JEFFERSON
INSISTED THAT
‘ALL EYES ARE
OPEN, OR
OPENING, TO
THE RIGHTS
OF MAN.’ HE
ALSO SAID HE
BELIEVED THAT
THE UNIVERSAL
LANGUAGE
OF THE
DECLARATION
WOULD ONE
DAY APPLY
‘TO THE WORLD’
VIEWPOINT
Annette Gordon-Reed
THOMAS JEFFERSON’S REVOLUTIONARY WORDS
Thomas Jefferson began life in a monarchy, under The
reign of George II, in one of Britain’s North American colonies—
Virginia. In this monarchical system everyone knew his or her
place, with little expectation of being able to move very far out-
side of it. Though the American provincials were not on a par
with the aristocrats in the mother country, they had developed
their own version of hierarchy. Jefferson, by dint of his family
ties, was born at the top, and there would have been no reason to
suspect that he would ever come to be associated with the idea
of equality. This is especially so given that he was born into a
slave society, and his family fully participated in the institution
of slavery. From an early age, he would have understood what
unequal status meant, with his lifelong involvement in the most
extreme version of it as a slave owner. The equality of human-
kind was simply not an expectation in his world.
Yet, as a young man inspired by the books he read that intro-
duced him to the Enlightenment, Jefferson began the process of
questioning these hierarchies and status-based power. As the cri-
sis with Britain flared up, Jefferson questioned the power of the
church (preferring the primacy of science and reason), as well as
laws that entrenched the power of great families (entail and pri-
mogeniture) and the morality of slavery. He began to think of dif-
ferent ways of ordering society. There would be no assumption
that a given class of people was born to rule. If there was to be an
aristocracy, it would be one of talent, not birth. Ordinary people
would have a say in how their government was to be constituted.
Jefferson’s vision of equality was not all-inclusive. Neither
the enslaved nor women were part of it. Native peoples could
be, but only if they agreed to assimilate with white people.
Even though he produced eloquent denunciations of slavery,
and he saw himself as a progressive on the question, he has
been faulted for not working as hard for the freedom of African
Americans as he did for that of white colonists. He also ques-
tioned the equal intellectual capacity of black people, and he
never really contemplated the equality of women on terms sat-
isfactory to us today. Even acknowledging all of that, we cannot
ignore the transformative and bold words Jefferson wrote in
the Declaration of Independence: that it is “self-evident” that
“all men are created equal.” Many people, enslaved and free,
black and white, believed those words; believed they expressed
their long-held intuitions and condemned the wrongness of the
oppression they suffered. They were moved to act.
In the AmerIcAn revolutIon, enslaved African Americans
(and some free black people) joined the fighting on both sides,
to vindicate their equal humanity. When they had the chance,
they filed freedom suits arguing
that the words proclaiming
the equality of mankind made
their enslavement illegal
and unjust. Many African-
American agitators—from
Frederick Douglass to Martin
Luther King Jr.—have pointed
to the Declaration as a promise
of equal citizenship. Indeed,
many groups—women,
immigrants, members of
the LGBTQ community—
have looked to the document
to justify their claims to an
equal place in American
society.
With his stubborn support
for the French Revolution, his
calls to separate church and
state, and his desire to expand
the voting franchise among
white men, Jefferson gained
a reputation as a dangerous
radical who would turn society
over to a mob. His claims of
equality frightened many in
America.
In the months before
he died in 1826, Jefferson
reaffirmed the ideas expressed
in the Declaration, whose
meaning had long transcended
its original purpose—
announcing the break with
Britain and the colonies’
determination to form a new
nation. In a letter to Roger
Weightman, declining an
invitation to participate in
a celebration of the 50th
anniversary of the Declaration
of Independence because
he was ill, Jefferson insisted
that “all eyes are open, or
opening, to the rights of man.”
He also said he believed that
the universal language of the
Declaration would one day
apply “to the world.”
Equality was the wave of the
future.Gordon-Reed, a professor of
law and history at Harvard
University, won the Pulitzer
Prize for The Hemingses of
Monticello