Thomas Jefferson's New Old World: the Development of “Europe”

Thomas Jefferson’s New Old World: The Development of “Europe” as a Political Concept in Jefferson’s Political Thought

Armin Mattes

Abstract This article argues that “Europe” as a political concept emerged to a significant degree not in Europe itself but in the United States, and more specifically in Thomas Jefferson’s writings of the Age of Revolution (and in those of some of his political allies, such as Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow). It did so in two ways. First, in the wake of the American Revolution, many Americans constructed a new “American” national identity in opposition to Europe. Consequently, “Europe” became re-conceptualized as the “Old World” antithesis to the United States. This “Old World” concept of Europe was, however, just as conceptually new as their imagined American “New World.” Second, following the outbreak of the French Revolution, Jeffersonian thinkers in particular hoped or even expected Europe to follow the American example and accordingly began envisioning “Eu- rope” as a democratic and federal European Union along U.S. lines.

Keywords: Europe; Jefferson; Age of Revolution; New World-Old World; conceptual change

Introduction

As the “spatial turn” has gained ground in the Humanities and So- cial Sciences during the last three decades, so too have historians put a renewed focus on concepts of space and place (Gotthard; Döring and Thielmann). Unsurprisingly, the concept of “Europe,” as a notion deal- ing with a global macro-region, has garnered considerable attention in this context (Schenk, “Mental Maps: Die Konstruktion”; “Mental Maps: The Cognitive Mapping”). Approaching the concept with various

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.2 (2021): 401-21 401 Armin Mattes methodological tools, historians have illuminated its content, its historical evolution, and its contingent and contested nature. Examining the development of “Europe” as a political concept in Jeffersonian writings—mainly those of Thomas Jefferson himself but also those of some of his political allies, such as Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow—this essay adds to this literature by highlighting the contribution of American authors to the conceptual evolution of “Europe.” The concept of “Europe,” of course, is much older than the Age of Revolution. From its classical Greek roots and Charlemagne’s revivi- fication of the concept to its renewed usage as a secular alternative to “Christendom” in the late Middle Ages, “Europe” had already had a long history before the early modern period (Delanty 16-29; Gollwitzer 17-38; Schmale). Especially in the eighteenth century, however, both the usage and the meanings of the concept expanded. The major impetus for this development was European expansion into other parts of the world and in particular into the “New World” of the Americas. The encounter and increasing connection with non-European worlds promoted the search for a more precise definition of what exactly “Europe” was and what set it apart from other parts of the world, especially the American “New World” (Münkler 531-34). The result was a multitude of comparative ef- forts by naturalists such as the Comte de Buffon and the proliferation of myths such as the distinction between the “noble savage” and European (over-)refinement. In other words, for better or worse, the “New World and Old World were defined against each other” (P. Onuf 4) and it was in such comparative endeavors that “the idea of Europe was becoming more fully worked out, more tangible, more forceful” (Gerbi 31). A central aspect in “Europe’s” conceptual development was the question of its unique political organization. Among a host of interpreta- tions, two dominant strands of thought emerged in the eighteenth century. The first, building on the works of sixteenth-century jurists Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf and reaching a high point with Emerich de Vattel’s 1758 The Law of Nations, emphasized (and often developed) the law of nations. In this tradition, Europe was interpreted as a “republic” in the sense of the prevalence of the rule of law in intra-European relations. The second strand, especially prominent in the British sphere, stressed a balance of power philosophy. In this view, what characterized “Europe” was a conglomerate of religiously, economically, and culturally similar states whose political independence was guaranteed by an ever- shifting web of alliances. This system prevented any one power from becoming too powerful, thus preserving Europe’s peculiar political con- figuration (Gollwitzer 39-48; Münkler 534; Schmidt). A third early modern intellectual movement that was significant for the evolution of the concept of “Europe” was less concerned with de- scribing what Europe was than what it ought to be. Realizing that the law of nations and the balance of power were rather deficient in prevent- ing frequent outbreaks of war, several authors from the Duc de Sully to

402 Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 Thomas Jefferson’s New Old World the Abbé de Saint-Pierre and Jean-Jacques Rousseau put forth “peace plans” (Aksu 25-73). In varying forms, most of these plans called for the installation of a European Congress that could serve either as a Euro- pean parliament in regard to foreign relations or as a court of arbitration. However, virtually all of these plans addressed only the problem of how to prevent war in international relations. They did not advocate political changes within the respective countries, and such a European Congress would thus have been an assembly of sovereign monarchs. Only in the wake of the revolution in America, and even more so of that in France, did conceptions of “Europe” also evolve seriously in regard to the continent’s social constitution (Boer 1-2). The most famous essay linking the issues of peace and the democratization of society was probably the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace (Aksu 87-229). However, Kant’s proposition for a League of Nations between sovereign, democratized nations was inherently unlimited and therefore already looking beyond Europe. In contrast, many other writings on “Europe” by Europeans from the Age of Revolution—like most of the early modern peace plans—were little more than apologia for the hegemony of a particular country in Europe. Prominent examples were the writings of Comte d’Hauterive and the German professor Niklas Vogt, whose suggestions for the development of “Europe” promoted French expansionism and Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine (Gollwitzer 108-09, 115-16; Münkler 536). In contrast to these European writers, Americans during the Age of Revolution contributed to “Europe’s” conceptual development in two different ways. First, in the wake of the American Revolution, most Americans were more concerned with their own new republic than with Europe. Having achieved independence and created a federal republic, Americans were deeply anxious about their place in the world. The majority of free White Americans tracing their ancestry to Europe, and American culture being an offshoot of Europe’s, Americans, in Daniel Kilbride’s words, “found it hard to resist the temptation to use Europe […] as a foil against which to create a new national identity” (6). Of the many Americans engaged in this project of identity construction in opposition to Europe, Thomas Jefferson was one of the most active and most influential. However, while Jefferson and other Americans envisioned their ideal of the new American nation in juxtaposition to Europe, they also, as an unintended but unavoidable by-product, created new concepts of “Europe” in the form of the “Old World.” Yet, conceptually their reinterpretation of the “Old World” was as new as their imagined “New World.” Second, and historiographically even more significantly, Americans were among the first to envision “Europe” as a federal and democratic union. The tendency to define “Europe” in contradistinction to the United States existed throughout the Age of Revolution. In contrast, the idea that Europe would follow the American model and become a

Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 403 Armin Mattes federal, democratic union, which reached a high point in the early phase of the French Revolution, subsided considerably with Napoleon’s con- solidation of power. Moreover, while Americans of all political persua- sions took part, in one form or another, in defining Europe and America against each other, envisioning Europe as a student of the young United States was much more prevalent among ardent supporters of the French Revolution, meaning mostly members of the emerging Republican Par- ty. For these Jeffersonian Republicans, belief in the revolutionary trans- formation of Europe became a rallying point in distinction to the much more skeptical Federalists. Jefferson, as the Republican leader, again stood in the forefront of this development. Because some of his political allies, especially those who resided in Europe during the French Revo- lution, such as Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow, contributed to the development of the idea of “Europe” as a federal, democratic union in even more elaborate ways than Jefferson himself, their writings on the subject are included in this analysis.

Europe as the Antithesis

During much of the colonial period, it was not the settlers in Amer- ica who thought of the New World in terms of a polar opposite to the Old. On the contrary, while European colonists in America, especially in the early years, carefully preserved their ties to Europe out of sheer necessity, and over time saw their burgeoning societies as proud out- posts of European civilization, European intellectuals imagined the vast and still largely unknown North American continent as a contrast to Europe. This opposition of New and Old Worlds manifested itself in such myths as the “noble savage” or, as in the case of the French natural historian Comte de Buffon, in theories about the degeneration of species in the New World, a notion Jefferson and other Americans vehemently rejected (Woodward 1-15; Gerbi 3-7, 56-58). It was nevertheless during the colonial era that some cultural tropes developed that during the revolutionary period would contribute forcefully to the emergence of a dichotomy between the New and the Old World. The most important of these was the language of virtue and corruption. Especially in New England, the earliest settlers consciously set out to create a purer society than old England, a society that would—in the words of their leader John Winthrop— stand “as a city upon a hill” (199). Here, the notion that “God [had] sifted a whole Nation that he might send choice grain over into this Wilderness” thrived (Stoughton 246), fueling a sense of moral superiority on the side of the colonists that came to the fore whenever they faced challenges from the mother country (cf. also Van Engen; Yirush). This language of a purer colonial world played an important role in American colonists’ vindication of their resistance to British measures in the 1760s and 1770s. For example, after having been humiliated in front

404 Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 Thomas Jefferson’s New Old World of a committee of the Privy Council, and subsequently having lost his hope in a continued union on fair terms between Great Britain and the North American colonies, Benjamin Franklin in February 1775 rational- ized his disillusionment with the metropolis. He came to terms with a possible separation, arguing that when he considered “the extreme Corruption prevalent among all Orders of Men in this old, rotten State [England], and the glorious publick Virtue so predominant in our ris- ing Country, I cannot but apprehend more Mischief than Benefit from a closer Union” (Franklin 21: 508-10). Vice was thus the mark of old England, virtue that of its young North American offspring. Since these traits stood in direct opposition, it was better to separate the two so as not to risk the contamination of the latter. Thomas Paine took up this theme in Common Sense in 1776, contending that the much praised English constitution consisted of “the base remains of two ancient tyrannies [monarchy and aristocracy], com- pounded with some new republican materials.” He argued that it was the “new republican materials, in the persons of the commons,” alone “on whose virtue depends the freedom of England” (9). In other words, the “exceedingly complex” English mixed constitution was corrupt and Americans would do well to build an independent nation that was based entirely on “new republican materials” and virtuous commoners (9). Even many Loyalists, although rejecting a break with the mother country, concurred with the Patriots’ perception of a corrupted English society in contrast to a purer America. Thus, Samuel Curwen of Salem deplored “the dissipation, self-forgetfulness, and vicious indulgence of every kind, which characterize this metropolis” and “which (thank God) our part of America is ignorant of” (33). Significantly, during the imperial crisis Americans in their writings dealt almost exclusively with their immediate antagonist, England, and not Europe as a whole. This is indicative of the way in which British American colonials did not yet think about “Europe” as a system characterized by a coherent political nature, but mostly as a geographical entity. Politically, and to a lesser degree culturally, the colonists still very much lived within the conceptual framework of the British Em- pire, which, if anything, drew a distinction between the empire, with England at the center, on one side, and the continental European states, on the other. This mental map began to change for the American colonists in the American Revolution. In Common Sense, Paine had been one of the first to call for American independence, and in the same pamphlet he also initiated the mental process of lumping England in with the rest of “Eu- rope” and contrasting that entity as a whole with America. Because it is unnatural that a satellite should be larger than its planet, Paine argued, it was absurd to suppose “a continent to be perpetually governed by an island” (28). To Paine, the conclusion was obvious. England and Amer- ica “belong to different systems: England to Europe, America to itself”

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(28). Noah Webster’s call for a distinct national American language in 1778 further exemplifies this trend. Webster regarded such an undertak- ing as necessary to preserve American virtuousness because “Europe is grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny—in that country laws are perverted, manners are licentious, literature is declining and human nature is debased” (qtd. in Elson 432). Webster’s proposal may well reveal a cultural inferiority complex, but his linguistic nation-making project nonetheless signals the subsumption of England, both culturally and politically, under the larger, singular umbrella of “Europe,” which itself began to be seen as the Old World antithesis to a new American world. Few Americans expounded the New World-Old World antithesis in such breadth and depth as Thomas Jefferson. Much like other American colonists, the author of the American Declaration of Independence had not initially thought about transatlantic relations in terms of a dichotomy. In fact, “Europe” did not play much of a role in his early thinking at all, except as a geographical entity. Instead, the major framework for conceptualizing the American colonies’ place in the world was the Brit- ish Empire. In his 1774 Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jef- ferson, although more radical than most of his compatriots at that time, still wished for Americans’ continued membership in the British Em- pire (Conrad). However, in the Summary View he also made clear that a “union” between “Great Britain and America” had to be “reciprocal” (Writings 121). Colonists in America had to enjoy exactly the same rights as Englishmen at home, and the colonial legislatures had to stand on the same constitutional level as the English Parliament, enjoy the same relationship with the king, and possess the same jurisdictional powers within their respective societies. If the English government had met these conditions, as Jefferson bemoaned in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, England and America “might have been a free & great people together” (qtd. in Maier 240). As the King and Parliament were apparently hostile to Jefferson’s vision of a transatlantic British Empire that consisted of a union of equal corporate entities held together by a common sovereign, Jefferson thought it better to “acquiesce in the necessity” to independence and separation, and to strive for an “empire of liberty” in America alone (qtd. in Maier 240-41). In Jefferson’s mind, July 4, 1776, thus became the birth date not only for a new country but also for a New World. This concentration on America led Jefferson to expand his notion of Europe. Separation from Great Britain and the founding of a republic increased and highlighted the differences between America and Eu- rope (now including England). A republican government, the absence 1 This peace only ex- tended to member states of a hereditary, privileged ruling class, and peace in a federal union on of the Union and not, one side of the Atlantic contrasted sharply with a monarchical order, for example, to relations 1 with Native Americans. hereditary privileges, and a near perpetual state of war on the other. On peace and the federal For Jefferson as well as many other Americans in the decades following union, see Hendrickson. the American Revolution, “Europe” thus became the embodiment of

406 Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 Thomas Jefferson’s New Old World everything the new republic stood against, instead of just a geographical entity or the point of origin of colonial American civilization. As a result—at least in Jefferson’s thought—the Atlantic, which had hither- to bound European and American societies not only commercially but also conceptually, became increasingly seen as a barrier. Americans cer- tainly wanted to continue to trade with Europe. In fact, to gain access to European markets outside the British mercantilist system was one of the major hopes Americans, including Jefferson, associated with gain- ing independence. But in political and social terms, Jefferson hoped to keep Europe out of America throughout his career, and thus he wished that the Atlantic “were an ocean of fire between us and the old world” (Writings 1044). Jefferson’s wish implicitly acknowledged the weakness and vulner- ability of the fledgling United States. This precarious position made it imperative to steer clear of embroilments in European wars in order to avoid becoming the vassal or prey of one of Europe’s great powers (Gould). Should the United States fail in this endeavor, Jefferson warned his protégé William Short in 1820, the “meridian of partition through the ocean that separates the two hemispheres” would collapse and the New World would become a part of the Old (Writings 1439). Jefferson dreaded such a potential collapse of the distinctions between New and Old World because it would mean the end of the republican experiment in the New World. Indeed, it would mean the end of the “New World” as a politically meaningful concept itself. Jefferson was able to flesh out his idea of America as the “New World” most easily via juxtaposition to the Old World. “The principles of society there and here,” he observed late in his life, “are radically different,” and these differences went deeper than just the absence of a king on the American side of the Atlantic (Writings 1439). They were at the same time political, social, economic, and moral. In short, the differences were so great that they justified speaking of different worlds. In creating this dichotomy between America and Europe, Jefferson drew mostly on his personal experience in Europe as the U.S. minister to France from 1785 to 1789. These four years, therefore, were formative for his creation of a dichotomy between the “New” and “Old World.” The most visible difference Jefferson identified was the political order. In America, the people elected their leaders, who were also accountable to them and could be replaced at relatively short intervals, thus ensur- ing—at least in the long run—that only those best able to govern would come into positions of power. Consequently, the American republic was well-governed. Recollecting his encounters with European royalty, Jef- ferson thought that the situation in Europe was very different. The hereditary principle in monarchical government coupled with the tendency of the few monarchical families to intermarry virtually guaranteed that monarchs within a few generations became “animals […] without mind.” Contemplating the characters of the then reigning monarchs,

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Jefferson painted a devastating picture. “Louis XVI was a fool,” as were the kings of Spain and Naples. “The King of Prussia […] was a mere hog in body as well as in mind,” the kings of Austria and Sweden “were really crazy,” and George of England “was in a straight waistcoat” (Writ- ings 1221). Compared to such characters, those of American statesmen such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin counted “among the most celebrated worthies of the world” (Writings 190). During his stay in Paris, Jefferson noticed a similar contrast in the social orders in America and Europe. He analyzed the differences between American and European societies most perceptively through the example of the role of women. In a letter to George Washington in 1788, Jefferson scathingly criticized the luxurious, careless, and self- indulgent lifestyle of aristocratic women, who were “hunting pleasure 2 in the streets” and salons. He also confessed his shock at the “influence of women in the government” (Writings 932). But if European aristocratic women indulged too much in both luxury and political power in comparison to American republican women, Jefferson also noted that the great mass of European women labored in the fields and in other occupations that in America fell into the scope of duties of men. Dur- ing his travels in rural France, the Netherlands, and along the Rhine in 1787 and 1788, he indignantly noted “women and children carrying heavy burthens, and labouring with the hough.” He contrasted the, from his point of view, unnatural lifestyles of European women with the situation in the United States. There, he argued, “men […] never ex- pose their wives and children to labour above their force or sex” (Papers 11: 415). Nor did American women live in idle boredom. Instead, they “have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other,” and accordingly took care of their home and children and “soothe & calm the minds of their husbands returning ruffled from political debate” (Writings 922). In short, as he assured his friend Anne Bingham in a letter in May 1788, the comparison between European women—both from the elite and the bottom of society—and American women was “a comparison of Amazons and Angels” (923). In the end, Jefferson reasoned, the distinction between European and American gender norms was the baneful result of aristocracy. It was the “unequal division of property,” Jefferson assured his close friend and political collaborator James Madison shortly after his arrival in France in 1785, that caused “the numberless instances of wretchedness” and the extreme riches of a few throughout Europe (Papers 8: 681). As a member of the Virginia planter elite, Jefferson by no means promoted a proto- 2 For excellent analy- communist division of property. Yet when, according to his estimation, ses of Jefferson’s view on women and its role in his nineteen out of twenty million Europeans lived in “more wretched” cir- construction of an Ameri- cumstances “than the most wretched individual of the whole United can identity in contrast to Europe, see also Steele States,” then something was wrong (8: 404). Jefferson had no trouble dis- 53-90 and Gordon-Reed cerning why “Europe was loaded with misery”; it was the inevitable re- and Onuf 117-22, 140-43. sult of the oppression of common people “by kings, nobles, and priests”

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(Writings 859). “Under pretense of governing,” Jefferson argued, Europe- ans had “divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep,” or, in other words, aristocrats and commoners (Papers 11: 49). This social order, Jefferson concluded in a 1785 letter to an American acquaintance, was “the true picture of Europe,” and a perversion of the “lovely” republican “equality which the poor enjoy with the rich,” and women with men, in America (Writings 838-39). Of course, in this case Jefferson was only thinking about White men and White (middle-class) women. He ignored the fact that the slave labor of Black men and women, living in conditions at least as wretched as those of European peasants, contributed a great deal to making possible the “lovely equality” and the separation of spheres in his home state of Virginia. He also neglected to mention that it was one of his own slave women who “soothed & calmed” him when he returned to Mon- ticello “ruffled from political debate”Writings ( 922). Although some of Jefferson’s writings suggest that he was well aware of the significance of slavery for the American political economy, he never explored this fact in his juxtapositions of America with Europe. In a sense, Jefferson had to omit the role of slavery from his analysis, because otherwise his distinction between a free, egalitarian New and an oppressive, hierarchical 3 Old World would have immediately fallen apart. According to Jefferson, the combined effects of a monarchical form of government, aristocratic privileges, monkish superstition, and extreme economic inequality had a debilitating effect on Europe. He feared that the common people of Europe were morally so degraded from centuries of living under despotic regimes that even if “all the sovereigns of Europe […] set themselves to work to emancipate the minds of their subjects from their present ignorance & prejudices, & that as zealously as they now endeavor the contrary, a thousand years would not place them on that high ground on which our common people are now setting out” (Writings 859). In the late 1780s, Jefferson thus suspected that a reenactment of the American Revolution in Eu- rope would be doomed to failure because, as he told his French friends at the start of their revolution, due to their peculiar history they were “not yet ripe for the blessings to which they are entitled” (Department of State 2: 133). The American people, in contrast, were a different matter. During his years in Europe, Jefferson became ever more convinced that Ameri- cans, separated as they were “from their parent stock” by “so wide an ocean,” and therefore “kept from contamination” by the “people of the old world,” had developed a republican simplicity, independence of mind, and virtue that made them singularly suited to master the art of self-government (Writings 859). In the end, then, it was neither the con- 3 On Jefferson and struction of America’s constitution nor the character of its leaders that slavery, in general, and fueled Jefferson’s hopes for the success of America’s republican experi- Sally Hemings, in particu- ment, but rather the spirit of its people, which, simply put, he regarded lar, see Gordon-Reed.

Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 409 Armin Mattes as exceptional (Steele 100-23). Accordingly, the best way to preserve the uniqueness of the New World was to perpetuate the conditions that enabled the American people to be exceptional. For Jefferson, that meant first and foremost the maintenance of an economic system that secured the great majority of citizens an independent livelihood as yeoman farmers. “Those who labor in the earth,” he contended in his Notes on the State of Virginia, were “the chosen people of God” because their economic independence would enable them to be politically independent as well, which, in turn, made this class the “peculiar deposit” for “genuine virtue” in any polity (Writings 290-91). Europe, in this regard, had a serious problem. Its lands were “either cultivated, or locked up against the cultivator” by aristocratic practices such as entails. Europeans had, therefore, to turn to manufacture out of necessity, in order “to support the surplus of their people” (Writings 290). Working for another person in manufacturing, however, caused “depen- dence,” which in turn “begets subservience” that “suffocates the germ of virtue” and turned people into “fit tools for the designs of ambition” of the rich and well-born few (290-91). In contrast, as Jefferson averred in his First-Inaugural-Address in March 1801, the United States had an “immensity of land” at its disposal to guarantee the continuance of his agrarian ideal “to the thousandth and thousandth generation” (494). This was all the more true after Jefferson had doubled the landmass of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, thus further enabling the United States to perpetuate the distinction between an agrarian, prosperous, and virtuous New World and an overpopulated, poverty-ridden, and corrupt Old World. In political, social, moral, and economic regards, the Old World thus constituted the negative foil against which Jefferson could imagine what an ideal America should look like. But it was not only an idealized vision of the United States that emerged as a result of Jefferson’s creation of the New World-Old World antithesis. It also had consequences for his conception of “Europe.” For Jefferson and many other Americans, Europe had been mostly a geographical entity and a cultural point of reference. As one side of the binary born in revolution, however, “Europe” became a politicized and politically serviceable notion. In addition, in the minds of Jefferson and like-minded Americans, “Europe” also became a more consolidated political concept. Up to the American Revolution, the diversity and differences between the various European states had stood in the foreground (as, for example, in the contrast between Britain as the freest European country and the absolutist French monarchy). Within the framework of the New versus the Old World, however, these differences took a back seat, and all the European states were subsumed under the label of a mo- narchic and aristocratic old order. It is important to note, however, that this “Old World” conceptually was as new as Jefferson’s imagined New World. Thus, thinking about what a republican United States ought to

410 Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 Thomas Jefferson’s New Old World look like during the Age of Revolution led Jefferson to also create a politicized and ideologically coherent concept of “Europe” in the form of the “Old World.”

Europe as the Student

Although Jefferson contributed as much as anyone to the construction of the New World-Old World antithesis, and expressed it in more lyrical form than most, his relationship to Europe was more complex than a simple dichotomy. For one, he was too much a man of the world not to be attracted by the cultural offerings of Europe, and too intel- ligent a nationalist not to realize that America in certain fields could profit greatly by learning from Europe. Thus, in 1785 he wrote from Paris to Charles Bellini that “were I to proceed to tell you how much I enjoy their architecture, sculpture, painting, music, I should want words” (Writings 834). Nor did he stop at merely admiring certain aspects of European culture. Despite lavishly praising the natural resources and potential of the New World in general and of his beloved Virginia in particular in his Notes on the State of Virginia, he had no qualms about sending wine and olive trees, grass seeds, and Italian rice from Europe to augment the New World’s natural stock with some useful items. While residing in Paris as the American minister, he also spent hours in bookstores, diligently collecting everything that “was rare and valu- able in every science” (1353). European books and book markets were indispensable for Jefferson as he built his library, which in time would provide the foundation for the Library of Congress. In his architectural endeavors, too, Jefferson borrowed heavily from classical and contempo- rary European styles to enhance the New World’s cultural appearances. Realizing that in some areas the New World still had quite some catch- ing up to do, Jefferson had no problem looking to the Old World as a teacher and working hard to make the New World—in at least some cultural aspects—look more like the Old. Most Americans shared Jefferson’s admiration for European culture and were eager to emulate the Old World in that regard. Especially after the start of the French Revolution, however, the question of whether or to what degree the United States should also look to the European model of politics became one of the dividing lines between the emerging Federalist and Republican factions. For example, more conservative Americans such as John Adams, second president of the United States, not only looked forward to a time when the United States would have closed the cultural gap between New and Old Worlds, but also feared that America would have to follow the example set by European history in politics. Because Adams regarded human nature as unchanging, he argued time and again that “there is no special Providence for Ameri- cans” (4: 401). Convinced that Americans were therefore destined to re- peat the experiences of Europeans, Adams in his Defence of the Constitu-

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tions of Government of the United States of America (1787-1788) accordingly turned to European political and constitutional history as a blueprint for America’s future development (Ryerson). Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury under the new federal Constitution, also looked to the political system of Europe in order to learn how to enable the young United States to stand up to the great European powers. For instance, one of the major elements in his plan to create a fiscal-military state in the United States was the establishment of a national bank (Edling). In his 1790 Report on a National Bank, Hamilton stressed that all “the principal and most enlightened commercial nations” had already founded “public Banks” and had realized that “there exists not a question about their utility” (47). For Ham- ilton, it made no difference that America was a republic, whereas most European states were monarchies. Executive powers, especially regarding war and finances, were not dependent “on the particular form of a government.” They belonged to “the nature and objects of government itself,” and were thus as essential for a republic as for any other regime (90). In short, Federalists such as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were especially willing to look to Europe as a model not only in cultural but also in political regard. In contrast, Jefferson saw no reason to look to Europe for insights on political and social topics. Rather, Jefferson and many of his Republican political allies thought that Europe had to learn from the United States. Hence, they eagerly looked for signs that European nations would follow their example, revolt against monarchy and aristocracy, and insti- tute republican regimes, thus vindicating their belief that the American Revolution was not just an isolated event with no larger significance than American independence, but—in Jefferson’s words—“an instru- ment pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world” (Writings 1516). The French Revolution was just such a sign. During the early years of the French Revolution, Jeffersonian Republicans painted a picture of a Europe that had been engulfed by what James Madison had called “the sacred fire of liberty,” the spark of which had been kindled a few years 4 earlier in America (12: 123-24). In the view of these writers, America acted as a model for the Old World, and the start of revolutions in Eu- rope confirmed them in their belief that the American Revolution had indeed started a new order of the ages, rather than making the United States a peripheral republican oddity in an otherwise monarchical transatlantic world. Jefferson himself, despite the suspicions he had voiced in 1788 that the French were “not yet ripe” for self-government, got caught up in the enthusiasm that accompanied the storming of the Bastille, the issuing 4 On Jeffersonians of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789, and such as Jefferson, Madi- son, and Paine’s reactions the creation of a French constitution in 1790 and 1791. In fact, shortly to the French Revolution, before his return to the United States in late 1789, Jefferson thought that see Mattes; Banning. “this great crisis [was] now over” and that the French Revolution was

412 Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 Thomas Jefferson’s New Old World complete (Department of State 2: 302). Moreover, if a revolution could succeed in France, where the Ancien Régime had seemed more deeply entrenched than anywhere else, Jefferson expected that further revolutions would soon occur in other European countries as well. Europe as a whole would then be republicanized according to the American model, thus overcoming the gulf that separated the New and the Old Worlds. The subsequent course of the French Revolution, and especially Napoleon’s rise to power in the late 1790s and early 1800s, dampened Jefferson’s hopes that the “contagion of liberty” might catch on faster than even he had thought possible. As a result, from the late 1790s onward, Jefferson reverted to seeing the relationship between America and Europe primarily in dichotomous terms, even though he continued to expect that European societies would eventually follow the Ameri- can example. Most importantly, despite the apparent failure of the French Revo- lution, Jefferson’s descriptions of an opposition between New and Old Worlds from the 1790s onward were never absolute, but provisional and temporal. Even in his last public letter to Roger Weightman from June 24, 1826, Jefferson held fast to his conviction that the Old World would follow the example set by America and, through revolutions of their own, would join America in the enjoyment of “the blessings and security of self-government.” To be sure, he had serious doubts about whether Europeans were yet ready to “burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves” (Writ- ings 1517). Given the moral state of Europeans and the resurgence of monarchical government after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, he expected that it would take both “years of desolation” and “rivers of blood” to renovate the Old World along the lines of the New (1478). Neverthe- less, he had no doubt that “the general spread of the light of science,” sparked in a political sense by the American Revolution, would spread “to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all” (1517). Jefferson’s American exceptionalism—if that is even the best term to describe it—thus looked forward to the time when it would transcend itself and become obsolete. Once this had happened, the antithesis between the New World and the Old would dissolve, and the nations on the European side of the Atlantic would join in a federal, republican union of peace and amity just as the states in North America had done, thus ushering in a “republican millennium” (Onuf and Onuf 221-39). Ultimately, therefore, the concept of “Europe” that emerged from Jef- ferson’s writings during the Age of Revolution was Janus-faced. On the one hand, there was the notion of Europe as the “Old World,” the polar opposite of the United States. This notion emerged during and after the American Revolution and remained predominant through the rest of Jefferson’s life, and especially so in times when European wars threatened to spill over into America. On the other hand, there was the hope, even the belief, in the inevitability of Europe becoming the

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United States’ sister union on the other side of the Atlantic, based like the former on the American Revolution’s two arch-principles of repub- licanism and federalism. For a few years during the early phase of the French Revolution, this second notion gained the ascendancy in Jeffer- son’s thought. But although this ascendancy was short-lived, Jefferson’s conviction in the ultimate realization of its potential always qualified his dichotomy between New and Old World, even after Napoleon’s consoli- dation of power in France all but ensured that this would not happen in the near future. During the 1790s, the momentous developments set in motion by the French Revolution also prompted other Jeffersonians to construct new concepts of “Europe” in the expectation that Europe would follow the American model. For instance, Thomas Paine, the great propagandist of the Age of Revolution, also saw the impact of the American example at work in the French Revolution. In 1791, he therefore dedicated the first part of his Rights of Man to George Washington, in the hope that “the 5 New World [would] regenerate the Old” (433). The Old World, Paine thought, was in dire need of such regeneration. European countries called themselves civilized, and yet “a great portion” of their populations lived “in a state of poverty and wretchedness, far below the condition of an Indian” (597). Paine did not have to search for long to identify the reason for this deplorable situation. Monarchical governments, interested only in war and enriching themselves and their aristocratic lackeys, prevented the European peoples from realizing that these very governments were their true enemy. What was needed to effect the regeneration of Europe were revolutions that would bring about “a change in the moral condition of governments” (598). For Paine, this meant primarily the change from a monarchical to a republican form of government. Paine was not only conscious of Europeans contending for rights and conditions that Americans were already enjoying, but also proud that with its revolution America had set the precedent that Europeans were now following. “The independence of America, considered merely as a separation from England, would have been a matter but of little impor- tance,” he contended in the first part of Rights of Man (548). However, the American Revolution had been more than that because it had been “accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of governments” (548). With their republican constitutions (state and federal) and their federal system, Americans provided Europeans with the model of “the only real republic in character and practice, that now exists” (566). 5 On Paine’s prescrip- tion of the American mod- If Europeans also wanted to create such a new system, they had little el to Europe, see Claeys choice but to emulate the United States. As a result, “what Athens was 71-75. Despite Paine being arguably as much a trans- in miniature, America will be in magnitude,” Paine boasted; “the one atlantic as an “American” was the wonder of the ancient world; the other is becoming the admira- figure, he is nonetheless included here, as he can tion and model of the present” (568). be classified politically as With the French Revolution successfully completed—as Paine, like a “Jeffersonian.” Jefferson, believed it to be in 1791—Paine had no doubt that these “Rev-

414 Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 Thomas Jefferson’s New Old World olutions […] in the moral condition of governments” were forthcoming in other European countries as well (598). The French Revolution, after all, had “thrown a beam of light” on the hitherto prevailing ignorance of Europeans regarding the proper order of government and had thus “provoked people to think” (513). Once thinking, Paine continued, it would be impossible for kings, nobles, and priests “to put the [Euro- peans’] mind back to the same condition it was in before” (513). Having thus realized how their governments had duped them, the European nations would not wait long to throw off their yokes. Accordingly, Paine did “not believe that monarchy and aristocracy [would] continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries in Europe” (545-46). Once a few more European states had joined France in getting rid of their monarchies and installing republican governments, Paine thought that Europe would also follow the American model of federalism by constituting a “European Congress.” He was convinced that “when a few are thus confederated, the progress will be rapid,” with more and more states joining the republican European union “till despotism and corrupt government be totally expelled, at least out of two quarters of the world, Europe and America” (654-55). In Common Sense, Paine had been one of the first to justify the rupture between America and Europe on the ground that they belonged to different systems. The revolutionary fervor of the 1790s, however, led Paine to develop a new concept of “Eu- rope” as a federal union of equal democratic republics that re-aligned the two continents within the same political system, for which only the United States of America could provide the model. Joel Barlow, an American diplomat and writer who is best remem- bered today for his epic poem Vision of Columbus, created a more detailed concept of a new “Europe” than either Paine or Jefferson. Barlow spent the early 1790s in Paris as an agent for a land company. More interested in the sweeping revolutionary transformations occurring at the time than in taking care of his business, in 1792 he published an essay entitled 6 Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe. In this essay, Barlow made it clear that he, as an American, felt both especially qualified and obligated to give his advice to the Europeans. He argued that it was “the duty of those who now possess” knowledge about the theory and practice of the new principles of government to spread that knowledge and “induce the men who now govern the world to adopt these ideas” (9). Although his stated aim was to present an account of the probable effects of the French Revolution on the other states of Eu- rope, in presenting his advice Barlow repeatedly, and almost automati- cally, had recourse to the American experience. For example, when talk- ing about the writing of constitutions, the merits of citizen soldiers vs. professionals, and the choosing of rulers, Barlow always contrasted the practices of monarchical Europe with those of republican America. 6 On Barlow’s political Yet, Barlow did not set up these comparisons to construct a di- activism see also Hill; chotomy between the New and the Old World, between America and Ford; Ziesche.

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Europe. To all those who clung to the order of the Ancien Régime by arguing that the American political innovations “will do very well for America” but would be impossible to “apply to Europe,” he answered by pointing to the example of France (Advice 38). “The event of that revolution,” he contended (39), had shown conclusively that it would be futile to fight the revolutionary “renovation of society,” as the revolutionary transformations “could scarcely be limited” to France alone (2). Indeed, Barlow saw the other “nations of Europe” moving “with rapid strides” toward the “rational system” already (9). All that the privileged orders of Europe could do, therefore, was to look to the United States and learn about the principles of the “rational system” and how to implement them successfully before they were swept away by ensu- ing revolutions. In a 1799 letter To His Fellow Citizens of the United States, Barlow spelled out what these principles were and what exactly they would mean for Europe. He identified representative“ democracy, and the fed- eralizing of States” as the “two pillars” of the new American political system. Individually, the former “may promise liberty” and the latter “may promise peace,” yet individually neither of the two was sufficient to guarantee both liberty and peace. Barlow conceded that Americans had invented neither of these principles, but he thought that “infi- nite credit is due to the conductors of our American Revolution” for conjoining them because “in no instance had the two principles been brought together and wrought into one system” before. Uniting democracy and federalism “in one system” and keeping them “inseparable in their practice” was the key to the American “rational system” (10-11; emphasis in original). Hence, Barlow’s vision for a renovated Europe built upon the conjoining of these two principles. Revolutionary France would become the nucleus of a “general confederation” which would be “joined by every European people, as fast as they become free,” that is, as fast as they could change “their feudal for their representative constitutions” (Citizens 8-9). This confederation then “would represent a great union of Republics,” which, he suggested, “might assume the name of the United States of Europe,” thus mirroring the United States of America on the other side of the Atlantic in name and political practice (9). America and Europe were therefore not antithetical entities with mu- tually exclusive social and political environments and historical trajec- tories. On the contrary, like Paine and Jefferson, during the 1790s Bar- low hoped for the dissolution of the differences that had temporarily set the New and the Old World apart. Like Paine and Jefferson, Barlow expected the restoration of the transatlantic unity in political principles to be realized by Europe adopting the model provided by the United States and developing into a federal, democratic union.

416 Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 Thomas Jefferson’s New Old World

Conclusion

Ultimately, then, Jefferson and his followers during the Age of Revo- lution contributed to the conceptual development of “Europe” in two significant ways. First, they brought the New World-Old World dichotomy to a new height. To be sure, in the wake of the American Revolution, other Americans and also Europeans drew similar lines between the republican United States and the European monarchies (Dippel; New- man). But Jefferson developed and applied the New World-Old World antithesis more forcefully than most and with correspondingly far-reaching consequences for the concept of “Europe.” The founding of a republican and federal United States after the American Revolution was such a momentous event for Jefferson that it created a novus ordo seclorum on the western side of the Atlantic and set the United States radically apart from all of Europe. As a result, in his writings Jefferson transformed “Europe,” now also including the former English mother country, from a largely geographical and cultural entity into a more coherent and politicized concept that was characterized by its uniformly monarchical and aristocratic political and social organization. This new concept of “Europe” thus emerged in the form of the (conceptually updated) “Old World” as a politically serviceable antithesis to the United States. The second contribution that Jefferson and the Jeffersonians made stands out even more. Spurred on by the radicalism of the French Revo- lution and the formation of the French Republic, during the 1790s Jef- ferson and his political allies went beyond the early modern European peace projects and advanced the idea of a European union. Some Eu- ropeans, most notably the Girondins and their sympathizers in other countries, advocated the spread of revolutionary principles as well. However, in contrast to the Girondins, whose plans basically amounted to the creation of French-dominated satellite republics, Jefferson, Paine, and Barlow called for the founding of a true federal union of equal Eu- ropean republics. There are several reasons for the Jeffersonians’ distinc- tive outlook. For one, as non-Europeans, they were free from any over- bearing attachment to a particular nation and could thus approach the issue from a more impartial perspective. As Americans, they also had a different perception of the European balance of power and the respective European states’ quests for national security that this balance en- gendered. Lastly, and possibly most importantly, they were approaching the European situation from their vantage point as American citizens already living in a working federal republic. This unique perspective, while perhaps leading them to underestimate some of the problems im- peding the creation of a “United States of Europe,” also enabled them to flesh out a new political concept of “Europe” in the form of a modern federal union of democratic countries. To be sure, no direct line can be drawn from these Jeffersonians’ plans to the creation of the current European Union. Nonetheless, their writings represent some of the first

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examples of the conceptualization of a federal, democratic European union. This second aspect of how Americans contributed to “Europe’s” conceptual development has been all but overlooked in the historiography. For instance, most historians looking at Americans’ uses of “Europe” are primarily interested in the creation of an American national identity. As a result, their focus is more on “America” than “Europe” and on how Americans created a national identity through the dichotomy between America and Europe (Boorstin; Strout). Yet, as this essay shows, American, and especially Jeffersonian, writings have more to offer for the study of identity formation than just the construction of an Ameri- can national identity in opposition to Europe. In their writings from the 1790s, in which they imagined a transatlantic unity based on revolutionary principles in contrast to both the European Ancien Régime and the ideas of the American Federalists (whom they branded as “monocrats” and “aristocrats”), the Jeffersonians offer an example of identity formation occurring more along transnational, ideological lines than along 7 national or hemispheric ones (Mattes 162-69). Some of the most original work on “Europe” and related concepts in recent years has been done on the basis of “mental maps.” Starting from the premise that terms for spaces such as “Europe” are never neu- tral and value-free geographical markers, but are instead concepts with a contested history and character, historians and scholars from related disciplines such as geography have analyzed in depth the historically constructed nature of spatial concepts. Yet, much of the research in this field has concentrated on European sub-regions, such as the concepts of “Eastern Europe” or the “Balkans,” and on the relation between Eu- rope and these smaller regions (Schenk, “Mental Maps: Die Konstruk- tion”; “Mental Maps: The Cognitive Mapping”; Götz and Holmén). In accordance with their topics, the source-base in these studies is often also limited to the relevant sub-regions. As a result, the contributions of American historical figures to the evolution of the concept of “Eu- rope” have been neglected. However, taking into account the writings of Americans such as Jefferson, Paine, and Barlow in regard to the study of mental maps of Europe can provide new insights, as in the example of Great Britain becoming subsumed into the larger category of “Europe” after the American Revolution. One might assume that the concept of “Europe” would have received extensive treatment in the field of conceptual history. Interestingly, this is not the case. In several of the major works of conceptual history such as the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe or the Dictionnaire Critique

7 For the study of iden- de la Révolution Française (Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck; Furet and tity formation through Ozouf), “Europe” is not included. On the other hand, in those articles both “communitization” and “othering” in general, and monographs that do analyze the conceptual development of “Eu- see Anderson; Hobsbawm rope,” American authors are largely overlooked, much as they are in the and Ranger; Said. study of mental maps (Heater; Schmale). This is unfortunate because, as

418 Amst 66.2 (2021): 401-21 Thomas Jefferson’s New Old World the writings of the Jeffersonians examined in this article illustrate, the crucial conceptual development of “Europe” during the Age of Revolu- tion was as much a transatlantic as a European story.

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