Was Jefferson a Good President and Founding Father?

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I'm near the end of a multivolume biography at Lincoln and I can't stop scratching my head at the most outré radicals who opposed all the war measures necessary to bring about emancipation of the slaves. Even William Lloyd Garrison, who in the 1830s and 1840s seemed more interested in his own moral purity than in actually helping the people who were slaves, came around during the civil war!

Indeed. This is one of my hotter takes, but I do sometimes get the impression that Garrison and his acolytes were more interested in personally divesting from the evils of slavery than adopting a course of action that was likely to bring that institution to ultimate extinction. If you are an abolitionist prior to 1861 and you are serious about ending slavery, you have basically two options: you can try to legislate emancipation through the political system, or you can try to impose emancipation at bayonet point. Garrison was a pacifist who refused to vote in elections sanctioned by a proslavery constitution —so what is his strategy? The Underground Railroad is not a scalable solution to the enslavement of nearly four million people by 1860; attempts via the Free Produce movement to boycott slavery and the products associated therewith ultimately failed to exert substantial economic pressure on the South due to the prohibitive cost of free labor alternatives. Even John Brown (certainly no stranger to violence) at times seems to fall into this camp: anyone making even the most cursory examination of the Harper's Ferry Raid will immediately conclude that it was an at-best fanciful plan that was doomed to fail, in large part because Brown didn't alert any enslaved people of his intentions! Was this simply megalomania on his part, or was he ultimately more interested in martyrdom than the practical work of emancipation? The most we get from Garrison is a vague hope that a geopolitically isolated Confederacy would eventually be forced to abandon slavery; even if this came to pass, the most likely outcome is a "free" black population more oppressed and disenfranchised than even under Jim Crow. It is an unworkable solution designed to satisfy Garrison's inflexible moral convictions at the expense of the timely progress of emancipation, and indeed Garrison's rigidity eventually alienated some prominent black abolitionists (such as Frederick Douglass) who initially regarded him as an ally for his uncompromising defense of black equality.

To be entirely fair to Garrison, he did eventually accept the war as a necessary evil and pledged his support to the Union as you say, though he requested he and his sons be granted conscientious objector status. Unquestioningly a principled opponent of slavery, but I think we have to ask to what extent his principles were self-serving when they prevented him from taking tangible action against slavery in 1861.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

That being said Lincoln did invoke Thomas Jefferson directly and the Republicans did in large measure emphasize the aspirational elements of the Declaration and seek to put them on a more equal footing with the Constitution.

Jefferson was hugely important to the Republican party that emerged in the 1850s, in part from necessity: there was a real danger that the new organization would be dismissed as Whiggism 2.0, which would alienate the free soil Democratic element and defeat any effort to form a big-tent antislavery party. Beyond mere opportunism, the ethos of egalitarian democracy and individual liberty as articulated by Jefferson was a powerful counterargument to proslavery that could resonate with both committed abolitionists and racist whites who nevertheless did not want their states overrun by slavery. The Homestead Act was of course an old Jacksonian policy repackaged as the epitome of free labor ideology, wrapped in Jeffersonian rhetoric about the independent yeoman farmer. As for non-extension, the Wilmot Proviso was essentially the same policy Jefferson had advocated in 1784 (before later abandoning it during the Missouri controversy) and fit nicely with the American conception of the West as a place for poor men to go and better themselves. It's not an accident that this new party called itself "Republican" or that the Declaration of Independence featured prominently in the 1856 platform.

And of course the increasingly reactionary pro-slavery movement plays a role in this too. By that time you had ideologues all over the country, not just in the Deep South, asserting that the Declaration was not worth the paper it was written on - a Senator from Indiana, for example. And there had been a growing strain of proslavery thought, as exemplified by people like Fitzhugh and a newspaper in Richmond whose name I forget, advocating that slavery was the ideal state for the vast majority of people of all races, not just blacks. Without having read deeply into this specific thing, I have to imagine that it dramatically increased the amount the average white laboring Northerner felt threatened by the slave power. The positive-good camp, and the accommodationists who repeatedly bent over backwards to appease them, had so thoroughly trashed the Declaration and the ideas behind it that it was just there waiting as easy bait for any political group who wanted to take it up as their mantra again.

Indeed, indeed. The senator from Indiana in question was John Pettit, who exclaimed during the debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act that the Declaration of Independence was based on a "self-evident lie." The extent to which southern reactionaries accepted the antislavery characterization of Jefferson's philosophy and disowned any association with that most famous sentence can be seen in the Cornerstone Speech, where Stephens describes Jefferson's (real or supposed) belief in the equality of all men as a fatal flaw in his reasoning, one which the Confederacy has corrected with their constitution. And of course this was great news for the antislavery movement, who could now take on the mantle of "defenders of the constitution and the intent of the founding fathers" —a strategy pioneered by Salmon Chase in his Liberty party days, who recognized that associating abolition with the founders did far more to win over converts to the cause of antislavery than Garrisonian histrionics about a "covenant with death and an agreement with Hell."

Radicals via their excess would necessarily come to turn on some of their most heretofore effective weapons and concepts for their side, thereby ceding them and the language of their preservation to the other side. In this sense it is not the "Constitutional Unionists" that are seeking to the preserve the union and the constitution and the founder's intent in 1860, so much as they are trying to bring 1840 forward in time to 1860. On the contrary, it is to Lincoln, the more moderate opponent of slave power (relative to say Seward), that the Jeffersonian mental can thus be picked up and ran with.

That the Republicans moved to the center on the slavery question (the center of opinion in states comprising a majority of the electoral college I would note), at the exact same time that the South had gone full extremist, created the opening for a "moderately, anti-slavery coalition" to come to existence in the North in 1860. Such would not have been possible, without the South's extremism, as we have both noted and thus likewise as we have both noted, the South were the architects of their own undoing.

Specifically as regards the southern fire eaters, there is a clear and observable phenomenon of the favored policy of last year no longer being good enough, as the likes of Davis or Louis Wigfall demanded increasingly dramatic displays of proslavery intent from the federal government. The rapid decline in support for popular sovereignty among the southern Democrats illustrates this nicely: adopted in 1854 to win southern support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, within a few years it was already unacceptable, and by 1860 was actually a liability as Stephen Douglas sought the Democratic presidential nomination that year. What had changed was the national context of the slavery debate, as rising opposition to slavery's expansion in the North engendered still more strident defense of slavery from the South.

For the conditional unionists like Stephens, they correctly diagnosed the rising popularity of disunion as a symptom of the slavery debate, and concluded that there therefore should be no further debate over slavery. This was the guiding assumption of the Compromise of 1850, which sought a definitive settlement of the slavery issue by making a "grand gesture" in the form of the Fugitive Slave Act that the South had no reason to doubt the federal government's antislavery intentions. The problem with this strategy is of course that demonstrating the proslavery bias of the federal government only strengthened northern opposition to slavery and the slave power, which yielded louder criticisms of both, which again stoked southern fears of federally-enacted emancipation. Thus the country was trapped in a vicious cycle of increasingly pro-slavery "compromises" that only exacerbated sectional tensions.

The shift of southern Democrats and Whigs away from Jeffersonian language describing slavery as a "necessary evil" (motivated by self-interest and a partisan incentive to "one-up" the other on slavery) left that legacy up for grabs to antislavery politicians, who dropped the "necessary" modifier and argued persuasively that compromises with slavery had weakened the Union by deviating from the intent of the founders. Northern doughfaces like Petit responded by challenging abolitionists' claim to Jefferson's legacy, noting (correctly) his opposition to black equality and political rights, but southern fire-eaters were uninterested in any such accommodation, perhaps because they wanted to avoid the appearance of agreeing with the abolitionists, perhaps because antislavery speakers had so effectively made their argument that there was nothing left to work with. Radicalism begets radicalization begets more radicalism.