Jefferson and Emerson’s Urban Hatred and Agrarian Ideal
The philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and the thoughts of the Romantic Era are often and easily contrasted but it is certain that important figures of the American Romantic period — such as Ralph Waldo Emerson had ideas that were greatly influenced or at least reflect some of Jefferson’s ideas. Jefferson, of course, taking a major part in the Age of Enlightenment could be mistaken to be completely distant from the reactionary, contrasting, but succeeding Romanticist movement — but this is not the case in many aspects. Jefferson’s Philosophy strongly resembles that of Emerson in terms of his ideas of naturalism, agrarian supremacy, and the dignity of mankind.
Jefferson is a great embodiment of the Enlightenment but there are certain peripherals of his thought that do not fall in line with the standard Enlightenment thinker. Whether you believe these unconventional beliefs of Jefferson are an extension of the spirit of the Enlightenment or a rejection of it, I will leave to you. But the goal of this essay is simply to point out some of the similarities between Jefferson and Emerson, a figurehead of American Romanticism, in regard to their conception of individualism.
Jefferson, with the majority of his life within the First Industrial Revolution, witnessed the drastic economic changes large-scale manufacturing brought. Despite this innovation, he stood by his ideal of agricultural ascendency. With Jefferson’s family coming from an agricultural background and him being an inheritor of a large sum of land in Virginia, his philosophy certainly had an influence from his personal life. He writes most of what he has to say about his ideal of an agrarian America in his Query XIX in Notes on the State of Virginia. Specifically under the subsection titled Manufactures, he states,
Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue… Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phænomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example… Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition… While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff. Carpenters, masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry: but, for the general operations of manufacture, let our work-shops remain in Europe. It is better to carry provisions and materials to workmen there, than bring them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners and principles. The loss by the transportation of commodities across the Atlantic will be made up in happiness and permanence of government. The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.
Here he claims that Europe’s idea that a nation must have self-sustaining manufacturing does not have to apply to America. He thinks America is so distinct that it must refrain from manufacturing as much as possible. He continues by saying that those who work in agriculture are superior because they are not dependent. His agrarian philosophy went so far as to completely discredit the urban world. He suggests that cities and too much focus on improving strictly the economy, especially through manufacturing, will eventually cause corruption of American principles.
Jefferson was ahead of his time. Brief examples of an agrarian ideal have been sporadic since the times of ancient Greece but it never became substantially popular until the age of Romanticism. Romantics rejected core components of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. Even though the Industrial Revolution was present in the time of Jefferson, it was only in its early stages and was not something he saw the full extent of, yet still, he foresaw how an extensive focus on manufacturing could corrupt civilization as well as the individual.
Emerson, perhaps the largest figure in American Romanticism and Transcendentalism, brings up a few related points in one of his most famous works, The American Scholar. This speech was first addressed in 1837 and was primarily focused on the formation of a new heroic American intellectual identity. It was a call for an individualistic academic reform that would not be forced to rely so heavily upon the institutionalized systems and social pressures brought to the United States by Europe. Here is his first reference to his expansive idea of self-reliance, which he later elaborated upon in his famous essay of the same name in 1841.
Emerson’s idea of self-reliance is as simple as it sounds. There is an emphasis on internal contemplation, an independent state of mind, as well as the avoidance of dependency on others. Jefferson would almost undoubtedly agree with what Emerson put forward here. Emerson’s Self-reliance directly ties into Jefferson’s ideal of sustaining oneself working within a complex economic and social system.
Both men saw the practical and moral reasons for relying on oneself materially: that is being able to provide for yourself food, water, clothing, and shelter without dependency — but Emerson took the concept a bit further with a self-reliance which he thought could ascend man.
Emerson, like most other Transcendentalists, believed that it is the complex systems and societal pressure that corrupt the individual. In his view, man was at his best state of mind and being if he is self-reliant. To add to this, Emerson also has a deep philosophy of nature which often connects to self-reliance and an agrarian ideal. He believed that farmers are often of high virtue because they are the closest in proximity to nature. To Emerson, farming was the only creative economic enterprise — because nature, he believed, is the only true creative force. Therefore he believed those who abstain from nature, namely city-dwellers, are vulnerable to be corrupted and practice vices.
Here’s Emerson, in his own words — a passage from Self-Reliance:
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away.
Jefferson remains an interesting figure, for he is often viewed as an embodiment of the Enlightenment, and while in many ways he represents the movement, he was also one of the only Enlightenment thinkers to attempt to foresee the negative consequences of the the changing world around him.
A comparison between Jefferson and Emerson shows us that Enlightenment thought is not always at odds with “reactionary” Romanticist thought. Resentment of an industrializing world did not start with Romanticism but with a select few individuals who foresaw the effect of rapid industrial growth far before the mid-19th century.
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Sources
- Jefferson, Thomas. “Notes on the State of Virginia: Electronic Edition.” Thomas Jefferson, 1743–1826. Notes on the State of Virginia, Documenting the American South (DocSouth), https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html
- Levine, Robert S., editor. The Norton Anthology American Literature. 9th ed., A, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
- Stenerson, Douglas C. “Emerson and the Agrarian Tradition.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 14, no. 1, 1953, pp. 95 — 115. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2707497
