“If Jefferson Was Wrong, America Is Wrong”
Jefferson still looms large over America, despite a complicated legacy
(Wikimedia Commons / Amaury Laporte*)
By Rich Lowry
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
Thomas Jefferson selected three achievements to be engraved on his tombstone: author of the Declaration of Independence, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. These are idiosyncratic choices. They either show that Jefferson had his priorities in the right place or represent the most epic humble brag in American history. You have to be pretty accomplished for your list not to include president of the United States or secretary of state.
An early biographer named James Parton wrote: “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right.” That is a rank simplification, of course, but there is some truth in it.
For much of America’s history, people generally assumed that America is right and Jefferson was right. Various political factions and players jockeyed to associate themselves with Jefferson. FDR, whose agenda of federal aggrandizement would have been anathema to Jefferson, initiated the Jefferson Memorial and laid the monument’s cornerstone.
Lately, though, with more focus on Jefferson’s morally compromised relationship with slavery, the debate has turned. At least some critics believe America is wrong and Jefferson was wrong.
There is no doubt that Jefferson badly failed his own ideals when it came to slavery. He maintained that slavery was unjust and favored gradual emancipation, with the appalling proviso that when slaves were freed, they should be exported somewhere else. He never freed his own slaves, even upon his death, except for children of Sally Hemings.
In 1814, a young Virginian named Edward Coles wrote Jefferson, urging the former president to lend his voice to the antislavery cause. Jefferson responded by saying that “the hour of emancipation is advancing in the march of time,” that “it will come”—but he said nothing that Coles wanted him to say. Jefferson declined the request to take up the cause of abolition, insisting, “This enterprise is for the young.”
THE HYPOCRISY QUESTION
Still, Jefferson had made efforts to curtail slavery. He wrote a 1778 Virginia law that banned the importation of slaves from Africa. In 1784, his draft of the Northwest Ordinance included a provision that would have banned slavery in the swath of territory that became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. To his regret, that provision failed. A subsequent version of the Northwest Ordinance, passed in 1787, did ban slavery. As president, Jefferson signed a ban on the transatlantic slave trade at the earliest date provided for in the Constitution.
But Jefferson was mistaken, as most other Founders were mistaken, in believing that slavery would sink under its own weight. His confidence that emancipation would eventually come could be seen as passivity.
The most common charge against Jefferson is hypocrisy. How could he call slavery a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot”—and declare to the world that “all men are created equal”—when he enslaved hundreds of people?
The generous way to look at Jefferson’s legacy is that he was deeply entangled with the slave system and yet rose above his selfish and sectional interests to enunciate timeless principles.
Certainly there were men of the South who were more consistent. John C. Calhoun devoted his later career to trying to discredit Jefferson’s notion of natural rights. And in March 1861, the newly appointed vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, took aim at the principles Jefferson enunciated in the Declaration. Jefferson and most other Founders, Stephens said, believed that “the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature.” But that belief, resting “upon the assumption of the equality of races,” was “fundamentally wrong,” Stephens added. He explained that the Confederacy was “founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
Almost all people are hypocrites. But principles—or “axioms,” as Lincoln referred to them when he talked about the Declaration—are not.
Jefferson partook of a vaulting—or one might say heedless—optimism.
THE MEANING OF JEFFERSON
For all the revisionism about Jefferson, I believe his appeal is destined to endure. He is too iconic, too fascinating.
First, Jefferson was an exceptionally gifted writer, with a knack for memorable phrases and arresting formulations. There is no substitute for this skill. Mark Twain said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”
Jefferson’s gifts as a writer come clear in the Declaration. In an 1822 letter, John Adams insisted that he let Jefferson draft the Declaration because Jefferson was a Virginian, was more popular than Adams, and could “write ten times better.” Yet he seemed a bit sore that Jefferson got all the credit. In the letter, Adams harrumphed that there was “not an idea in” the Declaration that had not “been hackney’d in Congress for two years before.”
Of course, Jefferson said much the same thing. In an 1825 letter, he wrote that the point of the Declaration was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of,” but instead “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject” in “terms so plain and firm, as to command their assent.”
Mission accomplished.
Second, Jefferson was a man of incredibly wide-ranging interests and talents. In 1800, he wrote a memo to himself looking back at his career and assessing his acts of public service. He included his writing the Declaration and various laws, but he also mentioned things like improving the navigability of Virginia’s Rivanna River and importing olive trees to America. Keep in mind, he wrote this list before he was even elected president.
Jefferson was an expert on food and wine as well; three presidents consulted him on what wine to serve at the Executive Mansion. After the British burned the Library of Congress in the War of 1812, Jefferson sold his personal collection of nearly 6,500 books to reseed Congress’s library.
Finally, Jefferson had a faith in the people more thoroughgoing than that of any other Founder. He partook of a vaulting—or one might say heedless—optimism. Over time, Jefferson’s commitment to popular democracy and his future-oriented worldview became fundamental aspects of the American character. Every time you hear a pundit or politician invoking what the American people want—with the presumption that because it’s what the American people want, it must be correct—you hear an echo of Jefferson.
All of this, coupled with the sacralization of the Declaration, has made Jefferson an irresistible symbol of America and of democracy. If you want realism, you go to Adams. The more conservative Adams was right about more things. Jefferson, for example, maintained his strenuous—and misguided—support for the French Revolution right to the end.
Still, we don’t quote Adams the way we quote Jefferson. No one struggles over Adams’s legacy, let alone invokes Adams when they fight their own revolution. “We hold these truths,” they wrote at Seneca Falls in 1848. “We hold these truths,” Ho Chi Minh said in 1945.
Jeffersonianism also dominated democratic politics in the early nineteenth century. Jon Meacham notes that for thirty-six of that century’s first forty years, either Jefferson himself or a self-proclaimed Jeffersonian served as president. Jefferson has had a profound influence on this country. That influence endures. The intense argument over Jefferson’s failings and what they might mean for the very essence of America is itself a tribute to his totemic power.
Jefferson lives.
Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.
* Photo taken by Amaury Laporte, available at Wikimedia Commons
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.