Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History

Epilogue: “I leave it, therefore, to time”

Epilogue “I leave it, therefore, to time” Ten days before his death, Jefferson wrote a letter declining an invitation to attend the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Fourth of July at Washington, DC, because he was too ill to make the journey to the capital. Feeble as he was, he did not let the occasion pass without composing an epistolary valediction praising the crucial significance of his generation’s contribution to history. He showed himself convinced that the American Revolution would become to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves , and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. . . . All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.1 Jefferson’s last message is full of references to temporality, illustrating his own and his generation’s middle position in the gradual progress of enlightenment and republicanism. He saw his contribution to this progress, not as its culmination, but as the opening “signal” at the turning point between a Kantian self-incurred tutelage in the ancien régime and a new time shaped by enlightened citizens of peaceful republics. Parallel to the signal of the Epilogue 216 DeclarationofIndependence,theempiricalscienceshadbroughtto“light” the absurdity of the doctrine of divine right. This visual information, however , had yet to be realized by the majority of mankind. Some “eyes” were already “opened,” but from a universal point of view most eyes were still merely in the process of “opening.” Within his Newtonian gradualism, Jefferson did not have to commit himself as to the exact temporal scope of this “mean time” between the “signal” of the American Revolution fifty years earlier and the universal vision of human rights at some point in the future. To some parts of mankind, he realized, the self-evident truths of the Declaration would become visible rather “later” than “sooner.” Yet what mattered for Jefferson, from the perspective of his final days, was his conviction that the telos of universal history itself was fixed and would “finally” become visible “to all.” The self-congratulatory tone of the letter obscures what may have been themostproblematicpersonallegacyofJefferson’sconceptionoftemporality . He chose to see American republicans as the avant-garde of mankind, since they had already been enjoying the “blessings and security of selfgovernment ”forhalfacentury.Forthisargument,heneededtosuppressall mention of the continued existence of chattel slavery in America—an institution that was situated, also by his own standards, at an even lower point of progress than the ancien régime. Unenlightened Europeans, after all, had only been persuaded “by monkish ignorance and superstition . . . to bind themselves,” whereas American slaves were bound by chains that resulted from the violence of a continued state of war, an archaic conflict that Jefferson had recognized as an unjust war in an enlightened world. If American slaves were aroused by the signal of the American Revolution to claim their universal rights, they had to do more than exit a self-incurred tutelage: they would at first have to repeat the violence of their oppressors and materially “burst the chains” of their bondage in a bloody slave rebellion. In his pessimistic moods, as has been discussed, Jefferson was aware of this crucial difference and feared that apocalyptic scenes caused by a devastating mixture between a “servile war” and a civil war would take place in the future. Yet on occasions allowing or requiring a greater amount of optimism—and the fiftieth anniversary of American independence certainly was among these— Jefferson was able to think of the American slaves merely as one (“African”) nation among other nations in Europe and South America, who still had to wait, in the “mean time” of the present, until a future moment when they could follow the example of the American Revolution and found their own republic. Epilogue 217 Since for Jefferson the abolition of slavery was necessarily characterized by this alternative—it would be accomplished either by the sudden event of a bloody slave rebellion or by the controlled...