Thomas Jefferson

This July 4th marks the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, but it also marks the 200th anniversary of the death of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), the Declaration's author and one of the most important, admired, and controversial figures in this entire history.In 1776, Jefferson was a young lawyer who had been appointed one of the delegates for Virginia. But he was, above all, a landowner, also possessing numerous slaves, even though he often expressed an unfavorable opinion towards this institution. In any case, his political vision was always marked by an idea of community linked to the land and cultivation by landowners, and by opposition to the mercantilist drift that was imposing itself at the end of the 18th century.In his Notes on the State of Virginia, written between 1781 and 1782, Jefferson praises farmers who work without depending on any master, because, he maintained, they would hardly be tempted by corruption. This scourge, he believed, is much more common among people who depend on others: on the customers who buy their products or the employer who pays them a salary. Therefore, the ideal form of state for the new country that was being born had to be that of an agrarian republic made up of owners who depended on no one. He was convinced that it was better to import what was needed from Europe than to build factories, because nothing led more quickly to degeneration than the proliferation of cities with industries and immense residential areas.For Jefferson, the figure of the landed farmer was the greatest representation of a virtuous citizen, because whoever is not economically independent, will not be politically either. Despite what it may seem, Jefferson was not a retrograde nor an ultraconservative fanatic, but an erudite humanist, a polymath who excelled as an inventor, musician, philosopher, archaeologist, and architect. He was also a good connoisseur of Europe and between 1786 and 1789 he lived in Paris as the US representative minister to France, which is why he could not intervene in the drafting of the 1787 Constitution.Despite everything, he did not hide his criticism of a constitution that he considered too centralist and favorable to a more urban and industrial context. One of the controversial aspects of the text, which helps us understand Jefferson's temperament, was the strengthening of the military power of the new federal state, motivated in part as a response to a violent peasant revolt in Massachusetts who could not cope with debts and taxes. Against the current of the majority, Jefferson positioned himself in favor of the peasants and their right to rebel: "The tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure," he wrote in a letter in 1787.But the immensity of the character did not protect him from contradictions. Between 1801 and 1809 he was president of the USA, he promoted its territorial expansion with the purchase of Louisiana and was a precursor to what would later be the Monroe Doctrine. However, once he left the presidency, he founded the University of Virginia, the architectural project of which he drafted.Jefferson is part of the mythical founding of the USA and is, himself, almost a myth. J. F. Kennedy attested to this when, in 1962, at a dinner at the White House with about fifty Nobel laureates, he stated with a touch of irony that there had never been so much human talent and knowledge gathered there together, except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.