When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them. Philip Collins
and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.
This call for unity sounds routine today. Kennedy said it; Obama said it; every president says it. But Jefferson needs to say it. Technology has quickened politics but it hasn’t coarsened it much and the election of 1800 remains one of the nastiest in American history. Under the pretext of articulating differing destinies for the republic, the two candidates, John Adams, the New England lawyer from a modest background, and Jefferson, the lofty Virginia intellectual, conducted an acrimonious campaign. Jefferson accused Adams of being pro-English, quite an accusation to level at a Founding Father of the republic, and Adams countered by mocking Jefferson’s association with the violence of revolutionary France and by revealing that Jefferson had fathered a child with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. When Jefferson won, Adams churlishly left Washington DC before the new president spoke. Hence, if the emollient tone is laid on thick that’s because a lot of mollifying was required.
Jefferson worked hard on this pivotal section, balancing minority rights against the will of the majority. The tactic worked. The Federalists of the time praised Jefferson’s caution and wisdom. James Monroe wrote that the speech conciliated the opposing party. Note how this is done by avoiding specific positions, on which a speaker can be pinned down. Instead, Jefferson elevates his language into the floridly abstract. This is a more flowery section than the rest, which is usually the tip-off that a writer has less to say.
But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
This passage is the fault line of the American republic, the substance of the dispute between Jefferson and Hamilton about where power should lie. It is the great political cleavage that persists in our time: Democrats for a little more government, Republicans for a little less. There is no easy philosophical reconciliation, so Jefferson does what good rhetoric often does. He slides over the difference with a well-balanced, high-minded, euphonious sentence – ‘We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists’ – and evokes the virtues of the nation which belong to Americans of any persuasion. All presidents do this. Barack Obama said there were no blue states or red states, there was just the United States. Jefferson had more call to do it than most, as he was nursing an infant democracy that was prone to tantrum.
Note how unequivocal and confident Jefferson is in declaring the United States to have the strongest form of government on earth. Then, cleverly, at the end of this section he brings the people to his side, drawing the implicit contrast that I, the Republican, trust the people, whereas you, the Federalist, arrogate power to the state. He concludes with a vivid rhetorical question about whether we have found angels in the form of kings to govern men, then adds the redundant answer that history will be the judge. Or to put the effect more bluntly but less poetically: No, we haven’t and we never will. This is why we need to curtail power; it is why we need democratic institutions. Because men are not angels.
Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honour and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter – with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens – a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
To us, wearied by repetition at a time when democracy can feel old and worn, a claim to American superiority sounds arrogant. But in early American speeches this was a claim of hopeful naivety and youthful excitement in an era when democracy was a novel experiment at home and a rarity anywhere else. So look past that claim towards the really suggestive words here, which are ‘to close the circle of our felicities’. As well as begging the listener to pay attention, the phrase concludes a profound point: wise government is defined more by what it prevents than either what it does or what it permits. This passage could be read as the origin of the American suspicion of the encroachment of the federal government, and it is that too, but the point runs deeper. Perhaps the greatest achievement of democratic politics is that public authority is limited to create the space for private autonomy. It closes the circle of our felicities.
The circle closes here, though, over a dark question. It is inconceivable surely, as he drafted the speech in the two weeks before the Inauguration, that Jefferson did not reflect on his slaves. Not for them the bread they have earned. The fellow-feeling and empathy of the rest of this passage hardly seems consistent with such a blind spot, although we can also hear a vocabulary of politics that seems lost to us now. It would be a brave politician today who would wish for happiness and blessings, but it was an idiom that came easily to Jefferson and his peers. Political conversations are drier than they were and Jefferson has something to teach us. Blessings and happiness should find their way back into our rhetoric.
About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigour, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and