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3 Standing in the “Field of Freedom” Thomas Jefferson and the Reverberations of that Declaratory Promise The Declaration of Independence has always been America’s most problematic document. Articulating the nation’s founding claims of freedom and independence, the Declaration guarantees the “inalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” affirms “in the course of human events” the necessity “for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” and expresses the “right of the people to alter or abolish” any government that restricts liberty and the pursuit of happiness or that has lost the “consent of the governed.”1 Thomas Jefferson was well aware that once such a revolutionary document was offered up as the basis for a nation, instability would become a way of life. Such freedom, once released, would never cease spawning new rebellions. “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,” Jefferson wrote a decade after the Declaration, as he expressed concerns with the way the new nation was turning its rebellious energy into lawmaking. “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. . . . The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants . It is its natural manure.”2 Perhaps by May 1825, a little more than a year before his death, Jefferson already had an inkling of how the Declaration might inspire those within the new nation to begin to conceive of their own young government as the new tyrant that needed to be “altered or abolished.” Perhaps he realized that his own slaves, along with slaves across the country, would be moved by the 1. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” Life and Selected Writings, 22. 2. Jefferson, “Letter to Colonel Smith,” ibid., 436. 94 s t and i ng i n th e “ fi e l d o f f re e d om ” 95 Declaration’s call to life and liberty, and that the Declaration would be invoked by slaves and abolitionists as they called for slave revolts to demand liberty for those the Constitution excluded from the rights of citizenship. Jefferson died unaware of how his Declaration would be used by his fellow southerners as a justification for their own rebellion, their claim that the United States government had ceased to have the “consent of the governed.” Over the span of American history, the Declaration has continued to be performed by many groups for many reasons. It is one of the telling paradoxes of our nation’s history that slaveholders and slaves turned with an equal sense of entitlement to the Declaration of Independence. They did so because it valued freedom above all else. It asserted the right of the governed to dissolve its ties with the governing body, whether slaveholders or the Union itself. When freedom is perceived as a primary right, people with vastly different conceptions of who should enjoy that freedom can use the same document to support their revolutionary actions: justice follows those who exert the power to free themselves to act as they see fit, even if their freedom allows them to enslave others. “The Declaration,” Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee in 1825, had not been authored “to find out new principles or arguments,” but “to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment,” it “was intended to be an expression of the American mind.”3 In this chapter, I will contemplate the implications of the Declaration as an “expression of the American mind,” engaging its declaratory promise in ways that go beyond its revolutionary intent. Jefferson’s phrase signals the Declaration as a philosophic text: one in which a way of being-in-the-world is first articulated and argued. The reverberations of that argument call for our attention, as they have done again and again throughout our history. From the perspective of ethics, the Declaration, with its celebrated promises of freedom, provides a unique window on this way of beingin -the-world. For in the final analysis, the ideal of freedom must be answerable to the demand for justice. In moving toward that realization, we need to rethink freedom as something other than autonomy, independence, and unfettered self-sufficiency. Indeed, we need eventually to go so far as to find the place where freedom discovers its investment...

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