THOMAS JEFFERSON AND LOGIC
By Jon Rappoport
Author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS,
a course for home schools
qjrconsulting@gmail.com
For several months now, I’ve been writing articles about logic, and I’ve made connections between that subject and the founding of the American Republic.
As a corollary, I’ve mentioned that the disappearance of logic as a primary subject in US schools has accompanied a long, gradual erosion of individual freedom and independence.
Now I’ve discovered an even closer link: It leads to Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence.
THIS IS OF ENORMOUS IMPORTANCE.
I just came across a letter to the editor of Commentary Magazine. The letter was published in the January 1979 issue. It came from a Jefferson scholar, Wilbur Samuel Howell.
Howell makes several key points. As a college student, Jefferson studied philosophy and logic under Professor William Small, at William and Mary. Small had come to the college from Aberdeen, Scotland, where he had studied under William Duncan, a renowned logician and author of Elements of Logick. Indeed, Jefferson later remarked Professor Small went a long way toward shaping his life.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that the Declaration of Independence would adhere to a logical structure. Indeed, the Declaration is a kind of argument from first premises, through to a conclusion.
I went back and read the Declaration, and I’ll open up its logical structure.
It begins with this:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
Jefferson, in this prologue, indicates that the people should state their reasons for separating from a ruling power. Before he goes on to do that, he enunciates his first premises.
All men have rights, and to secure them, they create governments.
Second, the people have the authority to abolish any ruler that tries to destroy those rights, and, in its place, the people should institute a new government.
Third, when a long history of tyrannical abuse proves that the old government cannot be corrected, the people have a duty to overthrow it.
Here is the text:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, 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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.”
What remains is for Jefferson to list the abuses of the British Crown; to prove, in other words, that the king has, in fact, brought on such a stream of tyrannical actions.
Well, here they are:
“He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
“He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
“He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
“He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
“He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
“He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
“He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
“He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
“He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
“He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.
“He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.
“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
“For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
“For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:
“For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:
“For imposing taxes on us without our consent:
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:
“For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:
“For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:
“For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:
“For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
“He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.
“He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
“He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.
“He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
At this point, Jefferson makes it clear that the colonists have tried, without success, to correct these tyrannical abuses through peaceful means. They are not acting in haste:
“In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
“Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.”
Jefferson then announces his conclusion, based on the original premises of his argument and the examples he has cited to confirm that the heart of these premises is true:
“We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.
“We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
Fire, passion, even poetry, held within the flow of a logical progression.
I point this out to show that the Founders were not only acquainted with the use of logic, they wanted to make their great case for freedom and independence by using its power.
In their minds, freedom and logic were connected.
If in our schools, in 2010, logic as a distinct subject has been reduced to paltry terms, how are students able to grasp the majestic nature of freedom, as expressed in the Declaration? How are they able to understand that living in freedom is more than vaguely drifting from one slogan to another, one addled piece of political rhetoric to another?
Note: James Madison, thought of by many as the father of the Constitution, studied logic intensely at the College of New Jersey. In fact, we have 122 pages of Madison’s own handwritten notes from the course. The course followed the pattern laid down in a famous 17th-century book, Logic or the Art of Thinking.
Jon Rappoport has been working as an investigative reporter for 25 years. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, he has published articles in LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, CBS Healthwatch, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. He has taught in several private schools in New York and Los Angeles, and has tutored extensively in remedial English at Santa Monica College. At Amherst College, where he graduated with a BA in philosophy, he studied formal logic under Joseph Epstein, a revered professor of philosophy. He is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a course for home schools. He can be contacted at qjrconsulting@gmail.com