Thomas Jefferson commands a powerful presence in American history. As the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, he defined the values the colonists would fight for in the Revolutionary War. This was a very powerful position to have; when a nation fights a war for independence with specific values in mind, those values will be front and center once it comes time to form a government and will remain prominent throughout the country’s history.

Indeed, the U.S. Constitution and the ideas of the “Founding Fathers” are now viewed with reverence. One problem with this is that the founders had conflicting ideas and some of them even contradicted themselves in famous quotes. In this post, after examining a few remarkable aspects of Thomas Jefferson, I’ll focus on how one of his revolutionary quotes is being used today.

Jefferson’s biography reads like that of a European intellectual from the Enlightenment or the Scientific Revolution. He started studying Greek, Latin, and French at the age of nine and attended William & Mary at sixteen, graduating within two years. According to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, he later claimed to have taught himself Spanish while on a nineteen-day voyage to France, using only a Spanish grammar book and a copy of Don Quixote.

He excelled in much more than linguistics; Jefferson was a true Renaissance man. His areas of strength included mathematics, mechanics, architecture (especially in the classical style), religion and philosophy, and writing. Jefferson served as President of the American Philosophical Society from 1797 until his resignation in 1815, meaning that for eight of those years he was president of two different entities. Given that he felt like “a prisoner, released from his chains” upon handing the presidency of the United States over to James Madison, he probably enjoyed his position with the philosophical society more.

Jefferson demonstrated his love of writing by composing over 18,000 letters of correspondence during his lifetime, allowing nothing to slow his output. He dislocated his right wrist in 1786, trying to jump a fence in Paris. The wrist hurt for many years afterwards and for a few months he had to write his letters left-handed. Two years later, still living in Paris, Jefferson found that his mail was being opened by postmasters, so he invented his own “Wheel Cipher” to encode important communications and used it for the rest of his life.

Jefferson’s favorite French correspondent was likely the Marquis de Lafayette, who consulted with him on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and in 1824 visited him for eleven days at his home of Monticello. Jefferson was very supportive of the French Revolution, refusing to denounce it completely even during the Reign of Terror, saying “to back away from France would be to undermine the cause of republicanism in America.” In the election of 1800, Federalist opponents took advantage of this and his time spent in France, denouncing him as a “godless libertine in thrall with the French.”

Jefferson’s support of the French Revolution is emblematic of his attitude toward democracy. As we should remember from U.S. History class (or maybe from the musical Hamilton), Jefferson was born to wealthy parents but had great trust in the common man, whereas Alexander Hamilton was born a commoner but thought the common man foolish and untrustworthy. Therefore, Jefferson worried more of corruption among elites than of uprising and mob rule, and tended to support expanding the people’s role in government.

He expressed this view strongly in a 1787 letter to a diplomatic official in London:

[The motives of Shays’ Rebellion] were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always, well informed… What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure. (emphasis mine)

Jefferson is essentially saying that it is best to let the people express their frustrations – through violent uprisings, if necessary – and explain to them why they are wrong afterwards. I disagree with that. I would prefer that in a stable system of government, there are means of resolving these issues through discussion rather than by misguided violence. James Madison agreed, equating the rebellion to treason and arguing that such rebellions must be quashed immediately. After a few years, Jefferson came around to the position I laid out above, saying:

Happy for us, that when we find our constitutions defective and insufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we can assemble with all the coolness of philosophers and set it to rights, while every other nation on earth must have recourse to arms to amend or to restore their constitutions.

However, it was too late, because only one sentence out of the quotes above is remembered today. It is the following: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Taken out of context, it sounds like its own ideology, and one that is difficult to refute. But what does it essentially mean? It means that we should always be on the edge of revolution – and not a “political revolution”, as Bernie Sanders called for, but a violent one, like the French Revolution. We should be – and I think we are – past the time when blood has to be shed, against our own government, in exchange for liberty.

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh wore a t-shirt sporting Jefferson’s “tree of liberty” quote on the day that he bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and wounding hundreds more. In modern terms, Jefferson’s idea of admonishing those who are “misinformed” isn’t practical; once people like McVeigh – a member of an extreme right-wing survivalist group – are radicalized against the government, the imminent danger is quite high and the chance of reconciliation afterward is miniscule.

Last Saturday, September 10^th, Governor Matt Bevin of Kentucky brought up the “tree of liberty” quote at the Values Voter Summit. Though he later denied it, he was clearly casting Hillary Clinton as the tyrant in this speech:

Somebody asked me yesterday… “Do you think it’s possible, if Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it’s possible that we’ll be able to survive? That we would ever be able to recover as a nation?”

And while there are people who have stood on this stage and said we would not, I would beg to differ. But I will tell you this: I do think it would be possible, but at what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots.

Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something, that we through our apathy and our indifference have given away.

Bevin makes himself sound reasonable by setting expectations incredibly low, starting with the assertion that people disagree over whether the country could survive Hillary Clinton becoming president. He proceeds to treat Jefferson’s quote as an absolute truth to back up his allusions to violence, using people’s knowledge of the quote to make his references to blood sound natural.

In a later statement, Bevin said that he was talking about the need to combat radical Islamic terrorism. Since he didn’t even mention that in the relevant part of his speech, he was clearly rallying people around the idea of fighting against Hillary Clinton, the tyrant. He probably doesn’t actually think that a war or armed rebellion is at all possible or necessary, but that’s the way he framed the election, and that’s a pretty dangerous and irresponsible thing to do.

Thomas Jefferson’s philosophical writings have had significant yet complex effects on the country’s civic values and actual events in its history. To be fair, he probably exacerbated some conflicts, such as the issue of secession with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which argued for the states’ right to nullify federal law. But we should also recognize that the situation was much different in the late 1700s, and his revolutionary quotes are – for the most part – no longer relevant. He himself changed his mind about violent uprisings just a couple of years after the “tree of liberty” quote and completely reversed his position when he became president, realizing the necessity of keeping order.

It is good to use past thinkers’ philosophical musings to inform our own thoughts and ideas. But if we are doing that, we need to understand what they actually meant and how it applies – or doesn’t apply – to us. Most of all, we want to properly inform ourselves and others to avoid imprudently watering the tree of liberty.