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By James C. Johnston Jr.
When Thomas Jefferson was still the United States Minister to France on January 16, 1787, he wrote to his old friend by the name of Edward Carrington who was serving as a member of Congress in Philadelphia the following lines, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Jefferson was living in pre-revolutionary France where freedom of the press was still something to be fondly wished for. People were still sent to jail in many if not most countries for the crime of sedition for printing articles in the public press which were not liked by the “powers that be” in most western nations, As for the rest of the world, a free press was unknown, and very few people could read the printed word anyway.
The idea of living in a country with a free press and no government was an extreme one at best, but Jefferson was probably sincere in this belief. He held to this belief for all of his life even when he became the object of vicious attacks when he ran for the office of President of the United States in 1800 and 1804. There were attacks made upon him and his personal life that would shock most modern readers of scathing editorials today.
The fact that Jefferson lived with his slave woman, Sally Hemmings, and fathered children by her, was widely published in the Federalist press. The fact that Hemmings was his late wife’s half-sister was also widely published. In spite of that, and hundreds of other stories circulated about Jefferson, Jefferson always remained a champion of the free press. Even when he was vice-president under his once and would-be friend and political foe, John Adams, Jefferson actively opposed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts which made it a crime to criticize the Government, the President, and other government officials in the public press. As a full disclosure, I really must declare that Mr. Adams and I are in fact distant cousins. I can also say that I have never met Mr. Adams, nor does our being related influence my evaluation of him.
During Jefferson’s eight year tenure as President of the United States, he and his policies such as the Embargo Act were subjects of vicious editorials, out-right attacks, and very unflattering political cartoons. Jefferson, who could be a very skilled and vicious political fighter himself, allowed the Alien and Sedition Acts to die and remained a great defender of the free press. At the end of the day, freedom of the individual in every respect was at the base of Jefferson’s personal philosophy.
This seems to be at odds with the great fact of Jefferson’s life that he was the owner of hundreds of other human beings in his lifetime. Jefferson hated slavery but bowed to the economic necessity of his situation. This may have made him a moral coward, but in 1807, in the seventh year of his presidency, he supported the ending of the international slave trade. He wanted to free his slaves at his death, but his debts were so great, that this could not be done. In the context of his time, he was a decent man, yet there was also a nasty bit of hypocrisy at war with his legacy of greatness as an advocate of freedom and human rights. Jefferson was a complex man. The important thing to remember is that Jefferson would fight for my right to call him a hypocrite in the public press.
James C. Johnston Jr. is a former Franklin selectman, Franklin High School history teacher, and author of "The African Son," a novel , as well as "The Yankee Fleet" and "Odyssey in the Wilderness," (a history of Franklin, Massachusetts). Article copyright James C. Johnston, Jr. 2023, used with permission.
