Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood. (Book Reviews).

Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood. By Peter S. Onuf. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Pp. xiv, 250. $27.95, ISBN 0-8139-1930-4.)

Two decades ago, Francois Furet destabilized conventional histories with an essay impishly titled (in English translation) "The French Revolution Is Over" (in Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster [Cambridge, Eng., 1981]). Taking issue with both Marxist and Whig scholarship, Furet maintained that the French Revolution was no longer a dynamic, living part of France's modern history. Instead, he argued, the epoch that began with the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy in 1789 had to be understood as a historically distinct moment, one that scholars could not hope to comprehend unless they rejected presentist categories of analysis--especially those associated with questions of social transformation--and studied the French Republic (and Napoleonic Empire) on its own terms. Without entirely discounting the Revolution's modern legacy, Furet insisted that its effective history belonged entirely in the past.

Peter Onuf's marvelous new book performs a similar service for the American Revolution. Unlike Furet, Onuf does not hesitate to proclaim the Revolution's fundamental "modernity," especially as reflected in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, his book's main subject. By modernity, however, Onuf does not mean (at least not exclusively) the democratic social and political transformations that have dominated revolutionary scholarship for the last half century but rather the invention of the American nation and the principle of national self-determination. As Onuf convincingly demonstrates, the sage of Monticello was deeply--even passionately--interested in the latter set of questions. In particular, Jefferson was a committed believer in "what we now call `federalism'" (p. 8). Although he supported the Constitution of 1787, he was convinced that the only way Americans could safeguard their own liberty, let alone guarantee the new nation's stability, was by establishing an empire based on "a hierarchy of legitimate authorities ... ascending from village or `ward' to an all-inclusive union of state-republics" (p. 8). During each of the great crises of his political life--the coming of American independence, the party struggles of the 1790s, the embargo of 1807, and the Missouri Compromise of 1820--Jefferson clung tenaciously to a vision of the United States as a voluntary union of sovereign states or "nations" bound together, not by the overbearing central authority that (in his eyes) had corrupted the British Empire, but by patriotic ties of love and affection among equals. Despite his isolationist proclivities in foreign policy, he also believed that the American federal experiment held the key for unshackling the chains of tyranny elsewhere in the world. "American nationhood," writes Onuf, "was not simply a boon to colonists seeking to evade onerous tax burdens but a great benefit to mankind" (p. 191).

The effect of Onuf's analysis is to historicize the republican vision that lay at the heart of Jefferson's political theory. Nowhere is the resulting distance between Jefferson's day and our own more striking than on the question of slavery. As is well known, Jefferson was deeply troubled by the moral and political implications of one people holding another in bondage. During the Missouri crisis, however, his public statements suggested more than passing sympathy with the slaveholding interest in Congress and the western territories. As Onuf deftly shows, Jefferson was able (just) to hold these apparently contradictory positions because of his conviction that black and white Americans were "two distinct nations whose natural relationship was one of war" (p. 149). Despite his intimate relationship with his own servant Sally Hemings, he believed that even free people of African descent were "perpetual aliens, foreigners by nature" (p. 182). To claim the rights that justice dictated, slaves and former slaves thus needed to found their own nation just as Americans had done in 1776, which in turn meant that the only viable solution to slavery's dilemma was black emigration and recolonization--whether to Africa, Haiti, or the American West. These convictions loomed large in Jefferson's response to the Missouri crisis. By attempting to bottle up slavery within its existing borders, he argued, northern "restrictionists" would inevitably make it far more expensive (and therefore more politically difficult) for either the federal government or the individual states to shoulder the costs of emancipation and expatriation in states where slavery remained legal. Jefferson also insisted that federal efforts to limit the spread of slavery threatened the fundamental right of white Missourians to self-government.

As his more perceptive contemporaries realized, Jefferson's intervention in the Missouri crisis helped lay the groundwork for the proslavery position on states' rights that eventually destroyed his beloved union. Still, Onuf insists that Jefferson saw his actions as those of a consistent proponent of the right of national self-determination, for blacks as well as whites. Indeed, the image of Jefferson that emerges from these pages is of an ardent, even idealistic, believer in the transcendent value of the nation as an expression of the popular will. At times, Jefferson's nationalism made it hard for him to distinguish between legitimate dissent and treasonous rebellion. Even after the election of 1800 put him in the White House, he continued to think of federal New England as a foreign country and to refer to the Federalists themselves as British agents. In Onuf's words, "nationhood was the solution to the local tyrannies of the old regime, the threshold to full, equal, and consensual participation in the modern world" (p. 190). Although anathema to modern (or postmodern) sensibilities, Jefferson regarded anyone who seemed to threaten the nation's viability as, by definition, an enemy to be dealt with harshly.

Not everyone will take comfort from this rendering of Jefferson's politics. Among those likely to be unsettled by Onuf's conclusions are the many Jefferson scholars--whether of a demonizing or hagiographic bent--who would insist on their subject's contemporary immediacy and relevance. If Jefferson's Empire helps change the way we think about the place of Jefferson's life and times in American history, however, it will have achieved a great deal. As Onuf remarks in the book's final paragraph, "Jefferson's empire, the federal union that sustained slavery and imploded in a bloody war, is long gone; the nation he helped create in order to secure that union has been transformed beyond recognition" (p. 191). Obviously, this does not mean (and Onuf certainly does not mean to imply) that either Jefferson or the revolutionary epoch he did so much to shape is without significance for today's world. But anyone seeking to understand that significance will need to pay close attention to the caveats in Peter Onuf's splendid new book.