A Rejection Letter: Some Serious Problems with an Essay Submission from Thomas Jefferson
The following recent archival discovery may be of interest to CounterPunch readers one week after the nation’s 250th anniversary.
Dear Thomas Jefferson:
We hope that you and your slaves are enjoying your summer in Monticello. We certainly appreciate the hard work and elaborate word-crafting that has gone into your submission on national independence, but regret that we cannot publish it for the following reasons:
1. The fact that you and other signers of your declaration are slaveowners renders crassly hypocritical your eloquent statement that “All men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is richly ironic that you combine this statement with the complaint that the British king has “excited domestic insurrections amongst us,” which we take to mean that London has offered freedom to your slaves. Insofar as your complaint is true, we say three cheers for the British crown.
2. There is no evidence for the existence of a “Creator,” which we take to mean a God.
3. Human rights are fought for and won by human beings working collectively for their emancipation from exploitation and oppression; they are not granted by a deity.
4. There is no such thing as a “self-evident truth.” Truth is determined by the extent to which it corresponds to material and historical reality. Truths must be demonstrated by evidence, deeply and scientifically understood.
5. Governments have NOT been formed to “secure” the rights you mention, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The historical evidence is quite the opposite. States/governments emerged from and function to this day as enforcers, protectors, and coordinators of ruling class power, the dictatorship of those who own and control the lion’s share of society’s productive resources and wealth. This is no less true under republican and electoral systems than it is under feudal monarchy and “the divine right of Kings.”
6. We know very well that your flowery rhetoric, portraying your fledgling republic as the noble and idealist victim of the British Empire, is driven by you and your fellow propertied insurgents’ fierce and explicit aim to create a continental empire of your own – to expand your profit-centered and slave-based regime across all of North America, murdering Native Americans’ en masse along the way.
7. We find it richly ironic that your bill of grievances against the British crown includes the claim that the king has inflicted on you “the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” This is truly the pot calling the kettle black! It is you and your colonizing brethren who have brought genocidal war to your continent!
On a happier note, we heartily approve of your argument that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive” of liberty and happiness – when a state becomes “tyrannical” and “despotic” — “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” That is a right to revolution.
We believe the new government you propose to form will serve the narrow and oppressive interests of your hoped-for independent nation’s wealthy Few. We expect your desired state to be despotically destructive of liberty and happiness for vast swaths of your population, and for others who stand in the way of your transparently imperial ambitions.
May the rights of revolution and independence that you uphold against England be wielded by your new nation’s slaves, women, wage-earners tenant farmers, artisans, Indigenous peoples, and laborers! We hope those rights are upheld by your own domestic subjects against you and other arrogant, imperial, and parasitic North American slaveowners, merchant capitalists, gentry, and their publicists, generals, and lawyers!
I regret that we don’t have better news about your interesting and thoughtful essay, which we recommend you send to your aptly named Continental Congress.
Sincerely,
Historical Truth Commission
Editorial Board
July 1, 1776
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