The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
REBELLION / NEEDED TO SECURE LIBERTY
I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams, I am to give my
thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you
to place them where due. It will yet be three weeks before I shall
receive them from America. There are very good articles in it, and
very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read,
in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would
have sufficed to set me against a chief magistrate, eligible for a
long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one; and what we
have always read of the elections of Polish Kings should have forever
excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect
of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long
hired their gazetteers to repeat, and model into every form, lies
about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed
them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves
have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have
believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did
it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusetts? And can
history produce an instance of rebellion so honorably conducted? I say
nothing of its motives. They were founded in ignorance, not
wickedness. God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a
rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The
part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the
importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under
such misconceptions, it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the
public liberty. We have had thirteen States independent for eleven
years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a
century and a half, for each State. What country before, ever existed
a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can
preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to
time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them
take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and
pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The
tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of
patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. Our convention has
been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusetts; and on
the spur of the moment, they are setting up a kite to keep the hen
yard in order. I hope in God, this article will be rectified before
the new constitution is accepted.
to Colonel Smith, 13 November 1787
|