America is a republic of merit, not birth

The letter I wrote to John Adams on October 28, 1813, addressed our differing views on governance during a time of peaceful retirement at Monticello. After years of political estrangement we had resumed our correspondence. I countered his belief that the wealthy artificial aristocracy should be isolated in a separate legislative chamber to prevent harm. I argued instead that giving them a dedicated branch merely arms them to commit mischief. I maintained that free election by ordinary citizens remains the safest way to separate the wheat from the chaff. While selective breeding might theoretically cultivate a superior race of virtuous leaders, the principle of equal rights obliges us to rely on the accidental talents produced by the fortuitous pairing of human beings. I agreed that a natural aristocracy of virtue and talents exists and is the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, trusts, and government of society. An artificial aristocracy of wealth and birth without virtue or talents is a mischievous ingredient that must not be allowed to ascend.

Several key episodes and lifelong projects in my career directly echo these themes. They include the distinction between a natural aristocracy of virtue and talents and an artificial one of wealth and birth, the reliance on free elections by ordinary citizens rather than structural privileges for the pseudo aristoi, and the tension between theoretical selective improvement of the race and the principle of equal rights.

In the earliest sessions of the Virginia legislature after independence, I drafted and successfully pushed the abolition of entails in 1776 and later the law of primogeniture. Entails were legal rules that restricted how land could be sold or passed on. Under an entail the owner could use the land but usually could not sell it or leave it outside a fixed line of heirs, most often the eldest male descendants. This kept large estates intact within certain families for generations. Primogeniture was the rule that the eldest son inherited the whole or the largest share of a parent’s real estate when the parent died without a will. Younger children received little or nothing of the land. These English derived rules concentrated land in the eldest male line and created a landed patrician order that supplied the king’s councilors and perpetuated privilege across generations. I later described these laws as laying the axe to the root of pseudo aristocracy. I framed the change as opening the way for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided and scattered with equal hand through all its conditions. This is the same practical program I invoke in the 1813 letter when I contrast giving the artificial aristocrats a dedicated legislative chamber, which was Adams’s preference, with trusting the people and removing legal props for hereditary privilege.

In 1779 I proposed a system of free ward schools for basic literacy and arithmetic, with competitive selection of the most promising students regardless of wealth or birth for further public supported education, culminating in a university. The explicit aim was to identify and train those whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue so they could guard the rights of their fellow citizens without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition. In later reflections, including the 1813 letter and related correspondence, I called this the measure that would have completed the work of defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts, literally raking the natural aristoi from the rubbish. The bill failed in the legislature, largely due to resistance from the well born who did not wish to be taxed to educate the masses, but the idea remained central to my thinking.

In retirement at Monticello I made this educational vision concrete. I designed, lobbied for, and oversaw the University of Virginia, which opened in 1825. I listed Father of the University of Virginia alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom as one of the three accomplishments to be inscribed on my tombstone. The university embodied my belief that the best government is the one that most effectively selects the natural aristoi of virtue and talents for the offices of instruction, trust, and government, precisely the standard I affirm in the letter to Adams.

The 1813 letter belongs to the famous late correspondence that resumed after more than a decade of bitter estrangement. Adams and I had been close collaborators in the Continental Congress and in Europe, but the partisan battles of the 1790s and the Election of 1800, the Revolution of 1800, drove us apart. Our mutual friend Benjamin Rush worked for years to restore contact, and Adams took the first step with a letter on January 1, 1812. Over the next fourteen years we exchanged roughly 158 letters on philosophy, religion, history, and politics. This particular exchange on aristocracy grew out of Adams’s earlier writings, the Defence of the Constitutions and Discourses on Davila, and his insistence that beauty, wealth, and birth often overpower genius and virtue. My measured reply, agreeing on the existence of a natural aristocracy while rejecting any institutional arming of the artificial one, illustrates the tone of rational friendship I describe: we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. Both of us died on the same day, July 4, 1826.

As minister to France from 1784 to 1789, I observed hereditary European aristocracy at close range and saw its dependence on birth and privilege rather than merit. This reinforced the republican convictions I articulate in 1813. The same period and the subsequent French Revolution became a major point of divergence with Adams. I remained more optimistic about republican possibilities, while Adams was more skeptical of unrestrained popular power and more convinced that mixed institutions were needed to contain aristocratic forces. Those earlier disagreements resurfaced, in a more philosophical key, in the 1813 letters.

My confidence that in general the citizens will elect the really good and wise, and that occasional corruption by wealth or birth would not endanger the society, was tested and in my view vindicated by the peaceful transfer of power in 1800 and by decades of American state legislatures. At the same time, the letter’s discussion of Theognis, the Pythagoreans, and the theoretical possibility of improving the human race by selective breeding is carefully subordinated to the principle of equal rights, which will rise up against this privileged Solomon and his Haram. This tension between classical ideas of selective improvement or natural hierarchy and the republican commitment to equal rights and popular election runs through much of my thought and practice.

These episodes show the 1813 letter as a late, reflective summation of positions I had been advancing in law, education, and politics since the Revolution: destroy the legal and institutional supports of artificial aristocracy, educate and select for virtue and talent, and trust the free choices of citizens rather than entrench privilege.