Much as Jefferson worried that an indebted nation could become enslaved to its creditors, he feared banks because they, too, deprived debtors of true liberty. He believed all government a necessary evil at best, for by its nature it restricted the freedom of the individual. For this reason, he wanted the United States to remain a society of small independent farmers. Such a nation did not need much political organization.
Jefferson’s main objection to Alexander Hamilton was that Hamilton wanted to commercialize and centralize the country; Hamilton embraced public debt so as to initiate public projects and promote investment. This Jefferson feared, for it would mean that financial speculators and creditors would acquire economic power. Moreover, a commercial economy would lead to the growth of cities, which would complicate society and hence require more regulation. “The mobs of great cities add just as much to the support of pure government,” he said, “as sores do to the strength of the human body.” Later in life he warned a nephew to avoid “populous cities” because, he said, in such places young men acquire “habits and partialities which do not contribute to the happiness of their afterlife.” Like Hamilton, he believed that city workers were easy prey for demagogues. “I consider the class of artificers as the panderers of vice, and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are usually overturned,” he said. “Those who labor in the earth,” he also said, “are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people.” Like Hamilton, Jefferson thought human beings basically selfish. “Lions and tigers are mere lambs compared with men,” he once said. Although he claimed to have some doubts about the subject, he suspected that blacks were “inferior to whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” (Hamilton, who also owned slaves, stated flatly of blacks that “Their natural faculties are as good as ours.”) Jefferson’s pronouncements on race are yet more troubling in light of recent research, including DNA studies, that point to the likelihood that he fathered one or more children by Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. (See Debating the Past, “Did Thomas Jefferson Father a Child by His Slave?” p. 174.)
•••-[Read the Document Memoirs of a Monticello Slave at myhistorylab. com
World History
