Jefferson’s Vision

On election night, addressing a huge crowd in Chicago's Grant Park, and millions more watching worldwide, the president-elect, with great calm and assurance, invoked America's Founding Fathers, claiming them for all Americans, white and black alike. His successful campaign and election, he said, showed that the "the dream of our Founders" was still alive. He had done this before, during the campaign—referencing the founding era. As one who writes about the period, I had noted this and seen the irony of it. (Article continued below...)

Of course, at the time of America's founding, when Thomas Jefferson wrote his stirring words in the Declaration of Independence about the equality of all mankind, the majority of black Americans—one fifth of the country's 2.5 million people—were enslaved, and totally outside civil and political society. Those who were free were, in the main, people of mixed African and European ancestry just like Mr. Obama. And those whose families had been free the longest were the descendants of the English women and African men who married or had liaisons back in the 1660s before Colonial legislatures got around to forbidding and punishing that behavior. Whether enslaved or free, blacks—who included mixed-race people, for they were by law the same as "Negroes"—were not under the cover of Jefferson's Declaration. What dreams did the Founders, particularly Jefferson, the most famous "dreamer" among that group, have for people of African origin?

Approaching the matter in the most literal-minded way, it is hard to imagine that Jefferson could have specifically dreamed of an American electorate that would put Barack Obama at the head of the American government. Jefferson, along with James Madison, John Marshall and many other prominent Americans, including, for a time, Abraham Lincoln, espoused what was considered the "enlightened" position of his day. After slavery was abolished in the United States—at some unspecified moment in the future—blacks were to be expatriated to form their own countries. A President Obama could exist, but he would be in Africa. That was all theory. In the real world, Jefferson had no intention of his sending his own mixed-race children "back to Africa" and arranged to have them and some of their relatives remain in the country. After Jefferson's death, two sons, along with their mother, Sally Hemings, would be asked if they wanted to go "back" to Africa. They declined. To be fair, Jefferson also would not have contemplated a President Hillary Clinton, a Vice President Sarah Palin or even an electorate that included female voters.

But while it would be easy to locate other identifiable groups within current-day American society that likely would have been outside of Jefferson's reveries, his relationship to black people has always been noticeably problematic and conflicted. There is no question that from the time of the American Revolution until today, blacks have used Jefferson's words to establish their right to equal citizenship. Benjamin Banneker, David Walker, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, all in different ways, used the Declaration to challenge their countrymen to help fulfill what they saw as the promise of that document, its "dream," as King put it. Even President Obama's favorite politician, Abraham Lincoln, who loved Jefferson, understood the power of the words "all men are created equal" and used them as he committed a country, deep in the midst of a civil war over slavery, to a new birth of freedom.

Lincoln's move was not without controversy. There were those who said at the time, and even now, "Jefferson didn't mean black people," without explaining exactly how or why that observation settles anything—what it binds us to. No creator of a meaningful phrase, a useful invention or powerful idea has the ability to control the uses to which his or her creation is put. They cannot envision what the future may hold for the thing they have put in motion. The Declaration is not the Constitution. It is a document designed to explain the desire of a colony to break from the mother country, with justifications for that expressed in terms of ideals that were supposedly universal and "self-evident." Jefferson believed the Constitution should be torn up and rewritten every couple of decades, figuring that each generation should chart its own course in matters of law and politics. It is highly unlikely he would have thought the ideals expressed in the Declaration should, or could be, scrapped periodically. Instead, as a believer in "progress," he predicted at the end of this life that one day the ideals expressed in the Declaration would come to apply to everyone as humankind improved itself.

So, what do we make of talk about the dreams of the Founding Fathers in a nation that is, in some yet undefined way, rewriting the narrative of race in America? We may turn to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who appeared almost giddy in the days after Obama's election. She spoke of America's capacity to "surprise," to "renew itself" as we struggle to form a more perfect Union. True perfection can never be attained, so what has been called the "American experiment" inevitably involves working toward that goal. It was clear from the beginning that the United States would always be a work in progress. Its people would grow into nationhood and into a national identity by trial and error. This is the fundamental truth in Secretary Rice's statement that Jefferson would understand and recognize, even if the particular "surprise" dealt this past November would be more like a shock to his 18th-century sensibilities. He styled his first election as president as "the revolution of 1800" and pronounced it as "real a revolution" as the one in 1776. Jefferson was prone to excited utterances, but he was right in seeing that many American voters had sent a message about their preferred identity as citizens when they chose the Republicans, the self-styled party of "the people," over the more tradition-bound Federalists.

In 1800, Americans who could vote voted for a more open society, one less based on deference to old hierarchies and ways of doing things. Many Americans hated the attack on life as they knew it, seeing, rightly, that it would be difficult to put things back together in just the same way. The world they knew was dying, and they were clear about who had delivered the coup de grâce. In later years, the bitter New Englander Eli Hawley Canfield said that Jefferson had introduced chaos into America's social and political life by wrongly, he felt, telling lower-class whites that they were worthy of participating in the electoral process. The Declaration apparently did not apply to them either. But that was merely the first of Jefferson's "sins." His skepticism of religion, and adamant stance on the separation of church and state, threatened the moral fabric of the nation. Finally, not by his actual words but by his personal "example," Jefferson promoted the "amalgamation of the races." These three things were intimately tied in Canfield's mind. To erase the distinctions between people through political inclusiveness and racial mixture, while secularizing society, was to sow the seeds of decay and social collapse. No, the old familiar ways were better if America was to remain a strong nation.

As any historian will say, it is much too soon to know how much, or even whether, 2008 resembles 1800. But we can say that on Nov. 4, American voters said something about who they wished to be. They repudiated conventional wisdom about what was possible and expressed a desire to forge a new identity, discarding an old, confining one. Obama saw this yearning in the electorate, made a bet on it and won. Americans were willing to put on a new face for the world. That we have had the chance to move forward in this way is due, in part, to the Founders' vision. And, I will say it, Jefferson's vision. Whether he specifically dreamed of Barack Obama or not, whether he would have thrown himself into the ocean at the prospect of President Obama, he along with others put forth a set of ideas that helped put us on this path. Over the years countless Americans, black and white, heralded and unheralded, have struggled, and continue to struggle, to give meaning to the promise of America. It is no coincidence that the first nonwhite leader of the Western world should come from this country. The way we have arrived at this moment in history is truly the result of a dream.