Jun 30, 2018 3 min read

The columnist George F. Will once wrote, “We honor Jefferson, but we live in Hamilton’s country.” By that he meant the America we live in today is a country of commerce, industry, finance and manufacturing, just as Hamilton envisioned it. It is not, as Jefferson envisioned it, an agricultural nation of gentlemen planters living alongside yeoman farmers.

But as Abe Lincoln wrote regarding Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence, this week in 1776, “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 tyranny and oppression.”

To Lincoln, Jefferson’s Declaration didn’t just announce America’s departure from the British Empire, but articulated universal principles that not only apply to the people who created the new American nation based on the radical concept that the people were sovereign, but also are “applicable to all men at all times … today, and in all coming days.’

“All men are created equal,” Jefferson proclaimed, which meant, Lincoln observed, that the America of the future would include immigrants from around the world wanting to be Americans. And even though they were not of the revolutionary generation that founded America, they would be fully equal to, and perpetually connected with, those who were. Thus, they too are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …” Liberty and equality under the laws were their right as well.

Jefferson was also an optimist. His fellow Founders were, rightly so, pessimists, at least with respect to governments run by imperfect, mostly self-interested humans, and therefore myriad checks must be placed on the powers of such governments.

By contrast, Jefferson had great faith in mankind’s capacity for improvement, including an ever-improving capacity for self-government, and if he was often overly optimistic (and he was), he still believed that the most polyglot nation in the history of the world would always remain a nation of “one people,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it. And the one people’s belief in, and willingness to fight for, “an abstract truth,” that we all have the equal right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” shall always be, as Lincoln noted, “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of tyranny and oppression.”

And so, rightfully, “We honor Jefferson” for reminding us of that “abstract truth,” even when, as happens oftentimes, we lose sight of it.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.