he took; he cut government expenditure, reduced national debt, abolished an unpopular tax on whiskey and doubled foreign trade.  He was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase and the commissioning of the Lewis and Clark expedition.  He also took on the Barbary pirates.

The Barbary Pirates

The Muslim states of North Africa that included Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli and Tunis, were known collectively as the Barbary powers, and these had been engaged in piracy, kidnapping and slavery since the 16^th century.  They often took European captives to extract ransoms from European powers.  Jefferson was well aware of this.

When Jefferson was the United States minister to Paris and John Adams the equivalent minister to London, they had met the ambassador of Tripoli and asked by what right were they were being expected to pay tariffs for the return of American hostages.  In a letter to Jay and to Congress on 28^th March 1786 Jefferson recorded the answer they were given:

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners.³⁸

Jefferson found this explanation totally unacceptable and yet despite his objections the United States continued to pay ‘tributes’ to the Barbary powers.

This came to an end when Jefferson became President because he refused to pay protection money against piracy to the Pasha of Tripoli, who consequently declared war against the United States.  Jefferson sent a fleet of naval vessels to the Mediterranean to fight the Barbary pirates.  Because of this action, Tunis and Algiers were forced to abandon their alliance with Tripoli.  However in 1803, the US frigate Philadelphia was captured and its captain and crew taken hostage.  Despite this setback, a new American expedition forced Morocco to make peace with America and Tripoli was subjected to five separate naval bombardments.  In 1804, a daring raid led by Captain Stephen Decatur was successful in rescuing the captain and crew of the Philadelphia from imprisonment.  The same man, a few months earlier, had sailed into Tripoli harbour and torched the captured Philadelphia to prevent it from being used by the enemy.  Jefferson’s policy of standing up to the pirates paid off and protection for American shipping was maintained until finally in 1815 the Barbary States gave up their demands for tribute.

Louisiana Purchase

The Louisiana Purchase came about because Napoleon wanted money to fund his war with Britain and the Americans wanted more land.  Jefferson’s successful deal doubled the size of the United States and obtained some of the most fertile land in the world at a rock bottom price.  Despite being criticised as unconstitutional, this purchase fitted with Jefferson’s vision of an expanding ‘Empire of Liberty‘.

Lewis and Clark Expedition

In 1804 Jefferson commissioned his former private secretary Captain Meriwether Lewis (who then invited William Clark to join him) to embark on a three year expedition with a team of 40 or more others, to travel west as far as the Pacific Ocean, a journey covering some 8000 miles, in order to create maps and follow the waterways to seek a Northwest Passage (which did not in fact exist); gather as much scientific data (and specimens) as possible of plant and animal life; record the availability of natural resources; and establish trade relations with the American Indians in the newly acquired territory and beyond.

The Lewis and Clark expedition, as it became known, was declared a triumph when it returned in 1806 with a multitude of botanical and zoological specimens, extensive maps and detailed reports.

Second term

The attack and capture of American ships by both Britain and France, each of which were trying to disrupt the trade of the other, and Britain’s practice of impressing American sailors into the British navy, triggered a response from the United States against these warring European nations.  In 1807, during the President’s second term in office, the Embargo Act was enacted by Congress; this prevented American vessels from trading with the French, the British or any other European power.  The measure was a disaster; it did more harm to American trade than it ever did to the commercial interests of either France or Britain.  Congress repealed the act at the end of Jefferson’s presidency.

Also in 1807, with Jefferson’s support, Congress passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves.

Monticello

After two terms as president, Jefferson was ready to retire to Monticello.  He had a number of projects he wished to complete including: his compilation of the life of Jesus, the writing of his autobiography and the establishment of the University of Virginia.

The Jefferson Bible

Jefferson compiled what has now become known as the Jefferson Bible, by collecting the moral teachings of Jesus and eliminating all the supernatural references in the Gospels.  In a letter to Mr Charles Thompson, Jefferson explained how he did this:

I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials (The Gospels) which I call the Philosophy of Jesus.  It is pareadigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject.  A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen.  It is a document in proof that I am a REAL CHRISTIAN, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call ME infidel and THEMSELVES Christians and preachers of the Gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said or saw.  They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the greater reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were he to return on earth, would not recognise one feature.³⁹

The full title of Jefferson’s composition is The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels In Greek, Latin, French and English.  In Jefferson’s Bible there is no virgin birth; there is no resurrection; there are no angels or miracles, no superstitions or supernatural events, only the life and teachings of Jesus, who according to Jefferson was “one of the best men that ever lived.”⁴⁰

In the strictest sense, Jefferson did not write this book.  Using scissors and paste, and destroying eight bibles in the process, he assembled the parts into a unique version of the Bible, the Jefferson Bible.

The Autobiography

Jefferson was 77 years old when he began writing his autobiography; on page one he stated that it was intended ‘for my own ready reference, and for the information of my family.’  It is a short book of just 101 pages, but what is significant is that Jefferson included, for posterity, his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, complete with its condemnation of the slave trade.

The University of Virginia

Jefferson’s dream of creating a University of Virginia became a reality when it was officially opened on 7^th March 1825.  Jefferson had been involved in every aspect of the University’s creation: from the concept of an ‘academical village’ to the design of the Rotunda, and even the idea that professors should be recruited from as far a field as Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, as well more locally from New York and Virginia was his; everything about the University bore his influence.  Today a statue of Jefferson stands on campus to honour the father of the University of Virginia.

Death

Thomas Jefferson died on 4^th July 1826, exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence was adopted.  A fellow Founding Father, John Adams, died on the same day; his last words were, “Thomas Jefferson survives”.  In fact, unknown to Adams, Jefferson had died a few hours earlier that day but he was right in the sense that Jefferson’s words live on.

Jefferson was 83 years old when he died, leaving a mountain of debts settled only by the sale of all his worldly goods including his slaves and his beloved Monticello estate at auction in January 1831.

Having sketched Jefferson’s life story, I will now focus on a number of themes which feature throughout much of his adult life.  These are his Anglophobia, his attitude towards the French Revolution, his love of books, his writings, his connection with and attitude towards slavery, with particular reference to the case of Sally Hemings, his religious and philosophical views and finally his libertarian views.

I will state why I think he was right on some things and wrong on others.  I will reflect on his legacy and conclude why I think he can justly be labelled a ‘Libertarian Wordsmith.’

Anglophobia

There is no doubt that Jefferson was an Anglophobe and his reasons were personal as well as political and philosophical as Ron Chernow notes:

The Revolution left Jefferson with an implacable aversion to the British, whom he regarded as a race of “rich, proud, hectoring, swearing, squabbling, carnivorous animals.”  He had a long list of personal grievances beyond his distaste for Britain as a corrupt, monarchical society.  Cornwallis had ravaged one of Jefferson’s farms, butchering animals, torching crops and snatching thirty slaves.  Like many Virginia plantation owners, Jefferson was land rich but cash poor and chronically indebted to British creditors.⁴²

Another incident reinforced his anti-British sentiments.  Joseph J. Ellis records:

When Jefferson visited Adams in England in the spring of 1786, the two former revolutionaries were presented at court and George III ostentatiously turned his back on them both.  Neither man ever forgot the insult or the friend next to him when it happened.⁴³

Yet despite his understandable post-war Anglophobia, Jefferson was linked to and much influenced by the English.  He had English ancestors, and was related to the celebrated freedom-fighter and Leveller John Lilburne.  He had studied English Common Law under George Wythe in Williamsburg.  He was impressed by the writings of the English pamphleteer Thomas Paine and he regarded three Englishmen: Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton as the greatest men who had ever lived.

Jefferson and the French Revolution

Jefferson was an ardent supporter of the French Revolution both before it had begun and during its violent beginnings.  It was only much later that he denounced the atrocities that occurred under Robespierre.  When you consider that from Jefferson’s point of view, the French Revolution appeared to be a continuation of what had begun in America, it is understandable that he should support it.

A Lover of Books

Jefferson loved books, as is clear from this extract from a letter to a friend, John Page, in which Jefferson described the damage caused by a fire at his mother’s mansion house at Shadwell in 1770:

My late loss may perhaps have reached you by this time, I mean the loss of my mother’s house by fire, and in it, of every paper I had in the world, and almost every book.  On a reasonable estimate I calculate the cost of the books burned to have been £200 sterling.  Would to god it had been the money; then had it never cost me a sigh!⁴⁴

As Kevin J. Hayes comments in his biography of Jefferson, “Jefferson’s preference for books over money places him among the cadre of true book lovers.”⁴⁴

A self-confessed bibliophile, Jefferson amassed a library of 6,487 books, the largest private collection in the United States at that time, which he offered to sell to Congress in 1814 to replace the Library of Congress, which had been torched by the British when they had occupied Washington DC during the War of 1812.  After the sale, he immediately started on a new collection, admitting to John Adams, “I cannot live without books…”⁴⁵

A man of letters

Jefferson was a prolific writer and the author of more than 18,000 private letters.  However, he had only one book published during his lifetime: Notes on the State of Virginia; his autobiography was originally written just for himself and his family.  He is famous for being the author of a pamphlet under the title of A Summary View of the Rights of British America and a formal document entitled A Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, as well as public papers such The Kentucky Resolutions, The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and of course the Declaration of Independence.  Jefferson was a master wordsmith whose noble expressions were both inspiring and optimistic.  His correspondence with John Adams, which he famously resumed in later life, continued into old age.

Jefferson and slavery

Jefferson condemned slavery, whilst at the same time being a slave owner.  For most of his adult life, he owned approximately 200 slaves.  He formally arranged for the emancipation of two of his slaves and allowed two more to go free unofficially during his lifetime; five others were freed after his death, as specified in his will.  Jefferson was the champion of freedom in word but not deed.  This contradiction needs to be examined in more depth fully to understand Jefferson the man.  Jefferson’s whole life, from beginning to end, was closely linked to slavery; as one of his biographers explains:

According to family tradition, Thomas Jefferson’s earliest memory was of a trusted slave carrying him, at the age of two, on a pillow when his family moved from his birthplace, the Shadwell plantation, to Tuckahoe plantation, along the James River above Richmond.  Eighty- one years later, as Jefferson lay on his deathbed, passing in and out of delirium, another trusted slave was the only one present who understood and honoured his dying request to have his pillows adjusted so that he could lie more comfortably.  From cradle to grave, Jefferson was surrounded and supported by the institution of slavery, a core element of the life of Virginia’s gentlemen farmers.  No matter how modern, even forward-looking, he seems to us, he was a product of his time and place.⁴⁶

In a letter to Jean Pierre Brissot de Warville, dated 11^th February 1788, Jefferson expressed his opposition to the slave trade:

You know that nobody wishes more ardently to see the abolition not only of the trade but of the condition of slavery: and certainly nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice for that object.⁴⁷

Yet he thought it prudent not to join the society for the abolition of the slave trade.  However when Jefferson was a delegate to the Continental Congress at the time of the Revolution, he drafted a Northwest Ordinance in which he proposed banning slavery from the American territories to the west.

In his book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Query XIV, he noted:

I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.⁴⁸

This view is shocking from a 21^st century perspective, but it should be born in mind that this opinion was not uncommon among intellectuals in the 18^th century.  Take for example this statement by the distinguished philosopher, David Hume (1711-1776), who is now regarded as a major figure in the history of Western Philosophy:

I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites.⁴⁹

To criticise Jefferson for his racial bias is therefore anachronistic

Later, in a letter to Henri Gregoire, dated 25^th February 1809, Jefferson expresses uncertainty about his earlier opinion:

Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves.  My doubts (in Notes on Virginia) were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favourable, and those of exercising it still less so.  I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever 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.  On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family.⁵⁰

There is no doubt that Jefferson was uncomfortable about the practice of slavery as he made clear in his Notes on the State of Virginia:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.⁵¹

However, he did try to mitigate the treatment of slaves by making comparisons with the English labouring classes in a letter to Dr Thomas Cooper, dated 10^th September 1814:

Nor in the class of laborers do I mean to with-hold from the comparison that portion whose color has condemned them, in certain parts of our Union, to the subjection to the will of others.  Even these are better fed in these States, warmer clothed, and labour less than the journeymen or day-laborers of England.  They have comfort, too, of numerous families, in the midst of whom they live without want, or fear of it; a solace which few of the laborers of England possess.  They are subject , it is true, to bodily coercion; but are not the hundreds of thousands of British soldiers and seamen subject to the same, without seeing, at the end of their career, when age and accident shall have rendered them unequal to labour, the certainty, which the other has, that he will never want?  And has not the British seaman, as much as the African, been reduced to this bondage by force, in flagrant violation of his own consent, and of his natural right in his own person?  And with the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman or the slave?  But do not mistake me.  I am not advocating slavery.  I am not justifying the wrongs we have committed on a foreign people, by the example of another nation committing equal wrongs on their own subjects.  On the contrary, there is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity.  But I am at present comparing the condition and degree of suffering to which oppression has reduced the man of one color, with the condition and degree of suffering of another color; equally condemning both.⁵²

Jefferson’s writings make it clear that he was in favour of the abolition of slavery in theory but his lack of action regarding abolition suggests he was fearful of the likelihood of racial strife and bloody conflict that could follow:

Jefferson’s views about race grew stronger with the passage of time, eroding his early antislavery sentiment and convincing him that white Americans faced an insoluble dilemma.  He expressed that dilemma in memorable terms: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.  Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”⁵³

There was also the issue of debt as Ron Chernow points out:

Jefferson was land rich but cash poor and chronically indebted to British creditors…  The steep payments he owed British bankers forced Jefferson to retain his enormous workforce of slaves despite his professed hatred for the institution.⁵⁴

It should also be remembered that Jefferson was not the only Founding Father to have owned slaves: George Washington, Patrick Henry, and James Madison were all slaveholders.

Professor Thomas Sowell counters those who criticise the Founding Fathers for owning slaves:

Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century.

People of every race and color were enslaved – and enslaved others.  White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed.

Everyone hated the idea of being a slave but few had any qualms about enslaving others.  Slavery was just not an issue, not even among intellectuals, much less among political leaders, until the 18^th century – and then only in Western civilisation.

Among those who turned against slavery in the 18^th century were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other American leaders.  You could research all of the 18th century Africa or Asia or the Middle East without finding any comparable rejection of slavery there.

But who is singled out for scathing criticism today?  American leaders of the 18^th century.

Deciding slavery was wrong was much easier than deciding what to do with millions of people from another continent, of another race, and without any historical preparation for living as free citizens in a society like that of the United States, where they were 20 percent of the total population.

It is clear from the private correspondence of Washington, Jefferson, and many others that their moral objection to slavery was unambiguous, but the practical question of what to do now had them baffled.  That would remain so for more than half a century.⁵⁵

Sally Hemings

The biggest controversy surrounding Jefferson both during his own lifetime and ever since has been the allegation that he had sexual relations with one of his black female slaves.  Her name was Sally Hemings.  Jefferson had inherited her from his wife’s father.  Sally was the daughter of Betty Hemings (a mulatto slave) and her white slave owner John Wayles (Jefferson’s father -in-law).  This means that Sally Hemings was Jefferson’s wife’s half sister.

Sexual impropriety between slave-owners and their female slaves was not uncommon at this time.  Jefferson was not only contaminated by that contagion, but also not above suspicion because “there was not a planter in Virginia,” Adams observed, “who could not reckon among his slaves a number of his children.⁵⁶  This made the allegation a probability.

The scandal became public when James T. Callender (a sensation-seeking, grudge-harbouring hack, who had once worked for Jefferson but was now out to get him), wrote a piece for the Richmond Recorder in 1802, during Jefferson’s presidency.  “It is well known,” the article began “that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves…  By this wench, Sally, our president has had several children.  The African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.”⁵⁷

To understand the full story we need to go back to when Jefferson’s wife Martha died in 1782 after a difficult childbirth; before she passed away, she made Jefferson promise her that he would never remarry.  Sally Hemings, who had been nursing Martha at the time, would certainly have been aware of that promise.  In 1784 Jefferson went to Paris taking his daughter Martha (named after her mother but nicknamed ‘Patsy‘) with him.  Among the slaves that accompanied him was James Hemings (Sally’s nineteen year old brother), who was to be trained as a French chef.  When Jefferson’s youngest daughter Lucy died at Monticello, Sally Hemings, one of his privileged house slaves, was entrusted to bring his other daughter Maria (known as Polly) to Paris.  Sally went to Paris to serve the Jefferson household.  The illicit relationship between Sally and Jefferson allegedly began in Paris.  According to Sally’s memoirs, as told to her son Madison Hemings and published in an Ohio newspaper in 1873, Sally said that if she stayed in Paris she could be free (according to French law) but if she returned to America she would still be a slave and so she made Jefferson promise that if she came back to America he would free any children he fathered with her, when they reached the age of twenty one.  This was in 1789 when Sally was about 16 years old and less than two years after she had arrived in Paris.  Clearly, if her son Madison’s testimony is to be believed, the relationship had already begun by this time.

This is Madison’s version of events:

Maria was left out here (United States) but was afterwards ordered to accompany him to France.  She was three years or so younger than Martha.  My mother accompanied her as her body servant.  When Mr.  Jefferson went to France, Martha was a young woman grown, my mother was about her age and Maria was just budding into womanhood.  Their stay (my mother and Maria’s) was about eighteen months.  But during that time my mother became Mr Jefferson’s concubine and when he was called home she was ‘enceinte’ by him.  Soon after their arrival she gave birth to a child of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father.  It lived but for a short time.  She gave birth to four others, and Jefferson was the father of all of them.  Their names were Beverley, Harriet, Madison (myself) and Ester.⁵⁸

Apart from Madison’s testimony, there is evidence to suggest that there is truth behind these allegations: circumstantial evidence, DNA test results and the children’s resemblance to Thomas Jefferson.  Information drawn from Dumas Malone’s six-volume biography of Jefferson reveals that:

Despite his own forcefully argued conclusion that the Sally story was a fictional creation of Callender and nothing more, Malone’s own research revealed that Jefferson was present at Monticello nine months prior to the birth of each of Sally’s children.  Since he was often away at Philadelphia or Washington, and since Sally never conceived in his absence, the timing of her pregnancies was compatible with his paternity.⁵⁹

In addition, the DNA evidence is compelling:

On the 5^th November 1998 issue of Nature, the results of a DNA comparison between Jefferson’s Y chromosome and the Y chromosome of several Hemings descendents demonstrated a match between Jefferson and Eston Hemings.⁶⁰

Moreover, as Joseph J. Ellis noted:

…Sally Hemings did have several children who were obviously fathered by a white man and some of whom had features that resembled those of Jefferson.⁶¹

All this suggests to me that there is a strong case in favour of Thomas Jefferson being the father of Sally Heming’s children and I am inclined to believe that this is likely to be true based on the evidence currently available.  In the light of this, how should we interpret the relationship?  With regard to this, Joseph J. Ellis recalls:

…the most dramatic episode occurred in 1974, with the publication of Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, a national best-seller that argued in favour of the liaison and even claimed that Jefferson and Sally Hemings loved each other…⁶²

This may or may not be true but at the very least I think that the arrangement was consensual and mutually beneficial.  Any more sordid interpretation doesn’t fit with Jefferson’s known character.

Also as Christopher Hitchens noted:

In her brilliant, dispositive study of the subject, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed points out with well-controlled scorn that most analysts have refused even to consider whether Sally might have had a mind of her own, or might even more shockingly have made that mind up – in favour of an affair with a rich, famous, powerful, and fascinating man.⁶³

Jefferson and religion

History books usually describe Jefferson as a Deist, by which they mean that he believed in a Creator God who does not intervene in the natural world but just allows events to take their course.  Jefferson admired Jesus as a man, but disliked organised religion and in particular the Established Church.  What he certainly did believe in was religious freedom.

I think Jefferson’s views on religion are best understood by reading his own words on the subject.

The Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which was drafted by Jefferson in 1777 but not passed by the Virginia legislature until 1786, included the following passage:

We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry, whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods; or shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or effect their civil capacities.⁶⁴

If this is compared to the religious toleration clause in the Agreement of the People, a document compiled by the English Levellers, more than 100 years earlier, it can be seen that they both express similar objectives:

That we do not impower or entrust our said representatives to continue in force, or to make any Lawes, Oaths , Covenants, whereby to compell by penalties or otherwise any person to anything in or about matters of faith, Religion or Gods worship or to restrain any person from the profession of his faith, or exercise of Religion according to his Conscience, nothing having caused more distractions, and heart burnings in all ages, then persecution and molestation for matters of Conscience in and about Religion.⁶⁵

Once again, we see a similarity between Jefferson’s views and those of the English Levellers that came before him.

The following two statements on religion appeared in Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia:

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.⁶⁶

Millions of innocent men women and children since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned: yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.⁶⁷

Jefferson, on the theme of religious liberty, wrote these words in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in the State of Connecticut on January 1, 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and State.  Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.⁶⁸

In a letter to Mathew Carey on 11^th November 1816, Jefferson expressed his contempt for religious dogma:

On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.⁶⁹

What is revealed by these extracts is Jefferson’s religious scepticism.  This scepticism provoked his political enemies to describe him as an atheist.  It is also clear that he was passionately in favour of religious freedom and deeply distrustful of organised religion.

Jefferson the Epicurean

When it came to the philosophers of ancient Greece, Jefferson was clear about whom he regarded as being far above the rest.

In a letter to William Short, on 31^st October 1819 Jefferson admits:

I too am an Epicurian.  I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.⁷⁰

I think it is interesting at this point to look at some of the sayings of Epicurus to provide us with an insight into his beliefs, in order to speculate whether or not these views would have been shared by Jefferson.

This is Epicurus on happiness:

We must, therefore, pursue the things that make for happiness, seeing that when happiness is present, we have everything; but when it is absent, we do everything to possess it.⁷¹

Could this have been the inspiration for the phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’ used by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence?

This is Epicurus on death:

Death, therefore – the most dreadful of evils – is nothing to us, since while we exist, death is not present, and whenever death is present, we do not exist.  It is nothing either to the living or the dead, since it does not exist for the living, and the dead no longer are.⁷²

This chimes with Jefferson’s religious scepticism.

Epicurus on friendship:

Of all the things that wisdom provides for living one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.⁷³

Jefferson’s genial hospitality at Monticello confirms that Jefferson made his friends very welcome.

On self-sufficiency:

The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom.⁷⁴

There is no doubt that self-sufficiency and freedom, both national and personal, were amongst Jefferson’s most treasured values.

Jefferson’s actions and stated beliefs suggest that he was indeed an Epicurean.

Jefferson’s libertarian views

There are numerous Jefferson quotes expressing views which can be described as libertarian.  Here are just a few:

In a letter to James Madison in 1787, he declared:

I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government.  It is always oppressive.⁷⁵

In his first inaugural address on 4^th March 1801 in Washington DC, he states that:

… a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.  This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.⁷⁶

In his first annual message to Congress on 8^th December 1801, Jefferson stated that:

Agriculture, manufacture, commerce and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.⁷⁷

In a letter to Isaac H. Tiffany in 1819, he noted:

But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.⁷⁸

All of these statements indicate Jefferson’s libertarian outlook but what was the source of his political philosophy?  In Jefferson‘s view, three English men: Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton were, “the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception.”⁷⁹

The second of these, John Locke, was the man who provided the foundation for Jefferson’s political views.  John Locke (1632 – 1704) was an English philosopher and political theorist, and is regarded as the ‘Father of Liberalism’ and a major influence on modern-day Libertarianism.  John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government became a primary influence on Jefferson’s wording of the Declaration of Independence.

Some of the words are identical.  Look at these two phrases:

The first is taken from the Declaration of Independence:

But when a long train of abuses & usurpations…⁸⁰

The second is from Locke’s Second Treatise of Government:

But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices…⁸¹

Some of the wording is similar.  Compare these two extracts:

…that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.

Second Treatise of Government, 1689.⁸²

…that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights: that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Declaration of Independence, 1776.⁸³

Libertarians today talk about the right to life, liberty and property.  The Declaration of Independence can be interpreted as a statement of these libertarian principles.  Therefore, we can justifiably claim that Jefferson, as the Declaration’s primary author, was, from a political perspective, a libertarian.  In fact, the American Revolution itself can be seen as libertarian in origin as Murray N. Rothbard put it:

Thus, America, above all countries, was born in an explicitly libertarian revolution, a revolution against empire, against taxation, trade monopoly, and regulation; and against militarism and executive power.  The revolution resulted in governments unprecedented in restrictions placed on their power.⁸⁴

My suspicion is that Jefferson avoided the word ‘property’ in the Declaration because its use could and probably would have been seen as a justification of slavery (as slaves were considered to be property) and Jefferson didn’t want the Declaration to condone slavery; in fact his original draft contained a condemnation of slavery.

The libertarian economist Murray N. Rothbard tells us what he calls the ‘Great Jeffersonian Lesson’:

Jefferson’s political philosophy is summed up in the phrase: “That government is best which governs least.”  It received its finest expression in our own declaration of independence: man is endowed by God with certain natural rights; ‘to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,’ and when government becomes destructive of that end, the people have the right to change the form of government accordingly.  Thus Jefferson, as John Locke had done a century before, drastically shifted the emphasis from the State to the individual.  In the absolutist and feudal era from which the world was beginning to emerge, divine right settled only on the kings, the nobility, the State and its rulers.  To Jefferson, the divine rights were conferred on each and every individual, not on rulers of government.

What were these natural rights?  The fundamental right, from which all others are deduced, is the right to life.  Each individual has the moral right to live without coercive interference by others.  To live, he must be free to work and acquire property, to ’pursue happiness.’  In political terms, the one important natural right is self-defense; defense of one’s life, liberty and property from invasive attack.  Government’s function, then, is to use its power of force to prevent and combat attempts to use force in the society.  If the government extends its power beyond this ‘cop-on-the-corner’ function, it in itself becomes the greatest tyrant and plunderer of them all.  Since the Government has virtual monopoly of force, its potentialities for evil are far greater than that of any other institution.  The people must constantly keep their Government small and local, and even then must watch it with great vigilance lest it run amok.  That is the great Jeffersonian lesson, and it is one that all Americans must begin to learn again.⁸⁵

Rothbard recognised a kindred spirit.

Jefferson: right and wrong

Jefferson was in my view right about some things and wrong about others; take this sentence for example:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.⁸⁶

He is referring to African Americans and is right when he says that they will eventually be free; he is wrong however when he says that the two races cannot live together in harmony as free people.  Nevertheless, this does help us to understand how difficult the problem of slavery appeared to him.

In the final year of his life, Jefferson expressed, in a letter to James Heaton, his settled view on this issue:

The subject of your letter of April 20, is one which I do not permit myself to express an opinion, but when time, place, and occasion may give it some favourable effect.  A good cause is often injured more by ill-timed efforts of its friends than by the arguments of its enemies.  Persuasion, perseverance, and patience are the best advocates on questions depending on the will of others.  The revolution in public opinion which this cause requires , is not to be expected in a day, or perhaps in an age; but time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also.  My sentiments have been forty years before the public.

Had I repeated them forty times, they would only have become more stale and threadbare.   Although I shall not live to see them consummated, they will not die with me; but living or dying, they will ever be in my most fervent prayer.⁸⁷

Jefferson was also right to place his confidence in the success of the American Revolution, because it was justified (in part at least) in terms of the restoration of ‘ancient liberties’ and therefore historically based, whereas he was wrong about the rationalistic French Revolution, in the sense that he was over optimistic about the end result.  He failed to see that by scrapping the old order and replacing it with an entirely new one, the revolutionaries were producing an outcome that was very unpredictable, and that dangerous unintended consequences were likely to follow.  One man who understood this was Edmund Burke (1729-1797).  He is considered the father of modern conservatism, and yet he did justify the need for change in order to conserve when he famously stated:

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.⁸⁸

Burke was not in fact a Tory but a Whig.  He regarded himself as an ‘Old Whig’, distinguishing himself from ‘New Whigs’ by his opposition to the French Revolution.  By contrast he supported the cause of the American colonists.  The distinction he made between American Revolution and the French Revolution was that the former was based on rights already established in English law whereas the latter was built on a foundation of rights not previously known to exist in France.  He trusted historical evolution rather than rationalistic revolution.  Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution is spelled out in his classic work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was written in the early part of the Revolution; here he predicted many of the atrocities of the Reign of Terror before they happened.  With the hindsight of history, it is easier to see the merits of Burke’s argument.  Despite his reservations about the French Revolution, Burke did support the American Colonies in their struggle for freedom as he was passionate about liberty:

The Liberty I mean is social freedom.  It is that state of things in which Liberty is secured by the equality of Restraint; a Constitution of things in which the liberty of no one Man and no body of Men and no Number of men can find means to trespass on the liberty of any Person or any description of Persons in the Society.⁸⁹

Jefferson on the other hand thought that the French Revolution was merely following in the footsteps of the American Revolution and he lacked the insight of Burke.

Jefferson’s legacy

Jefferson’s greatest legacy consists of his written words because they continue to influence and inspire people, as these examples show.

On the 24^th June 1826, less than two weeks before he died, Thomas Jefferson wrote his final letter: a response to an invitation to come to Washington to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  After declining the offer due to ill health, he expressed his regret at not being able to attend:

I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies who joined with us on that day, in the bold  and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword, and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made.  May it be to the world, what we believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.  That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.  All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man.  The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.  These are grounds of hope for others.  For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.⁹⁰

These words, ‘the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few booted and spurred ready to ride them, by the Grace of God.’ were not of Jefferson’s own creation but those of Colonel Richard Rumbold, a Leveller, who famously uttered them before his execution 1685.  Once again, we see a connection between Jefferson and the 17^th century English Levellers.

The Seneca Falls Declaration of 19^th July 1848 (sometimes known as the Declaration of Sentiments) is clearly based on the Declaration of Independence and it was an influential document of its time, demanding equal rights for women.  It was written for an early ‘Women’s Rights’ Convention in New York and contains the following extract:

We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.⁹¹

In 1859, 33 years after Jefferson’s death, Abraham Lincoln remembers his significance:

All honor to Jefferson: to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.⁹²

The Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC on the shore of the Tidal Basin of the Potomac River was completed in 1943 during World War II and this is when Jefferson once again became a symbol for freedom.

The moment of Jefferson’s ascent into the American version of political heaven can be dated precisely: 13^th April 1943, the day that Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin.  “Today in the midst of a great war for freedom,” Roosevelt declared, “we dedicate a shrine to freedom.”  Jefferson was now an American saint , our “Apostle of Freedom,” as Roosevelt put it; he concluded by quoting the words inscribed around the inside of the Jefferson Memorial’s dome: “For I have sworn on the alter of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”⁹³

Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted Jefferson’s words in his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech made in Washington D.C. on 28^th August 1963:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.”⁹⁴

As we have seen, Jefferson was described by Franklin D.  Roosevelt as the “Apostle of Freedom” and his legacy is that his words continue to inspire the struggle for liberty in America and around the world.

Conclusion

After studying Thomas Jefferson the man, I have come to the conclusion that he was a complex individual, who was intellectually brilliant despite sometimes holding contradictory views; he was ambiguous, enigmatic, and above all human.  What shines through is his passion for liberty, learning and limited government, ideals highly valued by libertarians and his written words are so powerful and inspiring; they are like secular scripture.  He succeeded in helping to build a nation on a foundation of freedom but failed to solve the problem of slavery.  When it came to the subject of liberty, he found the right words to express the principles of libertarianism, which is why I feel justified in calling him a ‘Libertarian Wordsmith’.

Notes

(1) Joyce Appleby & Terence Ball (eds.), Jefferson: Political Writings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 37

(2) R.B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p. xiv.

(3) –, p. ix.

(4) Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, Penguin Press, New York, 2004, p. 311.

(5) –, p. 311.

(6) Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, Vintage Books, New York, 1998, p.29.

(7) –, p. 30.

(8) Bernstein, 2003, p. 181.

(9) Fred Donnelly, ‘Thomas Jefferson, John Lilburne and the English Levellers’, Albion Magazine Online, Autumn, 2010, retrieved 22^nd January 2012, www.zyworld.com/albionmagazineonline/jefferson_lilburne.htm, p. 1.

(10) –, p. 2.

(11) –, p. 5.

(12) Nicholas Elliott, ‘The Levelers: Libertarian Revolutionaries’, The Freeman, May 1989, Volume 39, Issue 5, retrieved 22^nd January 2012, www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/the-levelers.

(13) Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, Dover Publications, New York, 2005, p. 3.

(14) –, p. 3.

(15) Donelly, 2010, p. 4.

(16) Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson, Oxford University Press, New York, 2008, p. 152.

(17) –, p. 152.

(18) –, p. 153.

(19) Appleby & Ball, 1999, p. 65.

(20) Ellis, 1998, p. 44.

(21) Bernstein, 2003, p. 31.

(22) –, p. 33.

(23) Jefferson, 2005, p. 21.

(24) Appleby and Ball, 1999, p. 148.

(25) Hayes, 2008, p. 237.

(26) –, p. 243.

(27) Bernstein, 2003, p. 52.

(28) Ellis, 1998, p. 80.

(29) Appleby & Ball, 1999, p. 110.

(30) –, p. 361.

(31) Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, Vintage Books, New York, 2002, p. 49.

(32) Bernstein, 2003, p. 90.

(33) –, pp. 90-91.

(34) Hayes, 2008, pp. 432-433.

(35) Bernstein, 2003, pp. 124-125.

(36) –, p. 125.

(37) Hayes, 2008, p. 461

(38) Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, Harper Collins, New York, 2005, p. 128.

(39) Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Dover Publications, New York, 2006, p. 12.

(40) Hayes, 2008, p. 593.

(41) Jefferson, 2005, p. 1.

(42) Chernow, 2004, p. 313.

(43) Ellis, 1998, p. 88.

(44) Hayes, 2008, p. 2.

(45) Bernstein, 2003, p. 178.

(46) –, p. 1.

(47) Appleby & Ball, 1999, p. 473.

(48) –, p. 480.

(49) David Hume, footnote to ‘Of National Character’ (1748), The Philosophical Works of David Hume, Volume III, Theommes Press, Bristol, 1996, p. 228, cited at ‘Hume and Racism’, 2007, retrieved 22^nd January 2012, http://www.philosophicalmisadventures.com/?p=6.

(50) Appleby & Ball, 1999, p. 492.

(51) –, p. 481.

(52) –, pp. 138-9.

(53) Bernstein, 2003, p. xi.

(54) Chernow, 2004, p. 313.

(55) Thomas Sowell, ‘Twisted History’, Jewish World Review, 17^th December 2003, retrieved 22^nd January 2012, www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell121703.asp.

(56) Ellis, 1998, p. 259.

(57) Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair, Sinclair-Stevenson, London 1996, p. 21.

(58) –, pp. 21-22.

(59) Ellis, 1998, p. 365.

(60) –, p. 366.

(61) –, p. 364.

(62) –, p. 365.

(63) Hitchens, 2005, p.p. 62.

(64) Appleby & Ball, 1999, p. 391.

(65) A.L. Morton (ed.), Freedom in Arms, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1975, p. 271.

(66) Appleby & Ball, 1999, p. 394.

(67) –, p. 395.

(68) Hayes, 2008, p. 475.

(69) Appleby & Ball, 1999, p. 401.

(70) –, p. 313.

(71) Eugene O’Connor (translator), The Essential Epicurus, Prometheus Books, New York, 1993, p. 61.

(72) –, p. 63.

(73) –, p. 73.

(74) –, p. 85.

(75) Appleby & Ball, 1999, pp. xviii-xix.

(76) –, p. 175.

(77) Hayes, 2008, pp. 473-474.

(78) Appleby and Ball, 1999, p. 224.

(79) Hayes, 2008, p. 370.

(80) Appleby & Ball, 1999, p. 97.

(81) John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, J.M. Dent, London, 1993, p. 225.

(82) –, p. 117.

(83) Jefferson, 2005, p. 18.

(84) Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Collier Books, New York, 1978, p. 6.

(85)Murray N. Rothbard, ‘Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian?’, Mises Daily, 31^st July 2009, retrieved 22^nd January 2012, http://mises.org/daily/3591.

(86) Jefferson, 2005, p. 44.

(87) Appleby & Ball, 1999, p. 487-498.

(88) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin Classics, 1986, p. 106.

(89) –, p. 15.

(90) Hitchens, 2005, pp. 1-2.

(91) Appleby & Ball, 1999, p. 611.

(92) Hitchens, 2005, p. 3.

(93) Ellis, 1998, p. 9.

(94) Coretta Scott King (ed.), The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robson Books, London, 1983, p. 95.

I did discuss all this a few years ago with Norman Tebbit. His response was that the economic mess they took over in 1979 was so big that there was no choice but to deal with it to the exclusion of all other issues. He told me to put aside all benefit of hindsight and see things from the perspective of 1980. Hardly anyone took multiculturalism and ecototalitarianism seriously. But the Soviet Union was still there, and showing no signs of imploding. There was a fiscal crisis and high inflation. The labour market was rigid. The unions were out of control. The Thatcherites saw their job as winning a set of battles that had been running since 1945. They had no time to worry about what might come next.

I can’t say I’m convinced, but it was a good defence. Certainly, when MHT resigned, I retired to the gents at work for a few manly sobs. I don’t propose to go and watch a film that sounds like more lefty triumphalism. One film I would go and see is “The Trial and Execution of Tony Blair.” Mrs Streep would make a good Cherie! SIG

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/euro-centric/the-iron-lady/

An old woman stumbles into the shop of an Asian grocer and peers quizzically at the price of milk. Indian music blares from the speakers as a large African smirks with the usual blend of contempt and hostility at the white slag fumbling with her pence at the counter. She shuffles home through the dirty streets, passing dull-eyed denizens of the metropolis, and complains to her husband about rising prices as they sit to a modest breakfast. Only after another woman enters the kitchen do we discover that Lady Thatcher is talking to herself, a prisoner in her own home and of her own memories. Like Britain herself, she has been buried alive.

The Iron Lady is a film about the ghosts of people, issues, and a nation long since vanished. It has little to do with Margaret Thatcher’s accomplishments, beliefs, or time in office. Instead, most of the movie is spent watching an old demented woman scurry about her modest quarters in conversation with the shade of her dead husband. Occasionally, it shifts from clumsily executed biopic to outright horror. In one particularly disturbing scene, Lady Thatcher frantically turns on all the appliances in her house to drown out the hectoring of her dead husband. Denis Thatcher stares at his wife’s back from within a mirror, as Lady Thatcher desperately pleads with herself to turn away from madness. The camera zooms in and out with one wild cut after another. Such a mood fits The Exorcism of Emily Rose or Paranormal Activity. So much for those who came to the theater to see a movie about the Conservative Party.

As a portrayal of a living woman, it is sickening and without excuse. Obviously, this kind of treatment is limited only to someone who is right of center. Can anyone imagine a biopic focusing on a senile Nelson Mandela or Rosa Parks? To ask the question is to answer it. Even as the issues Thatcher championed have faded, as “New Labour” and other left-wing parties reconciled themselves to a diminished role for the unions, the rage against the Iron Lady is constant and enduring and the controversy about her continues. Websites have been set up to commemorate her death with a party, the comment boards on videos and articles about her are filled with furious vulgarity and loathing directed at woman who hasn’t been in power for 20 years, and even the Conservative Party has backed away from “Thatcherism,” as much as they can, even to the point of changing the Party’s logo from a flaming torch to a tree seemingly drawn by a child.

The result is that in some way, the portrait of a defeated and dying woman is the only kind of tribute the Kali Yuga can pay to a figure of importance who came from the wrong side. Meryl Streep (whose mimicry is skilled, but what of it?) sets the tone with the usual comment along the lines of “of course, I don’t agree with her evil politics, but this portrayal makes her sympathetic.” Similarly, the chattering class of Britain in the press and online have come to terms with this portrayal of Thatcher precisely because it shows the Iron Lady at her lowest point. Thatcher is, of course, racist, a traitor to woman, an enemy of workers, a woman who made people starve and completely destroyed Britain. As a human being, however, she is sympathetic because she is dying. In a culture where the highest value is self-loathing, this is perhaps the most a conservative can hope for.

The movie also does its best to turn Thatcher into a symbol of identity politics. The young Thatcher lectures her husband (just after he has proposed no less) that “one’s life must matter…beyond the cooking and the cleaning and the children, one’s life must mean more than that.” A young Thatcher dressed in bright blue and heels enters Parliament for the first time and is contrasted with the stereotypically stern aristocratic British men in dark suits who just strolled over from being evil in The King’s Speech. All gaze at her in astonishment, although the first woman in Parliament had already taken her seat 30 years before. Ominously, the “Members” room has urinals, while the “Lady Members” room contains an iron. Obviously, we are supposed to think Lady Thatcher should have forgotten all this silliness about the collapsing economy and championed the sitzpinkler movement. As Steep herself observes, what is important about Thatcher is not anything she did (which was all evil) but that a woman was elected in “gender biased, homophobic, class-ridden England.” Movement conservatives, of course, don’t believe the movie is feminist enough.

What did Margaret Thatcher do? Well, we really never really find out. She confronted the unions…but why this matters or what was the outcome is never really explained. We know it is incredibly controversial but the military-style planning Thatcher used to humble the trade unions is ignored and the entire subject simply peters out. Then we jump straight into the Falklands War, which gives Thatcher the popularity needed to carry out the rest of her program. However, again, why the decision was difficult, why there was opposition, and why Thatcher made the difference as opposed to anyone else being in charge is not explained.

After the Falklands, prosperity magically comes to Britain (again, no explanation why) and Thatcher rules for a lengthy period of time—during which nothing apparently happens. There is a shot of perhaps three seconds of Margaret Thatcher dancing with a tuxedoed Ronald Reagan, but that’s all the mention the “…or maybe even . Even Thatcher’s collapse is reduced to the petty and the personal, as her colleagues seemingly betray her because she yelled at them, not because of any policy differences. Thatcher’s about increasing European centralization and fiscal union, a subject as timely as ever, is all but ignored aside from a brief comment about the UK not being “ready for it.”

Such a treatment is perhaps inevitable because the issues that motivated Thatcher have become all but irrelevant. The best that can be said of Thatcher is that she confronted, and to some extent defeated, the primary challenge of her time by frustrating the British Left’s attempt to turn the sceptered isle into a grim Airstrip One of Brezhnev bureaucracy and overwhelming state ownership of the economy. The Iron Lady contains

one notable scene of an enraptured Thatcher watching her father speak of the virtue of a “nation of shopkeepers”; later, Thatcher speaks of the small businessman’s proud rejection of noblesse oblige.Of course, Thatcher’s libertarian rhetoric about there being “no such thing as society” belied her electoral dependence on a British traditionalism she did not identify with. Despite the fact that she in large partowed her rise to power to a thinly veiled critique of non-White immigration (and spoke even more frankly about the subject in private), Thatcher did precious little to stop the demographic transformation of the United Kingdom, the transformation of the British Empire into a mere satrap of the United States (or even worse, the European Union), and the eradication of the culture and identity of the British people.

Just as American conservatism of even the Russell Kirk variety was gradually replaced with a deracinated defense of “values,” so did Thatcher ground her politics in abstractions rather than in a sense of British identity. When Enoch Powell commented to her that he would fight for Britain even if it were under a Communist government and that values “can not be fought for, nor destroyed” because they exist beyond space and time, Thatcher was literally rendered speechless. Thatcher represented the “Americanization” not just of the British economy but of conservative politics, and the result was inevitable retreat and failure on cultural issues, as in the United States.

Even her economic reforms can be seen with the advantage of hindsight as, at best, a rearguard action. While outright state control over the economy may have been blunted, the fall of trade-union power may have been inevitable. The larger concern is that as with the “Reagan Revolution” and later “Republican Revolution” within the United States, Thatcher’s Conservatives failed to cut the growth of government or the ever increasing share of government spending that went to the welfare state. By saving British socialism from itself but ceding to the hard Left control of the commanding heights of the culture by defining conservatism purely as economic, Thatcher made “Cool Britannia” and its all encompassing political correctness possible.

Even victory in the Falklands may have simply postponed the inevitable, as Britain’s military position has seriously declined and Argentina is simply biding its time to , Thatcher’s call to make “Great Britain great again” seems almost tragic. As London is no longer an English city and the governments of the West are girded for seemingly permanent economic decline, it is hard not to view Thatcher’s story as irrelevant.

One can imagine an alternate British history with Enoch Powell as Prime Minister laying the foundation for a sustainable traditionalist Right that would preserve the long-term existence of British identity, culture, and economic power. Instead, we had the transformation of Toryism to American classical liberalism, and therefore its inevitable (and perhaps intended) defeat. With Thatcher’s accomplishments alternatively co-opted or undone with the passage of time, what is left? To the emerging post-Britain, she’ll be linked to the evil racist past, a bump on the road to Equality, her policies bluntly summarized as supporting the “.”

To the official conservatism of the rump Britain, she’ll be a symbol of the Good Old Days of Conservative victories against unsympathetic statist enemies, with troubling questions about immigration, culture, and the long-term impact of her policies abstracted away and easily avoided. Of course, to official opinion, even harmless nostalgia can not be tolerated. Would that there was a real British Right to come to the same conclusion!

The £1m bonus to be received by Stephen Hester, chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, 83% owned by the taxpayer, raises interesting issues for libertarians.

The government should not be dictating board-level pay in private companies. But, by the same token, this is not a private company: it is owned by the state.

A lot of unintended consequences have flown from the refusal to allow the collapse of the financial services industry in 2008/09. It was argued that the collapse of financial services was equivalent to the collapse of the real economy. Surely, the collapse of financial services would have entailed a sharp fall in economic output. Nevertheless, we should be wary of any attempt to equate one industry (a vested interest) with the whole economy.

During a financial collapse, the impact on the wider economy is normally less severe than on the financial services industry itself. Iceland is an example: the banks collapsed, and the economy entered a sharp downturn, but the Icelandic economy is now growing again, and the Icelandic state has regained access to the bond markets. In a true systemic collapse, as in Iceland, it is simply not possible to repossess every house in arrears: for a start, there would be no buyers. A true cash-only property market (we are not quite there yet in the UK, as mortgage lending is proceeding, albeit at a lower-than-normal level), the banks simply have to lengthen or alter the mortgage terms, as it makes no sense to do otherwise.

By bailing out the banks, we have ended up transferring huge debts to the public accounts. The end result is a zombie economy, with years of low or no growth ahead of us. The banks remain in crisis, and will not lend, and a large risk is transferred to the national accounts as it remains unclear if the money sunk into outfits like RBS will ever be recouped.

Once the bond markets revolt over the astonishing annual increases in our public indebtedness, then things could get really interesting. A rise in interest rates could force much greater cuts in the state, which would have to devote much larger sums to debt servicing, and mortgage-holders could find their mortgage payments going much higher, in a situation where many are telling surveys even a one percentage point rise in interest rates would see their mortgages pushed into arrears.

It would have been better to take the hit in 2009. A strong downturn in the economy would have been coupled with a quick working through of the debts, mainly in the form of bankruptcies.

This is where Stephen Hester comes in. His task is to get RBS back into the private sector, with the state apparently hopeful of making a gain on its ill-thought-out investment in the bank. I would not query any bonus payments, however high, that shareholders of a private company approved. It is not for us to make rulings on footballers’ pay and financial services’ bonuses generally. But Mr Hester leads a bank in crisis, a bank that foundered and then imposed itself on the national books, a bank that continues to imperil the wider British economy.

We shouldn’t have taken over RBS, but the in the circumstances, I don’t see how a bonus payment can be justified. This amounts to a recycling of the bailout funds in the form of executive bonuses. True, banks need to be able to employ the best personnel, although such bonuses are poorly correlated to individual performance by a chief executive. Is there any evidence that had Mr Hester phoned in sick every day for the past year that bank performance would have been any different?

My solution is that no bonuses—not even a single penny—should be permitted at the state-owned banks. But these banks should be sold off as soon as possible, to return them to the private sector and allow the bank boards to hire and fire and pay bonuses according to their own view of the banks’ best interests.

Waiting for the bank share prices to soar in price seems a little forlorn: these bank stocks are likely to remain depressed, at least compared with the pre-2007 share prices, for a long time to come. Having made the foolish decision to take them over, the state should simply accept that it has to take a hit on these shares. RBS should be prepared to be sold to the private sector at a loss to the taxpayer, with a no-bailout law passed making clear that further trouble at RBS will lead to bankruptcy, not bailout.

Banks should not be told how much money to hold in reserve. All such intervention should cease. However, a full publication of RBS’ exposure to subprime mortgage debts in the US and to euro zone sovereign and private debt should be made, to allow shareholders and depositors to assess the financial position of the bank. There should be no further depositor protection: if the bank collapses, the depositors and shareholders should lose their money. Most people do not have great savings or deposits. However, banks should also be forced to take the hit on repossessed houses sold off at a loss: the non-recourse principle used in the US, which prevents the banks from pursuing householders for the remainder of the debt, should be introduced here, in order to encourage the banks to consider their lending quality, and to prevent the “moral hazard” occasioned by turning mortgage loans into a one-way bet for the banks.

SIIIY JD…..B4 WEE (really)…..B4 14 SUE (conjures up worrying scenarios of interest to social workers, that one.)

Hungary has come under EU pressure to reverse its attempt to bring its central bank under democratic control. I suppose you could say the  EU is consistent in that it wants monetary affairs conducted away from the glare of publicity–there is no democratic input into the European  Central Bank either. Of course, Hungary is not a member of the eurozone and so should be free to do as it pleases in monetary affairs, but, given its financial difficulties, the country is vulnerable to EU pressure not to dismantle the undemocratic technocracy, of which independent central banking is one element.

Interestingly, I once (ca. 2000) went for a job with Business for Sterling and was interviewed by Nick Herbert, the current police minister. I was quizzed on many political issues in the interview, and I mentioned that the independence of the Bank of England was the only good thing Labour had done. Mr Herbert–correctly in my current view–was strongly of the view that the government of the day must be accountable in parliament for interest rate decisions.

I suppose I thought that the Bank of England might correct Gordon Brown’s excesses, by raising interest rates if fiscal policy were too loose. I hadn’t factored in the deliberate stoking of a property boom via the device of linking interest rates to a measure of inflation (the CPI) that did not include property prices. It turns out that the government should be accountable for interest rates to parliament–at least, where official rates are centrally set, and not (as may be more acceptable to libertarians) set by each commercial bank without guidance or manipulation by a central bank–and that the last government quite wrongly sought to blame bankers for a crisis created by the government’s own decision to stoke the boom by ignoring asset  prices.

There is no reason at all why Hungary should not bring its central bank under democratic control. Indeed, Hungary’s proposed reforms to bring the judiciary under democratic control also have positive aspects too, as an independent judiciary only works where the judges interpret the law without making it. It is frustrating for the UK to be a member of a body like the EU, so insistent on imposing unaccountable government on a whole continent.

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/1662/881/NL/Shadow_People:_Attacks_On_Humans_Increasing.html

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Legendary radio host Art Bell’s intrigued by them, neurologists dismiss them, psychologists laugh about them. But now grim researchers are investigating startling cases of the mysterious, faceless entities called Shadow People that are relentlessly attacking unwary humans.

Horror-stricken Australian Anne Williams claims a shadow person attempted to rape her.

Photo of alleged Shadow People next to a tree

The appalling incident started years ago with glimpses of something dark hiding behind trees, darting around corners, or fleeing a room as she entered.

The sightings escalated gradually until they became a daily event and her brief glimpses transformed into full views of nightmarish things.

Then her paranormal experiences began to escalate until they reached a crescendo of screaming fear.

The night the shadow attacked

Imagine cowering helpless in your bed, paralyzed with fear, fully awake, helplessly watching something dark and silent creeping inexorably towards you. That’s what Williams claims she encountered.

Some have dismissed her nocturnal attack as nothing but sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming, but she insists the bizarre attack left her bruised, scratched and emotionally shaken. She swears she didn’t imagine the sinister thing fondling her, tearing back the bed covers, and roughly groping her.

Even as it happened she knew she was being sexually molested and while the experience terrorized her then, it completely sickens her now.

Shadow People often appear when least expected

According to researcher Jason Offutt Williams testifies that “One early morning I felt so strongly that there was a presence standing next to my left as my bed was right in the corner of the wall. I felt as though I was blocked, like something was standing over me or wanted to scare me.”

This is a classic encounter with an entity that appears in the middle of the night.

“As I opened my eyes to see what the hell it was, there stood on my left side of the bed a black cloaked hooded figure.”

The ghastly thing leaned over her, pinned her to the bed and grabbed her neck when she attempted to scream. When she tried to push it away it savagely pinned her to the bed and then began groping her and hurting her.

“I felt that it shoved its arm down [on] my neck and was choking me as nothing came out of my mouth,” she explained. “Like no noise. I could not even hear myself scream, but I was.”

Finally, after what seemed an interminable struggle, the being left. After the attack, Williams felt enraged, soiled, and frightened. Upon learning the details of the incident, Williams’ mother speculated that the entity may have been the evil ghost of a dead rapist.

But the being Anne Williams encountered in her bedroom was no ghostly entity; it was a shadow person.

Photo of a shadow person standing in doorway

Other witnesses encountering Shadow People also describe physical attacks leaving them with scratches, bruises, even burns.

Attacks by Shadow People on human victims can range from being stalked and chased to being attacked with weapons.

On rare occasions Shadow People stalking a victim have been witnessed by friends and family.

Not all Shadow People are the same

Paranormal researcher, Rosemary Ellen Guiley says of the phenomenon, “There are different types of Shadow People. The core, dominant experience is the nighttime bedroom visitor: a tall silhouette of a man, often dressed in a coat or cape, and a brimmed hat. The figure is blacker than black and 3D, obstructing light and blocking the view of objects. There are no facial features or eyes (sometimes red eyes are reported), but the experiencer knows he is being observed with great intensity. The figures do not communicate, but often radiate a malevolent, trickster, or evil intent.”

What are Shadow People?

The perception of Shadow People differs depending on the researchers and their specialties.

Some experts believe that the sightings have little to do with reality, but are simply people’s minds playing tricks. Others think seeing a shadow person is evidence of a neurological anomaly in the region of the brain that governs sight.

Imagination may play a role in some Shadow People experiences, argue other experts, while those with strong religious beliefs assert that the appearance of these things are nothing less than manifestations from the dimension called Hell: demonic creatures sent by Satan to torment and terrorize humans.

Victims often report that calling on God or Jesus to help them wards off an attack.

Although experts disagree over exactly what Shadow People are, where they come from, and how they manifest themselves, strangely witnesses from every culture and throughout history tend to describe something similar. Certain traits repeat themselves.

The most ubiquitous feature present in many of the reports of Shadow People encounters describe a tall, mannish-looking entity that, curiously, wears a wide-brimmed hat.

A faceless entity that wears a hat is high strangeness indeed.

Famed paranormal researcher Heidi Hollis says she created the name “Hatman” to differentiate sightings of dark, featureless entities seen wearing hats. She says those beings are often described as wearing long dusters or trenchcoats and 1940s style, or Hispanic gaucho type hats.

If the beings actually exist, and witnesses swear they do, then the likely source of their origin is a nearby universe or parallel dimension.

The present historic epoch is one of transition from authoritarian institutions like states and corporations, to a society of self-organized networks and voluntary associations. As in any historic transition, second-order variables introduce high levels of turbulence to the process.

One such source of uncertainty is internal divisions within the authoritarian camp. That can only be expected. The very existence and function of authoritarian institutions is zero-sum in character. States are instruments of economic exploitation, through which ruling classes extract their wealth from producers. The wealth of parasitic corporations consists of rents on artificial property rights and artificial scarcities extracted from the consumer. It’s no wonder a gang of thieves might fall into quarreling internally as each attempts to put one over on the other.

On the other hand networks, non-capitalist markets, and other voluntary associations among free individuals have no reason for dissension because they’re predicated on positive-sum, cooperative relations among equals.

Among the instabilities of the authoritarian side is dissensions among states in the global system. We’ve seen this in recent years with states aiding (and frequently attempting to co-opt) dissident movements within competing states. Hence the American policy of encouraging the use of encrypted routers in Iran and China, and its limited support for the Arab Spring uprisings (except in Bahrain and the other conservative Gulf monarchies, of course).

Compared to the Arab Spring, the US had somewhat better luck co-opting the so-called “color revolutions” of the former USSR, using them as disposable tools for installing neoliberal regimes. In Egypt, in contrast, the Tahrir Square movement seems ill-disposed to settle down, accept the new military regime, and take orders from the World Bank and IMF. And the US is on the whole hostile to movements like those in Spain and Greece, because of their much stronger anti-neoliberal focus.

It’s a truism of geopolitics that the emergence of a single, overly strong power will be countered by the emergence of coalitions of smaller powers against it. One early sign of such a counter-tendency was the Shanhai Cooperation Organization, a loose security alliance between Russia, China and several former Soviet republics in Central Asia. We can expect such attempts to solidify and enlarge if the United States attacks Iran. Such an attack will have the same effect on the world system that Hitler’s aggression had on the European Allies.

Recently India announced it will pay for Iranian oil with gold rather than the US dollar. China is likely to do the same shortly.

The Empire is extremely vulnerable to mass, nonviolent — and coordinated — defections by the global South: Abandoning the dollar as reserve currency, repudiating foreign debt, withdrawing from “intellectual property” accords, and transforming themselves into free information havens, etc. And I think we’re very close to the tipping point at which a significant number of countries hit on this idea as a way of restraining the Empire’s power. Perhaps the attack on Iran will be what triggers it.

The most important question is whether the Empire will collapse. Will America retreat into managing its own affairs without trying to take the world down with it? The worst-case scenario is Washington fighting a world war against “failed states” and “terror states” engaged in what it calls “economic terrorism,” with hunter-killer drones operating in Iceland, Spain, Greece, Venezuela, and other states which either fall to networked uprisings or attempt to secede from the global corporate system.

Even in the latter event, though, we can expect the emerging free world to defeat the dying superpower in the end. Networks and other free associations run circles around authoritarian hierarchies. They’re more agile and react to situations more quickly. Because they are not divided among themselves by mutually exclusive interests, because they can trust each other, their local nodes and individual members are free to react to emergent situations on their own initiative and take up promising innovations from other nodes without having to follow endless bureaucratic rules and standard operating procedures in order to get permission to act.

A global superpower founded on the principles of information control and fear and distrust of its own people cannot long endure. We already saw one superpower so founded collapse from the weight of its own internal contradictions. I expect the second one to fall within our lifetimes. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Mrs Gabb and I watched the whole of The Boy Friend on telly last night. All else aside, it may be her only collaboration with Ken Russell in which Glenda Jackson keeps all her clothes on….

I don’t know really how people who have stuff to do can find enough time to blog. At least it’s rather easier today than trying to keep a “diary”. Does anyone remember those? And you couldn’t even publish them. Not easily anyway.

We are embarrassed by the lack of content put up by us this last few days, but there are always other things that need to be done.

Privatisation of services – which is basically what libertarians are calling for, along with an elimination of personal taxation – suffers from the key flaw that the bureaucratisation of our society extends to the private sector too: just because they are privatised, services do not have to be efficiently run, with lean management teams.

US healthcare is a prime example: as a percentage of GDP, expenditure on healthcare in the US is very high, and although health outcomes are better than in the UK, it is still true that relative to the low expenditure as a percentage of GDP, healthcare in the UK is relatively productive compared with the US system.

Why is that? Well, ambulance-chasing laws and compensation payments account for a good deal of that. Even privatised services are infested by the same managerial culture as in the public sector, with health-and-safety and the compensation culture taking a big toll. Telephone number salaries for healthcare professionals are another factor, pushing up the ultimate cost, although we have found that even under the state-funded NHS, we are funding extremely lavish pensions for bog-standard GPs.

I am convinced that some kind of law limiting the compensation culture has to be part of the privatisation of healthcare package. After all, the managerial culture in healthcare, and the fact that healthcare is an essential service that operates like a cartel even in privatised systems, means that all hospitals and surgeries do is to take out insurance against compensation suits – passing the bill to their patients in a privatised system. This is part of the reason the US system is so expensive. A “rip-off Britain” privatised healthcare system is not really what I want to see.

I am toying in my mind with the idea of not having any compensation payments at all for healthcare misinterventions. That means no insurance for doctors or hospitals, and no increase in the medical bills as a result. I basically tend to believe that most doctors are not going to try to kill off  their patients, and that we have to trust them to do their best. There is a considerable body of anecdotal evidence that doctors from the Indian subcontinent operate in a more careless cultural framework, and they are much more frequently involved in newspaper reports of medical mishaps. I would like to see all medical personnel in the UK eventually chosen from the native British community: I am convinced that medical mishaps would decrease greatly in proportion as a result.

But where mishaps occur, there should be no lottery-style wins. If your baby dies because of mistakes by the doctors, there need be no multi-million-pound payments. People always claim that it is not the money they are after, but the principle, but when offered a smaller sum, say “are you saying my baby is only worth X?”, showing that it is not the principle, but the money, that they are after. Instead of money, they should be able to sue the doctors – take the decision themselves to sue, without intervention of the Crown Prosecution Service – with the courts liable to cancel the doctor’s medical practice licence as a result of mishaps. That solves the “principle” without offering any money: a doctor who causes the death of  a baby is simply barred for life from practising. No money changes hand. If some smaller compensation payments were thought necessary, they should be limited to the doctor’s private assets (his house, pension fund, etc), with the hospital never having to pay compensation. Manslaughter charges and other criminal charges could also be brought against doctors, but in no cases leading to financial rewards.

We could possibly refine this approach by allowing compensation in the relatively small number of cases where someone has been paralysed for life and relies on life-long care as a result, but in general there would be no payouts. Having an operation go wrong would not be like winning the lottery, and patients would not have to pay astronomical sums as the doctors cynically passed the bill for their negligence onto other patients. My approach contains a strong presumption that failing doctors be struck off in every case. This is the only way to pressure the doctors into performing well.

This approach could be more widely adopted. For example, we hear regularly of how the Metropolitan Police use taxpayers’ money, ostensibly being made available to fund crime prevention, to pay compensation for various types of police malpractice – including politically motivated “compensation” cases, such as the award of a telephone number payout to Doreen Lawrence for their failure to solve the murder of her son. I would like to see the right to any type of compensation payout from public bodies abolished: if the Met behave badly, the police officers involved should be sacked, and could be pursued through civil courts for their own private assets, but in no case should public money be wasted on compensation.

By extending this principle to privatised semi-monopoly services, such as healthcare, we could gain cheaper and better healthcare. Why should libertarians be aiming to enrich lawyers, after all? We need a debate on this.

K4MAL (must be a Lebanese restaurateur), K9REN (seen a few weeks earlier but forgotten), WI6AN M, followed closely by another similar WW Beetle called WI6AN W (driven by a girl.) Hint: think famous coalfields.)

No: we are interested in the interesting ones. KEN 699P does not cut the cake, nore does J233 RON, or P333 SHE. These are merely unimaginative and cheap.

I have just heard that Nadine Dorries has withdrawn her Sex Education (Required Content) Bill. If passed, this would have required schoolgirls to discuss abstinence in the classroom. The summary of the Bill taken from the UK Parliament website is as follows:

A Bill to require schools to provide certain additional sex education to girls aged between 13 and 16; to provide that such education must include information and advice on the benefits of abstinence from sexual activity; and for connected purposes.

In her blog entry following the first reading on 4th May 2011 (which passed 67-61), she explains the reasons for presenting the Bill:

“I am not seeking to diminish sex education as taught at present, but to include the empowering option that young girls can just say no. In school, children are taught to base the decision whether or not to have sex on their feelings and wishes. I don’t believe young girls under the age of 16 have consistent feelings and that they can change from day to day. My bill was about making boys wait being an empowering and cool thing for girls to do and that it should be taught as a viable, if not preferable option for girls aged 16 and under – especially as sex at that age is unlawful.”

The Libertarian Alliance is not an organisation that regards itself as judgemental. Our policy has always been one of perfect love and good will to all. This being said, we cannot resist quoting a Daily Telegraph article from the 7th January 2011:

“Nadine Dorries, the outspoken Conservative MP, has confirmed that she has started a new relationship with a married man who has been a family friend for 13 years…..

“Mrs Dorries, 53, said that she begun a relationship with John Butler, a 55-year-old father of two and devout Christian, in December shortly after he left his wife of 30 years….
“Mrs Butler, who found out about the relationship on Friday morning, added to the Daily Mail: ‘Because she’s an MP people think of her as a pillar of society but in fact she’s a marriage wrecker.

“’I’m shocked and hurt. I know it takes two to tango but she shouldn’t have gone after a married man.’”

We cannot find it in ourselves to praise Mrs Dorries for wanting young people to be hectored by their teachers into continence at a time when sexual intercourse is at its most pleasurable. But we do look forward to her denunciation of women who, in late middle age, get into bed with married men. Surely, at this time in a person’s life, abstinence is both easier and more reasonable to expect?

Heraclius: Emperor of Byzantium

This is the first biography of Heraclius in over a century, and the first ever in English. That a biography was worth writing should be clear from the book’s cover note:

This book evaluates the life and times of the pivotal yet controversial and poorly understood Byzantine Emperor Heraclius (AD 610-641), a contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad. Heraclius’ reign is critical for understanding the background to fundamental changes in the Balkans and the Middle East, including the emergence of Islam, at the end of Antiquity.

Though few in England know of him, Heraclius is one of the most astonishing figures in history. Except they are true, the facts of his life read like something out of legend. He seized power in 610 just as the Persians were turning their war with the Empire from a set of opportunistic raids into an attempt at its destruction. During the next ten years, every Imperial frontier crumbled. After a thousand years of control by Greeks, or by Greeks and Romans, Persia and Egypt fell to the Persians.. The Slavs and Avars took most of Greece. The Lombards and Visigoths nibbled away at the remaining European provinces in the West. Africa aside, the Empire was reduced to a core that covered roughly the same area as modern Turkey.

Suddenly, after a decade of seeming inactivity, Heraclius went on the offensive and struck deep inside the Persian Empire. In a series of brilliant campaigns, he shattered the Persians and won everything back. In 629, he went in triumph to Jerusalem and restored the fragment of the True Cross that had been taken by the Persians. It seemed to be the start of a new age of Roman greatness, in which its absolutely triumphant Emperor – the new Alexander – could remake the world as he pleased.

Five years later, and without warning, the Moslems streamed out of the desert and took Syria. Another few years, and they took Egypt. By the time he died, Heraclius had lost nearly every one of the regained territories. And these were now permanently lost. From the ashes of the Eastern Roman Empire would emerge the Byzantine state and society in much the same form as they preserved down to 1204.

You can hardly go wrong in telling the story. Gibbon did it well. So did Finlay. So did Oman. So did many in the 20^th century. I have now written six novels set in seventh century Byzantium, and you really have to work hard not to convey something of how remarkable the age was. Yet, for all his undoubted mastery of the sources in at least four languages, Walter E. Kaegi makes an embarrassingly good effort at draining all sense of wonder from the story.

First, there is the writing of the book. It begins well enough – even if the discussion of possible Armenian origins soon outstays its welcome. After a few dozen pages, though, the narrative breaks down into a mass of repetitions. Look at this:

Both antagonists remained on the battlefield after the combat. Byzantine cavalrymen watered their horses to arrow-shots’ distance from the Persian horsemen, who watched over their dead until the seventh hour of the night. (p.162)

At the end of the battle of Nineveh, after the stripping of the dead, and while the Zoroastrian Persians watched over their dead for a minimal observance of respect, the Byzantines, at a distance of two arrow-shots (approximately 266 or 600 meters), watered and fed their horses. (p.163)

After defeat, the Persians, in what was a kind of standoff, having lost 6,000 men, kept a watch over the corpses of their dead…, following Zoroastrian strictures, but for a more limited duration, for one-fifth or so of a day (probably an abbreviated watch for military exingencies). (p.169)

These repetitions are carried to the point where I suspect that Professor Kaegi, over many years, jotted his thoughts onto postcards, and wrote his book by arranging the cards into loose order and not revising anything at all. Apart from looking incompetent, he manages to ruin any sense of narrative.

Then we have continual assertions of what might have been, but for which we have little or no evidence. For example:

Heraclius probably used the threat of abandoning Constantinople for Africa to help persuade the Patriarch Sergios and the clergy and the Constantinopolitan public to accept, or be resigned to, the forced loan of ecclesiastical plate and to accept other extraordinary governmental measures. (p.111)

This might have happened. There is nothing wrong with asking what might have been in history. I do this all the time in my novels. I see no reason why historians should refuse to speculate. For Professor Kaegi, however, it seems to have crowded out many things that should have gone into his book.

He does not give a clear overview of the Orthodox and Monophysite dispute about the nature of Christ. Nor does he show how the Monothelite compromise was an attempt at shutting down almost two centuries of rancorous debate. The omission is a grave fault, as there was no boundary in this age between religion and politics. Possibly one reason why Syria and Egypt fell so easily once the Persians broke through the frontiers was that the Semites largely believed in a single nature for Christ and the Greeks did not. Each side saw the other as heretical. This may also have allowed a shared outlook with the Arabs when they invaded. Why Greek hegemony collapsed so easily in Syria and Egypt cannot be explained by any single cause. But religion was one of the important causes.

Again, there is no systematic or ultimately meaningful discussion of how the Empire twice managed to survive the loss of Syria and Egypt. These had always been rich territories, contributing much in taxes and manpower. And Egypt, for over 600 years, had been sending around seven million bushels of corn every year, first to Rome, then to Constantinople. The corn was sold or given to the people. It fed armies on campaign. It was handed out as bribes to allies or enemies. How did the Empire get over this loss? What effect might it have had on the population of Constantinople? How far might the numbers have declined? To what extent might the Imperial capital have become less parasitic?

Above all perhaps, there is the brief mention of an anomaly that I have long wondered about, but no discussion of how this might transform our understanding of Byzantium during and after the reign of Heraclius. Back in the third century, the undivided Empire had faced increased pressure on two fronts – the arrival of the Goths on the Rhine and Danube, and the Persian revival in the East. By and large, the frontiers were held. But there was a fiscal crisis that led to debasement of the silver coinage. Though the frontiers simply collapsed after 602, the gold coinage was not debased. Indeed, in 615 – between the loss of Syria and of Egypt – the silver coinage was stabilised for the first time, and the new standard lasted for centuries. What was going on? The established narrative is one of catastrophic decline, only briefly arrested, and only finally overcome by internal recovery and the decay of Islamic power. But hard money has no place in this narrative. Professor Kaegi writes much about forced loans of plate from the Church, and secular confiscations. But I do not see how these could account for a bimetallic stability that lasted though all the interlocking crises of the seventh century and beyond.

Now, my credentials for announcing new theories are slight. I am a novelist. I have not spent a lifetime studying Byzantium. On the other hand, I am reasonably competent in the two classical languages, and have read all the Greek and Latin literary sources, either in the original or in translation. I have read my way through most of the Dumbarton Oaks conference papers, and dozens of other journal articles. I have read many of the relevant archaeological reports, and the main overviews of the numismatic and epigraphic sources. In saying what I think, I have some right to a hearing.

I suspect is that the seventh century was far less disastrous than the subsequent historians have claimed. The real collapse happened in the middle of the sixth century, when bubonic plague killed over a third of the Mediterranean population. It was now that Syria and Egypt lost their Greek elites, and ceased to contribute anything meaningful to the Empire. They remained attached only so long as no other power was able to detach them. The Empire itself retreated into its “Turkish” core. Within this, a largely Greek and mostly Orthodox population slowly recovered. It was barely touched by the Persian and Arab wars, and was always able to provide sufficient armies and taxes to defend the core. Syria and Egypt could be recovered from the Persians because they were overstretched, and Heraclius was clever enough in the end to defeat them inside Persia with minimal forces. Recovering territory from the Arabs was another matter – but the Arabs never broke for long into the core.

If we assume that the mediaeval Byzantine Empire had already come into being by the time Justinian died in 565, the reverses of the next century were less a disaster than somewhere between an embarrassment and a blessing. Perhaps the currency was never debased because no one in government was that concerned about the lost territories.

But let me return to the book in question. It would have been useful had it contained a discussion of the decay of Latin in the Empire, and its replacement by Greek as the official language. Professor Kaegi does mention the change in the Imperial titles from something long and pompous and very Roman to the simple Pisteuos en Christo Basileus. But there is no sense here of how one civilisation is giving way to another. George of Pisidia is used as a source. But we are not told that he wrote his epic in iambic trimeter rather than the traditional hexameters. That would have led us into the interesting matter of how Greek was spoken in the seventh century, and the relationship between the living and the increasingly distant exemplars on whom they tried to base themselves. I suppose you can find all this in Warren Treadgold. You can certainly find it in the Dumbarton Oaks papers. But a biography of Heraclius without any of the cultural background is of doubtful value.

To be fair, the book does have its good points. There are excellent notes and a comprehensive bibliography. Also, Professor Kaegi tells me things about the campaigns in Persia that I did not know. He locates and describes the battlefields. No one else has done this. Also, I had supposed that Heraclius won annihilating victories. In fact, he won a series of what amount to skirmishes, relying on diplomacy and the terror of his name to bring an already exhausted Persia crumbling into dust. And, better than anyone else has, this explains why he failed to stop the Arabs. Unlike the Persians, they needed annihilating defeats that were not possible given the resources available. Or their generals needed to be bribed or tricked into treason against the Caliph in ways that the fellowship of early Islamic civilisation made impossible. If you persist with this book, you will not come away empty handed.

On the whole, however, the book is disappointing. It could have been so much better. Perhaps it will be – if only it can be rewritten for a second edition.