The Earth Belongs in Usufruct to the Living

Herbert Sloan

[A quote from Jefferson Legacies, edited by Peter S. Onuf, University Press of Virginia, 1993]

"...much of what Jefferson had to say in the letter to Madison was commonplace. Nor was the idea that the earth belongs to the living at all extraordinary in late-eighteenth-century thought. When Jefferson observed in 1785 to the Rev. James Madison, president of the College of William and Mary, "The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour & live on," he simply echoed a theme that natural law writers had insisted on since at least the seventeenth century. By Jefferson's day, it as a cliche, though admittedly an important one. It had figured in the arguments of Robert Filmer's opponents, Algernon Sidney and John Locke, in the 1670s and 1680s; eighteenth-century commentators and philosophers had endorsed it. God, after all, gave the earth to mankind, and if Jefferson's presentation remained resolutely secular, the point was as well established among the religious as among those of a more philosophical bent. Indeed, it was so widely acknowledged that it could take on quite varied forms; in the 1770s and 1780s, for example, it served as the point of departure for the radical speculations of William Ogilvie and Thomas Spence, and at the same time for the more acceptable arguments of Archdeacon Paley. In turn, Paine and others found it highly useful in the 1790s. (footnote here: TJ to Rev. James Madison, Thomas A Horne, Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain, 1605-1834. Chapel Hill, 1990. Janet Coleman, "Property and Poverty in J. H. Burns (ed.) The Cambridge History of Medieval Thought, c 350-c. 1450. Cambridge, 1988.) Jefferson broke no new ground in this respect; he merely took up a theme in wide circulation.