‘The creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction’

Jefferson opened his first Inaugural Address with an uplifting vision of polit­ical society and its potential accomplishments (4 March 1801). A ‘rising

‘This beautiful political order’ 159 nation’, he declared, was ‘spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry...

A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to des­tinies beyond the reach of mortal eye - when I contemplate these tran­scendent objects, and see the honor, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved country committed to the issue and the auspices of this day, I shrink from the contemplation, and humble myself before the magni­tude of the undertaking.³⁴

The tectonic shift then underway found its most complete recapitulation - one might even say apotheosis - in Jefferson’s Inaugural Address. Divine­right rulers had oppressed a nation’s inhabitants for the purpose of enabling officialdom to rule by command and control. Inhabitants, not surpris­ingly, drew their political identity from the subject-government relation as the government defined that relationship for inhabitants. To Blackstone’s intense disgust, this was the default mode of governing in the then-distant 1760s, especially in criminal law.

Jefferson named as government’s immediate beneficiaries the ‘friends and fellow-citizens’ whom he addressed. Jefferson’s ‘friends and fellow-citizens’ were entitled to view themselves as consumers. My elaboration is consumer­inhabitants. Their participation in government programs was subject to transactional, that is, economic analysis. In other words, Jefferson waved everyone into the tent. Jefferson, the new President, offered himself as one who was ‘instrumental to the happiness and freedom of all’ the nation’s consumer-inhabitants.³⁵

Comparison of the Inaugural Address with Burke’s Reflections suggests that these two essays presented much in common. Like Burke, Jefferson accepted that ‘Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants’.³⁶ In place of Burke’s ‘wants’ Jefferson’s reference to ‘the honor, the happiness, and the hopes’ of the nation’s inhabitants struck a more elevated chord. Burke and Jefferson were still on the same track when Burke offered his endorsement of transactional analysis, declaring that ‘Society is, indeed, a contract’ in a later passage in his Reflections.

From this point Burke’s analysis deviated dramatically from the path Jeffer­son would take. The ‘state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest,

and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties’.³⁷ The state, Burke continued, ‘is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partner­ship in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection’.³⁸

In this passage, Burke may be regarded as appealing to Harrington’s ideal. The ‘soul of government, as the true and perfect image of the soul of man, is every whit as necessarily religious as rational’.³⁹ Burke made his way to the summit by direct assault.

In his Address Jefferson listed ‘essential principles’ of government; he headed up his list with ‘justice’, ‘peace’, ‘commerce’ and ‘honest friendship with all nations’. These may be taken as semantic way stations on the upward path to ‘transcendent objects’. These terms gather government’s service missions into packages suitable for citation on a public occasion. Immediately after naming ‘principles’ of government accomplishment, Jefferson declared that to achieve these goals he would rely on the work of legislators and their ‘resources of wisdom, of virtue, and of zeal’.⁴⁰ He also expressed the belief that law-makers had a contribution to make in promoting these principles, even if they were engaged in a ‘low concern’, such as trading in ‘pepper and coffee’.

Jefferson had more to say about what he expected from law-makers. To make this connection vivid he elaborated the link between the aspirational and the technical. Jefferson offered two relations germane to this connec­tion. The first brought into play the role of citizens. (In my recasting of Jef­ferson’s Address, as a functional matter citizens are voters for purposes of this study.) The second centred on the work of legislators.

As to citizens Jefferson detailed how they should go about fulfilling their duty to examine the divergence between the observed and the expected behaviour of public officials. He began by listing ‘the essential principles of our Government’, noted above. Jefferson referred to ‘principles’ three times in the run-up to one of the most famous passages in his speech.

should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.⁴¹

Jefferson’s formulation may be compared with that of Adam Smith, previ­ously quoted in Chapter 5 of this study: ‘Public services’ obliged officials to exhibit ‘diligence employed in performing them’.⁴²

At this point, a serious gap opened up in Jefferson’s reasoning. Consti­tution IPs ‘text of civic instruction’ offered citizens their opportunity to encounter a nation’s constitution as an inventory of prescriptions. Risk existed in any contemplated exertion of ‘common efforts for the common good’⁴³ because a constitution, as with any list of prescriptions, might fail to guide the way so that the inhabitants’ ‘attachment to union’ could be achieved in the fullest measure. Thus, even when inhabitants arranged ‘themselves under the will of the law’ the law might lack the guidance which the moment required.

When citizens tried ‘the services of those they trust’ the behaviour of pub­lic officials might indeed be found wanting. But their services might also be indispensable. Leaders whose services were found to be indispensable (even as their behaviour on occasion did not meet consumer expectations) populate the political history of the study interval. Failing to perform as pre­scribed by some previously-coded inventory of prescriptions was not neces­sarily fatal to a political career. Only a nation’s citizens could make sense of these divergences because the citizens enjoyed the ultimate right to judge what government had on offer.

As exposed above, Jefferson’s first attempt to connect the aspirational and the technical was seriously marred. There might, in fact, be no remedy for the deficiency he exposed. In the first presidential road test of Jefferson’s analytic, voters overwhelmingly re-elected Jefferson despite the Senate’s rat­ification of the Louisiana Treaty (1803) which enabled the territorial acqui­sition under that treaty. Although wildly popular, the treaty terms, with equal exuberance, wandered far from the ‘civic instruction’ of Constitu­tion II.⁴ Jefferson’s phrase ‘common efforts for the common good’ seemed to promise some collaborative behaviour of citizens brought to bear when citizens judged public officials. In 1803 legislators brushed aside Jefferson’s attempt to reconcile constitutional prescription with describable behaviour. Jefferson was unable to compose a passage in the Inaugural Address that fleshed out what he may have had in mind when he called for the ‘common efforts’ of inhabitants. Jefferson seemed to understand that the solution involved merging the class of voter-citizens into the superclass of consumer­inhabitants but he faltered during the course of his exposition, at least in the Inaugural Address. It is not a fatal error to fail to anticipate the course of the subsequent two or three centuries and Jefferson’s thinking is, on this account, excusable.

Jefferson’s second point was grounded in the work of legislators, whose ‘resources of wisdom, of virtue, and of zeal’ have already been mentioned.

Getting things done in ordered discourse - taken as an entrepreneurial adventure - may have been too low-brow for Burke, but well-governed oper­ations in legislative assemblies - with all the attendant noise of a machine doing ‘business’ in public - excited the interest of Jefferson. He lavished one of his most passionate phrases - calling members ‘friends of the paragraph’ - on a moment in debate-and-ballot when members had, gradatim, ground their way through successive event states. ‘When it is proposed to amend by inserting a paragraph, or part of one, the friends of the paragraph may make it as perfect as they can, by amendments, before the question is put for inserting it’.⁴⁶ At the most technical level the core competence of legisla­tors enabled members to display their individual and collective talents for code-writing by managing ideas, gradatim. This is one of Jefferson’s livelier neologisms. In common with Bentham, Jefferson never made up a word he didn’t like.

For bravura overtures I have brought forward canal companies, Canadian assemblies and nationally organised boycotts along with commissioners of audit and finance (a double portion). These functionaries worked gears and levers alongside Sinking Fund wizards and their Bank of England nannies (1786). On the American side a spanking new national court system (1789) compared well with the Trent-to-Mersey’s self-help ‘hey neighbour’ pro­gram by which landowners could opt-out of a visit to King’s Bench (1766). By the standards of the late 1780s, even the 1760s seemed rather musty. These projects gave legislators their best chances to learn how to satisfy consumer expectations, given that these consumers’ ‘hopes’ and ‘happiness’ were at stake in the legislative process. There was no way that ‘transcen­dent objects’ would overcome ‘all difficulties’ without the exertions of the ‘sovereign functions of legislation’. For details in this regard, Jefferson was not obliged to explain to posterity how the functionalism in his ‘functions of legislation’ would play out in practice. He had, on the Saturday previous to his inauguration (28 February 1801), picked up newly-minted copies of the Manual from his printer. That event should serve as the twenty-first cen­tury’s cue to pick up his Manual in its original 1801 edition.

The radical nature of Jefferson’s claim turned on this point. If systems, structures and institutions in political society were expected to ‘close the cir­cle of our felicities’ in civil society, then collaborative behaviour in a legisla­ture, according to a ‘code of rules’ meeting his Manual’s standard ‘accuracy

‘This beautiful political order’ 163 in business’, should permit legislators to imagine the ideal features of civil society. These features - after Bentham’s fashion - would figure when legis­lators went about the daily business of benefitting inhabitants or alleviating their burdens. And, by the same token, the nation’s inhabitants must be taken as equally capable of considering whether the ‘felicities’ imagined on their behalf were acceptable to them. Jefferson’s ‘friends and fellow-citizens’ may be ‘all Republicans’ and ‘all Federalists’ as Jefferson famously declared in his Inaugural Address,⁴⁷ but inhabitants of the new republic were - in a ‘transcendent’ sense - endowed with the inalienable right to consume the government’s goods and services.

In this way, political society served as the mind of civil society. No longer content to supply the machinery of Burke’s contrivance, the systems, struc­tures and institutions of political society might aspire to become change agents, transforming the sphere in which inhabitants lived their daily lives and went about their daily business. One could argue that legislators with the technical facility to endow private canal companies and establish national court systems could not be content with a self-regarding vision as a ‘contrivance’. No chains would serve this purpose. The sheer size of the impact legislators made on the real world would necessarily transform their own role in political society and therefore change how change came about in civil society. Someone had to be in charge of the machinery. Putting the legislators in charge was necessary and convenient, at least until some other body acquired and employed the skill to connect the technical to the aspirational.

Burke’s Reflections misdirected his critique of French republicans. Two Americans had been at work for nearly a decade before Burke published his essay (1790). Hamilton and Madison articulated for the Continental Congress the axiom that governments do what they have to do to preserve themselves (1780-81). A government that has the power to preserve itelf and maintain a consistent delivery of goods and service to its inhabitants does not serve as a dogsbody to civil society. Its existence is independent of the wishes of civil society. Such a government possesses the will, muscle, and skills to back up this claim.

Hamilton and Madison opened the door to the future. In a decade’s time, Pitt and Washington assumed that the mind of national assemblies was available to consciously model civil society, by claiming to speak for the lat­ter’s needs and wants. If one were to defy that idea and rein in the ambition of national legislative assemblies in the 1790s, the challenger would have to take on Pitt the Younger and George Washington. It was not going to be a contest of equals.