Monticello Blog

man ... feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day... --Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Cabell, February 2, 1816

"A nation, by establishing a character of liberality and magnanimity, gains in the friendship and respect of others more than the worth of mere money." --Thomas Jefferson, Special Message, January 13, 1806.

Advocates of "strong" or "participatory" democracy invoke Jefferson's letters to Joseph C. Cabell and Samuel Kercheval, usually acknowledging that they refer to local self-government in what Jefferson calls "ward republics," but without grasping the fuller implications of Jeffersonian federalism.

"man ... feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day..." --Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Cabell, February 2, 1816

Well, I've missed our President's actual inauguration by several days, but I'd like to belatedly commemorate the occasion by offering an intriguing historical tidbit about - yes! - Jefferson's first inauguration.

When Jefferson penned these words he was thinking of the kind of participatory "ward" democracy that took place in New England town meetings, the kind of democracy that still only takes place in small towns where people personally discuss and vote on issues relating to their communities.

Hot off the press (almost) from another of our former ICJS fellows, Jeff Matsuura, is Jefferson vs. the Patent Trolls: A Populist Vision of Intellectual Property Rights.

One of our alert former fellows brought Hillary Clinton's quotation of Jefferson during her recent Secretary of State confirmation hearings to my attention. Of course I can't help myself from checking to make sure that famous people quoting TJ have actually gotten their quotes correct.

An excellent overview of the philosophical argument between Buffon and Jefferson regarding "degeneracy" of New World flora, fauna, and even people vs. those of the Old World.

We get a lot of questions from the public asking us to verify quotations as Jeffersonian or not, but these almost always concern only a single quotation. The other week I got a query from an inquiring person that contained not one, but 10 quotations. The source of the query was a sort of chain-email calling Jefferson a "prophet" - an appellation I suspect he would not in fact like very much - and listing 10 purported Jefferson quotations.